Movie Nation

Impressive effects and a general light-hearted tone give “Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman,” a Korean sword, sorcery and ghost-busting action comedy, a fighting chance.

It doesn’t quite come off as it cannot avoid the trap of so many comic (web comic in this case) adaptations, over-emphasizing the brawls over the laughs. But genre fans might find enough in it to draw them in.

The plot gets lost in a lot of mumbo jumbo about “Seolgyeong,” talismans installed by shamans to keep demons locked away in the netherlife. So the makings of a pretty good “scammer” ghost buster who discovers there are real ghosts to bust, and that he knows how to do it, are kind of discarded in a jaunty-but-not-quite-jaunty-enough comic thriller.

The title character is given a nice swagger by Korean star Gang Dong-won (“Peninsula”). Dr. Cheon is a trained psychotherapist given to analyzing Korean culture via observations from the American-published Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM.

Korea, Dr. Cheon rationalizes to Apprentice Kang (Lee Dong’hwi), suffers from two culture-related mental maladies — “anger syndrome” and “ancestral possession.”

Well, he is quoting from DSM-4, we note, when DWM-5 may not buy into the same societal illnesses.

Dr. Cheon is a scammer who tells his apprentice and anybody else who questions his gadget trickery and flim-flammery that he’s saving these “subjects” from blowing bigger bucks on fighting their delusions about the undead.

He’s just busting the “ghosts” inside their head.

Dr. Cheon wears this cute little bell on a bracelet that “never rings,” one that is designed to sense the presence of the supernatural. “The Lost Talisman” is the quest and fight for his life that the Doc takes on, for others, on the day that damned bell finally rings.

There’s some demonic shaman (Huh Joon-ho of “Escape from Mogadishu”) who is manipulating hapless victims into fighting to break a talisman and wreak havoc upon the real world, so Dr. Cheon must use this busted sword that must be reforged to save possessed victims, young and old, from this menace from beyond.

Or something like that.

Esom plays a haunted, monied woman who sees dead people who throws cash at the ghostbusters to save a child. Her little sister?

The threads of the plot are a tad untidy and more difficult to follow than is necessary. Gang Dong-won as “The Broken Sword-Wielder” doesn’t give us much in the nature of surprise, shock and horror at the good doctor’s discovery that these beasts he’s banishing really exist, and that he has ties to them going back to his childhood, and earlier generations of his family.

There’s no learning curve in his battling the monstrous entities he now realizes are real. I guess remembering all the folk traditions and everything he’s faked over the years is enough.

I’m leery of any picture that puts too much emphasis on the final battle. Here, psychotronic effects and grenade launchers are used in a fight the infightable struggle in a gloriously gloomy cave. And that eats up the entire third act.

Perhaps this seemed more coherent in Korea. Unlike kimchi, Kias, K-pop and other Korean cinema, “Dr. Cheon” just doesn’t travel well.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Gang Dong-won, Huh Joon-ho, Esom, Lee Dong-hwi and Kim Song-hoo.

Credits: Directed by Kim Seong-sik, scripted by Kang Hye-jung, based on a web comic by Huretsha and Kim Hong-Tae. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:38

Cynthia Erivo is the witch Elphaba, Arianna Grande is Glinda the “Good Witch,” with Michelle Yeoh, and Jeff Goldblum.

No Dorothys are necessary in this version of Mr. Baum’s Oz, remember.

Jon M. Chu of “In the Heights” and “Crazy Rich Asians” and a dance pic or two and “Now You See Me 2,” directs what looks to be a “Wonka” sized holiday spectacle, and just the first half (“Part One”) of the story.

Thanksgiving.

“Ashes” is a slick and sleek Turkish thriller about a woman who falls in love with an unpublished book, a romance based in reality but enveloped in romance novel fantasy.

The latest from filmmaker Erdem Tepegöz (“In the Shadows”) begins with promise, throws in a little sexual heat, and reaches a violent and faintly cryptic climax. But it’s a melodrama that grinds its gears through the middle acts as the dull competes with the far-fetched, muting the story’s impact as it tumbles into boredom.

Gökçe (Funda Eryigit) is a happily-married upper middle-class mother of one, a wife whose publisher husband Kenan (Mehmet Günsür) utterly depends on her evaluations of manuscripts worth publishing as novels.

All is right in Gökçe’s world, save for the occasional botched delivery at her tony Nisantisi (Istanbul) neighborhood boutique. And then she picks up this battered proof with the word “Ashes” (Kül) on the cover.

