Movie Nation

Theo James has the poise if not the gravitas to carry the new skullduggery-at-the-U.N. thriller “Backstabbing for Beginners.”

The “Divergent” hunk has to animate a generally dull account of the hopelessly corrupt, sadly-necessary “oil for food” program the United Nations ran during the years Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was under international sanctions for its aggression and pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Danish director Per Fly (“The Inheritance”) and screenwriter Daniel Pyne (“The Manchurian Candidate”) have made a film of meetings, office politics, underworld connections, murder and romance. But mostly meetings. It’s all James and the always entertaining Ben Kingsley can do to get it up on its feet, much less sprinting forward.

James plays Michael Soussan, a Danish born son of a diplomat whose father was killed in Lebanon, and who can’t see squandering his high-priced education on a lucrative career in finance.

“I want to make a difference,” he tells his U.N. interviewers, every time he interviews there. That’s where he wants to work. At 24, he lands work as the Assistant to the Undersecretary General the way jobs are landed by those of his class.

“I knew your father,” the undersecretary, “Pasha,” purrs.

Kinglsey’s Pasha schools the impressionable kid with a blend of fatherly indulgence and testy profanity. His blurted f-bombs and oddly-timed curses are disarming and amusing. But the previous assistant died in a car accident in Iraq. The “accident,” whatever Pasha says, deserves to be discussed in skeptical quotation marks.

It’s 2002, in the months leading up to the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, and Pasha is in charge of Oil for Food program. That was supposed to keep money out of the hands of Saddam Hussein, funneling cash straight into food, medicine and the stuff of life for the Iraqi people. But with all that money and oil at stake, Iraqi thugs, international hustlers and con artists and highly-placed Bad Actors in assorted countries and within the U.N. itself were suspecting of “gaming” the system.

Michael’s warned of that  by a C.I.A. agent (Aidan Devine) before his first trip to Baghdad. Will he do the right thing? You know, pass on any funny business he observes?

The trouble is, everybody’s got their agenda. The C.I.A. is hunting for an excuse for Bush to order an invasion. The Iraqis, under a leader they’ve nicknamed “The Angel of Death,” bristle at international control and are murderously intent on breaking free. The oil profiteers are hellbent on getting cheap crude they can flip on the open market. The big contracted suppliers don’t mind selling expired medicines that they’re sure no one will check.

And everybody, at every step of the process, is taking a cut. That leaves the people, most particularly the Iraqi Kurds, starving and dying. Just not in the numbers they were in the days before this program was cooked up. Progress!

“The first rule of diplomacy, kid, is ‘Truth is not a matter of fact. It’s a matter of consensus.'”

Pasha is part cynic, all-realist. He’s jockeying for position with an inter-U.N. foe (Jacqueline Bisset), trying to get Michael to “chose your facts carefully” in reporting the “success” of the program. Photo ops and reports that maintain funding, “our continued existence,” is job one, he says. His rationale?

“What’s the alternative? Doing nothing?”

A pretty, sad-eyed young translator for the program (Belcim Bilgin) is closer to Michael in idealism. She wants the world to know the truth. But even she might be “a honey trap,” someone with an agenda all her own.

Bisset makes her French official officious, blunt and furious. Kingsley is an old hand at making even those we know are villains twinkly as well as imposing.

“Backstabbing” makes an interesting run at painting the many shades of grey in this corner of diplomacy. The mature U.N. under Kori Annan was hidebound and corrupt, largely a consequence of filling its ranks with opportunists and pocket-liners, some from the First World, many many more from the Third.

But as Pasha, a Cypriot whose real name is Benon Sevan, points out, there are things that have to be done and awful, corrupt places where they need to be done. And what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

This Danish/Norwegian/Swedish/Canadian production muddies the waters of Soussan’s expose of the U.N. culture and the program. Soussan’s title promises a more flippant treatment than the subject will allow. Sadly, for all the murders, the threats and intimidations, Fly’s film takes barely a moment to show the real victims of the crimes — starving, sickly people under the thumb of a dictator it took a president with impure motives of his own to take out.

Miscast, bland “Bad Actors” abound. Pasha? Kinglsey does his best to make us think this guy could swing either way.

