Movie Nation

A strained marriage, a tipsy New Year’s Eve party and a deadly road accident are but the opening gambit of “Midnighters,” a just-taut-enough thriller about ordinary people faced with extraordinary dilemmas.

It’s about secrets and betrayals, shifting loyalties and the grim, heartless calculus of death when it’s “either him or me.”

Lindsey (Alex Essoe of “Starry Eyes”) and Jeff (Dylan McTee of TV’s “Sweet/Vicious”) are renovating their house and struggling to make ends meet, as he can’t find work. The last thing either of them needs is hitting a pedestrian on a dark country road after having a few New Year’s Eve drinks.

To their credit, that’s not the first thing they think of. They try to save the guy, even though he’s got facial tattoos. But when they lose a pulse, it’s “We need some place where we can think about this” and even though “This isn’t ‘Goodfellas,'” that’s what they do.

When Lindsey’s trouble-in-mind younger sister (Perla Haney-Jardine) gets home from her own New Year’s Eve party, things get even more complicated — and deadly.

The cops are suspicious, especially this one detective (Ward Horton) who shows up, side-eyed in his oily-charm.

“You must be a Capricorn! So honest and…forthcoming.”

Veteran TV editor turned director Julius Ramsay, working from an Alston Ramsay (military speechwriter turned screenwriter) script, keeps the lights off and the mood menacing. The performers manage to make even the lapses in logic in that script skim past with barely a “Wait, nobody’s that naive/stupid” pause, though there are a few.

Some of the abrupt shifts in attitude seem like core beliefs abandoned simply to let the story move along, but the players let on that these characters have agendas that steel their inner resolve.

The twists become increasingly obvious as the layers of intrigue are peeled off. But the third act, with its stark choices and grisly cliffhanger of a brawl, pays off, even it that payoff feels a tad more conventional than is promised.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Alex Essoe, Dylan McTee, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ward Horton

Credits:Directed by Julius Ramsay, script by Alston Ramsay. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:34

Long been a big fan of A24 Films, the best of the arty boutique film distributors (“Ex Machina,” “Lady Bird,” “The Florida Project,” “The Disaster Artist,” etc.). Here’s the trailer to their upcoming horror tale, “Hereditary,” starring Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne, and involves a family legacy. June 8 is when we see it.

There’s not much to say about the enervated romance “The Boy Downstairs,” except that literally every character and actor playing that character is more interesting than the leads. Every last one of them, down to the accented waiter at the Italian restaurant where our would-be couple bickers over there being no lemons for their ice water.

“But…you have lemon risotto on the menu!”

“Lemons are for food, only!”

Zosia Mamet of TV’s “Girls” is Diana, newly moved in to the same apartment building as her ex, Ben (Matthew Shear of “Mistress America”).  Through her eyes we revisit their affair, the break-up precipitated by her two-year move to London, and the regrets that wash over her with every fresh flashback.

And with every rose-colored recollection, we scrunch up our noses and wonder, “Yeah, and?” Rarely has the big screen exhausted 91 minutes on a romance with less sexual heat, with leads who have compatibility — they’re equally dull — but little chemistry Seldom have we met an aspiring writer (Diana) and musician (Ben) who make meeting and falling in love in the Big City more boring, with less evidence that either has anything going on.

She has a prettier and funnier BFF (Diana Irvine) and he has a prettier and funnier new girlfriend (Sarah Ramos), actually the real estate agent who showed Diana the apartment. And they both have a landlady (Deirdre O’Connell) with a more interesting back story (a widowed one-time actress) than we suspect these two bores will ever achieve.

Few things are duller on the screen than the process of writing, and adding Apple product placement to it adds no pizzazz. There’s more promise in Diana’s day job — working in a bridal boutique. Ben? We see nothing of his life outside Diana. Mamet, yeah she’s HIS daughter (with Lindsay Crouse), has little animation to her acting, her voice a mousy “vocal fry,” her face a near blank beneath inexpressive jet-black eyebrows.

