Movie Nation

Filmgoers have lots of choices at Fandango.com or in the line at their favorite cineplex box office this weekend.

The holdover “Bohemian Rhapsody” should continue the Queen revival.

But “The Grinch” gives families with small children something to go see, even though the Chuck Jones cartoon from the ’60s is far better, and cheaper to obtain.

“The Grinch” is sitting in “fresh tomato” territory on Rotten Tomatoes, but isn’t even close over at the more selective Metacritic. 

I thought it Cumber-boring, pretty, empty-headed and heartless. 

Horror fans, video gamers, mashup movie buffs and their ilk — referred to as “fanboys” and “fangirls” — have to be salivating over the J.J. Abrams produced “Overlord,” which was pitched as “D-Day with Zombies,” dollars to donuts.

It’s getting mostly favorable reviews, although not raves — something Metacritic reveals more readily than Rotten Tomatoes.  

For me, “The Zombies of Navarone” was a bit of a drag. A good-looking one, but so reliant on cliches (noble sacrifice, child in danger, suicide mission, Nazis in leather, intrepid French beauty who speaks English and isn’t collaborating, etc).

But as pioneering film critic Abe Lincoln once said, “Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing they like.”

Poor notices and the lack of a screening in my market mean I will get to “Girl in the Spider’s Web” later today. I do love that Claire Foy, though if I was doing a fresh installment in that franchise, I would have given serious thought to using the one and only Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Noomi Rapace. Still, could be good. Fingers crossed.

Box Office Mojo is predicting a $60 million weekend for Universal’s latest version of “The Grinch,” which allows the studio to make bank before “Ralph Breaks the Internet” comes in to rain all over their Disney Parade.

Box Office Mojo is thinking $52 million is more likely.

Deadline.com figures “Grinch” will hit $70 million in the US on its opening weekend.

No word yet from Deadline.com about Thursday night preview ticket sales, but I saw “Overlord” in a mostly-full IMAX (it wasn’t really, AMC just charges more) showing. Guessing it got the jump on “The Grinch.”

I also would bet the bank that BO Mojo’s prediction that “Overlord” will only add $11 million to Paramount’s bottom line is laughably off. The fanboys and fangirls are eating up the zombies/WWII D-Day movie mashup. Box Office Mojo is saying $14. I figure over $20, but we will see.

The “Girl/Spider’s Web” predictions are in the $8-10 range, which may be a tad high.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” opened to a gravity-defying $51 million last weekend. Anything more than $30 this one will be a big win for Fox, anything less suggests it’ll never match “A Star is Born” in the fall musicals box office race. “Star” is over $170, “Bohemian” not quite at $70. Will the Gaga/Fat Bottom Girls gap close?

“Overlord” grafts World War II combat movie cliches onto zombie and Frankenstein “Give my creature LIFE!” cliches, a D-Day with Monsters mashup with splendid firefights, digitally dazzling airdrop action and gruesome as all get out Nazi Walking Dead effects.

It’s such a slick spin on the two genres that it feels familiar, first scene to last. But when your whole concept is “Let’s give these cliches a new setting,” this “Re-animating Private Ryan,” “Frankenstein SS” or “The Zombies of Navarone” (I see a drinking game in the making) is rarely more than a grind. We know where it’s going, know the settings, know the action beats long before they show up. As comfortingly familiar as they are, the cliches play like a checklist from a screenwriting seminar.

They make the movie seem like it’s crawling along at half-speed.

Jovan Adepo (“Fences”) heads a little-known to unknown cast, playing Boyce, a “90 day wonder” in the 101st Airborne, dropped into Occupied France on the eve of D-Day.

It doesn’t pay to sweat the militaria in this, so don’t get caught up in “The Army wasn’t integrated in WWII” and the Screaming Eagles required a lot more training than 90 days pre-D-Day.

His squad, led by a crusty, foul-mouthed Sgt. (Bokeem Woodbine, fun), is to take out a German radio jamming station built into a church in a French village.

The Sarge gives his men, including the testy new guy (Wyatt Russell, Kurt’s son), the Jewish kvetcher (Dominic Applewhite), the combat-inept photographer (Iain De Caestecker) and the wisecracking Bronx Tale Italian (John Magaro) a call-and-response pep talk. His “ladies” need reminding that the Nazis are “destroying everything that’s good in this world. So what do we have to DO?”

“Our Goddamned JOBS, Sergeant!”

