Movie Nation

David Harbour, Olga Kurylenko, Oscar winner Rachel Weiss and Emmy diva Julia Louis Dreyfus star in this May “Black Widow” spinoff.

Looks…violent. And Russian. With an asterisk.

A “mythic treasure,” a Halloween curse?

A high school trio take their shot in this Oct. 1 release.

Cooper Tomlinson and Kim Sandwich and Charity Rose star on it. 

The new trailer — this one is the Brit version of Trailer 2 — plays up the odds, the new star and the vengeance.

Nov. 15

It’s a murder mystery set among the filthy-rich/cash poor on Cape Cod, a tale of parties and endless infidelities in which almost everybody has some posh name or nickname — “Tag, Merritt, Greer,” “Shooter” — and almost everybody seems like a suspect.

Netflix’s “The Perfect Couple” is perfectly trashy and predictably unpredictable as it spends six episodes setting up one “HE did it” or “Maybe SHE did it” after another.

Built around Oscar winner Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber, thisJenna Lamia (“Good Girls,” “Awkward”) production is practically a parody of a “beach book” turned murder mystery movie, dolling everybody up and sketching characters in as “types” — the stoner womanizing patriarch, the entitled, broke bro son (Jack Reynor), his bitchy-pregnant wife (Dakota Fanning) who married money. She thought.

“The key to this family is to just stay on the periphery, where it’s safe.”

And amid the accusations, intrigues, police interrogations and flashbacks to the rehearsal dinner/party where the crime was committed, and to earlier parties and arguments, “Couple” shows off beachside mansion life, vamps a version of “how old money” acts and showcases the difference between good plastic surgery (Kidman) and bad (Isabella Adjani).

Working class Amelia (Eve Hewson) is about to marry Benji Winbury (Billie Howle). Mother of the groom Greer (Kidman) is frosty but accepting. She, too, married Winbury money. But she’s had to prop up the clan and her louche husband Tag (Schreiber) by writing fiction of the romance novel persuasion.

But Amelia’s model-thin influencer maid of honor Merritt Monaco (Meghann Fahy) turns up dead at that rehearsal dinner. People have motives. People have injuries, suggesting involvement. People have access to drugs that were found in her system.

Male people have the ability to put her in the condition she was in at her death — pregnant.

Who could have done it? Well, any of them.

The Nantucket police chief (Michael Beach) is so cowed by Winbury cash that the State sends an abrasive investigator (Donna Lynne Champlin) to supervise this case. Wait’ll she finds out the chief’s daughter is sneaking around with a Winbury teen.

And on and on the complications, interrelationships and suspicions go, with character after character subjected to scrutiny, “custody” and accusations. They sneak around and sleep around, rummage for clues or to cover their tracks, scheme and cast asperions and deflect blame.

“Dont get caught in Greer’s crosshairs!”

Even Kidman and Schreiber have trouble making their characters two, much less three dimensional. The lesser lights in the cast have no prayer.

There’s nobody here to identify with, nobody to root for, even the bride, who gets an E-Type Jaguar for her troubles.

So like any soap opera, you hunt for villains to relish. But even they — the foreign friend who’s slept with generations of Winburys (Adjani), the most abrasive heir, the loutish Tag, the controlling matriarch, the judgmental housekeeper — are lacking the snap of lip-smacking villainy.

“The Perfect Couple” has a thesis no one buys into, a dated grasp of media and scandal in the 2020s and characters that are more cartoons than flesh and blood folks with foibles. It’s a TV version of a bad “beach book,” making one wish one had spent these six hours doing something else, preferably on a beach.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Liev Schreiber, Eve Hewson, Jack Reynor, Isabelle Adjani, Ishaan Khatter, Michael Beach, Meghann Fahy, Billy Howie and Dakota Fanning.

Credits: Created by Jenna Lamia. A Netflix release.

Running time: Six episodes @:50-63 minutes each

A filmed-in-Georgia comedy about two parents steamrolling a rural inn/venue on behalf of their respective ready-to-marry children, this one has
Geraldine Viswanathan, Meredith Hagner, Jack McBrayer, Wyatt Russell, Bobby Moynihan and Celia Weston.

