Movie Nation

We can imagine greater horrors than anything most movie makers can conjure up visually. It’s the unseen unknown that truly terrifies.

And for about 25 minutes, “The Void” lives up to that credo and the promise of its title. We witness a killing spree. A sheriff’s deputy collects a bloodied survivor and gets him to a tiny remote hospital.

Almost instantly, the violence explodes inside the building, and the hospital itself is under siege, encircled by mysterious hooded figures with giant black triangles on their cowls.

What’s going on here? We’ve barely caught our breath long enough to figure out the deputy’s (Aaron Poole) marginally competent and over-matched, the staff (Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, et al) is isolated and in shock. Leave one of them alone, and she just might kill a patient.

A nurse trainee (Ellen Wong) is the last person you’d want to lean on in a crisis.

“Statistically, you’re much more likely to die in a hospital!”

There’s a pregnant girl (Grace Munro), her grandpa (James Millington), a state trooper (Art Hindle), and the fellow leading that killing spree (Daniel Fathers) has arrived to finish the job, not-exactly-explaining what the escaped victim (Evan Stern) did to bring all this horror down on them all.

“Yeah? What about you, Man of Mystery?”

“Mind your own business!”

And then, wham! We see tentacles crawling out of the mouths of the dead. We see the giant blob these belong to. The mystery evaporates and the siege and the movie built around fritter away every iota of tension that a good-at-showing-terror cast and the scenario have built up.

“The Void” devolves into a creature feature. The legions of hooded cultists, the people inside who “turn,” all routine and gory and not the least bit frightening.

Killer cult pictures are almost as common as monsters among us films. But the moment co-writers/directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski turn their movie over to the blob wrangler, “The Void” — with its wise-cracks and crackling, static-filled radios, it’s desperate dashes to fetch a shotgun from a police cruiser — exhausts all interest and falls apart.

The blob isn’t nearly as scary as something we cannot see. Nothing they do to finesse that — human acolytes of the blob, cult leaders — fixes that hole in the middle of “The Void.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence

Cast: Aaron Poole, Ellen Wong, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Grace Munro, Daniel Fathers

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Gillespie, Steven Kostanski. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:30

Those sexist eunuchs that warped a generation discover “The Future is Female” in “Smurfs: The Lost Village,” a Neil Patrick Harris-free reboot of this insipid franchise.

There’s no live-action, Smurfs-in-the-Real-World element to the first Smurfs movie since 2013, just polished animation with a fresh set of famous actors doing the voices.

Same Smurf puns — “Code Blue!”

Same patriarchy, with Papa Smurf trying to rein in the adventurous Single Smurf Female, Smurfette.

Same “Smurf-obsessed wannabe wizard,” Gargamel.

“Smurfs! Why won’t they just DIE?”

Same candy-colored forest, this time with colorful dragonflies, Smurf-eating plants and the like. Same sort of unchallenging story, traveling through The Forbidden Forest and The Swamp of No Return, a tale aimed at five-and-unders.

Only this time, we have Oscar winner Julia Roberts as leader of an Amazonian branch of the Smurf diaspora, Michelle Rodriguez as the toughest Smurf of them all, Rainn Wilson as Gargamel, Demi Lovato as Smurfette, and Joe Manganiello as Hefty Smurf.

And since there is no point to making any cartoon without the cartoon-voiced Jack McBrayer, he’s Clumsy Smurf.

That’s the sole challenge and only entertainment value in this nicely-animated drivel, figuring out the voices. And there I’ve gone and spoiled it for you.

Do Gordon Ramsay, Titus Burgess, Ellie Kemper and Ariel Winter really voice bit parts?

The only chuckle any savvy viewer will pull from this is the sound of Mandy Patinkin as Papa Smurf. His reputation as the most unpleasant diva in Hollywood makes one laugh at him being sentenced to this Belgian blue hell, if only for the single afternoon it must have taken him to record his part.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild action and rude humor

Cast:  The voices of Demi Lovato, Julia Roberts, Rainn Wilson, Mandy Patinkin, Joe Manganiello, Michelle Rodriguez, Jack McBrayer

Credits:Directed by Kelly Asbury, script by Stacey Harman, Pamela Ribon. A Columbia/Sony Animation release.

