Movie Nation

Superhero movies have gone all in on “universe building” of late, that “Avatar” model that pushes the notion “If we show them strange, ‘new’ and wondrous places, they will come.”

So the latest “Ant-Man” is basically “‘Avatar’ with Ants…and some jokes.”

Trapped in the multi-verse mania that has been a hallmark of post-“Avengers” comic book adaptations, it finds an excuse to drag our loveable goof of a hero (Paul Rudd), his sidekick The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) and entourage — Wasp mama (Michelle Pfeiffer), shrinking/expanding scientist (Michael Douglas) and Ant Man Scott Lang’s neglected, acting-out teen daughter (Kathryn Newton) — into “The Quantum Realm.”

That’s a universe that exists on a subatomic level. But you just know they won’t be content to fight over submicroscopic stakes there. Somebody in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is going to toss that word “multiverse” out there as its become like product placement in most Marvel and DC superhero movies.

“The Quantum Realm” is full of odd creatures like horses with snail heads and sentient manta rays who provide friendly “Finding Nemo” transport wafting through a gloomy, cave-like landscape that looks like “Avatar” with a different color palette.

Yes, there’s a war on, with a vast array of folks ranging from talking blobs to “Cantina Band” alumni to warrior princesses taking sides and resisting “The Conqueror” (Jonathan Majors of “Lovecraft Country” and “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”).

The “jokes” in this “Avatar with Ants and Jokes” are provided by Rudd’s lighthearted persona more than witty dialogue writing. He can make Scott’s first panicked reassurance to daughter Cassie when they figure out where they are amusing just with sputtering Dad-isms.

“We’re OK. It’s going to be OK. OK? Ok!”

There’s topical messaging about “There’s always room to grow” as a person (Ant-Man puns!), getting involved in defending others — “Just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening.” — and the idea that even the most evil among us redeemable.

“It’s never too late to stop beiing a d–k!”

Toss in the most boring Marvel villain in ages and colorfully-animated or costumed (Katy M. O’Brian) but generic sci-fi action archetypes fighting over this wholly derivative world you’ve gone to the trouble of building.

But there’s no getting around the general pointlessness, the low stakes they’re playing for and the aimlessness of it all.

Checking the time, via watch or cell phone? Plan on doing that. A lot.

“Ant-Man” franchise director Peyton Reed cut his teeth on a cheerleading comedy (“Bring it On”), a forgettable Jim Carrey high concept comedy (“Yes Man”) and failed rom-coms (“Down with Love,” “The Break-Up”). His real gift to this genre is tone — light and jovial, not as clever or funny as “Thor,” but cute.

He makes the CGI effects trains run on time, gets a cameo or two in (Bill Murray, a returning Corey Stoll) and makes one of them amusing and milks a few sight gags for all that they’re worth.

His direction of the Jeff Loveness script borrows from “Star Wars” and “Avatar” and even “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and rarely in subtle ways.

The action beats are often straight up “The cavalry’s here” Western tropes, with this or that character getting her or his fight “moment,” and others just left on the periphery.

Pfeiffer is moved front and center for this film, and her stunt double gets quite the workout out of it.

But Majors seems at a loss, as good actors often are (Oscar Isaac comes to mind) when it comes to finding one’s omnipotent supervillain footing. At least Josh Brolin had the excuse of being wholly animated, and given a few darkly-amusing lines.

Fans will find more in this than I did. But if you’re a filmgoer not craving “fan service” from this and every Marvel movie, it’s just a time-killer, fitfully amusing tedium.

“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is much ado about a lot of microscopic nothing.

Rating: PG-13 for violence/action, and language

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Kathryn Newton, Katy M. O’Brian, William Jackson Harper, Corey Stoll, Bill Murray, Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Credits: Directed by Peyton Reed, scripted by Jeff Loveness. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:05

At some point, as a romantic comedy is failing right before your eyes, you settle for “at least it’s not offensive.”

“At Midnight” is the mildest R-rated rom-com on record, a tame and tepid affair pairing up a couple of career supporting players as the leads, with mild-mannered laughs, lukewarm love scenes and conventional wish-fulfillment-fantasy plot points.

Think “Notting Hill,” with Spanish accents instead of British ones. There’s even an “I’m standing here” line, and a visit to a birthday dinner with the lucky duck “civilian” who falls for a movie star.

Avrile Lavigne had an “obvious” line about that. And yes, she’s mentioned in the movie.

