Movie Nation

Oscar winner Viola Davis plays a woman married to a robber (Liam Neeson) whose gang is wiped out in a heist gone wrong. So she, Michelle Rodriguez and the other “Widows” take on that “one last job” that will clear their family slate with Bryan Tyree Henry.

A Little Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl,” “Sharp Objects”), a little Steve “Twelve Years a Slave” McQueen, a lot of action.

“You reap what you so,” says Colin Farrell (Oscar winner Robert Duvall plays his dad). Kind of wonder if ol’ Colin will see the closing credits.

“Widows” opens Nov. 16. 

“Alpha” has to stand as one of the pleasant surprises of the cinematic summer, a gritty yet sentimental fantasy about that first Ice Age boy to fall for a dog.

It’s a movie with more blood and guts than Disney would have allowed. But any movie with a teen and a dog in it is going to tug at the heart, even if the dog’s a wolf and the kid’s not much further along the civilized scale. And while it’s not on a par with that classic of pre-history, “Quest for Fire,” director Albert Hughes (“The Book of Eli”) gives us a beautifully barren prehistoric Europe of steppes, volcanoes, mesas and canyons, a forbidding land presented in magnificent 3D.

Keda, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee of “The Road” and “Slow West,” is the son of the chief (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) of his tribe of hunter-gatherers, good with his hands (he fashions enviable flint spearpoints) but sensitive, a bit of a mama’s boy.

He may pass spearhead making, but he flunks his first and second Big Tests on the joint tribal hunt, refusing to finish off a wounded wild boar that squeals in pain and looks him in the eye, terrified. That second test, fleeing the bison the hunting party are chasing off a cliff, gets him gored and flung down a cliff-face.

Mother (Natassia Malthe) will have only his memory to cling to.

But Keda, left for dead, clings to that cliff, re-sets his busted ankle and using the tribal tattoo — a constellation inked on his hand — he might be able to find his way home. If only he can dodge the saber tooth tigers, hyenas and wolves.

It’s one of those that almost gets him, and one of those that he almost kills defending himself. Showing empathy, he nurses himself back to health and tends to the wary wolf he knifed as he does.

The production almost seamlessly marries CGI wolves to a real wolf for some scenes, mostly close-ups. Hughes may give us windswept vistas and time-lapse scans of the night sky, but “Alpha” lives or dies on its extreme close-ups — hunters, camouflaged in mud, crawling up on the herd, a wolf softening its fear of fire and the humans who create it (with great difficulty).

The kid talks to the wolf — in a subtitled pre-Greek or Latin dialect — far too much for my taste. The movie itself is chatty when in essence language was a newish thing and vocabularies were limited enough that using gestures and images to tell the story would have been a safer, smarter and more cinematic bet.

Still, there’s value in a father teaching his son, “Raise your head, your eyes will follow” and that wolfpacks are led by the Alpha dog, not an inherited title, “but one won through courage.”

Hughes, who came up with the story the script was based on, has fashioned the simplest of quest narratives and rarely gets in the way of it. He takes us exactly where we expect him to.

But he gets the boy and us to connect with the dog and has a little fun showing us boy-and-his-dog firsts — first whistle to call Alpha (what he’s named the dog), first accidental game of fetch.

It’s kid-film cute some of the time, pretty rough and bloody going at others. But “Alpha” holds together well-enough and exceeds expectations. When this was first announced, I was sure Sony would animate it, “Ice Age” style. I’ll bet you were, too.

Smit-McPhee is no Leo and “Alpha” is no “Revenent.” But in an era where films have shied away from challenging, scaring or hitting kids with anything resembling harsh reality in critter features, “Alpha” is a lovely yet tough-minded reminder that the cuddly Spaniel or Pomeranian curled up at your feet didn’t get there by accident, or by being a pushover.

Then again, maybe that’s exactly what put him there.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some intense peril

Cast: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Natassia Malthe, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Leonor Varela

Credits:Directed by Albert Hughes, script by Daniele Sebastian Wiedenhaupt . A Sony/Columbia release.,

Running time: 1:36

True story — classical pianist Don Shirley had a white tough-guy bouncer-type driver behind the wheel of his Caddy as he toured the segregated South of the 1960s.