Running time: 1:29

Any  honest, accurate sequel to “Trainspotting,” the 1996 film based on Irvine Welsh’s flinty-funny novel about heroin addiction, love, hijinks and capers going wrong in Edinburgh, would have to be even more littered with corpses than the original.

Twenty years on and most of these needle-sharing losers would be dead — and not just walking dead, with the faces and physiques that betray years of abuse.

But that would be a mighty short Danny Boyle film, and totally spoil the nostalgia and affection he and his cast felt by revisiting that story, that place and that time. Amusing and toothless is what they went for.

So in “T2 Trainspotting,” Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) comes home for a brief visit. He took off with the loot from the caper from the first film, heading to Amsterdam to get his life on track. That’s like retiring to North Carolina to quit smoking, but the irony’s intentional (no doubt).

He’s a married accountant, and catching up with the former Sick Boy, Simon (Jonny Lee Miller), he discovers his old mate has moved on to cocaine and digital blackmail schemes with a Bulgarian hooker (Anjela Nedyalkova), and that he’s never forgiven Renton for the betrayal.

“I’m gonna make him sorry he ever came back.”

Begbie (Robert Carlyle) still needs subtitles for us to understand his slang-riddled Scots accent. He’s spent years in prison, which probably extended his life. He, too, hasn’t forgiven and forgotten Renton.

Only Spud (Ewen Bremner) has maintained the lifestyle, clinging to the Horse as his only true friend, losing touch with his one-love Gail (Shirley Henderson) and their son despite AA meetings and an desperate desire to kick.

Whatever Renton’s intentions, he is lured back into this world. He’s just another nostalgic Brit swamped in a culture that lives in the past, “a tourist in your own youth.” He’s not unaware that “the world changes, even if we don’t.” Change is all around them, the Leith and Edinburgh of decay is mostly gone.

They’re all in their late 40s, and they each figure out the only way to feel alive is to recapture that past — the razor’s edge of drugs, casual relationships and violence that marked their youth.

Boyle revisits the early hallmarks of his style; extreme close-ups, artsy effects, pop-jangled score. He quotes from the original film’s dazzling soundtrack and iconic images. hiking the same hills, bathing in the changing textures of the times and wallowing, here and there, in nostalgia.

There’s one properly seedy pub, which the lads scheme to turn into a bordello (helped by government grants), and one flashy club scenes where those sing-along-Scots revel in the yesteryear of Queen and”Radio Gaga.”

And there two killer moments, though nothing on a par with the vile toilet or baby dying of neglect of the first film. Here, we have McGregor and Miller singing to weepy Catholic hating Orangemen and McGregor explaining, in a breathless riff full of sarcasm, rage and wit, the “Choose Life” motto of Thatcherite Britain, mock-embraced by Wham!, ridiculed in the original “Trainspotting.”

“Choose slut-shaming. Choose never learning from your mistakes…Choose 9/11 never happened.”

McGregor settles nicely back into Renton, and Miller shows his mileage in some early scenes (dyeing his hair gives us the Sick Boy of old). Carlyle’s Begbie is thick-featured, has lost some sex drive, but not the testosteroned urge to head-butt his way out of a jam.

And Bremner’s Spud, the longest survivor of the deadly addiction, turns out to be the one with the best memory, the bard for their “lost youth.”

That’s meant ironically, too, I suppose. But it’s not nitpicking to see that this is a seriously defanged affair, a sequel that lacks the punch or novelty of the original. Novelist Welsh and Boyle do little to bring gender equality to this world. Putting a new starlet into the gang’s midst upsets the balance and steals screen from Henderson, and in a glorified cameo, Kelly Macdonald (in a single scene, giving the film’s best performance)– female survivors of that epidemic.

It is a story of a reckoning — several reckonings — that is afraid of actually wrestling with the consequences of betrayal and self-abuse, of letting its characters naturally mellow or die because they can’t.

