Movie Nation

“Mohawk” is an indie period piece that’s somewhat like life on the frontier of the War of 1812 — “nasty, brutish and short.”

A nonsensical, malnourished tale of vengeance and horror, it’s set in the Mohawk nation, where that warrior tribe, decimated by the American Revolution and the intervening years, has decided to stay neutral in this latest of the “Cousins Wars” between Britain and her former colony, the United States.

The director of “We Are Still Here” wraps a slasher film in Mohawk and Army garb for an odyssey about a meddling Brit (Eamon Farren), his agitated Mohawk warrior friend (Justin Rain), and the woman they share — Okwaho (Kaniehtiio Horn).

Joshua Pinsmail (Farren) is trying to talk Mohawk elders into joining the fight, late in the war (1814) in “Last of the Mohicans” country — upstate New York.

“You are already dying…Trust me. Side with King George. I am here, more will follow.”

Calvin Two Rivers (Rain) has made up his mind, and figures he can trigger a conflagration with just a murder or two. When the three of them run afoul of an Army patrol, which makes an international incident even more likely.

As the shots ring out and knives flash, the crazed Captain Holt (Ezra Buzzington) makes it his mission to bring these “murderous redskins” to heel, to get them back to Fort George or “The Mission,” whichever outpost of civilization shows up first.

Lost in these woods, chasing the Indian and her two lovers, it’s anybody’s guess where they’ll end up.

“I will drag that buck back to Fort George by his buckskin!”

“Mohawk” is a classic over-reaching film festival movie, not really fit for theatrical release. It was shot on the cheap with middling, no name actors, passable costumes, vivid makeup, bloody effects and sharp video cinematography that lacks texture, depth of field and cinematic quality. It looks cheap, as if most every scene was shot at exactly the same hour of the day.

The parkland locations –waterfalls, rivers and the like — are striking. But too many shoot-outs and debates were shot in the neat medium-growth rows of a pine tree plantation.

For too many moments lack even a hint of logic, but here’s one. Walking into an abandoned outpost, the cook fire and candles are still burning. The smoke trails straight up into the sky, not a hint of wind. And yet there’s a bad Western style wooden door swinging, rattling and thumping, open and closed, in this non-existent breeze.

The better to draw the protagonists into the one room that will tell them “What happened here?”

The bigger theme, expressed in the murderous visions of Okwaho, is of a demonic land stained with blood doomed to forever be home to the horror of racial strife. A deer-skull masked demon foretells it. And the American officer (Jack Gwaltney) who questions the sneaky Brit Pinsmail puts it out there, plain and simple.

“I’m surprised that a man of your perceived heritage would bear arms against his fellow American patriots” whilst in the company of savages.

There’s no effort to show Indians communicating in Mohawk, or even affect a broken-English accent. The dialogue has the odd profane anachronism, and a certain half-hearted idealization of the Mohawk.

“In my experience, it is the white man who does the scalping.”

The weapons are wounds are realistic, the fights reasonably well-staged, but little costume details and the “map” the Captain consults scream “amateurs.”

Whatever ideas “Mohawk” had behind it, whatever the filmmaker saw in the cast, especially Ms. Horn (think Grace Slick circa “White Rabbit”) not much of a movie came out of the effort.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Kaniehtiio Horn, Eamon Farren, Justin Rain, Ezra Buzzington, Noah Segan, Ian Collewtti, Robert Longstreet, Jonathan Huber, Sheri Foster, David La Haye

Credits:Directed by Ted Geoghegan script by Ted Geoghegan and Grady Hendrix. A Dark Sky release.

Running time: 1:32

I have this weird thought every time I see Michael Peña in a movie. And he’s in a LOT of movies, most often as the hero’s pal, Ant-Man’s sidekick, etc.

Every other Hispanic actor in Hollywood must hate him. Seriously, he sucks up a lot of work, and even though he generally makes the most of every opportunity, there’s a lot of “type” casting that has his agent’s phone ringing off the hook.

“We need a Latino cop/neighbor, FBI agent, ex-con.” Who do they call? It is almost always (it seems) Michael Peña.

Interviewed him several times over the years, and while he’s lost his “luckiest guy in show business” veneer, he’s still the luckiest guy in show business.

He rarely gets the chance to be the lead, but Netflix gives him that shot as a maintenance worker who thinks his dreams are predicting an alien invasion future.

Which of course they are. July 27, “Extinction” comes to the most popular streaming service.

IMDb doesn’t even have him top billed. 