They followed the “Green Book” of places that accepted black patronage — hotels, restaurants, etc., as they toured. And sometimes, the Green Book was no help at all, so a guy’s gotta get tough, you dig?

In this Peter Farrelly (The “serious” half of the Farrelly Brothers?) film,  Mahershala Ali of “Moonlight” is Shirley, and Viggo Mortensen is Tony Lip, the guy doing to the driving.

Might this Universal pic set for Thanksgiving release be Oscar bait? It’s happened before. The KFC jokes blend easily with the injustice that Tony Lip has his eyes opened to, and the innate “dignity” of a great musician breaking great music to white audiences more used to seeing people like him in waiter’s uniforms in this trailer.

Every so often, we remember to tape over our built-in laptop camera, turn off location tracking on our smarter-than-us phone and that there are other search engines aside from all-knowing/all-coveting Google.

But for the most part, we try not to think about the fundamental question of our age — “Do You Trust Your Computer?” 

Chris Paine, director of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” and “Revenge of the Electric Car” rounded up scientists, software engineers, journalists, futurists and filmmakers to discuss the reasons for asking that “trust” question about the gadgets we let do our taxes, plan our trips, perform surgery and soon, drive our “electric” cars.

And in this eye-opening, sometimes chilling film, he talked to a wide range of the engaged and the clueless among us on the street and on the beach, and posed that question to one and all. “Do we?” “Should we?”

With the birth of “machine learning” largely unremarked when Google came along, with digital “super intelligence” on the horizon, with science fiction, “a lie that tells the truth” warning us from Asimov’s “I, Robot” to “Terminator: Judgement Day” to “Ex Machina,” maybe it’s time, one and all in this film seem to agree, that we wrestled with the morality, ethics and simple safety of the technology that has taken over our lives.

As a surgeon makes the ethical choice of not continuing a computer/robot-assisted brain aneurysm operation where the probability of success has slipped, mid-surgery, declares, “It’s not the future, it’s the present.”

It’s a brisk blur of a documentary that ventures from “How could a smarter machine not be a better machine?” to “the Faustian bargain” we’ve made with technology that will render 7,000,000 data entry jobs and 4,000,000  driving/transporting jobs (very soon) to medicine, law, journalism and other careers obsolete.

A former deputy Secretary of Defense, Christine Fox, discusses the debate over “autonomous weapons” (not just drones, but drones that decide who to kill) to Stanford professor Jerry Kaplan noting that “machines are natural psychopaths” as the film touches on the stock market’s “flash crash” of 2010 and computerized trading’s soulless role in it, the worrying collection of facts and problem areas swells.

And then we’re told that worrying won’t help. Not at all. If there’s something this lively film lacks, peppered as it is with cautionary words from IBM “Watson”-creator David Ferrucci to Elon Musk, interspersed with film clips from movies ranging back to “Forbidden Planet” to “The Matrix” and “Ex Machina,” it’s that simple solution, that “action” step at the end of a persuasive speech or argument.

“Awareness” of how Big Data allows companies like Cambridge Analytica and malevolent states like Russia to custom-message the impressionable and manipulate democracy, of how “we’ll be helpless” as computers get better at assembling our profile and learning how to manipulate us, will not be enough.

Adaptation will have to be rapid, human/machine interfaces will be more elaborate. There’s a Cyborg in our future. If we don’t want to be utterly subsumed by machines, we’ll have to become part machine.

As filmmaker Jonathan Nolan (“Westworld/Interstellar” screenwriter, and brother of director Christopher) notes that “We’re the last analog object in a digital universe,” questions like “Can A.I. (artificial intelligence) be compassionate?” leap forward in importance.

When Hiroshi Ishiguro demonstrates “Erica,” the most advanced/human–like, empathy-recognizing/empathy-generating android in Japan, gosh you hope so.

But even that isn’t reassuring.  “A.I. doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity,” Elon Musk notes. “We might just be in the way.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: David Ferruci, Rana El Kaliouby, Christine Fox, Elon Musk, Hiroshi Ishiguro

Credits:Directed by Chris Paine, script by Mark Monroe. A Cinetec release.

Running time: 1:17

Taraji P. Henson runs up against the glass ceiling, gets a little voodoo brew help with “What Men Want” and hears every guy’s innermost thoughts.

