Movie Nation

Truth be told, every generation’s “take stock of itself” dramedy has to come of as insipid to the generations that came before and after it.

It’s easy to see the arcane quaintness of “The Big Chill,” or “Return of the Secaucus Seven” or “Beautiful Girls” or, oh, “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” to tick off a few.

So there’ll be no dismissing, out-of-hand, “those kids” in “10 Years” or “About Alex” or yet another  “summoned home for a funeral” reunion picture for Generation Y that “Burning Bodhi” turns out to be.

An acting showcase for “Big Bang Theory” starlet Kaley Cuoco and Warner Brothers honcho daughter Cody Horn (“Magic Mike”), it’s got some good scenes, some graceful writing and decent performances.

Surprises? Not really. Start with the fact that assorted friends are summoned back to their hometown, Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they give away money to get movies made there, to the who-hooked-up-with-whom and who-will-hook-up group dynamic, this is “The Big Chill” for Generation Chill.

Bodhi, a product of this hippy redoubt in the desert, has died. Suddenly. And word spreads the way word spreads these days — by text message and otherwise.

“Finding out on Facebook? What’s WITH that?”

He was young, and “This is supposed to happen to OLD people,” Katy (Cuoco) gripes. “Makes me feel like I’m 40 or something.”

She may not have the years, but the girl’s got the mileage. Katy has a child the state makes her grandmother take care of. She has court-ordered community service (picking up trash). She used to date Dylan (Landon Liboiron), who has reluctantly returned from Chicago. And she has other problems.

“She’s a drug bunny, Dylan.”

Just in case her tattered clothes, piercings and garish, misapplied makeup didn’t give her away.

Ember (Horn) is the libidinous blonde who summons the others. She’s planning “a FUN-eral,” not a funeral. It’ll be like a wake, only for young people who prefer bong hits and joints to alcohol.

Dylan, an aspiring comic book artist, leaves his girlfriend (Meghann Fahy) behind in Chicago. But not for long. You know she’ll follow him anywhere.

Miguel (Eli Vargas), Dylan’s roommate, makes his own way west, picking up a vivacious and pregnant teen (Sasha Pieterse) in his aged VW camper van.

One in New Mexico, the 20somethings try to sort out their status, past and present. Dylan is forced to confront the mother (Virginia Madsen) who abandoned him and his professor/hippy farmer dad (Andy Buckley). Characters “come out” and confess (or don’t confess) their feelings for one another. And Bodhi.

And then they eulogize the guy.

Writer-director Matthew McDuffie concocted some nice scenes — an attempt at making up staged by text message, young people awkwardly snarking on the others attending the “viewing” because they don’t know any better and they have no coping skills.

And New Mexico provides the odd lovely sunset or seedy, broken-down RV crackhouse. McDuffie filmed a detailed version of cremation, sort of an explainer for generations young and old. And he gives everybody just enough to play to lure a decent cast in, and gives one and all the occasional funny, generation-specific one-liner.

“What kind of Miley Cyrus bong hit did you take, Bra?”

So even though it’s not particularly affecting and entirely too obvious in how it dresses the young women in the cast (Daisy Dukes, bra-less tank tops), “Burning Bodhi” isn’t a total write-off.

It’s just callow, the way we all are/were in our 20s.Which is why the best generational “take stock” reunion movies wait until everybody hits 30, or close to it, before even trying to make sense of it all. If you’re still smearing gold-with-glitter eye shadow on with a trowel, the wisdom and perspective of age are still a few years off.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, language and some sexual references

Cast: Cody Horn, Landon Liboiron, Kaley Cuoco, Eli Vargas, Virginia Madsen, Sasha Pieterse, Meghann Fahy
Credits: Written and directed by Matthew McDuffie. A Monterey Media release.

Running time:1:32

 “Triple 9” is a shaggy, uneven heist thriller that isn’t about the heists — it’s about the guys committing them, the cops chasing them and the Russian Jewish mobsters pulling the strings and setting all the mayhem in motion.

A clever ticking clock mystery, it tries your patience even if it is giving some of the best character actors in the movies plenty of screen time to chew the scenery, try on accents and make jokes in even the bloodiest, darkest moments.

