Movie Nation

In a streaming universe where whole channels are devoted to music documentaries, it’s inevitable that almost any band you an think of, any band anybody cares about, is going to merit a film telling their story.

Many of these films are “Behind the Music” formulaic, with the odd variation on a theme. Anvil never made it, for instance.

But “The Sound of Scars,” which tells the story of Life of Agony (LOA), stands out by telling us the story of its lead singer’s transition, from tortured and sometimes even suicidal Keith Caputo, to Mina Caputo, who she is today.

This transition happened just as they were about to break big. And the film’s story arc follows takes us from replacing their singer, to bringing her back as Mina, with struggles and triumph and a refreshing level of acceptance from their fans if not the entire hardcore scene.

The members — Caputo, guitarist Joey Zampella (Joey Z), bassist Alan Robert and recent-replacement drummer Veronica Bellino — tell tales of enduring “Raging Bull” childhoods in Brooklyn (Caputo and Zampella are cousins), where alcohol, abuse and violence were a part of daily life.

The founding cousins got their starts as roadies for other Biohazrd, which played in their local metal club L’Amour, where stage-diving and “letting out (testosteroned teen) aggression on each other” with stage diving, crowd-surfing and brawls were very much a part of that cacophonous scene.

When they formed Life of Agony, with songwriter/bassist Alan Robert coming up with the name, they staked out a more melodic, possibly even radio-friendly corner of hardcore. They still had an audience member die during a show there, and spent time in court over that calamity.

Had Caputo not wrestled with “the genderlessness of life,” and eventually quit to come out and reconcile the fact that “I’d always been feminine,” even in their most rough-and-tumble days, that accidental yet inevitable consequence of violent mosh pits (“Pitting” as Joey puts it.) might have been the focus of this film. It’s all “Somebody tried to steal my sneakers” crowd-surfing fun until the ambulances show up.

Perhaps a future Pearl Jam doc will take on that.

Director Leigh Brooks, who also did a Terrorvision-on-tour doc, interviews band members, record company folks and at one point has Robert’s parents (a lot less “Raging Bull” than the Zampella/Caputos, apparently) unironically read Alan’s bleak lyrics from the back cover of one of their LPs for a “Steve Allen Show” era laugh. As music docs go, “Scars” is almost entirely reliant on one “hook” Otherwise, the range of interviews is too narrow, the entertainment value limited.

But Mina’s journey has been an interesting one and the band is very much a big deal, as Rolling Stone referred to their debut LP, “River Runs Red,” as one of the great metal albums. And the title of their latest, which also gives the name to this film, points to exactly what this troubled journey to triumph is — “The Sound of Scars.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, violence, discussions of drug abuse, suicide, adult subject matter

Cast: Mina Caputo, Joey Zampella, Alan Robert, Veronica Bellino

Credits: Directed by Leigh Brooks. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:30

A mushroom expert bonds with a runaway he meets in the woods collecting mushrooms in “The Issue with Elvis,” a milder-than-mild-mannered family drama set in wild, wonderful West Virginia.

The drama is low-key/low-stakes, the pace is leisurely and the dialogue bland to inane in this All-in-the-Wincott-Family production.

Canadian character actor Jeff Wincott leaves his martial arts behind, but not his Canadian dipthongs, as retired academic mycolist Dr. Mercer, a man living alone in the woods outside of Morgantown but still able to rattle off Latin names and long lists of medicinal/culinary properties of assorted fungi on sight.

He’s not seeing nearly as much of his most treasured varieties in his corner of the woods. It turns out there’s this kid (Wolfgang Wincott) out there harvesting as well. Mercer barters for some of the kid’s mushrooms, and soon they develop a little system — food for fungi.

But no kid should be living in the woods, or the edge of them, in late winter. Mercer’s curiosity is piqued when the boy finally starts talking. The kid gives his name as “Elvis,” named after “Costello,” not Presley, he insists. And as the good doctor takes an interest he takes him in.

In between discourses on mushrooms, how you only harvest “half” from the tree so that it’ll come back, about life, religion and “modern medicine,” Mercer finds time to make some calls as he tries to figure out what to be with a runaway with a made-up name.

And that’s about all there is to this inoffensive, innocuous and dramatically-flat film by Jeff Wincott’s wife and Wolfgang Wincott’s mother. It’s not particularly interesting, and the performances do nothing to animate it.

