Movie Nation

To people in the know, financial “bubbles” must have long looked like hurricanes as we see them in the digital/satellite age. They’re slow-moving disasters waiting to happen giving plenty of warning that the End is Nigh, if you’re willing to heed it.

“Tulip Fever” uses the first and most famous such bubble, the Dutch mania for and speculation in tulips, then-seen as exotic, rare beauty brought in from the Far East, as the backdrop for a slow-moving romantic disaster that anybody who’s been to a period piece picture can see coming our way from the first act.

It’s an unwieldy, unsatisfying film that doesn’t live up to the high-minded allegory it aims to be. But that it isn’t an analog to the disaster that it depicts is a tribute to some clever bits of stage business, some good performances and spot-on period design and detail.

A couple of years back, Alicia Vikander experienced her own movie star bubble (for actors and writers, they’re called “a moment”) when no film seemed complete without her in it. Here, she is Sophia, an impoverished orphan who has been married off to a rich spice trader (Christoph Waltz) in 17th century Holland.

The Abbess who makes the marriage deal (Judi Dench) isn’t a villain. She’s looking out for Sophia and her orphaned siblings’ best interest. And even though Cornelis Sandvoort is played by that Oscar-winning mustache twirler Waltz, he’s not the heavy here either. He is indulgent of his young bride, a tad impatient for her to give him an heir, but no tyrant — just a tad gauche.

And as “The King of Peppercorns,” his spice specialty, he knows a fiasco when he sees one in the wildly speculative tulip market. Common people are gambling and getting rich. The market only goes up and up.

“It’s a madness!” He’s not wrong.

Madness might also describe Sophia’s swooning reaction to the scruffy young painter (Dane DeHaan) commissioned to paint the family portrait (with a tulip in the background). She. Must. Have. Him.

And Jan Van Loos, played by DeHaan at his DiCaprio Lite breathless best, must have her.

Our narrator, the Lady’s maid (Holliday Grainger, who has the sexy fleshier look famous for that period in painting), knows how this story plays out, and hints that tulip fever had a role in changing the lives and fortunes of all involved.

There’s a quack doctor (Tom Hollander, hilarious) who specializes in “female mysteries,” a drunkenly inept painter’s assistant (Zach Galifianakis), the fishmonger (Jack O’Connell) who loves Maria the maid (Grainger) and figures tulip speculation is the key to their future.

And we have the two folks who run this tulip trade — the Abbess, acting on behalf of the Pope (we’re told) and the mysterious Mr. Prater (David Harewood), who traffics in pure color tulips, and the exceptionally rare multi-colored varieties, “breakers,” the most valuable of which is named Admiral.

The great playwright Tom Stoppard had a hand in the script and touches of his wit show through, here and there. There’s no shortage of detail about the trade, the piety (and hypocrisy) of the Dutch when they were the richest nation on Earth. The structure of the tale is a tad too Shakespearean for its own good — coincidences, abrupt bursts of passion and commitment, mistaken identities.

It all comes together rather too neatly to be convincing or satisfying. The presence of Galafianakis gives away his function, and giving model-turned-movie-star Cara Delevigne a bit part as a pickpocket prostitute just reminds us what a kiss of death poor Dane DeHaan is in most movies. He and Delevigne co-starred in “Valerian,” the biggest flop of the summer.

We could be looking at what future generations will call “The Curse of Dane DeHaan.”

“Tulip Fever” isn’t on that scale, though one does wonder if the explicit sex scenes were desperate add-ons, late in the screenwriting process, and if the market has peaked and passed for the hollow-eyed DeHaan, and the delicate Ms. Vikander, so model-thin, so out-of-place in the world of Rubens, Rembrandt and better-fed girls in pearl earrings.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and nudity

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Christoph Waltz, Dane DeHaan, Judi Dench, Holliday Grainger, Zach Galifianakis

Credits: Directed by Justin Chadwick, script by Deborah Moggach and Tom Stoppard. A Weinstein Co. release.

