Movie Nation

Vigorous, violent, and would you believe…cute?

With “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back,” Tom Cruise & Co. take the popular Lee Child character and franchise and stick a gun in its mouth.

Cruise and his “thirtysomething” co-conspirators — a cheap shot, but hey, “Glory” and “Defiance” take a back seat in director Edward Zwick’s ouevre when he’s working on the script with longtime partner Marshall Herskovitz — take a lean, stoic man of action and have him bickering with a soldier (Cobie Smulders) he’s trying to rescue over who should take care of this annoying teen (Danika Yarosh).

Seriously. And sorry, teens. You’re all kind of annoying…in the movies.

Reacher (Cruise, who produced this as well) is headed to D.C., a drifter living, we assume, off his Army pension. He wants to meet this officer in the military police/Judge Advocates General department who’s helped him and who sounds sexy on the phone (Smulders).

But there are contractors out to kill her, and it turns out, him. They know about some girl (Yaroush) who claims to be his daughter. And they aren’t fooling around. They dress in black, the hit-man’s choice (Patrick Heusinger is “The Hunter”) and stalk Reacher in black SUVs , purchased wherever black suits and machine guns with silencers are sold.

And they frame Reacher for every death that happens during their pursuit. He has to tease out who is behind this, what they want and what their monetary angle, and figure out a way to get this movie to New Orleans.

Where production incentives make setting your story during Mardi Gras worth your while.

This isn’t the most interesting character Cruise has ever played, just a tougher Clint Eastwood-quiet brute who broods, tells bad guys which limbs he’s going to break and makes a show out of not being addressed by his former rank — Major.

It’s “EX-major.” Or “Just Reacher, I’m a civilian now.”

The Army and all its contractor scandals and those who would kill to cover them up keep pulling him back. And in that milieu, we get to hear how “You’re a LEGEND around here” and “they ran outta medals” when it comes to Reacher.

The movie starts with a brawl we don’t see, progresses to epic fights with bad guys (apparently) reluctant to draw their guns, and shootouts. Cruise’s ageing Reacher punches through car windows, drops legions of bad guys and ambles toward a final showdown.

And they drag along this kid the bad guys might want to hurt because she might be connected to Reacher, allowing Cruise to play a guy who has no idea how to parent. And he bickers, without irony, wit or sarcasm, with Major Turner (Smulders) over who should stay in the hotel and watch the kid. Because, you know, women, even Army badasses, must have maternal instincts, right?

We figure out what’s going on long before Reacher, and whatever cool value there is in the rough justice of Reacher’s beat-downs or the logistics of living off the grid, on the lam, stealing mini-vans and cell-phones, evaporates with every idiotic thing the sassy, brassy teen says or (predictably) does.

When it works, it works. But if this character and this franchise are to survive, “Never Go Back” needs to be a promise Reacher makes — about ever playing a parent again.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for sequences of violence and action, some bloody images, language and thematic elements)

Cast:Tom Cruise, Cobie Smulders, Danika Yarosh, Patrick Heusinger

Credits:Directed by Edward Zwick, script by Edward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz, Richard Wenk. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:58

The first teaser for the GOTG sequel (“Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2”) is nostalgic — for the first film and its judicious use of Blue Swede and “Hooked on a Feeling.”

They’re not giving us much, which is no real warning sign. But the first film was both unexpected and breathlessly anticipated. The second won’t have the element of surprise going for it. We’ve seen Mr. Pratt’s shtick, know Bradley Cooper’s raccoon voice and appreciate Zoe “Never Met a Franchise I Won’t Do” Saldana’s badass presence. Michael Rooker at his funniest. But Dave Bautista can’t be the sleeper but once.

It’ll make a mint. Will it be any good?

But Sly? Kurt Russell? Nathan Fillion? Let’s just say we’re intrugued, and withholding high hopes. Effects didn’t sell it, story didn’t either. Comedy and chemistry did.

“Ouija: Origin of Evil” makes you appreciate the fine art of cutting a movie trailer.

You’ve got to show us enough to want to buy a ticket, but you don’t want to spoil all your surprises and effects.

This is a movie that gives away most of its secrets in its trailers, and somewhat ruins its impact by spending much of its third act over-explaining how this “House of Evil Where Playing with a Ouija Board Can Get You Killed” came to be.

