Movie Nation

Robert Zemeckis was always a sort of sneaky effects innovator. “Back to the Future” to “Polar Express” “Cast Away” and “Forrest Gump” all had innovative approaches to practical effects, and digital ones.

Making his “Gump” co-stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright years younger for this time-lapse fantasy is his latest trick.

The cast, the presence of Yes music, the upbeat and hopeful “I’ve Seen All Good People” in the trailer give off a strong “boomer” vibe.

Paul Bettany, Michelle Dockery and Kelly Reilly also star in a story embracing the magic of a place for different families in widely different eras, people in love, present, in the moment, “Here.”

Nov. 15.

A new acquaintance picks up on Cora’s Achilles heel right off the bat. Or does he? Is her problem really just “You can’t read the room?”

Strangers and old friends alike cannot help but ask the obvious of singer-songwriter — “What is WRONG with you?”

As Cora makes every conversation antactless cringe, every introduction awkward and every awkward situation more awkward, as she carries herself with greater and greater confidence despite having a singing voice just shy of “unpleasant,” with dippy tunes that might have made the cut for “Phoebe Buffay’s Greatest Hits” on “Friends,” we — like everyone she meets, knows and loves — ponder the same question.

What the hell IS wrong with her?

“Cora Bora” is a laugh-out-loud indie comedy built around the deadpan swagger and musical stylings of Megan Stalter of TV’s “Hacks.”

It’s a tale of “Portlandia” transplanted, briefly, to LA, where Cora has dragged her guitar and her “talent” in search of her big break.

As she sings “What is so important about Portland,” we are puzzled, because she — formerly of Portland’s Maybe Nots — should know. She had her reasons for leaving, and watching her empty out open mike nights and mid-day cafe serenades with her music, “big fish in a small pond situation” isn’t one of those.

She’s in “an open relationship” with her girlfriend back home, which is why she’s always on the make in LA. One hook-up (Thomas Mann) wakes up in the morning, weeping, which tells us how that’s going.

Video calling home to her beloved Justine (Jojo T. Gibbs) just reveals another woman’s underwear, scattered around their house. There’s nothing for it but to go back and see if she can patch things up there. Justine is graduating from grad school, and “that only happens two or three times in a person’s life,” after all. In Portland.

Stalter, dressed-down, plump and proud, carries herself with cockiness about Cora’s allure, not that she’s not above using a fake photo on her Tinder profile.

Cora figuring out Justine has moved on, but not accepting it and never getting the new love Riley’s (Ayden Mayeri) name right doesn’t help. Losing their dog is just more evidence of her dizzy narcissism.

But with Justine, Riley, Cora’s parents (Carrie Armstrong and Darrell Hammond) treating her with kid gloves, and the handsome stranger (Manny Jacinto of “Top Gun: Maverick” and TV’s “The Good Place”) who keeps bumping into her and trying to “help,” we can guess something more than “tone deaf, ill-mannered egomaniac” is going on.

Director Hannah Pearl Utt’s second feature (“Before You Know It” was the first) and “Wonder Valley” screenwriter Rhianon Jones lift their games and are blessed with a cast that can wring every laugh out of the cringey situations and tactless responses, and a star who leans into “amusingly repellent.”

The material and Stalter’s presence in it was good enough to attract Jacinto, Mann, Chelsea Peretti (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), Heather Elizabeth Morris of “Glee,” “Saturday Night Live” alum Hammond, and as the most famous face and tattooed body at a Tinder orgy Cora signs up for, Margaret Cho.

They make the laughs land, and when things take a turn towards the sad, Stalter lets us buy into that, even if it is explained-to-the-point-of-overexplained.

You might not want to swipe right on Cora, probably wouldn’t stay for a second drink at any cafe or bar where she’s playing, and might not get past her overbearing bravado on first meeting. But Stalter & Co. make her a funny, infuriating and unpleasantly empathetic figure, “Portland” quirky no matter where you find her.

Rating: unrated, nudity, drug use, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Megan Stalter, Manny Jacinto, Jojo T. Gibbs, Ayden Mayeri, Thomas Mann, Chelsea Peretti, Darrell Hammond and Margaret Cho

Credits: Directed by Hannah Pearl Utt, scripted by Rhianon Jones. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:31

“Church of Jesus Christ,” maybe of “Latter Day Saints” or maybe not, door-knocking and handing out tracts.

