Movie Nation

It’s not the most original conceit. Round up scientists from different disciplines, have one specialist introduce his or her speciality to somebody from a wholly unrelated field, and see what happens.

But The Motherboard, the science corner of Vice.com, takes this roundtable discussion idea into the field and the far corners of the Earth for “The Most Unknown,” a documentary film/global game of tag with experts in the brain, measuring time, cognition in monkeys, particle physics and cave microbes relay racing their way from Italy to Puerto Rico, Hawaii to Sussex.

As microbiologist Jennifer Macalady from Penn State suggests, “Humans get smarter, the more things they experience.” So she leaves Fransissi Cave in Italy and “probably the most beautiful slime I’ve ever seen” to the deep underground particle research lab of Davide D’Angelo in Milan, observing “a physicist in his natural habitat.”

And D’Angelo meets, on camera, psychologist Axel Cleeremans in Belgium, and gets wired up for Cleeremans’ studies of consciousness.

Cleeremans is the REAL fish out of water when he goes camping with Montana astrobiologist Luke McKay, helping take DNA samples from the mud of boiling hot springs in the American West. And so on.

From methane vents in the deepest corner of the Pacific to Macaque Monkeys on Caya Santiago off Puerto Rico and the measurement research of Jun Ye and his colleagues in Boulder, Colorado, home to the world’s most accurate atomic clock, which they’re striving to make even more accurate, “The Most Unknown” mashes up scientists from widely divergent fields for intellectual, scientific, social and even comic effect.

Make a “Ghostbusters” reference, a “Pina Colada Song” joke or “Pokemon Go” aside, chances are the other scientist knows what you’re talking about, even if she or he doesn’t know what the Western term “ride shotgun” means.

They talk of how no one genius making a breakthrough alters human knowledge, but of scientific scholarship, building on tradition, earlier proofs, a wall of What We Know built one brick at a time.

One stand-out “fun fact” from the movie was Jun Ye’s explanation of how, if the clock is accurate enough and is measurably impacted by even the slightest changes in the mass around or underneath it, you could predict earthquakes with it, even the Big One headed for Yellowstone sometime down the road.

Whatever the intent of Ian Cheney’s film, at its best it humanizes a class of people being demonized in America’s virulent outbreak of Know-Nothingism. These are smart, funny and charming worker bees with limits to their knowledge, just like the rest of us.

Where they differ might be in their grasp of all we don’t know, what constitutes “The Most Unknown” in their area of science. The fact that they admit what they don’t know and grin at every “Eureka” moment of understanding they gain from this until-now stranger who is expert in something they know little about is reason enough for “The Most Unknown” to exist. And that’s why this class of open-minded thinkers should be celebrated, emulated and above all else, funded.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jennifer Macalady, Jun Ye, Axel Cleeremans, Rachel L. Smith, Luke McKay, Victoria Orphans, Anil Seth, Davide D’Angelo, Laurie Santos

Credits:Directed by Ian Cheney. A Motherboard/Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:32

The thing about “ticking clock” thrillers, movies with a hard, fast and deadly deadline, is that somebody on board has to be able to tell time. Preferably the director.

That was Job One for James McTeigue (“V for Vendetta,” and nothing remotely as good since) on the set of “Breaking In,” this weekend’s “Woman in peril from home invaders” B-movie. Keep the picture moving, keep the cast on task, amped up and on the edge of panic, maintain that sense of urgency.

Because the guys busting into Gabrielle Union’s dead-dad’s “country house” have only 90s minutes, as they’ve cut the power, before the alarm company calls the cops.

You know the firm. You’ve seen their ads on TV. “Last Alert: You’re already Dead by the Time we Show Up.”

But never mind that. If there’s one thing that Hollywood thrillers and the legions of actors who march through them teach us, it’s that faking shock and breath-gulping panic isn’t easy. And hiding boredom, for some actors, is damned near impossible.

Union, of “Think Like a Man, Too” and “Good Deeds” and “The Birth of a Nation,” is Shaun, a mom who drags her two kids (Ajiona Alexus and Seth Carr) with her to the remote Wisconsin estate that her dad owned. As we’ve seen him run down in the film’s smartly scored, shot and edited opening moments, we know he’s dead. And we know this was no accident, as the “hit and run” didn’t involve any running.

The house is a fortress of stone and brick and bullet proof glass and microchips — quite the security system. But minutes after their arrival, the kids are nabbed by house breakers, and Shaun is forced to master this house, and outfight, outsmart and out trash-talk the gang and its leader, Billy Burke (“Twilight”).

