Movie Nation

British martial arts star Scott Adkins ventures into “Get Shorty” territory with “The Debt Collector,” a brute brawler of a B-movie, but a bloody-minded bore.

He plays “Frenchy,” owner of a “traditional” martial arts dojo that has him deep in hock. So he begs his partner (Michael Paré) to hook him up with a side hustle the partner squeezes in — debt collecting for hire.

Tommy (Vladimir Kulich) is the boss, not a “shylock” but a guy the underworld lenders contract to get their debts collected. Tommy pairs Frenchy up with Sue (Louis Mandylor  of the “Big Fat Greek Wedding” movies), a gruff alcoholic with a vintage Caddy and a grim attitude about the work.

He’s got a lot of rules for the “newbie” that first day. Remember to “think of these Johns as slabs of meat,” he counsels. “A little head butt” gets you in the door quicker than anything else.

He tosses “Frenchy” the keys with a “We drive on the right side of the road here,” and “watch my whitewalls,” and they’re off.

Every delinquent borrower has a gun, or enormous bodyguards. Sue and Frenchy punch their way through the seedy side of suburban LA, delivering bloody warnings, collecting cash and meting out “punishment” according to the numerical “level” Tommy has assigned each case — a slap around here, a kneecapping there.

It’s amoral work which has driven Sue to drink, but Frenchy supposedly still has some moral compass.

“Moral compass in this job is like a pinless hand grenade,” Sue growls. No, that makes no sense.

The banter is offhanded at times, groaning “So what’s YOUR story?” personal history at others. One power broker explains is unwillingness to repay his loan with “I’m parsimonious.”

He hears an English accent, he figures the guy’s educated. No, he’s ex-military, comfortable with making his living with violence. Sue? He used to do stunts and fights in movies and he’s constantly cracking “You know how things are in B-movies.”

We’re learning.

Adkins was in “Doctor Strange” and “The Expendables 2,” played bad guys or fighters in a Bourne picture here, an X-Men there. Mostly, he’s been adrift in a sea of Bs like this. Still, he’s got to know a thing or two about how important fight choreography is to a two-fisted action film.

Here, we see the choreography. We can count the swings and misses that lead to this pre-arranged takedown, that punch through a cardboard wall. That’s a no-no.

A strip club that looks like a rented storage unit with decorations from the local dollar store and strippers who look more like the real thing than the models who want to be actresses who adorn such scenes in pricier genre pictures also give away the game.

But stuntman turned director Jesse V. Johnson has notions he’s making art here. He intersperses random shots of cattle being raised, then shipped to the slaughterhouse.

“Slabs of meat” one and all.

The women in “Debt Collector” are here to be slapped around or treacherously drive the action as the duo makes its way to one subject whom a particularly villainous client (played by Candy Man Tony Todd) has marked for death.

It’s slow-moving and generally unpleasant, unless you want to see the bare bones of fight choreography exposed on screen, “one two three DUCK, one two KICK,” something much more commonplace in the action cinema’s past.

Adkins as a movie star? He’s interesting enough, but generic save for the accent. Mandylor has more presence and makes more out of a chewy supporting role.

Because like every movie martial arts star before him, Adkins is a bit too happy to dial back the hard work of fistfight scenes by picking up a gun. Usually, that’s a sign you’re Chuck Norris/Jean Claude Van Damme  — over-the-hill.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with explicit violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Scott Adkins, Louis Mandylor, Michael Paré, Vladimir Kulich, Tony Todd

Credits:Directed by Jesse V. Johnson, script by Stu Small and Jesse V. Johnson. An Archstone release.

Running time: 1:35

A glittering cast adorned in period-perfect Romanov-wear, and parked in sparkling upstate New York locations can’t quite make yet another Chekhov adaptation, yet another version of “The Seagull,” take flight.
As a sort of city sophisticates lord it over their country cousins dramedy, the subtext feels fresh and timely even if the stolid theatricality, the usual Chekhov clutter of characters and the weary collection of plot complications do not.

Annette Bening swans through this world as if her character owns it, as indeed Irina does. She is a celebrated actress, a wealthy diva, and she rarely lets a relative or a servant forget it.

But she’s all concern and charm when she rushes “home” to visit her brother and his brood in the country. Sorin, played with warm fatalism by Brian Dennehy, is failing. And surrounded by family, one and all flash back to an earlier summer visit, back when her temperamental son Konstantin (Billy Howle) was struggling to find his artistic voice and escape her shadow, when she brought her famous writer-paramour Boris Trigorin (Corey Stoll) to meet them all for the first time.

