Movie Nation

If you ever wondered where the term “Grand Guignol,” used to describe the bloody and macabre, over-the-top-horror, came from, here it is.

If you ever speculated who might have been the original “scream queen,” long before Jamie Leigh Curtis, let us meet Paula Maxa, “The Most Assassinated Woman in the World.”

This gorgeous and gory French period piece is a thriller that uses Le Theatre du Grand Guignol as its setting, and the real Paula Maxa as its stalking victim.

Director Franck Ribière, who managed some chills with the little-seen “The Oxford Murders” some years back, loses himself in milieu and menace here, He wallows in foggy, crimson-colored production design and theater history. His screenwriter invents a back-story for Maxa, a reporter interested in learning that story and how it might connect with “The Montmartre Murders” which “the fanatics” in Paris in 1932 are sure were inspired by the nightly slaughter on the stage of the former chapel in Pigalle, on the Rue Chaptal in Paris.

Anna Mouglalis (“Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky”) is the smokey-voiced Paula, who narrates (in French, with English subtitles) that she has been “beaten, martyred, sliced to bits, crushed…vaporized, drained of my blood, impaled, hung, buried alive” etc. and become “The Most Assassinated Woman in the World.”

People, the resident playwright Andre du Lorde (Michel Fau) declares, “stand outside the theater every night, just to hear her scream.”

We meet her as she acts in “Murder in the Madhouse,” in which her eye is gauged out, geysers of blood spraying the audience.

“It needs to spurt further,” Andre gripes to the prop master (Jean-Michel Balthazar), the “real” genius behind this theater of blood.

Jean (Niels Schneider) is the handsome son of a count, a reporter for Le Petit Journal, assigned to write about the Grand Guignol, to make the case that the city’s murderers go there for inspiration. Picketers harangue those attending their shows, pleading that “this den of debauchery” must be closed, “for our children, our families, for FRANCE!”

Paula is cynical, aloof, all but dismissing Jean when they meet. But he noses around her dressing room and finds a note — “I love watching you die, night after night. Soon I will kill you.”

His interviews turn into dates (he takes her to see the Michael Curtiz film “Doctor X”), and rising concern. There’s something more than theater going on in that Theatre.

The actors complain of the taste of the fake blood. Could it be…?

Fanatical fans have a little too much access to backstage.

And the threats? They start showing up at Jean’s newspaper desk as well.

One of the delights of the script is the way it blends the real history of the theatre with this fictional story. Andre du Lorde really did collaborate with with psychologist Alfred Binet to create shows that pushed viewers’ buttons, perhaps even toyed with the mental state of the actors.

They really did keep a “doctor” (fake) in the house every night to handle all the fainting.

The shows presented here blend the macabre with touches that the contemporary Luigi Pirandello (“Six Characters in Search of an Author”), whose bizarre, psychological plays prefigured the later Theatre of the Absurd, would embrace as his own.

The narrative is less interesting in a general sense, lumbering towards an “Is the real murderer the fellow so obviously tagged as that?” and “Will Paula escape or be murdered?” posited for the sake of suspense.

Meh.

Schneider and his character have a callow prettiness that brings little to the film. Jean is underdeveloped, underplayed.

But Mouglalis has a magnificent face, demeanor voice for this character, world-weary, living only for the “thea-TUH.”

“Dying on stage keeps me alive…Frightening people is as interesting as making them laugh or cry.”

The milieu that  Franck Ribière so revels in features onstage guillotines, throat slittings and surgeons behaving badly, clever props and effect gimmicks ,and offstage a cellist provides musical effects as sexual shenanigans go on among cast, crew and well-heeled audience members in the wings.

Stick around through the credits as a postscript reveals a little about the “real” Guignol and its most famous star.

Just don’t expect much from the mystery or any novelty in the villain or the murders. Jason and Michael Myers and Jamie Leigh surpassed those decades ago.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Anna Mouglalis, Niels Schneider, Eric Godon

Credits:Directed by Franck Ribière , script by Vérane Frédiani and David Murdoch. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

“MDMA” is a lurid, over-sexed, drugged–out soap opera set at the tail end of the Go Go ’80s, when Reagan was King and “Molly” was his Queen.