And even though that clock is ticking, even though the power that the bad guys “cut” is somehow on (as is the security system), even AFTER Shaun pulls the circuit breakers and dunks them in a sink, gang boss Eddie (Burke) never breaks a sweat, never for one second lets us think he’s manic, and passing on his hurry to his equally bored team (Mark Furze, Richard Cabral, Levi Meaden).

Burke just mutters “Veerrrrrry impressive” for “a woman alone, trapped by strangers,” and “Moms don’t run, not when their babies are trapped in the nest.” If the man wasn’t bored by “Twilight,” why does he have so much trouble punching the clock here?

And his performance is contagious. Check out the little boy in his most terrified moments. How he doesn’t yawn is a miracle for the ages.

Union, who joins Halle Berry and others who have tackled this “You have no idea what I’m capable of” mom gets down and dirty when her kids are “Taken” genre, gives a little of herself. But she only goes half-Halle in this. The commitment isn’t really there as Shaun half-hearted shouts “I’ll get you out, I love you” to her children.

To her credit, she doesn’t listen when one bad guy, armed with a crowbar, shouts “STOP right there!”

Bad screenwriters (Ryan Engle), do you never learn? NOBODY stops right there.

“Breaking In” far too quickly devolves into unintentional laughs provided by the henchmen, complete with long stretches of near silence, affording the smart alecks in the audience the chance to half-shout, “She’s gonna ELECTROCUTE him,” or “There’s ONE IN THE CHAMBER” and “Shoot SHOOT” at the screen.

The dears. They, at least, have a sense of urgency the folks onscreen forgot. They, at least, can tell time as the minutes tick by in this clock-stopping ticking clock thriller.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence, menace, bloody images, sexual references, and brief strong language

Cast: Gabrielle Union, Billy Burke, Ajiona Alexus, Richard Cabral, Levi Meaden, Christa Miller

Credits:Directed by James McTeigue, script by Ryan Engle. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:28

The definition of “hood hero” has changed in the half century (close) between the original “Superfly” and the slick new remake.

Trevor Jackson stars, and while the haircut may scream “Pimp: The Next Generation,” think of where the culture is. Pimps are trend-setters with their own Youtube channel now.

So the new film steps things up a notch or three. “Director X” of Rihanna and Drake music video fame, “Across the Line” on the big screen, handles the updating — affluence, money, high-end motorcars, a real nouveau riche rapper lifestyle — with guns and drugs and whatever it is our hero sells to get over these days.

Lending a little character actor cred are Michael Kenneth Williams and is that Esai Morales (not credited on IMDb) as Mr. Big?

Look for “Superfly” June 15.

Augustine Frizzell’s Tale of Texas Teen Tarts — watch the trailer before siccing #MeToo on me, please — has raunchy laughs and that ever-so-intoxicating “Broke Girls” Out of, ah, HOOTS to give vibe.

In the picture, two stoner/waitress rebels take one of those “We deserve it” white girl (broke, remember) vacations that goes terribly, amusingly wrong.

Maia Mitchell and Camila Marone star, Kyle Mooney of “Saturday Night Live” pops up.

A24 has, it, naturally.  “Never Goin’ Back” opens in limited release Aug,. 3. 

Deliberate aimlessness is the narrative goal of “Sollers Point,” an intimate, gritty and meandering character study built around a charismatic turn by leading man McCaul Lombardi.

The film follows his character, Keith, through a month or so of trying to get his life back on track after a stint in stir, followed by months of house arrest.

The mild-mannered (so we think) ex-con is back under the same roof as his old man (Jim Belushi) because his ex (Zazie Beetz) is done with him. And she’s not giving his dog back.

The hood rats he used to run with (Kazy Tauginas, Tom Guiry) are “here for you, dog.” But he doesn’t want that, and that’s not what they want to hear. 

So he’s got to get a fresh hustle on, round up some scrap metal to sell, borrow a truck to haul that scrap, check in with his old drug dealer/pal (Brieyon Bell-El) to see if he can get back into distributing. Which he does, even though everybody short-changes him and one middle-aged junkie’s sob story (Alyssa Bresnahan, terrific) ought to be enough to change his mind. 

Grandma “Ladybug” (Lynn Cohen) and big sister Kate (Marin Ireland) are here for moral support.

Exes and might-be-future-exes abound, run-ins with the gang show Keith’s temper. And the cute old houses and neon underbelly of working class Baltimore are put on display. Baltimore’s favorite son, John Waters and TV’s “The Wire” have nothing on “Sollers” writer-director Matthew Porterfield (“I Used to be Darker”) in the sunny but sordidly scenic Baltimore department.

