Movie Nation

You’d think even Stephen King would be tired of “Children of the Corn” remakes by now. But as he’s having another “moment,” in which everything he ever wrote is potential fodder for a new franchise reboot, here we are with the tenth telling of a version of that tale and another check for the screen rights to his short story in the bank.

Kurt Wimmer, a screenwriter specializing in remakes (“The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Point Break” and “Total Recall”) and a writer-director credited with mostly disasters like “Ultraviolet,” eschews suspense for sadism in this prequel, which tells us how a Nebraska town’s cornfields got custody of its “children” and how the real enemy is Big Ag feeding high fructose corn syrup to a planet of addicts.

If you recognize a few familiar Aussie faces in the cast, most famously Bruce Spence from the original “Mad Max” movies (he plays a preacher), that’s because they turned filmed Down Under and turned Oz into Rylston, Nebraska for this corn dog.

An orphaned boy who spends too much time “in the corn” stalks in and butchers the adults in his (apparently) abusive orphanage in the film’s opening scene. A “hostage situation” develops, and an incompetent attempt to “gas” the place by the local sheriff (Andrew S. Gilbert) kills all the children there, save for one.

Eden (Kate Moyer) survives, and turns the rest of the tweens in town into minions, extras in her production of “Lord of the Flies,” “Lost Boys” and girls punishing kids by having them walk the plank.

The grownups are all worked up over a blight that’s killed much of the corn, thanks to GrowSynth’s GMO corn and breed-specific fertilizer. They want to plow all the fields asunder and take government subsidies in doing that.

One of the older teens in town, Boleyn (Yeah, right.), played by Elena Kampouris of Netflix’s “Jupiter’s Legacy,” dreams up a mock trial in front of a reporter to hold the local rubes — including her Dad (Callan Mulvey) — accountable via “public humiliation” for the brain-drained village’s biggest blunders.

But Eden and her “posse” have other ideas.

Wimmer’s cleverest touch might be having the locals watching a “Twilight Zone” episode about a supernaturally tyrannical child send adults “to the cornfield” (“It’s a Good Life”), acknowledging the font of many of Mr. King’s most marketable horror ideas. But even that’s head-slappingly on-the-nose.

Having a child wonder if they are “making a childish mistake” isn’t the cleverest turn of phrase Wimmer’s ever typed. “It’s never a mistake to try and change the world” isn’t much better.

The challenge here was to build a story around a rightfully, even righteously vengeful child out to punish adults for the world they’re leaving her and her peers, a pitiless Greta Thunberg with a taste for blood.

The writer-director isn’t up to it, giving away the game early, over-explaining almost as early and showing us the Groot of All Evil in too much detail. It’s no use expecting a child actress to save the picture with her performance.

Kampouris, the heroine here, is a pale, willowy presence at the center of the picture, but handcuffed by a thinly-sketched-in character with college on her mind and the skinny girl brass to send her big, tough daddy “for help” while she tries to thwart the psychotic tween and her crew on her own.

Sure.

This “Corn” sat on the shelf during COVID lockdown, but we can’t say it went stale during the delay. This was cynical in conception and rotten in execution long before the masks came out.

Rating: R for violence and bloody images.

Cast: Elena Kampouris, Kate Moyer, Callan Mulvey and Bruce Spence.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kurt Wimmer, based on the short story by Stephen King. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:33

A Bond Lite/Not Quite Impossible Mission action comedy might be in Mr. Ritchie’s wheelhouse. Love that cast.

Hugh as a cockney villain with posh pretentions?

This bugger opens Friday.

“Call Me Chihiro” is a soapy, static Japanese melodrama that drifts through the months after a sex worker has given up “the life.” It’s true to its source material as it captures the brooding, interior world quality of some of the more subtle manga, the Japanese comic books for adults. But as cinema, it plays as dull, seemingly random sketches that add up to a motion picture that’s more of a still life portrait.

Our title character (Kasumi Arimura) is a beaming bento shop clerk whom we quickly notice is popular with her customers. Very popular. They’re all male, local factory workers who flirt and make crude come-ons, and she smiles and gives as good as she gets.

They knew her in her previous profession, as a “massage parlor” sex worker.

