Movie Nation

A fictional Buddhist legend separating the two eyes of The Evil One so that they can’t reunite and “turn the world into Hell” is the centerpiece of “The 8th Day,” a Korean horror thriller in which the hope of the world rests in the hands of (naturally) Korean monks and a Virgin Shaman.

The red eye got buried in the West, in the desert on the Indian/Pakistani border, so the story goes. The black eye was tucked away for safe keeping, inside a capped stone urn inside a Sarira basket in the East. Guess which country that would be?

Kimchi and Hite lager for everyone!

The inciting incident in Tae-Hyung Kim’s film involves an archaeologist who tracks down the Western basket, and takes being called a “fraud” so poorly that he must have his revenge on the world. Just like a guy, ending civilization just to “prove I’m RIGHT.”

The legend, repeated to a couple of characters so that the audience will eventually remember it, says that these eyes will use “seven stepping stones over seven nights” to make their way back to each other.

“They reunite on ‘The 8th Day!'”

Elderly Master Haejong gets wind of the new danger, summons an aspiring monk who hasn’t finished his vow of silence yet. Cheongeok (Dong-yeong Kim), of all people, is who he entrusts the Eastern Eye with, and who he sends to “find Seonhwa!”

That would be a grumpy, haunted, solitary man (Sung-min Lee) who finds his visitor annoying, even more so after the high-maintenance young monk (He can’t touch meat, so buying him a burger means you have to remove the patty yourself.) accidentally breaks his vow of silence.

He’s stuck with a chatterbox and he undertakes the mission to take away a “stepping stone,” the only one the monks know by legend. “Stepping stones” are the people whose body the demon takes over. All are random, save for the Virgin Shaman, Ae-ran (Kim Yoo-Jeong). Find her and you break the “bridge” to creating Hell on Earth.

There’s also a dogged police detective (Rich Ting) unwittingly tracking a demon thanks to the bodies the beast leaves behind. The cop is also saddled with a clumsy sidekick (Nam-Da-reum).

The toothy, crazy-eyed grin their quarry wears should give them away. If not, when the “eye” pokes itself out of their cheek, the game’s up.

The movie’s a plodding, semi-methodical search for the black eye demon, which Cheongeok clumsily lost and let loose, with Seonhwa starting to look more and more like a suspect, the more often he turns up in places where desiccated corpses are found.

The finale, involving more incantations and an elaborate “trap,” is pretty good. And the effects can be chilling in that neck-cracking, beady-eyed grin sort of way. Lee makes a properly grizzled anti-hero for this question.

But the exposition-heavy plot and long leaving many of the monstrous attacks off-camera rob “The 8th Night” of suspense or anything else of interest. For something that we can label “K-horror,” this is tedious going.

And if you’re not going to do anything more with a character you’ve named “The Virgin Shaman” than this, why bother?

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Sung-min Lee, Kim Yoo-Jeong, Rich Ting, Dong-yeong Kim, Nam Da-Reum

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tae-Hyung Kim. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

“I Carry You With Me” is an innovative take on the classic “coming to America” immigrant saga.

It’s not just about Mexicans longing to travel north for opportunity and freedom. The couple here are gay, so their hopes are to be more open about their relationship in a culture more tolerant than Catholic, machismo-addicted Mexico.

Their story is told as a docudrama. The film lives in three timelines. In their childhood, little Ivan quickly learned “to pass,” to keep his sexuality hidden, but wealthier Gerardo didn’t, and they both picked up on the dangerous intolerance that faced them as adults, occasionally in the cruelest ways. We spend much of the movie in their young adult years, where the aspiring chef Ivan (Armando Espitia, terrific) meets graduate student Gerardo (Christian Vazquez), both of them far from home, in the city of Puebla. They talk of their dreams, and one decides he simply must “cross over” into America.

And decades later, we spend time with the real Ivan and Gerardo, living in New York, successful but trapped, unable to leave or travel by plane because of they both crossed-over illegally.

Family members age and die, and Ivan feels the tug of the son he fathered but didn’t raise and hasn’t seen for decades, a boy and then young man repeatedly denied a VISA because US Immigration officials have an idea of what he’ll do if he “crosses over.”

Director and co-writer Heidi Ewing presents this story in the sad tones of an elegy to all you give up and what you’re driven to do to make this struggle and separation “worth it.”

Cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramirez paints his picture in muted blues, underlit interiors, early mornings and mid-twilight to match the soft conversations, the tender courtship.

It’s a familiar narrative that leans toward melodrama, and even the dramatic moments avoid loud confrontations.

One child is slower experiencing what is “wrong” about his gender dysphoria. Why CAN’T he have a quinceañera? A boy is dragged into the desert by a father furious at him and himself for “not teaching you to be a MAN,” (in Spanish with English subtitles). “Do you know what happens to people like you? They get killed, and then dumped in the mountains!”

The coyote-assisted “crossing over” is both a classic rite of passage and a trope of such narratives, fraught in familiar but entirely believable ways. The threat of deportation is an unseen helicopter at night, an unsympathetic border agent, nothing more overt.

The film doesn’t judge the characters for the fateful choices they make, but it does have them rationalize them to each other in the debates about something that will separate the couple, perhaps forever. The wealthier, more educated Gerardo laments about “What will you DO in California?” should that be where Ivan ends up. Pick fruit?

“We’re gays. We don’t PICK avocadoes!”

The triumph of Ewing’s film is that it packages the American Dream for those who long to come here as rewarding and justified, but sometimes selfish and ill-considered with trade-offs that make the migrants and the viewer wonder if it all was worth it.

Telling a loved one “I carry you with me” is never enough.

MPA Rating: R for brief nudity and profanity

Cast: Armando Espitia, Christian Vazquez

Credits: Directed by Heidi Ewing, script by Heidi Ewing and Alan Page. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:52

On a night in February of 1983, Carlos DeLuna ran away from the scene of a murder, a Corpus Christi, Texas convenience store.

The 911 dispatcher, and later a courtroom, heard the 911 tape of Wanda Lopez confirming that a Hispanic male was robbing her store, and heard him kill her.

There were eyewitnesses. And when after a “chaotic” 45 minute manhunt, the police dragged DeLuna, a man with a long rap sheet, out from under a van and stuck him in a police car, those eyewitnesses identified him as the killer they’d seen.

DeLuna assured cops that he didn’t do it, but that he knew who did. He gave the police a name. He trotted out an alibi. And then he clammed up.

But at trial, that alibi was proven a lie. Prosecutor Steve Schiwetz was “very compelling,” recall reporters who were present there, as he said that other person named, “Carlos Hernandez,” as a “phantom,” no one they’d ever heard of.

As even his defense attorney lost faith, DeLuna was convicted. irregularities in the case, things the prosecution either didn’t know or failed to reveal, turned up. But “nobody wanted to rock the boat,” one attorney remembers. “The case was closed.” And six years later, Texas put Carlos DeLuna to death.

Using recreations, TV coverage, police, attorney and eyewitness testimomy, filmmaker Patrick Forbes leads us through this case in a way it must have unfolded back in the ’80s. In “The Phantom” he allows us to believe what witnesses, lawyers, police, the media and a jury did way back then. We’re kind of implicated, in that way. It seems “open and shut.”

But then we hear an attorney not directly linked to the case, Rene Rodriguez, speak about how Corpus Christi justice worked back then. “If it involves somebody of color,” he says, to the locals that just meant “one less Mexican.” Rodriguez, and later James Liebman, professor at Columbia University, point out the gaping holes in the case, with the fact that a crime scene covered in blood and bloody footprints, there wasn’t a drop on DeLuna.

We learn that there were conflicting descriptions of the suspect. We hear that police “recorded over” taped accounts of the manhunt, and hear a version they didn’t erase. And we see that the “phantom” was real, that cops and prosecutors knew all about this knife-wielding sociopath, who left a trail of violence leading up to that murder, with more violence to come as he walked the streets, a free man.

We start to wonder and then we lose all doubt. Once again, rush-to-judgement Texas has executed the wrong man.

Forbes — “The Widowmaker” heart attack documentary was his — basically recreates the crime and the research on it done by Liebman and his student team and published in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. He skillfully takes from a shocking crime to the almost as shocking miscarriage of justice that follows. And he lets us see how it might have happened.

That’s what sets “The Phantom” apart from other “Innocence Project” cases and the like. We can see why people were convinced they had the right guy, only noticing the discrepancies when they’re pointed out to us.

