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Here’s what the best movies about talk radio — “Talk Radio” being the gold standard — get right.

It’s what Marshall McLuhan called a “hot medium,” requiring the engagement of the listener/consumer at a level TV and film don’t. Voices matter. The words matter.

It’s a world with urgency built into it, an endless succession of moment by moment deadlines where every second is “money” and even the most laid-back practitioners (the somnambulists at NPR, and their podcast imitators) have an energy that can seem manic when you look behind the scenes.

“Dead air” — casual, undramatic silences — is a death sentence. No one “listening at home” will “stay tuned.”

The Eddie Marson talk radio thriller “Feedback” a couple of years back got most of these elements right. “On the Line,” the new Mel Gibson thriller about a “shock jock” held hostage, on the mike, by a threatening caller, gets most of them wrong.

It’s bad radio, and that makes for a very bad movie.

It feels off in ways obvious and also more slyly annoying. By the time we hear the fourth foreign accent with LA’s KLAT-FM staff — building guard to program director, Brits and Asians and Continentals, one and all — we’ve guessed that they filmed this thriller abroad. My guess was South Africa or Eastern Europe. No, writer-director Romuald Boulanger cast and shot this close to home, in Paris.

We never hear a commercial from this alleged commercial radio station, never get a sense that the real-time (ish) story is ticking over and tensing up. The host, Elvis Cooney (Gibson), is Imus-old and slow, spewing his low-energy patter into the cosmos with nothing that would keep a listener engaged in a Top Five market.

It’s no wonder his ratings are “flat as a crepe,” the program director (Frenchwoman Nadia Farès) complains, in the parlance of Paris. He’s making bad radio.

The movie? It never overcomes that unreality, never gets up a head of steam. And no amount of scripted surprises — all packed into the finale — can atone for that.

Elvis kisses his wife and five year-old daughter good night, checks into the high rise where the station is located, and we note how he doesn’t know the Anglo-Indian security guard and has no interest in learning how to pronounce his name.

“On the Line” is a midnight/all-night anything goes chat show, something Elvis has wearied of. We see how angry the guy who has the earlier time slot (Kevin Dillon) is over Elvis coveting “my show.”

A new, wet-behind-the-ears British engineer (mislabeled the “producer”) here, Dylan (William Moseley) sees what Elvis looks like “triggered,” as a part of his hazing ritual on the job. The much-younger call-screener, guest-booker and real producer Mary (Alia Seror-O’Neill) is in on the prank, and takes the “washed-up diaper wearing has-been” host’s sexist jokes with good humor.

What kind of audience might a no-holds-barred (lots of F-bombs and other profanity on the air) host attract?

“Nocturnal emitters,” Elvis labels them. But his callousness can bend towards kindness when he senses a caller is troubled. That would be “Gary,” who is “gonna do something really screwed up tonight.” Gary has a beef with somebody. “I’m gonna take out his whole family.”

And Elvis takes pains to talk him out of it. By the way, where’re you calling from, Gary?

“I’m at YOUR HOUSE!”

A kidnapping “game” with murderous blackmail, humiliation and execution is set in motion. It’s shockingly convoluted and stunningly dull.

Characters meander all over the high rise, threats are made and a couple of people are turned into corpses.

“Let’s call the police to save time!”

Naah, “I’ve dealt with kooks like this for 30 years,” and cracks about “We’ve gotta keep the cops kosher, right?” remind us that the star of the show’s in charge, and that the star of the movie was anti-Semitic before Kanye tried to make anti-Semitism cool.

The screenplay is laced with the phrase “I’m begging you,” with advice like “We have to hurry” which neither the characters nor the filmmakers listen to.

There’s little menace in the (mostly) unseen kidnapper’s voice, and Gibson never lets on that the stakes are as high as the story claims.

It’s a movie that demands we tune out long before it tries to “explain” away its shortcomings.

Gibson’s always given fair value, even in C-movies in his post-cancellation dotage. This one dogs along until the cheap cheat of an ending lands. And tries to land again.

But at least he and Dillon got a trip to Paris out of it.

Rating: R (Language Throughout|Some Violent Content)

Cast: Mel Gibson, Alia Seror-O’Neill, William Mosely, Nadia Farès and Kevin Dillon.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Romuald Boulanger. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:44

I cringe so much every time I have to pummel a really bad performance that I avoid doing so at almost all costs. There are so many things that can go wrong in the making of a bad film — script, direction, cast chemistry, tone — that it is pointlessly mean to single out the poor people playing the poorly written parts.

