Movie Nation

He died in 1995, but there’s plenty of evidence that PBS painting show star Bob Ross is as popular as ever. For starters, the reruns of the 30 series of “Joy of Painting” that he did for the network are still on the air here and in other countries around the world.

Ross, of the calming voice, upbeat demeanor and fluid facility with a brush, was a pop culture icon in his day, and lives on not just in those reruns, but in painting supplies and brushes that bear his name, and in Internet memes, where his gentle “Mister Rogers with an Easel” persona is sent up, almost always in the spirit of good fun.

But as its title implies, “Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal and Greed” implies, all is not well in Rossworld. All that money he’s generating after his death is going to some seriously unscrupulous business partners. An artist who preached art as therapy, renewal and a means of changing your sense of self-worth is being bled dry, post mortem, by some Jamie Spears/Col. Parker/Jeff Zuckerberg-level villains.

Director Joshua Rofé, who has Lorena Bobbit and Sasquatch documentaries under his belt, gives us a lovely “origin story,” and tracks the laid-back Ross, an affirmation-oriented teacher “who was never in it for the money” as he became famous enough to teach Regis Philbin the “Joy of Painting” on live TV. Then Rofé introduces the hissable villains who bought in, took over and exploited Ross and the family name and continue to do that to this very day.

Born in Daytona Beach and raised in Orlando, Ross was in the Air Force in Alaska when he and his first wife started a business of painting wilderness landscapes on gold miner’s pans. Eventually, he spied early PBS painting teacher William Alexander, the first guy to manage that “wet on wet” or “ala prima” finished painting in half an hour trick.

Ross befriended the accented, manic Alexander, became an acolyte and teacher of workshops on Alexander’s behalf. And when the time came for Alexander to pass the baton on to a younger TV host, Ross took over and positioned himself as a quieter, more calming and some said “seductive” version of a painting teacher.

Art critics and art historians weigh in, placing Ross’s work within the history of painting, not fluffing his talent but making a point to not dismiss him, either. His value as a popularizer of painting and an inspiration to others emphasized, again and again.

But you never had to paint along with Bob Ross to get something out of his show. He could be downright hypnotic, burbling about “fluffy clouds” and embracing the “happy accidents” he’d make with a brush, painting knife or errant drop of paint. Like Fred Rogers, his brand of mellow could be a balm in a harrowing, stressful world.

Members of the production crew of the homey (their studios were literally in a house) Muncie, Indiana PBS affiliate that launched “Joy of Painting” speak adoringly of Ross, who comes off as a slightly edgier and hipper Mister Rogers, a permed-hair, shirt-open “sex symbol” to middle aged women who longed to learn to paint from a guy with a bedroom voice.

Rofé harshes our mellow when he introduces Annette Kowalski and Walt Kowalski, who come off as controlling, paranoid and greedy manipulators who helped boost Bob into fame, and poured all their energy into ensuring that his legacy, archives and his very name belonged to them and not his family.

They are described as people who “love to sue,” and the film goes to some pains to show those who choose to talk about them relating stories of the many too scared to do so on camera. Bob’s son, Steve Ross, trained to take over his teaching, if not his TV series, disciple and friend Dana Jester and an Alaskan teacher who had Bob in class all relate tales of the underhandedness, avarice and callousness of the Kowalskis, who as of this writing are the poster children for “Evil Triumphs.”

This movie cries out for a “to crowdfund a lawsuit against the Kowalskis, visit http://www.suethosebastards.com” closing credit.

That isn’t the case, of course. Not yet.

But as we follow the back and forth of a newly-empowered Britney Spears in battling her father, any documentary that takes up the cause of an embattled public figure, even one long dead, at least leaves us with hope.

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Bob Ross, Steve Ross, Cathwren Jenkins, Sally Schenk, Dana Jester, Annette Kowalski and John Thamm.

Credits: Directed by Joshua Rofé. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

“HipBeat” opens with docudrama scenes of European protest and solemn voice-over narration.

“No one is free if others are oppressed,” the aptly-named “Angy” (short for Angus) intones. We’re “being lied to…capitalism ruined democracy…These police, they’re only here to protect capitalism.”

And in the mind of our Euro-Irish hero, “We the people must fight back” because “every struggle is real.“

But in this fever dream of writer/director/star Samuel Kay Forrest (“Groove”), it’s “every struggle” added on to that global one against anti-democratic fascism that takes over his movie.