Near as we can tell, this other profession didn’t scar her. As we never get an idea of what exactly drove her into that work via the film’s flashbacks, we accept her as she presents herself — solitary, friendly and kind. A teenage schoolgirl (Hana Toyoshima) takes secret snaps of her cuddling a feral cat, chatting up a bratty little boy (Tetta Shimada), sticking up for, feeding and all but taking in an old homeless man (composer turned actor (Keiichi Suzuki) she sees bullied on the docks of Hiroshima.

Eating with him, we see her fondness for the food of the cranky cook, Nagai (Toshie Negishi) at the bento shop and her taste for the extremely tart pickled plums that are Nagai’s specialty. Chihiro grimaces, and then smiles every time she takes a bite.

And there’s our big fat manga metaphor, film fans. Chihiro has a taste for the bitter, even as she maintains that sweet face.

She allows herself to bond with the teen Suniko and sassy little boy, Makoto, even as figures from her old life — from customers to her transgender sex-worker friend Basil (Van) and her ex-boss, the tropical fish dealer/pimp, played by Lily Franky — wander back into her current one.

She visits the now-blind owner of the bento shop (Jun Fubuki) who hired her in the hospital, chatting her up under another name, hiding their previous connection.

Through it all, we sense a damaged young woman making an effort to connect with people, but lonely and uncertain of her place or anyone’s ability to connect thanks to the scars of her life, most of them left unexplained.

Co-writer/director Rikiya Imaizumi’s (“Sad Tea,” “What is Love?”) adaptation might have had a dreamy quality as he leads us through this woman’s drfting life and implied struggle for happiness and connection. But the blocking and acting is laughably stiff. There’s almost no such thing as a walking and talking shot here, with virtually every encounter a series of stock-still one-shots — Chiriro arguing with Basil, Suniko lashing out at her chilly, remote “certified cook” mother, Matako’s single mom chewing out Chihiro for befriending him.

A movie this long and this still practically begs to be taken more seriously than what transpires on the screen actually merits. What I took from it was a renewed appreciation for Japanese cooking, that “Iron Chef” obsession with food as mere subtext, and a sense that I’d just seen the most PG (It’s rated TV-14, due to a single sex scene) rated film about a sex worker in the history of cinema.

Fans of the manga may get more out of it than the casual viewer just dipping her or his toes in this “Around the World with Netflix” entry. The rest of us are left to scroll through bento online menus to see how much of what we’ve sampled on the screen we can order as take out.

Rating: TV-14, sex, adult subject matter

Cast: Kasumi Arimura, Hana Toyoshima, Tetta Shimada, Van, Ryûya Wakaba. Jun Fubuki and Keiichi Suzuki

Credits: Directed by Rikiya Imaizumi, scripted by Kaori Sawai and Rikiya Imaizumi, based on the manga by Hiroyuki Yasuda. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:12

It was a hit when it was first released and nominated for four Oscars, winning two. But Franco Zeffirelli’s lavish, period-perfect and bracingly young “Romeo and Juliet” wasn’t universally loved.

Critics decried its “bowdlerized” Shakespeare, the dewy inexperience of its teenaged leads.

The first filmed “Romeo and Juliet” to dare to cast truly age-appropriate leads, filmed in sunny Tuscany (not Verona, in Veneto) with a colorful Medieval setting, was a bracing, breathless take on a play long served up by overaged stage actors. As such, it is a movie whose luster grows with the passage of time.

Franco Zeffirelli became the official heir to Laurence Olivier’s lifelong passion for popularizing Shakespeare on the big screen (a passion he shared with Orson Welles). Olivier passed the baton by giving the film its narration, and dubbed a couple of voices in the soundtrack for Zeffirelli, who had just filmed a boozy, bawdy, brawny and sexy “Taming of the Shrew” with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

In the years that followed, others reconnected the play with the heightened emotions and headstrong, limited-life-experience stakes of youth in the first blush of love. Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” moved the violence and heat to a modern setting with some success. But the Italian creator of operatic spectacles on stage and screen – the Mel Gibson “Hamlet,” a decent “Jane Eyre,” the weeper remake “The Champ” and “Endless Love” were his — reset the tone and the bar for Shakespeare adaptations to follow with this lush, romantic and violent melodrama.