But what thin promise “I’m Totally Fine” makes to us in its opening scenes — a grieving woman (Jillian Bell) drives to a rural SoCal rental house for a party she forgot to cancel — vanishes in a flash the moment the dead best friend/business partner (Natalie Morales of “Happily,” “Stuber” and TV’s “Dead to Me”) manifests herself before her.

The inane script has the dead friend brought back to life by an alien, an advanced and curious but naive and tone-deaf “Starman” in female form. Morales makes the disastrous — no other word for it — decision to play the character in a stunningly unfunny, unaffecting and college acting class incompetent impersonation of Mork, Starman or Lieutenant Data.

“‘Boogie Woogie Woogie,'” she says in a flat, metallic attempt at appearing otherworldly. “That was Jennifer’s favorite wedding song.”

Vanessa (Bell, of “Office Christmas Party, “22 Jump Street” etc.) tries writing this off to a hangover, grief, a “ghost” or what have you. A holographic “Human Orientation” presentation half convinces her that this Jennifer-look-alike in the “Darling, You’re Different” T-shirt is interplanetary.

Jennifer chugging olive oil for its lubrication/anti-freeze qualities should seal the deal. The alien is here to “do tests” and “study” us. For 48 hours. Poor Vanessa — a dead friend and business partner and now this.

“This body seems designed for dancing.” On Vanessa bursting into tears — “We do not have crying. This is valuable data. Thank you.”

It’s fingersnails-dragged-across-a-blackboard until they’re bloody unfunny, cringe-worthy in the worst sense.

Bell delivers a deflated performance that gives away the fact that as a former “SNL” writer, sitcom creator (“Badsitter”) and cast member of a few rowdy comedies that actually play — “The Night Before,” “Bridesmaids,” “Office Christmas Party”) — she knows this isn’t getting there.

The sentimental stuff is limp and unaffecting. Bit players in support struggle to wring a laugh out of the Molly-offering DJ Vanessa forgot to cancel, the hovering husband checking in by Facetime constantly out of concern or the helpful good ol’boy who isn’t the serial killer Vanessa tells her friend from Roswell she might be.

No, one cannot and should not blame Morales all of this, much of it laid at the feet of screenwriter Alisha Ketry, whose script plays like an inept piece of pandemic typewriting, a “movie we can get made for little money” and under isolation restrictions. But if Morales is anxious for “I’m Totally Fine” to die a silent, unnoticed death, one can see and hear why in most every word to come out of her mouth here.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jillian Bell and Natalie Morales.

Credits: Directed by Brandon Dermer, scripted by Alisha Ketry. A Decal release.

Running time: 1:23

The critically-acclaimed drama “Call Jane,” about the “bad old days” before abortion was legal in the US, isn’t just a movie, it’s a cause.

Now the producers of it are showing it at women’s health care clinics that provide abortions, a way of spreading the word, pushing voter turnout and reversing the incredibly unpopular and comically “defended” Supreme Court decision that threatens woman and America with a civil-rights-stripping return to something like the Dark Ages.

That’s right. Instead of addressing the assorted problems and crises facing the world today, women are having to organize in ways that the film, set in 1960s Chicago, recreates — prepping for a war over “privacy” and “settled law” that’s been in place for nearly 50 years.

Here’s a short doc on the movement that the film, starring Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Wunmi Mosaku and Kate Mara, recreates.

Scott Cooper helms this latest Tale of Poe to make it on the screen, based on a novel by Louis Bayard in which EAP is a character.

Gillian Anderson is in it. And Harry Melling co-stars as Edgar Allan Poe.

Gloriously gloomy looking, as was the no budget indie “Poe in a murder investigation” film “Raven’s Hollow,” which came out last summer.

Jan. 6 this comes to Netflix.

Interesting that Disney+ goes to the Tim Allen well again. Irrelevant to the generation that has kids, too reactionary for about two thirds of the country to avoid being “canceled.”

You seen some of the stuff he’s been “joking” about? Ugh..

Nov. 16.

A steep fall off from it’s $67 million opening didn’t kill “Black Adam.” Dwayne Johnson’s comic book crap on a cracker added $25 million on its second weekend, pushing it over $108 million overall.

The new Lionsgate release, smuggled into theaters without critics’ previews and shelved so long one of its stars died two years ago, “Prey for the Devil” did $7 million because a PG-13 horror movie is always money in the bank.

It’ll never catch “Smile,” which will hit the $100 million mark next weekend.

“Halloween Ends” has another $3.7 and clears the $60 million mark, far short of “Smile,” but good enough.

“Lyle Lyle Crocodile” is chomping away, over $32 million by the end of the weekend.

