Movie Nation

“The Modelizer” is a sex-comedy masquerading as a wish-fulfillment fantasy romance, sort of a “Crazy Rich Womanizing Asians,” and pretty much as insufferable as that sounds.

Veteran supporting player Byron Mann — “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” “Little Fires Everywhere,” “The Big Short” — scripted himself a star vehicle. He plays a smirking, narrates-to-the-camera heir to a Hong Kong real-estate empire who uses his wealth and access to “the most coveted commodity in Hong Kong” — living space — to bed every model who makes her way to the modeling capital of Asia.

We meet Shawn doggie-styling/multi-tasking one model while talking about his model girlfriend Jana
(Dominika Kachlik) and comparing notes with his best bud Bucky (Nichkhun) who is doing the same — in the same penthouse living room.

Frat-bro tacky? Why yes it is!

Perhaps Shawn’s biggest challenge is keeping Jana by reassuring her he’s his “Queen Bee” while continuing to piggishly pick-up models, who look for work and sugar daddies in the city with the highest per capita population of millionaires in the world.

But there’s also a big merger his mother (Julia Nickson) is badgering him about. Seems his womanizing is “bad optics” for their prospective Mainland business partner. He needs to give up the posse and the steady, find a nice Chinese woman and settle down.

And that could be derailed by an extravagant “gift” he sugar daddied to the wrong side-piece. Alina (Hana Hrzic) has a deed, demands and if need be, the services of her Polish thug brother.

That makes this the perfect time for Shawn’s easily-distracted-eye to turn towards sweet, innocent Brazilian Camilla (Rayssa Bratillieri), fresh off the plane, relying on Google translate and facing one indecent proposition after another just for showing up.

At least the little old rich man named Wellington (Kenneth Tsang) will take her to mass. Shawn? He’s closing stores she can try on a new wardrobe he offers to buy, or pitching a “We’ve just met” weekend get-away.

“I’ve NEVER not ‘closed’ a model with the Maldives!” he incredulously smirks to the camera.

The hook here is the transactional “game” that playboys and married rich men play with fashion models, with each party looking to get what they want out of the transaction. That nasty, cynical edge is abandoned in stages as Shawn, in little fits and starts, sort of sees the error in his ways.

Or is he persistent because he’s not used to “I’m not that kind of girl” saying “no?”

There’s barely enough to hold our interest in what is essentially a seriously outdated and sexist women-as-commodities rom-com.

The plot is clumsily built on “deadlines” that no one takes seriously enough to give this tale stakes or urgency.

The movie shoehorns in its own “Bro Rules,” but “wish-fulfillment fantasy” rules these days ordain that whatever people “learn,” they sacrifice nothing to acquire their hearts’ desires. A little bit of “growing,” but not much.

He still wants the youngest, prettiest model he sees. She still wants to parlay her beauty into wealth and comfort.

Still, Hawaiian-born director Keoni Waxman treats us to a veritable Hong Kong travelogue of sights and street scenes, a shiny utterly empty-headed romance with none of the grit of Hong Kong action and little of the charm of a normal romance, because almost everybody here is too obnoxious to relate to.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Byron Mann, Rayssa Bratillieri, Dominika Kachlik,
Hana Hrzic, Kenneth Tsang and Julia Nickson

Credits: Directed by Keoni Waxman and starring Byron Mann. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:35

A kid grows up in a sibling’s shadow in this adaptation of a novel by  David Chariandy.

Screens and streams VOD Aug. 4, and this Clement Virgo film looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

“Gold Brick” is a twisty French heist picture that leans on the “cute.”

It’s a “Get even with the rich” scheme that involves pilfering perfume from France’s Chartres-centered “Cosmetics Valley” distribution chain. It’s more of a “How to” heist picture than a caper comedy.

But this short, not-quite-brisk film’s real shortcoming is that writer-director Jérémie Rozan makes it all about the MO and the VO — “how they’re doing it,” and having his hero explain how, ad nauseum, start-to-finish, in voice-over narration.

We don’t get to figure things out from visuals, situations and dialogue. Noooo. It must be spoon-fed, explained endlessly, with the odd quip or aphorism to make the thief Daniel Sauveur (Raphaël Quenard) sound like a wit.