The shot selection isn’t the best, the one pointless instance of juggled hand-held footage feels amateurish and in low-light, the shortcomings of whatever gear they used to record “Elvis” stands out.

It’s also worth pointing out that Charlotte Wincott started out as an academic neuroscientist before taking up movie making. Their son will hopefully experience a similar search for a true calling, as acting doesn’t appear to be it. Leaving your kids’ stumbling line-readings (almost every line) and awkward, coached gestures in the finished film isn’t exactly a confidence booster.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Jeff Wincott, Wolfgang Wincott

Credits: Scripted and directed by Charlotte Wincott. A Random media release.

Running time: 1:28

Film and the culture it reflects tends towards gross oversimplifications. When a terrible crime happens, we want it explained. We want to know what “triggered” this person, what made them “finally snap.”

The truth is always muddier, more complicated. Sometimes, some disturbed people are repeatedly, almost constantly “triggered.” It’s just the last and worst incident forces us to put it all together, to “see the signs.”

For Nitram, it could be a lawnmower that won’t start, being told that he can’t/shouldn’t set off fireworks at a nearby school during recess or even a suggestion that he cut his unkempt hair that sets him off.

“Nitram” is a tense thriller about a mass shooting whose edge-of-your-seat suspense comes from the viewer’s dread and growing alarm at how “off,” angry and unmanageable its subject plainly is. What will set off the title character, played with dead-eyed, hair-trigger intensity by Caleb Landry Jones, next? And how bad will it be?

“Nitram” spelled backwards is “Martin,” the filmmakers’ way of giving themselves a little distance from the worst mass shooting in Australian history, and a bit of fictional latitude in depicting it. The murderer’s name is Martin Bryant.

Director Justin Kurzel (“Assassin’s Creed”) reteams with his “True History of the Kelly Gang” screenwriter Shaun Grant to show us a developmentally-disabled child with dangerous tendencies who grew up as a medicated, almost unmanageable son lacking empathy, impulse control or a rational way of approaching any problem that confronted him.

He’s in his mid 20s when he threatens to run away. Again. His weary mother (Judy Davis) is sanguine about that.

“He’ll be back. No one else can live with that boy but us.”

There’s conflict in the house about regulating the son’s behavior. His mother still makes attempts at reining him in. His dad (Anthony LaPaglia) gives him more leeway just to limit the meltdowns.

The kid’s mania for fireworks began in childhood where we see him interviewed on television with other kids in a burn ward.

“You think you’ll be playing with firecrackers again,” the reporter wants to know? After all, he’s had skin grafts and suffered great pain.

“Yes,” the tween tells her. No “lesson learned.” He’s hooked and he cannot fathom the idea of consequences.

The adult he grows up into gets disability payments from the state and regular healthcare visits to a troubled shrink. Nitram drifts from passion to passion. He was into scuba diving. Now he’s all set to become a surfer. But he can’t earn enough extra to pay for a board, as he can’t even get a driver’s license.

So the social-signals-missing adult with the long, stringy hair and scary intensity sets off, door to door, trying to earn money mowing lawns. The neighbors, many of whom scream at him about the fireworks thing, have to ask the frankly-creepy guy to remove his foot from their doorway to close it on him. His sales pitch is blunt to the point of rude.

Yet the flighty, Gilbert & Sullivan-addicted oddball down the road, Helen (Essie Davis) takes him on. She has a constantly-spinning record player and a house full of dogs, and tells him “You look like a movie star.” His behavior around her seems calm enough, until we see what he does when somebody else is driving, until the target-practice with his air rifle comes to her yard.

And no, his “I just get sad sometimes” isn’t a real explanation.

Kurzel and Grant blend in story points from the real shooting and its prologue with fictional speculation and cinematic simplification. There was a B & B that dad had his heart set on buying so that their son could help them run it, and both parents could be there to “keep an eye” on him and regulate his behavior.

Jones, of “Three Billboards” and “Get Out,” mastered the Aussie accent of this Tasmanian killer, and gives a performance that could make one and all mutter, “Well, we saw that coming.”

Just casting the two-time Oscar-nominee Davis as his mother renders the woman bitter, brittle and resigned to the life sentence giving birth to him gave her.

One fraught scene has the son try to deliver some sort of “tough love” to his father, who turns morose, refusing to get up and get dressed after the lifeline that purchasing Seascape B & B is yanked from him. It’s a brutal moment, and we wonder if this is something the kid’s parents tried on him early on, to no avail.