“Till” added thousands of theaters and climbed into the top ten, $2.8 million. Good film. Go see it.

“The Woman King” has one last weekend in the top ten, over a million.

“Tar” added hundreds of theaters and didn’t crack the top ten, right around $1 million.

When he thinks of his father, the memories of the distant past are in vivid color. It’s the present day that seems monochromatic, colorless and harsh.

That’s how Héctor remembers his sainted Dad in “Memories of My Father,” based on a novelistic memoir by Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince. That book (“Oblivion: A Memoir” in English) becomes a sweet, sentimental and often moving Colombian story in the hands of Spain’s greatest cinematic sentimentalist — Fernando Trueba (“Belle Epoch”).

The “present” in “Memories” is the 1980s, when Hector (Juan Pablo Urrego) is summoned home from college in Turin, Italy. Dad has been forced into retirement at his Colombian university, and he’s to be feted before he leaves.

But “home” is Medellin, a long-troubled city just then taking its place as a waypoint on South America’s cocaine pipeline, a town that taught the world the meaning of “cartel.” Young Héctor sees the tearful tribute-farewell his colleagues and students have prepared for his father, also named Héctor. And he remembers the colorful, doted-on childhood this celebrated public health crusader, college professor and social gadfly gave him.

Trueba’s younger brother David scripted “Memories,” and the star of David’s best known film in this country, “Living With Eyes Closed,” is the perfect choice to embody this man of learning, letters and principles, the one who would teach his doted-on twelve-year-old (Nicolás Reyes Cano plays the youngest Héctor) those values back in the early ’70s.

The script and the wonderful Javier Cámara create an Atticus Finch image for Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez, a man who agitates, takes direct action and lectures his public health students about the “five needs for healthy growth” (in Spanish, with English subtitles) — “Air, water, food, shelter and affection!”

It’s the latter that we see him shower on his only boy, a kid raised with one younger sister, and four older ones. The kid comes along to university to see the medical cadavers Dad uses for his lectures and watches his father in action, taking students as field workers into the poor barrios of Medellin as part of project Futures for Children.

And when little Héctor, and even older Héctor screws up, his atheist father in Catholic Colombia is the one who makes a teachable moment out of it. A pal talks the kid into breaking the window of a Jewish neighbor and yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Dad marches Héctor over for an apology and tells him the story of Kristallnacht to point out just how wrong he was.

His little sister falls into the sea, unable to swim, and Héctor doesn’t spring into action? His father is a believer in shame as a teaching tool.

Trueba creates an immersive version of the privileged life the kid grew up in, the nanny nun the kid is only supposed to pay just so much attention to, sisters with boyfriends, one sister who has learned English and guitar playing well enough to make the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” her favorite song.

I kept thinking of Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma,” which despite being similar in themes, look (more washed out) and length, plays much longer due to his opaque, meandering narrative that really doesn’t go anywhere.

Trueba uses images, not voice-over narration, to tell this story, which can be patience-testing as we pick up on the layers of family life and Dad’s sense of ethics and moral responsibility for the poor in his city and his country, sympathies that get him criticized and threatened, with “Comunista” spray painted on their house.

There are bursts of violence outside their and the viewer’s field of vision, reminders of what was starting to happen in Medellin, even before the cartels amped up the violence in the early ’80s.

What young Héctor remembers are the ways his sisters chased him from the room when they wanted to talk about boys, his father taking him to grown-up movies that moved the old man but put the kid to sleep, at seeing his father cry at an impending family tragedy.

Cámara holds the film together and touches us with the moments we see him teaching important things to his son like compassion and responsibility to his son. And he lets us see Héctor Sr.’s human foibles as the kid REALLY screws up and tests a parent’s love. Dad’s belief in his son is unshakable, even if we wish he’d get a little tougher with the kid who seems to be his father’s favorite.

There’s just enough Colombian history to let us see a country’s descent into hard times, and plenty of family history pointing to a patriarch’s courage and sense of purpose in the face of that.

And in Cámara, a favorite of filmmaker Pedro Almodovar as well, we have the perfect player to embody a Colombian of virtue and accomplishment, a noble figure worthy of being celebrated in an era when so many Colombian men gained global fame on “Wanted” posters.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Javier Cámara, Juan Pablo Urrego, Nicolás Reyes Cano, Patricia Tamayo and Kami Zea.

Credits: Directed by Fernando Trueba, scripted by David Trueba, based on a memoir by Héctor Abad Faciolince. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 2:16

Remaking the Jamie Lee Curtis horror canon pays off. So taking another shot at “Terror Train,” which the Queen of Screams filmed back in 1980, isn’t a bad idea.

