Movie Nation

One hair-raising moment in the Korean thriller “The Ghost Station,” a tale of people having subway”accidents” that look like nothing of the sort, involves cell phone tech.

Someone points their cell camera down a tunnel. The focus framing outline pops up on the cell screen as the device zeroes in on what it senses the owner is trying to photograph. The phone sees what the eyes can’t as this frame jumps back and forth, quickly closing in on our wireless customer, who is, by this point, understandably freaked-out.

This brief and seriously derivative ghost story has a Korean director, cast and settings, and a Japanese screenwriter and references to a “grudge” and a “well.” J-horror fans will get those references.

Most of the creepy stuff is tucked into an explained-to-death-but-we’ve-already-figured-it-out third act. But it more or less holds one’s interest, and it manages a chill or two.

Kim Bor-ra play Na-young, a cub reporter with Daily Modu. She’s just screwed-up when we meet her, getting reamed-out for not knowing her selection for a “Summer ‘It’ Girl” photo feature is transgender, and apparently inadvertantly “outing” her.

A lawsuit is pending. But when your job is to generate clickbait, you can barely pause to consider that.

“We’re not a legitimate news outlet,” her editor (Kim Na-Yoon) lectures her. “We’re a cheap tabloid. Don’t forget who we are.”

That’s why she chooses to make something out of a tragic accident-or-suicide at a nearby subway station. She sees weird things going on — a woman jerking about as if yanked, clues about a “second victim” at the accident scene. The embalmer who showed up to clean up the mess confirms it. He saw a child underneath a stairwell next to the tracks. She showed him a number on a cardboard placard, and vanished.

Digging into the mystery, warned away from “ghost stories” by the detective who decided this was an open and shut case and harangued by her abusive, pageviews-crazed publisher (Kim Soo-jin), Na young will clickbait her way to some answers, endangering herself and others as she does followup story after followup story.

One interview subject turns out to have died an hour before their chat. And what’s up with those fingernail scratches those entrapped in this mystery seem to have?

The brevity of “The Ghost Station” means that there isn’t a lot of time for gravitas. But not a lot happens until that third act. The solution to the mystery shocks and appalls, but it is about as original as “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Still, it’s short, so it’s not an utter waste of time. Or not a waste of much time.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kim Bor-ra, Kim Jeahyun, Shin So-yul,
Kim Na-Yoon and Kim Soo-jin

Credits: Directed by Hiroshi Takahashi, scripted by Jeong Yong-ki. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:20

This looks indie and non traditional, as far as Westerns go.

We are… intrigued. Jan. 12.

Hand it to Warner Bros. for their approach to their favorite piece of Roald Dahl intellectual property.

They didn’t just remake “Charlie” or “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” They took a stab at giving us a back story about how “magician, inventor and chocolatier” Willy got his start.

They spared almost no expense in acquiring a big name cast, new music (by Neil Hannon and Jody Talbot), choreographing big new production numbers with more sprawling production design, giving us something like the most spectacular “Wonka” ever.

They cannily hired the wit behind “Paddington” to direct and co-write it and make the chocolate trains run on time.

With Hugh Grant, Keegan Michael Key, Rowan Atkinson, Oscar winners Olivia Colman and Sally Hawkins on board, the only worry might have been Timothée Chalamet in the title role. And he gives the chocolatier a light, upbeat touch. There’s none of writer-Roald’s sinister, punishing edge in Young Willy.

And Chalamet can sing, showing off a lilting, pleasant movie musical (not Broadway ready) voice, holding his own in some pretty impressive dance numbers, and selling his chocolate with an off-center twist.

“Hover chocolates?” They not only let you fly, they’re “salted with the bittersweet tears of a Russian clown.”

“Wonka” is a musical comedy that bowls you over with bigness — big stars, big sets, big numbers and big whimsy in service of a story that takes Willy from a ship’s cook gig on a fanciful fantasy film freighter to an unnamed 1930s EuroCity where he does battle with the singing, dancing, back-stabbing “chocolate cartel” (Paterson Joseph, Mathew Banyton and Matt Lucas).

“The greedy beat the needy” is their motto, and the movie’s cautionary message.