And there’s the soul-sucking amorality of a “no worries,” just-make-big-sale gun dealer, who lets the lack of a firearm license slide with an “Awright, nooo dramas” as he arms this Tasmanian sociopath to the teeth.

It was always going to be a chilling, emotionally deflating film. Kurzel and Grant double-down on that by not showing the murders and not focusing on the victims. And they finish it off with a coda that doesn’t let the way this slaughter impacted Australian society get sugar-coated, the way it’s often discussed in the US.

There are people among us who are “triggered” without even trying. And if the wrong politicians get a say, there’s no keeping machine guns out of the country or out of their trigger-happy hands.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Judy Davis, Anthony LaPaglia, Essie Davis.

Credits: Directed by Justin Kurzel, scripted by Shaun Grant. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:51

Downbeat, infuriating, reluctant to give up its mystery and illogical and anticlimactic by its finale, “Compartment No. 6” parks us in a Russian train for a long journey from Moscow to Murmansk with two intriguingly mismatched traveling companions.

It might be dismissed as one of those Cannes Award winners destined to be forgotten not long after the fizz on the champagne has bubbled out. But grasping for meaning in its unsettling, occasionally comic and always cryptic “relationship” can be an interesting thought exercise.

At a vague point in time after “Titanic” and before Putin, a just-jilted gay college student and a hatefully boorish and drunken Russian mine-worker get off on the wrong foot and yet must endure one another for days of infuriating, fraught and occasionally comical interactions as they rumble north in the late Russian winter.

Chainsmoking, aggressive and bottle-emptying Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) seems somewhere far down the obnoxious/dangerous spectrum. He’s bad enough that I wondered for a few minutes if he wasn’t going to wind up dead with the Finnish woman — who I never heard called “Laura” (Seidi Haarla) — as the suspect.

He is that insistently awful. She is that anxious to get out of there, change compartments, go down a class in accommodations or even exit the train.

But there is no going back to Moscow, where she’s been studying at the university, destined to be just another “houseguest” of the charming, sophisticated and sexy older academic Irina (Dinara Drukarova).

Loutish Ljoha staggers into the sitting/sleeping berth, fills a glass out of a fresh bottle, and instantly misreads the situation, starting in with scores of questions. Whatever she’s doing, documenting the trip to see “the petroglyphs” (ancient stone carvings) outside of the Arctic Ocean seaport of Murmansk by camcorder, collecting her thoughts or reading, he is a Russian male in his cups and will not be ignored.

“You look so serious all the time,” he says (in Russian with subtitles). “You’ll get old too soon...wrinkles.”

He’s hitting on her. She isn’t having it. And he won’t stop. Her Russian isn’t entirely fluent, but when she finally lets him engage, she gives rude, obscene mistranslations for his inane “How do you say?” queries about Finnish.

North American viewers might be puzzled that she’d engage with him at all. But director and co-writer Juho Kuosmanen, adapting a novel by his fellow Finn Rosa Liksom, forces us into her shoes — a gay foreign woman trapped in this situation, with no lifeline from the rude Russian porter, rude waiters in the dining car or instantly-moved-on lover back in Moscow.

“You think I’m a bad guy?”

“I only know what I see.”

It’s probably a mistake to read too much into the geopolitical metaphor that seems all the more obvious since Russia invaded Ukraine, which happened a year after “Compartment No. 6” was the toast of a pandemic-depleted Cannes, almost two years after it was made.

But Russia has always been Russia, even with that ’90s interlude when the world hoped it might outgrow its belligerent, vodka-soaked adolescence. And Finland’s relationship with the Bear next door has always been perilous.

Even that, coupled with a scorned woman’s softening to the abrasive “any port in a storm” jerk she’s been thrown together with, is a hard sell. I never bought that, gritted my teeth at every fresh rapprochement and took on a little extra concern for this young woman giving anything like encouragement to the bully she’s clearly paired up with.

As others are stuffed into the compartment for this or that leg of the journey, does he really seem less toxic by comparison? Even the incessant guitar-playing of a clingy, instantly-over-familiar Finnish tourist feels like a welcome respite.

Still, the stark, grey ugliness of just-post-Soviet Russia is immersive, and the grace notes — friendly mechanics offering a bottle, a slowly-softening porter, a near heroic effort to help Laura complete her quest (treated as an anticlimax) — give us something to cling to in “Compartment No. 6.”

