Movie Nation

“Counterfeiters” is an ambitious, abridged thriller about a hustler who figures out a DIY way of making funny money.

A short, low-budget affair, it’s more of a prospectus than a polished, finished feature. Think of it as a calling card designed to advertise its remake potential, with a bigger budget, “name” cast and a rewrite or two.

Most film actors figure out the need to “make your own breaks” at some point. So there’s no such thing as a “vanity project” in the movies. Ask Ed Burns. Even when you write and direct it, have characters call your character “hot” and play with your luxuriant locks like a model told to “work it” by her favorite photographer.

Bryce Hirschberg wrote, directed and stars as Bridger, Mr. lives-with-his-mom and fusses at the way she does his laundry.

He’s got his reasons. Mom has been sick, and then she tells him “My cancer came back.”

They’re broke, but desperation joins inspiration when Bridger brushes his hair aside and notices what happened to the bills in his pocket. That’s how he can round up cancer-fighting cash. He’ll print his own money.

The script cleverly shows this process in a short opening montage, and only explains it “six months later” as Bridger’s operation has taken on lots of friends, a reasonably careful counterfeit laundering (Hah!) operation and a Carver motor yacht where the deed is done.

But “loose lips sink ships,” as they used to say in WWII. And “Sound travels on water, man.” These guys are getting greedy and sloppy. The idea is wash one dollar bills and re-print them into twenties. Because while bartenders, drug dealers, people selling used cars, etc., will check a hundo, “nobody” holds $20 bills up to the light.

True story — one of the few counterfeiters to ever utterly elude the Secret Service followed the same rule, way back in the 1940s. What was he copying and putting out as “legal tender?” Nickels.

Hirschberg squeezes a suspicious girlfriend, a flirtatious barmaid and a horny coke dealer into the mix as an old friend (Shawn Rolph) is added to the operation as “driver” of the boat.

Too many people know too much, and even the mastermind is prone to getting sloppy. It can’t last. It doesn’t.

“Counterfeiters” rarely builds up suspense, and Hirschberg the actor doesn’t register the panic that Bridger must be feeling as the walls close in. Decent sequences are followed with clumsy, amateurish ones — the worst stoned come-on scene in recent memory.

You may try to trip the viewer up with fake police stops and the like, defying expectations of this sort of movie’s formula. But there’s still the “I’m getting out after this” trope, the false promise of “I’m not gonna get caught.”

The chapter headings are cute, “Monopoly,” as in “We might have Monopoly money, but there’s no ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card,” “Jenga” (All comes tumbling down?). Are they really necessary in a 70 minute movie?

Which is why this feels more like a pitch for a longer, more polished remake. Maybe that first rewrite will work out some kinks, discard lines like “Those are some interesting words” and get this tale out of film festival purgatory.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sexual situations

Cast: Bryce Hirschberg, Shawn Rolph, Julie Simone, Bridget Avildsen, Annie Newton

Credits: Written and directed by Bryce Hirschberg. A Call It Pictures release.

Running time: 1:12

The trailer is freaking hilarious. The premise? A game of “tag” that lasts a lifetime? Through marriage cross-country moves, and childbirth, death and ruin? And it’s a true story?

Slapshticky, sentimental, great cast. Renner goes Action Jackson, Hannibal Buress puts the punch into the punchlines. Jake Johnson brings the high, hard stupid and Ed Helms takes the pratfalls. Damn.

Mark me “present” for “Tag.” June 15.

It’s a gimmick, a stunt, a filmmaking exercise.

Shooting your movie on an iPhone? That’s for aspiring filmmakers, somebody looking for a cheap way to shoot a movie and a headline-grabbing hook when you’re pitching it to film festivals.

Sean Baker makes “Tangerine” on the streets and seedy clubs of LA, he becomes a star director. “The Florida Project” comes next.

For a proven master filmmaker who likes to be his own cinematographer, Steven Soderbergh (he’s listed as Peter Andrews/Director of Photography in the credits) shooting “Unsane” on his iPhone had to be a fun, challenging exercise.