Willy’s got his tiny chocolate factory in a traveling trunk, unusually delicious and large beans that he stole from Oompa Loompa land — which a lone Loompa (Grant) is hellbent on stealing back, in bean or Wonka Chocolate form.

All he has to do is escape an enslaving laundry run by villains played by Colman and Tom Davis, where young Noodle (Calah Lane) and Abacus Crunch (“Downton’s” own Jim Carter) are among those working off their debt. He’s got to dodge the chocolate-craving/ever-fattening-up chief of police (Key) and his minions and outfox the cartel.

All if he wants to manifest the “destiny” his late mother (Hawkins) urged him into.

Every trailer gets more and more of the scale of this epic across. This one offers up more of the Chalamet/Zendaya love story (Watch your back, Tom Holland). And “More COWbell.”

Just saw Chalamet’s “Wonka,” and seriously — if he can duel to the death, ride giant worms, get the girl AND carry a tune — the skinny dude’s going to be at the front of the A-list from here on out.

March 1.

It was all supposed to be “utopian.”

High-rise apartment towers, surrounded by trees — and other apartment towers — would provide affordable housing, convenience, population density that makes mass transit and other service deliveries “efficient” and could create instant “community.”

It hasn’t exactly worked out that way in much of the world, but maybe South Korea would be different.

That’s the promise of “Concrete Utopia,“something set up and underlined in TV news coverage and documentary footage in the opening sequence of Uhm Tae-hwa’s Oscar submitted thriller.

That’s before the “event,” the “dystopian premise of the film is established.

It came with the roar of a giant beast, giving one the first thought that this would be another South Korean tale of disaster brought on by zombies or toxic-waste created river monsters. But this rumble is from a seismic wave, a building-toppling ripple caused by a catastrophic earthquake.

And this disaster apparently isn’t something localized. For “Concrete Utopia” and its “Lord of the Flies,” “Animal Farm” and “The Omega Man” parable to work, the survivors here — the residents of the last tower standing, Seoul’s Hwang Gung Apartments — government has to disappear. “International aid” is off the table.

With no power, communication, food or water supply, these “216 survivors” in “136 apartments” are on their own.

Confusion and trauma are quickly replaced with how “lucky” and “chosen” they were that they survived, and that they have shelter. It’s winter. But that means other survivors are coming to their doors, begging to get in. They aren’t wholly overrun, but things get crowded and testy pretty quickly.

Nurse Myung-hwa (Park Bo-yong) is instantly welcoming of the desperate mother and little boy who knock at their door. Civil servant/planner husbnd Min-sung (Park Seo-joon) is more wary. He can do the math. With no signs of outside help, not so much as a crackling voice of hope on their walkie talkies, simply surviving medium-to-long term is going to be unsustainable.

Tenants gather to debate what to do, how to organize this impromptu society. Fortysomething mom Geum-ae (Kim Sun-young) called the meeting and asks the right questions through a cacaphony of “They say women are stronger in a crisis,” “outsiders must go” and “We can’t just let them freeze” (in Korean, with English subtitles).

Planner Min-sung notes that somebody has to be in charge, a leader who can organize their survival until help comes or directing people how to restore some of their former life of safety, good health and comfort to them. The group abruptly skips past Geum-ae and Min-Sung as “candidates” and settle on the guy who frantically and bravely put out an apartment fire that could have doomed them all.

Yeong-tak (Lee Byung-hun) seems to have military experience, and the “thousand yard stare”of a man in shock at everything he’s been through on top of what everybody else has been through. And he’s a bit taken aback by this new “delegate” status conferred on him.

But when it’s decided to “throw out” all the “outsiders,” he and Geum-ae formulate an impromptu plan to carry it out, no matter how much Myung-hwa protests. Min-sung and pretty much everybody else just go along.

That’s just beginning of this “human empathy is the first thing to go” disaster parable, as personalities clash, socialism morphs into “You work, you eat” capitalism and impersonal ruthlessness points the picture down a very familiar path.

Hayao Miyazaki, the great Japanese animator whose name is synonymous with the anime art form, told the world he was retiring with the 2013 film “The Wind Rises.” That’s a fascinating, mostly historical World War II story about the idealistic designer of Japan’s iconic World War II fighter plane, labeled the “Zero” by the U.S. military.