Not improving on a nut-with-a-knife thriller that wasn’t all that to start with is.

Our heroine, Alana, played by Robyn Alomar this time, gives us a shocked, moving and very human reaction to the site of her best friend’s corpse, making her realize this frat party chartered train ride has a murderer on board.

But there isn’t much more that recommends this listless, generally lifeless remake.

Alana’s a med student mixed up with frat boys (Matias Garrido, Corteon Moore etc) who use her to play a particularly cruel prank. When Halloween rolls around and she and her sorority sisters (Emma Elle Paterson, Romy Meltman) join in on the frat’s party on rails, that opening scene prank comes back to stab people in the ass. Or other vulnerable body parts.

There’s drinking and pranking and hooking up and on-board entertainment — Tim Rozon gives a creepy vibe to the hired magician on board. And there is “staff” utterly unequipped to deal with this “no cell service” emergency. Nadine Bhabha is a not-nearly-overwhelmed-enough porter.

Bodies pile up and the blood will flow.

Who will still be around for their final destination? Who is doing the killing? Who’s in on it? Who figures it out first?

The slack pacing and perfunctory ways the killings are staged by director Philip Gagnon mean that the only real question is “Who will care?”

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

Cast: Robyn Alomar, Emma Elle Paterson, Matias Garrido, Nadine Bhabha, Mary Walsh, Romy Meltman, Corteon Moore, and Tim Rozon

Credits: Directed by Philip Gagnon, scripted by Ian Carpenter and Aaron Martin, based on the 1980 film scripted by Judith Rascoe and T.Y. Drake. A Tubi streaming release.

Running time: 1:30

Here’s an indie whimsy that just doesn’t work, or work out.

“Hello from Nowhere” sends four folks for a hiking/camping trip along the Pacific Coast Trail in the Pacific Northwest, one fellow that’s a trail veteran and three novices.

The kicker? Two of those tenderfeet are “theater types,” and not just “types,” but friends since high school who used to date, friends who never got over a childish Gilbert & Sullivan style musical their teacher wrote. They insist — ever so much — on regaling one and all with the snappy numbers from “Marmaduke & Murgatroyd, Pirates of Bredvakistan.”

Brendan (G. Gordon Brown) and the slightly less feminine Lanie (Summer Rain Menkee) may be out of their depth. But their response to veteran trailhand John (John Armour), now married to Lanie, and his Wilderness Wisdom lectures is to be always ready with a song.

“When a fairy waves his wand at you, you’re in for a surprise! When you become a rattlesnake, a swarm of tsetse flies!”

Brendan has a new lady friend (DeHah Angel) whose gaydar isn’t switched on. But she’s game to enjoy her first camping trip, despite the nails-on-a-chalkboard showtunes.

Brendan isn’t keen on the freeze-dried backpacker menu — “This is ASTRONAUT food!” But he’s smuggled wine, and his cummerbund — to make dinner more civilized.

And then they all spy the Brawny Towels spokesmodel (not literally) camping right across the lake from them. Jason (Sean Paul Ross) is roughing it in a kilt, which gets everyone’s attention, especially Brendan’s.

“I LOVE that skirt,” he says. “A little lumberback, a little drag queen” he suggests later.

Jason is out there hiking the length and breadth of North America, a true natural man. Or is he just homeless?

“A hobo? A hoboSEXUAL?”

Those are the highlights of the banter sampled here.

Writer-director Anthony V. Orkin had the germ of an idea, put flamboyant theater folk in the forest and fish-out-of-water your way to laughs — Will & Grace and Show Tunes in the Woods!

“Theater people — they need that light on them all the time.”

Instead they go for the “wild card” in a kilt threatens to upset the two couples dynamic. And even that isn’t rendered into anything tense, funny or interesting.

Rating: unrated, on the PG, PG-13 spectrum

Cast: G. Gordon Brown, Summer Rain Menkee, DeNah Angel, Sean Paul Ross and John Armour

Credits: Scripted and directed by Anthony V. Orkin. A Crunchy release.

Running time: 1:19

This thriller is an alt and engrossing example of a policeman, even with issues, knowing just what he can get away with and using that expertise for less than noble purposes.

“Unidentified” seems like a good tale with subtitles to donate to a library in rural Florida, which sheriffs rule over like law into themselves fiefdoms. The one here is especially sketchy.

Remember, donate your DVDs to libraries, bastions of knowledge even in a banana republic.

MovieNation, spreading fine cinema all across the Southeastern US, one movie, one library at a time.