“Don’t forget, the worst rich person is the one who used to be poor,” he narrates (in French with subtitles, or dubbed). “Like they say in Japan, ‘Rain falls harder on a leaking roof.'”

That oer-explaining is a pity because one thing the script tries to get right is that thieves aren’t generally the smartest guys in the room.

Daniel grew up working class in Chartres, world famous for its cathedral. But even the family home’s view of that stone pile of magnificence is ruined by a billboard for Breuills & Fils (and son) trucking. In Chartres, “The Breuills always win.”

Daniel and his pal-named-for-the-truck-company Scania (Igor Gotesman) fight to not end up working for the Breuils, to no avail. They “own this town.” But once on the payroll, Daniel is the one who figures out all this trendy perfume they’re shipping comes in boxes. The company inventories the boxes, not the number of bottles in them.

A scam is born. But being lummoxes, they sell online, or to street stall vendors. They throw money around. Daniel is stupid enough to wear a Rolex to work, which his crooked foreman (Stéphan Wojtowicz) takes from him. They’re barely clever enough to stay one step up on that shakedown artist and the out-of-his-depth heir who runs this place (Antoine Guoy), much less the cops.

Daniel even blurts out details of his “start-up” to the out-of-his-league blonde (Agathe Rousselle) he hits on at the tony night club. Turns out, she’s new at Breuill’s, in HR. His scheme almost unravels before it really gets going.

The film tracks that pilfering as it progresses from stealing little and thinking small to stealing big and playing all the angles. And every step of the way, Daniel has to thief-splain every damned thing he does, including alternate versions of the way this all will play out.

It’s more engrossing than engaging, as one consequence of over-reliance on voice-over is that it distances the viewer from the protagonist. Even in films where it works — “Goodfellas” comes to mind — we are more observers than participants in what’s going on thanks to the remove having a character talk directly to the viewer adds to the narrative.

The path through the plot here is fascinating, but low-stakes all the way. We never fear for our “heroes,” or connect with them.

And voice-over becomes not just the writer-director’s crutch, but the actor’s. We get less out of Quenard’s performance than we should because his endless explanations leave little that needs to be gotten across by the acting. And when he’s a little less interesting to watch, so if everybody around him.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex

Cast: Raphaël Quenard, Igor Gotesman, Agathe Rousselle, Stéphan Wojtowicz, Youssef Hajdi and Antoine Guoy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jérémie Rozan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

I was about five minutes into re-watching “The Cincinnati Kid” when it struck me that I needed to read or re-read director Norman Jewison’s autobiography, or hunt down the recent biography of the Canadian director.

He’s not exactly an obscure filmmaker, with seven Oscar nominations and films like “Moonstruck” and “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming” in his extensive filmography.

But his fifth feature film, his first “serious” movie, has threads that turn up so often in his later work that one wonders, “What made him such a righteous dude?”

The Toronto native who made the groundbreaking “In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier’s Story” and the very impressive bio-pic “The Hurricane” was astutely in touch with America’s shifting attitudes on race. And he made sure his films were ahead of the curve in that regard.

Jewison, a child of the Great Depression, took over a 1930s gambling drama Sam Peckinpah was hellbent on making dark and noirish (he filmed a few scenes in black and white, and was fired) and gently folded “representation” and “inclusion” into it so subtly that one barely notices it today.

Steve McQueen, the emerging icon of Hollywood cool, is the title character, a transplanted-to-New Orleans poker player living by his instincts and wits and occasionally surviving with his fists. And who’s the first person we see him show an interest in impressing?

It’s a Black shoeshine boy who always wants him to stop and “try me.” They pitch coins, and Eric, “The Cincinnati Kid” wins. Always. He smiles, tells the lad “You’re not ready for me, yet,” and keeps his coin.

The film, reset from the St. Louis of the Richard Jessup novel to the more racially-tolerant New Orleans, points us towards The Big Game, a showdown between The Kid and the best player of the day, Lancey Howard (Edward G. Robinson). But this being The Big Easy, Jewison made sure to include jazz singer and actor Cab Calloway at the table. “Yeller” the character is named, mixed in with players named “Pig” and “Ladyfingers.” The mere fact he’s in there, playing cards as equals, gives us a taste of New Orleans and an idea of all the “erased” history movies set in such milieus that Hollywood had served up prior to this.