Narrated in a woman’s voice, it is about a carpenter who “changes the live of people whose path he crosses,” perhaps for the better. Then again, maybe not. The mysterious “M” she writes about, and his mysterious “tower” that opens up the way the narrator sees the city, draws Gökçe in.

Next thing Gökçe knows, she’s tracking down a bakery mentioned in the book. And when that turns out to be a real location in the more hardscrabble Balat district, she starts looking for this “M.”

Lo and behold, she finds a furniture maker who matches the description. “Ali,” he goes by. But his first name is Metin (Alperen Duymaz). He is bearded, sexy and grumpy and apparently in demand. She commissions him to make a mirror for her shop, and that throws them together.

She mentions nothing of the book she is evaluating, and by the time she’s figured out this “tower” and “view,” we realize what Gökçe apparently does not.This guy is catnip, and she’s under his spell and soon will be under and over his sheets, etc.

Tepegöz, working from an Erdi Isik script, visualizes scenes from the faintly purplish prose of the book “Ashes” using a turn-to-ashes/materialize-from-ashes effect to let us see his Gökçe is watching this supposedly fictional book become real via locations and a flesh-and-blood “M.”

But who wrote the book, and what conclusions does the author reach about the irresistible “M?” 

The performances have enough heat to make the chemistry convincing, even if we never get a hint of guilt or fear of discovery from our straying heroine. The revealing wardrobe and cliched violent argument that turns to vigorous sex isn’t enough to make us forget the full life and loving marriage she has thrown over for a case of “fictophilia,” falling in love with a character from a book.

The arguments seem more pre-ordained than impulsive and in-the-moment. Eryigit doesn’t give us much in the way of “conflicted” in this urbane, high-class boutique-owner who tumbles into slumming with a carpenter.

And the movie’s mystery and hint of magical realism are tossed aside in a flurry of prosaic over-explaining that tends to let the ashes, so carefully swirled into the air in the opening act, settle in the most predictably pedestrian places by the finale.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Funda Eryigit, Alperen Duymaz and Mehmet Günsür

Credits: Directed by Erdem Tepegöz, scripted by
Erdi Isik. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Your short flight from LAX to Cabo San Lucas goes down. Way down.

You’re trapped in an air pocket in the fuselage some distance below the surface. There are sharks outside, a limited air supply inside, and help may or may not get there “in time.”

What do you do?

That’s the winning premise of the thriller “No Way Up,” a picture that presents us with a survivable air crash scenario and a grim dilemma and invites the cast of “survivors” and the viewer to work the problem.

This disaster movie, from some of the people who made the “47 Meters Down” pictures (not the writers or directors), has a little suspense but very little sense of urgency, which considering the prospects of the half dozen or so folks trapped, is a problem. Lacking much in the way of pace or panic, if just sort of flounders.

Sophie McIntosh is Ava, the fetching daughter of a California governor running for re-election. She’s met two college friends (Jeremias Armoore, Will Attenborough) for a little vacation-reunion in Cabo San Lucas.

What can go wrong? Well, as she’s the daughter of a famous person, lots of things. Which is why Dad’s go-to retired bodyguard (Colm Meaney) comes along as a “babysitter.”

We have just enough time to get acquainted with the gay flight attendant (Manuel Pacifo), the elderly couple (Phyllis Logan and James Carroll Jordan) taking their 10 year-old British granddaughter (Grace Nettles) to their condo in Cabo when the plane goes down.

Ava’s “I just like having you around” foreshadowing pays off as Brandon (Meaney) quickle sizes up the situation, their options and possible rescue.

“Look for anybody getting drousy,” he tells Ava as he heads off to rummage for anything useful in the totally-submerged plane. That’s the give-away that they’re running out of air. He doesn’t suggest tapping on the hull, the time-honored way of letting survivors of a sinking know there’s life below. And no, his assessment of how “stable” the plane teetering on an undersea shelf is cannot be right.

But nobody figures on the instant arrival of sharks looking for snacks.

Most everything in this lumbering thriller, scripted by producer-turned-producer/screenwriter Andy Mayson and directed by Claudio Fäh, the Swiss director of a couple of lesser “Sniper” sequels and “Northmen: A Viking Saga,” is predictable down to the timing of what happens and when.

But the underwater photography is striking, the sinking plane set convincing and a few of the jolts work.