Running time: 1:47

Disney has become the movie studio equivalent of a baseball manager with “a quick hook,” ready to pull the trigger on changing pitchers the minute things start to go south.

They chased the animation vets in charge of the Han Solo feature film last summer, and now they’ve sent Colin Treverrow, the “Safety Not Guaranteed” wit who at least made the big budget trains run on time with “Jurassic World,” packing. CT was helming the “last” film in the current saga, “Episode IX,” due out in 2019. “Was” is the operative word here. He’s out.

He has a “Jurassic World” sequel in the pipeline, due out in 2018, and another film. And then his last film was the miscalculated flop “The Book of Henry.”

With so much money at stake — not so much the budget, but the potential earnings, which Disney is counting on well in advance — it’s no wonder they don’t brook any actions/arguments/decisions that threaten that. It’s not about the art, it’s about not letting somebody use the phrase “MY vision” about these films. Even J.J. Abrams was muzzled, constrained, in re-launching the franchise.

And if J.J. cannot get his way, who can?

There’s a covered wooden bridge, a stony brook and a quarry where the kids can go swimming.

Historic buildings line the tree-shaded streets, where the traffic’s so light a child can ride his or her bike right down the road without worrying about being hit by a car.

But the adults are pedophiles, trigger-happy thugs and textbook cases of Munchausen by Proxy. The high school is overrun with monstrous mean girls, and gangs of knife-wielding psychopathic bullies.

Children keep disappearing. And in Stephen King’s nightmarish Derry, Maine, there’s one certain thing in life. A child can call for help, and no one will notice.

King’s “It” comes to the big screen as the most horrific vision of childhood since “Schindler’s List.” Forget the killer clown, Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) who lures kids to their doom. There’s already enough going on in this scenic hellhole to make you wonder how anybody gets out of here alive.

That deep-seeded childhood terror — that there’s a threat, and no adult will listen to your warnings — drives “It,” an otherwise somewhat taxing tale of killer clowns, vivid, bloody visions and a small town with a sewer system to rival any NFL city in the US.

Because that’s where Pennywise the Dancing Clown lives, dragging children like innocent Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) to his gruesome death in the film’s opening moments. His disappearance haunts his stuttering older brother, Bill (Jaeden Lieberher of “St. Vincent” and “The Book of Henry”).

Bill eggs on his fellow “losers,” the most picked-upon 14 year-olds in town — mouthy Richie (Finn Wolfhard), asthmatic hypochondriac Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer) and the timid rabbi’s son, Stanley (Wyatt Oleff) — into helping him search for his long-missing brother over summer vacation.

But it isn’t until portly “New Kid” and New Kid on the Block fan Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor) shows up and shares his “research” into this town’s blood-stained history, and the harassed but mature redhead Beverly (Sophia Lillis) joins up, that it all comes together.

“I’m sorry. WHO invited Molly Ringwald?”

It’s 1988 and kids all over Derry are seeing satanically spectral paintings of flutists come to life, blood and bile pour out of sinks, haunted houses and haunted meat-lockers — all orchestrated by the balloon-toting clown.

The visions are grim, grisly and graphic, although actual hair-raising moments are rare — a chase here, a narrow escape there.

Director Andy Muschietti (“Mama”) keeps the violence lurid and shocking, interrupted by moments of often-profane gallow’s humor.

The film lays bare King’s tropes — a haunted house straight out of a theme park — and paint-by-numbers outline — a collection of “types” challenged by the sum of their fears (How “Nightmare on Elm Street” of him). The fat kid, the stutterer, the coward, the cute girl with the ugly reputation, the sassy, oversexed Jew, the black kid (Chosen Jacobs) learning to slaughter sheep, mullet-wearing punks in a Trans Am.

It’s “Goonies” meets “Stand By Me” with a killer clown after them all. If King was word-processing this today he’d have treated us to a gay boy and a trans girl, no doubt.