But this amusing and occasionally hair-raising thriller still delivers the chills and giggles, and joins the growing honor roll of a new Hollywood Golden Age of Horror. Read through the credits of films from “Insidious” to “The Visitor,” “The Conjuring” to the “Amityville Horror” revivals. There’s a lot of overlap in producers and house styles.

They’re hiring good actors and turning them loose on scary movies. And good actors know how to register shock and awe, and how.

“Origin of Evil” is a “Ouija” prequel, an improvement on the original film — which had kids playing with a dusty old Ouija board game, breaking its rules, and paying a deadly price.

Those rules again? “Never play alone. Never play in a graveyard.” And “always say good-bye” to the spirits you’ve contacted.

In 1967, Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) makes her living as a spiritualist, someone who will contact the dead in order to help the living. “We help people,” she explains to her daughters, who assist her in the various con-job effects (doors opening, candles blowing out, etc.). “We heal their hearts.”

But when rebellious teen Lina (Paulina, for those inclined to do character research) plays a new board game with her pals, Mom picks up a Ouija (by Hasbro!) and figures to add it to their afterlife services menu. Lina (Annalise Basso) isn’t keen on it. Little Doris (Lulu Wilson) starts hearing voices and acting strangely.

Adding to the milieu is the fact that Alice is recently widowed, that the kids miss and long to talk to their daddy (Doris prays to him). Alice is broke and about to lose their spooky old house.

And the girls are in Catholic school, where helpful Father Tom (Henry “E.T.” Thomas) is worried about their grades and their spiritual well-being, but open-minded enough to wonder if they’re messing with things they cannot control or fathom.

Reaser (“The Twilight Saga,” “Sweet Land”) is impressively wide-eyed when her daughter turns out to be capable of actually doing what she herself has always faked. Thomas, in his best role in decades, makes Father Tom as interesting as the script allows. Watch the way he tries to roll-back Lina’s raging 15 year-old hormones with relation to the handsome and attentive Mikey (Parker Mack).

“Boys his age require discouragement. Makes them better men, in the long run.”

The rising threat from the game, the too-obvious black-spandex clad spooks Doris sees and the climax play according to formula. The finale is drawn-out anti-climactic And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve seen most of the effects in the trailers.

But director Mike Flanagan, who did the haunted mirror thriller “Oculus,” makes great use of deep-focus close-ups, playing up the scariness of the youngest child.

And Reaser, Thomas, Basso and especially the demonically playful Miss Wilson play the Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard script like a fiddle. They make “Ouija” stand out among the generations of Ouija-board using horror pictures — the first might have been “The Uninvited,” in 1944 — a spooky thriller that, like its characters, only gets into trouble when it breaks the rules. 

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for disturbing images, terror and thematic elements

Cast:Elizabeth Reaser, Annalise Basso, Henry Thomas, Lulu Wilson, Parker Mack

Credits:Directed by Mike Flanagan, script by Mike Flanagan, Jeff Howard. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:39

You have to appreciate the high-mindedness of “Priceless,” a faith-based drama in which a “transporter” makes it his business to free Mexican women he’s unknowingly delivered into the Southwestern U.S. sex trade.

But other good intentions — director Ben Smallbone crafting a “star vehicle” for his hunky Nashville singer brother Joel — tend to trip this sluggish melodrama up.

Joel Smallbone stars as James, just a guy with anger issues driving a third hand box truck through the desert southwest. He used to be married, now he’s widowed. The truck used to be a U-Haul, now it’s got faded “party time” stickers, sort of hiding what he’s got inside.

He doesn’t know what his cargo is, doesn’t question the folks who give him fat wads of cash to do the driving, until he runs off the road and hears whimpering from the back. He breaks the lock, and voila — two young Mexican sisters appear (Bianca A. Santos, Amber Midthunder).

The film’s most honest moment has James slam the door shut, as if he doesn’t want to see what he’s a party to. He changes his mind, helps them clean up, even buys them fresh dresses. The film’s most dishonest moment comes at the point of delivery, when the recipient (Jim Parrack) shows up with a van full of women, and two roses for the girls.

James acts shocked. He’s not living up to his favorite tattoo — “Let all you do be done in love.” This is about sex, not love.

And he’s the only person on Earth who hasn’t figured out exactly what these two young women have been smuggled into the U.S. to do.

