Movie Nation

Eve Mauro and Ashton Leigh are among those who join Alex and Jackson for this B-movie/actioner.

“Black Noise” opens Nov. 3.

Steven Soderbergh produced Eddie Alcazar’s dystopian assault on the senses. Check out the trailer. It’s a real pin-your-ears-back sales pitch, right?

Bella Thorne, Scott Baluka, Moises Arias, Stephen Dorff and snippets from earlier B & W sci-fi classics appear to make up this Utopia release.

Wowza.

The late Tom Sizemore’s waning days and only slightly-diminished talents were utterly wasted on “Impuratus,” an under-lit, under-edited and over-written period piece mystery just now coming before the public.

It’s a supernatural thriller about a 1920s detective summoned to hear a “confession” from an ancient, near-catatonic Civil War veteran, played by Jody Quigley.

What the film — whose title translates as a succint two-word review, “vile, infamous” — adds up to is a 35 minute dramatic short spread over 133 minutes of run time. It’s interminable, with scene after pointless scene and a novella’s worth of discardable, doesn’t-advance-the-plot-or-illuminate-characters dialogue.

Sizemore’s Allentown police detective gets the word that a witness to all this man’s weird history is dead, but only after he’s been informed of much she said and thought, ad nauseum, by the head shrink (Robert Miano) at a Pennsylvania insane asylum.

“Passed. Whattaya MEAN passed? As in dead? AS IN DEAD?”

That’s a lot of words to get across “Oh she’s dead, is she?”

“Well well well, that’s a fascinating surprising development, Doc.”

Well, if you say so, flat foot.

Writer-director Mike Yurinko burns through some 20 minutes of screen time just to get us to the point where our detective is summoned to that mental hospital — by the patient — only to be trapped there A) by a coming ice storm and B) by this endless back-story, some of it visited in Civil War flashbacks, much of it narrated from combat veteran Daniel Glassman’s jumbled, run-on “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typewritten confession.

Sizemore was perfectly credible as a detective, private or police, in most periods the movies depict such gumshoes.

“People say the damned things to avoid getting what’s coming to him,” he growls, and we buy in.

But he floundered here, a troubled actor and screen veteran who seems to realize what he’s saddled with here, and that no amount of improv or animation on his part can improve it.

Yurinko (“Entity” was his) made a dark, not-particularly spooky movie that is cryptic with no real mystery to hide, repetitive with no scene or situation worth repeating and based on a script that apparently he got no feedback on before starting production.

“What causes mental illness?” our pre-Freudian detective wants to know at one point. That’s what we call a non-starter.

And “Just get to the point” he says later, one instance where he really should have repeated himself — constantly. Not that one line, even repeated, would have made a difference in this dull exercise in demonic whaeverness.

Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Tom Sizemore, Robert Miano, Airen DeLaMater, Lew Temple,
Silvia Spross and Jody Quigley,

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mike Yurinko. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 2:14

Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Lily James, Maura Tierney and Holt McCallany are among the stars in this edgy Dec. 22 biopic of ’80s wrestling tyros, the Von Erich Brothers.

You know what we say? “If it’s A24 I’ll take a look.”

A feel good dramedy on our cinematic horizon starring one of Mexico’s most likeable stars.

“When Evil Lurks,” the Argentinian horror thriller titled “Cuando acecha la maldad” in Spanish, drops the viewer into a world where “evil” is recognized, accepted and somewhat understood.

Even if the locals in this corner of rural Argentina can’t figure out why they’re dealing with a demonic possession outbreak, as such things are mostly in “the city,” they know “rotten” when they see it, hear it and smell it. They even have “rules” for coping with it.

“Do not use electric lights” (in Spanish with English subtitles) as evil travels “in the shadows” of those. “Do not try to kill them with guns.” “Do not name” this which must not be spoken of,.

You can go to the cops, because in this corner of the world, even the police know what “a rotten” is and what its presence heralds. But they don’t know any more than you do about how to stop what’s happening.

Brothers Pedro and Jimi (Ezequiel Rodríguez and Demián Salomón) hear shots in the dark from their farm. Older and savvier Pedro even identifies the weapon, a pistol. But they don’t go and check it out in the dark. They’re not idiots.

The next day they do, and sure enough, there’s a body. Or half of one. It’s entrails are laid bare, and neither one of them reacts with revulsion, surprise or fear. But Pedro has a suspicion.

Alerting their neighbor (Luis Ziembrowski) to this and visiting a third neighbor only confirms that hunch. There’s a Jabba-bloated, puss-filled man suffering in bed as his hapless mother and sibling fret about what to do, and what not to do.

Telling the cops is standard operating procedure, but pointless. Dashing to Pedro’s ex-wife (Desirée Salgueiro) and new family to get them out of there is futile. A “rotten” has been discovered and not dealt with. The body count has already notched multiple corpses.

Writer-director Demián Rugna, of “Cursed Bastards” and one of the talents behind “Satanic Hispanics,” plops us into this world unprepared, and turns our vague unease into genuine shocks when the violence comes.

His technique is sometimes crude — jumpcuts, sped-up camera effects — because visualizing how someone might kill herself with an ax in a way that doesn’t look faked is a challenge. But it’s a largely effective piece of storytelling as the day after the first night drags onto into a hellish second night where the outbreak spreads, children are involved and an “expert” (Silvia Sabater) may or may not have the answers necessary for fighting this contagion, or even surviving the night.

Rodríguez, in a Hugh Jackman as Wolverine beard, is the driving soul of the piece, showing us a man overmatched, not quite panicking and yet rattled enough to forget the rules, ignore warnings and act on instincts that may let him down in this, the crisis above all crises.