But this dashing older chap might not be the open-to-religion-minded convert that he seems to be.

He will test them, “study” them.

This has “What a horrific hoot” potential. Set to one of the best-known tunes by The Hollies?

“Daddio” is a cinematic seminar in the value of movie stars.

A variation of the “Night on Earth/Taxicab Confessions” formula, it puts Sean Penn behind the wheel and lets Dakota Johnson hold her own with him from the back seat.

Its sole power to dazzle is in the things a cab passenger will tolerate in terms of frank, coarse conversation about sex and the city. In a drawn-out, melodramatic chat, our rider lets her philosopher, confessor and psychoanalyst cabbie “read” her, flirt and offer unsolicited advice on his “last fare” of the night drive from the airport into Manhattan.

By turns creepy, sexy and forlorn, the picture is made mesmirizing by an Oscar winner doing his best world weary and edgy act for one of the screen’s great beauties, with her showcased in a performance of reactions, and counters, framed in adoring close-ups.

Christy Hall, a TV writer (“I Am Not OK with This”) who scored the assignment to adapt the novel “It Ends with Us” for Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, makes her writing-directing debut with this simple, chatty two-hander.

Her way with a pithy turn of phrase — “bucket list” wishes, philosophical observation and crude-enough-to-be-a-come-on sexualized conversation — must have made this an easy sell.

Our rider is from the city. “Your little outfit gave it away,” he says, after thanking her for not staring at her phone in a long, accident-delayed “fixed rate” ride. “You can handle yourself.” She must be “a New Yorker who pays attention.”

But she is on her phone, getting sexted by her paramour. There’s resignation in her eyes at her lover’s over-eagerness. She’s just flown in from “back home” in Oklahoma and her sexter is in the mood.

As the cabbie’s questions and observations grow more and more personal, maybe we wonder if she should be passing on the name off the hack license displayed in the back seat. More than a few remarks give the driver a stalker vibe.

“Looking like a family man is more important than being one,” he growls. Cabs and cabbies “are like f—ing BLOCKbuster,” he grumbles. The self-driving taxi/app in on the horizon, and that’s the end of his profession.

He’s got a hint of bitterness, but he makes a lot of eye contact. She stares off into the night, smiles, brings her vocabulary down to his street argot and lets on about her work, her life and whoever it is who keeps begging her for texted nudes in the middle of a cab ride.

The conversation can be playful — “I can’t be a knowitall if I don’t know nothing.” — and insightful, mostly from his cynical, man-of-the-sexual world end.

“Don’t ever say the word ‘love.'”

“I’m not THAT girl!”

The script’s simplicity is both its beauty and its trap. Two players, lots of two-shots and soulful, reflective close-ups and twists that are hardly surprising are bound to cause a little impatience. The intimate setting is more myopic than claustrophobic. The stakes seem low, and are.

But in a world where people still take cabs and not Lyfts, where sexting is still a thing and guarded, hardened New Yorkers don’t just make eye contact, but talk about their pasts, their fears and desires, “Daddio” works.

And Penn and Johnson, confined to a single setting, let their star power do the heavy lifting and create possibilities out of nothing but their screen appeal, their magnetism and their ability to become characters just far enough removed from their off-screen personas to be interesting.

Rating: R, nudity, profanity, adult conversation

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sean Penn

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christy Hall. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40

Jason S. plays a temple cantor who has kind of lost the plot, when lo and behold, his former music teacher (Carol Kane) shows up and wants Bat Mitzvah classes.

Oy? Don’t forget the “vey.”

Kane and Schwartzman have made quirky their respective brands over the years, and this Aug.23 release has them at testing the limits of “How screwy can you be and remain endearing?”

Sweet and ever-so-slight, “Confessions of a Wandering Saint” is a dark, deadpan Argentine comedy about a “miracle” and the faithful Catholic who’s willing to risk her fast pass to heaven to “prove it.”

The debut feature of Argentine filmmaker Tomás Gómez Bustillo, “Crónicas de una Santa Errante” is set in a rural village where a quartet of little old ladies tidy the ancient church whose saint gives the crossroads its name — Santa Rita.

The others also serve as a vocal group for Father Eduardo (Pablo Moseinco). But pious Rita (Mónica Villa) stumbles across something that might prove her faith is the strongest of all. An old statue, covered and stored, bears a resemblence to a long missing icon of the saint she and the town are named for.

