Movie Nation

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The pedigree for “Fathers and Daughters” suggests there were great expectations for this melodrama at one time.

Oscar winners Russell Crowe, Jane Fonda and Octavia Spencer, Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis and reunited “Big Love” lovers Amanda Seyfried and Aaron Paul are in the cast.

The director, Gabriele Muccino, helmed two blatant grasps at Oscar nominations for Will Smith, “Seven Pounds” and “Pursuit of Happyness.”

It has Crowe, who has never recovered the fans he lost eleven years ago when he infamously tossed a phone at a hotel clerk, playing a novelist and doting daddy who is losing his mind, a sad, sick man who may lose his daughter to evil in-laws in the process. That’s what’s called “softening the image.”

It has Seyfried as that daughter, all grown up and dealing with intimacy issues by bedding and abandoning every man she fancies. What might happen if she finds Real Love (Paul)? She’s also a psychotherapist in training, trying to help a speechless child (Wallis, of “Beasts of the Southern Wild”) overcome her own “trust” issues.

Spencer is Katy the future-shrink’s mentor/adviser, Fonda is Jacob-the-cracking-up writer’s stoic literary agent.

And for good measure, there’s Diane Kruger as the brittle, drunken sister-in-law who can never forgive Jacob for being at the wheel in the accident that killed his wife, her sister and Katy’s mom. Bruce Greenwood plays her hatefully rich, heavy-handed husband, determined to wrench young Katy (the adorable Kylie Rogers) from her daddy.

But the sum of “Fathers and Daughters” is so much less than each of its individual parts. A misshapen attempt at maudlin (not unlike Muccino’s other Hollywood films), it enrages, here and there, but rarely touches or moves us.

Crowe is at his most sympathetic, a man having seizures, committing himself to a mental hospital in the film’s 1989 opening. He fetches six year old Katy from the in-laws upon getting out, but they’re all over him, determined to adopt her out of his life. He needs money. He needs a hit book. And he’s losing his mind.

Cut to the present, 27 years later, where Katy is pursuing her psychology degree. No, that college math doesn’t really add up. Seyfried, whatever wildly uneven career she is pursuing these days, is quite sympathetic as a broken woman whose psychic injuries date from decades before.

“I don’t love,” she tells her own therapist. “There’s nothing in here.”

The “Why is she still in college at 32?” math is just one of the lapses in the movie’s logic. Katy is constantly defying orders to break through to the child she’s treating, with no consequences. Greenwood and Krueger’s characters are insufferable caricatures of the worst in human behavior.

And the novel that the “blocked” writer frantically types away at is apparently inspired by the simple banalities of his own father-daughter relationship. That’s a best-seller?

Muccino should have thinned this out, picked up the pace to give urgency to the novelist’s impending madness and literary quest, spent less money on peripheral characters so that he’d feel less guilt about trimming their scenes to quick sketches that make the plot work. Fewer sex scenes (We get the point.,), fewer over-the-top seizures (Ditto), fewer father-daughter idylls.

Without those trims, “Fathers and Daughters” — The banality of the title is telling. That, and it makes no sense in the story as edited and presented here. — amounts to a lot of dead space with the odd great moment, a lot of plot and characters and dead-end scenes that add nothing to a story we have been twenty minutes ahead of after the first half hour.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content/references

Cast: Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Jane Fonda, Octavia Spencer, Diane Kruger, Quvenzhané Wallis
Credits: Directed by Gabriele Muccino, script by Brad Desch. A Voltage release.

Running time: 1:56

Gennadiy Mokhnenko is a two-fisted Pentacostalist pastor who sees himself as a character he remembers from a children’s cartoon.

He is “Gennadiy the Crocodile,” friend to children everywhere, and a friend with teeth.

Steve Hoover’s documentary “Almost Holy” follows this Ukrainian force of nature as he rescues child addicts from the streets, from those exploiting and abusing them, from a broken disinterested “system” and (ex-Soviet) culture and from the very pharmacists who sell them the drugs that take their youth, their health (some have lost limbs) and often, their lives.