Comically querulous Masha (Elisabeth Moss) doesn’t bother to hide her drinking or her disdain for a would-be suitor (Michael Zegen).

“Why do you always wear black?”

“I’m in mourning…for my life!”

There’s Polina (Mare Winningham), Doctor Dorn (Jon Tenney) and Irina’s long-suffering manager (Glenn Fleschler from HBO’s “Barry”). And the center of this flashback is fair Nina, the neighbor girl whom Konstantin has made his muse. They will stage a play in the woods, for the family — well, for his mother.

But the inventive shadow puppets behind the curtain cannot save it as Nina (Saoirse Ronan) launches into the opening soliloquy — “Cold, cold! Empty, EMPTY! Horrible, MOST HORRIBLE!”

Mom cannot contain her mockery, and the central conflicts are laid bare — Konstantin’s mania for success in the arts dissolving into manic Mom-induced mood swings, heightened by her bringing along an accomplished writer to further lord it over him, Nina’s innocence tempted by the flattery of the famous actress and her flirtatious lover, and all the others, grousing in well-heeled, well-fed, well-dressed discontent.

“I ache all over, but the doctor won’t treat me.”

“You’re an old man!”

“Old men want to live!”

The dialogue, adapted here by Stephen Karam, still delights. Scenes between the adoring Nina and aloof, alluring Boris crackle.

“Let’s talk about my beautifully brilliant life. I must write. I must write. I must write.”

But this Michael Mayer (“Flicka,” “A Home at the End of the World”) film never escapes the Cinematic Chekhov Trap. It’s a breezy, lightly charming chore to sit through, and sit through it we must because it’s Chekhov and it’s good for us.

Actors love his plays for the characters, the dialogue and the chance to work with a LOT of their friends. College theater programs, which can afford to do shows with huge (unpaid) casts, are devoted to Chekhov and keep him as a cornerstone of an actor’s education for the same reason.

On the screen, a lot of that sense of “life” is lost. The films — endless remakes of “The Seagull,” “Three Sisters,” “The Cherry Orchard” and “Uncle Vanya” — take on that “important work” seriousness that hijacks one’s attention. We watch and we mull over what is said, the meaning and metaphors, the human profundities. But all too often, the movie never breaks free of “the play.”

“Seagull,” as radiantly self-absorbed as Bening can be, as self-serious as Howle and Stoll come off, as winsome as Ronan remains and as funny and cranky as Moss’s mastery of Masha might be, never quite adds up to an adaptation that’s anything more than “Well, we saw them do Chekhov.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some mature thematic elements, a scene of violence, drug use, and partial

Cast: Annette Bening, Saoirse Ronan, Billy Howle, Corey Stoll, Brian Dennehy, Elisabeth Moss

Credits:Directed by Michael Mayer, script by Stephen Karam, based on the Anton Chekhov play. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time:

Swinging London? Close enough, as the music, the fashions and the cars (an Aston Martin DB5!) migrated to the environs of a hapless lad (Brenock O’Connor of “Game of Thrones”) who falls for the right girl and the wrong football at about the same time.

“The Bromley Boys” just opened in the UK. Not sure when we’ll catch it in North America.

History seems to be the last refuge of films that challenge children with the ugly realities of life. Cinema for kids has long erred on the side of rubbing the sharp edges off to protect delicate youth and its sensibilities.

In other words, try to remake “Old Yeller” or “The Yearling” today, you’d get hashtagged out of polite, nurturing society.

But good children’s films have an easy acceptance of the bittersweet, an acknowledgement that even a story’s sad side teaches empathy, that there are times when it’s OK to cry at what’s happening on the screen.

“Zoo” is a warm, sentimental Irish period piece about some kids, an elephant and World War II. Its lessons include not judging people by appearances, that growing up requires passing tests of character and sometimes following your own morality and not what authority demands is how you do the right thing.

And in a time of war, death is never far removed from your life.

Tom (Art Parkinson) is a young Belfast teen who loves nothing more than helping Dad (Damian O’Hare), a vet at Bellevue Zoological Gardens. That’s how he’s the first kid in town to see the zoo’s newly-arrived baby elephant, despite the protestations of cranky security guard Charlie (Toby Jones).