Angy’s in Berlin and in love, he thinks, with “the one,” Angie (Marie Céline Yildirim). It’s just that he can’t stop picking up women in all the raves that are part of the Euro-anarchist scene.

He can shoplift spray paint to spread his “HipBeAt” graffiti, with the “A” rendered into global brand for for “anarchists.” He can plan breaking and enterings to “hack” the system with trusted friends. He can weather arrests and arguments with his single mom, whom he’s always hitting up for money because “I live on the streets.”

Somehow, he’s managing to maintain that hip “Last of the Mohicans” haircut, drink and do drugs, organize without cell phones and philosophize without a college degree or any visible means of support.

Yet Angy can’t stop obsessing about his “polyamory,” his feckless infidelity, his need to hook-up — constantly — to consult with drag queens, cross dress and occasionally go down on a guy.

“The Revolution will not be televised,” he narrates, quoting Gil-Scott Heron. “It”ll be live streamed!”

Not in you’re in charge, mate. In broadening Angy’s amorphous notion of “The Struggle,” Forrest — the writer-director– takes his eyes off the prize.

There’s an argument to be made about “struggle” being universal and ensuring the rights of women and everybody on the sexual spectrum having equal validity in that debate. But man, “HipBeat’s” abrupt turn in this direction makes for a messy, indulgent and shallow movie.

Because if you can’t identify a threat and stay focused on it as the subject of your movie without it drifting into other obsessions, you’re lost.

“Everything passes, but freedom will rise again,” Angy says, hopefully. Nothing Angy or Forrest shows us here backs that up. Whatever pronoun Angy is comfortable with isn’t focused enough to manage that.

Rating: unrated, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Samuel Kay Forrest, Marie Céline Yildirim

Credits: Scripted and directed by Samuel Kay Forrest. A Mother Earth Films release.

Running time: 1:29

I’ve seen and reviewed a few Robinson Crusoes over the years. Aidan Quinn was in a good one, Pierce Brosnan did another. “The Wild Life” was a cartoon version that came out in 2016. Georges Melies made it one of his pioneering “fantasy” shorts way back in 1903. It’s been adapted too many times and in so many different ways that it’s hard to keep count.

But I can’t recall ever catching the most straightforward and faithful-to-the-novel and its time version, the one Luis Buñuel made shortly after his international breakout hit “Los Olvidados.”

“The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” which turns up as “Robinson Crusoe” on streaming platform menus, is old fashioned in look and feel and in its “white man’s burden” racial politics. It would fall to later generations to update the 18th century novel into something a little more enlightened.

But as in Defoe’s “first novel in English,” our “hero” is shipwrecked while involved in the slave trade and does experience something of a conversion and a discovery of his own humanity during his trials.

Dan O’Herlihy went on to a long and storied Hollywood career that stretched all the way to “Robocop” and TV’s “Twin Peaks,” but “Crusoe” offered him a rare early lead, and he delivers in one of the iconic roles in all of fiction.

Buñuel faithfully presents this as a long reading from “the book” of Crusoe’s life and exploits — even showing us “the book” as was the style of such films (“Adventures of Robin Hood,” etc). The narrative is largely delivered in voice over by O’Herlihy, who recalls tumbling out of the surf on a Caribbean isle with his folding razor “my only possession, my only weapon.”

This version of the story makes the most of Crusoe’s industry and enterprise, a British Isles work ethic that has him not merely salvaging the wreck of the “Ariel,” rescuing its cat and dog as he does, but setting up his island “castle” with all the comforts of Scotland (the birthplace of Alexander Selkirk, whose true story was the inspiration for Defoe).

The first thing Crusoe reaches for on swimming aboard the wreck is a musket, the second a keg of rum.

Before he’s done, he’s constructed a fortified jungle cave-pit, cultivated grains to make bread and domesticated the island’s roaming (from earlier shipwrecks, Selkirk said) goats and invented the doggie door.

“You can wag your tail,” he notes, forlornly, “but you cannot talk to me.”

Loneliness becomes his greatest enemy, with dreams of the father he left behind and drunken hallucinations about his plight, “one day much like the other.”

And then the cannibals show up, a victim (Jaime Fernández) escapes and Crusoe intervenes, saving a man he names “Friday” who becomes both companion and subservient labor, a native who calls him “master.”

