Movie Nation

Here’s a pet peeve about the acting one typically sees in horror movies.

Few performers take things far enough to give us a sense of what it would be like to confront the truly unexplainable. An encounter with some supernatural threat, one might think, would induce shaking, gasping, gulping, pants-wetting terror. Eyes wide, almost immobilized by shock, jaw-agape, Danny-in-“The Shining,” the works.

The British import “Ghost Stories” is one of the few films since “Blair Witch” to truly get it. A collection of chilling run-ins with ghosts and maybe the supernatural are remembered by the people whose psyches were gutted by the experience. It’s a quiet, hair-raising thriller that fills one with dread and makes you appreciate how destructive just such event would be in a person’s life, even if the rest of us don’t believe them, especially if we don’t believe them.

Andy Nyman plays a professional TV debunker of the supernatural, exposing fraudulent psychics, explaining away phenomena “experienced” by those who often turn out to have manufactured it for personal gain or fame.

Professor Goodman’s “Psychic Cheats” career began with his father’s fanatical (Jewish) religious beliefs “which destroyed our family.” Life experiences that followed solidified Goodman’s conviction that “We have to be very careful in what we believe” because “The brain sees what it wants to see.”

His idol, the one who pointed him in the direction his life would take, was a Scottish TV presenter/debunker named Cameron, a man who disappeared years ago, never to be found.

Until a tape arrives on Goodman’s desk, a hoarse whisper asking to see him, directing him to a tatty travel trailer (caravan) on the Scottish coast. That’s where he meets the gnomish recluse, Cameron.

“I just presumed you were dead,” Goodman offers.

“‘Ow d’ye knooo that I’m NOT?”

Goodman gushes over the legend who coined the phrase “existential terror,” but Cameron insults him back, for his “arrogance,” his “disrespect” for the people who say they’ve experienced something unexplainable.

He shoves a battered binder in Goodman’s hands, three cases he himself could never explain. “The supernatural…is REAL. I need you to tell me I’m wrong!”

Co-writers/directors Jeremy Dyson and Nyman, working from their play, rely more on atmosphere and mood than startling effects to get their frights. It’s the dark dread of that first case, a former night watchman (Paul Whitehouse) at an abandoned women’s mental hospital (why such a place needs a watchman is anybody’s guess), that raises the hair on the back of your neck.

Glimpses of a patient in yellow through the gathering gloom, skittering, scampering noises, low moans and pounding at the door of the watchman’s guard office might be enough. Anything beyond that, a taste of the terror of “The Ring” and its imitators, is icy icing on the cake.

Whitehouse plays this Tony Matthews as a man absolutely broken by this “event,” devastated and embittered by personal loss, a devastation compounded by what he says he’s seen.  Goodman’s interrogation with the man’s credulous priest (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) does nothing to convince him that what Matthews described really happened.

But he and we are shaken to our bones by Case #2, Simon Rifkin. Alex Lawther of “The Imitation Game” and “Goodbye, Christopher Robin,” is a quivering pile of tics, winces and paranoid nerves. He’s a very young man who hit something with the family car on a lonely forest road late one night, and now he’s holed up in an over-heated basement room, fortified against the chill he feels almost constantly, staring at every convincing, affirming Hieronymus Bosch vision of Hell and the Devil he’s been able to print out from the Internet and paste on the walls.

He weeps. He stammers. He can barely get through his account of what he saw, the car breaking down and the confrontation with “evil” he is dead certain he had.

This is “Blair Witch/Insidious” level terror and Lawther’s performance of it becomes a new yardstick to measure horror genre acting against.

The third “case,” involving a high finance whiz (Martin Freeman), he and his wife’s desperate attempts to have a baby and the terrors that come with that, is the least convincing, even as it leads Goodman into examining the life of debunking he’s pursued and his own darker motives.

The film Nyman and Dyson have cooked up has healthy dollops of foreshadowing, and even a rare “flash forward” (as opposed to flashback) when we’re teased with terrors to come.

The settings –day and night — are uniformly spooky and forlorn, and Nyman ably suggests a doubter who, like John Cusack in “1408,” comes to doubt his doubting.