And washed away in this sea of shades of grey is the colorless Mr. James, not emotive enough to suggest the passion Michael is supposed to have for “making a difference,” under-reacting to seeing Iraqis in his employ murdered right before his eyes, under-selling the fear Soussan must have felt, underwhelming us with his sense of love and concern for the lovely, passionate Nashim (Bilgin).

Like Pasha, who got the blame for the scandal when it erupted, James make take the hit for “Backstabbing” not coming off. But like Pasha, he’s just part of the problem, a figurehead on an international production rife with dramatic, scriptural and casting compromises.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, and some violence

Cast: Theo James, Ben Kingsley, Belçim Bilgin, Jacqueline Bisset

Credits:Directed by Per Fly, script by  Daniel Pyne. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:49

No matter how adult, rational and organized you think you are, you cannot save somebody from himself. And yet we try. If only to prove to ourselves we’ve made an effort, we try.

“6 Balloons” is a short, sharp and contemplative drama about addiction and the one person who thinks she can prop her brother, the addict, up.

Abbi Jacobson of TV’s “Broad City” shows her dramatic chops as Katie, finicky, organized, the sort of person who listens to self-help books on tape — “You had a chance to stay on dry land, but you’re going to the boat again…You never asked for help, even when it was offered to you” — to get her through whatever.

She’s got a new boyfriend, an adoring dad (Tim Matheson) and a manic mom (Jane Kaczmarek) all-too-eager to binge-shop to help her plan a surprise birthday party for that beau and all their friends.

But somebody’s “got to pick up your brother.” They keep mentioning it and Katie, checking off things on the Post-it note tacked to the car radio, is trying to put it off.

Dave Franco is Seth. He’s usually “the grinning Franco brother,” but here he’s the sleepy-eyed one. He’s got that sibling thing of picking on his sister’s choice in men.

“Jack is such a B-minus.”

Katie’s noticed he hasn’t answered his mail.

“You stopped opening your mail last time, too.”

She knows. “Could you just roll up your sleeves? Show me your arm!”

Seth is a single dad (“You picked THIS moment in your life to become a parent?”) and an addict. Katie finds herself, on the night of this very important party, dealing with a brother she needs to get into rehab and a talkative toddler (Charlotte Carel) on her hands.

Writer-director Marja-Lewis Ryan squeezes nothing but truth into her 76 minute movie. Real situations, hard real-life dilemmas. Seth’s insurance doesn’t cover this rehab place. Maybe this other one, downtown? Little Ella needs attention and a bathroom.

And there’s this party Katie is desperate to get back to. She’s going to take care of everything. She can have what she needs and put a band-aid on Seth, too.

As dramas go, “6 Balloons” is compact to the point of “slight” —  in ideas, themes and length. It begins melancholy, spirals into dread and despair and makes a grab for hope.

Franco veers from somnambulistic to hyperactive. But it is Jacobson we identify with, the one who wants to do the fixing, the one desperate to get and keep something normal in her life, the one who tries and the one who still cares.

As much as you want to slap this Franco (too), it is Abbi Jacobson’s Katie that you want to give a hug and give a hand to.

MPAA Rating: unrated, drug abuse subject matter, profanity

Cast: Abbi Jacobson, Dave Franco, Jane Kaczmarek, Tim Matheson, Charlotte Carel

Credits: Written and directed by Marja-Lewis Ryan . A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:16

Historian John Man’s “Searching for the Amazons: The Real Warrior Women of the Ancient World,” started life as a primer on the historical and mythological antecedents for the comic book icon and film phenomenon of last year, “Wonder Woman.”

Having traveled, researched and written authoritative and imminently readable biographies of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan, Man has produced a fascinating history of the myth of Amazons, warrior princesses living in a matriarchy of their own creation.

From the Scythians of the Steppes, who inspired Greek accounts and led the historian Herodotus, who accepted Amazons as real, to centuries of quests, research and scholarship since, Man details the ebb and flow of belief, debunked belief and the lingering impact of this proto-feminist universe upon culture and the arts.

Tribes in Africa, South America and North America were considered candidates to be the “real” Amazons of myth.

Modern day horse archers have sought to recreate the fighting skills these women were endowed with.

Female warriors from Joan of Arc to the Soviet Air Force’s “Night Witches” — fighting female pilots of World War II, Qadafi’s female bodyguard corps and the Kurdish women doing much of the fighting against Syria and ISIS are given chapters.