The elderly, thoroughly professional coroner wonders why there was no blood on the man arrested, and explains how there should be. Prosecutor Schiwetz feigns ignorance about not “finding” Carlos Hernandez, when he’d been arrested for convenience store knife robberies, with identical looking weapons, several times. Defense attorney James Lawrence bristles and says he’s heard the “bad lawyer” complaint before.

It’s pretty damn damning, to be honest.

And we wonder why we’re still letting an easily-corrupted system kill people on our behalf, and if anything will ever change, especially in Texas.

MPA Rating: unrated, a graphic 911 tape, crime scene photos

Cast: Manuel DeLuna, Mary Conejo, Steve Schiwetz, George Aguirre, Julie Arsuaga, Karen Boudrie, Linda Carrico, James Liebman,

Credits: Directed by Patrick Forbes. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:23

Claustrophobic, minimalist and deliciously macabre, “Rock, Paper, Scissors” is an Argentine variation on the paranoid excesses of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” or “Misery.”

Well-acted and properly gloomy, if a tad predictable, it starts off dark and turns pitch-black in an instant as an often harrowing tale of sibling rivalry and old grudges plays out.

The door is buzzing incessantly, but siblings María José (Valeria Giocelli) and Jesús (Pablo Sigal) can’t tear themselves away from “The Wizard of Oz” (dubbed into Spanish) on TV. They have to “Piedra, Papel, Tijera” (rock, paper, scissors) to decide who finally gets the door.

It’s their half-sister from Spain, Magdalena (Agustina Cerviño)! “You should have called,” they chirp (in Spanish with English subtitles). But she did. The phone’s unplugged.

“People mean to help, but they can be a nuisance.”

She doesn’t want to put anybody out so she’s made a reservation at a hotel. There’s been a death. Their shared father left “No will?” Well, we’ll settle everything up, take care of paperwork. Probably need to sell the house and split the proceeds, OK?

That’s when Magdalena falls down the stairs. When she wakes up to the sound of devout María José’s fervent prayers, she’s in a hospital bed that their Dad used to use, she’s bandaged up and in a neck brace. And she’s sure one of them pushed her, and accuses the “psycho” sister the first time she and Jesús are alone.

Will he help? Was he in on it? How can she know? She should call for help, but her phone won’t charge. Screams blast out into void, not clearing the walls of the house.

“Sometimes we need to scream for God to hear us,” her sister coos.

Not to worry, the family doctor is checking in on her tomorrow. Well, maybe the day after tomorrow. Actually, he’s been held up…

The script unravels little pieces of their shared past and little clues about what’s been going on there since actress Magdalena left for Spain to pursue a different life. Her sister may be psycho, but her brother? He’s an aspiring filmmaker, aka also a little “off.” We see snippets of his dream movie, which confirms it.

Will Magdalena put together the pieces, and will knowing this give her a means of escape?

All we know is that this wasn’t the only time those two have watched “The Wizard of Oz,” and that Dad didn’t die by suicide. But he’d tried it.

Co-directors Martín Blousson and Macarena García Lenzi, making their debut feature, manage some suspense but forget to use the traditional Gothic horror camera angles that tends to heighten it. They rely on revelations, character “tells” and a shifting power and guilt dynamic to pull the viewer in and keep us engaged.

And the occasional shock doesn’t hurt, either.

Cerviño, a dead ringer for a North American actress with whose fame stems from “Argentina” (Patti Lupone, the greatest “Evita”), makes Magdalena an empathetic yet cunning victim. Giorcelli and Sigal have to alternately suggest guilelessness and guilt, and almost manage that.

Maybe you figure it all out more quickly than the filmmakers would have liked, but maybe that doesn’t matter as much as you’d fear. Thanks to all involved, “Misery” has company.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Agustina Cerviño, Valeria Giorcelli and Pablo Sigal.

Credits: Directed by Martín Blousson, Macarena García Lenzi, script by Martín Blousson, Macarena García Lenzi, Julieta García Lenzi and Valentín Javier Diment. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:23

Mike’s the kind of guy everybody walks over and everybody talks over. Like that manic driveway car salesman Dennis, who tries to sell him a ’65 Chrysler New Yorker when the kid came over to buy a practical, cheap Toyota.

“This things runs like a scalded dog! Two and a half tons…Baby you hit something in this? You don’t need an air bag, because THEY’RE gonna know it and you’re NOT.”

Mike needs the car because he has a “First Date,” and his self-absorbed parents wouldn’t think of changing their Vegas plans so that he can use the family van. “Condoms are in Dad’s night-stand,” and they’re off.

