“It is the business of times to change and gentlemen to change with them,” explains Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov (Ewan McGregor) in “A Gentleman in Moscow,” the eight-episode mini-series adaptation of Amor Towles’ acclaimed 2016 novel about love and loss.

Count Rostov’s saga begins in 1921, after he’s caught in the Russian Revolution which designated former nobility as enemies of the state. A Bolshevik tribunal sentences him to spend the rest of his life within the confines of Moscow’s Hotel Metropol – not in the elegant suite he’d previously occupied but in a drafty attic, formerly used as servants’ quarters. Should he ever leave, he will be shot on sight.

Haunted by memories of his bucolic past and taunted by Osip (Johnny Harris) from the Russian Secret Police, Count Rostov is soon befriended by precocious nine year-old Nina Kulikova  (Alexa Goodall), who has explored every nook and cranny of the hotel, showing  him secret passageways and locked rooms filled with confiscated treasures.

In turn, given his extravagant nature and impeccable manners, childless Count Rostov enthralls inquisitive Nina with stories about his glamorous aristocratic past, instructing her on precise and proper etiquette. 

Watching her grow into womanhood, their bond grows deeper, aided and abetted by their makeshift family: other long-term hotel residents as well as the waiters, bartenders, cooks, seamstress, barber, and musicians.

Nina’s fate becomes even more intertwined with his after she marries. Determined to follow her Soviet soldier husband to Siberia, yet unable to travel with a child, she leaves her five year-old daughter Sofia (Billie Gadsdon) in his care.

As years go by, Count Rostov becomes increasingly romantically involved with ambitious actress Anna Urbanova (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and more embroiled in the sociopolitical ramifications (terror, famine, mass murder) of the Communist State.

Adapted by Ben Vanstone and directed by Sam Miller, the plot is filled with dramatic twists and turns, set in and around the iconic hotel, as Ewan McGregor delivers one of his most compelling performances, bringing depth and humanity to irrepressible Count Rostov.

FYI: In real life Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are married; they met playing lovers in “Fargo.”

On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “A Gentleman in Moscow” is an intoxicating 7, streaming on Paramount +.

If you’re a Paul Schrader fan, perhaps you missed the dramatic thriller “Master Gardener,” the third in his ‘God’s Lonely Man’ trilogy that started with “First Reformed” (2018) and continued with “The Card Counter” (2021).   

Obsessively contained and solitary Narvel Roth (Joel Edgerton) is the scholarly head horticulturist at formal, ornately manicured Gracewood Gardens, a vast former Louisiana plantation owned by wealthy Baroness Norma Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). “Gardening is a belief in the future,” he says.

When his imperiously entitled patroness/benefactor asks him to take on her estranged, bi-racial grand-niece, Maya (Quintessa Swindell) as an apprentice, suddenly his highly organized life is in grave danger.

From the moment of her arrival, 20’ish Maya, who inherited drug issues from her mother, threatens obliging Narvel’s meticulously ordered existence. A former white supremacist, now in witness protection, carefully covering his tell-tale neo-Nazi tattoos with a black turtle-neck, long-sleeved sweater and overalls, Narvel becomes Maya’s mentor, then her lover, a relationship that inevitably leads to violence, tempered by grace. 

Perhaps best known as the screenwriter of Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed “Taxi Driver” & “Raging Bull,” Schrader wrote the book “Transcendental Style in Film” (1972) in which he delineated an ascetic form of filmmaking that “seeks to maximize the mystery of existence; it eschews all conventional interpretations of reality, realism, naturalism, psychologism, romanticism, expressionism, impressionism and, finally rationalism.”

Using the metaphor of gardening – how it calms the mind and mends the soul -Schrader centers this character-driven film once again on a tormented man in turmoil, writing “The seeds of love grow like the seeds of hate” in his journal, trying in vain not to allow the secreted skulls and swastikas to surface. 

Then there’s Schrader’s perennial question of transgression and forgiveness, tracing back to the Calvinist fatalism of the Christian Reformed Church in which he was raised.

Bottom line: Too much angst, too little payoff.

Also, the title has a double meaning. While “Master Gardener” designates a certification program providing intensive horticultural training, in this instance it also refers to the Nazi “master race,” indicating blond, blue-eyed German people.

FYI: Zendaya was Schrader’s first choice to play Maya but their salary discussions soon disintegrated.

On the Granger Gauge, “Master Gardener” is a stoic, serious, even severe 6, streaming on Hulu and Apple TV+.