It may pass itself off as “cautionary,” but this is exploitation, the sort of faintly alluring journey through hell that reminds us that every generation craves its “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” or “Less Than Zero.”

First-time writer-director Angie Wang didn’t attract “Zero” level A-listers for her titillating indie expose. But she got some decent players to flesh out her fleshy fandango through promiscuity and profitability, temptation and tragedy.

It was the Club Era, before Raves arrived, when most people called the hot new drug “E,” “Ecstasy,” but the science nerds know it as MDMA, 3,4 Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine — “Molly” to her friends.

Angie is a college freshman chemistry major in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time to get a taste of the drug itself, and with the brains and means to make it herself and finance college, partying and even generous Big Sistering with her profits.

Former child actress Annie Q of TV’s “Are We There Yet?” and “The Leftovers” stars, and can’t really play Angie as naive, lonely and a long way from home falling under bad influences. She may weep at the father (Ron Yuan) who cannot say “I love you” back to her when she boards the bus for a cross-country trip to college in San Francisco. But when she gets there and meets her party-debutante roommate (Francesca Eastwood), she’s more than ready to knock back and few drinks and “Go find some fun.”

A fraternity party leads her to the hunky swimmer all the coeds crave (Pierson Fode). And he has these pills he’d love to share — Ecstasy.

“The club drug? HIT me!”

That puts her in his bed and in a mind to find a way to make this drug, not-yet-banned but only made in Germany, after school. A lab assistant job should do the trick. Maybe with a little help from the straight-arrow lab partner who has a crush on her (Scott Keiji Takeda).

Angie may burn through Chinese restaurant cook dad’s cash too fast and look for a quick and dirty solution to that problem. She may be promiscuous. But flashbacks show us the open warfare her parents engaged in and the rape she suffered as a younger teen.

And she’s not so rotten that she doesn’t have time to Big Sister Bree, the young daughter of a local crackhead.

The “lurid” here comes from Wang’s frenetic club scenes, lots of extreme closeups, garish lighting, dancing and snorting away, and from the broad strokes Wang and her actress (Yetide Badaki) paint the crack mom with.

The story arc is straight-up drug era parable — prodigal daughter, missing mom, a how-to primer on getting started in the drug trade (ID the right clubs and the right frat boys for distribution). Angie has no sooner growled “I know how to take care of myself,” when the ways she doesn’t start to pop up.

As the story is told in a flashback with Angie as a drug-addled cage dancer in a club in the opening scene, any notion of surprise is abandoned straight out.

Annie Q is better at the cold-hearted, calculating Angie than the “freshman” and Big Sister Angie. It’s a performance and characterization steeped in sexual experience, risky behavior and vocal fryyyyyyyyyy.

Eastwood, you-know-who’s daughter with Frances Fisher, is likewise too old for the “freshman” stuff. But if you’re making a point about drugs and booze and a bad home life that makes girls grow up too fast, 26 year-olds are the way to go. I guess.

The “Valley of the Dolls” connection is underlined with sex scenes — a threesome, of course — because if there’s one thing about Molly’s rep that resonates, it’s how she fires up the libido.

The only reason to make this a period piece is catching the drug at its pre-crackdown, any science nerd can make it birth — that, and the cheaper Frankie Goes to Hollywood music clearances for the club scenes.

Wang seems to have sincerely set out to make a cautionary tale, “inspired by true events,” with a dedication in the opening suggesting she knew a victim of MDMA. But what she’s releasing is straight-up exploitation, and a film too cautious to work on that level, too torrid to play the “Stay off drugs!” card.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, explicit sex

Cast:Francesca Eastwood, Annie Q., Pierson Fode, Scott Keiji Takeda

Credits: Written and directed by Angie Wang. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:38

It’s actor Paul Dano’s feature directing debut, this sensitive coming-of-age-in-crisis drama starring Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal and Bill Oxenbould as the kid.

The wonderful and omnipresent Bill Camp is in “Wildlife” too, which earns limited release Oct. 19.

In Europe, they remember who the Evil Empire is, and why you don’t let them have a say in your elections.