Periodic fights with the one gang member (Guiry) who won’t let it go mean that eventually, Keith will have to go to the kingpin, named “Mom” (Michael Rogers) to beg for a little relief. Porterfield’s instincts fail him here, because if there’s one thing the movies don’t need more of, it’s nitwit philosopher gang leaders.

“Deeds and actions are a mirror,” is the most coherent thing Mom says in a long lecture that brings the film to a full stop. A movie this slow doesn’t need that.

But for all the set-piece scenes, the empty (in broad daylight) streets and theatrical quality of Keith’s cross-city odyssey, Porterfield gives us characters we believe (generally) and situations that look lived-in. An old man’s poker game may be a movie cliche, but keeping a blown line in the final cut lends authenticity to the patter. Real people stumble over their words.

“Stop cryin’!”

“Who’s TRYin’?”

Lombardi, yes he’s descended from the legendary football coach, holds the screen with ease and carries the picture along on Keith’s travels. He has the advantage of looking like a punk, one with movie-star eyes. He keeps Keith’s secrets and barely hints at the problems that ran him afoul of the law before it’s too late, we’ve already emotionally invested in his redemption.

The supporting ladies — Beetz and Bresnahan, Cohen, Everleigh Brenner and Imani Hakim (Flings?) and Maya Martinez (another possible fling) are interesting enough to warrant more scenes and a more central place in the plot.

But again, “Sollers Point” isn’t really about the plot, or advancing it. It’s all about the place, the sorts of people in it and the good and bad support systems that could sink or swim our hero. Thanks to Lombardi, we stick around for the answer.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, drug content, and some sexual material

Cast: McCaul Lombardi, Jim Belushi, Zazi Beetz, Imani Hakim, Alyssa Bresnahan, Tom Guiry

Credits:Written and directed by Matthew Porterfield. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:42

If one didn’t know better, one might swear on a copy of “Fahrenheit 451” that the makers of “They Remain” had just seen “Annihilation” and set out to do a micro-budget/tiny-cast/no-name-cast version.

They didn’t, of course. But if we’re going to accept this malnourished thriller on its own terms, that’s a good starting point. Yeah, it’s just a little bit like that. A good looking but talky, duller action-starved version of Natalie Portman’s monster movie.

Two young scientists are helicoptered into a remote forest where they set up cameras, run tests and do research from a collection of Buckminster Fuller-styled futuristic tent-labs.

Keith and Jessica are the mismatched pair sent out by “The Corporation” to look for something of biological value in woods made notorious by a killer cult’s crimes there.

Keith (William Jackson Harper) treks out each day, checking the wildlife surveillance cameras he’s set up, looking for some trace of whatever it is that he’s been told “will make you famous.”

Talkative, abrasive and “a little obsessive” Rebecca (Rebecca Henderson) does the lab work and hits him with “Anything weird happen today?” Every day.

Keith starts to have nightmares about whatever is “out there,” and whatever happened with that not-that-long-ago cult. Rebecca starts hearing knocking sounds, and more.

“I swear someone STAGE whispered my name.”

He’s willing to discount that, but he keeps seeing this wolf-dog, and those night vision wildlife cameras pick up hair-raising images of hooded death, or naked cultists frolicking and doing whatever it is they did with their victims. And she is plainly going a little off mission and off center.

“It’s your imagination,” he reassures her.

“I think it’s YOU.”

That “stage whisper” line describes a lot of what we see going on here. These two banter, insult each other, relative company cocktail party gossip and speak only opaquely about their mission, as this burial ground or that artifact from a cave is introduced into their “experience.”

It’s a staged reading of a horror movie screenplay, not a compelling, chilling or even that interesting thriller.

Whatever tone writer/director Philip Gelatt was trying to create, he bores it right out of us.

Whatever the actors make out of these characters, there’s just not that much going on, a little bunker mentality “Blair Witch” titillation, a lot of wandering in the woods and a resolution that’s not consequential enough to dismiss as “a cheat.”

And the players, as in so many horror movies, fail to adequately express the terror, disbelief and shock people do when faced with the unexplainable and seemingly supernatural. Only those snatches of “found footage” of the cult promise any chills, and even they aren’t chilling enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, sexual situations and profanity

Cast: William Jackson Harper, Rebecca Henderson

Credits: Written and directed by Philip Gelatt, based on a Laird Barron novella. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:43

It’s Wednesday, and what do we know about movies that “preview” Wednesdays?

There are two such previews tonight in my little corner of filmdom. And judging from the lack of reviews posted elsewhere, most critics are facing this dilemma.