While distinctly Japanese in subject matter, that somewhat jingoistic “farewell” seemed out of character for a filmmaker who won an Oscar for “Spirited Away,” someone best known for fables with magical characters (“My Neighbor Totoro,” “Ponyo,” “Howl’s Moving Castle”) playfully or symbolically juxtaposed against life in “modern” Japan.

So he’s made another “farewell” film much more in keeping with his style and his sort of storytelling.

“The Boy and the Heron” is about a child of World War II sent to live in the country with his father and his father’s new wife after the lad’s mother is killed in a hospital fire. He runs afoul of a pesky gray heron, who transforms into creature trying to lure him into “the other world” that’s apparently much easier to access in the countryside than in the bombed cities.

“Your presence is requested,” the toothy heron (voiced by Masaki Suda, in Japanese with English subtitles) croaks more than once.

When young Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki) sees his pregnant stepmother (Yoshino Kimura) wander into the forest, he fetches his homemade bamboo bow and arrow and pursues her into the underworld.

The lad, bullied in his new school to the point where he injures himself rather than go back, has nightmares about his mother dying in that fire that resulted from Allied bombing. The film is set shortly after the fall of the island of Saipan, which when the bombing began and is mentioned by his father (Takuya Kimura), an industrialist who has set up an airplane cowling factory in the remote countryside. The boy’s heron-guided plunge into an afterlife of magic, gigantic talking and fighting parakeets and the like in pursuit of his stepmother is a search to save his stepmother and perhaps his birth mother, or at least obtain closure with the latter.

You don’t have to be a teacher to be triggered by the tense and suspenseful drama “The Teacher’s Lounge,” Germany’s most worthy contender for a Best International Feature Oscar nomination.

A gripping story of idealism battered by bruising reality, high-handed authority and arrogant, misguided students who organize themselves to achieve maximum chaos, “Lounge” is a cautionary slice of education in an “Every parent’s an expert” era. Over-booked teachers are an easy target for parental ire in what passes for a political satire of the corrosive effects of ever-bending tolerance in the face of anarchy. And yet there’s still room to believe the final line of every teacher’s prayer about “reaching just one kid.”

Like schools themselves, Iker Çatak’s film, co-scripted by Johannes Duncker, is loaded with a lot of hopes, expectations and baggage. It is a riveting, intensely disquieting experience.

Leonie Benesch of TV’s “The Crown” stars as Carla Nowak, an idealistic young teacher who seems popular with the sixth graders in her new school. The kids even buy into her cutesy little “Guttentag” call-and-response clap exercise to start each (math) class.

But when we meet her, she’s squirming in her chair and blurting out words of protest. A couple of colleagues, including one who had his pocket picked, are leaning on the two student council representatives who sit in on faculty meetings with the principal (Ann-Kathrin Gummich). There are thefts happening in school, even in the teacher’s lounge. And one teacher in particular (Michael Klammer) is going full authoritarian on making these two name a suspect.

Ms. Nowak’s protests fail. The boys are separated from the girls in her class, and then a “voluntary” search of wallets has the adults accusing a Turkish boy of stealing. That falls apart under examination, and the boy’s parents are understandably outraged at the stigma this puts on their child.

Ms. Nowak may be vindicated, but at what cost? We start to count the ways she’s overly permissive and downright lax in keeping her students in line above and beyond simple “pay attention in class.” She’s intent on giving one and all the benefit of the doubt, allowing a cheater a second chance at taking a test, seeing students to slip out of P.E. to sneak a smoke, and then letting them talk her out of “calling your parents.”

But it’s when Ms. Nowak notices a colleague raiding the coffee fund piggy bank that she decides to take action on this injustice of accusing kids of stealing. She leaves her wallet in her jacket in the lounge, and leaves her laptop open and secretly “watching” that jacket.

Her “discovery” seems damning enough. But even after the accusation, she and we have doubts. The principal gets ahead of herself and in legal terms, they have to retreat to a CYA position. And that’s when parents, students and Nowak’s fellow teachers sense blood in the water.

“What happens in the teacher’s lounge stays in the teacher’s lounge” isn’t funny in this context, deflected in German with English subtitles. Nowak is embattled and at a loss for allies.