This has a fall opening in Europe, coming soon to the US — Thomas Vinterberg (“The Celebration,” “Far from the Madding Crowd” and “Submarino” directs “Kursk,” about the infamous Russian submarine disaster, and  the impressive cast includes “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” co-star Michael Nyqvist is his final role.

All the upgrades, tech advances and iPhones since “Fear.com” (2002) came out, all the variations of “Friend Request” and “Unfriended: Dark Web” in computer-streaming/cell camera/web camera murder and the formula hasn’t changed. Not much, anyway.

It’s still a lot of first-person (holding a phone camera) point-of-view, limited settings, narrow field-of-vision, a handful of people talking into a laptop or phone camera, multiple windows folded into a Skype screen and lot of screen-freezes, image-ghosting, blackouts and buffering.

In “E-Demon” friends gather for an informal online college reunion. They’re 30, each at different places in his or her life — married with kids, or broke and moved back in with the parents, richer than rich or struggling to get that first book published.

But the one thing New York author Kendra (Julia Kelly), doting Dayton dad Dwayne (John Anthony Wylliams), Seattle high-roller A.J. (Christopher Daftsios) and struggling mental health counselor Mar (Ryan Redebaugh) have held onto is “Freak Out.” That’s their name for elaborate scary pranks they play on each other.

And in the Internet age, separated by a wide continent, the gags have moved online.

But Mar stages one that most would admit, “goes too far.” He’s shown the others (walking the camera down the hall) his dotty grandmother and the younger brother who does a lot of her caregiving (Vincent Cooper).

“Gamma, tell me the story of the cursed trunk!”

So she does. Her story takes them back in family history, to a relative executed during the Salem Witch Trials, with “The cursed trunk is being kept in our attic! The end of days will come!”

Mar then goes to the attic, trots out a little Latin incantation over a mirror and a voodoo doll he finds in said trunk, and OW. OUCH. Hah! Gotcha! Scary, right?

Wait, did I mention that Mar and his family of shrinks lives in Salem, Massachusetts? Never mind. Probably not important.

Next thing you know, whatever went “KLUNK” on Mar leaves his camera (Must be attached to his head.) upside down, dragged into another room.

Mar’s sister lets a glimpse of a pentagram carved on her belly show. A.J. is acting out a simulated ritual sex act with his girlfriend. Kendra freaks out and Dwayne, drawn away to tell bedtime stories to his kids, misses the escalating weirdness happening to four people logged in to Skype.

Something wicked is downloading into their digital lives.

Writer-director Jeremy Wechter parks this picture in real-time. We’re watching a recording of events that transpired in four cities involving scores of victims on that night, a voice-distorted spokesperson for the “E Demon Resistance Network” tells us.

“We need your help!”

That lame framing device aside, “E-Demon” sticks to formula. Bad things happen, characters grow paranoid about each other even as they’re trying to reason out what’s going on, innocent bystanders — relatives, boyfriends, paramedics and cops responding to 9-11 calls made cross country — are sucked in, possessed.

“Remember my theory…cameras speed up the process.”

Oh, and then the magical “explainer” shows up to talk us and them through demonology, maybe suggest solutions. Yes, Jeremy Wechter discovered “Magical Negro” all by himself.

The violence has a certain voyeuristic immediacy — helpless people watching their screens as this character is about to be attacked — “BEHIND you!” — or that one fights off demonically possessed people within the field of view of a laptop camera.

There’s blood on the lens in one scene, a person (their camera) dragged and held under water in a tub, clever effects. Movies like this are exercises in meticulous staging. It’s like the theater equivalent of a “door slamming farce,” characters enter and exit in varying degrees of logic, not knowing what the rest of the Skypers have seen or experienced while they were gone.

It’s kind of clumsy and obvious, but it moves things along.

Wechter keeps having attackers drag their victims out of the frame, because there’s only so much room on a screen filled with other screens, side-chats and Internet research
Windows on how to fight a demon, etc. And you can’t have the hero/heroine tripping over bodies as the next attack begins.

I’ll give the film this much — it holds your interest.

That’s despite the constant reliance on formula, the generally inane dialogue, some head-scratching logic you have to avoid if you want to buy into “This is somebody’s live camera capturing that view” conceit.