What first-time feature writer-director Sophie Brooks was going for is a meditation on longing and romantic regret, with Diana pining away even as she recalls the disapproval of her father (Arliss Howard) and the warm but cautious embrace of Ben’s parents, the ho-hum routines of her life with Ben and the abrupt but understandable end to the affair. The fictive present is filled with Diana finding ways to put herself back in Ben’s path, to the growing irritation of his new girlfriend, despite the blunt evidence that there’s nothing going on.

Which unfortunately makes an all-too-apt blurb describing “The Boy Downstairs” — the movie, the “boy” himself and the dull young woman who lives above.  Nothing but nothing goes on.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual material, brief strong language and drug references

Cast: Zosia Mamet, Matthew Shear, Deirdre O’Connell, Diana Irvine, Arliss Howard, Sarah Ramos

Credits:Written and directed by Sophie Brooks. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:31

Paul Rudd makes one of the more amusing superheroes, and if Evangeline Lilly isn’t forced to be the straight woman, this could be fun. It opens July 6, with Hannah John-Kamen, Walton Goggins, Laurence Fishburne and Michael Douglas in support.

As I was the first to tell you, as I’ve been telling you all along —  Disney is getting very rich by slowly bleeding enthusiasm for “Star Wars” to death. Courtesy of Box Office Mojo.

A hostage thriller/ethereal deep sea exploration romance, primal connections to the water, the womb and each other.

Deep stuff. Very Wim Wenders. The vibe of this trailer for the film based on the J.M. Ledgard novel has only the vaguest hints of plot elements of other movies, but a strong vibe of “The Abyss,” “The Big Blue” and other immersive, spiritual pictures plunging into the sea.

Looks and feels romantic, tragic and deep. May 18,

I had high hopes for the Gothic horror “based on a true story” tale “Winchester.” It’s not a Hammer Films release, but CBS is distributing it, like the late-winter Gothic hit “Woman  in Black” of a few years back.

It stars Helen Mirren, Oscar winner, “The Queen,” in more ways than one, as the ghost-believing widow Sarah Winchester who built a house she was then convinced was haunted by no end of ghosts.

Jason Clarke’s in it. And CBS Films has been promoting the hell out of it. For ages.

Imagine my shock when CBS chose not to preview their latest pre-Oscars horror come-on, a picture that had “Sleeper hit” written all over it.

Then again, the Spierig brothers directed it. Germans best known for the offbeat vampire thriller “Daybreakers” (2009) and last year’s less impressive “Jigsaw,” one gets the impression CBS, which never cracked the code for “What makes a major player in Hollywood films,” figure it’s a dog best hidden from one and all.

Either that, or Winchester firearms got them to suppress their marketing of it. Gun nuttery and blood money associations being what they are.

So I see it Thursday night like anybody else curious enough to figure out what Helen Mirren (doing a lot of no-budget stuff these days) saw in it.

My guess is, not much aside from a paycheck. And CBS? You want to play with the big boys, roll the dice, work with talent and market your movie like grownups. Let the press see your product unless you’re ashamed of it, because that’s what this looks like. Can’t be any worse than “Beastly,” and come to think of it, I liked that.

Stick with me a minute, as this is a peek at music through the lens of a movie critic and occasional concert goer and reviewer.

There was this telling on-camera moment back in the 2008 “Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Concert” documentary. Yeah, that. Miley, then just a Disney Channel star and daughter of a country music one-hit wonder was rehearsing. And Billy Ray Cyrus, her father was there, and his eyes got ridiculously wide when he checked out her band.

“Man, these guys are” the very best, he said, or something to that effect as he was shaking band-members’ hands like a star-struck fan. As in “Baby girl, you have NO idea.” But Daddy knew. It’s just that Young Miss Miley, like the rest of us, didn’t know the A-list players making her music magical enough to turn her into a star.