A paranoid (literally) thriller, he’d get the benefits of the intimacy you can achieve with a tiny camera, no bigger than your average video viewfinder on most digital cameras. He spends more time composing tight shots that get a lot of information in them, framing scenes in an arresting way that reminds the viewer, “Oh yeah, he did this with his cellphone.”

And if you watch “Unsane” on your cell phone, you’ll appreciate a picture of tight close-ups, natural lighting and action that’s right up in your face.

Does it serve the movie? Not really. The stunt is a false economy, an aesthetic “doing it one with arm tied behind your back,” a distraction. And it’s a way of reminding us of who a “star director” is or was in an era of cheap child labor age film school alumni and self-promoting hacks (Ava Duvernay and Steven S. DeKnight, this years’s Lee Daniels, Zack Snyder or Eli Roth) are studios’ preferred compliant employees.

Claire Foy, shorn of the attire, the accent and the regal makeup of “The Crown,” is the uncommonly-named Sawyer Valentini, a brittle, touchy investments analyst with a bank.

She’s new to Boston, and young — not so young that she can’t shrug off her boss’s suggestion that they attend a convention together by recognizing what he’s really pitching. Sawyer uses dating apps, and bluntly informs one bar meetup that “this evening is going to go the way you want,” but on her no-strings-attached terms.

The screenplay takes on the tint of a #TimesUp movie. And that’s before we figure out that she’s been stalked, that she moved to a new city, changed phones and uprooted her life to escape her tormentor.

And damned if she isn’t seeing his bearded, hulking presence in bars, her office, on the street. He’s gotten in her head, wrecked her sense of security and dinged her psyche pretty hard.

She reaches out to get some help, and damned if the mental health facility shrink doesn’t pull Big Mental Health Care Switch on her. Mention that yeah, maybe once you had thoughts of killing yourself, and that “boilerplate” paperwork she gives to you lets them “voluntarily self-commit” her.

Smiling, turning on the charm doesn’t work. Snapping “I have RIGHTS” to officious orderlies and nurses doesn’t work. It’s just “24 hours,” she’s assured. They have her — and her insurance — in their grasp, and bums-rushing her into a coed ward full of the genuinely disturbed where she’s threatened, bullied (Juno Temple is a belligerent psyche case who torments her) and medicated just ensures that those hours turn into seven days.

And so on.

We’re meant to wonder if Sawyer’s fears, her stalker-sightings, are all in her head. Maybe, for all the seeming shenanigans by this corporate facility, she’s in need of help.

But we’re seeing the damned stalker (Joshua Leonard) too. Her rage becomes our rage, even if her compliant reaction, almost accepting her fate even as she lashes out, fails to interest the doctors or cops in her dilemma (the stalker is now on staff there), can’t get rescued by her mother (Amy Irving, in a fierce and compact performance).

The system-wise fellow “prisoner” Nate (Jay Pharoah, cool and likable) tries to talk Sawyer through her crisis, assure her of the easiest path out. But she reacts the way any of us would. She’s enraged, humiliated. If she was bigger, she’d tear off a chair leg and try to beat her way out.

That’s an option I considered while watching her live through this nightmare. I’ve seen people use this sort of commitment to punish a wayward spouse, and it’s scary to think somebody can pull this on you.

But we don’t really fear for Sawyer, even as her stalker’s creepy fantasy unfolds and envelops her. She’s perfectly sane, we’re sure. And a smart cookie. She’ll extricate herself from this. Maybe.

“Unsane” makes a creepily watchable thriller, but it’s so light on thrillers and suspense that its Hitchcockian twist feels like an afterthought, a cheat not earned by the movie we’ve watched come before it. Listen for Soderbergh’s “Nespresso” joke. That’s for you, George Clooney.

As an exercise, it’s not as dull as an earlier Soderbergh no-budget experiment (“Full Frontal”), but it’s just as self-conscious. Film buffs will get more out of it than the casual viewer.

