Movie Nation

Steven Soderbergh makes his big screen “comeback” a caper comedy that characters within it dismiss as “Oceans 7-11.”

He’s got his “Magic Mike” in the lead, with 2015’s hot ticket Adam Driver, an Elvis grand-daughter, a country singer, a James Bond and an Oscar winner in the cast,  most of them sporting West Virginia accents so thick you can cut’em with a chainsaw.

And the damned thing doesn’t play. The rube jokes fall flat, the complex caper doesn’t skate by the way the best of the “Oceans” pictures did.

It’s as if the only research they did was listen to John Denver’s “Country Roads” a few times, and smugly reassure each other — “We’re good.”

It’s “Masterminds” meets “Little Miss Sunshine,” with a heaping helping of Coen Brothers “Burn After Reading” contempt for its characters — every character, about whom the phrase “ignorant rural white trash” is never uttered, but implied.

Channing Tatum is Jimmy Logan, a newly-laid-off construction worker, the one-time jock stuck in Blue Collar hell trying to be a good dad to his little girl, brushing off the married-up the financial ladder ex-wife (Katie Holmes).

His trashy, camo mini-skirted hairdresser sister (Riley Keough) dotes on his little girl and supports whatever he does. His one-armed veteran brother (Driver) serves drinks at the Duct Tape Bar and has this fatalistic view of the family’s “luck,” which means he just shrugs his way on board Jimmy’s scheme to solve their money troubles.

They’re going to knock over a NASCAR track, the Charlotte Motor Speedway, where Jimmy used to work. But they’ll need safe-cracking help. Trouble is, Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) is in stir — and won’t be out of prison for months. How can he help, will he help, when he’s got so little time left in Warden Burns’ (Dwight Yoakam) jail?

“You Logans must be as simple-minded as people say.”

What’s most impressive here isn’t the multi-element, multi-hillbilly heist — sort of half set-up, mostly revealed as the caper happens. It isn’t the enviable cast, which dives into Southern accents the way a century of ill-informed actors have tackled them — like Elizabethan English.

“Do you hear the words comin’ outta your mouth?” Words like “in-CAR-Ser-RATED” kind of punch you in the ears.

The “local color” — an apple-bobbing contest involving pigs feet — leaves something to be desired.

No, the impressive thing is that Soderbergh was able to attract this cast and a raft of permissions from the control-freaks at NASCAR to make a movie this tin-eared, this cumbersome, this condescending, this bad.

The women are passive observers/participants, even after Hilary Swank is added to their ranks, showing up as a Fed investigating the heist after it’s over.

There are clever flourishes — breaking Joe Bang out of jail for the robbery, him taking the time to explain the chemistry of an explosive he’s about to use with chalk on a wall on a tunnel beneath the speedway.

But there are all these dead-ends — Seth MacFarlane as an obnoxious British-accented sports-drink mogul, the Bang relatives/accomplices whose every sentence requires subtitles. There’s little narrative drive, with the caper lurching forward, stopping, and the movie going on and on after that’s wrapped up. The sentimental finale is a “Country Roads” cheat.

Tatum makes a passive leading man here and doesn’t so much drive the story– he writes a list of robbery “do’s and don’t” that includes “Don’t Get Greedy” on his fridge — as we slouch along for the ride. And the deadpan Driver stands out in the cast, sort of a cracker caricature of Nicolas Cage’s hero in “Raising Arizona.” He’s dreadful.

At least Craig is a hoot, even if one suspects that he saw the clunky finished product and realized that signing up for another James Bond picture was a safer bet than gambling again on a director trying to send-up the movies that made him rich — a director who has forgotten that those movies — whose characters he didn’t sneer at — were already send-ups themselves.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some crude comments

Cast: Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Katie Holmes, Adam Driver, Riley Keough, Dwight Yoakum

Credits:Directed by Steven Soderbergh, script by Rebecca Blunt. A FilmNation release.

Running time: 1:59

“A Taxi Driver” is a Korean epic, a tipping point in the history of South Korea. A little old-fashioned and a touch melodramatic, it’s still a compelling Korean “Year of Living Dangerously.”

South Korean cinemas’ Everyman, Kang-ho Song  (“The Host,” “Thirst,” “Snowpiercer”) has the title role, a struggling cabbie in Seoul trying to make a living in the aftermath of a presidential assassination and military coup.