Veteran character actor David Koechner plays a blunt but sympathetic hotel manager who provides James with a motorcycle, then a car, to track down the smuggling ring. And he lays down the film’s faith-based message.

“The flames of tragedy can refine you.”

But Smallbone the director makes sure Smallbone the star gets the star treatment here. The most beautifully coiffed truck driver in North America frets with his forelock in most every shot. First thing he does after crashing his truck? Flip his perfectly trimmed hairdo out of his eyes.

James narrates, blankly, and acts as if there’s no real rush in saving these two “unspoiled” immigrants from their sex trade fates. Smallbone should be leaning into the frame, guiltily rushing hither and yon to “undo what I’ve done, somehow.”

Instead, he just comes off as a vain first-time leading man. The film just drags, content to stare longingly at Smallbone’s chiseled good looks and perfectly-trimmed stubble. The character arc, from “non-believer” to righteous man receiving his first “God shot,” is blase.

Koechner, consigned to comic jerk roles decades ago, may have relished his rare shot at a dramatic role. But there’s not a lot to the character, just motorcycles, a hat and other conveniences that will aid James in his quest.

“Priceless” isn’t a particularly dislikable film, just an exhausted one — a couple of scenes have sardonic bite, the final confrontation is staged with some thought.

As for the Smallbones (Joel is in the band King & Country with another sibling, Luke) sometimes, having a relative behind the camera “looking out for you” is a help. But sometimes, they’re just enablers playing to your vanity.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving human trafficking, and some violence

Cast: Joel Smallbone, Bianca A. Santos, David Koechner, Jim Parrack

Credits:Directed by Ben Smallbone, script by Chris Dowling, Tyler Poelle. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:37

What’s memorable about “Autumn Lights,” an erotic thriller set in posh accommodations in rural Iceland?

Well, the nude scene depicted above, for starters. A couple of others. Some explicit sex.

It’s tempting to revive that long retired label “soft-core porn” in order to categorize this dim mystery in which the mystery is forgotten for most of the movie, and dispensed with, cursorily, late in the third act.

But we see Icelandic vistas and Icelandic forest, and naked actresses, which sounds like a movie to some folks. In this case, it adds up to instantly-forgettable.

We meet photographer David (Guy Kent) as his girlfriend is ditching him in the middle of an Icelandic assignment that he’d turned into a vacation. Her “We were fooling ourselves, it was a mistake” have barely sunk in when he stumbles across a body along the beach.

A young woman has killed herself. Whatever other plans David might have had, they’re back-burnered as the philosophical local cops want to question him and maybe explain away Scandinavian suicide to him.

“People die because they can’t live any more. They can’t go on.”

And sticking around lets David meet the neighbors. And their icy marriage and evasive answers to his questions about the dead woman draw him in.

That, and the Italian wife (Marta Gastini) makes no bones about flirting and isn’t the least bit discrete about what she likes to do in the woods.

Listening to her husband, the Austrian Johann (Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson), you understand Marie. Just a little.

“The only things we can depend on — ourselves, and our unhappiness.”

First-time feature writer-director Angad Aulakh avoids the Icelandic scenic cliches, and works hard to establish a lonely sense-of-place in “Autumn Lights.” He sets up a potentially intriguing sexual dynamic, with wary but helpless-to-resist David tumbling into whatever weirdness these bored Europeans are into.

David is drawn to Marie’s blonde Icelandic coed friend, only to feel Marie’s jealousy. And if our memory is sharp, we start to wonder if we’re seeing some version of what really happened before that suicide is playing out again here.

But Aulakh has a hard time distinguishing between ennui and simple boredom on screen. The relationships, to a one, are arid and unmoving. The performances, with the exception of Gastini, are as lifeless as paintings.

The cops, David and everybody else lack any sense of urgency or purpose. And for a movie built around a photographer, there’s too little pictorially that suggests anybody here has a photographer’s eye.

“Autumn Lights” has a hint of Ingmar Bergman about it in intent, setting and title (he made “Autumn Sonata”). But in execution, we can’t tell if this was meant to be an homage or a parody.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with sex, nudity, adult situations

Cast: Guy Kent, Marta Gastini, Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson, Thora Bjorg Helga

Credits:Written and directed by Angad Aulakh . A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:38

Here’s what I’ve been saying since “The Town.” Warner Brothers recognized, in Ben Affleck, their replacement for Clint Eastwood.