“The Cincinnati Kid” is an inferior run through the similar milieu and themes of “The Hustler,” an unamusing Depression Era card-game precursor to “The Sting.” The plot sets up a love triangle, a potential cheat, misplaced loyalties and what feels like a low-stakes contest. Win or lose, how will The Kid’s life change?

But its muted colors, quiet tone and some impressive performances lift this classic also-ran into something worth watching.

The Kid wants to prove something — to himself, his peers and to his girl Christian (Tuesday Weld), whom he wants to impress.

“Listen, Christian, after the game, I’ll be The Man. I’ll be the best there is. People will sit down at the table with you, just so they can say they played with The Man. And that’s what I’m gonna be, Christian.”

But McQueen’s too cool to let on that his character is “desperate” for this new status. There’s none of the alcoholic resentment of “Fast Eddie” “The Hustler” in him. McQueen gave performances worthy of Oscars. Most of the time, though, he seemed more determined to define his steely cool image and stick to it.

Karl Malden’s The Kid’s old friend, Shooter, a gambler reduced to “playing the percentages” and trying to keep a seriously mercenary floozy of a wife (Ann-Margret, terrific) interested.

Rip Torn plays the scion of local gentry, a would-be card sharp who isn’t in the same league with The Kid or the legendary Lancey Howard.

Jack Weston seems a tad on-the-nose, cast as the skilled but faintly delusional “Pig,” a guy sure to let you see him sweat. Joan Blondell impresses as the blowsy old broad Lady Fingers, with Calloway and veteran character players Jeff Corey and Theodore Marcuse, and Milton Seltzer playing a note-taking/math-computing “Doc” at the card table. Dub Taylor shows up as a dealer at a lower-rent game early in the film.

The McQueen/Edward G. Robinson dynamic is one place “The Cincinnati Kid” had the potential to best “The Hustler.” The dapper Lancey is more present in the picture, more insidious in the ways he brushes off the challenge of “The Kid,” and gets into his opponent’s head over his love-life troubles — Christian, awaiting a commitment, the married Mebla (Ann-Margret) throwing herself at the possible New King of Cards.

But Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats is a “presence” in “The Hustler,” a mostly off-camera myth, Fast Eddie’s Great White Whale. Robinson is too familiar as an actor and a character in the film to be Larger than Life. The movie needed less Edward G., more Edward G. mystique.

Even the Jessup novel was compared to “The Hustler” and found wanting.

Jewison still makes a perfectly entertaining movie out of a card game, a love triangle and a lot of competing agendas in play with every “fold,” “call” or “raise.” A game about “making the wrong move at the right time” becomes the right movie for Jewison, one that transformed a comedy guy into somebody who’d make dramas a lot better than this, often with a social subtext that couldn’t help but strike a nerve.

Rating: PG-13ish

Cast: Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann-Margret, Tuesday Weld, Cab Calloway, Rip Torn and Karl Malden.

Credits: Directed by Norman Jewison, scripted by Ring Lardner Jr. and Terry Southern, based on a novel by Richard Jessup. An MGM release on Amazon, Youtube and Movies!

Running time: 1:42

“Beauty and the Beast” may have been put in book form by a Frenchwoman in the 18th century. But as Disney and lyricist Howard Ashman reminded us, it’s a “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.” Researchers have found its plot elements and themes in stories from many cultures, some of which push its origins back some 4,000 years.

One of those “origin” lineages is Scandinavian. So California filmmaker Max Gold is on firm “Morphology of the Folk Tale” footing in setting “Belle,” his no-dancing-teapots version of the story, in a stark “Seventh Seal” (Icelandic) landscape.

It’s a violent variation of the story somewhat more in keeping with the grim darkness of the original tale, ignoring the “Disney” versions and the softening up the famous 90s’ TV adaptation gave it. But as recognizable as its themes and story beats are, as striking as the settings might be, “Belle” is a clumsy film, uncertain of its tone, unsatisfying in its performances and handling of those themes.

Andrea Snædal‘s Belle is a farm girl living with a widowed father (Gudmundur Thorvaldsson) who’d like nothing better than to marry her off to one of the local lumps. But she’s not having it.

