Movie Nation

Maybe “Never Let Go” looked good on paper.

Take your typical self-isolated “keep the kids safe from the world” thriller, people afraid of societal breakdown, the zombie apocalypse or an outbreak of “evil,” and jump to the part where we start to wonder if the protectors aren’t paranoid and off their rocker, and hurdle past it to see what awful things lie beyond for those raised in fear and sure of the limits of their “world” when they’re forced to confront it.

That’s like M. Night Shyamalan’s “Twilight Zone” ish “The Village,” and several other “because Dad/Mom/The Captain said so” stories with that “What’re we afraid of?” twist.

But even though this thriller has Alejandre Aja (“High Tension” was his best) behind the camera and Oscar winner Halle Berry in front of it, with its big conceit borrowed (Coincidence?) from an indie drama a few years back — “Tethered” — “Never Let Go” drifts from barely interesting to less interesting to a cop-out ending without making the viewer so much as break a sweat.

Berry’s the protective mother who guards her little boys Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs VI) and drills in them the rituals of their safety from the “evil” that stalks them and brought the outside world, she says, to ruin.

The youngest narrates that they’re in grandpa’s house, and it has magical powers. There’s an incantation they recite whenever they go outside.

“Oh blessed house of ancient wood, shelter to the pure and good,” it begins. They know it by heatd. There are prayers and spells carved into the doorjamb of this rustic cabin deep in the woods, and a root cellar door with ornate carvings grandpa gave it.

Something happened to grandpa. Something happened to grandma. Something happened to their dad (William Catlett), too. They see visions of them sometimes, when they’re sleeping, when they’re wandering the woods hunting rabbits and squirrels by crossbow and slingshot and harvesting slugs and popping live frogs in their mouthes for the protein.

Mom makes them wear a rope around their waists to keep them connected to the evil-repelling righteousness of grandpa’s “house of ancient wood” so that no harm will come from them from the zombies and other threats implicit in this “evil” threat Mom describes.

We have just enough time to wonder if Koda their faithful dog knows what’s up regarding those “something happeneds” when we and he get an answer, he flees and events turn dire and even more paranoid.

“There’s nobody else out there, baby,” Mom purrs, trying to keep them in line.

Because whatever happened out in the world, they’re starving to death. Listening to a 78rpm disc of
“Big Rock Candy Mountains” every time the moon is full won’t sustain them.

The brothers question each other, and they start to question their mom. And as they do, the screenplay seems to lose its point or back away from ever having had one.

“Never Let Go” is one of those movies that someone felt compelled to break into “chapters” with titles stating the obvious — “How Will I Feed My Children?”

The setting has possibilities, seeing as how 673 other horror tales have clung to a “cabin in the woods.” Berry generally gives fair value in thrillers, even supernatural ones. Not so much here.

But the sibling relationship is what resonates here, more than Mom’s paranoia or the monstrous visions or “real” manifestations the kids cope with. They bicker, collaborate and differ on what they think might really be going on here.

Is this a parable about the limits of blind faith, or the importance of clinging to it? It’s hard to tell because I’m not sure screenwriters made up their minds about that, especially after (just guessing) they were told to tag this thing with a clunky “Wait, what WERE we just looking at?” cop-out finale.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast: Halle Berry, Anthony B. Jenkins, Percy Daggs IV

Credits: Directed by Alejandre Aja, scripted by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:41

Sheer curiosity might be enough to lure the adventurous into “The Universal Theory,” a mysterious German-Swiss film noir that dabbles in alternate history and a confluence of events that might have triggered timeline shifts among those who were in its proximity.

Are black and white subtitled period pieces about alternate versions of people in jumbled-up differing realities are your thing?

But a jarring line of narration late in the film hints at the more ambitious, or at least coherent, movie this might have been. Our protagonist/author is said to have been unstirred by the student protests of the ’60s, and merely a spectator like the rest of us to “the Soviet moon landings.”

Our framework is the memory of a would-be physicist’s (Jan Bülow), jarred by an abortive 1974 German TV interview about his new “science fiction novel.” It’s not a “story,” not “science fiction,” Johannes Leinart insists. He stalks off the set without elaborating.

A dozen years earlier, Leinart was a physics student working on his dissertation with his grumpy, disapproving academic advisor (Hanns Zischler), traveling with him to an alpine physics summit where an Iranian researcher is set to announce a “universal theory.”

