Movie Nation

The adorably cringe-worthy “Eighth Grade” will make you wonder, “Was I EVER that awkward, shy, naive, delusional or unintentionally cruel?”

A better question as you’re pondering the closing credits might be, “How do ANY of us get that that awkward first year of our teens and last year of childhood?”

The comic and actor turned writer and director Bo Burnham has conjured up a hopeful girl filled with dread, a pained young teen determined, with help from Google, Youtube and the life lessons she’s figured out all by herself, to have a better time of it in high school now that she’s in the last week of middle school.

Kayla, given a wincing, winsome turn by young Elsie Fisher, is an obnoxious phone-addicted, media and web-savvy child who wonders, as she attempts to face-to-face chat with classmates staring down at their screens, why she has no friends.

She’s delusional enough to post life-lesson Youtube videos “for kids just like me.” Sure, the version of herself she presents in these two minute refreshingly under-rehearsed sermons is some sort of idealized, together worldwise eighth grader. Makeup and a tight camera shot hide her pimples and slow-to-fade baby fat plumpness.

And her life lessons, about “being yourself” and “Getting out there” are more just encouragements for her to start doing what she tells others to do. Because Kayla is the girl nobody remembers.

She hangs her head in shame at being named “Quietest” in the “Superlative” student honors, stares down into the time capsule she and every kid had to make when they entered middle school just a couple of years before, and recognizes her failure.

But if you’re not just a little inspired by her determination to hit restart and delighted by the blind alleys she wanders into along the way, you must have forgotten eighth grade — or be living through that hellish year right this moment.

Burnham works from tried and true coming of age comedy tropes — the pool party where body shaming is a real risk, the scrawny rebel classmate (Luke Prael) who has his own thumping theme music every time he pops into Kayla’s palpitating field of vision, mean girls, sexual curiosity and blundering misinformation.

We worry for Kayla as if she was our own. Some of us remember “Thirteen” — the movie, and the troubled, make or break by making big life mistakes year we all have to survive. 

She saves all her anger for her single dad, given a fragile, fearful flavor by Josh Hamilton, still worried sick about her every pitfall and bad habit (the nonstop iPhone ogling) Kayla’s developed, playing a father whose “dad humor” long ago lost its audience of one.

Another big question the movie asks is “Will Kayla finally give dear-old-Dad a break?”

But Burnham, with rare exceptions, treats these harrowing life hurdles Kayla is rushing through with juvenile crudity that defaults to benign. The hunky rebel’s into “dirty pictures” and sexual practices he’s probably only read about online? He’s out of luck with a shy girl who finds the taste of “practice” bananas revolting.

A “shadow a high schooler day” to help kids brace for the introduction of high school is a grand opportunity for “You’re a little girl” humiliation. But her mentor (Emily Robinson) is bubbly, outgoing, just-popular enough and kind enough to take this too-young wallflower under her wing.

There are scenes that will make your jaw drop, and moments that make your heart stop. The girl-vlogging her every inane thought onto the Internet gimmick was played out before “Eighth Grade” and the far less edgy “Hope Springs Eternal” (opening next month  used it.

But from the dorky teachers trying to act hip to the kids acting too cool and grownup for their own good, “Eighth Grade” feels lived in and real.

And the realest of them all is Miss Fisher, un self-consciously self-conscious, turning Kayla into a poster child for lonesome misery, but a bright kid who learns from every single stumble, and synthesizes those lessons into homilies for her (non-existent) online audience and for herself.

“You can’t be brave if you aren’t afraid.”

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual material

Cast: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson, Missy Yager

Credits: Written and directed by Bo Burnham. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

Mike Leigh’s take on the 19th century British political revolt that was crushed by armed force — a pro-democracy demonstration broken up with a massacre — comes our way Nov. 9.

It was “The Peterloo Massacre,” which wikipedia files under “battle” for some ridiculous reason. It happened in Manchester in 1819, when the 99 percent of their day gathered to demand representative democracy in a Britain still under the thumb of capricious, inbred royals and the aristocrats of the House of Lords.

Rory Kinnear plays the Patrick Henry of northern England, Henry Hunt, with Maxine Peake, Tim McInerny, Alistair Mackenzie and a few other notable names playing the luminaries of the day.

Her big screen romance fizzled, any minute now the social media darling Bella Thorne will age out teen films — comedies, romances and horror pics.

