Movie Nation

“A Tourist’s Guide to Love” is a lovely Vietnamese travelogue in search of a romantic comedy that would transform the trip into a movie.

It’s a Rachel Leigh Cook star vehicle so inane that even she seems more interested in showing us the sights than focusing on the “just broke up with her boyfriend” and “flirts with the Vietnamese tour guide” story.

Calling it “cute” is as strained as the efforts at humor. “Insipid” just sounds mean, but is closer to the mark.

It’s about that old Paul Bowles/”Sheltering Sky” difference between “a tourist and a traveler.”

“A tourist wants to escape life,” tour guide Sinh (Scott Ly) enthuses. “A traveler wants to experience it.”

The woman he’s explaining that to (Cook) is Amanda Riley, a “secret shopper” from her LA travel agency taking a guided Vietnamese tour with a tiny local company that her boss (Missi Pyle) might want to buy.

She and her boss overshare a bit, which is why Amanda thought her beau of five years (Ben Feldman) was about to propose, when really he just wanted to tell her he was moving to Ohio.

Now she’s in the Exotic East, scouting “the hottest tourist destination” on the planet, trying to decide if Saigon Silver Star Tours — which ignores Ho Chi Minh City’s real name — is worth buying to give their company an entrée to the market.

Sinh and his cousin/driver Anh (Tranh Truc) take have a dozen tourists from Ho Chi Minh City to Da Nang and elsewhere “off the beaten path” “to show visitors the best possible Vietnam.”

They do. It’s gorgeous, from the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations, lantern-lined streets and water candles to Champa Empire ruins.

But the movie makes little attempt to flesh out the other tourists, blandly presents even the “visit to my grandmother’s village” sequences, and is so blandly cast that Missi Pyle on the phone is the most entertaining person in it. And even she’s watered down for this outing.

Sinh, who grew up in the U.S., flirts by saying her full name repeatedly — “Is Amanda Riley being impulsive?” “Is Amanda Riley learning to relax?”

Is Amanda Riley as bored as I was watching this?

Travel rom-coms are an ancient genre (“If it’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium,” “My Life in Ruins”), and it’s laudable that they’re trying for something a little different here. But are they?

Top tip, if you find yourself so compelled, don’t forget Netflix has a playback speed adjustment on the lower right of the screen. At least the blase pauses between locations will pass by faster this way.

Rating: PG

Cast: Rachel Leigh Cook, Scott Ly, Thanh Truc, Ben Feldman, Nsut Le Thien and Missi Pyle.

Credits: Directed by Steven K. Tsuchida, scripted by Eirene Donohue. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

“Broadway” is a solidly suspenseful Greek film noir set among Athen pickpockets, men and a woman laying low by night, putting on “shows” to distract their marks during the day and slowly figuring out the trap this life is, one set for these “artful dodgers” by the Fagin in charge.

It’s not as clear about what transpires as it might be, and writer-director Christos Massalas has his heroine voice-over narrate the picture to death. But it’s not bad.

Nelly is a dancer and the daughter of a dancer. But her mother, she tells us, was a ballerina who married money and her husband was not Nelly’s dad. That explains, in her mind, where we see her dancing.

Nelly, played by Elsa Lekakou, needs a pole for her act.

Her family hired men to hunt her down and bring her home. But Nelly doesn’t worry. She has a habit of being “rescued” by strange men, she assures us in voice-over.

Markos “was an artist, or so he said,” and she let him think she believed him. But any mug tough enough to clobber a detective who tracked her down to the club isn’t a painter or sculptor. Markos is another kind of artist. She finds out the particulars when he takes her to his hide-in-plain-sight hideout.

There’s an abandoned live theater with a rooftop cinema complex called “Broadway,” filled with cockroaches and underworld rats like Markos (Stathis Apostolou), Rudolf (Rafael Papad) and Mohommed, aka “Mojito” (Salim Talbi). The guy they call “Locksmith”(Hristos Politis) lets them stay there.