Leinart’s dissertation is dismissed by Dr. Strathen as “purely speculative” “esoteric nonsense” (in German and French with English subtitles). But a boorish rival of the grump’s, Professor Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss) sees this “parallel eigen status” multiverse speculation as possibly “ground-breaking,” “a Nobel Prize,” something that could upend and “wreck (famed physicist Niels) Bohr’s life’s work” in one fell swoop.

Or maybe Blumberg’s just having one over on his old rival. Whatever you do, don’t ask Blumberg what he did in “the war.” And try not to notice the ten year-old Swiss bellboy who hears German spoken and snaps off a salute and a “Heil Hitler!”

It turns out that this Swiss boy and a little girl stumbled into secret tunnels underneath this corner of the Alps. There’s talk of radiation and uranium mining. Leinart notices queer formations in the clouds.

But he also notices the pianist in the hotel bar. Karin (Olivia Ross) mesmerizes him, and hints at a long past association with perhaps a bit of childhood trauma. Leinart tries to have a conversation or at least slow her down as she briskly walks away from him. She’s also looking at the clouds, and in the company of Professor Blumberg and others in overcoats and hats. What’s up with that?

People die. Or disappear. Or age mysteriously. Two chain-smoking cops (Philippe Graber and David Bennent) try to get answers, or answers that they understand.

Are they even asking the right questions? Because Johannes Leinart and his “purely speculative” theories make him the one person there who might be able to figure out what’s going on. And it’ll take him years and a publisher who insists on putting out his book as “science fiction” for him to work what he say and believes transpired there.

He’s the one person to hear an existential edge in the query, “Where were you in ’62?”

“The Universal Theory” is too obscurant for most tastes, with the slow-to-unravel thread of the story as difficult to follow as the entirety of the “Spiderverse” timelines and the mad blur of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” That goes for the performances, too — opaque.

It’s a modest but immersive film more interested in cryptic characters and plot lines and in period detail — minimal effects, mostly in the third act — and the idea that some sort of rift in reality might be possible, that it could happen, and why not in the Swiss Alps in 1962?

If only those Soviet moon landing cosmonauts could weigh in. I’m sure Buzz Aldrin has questions, too.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jan Bülow, Olivia Ross, Hanns Zischler, Gottfried Breitfuss,
Philippe Graber and David Bennent

Credits: Directed by Timm Kröger, scripted by Roderick Warich and Timm Kröger. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:58

“Uglies” is another cut-and-paste dystopia-masquerading as-utopia-YA sci-fi thriller about youth imperiled and in revolt.

It borrows from “Logan’s Run” and every book series/film series it inspired and a famous “Twilight Zone” episode — “Eye of the Beholder” — in creating a future where being “pretty” is not just the goal, it’s the great social equalizer and a way to narcotize the populace of the gorgeous and the forever young.

Packed with explanations, future tech and a big fat sensitive “uglies” vs. insensate “pretties” parable, it’s a standard-issue franchise-starter (based on a novel by Scott Westerfeld) and a stunning bore to anyone old enough to look at the PG-13 rating in their life experience’s rear view mirror.

“Kissing Booth” to “Family Affair” and “The Princess” streaming queen Joey King is our heroine, Tally, an ugly awaiting her surgery in “the dorms,” the high school where all pre-pretty kids are groomed for their gorgeous, carefree future, focusing on that one transformative moment that will take all their cares away.

Pretty Tally is thus merely “Squint,” her nickname taken from her least attractive physical trait. She is a parkour practicing rebel who hopes she and her bestie Peris (Chase Stokes), a pretty boy save for his “Nose,” are bonded forever with a connection that will endure past their surgeries.

But he gets operated on first, and drops right into the never-ending revel of life as a “pretty.” The shock of his brush-off has Squint more than open to friendship with classmate Shay, aka “Skinny” (Brianne Tju) and her hoverboarding hooliganism.

Shay has no interest in the surgery and is all about “escape” to “The Smoke,” a rumored counter culture beyond the reach of the pretties, their autocracy and their hi-tech “scouts.” The mythical “David” and his fight-with-fire followers in “The Smoke” are part of that lure.