As is the Wonder Woman herself. Man goes into greater detail than “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” at showing how this odd duck psychologist and the brilliant, unconventional women he shared his life with led to one of the most popular comic book characters, became a feminist heroine of the liberating ’70s on TV and a princess fighting for peace, justice and equality on the big screen.

Man was writing with an eye toward LAST year’s film phenomenon, but he could very well have shifted his attention to this year’s Big Thing — “Black Panther” — with its army of warriors supporting their king and guarding Wakanda against discovery, invasion and enslavement. Man goes into detail about the “Amazon Army” of the African state of Dahomey, a 19th century force of vital influence upon affairs in that West African state.

Yeah. They looked a bit like this.

Films become culture-shifting events in all sorts of ways — branding, connecting to the political, ethical and moral zeitgeist.

But one important way, as Man’s book illustrates, is tapping into ideas that have always been with us, simmering much of the time, bubbling to the surface at crucial junctures. Amazons may have never truly existed, but plainly women warriors have been around for thousands of years. Graves in the borderlands of Mongolia and the assorted “Stans” of the former Soviet Union prove it.

Timing makes this idea of avenging angels topical again. Who better to turn the tide in the “War on Women” than a woman warrior for justice, equality and truth, arriving just after an electoral eruption of sexism, racism and nativism — not just in America?

Who better to ensure T’Challa gains his people’s rightful place at the table than an Army of Amazons?

John Man, in short, is onto something deep with “Searching for the Amazons.” That he’s able to relate so much of this history in such a breezy, entertaining way, connecting it all to the present day, makes this book (Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton) an edifying delight.

Jason Statham is the butt of Rainn Wilson’s jokes in this trailer, a “Sharknado” ish Mega Shark (Megalodon) thriller.

Ruby Rose shows up with a new haircut, Li Bingbing is the love interest and Cliff Curtis and Page Kennedy and Masi Oka play straight men — got to have every race represented, right?

A fun shark assault summer escape comedy? Kind of.

Jon Hamm gets his best big screen leading man role, and delivers, in “Beirut,” a smart, taut tale of Middle East intrigues from the screenwriter of “Michael Clayton” and the better “Bourne” movies.

It’s a period piece built around a diplomatic shaker and mover who loses it all, and who doesn’t seek redemption or deliverance, just a return to a life of relevance.

Mason Skiles is the guy on America’s Lebanese embassy staff who makes the deals, a nuts and bolts arbitrator with an eye for the big picture and an ear for the apt metaphor.

Lebanon, he says, is like a boarding house filled with Arabs, Christians, French, Syrians, tribes with “2000 years of revenge, blood feuds and vendettas.” The Palestinians pounded on the door, begging to be let in after Israel declared its independence and they were forced out.  All these boarders in their Lebanese home — Beirut was “The Paris of the Middle East” until the early 1970s — have reached a level of tolerance. But they’re shocked when their new tenants “just want to burn down the Israeli house next door.”‘

He tells this story at a 1972 party, with he and his wife entertaining the elite of Beirut and U.S. Congressmen. It’s a Beirut bubble of Cadillacs, congressmen and cocktails. And for Skiles, that bubble bursts in a hail of bullets and a burst of post-Munich Olympics terrorism.

Ten years later, he hits the bottle too much, the flask even more and sometimes can’t even make it back to the budget motel without dozing off at the wheel of his Ford Pinto. He’s arbitrating small company labor disputes, a broken widower with a head full of skills he’s wasting on union mugs and corporate thugs.

But he’s summoned. He’ll “guest lecture” at the American University of Beirut. “The Company” needs him to negotiate the release of an old friend and colleague. Only Mason will do.

This isn’t explained until he’s on the ground, picked up by an Agency attache (Rosamund Pike). The guy in charge (the formidable character actor Dean Norris) sugar coats the request — “Putting a skirt in front of a jet-lagged (and hungover) man your age” tends to get results, he chuckles.

Shea Whigham is the military man on the ground, trying to limit Skiles’ role to just the conversations the kidnappers have demanded he lead. They’re all worried that the Israelis are looking for an excuse to invade Lebanon and end years of artillery and rocket attacks by the PLO.

Everybody’s motives are suspect.