Lust, greed, passing gas, it’s all in there. Tracy Morgan also stars, but neither he nor Taraji P. has the funniest line in this trailer.

“I thought black people stopped drinking tea after “Get Out?”

This January, Taraji gets another shot at releasing a mid-winter star vehicle/hit. Let’s hope “What Men Want” out-performs “Proud Mary.”

Here’s the social media era in dating perfectly summed up by a master of the “swipe right” hook-up.

“It’s like going to a bar on Friday night, without everything that sucks about a bar. On Friday night.”

For Harris, cavalierly played by Jack Cutmore-Scott of “Kingsman,””Dunkirk” and TV”s “Deception,” is an absolute terror on Tinder — actually its legal-department-approved-clone, named “Head Over Heels.” A 20something Internet Age ad-man who crushes it at work, entertains himself playing online first-person shooter games, each night’s adventure begins in a bar with a lot of swiping right on dating aps.

She shows up, grins and giggles all around, he plays “Let me read your ‘drink aura,” which he inevitably does — adding “shots” at the end of it.

And they wind up in bed. Night after night, which ends when he slips out of bed with barely an “I had fun” kissoff, because he did, an implied “I’ll call you” promise, because he never does.
“Bad Match” is what happens when he hooks up with Rachel, played with an Erika Christensen (“Swimfan”) 2.0 verve by Lili Simmons  (TV’s “Hawaii Five-O” and “Ray Donovan”).

She walked into the bar, a literal “Devil in a Red Dress,” and we know Harris is about to get some serious comeuppance for his faithless ways.

Because as determined as he is to continue his routine, it’s that second night — a pointed, irresistible sext leading to pin-your-ears-back sex — that’s the clincher. She spends the night at HIS place, turns off HIS alarm so he misses his important pitch meeting, and it’s all downhill from there.

“What kind of a nutjob shuts off your alarm?”

What kind of “nutjob” stays in your apartment all day, fetches groceries and cooks you a nice meal to make it up to you?

“What’s a little breaking and entering between friends?”

“The nerve,” his friends (Brandon Scott, Kahyun Kim) harrumph with him in the bar later that week. He’s tactfully, he thinks, moved on, gently blown off “What’re you doing right now, lover?” sexts and held his temper when she starts badgering him at work.

“She’s certifiable. I’m just glad I don’t have any pets.”

Yeah, when she overhears his cruelty, she cusses him out. And as things start to unravel in his life, he starts seeing her in a Glenn Close wig with a carving knife, “Fatal Attraction” redux.

Harris, a “slave to my genitals” who has this whole “dating” scene all figured out, is a creep. He may know “The Tao of Swiping,” may excuse his behavior with an “I just don’t get a girlfriend vibe from her,” time and again.

But when you lose your job, the FBI “SWATs” your apartment to find child porn on your laptop, maybe it’s time to do some soul searching, make amends or at least flee.

As you’d expect, Harris does none of that, in spite of the advice of a lawyer. And that’s when things turn violent.

Writer-director David Chirchirillo — the darkly-comic indie “Cheap Thrills” was his debut film — has filmed an efficient, chatty, expectations-flipper of a thriller built around a “hero” played with darkly comic bravado. Because Harris is really hung up on “Fatal Attraction.” 

“When I’m dead, I hope you think about this and it makes you very very sad.”

It’s a short, generally brisk movie which is meant to make the bros watching it think about “Who’s the real villain here?” Because Harris has a hint of sociopath about him, at least in the ways he regards women.

He fears (just a bit) his boss (Noureen DeWulf) and flips the power script with virtually ever other woman he meets — because he can. That’s how Chirchirillo wants us to read him, anyway.

I can’t say the film makes that leap obvious or intriguing, just barely plausible. “Bad Match” is too short and formulaic to give us anything to really chew on.

The unfortunately-named Cutmore-Scott makes Harris a likable lout, and Simmons makes Rachel every screen stereotype of “needy” and “unstable” date.

Whatever epilogue twists are thrown at us (obvious, too), the soul-searching we should be doing is muted, an afterthought. If you think “Wow, this is great,” try the “flipping the gender of the protagonists test.”  Still think the film plays fair with expectations, point of view and rough justice?