And then all Hell breaks loose — a waking nightmare of anti-aircraft explosions, shrapnel slaughter, a fire on their C-47 Dakota and a frantic CGI plummet into Hitler’s Inferno topped by plunging into a lake.

The handful of survivors are surrounded by Germans, now led by the testy Corporal and still with that “save D-Day” mission, knocking out that tower by dawn.

Fortunately, a French lass who speaks English (Matthilde Ollivier) is wandering the woods amidst all the carnage and combat. She will take them to town.

There’s a long, chatty and noisy interlude in Chloe’s house, where her cute little brother longs to play baseball with the Americans and her aunt, who has been “helped” by the German doctor in town, looks like every George A. Romero extra ever.

The rumpled, chain-smoking SS officer (Pilou Asbæk of “Game of Thrones”) must be captured and interrogated — “Zis is VAR, eh? Pipple die in many UNFORTUNATE vays!”

And eventually, they remember to get around to their urgent, desperate and against-the- odds mission.

J.J. Abrams produced “Overlord” and his touches are everywhere. The film has a lovely sheen, the darkness lit up by acres of light blimps (no doubt), the explosions and monstrous effects have a no-expense-spared gloss.

It never feels less than big budget (save for the cast), even if it the strain of every contrived moment shows. Of course the child is taken, naturally Boyce stumbles into the leftover “Captain America” sets of the science lab/underground lair.

The characters may be “types” borrowed from scores of films (a sniper with a “Put me in range of Hitler” boast stolen straight from “Saving Private Ryan”), but every now and then, a funny line crosses their lips.

“That’s weird.”

“Add it to the list.”

Adepo makes a fine, surrogate-for-the-audience lead, Magaro can handle a punchline and Russell has a lot of screen presence. Ollivier has a sexy spitfire air and Asbæk makes a perfectly vile villain. Still, the characters are never more than cartoons, and they spent no money hiring a proper mad scientist, a mistake “Captain America” didn’t make.

One pitfall of building your movie out of recycled materials is always going to be pacing. When every character is cardboard, every scene is preordained, you have to get more pop out of the performances and move this damned thing along. Director Julius Avery (“Son of a Gun”) was never going to be a guy to sprint us through the usual J.J. Abrams bloat.

“Overlord” has a “just work with me here” vibe, an invitation to “just go with it” goes without saying. But at some point, this 85 minute genre mashup in a 110 minute package, with its assaultive soundtrack and requisite shock-effect images, sucking chest wounds and mangled corpses coming back to life, just wore on me.

It crawls from “Sure, great,” to “OK, expected that” and onward, ever onward to “All right, get on with it” far too slowly to be that much fun.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, disturbing images, language, and brief sexual content

Cast: Jovan Adepo, Mathilde Ollivier, Wyatt Russell, Pilou Asbæk, John Magaro, Iain De Caestecker and Bokeem Woodbine

Credits:Directed by Julius Avery, script by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:49

It’s a Lars von Trief horror film, but really — aren’t they all?

It looks monstrous.

Dillon’s most challenging film since “Factotum,” I’d say.

“The House that Jack Built” is a serial killer tale starring Dillon, with Bruno Ganz is also in the cast, with Riley Keogh.

It opens at the end of this month, Nov. 28.

“Director’s cut,” they say. The horror, the horror, say I.

Pettyfer makes his directing debut in this Southern Gothic noir.

Juliette Lewis is mama in prison, Robert Patrick is the jaded local sheriff, Nicola Peltz is the ex-con’s sister in this adaptation of a Tawni O’Dell novel.

“Back Roads” may have finished its film festival run and appears to be awaiting a release date.

The “Paranorman” and “Coraline” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” folks are having Annapurna distribute this comedy, featuring the voices of Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana, Zach Galifianakis, Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry.

Yes, there’s a hint of “Smallfoot” about it. Couple of Hugh and Zach titters in this trailer.

“Missing Link” opens April 19.

Glad Universal got “The Grinch” out before Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” sequel. I’m sure they are, too.

Whatever these inside-video-games/characters’ interior lives comedies hold for kids, they’re great fun for adults who get the references, the jokes and the whole digital milieu cooked up for “Ralph” and Sarah Silverman’s little candy colored car racer girl.

“Ralph Breaks the Internet” opens Nov. 21. Yes, Disney is showing this one WAY before release because they think they’ve got a winner.

Committed runners talk about getting “in the zone,” the “zen” nature of the exercise, letting your mind go places unconnected to the path your body is covering one step at a time.