Locksmith takes his cut whenever they go out picking pockets. “Thieves are like magicans,” Markos says (in Greek with English subtitles). “They work with ‘distractions.'”

And now that they have a trained exotic dancer with access to the old theater’s abandoned costumes, they have their “distraction.”

Things are just getting good when another tenant of Broadway, a badly-beaten man (Foivos Papadopoulos) hiding out from the Big Gangsters in town, gets well enough to become a liability. He has to maintain the illusion that he’s dead, and yet somehow be useful.

Nelly’s access to costumes and makeup gives her inspiration. The “corpse” they realize is called “Jonas” becomes “Barbara.” Nelly choreographs Barbara into the act and the crowds they can pickpocket grow larger.

But as the opening scene to “Broadway” showed us Nelly visiting Markos in prison, we know it can’t last. And the dancer dressing as a woman is too pretty for Nelly to not to take up with him when the dangerous Markos is away.

Writer-director Christos Massalas dreams up a fascinating milieu and fills it with just-colorful-enough characters. Rudolf and Mojito are a couple, Jonas’s sexuality seems a bit fluid and Nelly is a straight-up opportunist who is just waiting on that next dance and that next “rescue.”

The film’s lone light touch is a scene in which the cops are onto them, but Barbara’s instant acceptance by the Athens drag community — and its speed-dial network of allies — effects their escape, hilariously.

The deadly love triangle that’s set up is engrossing, but all these mysterious underworld figures who seem to be pulling a lot of the strings are merely mentioned and never seen. There’s a “How’d THAT happen?” explanation or two lacking in the film’s affecting finale.

But Massalas immerses us in this pole-dancing “Oliver Twist” tale and the cast goes all-in to show us a Greece beyond the migrant headlines and the tourist sites, one where you’d better watch your wallet, because not everyone can count on a stampede of drag queens to bail you out of a jam.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Elsa Lekakou, Stathis Apostolou, Foivos Papadopoulos, Rafael Papad and Salim Talbi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christos Massalas. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:37

Ken Loach is Britain’s great social justice filmmaker, a chronicler of labor struggles and Irish uprisings and working class folks just trying to survive every fresh assault on their way of life.

Films like “Kes” and “Land and Freedom” and “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” and “Jimmy’s Hall and “I, Daniel Blake” could be period pieces and might be history lessons or sociology lectures, but they were consistently compelling leftist cinema and great favorites at Canned

Now he’s showing what he says will be his final film at Cannes. “The Old Oak” is about a dying rural village’s age old pub facing closure and becoming a flashpoint for blowback against the arrival of Syrian refugees.

He’s 87, and he says considering the time it takes to get a film together and fear of “declining facilities” means it’s time to hang it up. He’s tried to retire a few times before, but social injustices always enraged him enough to come back. Not this time.

Amelia had a pretty good time on her 18th birthday. Popular and beautiful, with a whiff of lazy mean girl about her, she drank and danced and shunned those nerdy “drama kids” like everybody else.

But something happens on 40th birthday that causes her to revisit her 18th, over and over again.

Yes, “One More Time” is a Swedish “Groundhog Day,” watchable in English or in the Muppet Show chef’s mother tongue. But that moment when it admits as much as over-and-over-again Amelia (Hedda Stiernstedt) tries to get answers is just one way this charming variation-on-a-theme wins you over.

Amelia has gone through her version of Kubler-Ross’s “stages,” adding “confusion” to the list that includes “denial” and “anger” and combining “depression” and “acceptance” as she works through that 18th birthday, beginning to end, repeatedly.

Finally, she’s turned to her former friend, that “drama kid” (Miriam Ingrid) who grew up to be a famous singer-songwriter (Tove Edfelt). Fiona showed up at Amelia’s 18th birthday party — they share a birthday — uninvited. She showed up despite the fact that she’d already tried to play a song she wrote at the school talent show, and Amelia walked out, just like everybody else in their class.

And even though this kid’s been hurt by the end of their friendship, she hears Amelia’s “crazy” story out, and serves up the answer — “Groundhog Day.”