It takes just one grim, blunt and blood-spattered meeting in a gutted, war-torn Beirut for Skiles to show his “particular skills.” Before self-help books put this on the cover, he’s a master of “getting to ‘yes.'”

“We’re just here to see if the market’s open,” he offers. Barking at him, saying “Out of the question” doesn’t rattle him. “Hypothetically, just for fun” he counters.

The CIA and military folk are taken aback. The Palestinians, Israelis and Embassy staff are knocked on their heels.

“You’re delusional,” he’s told.

“We’re in PLAY,” he barks back.

Who knew the mesmerizing ad-man of “Mad Men” would make a stellar peace broker?

Guilt, remorse, revenge, double-crosses and cover-ups play into Tony Gilroy’s tight script. And tradecraft, in spy parlance. Director Brad Anderson (“The Machinist,” “Transsiberian’) handles most of this with tension building mastery, though I will mention one quibble.

Characters scoot back and forth through factional sections of a city riven by artillery fire and snipers. And when they meet in the ruins of the “Paris of the Middle East,” inevitably, they’re standing in front of Peugeot or Renault headlights — a parade of sitting ducks scenes.

Hamm gives us everything we saw over the years-long run of “Mad Men” in an intricate, concise 110 minute movie — swagger, romance, hope and secrets, professional mastery and gutted personal oblivion.

Pike is her usual terrific, Whigham (“Boardwalk Empire”) perfectly non-plussed and Norris, Larry Pine (playing the ambassador), Alon Aboutboul (as a cagey Israeli) and Idir Chender (terrorist) are all first rate. 

There are no Bourne super-heroics, “surgical strikes” are a lie we haven’t been sold yet (it’s 1982 for much of the film) and no easy answers, just a grubby, clawing scramble back to status quo ante. Gilroy is no Le Carre and Anderson is no Scorsese, but this is a solid, thoroughly entertaining thriller.

Pity Bleecker Street has it. Chances are, nobody will see it. That studio couldn’t market a Marvel movie or merlot to a wino.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence and a brief nude image

Cast: Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Shea Whigham, Mark Pellegrino, Dean Norris, Idir Chender

Credits:Directed by Brad Anderson, script by Tony Gilroy. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:49

There’s this lovely moment that Joe Manganiello gives us in the middle of all the mayhem of “Rampage.” He plays a badly-scarred battle-tested mercenary sent by corporate fascists to deal with a genetically “edited” wolf.

This beast is as big as a bus, teeth the size of motorcycles and spikes along its spine. Did I mention it can fly, too?

And Manganiello manfully gapes in shock and awe at the (digitally painted in) monster he is confronted with. He grimaces, locks and loads, and turns to face his fate.

He’s one of two actors who convince us that what they’re seeing and what we’re seeing is so extraordinary that their widened, panicked eyes cannot take it all in, their minds cannot process the horror they’re beholding. The other standout is the criminally under-employed Naomie Harris, playing a plucky scientist who registers “stunned” when she sees the giant wolfe, gigantic ape and epic alligator that her eyes behold.

They aren’t the stars, but they stand out in this pricey, bloody-minded B-movie on steroids, an intensely unlikeable picture despite being built around the almost-always likeable Dwayne Johnson. 

Neither Johnson nor another co-star, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, give too much thought to the vast beasts they’re facing off with. They’re too busy taking turns posturing, cracking bad one-liners and hamming it up, playing that lazy screenwriter’s favorite character — the “ex-Special Forces” soldier, this time turned animal loving primatologist, and friend to a sign-language speaking gorilla, George — and a government agent with a “Men in Black” suit accessorized with idiotic cowboy belt, boots, pearl-handled Colt and drawl.

“You know whut mah ol’granpappy useta say…”

Morgan, an interesting character actor whose career was revived by “The Walking Dead,” puts his big screen future back into a coma with this, his worst performance.

And Johnson? Sometimes, he lets you see it’s all about the Benjamins. And that’s not always when he’s having to share the screen with Vin Diesel.

A secret private corporation space station is torn to shreds by the genetic experiment subjects being tinkered with in a gruesome and heartless opening scene. The “pathogen” the corporate fascists in charge (Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy) were shooting for, “weaponized” genetics, tumbles back to Earth and infects wildlife.

