Movie Nation

“Terminal” is a neo-noir mystery-thriller in the “Sin City/Dark City” vein, a not-exactly-triumph of style over story, surface sheen over coherence.

Built around another bombshell bad-girl turn by Margot Robbie, it’s getting limited release and is destined to be quickly forgotten, lost in the shadow of Robbie’s Oscar-nominated turn in “I, Tonya.”

Even her most ardent fans will be disappointed. Sorry, lads. Not all that much that’s titillating here, either.

Robbie plays Annie, a brunette femme fatale when we meet her, meeting in a confessional with a Mr. Big whom she tells “I want your contracts, all of them.” She’s a hired killer.

Or is she “Bottle Blonde,” the waitress at the End of the Line Cafe, the only thing open all night when wandering, lost, tired of life Bill (Simon Pegg) cannot catch a train, “any train,” out of The Precinct — which is what one and all call this unnamed noirscape.

If the station looks familiar, it’s the same Hungarian setting used in the film “Kontroll.” Yeah, I noticed that. Because “Terminal” demands that we pay the most attention to the lurid, neon-tinged lighting and production design.

We also notice the lone custodian in that terminal is Mike Myers under less old-age makeup than he used to require. He’s the geezer who sends “Bill” to the cafe. After an attempted mugging, which Bill has resisted by being stupidly brave, pedantically confident or simply tired of living.

“I’m very disappointed in both of you!”

Annie, the waitress, is something of a philosopher. Cheerful, pushy, her “Death is by far the best bit of life” gets at Bill’s situation. He, too, is “terminal.”

“It’s not time I’m trying to kill.”

And then there are the murderous mugs (Max Irons, Dexter Fletcher) holed up in a dimly-lit apartment, waiting for an assignment. Which takes them to the terminal AND to the terminal’s diner, where “Bottle Blonde” waits on them as well.

Veteran second unit director Vaughn Stein (“World War Z,” “Sherlock Holmes”) had access to talent and to people who could finance a film, and proves adept at managing a cohesive, distinct look and feel. But his inept story and fumbling efforts to connect the disparate threads of a tale no one cares about make his actors look bad.

Film noir is not just a look, not merely a collection of pithy one-liners.  This film plays like an audition reel.

The dialogue is a collection of cliches, inane profundities and tin-eared usages of “fortnight” and the like.

“Way I see it, you got two options.”

“This is what we call in the trade a ‘double-cross.'”

“Who says mystery is a lost art?”

I do. And I’m using “Terminal” as exhibit one in making my case.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Margot Robbie, Simon Pegg, Mike Myers, Max Irons, Dexter Fletcher

Credits: Written and directed by . An RLJ Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:35

A few years back, the U.S. Supreme Court established the idea of “corporate personhood,” insisting the organizations and companies have the same rights — “free speech,” etc. — as people.

But one thing I always wondered about the “Citizens United” ruling, if such entities are people with rights, why isn’t there a death penalty for them? People are executed, imprisoned, stripped of their rights. Why not wrongdoing businesses?

After Bhopal, why does Dow Chemical still exist?

Why, when I visit the Wikipedia page for Charleston’s exclusive, pricey Porter Gaud Prep, is it still there? And why is there no mention of the sex abuse scandals that rocked the school, cost its insurer over $100 million on that sanitized, dishonest “nothing to see here but the scion of Charleston’s elite” Wikipedia entry on its history?

That court ruling, and alumna Paige Goldberg Tomlach’s damning DAMNING documentary, “What Haunts Us” may be the only punishment proud, insular Charleston will allow for this hallowed private school, founded just after the Civil War, or as some parts of the South used to refer to it, “the Late Unpleasantness.”

Tomlach’s film revisits an open secret at the school — that it hired, protected and sympathized with a serial child rapist. And it reveals a still-open wound. Alumni of that school have been killing themselves ever since.

And “Everybody knew” this “coach/trainer,” Eddie Fischer was molesting boys. He had a nickname, “Drop your drawers.” Yes, any injury or malady a boy complained of at the school would prompt “nurse” Eddie to make that demand.