The performances occasionally hit “indifferent,” in between a few genuinely fraught moments. This far removed from actual terror — a screen within a screen showing events far, far away — it’s hard to get much acting in. Kelly and Wylliams have their chances.

But the people experiencing the violence in person don’t get close-ups. The camera is sitting on the computer desk far in the foreground of the brawl going on in the background.

Close-ups make scares. Ask John Carpenter. So no, “E-Demon” isn’t particularly frightening. And that problem was fixable, Drag the fights into the camera, and not just dropped cell cameras, which hold no closeup.

“E-Demon” would make a good movie to pick apart in film school, simulating the work-shopping process Wechter & Co. could have used to add close-ups, make the traveling cameras more logical, declutter the screen a bit and find a fright or two in this now well-worn wickedness on the world wide web formula.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Julia Kelly, John Anthony Wylliams, Christopher Daftsios

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Wechter. A Dark Cuts release.

Running time: 1:26

Every time you think “torture porn” is dead and gone, here comes another blood-and-bludgeoning tale to try and revive it.

A famous, rich musician is tased and yanked into a van only to wake up lashed to a school desk in “The Basement.” As we’ve just seen Craig (Cayleb Long) texting his girlfriend while on a liquor store run for his wife, maybe he has “sins” to atone for.

Shades of “Saw.” Every “Saw” movie. Ever.

The twist here, the variation of an excruciating theme, is that his captor (Jackson Davis), is some sort of performance artist. He’s messing with him, play-acting  a sadistic English-accented clown, a cop, a drawling doctor, an old school detective, a prison guard, a priest, parents, a lawyer, a psychotic inmate…

“Welcome to SAN QUENTIN!”

Even as he’s slapping, punching, teasing, firing a pistol near Craig’s ear, tearing out his teeth — “Chew’em!  Swallow’em!” — gouging and lopping off, well, you’ll see — Craig is trying out strategies for getting out.

Threats, pleading, bargaining, empathizing with and play-acting along with this guy, who must be “Billy,” “The Gemini Killer.”

“Please Doc, you took an oath to HELP people!”

“It’s natural to lash out! Here’s my card.”

To the lawyer — “What about my INSANITY plea?”

Anything to buy time, to figure out some way to break loose in between “performances,” which of course entail costume changes.

Meanwhile, wife Kelly (Mischa Barton) Kelly nags the police, questions the liquor store clerk (Tracie Thoms) and confers with her best friend (Bailey Anne Borders), who happens to be Craig’s secret side-chick, and both wonder if he’s “relapsed.”

As we’ve seen a blowtorch and a nearly-naked woman victim in the first scene, we fear the gruesomeness to come.

But every now and then, Craig forgets his pain, sensitively recounts his fading career, his failing marriage, “fumbling along in a haze.” He starts storytelling, weaving suggestions into his tales, connections with his captor, struggling to outsmart him.

The odd pointless chest-eye-view camera shot, endless red herrings, false hopes, middling acting, graphic injuries graphically administered and sets that look like “sets,” an epilogue “twist” that comes after we’ve given up on the movie — “The Basement” has it all.

If only it didn’t.

MPAA Rating: unrated, gruesome, explicit violence, torture, nudity

Cast:  Cayleb Long, Jackson Davis, Mischa Barton, Tracie Thoms, Bailey Anne Borders, Kareem J. Grimes

Credits: Written ad directed by Brian M. Conley, Nathan Ives. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:28

A grandfather suffering through his “last party” at his home takes a break from posing for family photos to hunt down the missing face from the group shot.

It’s his granddaughter, who could not be more than seven or eight.

She’s a bit of a grump, like him, and she’s holding out. Next thing he knows, he’s haggling with a funny brat who wants money for an iPhone. She plays hardball. He lowballs her. And when he relents, he taunts her that he would have given in at her original price.

She smirks that she lied about the price and will have money to burn, AND a phone. Old Man Burzstein’s face flushes.

“This is why you’re the FAVORITE!”

Thus begins “The Last Suit,” a road picture comedy about…The Holocaust. It’s an adorable Argentinian odyssey about a survivor who makes his way to the land of his birth to repay a debt.