But it’s 1941, Britain is hard-pressed, fighting the Germans and Italians pretty much on its own. Dad is called up.

“I’ll be coming home in no time” isn’t reassuring. And the new “apprentice vet” (Stephen Hagan) doesn’t like having the kid around.

Tom is bullied at school, but he hasn’t given up on the bully’s apprentice, Pete (Ian O’Reilly). And Tom is touched when his poorest classmate Jane (Emily Flain) sticks up for him. She’s ashamed of her drunken father and embarrassed by her clothes, but the least the lad can do is take her to her first-ever picture show.

It’s April of 1941, the darkest stretch of the war, and shipping and armaments industry Belfast is on the Germans’ target list. Air raids like the ones that have been pounding London for months would be devastating. Kids are trained in how to use gas masks, and in a real jaw-dropping moment, we see them herded into a smoke-filled van for “practice.”

But of all things, the authorities are worried about what might happen if “dangerous” zoo animals were to get out after a bombing.

The order goes out. “Shoot anything dangerous in the zoo.” Tom is inconsolable and powerless to stop it. But maybe, with a little help from some new friends, the elephant can be snatched and brought to safety.

The caper itself is a thinly-developed affair. “Zoo” is more about Tom’s “team.” He needs bully Pete, because he’s “strong.” Turns out, Pete is a bundle of fears and phobias, but Tom can make him brave. If not Tom, then Mickey (James Stockdale), Pete’s put-upon brother (he’s a dwarf) can buck them up.

Jane has inner resources the boys can only imagine.

And then there’s the neighborhood lady all the kids think is a witch, what with her dark shawl, testy demeanor and all the weird noises emanating from her house. Old Lady Austin, given a grumpy, mournful touch by Penelope Wilton of “Downton Abbey,” could be their secret weapon. Those noises in her house? They come from ferrets and parrots, bunnies and hedgehogs, snakes and who knows what all.

Mrs. Austin loves animals beyond measure, beyond reason, beyond the capacity of her packed, shuttered house and courtyard. One more couldn’t hurt, right? Two tons of fun and all that.

For all the kids and critters in this Colin McIvor (“Cup Cake”) film, there’s a gravitas and pallor to the proceedings. Cute moments don’t lighten the burden of confronting bullies and unreasonable, unbending authority, or the “Keep Calm and Carry On” stoicism of everyone’s awareness that “There’s a War On.”

Whatever happens with the caper, we know that tragedy is all around them and that it’s sure to intrude on this little blood pact the kids (and Mrs. Austin) make to save the elephant. When it comes, remember, there’s no dishonor in tears and remember to bring enough tissues for everybody.

The story here is “true,” in the broadest sense, which is why the film opens with that wriggle-room “Inspired by” real events credit. The Belfast air raids of 1941 were among the deadliest of the war, on the Allied side. Yes, animals were killed to “protect” the populace from their escaping the zoo, and yes, there was an “Elephant Angel” who sought to protect a pachyderm. 

The true story required some embellishment to make it into a kids’ film, and child-film length means that many relationships introduced get shortchanged.

But “Zoo” is a sweet and occasionally sad tale, told with sensitivity and performed with great charm by all concerned.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some war action and language

Cast: Art Parkinson, Emily Flain, Penelope Wilton, Toby Jones and Ian O’Reilly

Credits: Written and directed by Colin McIvor. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:37

“Solo: A Star Wars Story” is not quite tumbling behind “Deadpool 2” on its second weekend, “Deadpool’s” third. But it’ll certain fall behind it NEXT weekend, based on the absolute plunge it’s experiencing this weekend AFTER Memorial Day.

Based on Friday’s numbers, Deadline.com is figuring $28 million is all the patchwork “Solo” will manage on its second weekend. This, after an underwhelming opening. That’s a 77% drop, weekend to weekend.

In graphic box office terms, that’s what we call a TPPP — a “Tyler Perry Picture Plummet.”

“Pool” is losing theaters and dropping off a not-quite-robust 50% or so per weekend, but “Solo” will struggle to clear $200, at this juncture.

Maybe it’s just a mediocre movie — damaged goods — and word of mouth is chasing folks off. Maybe Disney has simply oversaturated the market with “Star Wars.”

That’s certainly part of the reason “Deadpool 2” isn’t dazzling the accountants at Fox. Three comic book movies in theaters basically at the same time, one of them R-rated, is just creating comic book fatigue.