But his version of Hell, small-town Maine, has never been more vivid and terrifying. The first hour of the movie, dominated by kid-on-kid violence and ugly, inattentive adults, is jaw-dropping in its brutality.

“This summer’s gonna be a HURT train!”

And if the acting’s a trifle uneven, the middle acts dull and the ending drawn-out, violent and almost nonsensical, the latest Skarsgard (another son of Stellan) to don makeup is a clown to overwhelm your nightmares, a red-nosed monster that may not be original (King rarely is), but plays as definitive — the last word on why those among us mortally afraid of the guys with the huge shoes, red wigs and greasepainted faces may have a point.

MPAA Rating: R for violence/horror, bloody images, and for language

Cast: Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff, Finn Wolfhard, Bill Skarsgard

Credits: Directed by  Andy Muschietti, script by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga and Gar Dauberman, based on the Stephen King novel.  A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:15

It took filmdom long enough to figure out that re-pairing Glen Close and John Malkovich, made-for-each-other in “Dangerous Liaisons,” was a good idea.

But it took just as long to realize that getting Patrick Stewart to grow out his hair is a transformative, liberating act.

So credit writer-director Damian Harris for making those two rarities come to pass in “The Wilde Wedding.” He found roles, and funny things to play, for an awful lot of under-used talent in this breezy, bawdy fourth-wedding farce about a retired movie star, divorced from a never-quite-broke-through actor ex-husband and about to marry a famous novelist.

Set in one of those movie-idyllic Something-on-the-Hudson mansions with that only-in-the-movies “Everybody come and stay here up to the nuptials” plots, “Wedding” makes Close, playing regal Oscar winner Eve Wilde (Olivia Wilde was, um, taken) gather her offspring and that beloved ex (Malkovich) for her fourth-time’s the charm wedding to famed British novelist Harold Alcott (Stewart).

Eve’s brood includes ex-musician Rory (Jack Davenport), whose career-before-commitment rock-star ex-wife (Minnie Driver) also shows up. There’s Ethan (Peter Facinelli), a pushing-40 horndog, and a few grandkids, most notably young Mackenzie (Grace Van Patten) who aims to make a documentary about the weekend — an over-used idea mercifully abandoned for much of the film.

Then there’s Harold’s entourage — lonely older daughter Clementine (Yael Stone) and other more hormonal offspring (Lilly Englert, Kara Jackson) and one daughter’s bi-curious girlfriend (Paulina Singer).

Harris then packs MORE characters into this — promising a kissing cousins love-interest for the teen Mackenzie, and a lot of coupling/uncoupling and canoodling as we wait for “Do you take this man?” etc.

It’s a madly cluttered film, so good luck trying to pack all these people (Noah Emmerich, 52, is supposed to be a son of Malkovich, 63) onto the screen and giving them something to do. I had a hard time keeping them all straight, and I take notes.

What works beautifully are the grace notes to the craft of acting, to first love/first marriage. The florid, self-adoring Laurence (Malkovich) keeps the bitterness in check for the sake of his family and the woman he never quite got over — despite decades of chasing nubile starlets in her absence.

“I have come…to see you off…again!”

Eve is equally magnanimous — “Fame, success, flattery…I leave it ALL to you!”

The documentary idea, overused as it is, shows promise when Mackenzie asks people, on camera, “What does marriage mean to you?”

“My parents fighting, people getting divorced.”

Minnie Driver sings (as do others), and Stewart stands around as younger women note “MAJOR hottie, even for an old guy.”

The motto that everybody lives by for this one weekend is best expressed by novelist Harold — “I sometimes wonder if we should be saying ‘no’ to anything.” The young people — sexting/flirting, social-media shaming, mixing and matching, drinking and disrobing — take that to heart.

None of which adds a lot to the “Wilde” recipe, whose greatest glory and pleasure is putting players of a certain vintage together and watching how little effort they show, how they make it all look easy, sexy and magical when given cute roles and the chance to have a little fun with them.

MPAA Rating:R for language, sexual content and drug use.