No, Cannes didn’t discover the “new Aki Kaurismäki” (“Leningrad Cowboys Go America”) with this film. But Kuosmanen hopefully has an entire career ahead of him to make this Cannes-honored fluke a mere stepping stone to acclaim he might eventually deserve.

Rating: R for language and some sexual references

Cast: Seidi Haarla, Yuriy Borisov

Credits: Directed by Juho Kuosmanen, scripted by Andris Feldmanis and Juho Kuosmanen, loosely based on a novel by Rosa Liksom. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:47

Of all the projects Netflix has given great directors the money to film — many of them Oscar-nominated, some of them even bringing master filmmakers like Jane Campion back to the mainstream — tossing money to Richard Linklater got them the most adorable results.

Linklater, an indie icon since “Slacker,” a writer-director lionized for “Boyhood,” took Netflix money and made a rotoscoped animated film, this one a classic of American late ’60s nostalgia.

“Apollo 10 1/2” is ostensibly a space race comedy about a kid plucked from a Houston elementary school after NASA’s first moon lander is accidentally underbuilt and only has room for a child. But it turns out to be Linklater’s thoroughly-detailed survey of a childhood spent growing up at the tail end of the “space race,” when the future seemed without boundaries, America embraced the new and all that mattered was “beating the damned Russians” to the moon.

So while a couple of “Men in Black” (Zachary Levi and Glen Powell) drop by Ed White Elementary (named for an astronaut) and recruit young Stan (Milo Coy) for their “super secret” mission, telling him “Stan, you’re our only hope,” the adult Stan’s memories of that are almost crowded out by everything else that was grabbing his attention in that summer of ’69.

Jack Black reunites with his “School of Rock” director to voice-over narrate that sentimental journey, describing everything from what was on TV back then and what “Astroworld,” the amusement park next to the world’s first domed stadium, the Houston Astrodome, was like, to the now-banned corporal punishment that faced school kids, neighborhood misbehavior and even Little League players who dared to make an error.

If you grew up in that era — Linklater and I are contemporaries — you will be bowled-over by the depth of details, the toy rocket mania and every other dangerous thing under-supervised kids and their didn’t-know-any-better parents did or allowed rather than let kids stay indoors and watch TV or play video games.

If you’re too young to remember any of this, you might be gobsmacked at all the strife, struggle, shock of the new and dizzying hope for the future that went on while “Sugar Sugar” was playing on the radio.

Unrestrained freeway rides in the bed of a pickup truck, “roman candle” fights and inattentive child care all seemed to come home to roost on the evening news, where Vietnam casualty counts began as grim and found their way into “routine” — normalized for a distracted, mass-consuming public.

“We were expendable,” adult Stan (Black) drolly notes. Indeed they/we were. After previous summers’ riots and assassinations, “the last ‘duck-and-cover'” generation would expect no less.

“Twilight Zone” to Jell-O molds, “2001: A Space Odyssey” to single-breadwinner families able to enjoy the good life on a single salary, it’s all a bit shocking if all-too-warmly remembered.

Rotoscoping, which involves filming actors and then coloring their performances to turn the footage into animation, tends to render its subject matter timeless, as Linklater did with “Waking Life” and Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman did with their animated/painted last days of Van Gogh classic, “Loving Vincent.”

With almost the entire film consisting of voice-over narrated memories, montages of events and vignettes as backdrop, “Apollo 10 1/2” might have been utterly forgettable without the rotoscoped adding of computer-painted rose-colored glasses.

But in this form, it becomes something timeless, not autobiography (Linklater’s parents divorced when he was 7), but a sweet and somewhat innocent memory play animated in brighter-than-real-life color, a summary of how things were in an America that accomplished great things even as its institutions strained at revolutionary/evolutionary change that continues to this day.

Rating: Injury Images|Some Suggestive Material|Smoking)

Cast: Narrated by Jack Black, with Zachary Levi, Lee Eddy, Milo Coy, Bill Wise, Josh Wiggins

Credits: Scripted and directed by Richard Linklater. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

This story of the Great Brit who boxed her way to glory — at the 2012 London games, no less — opens April 5.

A critic-friend I’ve sat on several film festival panels with over the years once explained to a questioner from the audience the difference between critics and filmgoers.

Most movie fans only go to films that interest them, genres, franchises, etc. that they have an investment in. If video game, comic book, horror or manga adaptations are your thing, you’re predisposed to like what you decide to go see.