He got the date because motor-mouthed pal Brett barked “Can you just stop being YOU for TWO seconds?” and dialed Kelsey up and put Mike on the phone with her. He got the date because Kelsey took charge of the chat that shy, put-upon Mike wasn’t holding up his end on.

“How have we not talked since eight grade?” she wants to know.

But that car will keep hapless Mike (Tyson Brown) from Kelsey (Shelby Duclos) for much of the mayhem of an epic, not-quite-manic Southern California night. A lot of people want that New Yorker, and not just the older couple that spy it on the road and were previous owners.

“I redid the rear seat cover,” Thelma (Shari Schweigler) gushes. “The blood wouldn’t come out.”

The combo gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight/book club led by The Captain (Jesse Janzen) crave it.

Dennis the “salesman” is missing, so his trigger-happy wife (Leah Finity) figures if she finds it, she’ll find him.

And there are deadpan sheriff’s deputies (Nicole Berry, Samuel Ademola) Mike keeps stumbling into, saying “I know everybody says this but…It’s NOT how it looks!”

“First Date” is a beautifully-engineered farce that runs a lot like that dieseling, sputtering ’65 New Yorker. All the plot elements click, the performances have a nice snap and the dialogue can crackle. But the pacing is way off. A simple trim to 90-95 minutes would make it fly by like “a scalded dog.

What’s here gets laughs out of car crashes and shootouts, an errant Roomba and a lot of people who don’t know the difference between a “short story” and a “novella,” and which one Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” is.

It’s a Tarantino-twisted tale of drugs, gangs, deputies and dead people, and poor Mike is just there to react to it all. Dennis? He’ll chatter through every scene unless somebody tapes his mouth shut or puts a bullet in him.

“If I’m gonna die, I’d at least like it to be at the hands of somebody who knows how to pour piss out of a boot without READING the INSTRUCTIONS on the f—–g HEEL!”

Kelsey? Well, maybe Mike crushes on her because he’s seen her work the heavy bag, boxing in her garage. Kelsey’s a lot of things Mike isn’t, starting with “badass.” That could come in handy.

All things considered, kids, you could do a lot worse than “First Date” as a first date movie.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Tyson Brown, Shelby Duclos, Jesse Janzen, Nicole Berry, Scott E. Noble, Samuel Ademola, Angela Barber

Credits: Scripted and directed by Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:44

I was curious to see what “The Nickelback of American Letters” was up to, dipping his glib toe in the murky waters of World War II and the undying myth of the “surgical (air) strike.”

“The Bomber Mafia” is a well-heeled podcast masquerading as a book, short and thinly backed up enough to devour in a single sitting. He of course plugs his podcasts on this same subject many times during its pages, and the TED talks he’s showbizzed on it as well.

Gladwell comes at several subjects and points, some head-on, some he sidles up to, about the bombing practices of World War II. He didn’t coin the phrase “The Bomber Mafia,” but he gives a functional overview of the pre-war corps of airmen, stationed in remote Alabama, who came up with the idea of “choke point” bombing, designed to break the enemy’s ability to make war without sacrificing millions in trenches and millions of civilians in the bargain.

A more “humane” way of making war spun out of these flying theorists, one that dominates US military thinking even today. Gladwell chats with a number of high-ranking Air Force folks, as well as historians and (pointlessly) the descendants of some of those who made those fateful decisions long ago.

As a historian, my “Nickelback” label fits, as he’s a popular best seller whom most legitimate historians seem to dismiss, and you’re hard pressed to find anyone who’ll admit he or she is a “fan.” You figure out why when you see the weight he gives a Ronald Reagan-narrated Air Force documentary script and the exonerating, image-polishing memories of General Curtis LeMay’s daughter. Not serious research.

“Glib.” As glib as say, a podcast, TED talk, or a movie or book review. It makes him readable, easy to summarize and quote (“10,000 hours” to become an “expert”), but with none of the authority he seems to crave.

Here’s what’s valuable in the book. We know little about the brilliant Dutch crank who invented the famed Norden bombsight of WWII bombing myth. The fact that the damned complicated analog computer didn’t do the job well at all under combat conditions isn’t wholly brushed aside, but Gladwell gets at that.