The performances may be uneven — with old pros Meaney and “Downton Abbey” vet Logan giving fair value and McIntosh managing the proper privileged-but-proves-to-be-plucky heroine.

As for everybody else, this can’t have been the most comfortable set to spend hours and hours on, and a little of that claustrophia makes it into the performances. Still, “lack of urgency” trumps that, and that is created through editing for pace. If “No Way Up” goes down for the third time, that’s not on the actors.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, a harrowing plane crash and gruesome shark attacks

Cast: Sophie McIntosh, Jeremias Amoore, Manuel Pacific, Will Attenborough, Grace Nettle, Phyllis Logan and Colm Meaney.

Credits: Directed by Claudio Fäh, scripted by Andy Mayson. An RLJE film, an IFC release.

Running time: 1:30

A truly transcendent figure is music, an iconic spokesman for the oppressed whoever and where they might be, and a guy who was a lot more than his mellow, uplifting persona.

I had higher hopes for this, a holiday rollout and perhaps awards consideration. Paramount put a damper on such expectations by pushing it into a cinema dead zone. But with theaters starved for new releases and audiences dying to see something fresh, maybe it’ll be a hit.

“Bob Marley: One Love” opens Valentine’s Day, Wednesday.

July 26.

Angus MacFadyen classes up this tale of “Marvel Jesus.” Looks fun, and yeah they’re out of ideas.

A Climate Changed, specially effected reboot of 1996’s “Twister.”

That Glen Powell (“Maverick,” “Anyone But You”) is having himself a moment.

With Daisy Edgar-Jones, Sasha Lane, Anthony Ramos, Katy O’Brian, Maura Tierney and Kiernan Shipka.

Riding the wind and its “Twisters” this summer. I feel a theme park ride update. I do.

July.

Alfred Hitchcock’s peak years were the 1950s, when he was utter master of his craft and he was privileged to make use of Hollywood’s best and brightest with the budgets to do them all justice.

From “Stage Fright” and “Strangers on a Train” through “The Man Who Knew Too Much,”The Wrong Man,” “Rear Window,” and “Vertigo,” he and “the system” cranked out classic after classic, enduring thrillers with iconic set pieces and often starring the greatest stars of their era.

And just as he was about to become a droll TV host, Hitch saw fit to remind us that he’d had a wicked sense of humor all long.

“The Trouble with Harry” might have been a stretch. But “To Catch a Thief” found him finally letting Cary Grant be Cary Grant — suave, dashing, sexy and witty. And that was but the appetizer for their collaborative masterpiece, 1959’s lightweight delight, “North by Northwest.”

It is an effortless two hours and sixteen minutes of classic set-pieces, unlikely traps and amusingly off-the-cuff escapes, all starring the handsomest tan ever to step onto a film set.

The working title was “In a Northwesterly Direction,” and the plot was just that simple. Introduce Cary Grant, put him in peril and set the chase in motion, from New York to Rapid City, South Dakota. We hardly notice when that linear path is interrupted and our anti-heroic hero has to backtrack from Chicago to rural Indiana, where the deadly crop-dusters roam.

Every element in this production is exquistive, from Ernest Lehman’s lighthearted, fizzy script to Bernard Hermann’s glorious “drunken fandango” of a score, to the immaculate production design that put Cray Grant in a single grey suit (save for the finale) and in peril indoors — on soundstages, rear projection car-chases, a mimicked train ride and a recreation of Mount Rushmore — or outdoors on a dusty crossroads in the middle of nowhere which produced the most iconic image of Hitchcock and Grant’s careers.

The VistaVision color pops off the screen 65 years later in a film whose seamless transitions between soundstages and locations are as much fun as the obvious “Hollywood trickery,” all in service of a beautiful-looking film that let us see Cary Grant run and climb and reel into sweaty, close-up panic.

Best of all, it’s deathly serious while never letting us, for one minute, truly fear for the hero’s safety. That’s because Grant has some of the best lines of his career in a movie that never wholly gives itself over to comedy.

When Eva Marie Saint, as Eve Kendall, comes on to Grant’s Roger O. Thornhill on a New York to Chicago train, the most modern words to come out of her mouth are “I’m a big girl, now.”

And Thornhill’s reply, in those oft-imitated Cary Grant cadences, is as naughty as he gets.

“Yaaaaas, and in all the right PLAY-sez.”

The story is a simple case of mistaken identity. Glib Madison Avenue Mad Man Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a mysterious agent named George Kaplan. Kaplan’s apparently been on the trail of this international menace named Van Damme. And fast-talking advertising man Roger (Grant) cannot talk himself out of the death sentence this mysterious Van Damme (the ever-urbane James Mason) hands down.