There are but tiny hints of the surrealist artiste Buñuel, the one who first gained notoriety working with Salvador Dali on “Un Chien Andalou” a quarter century earlier. The storm and wrecking of the ship are glimpsed in painterly flashes, but everything that follows is literal and simply if skillfully rendered.

The Mexican shoot skimped on having an on-set armorer. The gunfire is merely a sound effect. No flash or smoke of discharge, nothing that could be “fixed in post” back then. The sound is has a looped feel, as one would expect from an international film of the period, especially one told in voice-over (Spanish and English versions were released).

It was shot in Pathe Color, closer to Hollywood’s washed out Eastman Color than the glorious, saturated Technicolor that make films from that era still seem lush and larger than life dreams.

Still, the Buñuel “Crusoe” holds up like the benchmark telling of the story it has long been, the version every adaption since has referred to, even those that modernized its values and morality.

Rating: Approved

Cast: Dan O’Herlihy, Jaime Fernández

Credits: Directed by Luis Buñuel, scripted by Hugo Butler and Luis Buñuel, based on the Daniel Defoe novel. A United Artists release on Tubi and other free streamers.

Running time: 1:30

Rating: Approved

Cast: Dan O’Herlihy, Jaime Fernández

Credits: Directed by Luis Buñuel, scripted by Hugo Butler and Luis Buñuel, based on the Daniel Defoe novel. A United Artists release on Tubi and other free streamers.

Running time: 1:30

“The Old Ways” is an intriguing Mexican twist on the exorcism thriller.

It imagines a demonic possession diagnosed and treated in “the old ways” in a remote corner of the culture that’s more tribal than Spanish, more pagan than Catholic.

A young reporter has been taken hostage, dragged to a remote house with her head covered in a sack. She (Brigitte Kale Canales) doesn’t speak Spanish, but protests all she can in English. And she can’t answer her 60ish captor’s (Sal Lopez) Spanish questions.

“What were you looking for in La Boca?”

She throws a name out in desperation, a cousin from here. Miranda (Andrea Cortés) shows up, somber. She hears “She has it” from the face-painted one-eyed crone (Julia Vera) and stays. She will act as Cristina’s translator and guide to what’s about to happen.

“They think you have a demon inside you.”

Cristina has stuck her nose where she oughtn’t. But as she and Miranda talk, their mutual connection to this place and Cristina’s reasons for returning to the town of her birth become clear. Her mother went through something similar, with little Cristina witnessing it.

Now, the reporter whose “job is to go places people tell me not to go” will be subjected to the ritual, strapped down as “la bruja” (the witch) practices psychic surgery, pulling stuff out of her abdomen, chanting and dancing and blowing smoke to lure out the demon that mother may have passed to daughter.

The effects and production values set the gloomy scene for Christopher Alender’s (script by Marcos Gabriel) take on the genre. The body-contorting tropes of “possession/exorcism” films can seem to span many cultures, but the music (listen for the pre Valens “La Bamba”), face-painting and tribal incantations give this film it’s Mexican flavor.

But the tone is set by the performances, and they generally give the whole film the feel of a low-stakes game.

Seasoned reporter Cristina may be, but Canales under-reacts to her horrific plight, others render the ceremonial exorcism more matter-of-fact than part of a grand struggle against evil.

Dealing with this Postheki demon should feel terrifying to the outsider, if not the grimly-resigned locals. It isn’t.

“The Old Ways” never builds empathy for anyone, making it a horror movie you watch but don’t “experience,” its bland heroine someone who never makes us fear for her sanity, her safety or her life.

Rating: TV: MA, violence

Cast: Brigitte Kali Canales, Andrea Cortés, Julia Vera, Sal Lopez

Credits: Directed by Christopher Alender, scripted by Marcos Gabriel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

Fun fact, “Vacation Friends” was set up as a comedy to star the then-married Anna Faris and Chris Pratt — back in 2014. Was that even its first incarnation?

The point is, this pitch was funny enough to make the rounds for years, promising enough for actors to sign onto and worth throwing five credited screenwriters at. Well, five that we know of.

And it still turned out like this.

Wisecracker and master-reactor Lil Rel Howery and John Cena in gonzo comic mode — cliff diving and boat wrecking, drug tripping and wedding crashing, fox hunting and baby begetting, all thrown against the wall in a comedy that rarely stays on its feet long enough to amount to anything.