The “choke point” theory didn’t work under WWII combat conditions either. There have been other books decrying the staggering human and financial costs of that part of the war in Europe, debunking the “official” Air Force legend of how we brought Germany to her knees by bombing fuel refineries and ball bearing plants. The math, economists pointed out, didn’t add up. They’d still be making ball bearings and fighting had the Russians, Brits and Americans not marched in and stopped them.

LeMay, a much vilified figure who supposedly fretted over being charged with war crimes for his fire bombing Japan into submission, gets an image makeover. “Pugnacious,” a “doer” not a “thinker” (lazy, dim, drunken legacy-admission C-student George W. Bush stole quotes from the best), LeMay figured out that he couldn’t get Norden-directed bombs to hit the Japanese airplane engine factories (to become Subaru), so he swiftly pivoted to doing what the British did in Europe — carpet bombing/fire bombing cities.

Other books I’ve read — not all by British “I told you so” historians — maintain that Germany came closest to collapsing before its borders were ever crossed by ground troops after British bombers laid waste to Cologne, Dresden and Hamburg, killing thousands but leaving hundreds of thousands more homeless, adrift on roads and bringing the country nearly to a halt. A few more night “terror raids” or “morale raids,” and Berlin would have lost control.

No, “terror bombing” didn’t defeat Britain when the Germans did it, and thinking it would make the Germans give up where “British breeding” did not is, as Gladwell points out, laughable.

But the German bombers didn’t have the numbers or the payload to cover the skies with planes that carpeted blocks and square miles of cities. Gladwell leaves that out, as well as some of the other famous “choke point” strikes of the war — Ploesti, Peenemunde and the famous “dam busters” raid on the Ruhr, which did work…just not well enough.

LeMay took that British “terror bombing” notion, and the American-invented, Harvard-tested (in a retention pond dug near the Charles River) napalm, and burned over 60 Japanese cities to the ground.

No housing, no manufacturing, hundreds of thousands of deaths, Japan was at an untenable “cannot carry on” point before the A-bombs were dropped (which LeMay had nothing to do with), with only fanatics in the Japanese government hellbent on carrying on. There are other book length accounts of their sudden surrender, attempts to kidnap the Emperor to stop it, etc. “Bomber Mafia” and Gladwell admit that LeMay probably won the war, and insist that the “surgical strike” fellows won the peace. But for proof he cites a cocktail party conversation with Air Force leaders who boast of bombing accuracy today. Not always. Not by a long shot.

Gladwell’s book is too short to consider the consequences of that. We didn’t try to kill enemies, terror cells or foreign leaders with air strikes before Reagan took a swing at Gaddafi (and, uh, missed). It’s a monthly occurrence and cornerstone of American policy today, even though no surgical strike took out bin Laden, Assad or Hussein.

So perhaps the real value of “Bomber Mafia” is as a “podcast” that points you to “further reading.”

Gladwell’s dalliances in the psychology of doubling down” on “truths” that devotees treat like articles of faith — people cultishly refusing to surrender their long-held beliefs when confronted with damning, irrefutable contrary facts — seems like more fertile soil for him to till, and perhaps he will in his next podcast-short publishing outing.

But even Nickelback wore out their welcome and their fans, eventually.

“The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation and the Longest Night of the Second World War.” by Malcolm Gladwell. Little Brown, $27, 240 pages including index.

One thing I dare say Universal never bargained on was how sad these America Goes to Hell horror tales of “The Purge” can be. Because it’s not characters struggling, gaining our empathy and then dying that threatens to bring the viewer to tears, it’s how prescient these movies can seem, prescience tinged with regret for the America we hoped we’d be living in.

Because after January 6, 2021, nothing we see in these movies seems the least bit far-fetched. We know these grievance-filled goons are among us, hoarding guns, organizing online, plotting violence, egged on by opportunistic public figures in politics and right wing media.

We know they like to play dress-up, the dears.

We know they’re anti-democratic — Putin-worshipping fascists, parading around in their Vanilla ISIS pick-em-up trucks — infuriating by themselves, alarming when they’re waving their racist dog whistle banners.

Writer-director James DeMonaco tapped into the rising temperatures in a nation that couldn’t keep its white supremacist underbelly quiet when a Black man won the presidency with 2013’s “The Purge.” And in the years since, he’s charted/predicted a national descent into violence and madness, racial/cultural backlash run amok, cultish devotion to false prophets, the works, with every new wrinkle in this B-movie (and TV series) horror parable feeling more real with each passing year.