It’s a movie best left to Netflix, which you can stream on the same phone that the maestro filmed it on.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing behavior, violence, language, and sex references

Cast: Claire Foy, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple, Joshua Leonard, Amy Irving

Credits: Directed by Steven Soderergh, script by Jonathan Bernstein, James Greer . A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:37

Put it down to diminished expectations or what have you, but there’s a surprising delicacy to “Midnight Sun,” a teen weeper built around Bella Thorne.

You may know what to expect, if you’ve seen “A Walk to Remember” or “Everything, Everything” or even “The Fault in Our Stars.” But all involved give this picture a sympathetic shot, even if the script flails and fails miserably in concocting an ending that feels earned, honest and as graceful as what comes before it.

In this adaptation of a 2006 Japanese melodrama, Thorne plays Katie, a teen who has spent her whole life indoors — at least during daylight hours. She suffers from Xeroderma pigmentosum, “XP,” a rarer-than-rare genetic disorder that makes the sun deadly to her.

She grew up as “the vampire” next door, when the other kids in her corner of Washington thought of her. But that was years ago. The only people she spends time with are her doting dad, played by Rob Riggle at his sweetest and most PG, her BFF the irrepressible Morgan (Quinn Shephard, adorable) and the guy who runs the train station late at night, where she plays guitar and sings for passengers who get off the last commuter trains of the evening.

Then there’s Charlie, the hunky high school swimmer (Patrick Schwarzenegger) whom she watches go to school “every day, and yet he had no idea I even existed.”

Until that fateful night when she drops her songwriter’s journal and he picks it up.

It says something of Thorne’s skill that, as an almost certainly-jaded former child star (“Shake It Up”) who seems to court provocative web attention as a means of “building her brand,” that she’s able to summon up the awkwardness and under-socialized shyness necessary to pull off her early encounters with her dream boat.

“Holy pregnant cow!”

Schwarzenegger has barely a hint of his Dad in his looks and demeanor, and a disarming charm is the result.

The adaptation gives this story the expected high school touchstone moments — Katie’s first high school party, a post-graduation bacchanale cut into a montage as bouncy as a game of beer pong. A romantic trip to Seattle, a hint of how each gives something to the other, all tossed in for good measure.

Did I mention she doesn’t tell him she’s sick? She’s got her reasons. “When you tell somebody you’re sick, they stop seeing the real you.”

Director Scott Speer (“Step Up” sequels) and screenwriter Erik Kirsten don’t hide the inevitable and can’t get out of the drawn-out ending to save their lives. But they give Thorne some nice showcase moments, make her plaintive but pleasant singing voice fit the story and have the good sense to make Charlie’s summer job involve a marina.

What’s more romantic than a sailboat?

If you’re old enough to remember “A Walk to Remember,” there’s nothing here that will surprise you enough to warrant skipping this week’s “This is Us.” But if you’re still a dewy-eyed teen fresh out of going “Awwwww” at the out-of-date coming-out romance “Love, Simon,” there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a few tissues in your pocket and bracing for, if not a good cry, at least the sniffle or two “Midnight Sun” promises.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some teen partying and sensuality.

Cast: Bella Thorne, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Rob Riggle, Quinn Shephard

Credits:Directed by Scott Speer, script by Eric Kirsten ,based on the 2006 Japanese film screenplay by Kenji Bando . An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:31

Andrew Garfield is the hero, looking for a missing woman (Riley Keogh), looking to the point where he goes deep down the rabbit hole of obsession in this dark noirish (Comic?) thriller.

Topher Grace plays his helpful, common sense friend.

David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows”) directed “Under the Silver Lake”. 

A24 is releasing it. Our interest is…aroused.

Yeah, a killer “From the studio that brought you” sight gag.

Sure, a little “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” poke.

Lots and lots of the old ultra-violence, self-referential comic book movie incidentals properly mocked.

Score! May 18, DP sees if he can play with the Boys and Girls of Summer, this time out.

Those scamps from TV’s “Workaholics” let their R-rated freak flags fly in “Game Over, Man,” a scruffy, unruly comedy with violence, pot, full frontal nudity and a body count.