“I Still See You” is after “the event,” after the apocalypse that leaves the living haunted with after-images of the dead. And the dead…are irked.

Cool effects in this Scott Speer film, which doesn’t appear to have a US release date but should see limited release/VOD if nothing else, this fall.

It’s “Die Hard” in a famed British soccer stadium, with Dave Bautista killing his way through Russians (the world agrees, the best villains, well MOST of the world) to get to Pierce Brosnan.

Playing a Russian.

Saban Films has “Final Score,” no firm release date yet. With “Guardians of the Galaxy” drifting into limbo thanks to James Gunn’s repellent old tweets, Dave wants to work.

“Never Goin’ Back” is a scruffy, raunchy and random farce about two broke girls who blow the rent money on a beach vacation “Because you deserve it, WE deserve it.”

And in America, we all get what we deserve, right?

Jessie (Camilla Morrone of “Death Wish”) is about to turn 17. Angela (Maia Mitchell of “The Fosters” and “Hot Summer Nights”) is just a few months older. They’ve quit their Texas high school to share a rental house with Jessie’s stoner brother (Joel Allen) and his fast food cook friend Brandon (Kyle Mooney of “SNL”), share waitressing duties at a nearby diner and share a bed — because that’s how broke they are.

If you’re aiming for “cult film,” creating space for the occasional early morning tickle-panties fight is a must. “Exploitation” and “cult” go hand in um, hand.

They’re too young to be at a dead end, but stuck in minimum wage jobs on Fort Worth, only earning enough for rent, food, weed, bus fare and laundromat change — they can see the dead end from there.

When Galveston is your “dream” vacation, it might be time to wake up.

“Never Goin’ Back” is about what gets in the way of that trip. Because “stoner” is a bit generous in describing brother Dustin. He’s an utter idiot, sharing his delusions of drug dealing wealth with loser-pals Tony (Kendal Smith) and Ryan (Matthew Holcomb), creating every obstacle the girls face before they can hit the sand.

Hard feelings among the doofus dudes ensue, with Tony revenge-robbing the house at dawn, the two under-dressed teen not-yet-strumpets cussing, flipping-off and waking the neighborhood as he does.

That attracts the cops, the cops sniff around, and that puts the robbery victims in jail for drug possession. Angela and Jessie’s jobs are on the line, the rent money they blew on the trip they’re about to take is still due, and Dustin the moron  threw all his money at a busted dope deal.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, watching an aged hooker with envy, for instance.

“If you’re goin’ to go from man to man, might as well get paid for it.”

Robbery is contemplated, among other options.

“How illegal is blackmail?”

“Kinda medium…I think.”

You have to embrace the randomness to get anything out of “Never Goin’ Back.” It’s not “Spring Break” — no sex, no edge. It’s a bit “Dazed and Confused” meets “Three’s Company” and its spawn — “Two Broke Girls.” But the two stars are a stitch, and the dopes surrounding them can be laugh-out-loud funny.

Dustin’s one of those mini-mall Original Gangstas, absorbing stereotypical African American drug dealer speech because all the business schools tell you to master the vernacular of the profession you aspire to.

“Daddy GOT this!”

He’s nonplussed that his “friend” would rob him, he tells the cops. “We were hittin’ it off, I thought.”

“Are you homosexual, son?”

“No. Nooo. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…Love is love.” Read that “Seinfeld” line aloud like Napoleon Dynamite stoned and you get the vibe of the picture.

Over a two day span, the girls scramble to get their jobs back, struggle to launder their waitress uniforms to get those jobs back, accidentally imbibe the wrong brownies at the house of the dude who lets them use his washer, all while Jessie fails to evacuate her shy colon.

Somehow, they’re still irresistible. Somehow, they resist the crude adolescent-flavored advances of Brandon, the only gainfully-employed person they know, in his mid-30s, and looking it.

Writer-director Augustine Frizzell gives the duo their best laughs in tirades, curse-offs with their more competent diner colleagues, rants about how stupid Dustin is to his stupid face, and mumbled scheming in one memorable stoned-out-of-their-gourds scene.

She needed more funny stuff, though Mitchell and Morrone give the picture an unplanned, improvised feel and funny homoerotic buzz.

They make “Never Goin’ Back” a comedy about the journey, not the destination. Because who knows if these two nitwits will ever make it into their bikinis?

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content and language throughout, drug use and brief nudity – all involving teens.

