Movie Nation

August is traditionally a studio dumping ground, movies not strong enough to stand with the Big Boys of Summer, movies will few prospects of garnering attention during “Awards Season,” which begins in fall.

But smart players of the box office game know that “August Sleeper” is a real thing, a movie that opens at the end of a blockbuster summer, usually a genre picture that touches a nerve.

Might “Searching” be that picture this summer? A father (John Cho) starts plowing through his 15 year-old daughter’s school, social media and general online profile after she disappears.

“I KNOW my daughter,” is the catchphrase of this trailer.

Genre pictures like this aren’t usually marketed to the parent-age audience, but the general paranoia about “What the kids are up to online” is a part of the zeitgeist.

Debra Messing co-stars in this Aug. 3 release, with unheralded Aneesh Aganty behind the camera. And whatever else you want to say about it, there’s enough creepiness there to cut a really good trailer out of.

“Infinity War” is going to own the vast majority of the movie-going audience for at least one more weekend.

Because, you know, “Deadpool 2” opens next week. And maybe, JUST MAYBE, filmgoers and even comic book movie fans are going to wonder why they were soiling themselves over two hours and twenty minutes of hype (more bathroom breaks, fanboys/fangirls) when the self-mocking ‘Pool shows them how its done.

“Infinity War,” like “Black Panther” before it, has made stupid money, and will continue to — $50-60 million this weekend is projected. 

Melissa McCarthy’s latest vehicle, a mom-returns-to-college-after-her-divorce “romp” shows up just in time for Mother’s Day. It’s more cute than rude and coarse, PG-13 instead of another variation of her R-rated “Bridesmaids” banter. And was directed by her husband, the steadily-employed but rarely funny Ben Falcone. The reviews, including mine, reflect the way his influence waters down the McCarthy brand. I hope it does well, because trying to give your husband a directing career isn’t an ignoble ambition. Unless he’s Tom Arnold.

Expect it to do “The Boss” or “Tammy” (which he also directed) money, over $20 million. Widely panned by critics, it has a few laughs, if you’re in that mood and fall into that very forgiving corner of the comedy audience.

“Tully” is its most significant Take Mom to a Mom Movie for Mother’s Day competition, which is to say, no competition at all.

“Breaking In” is from genre loving, African American-audience friendly money-making producer Will Packer (“Ride Along,” “Think Like a Man,” “No Good Deed”), another Heroine in Jeopardy/Home Invasion thriller, this one with a “You messed with the WRONG mother” Mother’s Day angle, starring Gabrielle Union.

It’s a half-hearted thriller played at half speed, and Union isn’t a box office star. But Packer, hiring director James “V for Vendetta” McTeigue and keeping his costs low, always makes money. Will it do the $18 million Box Office Mojo is projecting? Nah. I think even the $15 Box Office Guru is suggesting might be a stretch. $12? We’ll see. Packer pictures have a way of blowing up (in a small way) expectations. The man knows his audience.

A big hand for the strong and enduring marriage of comic phenom Melissa McCarthy and comic Ben Falcone. And it’s also impressive that McCarthy has made it a point to give her showbiz husband a leg up thanks to her success.

But trusting him to co-write her scripts, leveraging her box office appeal to get him behind the camera, directing “The Boss” and “Tammy?” You don’t see Kevin Hart, who needs to SAVE his marriage, doing that. Tom Hanks may support Rita Wilson’s late life lounge singer ambitions. He’s not entrusting his work to her. With good reason.

Because Falcone’s latest, “Life of the Party,” is death itself.

There’s nobody there to push her, nobody on set with the power and emotional remove to tell McCarthy that they need another take, they need funnier lines, or that her decision to go with halting, wait for the rim-shot line-readings do no make the unfunny script funny.

She plays a housewife, ditched by her husband (Matt Walsh, colorless here) on the day they drop their daughter (Molly Gordon) off for her senior year in college. Deanna, the mom, is lost until she decides to enroll at Decatur U. and finish the degree she gave up for marriage.