Some will try to devour her, or get her fired. Others will fume at how her lack of “solidarity” with the faculty has exposed them all. And she finds herself carrying guilt over the accusation, fretting over collateral damage (the accused thief’s student son, played by Leonard Stettnisch) and under figurative and literal assault from all sides.

It stands to reason that a nation of “tinkerers,” motoring enthusiasts and hobbyists would be the birthplace of classic, vintage or “veteran” car restoration and collecting.

A culture celebrated for its fix-it-yourself ingenuity and preserve-the-past mania would of course find value in combining all that in an “It’s the journey, and journeying in style, not the destination” hobby.

Whatever supremacy America might claim in this global avocation is trumped by Great Britain’s pride of place as the first to recognize and organize those who didn’t want the legendary motorcars of the past recycled out of existence or allowed to rust to dust.

The founding document — the Magna Carta in all this — is preserved in celluloid form, a winning 1953 British comedy whose title character is a 1904 Darracq Type O named “Genevieve.”

It’s a classic “road comedy” that’s almost more interested in the road and the cars on it than the men who insist on puttering ancient or “Veteran” cars, as the Brits call them, to life, and their long-suffering better halves.

Director Henry Cornelius (“Passport to Pimlico”) battled cantakerous and ancient automobiles and British weather in this almost-romp set against the famed London-to-Brighton Veteran Car Run. That’s an annual road rally for enthusiasts that mimics “The Emancipation Run,” a celebratory rally in 1896 designed to commemorate Britain’s acceptance of cars as conveyances allowed on roads without earlier encumbrances on their use.

The recreation rally has been held every year — barring World War II — since 1927, and brings “vintage” cars — labeled “Brass Era Cars” in America — from all over the world as participants. The catch? The car has to have been built before 1905.

It’s so colorfully famous that it used to be covered by ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” and many a classic car restoration program (“Wheeler Dealers,”“Chasing Classic Cars,” etc.) has had its hosts participate in this “bucket list” event for collectible car enthusiasts.

In the movie, “Genevieve,” with brass fittings and headlamps and primitive technology evident throughout, is a car that’s been in the McKim family for three generations. That’s what made her the pride and joy of barrister Alan McKim (John Gregson). Even his wife Wendy (Dinah Sheridan) suspects she takes a back seat to keeping this car and this “tradition” of driving it to Brighton alive.

She figures all this ancient auto stuff is “childish and a bore,” but the real trouble starts when Alan offers to let her out of the next rally so that she can attend a party she’s just been invited to.

“I simply don’t see what’s ‘wonderful’ about getting into a 50 year-old (then) car and taking two days to drive to Brighton and back.”

There’s back and forth about who won’t disappoint whom. But of course she’s on board, seeing as how he bought her a fancy new bonnet for the ride.

Alan’s richer ad-man pal, given the on-the-nose name “Ambrose Cleverhouse,” is played by Kenneth More. Kay Kendall plays Rosalind, “this year’s model,” the beauty he’s talked into riding in his 1904 Stryker in this year’s rally. The men are rivals, and on this particular rally, that turns into bad blood as this “not a race” soon becomes one — a two day (round trip) dash full of breakdowns, flats, pranks, detours, bitter disagreements and offers to “buy you a jolly good lunch” which lapse into “buy you a jolly good dinner” thanks to the endless mechanical problems.

Cleverhouse isn’t ever-so-clever in his Genevieve insults, so he always punctuates them with a prep school laugh — “Ha ha HA ha!”

The cars smoke, and the engine noise is such that we can tell when the drive and conversation are taking place on a towed trailer next to the camera operator.

Shots mix sunny days with the odd insert of a rain-drenched road, underscoring how tricky it was getting this Technicolor shoot in the can in British weather.

We drive by a lovely collection of houses and historic pubs on the old A23 and get a further taste of the past via the “modern” cars folded into this caravan of (mostly) early internal combustion.

The jokes are somewhat droll, and a bit sparse, if we’re honest. Having to spend the night in a “limited bath” and even-more-limited-bath-time hotel parked next to a thunderous clock tower is bound to enrage Wendy.

“No one’s ever complained before,” the upbeat proprietor bubbles.

“Are they Americans,” another guest asks?

The story’s a tad myopic, focusing on these two “petrolheads” and their increasingly testy rivalry. Sportsmanship may fall by the wayside. Might manners follow? Not necessarily, old boy.