Merely dabbling in breaking curfew and talking-up this alternate lifestyle could get one’s surgery “canceled.” Shay is fleeing, so she doesn’t care. But when that happens to her, Squint is shocked, and when confronted by the scientist leader of their Future Culture, Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox of “Orange is the New Black”) Tally agrees to follow Shay and report her whereabouts, just for the chance to be “pretty.”

The characters are a pretty and pretty bland lot, with David (Keith Powers) just as runway model-ready as everybody else. King is nobody’s idea of “ugly,” and at 25, should probably stop accepting Netflix money to play “high school” characters.

The dialogue is so burdened with exposition, background and “That’s how we’ll change the world” plans that the predictable narrative never shows any potential.

Veteran director McG is a long way from “Charlie’s Angels” and “We Are Marshall,” and makes no impression on this effects (cool) and stunts (dull) dominated production, a YA adaptation as sexless as any “Hunger Games,” “Ender’s Game,” “Maze Runner” or “Divergent” installment.

Without romance there’s no warmth and no stakes. And while that’s understandable as every “pretty” looks as AI-polished as Squint’s idealizing “mirror” mirror on the wall, it makes “Uglies” a singularly heartless outing in the YA sci-fi genre, one with an obvious and obviously-botched “moral.” By the time the credits roll, it’s succeeded in creating zero interest in investing any more time in this universe or this story.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Joey King, Laverne Cox, Brianne Tju, Keith Powers, Chase Stokes and Charmin Lee.

Credits: Directed by McG, scripted by Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor and Whit Anderson, based on a Scott Westerfeld novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

F. Javier Gutiérrez’s “The Wait” is a supernatural parable of powerless poverty and callous wealth, the ancient class divide that endured in Spain under the Franco dictatorship.

It’s a grim, well-acted vengeance thriller with moral underpinnings that would have worked, with or without the supernatural “judgement” folded into its unraveling grief, guilt and madness.

Victor Clavijo is Eladio, a poor, illiterate caretaker of an arid estate high in the mountains in the South of Spain. His arrangement with the absentee hidalgo, Don Francisco, is that he’ll put in a few years here with his wife Marcia (Ruth Díaz) raising their little boy Floren, who will soon be old enough to hunt someday. That’s important in country too dry to grow much or keep livestock

“He’ll be shooting in three years,” Eladio assures Don Francisco (Pedro Casablanc), who seems keenly interested in the lad’s potential and progress.

Those three years pass, and sure enough, Floren (Moisés Ruiz) has learned to shoot at 13. With the help of an uncle (Antonio Estrada), he’s even bagged his first buck.

But another wealthy don, Don Carlos (Manuel Morón) has booked an excess of hunting parties onto the estate. He wants “13 stands” for deer hunters laid out on the land instead of the maximum of ten, when Eladio knows that would be “too dangerous,” crowding careless amateur shooters in each other’s line of fire.

A bribe is offered. Then Don Carlos visits Marcia to ensure that she wants that money. Hemmed-in, Eladio has no choice. And everyone’s fate is sealed, starting with the boy of 13.

Gutiérrez and his “Before the Fall” collaborator Clavijo paint a portrait of cascading tragedy that overhwelms Eladio, who crawls into the bottle, and which shatters the guilt-ridden Marcia. They grapple with “blame,” with the slow-to-catch-on Eladio finally deciding to do something about the callous Don Carlos, who set all this horror in motion.

But the revenge story turns back in on itself as we and Eladio are left to ponder how merely wanting more money, a better life and future makes this all his and Marcia’s fault in the eyes of the various dons. In a fascist Catholic theocracy stuck in the 19th century — save for Range Rovers and TV for the better off — that assault on conscience is enough to keep the poor in line.

“Testing” them with temptation just underscores the cruelty of the social order.

A stark, rundown setting is captured in arresting screen compositions and images fraught with meaning. Someone goes missing. Closeups of clothespins on the ground where the clothesline used to hold the laundry is the only clue we need to see.

The simple, primal thriller is the beating heart of this story. I found the third act turn towards the supernatural unnecessary in scoring its allegorical points, but if you need to make your movie a horror film in order for it to have a chance to travel, so be it.

The ethereal judgements characters endure in “The Wait” imply the consequences of defiance of a natural order long imposed by everybody’s favorite eat-fish-on-Friday whipping boy dogma, the key to keeping peasants in their place and Spain trapped in time before its aged strongman finally dropped dead.