The title comes from a flaw in police procedures and in cop psychology. Because some of these guys committing these Atlanta heists are dirty cops.

Chiwitel Ejiofor heads the crew of thieves, ruthless hoodlums with “special skills” whose bank robberies have a touch of “shock and awe” about them. Anthony Mackie and Clifton Collins, Jr.( “Capote”) handle weapons,  Norman Reedus (“The Walking Dead”) is the wheel-man, and Aaron Paul (“Breaking Bad”) is the wheel-man’s strung-out ex-cop brother.

The film’s opening scene is a beautifully staged and shot meeting in a darkened back alley BMW. The film’s opening caper has real mayhem, tasers, silent threats to a bank manager (showing computer printouts of his family, house, etc.) and a bank teller wetting herself and the carpet where she’s forced to lie perfectly still.

John Hillcoat did “The Road” and “Lawless,” so we lean into the screen as the complications set in during the getaway. The heist goes wrong. There’s a weak member in that crew.

And then the stoned, bedraggled Detective Allen, played by a seriously unkempt and drawling Woody Harrelson, shows up to investigate. “The MONSTER has gone DIGITAL,” he announces, speculating on the sophistication of the crooks.

Before “Triple 9” is over, we’ll see just how monstrous these monsters can be. Casey Affleck is the cop who calls Det. Allen “Uncle Jeff,” and who is newly assigned to partner with one of the dirty cops.

And Kate Winslet (not her subtlest work) is the snarling bleached blonde Russian Jew who runs her imprisoned husband’s mob from the man’s kosher deli. She wears her Star of David with pride, her Israeli underworld connections with honor.

They’re “La Kosher Nostra!” Allen cracks.

The cops — clean and dirty — are distracted by a Latino gang war that results in beheadings (“How they get way over here?” “Probably lookin’ for their BODIES.”) and a protracted chase and shootout.

But the main game is that “one last job,” the one the mob mistress orders and circumstances dictate that the reluctant gang must carry out.

There’s a jokiness to the proceedings, white cops mimicking Latino slang (“Know what I’m sayin?'”), cops ordering shop owners to “Go smoke a cigarette” while they take over the store for a quick argument.

That doesn’t hide the script’s detours or the strain of having an Oscar winner and seven “name” co-stars to service with scenes, dialogue and a reason to be in the film. Poor Teresa Palmer (“The Choice”) is odd woman out.

But that 14th glance at your watch is the important one, because that’s when you realize that all of this has to come to a head, the grim actions hinted at will be acted upon, the title will be explained and demonstrated and somebody will have to figure this all out to the audience’s satisfaction.

Hillcoat may drag out the middle acts, but the last thirty minutes are genuinely pulse-pounding, surprising, well-crafted and acted with bite and resolve by actors who let us see their characters figuring out this bloody, bullet-riddled puzzle in the City Too Busy to Hate.

“This ain’t Buckhead, awright?”

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language throughout, drug use and some nudity

Cast: Casey Affleck, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Anthony Mackie, Clifton Collins Jr., Woody Harrelson, Aaron Paul, Teresa Palmer
Credits: Directed by John Hillcoat, script by Matt Cook. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:55

“Eddie the Eagle” is a veritable “Forrest Gump on Skis,” a British version of the feel-good  story of hapless ski-jumper Eddie Edwards.

A stumbling working class dreamer, Edwards slipped onto the British Olympic team by virtue of being the first Brit in more than half a century to tackle ski jumping. His daring and amusing incompetence made him the darling of the 1988 Calgary Winter Games.

Taron Egerton (“Kingsman: The Secret Service”) plays Eddie as a bit slow on the uptake, a dogged plodder who doesn’t let braces on his legs dissuade him from his childhood dream of Olympic glory.

He loses the leg braces, and after turning his myopic eyes to everything from javelin and pole vaulting, realizes the Winter Olympics offer a better shot at his dream. Ungainly, with poor eyesight and wearing a permanent, mouth-breathing puzzlement on his not-quite-ugly mug, he takes up skiing as “my Olympic preparations.”

His plasterer/sheet-rock installing dad (Keith Allen) doubts him.

