Movie Nation

The standard rule of thumb for films that appeal to a more mature audience is that it takes that crowd a few weeks to get around to catching up with a new movie aimed their way.

Thursday night “previews” have been a regular practice for some years now, but unless the title has “Downton” and “Abbey” in it, that tends to be something seasoned filmgoers forget or ignore.

“Social Media Buzz” on such titles is negligible. Once that AARP card arrives in the mail, online addiction/utility slacks off.

So a middling Thursday meant little to Sir Ken Branagh’s equisite and fun third turn at the detecting of Hercule Poirot, Belgian epicurean and mustachioed crime solver.

“A Haunting in Venice,” loosely adapted from a Christie story, limited to a few locations and one big set and thus far cheaper than “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile,” had a good Friday, adding to Thursday night for a $5-6 million+ “opening day,” and is headed to the top of the box office charts with a $14.5weekend, according to Deadline.com’s Friday and Sat. updates.

The franchise pre-dates Disney’s purchase of 20th Century (no longer Fox), and the smartest play, aside from continuing to give Mr. B. the reins, was keeping costs down. This one cost less than half of the other two (just $45 million, per best-guesses). It’ll end up in the black worldwide, no problem.

Limiting costs and effects (that digital Nile boat, etc) gave Branagh an excuse for directorial flourishes and getting the most out of a less well-known cast. And the clever Irishman brought in Tina Fey, just for fun, and there you go. It’s the best-reviewed Agatha Christie adaptation in ages.

This is shaping up as the second worst box office weekend of the year, but “Oppenheimer” just crossed the $900 million mark, worldwide. So there’s that.

The blasphemously bad “The Nun II” is still drawing over $14.7 million, its unreliable estimators are claiming, almost certainly from towns where the superior horror offering “Satanic Hispanics” isn’t playing.

The race for the top spot may change when the “actuals” come in Monday.

“Equalizer 3” will have cleared $73-75 million, all-in, by midnight Sunday. That one’s drawing Denzel fans of all ages, but also a somewhat older crowd. And it’s good, which helps. $7.2 million?

“My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3” is pretty exhausted as an idea, and it fell off 60% from its opening weekend, but is still in the top 5. It might not reach $30 million by the time it loses its screens, but $4.7 on a second weekend will do, if it manages to draw near that for a coupld more weekends.

“Barbie” will have cleared $625 million by midnight Sunday, and if it didn’t drive a stake through the heart of comic book movie mania, it sure as shooting told Warner Brothers its money is better spent elsewhere (look at what they’ve been doing with “Aquaman).

Reshoots, delays, less Amber Heard, maybe no Aquaman at all in James Gunn’s vision for DC comics movies down the road. In any event, here’s the sequel now slated for a few days just before Christmas.

This Rodrigo Moreno thriller opens in late October in New York and LA and stars Daniel Eliás and Esteban Bigliardi as an Argentinian bank employee who does the crime and confesses to do the time, and the pal he stashes the loot with.

Es una pelicula muy larga. Damned long. Three hours? Aye caramba. But it looks good, oh yes.

When streaming was still new, I had a notion that it might be the perfect place for movies and filmmakers who’d rarely fill-four-corners of a theater with their work, the creators of romances, dramas and thrillers on a smaller scale.

Who’d have figured that sci-fi, comic-book content and streaming “blockbusters” would take up as much bandwidth as they have?

“Flora and Son” is the latest from the musically-romantic Dubliner John Carney, who gave us the Oscar winning “Once,” then “Begin Again” and “Sing Street.” It’s an adorable small-scale romance with music, a film that’s perfect for a short theatrical run and a good reason to sign up for Apple TV+, where it will stream afterward.

It’s a tale set in Dublin and LA’s Topanga Canyon, a digital-age tale of connection through Facetime and music and a single-mom growing up at about the same time as her 14 year-old son. It’s adorable.

Eve Hewson of “Tesla,” “Bridge of Spies” and the “Papillon” remake has the title role, a too-sexy-for-her-own-good 30 year-old still hitting the clubs, drinking too much and bringing guys home. When they wake up/sober up and realize she has a 14 year-old son?

“You said you were ‘COOL’ with it” is all she can get out and the race to the door.

She and son Max (Orén Kinlan of “Sunlight”) fight like a doomed couple heading for divorce, cutting cursed insults that aren’t a sign of love, but deep dysfunction. Flora scrapes together enough money to house them and keep herself in smokes and wine through childcare and waitressing jobs.