“The Forever Purge” weaves it all in — race and immigration, resentment against elites and a penchance for violence to show us how the next Civil War starts, or might if we let the insurrectionists among us go unpunished.

A racist political party, pushed from power, schemes and cheats and frightens its way back in control so that divided America can get back in the habit of “purging” its rage once a year.

We see much of what transpires here through the eyes of newcomers. Adela (Ana de la Reguera) knows about the coming Purge, but still hires coyotes to bring her north. She joins husband Juan (Tenoch Huerta), who has a job as a horse-trainer “horse whisperer” on a ranch in Texas.

That’s the setting of this “Purge,” our most militant, belligerent, armed and anti-immigrant state, where Adela finds a job in a meat packing plant.

They will ride out the purge as a couple, in a guarded warehouse where Latin American immigrants will be safe, they hope. That’s no more comfort than the sounds of gunfire are.

“There’s parts of Mexico that sound like this every night.”

Back at the ranch, the patriarch (Will Patton) worries that his son (Josh Lucas), who badgers Juan with accusations and threats, has reached his 40s without absorbing his father’s tolerance and values.

“Always taught my son to be a patriotic American,” he sighs. “But maybe I didn’t teach him what that meant.”

Come the purge, the white folks will be holed up in their fortified ranch, armed to the teeth. But they haven’t reckoned on one disgruntled employee (Brett Edwards) with a serious case of right-wing class war on his mind. His gang of New Patriots roll in, and all bets on the night to come are off.

But come the dawn, the sirens sound and it all ends, right? Not this time. “Endless Purge” or “Forever Purge” or “Purge Till You Drop,” this starts to look like a full-on insurrection.

Who will save whom, who will survive and where will there be refuge as Texas descends into secessionist slaughter and chaos?

These movies aren’t subtle enough to be called “satire,” but that’s what we’re watching. “Real Americans” (some with swastikas tattooed on their faces) revel in “home grown music from the heartland” and reject the “brownies” they see everywhere they look.

They will “PURIFY” “their” country with an ongoing purge. “Martial law” by their New Founding Fathers of America party just cements an unseen president’s hold on power and gives them license. The military is pulling back to let them have at it, martial law be damned.

The Latinx folks are scrambling to stay out of their way, and when that fails, they fight back. They, of course, are the first ones arrested for doing just that — defending themselves.

The violence is first-person-shooter video-game oriented, until the bullets run out. The shootouts, chases and fights are pro forma, and mostly effective enough as action beats.

A Nazi in a police paddy wagon ticks off the sounds he and others hear in the streets as they’re arrested and driven to jail — “Shotgun. Thirty-aught-six. An AK-47. That THERE’s a Glock!”

The reminders that this is satire come from the soundtrack (Freddy Fender singing “I’ll Be There Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” in Spanish and English) and the archetypal characters.

There’s a sage Native American pundit (Gregory Zaragoza) warning us on TV, then picking up the bow when we won’t listen.

The film’s message, that America’s immigrants and its disapproving but hopeful neighbors might help pull us from the brink, is as uplifting as these movies get.

Proof that this is a B-movie and straight-up exploitation comes from the violence, and the sometimes cheesy moments of connection, teamwork and salvation.

In every “Purge,” it’s always darkest before the dawn. But with “The Forever Purge,” we have to consider what we do after the sun comes up and the goons among us haven’t stopped, and haven’t been brought to justice.

MPA Rating: R for strong/bloody violence, and language throughout

Cast: Ana de la Reguera, Josh Lucas, Tenoch Huerta, Leven Rambin, Susie Abromeit, Sammi Rotibi, Gregory Zaragoza and Will Patton

Credits: Scripted and directed by James DeMonaco. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:43

A young man with a gun breaks into a Warsaw TV studio on New Millennium Eve, figuring to deliver a message or manifesto to the masses in “Prime Time.” But that’s not the way things work out in this mildly-suspenseful Polish thriller, a film that manages to be derivative and different, although not in ways that make it worth recommending.

In this violent grab for attention, our troubled, unstable gunman (Bartosz Bielenia) hasn’t picked his time to shine with much care.

