Movie Nation

Decades of young women reluctant to identify themselves as “feminist” is explained in just a moment, when artist and feminist Judy Chicago remembers her college years in the ’60s.

She’d say something about women’s rights back then, and she’d get “What ARE you, a Suffragette?”

No no, she’d say. When people thought of Suffragettes, they thought of activist little old ladies 50 years before. “I didn’t want to be thought of like that.”

Same with today, Chicago says with a laugh in the new Netflix documentary, “Feminists: What Were They Thinking?” Young woman don’t want to identify with the “old ladies” who are the icons of the women’s rights movement, or with people her age (and Jane Fonda and Hilary Clinton’s age).

Director Johanna Demetrakas’ “What Were They Thinking” is a sprawling  “then and now” documentary built around a 1977 art photography book by Cynthia MacAdams, “Emergence,” and a retrospective exhibit, Feminist Portraits: 1974-1977, which recalls her work capturing self-identified feminists, famous or young and obscure, during the push for the Equal Rights Amendment.

“They look free,” filmmaker Wendy J.N. Lee says, poring over the book’s pages. “You want to be like them. Its contagious.”

Demetrakas interviews women who appeared in the book then, among them Lily Tomlin, Laurie Anderson, Jane Fonda, Michelle Phillips and Sally Kirkland. They talk about the world they were born into, with girls shoved into lives wholly limited by their gender, with abortion illegal and birth control rigidly opposed by corners of the religious, cultural and political patriarchy.

They wonder, “Why is anger not considered feminine?

One declares “I need to fight to be who I was.”

And young women interject themselves into the conversation by freely identifying with this earlier generation, noting how much progress was made — and how little seems to have been made in the decades since feminism was demonized by the Far Right.

In her film, debuting on Netflix Oct. 12, hot on the heels of the Kavanaugh Supreme Court debate, Demetrakas notes that MacAdams noticing women “looked different because of feminism,” but “their eyes remind us that the challenge is still there.

Screen legend Jane Fonda admits that thanks to the rigid gender roles of her early hears, “I’ve only known for ten years that ‘No’ was a complete sentence.”

Present day protesters — No, nobody is PAYING them to protest — say, “I’m done. I’m wanna be done fighting, but I can’t.”

Dematrakas, who gave us “The World of Sesame Street” and “Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony,” covers so much ground and includes so many voices that this feels like a two-night PBS “American Experience” slashed into 85 minutes.

The tyranny of fashion, the battle over abortion and the ERA, feminists made when “putting my husband through medical school” proved to be an unfair bargain, when their marriage to an enchanting foreigner turns out to be slavery in Afghanistan, others who only discover how bad they’ve had it after realizing they’re gay, Phillips recalling the servile nature of her “employment” by her then-husband in The Mamas and the Papas, rotests and art, the special difficulties facing women of color protesting for racial civil rights AND gender ones, personal stories of abortions and divorces — it’s overwhelming.

Having Fonda here is understandable, but she imbalances the film, repeating stories that you might have heard on her the HBO documentary about her that premiered last month.

“All your life, people say ‘Be a good girl.’ That implies that you’re naturally not.”

But Tomlin’s feminist stage shows are sampled, and other plays. The film of “The Children’s Hour” and Germaine Greer’s defiant late ’60s TV interviews all paint a portrait of an almost giddy, determined era when women found common cause, united behind it and changed the world, if only briefly in some ways.

And the inclusion of so many young voices gives “What Were They Thinking?” an optimistic feel. Misplaced? Only November will tell.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity, adult subject matter.

Cast: Lily Tomlin, Laurie Anderson, Cynthia McAdams, Jane Fonda, Michelle Phillips, Johanna Demtrakas, Sally Kirkland

Credits:Directed by Johanna Demetrakas. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

“Brampton’s Own” is a wistful baseball romance that makes its home in the “impossible dream” futility of life in the minor leagues. It doesn’t offer many surprises, but a good cast and a few moments make it a perfectly watchable also-ran, much like the stuck-in the minors hero its story is about.