Watching it now, with its bloody Montague and Capulet brawls on cobblestone streets inside an old, stone-walled city, its stunning Oscar winning costumes and glorious Oscar-winning cinematography, you can see that bar rising, with only the big screen Shakespeares of Kenneth Branagh (“Henry V” and “Much Ado About Nothing” particularly) challenging this one in terms of sheer beauty and lived-in realism.

It’s studied and polished and yet feels impulsive, with the characters swept along by a story driven by hormones and ancient grudges beyond the control of the mere mortals, especially our love-at-first-sight lovers.

How young were Hussey and Whiting? Fifteen and sixteen. The two stars, whose ensuing careers didn’t measure up to this heady head-start, filed suit about being sexually exploited (the film has a lone scene of barely-glimpsed nudity) in January, 55 years after its release.

The title characters excuse the inexperience of the leads, who give this film its enthusiasm and breathlessness. But acting careers were made, then and now, by the showy violence of Tybalt. Young Orson Welles made his name on the stage in the part of the sword-fighting, feud-fueling hothead of the Capulet clan. Michael York, tanned and dark and dangerous here, explodes off the screen in a performance of such fencing fury that he found himself all but typecast for a while.

We should all be so lucky as to be “cast” as a swordsman in Richard Lester’s glorious “Three Musketeers” movies.

Tybalt’s the play’s purest punk, the swordsman who would rather fight than exchange witticisms with his Montague counterpart, the scalding, tipsy Mercutio (the wonderful John McEnery).

“Consort? What, dost thou make us minstrels? If thou makes us minstrels, look to hear nothing but discords. Here’s my fiddlestick!”

Milo O’Shea brings a hint of Irish wit and soul, and some priestly CYA fear, to Friar Laurence.

And Pat Heywood‘s effusive, doting turn as Juliet’s nurse amuses, charms and touches the heart.

Yes, the extensive dialogue of the stagebound play has been trimmed. Thank heavens. We’ve all seen what the unexpurgated — almost every word from every preserved “version” of a Shakespeare script — looks and sounds like, thanks to Branagh’s overly-faithful “Hamlet.”

The action is chaotic and the settings lend so much “as it happened” authenticity to everything that no Romeo since should dare climb anything but a real Italian tree to reach that balcony.

“But soft; what light through yonder window breaks? It is my lady! O, it is my love. O that she knew she were.”

There have been a few screen “Romeo and Juliets” since Zeffirelli’s, but the one or two that took a chance at being period pieces haven’t come close to this one. Most filmmakers have recognized that its a comparison they don’t want to risk, that its safer to attempt this timeless tale in verse in modern settings. But even Baz Luhrmann had trouble giving Leo and Claire the heedless, hormonal and heartbreaking hunger of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1960s film, the gold standard this “tale of woe,” and as Olivier hoped, a time-tested film testament of the timelessness of the Immortal Bard.

Rating: PG, violence, a moment of nudity involving teens

Cast: Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey, Michael York, John McEnery, Pat Heywood and Milo O’Shea, narrated by Laurence Olivier.

Credits: Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, scripted by Franco Brusati, Masolino D’Amico and Franco Zeffirelli, adapted from the play by William Shakespeare. A Paramount release on Amazon, Tubi and PosiTV.

Running time: 2:18

This May 26, a distributor called VVS (?) releases this good-looking action vehicle for our lad Gerry, who might be entitled to higher profile offerings after the success of “Plane,” but work is work.

Let’s begin with first principles. We are never going to get a “definitive” documentary that takes in everything, talks to everyone and tells us all we need or could possibly want to know about the inscrutable genius, Stanley Kubrick.

Consider just what’s available for a fan or fanatic’s perusal on Youtube at this writing. There’s “Lost Kubrick,” a pretty good “unfinished films” doc made for TV. A fan has pieced together all the film footage — including childhood home movies, much of it with sound — “All Video Footage of Stanley Kubrick.” Somebody else uploaded a “rare” hour long taped interview with him. There are collections of actors and directors talking about him, “behind the scenes” footage from any number of his films also archived there.

And that’s on top of the many other fine documentaries on him, about him, or deep diving into this or that movie, the most famous of which is “Room 237,” which gets at the obsession this most obsessive filmmaker feeds among his most devoted fans. Everybody in his life, it seems, has been in a film about him — family, colleagues, even his driver.