Amelia’s “never seen it.” But as Fiona’s Mom runs this 2002 town’s video store, Amelia arm-twists Fiona into fetching that DVD, passing up “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “Back to the Future” to get to it. That’s how Amelia figures out what we’ve spotted the moment she wakes up, 18, a second time.

Amelia’s got to learn to be “nicer” if she ever wants to break this “time loop.”

With “Groundhog Day” being one of my all time favorites, and probably one of yours, the only hope “One More Time” has of pulling us in is seeing what the filmmakers do with that too-similar-plot.

There’s a bit of “Before I Fall” fatalism in this version, as screenwriters Sofie and Tove Forsman hint at dire consequences, moonshine poisoning, shattered friendships and relationships that demand to be broken with every attempt Amelia makes to change her fate.

Even as she struggles through possible solutions to her trap and complains “Nothing I do matters” and turns reckless when nothing she tries works, we sense consequences to every action Amelia takes.

“You’ll regret this the rest of your life,” she warns her bestie (Elinor Silfversparre), who craves a hookup with a guy she crushes on. A drunken “tell all of you your future” speech at a later incarnation of that party climaxes with a heartfelt hug of someone the script doesn’t need to tell us will die in those intervening 20 years.

The third act has heart-tugging moments and a few twists that I didn’t see coming as I guessed “What possible directions can they take from here?” all the way through it.

“Groundhog Day” variations are always about life’s second chances, “fixing” something that’s gone wrong and digging the trapped character, in Punxsutawney or “Palm Springs,” out of the bitter rut their life has tumbled into. That’s a universal longing, which is why this plot keeps coming back, again and again, going back to “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

What if I hadn’t done this or that and life had turned out differently?

This isn’t the best “version” of this “do over” story ever. But it pushes a lot of the right buttons and is just different enough to be worth revisiting “Groundhog Day” “One More Time,” here in the company of cute young Swedes.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual references, binge-drinking teens

Cast: Hedda Stiernstedt, Elinor Silfversparre, Miriam Ingrid, Tove Edfelt, Maxwell Cunningham, David Tainton

Credits: Directed by Jonatan Zetzler, scripted by Sofie Forsman and Tove Forsman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

What else is there to say about “Say Anything,” the era-defining, hopelessly-romantic teen rom-dramedy that launched Cameron Crowe as a Grand Romantic Gesture filmmaker and John Cusack as a leading man?

Sitting through it the other night for perhaps the first time since it came out, certainly the first time in decades, I was bowled over by how smart, sweet and funny it still plays. The teen romances of that era, by and large, haven’t aged well, and not just because of the hair and the fashion sense.

I started my career as a critic during this “golden age” of teen rom-coms, and it was never as rosy as we tend to pretend to remember. “Say Anything…” (as it was originally titled) is aging better than any of its high school rom-com classmates. It’s the true classic of the era and of the genre.

I dial-hopped by a young Patrick Dempsey star vehicle from the era last night and was instantly bored and filled with near revulsion. Even the exceptions to the rule, the John Hughes films, have a cringey quality today, partly due to the affluence and attitudes and the bizarre version of suburban Chicago high school life that almost never showed a black face.

“Say Anything” was a Reagan-era, post-“Ferris Bueller” portrait that was just as monochromatic, but as others have pointed out, was more adult, kinder and gentler and just a bit more lived-in and real.

Like the rich, bullying brat Ferris, Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler is popular at school for no obvious reason. He’s not quite a loner, working class, not much of a dater. But he’s a kid who was out of the country for a bit and came back, a student slightly-older-than-average and thus a novelty.

I could never figure out why anybody would confuse Ferris Bueller with anyone you’d call “a righteous dude.” But Lloyd’s the guy everybody at a post-graduation pre-rave teen binge-drinking party surrenders their keys to. The party’s 20something host (Eric Stoltz) gives “key” duty to him because Lloyd’s responsible, compassionate. He’s not letting anybody drive home as drunk as his gonzo, blitzed jock classmate Mark (Jeremy Piven, of course).