“Games, must we?” Van Damme coos when sizing-up this mysterious foe who has tracked him cross country, letting him know there’s no denying his fate.

It’s perfect that Van Damme has a homoerotic henchman played by future Oscar winner Martin Landau to carry out his dirty work, and hilarious that their execution of this threat is to be via alcohol. They pour bourbon down Roger’s throat and park him behind the wheel of a cute Mercedes convertible, which he somehow manages to drunkenly avoid driving off a cliff.

“Oh Roger, NOT Laura’s Mercedes?”

The cover-up ensures that nobody believes Thornhill’s story, and when he tries to unravel the mystery himself, he’s framed for murder, fleeing for his life, falling in with Eve Kendall, and making escapes from a train, a hospital, an art auction, a crop duster and Mount Rushmore.

“I don’t like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me.”

Grant and his gray suit cut a dashing figure, start to finish, the classic man in over his head and improvising his way out of one jam after another.

This is why movies about “ex-special forces” types, women and men “with particular skills,” from Liam and Denzel to Jason and whoever, are by design less interesting than an Everywoman or Everyman who faces peril and thinks outside the box of their limited life to save his or her skin.

“North by Northwest” has intrigues guided by a mysterious “Professor,” played by past Hitchcock collaborator Leo G. Carroll, and a comical arrest and traffic court trial involing future “Get Smart” co-star Edward Platt as Roger’s nonplussed lawyer and Jesse Royce Landis as his amusingly disbelieving mother.

Scene after scene here has been mimicked or echoed in scores of films since, most particularly the art auction where Roger must rude-talk his way out of impending murder by drawing attention among the monied swells bidding on fine art.

And then there’s the cropduster sequence — tense, slow-building, masterfully shot and cut as it edits together aerial footage and ground-eye-view shots of a real biplane chasing and dusting and shooting at our protagonist, with snippets of Grant on a soundstage cornfield, running and ducking for his very life.

You can have your shower scene in “Psycho” and your falling effects from “Vertigo.” This is Hitchcock’s true tour de force sequence.

The film’s success and timeless presence ensured that three members of the cast would go on to star in TV shows about espionage — Platt, Carroll (“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”) and Landau (“Mission: Impossible.”). Hitchock would transition to TV and make the classic “Psycho” TV budget cheap, and manage a few more bloated and off-his-game productions in the ’60s into the ’70s.

Grant was less than a handful of films from retirement. And Saint, of “On the Waterfront,” would never be in anything as remotely entertaining as this Peak Hitchcock classic, a thriller that set a high bar for every high-toned thriller/comedy to follow.

“North by Northwest” is quintessential Hitchcock, a single film that explains his reputation and that tells us why generations since still love the very idea of Cary Grant. And it’s a true bucket list classic, a gorgeous, perfectly-crafted thriller that entertains the first time you see it, and every time you watch it again.

Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, Martin Landau, Leo G. Carroll, Edward Platt and Jesse Royce Landis

Rating: approved, violence, innuendo

Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Ernest Lehman. A Universal release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:16

More urban, the shock of the assault on noisy cities, different family unit, different director, same jolts.

A tent pole picture for the summer of 2024.

Giving Diablo Cody’s “Lisa Frankenstein” a wide release was as good an idea as anybody had for this movie-going weekend.

No other titles — almost all January releases– are still drawing, the WGA and SAG strikes cut down on production for much of last year, Warners couldn’t be convinced to roll “Dune 2” out early (that might have been a smart play), and theaters need to stay in business until the summer season starts.

But the second meek weekend of Matthew Vaughn’s “Argylle” is marching over $6 million. That’s down 60% from its opening weekend. And the flop flingers at Focus Features could only manage $4 million and change for a “dated” and “edgy” Lisa F.” teen rom-com that isn’t much of anything.

Kathryn Newton heads a mostly unheralded cast (save for Carla Gugino). Nothing about that was ever going to draw.

“The Beekeeper” is still battling “Wonka” for leftovers, with each projected to pull in around $3.3, per Deadline.com.

And “Migration” is enjoying that animated family comedy field all to its itself for a bit longer, drawing $3 million in ticket sales on the weekend that much of America will be watching Taylor Swift watch her boyfriend battle the San Fran 49ers on TV.

This might be he worst Super Bowl weekend at the box office ever.