Gutiérrez’s film suggests there is no escape from the guilt of greed and its repercussions, and that the trap of “the way things are and are always supposed to be” might be mental, moral and even supernatural. Or so we’re forced to believe.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, alcohol abuse

Cast: Víctor Clavijo, Ruth Díaz, Manuel Morón, Moisés Ruiz and
Pedro Casablanc

Credits: Scripted and directed by F. Javier Gutiérrez. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:42

Ron Perlman’s a heavy in this “The only way for me to do something right is by doing something bad” redemption thriller.

I’ve taken on the task of painting houses in half a dozen states over the years, which is why I can say, with some authority, that viewing the amateurishly-paced, clumsily-titled “Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark” is “like watching paint dry.”

A “road trip” dramedy about old (not that old) men fleeing a Michigan trailer park for retirees for The Ark Encounter in fundamentalist Kentucky, just 45 miles from The Creation Museum, “Old Bird” is the cinematic version of “The Road to Nowhere,” a film of inane dialogue, dull characters and an undermotivated “quest” littered with nearly pointless stops along the way.

This Maki family faith-based project clocks in at a “Shawshank” length of nearly two and a half hours. But there’s little to nothing redeemable in it, a film where half the scenes have no reason to exist and the other half go on past any point they may have.

Alan Maki stars as Jon, an overwrought widower who doesn’t look nearly old enough to be bound for the nursing home, which his kids have sentenced him to. He’s forgetting things, having fender benders, weeping for his late wife and gritting his teeth that his kids — Heather Hamilton plays his daughter, director and son Shaun Maki plays his son — have put his long-immobile mobile home on the market.

Jon is fuming when he and neighbor Gibbs (Dennis McComas) “meet cute.” There’s little cute about their meeting, nothing in their banter to make us buy into an instant bond that will turn into a road trip of several hundred miles.

Jon is leery of “religious talk.” Gibbs is all about the Bible, which he’s read cover-to-cover “fourteen times.”

“You didn’t get it the first time?”

With his children and their power-of-attorney hold on his life closing in around him, Jon impulsively decides the two of them should hit the flee for a pilgrimage to “The Ark Encounter.” Sure, one’s a published author — “That’s GOTTA be a lie.” — wearing his pain like a hair shirt, the other just might be suffering in silence.

Because it’s hard to get in a word edgewise on the cagey Jon, who figures the best way to make their getaway is by swapping license plates they swipe from a stranger.

The not-remotely-random stops along the way (at a church, etc) add little to this quest. There’s nothing surprising about what happens to them, and nothing remotely interesting about their destination.

Acting here ranges from adequate to not even that.

If there’s a parable to all this, it’s in some Maki’s head and not in the finished film. If there’s any reason to make a recreated Noah’s Ark the destination other than tricking Indiana Jones fans, or fundamentalist-virtue-signaling your audience that this panders to their beliefs, I didn’t catch it.

I was too busy missing all the drying paint that at least gives one the satisfaction that you’ve accomplished something, which is more than you can say for watching this “Escape to the Ark.”

Rating: unrated, PG worthy

Cast: Alan Maki, Dennis McComas, Mikah Scott Carter and Shaun Maki.

Credits: Directed by Shaun Maki, scripted by Alan Maki. A Sun and Paw Films release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 2:25

Hulu has this tested-by-illness romance, starring Arsema Thomas and Darrell Britt-Gibson, slated to stream Sept. 27.

It shows promise.

The creator of “Captain Underpants,” Dav Pilkey,  scripted this January 25 Universal release.

Half man, half dog, fighting crime?

Pete Davidson, Isla Fisher, Rickey Gervais and Lil Rel Howery are the names voice stars.

Oscar winner Fraser is scary, Oscar winner Marisa Tomei reteams with Dinklage as (once again) his love interest, Oscar nominee Glenn Close as the siblings’ psycho-mom and Fraser as the nutty “I AM JUSTICE” cop-avenger-seeker of the emeralds in this dark comedy.

Amazon Prime has this one, and t’s coming out Oct. 17.

Lotta star power for a dark comedy that goes straight to streaming. Something not quite come off? We’ll see.

Lionsgate has this November 8 release, an Irish period piece based on a Claire Keegan novel.

Watson’s a scary nun, Murphy’s a father stumbling into something awful about the Catholic church’s stranglehold on his small. town.