The kid? He’s a burden, the abortion her friends couldn’t warn her into getting at 17. His acting-out includes a lot of petty theft and a “one more time” and you’re in juvenile detention lecture from the Garda (police youth liaison officer) who never calls Flora out for her partial blame in all this.

“Sometimes I’d like to come home and he just wasn’t there,” she tells her classmate (Marcella Plunkett) who got around to having a baby much later. That’s enough to make Aisling call her the same name her ex (Jack Reynor) uses.

“Psycho.”

She even forgets her own son’s birthday. Spying a guitar in a dumpster, she gets it repaired and gives it to him, but he’s not biting. Oh well. Maybe the ex-wife of a formerly-promising bass player can pick it up, “commit” to something for once in her life and learn to play well enough to write her own songs.

There are tons of tuturoials for aspiring musicians (and pretty much anything else) on Youtube these days. After rejecting the “posers” and not-very-good teachers, she latches onto Jeff. Sure, for $20 a week, she’ll give him a try.

Hewson brings an earthy, overripe vitality and Irish outspokenness to Flora. Joseph Gordon-Levitt becomes the living embodiment of the soulful, sensitive West Coast singer-songwriter.

He comes on all mellow, laid-back and catering to her needs, wondering “What do you hope to get out of this?” She’s evasive, maybe wanting to be taken seriously, possibly wanting to “win my ex back,” perhaps envisioning a better pool of men becoming available in a pursuit she’s always seen as “just sexy.” And she’s not having any LA airs from Jeff, thank you.

“Yer teachin’ guitar online, luv.”

And “you’re…Irish,” is the best he’s got for a comeback.

Carney’s great-gift as a filmmaker is bringing heart to musical moments of creation. Jeff sings a song he’s written as a country boot-shuffle, then again as an introspective ballad, and Flora, like the viewer, is taken aback and moved. To top that, he covers “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” which stuns Florda, who doesn’t recognize it as being an American Songbook standard by Hoagy Carmichael.

When he gives her homework, and it’s Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now,” she is touched by the on-the-nose expression of her mental state, and the simple profundity a great tune like that or “I Get Along Without You” shares, that “three and a half minute pause in time” is how Jeff puts.

The “lessons” scenes have Flora envisioning this romance novel/Hallmark Channel romantic ideal at the same kitchen table with her, in the same park where she Zooms one lesson, or on the rooftop of her grim Dublin flat. They’re magical and give one a new appreciation for a filmmaker who is able to create that, seemingly at will.

“Flora and Son” is about music’s impact on Flora and her aspiring rapper son, their discovering their first real connection, about him facing the music of his choices and her facing the arrested development that her narcissism betrays. .

And it’s all set in post-card pretty or inner-city grey Dublin, from Griffith Park to Temple Bar. If that isn’t what movie streaming was invented for, I don’t know what was.

Rating: R for profanity, sexual references and brief drug use

Cast: Eve Hewson, Orén Kinlan, Jack Reynor, Marcella Plunkett and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Carney. An Apple release, in theaters Sept. 22, then moving to Apple TV+.

Running time: 1:37

It takes a good 70 minutes for Danish filmmaker Bille August’s period piece “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction,” to get through its talk-talk-talk opening acts, on its feet and find its fun and its purpose. It’s a 94 minute film, so you see the problem in that.

While it’s grand that Netflix provides work for the esteemed director of “Pelle the Conqueror, “House of the Spirits” and “Night Train to Lisbon,” this adaptation of a Karen Blixen novel (“Our of Africa” was hers), sort of a Danish take on “Dangerous Liaisons,” doesn’t quite pay off. But it comes close.

It’s a gorgeously set and costumed early 19th century tale of royal succession and birth lines in an imaginary duchy, where a seductive painter finds himself commissioned not just for portraits, but to arrange palace intrigues so that a royal heir can be provided.

Cazotte, played by Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (“Land of Mine”) at his most dashing, is a rakish portrait painter to the great royals of Europe. He’s brazen enough to flirt with those sitting as his subjects. The Grand Duchess (Sidse Babett Knudsen of “Limbo”) flushes and blushes and reciprocates his attentions.

But she has a problem. Her boyish teen son and heir (Emil Aron Dorph) doesn’t seem interested in girls. Yet. Perhaps Cazotte can instruct him in the allure of l’amour and the ways of love?