Freeman has fun with the showiest role, glibly observing that “You’re supposed to feel safe in your own home,” even as he beats back the madness that must be gripping him to accept seeing what he’s seen, experiencing what he say he’s experienced.

Few horror movies hold up under close-examination and dissection. But “Ghost Stories” has the goods to occasionally creep out even the most jaded gene viewer, something each year’s cinematic bumper crop of “Boo” rarely achieves.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, frightening images, profanity

Cast: Martin Freeman, Andy Nyman, Alex Lawther, Paul Whitehouse

Credits:Written and directed by Jeremy Dyson, Andy Nyman, based on their play. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:38

The human computers of “Hidden Figures” aren’t the only “forgotten women” of the early days of America’s space program.

While the names of the Mercury Seven, the crack fighter-jocks/test pilots turned astronauts are chiseled into history, with monuments for them prominent on America’s “Space Coast” (Titusville, Cocoa Beach, Fla.), the “Mercury 13” were a shadow group, not utterly unknown at the time, but almost erased from history as the space program’s story has been told.

“Mercury 13” is an inspiring, brisk remembrance of this group, the best female pilots America could muster in the late 1950s, women summoned for testing by the same physician/scientist NASA put in charge of drawing up physical and mental tests to see which male pilots would be best suited for space travel.

Dr. Randy Lovelace’s Lovelace Clinic, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, recruited women like Sarah Ratley, “Wally” Funk, Jerrie Cobb and Janie Hart to come in, and without NASA knowing about it, go through the same rigorous regimen that John Glenn, Gordon Cooper and the Mercury Seven endured.

Co-directors Heather Walsh and David Sington trace this story from the brassy, older and outspoken Jacqueline Cochran, a Florida born airplane racer who went on to run the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) of World War II. She’s the Chuck Yeager of this version of “The Right Stuff,” the best of the best. And the moment we hear one of the pilots she inspired describe first hearing her over her airplane radio, we know why she never got to space. An overheard conversation between an Ohio air traffic control tower and Cochran leads to an attempt to re-direct her to the runway she is supposed to land on.

“‘I’ll land on any goddamned runaway I like,” she drawls back. No, not NASA material.

But the women whom she inspired earned their wings, endured the “image” America was comfortable with as far as women in the cockpit were concerned (a dress, pearls, high heels, dabbing makeup on before take-off) and prejudice and discovered that they were every bit as good as their male counterparts in many regards, superior in others.

If you remember NASA history, or “The Right Stuff” version of it, you’ll recall the isolation tank endurance contests the Mercury Seven faced. The women rode out their time alone in a breeze.

As Janie Hart, a Senator’s wife and the only mother in the Mercury 13 cracked, “With eight kids at home, you’d want to go to the moon, too.”

Sexism is the easy answer about why we haven’t heard much about these women. When NASA got wind of Good Dr. Lovelace’s experiments, they kiboshed the whole thing. But the 13 got a Congressional hearing (a Senator’s wife can make that happen), TV interviews and a lot of attention when the brakes were put on this project in 1961.

And then the Russians put a female skydiver into orbit in 1963, and made us look like chauvinist boobs. Gordon Cooper’s crack that “We could have sent a woman” on an earlier test flight, one “flown” by a test chimp, is so cringe-worthy as to actually be hilarious, if not in the way he intended.

The film’s shortcomings stem from its narrow point of view. We hear from the surviving pilots, or their widow or children. No outside historian, no expert on the era is here to correct the “Looking at the past through the values of the present” error in the thinking. No woman at the time was allowed to be a military pilot, few if any women had flight hours in jets, NASA didn’t need the funding-drawing distraction of a “battle of the sexes” PR game playing out while it was focused on beating the Russians to the Moon. “Limited opportunities” worked against them. But less so on those who followed.

What’s inspiring is what these women did with their frustration. They got certified to fly jets. They took jobs with major aviation companies. One went on to co-found the National Organization for Women.

And decades later, the “Mercury 13” started getting their due in the ’90s, when the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle took off. This illuminating, artful and inspiring film completes that process.