Other demands — sodomizing kids as young as 12, going back over decades of a “teaching” career — were made in his home, office, locker room and showers. It is the Penn State scandal rewritten with the accent of Southern aristocracy, a closed “fortress” community that refused to listen to those few who spoke out, who refused to take action for a variety of reasons, some despicable, some criminal of the “fellow traveler” persuasion.

“Adults believe adults,” a local state solicitor says, explaining when there is no hope of excusing what was happening.  Another local sums up community indifference in the best sound bite in the movie.

“The rich people in Charleston, they harbored a pedophile.”

Tomlach interviews lawyers, prosecutors and victims — some of them disguised on camera. She tries repeatedly to get the school to put someone on camera to talk about what she and classmates from the late ’70s, early ’80s describe as a still-bleeding wound.

Former students relate their efforts — bringing up the “What IS it with Coach Fischer?” at student council meetings — and their guilty silence. Former teachers, when they will talk about it at all, are best at remembering thinking this Eddie Fischer guy was a “con man,” and bringing their concerns to the top two administrators.

Those two — Berkeley Gimball and James Bishop “The Major” Alexander — would be the film’s true villains, if there weren’t video of Fischer’s bald-faced admissions of his crimes in deposition.

And the story has a hero, a class screw-up finally kicked out for cheating, on purpose, he says, and we’ve no real reason to doubt it. Anything to get away from this monster given access to him by a totally complicit administration and largely complicit board and community at large. Guerry Glover stood up while in school, and kept harassing the complicit board and the State of South Carolina until this scandal burst into the open.

It’s a hard movie to embrace, and some of that stems from the entitlement that simmers in the background of the school, those who attend it, of the city, the monied alumni interviewed and indeed the filmmaker herself, who narrates and does the questioning here. They’re no less victims, but as they admit, they “knew.” Most didn’t even bother to tell their country club-set parents.

Tomlach begins with the suicides and ends, in short order (70 minutes or so) with lingering heartbreak and outrage.

But the only feeling one can walk away from it with is “Why is the criminally negligent institution still in existence?” At least now, we can change Porter Gaud’s infernal lie of a Wikipedia page. 

MPAA Rating: unrated, criminal sexual behavior whose victims are children, explicit descriptions, profanity

Cast: Guery Glover, Paige Tomlach, Eddie Fischer

Credits:Directed by Paige Tomlach. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:09

If you’re familiar with Eric Stoltz‘s acting career, especially the early years, you won’t be the least surprised at the sort of teen movie he’s chosen to make stepping behind the camera.

The star of “Mask” and the John Hughes-scripted “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and the straight man in the comedy “The Wild Life” ensures that “Class Rank” is a genial, sweet-spirited teen romance with barely enough edge to even allow the use of the word.

Maybe it’s more for people Stoltz’s age than teens, but snip out the lone f-bomb, the suggestion of pot and maybe the aftermath of a grownup romantic encounter, and it’d be the most charming thing to hit the Disney Channel in ages.

Bernard Flannigan, played by Skyler Gisondo of “Vacation,” is Livingston, New Jersey’s resident nerd, “town crier” and government gadfly. He’s 16, pedals his nerdbike to every school board meeting and politely and pedantically lectures the group on what it SHOULD be be doing.

“Stop teaching French,” he hectors, “and begin teaching CHINESE. It’s the future!” Lend high schoolers bikes so that they can all lower their carbon footprint and get cars and buses off the streets.

The kid’s been raised by his too-too-sharp grandpa (Bruce Dern) to not be shy, to challenge authority, politely and with seemingly well-reasoned arguments. He’s constantly submitting op-eds to the local newspaper, whose retiring editor (Kathleen Chalfant) indulges him.

Veronica Krause, played by winsome Disney starlet Olivia Holt of “Same Kind of Different as Me” and TV’s “I Didn’t Do It,” is a hyper-organized goal-oriented classmate who obsesses over extra credit, extracurriculars she organizes but doesn’t participate in, and getting into Yale so she can go to law school and make her way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And she is irked beyond measure when their school’s class rank is assigned to each student, and all her efforts have landed her at number two. “There goes Yale,” she thinks.