Monica Barbaro of “Top Gun: Maverick,” plays movie star Sophie, about to shoot the third film in the “Super Society” super hero trilogy with her co-star and faithless, boorish lover of five years Adam (Anders Holm of “Game Over, Man”) when she catches him cheating.

Not to worry. They share an agent (Whitney Cummings), who tells Adam “Cheating? It’s actually very hip. Very FRENCH…ForGIVE yourself!” Sophie she warns to keep quiet and think about defining herself by her famous, feckless beaus.” Remember Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston?

“Don’t be another Jen.”

That film shoot down in Cancún and Isla Mujeres will be awkward, maybe even painful. Then comes the “meet cute.”

Alejandro (Diego Boneta) is a bilingual assistant manager at the resort hotel where the cast is staying, demoted to looking after “la artiste,” the fetching leading lady, which means dropping off towels while she’s prepping for a shower.

He’s “seen me naked,” she complains.

“I wasn’t looking!”

“Well, NOW I’m offended!”

Yeah, the script is a tad retro. And duller that supermarket salsa. But let the limp “forbidden romance” begin. He’s endangering his career by violating “rule #1” for the hotel staff, “no dating guests.” She has to keep this breakup with the cheater quiet until after the film is shot, maybe until after the premiere.

But those crazy kids…

Catherine Cohen plays Sophie’s scene-stealing BFF turned personal assistant.

“Actors! They’re all unstable narcissists with no perfection of reality!”

Casey Thomas Brown is Sophie’s bitchy gay manager, constantly in conflict with her bullying, self-serving agent.

“If I wanted to get ‘topped’ I’d go on Grindr!”

Cummings and those two are the only “sparks” of comedy that “At Midnight” provides. But hats off for contriving a most realistic conflict/break-up scene for people of wildly different statuses, the one moment in this “Notting Hill” knockoff that plays as poignant and believable as the original film.

But “believable” kind of goes out the door when your tale is about a movie starlet falling in love, not dating for status, career, riches etc. That only happens in the movies.

Rating: R for some language

Cast: Monica Barbaro, Anders Holm, Diego Boneta, Catherine Cohen, Casey Thomas Brown, Fernando Carsa and Whitney Cummings.

Credits: Directed by Jonah Feingold, scripted by Maria Hinojos and Jonah Feingold. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:39

This Miramax/STX production changed hands and will be released by Lionsgate on March 3.My

Jason Statham and Aubrey Plaza and Hugh and Guy friends and fans, it could be fun. Should be fun. But as it’s been in the can a while, let’s wait and see.

Shy, reclusive and homesick when she wasn’t at home with her father and siblings in Haworth, Yorkshire, not much was known about “Wuthering Heights” author Emily Bronte in her brief thirty years of life. And not much more is known today, some of that spin from her equally famous competitive writer/sister Charlotte Bronte, of “Jane Eyre” fame.

Perhaps there were roiling passions beneath the surface of one sister that the other played-down due to decorum, reputation, prudishness or just plain jealousy. They do come off as rivals, thanks mostly to what we’ve learned about Charlotte’s fiddling with her sibling’s image.

But that leaves the door open to speculation, to inventing details of a life no one knows, a “Becoming Jane” (about Jane Austen’s “true love”) or “Immortal Beloved” (Beethoven) treatment of a discrete life whose discretion was guarded, even after death.

With “Emily,” the debut feature of actress turned director Frances O’Connor (“The Conjuring 2,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” TV’s Mr. Selfridge”), we’re shown a mercurial talent and “You know how I don’t like to meet new people” near-recluse who is also a woman of Austenesque wit and Byronic passions.

She carries on a torrid affair with the curate (assistant pastor) at her father’s church.

It’s probably not true. Scholars and fans have guessed that it was sister Anne Bronte whom Curate William Weightman adored. But that doesn’t spoil the film, which veers from defiant to self-destructive, playful to tragic, and gives a proper star vehicle to Emma Mackey of TV’s “Sex Education” and the recent big screen “Death on the Nile,” as the writer who billed herself Ellis Bell during her lifetime.

We meet a young woman lectured to “Try not to be a BURDEN, Emily” by her family, a girl growing up without her mother, determined to impress her stern father (Adrian Dunbar, terrific) and fit in with her sisters and brother.

But older sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling, biting and subtle) comes home from boarding school and chides her, straight away. She doesn’t approve of Emily’s oddness, her passion for making up stories, a girl nicknamed “the strange one” by the locals.