She starts digging around on the Internet and finds both confirmation and refutation for her theory. Typical.

She gets so wrapped up in this moral dilemma that she neglects her doting husband Norberto (Horacio Marassi), who is on her side.

“If you want it to be a miracle, it is,” he says (in Spanish with English subtitles).

The priest is an even easier sale, especially after the statue is “modified” to fit the old descriptions of it.

How far will Rita go to make her, her saint’s, her church’s and her town’s name? Pretty far.

That’s how she has the accident. The credits roll — full credits — and yet, we’re only 33 or so minutes into this story. The movie’s not over until the saintly statue and the faith that props it up says so.

Rita emerges from the wreck a ghost, trying to find one being who can see her. Norberto and her friends and priest don’t. At least Norberto sneezes in her presence, as if he’s got a clue.

A guy on a scooter seems to know, but he’s got horns and “you’re not my case.” It’s up to an “angel” (English pronunciation), complete with halo (Nahiel Correa Dornell) explains the drill — “express” service to heaven, or “”premium” path, complete with canonization, the works.

Will Rita’s dream come true? Or will she get “stuck,” manifested as a lightbulb or moth or what have you as a form of purgatory?

“Confessions” isn’t exactly Latin American “magical realism.” It’s a lot closer to “Heaven Can Wait/A Matter of Life and Death/Here Comes Mr. Jordan” than anything of great meaning and weight. There are “rules” to this afterlife, because there always are.

It’s a lovely looking film, of rustic rural vistas, pools of light in the evening gloom and whimsical angelic halos for the heavenly, with the dead-on-their-journey glowing in the dark.

But it’s lightweight, vague and a tad obscure, never quite delivering the parable it promises, limiting the young, quarelsome and randy new couple next door as mere decorative titilation, the priest is unrealized comic potential.

Screen veteran Villa, who dates back to “Waiting for the Hearse” in the ’80s, makes Rita a simple woman of faith, cunning enough to figure out what will seal the faked deal, clumsy enough to wreck on the way to her triumph. We kind of like her, but that’s more intuitive than anything this thin script delivers.

Rating: profanity, some nudity

Cast: Mónica Villa, Horacio Marassi, Pablo Moseinco and Nahiel Correa Dornell

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tomás Gómez Bustillo. A Hope Runs High release.

Running time: 1:25

A sweet turn by Amy Smart, Judd Hirsch trotting out another version of “curmudgeonly” and a sensitive take on childhood anxiety are what the kids baseball dramedy “Rally Caps” has to recommend it.

It’s a limp noodle of a “family” film, about as far from “edgy” as you can get. The big message is somewhat swamped by maudlin attention to “Big Game” kids’ sport film formula. But it’s inoffensive, and perhaps a potential mental health conversation-starter in some families.

As Hirsch’s baseball-mad grandpa mutters about his nervous, jumpy grandson, “Who knew kids could get the yips?” Yeah, they can. Children can have anxiety before they can spell the word.

Jordy (Carson Minniear) is an Orioles fanatic whose chief baseball skills might be the vast collection of “rituals” and “routines” he picked up from Baltimore Orioles lore — this star tapping each foot five times before a play, that one grabbing the bill of his cap a certain way.

The problem is, Jordy learned all that from his father and grandfather. And Dad died the year before. Now, Jordy’s got a much older brother (Ben Morang) away at college and nobody to coach him but grandpa. Grandpa is all about the “routines.” Jordy takes these rituals to extremes.

One traumatic Little League tryout later has Mom (Smart) nursing Jordy on the field and rushing him to the emergency room. It’s going to take more than a rituals and summer baseball camp with older brother Rob coaching to get Jordy over “the yips” and everything else going on in his head.

A novel touch — Jordy’s into baseball movies, and imagines visits with his dead dad on the field, or in the corn “Field of Dreams.”

Another touch? Several other kids are working through issues — one has cochlear implants, and so on.

Everything else, including the summer-ending “Big Game,” featuring play by play by goofy camp leader Jerry (James Lowe) and a professional baseball announcer, is generic enough to bore anybody older than Little League age.

“Play by play” announcers in Little League games are a lazy screenwriterly conceit of kid sports movies, a way of over-explaining what’s happening and what players are capable of or going through when visuals alone should be enough to get that info across.