Cast: Glen Close, John Malkovich, Minnie Driver, Patrick Stewart, Grace Van Patten, Yael Stone, Paulina Singer, Lilly Englert

Credits: Written and directed by Damian Harris. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:35

If the future is indeed female, then the most frightened corners of the Earth must be in the rigidly patriarchal, often Islamic states of the developing world.

And India, with its vast Muslim minority, certainly qualifies. Why else would the rude and irreverent Indian comedy “Lipstick Under My Burkha” be “Banned in Bombay,” censored in Sikkim?

This comedy by a female director, starring women and scripted by women, bashes India’s long-conservative screen boundaries as it lightly tells the tales of four Bhopal women coping with the last gasps of female repression by rebelling — mostly in secret, increasingly in public.

Rehanna (Plabita Borthakur) is a teen growing up in a sternly Islamic household where her duties are school during the day, slaving away at a sewing machine, contributing to the family’s bottom line, at night. But in her room, she hides Miley Cyrus posters. Under her burkha, she wears makeup — which she pilfers, along with skirts and shoes, from the mall. The burkha hides a world of sin.

She dreams of singing, sneaks out to parties and hangs with legions of like-minded girls whose families have lost control of a generation. Strict dress codes for women? Not for much longer.

“Right to jeans! Right to live!” Rehanna chants at school protests.

Leela (Aahana Kumra) is a sexy young woman with designs on a career and a life with the young photographer/entrepreneur she loves. But with an arranged marriage in the works, she has to get her groove back on the side. Hot, furtive sex in an Indian comedy! Still a rarer than rare thing.

Shirin (Konkana Sen Sharma) is a rising star “Magic” products door-to-door saleswoman. But her brute of a husband figures keeping her pregnant between his stints of work in Saudi Arabia is the best use of her life. She has abortions behind his back and longs for birth control to prevent the consequences of his selfish sexual urges.

And the landlady everybody calls “Auntie” (Ratna Pathak Shah) finds herself overheated by the prospect of a hunky lifeguard at the local pool, struggling to find modest swimwear in a country that grows more Western by the minute. She narrates our tale, recounting breathless passages from a steamy romance novel whose liberated heroine, “Rosey,” is a surrogate for all four repressed women.

Filmmaker Alankrita Shrivastava presents a vivid setting, a post-“gas tragedy” Bhopal full of working class/middle class life and clashing gender mores.

All of the women strain under the yoke of oppression, but Rehanna’s generation will be the ones to break it, is the implied message.

So many RULES for women, she gripes to a video reporter who shows up at a class rally. “Don’t sing. Don’t dance. No END to rules facing girls.”

But there is an end. And it’s coming.

“Why does our freedom SCARE you so?”

“Lipstick Under My Burkha,” in Hindi and English with English subtitles, nods to Bollywood (there’s a little song and dance, and like Bollywood comedies, it sort of waddles on too long) but hurls itself at the Subcontinent’s conservative sexual barriers with a giggling vengeance.

The comic shocks may play as “scandalous” in much of the world, but not to Western audiences. They’re still funny, as are the characters — funny with a feminist edge.

The performances are more real than fantastical, with Shah finding the humor in an older woman availing herself of “modern” liberation, Kumra suggesting resignation to her fade, but romantic/sexual longing, Sen getting across “I’m more than what this man is letting me be” and Borthakur bristling with teen social fears — fitting in — and finding herself as a woman by protesting restrictions on her behavior and attire.

To borrow an age-old American expression, how’re you going to keep them down under a burkha after they’ve seen the likes of wild and free Miley Cyrus?

Cast:  Plabita Borthakur, Aahana Kumra, Ratna Pathak Shah, Konkona Sen Sharma MPAA Rating: unrated, with explicit sexual situations, smoking

Credits: Directed by  Alankrita Shrivastava, script by  Gazal Dhalimwal, Suhani Kanwar, story by Alankrita Shrivastava.  An Star Synergy release.
Running time: 1:55

It was never going to be a banner weekend at the box office. Topping off a slack summer with a weekend that had no sleeper possibilities, no major wide releases and no potential Oscar contenders (sometimes one sneaks out on Labor Day), the field was left to “The Hitman’s Bodyguard.” It racks up another win by earning $12 million over the three days.