Do I see Melissa McCarthy’s latest rude and rowdy romp, playing a mom who joins her daughter at college (“Life of the Party”), or do I duck into Gabrielle Union’s home-invasion thriller “Breaking In?”

Both were deemed by their studios insufficiently promising to show to reviewers in advance. But as Universal booked first, it’s “Breaking In” for me. The trailer features another of those impossibly stunning, impossibly designed, ridiculously remote modernist mansions where the cat-and-mouse game of villains vs. SuperMom can play their deadly game.

It’d be more realistic to park this single mom in, say, a subdivision that’s unfinished (only people living there, no one will hear their screams) or about-to-be-abandoned apartment building. Somebody steal that idea, it’s better than this one.

“Breaking In” looks far-fetched, but I stick with the Union, as we say. And it can’t be any dumber than “Life of the Party.”

“The Rider” is a docudrama as elegy, a slice of rodeo realism that both romanticizes and demythologizes the Cowboy Way in a corner of America where that still means something.

Chloe Zhao’s follow-up to “Songs My Brother Taught Me” could have been set in a gym where Latino boxers weigh the danger of their sport with the machismo and hope for a better life that it gives them, or in a myopic world of drugs and gangs of an inner city, or  a coal mining town where digging is just what men do.

It’s about American masculinity, desperation, obsolescence and the fatalism of “the only way I know” to better oneself.

The tale is simplicity itself — a fictionalized account of a working poor rodeo rider recovering from a life-threatening/career-ending injury. It stars such a rider, Brady Jandreau, and his father Tim Jandreau and sister Lily Jandreau. They are the Blackburns, here, hardscrabble versions of their real-life selves, struggling to get by on the fringes of South Dakota’s Lakota Reservation.

We meet Brady, his head wrapped in bandages hiding a grisly skull fracture. He’s checked himself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders, popped the staples holding the bandage in place and gone home. He needs to heal his own way, look in on his special-needs sister and blow off the criticism of his widowed father.

“Why don’t you go inside and sober up?”

He needs to talk to his horse and visit his dead mother’s grave.

“I was tough, Mom.”

Over the course of his recovery, we’re immersed in his world and his worries about losing touch with it. His circle of cowboy friends have a “Cowboy up,” “Rub some DIRT in it,” attitude about injuries. Every male of every age that he meets shares that hope that he’ll “get back up on that horse,” literally.

Then there’s Lane Scott, the star of that circle of rodeo friends, barely in his 20s and in assisted living — paralyzed, unable to speak because of his own rodeo hard fall.

None of them would call these injuries “accidents.” You get on a bucking horse, and skill or no skill, you take your chances.

He may get a part time job at the DakotaMart, but when we see Brady take his first tentative steps back into this life he’s been warned away from, we get it. In a couple of long, uninterrupted takes, the director lets Brady tame unbroken horses, win their trust and make them useful.

It’s all he knows, but it’s also what he has a gift doing.

Zhao has created as intimate a character study as is possible for such Marlboro Men. The handsome, rawboned cowpokes here bond over war stories — rides that went right or wrong, drink beer by a bonfire, talk without saying anything too revealing and peer-pressure each other into living up to a code, the myth of a thousand Westerns and thousands more “Dang ol’ rodeo” Country and Western songs.

The performances are documentary-natural (non-actors, mostly), the drawls are so mumbled the film needs subtitles, the stoicism so thick you could cut it with a buck knife.

“The Rider” has an arm’s-length relationship with his broke, drinking, gambling and honky-tonking dad, but never figures out that the Old Man might be grieving for a lost way of life (and his wife) himself.

But what they’re both grieving is obsolescence, horizons that have so closed in around them that hope no longer really enters into it. For all the lovely landscapes, we know the breathtaking sunsets are preceded and followed by days and nights that are little more than bleak.

In an era when “toxic masculinity” is the phrase that pays, and white male entitlement is the cardinal sin, Zhao has broken ranks with that to deliver the first great film of 2018, revealing a stark and beautiful vision of a culture in mourning, of a way of life literally riding off into the sunset.

MPAA Rating:R for language and drug use

Cast: Brady Jandreau, Tim Jandreau, Lilly Jandreau, Lane Scott

Credits: Written and directed by Chloe Zhao. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:43

Ned Chipley doesn’t do things half-way. He’s an eager beaver of the first order.

“He just wants to help,” his frustrated mother explains.

He wants to help entirely too much. Like the time, in the cougar suit as his high school mascot, he dashed on the field and tackled an opponent running otherwise unmolested into the end zone.