When all the kids are “types,” and the camp stuff is a collection of tropes of the experience and cliches from a million other movies (a scary “swim test,” pranks and practical jokes), we know what’s happening, to whom and why and how this all will turn out because the formula is that rigid.

No doubt the book this is based on traffics in those cut-and-paste experiences, character types, etc., as well. Harmless as “Rally Caps” is, you’d kind of hope somebody would put more thought into the story than this.

Even graded on the kid-movie-curve, “Rally Caps” comes up short.

Rating: unrated, fart jokes

Cast: Carson Minniear, Ben Morang, James Lowe, Amy Smart and Judd Hirsch.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lee Cipola, based on a novel by Jodi Michelle Cutler and Stephen J. Cutler. A Crystal Rock release.

Running time: 1:35

The writer-director who gave us “The Lighthouse,” “The Northman” and “The Witch” offers his take on a vampire classic — “Nosferatu.”

Aaron Taylor Johnson, Emma Corrin, Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney and Willem Dafoe star in the latest cerebral horror from Robert Eggers, opening Christmas Day.

Jessica Alba just sold off her health and beauty company for a nice piece of change. It wasn’t that long ago that the “Dark Angel” alumna finished a run on her latest series, “L.A.’s Finest.” So it’s not like she needs the work.

But when Netflix comes calling with a check and ther offer of another thriller for the veteran action heroine to brawl, stab and head-butt her way through, it’s limber-up time.

“Trigger Warning” is a time-tested vengeance Western given modern combat, arms-smuggling and right wing politics trappings.

Alba plays a special forces commando of some sort, a woman we meet when her team is chased across some piece of Syria because the locals “figured out were aren’t aid workers.”

Parker is a tough broad you want on your side in a scuffle. She’s the type who has to be reminded “You can’t solve every problem with a knife.”

The moment we hear that, we figure that’s exactly what she’s about to do. A call from “back home” tells her that her father died in an accident in an old mine he owned next to the family cantina, Maria’s.

Returning to the desert Southwest, Parker’s old love, the sheriff (Mark Webber) has more doubts about the cause of death than she does. But the suggestion that Dad (Alejandro De Hoyos) might have killed himself, or died because he was clumsy at using grenades to open mine shafts, gets her back up.

Father Frank was a former Green Beret. He knows which end of a grenade to toss and which to keep as a souvenir.

Elvis (Jake Weary), the scumbag brother of our sheriff, drops hints and sets off alarm bells in his belligerent come-ons and Big Man in Town bluster. And since he’s not just the sheriff’s punk sibling, but they’re both the sons of a MAGA Senator (Anthony Michael Hall) running for re-election, Parker starts to piece together clues and connections and wonder what this right wing cabal with a stranglehold on the town and local “justice” is up to, and is capable of.

Alba’s still in fine fighting form and the sound effects team makes every stab, slice, hack and cut “thwick thwick shtick” through flesh with authority. Because Parker’s going to have to blade her way through a lot of minions to get to the truth.

But the story’s “twists” don’t merit the use of the word, and the action beats are generic in the extreme — big explosions here and there, shoot-outs, sniping and fist-fighting and pissed-off beat-downs.

There’s no reason the willowy Alba shouldn’t enjoy a long, two-fisted career thanks to her mastery of fight choreography. She’s more credible in a brawl than “Resident Evil” model/actress Milla Jovovich, if perhaps less convincing than the brawnier Gina Carano.

But Alba’s been around long enough to know good scripts from crappy ones. And she’s rich enough to be choosier — getting better writers, seeking out the best fight choreographers, insisting on bigger name co-stars.

Why have the clout and the luxury of a big bank account if you’re not going to use it to up your game?

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Jessica Alba, Mark Webber, Tone Bell, Jake Weary and Anthony Michael Hall.

Credits: Directed by Mouly Surya, scripted by John Brancato, Josh Olson and Halley Wegryn Gross. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

No household names star in this upcoming disaster movie. And the trailer doesn’t show everybody as alarmed as they might be as the Earth opens up in the middle of the continent, the famed overdue-for-a-quake New Madrid fault that changed the course of mighty rivers and knocked the few buildings in America’s midsection back then down, some 200 years ago.

But you never know with a B-movie. Novel idea, decent effects. Maybe a few folks look more terrified in the full movie.