Movie Nation

  “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” presents the viewer with a dilemma.

Is Logan Lerman less convincing as yet another sensitive, smart high school romantic determined to be a writer, as that writer in his late 20s, in writerly glasses sitting at his vintage typewriter tapping out his “Voice of a Generation” masterpiece, or as that writer post-burnout, fake beard, riding the rails on the run from his past?

Tough call.

But this meandering, messy melodrama gives you plenty of time to consider your choices. It’s a classic example of why movies about writers and their inspiration can be a trap for promising filmmakers. For every “The End of the Tour,” there are a dozen examples too much like this — soapy, sudsy and sappy, pretentious twaddle ladled out between filler scenes of typing, typing typing at a darkened desk, a single lamp beside it, cigarette smoke curling over the keys.

Lerman, saddled with “Percy Jackson,” remembered for “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” or “Fury,” and hoping against hope that you’ll forget “Indignation,” is the title character in this absurdly cluttered film about the making and unmaking of a young writer.

Sidney is the unfiltered star columnist of his school newspaper, a put-it-all-out-there truth-teller in his English class essays, awing his classmates — some of them — and singled out by the one teacher (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who gets him.

Sidney gets fan mail from the pretty underclassman (Elle Fanning) who lives across the street, and grudging admiration from the bullying jock (Blake Jenner) who is desperate for him to realize that he’s more than he seems.

Future Sidney has a hit novel on his hands, a high-powered publisher (Nathan Lane), an impending divorce and fans who come to him at book-signings, reciting his own words back to him.  He’s troubled.

“Find yourself a muse,” the publisher implores. So he does.

And then there’s Sidney after the fall, a bearded hobo riding the rails with his hound Homer, bearded, wandering into libraries and bookstores, setting fire to books and fleeing before the cops  an catch him.

“The Searcher” (Kyle Chandler) is looking high and low for this Sidney.

High school Sidney is precocious, adult Sidney is by turns insipid and insufferable.

But he himself has suffered. There are clues to his makeup, the “autobiographical criticism” way we understand some writers — Hemingway, dressed in girl’s clothes by his mother WAY too far through childhood, B. Traven’s troubled labor activist history that led to “The Treasure of Sierra Madre.” “Vanishing,” via “The Searcher,” aims to resolve those.

His not-quite-right mother (Michelle Monaghan), almost silent disabled father, brooding jock “friend” (not really), super sensitive, forward yet shy Pacer-driving girlfriend (Fanning), other damaged women, a long-buried (literally) “Big Secret,” all must be explored.

You could never have convinced me that the writer/director of the Oscar winning short “Curfew,” who turned that into the horrifically funny suicide interrupted by babysitting duties feature “Before I Disappear” had a picture this windy, empty and bloated in his future.

“Vanishing” is ambitious, but in every trite, pat and melodramatic way you can think of.  There was promise here, which lured this top flight cast. Shawn Christensen used to be what we called “a writer/director to watch.”

But Lerman? It’s hard to think of a young actor who has had more promising roles thrust upon him, almost certainly as a second or third choice. He is an adequate actor of narrow range and limited screen spark, which partly explains why the franchise (“Percy Jackson and the Olympians”) and prestige pictures (“Indignation”) have never made it happen for him.

The dull headache that “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” induces can’t be laid wholly at his feet. A writer-director with an unshakable grasp of the cliches of “writers movies” — from vintage typewriter to freight car, deserves that hit. Lerman is just the charisma-starved black hole at the heart of this movie, which will disappear like its title character, with only a wince to remember it by.

MPAA Rating:R for language and some sexual references

Cast: Logan Lerman, Elle Fanning, Michelle Monaghan, Nathan Lane, Kyle Chandler

Credits:Directed by Shawn Christensen, script by Shawn Christensen, Jason Dolan. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:00

Plump, dorky teenager has a dream, an impossible dream  — to fit in, be popular, be a cheerleader.

Don’t help her. Don’t get in her way. It doesn’t matter.  Just “Don’t Talk to Irene.”

Geena Davis is in this, and Anatastasia Phillips as the mom, with Michelle McLeod in the title role.

There is one laugh-out-loud joke in this trailer. See if you can spot it.

Yes, the young ladies, whom you’ll recognize as stars of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” and “Split” and “The Witch,” are the focus of “Thoroughbreds,” rich and murderously bored pretty young things.

Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy are the actresses.

But the only member of the cast of this film who died tragically in real life, for whom this is the LAST movie we’ll ever see him in, is the sweet-spirited Anton Yelchin.

March 9.

Sometimes one can pinpoint that moment in a movie when you, as a viewer, checked out. “Nope, lost me.”