From its first moments, in a dark indoor batting cage, Aussie actor Alex Russell of “Carrie” and “The Host” makes a perfectly passable almost-big-leaguer. Dustin Kimmel has been chasing that goal for a dozen years in the minors.

He’s treated like the locker room sage, a Crash Davis for the Tacoma club where he tries to hide his years and keep hope alive among the younger, hotter prospects. It’s all about “the call up.”

Even his regular booty call (Riley Voelkel) knows that.

“This is my career. I could be called up at any minute. I have to be ready.”

It’s why he won’t commit to her, which he regards as “no big deal.”

“Any time someone says ‘It’s not a big deal’ it’s a big deal.”

It’s also why he didn’t keep in touch with his friends in the small town where he grew up, where his “Brampton’s Own” exploits, being drafted by the Mariners, etc., are still clippings on the wall in the one bar and few restaurants Brampton has held onto.

His mom (Jean Smart) is the one to remind him “You said you’d give this until you were 30.” His smart-mouthed sister (Spencer Grammer) isn’t hearing “I didn’t have a backup plan.”

“It’s called ‘life.’ Figure it out.”

So Dustin faces “retirement” and starting over, without a clue and without the high school sweetheart who waited and waited, gave up on her own dream of singer-songwriter fame and gave up on Dustin — eventually. Rachel (Rose McGiver, Tinkerbelle on TV’s “Once Upon a Time”) is about to marry the new town dentist.

There’s nothing for it but to hang with the one old friend, an older jock (Kevin Linehan) even more “stuck” that Dustin. He, too, had a Big League dream. Now he’s over 40, still drinking and wearing his 1995 letter jacket to let everybody know when his life peaked, and what little he has to cling to now.

“You can’t quit. I gotta LIVE through you, man!”

You should know where this is going from that brief description, though not necessarily where it’ll go after it gets there. Whatever its charms, “Brampton’s Own” lingers past its payoff, becoming less predictable in scenes that amount to an afterthought/epilogue to a well-worn tale about jocks put to pasture.

The grace notes come from little snippets of humor, Dustin’s “old man” status in a Twitter-crazed clubhouse, his efforts at hiding his bitter disappointment, his attempts to coach kids in the art of hitting when hitting was what kept him out of the bigs.

“You’re casting. You look like you’re fishing. Keep your hands in closer.”

McGiver gives the film its few real sparks, showing consequence and heartbreak in someone who’s falling for a man playing a game that keeps him thinking like a boy.

“Brampton’s Own,” like Brampton’s own, is stuck in a kind of limbo, not really grappling with direction, never quite figuring out where to go. The film doesn’t find easy resolutions, though you get the impression first time feature writer/director Michael Doneger was looking for them.

It’s too adult to be a “family” film, not edgy or gripping enough for grownups.

Watchable? Sure. But it’s watchable the way a baseball game involving teams long out of contention is still watchable. You’d rather be seeing a contender.

And unlike baseball, in movies there’s no “There’s always next year.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Alex Russell, Rose McIver, Spencer Grammer, Scott Porter, Jean Smart, John Getz

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Doneger. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:30

Actually, actor Leon Bridges plays the famous jazz composer, singer and poet, in “First Man.” It’s in the “Why are we spending all this money on space travel?” montage.

Back in my public radio jazz program hosting days, I’d play this whenever I needed a wry laugh.

For you youngsters out there, here you go — “Whitey on the Moon.”

There’s a famous quote from the great French filmmmaker Jean Renoir, an expat who spent World War II in Hollywood trying to make his brand of important, politically allegorical films in “The Dream Factory.”

All Hollywood needs, he said at the end of a generally unproductive sojourn, “is a good bombing.” He wasn’t talking about its politics, but about its excess, the fantasy version of America and the world that disconnected Hollywood escapism from the real world.

Great art, he was saying, comes from people under stress. Orson Welles’ Harry Lime made a similar observation in “The Third Man,” nothing the Italian strife that produced The Renaissance, and Swiss peace which produced “the cuckoo clock.”