So canny class president Veronica recruits erudite government scold Bernard to run for the school board. She renames him “Bernie” as its more accessible and friendly. She does this over his “It sounds like a ‘Sesame Street’ character!” They’ll abolish class rankings and save her Ruth Bader Ginsberg dreams.

The Benjamin August script — he wrote the Christopher Plummer Holocaust survivor drama “Remember” — is pleasant enough, leaning heavily on the charm of the cast.

“Is he smart?” Veronica’s “Law & Order” production crew mom (Kristin Chenoweth) wants to know of this boy that’s taking up all her time.

“I’m not sure what he is.”

August throws in a smart-mouthed Greek chorus of Indian Americans, “The Bollywood Crowd” at Livingston High, who make snarky comments about Veronica and Bernie as “a couple,” even as they envy the Bollywood romance they imagine them having. Which Veronica, being narcissistic enough to be class president and wholly focused on the future ad thus undateable, kind of sees.

Bernie? He’s never at a loss for words, and never a FEW words when many more will do. But he’s utterly oblivious about Miss Right flirting right under his nose. As the local market’s resident stoner (Nick Krause) wonders, “Dude, what’s your deal?”

The campaign and plot play out in predictable ways, with just enough surprises to hold interest. The obstacles to romance are entirely too on-the-nose and require characters to be WAY behind the audience in figuring things out. Whatever the subject matter, this isn’t “Election.” It has the edge of a butter knife.

But the stars are ever-so-engaging, with Gisondo nailing the wordy nerd thing and Krause mastering that teen movie stereotype — beautiful, but too focused to be popular or dateable — she’s saddled with playing.

Whatever else happens to these kids and their dreams, “Class Rank” always defaults to “sweet,” a label often hung-on its director, way back in the day. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Just enjoy that last time you can take your tweens or very young teens to the movies with you. And watch for Stoltz’s cameo in the film’s third act. You’ll figure out why a freckled reddish-haired kid got the lead.

MPAA Rating: unrated, a tiny bit of profanity, a hint of pot use, a suggestion of adult sexuality

Cast: Olivia Holt, Skyler Gisondo, Bruce Dern, Kristin Chenoweth, Kathleen Chalfant

Credits:Directed by Eric Stoltz, script by Benjamin August. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:41

Two interviews will burn themselves into the brain of any film buff upon viewing the new documentary, “Always at the Carlyle.”

Tommy Lee Jones grins and jokes around and confesses to inviting the hotel concierge out to visit him at his ranch upon the man’s retirement.

And Harrison Ford, Jones’s most serious rival for the biggest grump in film, turns jovial and downright giddy, until the moment he realizes “Why didn’t I know about that?” when informed that there are bigger suites and better floors than he’s been “allowed” to check into in New York’s legendary Carlyle Hotel.

Even rich, accomplished grumps have a soft spot for The Carlyle.

The latest film from New York’s most aspirational documentarian, Matthew Miele (“Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s,” “Harry Benson: Shoot First”), “Always at the Carlyle” separates this discrete, swank East Central Park hostelry from the more famous (St. Regis, Waldorf Astoria, The Plaza) and infamous (The Algonquin, Hotel Chelsea) straight from the start.

George Clooney is sitting down, talking about the $20,000 a night Empire Suite as “a place that feels like home.” Jon Hamm is declaring it’s the place you go “that tells you you’ve made it.” Has he stayed there?

“No,” he jokes.

Britain’s Royal Family make it their New York HQ when they travel. And in Miele’s glittering, stately film, you understand why. His camera tours its restaurant, bars and world famous Cafe Carlyle, he talks with the “What happens at the Carlyle, stays at the Carlyle” staff — Ernesto the doorman, Lauren the phone operator, maids and concierges, many of whom have been there for decades (Salaries? Maybe. Tips? A better bet.).

The lobby, decorated with epic 17th century paintings, Bemelmans Bar, for the better part of a century an iconic, upscale watering hole of the well-heeled, its walls and lampshades decorated by “Madeleine” illustrator Ludwig Bemelmans, the glitzy front doors of the hotel, often crowded with paparazzi — there’s no place quite like it.