Cast:  Maia Mitchell, Camila Morrone, Joel Allen, Kendal Smith and Kyle Mooney

Credits: Written and directed by Augustine Frizzell. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:25

A student composer finds herself passed-over for a scholarship for playing it too safe with her music, abandoned by her boyfriend for being dull and naive and about to lose her New York apartment thanks to a rent hike.

She figures she can solve every single one of those problems just by becoming a sex worker. Who’s prim and demure and broke and uninspired now?

That pitch for “Her Composition” might point in a couple of promising commercial directions. But as it’s a “film festival” movie, arty and self-conscious, caught up in the visual “language of the cinema” and the artist’s need to flirt with madness and personal disaster to break through, it was probably never destined for a multiplex near you.

(It goes into limited theatrical release and onto VOD/DVD soon.)

It’s a striking movie built around an awakening performance by Joslyn Jensen (star of film festival favorite “Without”), playing a conservatory post-graduate hurling herself off a personal and creative cliff, something suggested by her dismissive mentor (Kevin Breznahan), taking in the sights, sounds, minutia and textures of the Big City as she reinvents herself and her music. 

Malorie is a classic small-towner in the big city, delicate but flinty, loathe to accept defeat and “go home” when the Big Scholarship for Women is awarded to a male classmate.

Despondent at this news, comforted right up to the moment he says “I’ve been hanging out with someone else” by her cowardly beau, Malorie takes a walk on the wild side to help her pal Gila and their favorite non-profit, Purple Justice. They’re a rapist-shaming NGO in contact with a sex worker who’s offered to share her client list with them.’

The exotic and mysterious “Kim” (Okwui Okpokwasili) has taken careful notes and photographs and “rated” her various clients. It’s a list that promises to make noise in the media, we’re told. And Malorie, noting that Kim is also an artist (she denies it), is intrigued.

With Gila’s help, Malorie takes over Kim’s list — as an experiment, as an experience, as a money-making side hustle. She’s got two deadlines hanging over her — her Phd composition for “The Schmeerstein Ensemble,” a modern music quintet, and the end of any government investigation of “the list,” the paying customers she’s helped set up for arrest.

Complicating this? She’s timid and boring in bed.

But as she lies back and focuses on wallpaper patterns, a street busker outside the hotel window (one client likes it standing up against windows), of the sounds her sometimes tender, generally brusque, always selfish with perhaps even a rapist or two in their ranks lovers, Malorie loses herself in what could be her masterpiece.

Writer-director Stephan Littger doesn’t dwell on the morality of what’s going on, the “victimless” crime shrieked into scarlet-letter-shaming by a shrill organization that both supports sex workers and condemns, without irony, their clients.

Littger exults in the music of the city, from clacking subways to street cellists and bongo drummers, the gritty patter of life in New York. He gets lost in extreme closeups of ordinary objects allegedly “meaningful” thanks to their juxtaposition within the editing — a dead bird on the street, dead fly on the table, the card-reader on the subway, sneakers hanging over a telephone cable looking like musical notes as they do.

That is Malorie’s new experience of the city — at the atomic level. As she gathers input, she covers her newly-repainted walls with a Mind Map, charting ideas and inspirations to make them flow into creative output. It’s a vast, messy collage of torn sheets of music, drawings, busted door privacy chains, that dead fly, a torn plastic plate we’ve watched Malorie drag her nails across while eating take-out curry.

Screeeeek, screeeek.

Jensen makes Malorie seem on the spectrum in early scenes, meek but given to flashes of anger, slow to follow conversations, a tad too innocent to be in New York.

Her journey through the sex trade begins in fear, transitions to transactions and teeters on the cusp of guilt and guilty pleasure. With a return to fear reminding us why this “list” might be righteous.

Decoding the visuals here could be a fun exercise for some, but most of us will latch onto Jensen’s attention-consuming turn at the center of it all, a scattered, perhaps “talented” creative person whose eyes open to a new world of possibilities when she burns down that old life and throws herself into risks.

Malorie is a fascinating, prudish riff on amorality and creativity and Jensen makes her worth following all the way through to her inevitably climactic final “Composition.”

But for parents shipping their kids off to art, music, acting or dance conservatories, it deserves better intertitles than the pretentious quotes from Georgia O’Keef and Joan of Arc. A simple “Don’t try this away from home” would suffice.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, explicit sex

Cast: Joslyn Jensen, Margot Bingham, Kevin Breznahan, Christian Campbell, Okwui Okpokwasili, John Rothman

Credits: Written and directed by Stephan Littger. An Indie Rights/Picture Train release.