That seems to explain the film art we’ve been seeing from movies about the African American experience of American policing in recent years. A corner of society that feels (with statistical justification) under siege is inspiring filmmakers from Jordan Peele to Kathryn Bigelow, Spike Lee to George Tillman Jr. (“The Hate You Give”) and Reinaldo Marcus Green, whose “Monsters and Men” is as familiar as this week’s tragic shooting, next weekend’s plaintive but increasingly urgent protests about each shooting.

From “Get Out” to “Detroit,” “BlackKklansman” to this fall’s films zeroing in on the same flashpoint, we’re seeing movies remarkable in power and quality, consistent in message and surprising for their mere existence.

“Monsters and Men” is about a fictional Brooklyn/Bed-Stuy shooting inspired by many a real world incident, some involving police shooting an unarmed man, one infamous killing by strangling a suspect whose crime was selling single cigarettes in the ecosystem of his small, under-employed Staten Island neighborhood.

Director Green’s breakthrough film is about the ripple effects of such a death, how the circle-the-wagons mentality of the Brotherhood of Blue protects bad cops and how one criminal police action spreads hurt and destruction to everyone it touches — victim and cops, bystanders and those motivated to protest or, in some cases, retaliate.

Manny (Anthony Ramos ) is a kid with a kid — barely out of his teens, happy-go-lucky but job hunting and dodging the “ever been convicted of a felony) line on applications. In his neighborhood, it’s the exceptional who can check “no” in that box without lying. He lives with his mother and girlfriend (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and their infant daughter.

We see the eco-system he lives in, the economy that has one kid offer him a different (Stolen?) bike every day, the crap game he ducks into some evenings and the “dealer” who sells single cigarettes among other things right in front of the corner store. Darius (Samel Edwards) is a big, fatherly, friendly presence, nagging Manny to “take care of your girl,” giving kids candy money for the store right behind him.

So when NYPD swarms over Darius one night, Manny whips out his phone and amps up the tension and chaos of the situation by screaming at the cops and recording this overkill of an arrest. “SIX DUDES on one guy! SIX DUDES on ONE guy!”

We don’t see the shooting, we hear the shot. We see Manny’s horrified reaction. We can tell this world will never be the same. And on the same day Manny finally lands a job, he must respond to rising police harassment about “what you THINK you saw.” Posting that video, which Ramos plays as an agonizing decision, hotheaded youth or not, gets him arrested.

John David Washington (Denzel’s son starred in “BlackKklansman”) is Dennis, a veteran cop with decent rapport with the neighborhood, but a unique perspective on this shooting, which he didn’t witness. He knows there are bad cops, knows the bad cop who pulled the trigger. He also knows the culture. We meet him as he is stopped, for the umpteenth time, for “driving while black.”

As protests over the shooting grow and Internal Affairs launches an investigation, Dennis is caught up in the whole “stick up for your brother cop” mentality of a police department where institutional racism is a fact of life. Then there are the Buppy friends he and his wife (Cassandra Freeman) have over for dinner, people who challenge the loyalty he shows for a police force which never forgets to throw “You have no IDEA what we face” or “what it’s like to not know if you’re coming home tonight” into every debate, the victimhood card trumping all.

Police work, in case you ever get into this debate with a “Blue Lives Matter” supporter, is the 14th most dangerous profession in America. Armor played and armed to the teeth, “To Protect and Serve” has taken a back seat to “making sure I get to go home to my family at night.” Shooting on suspicion, shooting out of frustration, shooting because you know you can get away with it follows.

Dennis has his conscience tested  when the investigation of the shooting begins.

Zyric (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is a baseball player with pro scouts sitting down with him and his dad, people who ask about his “character” and maturity. The shooting of Darius, and the endless humiliations of “stop and frisk” policing send him to the neighborhood protester/agititator (Chanté Adams) to “get involved.”

It’s all-in or don’t bother, to her. That shooting reshapes his life, too.

Green’s film loses some of its narrative thrust and drive by shifting points of view like this, with each compelling story seeming to disappear as a new one replaces it. That doesn’t mean the third act doesn’t have its pathos and power.

Seeing ordinary people get upset enough to take direct action is as inspiring here as was back when “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” when Norma Rae stood on that loom holding up a sign with one word on it — “UNION,” when sexual assault survivors flooded Washington this fall.