The staff don’t give away state secrets, but they talk about their “favorite guests” of every generation. Angelica Huston tells stories of her stays there with Jack Nicholson, Vera Wang waxes on about its timeless style, traveler and bon vivant Anthony Bourdain marvels, “How much longer can this exist?”

And superstar Harrison Ford gripes about “the closet” he’s stayed in, on occasion, and Hamm and others note how one could put a kid through college for the money you shell out for one of its more luxurious suites.

Yes, the Carlyle crowd may very well be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Wes Anderson (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) knows it well. Maybe it was an inspiration. So does Jeff Goldblum, whose jazz combo has played in the bars.

But the most famous bar is the one made legend by the elegant, dapper and plummy voiced Bobby Short, who held forth from the piano there for decades. He’d turn up on “”60 Minutes,” in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” make repeated appearances on NPR, and even small towners who heard him got the essence of the place just from the sound of his voice.

He just oozed cafe society sophistication, refinement and taste. “Class,” the late Elaine Stritch told Miele shortly before her death, summing up Short, the hotel named for the Scottish writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle but built by a Moses Ginsberg and everything “aspirational” about the place.

Through Short’s American Songbook jazz, I knew about the place long before I ever visited New York. And Miele’s documentary lets us know it even better, even if we can’t afford the cheapest rooms (not head-spinningly expensive).

That would be, of course, the “Harrison Ford Suite.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some suggestive content, drug references and brief partial nudity

Cast: George Clooney, Elaine Stritch, Naomi Campbell, Sofia Coppola, Harrison Ford, Angelica Huston, Lenny Kravitz, Lee Jones, Jon Hamm, Wes Anderson, Jeff Goldblum

Credits: Written and directed by Matthew Miele. A Good Deeds release.

Running time: 1:31

A thriller about mind-control experiments in an exclusive, gated community, “subliminal seduction” and the like?

Christina Ricci’s the “Unsane” woman being bullied into falling in line, John Cusack is the investigator digging into this evil in “Distorted.”

Note that Cusack finally gave up his Black Baseball Hat. For a hoodie.

Summer release. 

Who knew there was a “best second weekend ever” record?

Apparently there is. And “Avengers: Infinity War” has it.

It’s falling off aout 45% first to second weekend (an average decline) and heading towards $115 million or so, based on Deadline.com’s Friday night estimates. Saturday could change that (Deadline is way off, on occasion, WAY underestimated “Infinity War” last weekend, for instance).

Pantelion’s latest Eugenio Derbez vehicle is finding its audience. It won’t hit the $15-16 million it was projected to unless Saturday’s Latino audience blows up. It might. But right now, $13 million looks like all the “Overboard” remake will manage.

“Tully” is enjoying some pre-Mother’s Day attention. Not much, though. It’s on a generous helping of screens, got overly generous reviews (“Hug your mother” is in several of them, the dizzy dears) but isn’t all that. Charlize Theron reminded me of her turn in “Monster,” which she filmed here. I walked by her on the set on that movie and she was so made up and dressed down I didn’t recognize the South African model/actress. At all. Here, she’s weighed down with pregnancy and the life she’s chosen, depicting Motherhood as the draining, stressful health-crushing burden it can be.

But Theron, writer Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman are not the draw Focus Features thought. A $3.5 million take from 1353 screens is a piddly $2586 average. Nothing to celebrate. They should have platformed it — five cities this weekend, WIDE next weekend. Oh well.

Electric Entertainment’s great concept/weakly-executed Dean Devlin/David Tennant thriller “Bad Samaritan” did half the business on 700 more screens. Not enough “Doctor Who” fans out there to make this one hit. Under $2 million, based on Friday.

“Black Panther” should reach the $700 million mark by next weekend, and fall out of the top ten as it does.

“A Quiet Place” is rolling towards a $175-200 million take, all in.

“I Feel Pretty” is hanging in the top five, closing in on $50. “Rampage” probably won’t hit $100.

Every day I sit down with some piece of cinema or other and puzzle over the last of that movie’s opening credits.

