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She has been imprisoned for seven years, locked in a soundproof shed with only a skylight and a TV to connect her to the outside world.

Her son is turning five. He was the product of a rape by her captor/tormentor, and has only known the world of this 12 by 12 “Room.”

“Good morning, lamp. good morning sink,” Jack (Jacob Tremblay) coos. Kids can adapt to a universe limited to a toilet, tub, TV and toaster oven.

Upon turning five, Jack’s questions grow more pointed, about the time “before I came.” He is confused about “the real world” and “reality” in general. Ma (Brie Larson), with much of the life drained out of her pale face, tries to set him straight. She has to be gentle, because Jack is given to tossing tantrums at knowledge he doesn’t want to hear. He has never been out in the sun, never had a haircut, never played with another child, has no notion what is on the other side of that always-locked steel door. He’s curious, but scared to death at the possibilities.

“Room” is a wrenching account of a mother’s devotion to the one thing she’s been allowed to have — a little boy — and her guilt from raising him in this awful situation. “Old Nick” (Sean Bridgers) visits her each night, like clockwork, for sex and threats. She cannot protect Jack from him any more than she can protect herself.

Lenny Abrahamson’s film of Emma Donoghue’s novel is an overcast affair, a tale sodden with gloom and sadness. Jack is the only one who doesn’t realize this, and it is eating Ma alive.

The story is seen through Jack’s eyes. He narrates it and lets us see his whole world — mother, sparsely furnished room, and TV — through his innocent eyes.

“Old Nick” is “not our friend,” Ma has to remind him. They practice screaming when they know Old Nick isn’t around, but “the aliens can’t hear us.” “Out there” is nothing but empty space, he’s been taught. Dora the Explorer isn’t the only invented thing TV offers. “Squirrels and dogs aren’t real” either.

But then, in desperation, Ma hatches a plan and risks all –especially the one thing she has in this world, her son — in a chance to escape.

The aching thing about this movie is realizing there are dull, unspeakably cruel monsters in this world who would enslave a young woman and her child in just this manner.  Donoghue plainly was inspired by the Austrian Josef Fritzl, who held his daughter captive and fathered children with her, and the Ariel Castro case from Cleveland — women, kept imprisoned in dungeon-like conditions as sex slaves, having babies with a monster.

Larson was the sober-minded sister in last summer’s “Trainwreck,” and lets us see the exhaustion and hopelessness of Ma. Jack is the only reason she gets up each day and endures each night’s conjugal rape/visits.

Young Tremblay is a wide-eyed revelation as Jack, mercurial and smart, innocent but just beginning to acquire a little wisdom and courage. He does things that frighten him because he is his mother’s strength, now. He gets that.

The story takes a surprising turn midway through, a change in direction that deepens the experience for the viewer, making us culpable in at least part of the misery these two face. The film drags, ever so slightly, in its final acts.

But the miracle of this Irish-Canadian co-production is the tension Abrahamson (“Frank”) manages before that mid-movie climax, and the tension he recreates with a wholly new dynamic. That makes “Room” a movie that will have you checking your locks, looking in on the kids and yet hopeful thanks to the knowledge that children are “plastic” — adaptable, malleable, and able to upend their naive worldview and belief system if they hear it from a loving mother.

MPAA Rating:R for language

Cast: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Sean Bridgers
Credits: Directed by Lenny Abrahamson, script by Emma Donoghue, based on her novel. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:58

Bill Murray, a funnyman who long ago lost his fastball, was foolish to entrust his “comeback” star-vehicle to screenwriter Mitch Glazer, who never had one.

“Rock the Kasbah” is an old school/Old Murray comedy, the type he would have knocked out of the park in his mid-80s-early-90s heyday. If, that is, you could convince him not to sleepwalk through it.

But here, playing a has-been rock promoter who discovers a culture-shifting singing sensation while on a USO tour in bloodied, embattled Afghanistan, we only get a flash or two of the Old Murray. This lame, laugh-starved script (Glazer wrote “Scrooged” for him( makes Murray look like an Old Man — not a funny old man or a Grumpy old man (see the fine “St. Vincent” for that). Just old and not really up to trying too hard.

Richie Lanz (Murray) may be working out of a seedy Van Nuys hotel, conning talentless singers out of expense and promotion money. But he’s got the photos on the wall — him, much younger, with rock’s most famous and infamous. And he’s got the stories, about discovering Madonna.

“Did I tell you my Stevie Nicks story?”