His enthusiasm is why he got kicked out of his local volunteer fire department. His determination is why he shows up at the local Marine Corps recruiting office every year on his birthday.

“Sir, I’m tired of these terrorists SIR. And I’m ready to be a member, uh, of the most ELITE fighting force in the world. SIR!”

His birthday? The eleventh of September. And all Ned (Michael Angarano) wants for his birthday, all he DREAMS about (jungles, helicopters, heroism) is joining up. He works out every day. There’s a daily Polaroid to chart his physique-building, photos taken by his mom (Allison Janney), who remembers the dreams she once had and abandoned, and writes letters charting his “training progress” to the recruiting officer.

The corporal/receptionist (actress/director Jennifer Morrison) is used to him. The new sergeant (Xzbit) in charge, isn’t.

“Any medical condition we should know about?”

The kid delivers his spiel via index cards. He has a copy of Sir, we have to go after Bin Laden, sir. I will go to the caves, sir. I will leave NO man behind.”

“Son, get up and put your shirt back on!”

“Sun Dogs” is an underachieving comical character study that wears out its welcome after too short a while, and a minor-key mystery with a “Gung Ho!” mein. Because Ned, conditioned by years of watching nightly war movies with his unemployed stepdad (Ed O’Neill), is READY. Or thinks he is, in his limited capacity.

His stepdad isn’t taking the blame for this, either.

“No one in their right MIND would watch “The Deer Hunter” and want to enlist!”

Angarano makes the kid twitchy, squirrely even, “special needs” stereotypical. And something made him that way, something long before watching the Twin Towers fall, on his birthday, three years before.

Rapper/actor Xzibit gives an increasing softness to his recruiting officer. He’s the one that convinces Ned to become a “Sun Dog,” the fellow off to the side, supporting others, “taking care of things on the Home Front…Welcome to the fight!”

The kid has his mission, and has barely had his “Sun Dogs” business cards (?!) printed up when his mission, his misadventure in “helping someone,” begins. Tally (Melissa Benoist) is a semi-homeless casino hustler who causes trouble at Ned’s night job. That’s not the way Ned sees it.

And Tally? She’s cute and “Semper fi,” ready to help him go through his deck of “Most Wanted Terrorist” playing cards. Sure, she quit school. There’s a native intelligence about her that belies her actions. But about that scar on his forehead…

“D’you get that in the war?”

They set out to follow people who look like those Iraqis and al Qaeda members on the playing cards. Yeah, we know they’re Sikhs. Not Ned and Tally. “Sketchy,” Ned says in his frequent typewritten reports back to the Master Sergeant. He takes on Robert DeNiro’s beard and beret in “Deer Hunter” as he burrows deeper into his delusions.

The loopy, deluded desperation of Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye” is referenced as Tally flirts and reaches out to the “crazy serious” “Sun Dog.” Ned? He’s playing those cards, trying to “Save” well, somebody, and not giving away much about what makes him tick.

Morrison, working from a Raoul McFarland/Anthony Tambakis script, strains to make a sensitive story about two desperate people anxious to lose themselves in delusions. She tries to find the lightness in a tale of ignorant racial profiling.

“Sun Dogs” devolves into something sadder and far less mysterious than it wants to be, not as sweet as it seems and not the movie you kind of want it to be. There’s that omnipresent “follow your bliss” message that movies with no better idea trot out.

Tally could be a character out of “Good Girl,” where we first got a taste of people who lose themselves in a great book (“The Catcher in the Rye”) but are no wiser for it.  Her inability to see through Ned is disappointing. Her using him would have been a more dramatic and realistic approach.

And those who indulge Ned are creating a guy who really would like a weapon and probably has a pizza joint he’d be willing to storm, if his delusions told him to.

At some point, it’s just not cute any more.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult situations, profanity.

Cast: Michael Angarano, Melissa Benoist, Allison Janney, Xzibit, Ed O’Neill, Jennifer Morrison

Credits:Directed by Jennifer Morrison, script by Raoul McFarland, Anthony Tambakis. A  Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

In space, on Mars, things can go wrong. And do.

But what’s an investigator into a space accident to do when the AI “assisting” her in the digging has a mind of its own?

Sci-fi on a budget, for sure. But “2036: Origin Unknown” reminds us just how far ahead of the curve 1960s sci-fi (“Star Trek,” “2001”) was in terms of “We have nothing to fear but the Artificial Intelligence which displaces us.”

Gravitas Ventures is unleashing “Origin Unknown” which co-stars Steven Cree and Julie Cox, at the end of summer (speculating here). 

Yeah, we’re all thinking of HAL 9000 after “Upgrade.”