In our increasingly divided culture, movies like “Monsters and Men” don’t reach a broad swath of the populace, just a corner of it open to its message. Fox News will only acknowledge such a film if it is a failure,  the way they devote round the clock coverage to any “retaliatory” shooting of policemen and only cover the protesters — football players included — and not the until-very-recently under-reported decades of police shootings of unarmed civilians.

But some people will see this run of good to great films of social significance and get involved themselves. And that’s the point.

Green’s film is about a tragedy, born in a time of great national stress. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s an absolutely riveting piece of movie-making, one you can be sure Jean Renoir would appreciate. And nobody had to bomb Hollywood to get them to make it.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: John David Washington, Anthony Ramos, Cassandra Freeman, Kelvin Harrison Jr. Chanté Adams,  Samel Edwards, Jasmine Cephas Jones

Credits: Written and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:36

An American enigma comes poetically and touchingly to life in “First Man,” a nervy account of the American space program and the astronaut years of Neil Armstrong, culminating with “One small step for man.”

Ryan Gosling, like Sam Shepard’s Chuck Yeager and Tom Hanks’ Jim Lowell in earlier spaceflight histories, sets out to embody a buttoned-down, stoic American “type” — a “Mad Men” era man’s man with “The Right Stuff”  — and succeeds, filling the gaps about a most famous, most private and press-shy hero, making the iconic Armstrong flesh and bone.

Director Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”) rattles the nerves and raises the stakes with this electric reminder of the bravery and unflappable competence that marked those chosen to help the United States beat the Soviet Union in The Space Race.

Chazelle narrows the field of vision, giving us medium shots of parts of space vehicles and training craft, close-ups of sweating astronauts and recreating what the very little they could see, hear and feel, strapped to the top of a liquid bomb taller than the Statue of Liberty.

We experience the tiny, iced-over windows, archaic LEDs and electrical switches, grimy knobs and near-darkness in a deathly silence shaken by every groan, creak, pop and bang the absurdly complex and yet shockingly primitive space craft these select few were flying.

Claire Foy is the equally stoic wife, Jan, who says “I married Neil because I wanted a normal life.” She makes Mrs. Armstrong bluntly supporting but achingly alone, wed to a man who didn’t talk with her about anything, even the little girl they lost to brain cancer just as the engineer/pilot’s spaceflight career was taking off.

The screenplay and Gosling’s performance suggest that death, so close and intimate, shaped the private man’s determination to become even more private. In press conferences with impertinent or under-informed reporters, Armstrong was not one to suffer’s fools, gladly or otherwise. Gosling makes the curt answers funny.

Like many a famous man of few words, Armstrong chose his few words carefully, not giving in to hyperbole. If he said he was “pleased,” he didn’t mean “thrilled” or “Thankful” to some deity or other. Many of those few words — “The Eagle has landed” — have become cultural touchstones.

Josh Singer’s script picks up the story with Armstrong wrestling with the X-15 and his doomed child’s fate, takes us through the engineer’s harrowing Gemini 8 mission, which went haywire with Jan listening on the home’s hard-wired Mission Control audio feed until NASA panicked and turned her off.

“You’re a bunch of boys! You don’t have anything under control!”

We see Neil’s selection for Apollo, the disastrous Apollo 1 fire and actual news footage of the day of public figures (Kurt Vonnegut, with Leon Bridges as Gil-Scott Heron doing “Whitey on the Moon”) and the public at large complaining “What’s all this for?” with Armstrong fending off silly reporters and drawling, myopic senators looking to bait him into an admission that the space program served no great purpose.

Familiar faces give what little meat the film has left over for the famous supporting cast. Kyle Chandler is quite good as Deke Slayton, the astronaut condemned (until Skylab) to run the earthbound side of the astronaut program, Shea Whigham is an earthy astronaut Gus Grissom, with Jason Clarke as space-walker Ed White, Lukas Haas as Apollo command module pilot Michael Collins and Corey Stoll giving Buzz Aldrin all the blunt cockiness the Second Man on the Moon became famous for.