A gender is a terrible thing to waste. Especially in space.

MPAA Rating: unrated, mild profanity

Cast: Wally Funk, Gene Nora Jessen, Sarah Ratley, Myrtle Cagle, Eileen Collins

Credits:Directed by David Sington, Heather Walsh. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:18

This should be a spinoff from “John Wicke.” The idea of a hospital run for the murderous, the larcenous, injured “in the line of duty?”

Jodie Foster, Sterling K. Brown, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate, Sofia Boutella, Charlie Day, Dave Bautista and many many others check in. June 8. Looks like a hoot.

There’s a statue I always make a point of passing by whenever I’m in Central Park in Manhattan. It’s of Balto, one of the “hero” sled dogs of Nome, Alaska’s diphtheria epidemic of 1925 and the subject of a pretty good animated film for kids.

So there’s an historic precedent for “Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero,” a modest-budget cartoon based on the true story of a mascot/war dog and valued member of his regiment in the trenches of World War I.

You want to teach kids about the horrors of The Great War, a somewhat sanitized cartoon is a better way to do it than say, the grim realism of “War Horse.”

It’s about a mutt who follows a friendly recruit from a small town Connecticut Main St. parade to the Yale parade grounds and basic training, where he becomes mascot and eventually life-saving war dog to 102nd Regiment of The Yankee Division, deployed to France in the pivotal final year of World War I.

The official record is, this generally untrained pooch warned his unit about mustard gas attacks, tracked down and comforted the wounded and took part in 17 battles in the Argonne, Château-Thierry and the final offensives that won the war. There are books about him and after his death, he was displayed at the Smithsonian Institution.

The filmmakers, from Canada’s TouTenKartoon and Fun Factory, don’t have him talk, they just tell his story, with a little creative and animated license. Robert Conroy (voiced by Logan Lerman) was the soldier who found him, got him to Europe and smuggled him home.

An indulgent drill instructor with a sense of humor lets him stay. “This dog drills better’n any of you.” A French soldier (Gerard Depardieu) mentors Conroy and Stubby once they reach the trenches.

And Robert Conroy’s sister (Helena Bonham Carter), the one he wrote letters to about the dog, narrates the tale.

The script traffics in some pretty tepid cliches, cooks who don’t like serving the dog, until the dog makes himself useful. Gaston, the Frenchman, complains about the teetotalling dog handler.

“You don’t like wine, Americain solzher?”

The precious few laughs here come via the easily recognizable canine behavior the animators capture. Running the dog through the obstacle course the soldiers train on is an obvious but cute touch.

“No Man’s Land” is rather less devastated and horrific than the real thing, but the trenches are realistically rendered, and the horrid German mustard gas attacks are vividly depicted.

Having the “Yankee” Division ship out, via train, through a sagebrush littered Western landscape (Western Connecticut?) can be dismissed as a Canadian animation mistake. Otherwise, the visuals aren’t bad.

Truthfully, it’s a tame and tepid affair for a kids’ film, with its chief recommendation being the chunks of truth built into its story. Stubby really did this and that, and the Frenchwomen of Château-Thierry really did sew him a chamois coat for his bravery and service to the town. He came home a celebrated war hero.

And while there’s no statue to him in Central Park, you can find him in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., another reminder of “Who’s a good boy?”

MPAA Rating: PG for war action and some thematic elements

Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Logan Lerman, Gerard Depardieu

Credits:Directed by, script by Richard Lanni, Mike Stokey . A Fun Academy release.

Running time: 1:24

The groaning pills and pot gags, the bad puns, the middle-aged paunches.

Yes, Broken Lizard is back, 17 years after the “How lowbrow can we go?” success (ahem) of “Super Troopers,” the aging comedy ensemble, beloved by stoners, have crowd-funded their way back onto the big screen.

The “Club Dread” kids — not really — are older farts making fart jokes now, slapping together another slapstick farce about cops behaving badly for the adoration of frat boys everywhere.

The core of their corps — Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske — is none the worse for wear, and still willing to let it all hang out in “Super Troopers 2,” an international incident of a comedy about Vermont cops getting jurisdiction over a little corner of the scenic Northeast that syrup-slurping Moose Heads have long called Canada.