Almost every concert video sampled on youtube has them — men and women who play in the shadows along with Pink!, Alice Cooper, Kiss or Ozzy, Billy Joel or Hilary Duff or Elton or Rihanna or even Mandy Moore.   Because yeah, they love “the music, man,” but yeah, a musician’s got to eat.

Sometimes they’re left off of record credits. Often, they’re the touring version of the “band” one hears on the LP, or vice versa. They’re seriously unheralded. They’re underpaid and regarded as replaceable. Even their label within the industry has a negative connotation. This drummer, that guitarist/bassist, they’re not IN the band. They’re just a “Hired Gun.”

Fran Strine’s documentary is in “The Wrecking Crew/Twenty Feet from Stardom” tradition, just another generation down the line from those unknown ’60s music icons. It’s an affectionate metal and pop-centric take on the foot soldiers in modern rock and pop, the players who made Michael and Mellencamp, Billy and Miley and Mandy the stars they became.

We’re reminded that Michael Jackson hired the guys from Toto to record “Thriller,” that Justin Jerrico is the guitarist who gave rock cred to Pink!’s greatest hits, that for decades, every session or touring player’s goal was to “play with Steely Dan,” and that Billy Joel might be the biggest jerk in modern music history, but that he’s got a lot of competition.

Ray Parker Jr. was on the verge of quitting the business after years of playing for guitar for The Four Tops, Joe Cocker, Patti Labelle and Boz Scaggs and taking a brief shot at fame with Raydio. Then Ivan Reitman needs a hit song mere weeks before “Ghostbusters” was to come out, “and the rest is history.”

Session women and men step in when members of Kiss, Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osborne’s band retire, die or quit in a huff. Sometimes they stick, and sometimes they don’t.

“My friends from high school thinks I’m rich,” laughs Greg Upchurch, most recently of Three Doors Down. Half these people, they’re working odd jobs between tours, painting some more famous drummer’s house or delivering pizzas.

There’s Jason Hook, who went from guitarist for Hilary Duff to Alice Cooper to Five Finger Death Punch, and Chris Johnson, who’s played with Stevie Wonder and toured with Rihanna, Phil X and Eric Carr (replacement drumer for Kiss), Nita Strauss (Alice Cooper), David Foster, who figured out early on that the REAL money was in producing/composing and marrying somebody who could get him on “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” — briefly.

They tell stories, of being mistaken for Ted Nugent because you (Derek St. Holmes) sang and played rhythm guitar on his best tunes. They give frank accounts of run-ins with Trent Reznor over credit-hogging/under-paying for play in Nine Inch Nails, of getting a dream assignment to write a hit for George Benson, or being left out in the cold (literally) in Fargo by Billy Joel.

“You’re never fired. You’re just not asked to do the next thing,” says Liberty Devitto, once one of New York’s most famous drummers. He and his bandmates were with Joel for decades, until they weren’t.

Rob Zombie and Alice and Pink! talk about what they owe these players, but what’s implied in this arrangement is that the star is the star. And “reinvention” to keep yourself relevant is to be expected. Check out the number of people here with “Madonna” in their credits.

But if you’re moving on, don’t be a Billy Joel about it.

The anecdotes are, perhaps a bit less iconic (drummer Kenny Aronoff inventing the drum solo that “made” Mellencamp, in “Jack & Diane”), but they’re funnier and occasionally, more tragic than earlier docs in this genre have shared. One laid-off Joel  bandmate killed himself, and Ozzy had to replace Randy Rhoads in mid-tour because his guitarist chose the town Hank Williams died in for a little fun and games with a private plane.

And if you’ve ever wondered who it was who really turned “Thriller” into a smash or gave Kiss a new lease on life in their endless “Farewell tour,” this is the movie for you. ‘

MPAA Rating: TV-14, profanity and toilet humor

Cast: Liberty Devitto, Alice Cooper, Pink, Billy Joel, Derek St. Holmes, Eric Carr, Kenny Aronoff, Rob Zombie

Credits:Directed by Fran Strine. A Vision Films/Sony Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:38

  “The Cured” is a zombie movie heavy with allegory and political subtext. No zombie movie or TV show has a reason to exist without those elements. Only video games and films that aspire to their often amoral aesthetic get around this.