Howery (“Get Out,””Free Guy”) is Marcus, a “control freak” Chicago building contractor who only wants this Mexican vacation with his girlfriend Emily (Yvonne Orji of “Night School,” and TV’s “Insecure”) to come off, for his Big Gesture proposal in their resort suite to be perfect.

But it doesn’t. That flooded hotel room upstairs and the devil-may-care couple staying in it sees to that.

Ron (Cena) and Kyla (Meredith Hagner of “Set it Up” and TV’s “Search Party”) are YOLO/”live for the moment” working class lovers who blew every cent they have on this trip. Each of them is an open book, and both of them together are open-hearted enough to “save” Marcus and Emily’s trip. They’ll share their penthouse suite with them.

The uptight, accomplished Chicagoans will learn to “loosen up” at the feet of folks whose chief privilege is their irresponsibility. A toast! Margaritas all around! But uh, that’s not salt on the rim of the glass, kids. That’s “blow,” “Bolivian marching powder,” cocaine.

It’s all downhill from there, thanks to the “fun” couple that never learned when to say “When.”

Practical jokes with an edge, cliff diving in the dark, catamaran-wrecking in the broad daylight, all with a buzz on, this is a vacation to remember. Well, what they can remember of it, anyway. And when it’s done?

“You guys are in our lives now,” Ron, with a hint of menace in his voice, says as they depart. “Nothing’s ever gonna change that!”

Not even the high-stress/high-toned society wedding that Emily and Marcus don’t invite them to. But just wait until that pickup truck “crashes” it, with Ron and Kyla facing Emily’s snobby parents (Lynn Whitfield and Robert Wisdom), her punk-snob brother (Andrew Bachelor, funny) and all the upper echelon events (high stakes golf, a fox hunt, rehearsal dinner) that go with it.

The pitch for this was perfectly reasonable, that “what happens on vacation stays on vacation” dynamic of “Couples Retreat,” “The Heartbreak Kid” all the way back to “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation,” an ancient James Stewart/Maureen O’Hara vehicle.

On an allegorical level, it’s a comedy built on the “real” rift between The Two Americas — the careful and the careless.

But this feels forced, right from the start. Everybody has to lean into the would-be laughs too hard because they’re uncertain there’s another one coming again any time soon.

The situations are recycled and dully predictable. Of COURSE Ron throws big money bets into this golf foursome, of COURSE he’s sandbagging it. Of COURSE Ron and the insufferable father-in-law have a secret bond.

The drugged-up bits aren’t awful, and under-credited (he’s been “working” a long time, without much success) director Clay Tarver almost gets a laugh by filming the 40 foot catamaran wreck in long shot so — you know — they don’t have to actually wreck a $350,000 sailboat.

But as Barry Sonnenfeld (“Get Shorty”) decreed, comedy is a close-up medium. That was never going to play as funny. And if you can’t make “getting stoned and going on a fox hunt” funny, maybe comedy isn’t your thing.

Lil Rel’s over-the-top reactions aren’t far enough over-the-top, and Cena letting it all hang out (ahem) is only funny once or twice. Bachelor is the only supporting player, save for Carlos Santos, perfectly smarmy as an inept concierge, to come close to hitting comic paydirt.

This thing winds up being about as funny as the reason Anna Faris and Chris Pratt weren’t able to star in it.

Rating: R for drug content, crude sexual references, and language throughout

Cast: Lil Rel Howery, John Cena, Yvonne Orji, Meredith Hagner, Andrew Bachelor, Lynn Whitfield and Robert Wisdom

Credits: Directed by Clay Tarver, scripted by Tom Mullen, Tim Mullen, Clay Tarver, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. A 20th Century Studios/Hulu release.

Running time: 1:47

I got eight episodes into “Only Murders in the Building,” the comic mystery series starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez as aspiring “true crime” podcasters trying to solve a mysterious death in their New York apartment tower. That’s all that Hulu provided for reviewing the ten episode series. And I still have no idea who “the killer” or “killers” are.

That’s partly a tribute to craftsmanship, and at least somewhat owing to the fact that co-creators Steve Martin and John Hoffman (“Grace and Frankie”) don’t play all that fair with their twists and turns and red herrings and what-not. But they make it so much fun that the mystery becomes almost immaterial, which is what matters in a show like this.