In broken English, Mokhnenko describes the street kids of his city, Mariupol, Ukraine. And then he fearlessly shows you what he’s doing about them.

His methods are heavy-handed — kicking in doors, dragging kids away from their “vagabond” lives. For a pastor, he’s pretty blunt and foul-mouthed. He confronts sexual abusers with profane frankness. He shames pharmacists. On camera.

“I hope my life leaves a mark,” he says. And he is. He is making his corner of the world a tiny bit better, emptying the streets and Ukrainian version of “crack houses” of kids, intervening in the most “Scared Straight” ways.

“Why should I blow a fortune on your unlikely recovery?” he barks at one boy. Some, he gets adopted. Many, he takes into his own family. His wife Lena will bring tears to your eyes as you see both the overwhelming burden their family faces, and the unbending resolve they both have to do this work.

Hoover (“Blood Brothers”) gives voice to the controversy surrounding these “Pilgrim Republic” orphanages, the laws Pastor Crocodile breaks. And he lets us see how this work has been impacted by the Russian invasion of Crimea and assault on the rest of Ukraine. Not every child can be saved. Many want to escape back to the seeming horrors of their old lives.

Structurally, the film skips back and forth, from the “present” — a long cautionary speech at a women’s prison — to the recent past, with interventions, “raids,” counseling sessions — to the more distant past, when Mokhnenko got his start and stirred up enough controversy to wind up (repeatedly) on Ukrainian TV.

That doesn’t help the movie’s coherence or impact.

But this Ukrainian Crocodile Preacher makes an arresting subject, someone you’ll want to meet just to hear his story and see the past that put him on the path to being his country’s “Catcher in the Rye,” saving children from an ugly world and a doomed future.

MPAA Rating:R for disturbing content involving drugs and alcohol, sexual references and language

Cast: Gennadiy Mokhnenko
Credits: Written and directed by Steve Hoover. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:49

But but but…

I thought “The Curse of Sleeping Beauty” was a children’s film!

Not animated? In 3D? No true love’s kiss, and all that?

Well, sort of.

It’s a haunted house story, though it doesn’t start that way.

Thomas (Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory) is having nightmares. He’s in a desert, walking up on this canopy bed that’s surrounded by ancient Egyptian totems.

There’s a girl (India Eiseley), impossibly pale sleeping in a bustier to die for.

And just as he’s about to impose a smooch on her, Thomas always wakes up.

“Sleep paralysis,” his shrink advises. OK.

Maybe he’d buy that, but Thomas then inherits this rural, antebellum-styled mansion. His Uncle Clive, whom he never knew existed, left it to him. And did him no favors. Kaiser Gardens is a ruin. People disappear there — and have for years.

His uncle killed himself. Good luck finding a realtor who can sell that.

Linda (Natalie Hall) shows up with a grudge. She lost her brother and that house had something to do with it. She links up with a paranormal investigator (Bruce Davison of “Willard” fame). And they in turn link up with a computer -nerd researcher, stereotypically played by an Asian American (James Adam Lim).

Cobwebs and shadows aren’t enough to make a house spooky on the big screen any more. Adding manikins? Been there, seen that.

The effects — monsters, demons — are mildly chilling.

But Josh Nadler’s script is amateurish in the extreme. A dead give-away? Establishing/explaining locations with words, not images.

“Welcome to my home!” “Welcome to my SECRET lair!”

Welcome to my eye-roll.

The mansion has a basement, but there’s no use yelling “DON’T go in the BASEMENT!”

No point of anybody asking “Is that blood?” Because, you know, we can SEE it.

A couple of non-horror related amusing lines wither and die of loneliness. The actors have nothing to draw on and little to play, so they just mimic expressions and gestures they’ve seen in other horror movies.

