War has a way of curtailing imagination. When the news breaks of faraway civilian casualties — an erroneous air strike on a school that relied on outdated intelligence, for example — the mind takes refuge in abstractions and statistics.

Grief isn’t an infinite resource. There’s only so much distant suffering anyone can take in. Yet our moral health as a society depends on the recognition of our common humanity. We share something with the inhabitants of those countries whose civilization our government has threatened to destroy.

This is an important moment to experience “English,” Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, set in an English-language classroom outside of Tehran in 2008. The play, now having its L.A. premiere at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, reminds us of the lives — the hopes, the dreams, the sorrows — on the other side of the headlines. (As I write this, the New York Times homepage has a story that stopped me dead in my tracks: ”Iranian Schools and Hospitals Are in Ruins, Times Analysis Shows.”)

“English” isn’t trying to win any political arguments. Its focus is on the characters, who are in a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOFL) prep class. The exam will have an oversize effect on the future possibilities of this small, mishmash group of students.

Elham (Tala Ashe) needs a high score to pursue her medical education in Australia. Roya (Pooya Mohseni) wants to join her son in Canada to be part of her granddaughter’s life, but Persian is frowned upon in her son’s assimilated, English-language household. Omid (Babak Tafti), whose English is far beyond anyone else’s level in the class, has a U.S. green card interview coming up. And Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh), the youngest of the students, wants at the very least to be fluent in the lingua franca of American pop culture.

Marjan (Marjan Neshat), the teacher whose love for the English language is infused with longing and regret, harks back nostalgically on her years in Manchester before she returned to Iran. She insists for pedagogic reasons that the students only speak English in the classroom. But Elham, a contentious and fiercely competitive student, suspects that Marjan’s zeal for anglophone culture, including Hollywood romantic comedies, masks a resentment for the Iranian life she is now stuck with. (Neshat and Ashe are gracefully reprising their Tony-nominated performances.)

Tala Ashe, left, and Pooya Mohseni in “English” at The Wallis.

(Kevin Parry)

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Mastering English can open doors, but what if you wish you didn’t have to walk through them? Elham is angry that she has to leave to pursue her medical dreams. When she speaks English, she feels like a diminished version of herself. She calls her accent “a war crime,” and grows frustrated in class that she can’t easily explain what she’s thinking and feeling in her halting English.

The other students might not be as truculent as Elham, but they are just as ambivalent about the necessity of learning English. Toossi doesn’t grapple explicitly with the fraught internal politics of the Iran of the period. The conversation in the classroom doesn’t turn to the repressive regime or the state requirement of headscarves or the geopolitical strategies that have alienated the Islamic Republic of Iran from the global community.

When I saw “English” in 2024 at the Old Globe in San Diego, I was acutely aware of what the playwright was not addressing. At the Wallis in 2026, in the wake of Operation Epic Fury and the blitzkrieg of unhinged rhetoric from President Trump, whose rationales and goals for the war seem to change with every public utterance, I was intensely appreciative of what Toossi was putting front and center — the variegated humanity of her characters.

Tala Ashe and Marjan Neshat in “English” at the Wallis.

(Kevin Parry)

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This Atlantic Theater Company & Roundabout Theatre production, directed by Knud Adams, had a critically touted Broadway run, receiving four Tony nominations, including best play. The physical staging, featuring a rotating cube from set designer Martha Ginsberg, shows us the classroom from different vantages, bringing the play’s shifting perspective to three-dimensional life.

Toossi follows the interplay of the differing viewpoints and lived experiences. She’s not as concerned with settling differences as with understanding the thoughts and emotions animating the clashes of her divergent characters. The actors relish the pesky, droll, frequently adorable, sometimes incendiary individuality of their roles.

The play does something unique with language. When a character speaks English, an accent is employed and the manner is often a bit stumbling. When a character speaks Persian, the English that is heard is natural and relaxed, the sound of a native speaker.

The result is that these Iranian characters, when talking among themselves in their native tongue, sound awfully like Americans having a conversation in the mall or at a nearby table at a restaurant. We are no longer separated by language. The notion of the Iranian “other” falls by the wayside.

The cast of “English” at the Wallis.

(Kevin Parry)

It’s hard not to wonder if one of those missiles raining down on schools in recent weeks hit when Marjan was showing “Notting Hill” or another favorite rom-com to one of the students she was hoping might realize her dreams of living abroad. Omid, whose English surpasses Marjan’s own level, has excited such hopes, and the touchingly Chekhovian quasi-romance between them adds a gentle note of amorous wistfulness.