Running time: 1:33

Latchkey West Coast kids, goofing off, getting into trouble in the LA of the “Mid90s.” That’s what Jonah Hill chose to write about for his writing-directing debut.

The young kid finding his tribe, figuring out falling down and getting back up again is young Sunny Suljic. Oscar nominee Lucas Hedges plays his skateboarding older brother.

This coming of age drama hits theaters Oct. 19, and being from A24, well, the expectations bar is high.

Thrillers about “Death’s Grand Design” might be my favorite kind of horror film. It’s a time-tested subgenre, but “Final Destination” is one of the better examples of it of recent vintage.

“The Warning” folds that idea into a puzzle picture, “Memento” featuring “A Beautiful Mind” where the obsessed crank is trying to unravel the connections among decades of death at one fateful Spanish address in Basque country.

Jon (Raúl Arévalo) pops his pills before picking up his buddy David (Sergio Mur). David is late (He is Spanish, after all.) and he’s excited. He’s about to ask Andrea (Belén Cuesta) to fly to Paris with him so he can hit her with a surprise proposal.

Best friend Jon will be his best man, the guy he trusts with the rings. But first, let’s get some ice Andrea wanted. And some champagne. At a convenience store.

The drive-by shooting that follows puts David in a coma, Andrea in a tailspin and Jon off his meds and into his obsession. Thirty-two years before, there was an infamous ETA (Basque separatist) assassination attempt at that very filling station. There were five people present. He jots down their ages.

They match. “What’s the pattern?” he asks (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Ten years later, in the film’s present day, an about-to-turn ten boy (Hugo Arbues) is bullied into stealing a porn magazine by a gang of middle school toughs. The manager watches him do it, stops him and steers him away from the store.

As Nico endures more abuse at school and his frantic single mom (Aura Garrido) grows more furious and frantic with school officials about it, the boy gets a cryptic note — don’t show up at that store on your birthday, April 12.

We and his mother are chilled to the marrow. Nico? He wets his pants.

Director Daniel Calparsoro, working from a script adaptation of a novel by Paul Pen and Chris Sparling, deftly weaves in Nico’s growing dread — the beatings don’t stop just because mom’s a tattletale — with Jon’s rising mania.

As Jon’s pal David lies in the hospital, he fills his apartment with notes and research — violence associated with that particular place on the map, incidents years and decades apart. Lucia, Nico’s mom, does her own research. This note, she wonders if the store manager has a clue.

“Maybe it’s not a threat,” he mumbles. “Maybe it’s a warning.”

Calpasoro expertly ratchets up the suspense in “The Warning (El Aviso),” showing two timelines whose protagonists grow more frantic by the minute. Jon must figure this out, must “warn” somebody about this. Nico? He’s hellbent on not going back in that damned store.

And mom, hellbent on making this a teachable moment about superstition and the supernatural (no such thing), is determined he’ll go back there to prove her point and take away his paranoia.

Very clever of the novelists and screenwriters (Paxti Amezcua and Jorge Guerricaechevarria) to find third act twists that ice the cake of the resolution we think we see coming.

The performances, by Arévalo, Garrido and young Arbues, draw us in, with Arévalo and Garrido dialing up the mania as the stakes become clearer and young Arbues subtly suggesting terror that gives way to resignation.

But it’s the puzzle of a story, the fight against fate, “death’s grand design,” that makes “The Warning” one of the best made-for-Netflix thrillers to date.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, gun violence, profanity

Cast: Raúl Arévalo, Aura Garrido, Hugo Arbues, Belén Cuesta

Credits:Directed by Daniel Calparsoro , script by Paxti Amezcua and Jorge Guerricaechevarria, based on a novel by Paul Pen and Chris Sparling

. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Writer-director Elijah Bynum makes his feature film debut with “Hot Summer Nights,” a melodramatic and ham-fisted mashup of beachside-summer-I-came-of-age romance and birth-of-a-weed-dealer drama.

But it stars The New DiCaprio, Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet, and “It Follows” “It” girl Maika Monroe, so it’s worth a look, just for Next Gen acting value.

It’s a Hyaninis, Massachusetts story parked in 1991, which our very young bystander–narrator (mistake #1) relates as a seminal season — when grieving, anti-social toothpick Daniel Middleton (Chalamet) shows up to spend his summer with an elderly aunt.