“You are NOT an athlete!”

But his Mum (Jo Hartley) feeds his impossible dream, finds the cash to maintain his self-financed Quixotic pursuit.

And its just enough money to put him in a real training facility and attract the attentions of a real coach, played with hard-drinking, cowboy-boot wearing swagger by Hugh Jackman.

The coach is American, and he reluctantly gives Eddie pointers even as he frets that he’ll kill himself. Eddie is ever-undaunted. Bullied by his own Olympic committee (Tim McInnerny is head snob), taunted by Nordic veterans of the slopes, too poor to afford hotel rooms near the training site, Eddie plows forward.

Coach Peary is frankly awed by Eddie’s determination, as are we. No way this should happen, but it does.

There are villains and doubters, agonizing defeats and tiny victories snatched from the jaws of such defeats. Eddie takes falls, and breaks his glasses — repeatedly.

At every turn, somebody is telling Eddie to “give up,” that he’ll never be skilled or of the right class to make the team.

“It’s a world that don’t want to know you,” Dad counsels.

But Eddie, by pluck and by accident, makes sure the world does and comes to embody the Olympic spirit — “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part.”

The film is earning an inspired marketing campaign from the studio. The TV ads are pitching it as a mothers-indulge-their-kids tale, a boy who rises as far as his mother thinks her darling son can. That’s become a vital element in the American (not British) myth, that if you believe in yourself enough, you can play football for Notre Dame (“Rudy”) or become president.

That’s balderdash, of course, as is “Eddie the Eagle.” Actor-turned-director Dexter Fletcher (“Wild Bill”) and his screenwriters render this in broad, Hollywood strokes — training montages set to ’80s pop (“You Make My Dreams Come True”), composite characters (Jackman’s coach), expedient alterations of the truth (Eddie learned his sport at Lake Placid, New York, not in Germany).

But as “Forrest Gump” proved, never bet against a supportive mom. There’s a need and a market for lump-in-the-throat, feel-good treacle. And the winning while losing “Eddie the Eagle” revels in that treacle, and has the English teeth to prove it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive material, partial nudity and smoking

Cast: Taron Egerton, Hugh Jackman, Jo Hartley, Christopher Walken, Tim McInnerny
Credits: Directed by Dexter Fletcher, , script by Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton. A Fox release.

Running time: 1:45

The chilling moment in “Race” comes when Jesse Owens, played by Stephan James, is lining up for his first sprint at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

He notices the roar of the crowd, as it rises in a wave, turning to the right and raising, as one, right arms in the Nazi salute as Hitler himself enters the stadium to watch the games from his Fuhrer box. Then Hitler, who looks very little like the real Adolf, returns their salute and the illusion and the chill are gone.

That’s much the case for “Race” itself, an overlong, all-inclusive and all-too-tepid bio-pic of the great Olympian who showed the Nazis, and the racists black home, that in Owens’ words, “Ain’t no black and white. There’s only fast, and slow.”

James, of “Selma” and the faith-based sports drama “When the Game Stands Tall,” is a perfectly stoic Owens, even if he suggests little of the inner fire Chadwick Boseman let us see in the Jackie Robinson bio-pic “42.” Owens faced the same racist culture and obstacles Robinson did, more than a decade earlier. The inner turmoil and seething that must have come from that are missing, here.

But they were very different men. Owens is captured at someone caught up in the fame that came when he broke a fistful of world records in the space of 45 minutes in one college track meet in the mid-1930s. He fathered a child before college, was late marrying his baby’s mother and liked the occasional beer.

He is unflappable when his coach, the first time he meets the man, suggests he should plan on competing in the upcoming Berlin Olympics.

“I heard they don’t much care for colored folk over there,” Jesse muses.

They don’t much care for them over here, Coach Snyder hisses back.

But that’s the first place “Race” goes wrong. Jason Sudeikis tackles his first serious role and never sheds his years of comical jerk baggage. He never for one second lets us forget that he’s looking for the next place to land a one-liner.

Director Stephen Hopkins (“Lost in Space,” “Predator 2,” and a lot of TV) has his casting coups, and misfires. Barnaby Metschurat looks nothing like the shrimpy Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, but Andrew Moodie impresses, wonderfully, as Jesse’s too-proud-to-speak (as his boy goes off to college) father.