There’s nothing at all here to hold your interest, nothing out of the horror movie trope ordinary to see and “Curse’s” utterly generic story and execution offer no object lesson in “What NOT to do when making a horror movie.”

Except maybe look a little deeper than the Brothers Grimm for your source material. The whole Sleeping Beauty connection is lame and forced and adds nothing except “public domain” to your screenplay.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence

Cast: Ethan Peck, India Eisely, Natalie Hall, Bruce Davison, James Adam Lim
Credits: Directed by , script by . An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:26

Everybody pretty much abandoned this weekend to “Captain America: Actually an Avengers Movie.” It could manage another $80 million at the box office (any less than that is a sign of audience fatigue).

So there’s not a lot of new stuff rolling into theaters.

HOWEVER. I was chatting with a theater manager friend and he was asking about “Money Monster.” Lots of grownup patrons have been asking about it, he said.

“Great marketing,” he added. TV ads in all the right places. So “Money Monster” could have a decent weekend.

The reviews aren’t glowing. This is Jodie Foster’s weakest film as a director. She’s rusty, she’s not a thriller or satire or comedy specialist. All of that shows.

But it should do pretty well, pairing up Clooney and Roberts, with Dominic West as the possible heavy and some nice work around the fringes. The Box Office Guru figures $12 million for the weekend. But with that pedigree and cast, it should do better. It’s not bad, just not great. 

“High Rise” based on a J.G. Ballard novel, is set in the ’70s and feels as if it was shot in the ’70s, pre-“Star Wars” — when sci-fi was intellectually ambitious.

It’s not a classic, but it is thought-provoking, dark and features the omni-present Tom Hiddleston.

There’s a “Pele” movie about the soccer star. Casting a Pele proved to be nigh on impossible. The lead can play, but can’t act. 

“Queen Mimi” is a doc that hits limited release. ALL good reviews for this story of a homeless LA woman adopted by the community that meets her at the local laundramat. Not deep, but upbeat. 

Nobody saw “The Darkness” pre-release, so we’re all getting to it as we can. Studios never want to hide their movies, so when they do, it’s for good reason. Horror is smart counter-programming to a comic book blockbuster, though those audiences do overlap a bit. The Box Office Guru predicts $6 million on its opening weekend, which seems low. Quite low.

Another video game turned into a movie? I thought they’d all but given up that pitch? But no, Hollywood “branding uber alles” and such. Ubisoft is a big reason I never got addicted to video games. Glitchy titles in the games that interested me.

Michael Fassbender takes on the lead role in this modern-guy-goes-to-the-15th century to learn “mad skillz” to help him with present day battles.

Like Jeremy Irons, Fassbender will show up for a high paying gig and has no issues with “commercial” projects, even though he’s one of the best actors to not win an Oscar. He classes up this first trailer for the movie, which opens in December.

This cultural meme “Exceptional skills from the past we’ve lost” is a favorite of film and fiction in general. Since the passing on of such information generation to generation is the chief difference between those days and now (We’re no smarter, we just have easy access to all this acquired knowledge), that makes a certain amount of sense. But as the passing on of info was the chief barrier to advancement of any skill in any field, how these wizard warriors are supposed to have learned what they know is a comical mystery. One person’s knowledge, passed person to person, would be seriously limited.

But it’s a video game and I’m over thinking it.

What matters is the thinly credentialed behind the camera talent and a trailer that has some eye candy, and two Oscar winners (Irons and Cotillard), but no sizzle.

December, “Assassin’s Creed.”

Director Jodie Foster’s “Money Monster” aims high, an attempt to be a riotous, righteous Jeremiad about our “rigged” financial system and the TV hustlers who try to pass off hype as “business news.”

It never quite gets there, never quite takes flight as a “romp” or achieves the level of satire. It’s not a “Network” for our times.

But a game cast and a reasonably tense take on a topic that is a major component of this election year’s zeitgeist — financial cheats stealing from America, and never brought to justice — make it work.