Kim obsesses about his car, is behind on his rent, his 11 year-old daughter is a latchkey kid and he’s hitting up friends and relatives for cash.

His big break? Overhearing a 100,000 won (currency) fee a fellow driver is iffy about taking.

Kim bluffs his way into picking up the fare, a German TV reporter who assumes that the guy has been told what he’s in for. Peter (Thomas Kretschmann of “The Pianist”) has a camera and wants to get to Gwangju. Something terrible is happening there, and the military and secret police have sealed off the city.

We’ve seen the driver grouse about college kids protesting for democracy. He glad-hands the military check-points that stop them, referencing his own military service and returning salutes with the accompanying vow — “ALLEGIANCE!”

He speaks a little English, the one language they have in common. But his growing worry has him muttering, cursing his backseat passenger, in Korean.

“Why so rude? Go ahead and glare at me, you jerk!”

But what he sees after they sneak into Gwangju changes him. Peaceful protesters are met with hails of bullets. The hospitals are over-run. He gets to meet one of those college kids (Jun-yeol Ryu) marching for democracy.

And the state police have orders — no reporters can witness this. Jürgen Hinzpeter is determined to foil this fascist cover-up. Hinzpeter’s mission become’s Kim’s mission. He must help the German let the world see this.

Director Hun Jang’s (“The Front Line”) film lunges from violence to quizzical, comical in-over-my-head double-takes to chases and face-downs against heavily armed aggressors that will grab your heart and inspire you.

It’s somewhat labored and too long, despite the gravitas of the subject. The finale feels maudlin and hits its obvious point too hard. But think about that Samsung, “Gangnam Style” dance or Kia Soul you treasure.

None of that would have happened without real people, journalists and working Joes driving taxis, not uniformed “heroes,” standing up to men with guns.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with graphic violence

Cast:  Kang-ho Song, Thomas Kretschmann, Hae-jin Yoo, Jun-yeol Ryu

Credits: Directed by Hun Jang , script by . A Well Go release.

Running time: 2:17

The Stephen King horror brand may be well established with a generation of filmmakers and especially Hollywood decision makers.

But audiences? They’re living in the “Annabelle/Conjuring/Amityville/Insidious” universe.

New Line’s inexpensive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink is haunted (that’s the NEXT movie) “Annabelle: Creation” is opening to a whopping $36 million this weekend, based on late Thursday and all-day Friday results. 

That’s roughly twice what King’s “The Dark Tower” opened with. To add insult to mortal wound, “Tower” has fallen off a cliff its second weekend — dropping to fourth place at the box office. $.7.5 million, if they’re lucky. So much for Sony’s years-in-the-making franchise.

Half-decent reviews helped “Annabelle.” Barely passable. To some. 

“Dunkirk,” Christopher Nolan’s masterful  Oscar contender, added another $10-11 million for second place.

“The Nut Job 2” is opening at a measly $8 million, but in this lackluster summer, in the dog days of August, that’s a third place finish. Doubt if we see any more of those nut-loving squirrels. The worst summer for Hollywood animation in decades winds down with “Leap!” in a couple of weeks. No wonder adult-oriented anime has worked its way into theaters this year like never before, the Hollywood choices have just been deathly.

“Girls Trip” will clear the $100 million mark by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. It’s the comedy of the summer.

“The Glass Castle” will not quite reach $5 million, chasing Halle Berry’s “Kidnap” at the bottom of the top ten.

That damned “Emoji Movie” is over the $63 million mark. “Detroit” and “An Inconvenient Sequel” are fading from sight.

And “Good Time” is winning the per-screen average sweepstakes, in limited release. We’ll see that Robert Pattinson picture open wider in the coming weeks.

Long after her death, decades removed from the days when she was a brand-name novelist, famed for dark, romantic thrillers, Daphne du Maurier remains a Hollywood favorite.

“My Cousin Rachel” — remade and unleashed just this summer — delivered a dark dash of literary pretense to this summer of Spandex clad super-heroines and heroes.

But long ago, Hitchcock filmed “Rebecca,” “Jamaica Inn” and her short story “The Birds,” and irritated the writer no-end with his meddling with her narratives. Nicholas Roeg turned “Don’t Look Back” — a short story — into a sinister, smart hit in the early ’70s.