He’s become a reliable box office star in front of and behind the camera. They’ve shoved him into a Bat costume, and made him an accountant.

And they’ve let him direct a solid true story thriller to Oscar winning glory.

“The Town,” “Argo,” “Batman v. Superman” and now “The Accountant” have all opened. And though “Sully” shows us Clint isn’t quite finished yet, their replacement is working out quite nicely, thank you — groomed for the part, mocked in some roles, but a solid choice when you’ve got a big ticket picture on the line.

Remember, nobody celebrated Clint’s acting until he got his AARP card. Affleck may be a stiff trying to play an Autism spectrum “dark money” bookkeeper with gun-wielding survival skills in “The Accountant,” but the movie still did a whopping $25 million+ this weekend. 

Kevin Hart keeps going back to his audience for more pocket change with these concert films, and his latest pulled in over $12 million. It’ll top out in the mid $20s, maybe $30 ish. Low costs, a few top name cameos, and his pals help him write and direct it. Pocket change.

“Max Steel” had zero buzz heading into the weekend, a comic bookish (Is it a comic? Sorry, never heard of it. Maybe a video game?) action pic aimed at kids, it wasn’t previewed for critics. NONE have endorsed it. And it’s opening in the under $2 million range. That’s a BOMB.

“The Birth of a Nation” is still in the top ten, but barely. It has no staying power, has lost all its audience and will end up losing money for Fox Searchlight. It has zero Oscar prospects, to boot.

A flop, not a bomb. But still, beware of over-hyped Sundance pictures with little known rape charges hanging over the star, director and screenwriter. That tends to make people look at the weak acting and perfunctory directing a little more harshly.

“Idioten!”

If the sad Swedish comedy “A Man Called Ove” accomplishes nothing else, at least it’s taught us the Swedish word for “idiot.”

“Idioten!”

The title character, a walking/grumping antidote to the world’s stereotype of happy, friendly Swedes, uses it for pretty much everyone in this sentimental stroll down memory lane.

The lady who lets her dog pee on his mailbox? “Dumbon!”

The new Swedish-Persian neighbors who are inept at everything from backing up a car towing a trailer to simple home maintenance?

“Idiotens!”

Volvo drivers (He’s a Saab man, since birth)? “Idiotens.”

Audi drivers? “Four zeroes on the grill, another behind the wheel!”

We meet Ove (Rolf Lassgard) as he’s doing “his rounds” — walking around his subdivision, hassling rule breakers, leaving testy notes.

He’s a martinet, a “nit picky” prickly sort, even at his job with the railroad, which he loses to “the whiteshirts” (executives) after 43 years. He’s 59.

Ove considers his options and chooses that Swedish favorite, the Scandinavian paradise’s dirty little secret — suicide. And with each failed attempt, he flashes back to his traumatic childhood — losing his mother young, his dad tragically.

And then there was his late wife, Sonja.

“Before and after Sonja, there was nothing,” he says. And other flashbacks show us why. She brought him out of his shell, raised his horizons, made him feel loved.

Now, drowning in the bile of a world he cannot re-shape no matter how many rules he enforces, he doesn’t want to go on. Visiting the grave of Sonja (a radiant Ida Engvoll), he can only complain to her headstone.

“This must be the first time you ever had to wait for me.”

But these new folks next door cannot function, it seems, without him. He orders the husband out of their car when he can’t properly park it.

“Idioten.”

Ove fixes things and barks and shouts at the Persian wife (Bahar Pars), even as she’s making peace offerings. But the pregnant mother of two Parveneh is a tough broad in her own right. She might be the one person who can break his Strindbergian melancholy.

“Fate is the sum total of our stupidity.”

“A Man Called Ove,” in Swedish with English subtitles, can be quietly hilarious — Ove’s insistence on whistling through his various suicide attempts, his insistence on returning the rope that snaps when he tries to hang himself. His insult to the clerk he gives him lip over that return.

“Idioten!”

It’s also overlong and sentimental. But it’s a vivid, warm and amusing portrait of a real man, someone whose life began in darkness, experienced the light of a great love and has collapsed into a pit of self-pity.