Exacting revenge? Maybe. Honoring someone he lost? He will not say.

He’s a tailor, and the one thing he takes from his house as he abandons it to his badgering daughters is his “last suit,” and it’s not for him.

Miguel Ángel Solá plays Abraham Burzstein in “El último traje,” a stubborn old man who raised a large family in Argentina, but who emigrated from Poland. Only he won’t say the it, and his daughters grew up knowing of it as “the dirty word,” (“Polonia” in Spanish).

That makes this secret journey — he is 88, has a bum leg his doctors want to amputate and doesn’t tell his family what he’s up to — extra tricky.

An off-the-books “travel agent” (an actress-granddaughter of the agent he once used, nagged backstage at a theater to make his online reservations) helps him out. No, there’s no “discount” for knowing granddad.

Say this for writer-director Pablo Solarz. He’s not shy about assorted Jewish stereotypes. As Abraham flies to Madrid, overnights in a hostel and makes his way overland, haggling is a funny, necessary part of the process.

So is bickering — with the rude young man (Martín Piroyansky) sitting next to him whose ear he wants to talk off on the plane (a trick), with the hostel keeper and sometime Spanish chanteuse (fiery and sarcastic Ángela Molina) who gives as good as she gets in the haggling department, with the helpful but persistent German woman (Julia Beerhold) who wants to help him “not touch one meter” of German soil on his quest.

The young French ticket agent may have forgotten “what happened here a long time ago,” may not know what that number tattoo on Abraham’s arm signifies. German Ingrid hasn’t. There’s a bargain struck even in her assistance to this very old man on a mission — help, for his story.

Solarz serves up flashbacks to Abraham’s youth in Lodz, Jewish community dances. And we see Abraham upon his release from a death camp, the origins of the bum leg he’s named “Tzures,” and see 1945 visions of the man “who is expecting me” even though “we haven’t kept in touch.”

The screenplay — in Spanish, Yiddish, French, German and Polish with English subtitles — gives us a fresh take on the hell of growing old, the indignities, humiliations of a body that keeps letting you down, the memories you’ve piled up that you cannot shake.

Solá — “I Know Who You Are” is his best-known film in the English speaking world — gives Abraham a biting whimsy, with little touches of folksy as he imparts the wisdom of old age. We elderly, he says, “face the time we have left to live” and “doesn’t want to be a burden” even as he’s being a burden.

He’s amusingly annoying as Solarz concocts the work-arounds that a man who refuses to say “Poland” (“Polonia”) out loud tries to travel there, and without seeing, setting foot in or interacting with Germany or Germans. Abraham is going to get his way, no matter what.

Which makes “The Last Suit” a hopeful film, sweet at its core, even in the flashes of horror that built the bitterness Abraham has carried with him all life

As horrific as the subtext is, Solarz finds universal humor in a cranky old man on this one last quest. But he doesn’t let Abraham, assorted bystanders or the audience off the hook either.

Try and not be moved by the finale. That’s as futile as fighting this old man on his one-way trip into a past the world can “never forget.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Miguel Ángel Solá, Ángela Molina, Martín Piroyansky

Credits:Written and directed by Pablo Solarz. An Outsider release.

Running time: 1:31

I had, quite frankly, written off that raving egomaniac Julian Schnabel after his last debacle.

But if anybody is going to do “Vincent” justice, even with an actor who should have played him 25 years ago, it would be the director of “Basquiat.”

Willem Dafoe is 63 when Van Gogh died at 37. But he still looks and sounds right, doesn’t he?

Check out the supporting cast — great French actors Mathieu Amalric from Schnabel’s “Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” Emmanuelle Seigner, Niels Arestrup, Rupert Friend.

“At Eternity’s Gate” is going to have to be pretty good to top the animated masterpiece “Loving Vincent.” 

Nov. 16 we will see if it is.

It’s not secret that a documentary’s subject matter is more important to our reaction to it than its originality, “plot” and execution.

We fill the theaters for political docs we agree with, be they from Dinesh D’Souza or Michael Moore.