“The Scapegoat,” “Hungry Hill,” “Frenchman’s Creek,” “September Tide,” “Kiss Me Again, Stranger” — the titles filmed, re-filmed, turned into teleplays, revived — the list goes on and on. And year after year, the works seem to endure, at least as film fodder.

Stephen King may be “having another moment,” with “The Dark Tower,” “It'” and other works of his returning to the big and small screen. Du Maurier’s had decades of “moments.”

Why? Because, like Jane Austen before her — Du Maurier got something about Englishwomen that resonates with women the world over. Whatever the great loves of her life, when she lit into a book, architecture mattered. Houses matter.

Think of Elizabeth Bennett only swooning over Mr. Darcy when she first lays eyes on Pemberley. You know, in the Jennifer Ehle “Pride & Prejudice.” It’s the most orgasmic moment of the book and any film of it. And it’s over a house.

Tatiana de Rosnay’s new biography, “Manderley Forever,” makes that connection. Her book, a sort of fictionalized interior monologue biography — has brief chapter intros written about the places that mattered in Du Marier’s life. What follows those place settings is a not-quite-first-person memoir of a woman in emotional turmoil, a life of dating Carol “The Third Man” Reed and vacationing in Naples (Florida) with stage legend Gertrude Lawrence.

What follows would, I think, make a helluva good movie. Not just a truncated exterior British TV movieNot just a truncated exterior British TV movie — but a full-on “Aviator” styled birth to death epic.

Her parents wanted a boy — she grew up with two sisters. And Daphne internalized this, a vigorous manly woman who could channel her childhood alter ego — whom she called “Eric Avon” — into a male narrator when need be, a smoldering anti-hero if that’s what suited, or just a man trapped inside a woman who coveted other women.

Reserved and just a touch aristocratic — her father was a famous actor, and ancestors were painters and George L. Du Marier, the famous author of “Peter Ibbetson” — she loved the sea, boats, carried crushes for women and men (and had flings with many of them).

She was already published, a middling writer of little achievement aside from a famous surname, when she and her mother talked her actor-dad (Gerald Du Maurier did a few films @1930) into buying a landmark home in Fowey, Cornwall. Ferryside, built into the edge of a cliff, is and remains near what was then an abandoned Great House, hidden by trees and vines, which Daphne discovered and fantasized about.

The ivy-encrusted Menabilly (above) inspired “Manderley” and “Rebecca,” the novel that made her reputation, its opening line one of the most famous in literature.

“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

One of the disappointments of the biography is being reminded that she was never able to buy the house off the landed-gentry that owned it. But she did rent it, renovate it and call it home from the 1940s through the 1960s.

She all but ignored her daughters — and doted on her only son. She let her rising-through-the-ranks Army officer husband assume postings around the world, and in London. But once she got her hands on Menabilly, they were only together on his leaves, or on weekends.

She fell for a governess, a French boarding school teacher and the wife of a publisher. She had a fling, it is implied, with the great bawdy British actress Gertrude Lawrence, the “I” in the original “King & I.” But she fell hardest for the house.

She took on one last house — Kilmarth — for her last years, and Rosnay documents that piece of land’s impact on her work, her last passions as a writer emerging from the place she was coming to know.

Despite the odd misstep in English usage (French is her first language), Rosnay recreates, with brilliant sensitivity, the “fog” of old age, closing in and making the writer suicidal when Du Maurier realizes she’s utterly spent as an artist.

An aristocrat who grew up knowing the author of “Peter Pan” as “Uncle Jim” Barrie, a novelist who took inspiration from the Brontes, a bisexual pop culture phenomenon described as a great beauty, a woman who married but kept distant a major figure in World War II military circles (She defended Lt. Gen. “Tommy” Browning after Richard Attenborough and Dirk Bogarde besmirched his name in “A Bridge too Far”)?

That sounds like a movie, to me. Cate Blanchett, are your ears burning?

“The Glass Castle,” the film biography based on one-time gossip columnist Jeannette Walls’ memoir, is just dissonant enough to feel as if it’s from another era — an era when we knew “shame.”

You know, back before we invited TV crews in to see our relatives as “Hoarders,” before we turned a family of shameless sexual opportunists into TV stars and multi-millionaires, back before we put an unstable pathological liar, crook and sexual predator in the White House.