The veteran character lead More (“The Admirable Crichton,” “The Longest Day”), playing something of a bounder here, is fun and in fine form. Kendall. best known for marrying Rex Harrison (and dying young), vamps up posh Rosalind, a woman with a musical past, little tolerance for hardship and unable to hold her liquor. Keen-eyed viewers will notice James Bond’s future Minister of Defence,” Geoffrey Keen, here playing a too-tolerant motorcycle cop.

Seventy years after its release, “Genevieve” can be appreciated for the Technicolor snapshot-in-time that it was and remains, even if the comedy is more jovial than genuinely funny at this point in film history. And we can still marvel over how “new” those “fifty year old” antiques — all of them well over 100 years old now — look and the fact that there are fanatics who can keep them running to this very day.

Rating: “approved,” with an “ass” here or there

Cast: John Gregson, Dinah Sheridan, Kay Kendall, Geoffrey Keen and Kenneth More

Credits: Directed by Henry Cornelius, scripted by William Rose. A J. Arthur Rank production originally released bu General Film Distributors, Gaumont and Universal, now on Youtube.

Running time: 1:26

Claudia Piñeiro’s novel “Elena Knows” comes to the screen as a convuluted and mournful affair, a moody murder mystery whose solution seems too obvious too soon to truly come off.

Gabriela Larralde’s script transforms the compact single-day search for answers about why Elena’s adult daughter was found hanging in the bell tower of the church school where she taught into something more drawn-out, immersing us in the sadness and the building of “the case,” but spoiling any sense of mystery.

When we meet her, Elena (Mercedes Morán) is enfeebled and bitter. Stooped, walking with her eyes always fixed on the ground in and around Buenos Aires, it takes a while for us to figure out what ails her.

She has a pill regimen and a fridge full of prepared meals, all of this maintained by her 40something daughter. And whatever’s going on with her now, “life itself” gives her no pleasure. Daughter Rita (Erica Rivas, quite good) is prone to tears in her presence.

Maybe a visit to the hair salon will cheer her up. A nice dye job. Sure, the conversation with the hairdresser has a disappointed edge, but let’s move past that.

But when nobody comes to pick Elena up at the end of the day, when Rita doesn’t answer her phone, we expect the worst. It comes in the form of a cop at her door late at night, a body to identify in the morgue, and questions.

Rita was mortally afraid of lightning. Would she go out in a storm? Why would she hang herself in the church, where her long-standing crush, Father Juan is priest? What’s up with her husband, the weepy Paolo? Why are her students — one in particular — so disrespectful at the funeral home?

The cops consider the “case closed.” But Elena knows there is more to this, and is determined to get an autopsy and get some answers — harassing people, collecting appointment books and the like, even paying to have a banner demanding answers hung across the street from the parochial school.

Director Anahí Berneri is stingy with the clues here. Elena’s malady isn’t mentioned until midway through the movie. Other wrinkles in the narrative, designed to make us doubt this or that conclusion, are underwhelming if plausible.

Because the flashbacks are the real story.

Morán (of “Norma” and “Neruda”) is a riveting presence, carrying the narrative along its path, creating an unlikable heroine of stern convictions and unbending principles. Elena is one of those women (We never see a husband or hear a word about Rita’s father.) to whom EVERYTHING is a “principle.”

Miranda de la Serna ably plays Young Rita in flashbacks — open-hearted, desperately wanting to have a cat, and shut down every time she brings in a stray. We see young Rita struggling against them, but slowly absorbing her mother’s values.

The problem with “Elena Knows” is how early on we “get” that. It’s not that we “know” as soon as Elena does. We know sooner, too soon for this mystery to remain mysterious.

Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Mercedes Morán, Erica Rivas, Mey Scápola and Miranda de la Serna

Credits: Directed by Anahí Berneri, scripted by Gabriela Larralde, based on a novel by Claudia Piñeiro. A Neflix release.

Running time: 1:39

This Christmas will host “The Color Purple” musical, George Clooney’s take on “The Boys in the Boat” and a pre “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” Willie Wonka origin story.

The trailers to “Wonka” have a lovely Dickensian winter sheen sheen and lots of recognizable elements from the Wonkaverse.

Will it be the holiday blockbuster? Should it be? Let’s find out.