Movie Nation

It doesn’t limit “20th Century Women” to call it a “coming of age” story.

Because there is no limit to that which comes of age in it.

Sure, there’s a teenage boy, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). And he’s got this crush on a bad girl/broken spirit, Julie (Elle Fanning) who keeps coming over, leaning on him, spending the night and insisting that unlike every other guy she knows — she’s promiscuous — with Jamie she’ll “just be friends.”

His Santa Barbara, California mom (Annette Bening) “had me at 40” and is raising him by herself, something fairly novel even in California in 1979.

She studies him, frets over giving him a complete and well-rounded upbringing. But you kind of figure she’s coming of age, too, in between her pearls of tough-love wisdom.

Mother and son are brutally blunt with each other in that hip, sitcommie post “One Day at a Time” way of the late ’70s.

“Having your heart broken is a tremendous way to learn about the world!”

There’s a fragile, winsome boarder (Greta Gerwig) and free-spirit handyman (Billy Crudup) also under their roof.

And in 1979, America was coming of age — again — about to abandon the serious search for answers to the future and retreat into a deluded nostalgia that lasted for a decade.

So maybe writer-director Mike Mills (“Beginners”) was onto something, tapping into an exhausted zeigeist that suggests America, like Dorothea, Bening’s single-mom in the movie, is earnest and overwhelmed and maybe too tired to get everything just right, to always do right by everybody. She’s not going to be everyone’s friend, not going to get the answers from assorted feminist studies texts.

But being an adult and a mom, she can’t just check out. So the decisive, authoritative Dorothea gets on with it, prioritizing who she wants Jamie to become, enlisting Abbie (Gerwig) and then Julie in her mission. He’s got to be a man who’s a comfort to women, treat them honorably no matter what.

Over the course of the film, his mother and the other women in his life test Jamie, teach him, and on purpose or utterly by accident make him the man he will become.

It’s a sweet, sad-faced comedy in a minor key, with Bening holding forth as the iconic woman of the “20th Century” of the title. Dorothea is unflappable long before she needs to be. This may be mid “malaise” America. But she is pre-Reagan, pre-AIDS, pre-REAL recession.

Gerwig plays a more brittle version of her usual screen flakes, Crudup is perfectly cast as that rooster in the henhouse just outgrowing his “hippie” phase. Young Zumann holds our interest well enough for us to want to follow his story even though we know every other character in this has a more interesting one.

And Fanning, a wise-beyond-her-years starlet, is right on the money as a lost girl in ’70s straightened hair, catnip to the boys not just because of her looks, but thanks to the air of doom that hangs over her.

It’s not a deep film, but it is a rich one — full of flesh and blood characters, realistic “coming of age” moments and pithy homilies on the state of relationships, gender roles, “the California Dream” and the American one.

And as its title suggests, it’s a real showcase for three generations of the best American actresses in the business, women of feelings and heart and steel. They give Mills’ movie its backbone and in the malaise in which this film reaches us, a hint of hope.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual material, language, some nudity and brief drug use

Cast: Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Lucas Jade Zumann, Elle Fanning, Billy Crudup

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Mills. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:59

We don’t mislabel it “schizophrenia” any more. And few call them “multiple personalities” these days. It’s “Dissociative identity disorder” now.

But it’s still every actor’s wet dream. And given the chance to play a kidnapper with an array of guises living in his darkly disturbed skull, James McAvoy does what any gifted actor would under the circumstances.

He chews up the screen, the supporting cast and the movie, and then dabs his lips with his napkin, ever-so-demurely.

In “Split,” he plays a creep who kidnaps and imprisons three tartly-dressed teens —  Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula. They’re freaked out enough, packed into a makeshift dungeon with no TV, no cell reception and nothing to occupy their short attention spans but their doom.

And every time their keeper unlocks the door, he’s “different.”