Lloyd has few prospects in life but is utterly up front and blunt about what he sees his immediate future holding.

“What I really want to do with my life – what I want to do for a living – is I want to be with your daughter. I’m good at it.”

Maybe we don’t get the attraction, the “kick-boxing is the sport of the future” Lloyd pursuing and connecting with beautiful but insular and all-academics Diane (Ione Skye). But his posse of girlfriends, led by outspoken and intense Corey (Lili Taylor, just dazzling) and including Rebecca (Pamela Adlon, decades away from “Better Things”) do.

And Diane, noting Lloyd’s attentiveness, chivalry and genuine delight in introducing her to the classmates she spent four years not knowing, sees it too. She “gets it” at about the time the audience does, and long before Diane’s clingy, “stay focused” father (John Mahoney) hears that “I’m good at it” speech. Dad will never get it.

Think of all the high school parties depicted in rom-coms in the ’80s, and then watch Crowe raise the bar for all the teen comedies to follow. This party scene is brimming with life and fun, riotous but not out of control, engaging in all the subcultures it touches on. Everything before it imitated the gonzo “Animal House.” Everything after it was imitation Cameron Crowe. Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” would further codify how such fetes were filmed, after first being scripted and cast to perfection.

Cusack’s manic-patter in this picture was made for home video — “closed captioning.” He burns through the lines so fast that it’s no surprise that he grew up on Preston Sturges “screwball comedies,” where “faster, FASTER” was always funnier. Even when he’s heartbroken, even after he’s written a letter confessing his love and devotion and he’s sure he’s blown it, even when all he can do is leave a message on an answering machine he’s riffing run-on-sentences at top speed.

“Maybe I didn’t really know you maybe you were just a mirage maybe the world is full of food and sex and spectacle and we’re all just hurling towards an apocalypse, in which case it’s not your fault. I’ve been thinking about all these things and… you’re probably standing there monitoring. And one more thing – about the letter. Nuke it. Flame it. Destroy it. – It hurts me to know it’s out there. Later.”

Cusack was rarely this rat-a-tat-tat in his line-readings in the decades to follow, but we always knew it was there and it informed every character, every moment he let us see the wheels spinning, even if that spinning wasn’t spewing from his mouth.

Others were considered for Skye’s role as Diane, but the British-born “River’s Edge” actress brings a wholesome, smart but naive shading to this beauty-who-never-fit-in.

Crowe packed this Seattle production with Cusack cronies, most famously his unbilled sister Joan, who gives us working class reality in just a couple of scenes as his single-mom older sister. Lloyd’s emotional intelligence is on full display in how he plays the “fun uncle” to her little boy and still manages to understand her plight and her sensitivities.

Philip Baker Hall took another step on his road to no-nonsense immortality as the IRS agent who has to tell Diane just what her nursing-home-operator Dad was “guilty” of. Lois Chiles (also unbilled) plays Diane’s remarried mother, just a few years past her “Bond Babe” duties.

And then there’s the movie’s lone, loud false note. Bebe Neuwirth, already famous for “Cheers,” shows up at that post-graduation party as a too-sexy guidance counselor just “worried” about Lloyd, and anybody who ever went to high school can tick off the ways this is BS. She’s a wonderful actress, but that character should have never made the final cut. A little too “Bueller.”

The soundtrack, including that iconic Peter Gabriel moment on a boombox, was first-rate as you’d expect from the ex-“Rolling Stone” writer Crowe. And the milieu he set this in and the production design that realized it was as lived-in as you can get — from Lloyd’s beat-up late model Malibu to the crowded apartment he shares with his sister and her adoring, adorable moppet (Glen Harris).

But a lot of those elements “date” a movie. What makes “Say Anything” timeless isn’t the cast so much as it is the characters, and isn’t the story as much as the way it is told. The dialogue, crisp and (relatively) clean by modern, coarse and cliched standards, is its own “grand romantic gesture,” teen angst, teen curiosity and the teen dilemma incarnate.