And one of those creatures is pals with Davis Okoye (Johnson). George is a giant gentle ape with a gift for sign language and a passion for practical jokes. George is a big reason Davis prefers animals to people.

“They like you, they lick you. They don’t like you, they eat you.”

George starts to mutate from licking to eating.

Harris plays a scientist with some inside knowledge of why this is happening, Morgan is the Fed running roughshod over uncooperative witnesses and sedated monsters his bosses want to contain and study.

And Brad Peyton, director of Johnson’s now two worst movies since becoming a star (“San Andreas”) is the fellow put in charge of making this script-by-committee bomb-with-a-big-body-count make sense and keep us interested. He doesn’t seem to have cared about the faceless hundreds who die in this joyless jaunt. Why should his stars?

The whole affair lumbers forward like a giant gator in a big city headed towards some sort of “King Kong” vs. “Godzilla” finale, with Johnson showing a lot of teeth and just enough commitment to ensure that nobody has second thoughts about writing that even bigger “Jumanji 2” paycheck.

The whole thing is every bit as stupid as it looks.

I like the whole corporations are out to kill us message, though Akerman’s future as a villain seems limited. But it’s a movie where you cannot convince your eyes that most of what you’re seeing is real. Computer-generated creatures, tanks, boats and helicopters fill the screen, fake crashes and fake monsters climbing digital skyscrapers, all more impressive than convincing.

And you can’t even say that for the movie as a whole. It’s not convincing, not impressive, and after “Jumanji,” Johnson’s agents will probably never let him within a city block of Brad Peyton.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief language, and crude gestures

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman, Joe Manganiello

Credits:Directed by Brad Petyton, script by Ryan Engle, Carlton Cuse, Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:47

We Southerners do dearly delight in the aspirations, vexations and agitation of Outland actors taking their shots at Southern drawls.

We do. And after a lifetime of laughter and trepidation of the Foghorn — I say FOGHORN Leghornisms of the likes of Travolta and Keanu, Emma Stone, Dan Aykroyd and Anna Paquin among many, many others, I have taken a vow of tolerance.

If Michael Caine and Renee Zellweger and Nic Cage are going to treat Southern as Elizabethan English, well — I’m no longer takin’ the vapors over it. It’s funny and it is often meant to convey charm, politesse and chivalry.

So kudos for Rosario Dawson for not offending the ears, playing the title role in her normal streetwise city voice in the coming of age comedy “Krystal.”

But Nick Robinson, as the teen who falls for her, director William H. Macy, playing his stoner comparative religion professor Dad and Felicity Huffman as his drawling, long-suffering Mom? Many thanks for the chuckles, you all.

She Who Can Do No Errant Accent Kathy Bates, of course, gets a pass.

Here’s a tale of a lovesick teen, Taylor, who has achieved 18 virginal years of age despite suffering from PAT — Paroxysmal atrial tachycardia. His heart races out of control on occasion. Such as when he persuses Pop’s porn as an impressionable seven-year-old.

“Lassitude,” the patriarch says, will do its job of “lassoing the priapic pony of your sexuality.” In time.

But at 18, the drop-dead gorgeous woman who meets him on the beach gives him another episode. The emergency room doc (William Fichtner at his drollest) isn’t worried. Krystal kind of freaks.

And when the lad gets out, professes his crush, she is not having it but is kind enough not to dismiss his fragile heart outright.

Taylor, “Tay Tay” to his smart alec artist/brother (Grant Gustin), chases her to AA meetings, where he fakes addiction. He’s not scared off by her testimony.

“I did the stripper thing. I did the hooker thing. I did the heroin thing.”

And he’s not totally bummed out that she has an irritable wheelchair bound son just two years younger than him (Jacob Latimore, funny). Her drawling, smiling, happy-go-thuggy ex (T.I., hilarious)? He’s another matter. 

Macy, working from a seriously stereotypical script by Will Aldis, achieves a mild level of madcap, here and there. The world doesn’t need another movie where a matronly “Belle of the sunny Southern aphorism” (Bates) declares, “Some Southern boy has been readin’ too much FAULKNER!”

As if there WAS such a thing.

It’s quotable, as such movies inevitably endeavor to be.

Dawson is her sexy earthy self, Macy and his spouse Huffman have an effortless chemistry, and T.I., Bates, Latimore and Fichtner win laughs.