Carice Van Houten is quite good as German actress turned Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. But Jeremy Irons is entirely too old to play the ex-Olympian about to become U.S. Olympic Committee chairman Avery Brundage.

And those two characters are where “Race” strays most seriously from the generally-accepted historical record. Riefenstahl is shown to be awed by Owens and determined to resist her Nazi masters by filming him and making sure he made it into her Nazi propaganda documentary, “Olympia.” Irons manages an even trickier feat, suggesting a conflicted Brundage when history has judged him an anti-Semite who fought to keep the U.S. from leading an international boycott of the Nazi Olympics, a man who may have had a hand in keeping Jews from competing on America’s behalf.

My first visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. during an Olympic year featured an exhibit explicitly accusing Brundage of those failings, and suggesting the world might have been a different place had America done what it had the guts to do in 1980 — deny an aggressive, predatory totalitarian state the propaganda value of a showcase Olympics.

This reinterpretation of Brundage — Irons and the script make him brusque, bluff and blunt, a hard-nosed negotiator who might be excused for seeing what he wanted to see on a fact-finding mission to pre-Olympics Germany — might be accurate, but it’s a head-snapper.

Hopkins’ chief failing was his inability to make this planned Black History Month epic into an actual epic. Two hours and 14 minutes of Owens’ greatest hits should have lump in the throat moments, welling pride, scope and majesty.

And “Race”, for all the efforts of its cast, for the care that went into re-staging the games, using real locations and digitally creating crowds, the Hindenburg and  stadiums, doesn’t.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and language

Cast: Stephen James, Jason Sudeikis, Shanice Banton, Jeremy Irons, William Hurt, Carice Van Houten
Credits: Directed by Stephen Hopkins, script by . Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:14

“Deadpool” continues to blow up expectations for a February opening, a winter comic book movie, a Ryan Reynolds picture, what have you.

It’s losing just over half of its opening weekend box office and should pull in $56 million, based on Friday night’s numbers. HUGE hit.

“Risen” is a reasonably well-reviewed, well-cast and scripted faith-based period piece, a “Tale of the Christ,” as they used to put it. And it’s doing a middling $13 million or so on its opening. I dare say that number could go up if Saturday and Sunday turnout is what I figure it will be. Just going by Deadline’s Friday night numbers.

It’ll still do almost double what the well-reviewed horror tale “The Witch,” also a period piece, but perhaps not quite the cup of tea the faithful in that genre are used to. It’s smart, for starters. Period accurate, etc. It’s only managing $8-9 million. A24, the most reliable studio for smart sci fi (“Ex Machina”) is having a harder time selling smart horror.

“Race” isn’t doing squat. Focus Features didn’t quite abandon this Black History Month take on Olympian Jesse Owens. They didn’t screen it in a lot of cities, and reviews aren’t glowing. It is barely in the Top Ten. #blackfilmsmatter?

OK, offended Christians with the headline, horror-heads and everybody else in the story, so…

She’s the anchor star of “Once Upon a Time,” and Disney/ABC being all about the synergy, she’s got a plum part in the March animated offering from the Mouse, “Zootopia.”

It’s a somewhat daring cartoon about stereotypes, racism and fear. Yes, the elephants are bigots. Or can be.

Ginnifer Goodwin plays a plucky bunny cop. Literally. Type casting?

Anyway, we’ll be talking about that film, her love of short haircuts, maybe her pregnancy (married to Josh Dallas). But I’m always looking for suggested questions. Anything you’re dying to ask her? Comment below, and thanks for the help.

Those compiling a list for “the first against the wall when The Revolution comes” could get a healthy headstart on the work by jotting down names from “Crazy About Tiffany’s.”

Another love poem to New York aspirationalism and vulgar consumption, its 87 minutes are riddled with “Real Housewives” types, the famous and not-really-famous, breathless metrosexuals and condescending style queens of every sex and other worshipers of elegant, obscenely expensive jewelry.

It’s enough to make you weary of life, despairing of a culture that values whatever the folks who peddle the robin’s egg/turquoise blue boxes are selling.