It may give fans like me a bit of the warm and fuzzies, seeing these lads again. But if “Trainspotting” was alternately life-sapping and life-affirming, giddy and grim, hilarious and alarming, “T2” never achieves either the same highs or lows and is all the poorer for it.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, language throughout, strong sexual content, graphic nudity and some violence
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Jonny Lee Miller, Anjela Nedyalkova, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, Shirley Henderson, Kelly Macdonald
Credits: Directed by Danny Boyle, script by John Hodge, based on the Irvine Welsh novels. A Sony/Tristar release.
Running time: 1:57

Animation, if you do it right, is still the surest way to a blockbuster in Hollywood.

Dreamworks’ “The Boss Baby” wasn’t to every taste — the very definition of a film earning “mixed reviews” (50% Metacritic), I found the grownup humor a hoot. But it is hitting $50 million its opening weekend, the low end of the animated blockbuster range. Not bad at all for a movie owned by Alec Baldwin, doing his callous business brat in a baby’s body act (“We could share!” “You obviously never went to business school.” ) 

That knocks (barely) “Beauty and the Beast,” Disney’s almost-animated remake of its animated classic, out of the top spot at the box office. “Beast” doesn’t care. “Beast” will clear $400 million by Wed.

Fangirl/fanboy fave “Ghost in the Shell,” the live action version of the manga/anime/game phenomenon, underwhelmed. Scarlett J. in a body suit wasn’t enough to drag them in to this Japanese-inspired “Blade Runner” riff. It’s doing OK — $20 million+. But that’s WAY below projections (Sorry, Box Office Mojo), WAY below ScarJo’s similar sexy-violent “Lucy,” which opened at over $40.

“The Zookeeper’s Wife” opened on 474  screens, and sits just inside the Top Ten. Weak reviews won’t help this Holocaust with Critters drama.

“Power Rangers” plummeted, “CHiPs” and “Life” are officially bombs.

“Logan” will end its run with about $225 million, “Get Out” is winding down towards $170.

So iconoclastic filmmaker Terrence Malick shows up at Austin’s South by Southwest music festival with a camera crew, a cluster of adoring movie stars and no real story.

And the result is “Song to Song,” a rambling, insomnia-curing meditation on music and the musical life that has too little of either to make any sense at all.

Incoherent? Yeah. Random, too. Not to point out how far Malick’s been crawling up his own bum the past ten years, but let’s just say he’s lucky  “Song” didn’t find polyps, which he would have been tempted to show us.

As has been his habit for years, he’s “scripted” the movie out of what he’s shot. So the story, such as it is, and the dialogue if you can call it that is mostly after-thought and voice-over. He’s shot a silent film with sound, and “fixed” it with voice over — the lazy movie-maker’s crutch.

“Song” is an improvised-feeling tale of ambition and love triangles — “Jules and Jim” with Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender as the pals pursuing the wannabe played by Rooney Mara.

She’s a guitarist looking for a break, aspiring for fame and a career, but mumbling nonsense about wanting the “simple” life “living from song to song.”

Natalie Portman breaks that triangle, playing a dishy waitress charmed by the producer (Fassbender) who notices the important things about the rich guy.

“You have everything.”

Gosling has never looked more beautiful on camera, Portman never sexier. But the performances don’t register. At all. The dialogue ranges from inane to tedious.

There are musician (Iggy and Patty and assorted Chili Peppers) and actor (Val Kilmer) cameos . Some pointless conversations take place backstage, in a mosh pit or at posh parties tied to this vast music festival.

And here’s what’s memorable — Holly Hunter, as the mother of one of the characters, weeping and lurching about an empty Sears parking lot.  Patty Smith going on and on about her life and her late husband.

Some critics bought into and let Malick get away with his indulgent piffle, “The Tree of Life,” and he’s honored that graded-on-the-curve pass by giving us “To the Wonder,” “Knight of Cups” and this. They’re movies only inside the brilliant man’s head.