When Ricky Gervais jokes about Holocaust films and their record at the Golden Globes and Oscars, he’s making the same point — subject matter that connects with the audience is more important than dazzling style.

So it’s no surprise that “Science Fair,” an upbeat look at kids from around the world embracing science, was the Audience Award Winner at the Sundance and South by Southwest Film Festivals. At a time when reactionary politics and know-nothingism has reared its ugly head in too much of the world, here is the next generation,  smart as can be, bubbly about learning, straining at the bit to solve big medical, social and technical problems of the future AS TEENS.

Subtexts? You can’t miss the fact that many of America’s best and brightest, our hope for the future, are the children of immigrants, even in places that aren’t particularly welcoming of immigrants. An immigrant science teacher who fills ISEF — the International Science and Engineering Fair, a worldwide contest founded and championed in America — with her most dazzling Long Island students, lays it out there. Immigrants have always tried harder and they’re what made America great.

“I can’t wait until one of my kids wins the Nobel Prize,” Dr. Serena McCalla brags. Don’t bet against.

There is NOTHING more American than competition, striving for excellence, bringing in new brains with new ways of looking at things and new ideas, a past winner, Martin Lo of NASA, declares.

And what’s more American than bragging about it?

“Science Fair” introduces us to entrants in the 2017 ISEF, a gathering of 1700 of the smartest,, most ambitious teens the world has to offer, from 78 countries, competing to see who has the best new ideas in Earth sciences, life sciences and medicine, technology and engineering.

Filmmakers Cristina Costantini and Darren Foster traveled to Brazil and Germany, South Dakota, West Virginia and Kentucky, finding bright-eyed kids with unbridled enthusiasm for science and solving world problems with their ideas.

Anjali is one of the science stars at the best school in Kentucky. The DuMont Manual School produces kids who get into ISEF almost every year, and she’s one of them.

“A lot of people are very jealous of me. It sounds arrogant, but it’s true,” this daughter of immigrants declares. She’s a polymath with a dazzling array of scientific interests including this sensor that measures arsenic in drinking water, a global health concern.

“My research is great. I’ve always been a good public speaker. that’s why I win.” But even when she loses, she is unfazed. “It keeps me grounded. I’m just another kid.”

Of course Anjali has her own web site. She knows marketing herself towards a top college is the real goal of science fairs, and being in a documentary can be part of that.

We meet three other kids from DuPont Manual — Harsha, Ryan and Abraham — a real life “Big Bang Theory” of smarties. They’re working on a diagnostic stethoscope usable the world over.

We don’t have to be told that this is all happening in a state infamous for its Creation (Creationism) Museum and science denier in chief Mitch McConnell.

Ivo in Lorch, Germany has taken a new approach to an old, mostly-abandoned concept, the flying wing, and engineered a new design that could change aviation. He’s on Youtube, helpful because his is the most cinematic of the Big Ideas that the kids profiled here pitch.

Myllena and Gabriel are the film’s underdogs, working class kids from tiny Iracema, Brazil, modeling and analyzing new drugs that could battle a local crisis that’s gone global — the Zika virus.

If this was just a movie, or the audience got to pick winners, you’d make these two the favorites. But ISEF isn’t sentimental. Real scientists from California’s tech and space industries and best of the best colleges judge each project on its originality, scientific soundness, presentation and methodology documentation. They’re demanding, a little cold-blooded about it, and go to great pains to reward the best, soundest ideas.

Just like science.

Robbie is entirely too smart for his corner of West Virginia — cocky, clever, hipster nerdy in his Hawaiian shirts. He whipped up an app that can invent raps just like Kanye West. JUST like Kanye. His ISEF project is a device/process for monitoring how machines learn, an important component in the machine-learning (self-driving cars, for instance) future.

We can see, straight out, that Robbie needs to be challenged and the movie hints that this won’t happen in Shenandoah Junction, West Virginia.

But his mountain to climb is nothing compared to what Kashfia Rahman faces in the flatlands of Brookings, South Dakota. Her school is depicted as sports-obsessed,, endless money poured into facilities in pursuit of a glory that adds nothing to the culture.