Critics, on the other hand, “see everything,” he said.

It’s in that spirit that I approach a film like “Jujutsu Kaisen 0.,” a Japanese anime blockbuster that opened to very good business in North America last weekend. One wants to see what all the fuss is about, and see if all the Rotten Tomatoes reviews were merely fanboy endorsements, as even the ones that seem of mixed feelings or negative appear to be labeled “fresh.”

Fans, some of them critics, were presold on it. But is it for anybody else?

While I like some anime, I’ve seen enough of it to form an opinion of what has merit and what is pandering piffle, with “story” and “artistic ambition” being the big difference between winners and losers. And as a lover of Japanese cinema, I thought I’d sit in with the faithful to catch a subtitled (not dubbed) version of “Jujutsu.”

TV anime veteran Sunghoo Park’s “Jujutsu Kaisen O.” has a whiff of “Into the Spiderverse” about it. It’s literally like a manga come to animated life. Park uses manga-style intertitles and interstitials to introduce characters, treats us to manga-mimicking extreme action, extreme violence and exaggerated facial expressions in extreme close-up.

The animation, while still anime-jerky (under-animated) is CGI-assisted and more striking and luridly colored, “darker” than the water colorish hand-painted pastels of the classics of Hiyao Miyazaki and others. It’s a bit eye-popping.

But the story isn’t all that. It’s about a shy, bullied teen — Yuta Okkotsu — who is haunted by and protected by a curse, the vengeful spirit of a little girl he professed lifelong devotion to as a child. She was run over by a car and lives on as Rita, the curse that avenges him on others who treat him badly. In an opening scene, we see the pool of blood and the gruesome closet stuffed with mangled bodies, the aftermath of Yuta’s last “incident” at his last high school.

In the spirit of “No Child Left Behind,” Yuta isn’t executed, but summoned to a special school for special people like him. His enthusiastic teacher, Satoru Gojo, dons a blindfold each day before addressing the class. And with standoffish, gifted, curse-mastering/curse-battling classmates Maki Zenin, Toge Inumaki, and Panda, Yuta will be trained to control, fight and dispense with curses of all types, of course leading up to facing his biggest demon, the enormous, powerful and still-jealous-after-death Rita.

What an outsider sees is a sort of “Wizarding World” setting, Jujutsu High, with rules (“Only curses can affect other curses.”), students with magical powers and creatures/curses that range in appearance from “Ghost Busters” cuddly apparitions to “Alien” inspired monsters.

The students instruct each other as their sensei, aka “the dumb blindfolded guy,” “looks” on and provides guidance.

Yuta’s “normal” teen concerns, that “I want to be needed by someone,” are hindered by the burden of his childhood, a curse bound by a ring that Rita once gave him, because as his teacher intones, “There is no curse more twisted than love.” But the big question might be, “Who cursed whom?”

As an immersive experience, this adapted prequel to a best-selling manga series isn’t so much hard to follow as ornately detailed to cover what thin storytelling it actually is. One of the great things about Japanese cinema and TV is the sense that more than perhaps any other culture in the world, when we dip into it the instant feeling of “alien” comes through. I find the ingrained mythos, the legends, the cultural differences that turn up in everything from romances and gangster tales to horror movies, ghost stories, workplace and family dramas endlessly fascinating.

Hell, even “Iron Chef,” which helped introduce the “foodie” fad to North America, was a culturally illuminating hoot.

But as a medium for storytelling, anime is seriously miss-or-hit with me. There’s a world of difference between “The Wind is Rising” or “Howl’s Moving Castle,” “Ponyo” or “My Neighbor Totoro” and the average “Dragon Ball” franchise installment, and as pretty and vivid and violent as it sometimes is, “Jujutsu Kaisen O.” falls on the wrong end of that spectrum. It has all the virtues and failings of many a comic book adaptation — impressive visuals, generic supernatural action, thinly-developed characters and a “story” that barely fulfills the obligations of that label.

The jokes — many of them mouthed by the manic and not-at-all-mellow Panda — and the sight gags lean towards simply goofy or low-hanging fruit. The plot is convoluted, not the least bit inviting or deep and frankly puerile, with PG-13 violence and “darkness” draped over it.

Perhaps there’s more on the written/drawn manga page, and it’s understandable that fans would cherish the chance to see how a favorite manga is animated into motion. You made it a hit, and plenty of critic-fans have endorsed it. Cosplay away.