Adams’ production creates a cinematic penumbra through the projections of Ruey Horng Sun, a soundscape by Sinan Refik Zafar that lyrically underscores the actions and the emotionally attuned lighting of Reza Behjat. The effect heightens the romanticism of characters who are no longer lost to us in translation.

But the destination of the play is less about what these students sound like to an American audience than what they sound like to themselves. And that is a universal journey that transcends even the starkest barriers of language, culture and politics.

The Video Age was an amazing boost to the film industry. Not only did it open up a whole new marketplace for studios to sell successful films too, it also became a secondary outlet to eventually recoup losses if a film performed poorly in theaters. It even opened up some films to a wider audience.

Most Mom and Pop stores didn’t care that you weren’t seventeen and would rent you anything on their shelves, outside of those tapes behind the saloon doors in the back corner (from an industry that, let’s face it, probably profited more than any others since you no longer had to go to a gross and grimy theater), because every rental simply meant profit.

This era also expanded an already moderately active subculture: The Cult Film. Some of those movies that didn’t do well in the theaters caught on with the rental audiences, and so did some that you might not have heard about until you stepped into the store that day. Video also helped bring into your home those movies you only heard about as being shown in midnight screenings in larger cities.

There were also those that somehow became legendary through rumor. Movies whispered about in school halls or at recess. Movies that someone’s brother/cousin/friend-of-a-friend had seen at a sleepover. Movies so taboo that you’d be grounded for life if your parents found out you’d watched them. One of the most legendary of these was Faces of Death.

A documentary supposedly featuring footage of real deaths, it was the king of the no-no videos, going well beyond anything else on the Video Nasties list. Though later debunked as containing faked scenes, it still holds a solid spot in the pantheon of Cult Cinema. This being the 21st century, where any past property is fair game, we of course now have a meta-reimagining also titled Faces of Death.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works for Kino, an app similar to TikTok, as a content moderator. Every day she sits at her computer, watches the first moments of a video submitted for review and decides if it violates company standards or can stay on the platform.

Margot has personal reasons for doing this, having gone horribly viral in a video, and she wants to make sure the internet is a safer place. When a series of videos come across her desk featuring deaths that look too real, she tries to get her boss, Josh (Jermaine Fowler), to go further than simply banning them, but he refuses. Since no one will listen to her, she violates the terms of the company’s NDA and begins investigating them in her free time.

During her investigation, she discovers the existence of a movie called Faces of Death, and her horror-loving roommate, Ryan (Aaron Holliday), happens to have a copy. It turns out that someone is recreating scenes from the video, using the voiceover from the movie and possibly performing actual murders. That someone is Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), and Margot’s investigating puts her directly in his crosshairs.

If you’re going to do anything modern with the rights to the original Faces of Death, this is definitely the direction to go. The film is a creative look into the desensitized modern screen culture and the Insta-fame of influencers. Director Daniel Goldhaber and his co-writer Isa Mazzei, who together in the same capacities brought us the excellent Netflix film Cam, have created an interesting and surprisingly entertaining treatise on the extremes that current society can make a person go to, similar to the message behind their other film How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

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While based on such a grotesquery as Faces of Death, Goldhaber has decided to hold back on the gore created for this version. There’s still a good amount of blood, but not as much as you might expect from something carrying this brand.

Instead, the film’s more of a psychological cat-and-mouse thriller, where the emphasis is put on Margot’s investigation. Yes, through that we get to see not only Arthur’s recreations but also clips from the original video, but the filmmakers graciously curb the content shown. Plus, the slightly grainy look and the subdued lighting the Goldhaber gives to the film helps make it feel like a videotape from the 1980s, dipping us deeper into the intended effect I believe he is going for, here.

Ferreira makes for an interesting choice for a Final Girl. While she’s a beautiful woman, she’s not the person would typically get hired for this role being that she’s also plus sized. This makes her more relatable than your usual Hollywood beauty. She’s not Jamie Lee or Neve, she’s you and me, and that makes the situation she finds herself in even more frightening.

Montgomery is well cast as Arthur, too. He has the ability to put on this nerdy kind of public face, but his private persona is much more dangerous and off kilter. I look forward to viewing this where I can pause and see what videotape titles the filmmakers decided to put on the bookcase/door to his secret studio to see if that gives even more insight into Arthur’s mental state.