Sundance favorite, Chloe Grace Moretz star vehicle, with Jennifer Ehle taking on the Glenn Close/Louise Fletcher “Cruella meets Nurse Ratched”  villainness, and now opening Aug. 3.

The funny choice is pairing Moretz with her darker skinned, dreadlocked doppelganger, Sasha Lane (“American Honey”) in “The Miseducation of Cameron Post.” Let’s make that “homosexuality is just narcissism run amok” argument in casting, shall we?

Preposterous on an epic scale, “Skyscraper” is “Towering Inferno” meets “Die Hard” — “Hard Inferno” — starring man mountain Dwayne Johnson as King Kong.

Universal and writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber have The Rock clambering up the world’s tallest building — or at least the construction crane used to construct it. They hurl fire and bullets, aircraft (helicopters, not biplanes) at him, and at one point literally have him holding the structure together with his muscle-bound arms.

The King Kong references are as intentional as they are unfortunate.

Don’t expect much from the acting. Toss the laws of physics out of court, sign away your rights to a logical plot when you buy your ticket and remember, it’s not in 3D, so there’s no chance of injury from repeated eye-rolls.

But is all this poppycock fun? Every so often, sure. The odds are about the same as 7,000 King Kongs with typewriters eventually tapping out “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Johnson plays Will Sawyer, an FBI hostage retrieval commando when we meet him, a compassionate guy badly injured when a hostage sets off a bomb. But that’s how he met his wife. Sarah (Neve Campbell) is a Navy surgeon who saved his life.

Years later, he’s in Hong Kong, a one-legged security and safety consultant signing off on ascendant China’s new claim to The World’s Tallest Building, the 220 story monstrosity called The Pearl, after the video-projecting orb that tops it.

But just as its about to open, bad guys hack in, break in and seize the top floors — where the mogul who built it (Chin Han) has his penthouse, where Will’s Sarah and their two kids are vacationing.

Will’s derring do is what follows, fantastical stunts that seem straight out of a video game quest — level after level achieved, bodies piling up along the way. On one good leg, and one made of titanium. Just guessing there.

A simple flaw far too many action screenplays make is building “super competence” into the hero. Will is an ex-FBI commando, and an ex-Marine. He’d have been an ex-SEAL too but even writer-director Thurber (“Dodgeball,” “We’re the Millers,” “Central Intelligence”) knew that was a “He’s trained to be superhuman” over-reach.

Thurber cast a good bad guy (Roland Møller), and gave him one great line — “Light a man’s house on fire and you find out what he truly loves.” Thurber found a few stunning, over-the-top obstacles for Will to overcome.

But for a guy with all these comedy credits, Thurber (and his by-the-numbers star) fail to give the spark of sarcastic life to this version of John “Die Hard” McClane. The script gives Will one half-funny aside, and a single funny line.

“If you can’t fix it with duct tape, then you ain’t using enough duct tape.”

Tape isn’t what this screenplay, brisk as it is, required. Either take it completely over the top (Meet the REAL “Mr. Incredible”) or put more effort at parking it in reality. It dangles between the two, stopping the picture cold more than once.

If they’d put as much effort as The Studio that Brought Us “The Great Wall” puts into kissing up to China (again), with noble Chinese billionaires, stoic Chinese cops and generic Euro-Afrikaans/Australian villains, this might justify the stupid amounts of money it’s sure to make.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of gun violence and action, and for brief strong language

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Neve Campbell, Noah Taylor, Pablo Schreiber , Chin Han, Roland Møller

Credits:Written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:42

How overfamiliar does a horror movie have to be before even the filmmakers have to wonder, “Why bother?”

“The Ritual,” a British eOne/Netflix production, packs a bunch of boy-bonding lads off into the wilds of Sweden. No “found footage,” but it’s “The Borgholm Witch Project” in the Swedish “Cabin in the Woods,” “Wicker Man,” the works.

A beastly presence, witch signs carved on trees, the terror that lies just beyond the flashlight’s last beaming. This is based on a novel, you say? Novelist Adam Nevill was Netflixing every “Ten Little Indians” variation of the past twenty years as prep, then.

There are five, to begin with. Guys who like pubs and booze and group vacations. Even as they close in on midlife, with its curse of brunches and Rogaine. Where to, next?

“We’re too old for Ibiza!”

“Amsterdam?” “Too touristy.”

“Berlin?” “Nein.”

They’ve just rejected “Let’s hike the Swedish ‘Appalachian Trail,'” when Rob (Paul Reid) who proposed it is murdered in a convenience store hold up. Luke (Rafe Spall of “The Big Short,” “Hot Fuzz”) cowered behind a shelf as it happened, a shameful act that gives him nightmares.