The governor (Lynda Carter) explains how St. Georges du Laurent is actually American property, now. The chief (Brian Cox) leads the re-hired misfits fired so long ago for “The Fred Savage Incident” to “temporarily” take charge of a French Canadian town none too happy to lose its identity, its Pepe le Pew accents and access to National Health Care, Tim Horton’s and “Hockey Night in Canada.”

Or as they, led by their ex-hockey-player mayor (Rob Lowe) put it, you can stick your “Make America Great Again” where the Midnight Sun don’t shine.

“Weaker beer,” worse healthcare and zero gun laws is what the Yanks are offering, so the “Canuckleheads” say. And what’re they to lose? Aside from Rush and Barenaked Ladies?

A trio of disgruntled Mounties (Tyler Labine, Will Sasso and Hayes MacArthur) are aboot t’be kicked oot on their keisters. So hard feelings all around, eh?

The Canadians have Emmanuelle Chriqui as a cultural attache (Hey, a gal’s gotta work between “Fast and Furious” paydays) and that generally sunny Canadian way, always saying “Sow-ry” even when nothing is their fault.

The Americans steal their uniforms and run out ruining their reputations, pulling over tourists and unloading a string of French gibberish at them, as if the interlopers don’t speak the language.

“Frere Jacques grey poupon eau de TOILETTE! Ratatouille sacre croissant!”

I did laugh, here and there, at the endless “Mexican” gags aimed at Indian-American Jay Chandrasekhar, at Steve Lemme’s amusingly abrasive “Womack,” a comic actor of the Jimmy Fallon school — always on the brink of breaking-up in mid-scene.

The over-the-top blowhard Farva (Kevin Heffernan) tries ever so hard it’d be rude not to giggle at him, maybe twice.

But so many of the gags let the strain show. This stuff is seriously played, as in “R-rated comedy has passed you by.” Pill-paralyzed guy wheels his “Rascal” into a stack of bottles at a supermarket? Heat vision goggles revealing flatulence? The weary Canuck jokes? After “The Hangover” and “Bridesmaids,” after “Saturday Night Live” and for that matter, “How I Met Your Mother,” none of this stuff seems fresh, new, rude or that “politically incorrect.”

Cox blows his stack with skill, but the “plot” is a non-starter, the drug gags — female hormone pill jokes, a pot smoking band bus opener with Seann William Scott and whatever Wayans is still working these days playing the cops — past its expiration date.

Drug jokes are for the young, or the very very old. Plump middle-aged guys dyeing their hair to tell them? That’s just sad.

But never mind that. If you’re still into that, mazeltov. Go and be happy. Just designate a driver, stoners. You, like your heroes, aren’t as young and irresponsible as you used to be.

MPAA Rating:R for crude sexual content and language throughout, drug material and some graphic nudity

Cast: Broken Lizard, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rob Lowe, Brian Cox, Lynda Carter, Seann William Scott, Clifton Collins, Jr.

Credits:Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar , script by Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske

A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:30

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“Duck Butter” harks back to the earliest years of the Queer Cinema, “coming out” and “coming of age, sexually” dramas such as “Lianna” or “Go Fish.”

But it transcends those tentative first steps into the cinematic mainstream by foregoing many of the worn tropes of the corner of cinema, giving us a naive but wholly out and experienced heroine in search of herself and first true love, and maybe screwing that up the way she screws up much of the rest of her life.

Miguel Arteta did “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl,” and in star and co-writer Alia Shawcat, of “Arrested Development” and the TBS series “Search Party,” he’s got a collaborator willing to put it all out there and forget her comic crutches for an intimate, damaged and personal story packed into day and night of enforced intimacy with somebody who might “be the one.”

“I feel great about it!”

Shawcat is Naima, a young actress working the indie side of the street who might be getting her Big Indie Break. She plays a third wheel in an indie romance being directed by Mumblecore Kings the Duplass Brothers, Jay and Mark (“Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” “Cyrus”) starring Kumail Nanjiani of “The Big Sick.”