Or maybe the Mouse will take the lesson that the Luke-Leia-Han “Star Wars” storyline is finished and that letting J.J. Abrams & Co. kill it off is as it should be. No “Boba Fett” picture, no more “Solo,” nothing else with the original crew. Sorry, Darth Maul. Might be the wrong lesson, but I could see that one taking root. “Rogue One” wasn’t a big box office performer, in “Star Wars” terms, either. Even though it was the best SW movie since “Empire.” 

Shailene Woodley can open a movie. That’s the lesson of “Adrift.” No, it’s not sailboat folks like myself driving “Adrift” to a healthy $12 million opening weekend. Her years cashing “Divergent” checks made her bankable, I guess (terrible movies, based on crappy YA novels) as did TV’s “Big Little Lies.” A conventional “lost at sea” narrative, with a love story buttressing it (Sam Claflin) it, Woodley took a producing credit on “Adrift” and it’s gotten decent reviews (mine is fairly representative of the mainstream) and might have done even better had STX put a little effort in promoting it — like PREVIEWING IT for critics.

Blumhouse’s horror outing “Upgrade” isn’t finding an audience. At all. Lots of screens, only $4 million on its opening weekend. Bomb.

“Action Point” isn’t funny, Johnny Knoxville can’t hair-dye his way into another 10 years of “Jackass” stunts and the picture, largely filmed in South Africa, includes animal mishandling pranks to the point where it’s another of those pictures where you wonder if the “American Humane” credit at the end is BS.

And it’s bombing. Not even $2 million.

I was going to use the phrase “an authentic American Saint” in describing TV host, child welfare advocate and sensitive ordained minister and TV host Fred Rogers.

But in the new documentary about him, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” one of his long-adult sons talks about growing up, having dinner every evening with “The Second Christ as my Dad,” and rendered that point moot. Even his kids knew this was a Biblically righteous dude raising them, in between daily TV shows aimed at giving America’s children value and “values.”

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is far from the first Fred Rogers documentary, merely the latest movie to use archival programs, footage from other films and chats with those who knew him to lionize America’s foremost TV advocate for children. But Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) carves in stone the case for Rogers’ as an authentic American TV saint.

And his film, and give the Oscar to somebody else, I DARE YOU, takes on the topicality of the moment, placing Rogers within the zeitgeist of America, 15 years after his death. It’s a loving portrait that is in awe of what genuine kindness looks like, a movie shockingly out of touch with our times, and yet a tonic for them.

Using interviews with those who knew and worked with him — guests like cellist Yo Yo Ma, producers, actors, the show’s salty-voiced floor manager, a TV critic and family — Neville conjures up a flattering, occasionally biting picture of the soft-voiced, comforting figure of “America’s Dad,” a TV host who brought to kids and adults “a different way of being a man” in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and ’90s.

Neville’s film doesn’t find many dark sides to Rogers’ open-hearted TV persona. He hired a gay black actor and singer (François Scarborough Clemmons) to play a principal role on the show, and had im share a wading pool foot-bath, almost Biblical in its foot-washing implications in the divided America of the late 1960s. He might have been behind the cutting edge curve on acceptance of the difference of “gay,” but he was way ahead of America at large in such acceptance.

Rogers’ eagerness to separate “make believe” from the real world is documented, time and again, as his simple, under-produced puppet show dealt with divorce, racism, the Vietnam War and “assassinations” in ways the youngest kids of the ’60s, 70s and onward could understand.

Neville’s film deals with Rogers’ critics, from members of Congress to the Fox News nattering Nazis of negativism, mostly in clips, all of which are suitable for ridicule.

The filmmaker choses to emphasize what Rogers himself pointed to, “love” as the only virtue/issue/talking point worth considering. Kids who have it, thrive. Those who don’t, make your own inferences here, become a Trump or those who blindly/slavishly support him.

It’s worth remembering that Rogers wasn’t alone in holding the line against the antic, noisy, frenetic sugar-buzzed toy-selling nature of kids’ TV of his era. Bob Keeshan wasn’t an ordained minister with Rogers’ child psychology bonafides, but as “Captain Kangaroo” he reached an even larger audience with his quiet, contemplative animals-and-animation and-characters-driven TV show, which lasted on a commercial broadcast network almost as long as “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” hung around on Public TV.