What lifts this Irish film above the “Here they come, SHOOT’em!” trap are the moral dilemmas, the shaky ground underneath either side of those dilemmas and performances that can be downright wrenching in their humanity.

The Maze Virus, oddly not the name chosen for the infection at the heart of “The Maze Runner,” ripped through Europe and Ireland. But in a corner of the world with single-payer healthcare for all, it was beaten back. The infected had a 75% cure rate.

But what happens when “they” are cured? The cured remember what they did when they were infected, and it was awful.

“What they did,” a TV interview subject wonders, “I mean, how you d’ye get over that?”

And to those who survived their onslaught?

“They’re murderers, the lot of’em!”

Sam Keeley (“Anthropoid,” “In the Heart of the Sea”) is Senan, whom we meet in an exit interview. The brusque and unforgiving military man (Stuart Graham) in charge of his re-insertion into society asks about nightmares, as “they’re there to remind you of what you did,” and turns him loose.

He has a place to live, with his sister-in-law, Abby (Ellen Page) and his little nephew Cillian. His brother, her husband? Dead.

So maybe zombie dining habits aren’t the best idea for a joke when he moves in and she mentions “I was going to hire and interior designer, but…”

“They all got EATEN!”

He’s family and she lets that slide. Senan will work at the lab where some of the last of the infected are given further treatment in hopes of improving that 75% cured rate.

It’s just that society isn’t all that welcoming of people like him. The virus made them panting, blood-lusting fiends. But they could communicate. They “hunted in packs.” There’s a question of how much they knew, moral culpability and the like.

“It’s like being trapped inside your body, fighting yourself,” is how Conor (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) puts it. He was Senan’s only friend in rehab. An ex-barrister (lawyer) with political ambitions, he is enraged by society’s treatment of them after their release. And he’s hellbent on organizing the cured, who are unthreatened by the still-infected, to resist the uninfected’s hostility and draconian supervision.

What first-time feature writer/director David Freyne conjures up here is a zombie parable of the “truth and reconciliation commission” era. Bloody civil wars in South Africa, Northern Ireland and elsewhere cry out for those, having an accounting of the horrors committed and using that as the starting point for reconciling.

As in those scenarios, and the vast political divides emerging in Britain and the U.S., there are no easy answers. Here, the government is ready to give up on more efforts to cure the still-infected. And the cured worry that this “final solution” might spill over onto their ranks. Conversely, those whose instincts guide them toward a humane approach are risking their lives and the human race on faith and a hunch that they’ll be able to save those panting wretches chasing them down the street.

Keeley and Vaughan-Lawlor present compelling, conflicting sides to the debate, with Vaughan-Lawlor loaded with menace, even in his most submissive moments. But Page, playing a mother and journalist with enough information to be fearful for her life and that of her little boy, wavers between outrage over civil rights violations and every mother’s greatest terror — losing her child. She will tear your heart out, and her scenes remind one of the most heartbreaking moments in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dad with a zombie daughter drama “Maggie.”

It’s a gross and grossly over-exposed genre, with comedies (“Shaun of the Dead,” “Zombieland,” “Warm Bodies”) or cautionary political parables (“World War Z”) the exceptions to the simple shoot-em-ups Hollywood and the Great Danny Boyle (“28 Days Later”)  have served up.

But “The Cured” aims higher and gives us — forgive me  — a lot more to chew on than a mere collection of harrowing escapes and brain-shots.

MPAA Rating: R, graphic violence, some of it involving children

Cast: Ellen Page, Sam Keeley, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Stuart Graham

Credits: Written and directed by David Freyne. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:34

I didn’t have high hopes for the new bio-comedy, “A Futile and Stupid Gesture,” a not-quite-all-star remembrance of the comic genius behind “The National Lampoon” and “Animal House.”