Walls — a gorgeous, glamorous TV presence in the late ’90s, spilling the dirt on the rich and the infamous in print and in other media — was good at keeping one big secret: her secret shame, her upbringing.

“Castle” reveals that secret right out of the gate. It’s 1989, Jeannette (Oscar winner Brie Larson) is racing up the Manhattan media pecking order, engaged to an investments manager (Max Greenfield). But ask her about her parents, and her mom’s “an artist” and Dad “an engineer.” In Virginia.

And much of that smokescreen comes from the fiance, covering for her at a fancy dinner where she’s just broken the mood by asking for leftover take-home bags.

“When it comes to my family, let ME do the lying.”

Her childhood, flashbacks tell us, was worth a book. And that’s what she made of it when the gossip thing faded away.

She and her three siblings spent the late 1960s hurtling hither and yon in assorted worn-out station wagons — squatting here, camping there.

Dad (Woody Harrelson) was a regular “Captain Fantastic,” full of sound and fury about the evils of “the system” and wage slavery and debt and the state’s child endangerment laws.  Mom (Naomi Watts) was no “Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio” herself. She paints, seems to recognize the shared anti-convention/anti-establishment delusion that her husband has imposed on them all, and…just paints.

She’s too self-absorbed to protect the litter these two louts have brought into the world to raise themselves, “free range” children, before that was a thing.

They’re wonderful spinners, these parents. Where do they live? “Dad says home is wherever we go.”

Every move is always “the last time.” Every hardship — they don’t eat, often have no electricity or running water  — is “an adventure.”

Every trauma — taking little Jeannette (Chandler Head) to a segregated pool, where the black families are shocked at Dad hurling her into deep water with a hectoring “Sink or SWIM!” — is a life lesson.

We’re all heroes of our own story, and Walls tells hers — they wind up trapped in the poorest corner of West Virginia — with understanding, tolerance, attempts at humor and a barely-tamped-down fury.

The adult kids joke and wince and laugh about the time their father drank up what money they had at Christmas, and then took them into the yard and “gave” them stars as presents. The children get burned, cut, bruised and starved — kept out of school but not out of harm’s way by self-absorbed “free-spirit” parents.

Textbooks and movies tell us that such kids grow up fast. They have to be the adults. And that’s what happens here, a pact to “get out of here” — one at a time.

Harrelson, who was in “Prize Winner” and probably should have steered clear of this, can put a charming mask on a self-righteous monster who takes too much pride in not fitting in. Watts lets us see what might keep Rosemary with this man, but the writing doesn’t explain away her gross dereliction of her duties.

“The Glass Castle” — the title is just one of the pipe-dreams Rex sells his little girl — lurches between the comic and the appalling. West Virginia small-town poverty never looked so real, or so grinding. The effort to explain their father’s mania (Robin Bartlett is the mother who made him, the monstrous grandma to this brood) falls short.

And much of the “present day” material — with Brie stumbling into those parents as they dumpster-dive in Manhattan, and yet still trying to maintain ties and see to it that her siblings do, too — rings hollow.

If you were looking for someone to deftly juggle this sentimental-to-shocking story into shape, the director of the harsh and hilariously over-rated “Short Term 12” would not be first on the list. But here is director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton manhandling this — a little “Captain Fantastic” here, a lump of “Grapes of Wrath” there, none of it graceful or for that matter logical — into a lumbering ordeal of a picture.

It’s impossible for a movie using child actors to get across malnutrition, injuries, ruined teeth, broken spirits barely propped up with love, to any convincing degree. Then again, looking at the perfectly put-together/perfect teeth Walls on TV back in the day or even today, and you’re hard-pressed to believe this fable. But the burn scars are hidden.

And maybe it’s just the times, but remembering “shame” when it really does seem to have been kicked to the curb by our race to a social lowest common denominator, may be the toughest concept to take a swing at, something “The Glass Castle” manages with a swing and a miss.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content involving family dysfunction, and for some language and smoking

Cast: Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, Ella Anderson, Chandler Head, Max Greenfield

Credits: Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, script by Andrew Landham and Destin Daniel Cretton, based on the Jeannette Walls memoir.  A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:07

Robert Pattinson has his best role since he wiped off the “Twilight” glitter in as a stumbling, bumbling thief hurtling toward his fate in the ironically titled “Good Time.”