But here’s a new brick in the video wall of Kubrick scholarship. Gregory Monro’s “Kubrick by Kubrick” made the rounds of film festivals during the pandemic, and earns its official release Mar. 23. It’s built around one of the “rare” interviews Kubrick gave, this one to the French critic and longtime Kubrick enthusiast and expert Michel Ciment.

Is it the last word? Can’t be.

Is it even complete? The documentary was 13 minutes longer when it played festivals. Now, it lacks any mention at all of “The Killing,” “Killer’s Kiss” or “Lolita,” and only Sterling Hayden’s apologetic explanation of why Kubrick beat him down with 38 takes of one shot and few seconds of “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” turn up here. So something happened — rights or otherwise — between 2020 and now.

But it’s still a must-see for Kubrick fans, because here he is, exploring his themes of “evil” and “the duality of man” and “intelligence” and control — talking about his photography background, making his favorite Napoleon as a movie director analogies.

Little seen footage of Kubrick frolicking with his kids has him griping/joking about what Napoleon would think of “Lew Wasserman and David Picker” (moguls who put the brakes on Kubrick’s eventually-canceled “Napoleon” epic) controlling his fate.

He addresses one thing this film and all the other audio and footage of him talking punctures, his reputation as a “recluse.” There was even a John Malkovich movie about a guy who got away (sort of) with posing as Kubrick, “Color Me Kubrick,” remember.

“I just don’t particularly enjoy interviews,” Kubrick tells Ciment, who is interviewing him. He did lots of those through the 1960s and a few again in the ’80s, when “Full Metal Jacket” came out. He famously eschewed “explaining” or talking about his 13 finished films, but he does a bit of that here. If you take into account one infamous 1960s profile, which Kubrick agreed to when “2001: A Space Odyssey” came out, but which he demanded final approval of, you get a feel for what he didn’t come out and say to Ciment or anybody else.

The poor 1960s interviewer could only publish a single “approved” line from Kubrick, “I really prefer to let the films speak for themselves.” The journalist had to fill the page with a Jack Torrance (a decade before “The Shining,” mind you) sentence endlessly repeated. “I just spent three hours interviewing Stanley Kubrick. I just spent three hours interviewing Stanley Kubrick.”

What Stanley insisted on ALWAYS was “control.”

Ciment gets in a few pearls about Kubrick’s love of “the detective work” of research, which he’d dive into for years. His mania for “realism” in “2001” and most of his other films is legendary, and he goes into some depth explaining how he bought every book on 18th century European art in existence and cut pages out to get the costumes, colors and light of “Barry Lyndon” perfect.

But he cast “Love Story” star Ryan O’Neal as the lead for that film because “I couldn’t think of anybody else.”

He made “military consultant” R. Lee Ermey a star when he realized the man he was letting berate actors auditioning for roles in the film as an exercise was exactly the Drill Instructor as Profane Poet that “Full Metal Jacket” needed.

His mania for research, years of it wasted on “Napoleon” and “The Aryan Papers,” may have reached its zenith with “Full Metal Jacket,” a Vietnam War epic that takes Marines from basic training into combat, with Kubrick perusing through “100 hours” of documentary footage (TV, films movies like “The Anderson Platoon,” filmed in-country in the ’60s) to end up faking Parris Island and The Tet Offensive Battle of Hue in the U.K. because the Brooklyn-born Kubrick refused to film far away from his English home once he gained the clout to demand that.

No, a few palm trees and ruined “buildings from the same era” don’t look like Vietnam and Hue, no matter what he said. But who would correct him?

The title here is something of a misnomer. There’s a lot of archival TV coverage of Kubrick’s death, as well as video of vintage TV reviews and even roundtable discussions of his films, his life and his work, footage from France, the UK and even the U.S. That reinforces the reasons he is important, a still-revered creator of motion picture “events,” and just how thin the material the in-the-know Ciment actually gathered from this long sit-down.

Monro also artfully recreates the modernist bedroom with 18th century furniture from “2001,” and shows us slate/clapper images as he cuts to a homely 1960s cassette deck to reflect that medium the interview was done on.