Chilling images — children, gathered and alert at their desks in a pitch-black classroom because they’re either already possessed, or adhering to that “no electric light” dictum — are scattered, and the moments of mayhem are spread a bit thin.

But “When Evil Lurks” is still one of the most original horror films of recent memory and a pretty convincing argument to turn out the lights when you’re not using them, no matter how scary the dark is, especially out in the sticks.

Rating: unrated, graphic, grisly violence

Cast: Ezequiel Rodríguez, Luis Ziembrowski, Demián Salomón, Isabel Quinteros,
Desirée Salgueiro and Silvia Sabater

Credits: Scripted and directed by Demián Rugna. An IFC/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:39

The great ones are all raving egomaniacs. Their focus and commitment are next level intense, and that intensity is all focused on them. Their egos are generally unchecked, fame and glory are birthrights, their narcissism a badge of honor.

Being in the presence of the famed swimmer, sportscaster, #MeToo activist so early in the fight she could rename it #MeFirst, Diana Nyad has to be a little like listening to Pavarotti warming up backstage.

“Me me me me me me MEEEEEeee!”

That’s the obnoxious-to-the-point-of-adorable portrait of Nyad that Annette Bening gives us in “Nyad,” a grueling, amusing and eventually inspiring bio-pic about the greatest long distance swimmer of them all, and Nyad’s great white whale — her unshakeable determination to be the first to swim from Cuba to Florida through the treacherous Florida Strait.

“Nyad” blends TV news coverage of the marathon swimmer’s various epic swims and attempts at her longest — the Havana-Key West quest — with sometimes uplifting, sometimes grim childhood flashbacks and fun and fiesty scenes of the unbearable bore she (Bening) is at 60, raging about “mediocrity” and “laziness” and, it is implied, the lack of a spotlight shining on her.

“I don’t believe in imposed limitations,” she sermonizes to her long-suffering friend-not-lover and audience-of-one, Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). Don’t talk about her age. Don’t let her think she’s just another woman over 60, silenced by the culture and left “waiting to die.”

Spurred by a book of poetry she comes across by Mary Oliver, Nyad takes Oliver’s most famous line as a credo, a challenge, a call to (getting her swimmer’s) arms back in shape.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Bonnie, an ex-athlete herself , has to listen to this endless monologue of on-the-spectrum narcissism — again, great singers, actors and especially athletes are often like this — and when her closest friend decides to renew her greatest challenge thirty years after her “last swim” attempt to conquer it failed, Bonnie has to be there.

“Free Solo” co-directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi transition from documentaries to feature films with a sports bio-pic that checks off many of the genre boxe — the obstacles, moments of truth that will test our plucky and amusingly unbearable heroine, the tragedy that enters the picture, the full “thrill of victory, agony of defeat” experience that Nyad used to chronicle herself during her years with ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.”

The tests of her childhood include abuse, and implied abandonment issues.

Where the filmmakers score is in the casting. Bening, perhaps sensing an Oscar nomination in the role, lets us see her at Nyad at her insufferable worst, and Bening herself at her least glamous no makeup, swimsuited and fit enough but AARP-aged in every moment. Her form in the water is impressive enough for us to make the buy-in, her depiction of Nyad so fearlessly unlikable that you have to wonder if they’re on speaking terms.

Foster’s Bonnie is the audience’s surrogate, the one who endures Nyad’s endless versions of her “You’re named for a water nymph” speech from her adoptive (Greco-Egyptian) dad, who suffers through all the training and attempts Nyad would make in her 60s what she couldn’t manage in her late 20s.

We wait for Bonnie to protest, punch back or just demand that her closest friend dial back her “superiority complex” just a tad. Foster, her luminous screen presence undimmed, makes Bonnie the fabric softener to Bening/Nyad’s abrasive wet wool performance. Loved Bening. Foster is who makes “Nyad” bearable.

Ryhs Ifans comes on as the crusty Florida Keys “navigator,” “The King of the Gulf” who would chart a path and track the shifting currents of the Florida Strait, while others would figure out solutions to the sharks and killer jellyfish that awaited our intrepid swimmer as she tried to put in her 250,000 strokes, covering 103 or so miles, singing pop hits of her youth to herself to pace that voyage.

I kept thinking of that obnoxious Millenial put-down, “Okay, Boomer” during “Nyad,” because living in Florida and having sailed the Florida Strait, one remembers the many attempts, the needy-seeming media attention and maybe even feeling “Oh, give it up, sister” at all the self-aggrandizing hooplah.

And yet, she persisted.

Maybe it’s the ultimate “Boomer” picture. But if you can’t connect to her story or that megaphone Nyad kept raising to her lips as she raged, raged “against the dying of the light,” you will. Just give it time.

Rating: PG-13, peril, some nudity, profanity

Cast: Annette Bening, Jodie Foster and Rhys Ifans.

Credits: Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, scripted by Julia Cox, based on Diana Nyad’s (4) memoirs and other writings and public pronouncements. A Netflix (theatrical first) release.

Running time: 2:01

Annette’s Oscar overdue.

Theo Rossi, Kate Moennig and an old favorite, Graham Greene (as a doctor) are also in the cast of this bloody-minded Nov. 3. release.

Here, piggy piggy.

Andy Garcia is the Big Pharma mastermind pushing his sales force to Score Big.

David Yates of the final “Harry Potter Pictures” directs.

Yeah, it kind of looks like we’ve seen it before. But hey…

Oct. 27.