Sure. And while he’s at it, he’ll arrange to put the lad in the company of an eligible royal teen of a nearby duchy (he will paint the family, the boy will pose as his assistant).

But that’s just the start of the “complications” of this affair of the heart, inheritance and a “wager” that the painter can seduce the lovely, aloof and vigorous “maiden in a long line of warriors,” Ehrengard (Alice Esther Leisner).

The performances have a mostly stately nature, rarely hinting at the playfulness we get the feeling the material called for. Every variation of “Dangeous Liaisons,” even one based on a Karen Blixen novel, should be fun.

August, using a script by his son, takes his sweet time setting all this up, as if he’s got “Out of Africa” as his subject matter and planned run time. The better model for him to lean on might have been Orson Welles’ poignant, unhurried and masterfully short film of Blixen’s “The Immortal Story.”

Because once this picture finally rises out of its torpor, it’s damned delightful. The third act has action, intrigues, comedy and a jaw-dropping surprise or two. More’s the pity since the opening acts are such a sexless, humorless drag.

Rating: TV-MA, some nudity, adult situations, mild violence

Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Alice Esther Leisner, Emil Aron Dorph, Sara-Marie Maltha and Jacob Lohmann.

Credits: Directed by Bille August, scripted by Anders Frithiof August, based on a novel by Karen Blixen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Payne and his “Sideways” star/muse take us to a boarding school over the winter holiday of 1970, a student whose parents don’t seem to have time for him, a teacher (Giamatti) no one likes and a cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) are stuck together and forced to get along and get real with each other.

The trailer to this Nov. 10 release mimics the style of ’70s movie trailers, graphics included. Cute.

Vampires, lest we forget, are very old. How old? Grandma’s Consumer Cellular flip-phone-using old.

Some of them could stand to do some situps. And given their druthers, when they “vant to drink your blood,” they’d prefer to serve it to themselves in shot glasses.

Those are just some of the insights in the horror comedy anthology “Satanic Hispanics,” which turned five horror directors — “Blair Witch” icon Eduardo Sánchez serves us the chapter titled “El Vampiro” — loose on Latin legends and lore, with a little Tex-Mex mayhem to tie it all together.

Like all such anthology packages, “v.h.s.” and its sequels being the most famous horror collection of such short takes, it’s uneven. But when it’s good, it’s chilling, or in the case of “El Vampiro” and “The Hammer of Zanzibar” (directed by Alejandro Brugués), a guaranteed spit-take or two.

Cops roll up on a crime scene in El Paso, a scene of Mexican-American slaughter with a lone survivor. Call him “The Traveler” (“Napoleon Dynamite’s” Efren Ramirez). He’s the fellow two Texas detectives (Sonya Eddy, Greg Grunberg) interrogate, and that’s the connecting thread here.

The Traveler tells the skeptical, impatient cops that they have to let him go, that there’s a demon on his tail and that they have maybe 90 minutes to free him and/or prepare for the worst.

“You have no idea what is coming.”

Every time the police think they have him pinned down as to his name, his actual age and what really happened, he launches into another anecdote that becomes a flashback in the film. The Traveler has seen horror and its many Latin American faces.

An OCD Rubik’s cube champ (Demián Salomón) has a brain wired in such a way that he can “see” beyond, or perhaps open a portal that allows the dead to poke back into the world of the living just by manically waving his cell-phone flashlight and chanting an incantation at the colored glass that separates the rooms in his grandmother’s house South of the Border.

A murderous politician finds himself holed-up on his rural estate, waiting for the revenge and judgement of a witch (Gabriela Ruíz) from the Nahual native people of his region.

A portly vampire’s (Hemky Maera) Halloween bacchanal in a border town is interrupted by his longtime love (Patricia Velasquez) ringing him up and chewing him out for not grasping the Gringo concept of “Daylight Savings Time,” and what that means to someone who needs to be in his coffin and out of the prematurely returning daylight.

And a battered dude (Jonah Ray) meets his documentary filmmaker ex (Danielle Chaves) in “the restaurant where we broke up,” to find a little closure that gets out of hand.

The connecting interview segments are probably the weakest links here, lacking urgency on the part of the time-pressed Traveler and police who should be getting more anxious themselves. Other pieces seem so stand-alone they barely “fit” in the story the Travelor is weaving.