There’s Dennis, who buttons his shirt all the way to the top like all movie rapists and serial killers. When he barks “I choose YOU first,” the girls assume the worst. Intrepid Claire (Richardson) shrieks, frozen-in-fear Marcia (Sula) weeps in shock.

Only the odd-girl-out, a pity invite to Claire’s mall birthday party, shakes off the shock long enough to react to an impending rape.

“PEE on yourself,” she hisses to Marcia. It works.

Casey (Taylor-Joy of “The Witch”) has inner resources and a dark past. We start to learn about this in flashbacks.

Dennis, the trio discovers, isn’t alone. Shaved head in earrings and high heels, he returns as the ever-so-proper Patricia, or the nerdy nine-year-old Hedwig.

Hedwig?

Claire is all about forming a plan and ganging up on this short but muscular creep. Casey, as shaken as any of them, isn’t ready.

“I’ll let you know when I hear something that makes sense.”

It turns out, “Kevin” is under a doctor’s care. Betty Buckley plays a psychotherapist specializing in D.I.D. patients, and she thinks she’s made a breakthrough, a discovery that will alter our way of looking at such people and at reality. Pity she can’t connect “Barry,” the fey would-be costume designer, Patricia, Hedwig, Dennis or the others living in Kevin’s head with news reports that three girls were just kidnapped, in broad daylight, at a suburban Philly mall.

Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan weaves together three points of view and three storylines — the trapped girls, Casey’s past and Dr. Fletcher’s sympathetic, earnest and probing “treatment” of Kevin — in crafting this standard-issue psycho-abduction thriller.

Shyamalan gets his chutzpah, if not exactly his mojo back with this solid and modestly thrilling thriller. While it is markedly inferior to such recent hostage pictures as the riveting and Oscar-winning “Room” and the tighter, tense “10 Cloverfield Lane,” Shyamalan feels comfortable enough to go back to his old tricks after years in the director-for-hire (“The Last Airbender,””AfterEarth”) and cheap, gimmicky horror (“The Visit”) wilderness.

He builds gravitas into the story with madcap theories about the explainable supernatural, packaged in the person of Buckley’s “I’m onto something BIG” shrink.

He ties the picture into his early career continuum, linking it to the storylines he cooked up back when he was a Time Magazine coverboy/wunderkind.

And Shyamalan gives himself a cameo, with speaking lines, always a mistake. He’s not so much a bad actor as a distractingly dull one.

The young actresses are given roles with traces of pluck and self-reliance. But they’re objectified, presented in various stages of undress, a heavy-handed tease that a sex crime might be in their future.

That gives the film a standard horror movie failing — a disconnect, an empathy gap. The suspense doesn’t build as they race towards their fate. There is no pulse-pounding feeling to any “They/she might get away” moment. Casey may have demons to exorcise. We’ve seen the “Signs.”

But Shyamalan treats her, like everybody else, as an exotic lab exhibit he and we study, not people root for.

That leaves us with McAvoy, finally ripped out of that “X-Men” wheelchair and given his juiciest, most over-the-top part since “Filth.” He minces, he broods. He tries to manage walking on high heels. He’s fun to watch, but it’s a showy, obvious and flamboyant performance.

There’s just enough connection to the current psychological theory to give “Split” resonance, but too many Shyamalan indulgences and nods to his past to let it stand on its own. And when in the third act he brings it all together and tries to sprint for the finish, all he can manage is to ego trip over his past.

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

Cast: James McAvoy, Betty Buckley, Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula

Credits:Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:57

Every now and then, a cop picture comes along that makes bullet points out of the cliches common to the genre. “Sleepless,” a remake of the French thriller “Nuit blanche,” is here to teach us the conventions of “the cop thriller.”

There’s a dirty police department. Here, Las Vegas “is a city crawling with dirty cops.”

We always have a disgraced/demoted/wounded on the job officer in need of redemption, here played by Michelle Monaghan.