And we get to see her blow it. Maybe it’s her inexperience, her lack of understanding of the heterosexual situation she’s been cast into, but her off-key rehearsals and implied arrogance at refusing the gentler-than-gentle direction the sweetheart Duplasses give her tell us this won’t work out.

But off-set, she’s met somebody who pushes that “blown big break” to the back of her mind. Sergio (Laia Costa of “Victoria” and “Piercing”) is a bracing, exotic and impulsive foreigner, an aspiring singer and free spirit who dances to a tune only she hears. She scribbles art, tries out songs at Oil Can Harry’s gay bar and has neither any visible means of support nor obvious talent.

Naima is smitten.

Social drinking gives Sergio the chance to expound upon her world view —  “Do everything you want the second you want.” That might be a kiss, that could be something more profound. Sergio’s arresting idea for breaking the ice? “Skip time,” avoid all the dating and courtship rituals that trip up potential couplings. Spend 24 hours, eating, drinking,  copulating and relating to the person you’re interested in.

No sleep. No closed door bathroom breaks. Sergio, we come to learn, has a thing about her excretory functions.

And Naima, who confesses “I’ve never actually gotten close enough to someone to love them,” is willing to give this a go. After, of course, she learns she’s lost the movie gig.

So they get together in Sergio’s How-can-she-afford-this? LA house, play with her dog, argue and get intimate — repeatedly — over the course of what feels like a make-or-break first 24 hours of their relationship.

The current cliches of young love movies intrude here and there. Of course, they get “real” while video chatting with each other across an empty room. The movie business tie-in is lazy, a cheap way to get the Duplass Brothers on board and another name (Nanjiani) into the credits.

The most obvious way “Duck Butter” ties into the traditions of its gender genre are the “how to” nature of the sex scenes, giving the straight world and youngsters just discovering themselves a clue about “How do they do it?” This isn’t “Blue is the Warmest Color,” but the intimate scenes are intense and explicit without being particularly titillating. Romantic? Maybe.

Arteta’s quiet and deliberate storytelling style lets us see the pitfalls facing this couple before they do. Whatever hopeful vibe is in play here, this Sergio chick is a bit of a nut. The first time she goes ape with her feces — she warns us about this habit– most potential mates, and viewers — will get the clue. “Maybe a little too ‘OUT THERE’ for me.”

Sergio reinforces Naima’s worst impulses — argumentativeness, egotism, giving free rein to her anger at a world that doesn’t owe her a career. Neither, I have to say, comes off as that likable. Can they not see this? Or is that kind of their type?

But the two leads make an interesting couple, not so much with peg-the-meter attraction or sparks-flying potential conflicts, as two women recognizing something they’re lacking and desperately, naively hoping to find it in the next available partner — each other.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic sexual and scatalogical situations

Cast: Alia Shawkat, Laia Costa, Kumail Nanjiani, Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass

Credits:Directed by Miguel Arteta, script by Miguel Arteta, Alia Shawkat. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:37

Peter Weir’s original film — mid-70s mysterious, sensual, creepy, launched Australian cinema in the mid-70s. You simply cannot overstate the importance of this classic import, with its many overtones and subtexts, the first time the world saw actresses like Rachel Roberts and Jacki Weaver.

In the new “limited series,” Natalie Dormer of “Captain America” and “The Tudors” and “Game of Thrones” is the martinet of a teacher who loses some of her girls’ school students at an Australian landmark.

A little stoner “America absorbs Canadian Culture” comedy.

Among the guest stars, Brian Cox, Lynda Carter,, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rob Lowe, Jim Gaffigan, Fred Savage. As the original was like visiting the church of a strange religion (Stonertology) without imbibing in the rites (weed), well, low expectations.

Older farts doing stoner comedy? How’ll that work? Guess we’ll find “oot” in a tick.

Streaming cinema fans in search of the silly, the sexual, the satiric and the subtitled should definitely take a gander at “I Am Not an Easy Man,” a French sex farce about seeing the world from the other gender’s side.

It’s “What Women Want” or more exactly, the old Ellen Barkin/Jimmy Smits body-switch comedy “Switch” —  going further, into funnier places in a post #timesup take on the gender wars.