It’s enough to make you ready for The Revolution.

Then, again, maybe it’s  a chick thing –or a “New York values” thing, as Ted Cruz would put it. I’m not meant to get it.

Filmmaker Matthew Miele, thanks to this and “Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s,” has become a  cheerleader for these pricey New York institutions at the top of the world’s retail food chain. He sketches in brief bios of jewelers and company founders, dabbles in the history of Tiffany & Co., the jewelry firm that invented the engagement ring, designed the Super Bowl trophy, NASCAR’s Sprint Cup and the New York Yankees’ logo and settles on a few famous customers and a lot of pop culture references to tell the story of Tiffany & Co. and its place in American lives.

Well, the American lives of the One Percent.

We see Jessica Biel trying on this and that pre-Oscars, hear Jennifer Tilly talk about “taking just any piece of crap movie” so that she can pay her Tiffany’s bill, and take in scenes from “Sex and the City,” “”Ocean’s Eleven,” “Sweet Home Alabama,” “Friends” and of course, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” The aura of the brand is all.

Fran Liebowitz and others dissect that last film, at length, as otherwise, you’ve got a 70 minute movie. There are discussions of how the founder of the now 10,000 employee firm stole its signature color from the mid-19th century Princess Eugenie, who conceived it as her trademark, tales of presidents who shopped there and mini biographies of designers like Jean Schlumberger and others fail to flesh out the documentary to feature length.

Little hints of self-awareness sneak in, as most every rich white woman/customer curses (Katie Couric has a potty mouth?) or lets her lapdog interrupt her tale of the first time she got something in that precious “little blue box.” Elaine Stritch sings “Ladies Who Lunch,” music from “La Dolce Vita” wells up on the score as assorted “social X-rays” (Tom Wolfe’s name for them) prattle on about this setting, that brooch or tiara and when she got it.

The film avoids sexism. Most of these women, like Couric, who had an exclusive birthday “breakfast” in the store when she turned 50 —  are apparently spending their own money there, and store insiders reveal that “self-purchases” dominate their business these days, not wedding rings.

The most amusing bit in it is Todd Pipes of Deep Blue Something relating how he is shocked by how every woman he runs across can sing him the words to his hit song, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” even though he himself forgets the lyrics as he starts to pick it out on his guitar.

If the economy really is as Wall Street wants us to believe and we can all aspire to someday shopping in that most famous of jewelry stores, perhaps this glossy infomercial will find a home — on some cable network “for women,” most likely. I’m not the target audience and I found it, and its salivating, precious fans, simply revolting.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with plentiful profanity

Cast: Katie Couric, Jennifer Tilly, Jessica Biel, Fran Lebowitz, Baz Luhrman, Jerry Weintraub, Todd Pipe
Credits: Written and directed by Matthew Miele. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:27

More period accurate than Biblically Correct, “Risen” is a moving, engrossing and yes, entertaining account of the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, “Yeshua,” as he was called, back in the day.

Director and co-writer Kevin Reynolds and a solid, accomplished cast deliver an unblinking look at the gruesome violence of mass crucifixions, a fascinating investigation by a Roman Tribune (Joseph Fiennes) into the missing body of this latest “Messiah” and an uplifting, almost lighthearted take on the disciples — the First Believers, who are the only ones clued in to the dead man’s whereabouts.

Clavius is a cynical, battle hardened officer, tasked with the bloody work of tamping down every fresh insurrection popping up in Roman Palestine.

His boss is the self-serving, corrupt political hack Pilate, given a testy world-weariness by Peter Firth. Pilate is expecting trouble, warning Clavius of the coming execution and the factions braying for it.

“Never seen a death so wished-for,” he says, “even by Him.”

Clavius does his duty, even has a centurion hasten the crucified man’s end. He might be haunted by the last look the Jew gives him from the cross, but in death he is nothing but a corpse — eyes still open, mouth contorted in agony, blood everywhere.

Clavius allows Yeshua to be removed to a proper burial, and following orders, has the tomb guarded. But centurions have a taste for drink, and next thing he knows, the body’s gone, “Caiphus and his pack of raving Jews” are nagging Pilate and Clavius has to mount a search.