We don’t know, at that age, what we’ll want for the rest of our lives. But we’re starting to get an idea of what we don’t want. And that’s what Crowe and Cusack & Co. hit right on the nailhead.

“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”

Rating: PG-13, teen sex, teen drinking.

Cast: John Cusack, Ione Skye, John Mahoney, Joan Cusack, Lili Taylor, Eric Stoltz, Jeremy Piven, Pamela Adlon, Bebe Neuwirth, Lois Chiles and Philip Baker Hall.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Cameron Crowe. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:40

The filmmaker behind that holiday splatter Santa favorite, “Rare Exports” is back, serving up a Finnish revenge Western set during the last year of World War II in “Sisu,” a tale of gold, Nazis and the guy who kills them for taking his diggings from him.

This Jalmari Helander film is, as Thomas Hobbes’ might have described life in Lapland during wartime, “nasty, brutish and short.” It’s also folkloric, flesh-tearing “fun, for those in on the “gorier the better” splatter film joke.

Finland remember was invaded by the Poland-carving-up Soviet Russians at the start of World War II, with the so-called “Winter War” becoming their Ukrainian invasion of that era — a debacle that only huge losses and sheer numbers could salvage. When the Germans invaded Soviet Russia, “the enemy of my enemy” became Finland’s friend, and thus ally.

“Sisu” is set in 1944, when that alliance has ended and the German “scorched earth” retreat from the northern reaches of Finland has taken over.

Aatami Korpi (“Rare Exports” veteran Jorma Tommila) has removed himself from all that, he thinks. He’s a silent, solitary gold prospector, living out his days panning and digging with only a dog and a horse for company.

Let the fleeing German bombers shriek overhead, he’s got his rifle, his pickaxe, his tent and hermit’s life.

But discovering the Mother Lode changes that. A retreating, depleted SS tank company led by its very own SS Obersturmführer (Aksel Hennie) crosses paths with him. And before we know it, it’s on like Kittilä Kong as the Nazis figure out they’re not dealing with a man, but a “legend,” a trained and experienced killer with “Sisu,” a killer with a dogged determination to persevere, prevail and “refuse to die.”

Helander cannily shot this film in English and tips his hand early by being sure to show Aatami Korpi’s “Lavvu” tent, a traditional teepee by any other name.

You cross Korpi, you face his Old West vengeance. You may have a couple dozen disciplined veterans of The Eastern Front and a tank under your command. Something tells us it’s not going to be enough.

“Sisu” is sort of a “1917” odyssey of crossing a vast, unforgiving battlefield, with an Old West ethos and splatter picture vibe. Finnish women hostages, seized as sex slaves by the monstrous Nazis, are here not so much as a goal to be saved, but as the brutalized eyewitnesses and prophetic seers (Mimosa Willamo) who let the villains know what they’re in for.

The Nazis have “effed around,” in modern parlance. Now, they’re about to find out.

The various obstacles and dispatchings of bad guys standing between this Finnish-stiltskin and his gold become more and more over-the-top as this tale unfolds. Our hero repeatedly, gruesomely survives the unsurvivable, not via supernatural means but by simple Bugs Bunny Physics. And the things he does with that pickaxe.

It’s all a bit much, but all in good, gory fun even if this genre mashup never quite transcends any genre it borrows from.

And Tommila, like Stellan Skarsgard’s anti-hero father of “In Order of Disappearance,” proves a colorful, heroic and brutally efficient and creative avenger, a furious Finn expert in filleting fascists.

Reviewed at its Florida Film Festival North American premiere.

Rating: As “R” as it gets, “for strong bloody violence, gore and language”

Cast: Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan and Mimosa Willamo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jalmari Helander. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

A fun, adoring crowd throwing a few sharp questions his way and a lot of that good old John Cusack charm made last night’s “An Evening with John Cusack” at The 32nd Florida Film Festival a real treat.