Young Robinson? Tolerable, as we say down here. The accent grates until he sort of forgets it. Putting all this voice-over narration (lazy filmmaking) on it merely highlights how he abandoned the drawl for much of the movie, only to rediscover it in post production.

Something about filming on location in South Carolina does that to Hollywood folk.

But never you mind all that. Let’s just say that this endeavor rises, heroically but effortlessly, to the level of middling without anybody breaking too much of a sweat.

It’ll barely last a minute in theaters, but maybe, with a mint julep or three, it’ll play passing fair on Netflix or some such.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, drug use, some nudity and brief sexuality

Cast: Nick Robinson, Rosario Dawson, William H. Macy, Kathy Bates, Jacob Latimore, T.I., Felicity Huffman, William Fichtner

Credits:Directed by William H. Macy, script by Will Aldis. A Great Point release.

Running time: 1:33

Exotic, iconic, commanding, gender-bending, the very model of sexy androgyny and disco decadence, Grace Jones has cast a broad shadow over popular culture in a career that’s ventured from fashion show runways to James Bond villains.

On the cusp of 70 (her birthday is in May), she still tours, still makes appearances, still greets her fans at the stage door.

“Would you ever do another movie?” one adoring acolyte blurts out while getting an autograph.

“My own!” she snaps, with an evil grin.

“Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami,” tells her story in her own words and in remembrances of friends and family. It takes her from concert stage to music video recording to backstage to “back home,” Spanish Town, Jamaica, where this preacher’s daughter got her start.

Editor and documentary filmmaker Sophie Fiennes (Ralph and Joseph’s sister) delivers the diva to her (mostly, but not entirely gay) fans in a nearly two-hour version of “My story,” catching her performing her hits, switching languages and accents the way she changes her look — “Going native now, darling.” — her persona and her vibe.

We see Jones drop the New York accent she acquired by growing up in Syracuse (from age 13) upon her return to Jamaica, catching up with producers she worked with in the past, family and friends she grew up with there and taking on a Jamaican patois when trying to charm them, or bawl out those who keep her waiting, act unprofessionally or show her up.

The film captures her making her most recent autobiographical, reggae-flavored confessional album. And we see her endure a dazzling French music video shoot of her famed disco “La Vie en Rose” cover. “Tacky,” she says of the set. “Bite the bullet,” she grins. “This is paying for my record.”

But a lady has her limits.

“This makes me look like a lesbian madam in a whorehouse!” she insists to the director, in fluent French. Can they re-shoot it without all the scantily clad chorines?

“We are visual artists,” she explains backstage. “We know what this looks like.” And later?

“You have to be a high-flying bitch, sometimes!”

She comes off as the very picture of glamour onstage — higher than high heels, stunning makeup, masks, singing “Slave to the Rhythm” while spinning a hula hoop.

Her influential image-builder, style consultant and the lover who gave her a son, Jean-Paul Goude catches up with her and gets a “You’re the one who made me weak in the knees” confession. Her mom sings at her brother’s church and we see where the call to perform came from, even if Grace rebelled against a strict “No open-toe shoes, no makeup” upbringing.

And offstage, there is one truly unguarded moment, out of makeup for a “champagne breakfast, confessing in an upstate New York accent that we never, ever hear.

“It’s a lonely life.”

It shortchanges her fashion runway years, doesn’t use archival footage of her peak years in music, fashion and movies. “Bloodlight and Bami” may be mostly for her most faithful fans, but it makes for an interesting, just-revealing-enough portrait for those who only know her from the image she’s created and the music that rarely made it out of the clubs, back in the day.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with some profanity

Cast: Grace Jones, Sly & Robbie, Jean-Paul Goude

Credits:Directed by Sophie Fiennes. A Kino Lorber/BBC Films release.

Running time: 1:55

If nothing else, the timing of “Chappaquiddick,” a film about a tragedy and the infamous scandal that spun out of it almost 50 years ago, seems odd.

Why this story, about a drunk driving accident that killed a pretty young woman in the car alone with a married, rising star U.S. Senator with that magical Kennedy surname, and why now?

But ducking into a matinee of it you see the cunning of Entertainment Studios chief Byron Allen, the former comic who has aimed his operation at niche pictures ranging in quality from “Hurricane Heist” and “Friend Request” to “47 Meters Down” and “Hostiles.” The audience I saw it with was entirely white and quite old.