“Annabelle: Creation” is making major horror bucks, and will be over $90 by Monday, close to $100 million by say, NEXT Saturday.

But there’s good news. The dearth of new product means people are finally getting around to seeing the superb thriller “Wind River.” As should you. 

“Dunkirk” is inching towards $180 million (by Tuesday, Wed. at the latest.

“Logan Lucky” has one last weekend in the top ten to bask in. “All Saints” is just outside of the top ten. Not even a “700 Club” endorsement could lure Christian conservatives to a movie that embraces immigrants.

“Tulip Fever” is impressing no one, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” isn’t luring many back to theaters to see a 40 year old movie.

And in bad news, three middling-to-awful animated films are in the top ten, making one wish one August release had been by the folks who made “Coraline” and “Kubo and the Two Strings,” Laika. They could have OWNED August if they’d had anything like “Kubo” (an August release of yore) to put out there.

Next weekend belongs to “IT.”

Let the TV reviewers soil themselves about “the New Golden Age of TV,” but I’m far from sold. Long form TV has been on a roll, they say, since “The Sopranos.” I say, “Yeah? Another ‘Goodfellas’ — doled out in tiny, slow-paced cliffhanging dribs and drabs.”

They say, “But this is different. The mobster is put on the COUCH!”

I say, “Didya SEE ‘Analyze This?’ How about ‘Analyze That?'”

But…but…”TRUE BLOOD!”

“Redneck Gothic-biker vampire soap opera. Barely a variation on 345 other blood-sucker tales.”

“The WALKING DEAD!”

“Does nobody remember George A. Romero? Seriously, the man just died, dissed the crap out of this Georgia zombie soap opera, WITH CAUSE. The acting, the makeup, the draggy story lines — “Who will die next? Who will ‘turn?'” It’s been done, Romero said and I wholeheartedly agree. Almost unwatchable, and compared to ‘Warm Bodies,’ ‘World War Z’ etc., and not even in the Best Zombies Ever conversation.

Don’t even get me started on “Game of Thrones,” a sword and sorcery fantasy with a Showtime (uninhibited exploitative sex) touch. Yeah, I know it’s on HBO, and I’m a Dinklage fan from way back. But the first dragons and wolves that showed up, I tapped out. George “Arrr Arrr” isn’t the new Tolkien. He’s the new Stephen King. It’s pulpy page-turner proto-porn for people who’d be embarrassed to admit how much they adored the sixth-grade-vocabulary Harry Potter cut-and-paste fairytales.

The latest long-form that comes up shorter than short is “Get Shorty.” EPIX TV has taken the Elmore Leonard novel, and basically THROWN it out, to make a dusty, grubby and largely humorless Chris O’Dowd/Ray Romano vehicle that is lacking in almost every regard.

Barry Sonnenfeld’s “Get Shorty” delivered the Miami shylock Chili Palmer, a sharp-dressed thug played by John Travolta at his clothes horsiest, a movie-lover caught up in intrigues, learning the hard-funny truths about the movie business from the hangers-on, also-rans, has-beens and the inexplicably famous (Danny DeVito), a movie star that a low-rent director (Gene Hackman as Harry Zimm) needs to get his long-overdue big break. It’s knowing, very inside-mob-ball, freaking hilarious, a literal belly-laugh a minute farce with a bloody gangster edge.

Take away Miami, Chili Palmer, his swagger, confidence and sartorial sense, Leonard’s snappy, tetchy dialogue and most of Chili’s movie mania and you’ve got Miles Daly (Chris O’Dowd), a dull-ish, struggling, divorced desert-Southwest heavy in the employ of punks who couldn’t hold a candle to the elderly mid-level pot-bellied single-scene kingpin Momo of the Leonard novel and Travolta movie.