The four survivors — masculine, seemingly competent in the woods Hutch (Robert James-Collier of “Downton Abbey”), Phil (British TV star Arsher Ali) and bespectacled whiner Dom (Sam Troughton) — do what survivors always do in the movies.

They take on Rob’s quest, do the hike and stack a few stones into a memorial for him.

A twisted knee, a “short cut” off the treeless hills and rocky crags through a forest, and all Satanic hell breaks loose.

Weird, unnatural noises, “the bit they don’t show you in the nature documentaries,” a gutted goat in a tree, the carvings, the abandoned lodge where rituals abide. Let’s leave nothing out, shall we?

“Ooo knows whut they’re into up ‘here?”

The schisms within the group aren’t avoided with endless, “We’re not THOSE guys” and “Don’t BE that guy!”

These are good actors, and the “World’s End” pub banter promises an entertaining if cliched dynamic, with “Why do you always pretend you were in the Scouts? You were never in the Scouts” and an amusing statement of the horror movie obvious.

“A shortcut wouldn’t be called a shortcut if it was safe. It’d be called a ROUTE.”

But David “The Signal” Bruckner’s horror quickie, the Unseen Threat too quickly becomes Seen, and is seen as silly. The odd chilling bit is utterly undercut by the wacky, worn out premise.

And in the end, nobody gets off Scot-Free. Not Bruckner. Especially not the actors.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Rafe Spall, Robert James-Collier, Arsher Ali, Sam Troughton, Paul Reid

Credits:Directed by David Bruckner, script by  Joe Barton based on the Adam Nevill novel. An eOne/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

There’s a reason the romantic conversations here have a wordy/moonstruck, up-the-romantic-stakes feel, even as the world they’re delivered in feels lived-in and real.

Dan Fogelman wrote and directed “Life Itself,” and this trailer plays like his more famous creation, “This is Us.”

An intimate epic about life and love, with laughter and tears and Olivia Wilde paired up with Oscar Isaac, Olivia Cooke, Antonio Banderas and Annette Bening in the cast, along with the Meanest Guy in Show Business, Mandy Patinkin, also on board.

Isn’t that Jean Smart as the mother of the groom? Don’t see her listed in the credits. Yet.

Did Samuel L. Jackson make the final cut? Sept 21, we find out.

There’s an implicit covenant between filmmaker and audience, one that Tim Sutton, director of “Dark Night” repeatedly violates.

You can make your movie an attention-demanding exercise, invite us into your head by under-explaining, telling your story with tone, mournful music and visuals.

Your film can even be an impressionistic or expressionistic sketch, leaving so much to the imagination that the viewer is left with just a feel for what’s happening, a mood.

But all that said, the trip inside your head had better be engrossing, entertaining or at least interesting. “Dark Night,” alternately opaque and lurid, chilling when it isn’t just plain confusing, fails on all those counts.

It’s a piece inspired by the Aurora, Colorado mass shooting at a cinema showing “The Dark Knight.” That “lone white punk with automatic weapons” massacre is even an item being reported on the TV news in one scene.

A welfare motel tween plays with his milk snake, a skinhead bonds with his turtle, an articulate gamer does Skype interviews about games and violence, “Aaron” sits with his mother and recounts his disaffected life for an off-camera video interviewer.

Veterans meet and bond over PTSD experiences since returning from Iraq, and one cleans a collection of firearms including a semi-automatic pistol, a shotgun, a bolt action rifle and an assault weapon with a muzzle suppressor.

Assorted coeds strike selfie-poses, in various states of undress. One (Anna Rose Hopkins) is an aspiring actress.

And “Jumper” (Robert Jumper) seethes, pounds the steering wheel of his ancient Mercedes, and makes his plans. How many steps from the parking lot to the back entrance to the mall? Which mask to wear?

Sutton never seeks to explain or motivate, does little to illuminate the Florida lives threatened with impending doom and creates zero sympathy for anybody depicted.

He was going for something akin to Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant,” but there isn’t enough reality here for us plant our feet in this story. He demands our attention, and then wastes it.

Between the insert shots of street lights (in daylight), visits to the firing range, an interview picked up here and there and “homework” that involves a lengthy session on Google Earth, Sutton manages a couple of chilling scenes.

Jumper practices stalking, assault weapon at the ready, dressed in black and prowling down the working class suburban street where he lives — in broad daylight.

When he’s loaded down for the night’s mayhem, an acquaintance asks, “Where’s the party?”

“At the movies.”