But does it ever really come to life? Not for me.

Rating: PG-13 for violent content, bloody images, language, thematic material and some suggestive references

Cast: The voices of Megumi Ogata, Mikako Komatsu, Kōki Uchiyama, Tomokazu Seki, Yûichi Nakamura, Subaru Kimura and Kana Hanazawa

Credits: Directed by Sunghoo Park, scripted by Hiroshi Seko and based on the Gege Akutami manga. A TOHO Animation film, a Crunchyroll release.

Running time: 1:45

“X” doesn’t reinvent one of the most popular, time-tested horror genres so much as breathe a little life into it.

That “promiscuous young folks go slumming in rural America and get themselves slaughtered” plot feels seriously worn-out. But writer-director Ti West (“The Sacrament”) gives it a reset as he takes us back to a blood-spattered birthplace of the Culture Wars, with fundamentalism stripped down to its bare, hateful resentments of the carnal hedonism that new generations have embraced, and sexual liberality is exposed for the empty opportunism it can embody.

Even if few of the many murders served-up in this spatter-stained slaughter have real novelty to them, even if the set-up and “Psycho” meets “Friday the 13th” set-up is entirely too familiar, West has made a rare horror tale that makes you listen, ponder and consider what’s happening to its hapless victims, and why.

West takes the “Well, they had it coming” horror trope of “extra-marital sex gets you killed” and turns it on its “Psycho” ear.

Veteran character actor Martin Henderson (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Miracles from Heaven”) is Wayne, a hustler who has figured out a new way to “get rich” off the “girls” he manages in a seedy Houston strip club. He’s rented an old boarding house on a ranch that’s gone to seed out in the sticks and convinced his much-younger stripper/girlfriend Maxine (Mia Goth), her more experienced colleague Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Bobby-Lynne’s Black boyfriend (Kid Cudi) to come make a porno, “like ‘Debby Does Dallas.'”

It’s 1979 and Wayne can see the future, when people are going to want to “watch porn in the comfort of their own homes.” With an artistic-minded filmmaker (Owen Campbell) and the filmmaker’s girlfriend (Jenna Ortega) coming along to record sound, they’ll make “The Farmers’ Daughters” into “cinematic art” that’ll “make us all rich.”

Naturally they all ride up in a ’70s van. Of course they stop for “supplies” with the unfiltered Wayne and underdressed “talent” drawing unwanted attention from the store owner.

And naturally, the old geezer (Stephen Ure) who rents them the place out behind his farmhouse takes a dislike to Wayne. But money is money…

The crew of six commences to filming, and the more explicit the better. But there’s another person in that farmhouse, along with simmering resentments and deathly dark secrets. Maybe that gator in the swimmin’ pond and everybody’s tendency to run around barefoot and bare-assed around buggy barns and tumbledown outbuildings aren’t the only threats facing our enterprising movie makers.

West frames this story in a flashback. We’ve seen a sheriff (James Gaylyn) doffing and donning his sunglasses as he walks through the aftermath of whatever went wrong out there.

The director intercuts a non-stop TV sermon by a drawling, fire-and-brimstone preacher, warning of a “forgiving God” who has his “limits” into the proceedings, and gives his heroine the motivation that has driven generations of youth, much to the dismay of their increasingly enraged, conservative and “left out” elders.

“I need to be FAMOUS, Wayne,” is Maxine’s mantra. Most everybody here has that on their minds. The elderly, embittered and infirm can only mutter “I was young, once.” Maxine is the stand-out character and Goth (“Suspiria”) both the heart of the movie and its spectral warning of what’s to come, in more ways than one.

The movie-within-the-movie has a cheesy, 16mm celluloid quality. And the homages are sometimes implied but just as often spoken aloud — “Pyscho” among them.

West never quite lets the murdersp lapse into “perfunctory.” But his foreshadowing is obvious enough to feel intentional, and most of the gruesome killings are ideas cribbed from other movies, also intentional.

If you’re making a horror homage to other horror and setting your story in the late ’70s, with the soundtrack to match, there’s one touchstone tune destined to underscore your tour de force moment. This song was in the original “Halloween,” opens the first TV version of “The Stand” and returned to its hallowed place in horror with “Scream.” “Don’t Fear the Reaper” dresses up a fairly generic if gushing and graphically-detailed first murder, with chilling, Rock Hall-of-Fame-worthy style.