This is crap. Which is what everybody finds if they stick their heads far enough up their you-know-what.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexuality, nudity, drug use and language
Cast: Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling, Michael Fassbender, Natalie Portman, Holly Hunter
Credits: Written and directed by Terrence Malick. A Broad Green release.
Running time: 2:09

There is no shortage of Holocaust stories that Hollywood wants to tell, and since they concern history’s ultimate “Never forget” horror, that is all well and good.

The risk, of course, is that the subject becomes trivialized, rendered trite and cute in the endless variations on a theme. There is merit in a “Boy in the Striped Pajamas” or “The Book Thief.” But does that overcome the inherent cuteness of the telling?

“The Zookeeper’s Wife” slams into that conundrum, a true story of Warsaw zookeepers who smuggled Jews out of the ghetto, into their hidden animal paddocks and out of the city during the darkest days of World War II.

But from the very title you can guess the problems. There are cute animals, tended to by a kind and gorgeous woman, played with earthy empathy by Jessica Chastain.

This could very well have slipped into “Here’s a movie that explains the Holocaust to children” genre, cuddly and kid-friendly. But director Niki Caro (“Whale Rider,” “McFarland, USA”) repeatedly jolts the viewer with graphic violence and almost comical sex, as if to say, “Thought this was for KIDS, didya?”

The result is a film with too many rough edges for kids, edges too polished and precious to connect with adults.

Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh are Antonina and Jan Zabinski, zookeepers of Poland’s most celebrated zoo. Jan is the scientist, respected by his peers. But Antonina is his Dr. Doolittle, “a magician” with animals. From the camel that follows her on her rounds to the lion cubs she lets sleep with their little boy (Timothy Radford), they adore her.

And when there’s trouble with an elephant calf’s birth, Antonina can be counted on to flee a dinner party, in party dress, to grapple with the calf and fend off the frightened, insistent and persistent trunk of the mother to save it.

That scene, by the way, is stunning — an actress literally wrestling with a trunk in the middle of a performance. Alarming, but no Oscar nominees were harmed in the making of this movie.

The warning signs are there for everyone in Warsaw, but Antonina refuses to let them flee. Instead, she subjects her family and her young son to the bombing of Warsaw and the slaughter of the animals in their charge.

This subjects the audience to this horror as well. And that’s just the beginning.

Caro and crew treat us to a lightly sanitized version of the forced starvation and mass murder of the Jews of Warsaw, with the intrepid Zabinski’s figuring out a way to keep their zoo useful to the Nazis (it becomes a pig farm) and use it to hide refugees they help escape.

The victims are a saintly collection of the wronged and innocent — friends, children, a girl who has just been raped. Only that girl (Shira Haas) has enough of a character to play to make an impression.

Daniel Brühl of “Rush” is the generic smooth-talking Nazi zookeeper they have to fool, a “Good German” who only wants to “protect their breeding stock,” but who has eyes for Antonina, something she uses to keep the family’s secret.

The genetically obsessed German drags Antonina into his buffalo breeding experiment, a rutting/mating, bumping and grinding metaphor so laughable and obvious that you feel for Chastain and wonder why she didn’t veto this idiotic scene. The movie has sexual elements that feel frankly out of place, simply here to escape that “Children’s Movie about the Holocaust” label.

Historically, the ghetto and the war feel sanitized and the villainous Soviets are let off the hook, almost entirely. Dramatically, Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman serve up a couple of whoppers in between the standard tropes of the genre.

The players effect faint Polish accents, but Chastain is such a soulful actress that this wasn’t a bother. It’s not her most emotional performance, however. She’s too caught up playing an icon on a pedestal to make the polymath Antonina frightened, desperate to save lives.

There’s little tension, little sense of the suffering even if we understand the stakes.

The best you can say about the whole enterprise is that it’s a righteous story, clumsily told.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, violence, brief sexuality, nudity and smoking

Cast: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Brühl

Credits:Directed by Niki Caro, script by Angela Workman, based on the Diane Ackerman book. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:04

“Ghost in the Shell” is a sensory overload, eye-popping eye candy movie a visual feast of the “Blade Runner” “Fifth Element” variety.