Allen’s financed a film aimed at conservatives in need of a safe space at the cinemas where they can escape the tidal wave of TV news and its indictments, investigations and reminders of their very poor judgement.

Director John Curran, of “The Painted Veil” and “Stone,” and his screenwriters (one is Whit Stillman acting discovery Taylor Allen of “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona”) present a generally straightforward account of the Moon Landing Week (July, 1969) car wreck in which Ted Kennedy killed his passenger, professional campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne.

And if nothing else it’s to be praised for putting a face and person behind a name that history has bandied about like a political football for all these decades — Mary Jo Kopechne. Kate Mara, of the equally dynastic NFL franchise-owner Maras, shows Kopechne as an idealist, a professional, still broken up by the death of Bobby Kennedy the summer before, compassionate to the surviving Kennedy brother, Ted (Jason Clarke) who seems to shun the mantle his tyrannical dad (Bruce Dern) has put on him.

“Lead a serious life.”

The old man has had a stroke, but with three presidency-bound brothers dead before, Ted, the hard drinking, womanizing and callow youngest brother has a family brand to protect. He just doesn’t seem to want that, or welcome the “Kennedy ’72” talk one and all bandy about on this weekend of a small boat sailing regatta and Martha’s Vineyard reunion of the extended Kennedy family.

“Family,” as Ted describes it to the partiers at a cottage on Chappaquiddick Island (at the seaward end of Martha’s Vineyard), includes cousins like his lawyer “Joey will fix it” Gargan (Ed Helms), a like-minded state’s attorney (Jim Gaffigan) and “The Boiler Room Girls,” younger female campaign aides who flock to the Kennedy name like Elaine on that infamous “Seinfeld” episode.

Mara and Olivia Thirlby play two of those women, practical idealists whose professionalism trumps any hint of sexual opportunism that this reunion has had attached to it by conspiracy buffs, the film suggests.

“How’re your kids, Senator? How’s your WIFE?”

The accident happens after a lot of drinks and a heart to heart talk about expectations, burdens, grief and ideals. Nothing more. No wonder Fox News hasn’t been all over this one. Well, that and the fact that Producer Allen is a black man.

And as Kennedy has foretold, talking of “character” and the ways it is tested, it’s what happens after that Oldsmobile flips into Poncha Pond in the middle of the night that reveals his.

Kennedy, 37, was still lightly regarded by many insiders, still called “Teddy” by the likes of Ted Sorensen (Taylor Allen), veteran insider and family public relations strategist. Teddy’s closest pals, the lawyers played by funnymen Helms and Gaffigan, try to get the vacuum-sealed car doors open after the Senator staggers back to the party cottage. They direct him to do the right thing, row him across the bay to the mainland to report the crash to the police.

And that’s not what Kennedy, not-entirely-sober, certainly in shock and overwhelmed by the growing understanding of what this means to his career, does. He calls his old man, who can’t speak more than a word or two. His one word edict?

“Alibi!”

“Chappaquiddick” then becomes a master class on political spin, damage control and image management. Formidable character actor Clancy Brown (“The Shawshank Redemption”) is the the take-charge guy of the Ten Angry Spin Doctors summoned by Old Joe to “handle” this.

No, Brown doesn’t look anything like former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. But that’s a mere quibble compared to what we see presented as unvarnished fact in a movie that strays from that straight and narrow too often for its own good.

“Chappaquiddick” is more factual than “JFK,” less on-the-nose than “W,” on the sliding Oliver Stone scale of historical accuracy. There’s a lot we don’t actually know about the accident, and while the movie sometimes sensationalizes the grey areas, the fact that the Kennedy clan and the future “Lion of the Senate” saw to it that we will never know is undisputable.

As is the naked power play and value of family connections that we see as various “fixers” “get ahead of the story” in their efforts to “control the body,” bums’ rush the police investigation and prosecution and generally clear the ground for a Kennedy “comeback” before the poor woman even has her funeral.

This stuff is documented, and if anything alarms a country that has gullibly embraced political dynasties since its founding, it should be these scenes.