Lots and lots of scenes have McCarthy in her frosted-tips “Mom Perm,” sporting bedazzled alma mater-wear and trying to fit in with the hip kids half her age as she waddles to class.

“Go Tigers, right? “Mondays, huh?” “There’s always that one, right?”

There’s a little midwestern mom in this Georgia mom and her hot-dishes, her smocks and clip-on earrings, dropping into daughter Maggie’s sorority.

“I brought snacks!”

Scene after scene starts off stale and isn’t rescued by riffing. The supportive sorority girls (Gillian Jacobs, Debbie Ryan, Adria Arjona) may counsel “Party through it…We need to get you jack-hammer blasted,” to cope with divorce. Deanna may acquire college kid nicknames — Dee Dee, Dee-Roc. She may find an unlikely college friend-with-benefits (Luke Benward). 

And a frat house may throw an ’80s Night party, allowing the ladies to doll up like “Dallas.” Dee Dee gets her ’80s dance moves on, a low highlight of the picture.

None of it plays that funny. Even comic MVP Maya Rudolph, playing the foul-mouthed hard-drinking BFF, struggles to deliver a giggle. Chris Parnell is introduced as Deanna’s college classmate, now her archaeology professor, and given nothing to play.

It’s all harmless enough, but charmless as well. Wrapping messages about women supporting each other (and not stealing each other’s husbands or being mean girls in college) fall flat without more comic pop surrounding them.

If McCarthy’s still getting pitched scripts from studios all over Hollywood, she’d be wise to give up the co-written ones with her husband. Falcone’s not at full-tilt Tom Arnold here. But Melissa is heading towards a serious “MRS. Norman Maine” reckoning if her not-funny other half keeps misusing her talent in crap like “Life of the Party.”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual material, drug content and partying

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Gillian Jacobs, Molly Gordon, Matt Walsh, Julie Bowen, Stephen Root, Chris Parnell and Luke Benward

Credits:Directed by Ben Falcone, script by Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:45

So what do we know about the “Deadpool” sequel?

No, not the “Introductions,” the “new kids” in “X-Force” stuff. Change your diapers, nerds. Yeah, Josh Brolin’s yet ANOTHER Marvel villain.

And yes, Zazie Beetz is, oh, “Domino,” and is on “Atlanta” and in the indie film “Sollers Point” coming out the same week as “Pool 2.”

No, what we REALLY know is how much hilarity Fox/Marvel and the ol’Pool are hurling at us via marketing stunts, “feuds” with Hugh Jackman.

And gag TV commercials. Like this. Oh, Canada.

And this one.

So you have to wonder, “Damn. Are they giving away more laughs than are in the movie?”

Let’s hope not.

“Deadpool 2” comes out May 18.

It’s not the most original conceit. Round up scientists from different disciplines, have one specialist introduce his or her speciality to somebody from a wholly unrelated field, and see what happens.

But The Motherboard, the science corner of Vice.com, takes this roundtable discussion idea into the field and the far corners of the Earth for “The Most Unknown,” a documentary film/global game of tag with experts in the brain, measuring time, cognition in monkeys, particle physics and cave microbes relay racing their way from Italy to Puerto Rico, Hawaii to Sussex.

As microbiologist Jennifer Macalady from Penn State suggests, “Humans get smarter, the more things they experience.” So she leaves Fransissi Cave in Italy and “probably the most beautiful slime I’ve ever seen” to the deep underground particle research lab of Davide D’Angelo in Milan, observing “a physicist in his natural habitat.”

And D’Angelo meets, on camera, psychologist Axel Cleeremans in Belgium, and gets wired up for Cleeremans’ studies of consciousness.

Cleeremans is the REAL fish out of water when he goes camping with Montana astrobiologist Luke McKay, helping take DNA samples from the mud of boiling hot springs in the American West. And so on.

From methane vents in the deepest corner of the Pacific to Macaque Monkeys on Caya Santiago off Puerto Rico and the measurement research of Jun Ye and his colleagues in Boulder, Colorado, home to the world’s most accurate atomic clock, which they’re striving to make even more accurate, “The Most Unknown” mashes up scientists from widely divergent fields for intellectual, scientific, social and even comic effect.