George Clooney is Lee Gates, a gimmicky, shtick-loving anchor/pundit for the Financial News Network’s popular “Money Monster” show. He dances, he jokes, he hypes. He’s flip and glib and acts as if it’s all “Other People’s Money.”

The only difference between Clooney’s Gates and real-life TV clowns like Jim Cramer is the hair, and we don’t actually want Gates shot or blown up by the end of “Money Monster.”

Because that could be his fate, thanks to one ill-informed, super-hyped stock tip too many. A delivery guy (Jack O’Connell) gets onto the set of his live show, pulls a gun and makes Gates don a bomb vest. The overwrought Kyle lost his shirt when IBIS Financial dropped $800 million in a single afternoon.

The CEO (Dominic West) is nowhere to be found. And the only explanation the company gives is that its automated, super-fast investment algorithm experienced “a glitch.”

Kyle fires shots into the ceiling, locks the doors and traps the crew and director (Julia Roberts) in their Manhattan studio.

“I’m not the REAL criminal,” he shouts. “It’s rigged. It’s all fixed! They literally OWN the airwaves!”

He wants answers. And he’s hellbent on getting them.

“I came in knowing I’m not walking out.”

Clooney lets us see the panic and growing sense of guilt Gates might feel at putting everybody he works with in mortal danger with “research” and tips that are basically corporate press releases. And yeah, a lot more people than Kyle were taken in by his hype.

Roberts’ director, Patti, has already joked that “We don’t do JOURNALISM here,” but her think-on-her-feet competence gets a lot of people out of the building when the chips are down. Can she remember enough of her journalist past to find the answers before that bomb goes off?

There are the inevitable hostage drama benchmarks (Giancarlo Esposito is the head cop), but the script finds laugh-out-loud surprises in those. However, Foster squanders the story’s urgency with slack direction that robs the thriller of its ticking clock.

The communications director (Caitriona Balfe) of IBIS isn’t the rigid stonewaller the story needs her to be. The reporting shortcuts are what passes for “deus ex machina” in the movies these days — computer nerds/hackers reached by cell-phone.

And truth be told, the movie pulls its punches when it comes to business cable TV’s culpability in all this.

But after a TV-savvy opening, with Gates and Patti seat-of-the-pantsing a dazzling, ditzy show, the outrage flares up and never drops below a simmer.

And Foster moves us ever-so-cleverly onto the fence about whether this Cramerish clown should die for his sins, even if he looks like George Clooney. That’s why the world drops what it’s doing to watch.

And that’s the money emotion of “Money Monster” — unfocused rage finally given something to that rage at, if only for 98 minutes.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some sexuality and brief violence.

Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O’Connell, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito
Credits: Directed by Jodie Foster, script by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Koif. A Sony/Tristar release.

Running time: 1:38

Harry Hawkes is loud, boorish and overbearing, a real life of the party because he insists on being just that.

To state the obvious. Never was a man so intent on making a splash, or in his case, “A Bigger Splash.”

But there’s a desperation to this guy’s face-consuming grin, Harry’s backslapping way of bowling over friends or anyone more polite or genteel or considerate than he is.

Harry, given every ounce of impulsive, brash, unfiltered brio that Ralph Fiennes can give him, is the last thing rock star Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) needs as she recovers from throat surgery. Her beau, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) will say it even if she has no voice.

“Jesus, does he EVER stop?”

The answer is “No, never,” and before Paul can get out his objections on the phone, Harry is off the plane on the small Italian island where they’re staying, imposing himself and a young lady (Dakota Johnson) on these two with not so much as a “by your leave.”

Of course they’ll pick them up at the airport. Of course they can stay in their modest villa.

“Christ, THAT took long enough,” is what passes for “Thanks” from Harry.

He’s a record producer, and the young woman is a daughter he never knew he had. Harry and Marianne have history. Paul knows this history and is wary.