What West is really interested in is the sinister, self-absorbed generational resentment that provides the conflict in these movies. Before the phrase “Red State vs. Blue State” was ever coined, what West envisions is horror that predicts it and sees it coming. “X” takes us back to open our eyes to what all of these movies have been saying, showing us the culmination of America’s city vs. country, sophisticated vs. falling behind divide.

This sort of “Chainsaw Massacre without Chainsaws” has always pointed to that aching sense of a world that’s left the armed, unsophisticated and embittered behind. And the libidinous, tolerant and post-’60s “free love” drug-experimenting youth so often portrayed as “got what they had coming to them” in such movies never saw it coming, and never “had it coming,” no matter how often the genre reinforced that glib, hateful message.

The monsters are real, and with or without masks or machetes, they’d rather see others dead than be reminded that others are having a better time.

Rating: R for strong bloody violence and gore, strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use, and language

Cast: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Kid Cudi, Martin Henderson, Owen Campbell, Stephen Ure, James Gaylyn and Brittany Snow.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ti West. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:45

The action romp “The Lost City” is an inferior version of almost every single adventure comedy it steals from. But that’s the joke here, and it plays. Because there’s a lot of stealing going on in this multi-hand script, all-star cast spectacle.

The obvious inspirations are the “Romancing the Stone” movies, with a romance novelist — Sandra Bullock here, Kathleen Turner way back when — kidnapped into a daft adventure of the sort she usually writes about. But there’s a hint of “Nim’s Island,” too. Our novelist has become something of a recluse, and the guy who sets out to rescue her is her fictional action hero, Dash. Only “Dash” in this case is the “Fabio-wigged” model for the covers of her books. Alan poses as Dash on her covers, and hapless, handsome language-mangling hunk Alan is played by the generally shirtless Channing Tatum.

There’s a rich supervillain, as there always is, and if Daniel Radcliffe‘s name isn’t the first you think of when that character is labeled, it will after this. Radcliffe co-starred in “Jungle,” a movie about searching the jungle for “lost villages,” which doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

Because Brad Pitt, in a scene-stealing first act cameo, once produced and gave some thought to starring in “The Lost City of Z,” a true story about the search for an ancient city lost in the jungles of Amazonia.

Even the casting takes on a jokey air in “Lost City,” with moments meant to mimic “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and every other movie with a modern setting and a “lost treasure” in the tropics as its “MacGuffin.” Hell, there’re even jokes about Fabio and MacGuffins in this tossed salad of a screenplay.

Bullock is Loretta Sage, who “used to be the best selling” author of her romance genre, something her agent (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is gambling a lot of cash on as she talks the now-widowed and reclusive author out of seclusion and onto a book tour.

Booking Loretta with the vapid and insanely popular cover model (Tatum) of her books for joint appearances is the first sign that this is going to be a nightmare. There is no metaphor this himbo can’t mix, no semantic stumble he can’t manage. She’d much rather be done with the books and him so that he can set off on “The shirts-on phase of your career.”

Then she’s kidnapped after a book signing. It turns out, those quest romance novels were written by a trained historian and ancient languages linguist whose late husband was an archeologist who did some poking around looking for the Lost City of D. And that’s what billionaire punk Abigail Fairfax (Radcliffe) wants to find. Yes, there are jokes about wealthy Brits giving their sons effeminate names.

Loretta’s barely yelped, “What IS this, ‘Taken?'” when Alan — who hears the phrase “You DO realize you’re NOT Dash?’ more than once — springs into action. There was this special ops/soldier of fortune dude he met at some meditation retreat/whole-body-cleanse/ashram whatever.

You can tell on the phone that Jack Trainor is Mr. No-Nonsense, Mr. Competent, Mr. “Proof of Life” Rescuer. You can tell on the phone that Jack Trainor is played by Mr. Brad Pitt. And he’s hilarious.

That’s the first big joke that works, and his few scenes get “The Lost City” on its feet, onto the island where Loretta’s been taken to decipher ancient writings and locate this buried “Crown of Fire,” and into comic mayhem as prissy, pretty and dim-witted Alan becomes her last, best hope of getting out of this alive.

Bullock had a gift for Lucille Ball pratfalls in her early comic career, and she does a fair job of reviving that shtick here, traipsing and tripping through jungles in a “SeaQuest” pink sequined jumpsuit, chased by goons on motorcycles and a supervillain in his own luxury tank.