Based on the popular and enduring comic book/anime/Japanese media franchise, it’s dark and dazzling to look at. And whatever side you’ve taken in the “Why’d they cast a white actress as this beloved Japanese assassin?” debate, Scarlett Johansson works in this pan cultural-pan racial filmic universe.

Not that this will surprise anyone who saw her in “Lucy.” Or “Under the Skin.”

But the story, stretching back to the late ’80s origins of this franchise (famously turned into an anime film in 1995) feels worn and dated. And not just because comic writer Masumune Shirow was entirely too enamored of “Blade Runner” for his own good.

Johansson is Major, a trained killer made up of a dead woman’s brain and the best body futurescience can manage, a thinking, problem-solving person in a synthetic shell.

She is the ultimate “enhancement” in an era when eyes can be upgraded, body parts of all types replaced (at assorted price points), livers made hangover proof.

“You’re what everyone will become one day,” her creator (Juliette Binoche) purrs.

And she’s great at what she’s been created for — killing. Her boss, played by Japanese director/actor Beat Kitano, has but to rattle off a command (in Japanese, you can upload any language into your brain, even upgrade to a non-verbal wireless telepathy network) and she dives in to deliver justice and rescue the threatened.

But the company behind her and most of the world’s “enhancement” business, Hanka Robotics, is under threat. A mysterious hooded figure, Kuze (Michael Pitt), is hacking and sending insta-minions, Geisha-bots or humans nobody will miss, after Hanka employees.

Major must track him down before he spills more blood, wreaks more havoc in their world, on Hanka’s stock price.

But she has these memories, inadequately illustrated visually in the film, barely-suppressed suggestions of her previous life. Maybe she wasn’t a refugee who drowned on her way to Japan after all.

Every scene is overstuffed with background imagery that grabs the eye — streets filled with sky-scraper-sized holographic advertising, all manner of hi-tech eyewear, backpacks, fashion and the like. This is the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner” transplanted to Asia, ignoring the warnings that a growing chunk of Japan may be eventually rendered unlivable by the ongoing meltdown and radiation crisis of Fukishima.

For some reason, we haven’t enhanced our way out of needing machine guns and big-mag pistols, which is how Major and her team (Pilou Asbæk plays her sidekick) dispatch the legions of masked corporate goods and other bad guys. There are robo-cops on every corner, body scanners at frequent intervals. 

And still, guns are everywhere. Not to worry. If you survive the shootout, 3D printing, electronics and hydraulics can quickly undo the damage.

They’ve cast one of the most famously shapely actresses of her era in the lead role, but “Ghost” is largely de-sexed, a movie with barely a hint of the pervy appeal of the manga.

And whatever novelty there was in this notion that brain (soul) transplants will leave shadow memories of who you used to be has been beaten to death in the decades since “Robocop” (which predated “Ghost”). What’s the sci-fi hook of “Get Out,” after all? It’s a tired trope.

Still, I love the yakuza nightclubs, the high-rises, the wearying visual noise of the streets that director Rupert Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman”) and his team cooked up — stunning electrified wallpaper, manifold variations of functional or fashion-conscious facial gear that has Major wondering, and asking, that big question of every new face she encounters.

“Are you human?”

Pitt earns a nice Roy Batty moment, but the whole enterprise is emotionally flat and arid. The unfamiliar feels overly familiar. And no matter how many shots of a leotarded Johansson Sanders throws at us — he has a “thing” for his leading ladies, remember — “Ghost in the Shell” can’t escape its own ghosts, the movies, stories, characters and even settings of truly original work that predates it.

For all its gory mayhem, it’s a movie as bloodless as it is sexless.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence, suggestive content and some disturbing images

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Takeshi “Beat” Kitano,  Pilou Asbæk, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt

Credits:Directed by Rupert Sanders script by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler, based on the Masamune Shirow comic. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:47

A vivid recreation of the early history of professional golf is the principle pleasure of “Tommy’s Honour,” a stately, slow and distressingly dull biography of 19th century Scottish golf hero Tom Morris.

The film was directed by actor-turned-director Jason Connery, son of Sean, a man known for his turn at James Bond and his infatuation with the links. So the son knows a little something about the lay of the land — legendary Scots golf courses.