Jan. 30, hear come the brides! Love the way they have to label this “New Movie” in the trailers. Because it doesn’t seem “new,” much of what’s promoted with trailers these days is of the streaming series variety, or bogus “fan made” AI-assisted fakery.

A suburban sitcom — Alicia Silverstone co-stars — turns into a comic nightmare of slaughter, splatter and revenge.

Guaranteed to offend someone — EVERYone? Finishing its festival run, “coming soon” to theatrical and streaming?

“His Three Daughters” is an awards-bait drama about three quarreling adult children gathered for a death watch for their father. A drama-savvy reader will recognize that as the plot to Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” even if the writer-director doesn’t credit that classic as his inspiration.

Compact, almost claustrophobic in its setting, the size of the cast and the myopic scope of the drama, it’s theatrical, made for theater.

Characters talk at each other more than they talk TO one another — soliloquizing, taking deep breathes and launching into long anecdotes about Dad, their lives since growing up in his New York home and of course, their grievances with one another.

But while the power trio at the heart of the piece, Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen, play variations on character “types” — the shrill, brittle and OCD “organized” sister Katie (Coon), the weepy, touchy-feely, not-quite dizzy youngest Christina (Olsen) and the oldest, a slacker/stoner “professional” gambler, Rachel (Lyonne) — can impress and serve up shades of subtlety, it’s a dry and dry-eyed journey through a beloved parent’s last days.

Katie’s first impression is the one that sticks — a woman on edge and in charge, not just keeping it together but staying on task, one task that she obsesses over between backbiting about sister Rachel and testy calls with an unruly teen back home.

“Back home” is across town, “town” being New York City. Katie lives a few boroughs away, close enough to have visited before their Dad (unseen until the film’s finale) a lot before he entered hospice care. Did she?

“The past is the past,” she sermonizes. But it isn’t. As irked as she is about the present, she has an endless succession of bones to pick with Rachel, whom we gather is the oldest, a “leeching, broke-ass f—–g punk” pothead set to inherit the rent-controlled apartment.

Christina lives far away, has a pre-school daughter she Facetimes with at night and when she isn’t sharing airy fairy idylls about motherhood, she’s taking on her “shifts” sitting with Dad, and more than her share of the actual mourning going on.

Rachel isn’t taking “shifts.” She was their father’s caregiver for years, knows how often or how little the other two have visited and works at her obsession — sports gambling, “parlays” involving a collection of long shots, something she may have shared or learned from their working class father.

Katie’s situational obsession is the fact that their father didn’t sign a “DNR,” a do-not-resuscitate” request. Christina’s is “I think you should go a bit easier on (Rachel).” And Rachel’s is just getting through every not-wholly-aimless day, surviving this “sister” time, and not interrupting her life of lighting-up, placing bets and watching games with her beau Benjy (Jovan Adepo).

The script’s arch tendency towards speeches is thrown ino sharpest relief by the ironically-named “Angel” (Rudy Galvan), the hospice worker whose every word is an all-knowing pronouncement o finality. He is trying to keep the trio on task, letting them know when their father is losing his connection to the world and that it’s time to “say anything that you feel must be said.”

The sisters get as irritated with him as we do.

There are fantasy grace notes in the third act, but mostly “His Three Daughters” is a soapy, predictable “family” rift, Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” rendered in modernized Oscar-bait strokes.

Our three leads are good, with Lyonne giving us subtle moments that lift her character above caricature, Olsen’s West Coast “feeling” backed by an enviable level-headedness and Coon’s shrill martinet occasionally humanized.

But there is nothing here that comes close to touching the heart, and no attempts at “Terms of Endearment” tears or grappling with the growing sense of loss that aching dramas from “Amour” and “Departures” to “Biutiful” managed.

It’s set up the way Chekhov’s play is traditionally-mounted these days, as an actor’s showcase. That’s just not enough to put “His Three Daughters” over.

Rating: R, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Azazel Jacobs. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Nell Fisher’s a precocious kid who’s grown up without a Dad.

Then, her children’s magician for celebrity parties dad from America shows up.

And they set out on an adventure.

Looks sweet, cute and juvenile, all one could want in an adventure comedy made for tweens.

Is he cheating? What will she do about it? Why’s her baby crying all the time?

Oct. 25, we find out.