There’s a bad cop (Jamie Foxx) up to his elbows in dirty deals until one gets his son kidnapped.

He’s got a nagging ex-wife (Gabrielle Union) who doesn’t understand that the job comes first.

There’s a polished, over-dressed criminal (Dermot Mulroney), and an even badder guy covered in tattoos and violence (Scoot McNairy).

There’s an undercover officer’s car-with-character (a 1970 or so GTO, driven by Foxx’s cop).

And we’re treated to a sampler of car chases, club scenes including strippers or, in this case, almost naked dancers and brawls in which the bloodied hero/anti-hero still has enough in him, post shooting or stabbing, to better assorted villains twice his size.

“Sleepless” packs all its action into a single night and pretty much a single location. Foxx’s “dirty” cop, Vincent, and his partner (the rapper and really bad actor T.I.) have stolen the wrong guys’ drugs. Killed a couple of their henchmen in the process.

So the casino manager (Mulroney) and mobster he’s in business with (McNairy) kidnap Vincent’s neglected son (Octavius J. Johnson) to get the drugs back. They stab Vincent to show they mean business. The hand-off will take place in a casino.

Ninety minutes of kitchen fights and insanely illogical shoot-outs and brawls in the kitchen, in the club and in the parking garage and we’re treated to the “surprise twist” that we saw coming at about the 20 minute mark.

Union does a lot of yelling and cussing out Foxx on the phone. Willowy Monaghan tries to make us believe she’d be a match in a bar fight with a gym rat Jamie Foxx’s size.

And McNairy swaggers through the thing as if his villain so owns the city he can open up with an automatic weapon in the middle of a crowded night club and never face consequences.

It’s altogether ridiculous, made all the sadder because we’ve seen this ridiculousness before. And not just in the French film that trots out these same tropes, trivialities and worn out cop thriller cliches.

MPAA Rating:R for strong violence and language throughout

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney, Scoot McNairy, Gabrielle Union.

Credits:Directed by Baran bo Odar, script by Andrea Berloff, based on the French film “Nuit blanche” by Frederic Jardin. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:35

Gonzo. Just…gonzo.

Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg has owned January the way Will Smith used to own July 4 weekend at the box office. But “Patriots Day,” another well-reviewed true-story action collaboration between Wahlberg and his go-to director, Peter Berg (“Deepwater Horizon”), is only slated to do $14 million or so over the four-day holiday weekend.

It’s not weather or reviews that are keeping people away. Maybe West Coast weather dampened turnout. Maybe the public is leery of anything labeled “patriot” with all the political turmoil roiling around the Golden Boy set to take the oath of office. 

That’s the big surprise in a generally desultory pre-Oscar nominations holiday weekend, the first cluttered (several wide releases) cinema weekend of 2017.

A bad horror movie, “The Bye Bye Man,” is easily besting that — $16 million plus. And a POS kiddie monsters and trucks movie, “Monster Truck,” will manage $13.5 or so.

“Hidden Figures” is edging “Sing” to win the weekend, $19 million to $17-18.

A Jamie Foxx cop picture, “Sleepless,” is barely in the top ten. Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” opened wide, but at 740 or so screens, not wide enough to crack the top ten.

It doesn’t spoil “Patriots Day,” the new thriller about the Boston Marathon Bombing and the hunt for the bombers, knowing this. Mark Wahlberg, as a “suspended and then redeemed” cop at the center of the action, is playing a fictional character, a mouthy, obsessed F-bombing Boston cop cliche.

But it does mute the impact of a docudrama  that feels like fascinating, as-it-happened history. It’s more “Sully” than “United 93” or “Zero Dark Thirty,” movies which proved you don’t need to invent characters in multi-point-of-view narratives to tell a true story.

Still, you get Mark Wahlberg, you get your movie made.