It’s “Die Hard” with stoners, a blood-spattered tale of three hotel room cleaners with Big Dreams who find themselves the only thing that stands between a gang of kidnappers and the Middle Eastern party boy they’re trying to shake down.

Motor-mouthed Adam Devine is Alexxx, “the hustler, the Rick Ross” of the trio. Anders Holm, credited with the script, is Darren, “the Ideas Guy.” And Joel (Blake Anderson) is the mechanical whiz who can engineer their assorted “big ideas,” they hope, into reality.

One big idea? “Jeans Club,” where you “rent” pants for the night. Another? “Hot Tutor,” hiring strippers to be tutors so that teens are more interested in homework.

The one idea worth exploring, they figure, is “Skintendo,” a wearable inter-active video game suit. When their creeper hotel manager (Daniel Stern) orders them to work a big party booked by a Tunisian Bey (Utkarsh Ambudkar) and rich poseur-Instagram star, they smell their chance. They’ll pitch him.

That almost comes off, but the “not according to plan” part of the night is just beginning. Criminals led by Neal McDonough take the Bey hostage. And they mean business.

“You are CRAZY, Mr. Albino Bad Guy!”

The three are loose in a hotel in lockdown, unable to phone for help, not that Alexxx would like that. Not “cool” enough, he figures. The hapless, quarrelsome trio — the other two think Alexxx is an idiot — stumble their way into brawls, shoot-outs, with every scheme botched, every botching punctuated with some bad guy or other dispatched.

“He looks like a human-sized ketchup pack exploded!”

It’s a wildly uneven and violent romp, lurching between fights and comic set-pieces. Two bad guy minions are actually a gay couple, who interrupt their terrorizing for sex. Great way to trick bad guys? Fake your own death — via auto-erotic asphyxiation.

A clever escape? How about an improvised “Home Alone” zip line?

“Dude, that’s more ‘Home Alone 3.'”

Meanwhile, at the party, hostages are getting killed. As the Bey is rich and famous, people we know are at the party. We get cameos by Jillian Bell, Joel McHale, Shaggy, Donald Faison, Fred Armisen and assorted “Jackass” alumni. Not all of them make it.

The starring trio have comfort level that makes them believable as friends, though the other two tend to shrink into the background behind Devine. The highlights of the supporting cast are Ambudhar, a veteran of “The Mindy Project” and “Pitch Perfect” who masters the patois of a foreigner trying his hand at hip hop vernacular, trying a little too hard, and Rhona Mitra, as a psychotic henchwoman with murderous intolerance for sexism.

There are some explosive laughs in this. But they show up so randomly, with the story in between the payoff moments so lame, that “Game Over” screams out for more editing. Judging by the many names on the IMdb page for the film, a LOT of folks have already been cut out of it.

These filmdom frat bros don’t sweat the logic or physics of anything, don’t flinch at making a joke out of graphic violence. That can be forgiven. What can’t is the movie’s slow-footedness, endless pauses for the bros to bond or bicker that they should be more bonded. “Game” sorely lacks a sense of forward motion. Alexxx provides the words that an action comedy like this should live by.

“This is Video Games 101. You kill bad guys, you take their s—!”

Every time the script forgets that, it’s “Game Over” before it really gets going.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, pot use, full frontal nudity and sexual content

Cast: Adam Devine, Anders Holm, Blake Anderson, Jamie Demetriou, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Neal McDonagh, Daniel Stern, Aya Cash

Credits:Directed by Kyle Newacheck  script by Anders Holm. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

It’s a drama with conspiracy thriller elements based on the “oil for food” deal the world made with Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the years between the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“Backstabbing for Beginners” is an A24 release, which always gets my attention. The veteran Danish director Per Fly hasn’t had much exposure over here. Will this change that?

Interesting to hear Ms. Robbie flaunt something like her actual Aussie accent. And show a little leg in this taste of “Terminal.”

Vaughn Stein’s movie is a film noir thriller/mystery with Simon Pegg, Mike Myers and Max Irons in the cast. Assassins, a mastermind and madness. May 11.