I want to see a Buzz movie.

But none of those supporting turns match the throw-weight of the cast of “Apollo 13.” And the picture so avoids the jaunty swagger of “The Right Stuff” that it becomes an elegy for an America that embraced science, aimed high and inspired the world “back then.” The commentary on the Trump Era isn’t subtle.

Chazelle’s film still stands with those two earlier classics, with jittery camera work lending urgency, stellar effects (Spielberg is a credited producer) used sparingly and the best sound design since last years’ Oscar winner, “Dunkirk.” The director and his team use the silence of space well, the hellish explosions and rattles of spaceflight back then even better.

If NASA doesn’t go to school on “First Man” for their astronaut training regimen, or at least their “Apollo to the Moon” theme park simulators, they’re missing the flying boat.

And Gosling caps an already-distinguished career with an unfussy performance that lets us see behind the stone-faced public mask this most enigmatic American hero wore, from the moment he became a public figure to the very end of his days.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic content involving peril, and brief strong language

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Ciaran Hinds, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Shea Whigham, Jason Clarke, Lukas Haas, Ethan Embry

Credits:Directed by Damien Chazelle, script by Josh Singer, based on the James R. Hansen biography, “First Man.” A Dreamworks/Universal release.

Running time: 2:21

What kind of lowlife would bet on Little League baseball games?

Not the Little League World Series. Surely Vegas has action on that. I’m talking local sandlot ball, small town, setting “the line” and all that?

If you’ve seen any movies about the kids’ version of America’s Pastime, your first thought would be “Buttermaker,” the drunken kid-hating ex-ballplayer and very bad influence on “The Bad News Bears.”

But it takes a special kind of lowlife to think of the idea, set the line and make book on Little League games in a town where everybody knows everybody else.

That’ John Zbikowswki, “Zibs,” the small time bookie in suburban Baltimore who’s just trying to get “All Square.” 

“All Square” is a surprising, sentimental without sentimentality. cynical but with surprising dollops of heart, conventional in how it drifts on past its climax, but managing twists all along the way.

Michael Kelly of “House of Cards” lacks the natural, nasty crackle that Walter Matthau and Billy Bob Thornton brought to the various “Bad News Bears” movies. So he makes Zibs a loser without the “lovable” part, a one-time big league prospect sentenced, for life, to making book where he grew up, in Dundalk, looking after his inform dad (the great Harris Yulin), basically taking over the old man’s bookmaking business.

He narrates his story like a seen-it-all tough guy, defining “the line” and “the vig” and the bookie/gambler “code of honor.”

But he’s not tough. He rides up on one “deadbeat” (Tom Everett Scott) who owes him cash, and ends up helping him move a new curved-screen TV into the guy’s house. Zibs dodges confrontations.

Breaking in later is his play. It’s how he ended up with one deadbeat’s dog.

He figures he’s a genius for finding one thing that will get everybody in town who owes him money to pay him back — taking bets on their kids’ baseball games. It’s one place the lonely sports bookie doesn’t have to compete with Internet gambling.

“How’d I see it, when nobody else did?”

Here’s how. There’s this blowsy classmate (Pamela Adlon, bringing her high-mileage edge) who takes him from “Buy me a drink” to she’s not there when he wakes up in the morning in her bed.

There’s a kid watching TV. Brian (Jesse Ray Sheps) has nobody taking care of him during the day, and Zibs has no idea what he promised to do the day before. So he drags him around for ride along and a “get even/”All Square” break in.

The boy is so desperate for male attention that he invites this stragner, this foul-mouthed chain-smoker who never met a razor he liked, to see him pitch.

Fox? Welcome to the henhouse.

Director John Hyams — yeah, he’s Peter Hyams’ son — doesn’t have comedy chops. He’s produced TV shows like “NYPD Blue” and directed “Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning.” What he knows is milieu, and that’s where “All Square” lives.

It’s the bars where laid-off, burnt-out, “degenerate gamblers” hang out, the working class neighborhoods where everybody knows everybody and nobody has alarm systems, the personal connections that drift in and out of favor for decades because everybody’s stuck here. Adlon’s Debbie and Zibs hooked up in high school. Why not again?