Harry’s flirtatiousness extends to one and all, even his supposed daughter. And sparks are sure to fly, as the woman who cannot talk cannot get in a word edgewise to protest this blast from her past that threatens to blow everything up all over again.

“A Bigger Splash,” a remake of “La Piscine (The Pool),” a 1969 French film starring Alain Delon, is directed with a tantalizing sexual tension by Luca Guadagnino, who also gave Swinton the sexually charged star vehicle “I Am Love.”

It is a movie of sumptuous, sun-baked and terraced hillsides, tiny, curvy dirt roads, a quaint town, remote tidal pools and a real pool…which Harry dives into naked, always without invitation.

There’s a competition set up. Who will bed whom, who will get out of here with what he or she wants? Flashbacks fill in the characters’ history together, third act revelations undercut some of that history.

The performances are of the meaningful, lingering stares variety, everybody working out what everybody else’s game is.

Fiennes exults and explodes and throws his weight around, Schoenaerts simmers and Swinton, sort of playing a Patti Smith/Joan Jett/Bowie mashup, sways back and forth in the tug of war.

Johnson tries on a Lolita-tease, hinting that there’s nothing innocent going on behind those bangs. She is, as she has been ever since “Fifty Shades of Grey,” attractive without creating anything interesting to watch. Guadagnino lets his camera linger over her more enticing body parts. She is piling up a lot of performances that call for her to be naked, but at least she isn’t alone here.

There’s heat and confrontation and a big dollop of melodrama in “A Bigger Splash,” a film whose location and situation dredge up memories of ’60s Euro-thrillers (“Knife in Water”) and Italian sexual melodramas (“Swept Away”).

It never measures up to any of those, as Guadagnino melodramatically telegraphs the script’s foreshadowing. It’s a slow film — patient might be a more apt description — as we can sense betrayals and confrontations almost from the start. I was actually disappointed that more anticipated red herrings weren’t tossed into the simmering sexual soup cooked up here.

But the striking Italian setting encourages the nudity, and the filmmaker and cast lead us into temptation, even though we can see it coming from a long way off.

MPAA Rating:R for graphic nudity, some strong sexual content, language and brief drug use

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Ralph Fiennes, Matthias Schoenaerts, Dakota Johnson
Credits: Directed by Luca Guadagnino, script by David Kajganich, based on the French film “La Piscine.” A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 2:04

Addiction and overcoming it is the most traumatic thing most people who endure it will ever experience.

Harrowing, dangerous, destroying your health and relationships and taking lives all around you, its very intensity must convince you that nobody has ever experienced anything like this.

Unfortunately, millions have. There’s so little that’s new or unique to say about it that it’s a subject that rarely makes for an enlightening or surprising movie.

So even though director Rob Reiner’s son co-wrote “Being Charlie,” an addiction/recovery drama loosely based on his own problems, there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before. That makes the movie a 97 minute slog to a conclusion we see coming in minute one.

We meet Charlie (Nick Robinson) as he’s bailing out of yet another rehab. It’s in Utah, and he leaves with an act of defiance — breaking the stained glass windows of the chapel.

His second act upon escaping? Hitchhiking. His third act? Stealing oxy pills from the driver’s elderly mother who is dying of cancer.

That’s the sort of creep Charlie is, an affluent punk of 18 who is deep down the rabbit hole of denial, arrogantly lying that “This time it’ll be different” to his wants-to-believe-mom (Susan Misner).

But it isn’t. The guy who dashes out to fetch him in Barstow (Devon Bostick) is his best friend, and best enabler. He’s into drugs and girls who are into drugs.

Spoiler alert. Charlie must A) figure this out the hard way and B) finally decide to “accept” his disease, and vow to help himself.

The wrinkles in that standard issue AA narrative are that Charlie’s dad is a famous pirate actor (Cary Elwes) running for governor, that Charlie meets a fetching, damaged girl (Morgan Saylor of “Homeland”) in recovery and that he’s an aspiring stand-up comic.