As comedy’s oldest unmarried couple, Martin and his frequent collaborator Short, playing a has-been TV cop show star and flop-friendly Broadway director, bump into each other in the elevator of The Arconia, their tony Upper West Side apartment complex, they deliver their brand of light, bitchy and intimate fun with the best timing in show business.

“Oh hello,” extravagant director Oliver Putnam (Short) bubbles to Charles Haden-Smith (Martin). “FILMING something today?”

“Sorry?”

“All the MAKEup, I just assumed…”

Yeah, it’s like that.

This isn’t “Truth Be Told” — the podcaster murder drama starring Octavia Spencer, which preceded “Only Murders.” A comedy co-starring Tina Fey, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane and a deliciously over-the-top Sting (playing himself) isn’t just about the amateur sleuthing. It’s another laugh at the expense of “Everybody has a podcast” America’s latest audio fad, and a series that jokes that suggest that every network or streaming service will have its own series about “true crime” podcasters.

That’s what the onetime star of TV’s long-running “Brazzos” cop drama (glimpsed in goofy flashbacks) and the director of “Splash: The Musical” are into these days, one podcast in particular. “All is NOT OK in Oklahoma” and its sleuth (Fey) keeps them glued to their iPhone, or laptop.

They don’t know this about each other until a fire alarm kicks them out of their roomy, beautifully appointed condos and forces them to share a booth at local bar. That’s where they finally meet the building’s mysterious youngest tenant (Gomez), another devotee of that show.

And when the new acquaintances can’t go back into The Arconia because, it turns out, some neighbor they saw in passing in the lobby or elevator shot himself in the head, their curiosity is piqued and their podcast, legitimate theatre and TV cop show savvy is trotted out to poke around and decide that the victim didn’t pull the trigger on himself, no matter what the grumpy detective (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) says.

“Goddammit, what mother-f—–ng podcast are y’all hooked on? Swear to God, if I meet one more ‘true crime’ nut…”

The game is a afoot and the tone is set. They’ll do their own “investigation,” start their own podcast and gather their own evidence (not sharing it with the cops, who open-and-shut this case).

And every so often, some character self consciously will make it rain F-bombs, because that’s how America (and New Yorkers) talk these days.

It’s a series built on characters, the leads and assorted “suspect” neighbors (Sting, Lane, etc.) and running gags.

The ex TV cop is forever trotting out his catch phrase from the series — “This sends the investigation into a whole NEW direction.” He’s “not a tipper” and is hated by the apartment building staff, arrogantly never remembering anyone’s name.

“Do you appeal to ANYbody?”

“Not for years.”

The stage director is always giving “notes,” coaching the “performances” of the podcast — “Too…PBSy! — even people they’re interviewing, and recalling this or that epic flop he steered into Broadway oblivion.

At a couple of points, Short’s Putnam imagines himself as the “director” of this investigation, lining up suspects he berates and dismisses in “A Chorus Line.”

And the keeps-her-secrets Millennial absorbs their shots, and gives as good as she gets.

“I guess old white guys are only afraid of colon cancer…and societal change.”

One artful episode is dialogue-free. One lovely moment has smitten Charles listen to this oboist (Amy Ryan) practice through an open window, and join her in a love duet, because that too-damned-musical Steve Martin can play the concertina, too.

Listen carefully and you’ll hear the flirting as they ease into Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

It’s all more a series of chuckles and surprises than farcical big laughs, with only as much melodramatic menace as Woody Allen’s similar “Manhattan Murder Mystery.” But this trio clicks, and everything “Only Murders in the Building” lightly mocks — New York living, New Yorkers, modern “relationships,” podcasters, podcast fanatics, snooty celebrities, snootier wannabes — is funny because we’ve been laughing at this or that for decades.

Well, except for podcasts. But we used to call that “radio,” back when you had to be good enough to get someone to let you on the air and the “shows” weren’t recorded in your walk-in closet.

Rating: TV-14, some violence, and lots and lots of F-bombs

Cast: Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, with Tiny Fey, Nathan Lane, Sting, Aaron Dominguez, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Amy Ryan

Credits: Created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman. A Hulu release.

Running time: 10 episodes @ 33 minutes each

“Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt)” is so gossamer-light and cute that you don’t realize how good it is until it punches you, right in the heart.