Bitter? Yes, Ove is. But the movie reminds us, the bitter have their reasons.

“Idioten!”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, some disturbing images, and language

Cast:Rolf Lassgård  Bahar Pars, Ida Engvoll

Credits:Written and directed by Hannes Holm, based on a novel by Fredrick Backman. . A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:52

Diversity is once again front and center in the next “Star Wars” movie. But judging from the second trailer, “Rogue One” boasts a better cast, some genuine moments of pathos and sacrifice, and director Gareth Edwards (“Godzilla”) seems to have a better mashup/”Star Wars Greatest Hits” script than “The Force Awakens.”

Forest and Felicity and Mads and Donnie Yen and Diego Luna and Ben Mendelsohn as the heavy? Jimmy Smits? You have my attention.

I have to say, just based on this, that maybe this is the co-existing history that’s worth pursuing in Disney’s multi-verse take on the George Lucas franchise.

“Rogue One” opens Dec. 16.

Why is it that every movie Paul Schrader has ever made plays like an invitation to put him on the couch?

A screenwriter (“Taxi Driver”) and director (“Light Sleeper”) whose violent, moralistic melodramas play like peep shows of his id,  Schrader makes the sordid underbelly of America his beat. He plunges in unsparingly and invites us to wallow with him,  and when he’s on his game, makes us ponder our complicity in this world of his and our making.

He’s not been on his game, alas, for years. He teamed with Bret Easton Ellis for the unsavory sex games/mind games of “The Canyons,” and seemed genuinely shocked when Lindsay Lohan wasn’t professional enough offscreen or talented enough onscreen to make it work.

Although lustrous, sometimes Oscar-winning titles such as “Affliction” and “Cat People” dot his resume, lately, he’s tied his fate to filmdom’s talented but most reliably “direct-to-video” action star, Nicolas Cage.

“Dog Eat Dog” is their second consecutive collaboration, a disturbing, bloody and off-key thriller with surreal comic undertones.

Based on an Edward Bunker novel, it’s about a “crew,” eccentric, chatty and murderous ex-cons who team up for a series of jobs.

Schrader himself plays “El Greco,” “The Greek,” a racist underworld figure who sets up the various assignments.

Cage is Troy, a Bogart-fixated narrator who owes the aptly-named Mad Dog (Willem Dafoe) his life. Otherwise, who’d go into business with this psycho? We meet Mad Dog as he’s stuffing his nose with coke, hyped up on a gun-nut TV show, sweet-talking a portly lady friend and killing her and her daughter when she tires of his drug/porn/gun and violence addiction.

Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook of “The Walking Dead”) is their muscle, a supposedly smart guy who keeps getting caught doing stupid things.

Troy is meant to be the sane and stable one, whose job is “to take care of the crew.” But he’s capable of pitiless violence, too.

“I’m gonna blow your backbone out of your belly!

A series of bar scenes establish each and every one of these guys as a talker, a delusional dreamer and a user of women. Diesel works too hard to pick up a barfly (Louisa Krause of “Martha Marcy Mae Marlene”) by extemporizing on casino bartenders and why they won’t serve his whisky “neat.”  Troy tries to talk a hooker into flying with him to Nice after his next score. She’s never heard of Nice and is more interested in her cell phone than any plans this trick she’s literally just met has in mind.

Mad Dog, sick on every level, has his own warped code. And he won’t stand for a “Happy Ending” Asian massage in which the masseuse is also distracted by her smart phone.

They’re dead-enders, and their robberies and kidnappings are one-way trips. “We all have two strikes.” It’s succeed or die.

Schrader stages some wonderfully nervy heists — white deplorables hold a black drug dealer hostage in the middle of a neighborhood where they would stand out, even if they weren’t dressed as cops; a “Raising Arizona” kidnapping that begins with somebody’s head exploding from a shotgun blast, and goes downhill from there.

With touches like the fake cop car these dopes create by using duct tape to mimic striping and to spell out the word “P-o-L-I-c-E,” you understand that Schrader wanted this to be funny.

Troy lectures his mates about getting “Samurai Style” serious.

“Jackie Chan,” Mad Dog hisses with an idiotic grin.

The sight gags more ugly than funny. And the finale and coda drift from cops-as-murderous-as-crooks messaging to Cage hallucinating his best Bogie.