The comp here is “Tree’s Lounge,” with Kelly’s performance reminiscent of Steve Buscemi’s limited, unschooled and amoral man trapped in the world he was born into. Zibs is full of worldwise (bad) advice for the bullied Brian, buying the kid his first beer, teaching him about fighting back.

“What are you afraid of?”

“Getting my teeth knocked out.”

“They’re baby teeth. They come back. It’s like playing with house money.”

The bully is 12 years old, “so how hard can punch, anyway?” Don’t worry about his parents calling the cops because “you’re under 18.”

Ironically, it’s advice Zibs himself never took. Another guy owes him money, but Zibs is the one who gets the black eye. He collects his own markers, and a hurt look (He managed that on “House of Cards,” too.) is no incentive for most guys to settle up.

But he knows sports gambling, and figures out Little League in a heartbeat.

“Big kids beat up little kids,” so bet on the team with the bulkiest, tallest pitchers and hitters. “And if his dad is coaching, he’s probably good…He’s learning fundamentals.”

The “Let it Ride” setting includes a bartender, Beaches (Yeardley Smith of “The Simpsons”) who acts as his banker and secretary, and barfly/gambler pals who include Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.

Josh Lucas is the always-smiling, glad-handing clean-cut league commissioner, the fellow who notices a lot of drunks and others with no kids in the games showing up with a KEEN interest in the final score. The commissioner is running for city council.

“You should vote for me.”

“I don’t vote. ”

“Everybody should vote. ”

“You convinced me.”

The funny stuff isn’t sidesplitting, it’s rye-flavored wry. The plot drifts into melodramatic twists as well as the occasional clever one.

I didn’t expect to like it, and Timothy Brady’s script never quite hits that “sleeper” sweet spot. But “All Square” rides its spot-on casting, sharply defined performances and beer-stained sense of place well past second base, if not all the way home.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, under-age drinking, gambling

Cast: Michael Kelly, Jesse Ray Sheps, Pamela Adlon, Josh Lucas, Tom Everett Scott, Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., Yeardley Smith

Credits:Directed by John Hyams, script by Timothy Brady A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

Veronica, “Ronnie” to her friends, sees dead people.

But that’s OK. Everybody does. Ever since “The Event.”

And in “a world where the dead walk among the living,” there are rules. “They can’t alter their imagery…They can’t affect our natural world.”

That’s what the experts tell us. But why is there “a panic room in every house” if the dead can’t hurt us? If they can’t “affect our natural world,” why does a ghost, a “remnant,” keep showing up in Veronica’s shower, writing “RUN” on her bathroom mirror?

Aside from the fact Veronica is played by Bella Thorne, I mean?

“I Still See You” is a middling mystery thriller in which the supernatural is explained and over-explained by long bursts of exposition, “rules” and scientific gobbledygoop delivered by the smartest science teacher in Jewel City, Illinois (Dermot Mulroney), as well as a science nerd who’s been paying attention in class, and the obsessive “James Dean type,” the brooding and quiet Kirk Lane (Richard Harmon).

Guess which one Ronnie believes?

Ten years after “The Event,” life goes on in much of the country. “Ground Zero” was Chicago, now a “No Go Zone.” But in Jewel City, people like Veronica stare at dead people — like her dad, sitting, sipping ghostly coffee and reading the newspaper at breakfast every day — then vanishing in a puff of ashy smoke.

It’s a morbid, bittersweet existence, not helped when a long-dead woman pops up in science class, or an old man goes through the motions of leaf-blowing his lawn even though its covered in snow. At first, they thought it was just people killed in “The Event.” Now, Veronica and others are becoming “truthers,” like Kirk. They don’t know what to buy into. The “remnants” seem to be growing in number.

Ronnie is being stalked by this underwear model with murder in his eyes every day in the shower gets her attention. Who is he, why is he in her bathroom and does he mean her harm?

The overriding explanation for all this is a Hiroshima/Nagasaki comparison. Whatever happened in Chicago turned people into shadows of themselves, some trapped in a “loop” capturing the moment of their death, others intentionally drawn to some place and time very special to them.