“You’re an EMBARASSMENT to us,” Charlotte eventually fumes.

The film suggests that maybe this is because Emily was the one who dismissed Charlotte’s chances with the handsome new curate, a man fond of homey, lighthearted sermons that pass along Christian values with a bit of humor.

O’Connor strolls through the “known” parts of the biography such as Emily cowering in a closet at her sister’s boarding school, weeping until she’s sent home. The writer-director details the close attachment to Bronte’s only brother, the mercurial “Freedom of Thought” dreamer, Branwell (Fionn Whitehead).

But a couple of scenes will take your breath away with their audacity and invention.

We learn how their mother’s death is something “which we never speak of,” before Mr. Bronte brings out a theatre mask that was anonymously given, as a wedding present, to him and his late wife. When Dad goes to bed, the sisters, Branwell and their new pal — the hip young preacher — break it out for a guess-who-I-am-behind-the-mask version of charades.

They force the shy Emily to take a turn, and she becomes first a silent killjoy wearing the mask, then a chilling and ghostly recollection of their mother, which leads to an incredibly emotional opening for the siblings’ closure with their lost parent.

At another point, Branwell is being sent away, and he insists on making their farewells as Emily hangs the laundered sheets. They bicker, confess and even embrace never seeing each other, with a billowing sheet between them. And then he’s gone.

That’s brilliant in its simplicity.

I’m not the first person to pick up on how much the Anglo-French Mackey resembles the Australian star and “It” actress Margot Robbie. They’ve been cast together in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” comedy, two classic “doll-like” look-alike beauties. That’s germane because one can almost see Robbie cast in this version of Bronte, presented here as a woman who eschewed the “blind faith” of her father and the young preacher, Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who comes to their parish, teaches Emily French, and not just the language.

Ahem.

O’Connor sets up this affair in classic Austen “Loathing at first sight” fashion, and by the time things are hot and heavy, jokes around with the demure letters Emily writes and voice-over-narrates to her teacher-sister Charlotte comically contrasted with Emily’s literal rolls in the hay.

“Emily” won’t pass muster in the halls of academe or among the Brontefiles. Dates are rearranged, liberties taken, some of a libertine (opium, sex) nature.

But our writer-director has conjured up a full, flesh and blood life. And our star transforms Emily from a repressed Yorkshire artist who channeled her passions onto the pages of one of the Great Romantic Novels into a human being of sexual passion, love and heartbreak, and a thing for Men on the Moors.

Rating: R for some sexuality/nudity and drug use.

Cast: Emma Mackey, Alexandra Dowling, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Fionn Whitehead,
Gemma Jones and Adrian Dunbar

Credits: Scripted and directed by Frances O’Connor. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 2:10

“Ah don’t have to remind you that her daddy thinks he is the ‘Jesus J. Edgar Christ’ of the Appalachian Mountains,” the mountaineer crime patriarch drawls in warning to his only son, who has taken up with a local prosecutor’s “rabbit-ass daughter.”

“Mah daddy, his his daddy before’im, and now you — we do not choose this way of life,” he tells his boy, Jacob (Hopper Penn). It chose us.”

There is only one Thornton, and he goes by “Billy Bob.” In “Devil’s Peak,” the film adaptation of David Joy’s “Where all Light Tends to Go,” Billy Boy Thornton sinks his teeth into Southernspeak for a modern Southern gothic tale of “outlawing” as the family business, which these days and in these foothills and hollows means “meth.”

Thornton is the colorful linchpin of this somber, slow but simmering crime melodrama, a film that also features Jackie Earle Haley as the comfy-with-looking-the-other-way sheriff, and Robin Wright as the ex-wife Charlie McNeely (Thornton) gave up on when she got hooked on the drug his clan now sells all over Jackson County, N.C.

Penn plays the 20ish lad still figuring out his family’s criminal legacy and how he fits in it, and how he can hang onto the girlfriend (Katelyn Nacon) his daddy disapproves of as he faces the ugly, illegal responsibilities that come with being a McNeely.

Director Ben Young and screenwriter Robert Knott lose themselves in Joy’s colorful Appalachian colloquialisms and Thornton’s peerless way with such lines.

“If this thang needs to’go off for some reason,” Charlie says as he hands his kid a revolver, “it touches mud and water. Got that?”

Got it.

Thornton’s menace, augmented by a Satanic dyed goatee and bald pate, mixes easily with the folksy way he has of relating Charlie’s family anecdotes, each and every one designed to instruct via a life lesson learned, almost all of those lessons chilling. Charlie, we can guess, can be utterly heartless when the need arises.