His last shot seems to be Ronnie, played by actress-singer Zooey Deschanel. He has her singing covers to a backing track in a local bar. That’s where the USO promoter finds them, and drunkenly books them both to entertain the troops in a war zone.

Deschanel is (briefly) the life of the movie, melting down and freaking out from the moment they get on an Afghan airliner to her frantic hook-up with a mercenary (“Contractor”) named “Bombay” (Bruce Willis) who gets her out of the country, taking Richie’s cash and passport with her.

Here Richie is, a legend in his own mind, a fast-talking deal-maker, stuck in a dangerous place with no way of getting out. These two American arms dealers (the hilarious Danny McBride and the gonzo Scott Caan) seek him out and befriend him.

“You’re in Kabul. Man up!”

Yeah, “a coupla months ago, we were Herbal-life dealers.” But now, they’ve got a paying gig for Richie — deliver some ammo to a remote Pashtun tribe. Scared and dazed, he accepts. And that’s where he hears Salima (Leem Lubany). She’s obsessed with her country’s version of TV’s “America’s Got Talent,” “Afghan Star.” And she sings Cat Stevens ballads and accompanies herself on the guitar.

Richie has his new mission. The fact that there’s an “honor killing” in her future for “shaming” her father and culture for showing her lip-glossed/made up face and singing in English on TV doesn’t get in the way of Richie’s dream.

Kate Hudson plays another hooker-with-the-heart of gold whom Richie draws into the deal. Arian Moayed is the ’70s Soul-obsessed taxi driver/translator who translates for Richie, who gets mixed up in a tribal conflict and has to talk himself out of one gun-to-his-face jam after another.

And therein lies the problem. The lines Glazer has Murray spout to win people over and “close the deal” — this deal, that deal — aren’t funny or interesting or convincing. Murray, who has latterly made a new career for himself doing killer cameos, stinging supporting parts that play on his still-intact reservoir of cool — can’t manage the “fast-talking” part of the role. Aside from “St. Vincent,” he’s not been up to doing that sort of heavy-lifting in a leading role in years.

Director Barry Levinson is a long way from “Rain Man” himself, and cannot find funny in a situation that seems rife with it. A few scenes suggest the absurd dichotomies of “Good Morning, Vietnam” — McBride and Caan drunkenly hooting and hollering through Kabul in the back of an ancient LTD convertible. A CONVERTIBLE! But this whole USO tour gone wrong thing has been done often, and better, in films such as “The Sapphires” or the James Brown bio-pic “Get on Up.”

The big idea here, that a woman might break through the repressive patriarchy of the Middle East and change people’s hearts, is handled clumsily. In 2008, a real Pashtun woman, Lima Sahar, tried to manage that and the film is sort of inspired by her story. But the fictional comedy surrounding it isn’t funny enough and this third act gravitas doesn’t mesh with it.

Salima in the movie sings perhaps the only Western songbook theoretically approved by the Islamic world. But the movie’s most tone-deaf assumption is the idea that Yusuf Islam, the pop singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, is so totally rehabilitated that we can listen to his music — on the soundtrack and sung onstage — and not remember how he became the Western face for Islamic intolerance, thanks to his conversion and pronouncements on things like the death sentence (fatwa) hurled at writers who dared to criticize the religion-that-won’t-be-criticized.

Murray does what he can, sings “Smoke on the Water” with “Saturday Night Live” era gusto and tries to do something different with Richie. And that’s where Glazer and he go so wrong. It’s not originality that would have paid off. All that was called for here was a cover tune, just a few scenes with Murray’s Greatest Hits, preferably not phoned in.

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

Cast: Bill Murray, Bruce Willis, Zooey Deschanel, Leem Lubany, Kate Hudson, Danny McBride, Scott Caan
Credits: Directed by Barry Levinson, script by Mitch Glazer. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:40

The hat should’ve tipped them. The not-quite-hip/Orthodox Jewish diamond merchant hat.

That’s what Kurt is wearing when he approaches Alex (Adam Scott) and Emily (Taylor Schilling) in the park.

Or approaches their little boy, first. That’s a hint. Oh, and he’s played by Jason Schwartzman.

But he has a little boy of his own. He’s friendly. VERY friendly. He flatters them. They’re new to town, and he’s “sorta the neighborhood mayor.” He can show them around, introduce them to people.

“The Overnight” begins at that park, with Alex and Emily — whom we’ve seen coping with a tyro tyke, and struggle with their sex lives — coming to dinner with Kurt and his French wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche). Patrick Brice’s twisted four-handed comedy follows that day as it evolves into evening, and that evening as it turns into an all nighter.