I love O’Dowd, but this series has me yelling at the TV — Dude, show some PRIDE in your appearance. Dude, DEMAND funnier/cooler lines. It contributes to your MENACE.

And man, nobody but NOBODY regrets fleeing Dust Bowling BFE Texas for LA. Miami for LA? Close call.

Ray Romano is this series’ version of Harry Zimm, and as sharp as he’s been in stuff like “The Big Sick,” as promising as the character — Z-level producer “Rick” — he doesn’t have the pop or poseur flair of Hackman’s horror movie bottom feeder Harry Zimm. He’s not as pathetic and funny. OK, pathetic, maybe.

There’s no Ray Bones, the mobster on Chili’s trail, because really, there’s no replacing the late Dennis Farina. Not a prayer. Nobody of the stature of Delroy Lindo as a foe, or James Gandolfini as a henchman, etc. and so on.

The story arc is the same — Miles, who has a movie-mad kid, is trying to “get out” of organized crime and into movie producing (“How hard can it be?” is the operative thinking in both versions.). Topher Grace, playing a B+ lister with odd sexual proclivities and a lot of demands on his vain, lucky-to-be-a-star time, makes a hilarious substitute for all the actor types of the original tale.

But the tiny steps forward in the story, the teeniest suggestion of Chili Palmer’s cocky self-assurance, that’s all drowned in this blood-stained tale’s strained efforts to get a story Miles, as a collector/enforcer, connects with in front of the cameras, to “Get Shorty” or whoever so that it can be made, are…just…tedious.

“The Last Kingdom” not as good as “The Pilgrimage,” Jason Bateman better in most every movie he makes than he was in “Arrested Development” or “Ozark,” and so on. And so forth. We’re in an era when daytime TV has given up on soap operas, but cable has embraced the form — long, interwoven stories with big casts and stories that advance and never quite come to a climax.

Because they want to bring “Ozark/Shorty/Divorce/The Night Of/Big Little Lies” et al back for a second season.

I crave resolution, and TV is hellbent on avoiding it. Unless we’re talking about British TV.

Movies — still better than TV. Thinking otherwise just betrays how much it takes to get you up off the couch. The prosecution rests.

In public speaking and stand-up comedy, it’s a cardinal rule — “Know when to get off.” It’s having the sense to see when it’s time to say, “Well, you’ve been a GREAT audience…” and make your exit.

That’s just as important in movies, knowing when you’ve reached your climax, having the good sense to not to wander into one, two or three anti-climaxes, misguidedly trying to “wrap EVERYthing up.”

That’s a failing of “A Boy Called Po,” a sentimental, sympathetic and fairly well-acted look into the lives of an autistic child and his overwhelmed Dad.

It’s explanatory, showing us what clinicians mean by “regression,” when they say a child on the spectrum is “drifting” — retreating further into his or her own world. And it’s imaginative, offering fanciful speculation on what that child might see and experience in that world inside the mind.

But actor-turned-director John Asher’s warm and fuzzy picture undercuts a big chunk of the goodwill it earns by parking multiple endings after its climax, and beating its sappy theme song — a cover of The Carpenters’ “Close to You” — into our heads, scene after scene.

We meet David (Chrispher Gorham of TV’s “Covert Affairs” and “Two Broke Girls”) at his wife’s funeral. Wracked by grief, how will he cope? How will he explain this to their son?

That’s a big issue, because Po — “Patrick is a good boy’s name, but I think I’ll call you ‘Po.'” — is on the spectrum, 11 years old and mainstreamed into a local elementary school. But his routine has been destroyed, his “Where’s Mommy?” questions won’t stop. He’s added that and “Don’t be afraid, Daddy,” to his list of endlessly-repeated sentences (like his explanation of his name). He is, educators and others start telling David, “drifting.”