While it didn’t blow me away, I really had no idea what to expect from Faces of Death. So, therefore, I can honestly say that my expectations were exceeded.

Anna (Halle Bailey) doesn’t have great boundaries in other people’s homes. Her tendency to make herself entirely too comfortable gets her into trouble as a house sitter, but that specific quirk ultimately leads to her romantic good fortune during a spontaneous trip to Italy, so how bad can it really be?

In fact, if Anna had never donned the wardrobe of her high-end client (Nia Vardalos) to walk the dog in a fit of wealth cosplay, she never would have gotten fired in time to meet an Italian hunk, Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who inspires the trip that unfolds in “You, Me & Tuscany,” directed by Kat Coiro and scripted by Ryan and Kristin Engle. So really, the message here is that we should all be more impulsive and slightly unhinged — Anna ends up living her Tuscan dreams after all.

Running off to Italy and into the arms of an earthy Mediterranean man holding a big bowl of pasta is a specifically American, female-friendly kind of fantasy that’s been depicted on-screen before, in travelogues like “Under the Tuscan Sun” and “Eat Pray Love,” both name-checked in “You, Me & Tuscany.” The Vardalos cameo also connects the dots between this film and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” both with large, cartoonishly ethnic families enthusiastically champing at the bit to plan a marriage ceremony.

But first, how do we get from unemployed house sitter to impending Italian nuptials? Anna, a culinary school dropout, is drifting from gig to gig, grieving her mother, who was a chef, when she meets Matteo at a hotel bar. He enthralls her with stories of his Tuscan hometown and currently empty villa, having run away from the burden of his family’s expectations. Anna takes it as a sign and books a flight. She turns up in his hometown and, with nowhere else to stay, helps herself to his villa while Matteo gallivants around the States, blissfully ignorant.

Later, while trying on a random diamond ring she finds (see aforementioned boundary issues), Matteo’s family turns up. They put two and two together, add a few assumptions and Anna goes with it, letting his mother Gabriella (Isabella Ferrari) indulge in a best-case scenario. Then she meets Matteo’s cousin/adopted brother Michael (Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton” fame), a soulful winemaker, and things get complicated. There’s also a family restaurant that’s struggling and could really use the help of a talented would-be chef obsessed with Italian cuisine.

There are almost too many romance tropes in “You, Me & Tuscany” to take it seriously: fake dating, a journey from being enemies to lovers, a fiancé’s brother, etc. So many plot points and characters keeps things jam-packed in what’s essentially a Hallmark movie with a travel budget. But for an outlandish romance set in a theme-park version of Italy that features more slow-motion shots of food being tossed in the air than an ’80s McDonald’s commercial, it’s actually pretty charming.

Anna has an angel and a devil on each shoulder, neither of whom she listens to very much. One is her best friend Claire (Aziza Scott) in New York, who’s always encouraging her to make the prudent choice. The other is her Italian taxi driver Lorenzo (Marco Calvani), who suggests she tell the truth but agrees that her way is more romantic. They synthesize and parrot back the script’s outrageous plot points, serving as a Greek chorus, though being reasonable wouldn’t push Anna toward her destiny.

As a romantic lead, Page could do this blindfolded with one arm tied around his back — he’s just that handsome and smooth. He even manages to pull off an a cappella version of the 2004 Mario R&B ballad “Let Me Love You” without drifting into cringe territory.

Bailey has a wide-eyed clueless cuteness that lends to her character’s well-meaning naiveté — even her missteps have a way of working out. She brings a sort of Disney princess innocence and pluck to Anna, which makes sense considering she played Ariel in the live-action “The Little Mermaid.”

There are limits to Bailey’s charm, though. She manages comedy much better than sincerity but Coiro knows how to work around it, punctuating her big speeches with quick cutaways to comic relief so we don’t dwell on them too much. The script grounds its fantasy in real emotional traumas and triggers: Anna and Michael bond over losing parents and the competition between brothers resonates authentically. Even if the setting and circumstances are over the top, the choices the characters make track as actual human behavior (if heightened).

But most importantly, “You, Me & Tuscany” is self-aware. It’s transporting and ridiculous and knows exactly what it is, and therefore, we do too. So go ahead, enjoy a little dolce vita as a treat.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.