“Directed by…Joe and Anthony Russo, Olivia Milch, Deon Taylor.”

Who? A generation, maybe two generations, of accomplished, smart and indeed visionary directors have dropped from the screen. Hollywood, in cost-cutting/control-seizing mode, has simply disappeared them — or exiled them to streaming video or cable.

Andrew Niccol was an in-demand writer (“The Truman Show”) before making his mark as a director of stylish sci-fi in “Gattaca,” “In Time” “S1m0ne.” Not great films, frankly, but competent, thoughtful and distinct-looking movies that had a look, a cast and a chance to make a distinct statement.

His last theatrical feature, “Good Kill,” was a drone-pilot quickie starring his muse, Ethan Hawke. Now Netflix has given him cash and license to make “Anon,” a little “not-that-far-in-an-alternate-future” thriller with a look that instantly says, “Niccol” to the cognoscenti.

Fashions just a tad ahead of the curve, retro-futuristic cars (vintage Mercs, Citroens and Toronados), bleak blue-grey skies and tech that loads visual ID, messages, technical data and advertising right on your eyeball.

Everybody’s on everybody else’s eyeball. Except, as Det. Sal Frieland (Clive Owen) discovers one day walking to work, for this one stranger.

“Unknown: Error,” his eyeball readout tells him as she (Amanda Seyfried) passes.

This woman is depriving the world of her ID on the grid. No GoPro in-your-head video recording capabilities, which makes police work darned easy.

People are dying in the Big Impersonal City. Their “re-cog” eyes short out when the killer walks into their midst. They can’t “see” the criminal even if they can’t sense the danger.

“What’s the world coming to when our murderers won’t tell us who they are? Who can HACK a human?”

The cops must rely on shoe leather and memory to figure out who this killer for hire might be. Because she’s erasing her tracks.

Sal and his partner (Colm Feore) need to find a “fixer,” the woman erasing IDs, backgrounds and memories. Sal sets a trap. But is “she” (Seyfried) the one falling into it, or the person setting it?

Niccol, as is his wont, loses himself in the suits, the sex, the pristine, austere post-modernist sets, the lighting, the voyeuristic footage (what the eye, of victims, cops or the killer, “sees”) and the graphics. The heads-up display is quite convincing and very much within the realm of the possible — Google Glass in your eye, maybe Google Glass 4.0.

Owen has a smoldering, moist-eyed yet butch presence. But he’s rarely more than mildly interesting on the screen, which explains his many shots at The Big Time and their limited success.

Seyfried works a lot more, but all too often on pictures like this — a character of limited emotional range, a little nudity, and on to the next job. That would be “Mamma Mia 2.”

It’s the story and the tone that turn “Anon” into a droning affair, sort of imitation Kubrick, more mise en scene than action, a cat-and-mouse match that doesn’t play up that battle of wits because that’s harder to write than endless camera placement instructions, conference table debates and shootings.

“Anonymity is the enemy” is a fascinating subject to poke at, though.

“They try to look, I try not to be seen.”

“They say it’s for our own safety.”

“Then why don’t you feel safe?”

I wish I could call it a Niccol “comeback,” though it isn’t, wish I could say I was riveted to the screen by the suspense and thought-provoking discussion of memory, privacy perception and data mining.

But I wasn’t. It’s no “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” no “Gattaca,” even. Visually striking, thought-provoking yet emotionally drained, “Anon” is just too empty to make one care.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, bloodshed, sexual situations

Cast: Clive Owen, Amanda Seyfried, Colm Feore

Credits:Written and directed by Andrew Niccol. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

Old enough to play a soldier’s mom, now. A good stretch for Aniston. Alden Ehrenreich, the new Han Solo, also stars.

Looks challenging, intense. Tye Sheridan, Jason Patric and Jack Huston also star.

Joaquin Phoenix makes a triumphant return to the big screen with the haunting, harrowing and hallucinatory “You Were Never Really Here,” a hit man thriller from the director of “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”

Lynne Ramsey, working from a Jonathan Ames (TV’s “Bored to Death” was his) novel, has found fresh ground to plow in a genre that long ago ceased to promise anything new.