Bullied at school, needier by the day, Po (Julian Feder) is derailing David’s airplane-designing career, “regressing.” At least he’s finally found a new classmate to be his friend, Amy (Caitlin Carmichael).

The film’s most inventive touch is where Po goes when he slips into his mom’s room, covers his head in her favorite scarf, and hangs out with Cowboy Jack on the range, Sir Jack the knight in the forest or Captain Jack (all played by Andrew Bowen), a pirate searching for treasure on the beach.

Parents of autistic children may take issue with this speculative “Peter Pan” fantasy (shades of TV’s “St. Elsewhere”). But Julian Feder does a good job at avoiding eye contact, avoiding physical contact and repeating, “Rainman” style, Po’s comfort mantras.

“Mac and cheese, please.”

Gorham is more adequate than dazzling as the lead, and the script has room for lots of TV actors in small, archetypal supporting (Brian George from “Seinfeld,” Bryan Batt from “Mad Men”) roles performing lines that offer no surprises.

It’s a sympathetic portrayal of this disability in a lovely setting, which almost obligates one to cut it some slack. And the script explains away the one groaner of a performance, “Auditioning for an English ‘Wendy’ in ‘Peter Pan'” accent included.

But screenwriter Colin Goldman and director Asher overreach with that conclusion, with no ending “happy” enough to suit them. And that deflates the whole well-intentioned affair.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements and some language

Cast: Christopher Gorham, Julian Feder, Kaitlin Doubleday, Caitlin Carmichael, Sean Gunn, Andrew Bowen, Bryan Batt, Brian George

Credits:Directed by John Asher, script by Colin Goldman. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:33

It is upon us. A motley collection of mostly meek August titles and the fading glories of July are what await filmgoers on this Labor Day weekend, traditionally the end of summer but also the end of the August dumping ground, cinema’s Island of Unwanted Toys.

There are good movies that not a lot of people have seen — “Wind River” is the best thriller of the year, “Good Times” is a gritty, Robert Pattinson on the run NYC thrill-comedy (with violence), and not everybody has seen “The Big Sick,” which has been in theaters for nearly a month.

But we’ve all seen “Dunkirk” (best picture of the year) and “Spider-Man” (not even the best picture of its opening weekend). No new releases this weekend are reaching far and wide, and most are dogs anyway. “Goon 2,” “Mike Boy,” “A Boy Called Po,” that Lake Bell picture “I Do…Until I Don’t.” Nothing worth turning off the TV to go out and see. Netflixable, a couple of them. That’s the best you can say for the lot of them.

“The Hitman’s Bodyguard” should win another weekend, the tepid but embraced by fans “Annabelle: Creation” should finish second. “Wind River” has been in the top three, all week, thanks to weak competition and an expansion of screens.

I am shocked Christian film fans aren’t flocking to “All Saints,” but I guess they prefer argumentative political pictures that make them feel like victims — like “The Case for Christ” or “God’s Not Dead.” And it does take a pro-immigration tack — the John Corbett as preacher saving a dying church film, I mean.

Lionsgate is throwing another Spanish language Mexican import at part of the country, but Texas is under water, so that’ll dampen its prospects.

“Dunkirk” will hit $180 million, and a few other summer holdovers will essentially hit their final money mark this weekend.

But nobody is making money off Labor Day at the movies this year. Nobody. The best take of the weekend will be around $10 million, with the lower rungs of the top ten not even clearing $1 million.

Some stories are compelling enough to tell without embellishment. A simple recounting of the facts, carefully observed portraits of those involved and the trials life and “the system” hand our hero is enough.

And when those stories are filmed in that way we call them “documentaries.”

Filmmaker Matt Ruskin’s “Crown Heights” flirts with documentary realism at it painstakingly relates what happened to Colin Warner, a teen from Trinidad thrown in jail for a murder he did not commit. Warner, living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was trapped in a justice system that refused to acknowledge mistakes, which devoured him and vast sums of money with legal catch-22s as loyal friends and family spent decades and all the money they could raise trying to free him.