Romance “gets in the way of your recovery,” his counselor (Common) lectures. But Charlie knows better. Such sponsors, group therapy leaders and the like, are righteous folks, many of them recovering addicts themselves. But to Charlie, they’re just voyeurs looking for “courtside seats to human suffering.”

It’s hard to develop much sympathy for this rich kid’s self-inflicted trauma. And Reiner, whose last good movie was “Flipped” (2010), does nothing to help young Robinson (“Jurassic World”) rise above the utterly routine script. The direction is pedestrian and the movie, start to finish, makes us feel nothing.

Whatever high-mindedness was behind it, “Being Charlie” is no different from being any other addict. From intervention to check-in, group “sharing” at the halfway house to backsliding and skipping some of the twelve steps, we’ve seen it all before.

It takes nothing away from the awful thing people who experience this go through in saying that movies about it all too often are all tropes that render it trite.

MPAA Rating:unrated, with violence, drug abuse, nudity and sex, profanity

Cast: Nick Robinson, Morgn Saylor, Devon Bostick, Common, Cary Elwes
Credits: Directed by Rob Reiner , script by Matt Elisofon, Nick Reiner. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:37

The best of this year’s admittedly weak selection of Mother’s Day movies, the one getting a wider release AFTER the Hallmark holiday, is “The Meddler,” a broad and uneven comedy that coasts by on the charms of Susan Sarandon and the twinkle of J.K. Simmons.

Writer-director Lorene Scafaria won this battle with the casting. Her slight, unchallenging comedy about a hovering Jersey mom who has moved to LA to be nearer her “We need some boundaries” daughter, relies on low-hanging fruit for its jokes. But Sarandon in the title role, Rose Byrne as the put-upon daughter and Simmons doing his best Sam Elliott impression as the possible “love interest” give it the spark of life.

Marnie has been widowed a while, and has decided to fill her days with phone calls to her daughter, a TV writer (Byrne). Or pop in visits.

“I brought bagels!”

Marnie is lonely, given to impulsive gestures like, well “bagels.” Oh, and paying for the wedding of “what’s-her-name” (Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live”), a distant friend of her daughter’s.

But daughter Lori has her own issues. She’s newly dumped, by an actor, no less. She’s got a sitcom script to polish. She’s barely keeping it together and Mom cannot help but bring up her ex. Incessantly.

” I think we should get you a hobby.” Why not volunteer at the hospital? At least that’ll keep her from grilling Lori’s shrink for details about why she’s so sad.

Marnie is outgoing, though you sense she was something of a shrinking violet around her late husband’s gregarious Italian family. She trots out astrological judgments, unsolicited advice and presents. She still misses her husband and is in a little denial over that. She fills her time by imposing her generosity of spirit upon others.

“The Meddler” is a film of cute moments and the odd touching scene, which serve to interrupt the steady cavalcade of cliches. Marnie stumbles onto a movie set and is mistaken for “background” (an extra). Marnie stumbles across an old woman who has lost her voice in the hospital. Marnie takes too much of an interest in her favorite Apple Store employee’s (Jerrod Carmichael) education and life.

But Sarandon gives this material plenty of grace notes, imparting the sensual delights of the perfectly prepared, farm-fresh egg-in-a-hole.

She gets to play that because Marnie is set up to be charmed by the mustachioed and twinkly ex-cop turned chicken farmer Zipper. Simmons literally lights up the movie in his scenes with her.

Will Marnie learn to move on, live again and maybe stop bugging her only child to death? You don’t have to be a mom to know the answers. You just have to have a mom, “a birth mom” or that winning substitute characters talk about her, “an Earth mom” — somebody who cares enough to get under foot, and stay there.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief drug content

Cast: Susan Sarandon, Rose Byrne, J.K. Simmons, Cecily Strong
Credits: Written and directed by Lorene Scafaria.  A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40