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Jack Cutmore-Scott, Lili Simmons, Brandon Scott, Noureen DeWulf

Credits: Written and directed by  David Chirchirillo. An Orion/Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:23

It’s Michael Moore’s End Times documentary about the Trump Era — Nazis, racists, contaminated water, air, workplaces, etc.

A culture caught in mid-rage-spasm, an ignorance spiral that has put us in the hands of a Russian puppet, no problem solvable thanks to Russian influence, interference and cash propping up anti-American organizations like the NRA, which divide us and raise the level of helplessness. It’s all here.

“Fahrenheit 11/9” opens Sept. 21.

Writer/director Justin Lee must have a rich daddy. Or Sugar Daddy. State film commission incentive money. Something.

He’s getting a lot of low-budget features into theaters, Bigfoot horror, Western, wilderness pictures usually. And while I am down with his settings and subject matter, I’m mystified at how A) pictures this bad get made and released and B) how he’s not getting better. “Big Legend,” middling, not quite awful, “A Reckoning,” irredeemably bad.

“Any Bullet Will Do,” his vengeance Western, is Lee’s third release of the summer. Costco package deal or something?

As always, I dig the look, the setting. And there’s a good line in the trailer of this brother-hunting-brother (“Winchester ’73”?) tale.

Wake up the rest’a the boys. We got MURDERIN’ to do.”

“Any Bullet Will Do” finds limited release Sept. 4.

The funniest thing about a teen comedy seen years after its release is the way its jokes, its cultural reference, its music and its cast have aged.

Thus, a comedy that gives us the early days of the use of “beyotch,” Emma Roberts at her child starlet peak, prelapsarian Alex Pettyfer and Juno Temple the last time she could possibly be labeled “innocent.”

A spoiled, out-of-control Malibu teen “going through a rather difficult stage” is sent off to boarding school where they know how to deal with a “Wild Child” — in England.

Because that’ll teach her.

Roberts has the title role, Poppy, a Malibu Barbie, oldest daughter of a widower (Aidan Quinn) who arranges “the perfect Malibu welcome” for Dad’s new girlfriend on moving day, allowing the locals to ransack the moving truck loaded with everything new girlfriend owns.

Nothing for it for Poppy then but venerable Abbey Mount School, in rainy, rural England, with its tradition, hierarchy and no cell service. Poppy is hell-bent on not fitting in.

The girls say grace together at meals, Poppy chants.

“Namaste!”

She insults her “big sister,” the one supposed to show her the ropes (Kimberly Nixon) and doesn’t let “head girl” Harriet (Georgia King) scare her.

“Watch the “smere,” girlfriend — 200 goats died for this!”

The matron (Shirley Henderson) is “Hogwarts” scary, and  the headmistress (the late Natasha Richardson) isn’t open to bargaining over any “rights” Poppy figures she’s entitled to.

“To me a negotiation’s rather like a nightclub — not something I tend to go into.”

Get used to living in a dormitory, “LIGHTS OUT,” and lacrosse, “No wireless” and endless rain which does her Jimmy Choos and sundress collection no good at all.

To her pal back home, “these girls are all ugly losers who think ‘mani-pedi’ is some sort of Latin greeting,” “village idiots.”

“What do you hope to get out of this school, Poppy?”

“To get out of this school.”

Her plan, the only one the other girls will conspire to help her with, is to get expelled. Get blamed for everything, rile the administration, prank the pool (epic), etc.

“It’s on like Donkey Kong!”

“Wild Child” is a sassy, perky and just-potty-mouthed-enough to seem edgy, with “incredibly slutty and available” and “How many boys have you shagged?” jokes (just among us girls) about how to “snog on” the headmistress’s hunky son (Pettyfer), who like everyone on staff at Abbey Mount, drives a classic British motorcar — an Austin Healey “Frogeye” Sprite.

One hit the town used-clothing shop for a play dress-up montage so that Poppy can makeover the fashion-impaired Brits, one trip to the local beauty parlor operated by “the only gay in the village” (Nick Frost, a stitch), trying to pass themselves off as housewives in the liquor store,, a “Malibu moment” here and there — some bits are funnier than others, but even the near-groaners land lightly.

“This is a themed costume party, not a dwarf prostitute’s convention!”

The Hertfordshire locations are lovely, the settings quaint and cute and oh-so-English. As are the girls, the staff and hunky Freddy.