Money Monster, Network

It’s the end of a millennium, and New Year’s Eve. Everybody’s out partying. Everybody else is out of reach. The president will be speaking shortly. And even if the world-weary new producer (Malgorzata Hajewska) hadn’t cut off the live feed the moment young Sebastian burst in, he’d have a helluva time getting anyone’s attention.

Interviews with Polish youth reveals a wide range of plans to “leave” the country. The show Sebastian interrupts is a popular phone-in giveaway program. A “winner” keeps bleating “Hello? Hello? Did I win?” over the PA system as he seizes hostess/newscaster Mira (Magdalena Poplawska) and handcuffs her to the security guard he took hostage to get in the studio.

What’s his beef? What’s he determined to say? The control room takes on a late Soviet bloc nostalgia as the network security chief declares “Totally not my job, armed assault (in dubbed English, or original Polish with English subtitles). We check IDs,” that’s it.

Over the course of this only faintly-tense evening, Sebastian rants to “go live,” and Laura, the producer, resists those in the control room who suggest they acquiesce.

“And if he shoots Mira or the guard in front of the TV audience, or blows his brains out or screams ‘GAS the JEWS’ or does the Hitler salute?”

Nope. No nationwide audience for you, kid. And then SWAT arrives, two negotiators (Cezary Kosinski, Monika Frajczyk) take over, and the night wears on.

Director and co-writer Jakub Piatek might be trying to make points about cries for help and attention, about media’s toxic allure. But too little of that gets, and too much that’s familiar from other hostage tales, from “Dog Day Afternoon” to “Money Monster,” just plays as tired.

Even Sebastian’s chat with his un-summoned father (Juliusz Chrzastowski) going South, with the old man taunting the kid, feels like something we’ve seen before, because we have.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Bartosz Bielenia, Magdalena Poplawska, Andrzej Klak and Malgorzata Hajewska

Credits: Directed by Jakub Piatek, script by Lukasz Czapski, Jakub Piatek. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

As somebody who’ll laugh at any word that comes out of Alec Baldwin‘s mouth in that bossy, Wall Street bull-in-a-china-shop Jack Donaghy (“30 Rock”) voice, I laughed and laughed at “The Boss Baby.”

An animated tale of a bossy, business-suited baby taking charge of a threat to babies everywhere by leading his stunned older brother on a secret mission, with dialogue riddled with Baldwin in-jokes (his “Glengarry Glen Ross” hardcase sales chief)? Hilarious.

 “Put… that… cookie… down! Cookies are for closers!”

But here we are, four years and one 50 episode-run TV series later, and the “Boss Baby” is out of laughs. And those who would further profit from the Baby with Baldwin’s Voice gag are hard-pressed for ideas.

“The Boss Baby: Family Business” is a sequel to the TV show and the earlier movie, with an adult Theodore Templeton (Baldwin still) tearing up the business world, too busy to marry, quick to over-gift brother Tim (James Marsden) and his family (Eva Longoria) for the times he’s not there with them.

Tim’s recovered/forgotten that Theodore was once the diapered top agent/”fixer” for Baby Corp., and has a little girl of his own — Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt) — and a new toddler in the house.

Guess what? Baby Tina has the same calling Theodore once had. And she’s voiced by comedienne Amy Sedaris like a baby on Red Bull and a deadline.

“I’ve been on hold so long I’ve got a TOOTH coming in!”

There’s a new threat to babies, and it’s coming from this Acorn Corp, a “Little Einsteins/Baby Geniuses” operation designed to maximize every child’s potential and run by this expert (Jeff Goldblum, of course) who shames parents everywhere with “The only thing holding your child back is YOU.”

It’s “The END of childhood” as pampered, coddled American babies know it. And Acorn and Dr. Armstrong must be stopped! There’s nothing for it but to de-age Theodore, and Tim too (by accident) so that they can go undercover as infant and sibling at the Acorn Academy.

Get in, get the dirt, foil the bad guy, get out.

“Who wants to play ‘Shawshank?'”

There are a lot of voices I adore in this, Goldblum especially. And he milks this Dr. Armstrong with every plummy vowel, in every language, that the character pronounces.

It’s still the Baldwin show, with cracks about “Norma Rae,” “Night of the Living Boomers,” shots at public radio (Baldwin’s had shows there over the years) and singing “Strangers in the Night” in something not unlike his Tony Bennett impression.

“What a buncha diaper-sniffers” and “What the frittata?” are the caliber of one-liners.