But can it lead to a higher consciousness?

That was the thinking behind guru Sri Chinmoy’s creation of the 3100 Miler Self-Transcendence Race. An avid sprinter himself, the late Indian mystic believed that “the inner life and outer life” come together when you’re running.

So he and his followers concocted a New York ultra-marathon, 52 days of covering at least 60 miles a day, “the longest certified road race in the world.” The idea was if you send runners onto a half mile circuit of part of the city, lap after boring lap, they’re going to figure out things about themselves, their bodies and their connection to the world in the process.

“Sometimes he will run to reach the goal, at times the goal will come to him,” Chinmoy preached.

I don’t know about that. But if you’re making a documentary — “3100: Run and Become” — about this annual race (the 2016 running of it is what is documented), you’re going to have to have “characters” you follow, interesting characters, preferably. And you have to find ways to open up the picture. Because a half mile circuit? That’s ridiculously boring, just reading about it.

Filmmaker Sanjay Rawal decided to focus on a a fellow who came to dominate the race over the years, a Finnish man who runs to deliver newspapers every day in Helsinki.

And when even that wasn’t enough, Rawal broadened the film and burned through Sri Chinmoy cash flying to the Kalahari Desert, where bushmen no longer allowed to chase down prey while hunting still run the desert, to Navajo country in Arizona to meet Native American ultra milers and to Japan to follow a Buddhist monk walking the 1000 day spiritual “walking race,” kaihgyo, around Mount Hiei in Japan.

Ashprihanal Aalto, 45, is the Finn, who has to talk himself into taking on the race again in the opening scenes of “3100.” I’ve run so much. I’ve run enough, you know,” he tells his mentor.

But he’s a devout believer and determined to participate in this annual marathon to honor his spiritual leader. If you’ve been given a new name that means “inspiration fire inside the heart,” you’ve got a lot to live up to.

We follow Aalto as he stands at the starting line with a couple of dozen other competitors — from all over Europe and America (all white, most over 40) — and gets the pep talk from race chairman Rupantar Russo.

“No matter how well you do…you will be changed, and changed for the better.”

And they’re off, in the middle of a heat wave, hoping to run through rain, blisters, chafing and cramps for 52 straight days, a few of them hoping to dethrone the race’s undisputed master.

“It exposes everything about you, whether you want it to or not — emotions, weaknesses.”

When that gets boring, we travel to Africa where Gaola and Jumanda Gakelebone talk about laws that changed their traditional way of life in the bush, but not their need to run.

Then we meet Gyoman-san in Japan, explaining the rituals, attire and spiritual benefits of his 1000 day quest.

Aalto recalls running in a Navajo marathon a while back, which was filmmaker Rawal’s introduction to this new culture and a chance to bring other mystical/religious connections to running into his film.

“Running is prayer you’re praying with your feet,” marathon organizer and distance-runner Shaun Martin tells the competitors. Stunning scenery awaits this crew as they cover 35 miles of breathtakingly beautiful high desert wilderness in this race.

The film, like the enterprise itself, can be a rather tedious affair, with proselytizing woven into the spiritual journeys all these runners take on different pieces of ground, and for different beliefs.

And we don’t know if this enlightenment/higher consciousness thing really takes root. The runners of the 3100 are generally focused on that latest blister, that next meal.  Aalto, speaking mostly English but some Finnish here, comes off as a simple soul who’s found a religion and a guru he can work with.

But then again, he did that long before he ever came to the starting line of the 3100.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Credits:Directed by Sanjay Rawal. An Illumine Group release.

Running time: 1:20

Co-writer/director Steve McQueen doesn’t reinvent the heist picture with “Widows,” his follow-up to “Twelve Years a Slave.” But he does change the focus, the point-of-view, raising the stakes while piling on characters, subtexts and twists.

It’s as complicated as “The Departed,” which wasn’t a heist picture, and in spite of the fact that the phrase “mean and lean” was invented to describe this corner of the crime movie genre, he gets away with it with this well-cast, uncommonly well-acted sometimes pulse-pounding thriller.

A heist goes wrong in a hail of bullets and a torrent of fire in the film’s opening moments. Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) and his gang (Jon Bernthal among them) didn’t make it. All that’s left are ashes, and widows.