“Are you gay?”

“Just English!”

These movies all turn in the same general direction and at the same point in the story arc, so no sense acting all surprised (unless you’re the 15-and-under demo this is intended for). Poppy’s going to lose some of the brat, and the Brits will lose some of their Brit.

Editor turned director Nick Moore (he cut “Love Actually” and many a screen comedy) handles the action, such as it is, with flair and lets the laughs — many of them verbal — land with a thunk and not a thud.  A favorite line? Freddy’s cover for what sounds like a fart.

“Better an empty house than an angry tenant!”

Roberts was 17 when she made “Wild Child,” fresh off “Nancy Drew” and “Aquamarine” and TV’s “Unfabulous.” She plays Poppy rather broadly, TV style. She was better in “Nancy Drew,” and consistently better better later on. She would go on to see her child stardom fade, even announcing retirement at one point. The roles came back and more TV beckoned instead.

Temple, then better known as a director’s daughter, is adorable as the noisy basket case in need of a makeover and “confidence” boost here. She’s played romantic leads and far too many hookers, junkies and tarts for her own good since.

No kid today would have seen “Wild Child” in a theater, and not many adults, then or now, did either. Perhaps it was seen as damaged and “dangerous,” with a big “Don’t try this at home” streak. The irresponsible stuff here is “alarming” only in the finale, the rest? Hijinx, nothing more.

Is it Netflixable? You bet.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some coarse and suggestive content, sex references and language – all involving teens

Cast: Emma Roberts, Lexi Ainsworth, Shelby Young, Juno Temple, Aidan Quinn, Natasha Richardson, Shirley Henderson, Nick Frost,

Credits:Directed by Nick Moore, script by Lucy Dahl. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:33

“There’s something WRONG with the new babysitter!”

Jacob (Joshua Rush) is just a tween, but he’s got clues.

“Anna” is letting them tear up stuff to make costumes, paint on the walls. She tells them a bedtime version of “The Three Little Bears” that’s hand-drawn and oh-so-DARK.

Hide and go seek just gives her the chance to look the place over, find the family’s strong box, learn its secrets.

“Mom and Dad aren’t HERE now,” is her only rule.

Sometime between “Let’s see what happens when we drop your hamster into the constrictor’s tank” and “Let’s watch mom and Dad’s homemade porno,” Jacob puts it all together. Anna is NOT angling for a tip.

“She’s not a REAL sitter!”

“Emelie” is a short, slow-building nightmare built around an exceptionally creepy turn by Sarah Bolger (“The Spiderwicke Chronicles,” TV’s “Once Upon a Time,” “The Tudors”).

We’ve already seen the “real” Anna snatched in the opening moments. We’ve seen Fake Anna wipe the blood off her shoes and shout “Bye, Mom!” into the stranger’s house she was sitting on, waiting to be picked up by the kids’ father.

And we’ve gotten a very bad vibe from this stranger with the sweet, disarming smile the moment she asks the parents (Susan Pourfar, Chris Beetem) an odd question on their way out the door.

“Do the kids have their own phones?”

Anna watches the parents drive away, locks the kids in for the night. Let the “games” begin.

Music video and TV commercial director Michael Thelin, working from a textbook lean, suspense-building script by Richard Raymond and Harry Herbeck, is grudging with his frights in the early acts.

Bolger turns a cruel come-hither look on young Rush, and a callous “things die” cruelty on Carly Adams and Thomas Bair, who play the younger siblings. She has essentially two jaw-dropping moments to play, and knocks both of them out of the park.

When Emelie invites Jacob into the bathroom with her and gets him to locate a femine hygiene product, you know he’s either got a story his tweenage buddies will never believe or that he’ll be scarred for life. Emelie has an idea just how long that “life” will be.

The foreshadowing is entirely too on the nose, and the “explainer” flashbacks almost unnecessary.  But “Emelie” is a jarring, jolting entry in the “Hand that Rocks the Cradle” genre, a too-obvious thriller that still lands a sucker punch or three.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Sarah Bolger, Joshua Rush, Thomas Bair, Carly Adams, Susan Pourfar, Chris Beetem

Credits:Directed by Michael Thelin, script by Richard Raymond and Harry Herbeck. A Dark Sky release.

Running time: 1:22