It’s a story of two brothers — developmentally-disabled Nick, played as thick and short-tempered by the hulking Benny Safdie — and Constantine “Connie,” the “smart” one, who doesn’t want to see Nick lumped into with the state’s special needs system.

It’s what Connie (Pattinson) does after he yanks Nick out of a psyche evaluation that will make your jaw drop even as it kick-starts the picture. They don masks and rob a bank.

There’s dark humor in a lot of what Connie does, beginning with the robbery. He’s costumed them both as construction workers, and donned semi-convincing rubber African American face masks.

They don’t talk. He just slides misspelled notes to the teller. And when she slides a note back to him that this is all that’s in her drawer, “policy,” and Connie REALLY needs $65,000 — so go back and get more — we figure out Nick isn’t the only slow brother.

The teller leaves, goes to the vault, and may not come back. Connie never thought of that. Or when she does, there’s probably going to be a dye pack in their bag. Never thought of that, either.

As Connie leads them through a clumsy get-away, into the fast food restroom where they try to wash off the dye, through a mall where Nick is caught and into a night of running, improvising, bullying and seducing his way out of this mess of his own creation, Connie teaches us the difference between native cunning and smart.

There’s an unstable older woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) that he’s convinced he’ll take on a trip with the money — only now he needs it to post his brother’s bail. Fine.

“Just got to get him out of there before something bad happens,” he shouts, giving her the bum’s rush into the bail bondman’s office so they can access her mother’s credit card.

No dice. Yelling at the bondsman (Eric Paykert) only produces this nugget — Nick was hurt, and is in protective custody at a hospital.

Fine. Connie’ll break him out of there. He outsmarts the staff and the cop on guard, only to figure out he’s freed the wrong prisoner in a neck cast, his face covered in bandages.

Fine. He’s gotten this junky Ray (Buddy Duress, perfect) out of a room, off his life support monitors, into a special assistance city bus and talked their way into the apartment of a grandmother and her sassy, streetwise but naive granddaughter Crystal (Taliah Webster). His face shows up on the news on their TV? Distract Crystal by making a move on her.

She says she’s 16, so sure — fine.

Ray comes to, starts this rambling medicated monologue about how he ended up in police custody in the hospital, and Connie decides they’ll go get some cash and LSD Ray’s buddies stashed in an amusement park’s funhouse. In the middle of the night.

FINE. And so on.

I love the way the Safdie Brothers’ (“Heaven Knows What”) script just stumbles through this night, forcing Connie to rely on that native cunning and the one thing that’s gotten him through life up to this point — his smoldering allure to women.

Pattinson, who never lets on that he’s wearing an alien accent, gives Connie just a hidden hint of charm. Like the actor himself, women just get lost in those blue eyes, and he can talk them into anything.

The violence, when it comes, is shocking. The coda is abrupt, but fitting.

And that all makes for a night-long “Good Time” that will get under your skin and stick with you long after its consequences settle in on the impulsive, not-that-bright lowlifes it is about.

MPAA Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Buddy Duress

Credits:Directed by Benny Safdie, Jon Safdie, script by  Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:40

The violence in “Wind River” will take your breath away. As it should.

We’ve become so inured to it — in the movies and on TV — that we forget the shock that accompanies it. We don’t know how loud high-caliber firearms actually are up close, the jolt of their impact, the carnage they wreak.

Actor-turned-director Taylor Sheridan’s modern Westerns — “Sicario,” “Hell or High Water” and the latest, “Wind River” — take place in violent worlds full of brutish men who, on their best day, regard the guns that are part of their lives as tools.

And on their worst days? You don’t want to know.

“Wind River” reminds us that there’s still a lot of “wild” in the West. Set on the frigid plateau of Wyoming, where isolation and despair go glove-in-hand with contempt for government, drug abuse and a seriously unsentimental view of nature, wildlife and wild places, it’s the worst place imaginable to solve a murder.

FBI Agent Jane Banner (Elizabeth Olsen) is totally out of her element with “you people,” as she tactlessly refers to the locals on the Wind River Indian Reservation. The tribal police chief (the great Graham Greene) is alternately resigned to the fact of her assistance, and amused by her attempt.