It’s the quotation that opens the quirky Canadian comedy “Birthmarked” that gives away the game.

“I think of a new born baby as a blank book,” Walt Disney once said.

And as this uneven but amusing romp unfolds, with its scientist parents setting out to raise three kids in ways that contradict their genetic family history, you can’t help but think of “Little Einsteins.” That Disney TV series was a concept the company bought from folks who were just sure that exposing toddlers to Beethoven, Great Books and Big Science would make them grow up smarter. It didn’t work.  

But back in 1977, husband and wife scientists Catherine and Ben Morin (Toni Collette, Matthew Goode) wouldn’t know that. They pitch an eccentric, science-backing millionaire (Michael Smiley of “Free Fire” and “Rogue One”) the ultimate “Nature vs. Nurture” experiment.

“No one is a prisoner of their genetic heritage!”

They will raise three kids — Luke, their own son, the product of generations of scientists, taught from birth to be an artist, his every free expression praised and nurtured; Maya, adopted from a family of “simpletons,” taught and told she’s “brilliant” at every turn, and Maurice, adopted adopt from a long line of aggressive males, raised to be a pacifist, “like the Mahatma.”

We get a quick introduction to that upbringing — seeing years of exposure to Puccini, Mozart, complex concepts, with exercises bending them towards those end results. Luke (Jordan Poole) channels his hurt feelings into playing the blues, Maurice (Anton Gillis-Adelman) is forced to meditate away his tendency to tease and torment his siblings, with Maya (Megan O’Kelly) encouraged to intellectualize everything.

Catherine is into the project, but more accepting of what she sees the deviations of “any normal dysfunctional family.” Ben is totally into the experiment, all about “Anger Discharge Training” and “Stimulated Self Emotions” exercises.

But the kids? At 12, they’re starting to act out, befuddling their parents, arching the eyebrow of their Soviet defector Olympian research assistant (Andreas Aspergis).  Their roughhousing develops an edge, they stage a grossly “inappropriate” play based on “Letters to Penthouse,” and at every opportunity, they mouth off.

“Come on, you’re smarter than that.”

“Apparently not.”

Canadian director Emmanuel Hoss-Desmaris and screenwriter Marc Tulin (“Whitewash”) find their laughs around the fringes of what seems a more promising set-up than it actually is. Ben’s lifelong obsession with lady equestrians makes for an interesting sex life, and kids raised in a psychological environment addressing their parents in the jargon of self-help can be funny.

“Mom! Dig DEEP. Find that inner serenity!”

The kids get short shrift in the story, and without doing more with them, “Birthmarked” never gets its hands on the weird relationships between loving but experimenting parents and their kids, the subjects of that experiment. The experiment itself has a funny but predictable and barely-sketched in arc, from meticulous to off the rails in rather too abrupt a fashion.

And the parental relationship is a little thin, too, as if the writer and director were too invested in setting up a twist, using science experiment graphics and expecting droll, ironic narration by Fionnula Flanagan, playing a personal assistant to the millionaire who witnesses this years-long debacle-in-the-making, to cover the film’s comic shortcomings.

Collette ably gets across a woman finally questioning what they’ve been doing to their kids while Goode does a decent job suggesting a man dogmatic in his determination to see this project through. Smiley’s millionaire Gertz is a cartoonish figure without the colors drawn in.

If the kids are shortchanged in the movie, that just mirrors what they might lack in such an environment — quality time, constructive child-rearing and socialization. They can quote “Playful teasing builds character,” but that doesn’t mean that the boundaries being hammered into them are the right ones.

Frustrating as it is, this scruffy, misshapen farce still has laugh-out-loud lines, and lightly-amusing send-ups of an idea that has intuition going for it, and little else. Maybe taking child-rearing advice from the likes of Walt Disney isn’t the best idea.

MPAA Rating: unrated, slapstick violence, sexual situations, alcohol, profanity

Cast: Toni Collette, Matthew Goode, Michael Smiley, Fionnoula Flanagan, Andreas Apergis, Suzanne Clement

Credits:Directed by Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, script by Marc Tulin . A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:27