Like many in the audience, I hadn’t seen the Film That Made Him — “Say Anything” — in years and years. And that bad boy plays and plays hard. Still funny, still charming, the kind of smart teen rom-dramedy that Hollywood’s given up on and even Netflix has trouble replicating. His antic, “cool” and trenchcoated turn in that role set the tone for a career that’s had him turn up in the full gamut of screen “types” — romantic leads, creepy villains, soldiers, con artists, convicts, hitmen and born romantic music buffs.

J.C. had kind words about working with sister Joan, about the impacts Rob Reiner (“The Sure Thing”) and then Cameron Crowe’s (“Say Anything” was his first feature) had on his career. He recalled thinking the iconic “boombox” moment was “cheesy” and wouldn’t work.

“I was…wrong.”

I think he said Crowe had The Plasmatics playing out of the box when shooting the scene, but Peter Gabriel’s “Your Eyes” is what made the final cut…because the pulses on the VU meter of the boom box matched the earlier song.

He remembered arguing with producer James Brooks over his level of participation in the creation of the character and answered questions about his tastes in music (“The Replacements”) and his favorites among his films. “Grosse Pointe Blank” and the Brian Wilson biopic “Love & Mercy” topped that list.

Cusack remembered Wilson “showing up on set one day” at the “very record store” where he had his breakdown, and Cusack realizing that he had the character down when he noticed they were wearing “identical Hawaian shirts.”

He told his agents he’d fire them if “Being John Malkovich” ever got financing to be filmed and they didn’t get him in it, and Malkovich himself closed the deal with a call describing this movie as depicting him as “a total a–hole,” which J. Malk embraced, as did J. Cusack.

He tried to option the Jim Thompson novel “The Grifters” in his callow youth, and got lucky when Stephen Frears got hold of it and made the call that paired Cusack up with Anjelica Huston at her finest.

An observation — the men in the audience asked mostly questions about “Grosse Pointe” and music. The women? They all made sure to say their NAME first, gushy question or more serious one, it didn’t matter.

A couple of audience members were curious about his politics, something on ready display on Twitter, which has earned him a little extra notoriety over the years. I hadn’t known about the family connection to the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, whose Vietnam protests made them household names in the early ’70s.

Cusack has an interesting take on the “Hollywood that I knew” not existing anymore. Screenplays, which he writes and pitches, are put through “algorithms” to see if they’re worth Netflix or whoever’s trouble.

That doesn’t explain “Roma,” but I guess Scorsese’s “The Irishman” and other indulgent, big budget Netflix fare does tick off a lot of audience boxes. When you’re a leading man consigned to TV series support work and occasionally fun B and C movies that allow you to wear that trademark black baseball cap, they may be looking for other boxes to check.

I got him to talk about his Irish Western, “Never Grow Old,” which I enthused about when it was released. This being a savvy crowd of serious Cusiacs, a LOT of people there had seen that gem.

Cusack is doing a “Greatest Hits Tour” of evenings just like this. If you’re a fan, go online and find a stop near you. But remember, he’s the only one allowed in the theater in a black baseball cap.

Thanks to my friend and SERIOUS Cusack fan, studio publicist Linda George-Eure, for the photos. I’m the guy who left his black baseball cap in my black car.

A tale of tolerance and “kindness” in the face of fascism and hate, “in dark times.”

Ari Aster’s “Beau is Afraid” is an inscrutable thriller scripted and directed with the confidence of a filmmaker whose “Hereditary” and “Midsommer” upped the intellectual ante on modern horror, but edited with the audacity of a Next Big Thing who’s been reading his own glowing reviews.

It’s a cumbersome, ungainly journey through phobias and mommy issues — sprinting out of the gate in the first act, struggling to come to a conclusion in the fourth — a movie whose “Truman Show” ending has a whiff of “Defending Your Life,” with Patti Lupone in the Faye Dunaway/”Mommy Dearest” role.

That makes it a film everybody is going to be talking about, many will try to dissect and few will want to sit through a second time. It’s stress-inducing and patience-testing, an intimate story told in epic scale and at epic length.