The jolts may be few, as most chapters focus on the don’t-look-away gruesomeness of what they serve up. But almost all of the jokes land, because when you’re trying to buy “The Hammer of Zanzibar” “We don’t really have time for a back-story, man,” which is exactly what they and we get, time after time after time.

Rating: R, bloody gore, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Efren Ramirez, Hemy Madera, Patricia Velasquez, Gabriela Ruíz, Demián Salomón, Sonya Eddy, Greg Grunberg and Jonah Ray

Credits: Directed by Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Eduardo Sánchez, Gigi Saul Guerrero and Demián Rugna, scripted by Peter Barnstrom, Alejandro Mendez and Lino K. Villa. An Epic release.

Running time: 1:50

The time-honored “summer camp” kids comedy earns a most innocuous treatment with “Camp Hideout,” an almost faith-based take on a subject that “Meatballs,” “Ernest Goes to Camp,” an “Addams Family” movie and many others got to before it, almost always more amusingly.

One plus in this Sean Olson project was landing the great Christopher Lloyd as the cranky, armed hard-case camp director, not Lloyd’s first time riding herd on kids in the Great Outdoors. Remember “Camp Nowhere?” No?

Well, this one isn’t much less forgettable than that ’94 Disney outing. As in that one, Lloyd’s the one real “plus” in it.

We think it’s going to be about a social worker (Amanda Leighton) taking a problem orphaned teen Noah (Ethan Drew) to camp and out of trouble over the course of a summer. But Leighton’s Selena character falls almost completely into the background.

Noah, who gets on the camp bus right after escaping from the law and the guys (Josh Incola, Joshua Childs) he helped steal a Gameboy-like gadget from some tech company for, will be in the care of counselor Jake (“High School Musical” alumna Corbin Bleu).

Jake’s the movie’s connection to “faith based” as a genre, as Camp Deer Run is wholesome with a capital “W,” and Jake’s sing-alongs and meditative moments with what we take to be his Bible are meant to be an example to all, especially parentless and directionless Noah.

Camp manager Falco (Lloyd) has only to bellow “Stay OUTTA the woods at night! Stay outta the LAKE at night! And no gadgets. NO electronics!” for us to wonder what rules Noah will flout first.

Noah occasionally turns to the camera to give us a “Can you believe this place?” sneer and put-down. Hilarious.

Olson — “Max Winslow and the House of Secrets” and “F.R.E.D.I.” were his — and three credited screenwriters split screen time between camp activities like ziplines and paintball, camp flirting (Jenna Raine Simmons plays the girl who likes “bad boys”), camp bullying from the rich jock (Luca Alexander) and the hapless crooks anxious to get in and grab whatever Noah was supposed to hand over to them.

For the crooks to be foiled, Noah has to make friends and build teamwork, not easy for a guy with his temperament.

“Can you not be angry for like ONE MINUTE?”

There’s a chuckle or two from Lloyd, another couple from the crooks, and Noah’s dorky, over-eager, over-sharing “bladder control” issues roomie (Tyler Kowalski) lands one all by himself.

“Can you help me with the rubber sheets?”

There isn’t much here, and there’s absolutely nothing here we haven’t seen in every other summer camp comedy — on film or on TV — that preceded this one, including the fact that Christopher Lloyd’s on board.

And don’t expect Olson to wring laughs from mediocre material. His on-screen track record shows “harmless” is the main saving grace about his children’s films.

Rating: PG, some fisticuffs

Cast: Corbin Bleu, Ethan Drew, Amanda Leighton, Tyler Kowalski, Zion Wyatt, Jenna Raine Simmons, Luca Alexander, Josh Incola, Joshua Childs and Christopher Lloyd

Credits: Directed by Sean Olson, scripted by Kat Olson, C. Neil Davenport and Dave DeBorde. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time:

With many distributors scaling back promotion and previews for their movies, and refusing to pay their actors and writers, this appears to be the new movie reviewing paradigm.

Thursday afternoon I’m catching a Roadside Attractions release that wasn’t announced, pitched or near as I can tell, even advertised.

Let’s see what the (lack of) fuss is about. I hear Christopher Lloyd is in it.

Netflix has this star spangled adaptation of “several” Edgar Allan Poe stories, slated for eight episodes.

Love that Carla Gugino. Willa Fitzgerald, Bruce Greenwood, Annabeth Gish, Zach Gilford, T’Nai Miller, Henry Thomas, Mark Hamill, Rahul Kohli, Mary McDonnell and Kate Siegel are also in the cast.

Next month, I think?