Fiennes (“Shakespeare in Love”) morphs into U.S. Marshal Tommy Lee Jones, ordering a house-to-house, grave to grave search for the missing corpse. Tom Felton is his high-born new lieutenant, learning to offer “no quarter” to the civilians under their thumb.

They question Mary Magdalene (Maria Botto) and work the case — cop show style — making their way to the Apostles, who are in hiding. And it’s when the investigation finds Bartholomew (Stephen Hagan), that the movie turns and the tone lightens.

This future Saint Bartholomew is a surfer without a swell. He is tickled to be found, elated to be questioned and The Original Hippy in his credo.

“Our only weapon is LOVE,” he gushes. Yeshua isn’t a corpse. He’s out and about. And in case Clavius, who supervised the man’s death hasn’t figured it out, “This changes EVERYthing.”

Director Kevin Reynolds has been Kevin Costner’s go-to guy over the years (“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” “Hatfields & McCoys”). What’s he’s cooked up here is a modern version of “The Robe,” a Richard Burton sword and sandals, sand and Savior epic from the 1950s.

Meeting the other disciples and then Yeshua himself, played with an infectious grin and agenda-with-a-light-touch by New Zealander Cliff Curtis (“Live Free or Die Hard”, “Fear the Walking Dead”) will change Clavius.

It’s not a movie that hangs on surprises. But even though we know where all this is going long before it gets there, the story has enough absorbing twists and the performances are so compassionate that “Risen” draws us in.

Faith-based films, even the ones with the budget to recreate the Biblical Middle East, rarely lure actors as accomplished as these. Fiennes, Firth (“The Hunt for Red October”), Curtis, Harry Potter’s nemesis Felton and others, such as a twinkly Stewart Scudamore, as the fisherman Peter, lift “Risen” into the first rank of films about “The Greatest Story Ever Told.”

Yes, it’s aimed at believers. But Reynolds & Co. avoid the traps of Mel Gibson’s movie and many others, which made these times horrifically violent and real. The emphasis is on these Biblical figures and what they were about. They are compelling in their kindness, soft-selling their message so sweetly that even a Roman with blood on his hands will question his Empire, his religion and his way of living before all is said and done.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for Biblical violence including some disturbing images

Cast: Joseph Fiennes, Cliff Curtis, Peter Firth, Maria Botto, Tom Felton, Stewart Scudamore

Credits: Directed by Kevin Reynolds, script by Paul Aielo and Kevin Reynolds. A Sony/Columbia/Affirm release.

Running time: 1:4y

A recent piece by the numbers-crunching pundit site fivethirtyeight.com tried to come to grips with which actor has had the worst career, after winning an Oscar.

And while you can quibble with the methodology and conclusions that the website conjured up, you know in your gut that two names are going to be high on that list — Nicolas Cage and Adrien Brody.

Cage has, on a couple of occasions, told me about the therapeutic escape work offers him, and that this has more to do with his mania for making Z-movies, one right after the other, than finances.

Brody? After winning the Oscar for “The Pianist” and giving Halle Berry a smooch for the ages and then delivering one of the most heartfelt and touching acceptance speeches in Oscar history, he’s seemed hellbent on avoiding great success. Viewed from another angle, he’s defiantly gone his own way, rarely grabbing roles in potential blockbusters (“King Kong”), choosing to work instead with directors he admires (“Midnight in Paris”, “The Darjeeling Limited”), on no-budget films that challenge him (“The Jacket,” “The Experiment”) or just seem “cool” (“Splice,””Cadillac Records,””Hollywoodland’).

Thus, “Backtrack.” A ghost story set and shot in Australia, if he took it for the challenge — he almost of blows it. The performance is passable, but the Australian accent his troubled psychotherapist should, by rights, have, only pops up in the last scenes.

But if he was angling for “cool,” this sometimes hair-tingling thriller fills the bill. It’s a stylish riff on the man-haunted-by-his-past (literally) that makes for a pretty good ride.

Pete (Brody) spends his days in an office too-jarringly close to the elevated train tracks for anybody in his line of work — seeing patients, many of them with frazzled nerves and grim prognoses.