Haley’s county sheriff is something of an archetype — casually corrupt, but seemingly level-headed, with hints of compassion.

Wright makes a decent impression in a limited number of scenes, as does Emma Booth, brassy as the bald old crook’s half-his-age-hussy.

“Devil’s Peak” is a simple story whose filmmakers lose track of threads and characters, perhaps owing to editing. Jacob’s devotion to his girlfriend is thinly-developed, her politically-ambitious stepdad (Brian d’Arcy James) practically an afterthought. I am predisposed to go for Appalachian stories, so some of that I let slide.

A bigger issue is how this mixed-bag thriller is Exhibit A in the whole debate over Hollywood “nepo babies,” all those celebrity offspring who follow their parents into “the family business,” and how that often doesn’t pay dividends on the screen.

Hopper Penn is the son of Sean Penn and Robin Wright, and even playing callow lad of 20ish, he’s never more than adequate in the part and not always that. But without him, Mom doesn’t sign on, the film doesn’t have three big name stars to ensure its value and get financed and “Where All Light Tends to Go” isn’t adapted for the screen.

The Catch-22 of casting meant that they compromised on their lead just to get the film made. It happens all the time.

They had the makings of a solid, gritty and distinctly Southern B-picture. But their young lead, without whom I dare say this never would have been made, has an arresting look and yet little screen presence or acting craft (no acting school for him) to compensate for that.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Robin Wright, Hopper Penn, Jackie Earle Haley, Katelyn Nacon, Brian d’Arcy James and Emma Booth

Credits: Directed by Ben Young, scripted by Robert Knott, based on a novel “Where all Light Tends to Go,” by David Joy. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:35

It’s coming to take over the Spring. Soon. This weekend.

This “Winter’s Bone” tale is set in rural Jackson County, N.C., with power plays, politics, meth and bad blood tying up generations of folks given to “outlawing.”

Opens Friday, streaming Feb. 24.

If ever a rom-com didn’t merit, warrant or need a sequel, it was the thin gruel that was “Squared Love,” a Polish comedy about a vapid influencer and reluctant viral sensation/schoolteacher finding love.

But here we are, back to square one with “Squared Love All Over Again.” I guess “Can the handsome, shallow womanizer stay in love with the popular, famous yet down-to-Earth teacher?” is a question Warsaw wanted answered.

The sequel sees Monika (Adrianna Chlebicka) return from a long vacation with model/brand ambassador/influencer Enzo (Mateusz Banasiuk) to discover that her “naked buttocks” and other billboards and magazine covers have made her a national sensation, wanted for all sorts of gigs that don’t involve teaching.

Enzo? As he slept his way to fame and a sweet gig, his boss has fired him and made “destroying” Enzo her mission in life. He’s back to being plain old handsome but “blackballed” “Stefan” in a flash.

Monika is lured into co-hosting a kiddie TV talent show with an oily and embattled TV host (Mikołaj Roznersk). She stands up for the kids, who are taunted by the “celebrity judges,” and copes with a slow-but-steady come-on from Rafal.

Stefan is lost, but he falls in with Monika’s lonely, widowed car-restorer dad (Miroslaw Baka), who figures his own solitude and Stefan’s aimlessness have the same solution.

“It’s never too late to start something new,” he advises, in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English.

Dad gets a sexy, irate-customer as possible love interest (Monika Krzywkowska). Monika copes with her attention-whore school headmaster (Tomasz Karolak) and Stefan fumbles about for something he’s qualified to do, maybe something with classic Fiats, Lancers, Audis, etc.

“Squared All Over Again” is so mild-mannered that even the sources of conflict are rendered in shades of beige. And even if the script had called for more heat, one suspects the pretty-but-bland cast wouldn’t be able to deliver it.

Rating: TV-14, adult themes

Cast: Adrianna Chlebicka, Mateusz Banasiuk, Mikołaj Roznerski, Monika Krzywkowska

Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Wiktor Piątkowski, Natalia Matuszek A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

Here’s the TV spot from the Fox football game Sunday.

“Grumpy Old Indy,” villains sidekicks and stunt doubles.

Looks fun, even if it strains credulity.

Plainly too good to just abandon, whatever Armie Hammer impersonation Ezra Miller managed. Off camera.

Ben and Keaton and Supergirl…multiverses? Multiple timelines?

June 16.