We meet Damien, played by Vincent Elbaz of “The Hundred Foot Journey,” at the office, pitching a horrifically sexist phone app, the “Bone-o-Meter,” an idea hilariously endorsed by one and all in a conference room full of men.

Save for one. The only woman there is appalled.

Chuckling later, he strolls with all the swagger his entitlement can give him, swapping come-ons with assorted female shop owners and casual acquaintances who suggest “friends with benefits” arrangements. He goes to his pal Christophe’s book-signing and comes-on, aggressively and obnoxiously, to Christophe’s champagne-serving assistant, Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). He even has a favorite pick-up line.

“Do you know what champagne and orange juice is?”

“A mimosa!”

“Your mouth looks pretty when you say it.”

Say good-bye, Damien.

“And when will I see you again?”

“In another life!”

It’s the walk home with Christophe (Pierre Benezit) that changes Damien’s life. He blindly strolls into a street sign so hard he knocks himself out. When he wakes up, the paramedic (a woman) is checking him out. Christophe is worried.

And the sign, directing us to the famous Paris Pere Lachaise (Father Lachaise) Cemetery? It’s now called Mere (Mother) Lachaise. Women, brazenly and uninvited, flirt from their cars. And when he wakes up in the morning, there’s nothing in his closet but colorful, revealing and suggestive shorts, shirts, “too tight” pants and sweatpants.

Before the morning is done, he’s realized that the one woman in that conference room at work is now the boss, that women are in ALL the decision-making positions at his ad agency. That boss has crudely come-on to him, asking for oral sex. And when he’s bristled and lashed out at this “parallel world” he finds himself in, he’s fired.

Christophe is no longer the author. He’s the author’s assistant. Alexandra the assistant is now the star writer, aggressive, assertive and entitled — sure that her Jaguar convertible will impress the boys.

Co-writer/director Eleonore Pourriat is also an actress, and she was even on the Louis C.K. series “Louis.” So yeah, you can guess she’s got stories to tell, and a point of view.

“I Am Not an Easy Man” –the title uses “easy” in that “Easy A” or “Earth Girls are Easy” sense — gives Damien and the viewer comic whiplash, dropping him into a world where women call the shots and have since time immemorial. Their clothing is masculinized, their aggression and assertiveness is built into their thinking. Even the aged and the homely figure they’ve got the right and indeed the obligation to “make the first move.”

Just. Like. Men.

Damien hooks up with one of those friends-with-benefits, who rejects him because he’s got too much body hair down there, “like a monkey.” Time for the boys (Christophe) to get together for a waxing session.

Men endure belittlement, discrimination, intellectual dismissal, brutish/selfish/dominating sex, ogling, catcalls and harassment and strip clubs where lithe, athletic men are the pole dancers. Boys headed off to high school wear belly-baring shirts and short shorts, lads objectified since birth.

Naturally, they organize. The women don’t have much patience for their “Masculist Groups,” and Alexandra’s next book pitch was going to be about “the myth of female dominance.” Until she takes up with Damien and her publisher thinks his “men in charge” delusion would make for hilarious reading.

For women.

I laughed and laughed at this thing, a film of wry, knowing giggles whose director knows where to stick the knife. As it’s on Netflix, you don’t have to read subtitles. It’s available as dubbed into English (check your audio settings).

But in any language, “I Am Not an Easy Man” works, an over-reaching satire that gets at the horrors women face in a world where they don’t have equality or the entitled initiative to succeed and a film that suggests God help us if the shoe is ever on the other foot.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sex scenes, a fist fight

Cast: Vincent Elbaz, Marie-Sophie Ferdane, Pierre Benezit, Blanche Gardin

Credits:Directed by Eleonore Pourriat, script by Ariane Fert and Eleonore Pourriat. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

Alex Pettyfer is the reporter chasing down the “suicides” behind Soviet Russia’s World War II Polish mass murders in “The Last Witness.” Michael Gambon is among those assuring him “There’s no STORY here.”

This one opens in Poland this month, limited release elsewhere over the summer. Looks a bit malnourished, I have to say.