“Don’t lead me on,” he grouses at one point. “I’m used to no help.”

The “you people” thing cuts both ways. And he has news for her brand of “you people.”

“This isn’t the land of ‘back-up,’ Jane. This is the land of ‘on your own.'”

But they aren’t alone. Cory, played to near-perfection by Jeremy Renner, grew up here, a working class Joe whose latest job takes advantage of his lost-art skills. He works for the Fish and Wildlife Service as a tracker of predators that kill livestock — a tracker and a hunter. Jane, quick to point out that as a lone FBI agent, “I’m not here to solve this,” leans on his wilderness skills.

Because Cory’s the one who stumbled across an Arapahoe teen, barefoot and frozen to death in the snow. He sees things forensics won’t.

“All I know is what the tracks say.”

One of the pleasures of Sheridan’s tightly-woven script is the way Cory’s grim stoicism has a source, and that and his local ties —  a white man who married and divorced a Native American (Julia Jones)  — give him entre to that world, even if he’s an outsider.

The victim’s father, Martin (Gil Birmingham, of “Hell or High Water,” finally freed of “Twilight”) may be fatalistic.

“She’s just a girl that lost her way in the snowis all.”

But Cory knows better. He and Martin share something.

“Let yourself suffer.”

The crime itself — recreated in grisly flashback — isn’t that much of a mystery. “Wind River” is more about the culture clash — the Ft. Lauderdale native FBI agent finding her footing in the shadow of Fort Laramie. It’s about the remote, forbidding cold where jurisdictions overlap and all manner of dead-enders disregard the lawmen and women trying to keep them in line, where any confrontation is going to have firearms.

The airless tedium is tempered by the innate awareness that living and dying is done on the knife’s edge in country this hard.

“Luck don’t live out here.”

In “Hell of High Water,” Sheridan used a heist picture to point his camera at ageing, dying Western towns and the institutions that let them die. Here, it’s the hopeless neglect of Indian Reservations — children raised the way they’ve always been raised, but with grinding, inescapable poverty and deadly new drug distractions that eat into families and society.

He also has a tendency to cast the prettiest movie stars, which washes some of the grit off his movies. Here, Olsen’s runway-ready look earns comment and is a distraction. She needed to de-glam a bit, like Jodie Foster in “The Silence of the Lambs” or Chris Pine in “Hell or High Water.” Actors remind us they’re actors when they’re too well-groomed and turned out to look like the land has worn on them.

Rent “Frozen River” or “Winter’s Bone” and catch the contrast. This film rarely feels as cold as its first scenes, and never as cold as everybody is making out. The promised blizzard is a bust.

And the third act has a few moments where the script lets Renner hit the Western Icon button too hard.

But the “Hurt Locker” star brings a virile competence to Cory, a man in his element — hand-loading the rounds he uses in his work tool — a rifle — watching the skies to know when the blizzard is coming, scanning the ground to see who ran off where. Just the way he mounts his snowmobile — riding on one-knee to sit up higher and see further ahead, hurtling along on the edge of reckless — embeds him in the character and the place.

He and Sheridan and some terrific, under-used supporting players (the omnipresent hulk Jon Bernthal among them) give “Wind River” a somber, grim grace and the relentless forward motion of a thriller that isn’t just seen, but stared-down, because that’s the warrior code of the place and the people struggling to live there.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, a rape, disturbing images, and language

Cast: Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olsen, Graham Greene, Kelsey Asbille, Gil Birmingham, Jon Bernthal, Julia Jones

Credits: Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan.  A Weinstein Co. release.

Running time: 1:47

The dire state of animation screenwriting, made plain by a summer of “Cars 3,” “Despicable Me 3” and worse (“The Emoji Movie”) is pounded into stone by “The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature.”

Even the year’s funniest cartoons — “Boss Baby” and “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie” — got by on chuckles and giggles, barely a belly laugh between them.

Sony Animation may smirk over selling “The Emoji Movie” to a few million suckers over the howls of warning from critics and social-media trashings from friends and family. But the days of “If we animate it, they will come” are fast ending for the cynical and the skin-flinty in Hollywood’s corridors of power. If they don’t start spending on re-writes, the end is nigh.