There’s a clumsiness and tendency to miscalculate by every character in this — from the villain who doesn’t realize what his vertical take-off jet will do when its engines focus on a nice cheese sampler smorgasbord he’s laid out for his “guest,” to the “rescuer” who seems to mainly want credit for trying to “save” his meal ticket, to the writer herself, who is forever judging “a book by its cover.”

Only Pitt’s Trainor, running up trees, dispatching one kidnapper after another, tracking and plucking a plainly smitten Loretta in a flash, knows what he’s doing here. And what do we do with “competence” in America, kids?

“Lost City” works up a head of steam, but only here and there. Bullock is amusing and effective as the lead, although you have to believe she’d have thrown herself into this with real abandon 20 years ago. Tatum, Radcliffe and Pitt have their moments.

And “Office” alumna Oscar Nuñez makes a delightful appearance as a low-rent local cargo pilot who takes a fancy to Randolph’s irritated and on-task agent.

But there are characters who don’t land all the laughs they should and more than one situation whose clunky payoff slows the picture’s joke-to-joke rhythm and pacing.

Nobody could confuse the co-directing Nee Brothers (“Band of Robbers”) for comedy auteurs, although to be fair, this script feels more cut-and-paste than inspired.

The fact that “Lost City” still plays, still delivers plenty of cute and sometimes bawdy laughs amidst all the homages and “borrowings” from better films is a tribute to its stars and its one great conceit — that it’s taking on a jokey, derivative genre, and everybody we see in it is in on that joke.

Rating: PG-13 for violence and some bloody images, suggestive material, partial nudity and language.

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, Daniel Radcliffe, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Oscar Nuñez and Brad Pitt.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Nee and Adam Nee, scripted by Oren Uzeil, Dana Fox and Adam Nee. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:52

An Oscar-nominated actress completes her “Naomi vs. Nature” trilogy with “Infinite Storm,” a psychological battle against the primal elements starring Naomi Watts.

As in “The Impossible,” her character — a 50something New Hampshire search-and-rescue hiker named Pam Bales — faces an extreme event, this time a blizzard. Pam is tested. And as in Watts’ “The Sea of Trees,” when she stumbles into an out-of-his-depth hiker, that test grows more harrowing as she tries to get him off that frigid mountain in a howling gale.

Here, it’s not the life that she wants to get back to that drives Pam through hallucinatory flashbacks. It’s memories of the pictures of two little girls that this loner keeps in her remote riverside cabin.

There’s a dreamy, existential sadness that hangs over this Polish co-production, filmed in Slovenia and directed by Malgorzata Szumowsk (“Never Gonna Snow Again”). It begins with Pam, the fatalism she puts into her packing-for-the-hike routine, the radio weather warnings echoed by her innkeeper pal (Denis O’Hare). When she tells him “You know what day it is,” he knows better than to insist she not take this hike in that coming weather.

Something happened to those two little girls.

As she hears cries in the blizzard, we wonder if her ears are playing tricks on her. But when she sees tracks, she knows someone got caught in the blizzard.

“You have GOT to be kidding,” she gripes. “SNEAKERS?”

When she stumbles into the stranger (Billy Howle), he is all but frozen — stubborn, silent and maybe even stoned.

“Jesus, you’re dressed for the BEACH.”

He seems to have little interest in surviving, but she’s not leaving this dope behind. So begins their long trek down, with all the usual obstacles added to the life-threatening stumbles Pam had to overcome just to reach the summit.

“Inspired by a true story” or not, movies like this have their own formula and tropes, some of which I’ve listed above. I’m a big fan of the genre, and if this isn’t up there with “Wild,” “Into the Wild” and the like, it still works and Watts makes us invest in her character’s quest to survive. But what’s most interesting about “Infinite Storm” is the gutting grief that’s layered on top of that. We wonder who is more messed up. Will he kill himself? Will he get her killed?

Following up her woodlands sprint to a school shooting drama “The Desperate Hour” with this film gives one the impression that Watts is making a point about women over 50, actresses included. She’s perfectly credible in these roles, accomplishing physical feats that any fit woman could manage and performing in these movies with a sort of dogged “I’m still here, dammit” determination.

Watts’ stoic, sturdy performance and the film’s affecting and formula-busting third act make this “Infinite Storm” well worth weathering.

Rating: R, profanity, injuries

Cast: Naomi Watts, Denis O’Hare and Billy Howle

Credits: Directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, scripted by Joshua Rollins. A Bleecker Street release.

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