Make a “Ghostbusters” reference, a “Pina Colada Song” joke or “Pokemon Go” aside, chances are the other scientist knows what you’re talking about, even if she or he doesn’t know what the Western term “ride shotgun” means.

They talk of how no one genius making a breakthrough alters human knowledge, but of scientific scholarship, building on tradition, earlier proofs, a wall of What We Know built one brick at a time.

One stand-out “fun fact” from the movie was Jun Ye’s explanation of how, if the clock is accurate enough and is measurably impacted by even the slightest changes in the mass around or underneath it, you could predict earthquakes with it, even the Big One headed for Yellowstone sometime down the road.

Whatever the intent of Ian Cheney’s film, at its best it humanizes a class of people being demonized in America’s virulent outbreak of Know-Nothingism. These are smart, funny and charming worker bees with limits to their knowledge, just like the rest of us.

Where they differ might be in their grasp of all we don’t know, what constitutes “The Most Unknown” in their area of science. The fact that they admit what they don’t know and grin at every “Eureka” moment of understanding they gain from this until-now stranger who is expert in something they know little about is reason enough for “The Most Unknown” to exist. And that’s why this class of open-minded thinkers should be celebrated, emulated and above all else, funded.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jennifer Macalady, Jun Ye, Axel Cleeremans, Rachel L. Smith, Luke McKay, Victoria Orphans, Anil Seth, Davide D’Angelo, Laurie Santos

Credits:Directed by Ian Cheney. A Motherboard/Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:32

The thing about “ticking clock” thrillers, movies with a hard, fast and deadly deadline, is that somebody on board has to be able to tell time. Preferably the director.

That was Job One for James McTeigue (“V for Vendetta,” and nothing remotely as good since) on the set of “Breaking In,” this weekend’s “Woman in peril from home invaders” B-movie. Keep the picture moving, keep the cast on task, amped up and on the edge of panic, maintain that sense of urgency.

Because the guys busting into Gabrielle Union’s dead-dad’s “country house” have only 90s minutes, as they’ve cut the power, before the alarm company calls the cops.

You know the firm. You’ve seen their ads on TV. “Last Alert: You’re already Dead by the Time we Show Up.”

But never mind that. If there’s one thing that Hollywood thrillers and the legions of actors who march through them teach us, it’s that faking shock and breath-gulping panic isn’t easy. And hiding boredom, for some actors, is damned near impossible.

Union, of “Think Like a Man, Too” and “Good Deeds” and “The Birth of a Nation,” is Shaun, a mom who drags her two kids (Ajiona Alexus and Seth Carr) with her to the remote Wisconsin estate that her dad owned. As we’ve seen him run down in the film’s smartly scored, shot and edited opening moments, we know he’s dead. And we know this was no accident, as the “hit and run” didn’t involve any running.

The house is a fortress of stone and brick and bullet proof glass and microchips — quite the security system. But minutes after their arrival, the kids are nabbed by house breakers, and Shaun is forced to master this house, and outfight, outsmart and out trash-talk the gang and its leader, Billy Burke (“Twilight”).

And even though that clock is ticking, even though the power that the bad guys “cut” is somehow on (as is the security system), even AFTER Shaun pulls the circuit breakers and dunks them in a sink, gang boss Eddie (Burke) never breaks a sweat, never for one second lets us think he’s manic, and passing on his hurry to his equally bored team (Mark Furze, Richard Cabral, Levi Meaden).

Burke just mutters “Veerrrrrry impressive” for “a woman alone, trapped by strangers,” and “Moms don’t run, not when their babies are trapped in the nest.” If the man wasn’t bored by “Twilight,” why does he have so much trouble punching the clock here?

And his performance is contagious. Check out the little boy in his most terrified moments. How he doesn’t yawn is a miracle for the ages.

Union, who joins Halle Berry and others who have tackled this “You have no idea what I’m capable of” mom gets down and dirty when her kids are “Taken” genre, gives a little of herself. But she only goes half-Halle in this. The commitment isn’t really there as Shaun half-hearted shouts “I’ll get you out, I love you” to her children.