There’s a nice sampling of film people who were ill-used by Kubrick, and almost to a one they decline to judge him or even analyze why he’d demand “45 takes” of his Steadicam operator on “The Shining,” or 38 takes of the great Sterling Hayden. Composer Leonard Rosenman is the only one here to at least label this as “insane” to the man’s face. But when Kubrick demanded “105 takes, when the second was perfect” in a piece of Rosenman’s period-instruments “Barry Lyndon” score, Rosenman stormed into the engineering booth to ream him out. Then again, he had a whole orchestra ready to back him up.

The famous footage of Shelly Duvall abused and berated on the set of “The Shining” isn’t here, nor is a more obscure clip I’ve seen recently, in which Kubrick blamed his many takes on “lazy” and “unprofessional” actors “not staying at home” the night before a scene “and learning their lines.”

That’s nonsense, of course. Kubrick beat his players down in an effort to get exactly what he wanted. There’s got to be a middle ground between the “one take,” no matter how far short of perfect it is Clint Eastwood approach, the “Jaws” conditioned “get the perfectly-framed shot” and move on Spielberg, who also brushes off actors’ desired retakes, and Kubrick’s on-the-spectrum OCD approach.

If you love movies, you can’t help but get into Ford and Hitchcock, Welles and Kubrick, artists and manipulative control freaks that the great ones — not just the men — often are. But I’ve been making laps around the Kubrick star for ages, and my view of him changes almost annually.

The first film book I bought was Alexander Walker’s “Stanley Kubrick Directs.” I saw “The Shining” in 70mm several times when it came out while I was in college. But by the time “Full Metal Jacket” rolled around, in grad school, I was cooling on him.

His beautiful but often stiff and always arch later films led me to believe he’s a filmmaker you can outgrow, like a love of heavy metal or a mania for the fiction of Ayn Rand.

But here I am, reviewing another documentary about him. Yes, it was pitched just days ago, when I was fresh off watching more youtube collections of the Wit and Wisdom of Stanley Kubrick and other analyses of his work. Kubrick is a film buff’s ultimate rabbit hole. Watch “Room 237” if you don’t think so.

We may never get that “last word” book or film on him, his obsessions, his art, his finished films and the “Napoleon” mini-series that Spielberg just renewed his pledge to make (he first promised that, according to a post on this very blog, ten years ago. That’s a measure of Kubrick’s hold on any film fan’s imagination.

I’ve interviewed several actors who’ve worked for him over the decades, but the favorite anecdote I collected is one I won’t repeat here, as I used it in my review of “S is for Stanley” some years back. But I will repeat his “Spartacus” player John Ireland’s punchline for what he witnessed, the extent Kubrick went to in order to get that perfect look from actors, reacting exactly how wanted them to for a single shot in that film, something which Ireland laid out to me back in the ’80s.

“THAT’S genius!”

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: The voice of Stanley Kubrick, Michel Ciment, with archival interviews with Malcolm McDowell, Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Marissa Bernenson, Leonard Rosenman and Sterling Hayden.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gregory Monro. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:01

Like the beard, like the hat. The accent? It’s growing on me.

“Inspired by the actual files” of a fellow with that unofficial title.

“You have a problem with me, you talk to my boss.”

April 14, Russell Crowe works for Screen Gems.

The role that changed Hugh Bonneville’s life didn’t arrive in a “Eureka!” moment, and he doesn’t treat it that way in his charming memoir, “Playing Under the Piano.”

“Downton Abbey” made itself known to him as a make-conversation chat with his director, Julian Fellowes, on the set of an earlier movie they made called “From Time to Time.”

“You writing anything else at the moment?”

As recounted in the forward to “Playing Under the Piano,” Fellowes mentioned a few projects, and this “Gosford Park” “great house,” its owners and its staff saga he was about ready to pitch. He’d had great success scripting his first “Upstairs/Downstairs” melodrama, “Gosford,” for Robert Altman. And even though the genre was stale and dead at the time, Fellowes had a hunch. He did think Bonneville, one of a legion of British character actors appreciated by fans but not all that famous, was “too young to play a dad.”

Bonneville’s reply would change his life.

“I am a dad. Of three girls, marriageable age.”

“Downton” drifts through “Playing Under the Piano,” summoned up here and there to make a point about why one avoids eating what’s served to you in a scene (many takes, from different many angles, they have to match in continuity, making a LOT of brownies disappear from “Notting Hill”) or how you never know if what you’re doing is going to click with the public, much less become a global phenomenon.