Where they live, a legend has become more than local lore. Men poking around the cave where a rose of immortality is kept find themselves slaughtered and eaten by The Beast. The location of that magical rose seems well-known. But its origins, a “curse” rendered unto a man by a jilted witch-lover, are not.

That’s why that witch (Hana Vagnerová) is our narrator. She can set the story straight.

When Belle’s father grows deathly ill, she goes hunting for the rose. The cave where it is kept is guarded by a mute and blind young torch-bearer. Belle won’t be dissuaded. She meets the man who sometimes transforms into a beast (Ingi Hrafn Hilmarsson) and begs the rose off him. He seems nice enough, “kind” and all that.

With a little help from the conjure-woman, Papa is cured. But the “spell” that fixes him “has an ‘unless.'” It won’t last “unless” Belle goes to stay with the beast, and over Dad’s objections, she does.

His “curse” stares them both in the face, and in this version “I have to fall in love” is “the rule” that will break it. That’s a switch from the traditional point of the story, that the Beast has to be sweet enough for someone to fall for him.

The fetching, spirited Belle seems like a cute catch. But not so fast, there, fairytale fans!

The film, in English with bits of Icelandic dialogue and a folk song, reaches for a lighter touch as Belle tries to “test” ideas about the “rules,” the things that turn the rugged hermit into The Beast. Throwing rocks at his head doesn’t provoke him. Tying him up and pouring hot candle wax may have its kinky fans, but it does nothing to change man into Beast.

The film never quite finds its sweet spot. The violence mixed with flippant modern vernacular is never quite darkly funny, and the film leaves one puzzled about Belle’s agenda, or the Witch’s. The Beast’s, at least, we understand.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say Gold doesn’t “get” the meaning of the tale, whose best film version might still be the 1946 Jean Cocteau French classic. But at least the animated “Disney version” was moving.

This one just meanders about a striking landscape and struggles to strike a chord, or at other times, to simply make sense.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Andrea Snædal, Ingi Hrafn Hilmarsson, Gudmundur Thorvaldsson and Hana Vagnerová

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Gold. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:30

The first tune that grabs your attention in this horror film, directed by and starring Patrick Wilson, is a re-recorded Kevin Cronin cover of REO Speedwagon’s “Roll with the Changes.”

The second is a peculiar little flourish playing on the turntable of our nightmares, this ditty by ditty dynamo Tiny Tim.

And then there’s the one you have to stay through the closing credits to get to, the one that reminds us that Patrick Wilson’s a singing actor, when the need or the urge arises.

He’s “featured” on this, which plays under the credits.

Patrick Wilson has become something of the poster boy for “When Good Actors Do Horror.”

One thing you can be sure of, when Wilson does an “Annabelle,” “Insidious” or “Conjuring” movie, when something that can’t be happening starts happening, he’s going to give you an award-worthy interpretation of puzzlement, alarm and freaking the f-out.

Wilson co-stars in, steps behind the camera to direct and even sings in the closing credits song in his latest, “Insidious: The Red Door.” The movie’s a near triumph of murky tone and general spookiness. And the acting is sharp, up and down the line, another testament to actors turning director. They know what their players need.

The plot? It’s a muddle, especially if all these titles run together and the through-line of this “Poltergeist” derived saga of a family being sucked into “The Further” isn’t fresh in your memory.

Wilson doesn’t help matters in this regard by showing up in three horror franchises concurrently. They can’t help but get mixed up in the memory. “Insidious” is the one co-starring Rose Byrne. Vera Farmiga plays his better half in the “Conjuring” and “Annabelle” films about the “Amityville” investigators, the Warrens.

In “The Red Door,” the Lamberts have broken up. Josh (Wilson) has just lost his mother (Barbara Hershey, remembered in a photo), and that trauma may be triggering things in him that Renai (Byrne) had just as soon not have around.

A prologue tells us that after the last “Insidious” visitation from “The Further,” Josh and tween son Dalton were hypnotized and told to erase “the past year.”

Now Dalton (Ty Simpkins) is an aspiring artist headed off to college, and Josh is having recovered-memory flashbacks. Father and son aren’t communicating, which is a pity. Because if Josh remembers anything, it might be the “astral projection” that goes on when one dozes off under the right conditions.

Mom, who didn’t go under hypnosis, might have clearer answers, but she’s busy raising their other two kids and she’s not talking.