To her credit, she doesn’t listen when one bad guy, armed with a crowbar, shouts “STOP right there!”

Bad screenwriters (Ryan Engle), do you never learn? NOBODY stops right there.

“Breaking In” far too quickly devolves into unintentional laughs provided by the henchmen, complete with long stretches of near silence, affording the smart alecks in the audience the chance to half-shout, “She’s gonna ELECTROCUTE him,” or “There’s ONE IN THE CHAMBER” and “Shoot SHOOT” at the screen.

The dears. They, at least, have a sense of urgency the folks onscreen forgot. They, at least, can tell time as the minutes tick by in this clock-stopping ticking clock thriller.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, menace, bloody images, sexual references, and brief strong language

Cast: Gabrielle Union, Billy Burke, Ajiona Alexus, Richard Cabral, Levi Meaden, Christa Miller

Credits:Directed by James McTeigue, script by Ryan Engle. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:28

The definition of “hood hero” has changed in the half century (close) between the original “Superfly” and the slick new remake.

Trevor Jackson stars, and while the haircut may scream “Pimp: The Next Generation,” think of where the culture is. Pimps are trend-setters with their own Youtube channel now.

So the new film steps things up a notch or three. “Director X” of Rihanna and Drake music video fame, “Across the Line” on the big screen, handles the updating — affluence, money, high-end motorcars, a real nouveau riche rapper lifestyle — with guns and drugs and whatever it is our hero sells to get over these days.

Lending a little character actor cred are Michael Kenneth Williams and is that Esai Morales (not credited on IMDb) as Mr. Big?

Look for “Superfly” June 15.

Augustine Frizzell’s Tale of Texas Teen Tarts — watch the trailer before siccing #MeToo on me, please — has raunchy laughs and that ever-so-intoxicating “Broke Girls” Out of, ah, HOOTS to give vibe.

In the picture, two stoner/waitress rebels take one of those “We deserve it” white girl (broke, remember) vacations that goes terribly, amusingly wrong.

Maia Mitchell and Camila Marone star, Kyle Mooney of “Saturday Night Live” pops up.

A24 has, it, naturally.  “Never Goin’ Back” opens in limited release Aug,. 3. 

Deliberate aimlessness is the narrative goal of “Sollers Point,” an intimate, gritty and meandering character study built around a charismatic turn by leading man McCaul Lombardi.

The film follows his character, Keith, through a month or so of trying to get his life back on track after a stint in stir, followed by months of house arrest.

The mild-mannered (so we think) ex-con is back under the same roof as his old man (Jim Belushi) because his ex (Zazie Beetz) is done with him. And she’s not giving his dog back.

The hood rats he used to run with (Kazy Tauginas, Tom Guiry) are “here for you, dog.” But he doesn’t want that, and that’s not what they want to hear. 

So he’s got to get a fresh hustle on, round up some scrap metal to sell, borrow a truck to haul that scrap, check in with his old drug dealer/pal (Brieyon Bell-El) to see if he can get back into distributing. Which he does, even though everybody short-changes him and one middle-aged junkie’s sob story (Alyssa Bresnahan, terrific) ought to be enough to change his mind. 

Grandma “Ladybug” (Lynn Cohen) and big sister Kate (Marin Ireland) are here for moral support.

Exes and might-be-future-exes abound, run-ins with the gang show Keith’s temper. And the cute old houses and neon underbelly of working class Baltimore are put on display. Baltimore’s favorite son, John Waters and TV’s “The Wire” have nothing on “Sollers” writer-director Matthew Porterfield (“I Used to be Darker”) in the sunny but sordidly scenic Baltimore department.

Periodic fights with the one gang member (Guiry) who won’t let it go mean that eventually, Keith will have to go to the kingpin, named “Mom” (Michael Rogers) to beg for a little relief. Porterfield’s instincts fail him here, because if there’s one thing the movies don’t need more of, it’s nitwit philosopher gang leaders.