And it’s an otherwise noble enterprise, a detailed and action-packed account of a city’s darkest hour, and it’s professional, passionate response to it. Peter Berg, Wahlberg’s and Hollywood’s go-to guy for “true story” action (“Deepwater Horizon,” “Love Survivor”) has delivered a taut, riveting police procedural that maintains suspense even as it finds humor in the people, their funny accents and way with profanity, and pathos.

Wahlberg plays Sgt. Tommy Saunders, a demoted detective serving out a suspension in uniform, watching over the finish line of the 2013 marathon. You can tell he’s a fictional character by the special interest the Boston Police Commissioner, Ed Davis (John Goodman, rock solid) takes in him, by the number of other cops who and high-ranking officials who pat him on the back and remind him “These guys look UP to you.”

He’s a little distracted on the job, not that he could have seen or prevented what happens on that April 15, the 117th running of the race.

Berg gets us to the blast in the film’s first 25 minutes, and uses hand-held cameras (dropped to the ground), CCTV footage, archival footage and sound — tinnitus-like ringing tones in the score, concussive silence after the blast — to put us in the moment.

There is blood and torn flesh everywhere — a dead child, a disembodied foot.

And then there is professionalism. “All medical personnel to the finish line!…Confiscate all cell phones!”

The narrative also follows the bratty fanatic Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze, simmering with resentment and menace) and his even brattier, bullied and callous teenaged brother Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff, terrific). We see just the barest hint of their preparations.

Kevin Bacon is Special Agent Richard DesLauriers, the FBI man who looks over the bomb-shrapnel, calls the act “terrorism” and heads the investigation.

Berg handles of the unraveling of the mystery in brisk, nervy strokes. A great (fictional) moment — summoning the cop who knows the finish line streets (Saunders/Wahlberg, of course) to walk through a mock-up of it, recalling where the right surveillance cameras are that would have captured the bombers as they walked into the crowd to make their mayhem.

Legions of agents flip through video footage and ID the images that will give up the murderers.

But many stories are folded into this narrative — the young couple, planning a cross-country move, who take in the race’s finish only to become victims, the very young and monied Chinese immigrant (Jimmy O. Yang), selling order-placing applications to Chinese restaurants, trapped in the manhunt after the bombing, the equally young MIT campus cop (Jake Picking) who fell afoul of the bombers as they fled town.

J.K. Simmons lends marvelous, world-weary bravado to the Watertown P.D. sergeant who wades into the epic firefight where overmatched cops cornered the brothers. That shoot-out is worthy of something Michael Mann might stick into one of his action epics. In this case, the bullets, bombs and cars blowing up really happened.

And through all the tension and violence, Berg (he co-wrote the script) adds layer of flavor and a sense of place to it all. Personable, sassy, F-bombing cops, comically “helpful” F-bombing civilians, aerial shots capturing the beauty of the city, street-scenes showing its working class standard of living.

The great Michelle Monaghan has one electric moment, playing Saunders’ wife, wild-eyed with relief as she seizes him the moment he gets home.

Aside from those invented characters, Berg plays this thing straight down the middle. There’s no Muslim bashing, “I’m not gonna let Fox News run this investigation” is spat out and the FBI admits, quickly, that it had the older brother on a watch list.

The result is a film that, like “Sully,” celebrates competence over bravado, sympathy for victims over revenge against the perpetrators, and the people of Boston over any attempts to circumscribe their freedoms, dampen their enthusiasms or clean up their language.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, realistically graphic injury images, language throughout and some drug use

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Monaghan, Kevin Bacon, John Goodman, J.K. Simmons

Credits:Directed by Peter Berg, script by Peter Berg, Matt Cook, Joshua Zetumer. A Lionsgate/CBS release.

Running time: 2:13

Regarding that headline, here’s the old Oscar maxim.

“Best Directors direct Best Pictures.”

If your director doesn’t get nominated, your picture, even if nominated, doesn’t stand a chance at winning Best Picture.