Wine leads to “You guys smoke pot, right?” And that can only be chased by whiskey.

Dinner table chat leads to Kurt’s magical way of putting the kids to sleep (a planetarium nightlight, a twinkly keyboard). And that’s when things get surreal.

Brice’s culture clash comedy hurls two Seattle-ites into scenes where they’re watching Charlotte’s “acting” in breast-pump video demonstrations, or feasting their eyes on Kurt’s painting. His favorite subject? That would be a spoiler.

“This is California,” unemployed Alex shrugs. “Maybe this is the way dinner parties are.”

Emily, meanwhile, is growing more agitated by the minute. But she’s curious, too. Where is this evening going?

Brice’s script, produced by Mumbelcore Kings The Duplass Brothers, is a farce that dabbles in darkness. True confessions here, sexual mores tested there. We see where this is going long before it gets there, and in a short movie, that can be fatal.

But Schilling (“Orange is the New Black”) works up a fine, restrained outrage. Scott gives Alex his usual dopey gullibility.

And Scwartzman? He’s sort of the Mayor of Offbeat. He dials down the eyebrow-waggling weirdness to give Kurt an affably twisted personality — adoring husband, hovering/smothering dad, guy with an eye for something new. Or someone new.

Alex and Emily? They should have seen it coming.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexuality, graphic nudity, language and drug use.

Cast: Taylor Schilling, Adam Scott, Jason Schwartzman, Judith Godreche

Credits: Written and directed by Patrick Brice. An Orchard release

Running time: 1:19

A Big weekend for mild frights, as “Goosebumps” gets a 3D goose and looks to pull in over $24 million, maybe closer to $27 (Saturday’s kids’ movies are always underestimated by Deadline.com).

That will beat “The Martian,” which is still on track to have a “Gravity” sort of fall. “Martian” is still well over $20 million.

“Bridge of Spies” won’t set any records, but it is comfortably in the upper teens, SOP for an grownup picture in the fall.

“Crimson Peak” has opened right in the middle of the horror pack as far as expectations go. $14 million or so. Horror films, unless they’re franchises (another “Paranormal” is coming), typically do $12-18 million.  Decent reviews have helped it, stately attempt at Gothic by GDToro.

“The Walk” has, sadly, nose-dived. No amount of hype could save it. Dropped out of the top ten in a jiff. “99 Homes” hasn’t cracked the top ten. Awards season buzz notwithstanding.

The little boy knows. He’s  seeing things.
“I heard you scream last night,” he tells his mother. She’s seeing them, too. And he knows it.

He comes home to see paranormal investigators packing up.

“They found something, didn’t they?”

Jacob (Max Rose), who looks to be about `10, doesn’t mince words.

“Mom, you know we have GOT to get out of this house!”

“I’m HANDLING it,” she snaps.

Mom is behind on the mortgage, has a “buy you out” hustler (Patrick Fischler)

throwing her a financial lifeline.

“We can’t leave this house!” she shouts.

Because she’s like the WORST MOTHER EVER. So it comes as no great shock in the third act of “The Diabolical,” that Mom (Ali Larter), scrambling away from mouthless ghouls in the dark, shouts to her kids — “UPSTAIRS!”

Because the worst mother ever wouldn’t realize that’s the most obvious dead end in all of horror — escaping “upstairs” when what you need to be doing is getting yourself and your two small children OUT OF THAT HOUSE.

“The Diabolical” is a standard issue haunted house picture with a third act twist that is supposed to justify all the illogical, unmotherly and moronic behavior that’s preceded it. It doesn’t.

Larter, most recently seen in TV’s “Legends” and “Heroes,” is Madison, the worst mom ever, who sees and hears things — mutters, “Not again” — and then closes her eyes and whispers “This is not real.”

Her son has been taught to do the same. But that isn’t working. Mom’s new scientist boyfriend (Arjun Gupta) seems to know a lot about this sort of thing. Hmm.

The apparitions in Alistair Legrand’s poor-to-middling thriller are impressive, Larter’s reactions a tad off. And that third act payoff needs a bit more foreshadowing (not that you can’t figure it out) to feel justified.

That lets “Diabolical” join the burgeoning ranks of half-hearted horror films that most of us don’t get around to watching because there’s not much reward for doing so.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with horror violence directed at children, sexual situations

Cast: Ali Larter, Max Rose, Arjun Gupta, Merrin Dungey
Credits: Directed by Alistair Legrand, script by Luke Harvis and Alistair Legrand. An XLrator Media release.

Running time: 1:26