“Nut Job” had some Will Arnett sass, a touch of fast-paced slapstick and a cute hook — endangered park animals knock over a nut shop — a few years back. It wasn’t a laugh riot, but there were giggles enough to get by.

Are they selling the sequel with “Well, at least it’s not ‘The Emoji Movie?” Because the limp loonyness on display here has barely a giggle, much less a laugh.

Surly the hustler-squirrel (Arnett) presides over a never-ending feast at the nut emporium he and his fellow park dwellers have made their home.

His squirrel gal-pal Andie (Katherine Heigl) may be all about the aphorisms.

“Easy doesn’t build character…There are no shortcuts in life, Surly.”

But that falls on deaf ears, even after the nut shop blows up and the park they all used to call home falls under the gaze of a rapacious, crooked mayor (“SNL’s” Bobby Moynihan), Surly is still looking for an angle, a hustle.

There’s GOT to be a way to get the pug Precious (Maya Rudolph) into the mayor’s house, maybe by flirting with his obnoxious daughter’s Boston Terrier, Frankie (Bobby Cannavale).

But THEN what?

The picture meanders through a 1960 cityscape, with Surly not managing a single moment of funny business and Arnett and Rudolph having nothing funny to say.

Heigl? She’s never been funny. Ask anybody.

The one gag that works is probably a little racist, or at least racially touchy. Jackie Chan voices the lead mouse in a sea of martial artist mice who beat the purple out of Surly any time he ventures into Chinatown.

“Don’t call me CUTE!”

There’s novelty in hearing the voice of Scandinavian heavy Peter Stormare as an animal control officer — again, with nothing remotely funny to say or do.

Then again, maybe you bust a gut over the mayor’s license plate pun — “MBZLVR.”

The odd strained chuckle, here and there, isn’t enough to take the stench of “Emoji Movie” summer off “Nutty by Nature.” Maybe Surly is speaking for all of American animation when he delivers the one good line Arnett has in the script.

“Amazing how quickly rock bottom catches up to you.”

MPAA Rating: PG (for action and some rude humor)

Cast: The voices of Will Arnett, Katherine Heigl, Maya Rudolph, Jackie Chan, Peter Stormare, Bobby Moyniham

Credits:Directed by, script by . An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:24

“Dave Made a Maze” is the most jaw-droppingly original movie of 2017, a delirious and deliberate act of DIY whimsy in the Terry Gilliam style.

It cannot possibly have been as cheap to make as it looks. The sets are literally made of cardboard. But genius often scoffs at the word “budget.”

Start with the simplest of concepts — this frustrated, directionless goof Dave (Nick Thune) has built a labyrinth out of old refrigerator boxes in the living room of his apartment. Girlfriend Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) comes home and just rolls her eyes.

There he goes again. And yeah, he’s “lost” inside it.

But this thing “is bigger than it looks,” he insists. “Don’t come IN here! It’s DANGEROUS!” And no, you can’t tear it apart. I mean, he spent his whole weekend building it, its blind alleys, chimneys, tunnels and booby traps.

Oh yes — it’s booby-trapped.

“Call Gordon! Call Leonard! JUST Leonard!”

His pals are no help. Gordon ( Adam Busch of TV’s “Colony”) shows up with a documentary film crew, led by indie film icon and Hal Hartley muse James Urbaniak.

Leonard (Scott Krinsky)? He shows up with friends, Flemish tourists, the works.

They can’t lead Dave out. The maze shakes and smokes and every time they push against it, the sound of shattering glass and rending metal screeches from it.

“Don’t come in here” is ignored. Annie’s got her box cutter and she’s going in. And everybody and I mean EVERYbody else follows.

What they and we are treated to is a visual delight, dazzling cardboard rooms rendered from say, an electronic keyboard package, or walls of pasted-together playing cards.

And no, it’s not safe. It’s taken on a life of its own. There’s a monstrous Gilliam-style cardboard head straight out of “TRON,” predatory origami birds that attack and peck.

Slide into this room, and everybody is transformed into paper-bag puppets, cross into that one, death dealing axes or Vietnam War punji sticks await.

Hell, there’s even a Minotaur. And since the maze isn’t quite finished, there really is no way out.

“We’re going to die, and it’s all YOUR fault,” one and all scream at Dave.