Monica Zanetti’s Aussie LGBTQ coming-of-age romance never lets us see her, or her cast, trying. It sort of stumbles along, every bit as awkward as its leading lady, teenaged and just-figured-out-her-sexuality Ellie (Sophie Hawkshaw). And then, voila, race and heart and romance make their way past the chuckles and take center stage.

Ellie is one of those super-into-school over-achievers, a model student. But she kind of blows the “big reveal” to her single mum (Marta Dusseldorp).

“I’m asking a girl in my class to the formal,” she blurts, scrambling to get the old family video camera ready for an Aussie imitation (frankly admitted) of the American social media mania for “The Big Gesture” prom date invitation. And as an afterthought? “I’m gay.“

When her mother smiles, sweet and gobsmacked, for a tad too long, Ellie isn’t having it.

“Moooooooom! You’re such a bigot!”

She’s not serious, and nothing about this comedy’s first two acts is. The silliest twist of all? Ellie is visited by “your FAIRY godmother. Get it? FAIRY?”

That’s ponytailed, jeans-jacketed Tara (Julia Billington), an enthusiastic ghost who relates some sort of “coming out” rule, that if you had a gay relative who died before you knew them, you qualified for this sort of help.

Tara is a walking, talking anachronism, a bit too ’80s for the Lady Gaga era. Ellie freaks out a bit about the whole “ghost” thing, and rolls her eyes at the over-eager godmother’s dated suggestions.

Need to figure out if a “girl plays for the same team?” Ask her about her favorite (Australian rules football, aka “footie” players). Need tips for that even more awkward “second conversation?”
“Who do you you prefer, k.d. lang or Melissa Etheridge.”

Ellie’s already figured out the girl she’ll ask, the sexy, confident and outspoken Abbie (Zoe Terakes, terrific). Terakes makes Abbie someone Ellie doesn’t have to sweat getting her “gaydar” license for. The way Abbie carries herself, the ease with which she chats up Ellie up when Miss Goody Goody crashes detention, just to be around the foul-mouthed object of her anonymous desire, tells her and us which “team” Abbie’s aligned with.

What Ellie can’t seem to do is get anything out of her mouth that sounds like an invitation or any other type of overture.

Abbie’s friendly “How’s your day going?” earns a nervous “You, too!”

“Ellie & Abbie” never seems more effortless than in the unforced awkwardness of their first chats — in detention, at lunch. The leads click, even if their characters can’t figure out how.

It never seems more contrived than in the over-eager-to-help Godmother Tara moments with a teen who doesn’t want her help. It’s a relief the picture isn’t solely about that.

But that character, Ellie’s mother and Ellie’s mother’s BFF (Rachel House of “Whale Rider,” “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” etc) pay serious dividends when Zanetti’s film turns on an Australian dime and finds its heart.

Zanetti sketches in “high school” in quick strokes, leaving little to distract us from her leading characters and the subtexts the adult supporting players are toting around with them. For a such a short movie, “Ellie & Abbie” never seems to pass by at more than a slow saunter.

But that beautifully disguises the fact that Zanetti’s packed a lot of living, a lot of growing up and plenty of heart and plot into a story that’s really “first romance” simple.

Rating: TV-14, adult themes, profanity

Cast: Sophie Hawkshaw, Zoe Terakes, Marta Dusseldorp, Rachel House and Julia Billington

Credits: Scripted and directed by Monica Zanetti. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:22

The triumph of Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” is the sense of occasion the director and her co-writer/producer Jordan Peele bring to this reboot.

This is horror with grandeur, a movie that pays homage to history and feels so of-the-moment as to seem fresh out of the lab.

“Candyman,” the glossiest horror movie in ages, isn’t just horror. It’s horror that reaches for the Latin in that MGM (which produced the original film and gets co-credit here) logo we see in the opening credits — “Ars gratia artis,” “art for art’s sake.”

We’re treated to Tony Todd’s iconic boogeyman, the gentrification of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green projects by not just yuppies, but art-world Black buppies, the long history of lynching African Americans, then and now, “extra judicial killings” by a callous, trigger-happy police force and one great big unintentional metaphor for America deluged by Delta.

If there’s a lesson about tempting fate in any story that invokes “Say my name (five times),” it’s right out in the open and said out loud to the militantly anti-vax and anti-mask moronocracy.

“F–k around, see what happens.”