That’s where Tom Morris learned his game. But we’ll call him Tommy (Jack Lowden), because Tom Morris the elder (the great character actor Peter Mullan) was something of a legend before his son came along to dominate the early years of professional play and “The Open Championship.”

Tom the Elder was a groundskeeper, the man who laid out courses, designed and built clubs and caddied — for the gentlemen of the various clubs that employed him. He was master of the game, and taught his boy everything he knew.

They played as a pair, taking on all comers for the benefit of the wagering gentlemen, who would then pay them a chunk of their winnings.

Tommy the lad sees the injustice of this, of playing to benefit “gentlemen who despise me.” “They think they’re better than me,” and when he insists on payment up front, and a whopping share of the winnings, he has his proof.

“Your station in life was set before you were born,” lectures the captain of the club (Sam Neill). “A gentleman you will NEVER be!” The kid can’t even come into the hallowed halls of the clubs where he battles the best of Great Britain in the 1870s. And he’s not having it.

The golf matches, with their primitive clubs, under-groomed greens and scruffy “links course” settings, are fascinating, but mere interruptions for Tommy’s feud with the gents, with his “know your place, son” dad, and with the older woman with a checkered past (Olivia Lovibond) who wins his heart.

The lad’s parents disapprove, until she proves herself. Tommy struggles, battles the gallery with his fists, lets his success go to his head but never loses his sense of “honour,” as the title is both telling and a pun (“honour” is what the golfer who won the last hole earns, the privilege of swinging first).

And the next thing you know, he’s driving his Escalade into a fire hydrant and it all comes to tears. Sorry, I’m mixing up my tales of great golfers laid low.

The performances, save for Neill’s vulpine turn, are perfunctory. The framework — a reporter coming to interview “The Grand Old Man of Golf” — is trite.

Connery doesn’t give the matches any of the “Greatest Game Ever Played” razzamatazz. The script is most interested in the personal story, rising from the working class to show the rich how to play the rich man’s game, personal tests and personal tragedy.

It’s all ever-so-conventional and conservative, utterly predictable even if you haven’t looked up who Tom Morris the Younger was. And with that being the case, there’s no excuse for Connery’s dawdling style of storytelling.

Sometimes, in movies as in golf, you study the shot and fret over the lay. And sometimes, you should just play through.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some suggestive material, language and smoking

Cast: Jack Lowden, Peter Mullan, Olivia Lovibond, Sam Neill

Credits:Directed by Jason Connery, script by Pamela Marin, based on the Kevin Cook biography. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time:

The great Werner Herzog rarely takes on the effort of getting a fictional feature film made these days. The director of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “Fitzcarraldo” and “Rescue Dawn” has found his meditative documentaries to be a better use of his time. “Grizzly Man,” “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” “Encounters at the End of the World” and the recent “Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World” are more essays — on art, humanity, life at the extremes and modernity — than simple documentaries.

So when he does take on a feature and it fails, the disappointment is multiplied.

“Salt and Fire” is an odd environmental thriller, a perhaps-promising project that attracted Michael Shannon and Gael Garcia Bernal to Bolivia to see what this mad genius would make of it.

Not much, as it turns out.

A mismatched group of UN-sanctioned scientists — Veronica Ferres, Bernal and Volker Michalowski — arrive in an unnamed country, only to be greeted by armed paramilitaries who blindfold them and bundle them off to a remote hacienda. Nobody speaks Spanish, or even speaks with an accent. The guards are helmeted, with sunshield goggles, so they can’t tell who they are or what they want. 

“I take no pride in this,” their leader apologizes. He’s faintly contemptuous of their fact-finding “mission.”

“Do not try to come to the rescue of a tired world!”

It turns out, he is some sort of industrialist. And the scientists are there to learn about an ecological disaster of immense proportions — a vast salt flat, the “Diablo Blanco,” that was accidentally man-made and is swallowing up a huge swath of the country. That is, unless the volcano sitting beside it erupts and ends life on Earth first.