You don’t spend as much time in theaters as I do and not think about Aurora. I went to a movie in a Pasco County cinema where a week later, an ex-cop murdered a jerk he got into a beef with about talking on his phone during the movie (actually, during the previews, if memory serves).

But this Ringling College co-production doesn’t add to anybody’s understanding of shooters or sympathy for victims. It doesn’t even amp up the paranoia that comes from a culture where any public space — cinema, nightclub, church or place of business — could be some NRA-armed nutjob’s platform to cry out for attention.

Self-consciously arty, exploitative (Sutton just leers at the young women) “Dark Night” may be. It’s a drama without dramatics, a destination in search of the movie that takes us there.

MPAA Rating: unrated, firearms, nudity, profanity

Cast: Robert Jumper, Anna Rose Hopkins, Aaron Purvis, Karina Macias

Credits: Written and directed by Tim Sutton. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:25

This one opens in March of next year. There’s zero conflict or the possibility of conflict in this first teaser, so something’s missing.

I mean, I don’t expect “Action Point,” heaven forbid. But…something.

The short answer to that headline question is “No.”

Even on Netflix, director Kelly Reichardt’s movies are the ultimate acquired taste. Austere to the point where tiny gestures are magnified into moments of enormous consequence, silent save for the most banal blurbs of dialogue, they live in the eyes of her characters, in the sea of words left unspoken.

After flirting with melodrama in her feature debut (“River of Grass”), she quickly found her niche in telling stories where — to quote IMDB user reviews on “Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy” etc., “nothing happens.”

She made a Western about a wagon trail lost on the Way West, “Meek’s Cutoff,” and left them wandering to what we assume will be their doom.

Michelle Williams became her muse some years back, and the Montana Oscar winner was probably the magnet who helped draw Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, James Le Gros, Lily Gladstone and Rene Auberjonois to “Certain Women,” an adaptation of Montana stories by Montanan Maile Meloy.

Loosely connected, they tell of women coping with loneliness, distance, personal and professional frustration in Big Sky country, “Where the men are men and the sheep don’t mind.”

Sorry, old North Dakota joke about “Mont-ah-ah-ah-ah-na.”

It’s a humorless film, too, so you do what you can for it.

Dern plays a lawyer having an affair in Livingston, anything to liven up a life and practice whose highlight is dealing with one increasingly crazy client (Jared Harris). He suffered a head injury in an accident, accepted a hasty settlement, and has spent months refusing to accept her counsel that he screwed himself permanently and the blurred vision and increasingly irrational behavior are not something he can take to court again.

Williams is married to the guy (Le Gros) who is having the affair. With their teenage daughter, they’re living in a tent, struggling to build their own house, angling to talk the elderly Albert (Auberjonois) out of a pile of cut sandstone on his property.

Native American actress Gladstone (“Winter in the Blood,” “Scalped”) is a solitary ranch hand, dealing with livestock and a feisty Corgi out in remote Belfry (population, 218). One night she wanders into “town,” follows the “crowd” into a school, and finds herself in a class on “School Law,” mainly consisting of teachers anxious to question a lawyer about their rights — to compensation, overtime, to expel problem students.

The teacher? Working class, fresh-out-of-law-school Livingston lawyer Beth is played by Kristen Stewart at her most natural, disarmingly unkempt. The Rancher’s gaydar goes off and she’s smitten. But is she reading the girlish but rough-cut Beth right?

Reichardt’s serene, slow style means that even the big incidents in these stories pack no punch. The most dramatic might be the lawyer dealing with the increasingly unhinged client, the most aching is the rancher-lawyer flirtation.

The Williams/Le Gros episode has the expectation of fireworks that never come.

Poignant here, anti-climactic there, Reichardt wrings as much meaning as she can from her players’ eyes — words unspoken, hurt and hope and guilt and disappointment register in just a look.

You hope for more, and you have a right to expect more, but Reichardt has gotten away with less for so long that it’s too much to expect her to deliver it, now.

MPAA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Rene Auberjonois, Lily Gladstone, Jared Harris, James Le Gros, Kristen Stewart

Credits:Written and directed by Kelly Reichardt, based on stories by Melie Malloy. A — release.

Running time: 1:47

The people who made “The Lobster” have opted for “period piece” for their next trick, a dark comedy about the reign of daft Queen Anne of Great Britain.

With Olivia Colman as God Save Me and Rachel Weisz as her lady in waiting/power behind the throne and fellow Oscar winner Emma Stone as the new lady in waiting and thus new one we’d call “The Favourite,” this Nov. 23. release looks to be an awards season hoot.

And perhaps a little easier to take than “The Lobster.”