And Bonneville lets the dressing-for-dinner soap opera bookend his book with a lovely remembrance of Maggie Smith’s last scene, the last day of shooting the last film and even the New York press junket, savoring something that he never actually comes out and says “changed my life.”

It’s a brisk, florid biography in the standard actor’s life mold — “Hugh Boo Boo” childhood, memories of literally playing under a piano, first crushes, first roles, first time he figures out his character actor’s “stocky” niche, first time he is so “in the moment” that he makes something spontaneous and fun happen onstage during the run of a play.

The picture that emerges is of an affable chap who recognizes his privilege — son of a doctor who doted on him, whom he doted on in turn, prep schools, etc. — and the career he’s made out of that.

The anecdotes aren’t sizzlers, as he’s not retired and his former and possibly future colleagues aren’t dead and still in the position of possibly hiring him again. Well, he takes one good shot at director Mike Newell. And everybody knows Christoph Waltz is a “wanker.”

But there’s no “dishing” about Elizabeth McGovern or the Divas of “Downton” — just a note on Smith’s “reputation” — a warm note on Judi Dench‘s acting generosity and a lighthearted look at Julia Roberts, offhandedly throwing her Big Star weight around during “Notting Hill” to the betterment of the film and the benefit of her much lower-billed co-stars (ensuring Bonneville and others were flown to the NYC premiere), gratitude to Kenneth Branagh for hiring the Laertes in his stage “Hamlet” (Hugh) for a bit part in his “Frankenstein,” memories of films like “Iris” (he played the Jim Broadbent character as a young man, naturally) and “Burke and Hare.”

And the childhood recollections are occasionally amusing, but conventionally upper middle class, a long list of the semi-obscure corners of England where he grew up, schooled and summered.

The pursuit of an acting career, after entertaining thoughts of the law and the pulpit at Cambridge, makes for a fun account — meeting Olivier at a dinner party his parents dragged him to, failing to get his foot in any door, shortening his “Hugh Richard Bonniwell Williams” name to something even more posh. He tells cute, self effacing near disaster stories about auditions and recreates a National Youth Theatre/ National Theatre/RSC and Stratford world that he learned his craft and came of age in.

I tracked him down for a chat when the first “Paddington” bear picture came out, and found him much more “Notting” and less Lord Grantham, a fellow who recognizes the good fortune that moved him from lower billings to leads, the generosity of his “Downton” benefactor Fellowes when the chance came his way to join a George Clooney project (“Monuments Men”).

As for the career, movies like the recent thriller “I Came By,” which had him at his most villainous, suggest he has a few surprises in him.

On the whole, he comes off as you’d hope, disarming and not terribly self-serious, sentimental and enthusiastic about the work, if more laid back “British” about it than your average American “Actor’s Studio” alum or emulator.

“Playing Under the Piano: From Downton to Darkest Peru.” By Hugh Bonneville. Other Press. 372 pages, with index. $28.99.

I could see a lot of cell phone screens lighting up as filmgoers checked the time — often — at the preview screening of “Cocaine Bear” I attended.

Plainly for them, as for me, the thunderous buzz and giddiness and hype that the title of Elizabeth Banks’ gory, cokey comedy promised wore off sometime around the midpoint of the picture.

But it plays, and one has had the sense than the zeitgeist is ready for a splatter pic comedy with a deranged bear slaughtering the just and the unjust for laughs.

The ceiling for such a movie isn’t high enough to chase “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania” off the peak of the box office perch. But 21 million? Sure. This bear could do that with its eyes closed.

Decent Thursday night previews and a solid Friday point to that take. Word of mouth won’t help or hinder it Saturday, but I’d guess it’ll clear $20, with $25 its absolute ceiling. ($23 it is! See below.)

The news about “Quantumania” is actually a much bigger “wow.” The movie is more pointless than usual for a Marvel entertainment, and is something of a bore. It’s experiencing the steepest box office second week fall-off EVER for a Marvel movie — on track to be 80% lower than its bigger-than-expected opening weekend. It could rally into the $35 million range, but $30 may be it and audiences may — at long last — be wearying of lesser comic book fare. At least in terms of repeat viewings.