It’s a bit like religious teaching, isn’t it? Damned to hell, or somehow “sentenced” to heaven — a pleasant memory.

But Ronnie starts to see her stalker everywhere. An effective moment — Thorne’s Veronica lunging through the gym in the middle of a basketball game, touching people to see if they’re real. She brings the game to a dead silent halt.

There are ice skating reveries and falling-through-the-ice nightmares, a murdered young woman whose birthday matches Ronnie’s and an imaginary clock ticking towards Ronnie’s doom. Apparently.

Thorne is a real “gather ye rosebuds” movie (and music and TV and what have you) star, not the most selective in what she does, just getting while the getting’s good. She works constantly and not every film she takes on has the edge of “Assassination Nation” or camp of “You Get Me” (stalker girl) or the action beats to deliver real thrills of “Big Sky.”

She tries to bring a little flippancy to her line readings, going for throw-away laughs when she bats her eyes at the science nerd “obsessed with me since seventh grade” for help.

“Still got it.”

Her “Midnight Sun” director Scott Speer doesn’t do much with the potential romance here, letting the ripple effects that we see when somebody gently touches a ghostly image, and the ashes caught in the SFX wind when you storm through a “rem” (remnant) do the heavy lifting. Pretty, as are the underwater sequences.

While “I Still See You” has a nice wintry gloom, some creepy settings, it never manages more than a few minor thrills and a couple of chills.

Nobody registers fright, which I guess is to be expected if ghosts have become as commonplace as Kardashians — just something we live with.

But if Thorne wants to become the new “Scream Queen” (Who’s to say?), she’s going to have to give us more than this — anxiety, terror, panic, URGENCY. It’s not part of her repertoire yet, and considering how much we STILL see her — online, in movie after movie, music videos of her own creation and TV shows — she should have picked that skill set up somewhere along the way.

She may be the hardest working woman in show business. But it’s not just working a lot or working hard that counts. Being picky wouldn’t kill her.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violence, terror, partial nudity, and thematic material

Cast: Bella Thorne, Dermot Mulroney, Sara Thompson, Richard Harmon

Credits:Directed by Scott Speer, script by Jason Fuchs, based on the novel by Daniel Waters. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:44

Storyteller Gcina Mhlophe coaches orphan schoolchildren in Swaziland to create their own adventure story, which becomes the basis for “Liyana,” a marvelous blend of kids telling a story they’re making up and artist Shofela Coker rendering their words into images.

“You are the ones who are making it happen,” she tells them, in English and sisWati with English subtitles.

The kids — the films lets the boys in the elementary school classroom do most of the talking/storytelling — dream up a young girl their age, Liyana. They put her in a thatched hut in a township, with an abusive father who drinks and sleeps around at the bars and dies of AIDS.

They give Liyani two brothers, and a mother who dies of AIDS, too.

“So many of these children’s real life experiences are going to show up on this fictional character,” Mhlophe explains. Their lives have been bleak. The story they tell, with hunger and hardship, robbers and monsters, will reflect that.

“What is Liyana scared of? YOU will decide.”

The kids from the Children’s Home are seen playing, swimming, herding cattle and making toys out of junk. Swaziland, we are told, has a staggering HIV infection rate and hundreds of thousands of orphans to show for it. We even see the kids taking their blood tests.

The story of Liyana will be dark, a quest with magical realism qualities. She is chased by crocodiles, scorched by the desert and aided by a friendly bull, who is here ride and her protector.

All the while, Mhlophe cajoles, encourages, takes votes on plot directions and inspires with the plummiest accent this side of Jamaica.

“There is no RRrrrrrright answer, or wrrrrrrrrrong answer!”

The children admit to putting their own experiences in, from a desire to see the sea to a sense of hopelessness that makes you wonder if their tale will have a happy ending.

“I was too small…didn’t even know anything, when my father died.”

“In your own life, maybe there is no hope. But sometimes you need to keep pushing.”

It’s not literally correct to call Coker’s drawings animation, zooms and pans across vibrant, photo real still (CGI) images give the impression of action of movement, and that’s enough.