The entire affair isn’t terrible, just a drag. Truth be told, they’ve taken this idea and pounded the cute right out of it. Time to put the pacifier in this boss baby and move on.

Cast: The voices of Alec Baldwin, James Marsden, Amy Sedaris, Jeff Goldblum, Eva Longoria, Lisa Kudrow and Jimmy Kimmel

Credits: Directed by Tom McGrath, script by Michael McCullers based on characters created by Marla Frazee. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:47

It’s not “‘Groundhog Day’…technically.” Still, “that’s close enough.”

But “Long Story Short,” remembering it might help Teddy out. He’s the king of “waiting” and suddenly his life with his beloved Leanne is rushing by, one lost year at a time. He woke up the day after their wedding and one year was gone. A nap made another circuit of the sun just vaporize, a tumble into a kiddie pool takes away another, and so on.

And he’s not able to articulate what’s going on with his life, “traveling through time,” not that anyone else can tell. Because no one — not the wife who’s sharing that life with him and sees him all through that year that he’s just missed, not his best friend Sam, not the baby he didn’t realize he’s fathered and is supposedly raising — sees any evidence of that.

Except for that once a year, on their anniversary, when Teddy goes mental and can’t recall anything that’s gone on or all that’s gone wrong. Teddy’s marriage, friendships and life are getting away from him.

Rafe Spall is properly befuddled and exasperated as Teddy, a guy not able to cope with this curse or whatever you call it. Zahra Newman plays his straight man, long-suffering Leanne, the one who is witness to the years that pass as Teddy “forgets” their anniversary (He hasn’t. He can’t.), or at least forgets to buy a proper anniversary present as their marriage crumbles because Teddy is literally “never there” for it.

Writer-director Josh Lawson, an actor (“Mortal Kombat”) who also has a small role in “Long Story Short,” is dipping his toe in “About Time/Time Traveler’s Wife/Click/Groundhog Day” waters with this downbeat, wistful rom-com.

The script freely acknowledges its antecedents, because Teddy and best pal Sam (Ronny Chieng) break it down. All Teddy has to do is make things right, finally have “that perfect day” like Bill Murray in that Harold Ramis classic, and this will end.

“You DO know it’s not a documentary, right?”

But that “work out how to make this right” bit is just mentioned. Life doesn’t give you second, third, and three thousandth chances like that. It just passes you by.

Lawson’s Australian comedy begins with an epic “meet cute” that begins with mistaken New Year’s Eve kiss and ends with an epi pen. Confessions of true love at a cliffside cemetery — Teddy’s Dad died before he finally got around to proposing to Leanne come next.

And then “The Stranger” (Noni Hazlehurst) overhears them, and offers the workaholic, put-off important things, always “waiting” Teddy a gift. Only he doesn’t realize that or remember it.

Cynical Teddy has to learn big life lessons in what amounts to a day-long rush — aging but unchanged, scrambling to hang onto the great love of his life, friends and the like with mere hours to figure it all out.

You almost certainly have to have a few years on you to “get” or at least empathize with “Long Story Short,” which is “Where’d the time go?” writ large.

Spall’s antic act is fun, but the script doesn’t lean that way. His deft way with throw-away lines like “How young can you get Alzheimer’s?” is here just enough to lighten the mood.

He wakes up to a pregnant Leanne, and then is offered a baby girl he’s never met and expected to know her name.

“Tal-LUH-lah!”

“F— off, it is NOT…” Tallulah’s “not a name. It’s CHILD abuse!”

But as the years rush past, putting off the honeymoon they “never have time” for, going to the job he hates and promises to quit, and his iPhone becomes his only archive to the love, life, births and death he’s missed, Teddy’s “Groundhog Day” takes on the air that the original “Groundhog Day” took on — an intimate tragedy.

It’s a slender film with simplistic “live your truth” and “YOLO” messages, but Spall and Newman and Dena Kaplan, as the ex-girlfriend who wore the same dress on a New Year’s Eve that led to Teddy kissing Miss Wrong who turned out to be Miss Right, give it the heart and pathos it needs to pay off.

“Long Story Short,” here’s a rom-com that’s worth your time.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout 

Cast: Rafe Spall, Zahra Newman, Ronny Chieng, Dena Kaplan, Josh Lawson and Noni Hazlehurst

Credits: Scripted and directed by Josh Lawson. A Canal+ film, a Saban Films release

Running time: 1:35