The title for “Fuze” fills the screen, accompanied by loud house music, and the smeary credits that follow are over in a blink. From its first frame, this thing moves—so much so, moving so fast through its set-up, that initially it’s a little tricky to tell exactly what the hell is happening, or who these people are. But we don’t need to know much beyond their immediate function (proper intros, if necessary, can come later), and we don’t need to know much about the scenario beyond that there’s a big goddamn bomb, and it needs not to go off. Everything else is window dressing.The setting is London, present day, and in that opening shot, construction workers on a building site have dug up what appears, at least at first, to be an intact (but live) WWII-era bomb. Several surrounding blocks are evacuated, but in one small apartment of one nearby block of flats, a group of men close the curtains and stay put. What exactly are these dudes up to? In the tightly wound minutes that follow, director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”) will intermingle elements of heist movies, police procedurals, and military thrillers. His direction is propulsive; he keeps the cuts tight, the camera in motion, and the score (which is essentially non-stop) pulsing. It’s the kind of lickety-split, old-school programmer Steven Soderbergh and very few others are bothering to make anymore, and if it were content to simply be that, it would land cleanly. Alas, screenwriter Ben Hopkins piles on a few too many twists in the third act (including a couple that even a slow-on-the-uptake viewer like this one will get ahead of), and tacks on a wildly unnecessary epilogue (prologue, chronologically speaking, but at the end) to fill in blanks that we’ve already figured out. It all but sinks the ship, flying in the face of the very efficiency that’s made the picture work until then. Hopefully, some wise distributor will pick this one up and convince the filmmakers to quit while they’re ahead. Acting and directing don’t deploy the exact same skill set, but there are plenty of overlaps. So it’s somewhat jarring that Brian Cox, an actor who is seemingly incapable of a false note, has directed a film that consists of one false note after another. His directorial debut, “Glenrothan,” is the kind of bad movie that can only get made when someone important throws their weight around. Maybe it would’ve been made without Cox directing; it certainly wouldn’t be playing a major film festival. Cox also stars as Sandy, who lives in a small village in the Scottish Highlands and runs his family’s 200-year-old whiskey distillery. Forty years ago, his younger brother Donal (Alan Cumming) fled their home in the midst of a family conflict and made a life for himself in Chicago, where he owns and performs at “Donal’s Dive – Chicago Blues”; he’s first seen playing a version of “One Meatball” that is very much not the blues. No sooner has the picture started than the bar burns down (I presume to the immense relief of Chicago’s blues fans), and Donal and his daughter Amy (Alexandra Shipp) and granddaughter fly over for a visit. Long-harbored grudges and long-harbored resentments gradually reveal themselves in flashbacks, indicated by dialogue from the past with a heavy echo filter.These are fine actors, stranded by a laughable script and a director who hangs them out to dry; the typically capable Cumming, for example, is too often left to twist in the wind, indicating and over-emoting (he has a drunk scene that’s like something out of a junior high skit show). At a certain point, you just lose patience with him; he’s so fragile, but when the source of his trauma is revealed, it’s frankly underwhelming. That’s just one of the problems with David Ashton’s screenplay, where every line of dialogue is either a musty cliche (“We all make mistakes, Dad—it’s how we handle it that counts”) or clanging, on-the-nose exposition (“He’s your brother! He doesn’t have any kids! Just a distillery!”). Cox slathers it all in a twinkly, terribly, button-pushing score, and generates nary a moment of uncertainty or suspense about his musty story’s outcome. Take away the classy cast, and “Glenrothan” would be a Hallmark Channel Movie—and not an especially good one.Oddly, Anders Thomas Jensen’s “The Last Viking” is also about two adult brothers grappling with the long-term trauma inflicted by their cruel father, but seeing the two pictures in such close proximity is like a quick lesson in how to make and not make a movie. Nikolaj Lie Kaas stars as Anker, a tough criminal whom we first see stuffing a bag overflowing with stolen money into a storage locker. He entrusts his younger brother Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen) with retrieving and hiding that loot for when he gets out of jail.Fifteen years later, he does, but Manfred is “John”—John Lennon, specifically, he says—thanks to an acute case of dissociative identity disorder. (“You don’t even have the glasses right,” the skeptical Anker fumes). In fact, John attempts self-harm whenever he’s dead-named—those attempts become an inspired, if “Harold and Maude”-derivative, running gag. More direly for Anker, “John” can’t access any of Manfred’s memories—specifically, where he hid the 41.2 million kroner in stolen money. Like Jensen and Mikkelson’s earlier “Men & Chicken,” “The Last Viking” sports a cockeyed streak a mile wild, trafficking in the best kind of straight-faced absurdism—wry, but simultaneously genuine and sincere. But Jensen’s script also goes hard on the darker elements of the crime story, creating some jarring tonal shifts; it’s difficult for the rough violence that rears up in the back third to co-exist with the lightness before and the pivot to pathos after, and the closing scenes are just a touch too tidy. But Jensen keeps throwing curveballs, taking the story in unexpected directions, while remaining true to the central thesis of its opening voice-over: “If everyone is broken, no one is broken.” That notion seems more accurate with every passing day.