Josh is visited and haunted at his mother’s house. Nightmare-tormented Dalton has only his accidental college roomie Chris’s (Sinclair Daniel) Black Girl Magic, empathy and facility with Google Search to lean on.

The movie features the requisite jolts, few of which have much punch. But the first truly creepy thing in it is a lulu. Josh is texting in his parked SUV, unaware of the unfocused, grunge-attired figure behind his car which is barely discernable as human. Ish.

The film’s depiction of college life is an amusing mix of cliches — the frat “baby” party (wearing diapers, eating “diaper pudding” out of other diapers) — and a bracing college art class built around two bravura scenes with Hiam Abbass (“Blade Runner: 2049,” “The Visitor” and “Munich”). She plays the demanding professor whose “dredge up your darkest, innermost thoughts” is what triggers Dalton to start having nightmares and “astral projection” strolls and forces him to recover memories he was hypnotized out of at age 10.

Wilson doesn’t utterly lose the thread, but “The Red Door” tends to meander, over-decorating the monstrous “Entity” scenes, reaching for “explanations” that explain nothing other than “This franchise will go on” and serving up a little Tiny Tim to set the mood.

One sure way to gauge a horror film’s success is whether it shocks and shakes you, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. That never happened for me, here. For all the interesting performances and promising characters in this one, I think the actor/director and actor’s director lets us off the hook entirely too easily.

Well at least he gets to sing again, if only over the properly creepy rocker playing under the closing credits.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, terror, frightening images, strong language and suggestive references

Cast: Ty Simpkins, Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Sinclair Daniel, Hiam Abbass and Lin Shaye..

Credits: Directed by Patrick Wilson, scripted by Scott Teems, based on Leigh Whannell’s characters and story. A Sony/Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:47

The cognescenti burn a lot of electrons typing out odes to the adored, enduring superhero of science fiction, Philip K. Dick. But the ongoing appeal of a writer who arrived on the scene right after the author of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” had his moment is just as fascinating.

Michael Crichton was a to-the-manner-born Harvard educated doctor who decided medicine wasn’t for him, so he wrote “Jurassic Park” and wrote and directed “Westworld,” some of the most enduring franchises in cinematic science fiction.

“Andromeda Strain,” TV’s “ER,” “Runaway,” he was prolific, an Emmy winning writer and show-creator, a writer-director of films as disparate as the classic “original” caper tale, “The Great Train Robbery” and “Coma,” a paranoid thriller set in the mysterious world of Big Medicine, a subject ripe for conspiracy theorizing.

Critchton had his finger on the pulse of the culture and its connection to science for most of his life. Movies based on his books (“Looker,” about cosmetic surgery’s end game) and “Rising Sun” (about “The Japanese Century,” which lasted about 8 years) weren’t all hits.

But the man did his research and did a pretty good job of convincing us that dinosaurs could be brought back to life, that theme park animatronics could reach a dangerous level of sophistication and sentience and that a first encounter with alien “life” would probably be a virus.

“Coma” was based on a Robin Cook novel that was right in Crichton’s wheelhouse. A hospital and its corrupt leadership conspire to knock people into comas for organ harvesting to the highest bidder. Be honest. That sounds a LOT less far-fetched today than it did 45 years ago.

It’s a Geneviève Bujold star vehicle, allowing this acclaimed Canadian actress primacy in beating Sigourney Weaver (“Alien”) to the punch in playing a heroine fronting a major sci-fi thriller.

“Coma” is a movie made memorable by that one iconic image — naked coma victims, dangling from wires on life support, their lives “preserved” ostensibly until something could be done for them, or even to them when “society” changed its minds about them.

The medical profession? We’re just taking “care of the vegetables,” one cynically notes.

Dr. Susan Wheeler (Bujold) is a surgeon-in-training at Boston Memorial, where her doctor boyfriend (Michael Douglas) is in line to be head internist. When Susan’s friend (“Bond girl” Lois Chiles) comes in for an abortion, Dr. Wheeler is there to comfort her. Imagine her shock when this “routine” surgery goes awry and Nancy is left in a coma.

When Susan starts asking questions, the hospital’s usual CYA deflection reaches a whole new level. She’s constantly called into the office of the chief of medicine (Richard Widmark, a real villain’s villain) .