So “La La Land,” “Arrival,” “Manchester by the Sea,” “Moonlight” and “Lion” have the edge, at least according to this year’s Director’s Guild nominations.

I am outraged on behalf of Jeff Nichols of “Loving,” “Midnight Special” etc., one of the best, most versatile directors working today. But it’s hard to argue with that field.

There can be as many as ten Oscar nominations for Best Picture, but the DGA also manages to get ten (nine this year) Best Directors.

Garth Davis of “Lion” copped both Best Director and Best First Time Director nominations. He’s up against Tim Miller of “Deadpool,” Nate Parker of “Birth of a Nation” and Kelly Fremon Craig of “The Edge of Seventeen” and Daniel Trachtenberg for “10 Cloverfield Lane.” I’d say Davis has the inside track on that one, with Parker, Trachtenberg and Craig helming films of lower ambition.

“Moonlight” has some buzz, but has felt like an Indie Spirit Award winner, from the get-go. “La La Land” and “Manchester” may have peaked early, in terms of awards heat.

“Arrival” gets a nomination and we remember, “Oh yeah. It’s a contender, and Amy Adams has an outside chance of finally taking a Best Actress statuette (Damn you, Natalie Portman!”).

The TV nominations are, like the Golden Globes, more attuned to the trendy hits (“Stranger Things,””Game of Thrones”) than the true “best directors.”

The DGA hands out its honors Feb. 4.

Upon first hearing they were turning the lame ’80s TV series “CHiPs” into a movie, I thought — “Well, they cast it right.”

Whack-job funnyman and car nut Dax Shepard and funny-when-he-wants-to-be Michael Pena?

That works.

The trailer, with its homoerotic riffs, crashes and Maya Rudolph/Kristen Bell (Mrs. Shepard)?

“Well, they cast it right.”

“The Bye Bye Man” is a moldy slice of Wisconsin-set cheese, a horror film that manages as many unwanted laughs as frights.

But there was just enough here — maybe in the pitch, if not the script — to attract the Great Faye Dunaway and fanboy icon Carrie-Anne Moss, who show up for chewy moments in the third act.

It’s a “Boogeyman/Candyman/Bloody Mary” variation. Say his name, and “The Bye Bye Man” comes to getcha.

You experience hallucinations that cause you to commit violence. A silver dollar keeps falling on the floor, you see and hear trains.

And then this spectral wraith, a “reaper,” shows up in a hooded cloak, his trusty  Hellhound by his side.

A badly-acted 1969 prologue shows a tearful man stumbling through his neighborhood, asking friends if they “told anyone” a story he passed on to them. He shotguns anybody who says “Yes,” and kills anybody they mentioned this Bye Bye Man to.

“Don’t think it, don’t say it,” he mutters over and over, a mantra for protection that never comes.

Forty-seven years later, three college kids — a romantic couple (Douglas Smith, Cressida Bonas) and the guy’s best friend (Lucien Laviscount) rent a remote old brick two-storey. Elliot (Smith) stumbles into writing in an old end table drawer, and says the fateful name.

Next thing you know, he’s seeing eyes glowing in the dark, hearing this silver dollar (that everybody in the movie refers to as “gold”) rattle to the floor. And he’s dreaming about this train. Let’s call a seance and see what’s up.

Bad things ensue, fomenting jealousy, paranoia, other people saying the name and a rising sense of moral duty. They can’t tell anyone else what is happening, because if they repeat the name, it’ll happen to them, too.

Elliot’s research has to go far beyond Googling “Bye Bye Man,” and the wise old widow (Dunaway) and sympathetic cop (Moss) show up.

The visions and hallucinations are bloody and maggot-infested, or as bloody as a PG-13 movie allows. Dead college kid movies don’t work as PG-13s, ask any horror fan. The violence and sex aren’t explicit enough to alarm or titillate.