But Morgan Neville has conjured up the ghost of a man who called for acceptance, tolerance, kindness and love — understanding — as a way of healing America and the world it was straining to find its place in. A TV host who swayed Congress in is appeal for taking children’s feelings, hurt and emotions seriously, who told all who would listen that “what is essential in life is invisible to the naked eye — love, “and the absence of it” — is worth listening to, 15 years after his death.

Rogers wasn’t talking just about TV and programs and market research and demographics, he was speaking philosophically and existentially, to children and adults about conflict and connection, about each person’s “value” as well as her or his “values.”

No wonder the Foxists hated him. And no wonder he makes the perfect rallying point in a movie about fundamental 2018 American values, where they’ve gone and how they might be reclaimed, in a documentary that questions (lightly) if he can be said to have had any impact at all in a country that named a godless, feckless, lying bully as its leader a dozen years after his death.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements and language

Cast: Fred Rogers, David Bianculli, Margy Whitmer, Joe Negri, Joanne Rogers, Susan Stamberg

Credits:Directed by Morgan Neville, script by . A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:41

The great ones suffer for their art — Keaton and Lewis, The Stooges and Wanda Sykes.

And nobody suffers more than Johnny Knoxville, still doing enough of his own “Jackass” stunts, at 47, to make you question his durability, his sanity and his insurance rates in “Action Point,” a pratfall farce in the “Bad Grandpa” tradition.

There are so few laughs in this thing that it’d have been a shame had somebody gotten hurt making us laugh at their pain. Whatever promise was in the premise, an old man (Knoxville, real name Philip John Clapp) telling his grandkid about the amusement park he used to run before safety regulations and “The Nanny State” took over, there’s nothing verbal and precious little physical that Knoxville & Co. could find funny in it.

Pee Paw regales his granddaughter, “Princess Bride” fashion, as she’s confined at home, thanks to a busted ankle. He talks of an earlier carefree age, the ’70s, when rides were unsafe, hazardous activities weren’t legally actionable, because “Back then, there was a little thing called ‘personal responsibility.‘”

Pee Paw remembers his rural California (this was largely shot in South Africa) park, Action Point, crushed by competition with corporate, lawyer-backed “7 Parks” (A Six Flags joke?), but glorious in the unsafe rides, less safe “petting zoo” and crazy “stunts” he and his gang of reprobates pulled to get attention and lure patrons.

He had a neighborhood bear that would only hassle him when he was having a Schlitz, a park that served beer, violence, accidents (go-karts, zip lines that snapped, water slides that collapsed) and good times until The Man shut him down.

Sight gags about duct-taped repairs aren’t improved with punch lines, canine copulation is always more crass than funny and the circus of grotesques Knoxville always surrounds himself with are somehow not as amusing when they’re a multi-national cast of mostly unwashed unknowns.

The animal stunts — ostrich rides (by unruly adults), porcupine and gator baiting, yanking a raccoon by its tail — had me sitting all the way through the credits to see if the joke of an “oversight” organization, listed as just “American Humane” here, actually signed off on this.

They did. Even though you can see with your own eyes just what was pulled by this offshore production. I can say with some certainty that some animals “WERE harmed,” or at least badly misused (physically) in the making of “Action Point.” And not just Johnny Knoxville.

Good on you, Paramount. You found a loophole to escape even the most lax oversight organization in animal welfare. Shoot offshore.

Yeah, the drunken bear was funny. The flashback granddad remembering how much trouble he had with his granddaughter’s mom (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) back in the day, produces one laugh.

“Relax Dad, it’s a TAMPON.”

“Don’t you swear at ME, young lady!”

Knoxville’s dye job just makes him look more and more like a Southern fried Frankenstein — no, NOT the mad scientist — as he closes in on 50.

But again, props for the guy for continuing to do so many of his own stunts. Fear stopped figuring into it, many “Jackasses” ago. Unfortunately, so did funny.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content, language, drug use, teen drinking, and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Johnny Knoxville, Eleanor Worthington-Cox, Chris Pontius, Don Bakkedahl, Brigette Lundy-Payne

Credits:Directed by Tim Kirkby script by Dave Krinsky, John Altschuler. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:25

Totally down with Jennifer Garner taking back her “Alias/Elektra” action chops, though the set-up for this Vengeance is MOM thriller is an eye roller.

Woman loses her family to drive-by punks, takes five years to “train,” and comes back to splatter their brains all over creation.