Who does this kid, who lost his dad not long before, make his first beach friend? That would be Hunter (Alex Roe of “The Fifth Wave”), the drop-out turned mechanic who is also the town weed dealer and a local legend. The kid passes muster in a pinch, and he’s in with the mysterious Hunter.

“I heard he burned down an ice cream shop just for putting sprinkles on his cone,” a kid repeating his myth says.

“I heard he killed a man,” a chorus of others echoes.

Daniel becomes Hunter’s sidekick, an asthmatic who abruptly announces he wants to get into the weed business, too. Being young and smart, he makes Hunter think big. Of course that eventually gets the interest of someone tougher and further up the food chain (Emory Cohen).

But the real obstacle to this bromance in the making is the girl — the icy, confident and foul-mouthed beauty every boy “within 50 miles” covets — McKayla (Monroe). She imposes on Daniel for a ride, the way arrogant beauties learn to do at an early age, and he’s smitten.

Problem — she’s Hunter’s estranged “baby sistuh.” And “Stay away from her” is all he’s got to say about that.

Bynum weaves in a second forbidden love interest , a “bad-good girl” (Maia Mitchell) for Hunter, two guys who have to keep their new romances secret from some menacing male.

Meanwhile, this ridiculous drug trade thing is racing through a story arc mere weeks in length, with the lads taking on more and more trade, rolling in cash and somehow avoiding the attentions of the local cop who just knows that Hunter kid is “headed for Walpole” where the state prison is.

Bynum makes great use of Chalamet’s unaffected, natural manner on screen. He plays around with the whole androgynous thing which the kid showcased in “Call Me By Your Name.” The moment Daniel sees Hunter for the first time, he hears “I Don’t Want to Lose Your Love Tonight” in his head.

That’s not the way this is going, but a little tease (this was filmed before “Call Me By Your Name,” but the song might’ve been added later) never hurt anybody. It’s interesting to watch Chalamet play Daniel’s increased confidence around McKayla, thanks to his daring drug-dealing on the side. Confident, sure, but he’s still incompetent at wooing her.

Monroe is hyped as the sultry bombshell this time out, many of her scenes open with a backlit fix-the-camera-with-a-sexy/sleepy-eyed-stare to make us see Daniel’s overwhelming attraction. She’s a bad girl who tempts the rich boys, and even if Daniel can win her heart, he can’t tell her he knows her brother, or tell Hunter.

Those two are the stand-out players and the reasons to see this sometimes ludicrous (Daniel buys a Corvette with his drug money, and NOBODY — including the never-really-seen Aunt — notices?) melodrama. The threat of violence is all that disturbs the happy montage of lads loading up on loot as they grow their business, and the love story is so over-familiar as to be a genre unto itself — beach romances, “Summer Lovin,'” as they called it in “Grease.”

And aside from those two leads, the rest of the cast is a catalog of acting affectations. Check out the cool but a bit-much way the cop played by Thomas Jane is introduced — pulling over Daniel, his face hidden in classic “star entrance” fashion, kicking the ground with the toe of his shoe, running his fingers down the side of Daniel’s pre-Corvette Toyota wagon. Busy busy.

Watch Cohen’s man-with-muscle play with his huge stack of waffles at the “meeting” he drags Daniel and Hunter to by force. Fussy.

Yeah, James Dean got famous for loading scenes with tics and mannerisms, but they’re such attention-grabbers they always play as excessive in the hands of lesser acting mortals.  “That’s an actor acting,” we say as we watch each rehearsed tic trotted out.

They’re not the reason “Hot Summer Nights” fails. Their affectations are just what you notice when the story is as contrived, melodramatic and unoriginal as this one.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content and language throughout, sexual references, and some strong violence

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Emory Cohen, Maika Monroe, Maia Mitchell, Alex Roe, Thomas Jane and William Fichtner

Credits: Written and directed by Elijah Bynum.  An A24 release.

Running time: 1:47

A hint of “The Trip to Bountiful” about this dramedy, with Blythe Danner the mother who is no longer all there, Hilary Swank and Michael Shannon as siblings deciding what to do “when that time comes” and Robert Forster as the husband Mom barely remembers.

We’ve all been there or are going to be there.

Taissa Farmiga and Josh Lucas fill out the cast of “What They Had,” which is slated for Oct. 12 release.