Warner’s story, told in a “This American Life” radio segment which inspired the film, is a Kafka-esque nightmare of legalese, defiance and persistence. The movie of it is a murky affair, a confusing revolving-cast of witnesses, perpetrators, lawyers, cops and relatives. But thanks to a quietly riveting performance by Lakeith Stanfield of “Get Out” and TV’s “Atlanta,” we start to share Warner’s frustration and utter despair at what his plight has done to him and his family.

Warner was a dreadlocked teen in 1980 New York, devoted to his mother in New York and his grandma back in Trinidad, studying car repair in high school with his best friend, “KC,” Carl King (Nnamdi Asomugha).

But he’s in the system and on the cops’ radar. He’s shown stealing a car, as if he’s done it before — and wrecking it, because he’s 18 and not an accomplished driver or a smart one. The real Warner was on probation for a switchblade possession conviction at the time of his arrest for murder.  So the police know him by name and he doesn’t seem all that shocked to be picked up with his mother’s TV (it had just been repaired) in his hands.

What stuns him is what they take him in for. He’s been identified as a murder suspect. No, he doesn’t know any of the people involved in what obviously seems a revenge shooting. But he’s booked, locked-up and ground down in jail as he awaits trial (no bail), for the police and the D.A. (Josh Pais) to realize they’ve made a mistake, for the actual shooter to admit he’s never met him. He waits in vain.

Ruskin ably sets the film within its times — footage of Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton making speeches promising to “get tough” on crime by creating “three strikes” laws, “mandatory sentences” and the like. That helps turn policing into a “results” oriented mad-rush to arrest, with district attorneys only concerned with convictions.

We see KC go door to door, fund-raising to pay for an appeal, never losing faith but sorely testing his marriage (Marsha Stephanie Blake plays Briana, his wife) and patience. 

And we get to know Antoinette (Natalie Paul), a girl when Colin first flirted with her, a woman moved by compassion and an unshakable belief that this guy she knew as a teen wasn’t capable of murder.

But that’s a shortcoming of Ruskin’s film, that “get to know” idea. Relationships aren’t explained or properly motivated. Trinidadians’ tendency to refer to close friends as “brethren” may have you believing KC and Colin are related.

Ruskin loses himself in documenting the tracking each twist and turn in the case, and the passage of time, as if the simple horror of this man’s story and the years it took for his story to get out was enough. It just isn’t.

That’s only corrected in a conventional but still gripping third act, when that one lawyer (the omnipresent character actor Bill Camp) takes a look at the case and digs in for a dogged pursuit of justice.

Names were changed to protect the actually guilty and the murder victim, making it difficult to know just how much of the story has been altered for a film that plays as documentary-real. And the presence of Camp, of TV’s laborious but excellent murder investigation series “The Night Of,” points to the biggest hurdle facing Ruskin.

With so much film and TV devoted to police procedurals, the bar is pretty high for you if that’s the genre the story you want to tell falls in. “Crown Heights” doesn’t raise that bar. It plods. It shortchanges characters and back-stories.

We see Warner cope with the brutality of prison, and finally turn violent himself, another “catch-22” when it comes to his parole hearings. We see a relationship develop, abruptly, with Antoinette.

The performances are studied and largely internalized, but clarity is lacking and a neat through-line is lost in the myriad sidebars about this missing witness being stalked, that one discredited — eventually.

Warner’s story is cautionary and representative of a system that wasn’t working well, only to have its failings exacerbated by politics and law enforcement pushed into taking shortcuts to get results.

But as righteous as it is, “Crown Heights” fritters away goodwill normally built by intimate, revealing performances, sacrificing clarity for under-explained bulk examples of injustice, and exhausting its sense of outrage in the process.

MPAA Rating: R, violence, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Natalie Paul,  Nnamdi Asomugha

Credits:Written an directed by Matt Ruskin. An Amazon Studios/ release.Bill Camp

Running time: 1:40