After all, Doug Kenney, the magazine’s co-founder, was ably memorialized in the documentary, “Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead” just a couple of years ago. Rounding up actors to play the important figures in that story, including Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Harold Ramis and Michael O’Donaghue, would intimidate anybody, even the shameless David Wain, writer and director of “MADtv,” “The State” and “Wet Hot American Summer” infamy.

But “Futile” which would have been better titled “Three Food Fights and  a Funeral,” is laugh out loud funny. It laughs at its own inadequacies (a mid-movie crawl rapidly listing all the writers, performers, et al who made the magazine famous but whom they couldn’t squeeze into the film) and mocks the elitism and near-racism (no black, Asian or Hispanic folks in this Harvard Mafia take on comedy) of the days when the R-rated humor magazine was born. It’s scruffy and amusingly cheap looking, at times.

It is, as the new verb sums up, perfectly “Netflixable.” Which is why Netflix made it.

Will Forte is Kenney, the whip smart comic anarchist from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, who teamed with his urbane, pipe-smoking classmate Henry Beard (the omnipresent Domhnall Gleeson) to transform The Harvard Lampoon into a more riotous read than it had ever been, and then refused to grow up after school by launching The National Lampoon in the middle of the turbulent ’60s.

Their pitch, rejected by most of the big names in publishing, was a raunchy/funny niche mag that filled the void between Mad Magazine and The New Yorker. The publisher of Weight Watchers and assorted family titles (Matt Walsh) was the one suckered into it. Thus, was a comedy empire and a whole brand of funny business born.

We worship at the shrine of Monty Python, even in America, as the template for smart, irreverent and ironic humor. But Kenney and Beard created a whole comic ethos that followed — just as absurdist, but distinctly American, giving birth to “Saturday Night Live” and “Animal House” and all that spun from them. Forte’s wonderful in the part, never more than in showing Kenney and indeed cinematic comedy’s rapid decline in the late 70s thanks to the pervasive cocaine usage rampant in comedy circles and in Hollywood.

Remembering what a mess Kenney and Harold Ramis’s “Caddyshack” was and is, a cult movie for stoners now, a coke and corporate compromised calamity, is a valuable service Wain’s picture does.

Famous covers — the “Buy this Magazine or the Dog Gets It,” pantie-free “Yearbook” cheerleaders — are revisited, as the mag perfected darkly comic conceptual sight gags. The brightest minds working there,were a colorful lot — Tony Hendra (Matt Lucas), sassy Anne Beatts (Natasha Lyonne) and “Mr. Mike,” the deathly-dark Michael O’Donaghue, later of “SNL.”

Of all the impersonations, Thomas Lennon‘s spot-on send up of the balding, sunglassed cynic Donaghue is the one that dazzles. Matching Belushi’s fearless lunacy or Chevy Chase’s studied pratfalls is trickier on even a “generous” Netflix budget.

Martin Mull is cynically warm as the older Kenney, narrating his life story and that of the magazine with a jaundiced eye for every failing, personal, cultural or cinematic, exposed by the movie.

The witty/profane office banter, the free-wheeling brain-storming that created unforgettable sight gags, the stage show “Lemmings” and the “National Lampoon Radio Hour” is clever enough. And the bitterness at losing their pre-eminence, first to “Saturday Night Live,” which raided the Lampoon’s writing staff and radio players, and then “Airplane!,” which upped the comic ante for the pace of jokes, is palpable.

Look for cameos from assorted “Animal House” survivors (there are a few) mixed in with recollections of that chaotic film shoot, a movie which changed American cinema comedy forever.

And remember the old saying about the sad clown as the film recalls Kenney, a funny man who accomplished much and had everything but peace of mind and (the film says) a father’s affirmation.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, nudity, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Will Forte, Martin Mull, Domhnall Gleeson, Natasha Lyonne, Annette O’Otoole

Credits: Directed by David Wain, script by  Michael Coulton and John Aboud, based on the Josh Karp book. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41