And a debt. Turns out Harry & Crew were robbing from the well-heeled gang leader Jamal Manning (John Tyree Henry), who just happens to be running for district alderman in this corner of Chicago. Jamal and his ruthless enforcer/brother Jatemme (say it like it’s French) want that money — $2 million — back. They need it to win the election.

As they’re battling Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), son of Tom Mulligan (Robert Duvall), whose family has owned that ward seat for decades, that further complicates matters.

And demanding the money, on pain of death, from the widows of the robbers, could be a non-starter. Just how many assets to the four women have? Even stripping teacher’s union lobbyist Veronica (Viola Davis) of her posh condo, swank furniture and Escalade won’t get them close.

She’s tasked with getting the other widows on board — bridal shop owner Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), blonde beauty with no visible job skills Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) are made aware of the dilemma. New mom Amanda (Carrie Coon) stays out of it. The others are close to broke.

Veronica, queen of looking the other way, has to figure this out with only her punch-drunk driver Bash (Garret Dillahunt), a retired accomplice of Harry’s, and this safe deposit box key.

That’s where her late husband kept his planning journal, research, logistics and scheduling for every job he ever did. And there’s this “next” job, with $5 million on the line, that could save them all.

McQueen never lets “Widows” descend into “Set it Off” or “Going in Style” absurdity, zeroing in on how hard achieving every little step that most heist pictures skim over actually is. Getting a van that can’t be traced? Police auction, fake name. Guns? Visit a gun show, find an overweight gun nut to help hook you up. Finding out where the “safe room” whose blueprints Harry had, the place they’re actually going to rob, actually is? That’s hard.

“How’m I supposed to know this?”

“By being smarter than you are right now!”

One inspired piece of casting — making Daniel Kaluuya of “Get Out” the heavy, Jatemme. McQueen’s camera circles him as he gets right up in the face of those he wants to intimidate, nose-to-nose. Yes, that action has purpose. But sometimes, he’s just getting his sadistic jollies out of somebody he expects to stab or shoot anyway. It’s a monstrous turn which should park Kaluuya on everybody’s “must have” list of actors you want in your thriller.

Davis suffers mightily, lets us believe she’s lost the love of her life (Harry/Neeson is in her dreams and flashbacks) and takes on her burdens with the stoicism that has become her trademark. One thing she doesn’t pull off is acting as if she’s had an adorable lap dog (bearded collie) in her life. She carries him like an ungainly sack of rice, as if she’s never picked up a dog or had one on a leash. Maybe she resents sharing the screen with the pooch, who is a scene stealer (as W.C. Fields warned us).

Rodriguez (“Fast and Furious,” “Girlfight”) has to hide the toughness she carries around as her screen baggage. Debicki, with her model’s looks, makes good work of the “one we’re supposed to underestimate” and Cynthia Erivo makes us forget her in “Bad Times at the El Royale” playing Belle, a late addition to the “gang” who is a walking muscle thanks to the multi-job schedule she keeps as an inner city single mom.

Duvall delivers his usual sound and fury, and Farrell easily suggests the cunning Jack Mulligan uses to get by, the act he puts on as a white politician trying to hold power in an overwhelmingly African American ward.

McQueen includes so many folks in his story (based on a Lynda La Plante novel) that many characters feel underserved and a few story threads lack the fulfilling payoff we want. Jacki Weaver plays Alice’s “use your looks to make money” mom, Lukas Haas is cast against type as a wealthy developer paying for Alice’s company and Kevin J. O’Connor, as a wheelchair bound bowling-alley owner no longer in “the life” so stands out in his couple of scenes that we crave more of his character.

The extra faces make “Widows” feel cluttered, and coincidences and the occasional jarring, illogical scene that comes out of nowhere show us some points on the steep learning curve he was on that he hasn’t mastered.

But he’s still made one of the best thrillers of the year and one of the best heist pictures since David Mamet made “Heist,” the modern benchmark for excellence in violent, complex cinematic capers.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, language throughout, and some sexual content/nudity

Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Daniel Kaluuya, Colin Farrell, Elizabeth Debecki, Robert Duvall and Liam Neeson

Credits:Directed by Steven McQueen, script by Gillian Flynn and Steve McQueen, based on the novel by Lynda La Plante. A Fox release.

Running time: 2:09

In 1999, on the war-torn, divided island of Timor north of Australia, some 1500 women and children were trapped and in danger of almost certain slaughter by invading Indonesian forces and their supporters.