DaCosta (“Little Woods”) conjures up a story about stories, having characters, from our artist Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II of “The Get Down”), “researching” the legend for inspiration, to the Cabrini refugee (Colman Domingo of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”) who runs a laundromat, grab us with just their voices. We hear how grad student Helen Lyles (Virginia Madsen, heard on tapes from the original 1992 film) played a part in summoning up the Halloween season horror long ago.

These chilling scenes, just an actor telling a tale, are brilliantly illustrated with creepy-as-all-get-out shadow puppetry. The cut-out stick-puppets match this art-world thriller’s self-conscious sense of “artistry,” pretentious poseurs dabbling where they shouldn’t, gentrifiers blind to their role in cultural destruction.

“The Great Black Hope of the Chicago Art Scene” lives with polished curator Brianna (Teyonah Parris of “The Photograph,””If Beale Street Could Talk” and TV’s “WandaVision”), and desperately needs “the new, the now.” Thanks to a spooky story told by her brother Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), Anthony finds himself stumbling into the Candyman tale while digging around the ruins of Cabrini Green.

He titles his “didactic cliche” (everybody’s a critic, especially the critic — Rebecca Spence) show “Say my Name.” Uh. Oh.

We see the first wrapped candy hit the floor, we cringe. We hear the first bee, we wince. We get our first glimpse of the man with the candy in one hand and a hook for the other, we rejoice.

DaCosta serves up a few of “Candyman’s Greatest Hits” amid the violence she unleashes here. It’s a spatter film that goes to some pains not to show the slashing. We hear it, see flashes of bloody mayhem from inside a locked girls’ bathroom stall in the inevitable “high schoolers summon Candyman” moment.

It may not deliver the edge-of-your-seat gulping terror or pander to the “gore uber alles” corner of horror’s fanbase. But catching just enough of a mass slaughter through a dropped teen’s compact mirror is smart, sophisticated storyboarding and framing.

The acting is more solidly-grounded than dazzling, but Domingo stands out, a character actor taking his place among the greats.

The script is on a whole new horror level, weaving in the themes, subtexts, history and social commentary together so artfully that you might not notice until you see how Anthony’s body, rotting under the weight of the curse he’s unleashed, evolves into the most horrific lynching victim you’ve ever seen.

And kudos to whoever cooked up Troy’s bitchy gay put-down of “Basquiat ass…Sun Ra” pretentious artiste Anthony.

DaCosta, along with cinematographer John Guleserian, gloss-and-grit production designer Cara Brower and art directors Jami Primer and Ines Rose, ensure that fans are served, and fed something that feels — first frame to last — classy, upscale, an homage that delivers that “sense of occasion.”

Rating: R, for bloody horror violence, and language (profanity) including some sexual references

Cast: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyona Parris, Colman Domingo, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Rebecca Spence and Tony Todd

Credits: Directed by Nia DaCosta, scripted by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld and Nia DaCosta, based on the 1992 MGM film. A Universal/MGM release.

Running time: 1:31

“Flag Day,” director and star Sean Penn’s painterly but somewhat perfunctory tale of toxic parenting, was intended as a star vehicle for his daughter Dylan Penn. And he makes sure it fills the bill, in that regard, a movie of striking landscapes and beautiful silhouettes, but whose “money shot,” first scene to last, is close-up after lingering closeup.

All Dylan has to do, playing the teen and then adult journalist Jennifer Vogel, child of a con artist and counterfeiter, is hold her own in scenes with one of the finest screen actors ever. And the model-turned-actress daughter of Robin Wright more or less does, giving us a flash of temper here, weeping despair there and a lot of stoic disappointment in between.

Josh Brolin, Dale Dickey and Eddie Marsan lend effortless support, with Penn’s son Hopper Penn playing the other child of lie-spinning, Chopin-listening Minnesota “entrepreneur” John Vogel, a guy who is in and out of his kids’ lives over the 17 years the story covers.

But Penn the elder has made a movie more concerned with grainy images captured in twilight than pace, more wrapped up in picture-postcard cinematography than a plot that surprises or dialogue that rings true.

“Flag Day” is framed within the real-life journalist-daughter’s meeting with a law enforcement official (Oscar winner Regina King), who fills her in on her father’s latest brush with the law.

The story-proper is told in flashback, with Jennifer (played by Jadyn Rylee as a tween) remembering her “reckless” and dishonest father as the family bounced around, ran up debts and ran out on those debts, sometimes before and occasionally after a beating when he hustled the wrong guy, often torching the house or business he couldn’t make the payments on as he fled.