But Pete is a bit of a patient himself. His wife,Carol  (Jenni Baird) is a weeping wreck. And Pete wanders the dimly lit streets in a permanent funk, one his mentor/shrink (Sam Neill) tries to cure him of. Pete and Carol lost their daughter.

A silent teenager (Chloe Bayliss) in a hoodie who appears, and disappears, in his office, and a brittle, grief stricken mother (Anna Lise Phillips) who pops up on his couch or on his train rides seems to be pushing his buttons.

“I must be hallucinating the whole thing.”

Indeed. He can’t prove their existence to his mentor or himself. But the talking cure and dream analysis suggest a source. And the ghosts he thinks he’s seeing make him backtrack through his past.

Screenwriter (“The Book Thief”) turned writer-director Michael Petroni delivers plenty of surprises in the film’s 90 brooding minutes. Just when Pete and we are reassured that we’ve figured him and his past out, new twists arrive. The effects in “Backtrack” are judiciously applied — human faces turning into corpses, things of that sort — and genuinely hair-raising.

Neill is quietly compelling, as always. Brody underplays Pete, emphasizing his suffering, his victimhood, his guilt. It’s a performance mostly of reactions, and the aforementioned wayward accent.

But watching him, he makes us understand why he chose this project, how his choosing it helped a pretty good film get made and that there are different ways for a screen actor to measure personal success, even if they aren’t measuring by the numbers nerds at fivethirtyeight.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, disturbing images and language

Cast: Adrien Brody, Sam Neill, Chloe Bayliss, Jenni Baird, Bruce Spence
Credits: Written and directed by Michael Petroni. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:30

“A Country Called Home” makes a sturdy enough indie star vehicle for the criminally under-heralded Imogen Poots (“Need for Speed,” “That Awkward Moment”).

She plays Ellie, who ventures to the small town in Texas where her wayward, alcoholic father has just died.

Ellie might have had some company for the trip, but her older brother (Shea Whigham) isn’t having it. Dad ran out on them decades before. Let whoever’s stuck with him now deal with him.

But after Ellie flies into Austin and ventures into the boonies (Smithville and Bastrop, Texas provided locations), we and she start to learn a little something about the boozer.

When he was sober and stable — in stretches — he was a luthier, a guitar and violin maker.

But he never really got sober. Amanda (Mary McCormack), his tippling lady friend who was there at the end, is proof of that. Amanda is sober enough to guilt Ellie about “the least you can do” when Ellie wavers, ready to turn tail and flee. “Stay until he’s in the ground,” at least.

So Ellie does. She meets the grandparents (June Squibb of “Nebraska”) she never knew, and the town that produced her father.

“We ALL know who HE was, don’t we?”

Even a priest skitters out when Dad’s name is mentioned to a store clerk.

It’s a backward hole, and as Ellie explores it in Dad’s 1960s Studebaker station wagon, she stumbles across the closed-in lives that produced him.

Tall model-pretty Mackenzie Davis (“The Martian”) has a showy supporting part, playing Reno, the only lesbian in town (apparently). She wears a bolo, cowboy hat and boots. But she can’t get through a whole song at the local honky tonk without rednecks chasing her off the stage.

Real-life country singer Ryan Bingham (he wrote “Crazy Heart” for Jeff Bridges) plays Amanda’s surly, solid citizen son, a single-dad slow to warm to Ellie’s Los Angeles charms.

Local yokel jokes, clumsily performed by (apparently) amateur supporting actors and utterly generic situations mar director Anna Axter’s quiet study of a people and place. The odd moment with edge — Whigham’s brother listing his father’s first love “booze, money to buy booze” etc., Ellie’s first attempt at standing up to someone — is smothered in the surrounding banality.

But Poots, Davis, McCormack, Squibb and Whigham quickly sketch in interesting, if not quite compelling characters. And they, more than the story or locale, make “A Country Called Home” worth a brief visit.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Imogen Poots, Mackenzie Davis, Mary McCormack, June Squibb, Ryan Bingham, Shea Whigham
Credits: Directed by Anna Axster , script by Anna Axter, Jim Beggarly. A Raindance/Kickstart release.

Running time: 1:32