Save for Harry (Urbaniak), the doc director who interviews everyone as they explore, manipulates performances (“More ‘childlike WONDER’ this time!”) and stays on task, even when people die.

The deaths are tiny little comic works of art — an arterial spray of red confetti, yarn and silly string.

Seriously, if this little indie pic’s production designer, Jeff White, isn’t nominated for an Oscar, the Art Director’s Guild doesn’t know genius when it sees it.

Actor-turned-director and co-writer Bill Watterson keeps the tone light and the surprises surprising, for the most part. The energy flags as the picture loses a little of its momentum in the middle acts. It’s only 80 minutes long, so even that doesn’t hurt it much.

The characters are dizzy, the film-making jokes (documentary fakery) zing and the stakes seem high even when we’re seeing characters ground up by cardboard gears, sliced by cardboard saws (“Paper cuts!”) in a cloud of paper-shredder plasma.

Urbaniak stands out in the cast — a droll voice of ’80s hipster nerd slumming among millennial slackers — though Busch, Thune and Stephanie Allynne all make funny impressions.

The whole merry affair walks a tightrope between ingenious and happy accident, skating along on a killer gimmick and the make-do/can-do DIY spirit of the production team.

Seriously, why bother making a sequel to “Labyrinth” now that “Dave Made a Maze?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, cartoon violence

Cast:  Nick Thune, Meera Rohit Kumbhani, James Urbaniak, Adam Busch, Stephanie Allynne

Credits:Directed by Bill Watterson, script by Steven Sears and Bill Watterson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21

“Annabelle: Creation” back-engineers the tale of the demonically possessed doll — the latest version of a demonically possessed doll — into an origin story that is a veritable grab-bag of terror.

The director of the simpler and superior “Lights Out” takes his best shot at making us quake, jump or recoil at demons, dolls, scarecrows and puppets. But while David F. Sandberg uses his silences well and doles out the early chills like a doctor worried we’ll get hooked on thrills, that grab bag is mostly stuffed with cliches. And if we’re talking back to the screen, as audiences often do at horror pictures, it’s because we’re two steps ahead of the plot and trying to hurry this lumbering beast along, or correct its lapses in logic or its anachronisms.

In the 1940s, a little girl named “Bee” is killed in a motoring accident. Her mother (Miranda Otto) grieves, and her taciturn doll-maker dad (Anthony LaPaglia) will never make another doll.

But years later, with his wife an invalid at their remote Southern California farmhouse, Dollmaker Sam invites the Catholic Church to set up a mini-orphanage in their home.

The half-dozen little girls under the care of Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman) love having all this space. But there are a lot of shadows there, and a locked room with a spooky dollhouse and a closet holding an even spookier doll.

The teens are creeped-out, but the young polio victim Janice (Talitha Bateman) lets her curiosity get the better of her and her best bud, Linda (Lulu Wilson).  They’re the first to connect the doll dots.

An “I can’t stay here” followed by “We need to leave” falls on the nun’s deaf ears. She hasn’t noticed how naturally creepy those two little girls are to start with.

So naturally, all hell breaks loose.

Sandberg opens the picture with a couple of dazzling camera moves and disorienting crane shots, and then settles down on the penny plain effects that work in most horror pictures. Shadows that spread, taloned fingers that reach out of the dark, a well you shouldn’t look down and a beneath-the-stairs hiding place you shouldn’t hide in are all classic horror tropes.

As indeed is the idea of a demonic doll. From “Twilight Zone” to “Chucky” to “Treehouse of Terror,” we’ve been treated to all manner of manikin monsters. Usually they talk.

Producer James Wan commissioned screenwriter Gary Dauberman to fold this tale back into “The Conjuring” universe, the many spooky hoaxes of ghostbusters/book-hustlers Lorraine and Ed “Amityville” Warren. The result is a clockwork horror picture where the trains run on time and the attempted frights arrive in their turn. There’s just too little that’s novel and even less that’s scary.

If you can’t get more than just a taste of terror from throwing half a dozen orphans into a haunted house, maybe your “universe” isn’t expanding at all and your “Creation” has run its course.

MPAA Rating: R for horror violence and terror.

Cast:  Talitha Bateman, Lulu Wilson, Stephanie Sigman, Anthony LaPaglia, Miranda Otto

Credits:Directed by David F. Sandberg, script by  Gary Dauberman. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:48