“Mute,” the new Netflix film from director Duncan Jones (“Moon,” “Source Code,” “Warcraft: The Beginning”) is a random riot of such moments, two hours and six minutes of sci-fi eye candy that makes “Valerian” seem serious, streamlined and coherent.

It’s about this Amish bartender (Alexander Skarsgard) — so take a beat, have a head-slapping laugh at that idea — in FutureGermany who loses his cocktail waitress/hooker girlfriend and must track her down despite being, well, hell — AMISH.

The fact that he’s been mute thanks to a gruesome swimming accident in his childhood isn’t his biggest handicap. He can’t drive, although he steals a car, never has had a phone but uses one to track her down and gets really violent when anybody insults that girlfriend (Seyneb Saleh). Again, he’s AMISH. So no, trying to cope with voice activated phones, computers and library search engines of this future isn’t his only problem. 

Wandering around this neon, dew-soaked “Blade Runner” world where screens are everywhere, cameras are everywhere there are screens, hovergadgets deliver everything except for the beatings our AMISH hero metes out to bad guys is the movie’s quest.

Then there are these two amoral, off-the-books AWOL Army surgeons (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux, no doubt sharing Jennifer Aniston stories between takes) wandering the back alleys, performing medical miracles for the mob or anybody else who can afford their fees, playing The Ugly Americans to German barristas, bartenders, mall security guards and the like.  They might as well be in another movie. A worse one.

The nightclubs have the usual lurid lighting and robotic pole dancers we’ve come to expect from The Future. Stumbling into Dominic Monaghan (“Lord of the Rings”) dolled up in geisha drag, playing a perv who has hired two such robots to have sex for his entertainment is another “Well, so much for THIS movie” moment.

Skarsgaard is fascinating, but maybe the most anti-Amish AMISH hero in the history of the Amish. He’s basically playing a private eye working a case without using his voice, and maybe one arm tied behind his back.

I mean, I love a flying “Fifth Element” taxi as much as the next nerd, but Jones — whose films have been spiraling down the “less and less interesting” drain since his breakout in “Moon” — shoves a showy, pointless Sam Rockwell cameo (A cloned soldier of the future?), some of the old futuristic ultra-violence and some old-fashioned “Being bad means being a HAM” Paul Ruddery into the blender.

If this is what the excruciating finished film looks like, what manner of dreck must Mr. Bowie’s son have left on the cutting room floor?

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, sexuality, substance abuse, profanity

Cast: Alexander Skarsgard, Seyneb Saleh, Paul Rudd, Noel Clarke, Sam Rockwell, Justin Theroux

Credits:Directed by Duncan Jones, script by Duncan Jones and Michael Robert Johnson. A Liberty Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

There’s the seed of a promising premise at the heart of “The Lullaby,” a modern tale of Gothic horror from South Africa. It’s just a seed, though. An incoherent and obscure script, unrestrained hysteria in the performances and inept “gotcha” execution let that seed rot in the ground.

A prologue shows us Boers — white South Africans — stuffed into history’s first concentration camps during the Boer War at the start of the 20th century. Women wail, as they’ve been raped by their British captors. A helpful preacher intervenes. He wrings their rape babies necks and tosses them off a cliff, “Eden Rock.” Needless to say, this doesn’t help the mothers’ states of mind.

In Eden Rock in the present day, Chloe (Reine Swart) is a troubled 20ish young woman with Ricci eyes and Cara DeLevingne eyebrows whom we see give birth. Her mother Ruby (Thandi Perun) brings Chloe and little baby Liam home from the hospital, and asks one question.

“Who’s the dad?”

Chloe’s not telling. Mom is irked — “You’ve done this to SPITE me.”

And she’s alarmed. Chloe’s missing a few mothering instincts. Like all of them. The baby is being neglected, mishandled even when he’s being coddled.

When Grandma Ruby is away, things turn worse. Chloe has visions — of killing her baby, lopping off his toes when she’s supposed to be trimming his nails, of demons on the static-filled TV or in the shadows, coming to steal her baby.

Mom’s lepidopterist shrink (Brandon Auret) isn’t the solution to their problems. He may be the creepiest psychotherapist the movies have ever produced, and not just because he enjoys poking pins in butterflies.

“I’m a collector. I collect…things.”

So we the audience can make connections between the horrors of the past and the haunting of the present, even if Chloe can’t. Her mother’s lullabies should more overtly tie the prologue to the main story thread, but doesn’t.