I found myself seeing girls in the classroom, but wondering why we weren’t hearing them pitch in on this epic girl’s story. One or two are included near the end, almost as an afterthought by the filmmakers. Pushy boys hogging all the camera time!

But “Liyana” is still a wonder, and the story the kids cook up themselves every bit as epic as the one Disney plagiarized for “The Lion King.” This effort turns out so delightful that somebody should hire these children as focus group consultants the next time Hollywood wants to tell a tale of Africa.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Gcina Mhlophe

Credits:Directed by Amanda Kopp, Aaron Kopp. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:16

Demonic possession, you say?

“I’ve seen MANY things,” says the priest.

So much for white picket fences, settling down and starting a family.

“Isabelle” looks B-movie creepy and has a not-quite-set 2019 release on tap.

That’s the image we all have of Stan Lee, Mr. Marvel, jaunty self-nicknamed “Stan the Man,” the grinning, self-mocking mascot of the comic book universe he presided over, cameo good lock charm in the legions of blockbuster films that come out of Marvel Studios, still his baby in soul if not Disney bean-counter reality.

The image doesn’t take too much of a ding in Bob Batchelor’s workmanlike new biography of Stanley Lieber, “The Kid” who got into comic book publishing in his teens, surfed the ups and downs of the business for decades, and became every bit as famous as his many creations.

Or co-creations.

Because whatever credit Lee deserved (and it’s a LOT) for the Comic Book Renaissance of the 1960s, which continues to this day, his self-mythologizing and endless self-promotion have tended to inflate his role in some ways and his versions of the “luck” and “hard work” and genius that brought him riches and glory have some holes in them.

Family connections, not “luck” and “pluck” got him his job at Timely Comics just before the war. His uncle married the daughter of Martin Goodman, the guy who owned Timely.

He stabbed fellow employees in the back — “Captain America” co-creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, most infamously — to take over the comic book division of Goodman’s publishing empire.

This isn’t a hagiography, and Batchelor, to his credit, doesn’t take Stan’s word for everything. Or anything. Having only read Stan’s autobiography as prep for a couple of interviews I did with him over the years, I was a little surprised to see some of the “cuddly” Stan rubbed off in this way.

But here’s what Stan DID do. After years of well-compensated struggle, Lee and Jack Kirby hit upon “Fantastic Four,” though their contentious relationship gets in the way of getting the real scoop of who was more important to making  that the breakthrough comic that launched the Age of Marvel. Lee probably deserves most of the credit, though he was very generous at crediting Kirby’s rock’em/sock’em drawing style for making the comic come off.

“Spider-Man” gave teen angst its own superhero. “The Hulk” showed us a troubled, sensitive monster.

Lee hit upon what Marvel fans, even those who only know the work through the movies, experience as The Never Ending Story. Serials, cliffhangers, have worked since Dickens, roped in fans for weekly trips to the movies when Stan was a boy and still work their magic today.

Hell, I was at “Venom,” a bit of a dog, the other night at fully a third of the house got suckered into waiting through the credits to see what would be teased for the “NEXT exciting installment in the Adventures of Venom!” (A terrible let-down, like the movie itself).

The other thing Stan Lee did was pick up on the first real fan letters creators ever got, and start interacting with fans in the back of the magazines, answering letters, using readers as market research on what he and his team should do next, but also wising off and engaging in a little self-mockery with them.

You’re over 40 and writing teen slang? Reading a lot of letters from comic book fans helps with that.

He became the face of his industry in the process, created generations of LIFEtime fans (fanboys, fangirls) and set the stage for the Comic Book Takeover of the Cinema and to a lesser degree TV.

Fans really into the history of Marvel, Lee or comics in general won’t find a lot to surprise them here. I’ve read a few books on the early history (not Sean Howe’s Marvel book, but Larry Tye’s recent “Superman: The High Flying History” for instance) and found “The Man Behind Marvel” a brisk overview of Lee’s life and Marvel’s history, not officially sanctioned (the author got his photo taken with Stan at some signing, haven’t we all?) but a good, quick dissection of what made Lee tick and what made Marvel hit.