Cage and Dafoe never give less than their best, Cook is not bad, though the women aren’t allowed to make any impression at all, and Schrader’s acting just makes one wish he’d called in a favor and gotten a real actor to be The Greek.

The story may be linear and the film brief. But the movie drags, with a ragged, slapdash and random feel to the scenes and how they’re tied together.

If we’re invited, as always, to put the filmmaker on the couch after this one, I have a killer first question for the patient.

“Did it all make sense in your head? And was it funny?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, drug abuse, nudity and sexual situations. And profanity.

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe,Christopher Matthew Cook, Paul Schrader, Louisa Krause

Credits:Directed by Paul Schrader, script by Matthew Wilder based on an Edward Bunker novel. An RLJ Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:33

Good scripts don’t over-explain. They leave mysteries for us to speculate about, mull over, mysteries that draw us in.

“Little Sister” is slight, unfussy character study with a hint of such mystery. It’s about a 21 year-old novice nun estranged from her family for three years. Colleen (Addison Timlin)  ran away to join a convent.

Why? We don’t really learn the “big mistake” that hurled her into the arms of religion. But when we meet her family and get a taste of her past, we get hints.

Sister Joan is about to take her vows. She reads to the sick, buys food and feeds the poor and seems to walk the walk and talk the talk. But she still hangs out with people her age, experimental theater types who ridicule the Bush Administration (It’s 2008) on-stage, and offer the nun-to-be “blow” offstage.

And as is often the case in movies about nuns — “The Sound of Music” wasn’t the first — her Mother Superior has her doubts about the girl. Barbara Crampton, flinty but much prettier than the typical movie Mother Superior,  lays down the lay to Colleen/Joan.

“It took God six days to create the universe. You should be able to get your act together in five.”

Go home, see the family you don’t talk to. Take my car.

So Colleen returns to Asheville to deal with her mercurial, medicated mom (Ally Sheedy), her adoring, indulgent dad (“Pieces of April” director and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” writer Peter Hedges), her brother and her past.

That past is first confronted when she returns to the darkly-decorated (black paint, upside down crucifix) bedroom she abandoned for the nunnery. She runs into people who knew her, and then an old friend from “back then” (Molly Plunk). They’re not used to seeing her buried under pancake makeup, her hair dyed some unnatural color.

Back in the day, Colleen was an Asheville Goth.

Evening meals, which she insists on praying over, show how far she’s left all that behind.

But her beloved older brother (Keith Poulson) is a Marine, returned from Iraq burned and scarred for life. He’s crawled into his garage apartment, alone with his thoughts, his old GWAR horror-metal CDs and his drums. He seems lost and doomed, self-aware enough to not wallow in self-pity, not wanting anybody else’s pity either.

Joan will need her inner Colleen to draw Jacob out.

“Sister” has that “film festival movie” tone to it, where nothing much happens — character arcs are limited and narrow — but carefully observed details and personality quirks keep you interested. Almost every character on the screen feels lived in.

Timlin, of “That Awkward Moment” and TV’s “Zero Hour,” has a wounded winsomeness that is quite winning. Poulson registers some emotion underneath his “Deadpool” mask, and Kristin Slaysman makes a lasting impression as the sexy fiance who refuses to abandon Jacob even if that’s what he wants, even if her sexual frustrations are getting the best of her.

Sheedy, decades beyond her “Breakfast Club” heyday, still brings the brittle. Her Joani (A convent clue?) has a fierce and formidable narcissism that cannot understand Colleen’s choice and refuses to accept the uptight religious woman her daughter turned into, something she lashes out about in between medications.

“I will try to correct myself, with the grace of God,” is exactly the sort of reply that will set her off.

The script has the odd zing, even if it never quite dazzles. Writer-director Zach Clark isn’t above going twee and cute — a lip-syncing Goth moment, a high school crush acted-on. And the whole “hope/change” election year setting seems obvious and pointless.

But even without big revelations or surprises, it’s not without its charms. “Little Sister” levitates above the trite and banal, even if it never quite takes flight.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with drug use, adult situations, near nudity

Cast: Addison Timlin, Ally Sheedy, Keith Poulson, Peter Hedges, Barbara Crampton, Kristin Slaysman, Molly Plunk

Credits:Written and directed by Zach Clark. A Forager/Wraith release.

Running time: 1:31