From time to time, I’ve been asked to help judge student filmmaker competitions, and rare is the weekend when these aren’t stuffed to the rafters with hit-man tales. Seeing scads of these genre pieces at once points you to the narrow confines moviemakers create them in. The tropes all go back to John Woo (“The Killer”) and Jean Reno (“The Professional”).

They’re loners, silent, uncommunicative and inconspicuous, blending in. “Joe” (Phoenix) is like that. He’s bearded, doesn’t talk much goes about his “work” with the efficiency of the well-practiced. We meet him in a hotel room, cleaning up. He washes the blood off the tools of the trade (a ball-pein hammer), careful not to spatter anything beyond the plastic he’s laid out. He burns paper evidence, careful not to set off the smoke detector (covered in plastic).

The plastic has another use. Joe covers his head in it, to the point of near-asphyxiation. An erotic kick, or reliving a childhood trauma? Flashbacks start to give that away.

Hit-men always have intermediaries, guys who set up the contracts and handle the money. Watch HBO’s “Danny” with Bill Hader, or Luc Besson’s Jean Reno masterpiece, “The Professional.” Joe gets the call from McLeary (John Doman) and collects his cash from bodega owner Angel (Frank Pando).

Hired guns are paranoid. They have to be. Joe is rattled when a teen employee of Angel’s makes too much eye contact.

Inevitably, they have some “soft spot” secret, a pet cat or a favorite plant (“The Professional”) at home, in Joe’s case — his elderly, infirm mother (Judith Roberts). She’s always asking him about “your girlfriend.”

“Janice? My girlfriend from 20 years ago?”

They’re unsentimental, but a LOT of movie hit-men have “a code,” “No women, no kids,” as Chow Yun-Fat put it in films like “The Replacement Killers.” Joe doesn’t own up to this, but when he takes a job, rescuing a senator’s daughter from a pedophile sex slavery ring, that becomes his ethos.

Child sex slavery rings are an Internet and movie meme, at least partly because of scandals and rumors of scandals that permeate the Internet Hollywood gossip scene. 

Joe’s orders are to get this kid back, and the senator (Alex Manette) adds, “I want you to hurt them.”

Ramsey, like many tackling this genre before her, revels in Joe’s prep-work. There’s always a trip to the hardware store — duct tape, pull-ties, and a ball-pein hammer.

We’re not meant to think this hardcase is any sort of deep thinker. He wears hoodies, takes the stairs and not the elevator to meetings and doesn’t engage in smalltalk.

He doesn’t over-plan. He’s got that ball-pein hammer. He’s seen “Old Boy.” He knows how injurious and lethal that simple tool can be. Ramsey shows us, via closed circuit TV footage (no sound) and off-camera (sound only) just how much mayhem a bulky, hot-tempered brute like Joe can stir up with just that hammer.

But there are complications with the contract. Cops are involved. Blowback is quick and ruthless. Joe suffers (he’s injured on every job), he grieves and he sticks with it.

“No women, no kids” he must think. In between the flashbacks, hallucinations and moments where he’d just as soon end it all, with a plastic bag or a well-timed step in front of a New York elevated train.

That depiction of the psychic toll this work would take on a person, and the traumatic past that might make one consider hurting people for a living, is what lifts “You Were Never Really Here” clear of its genre.

The true-story hit-man movie “Ice Man” followed a pitiless killer by day, a soul-dead assassin, who keeps that life from his wife and neighbors. Joe was broken as a child, and military service, with the unrelenting horrors of a war zone, reinforced that.

Phoenix is equally adept at delivering the savagery this man summons, on demand, and the brooding talk-to-himself, cannot-trust-what-he-sees inner turmoil of a made-not-born sociopath. Ramsey keeps the camera tight on him for much of the movie, letting his eyes do the acting.

It’s a compact, perfect performance in a tight, tense genre picture that manages just enough twists and surprises to separate it from the hired-killer-movie pack.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, disturbing and grisly images, language, and brief nudity

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov, Frank Pando, John Doman

Credits: Written and directed byu Lynne Ramsey, based on a Jonathan Ames novel. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:29