But no, you don’t need to see it in IMAX, no matter what the A24 “event” hype.

The brilliant first act throws us into a paranoid’s vision of The Big City, a Heironymous Bosch hellscape straight out of Fox News depictions of New York, Chicago and D.C., depictions meant for rural folks who would never go there anyway.

Joaquin Phoenix is the title character, a quivering mass of insecurities, on medication and in therapy (Stephen McKinley Henderson is his quick-with-a-“script” shrink). And when we see the world the way Beau does, we get it.

He sprints past murderous, tattooed crazies to get to the store or his psychotherapy appointments, and dashes past a street market where assault rifles are sold and surgeons, still in their bloody scrubs, sip espressos and cops draw on any citizen fearful enough to seek their help.

Soul-sucking anxiety is the only sane response to this Kafkaesque nightmare, and that’s how Beau lives — secluded in his beseiged apartment building, looking for some way, any way, to get out.

Maybe that planned trip to visit his rich CEO mother will do the trick, his therapist hopes. But even the “realistic expectations” that his shrink wants him to embrace include a killer caveat about the woman who gave birth to and raised him.

“Do you ever wish that she was dead?”

To make that visit, Beau must contend with increasingly insane notes slid under his apartment door about the “noise” he’s making (he isn’t), notes that lead to the unseen threatener cranking up CONCERT level music that pounds Beau awake through one more miserable night.

He oversleeps. A loony confluence of events conspire to prevent that trip, but that’s nothing compared to the guilt trip his mother gives him on the phone before hanging up.

That missed visit drives the narrative, as something happens to Mom and Beau’s efforts to be there for her are thwarted by an accident, other violence, the reluctant-to-release-him religious couple who take him in (Amy Ryan and Nathan Lane) and other detours.

Flashbacks are how Beau shows us how he turned out like this, assorted childhood clashes with his single Mom (Zoe Lister-Jones), nightmares about things he might have witnessed back then and a cruise with her where he meets the first and only girl ever to take an interest in him. Elaine’s tween-aged “Wait for me” also circumscribed his life.

Beau’s odyssey to be by his mother’s side has him chased and shot at, tumble into a traveling theater troupe’s forest-idyll production of a play that seems to be about his life, has assorted testy calls with his mother’s lawyer (Richard Kind) and features fresh injuries, physical and psychological, which are the last things this 50ish sack of insecurities needs.

Phoenix is absolutely perfect in the part, and the casting — up and down the line — is deliciously on-the-nose. Ryan is nurturing until the moment calls for her to snap, Lane is at his most unctuous. Parker Posey plays childhood crush Elaine as a libidinous adult. Bill Hader pops up as a delivery man with bad news and Lupone is as imperious and delusionally martyred as you’d expect, playing the older version of Beau’s archetypal Jewish mother

But the forest idyll manages to be inventive (animation, and amateur theatrics) and a tiny bit revealing and stunningly boring at the same time. Aster gives few sequences much urgency, despite Phoenix breaking into panicked sprints here and there. The “recovery” with the still-grieving parents of a fallen soldier (Ryan and Lane) includes an over-the-top rebellious teen (Kylie Rogers) and one of their son’s deranged comrades, named Jeeves (Denis Ménochet).

The violence, an Aster trademark, shocks and repels in between interludes where we think Beau is getting help, getting answers and might even get better.

I’m guessing the average viewer can appreciate much of what’s going on and maybe even take some pleasure in figuring out what Aster is going for here. But “Beau is Afraid” has an indulgent, opaque air that combined with scenes that go on past their payoff makes it an unpleasant, almost assaultive experience in its violent moments, repetitive and dense in others.

Darren Aronofsky’s equally ambitious “Mother!” was an hour shorter, after all.

Performances aside, there just aren’t enough “Mommy Issues” here to justify the tedium of a movie that challenges you and wears you out but doesn’t deliver a payoff satisfying enough to make it worth this much of your time.

Rating: R for strong violent content, sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language.