Filmmaker Stacy Title puts his reaper into glimpsed moments of background, in mirrors or shadows. And those shots never deliver the jolt that some dreaded “Now we see it” horror is supposed to deliver.

The leads are adequate, but Smith lifts his game for his scenes with Moss and Dunaway. There might have been a better picture in all this, but then again, maybe not.

“Don’t think it, don’t say it,” sure. Don’t see it, either.

Don’t fear the reaper, kids.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for terror, horror violence, bloody images, sexual content, thematic elements, partial nudity, some language and teen drinking

Cast:  Douglas Smith, Cressida Bonas, Lucien LaviscountCarrie-Anne Moss, Faye Dunaway

Credits:Directed by Stacy Title, script by based on a Robert Damon Schneck short story. An STX release.

Running time: 1:30

Michelle lets it slip, almost casually, in a restaurant — at a group dinner with friends.

“I guess,” she hems and haws, “I was raped…I feel stupid for bringing it up.”

But we already know that. We’ve seen the brutal home invasion, the punches, and heard the glass shatter. And we’ve watched her throw away her torn clothes, clean up, order sushi.

And at work? She calls to get her locks changed, only to field menacing, sexually taunting texts from her assailant.

“Elle” is no ordinary rape victim. Leave it to the Dutch master of kink, Paul “Basic Instinct” Verhoeven, to bring a distinctly disturbing take on a notorious novel to the screen, a comeback of sorts for him and his fierce, almost ageless 60something star, Isabelle Huppert.

Michelle is a take-no-guff co-owner of a video game company, and the way she lords it over her young male staff makes her certain that her attacker came from their ranks.

But she’s having an affair with the husband (Cristian Berkel) of her co-owner and closest friend (Anne Consigny). She is sarcastically rude to the rent-boy her aged mother (Judith Magre) has taken up with, and utterly intolerant of the hair-triggered pregnant girlfriend her son (Jonas Bloquet) loves.

There’s an ex-husband (Charles Berling) whom she cheated on and regularly insults and whose car she vandalizes.

The list goes on. Some of them could have done it, others could be motivated to pay someone to do it.

But there are also hints of Michelle’s further, even more infamous notoriety.

The Oscar favorite for Best Foreign Language Film (in French with English subtitles) is no ordinary thriller, as Verhoeven films that unblinking opening scene with just enough titillation to let us think — maybe for a moment — that this is rough sex play that’s gotten out of hand.

He teases us with suspects, left, right and center. He never flinches from the violence of it all. And if he never quite puts his heroine on the psychiatrist’s couch, that’s by design. We do the head shrinking from the distant comfort of our cinema seats.

At the center of the mystery is the poker-faced Huppert. Michelle takes a sexual assault and later an ugly confrontation in a cafe, a trip to a self-defense shop to buy pepper spray and a hatchet, all in stride. It’s as if it’s her due, she’s used to it and trying to get the authorities to intervene would be fruitless.

We’re slow to solve the mystery, pondering the various suspects assembled for us. The script solves it for us, abruptly and a little too casually.

But Verhoeven, a chilly, efficient director of arms-length sexually-charged thrillers, doesn’t want you to fall for the heroine. He wants you to almost pity the man. He’s done something heinous, but he’s not walking away from it. And this broad is going to mess him up, we just know it.

It’s a performance of measured menace and silent suffering, maybe even survivor’s guilt. And Huppert, after a career that has included “Entre Nous,” “8 Women,” and the equally unnerving “The Piano Teacher,” makes this unfiltered fury the capstone of a stunning career in which she journeyed from French sex symbol to grande dame of European cinema without losing even a hint of her allure.

 
MPAA Rating: R for violence involving sexual assault, disturbing sexual content, some grisly images, brief graphic nudity, and language

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jonas Bloquet, Anne Consigny, Christian Berkel, Laurent Lafitte, Charles Berling

Credits:Directed by Paul Verhoeven, script by David Birke, based on the novel by Philippe Djian. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:11