“I certainly don’t want to lose a good surgeon,” he growls, with a menacing smile.

Every place Susan goes, she gets either a run-around or vague, noncommittal answers. Even when she learns something, whoever she’s asking flips-out and squeals on her. A terrific scene has her question the cynical, kind of callous pathologists, one of whom is played by a very young Ed Harris.

“Suppose you wanted to put people into a coma,” she asks. “What would you do?”

And where do those patients end up after “our lousy luck” at Boston Memorial has rendered them unrevivable? The Jefferson Institute, where a real rival to Nurse Ratched (Elizabeth Ashley) presides.

“Coma” is about Susan’s empathetic curiosity and dogged determination to find out what’s going on, her lover’s blindness to what’s increasingly obvious to her, and how far people will go to keep the surgeon with the sexy accent from finding them out.

Critchton was a competent director whose greatest contributions here might have been recognizing the hook in Cook’s novel, the plausibility of it all, and in making sure he cast well and hired the right production designer (Albert Brenner, art director or production designer on “Bullitt, “Backdraft,” “2010”).

That image of dangling “vegetables” is just as haunting today as it ever was. Now, it’s iconic.

The film is enough of a watershed moment in cinema to deserve “classic” status, even if it’s a tad mild-mannered (PG rated) and convoluted.

Watching it now, we can see Critchton’s attention to medical detail, which found its fullest flower on TV in his series “ER.”

The suspense is well-handled, here and there, but the shocks and surprises are few. The minute we see that Susan drives an MGB convertible we know there’ll be a moment when it won’t start and she’ll be A) kicking it and B) put in peril.

One of the coma patients is a monobrowed smart aleck who would go on to hustle “reverse mortgages” — Tom Selleck.

Critchton’s best directing job remains the Brit film about two 19th century thieves — Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland — out to stage the first “Great Train Robbery.”

But every thriller that uses science and makes informed, somewhat plausible (NOT “Timeline”) fictional speculations about where science might take us owes something to Michael Critchton, the guy who started worrying about AI ahead of the curve, and who will deserve at least some of the credit when we bring a wooly mammoth, a passenger pigeon, a Tasmanian tiger or dodo bird back to life.

Rating: PG, violence

Cast: Geneviève Bujold, Michael Douglas, Rip Torn, Elizabeth Ashley, Hari Rhodes and Richard Widmark.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Critchton, based on the novel by Robin Cook. An MGM release now on Amazon, Youtube, Movies! etc.

Running time: 1:53

Based on Thursday night and Friday’s take, “Insidious: The Red Door” could dethrone “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” after just one week at the top of the box office sweepstakes.

Deadline.com sees the race as pretty close, with both pictures — one ballyhoo’d to death, the other smuggled into theaters right after July 4th, a horror franchise with a lot of fans. “Insidious the Third” is heading over $32 million.

“Indiana” fanboys, probably the same folks complaining about the “Dial of Destiny” being too “woke,” have been blaming the one woman exec/filmmaker involved with that aged underperformer and calling for LucasFilm’s Kathleen Kennedy to be fired. Is Disney thinking the same thing? It could earn $27 million this weekend. Not terrible, but not good enough

“Insidious,” nor previewed for critics, has the edge. I can’t recall seeing a trailer, TV ad or what have you for this one. Invisible, except to the genre fans. “Screen Gems.” I caught it this afternoon.

The second weekend of “Sound of Freedom” won’t be as reliant on pre-sales to boost its numbers. It is still heading towards an $18 million take, basically money made from the “pedophiles are running a pizza parlour” crowd, judging from the hate mail I got for my review.

There’s money in those gullible Q-Anons, and Angel Films has no problem taking it from them.

“Elemental” is heading towards another $8 million.

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” will pull in another $7-7.5 and is finally, slowly running out of gas.

The other wide release this weekend is the raunchy and rude “Joy Ride,” a Crazy Funny Asians comedy that’s been marketed for months and should have opened bigger than it is. It may make $6 million this weekend, maybe $5.5.

I’m not sure why this isn’t finding its audience. Perhaps years of China bashing have scared off both the wider audience and the Asian one.

The final “estimates” from Box Office Pro.

A Dark Fantasy for the Dog Days of Movie-Going’s summer, Aug. 4.

This looks twisted.