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Zoe Lister-Jones, Richard Kind, Parker Posey and Patti Lupone.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:59

There are some genuine frights amid the gruesome, gory, eyes-averting horror of “Evil Dead Rise,” a reboot of/homage to the franchise that made Sam Raimi and his muse, Bruce Campbell, famous.

Writer-director Lee Cronin pays tribute to that franchise with a chainsaw here, a Campbell catch-phrase there — “Come GET some!”

But I found it a pitiless version of a story that was amusingly cheesy in its original incarnation. Throwing a lot more eye-gouges, impalings, shotgunning and skin-shredding at us seems like overkill designed to make us ignore how heartless and humorless this all is.

A grisly prologue set in a lakeside A-frame in the woods by a lake make us wonder if we’re headed into a variation of Raimi’s “cabin in the woods” narrative. But a few bodies there are but a tease for what came “one day earlier.”

That’s when rock tour guitar tech Beth (Lily Sullivan) peed on a stick and decided the result was a reason to catch up with her much-neglected LA sister Ellie (Alysa Sutherland) and her family.

That’s when an earthquake hits and opens up a hole in the basement of their condemned used-to-house-a-bank high-rise, exposing the old bank’s buried vault. It’s not cash that aspiring DJ-son Danny (Morgan Davies) uncovers. It’s old shellac records, and this creepy old book.

Do we remember our Latin? Or our Raimi?

That would be “Naturan Demento,” “The Book of the Dead,” its pages made “from human skin,” its binding from human bone. And as we all know, all it takes is a simple injury and a drop or two of blood for the book to open, its horrific images to be exposed and Danny’s activist sister Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) to be wholly creeped-out.

Playing the incantations captured on those 1923 discs is what lets all hell break loose.

If only Danny had guessed why a long-sealed bank vault was decorated with crucifixes. If only he’d taken heed of the seal on the crypt where he found the book. If only this story’s theme and morality were more complex than “curiousity killed the cat.”

The creepy, Flatiron-shaped building features flickering lights and soon, an elevator with a demonic mind all its own. Neighbors may be introduced and a family dynamic suggested — Ellie’s husband moved out, her youngest (Nell Fisher) traumatized by the hope that Daddy will come back.

But we know where this is going and who is but fodder for slaughter, even if we can’t suspect how merciless the director of “The Hole in the Ground” will be in taking us there. Tattoo’d punk rock Mommy is who the demon comes for first.

And there’s no talking with “her.”

“Mommy’s with the maggots now.”

Others can make the case that horror shouldn’t let the viewer off the hook, that relentlessness is one way to go to jolt, shock and revulse horror fans.

But “Evil Dead” in the title gives us the right to expect more than just gore.

There’s little that’s realistic outside of this “universe’s” established tropes — the book, the demonic possession, the fact that shotguns and knives and cudgels won’t stop it, but a good wooden door or “Fargo” farm implement will.

Still, the players are good at registering shock, even if their characters are slow to react to threats to loved ones. Perhaps the kids liked Daddy best.

Cronin gives the picture a period piece flavor, cell phones and digital mixing boards, with all the cars coming from the ’80s or early ’90s. Raimi’s famous ’73 Olds Delta 88 becomes a ’90s Buick Roadmaster wagon here.

The only things I found amusing are goofy, perhaps intentional mistakes — a veteran rock roadie calling the ancient recordings “vinyl,” and suggesting she can fix the DJ’s set-up to work after a power outage… by using her AC-powered soldering iron to rig up batteries that mysteriously manifest themselves.

By the time the picture goes “Army of Darkness,” it’s way too late and entirely too much blood has been spilled for any lighter touch to work.

I recognize the effects, the makeup, the murderous efficency and the bottom-line/it’s sometimes scary values of this visit to “The Evil Dead,” a film that was originally going straight to HBO Max. But the lack of fun marks this big screen abattoir squarely in “not my ‘Evil Dead'” and “not really my thing.”

Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, and some language

Cast: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher and Morgan Davies.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lee Cronin. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:36