“Death Wish” is more interesting if it’s revenge crimes of an incompetent, heat-of-passion nature. “Three Days of the Condor” is a LOT more involving when it’s a guy out of his depth dealing with assassins, not somebody with that Liam Neeson set of “particular skills.” Not that I didn’t like “Taken,” but we’re hurling all these “Ex-Special Forces” dudes and women at villains, and acting “shocked” when they slaughter the to last scumbag.

A fish out of water, “American Animals” who don’t know how or want to “hurt anyone,” that’s more dramatically fascinating to me.

“Peppermint” opens in that Labor Day “dead zone” of releasing, Sept. 7.

Not the first Fred Rogers documentary, but as it is from the director of “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” it’s the first one with Oscar buzz.

An American TV saint gets his documentary due. Really looking forward to this one.

“Hereditary” is a horror film that features ghosts, a Satanic cult, grisly deaths, flies, possession and seances, children imperiled, nightmare sequences, a doubting adult or two and a dog who seems to be the only one to know pretty much what’s going down.

Nothing new to see here, right?

And the fact that first-time feature director and writer Ari Aster treats all this as if he’s just discovered it, and that these cliches merit a stately two hours and seven minutes of screen time, should be turn-offs. I mean, come on.

But Aster landed superb actors Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd, Alex Wolff and especially Toni Collette. Great actors make you believe because they believe. It gets under your skin by messing around with those conventions and cliches.

And damned if “Hereditary,” macabre, meditative and meandering as it is, doesn’t well up in your throat like a breathless scream that can’t get out.

Collette plays Annie, a visual artist in the alien, underpopulated wilderness and wealth of Park City, Utah, the home of the Sundance Film Festival. She, husband Steve (Byrne) and their two kids live in a mountainside chalet that looks like a designer dollhouse.

And that’s sort of what her art looks like. It’s a dollhouse filled with dollhouses, actually meticulously crafted diaoramas ranging in subject from the banal to the bizarre.

As Annie bases these on her world and events in her life, her latest is “Hospice,” part of a show she’s pulling together for a prestigious art dealer. “Hospice?” That’s where her hated mother was until she died. Yeah, the funeral will make a cool “subject,” too for “Small World Artworks.”

“Should I be sadder?” she wonders, and she’s not alone in that family. She should be worried. She’s got a teen son (Wolff) who tolerates her via a serious dedication to marijuana. Her daughter Charlie? That girl ain’t right.

Whatever’s going on or about to in that house, Charlie( Milly Shapiro) is the focus of our suspicions. “On the spectrum,” as we say — she’s 13, disheveled, miserable and morbid, playing with grim toys of her own design, obsessed with death and plainly indulged by a school when she should be in a class all her own.

She obsessively devours chocolate bars (without nuts), clucks her tongue, scribbles weird graffiti on her walls, seems far away even when she’s sitting right next to you and would give anybody not used to her appearance, her slow-wittedness and manner the creeps.

It’s a portrayal so unsettling that you worry for the young actress creating it, fret over how her young life might be scarred by association with a character so homely, socially crippled and mentally off.

Charlie doesn’t so much drive the action as incite it.

And Aster’s film isn’t so much a cerebral (This IS an A24 release) exercise in genre filmmaking as a picture that gets in your head through the performances. The grief support group lady (Ann Dowd) Annie meets who talks her into a seance is a laughably abrupt introduction and re-direction of the film.

But Collette plays that seance with the overwhelming shock that most of us would register upon seeing “proof” of the supernatural.

Peter’s reaction to tragedy is mute shock and denial in a searing scene that is the movie’s first-act jaw-dropper. Byrne’s Steve is stoic, keeping it all together, skeptical and haunted, in his own way, by what he sees in his wife and what he knows about her past.

Collette’s Annie? She comes completely, believably apart, dissolving in paroxysms of grief.

Ordinary horror films give us hope, but Aster’s vision doesn’t, an apt metaphor for the End Times the world and America seem to be heedlessly sprinting toward.

“Hereditary” isn’t original enough to merit “great film” praise. But by bending and extending the tropes of the genre and hiring top drawer talent to buy in, Aster makes us buy in, too, and gives us a pretty disturbing picture to chew on and mull over on the way home.

MPAA Rating: R for horror violence, disturbing images, language, drug use and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd

Credits: Written and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:07