He’d put Jennifer, his oldest, behind the wheel in his lap on long overnight drives, “because you’ve got to learn to drive if you want to see the world,” and he needed a little shuteye.

Seriously.

John runs out on wife Patty (Katheryn Winnick), tells his brother (Brolin, understated and stoic) “I’d do ANYthing for those kids.”

“Prove it,” his younger brother growls.

Patty crawls into a bottle, and then into a marriage to a creep who takes his best shot at molesting Jennifer during her punked-out teens. And despite all of Patty’s warnings about who and what her father is, that’s her escape.

The child grows into young adulthood, hearing her father spin this or that attempt at “going straight,” debating him on their matching drug-abuse habits, struggling to reconcile her love for him with her desperation for a normal, supportive role-model parent.

Dickey does a short, earthy turn as John’s mom, calling her son “a bad penny…
born on Flag Day” who would “burn down the world if he thought it’d put him in a white mansion.” And Marsan has a cameo playing a polluter the adult Jennifer confronts in an interview.

What Penn was shooting for here is a far softer-edged “At Close Range,” a career-making coming-of-age picture about that moment when a child realizes they’ve been worshipping a false idol.

But “softer” in this case means the arc of the story is pre-determined and dramatically flat. The stakes seem lower, right up to the moment in the third act when they’re not.

Jennifer’s “finding herself” years are covered in a montage of hitchhiking hippy excesses. And there’s not much detail or color to her father’s myriad schemes (a “jeans stretching” device) to keep things interesting.

Their shared scenes have some meat to them, but the content around them is so thin that we’re relieved when John pulls a bank robbery and disappointed when it’s handled so flatly.

Penn the younger just turned 30, and is thus less convincing as a teen than as an adult. And the “model” in her (she’s done a little acting, here and there) might explain some of the grammatically clunky lines she spouts (Blown takes?) as Jennifer tries to get into journalism school, and then becomes a journalist, one lacking an alacrity with the language when asking questions, arguing with an editor or facing off with a polluter.

The problem with “Flag Day” isn’t that she doesn’t measure up to the material. It’s that a pretty promising story (the “Ford v. Ferrari” Butterworth brothers scripted it) rarely measures up to the damned fine cast her father rounded up for it. He’s made a film that may look as painterly as Penn’s best directing job, “Into the Wild,” but never measures up to it.

Rating: Some Drug Use, Violent Content, language (profanity)

Cast: Sean Penn, Dylan Penn, Regina King, Dale Dickey, Hopper Penn, Eddie Marsan, and Josh Brolin

Credits: Directed by Sean Penn, script by Jez Butterworth and John Henry Butterworth. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:49

There are “film festival” movies, pictures so odd that there’s no audience for them outside of “The Festival Circuit,” and there are student films, which are unpolished and indulgent for a reasons, and there are even student “film festival” films — indulgent onanism somehow interesting enough to gain entry to a film fest, here and there.

“Like a Dirty French Novel” is almost a whole new thing, a nonsensical mishmash in the episodic, possibly interconnected “stories” mold. “Pulp Fiction,” “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” “Sin City” were examples of this that worked, some more than others.

“Like a Dirty French Novel” doesn’t.

A seriously random, badly-acted (as a rule), with lines recited rather than “performed,” “stories” that lead nowhere with characters that aren’t relatable — to the viewer or reality in general, here’s a “film” that has it all. Or nothing to recommend it, to be more precise.

Sex and sex work and phone sex and porn kind of weave through it, not so much a “theme” as well, “something to put in our movie.”

Florid, deranged monologues, random action — a kidnapping, mistaken identity, car theft, “It’s quicksand, it’s QUICKsand!” — feigned “erotic” dancing, a mysterious phone-sex caller, Halloween-masked “observers, all set against a “vertiginous pandemic.”

All these “stories,” not one of them worth following, not a one amusing, titillating or remotely entertaining. “Tied together?” Not really.

The upshot? Unwatchable twaddle. Clever title, though.

Rating: unrated violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Laura Urgelles, Amanda Viola, Jennifer Daly, Brittany Sampson, Robby Valls, Aaron Bustos, Dan Rojay, Arko Miro

Credits: Directed by Mike Cuenca, script by Mike Cuenca, Ashlee Elfman, Dan Rojay. A Bldv. du Cinema release.

Running time: 1:18