The “Jesus Revolution” is bringing the faithful out, a decent, uplifting and positive-messaging faith-based film with none of the politics that poison so much cinema in that genre. Early projections saw this no-big-stars historical “moment” movie managing maybe $10 million. Nope. $15 million+, depending on how Saturday and Sunday pan out.

Ticket prices being what they are, that’s not a staggering number of tickets sold, over a million or so. But front-loading with Wed. and then Thursday previews gave it a head start and helps get the word out.

A Kelsey Grammer big screen hit? Here it is.

“Avatar: The Way of Water” is pulling in another $4 million and change, closing in on what should be a $675-680 final take, when all is said and done.

“Puss-in-Boots: The Last Wish” won’t hit $200 million, as another $3 and change leaves it in the $173-175 million range, probably finishing its run @$188-190.

The rest of the top ten is #6, “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” earning another $2.7 million and fading so fast it won’t reach $30, M. Night’s “Knock at the Cabin,” adding $1.77 million on its way to $40, #8 “80 for Brady,” wrapping up Tom Brady’s big screen adventure with $1.7 (it’ll just clear $40, all in), “Missing” ($1 million), and Tom Hanks’ “A Man Called Otto,” which has hung around, played all over America and will finish its run under $65 million.

Here’s the UPDATED Sunday afternoon tally from @BoxOfficePro.

It’s a good thing the coked-up bear and the faith-based crowd are showing up, doing their part in keeping cinemas open until the next big hit arrives.

A good rule of thumb for horror cinema is that your movie can get away with being obvious, or it is allowed to be slow to unfold. But it can’t be both and work.

That’s the curse of “The Womb,” an occasionally tense but generally tedious horrors-of-giving-birth tale from Indonesia.

“Obvious” comes from its opening tease, a wizened shaman (Pritt Timothy) is being interviewed about a particularly unlucky day — by tradition — to give birth. He describes the remedy in vague terms, a “ritual” designed to “cut off…the misfortunes the baby comes with” (in Indonesian, with English subtitles).

That’s what the movie is about, a pregnancy facing a dangerous “Wekasan Wednesday” birth, and just what that “cut off” ritual involves.

But before anything like that can enter the picture, we need over a half hour of the story of unhappy Wulan (Naysila Mirdad), pregnant with a fair weather beau who tells her to “get rid of it.”

She lives in a tenement, and is late on the rent because sonograms aren’t covered by national health insurance. The landlord, overly fond of the sex worker living across the alley from her, doesn’t want to hear about it. Asking her boss at the big box home improvement store for an advance just earns her an unwelcome advance of a sexual nature.

So that’s three “problem” men in her life, not even taking into account her flashbacks to her unhappy childhood, where Dad and Mom fought constantly.

After taking suggestions from a friend and co-worker, consulting a pushy male operator on an unwanted pregnancy hotline, she stumbles across an older couple. Eva and Agus (Lydia Kandau, Rukman Rosadi) are desperate to adopt.

Next thing we know, she’s on her way to their big, remote country house, offered all sorts of health tips, “special” food and body oils by Eva and a sympathetic ear by Agus. It’s all good until the vivid nightmares start, triggering her growing suspicions about the place and these two, the midwife they consult and the shaman (Timothy again) they bring in. It’s enough to completely freak her out in her heightened, hormonal state.

And Wulan isn’t seeing all the stuff that director Fajar Nugros is showing us — the rat trapped in a cage in the garden shed metaphorically cut into the scene where Eva shows Wulan her room, what happens to rats when Agus is around.

“The Womb” takes its sweet time to get going, and drags out the assorted incidents that raise Wulan’s suspicions to the point where, whatever alarmed look Mirdad occasionally shows us, there’s no momentum for building a sense of rising paranoia.

Nothing really gets going until the third act, which is as good a time as any for the viewer to remember the “obvious” tease in the opening.

Remember, this is a Muslim country, and considering that, the movie’s very subject matter and treatment of sex is pretty racy and risky.

It’s a good looking film, with simple but effective effects and jolts of violence here and there. But it’s a bit obvious and entirely too slow in getting around to reminding us of that.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, smoking, profanity

Cast: Naysila Mirdad, Lydia Kandau, Rukman Rosadi, Dimas Anggara and Pritt Timothy

Credits: Directed by Fajar Nugros, scripted by Deo Mahameru. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56