The terrors Chloe fantasizes will eventually become reality, and she’s not the only one seeing this. But the shrink is mysteriously “Let things run their course” passive. And Ruby keeps leaving her grandbaby in the care of a girl who has to be reminded, “Don’t forget to FEED him.”

The only hair-raising moments come early on, glimpses of shadows that instantly send Chloe over the edge. There’s no rising realization of horror in her mind. She jumps straight into freak-out mode. And young Ms. Swart plays that bug-eyed mania, from start to finish.

Director Darrell Roodt does nothing to build suspense and little to build empathy for the character. Only the helpless baby earns our pity, and that’s because he’s not old enough to have a better agent.

Nor does Roodt spell out the connections between the adults in the story and the village’s horrific past, though that’s obvious enough to pick out visually.

There was promise in the set-up, which surprisingly makes the racist, Dutch Nationalist Afrikaans the victims despite the fact that they’d rather kill their babies than raise British bastards. Those opening horrors should burn into our memory and carry the succeeding picture off.

But for an SUV load of reasons — budgetary, acting prowess, camera placement, cutting — they don’t. And the unfrightening film that follows just underlines that with every fresh shriek and scream.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Reine Swart, Thandi Perun, Brandon Auret

Credits:Directed by Darrell Roodt, script by Tarryn-Tanille Prinsloo. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:26

Hollywood’s assorted guilds are handing out their peer-recognized best work over the past year in film and TV. And today it was the Hair and Makeup Stylists who honored “The Crown” and “Feud” and “American Horror Story” and “Big Little Lies,” and of course “Game of Thrones” on the TV side.

Film? A category honoring best contemporary makeup went to “Pitch Perfect 3.” Not exactly an “awards season” favorite. Nor was “Guardians of the Galaxy 2,” which had the best hair of any contemporary movie of last year.

Really? Does Jessica Chastain know about that?

Margot Robbie and Allison Janney transformed in “I, Tonya,” and the guys got period perfect near-mullets in that one, too. Best period hair styling.

Best period makeup? That would be “Darkest Hour,” turning Gary Oldman into Winston and Kristen Thomas into Clementine Churchill. Hiding Ben Mendelsohn’s natural villainy and making him George VI was impressive, too.

You hear the motor-sailor’s rigging groan, every squeak and metallic bend in the Spitfire, the muted pounding of a pilot trying to break his canopy and escape his sinking airplane, you feel the automatic weapons rounds thump against the hull of the beached trawler, whistling through the air of the front lines on the streets of “Dunkirk.”

So it was only natural that the Cinema Audio Society recognize Christopher Nolan’s largely dialogue-free masterpiece for the sound environment the crew concocted to match the spare, immersive and visceral visual one of the film.

“Dunkirk” took the big prize, the documentary “Jane” won for non-fiction, and “Game of Thrones” and Silicon Valley” took the TV prizes at the guild’s annual event.

“Dunkirk” could do well Oscar night, if there isn’t a “Whatever, just give it to ‘Shape of Water'” landslide. Though it was never going to have much in the line of singled-out acting honors (Mark Rylance, and Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy stand out, but in compact ways that serve the story’s tense claustrophobia), I still say it’s the best directed, best edited, best shot best picture of 2017.

Seriously. It’s opening March 9, first I’ve heard of it. I dare say it’s the first you have as well.

Because it’s a Florida crime tale — Andy Garcia has a supporting role — and will probably only earn limited release.

Sofia Vergara has an awful track record on the big screen, and Karl Urban, despite his droll “Star Trek” and “Red” turns, has never blown up as a leading man, heavy or star with box office pull.

So yeah, see the trailer before taking a flyer on “Bent.”

Was there ever a more British title for a period piece romance than this?

“On Chesil Beach” suggests…not much of a beach at all, gloomy skies, tennis “at the club,” and Humber motorcars delivering one and all to a quaint port where a marriage doesn’t quite come off the way one expects in that pre-sexual revolution/pre-sex education era.

Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle play the should-be-happier couple, Emily Watson’s her mum, and it’s all based on Ian McEwan’s novel about sexual hang-ups and expectations in 1962 Britain, land that was later to inspire the play, “No Sex Please, We’re British.”

“On Chesil Beach” is almost certain to get lost in the swamp of summer films, but might be worth checking out May 18.

Here’s an unusual take on the post-Rodney King verdict, a foster parent trying to keep a house full of black kids indoors after the original “Black Lives Matter” moment — the police “wilding” assault on motorist Rodney King — with her white neighbor (Daniel Craig) making the journey from irritated to sympathetic as the LA Riots break out around them.

Berry’s hair looks awfully high maintenance for a manic, overwhelmed foster mom. “Kings” opens April 27.