Movie Nation

“This Much We Know” is an old-school first person essay documentary and new style “performative” bit of navel gazing about suicide, how we understand it and why Las Vegas is the “suicide capital of North America.”

But filmmaker, interviewer and voice over narrator L. (Lily) Frances Henderson — the hospice documentary “Lessons for the Living” was hers — meanders around a couple of subjects, giving us a seemingly intimate and personal film that is never quite either, despite being equal parts early Ross McElwee (“Sherman’s March” and early Errol Morris (“The Unknown Known”).

Henderson recreates the last hours of a focused, martials arts-trained teen named Levi, who ended that day by riding to the top of the Vegas Stratosphere tower, climbing over protective barriers and leaping to his death.

Henderson uses Levi’s life and actions as a means of examining the Las Vegas suicide situation, glancing in passing at the city’s gambling industry as she makes her way to the years-long debate over the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository set up outside of the city.

Hearing from Yucca Mountain experts allows Henderson to weigh the issues of statistical probabilities, the mathematical truths, remote and otherwise, that determine the odds against accidents at the now-semi-active (it’s a political hot potato) facility, and compare that to the statistical certitude of a “suicide ruling” in a coroner’s cause of death declaration.

Yes, that’s a bit of a reach and the film never made that connection work for me.

“This Much We Know” is “inspired by” and based on John D’Agata’s non-fiction best seller, “About a Mountain,” which is about him moving to Las Vegas, digging into the Yucca Mountain waste repository issue, learning the city has the highest suicide rate in the country and apparently answering a suicide hotline phone and speaking with Levi, Henderson’s subject, hours before he took his own life, something Henderson alludes to (not mentioning D’Agata by name) in the film.

Soooo…D’Agata’s done the heavy thematic lifting and fact-finding and Henderson is just… parachuting in and riffing on his ideas? If so, she has a lot more trouble tying all this together in a coherent argument or documentary.

Long Yucca Mountain passages with one anchor interview about that aside, the meat of the movie is Henderson’s efforts to get at the big unknown in most suicides, “Why” someone did it. It’s an issue she tackles in classic journalistic fashion, getting to asking “Why” after she’s explained “Who, what, when, where and how?”

Her central argument, vaguely presented and under-narrated in Henderson’s quiet, intimate monotone (roughly one third the volume of anyone she interviews), is that there should be degrees of uncertainty about the coroner’s judgement that someone has taken her or his own life.

“Involuntary self-manslaughter,” she considers. “Accidental suicide.” The movie’s most pointed debate is with former Vegas coroner Ron Flud, who shuts down her “uncertainty,” “yes and no” “grey area” doubts, just not to her satisfaction.

What Henderson is getting at indirectly is the stigma still attached to suicide. She hears out a bullying, intemperate and off-the-record (we don’t learn his name) complaint call about doing a film about Levi, and we maybe we shake our heads at his brusque “move on/let it go/get over it” dismissal.

Henderson mentions a “friend” who took her life several times in the film, often as a means of passing on to someone she’s interviewing her connection to such tragedies and understanding of what someone who loses a loved one that way goes through. She evens shows us pictures of the blonde woman who shot herself and ponders what one unguarded photo might say about her state of mind.

But while she takes pains to identify Levi Walter Pressley in full, interviewing his still suffering parents (his mother consults a spiritualist), Henderson never names that friend, stigmatizing her death and treating her suicide with a delicacy not applied to her study of Levi and interviews with friends and family.

As to “Why,” at the end of the day and the end of the movie, she can’t know and we can’t know, despite her study of and many citations from French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s groundbreaking 1895 book “Suicide: A Study in Sociology.”

Maybe that book would have been easier to get an uncluttered, thematically-compact film out of than “About a Mountain” and vague notions of what risks and uncertainties we as a culture are willing to take as they relate to suicide and nuclear waste storage.

Whatever D’Agata managed Henderson just doesn’t pull off.

Rating: unrated

Cast: and Lily Frances Henderson, who also narrates.

Credits: Scripted and directed by L. Frances Henderson, inspired by “About a Mountain,” by John D.Agata. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:50

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.