The head scientist, Laura (Ferres) and the “Consortium” industrialist Riley (Shannon) talk and debate and talk and talk some more. They ponder the imponderable in a sort of David Mamet learns German and has it translated by Werner Herzog dialogue — metallic, poetic, repetitive.

“There is no reality, only selective views of reality.” “The noblest place for a man to die is the place he winds up deadest.”

Riley has a sidekick, a fixer, “the brains” behind the operation. He’s played by real-life Arizona State scientist Lawrence Krauss, plainly no actor and a man not helped by the affectation of a wheelchair.

“I only use the wheelchair when I’m tired of life.”

If you’re going to look ridiculous, there’s no sense half-assing it. And I’m not just talking about Krauss. Herzog, who pointlessly strands his lady scientist in the middle of the salt with two blind native boys, shows flashes of the madness that so fascinated him in his earliest work — in front of and behind the camera.

Whatever he was getting at with “Salt and Fire” — perception twisting environmental parable is my best guess — the picture never coalesces into anything straightforward enough to get a handle on.

Herzog, whose “Into the Inferno” documentary (now on Netflix) is all about volcanoes, may be saying something about nature’s capricious capacity for disaster dwarfing that of man, when it comes to climate change. If so, he’d have been better served sparing Shannon, Bernal and Ferres the effort and Professor Krauss the embarrassment and just made “Salt and Fire” a documentary.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, Gael Garcia Bernal, Lawrence Kraus

Credits: Written and directed by Werner Herzog, based on a Tom Bissell short story. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:37

A remote snowy, Northeastern Catholic boarding school, schoolgirls forgotten by their parents over spring break and a sinister presence are the promising ingredients of “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” a horror thriller concocted by one of the sons of Anthony “Psycho” Perkins and scored by another.

It’s a triumph of tone over content, chills over frights, an under-lit and cryptic tease that never quite measures up to the gloom of its production and the heft of its cast.

Kiernan Shipka of “Mad Men” and Lucy Boynton are Kat (Katherine, to her teachers) and Rose, an underclasswoman and senior stuck at Branford, in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire (Ontario, actually).

When Mom and Dad don’t show for her turn in the talent show, Kat is “concerned.”

Rose, with plans to get busy with a local boy that night, is more upset at an opportunity lost. Instead, she’s charged with “looking after” Kat, and takes it out on the kid by filling her head with sordid stories of Satanic rites involving nuns, myths about what’s REALLY hidden under that habit.

Writer-director Osgood Perkins gives each of the girls her own chapter heading — “Kat” and “Rose.” And when he switches the setting, there’s a chapter about “Joan.” She’s played by Emma Roberts.

Joan is making her way from Branford to Portsmouth when a man sees her at a frigid bus stop and takes pity on her.

“I just want to help.”

As the man is played by veteran movie heavy James Remar, we fear the worst. But he’s traveling with his testy wife (Lauren Holly). And there’s this story about the daughter Joan reminds him of, a story the wife is quick to undercut.

There’s a phone call home to the parents, a call answered with a scratchy signal and unearthly voice. Knives are introduced as foreshadowing, and the creepy solitude of all the settings is emphasized, along with the gathering darkness.

First-time writer-‘director Osgood Perkins, who never quite made it as an actor, gave us a superior indie thriller (“Cold Comes the Night”) in his first time out as a screenwriter (co-writer). Here, he’s determined to hide his striking starlets’ faces in shadows, hint at Catholic Problems (demonic possession) and let his brother Elvis Perkins fill the soundtrack with properly chilling minor chords until those moments he flings unmotivated violence at us.

“The Blackcoat’s Daughter” — an illusion to a priest’s cassock? — never amounts to much more than its tone, the dread Perkins summons up with morose faces, shadows and music. It’s unconventional for a genre picture. But then, those conventions — motivation, anticipation, empathy and shocks — became conventions because they work. This doesn’t. Not really.

MPAA Rating:R for brutal bloody violence and brief strong language

Cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, James Remar, Lucy Boynton and Lauren Holly

Credits: Written and directed by Oz Perkins. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:34