“Deeds and actions are a mirror,” is the most coherent thing Mom says in a long lecture that brings the film to a full stop. A movie this slow doesn’t need that.

But for all the set-piece scenes, the empty (in broad daylight) streets and theatrical quality of Keith’s cross-city odyssey, Porterfield gives us characters we believe (generally) and situations that look lived-in. An old man’s poker game may be a movie cliche, but keeping a blown line in the final cut lends authenticity to the patter. Real people stumble over their words.

“Stop cryin’!”

“Who’s TRYin’?”

Lombardi, yes he’s descended from the legendary football coach, holds the screen with ease and carries the picture along on Keith’s travels. He has the advantage of looking like a punk, one with movie-star eyes. He keeps Keith’s secrets and barely hints at the problems that ran him afoul of the law before it’s too late, we’ve already emotionally invested in his redemption.

The supporting ladies — Beetz and Bresnahan, Cohen, Everleigh Brenner and Imani Hakim (Flings?) and Maya Martinez (another possible fling) are interesting enough to warrant more scenes and a more central place in the plot.

But again, “Sollers Point” isn’t really about the plot, or advancing it. It’s all about the place, the sorts of people in it and the good and bad support systems that could sink or swim our hero. Thanks to Lombardi, we stick around for the answer.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, drug content, and some sexual material

Cast: McCaul Lombardi, Jim Belushi, Zazi Beetz, Imani Hakim, Alyssa Bresnahan, Tom Guiry

Credits:Written and directed by Matthew Porterfield. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:42

If one didn’t know better, one might swear on a copy of “Fahrenheit 451” that the makers of “They Remain” had just seen “Annihilation” and set out to do a micro-budget/tiny-cast/no-name-cast version.

They didn’t, of course. But if we’re going to accept this malnourished thriller on its own terms, that’s a good starting point. Yeah, it’s just a little bit like that. A good looking but talky, duller action-starved version of Natalie Portman’s monster movie.

Two young scientists are helicoptered into a remote forest where they set up cameras, run tests and do research from a collection of Buckminster Fuller-styled futuristic tent-labs.

Keith and Jessica are the mismatched pair sent out by “The Corporation” to look for something of biological value in woods made notorious by a killer cult’s crimes there.

Keith (William Jackson Harper) treks out each day, checking the wildlife surveillance cameras he’s set up, looking for some trace of whatever it is that he’s been told “will make you famous.”

Talkative, abrasive and “a little obsessive” Rebecca (Rebecca Henderson) does the lab work and hits him with “Anything weird happen today?” Every day.

Keith starts to have nightmares about whatever is “out there,” and whatever happened with that not-that-long-ago cult. Rebecca starts hearing knocking sounds, and more.

“I swear someone STAGE whispered my name.”

He’s willing to discount that, but he keeps seeing this wolf-dog, and those night vision wildlife cameras pick up hair-raising images of hooded death, or naked cultists frolicking and doing whatever it is they did with their victims. And she is plainly going a little off mission and off center.

“It’s your imagination,” he reassures her.

“I think it’s YOU.”

That “stage whisper” line describes a lot of what we see going on here. These two banter, insult each other, relative company cocktail party gossip and speak only opaquely about their mission, as this burial ground or that artifact from a cave is introduced into their “experience.”

It’s a staged reading of a horror movie screenplay, not a compelling, chilling or even that interesting thriller.

Whatever tone writer/director Philip Gelatt was trying to create, he bores it right out of us.

Whatever the actors make out of these characters, there’s just not that much going on, a little bunker mentality “Blair Witch” titillation, a lot of wandering in the woods and a resolution that’s not consequential enough to dismiss as “a cheat.”

And the players, as in so many horror movies, fail to adequately express the terror, disbelief and shock people do when faced with the unexplainable and seemingly supernatural. Only those snatches of “found footage” of the cult promise any chills, and even they aren’t chilling enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, sexual situations and profanity

Cast: William Jackson Harper, Rebecca Henderson

Credits: Written and directed by Philip Gelatt, based on a Laird Barron novella. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:43