American Marie Colvin was the only Western journalist on the ground there, and stubbornly refused to leave or stop reporting — doing interviews with media companies in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere — “bearing witness” to what was about to happen and warning the world of an atrocity in the making.

The Indonesians backed down.

In 2001, at the height of the Sri Lankan Civil War and the humanitarian crisis it spawned, her cries of “Journalist JOURNALIST” could not dissuade government forces from dropping one last mortar round on her, taking out an eye. She filed a 3000 word story, on deadline, while wearing an eye patch, the first of many.

And in February of 2012, she slipped into war-torn Syria and died in an artillery barrage of civilians by the army of genocidal dictator Bashar al-Assad. 

“Bearing Witness” was Marie Colvin’s life’s work, and the title of an earlier documentary about her. “Under the Wire” is a fine new film about her, covering her full career and her death and timed to come out just before “A Private War,” the feature film about Colvin starring Rosamund Pike, hits theaters.

Colvin was a foreign correspondent who specialized in conflicts, showing up wherever fighting broke out — from Chechnya to Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone to country-by-country protests and insurrections of The Arab Spring.

Working first for U.S. wire services, and then for Britain’s “Sunday Times,” and appearing on TV in the process, she became a legend in her business — the first to talk to Gaddafi after U.S. air strikes failed to kill him, frequent interviewer of Arafat and other world leaders, but most importantly — as someone who did not lay back when the shooting started.

When the civilians who always come off the worst in combat zones would cry “Tell the World, TELL THE WORLD,” Colvin was their ally and their microphone.

“Under the Wire” uses archival footage of Colvin and extensive interviews with those who worked with her, including Paul Conroy, the British photographer/videographer who ventured into many a war zone with her over the years.

“But she was a complete and utter one-off,” Conroy says, always focusing on the human tragedy of war, brassy and brave and always “bearing witness.”

“It’s about what people, what people are going through” she said on one TV appearance.

Others echo Conroy’s “legendary” assessment of Colvin, called “one of the greatest war correspondents of our generation” by her Sunday Times editor, Sean Ryan.

Chris Martin’s documentary uses extensive footage shot by Conroy and others, and occasional recreatings, capturing not just Colvin in action but the chaos of any combat zone — jumpy hand-held footage of camera people running from gunfire or to a safer spot to ride out an artillery bombardment.

We meet their guide and translator for that fateful trip into Syria (Assad’s government didn’t want anyone “bearing witness” to the civilians it was slaughtering in the name of putting down an insurrection).

The harrowing nature of the work is the primary focus of this film and many others on this subject. But Colvin never comes off as the classic adrenaline junkie/Hemingway wannabe that too many of these films turn their heroes into.

She turned her lost eye and eyepatch into a trademark, her reputation into armor and a pulpit from which to warn the world about this genocide or that refugee crisis.

The most fascinating part of Martin’s biographical documentary is the detail — from interviews with survivors, found footage and recreations — we get about Colvin and Conroy’s most dangerous mission, which would turn out to be Colvin’s last.

Crossing the Syrian border with Lebanon in darkness on the backs of motorbikes, “a shadow gives you to another shadow” is the way Conroy described their trek.

Filing stories from the besieged towns of Baba Amr and Homs, appearing on TV with Anderson Cooper describing the “worst” slaughter she’d ever witnessed. Conroy and reporter Edith Bouvier remember death — a baby’s and later Colvin’s own, with grim audio of the moments just after the artillery round that fatally wounded her and French correspondent Remi Ochlik.

Fittingly, the film goes on after Colvin’s death as indeed the dangerous work does. One of the best things this History Channel produced film manages is take away the “They should never have been there” dismissal by the clueless who shrug every time a journalist dies. They have to be there because we need to know.

And the other is to strip much of the glamour off the profession. Nice hotels in places most people would be too frightened to visit aside, war correspondent is a grim, dangerous line of work that seldom allows for the peacocking we see such “characters” do in the movies. Far too often, they end up like Colvin, remembered but rarely living long enough to enjoy being labeled “a legend.”

MPAA Rating: R for language and disturbing violent images

Cast: Marie Colvin, Paul Conroy, Sean Ryan, Edith Bouvier, Williams Daniels,Wa’el

Credits: Written and directed by Chris Martin. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:40

I’ve been looking forward to this one for much of the year — Viola Davis in an action pic, and Ms. “Girlfight” Michelle Rodriguez, in a role worthy of her talents and not billed behind the cars.

Steve McQueen’s “Widows” opens Nov. 16.