What works against “Chappaquiddick” is its lack of narrative drive, that drum I beat far too often — urgency. Curran is a slack filmmaker saddled with an ugly story, cynically told, and a generally unlikeable “hero.” Clarke, of “Winchester” and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” is a reliable character actor without a lot of screen charisma. Here, he doesn’t even bother to master the Kennedy patrician Back Bay accent. He’s built up into a villain who hardly seems worthy of that label.

Clarke’s a leading man like Teddy was presidential timber. Not really.

The speculation about Kopechne’s manner of death tends towards the graphic and lurid, even if it’s fair game.

That makes for a movie that has quality and some value. It’s just not one you warm to. Even Helms, playing “the conscience” Teddy chooses to ignore, seems more a conservative construct than a real person.

We don’t know what we don’t know, Donald Rumsfeld famously said. But in this case, we know enough. Wandering into the unknowns doesn’t serve history or the film well enough to make “Chappaquiddick” anything more than cinematic escape for folks who don’t like the current history they’d rather avoid thinking about by going to the movies.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, disturbing images, some strong language, and historical smoking

Cast: Jason Clarke, Kate Mara, Ed Helms, Olivia Thirlby, Bruce Dern, Clancy Brown, Taylor Nichols, John Fiore

Credits:Directed by Michael Curran, script by Taylor Allen, Andrew Logan. An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1:46

The best effects are often the simplest.

Especially in horror. Particularly in “Truth or Dare,” the latest spin on “It Follows,” the horror trope that you pass on your curse to somebody new just so you can survive.

Here, it’s that killer Joker Smile that victims see or paste on themselves as they’re playing “the game.” A little makeup or glue, a bit of lighting, an added dab of digital Satanic red in the eye — you’ve got yourself a murderous threat asking the life-or-death question, “Truth or Dare?”

Yeah, that’s pretty much ALL the team of writers and director Jeff Wadlow have going for them. But not every Dead Teenager movie can be “It Follows” or “Final Destination.”

Six college friends and a nerd tag-along spend spring break in Mexico. Cute “Miss Moral High Ground” Olivia (Lucy Hale of “Pretty Little Liars” and “Scream 4”), the one who’d rather be building houses for Habitat for Humanity, picks up a bearded, chivalrous stranger (Landon Liboiron) who suggests a little after-hours drinking at an abandoned mission church. 

Hey, why not play a little “Truth or Dare?” They start, and that’s when Carter the stranger is tasked with a truth that will change all their lives, and end most of them. He’s lured them there to take a curse off himself, or at least better his odds.

“Tell the truth or you die. Do the dare or you die. Refuse to play? You die!”

It’s not until they get back to school that they start seeing people smile that smile, hearing people make that murderous challenge. It takes minutes to get everybody on board, but once enough of them have had the visions, and one or two of them die, the rest team up to try and survive.

Olivia’s relationship with BFF Markie (Violett Beane of “The Flash” and “The Leftovers”) is strained. So much for their pledge, “Between you and the world, I choose you.”

A boy comes between them. Some survive their first challenge, others don’t. Count them down — seven, six, five, four…

That’s where the tedium sets in. The truths get more lame, the dares less creatively deadly. A gay kid (Hayden Szeto) has to confront his homophobic cop dad, and amazingly, that’s played out OFF camera. The feud between Markie and Olivia feels arbitrary and weak.

And still the movie goes on, grasping for a conclusion that feels as if it was workshopped in a college course — correspondence school maybe.

Such Blumhouse Horror productions have the most generic of casts, as if they think the audience won’t notice the undersold emotions, the failure to properly register shock when confronted with the supernatural.

That’s the difference between “A Quiet Place” and “Truth or Dare” kids — the kids. And the adults. They’re emotive, empathetic actors who reach out and connect with the viewer, at least in John Krasinski’s blockbuster.

Cut-rate horror like this, they’re just girls in revealing outfits and boys drooling after them — until the next coed gets killed. Preferably after her big make-out scene.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and disturbing content, alcohol abuse, some sexuality, language and thematic material

Cast: Lucy Hale, Tyler Posey, Violett Beane, Sophia Ali, Landon Liboiron, Nolan Gerard Funk, Sam Lerner, Hayden Szeto

Credits:Directed by Jeff Wadlow, script by  Jillian Jacobs , Michael Reisz, Christopher Roach. A Blumhouse/Universal release.

Running time: 1:40