The biggest laugh in “Science Fair” might be the kids at Brookings, shrugging at the millions the alumni and the state have dumped on a WINLESS football team. The saddest  moment in “Science Fair” is the school’s dimwitted refusal to formally or informally acknowledge this contest-winning genius in their midst, child of Pakistani immigrants. Her hijab might have something to do with it, the thing that makes her feel uncomfortable, “especially at Walmart.”

Even the football coach knows that’s messed up.

And then there’s Dr. Serena McCalla, the daughter of Panamanian immigrants badgering, demanding excellence from a legion of students — many of them children of immigrants — from her Long Island school. She’s a mother figure to them all right — a Tiger Mom.

“Science Fair visits with past winners of ISEF, which started life as a US national competition during World War II, showing us the shakers and movers of science that many of them became — at NASA, MIT and elsewhere.

In the 1960s during the space race, ISEF was a very big deal. “Science Fair” suggests that maybe it can be again.

A recent past winner, Jack Andraka, was 15 when he took the top prize, a $75,000 award named in honor of Intel founder Gordon Moore (of Moore’s Law fame). His exultant, just-won-the-Super Bowl reaction as confetti cannons went off behind him made him and ISEF famous a few years back, and he’s here to tell the prospective winners how this event will change their lives.

But win or lose, this global gathering of the tribes lets smart kids be smart among others who care about science as much as they do, to check out what the competition is attempting and thinking about, to learn, to dance at a nerd prom (they don’t call it that, but they should, with pride).

As I alluded earlier, a lot of what is depicted here isn’t necessarily cinematic. Ovarian cancer detection and “Hum Your Way to a Better Life” don’t make for great pictures. The science is always explained or described rather than shown (save for Ivo’s wing), and by focusing on so many kids, the personality profiles feel a little shortchanged.

The actual judging is done off camera, so the most fraught and grueling part of the story, the “big game” they’re all counting down towards, is a non-starter.

“That makes “Science Fair” more an Audience Award winner than a great film. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t inspiring, that the kids and their heroically supportive teachers aren’t winners  worth celebrating, heralding and deserving of  parades down Main Street, Brookings, South Dakota.

Bravo, National Geographic Channel, for flying in the face of the zeitgeist, getting this made and putting it in front of audiences in theaters, and later on TV.

MPAA Rating:  PG for some thematic elements and brief language

Credits: Written and directed by Cristina Costantini, Darren Foster. A National Geographic Channel release.

Running time: 1:30

I was chatting with Jordan, one of my favorite cineplex managers at one of the busiest theaters in the entire Regal Cinemas chain, on my way in to see “Peppermint” and “The Nun” the other day, pondering what sort of weekend we’d see at the box office.

“Maybe things’ll pick up with ‘Predator,'” he says. “But I don’t know. Dead couple of weekends.”

Well, it’s a brand, and that’s what fans flock to — the familiar, the “universe.”

Even “The Nun” I added, has that “brand” going for it — ‘Conjuring’ universe and all.

But hell’s bells, NOBODY saw this coming. A $50 million blowup for a movie exploring the history of a character from “Conjuring 2,” pre-“Annabelle,” pre-“Conjuring?”

The $5 million+ opening Thursday night was the first sign — almost 10 times what “Peppermint,” the other big new release grabbed that night ($800K).

Demian Bichir and Tessa Farmiga are both in a blockbuster. Imagine that. I’d love to have a fly on the wall when older sister Vera Farmiga pitched baby sis on horror. “Just DO it. Money in the bank.” Even without profit sharing points, both stars should see their profiles rise.

Not a great movie, light on frights. But so what?

“Peppermint” didn’t earn great reviews either, but STX can put $12 million, or their share of it, in the vaults by midnight Sunday. Not bad for a Jennifer Garner action outing that needed a better villain and maybe a less over-explained and “justified” plot.

“Crazy Rich Asians” nudged past the other Chinese flavored smash of the summer, “The Meg,” and is still going strong enough to hit $150 before it loses its screens. It leads “Meg” $135 to $130 now.

And Spike Lee’s “BlackKklansman” is the comeback Jordan Peele hoped it would be. The “Get Out” director’s producing help turned this into the first Spike movie to reach $50 million (by next weekend) in ages.