Movie Nation

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.

I haven’t seen the Kurosawa classic about an old man taking stock of a life of quiet company man desperation, “Ikiru,” in ages.

But Bill Nighy in 1950s Britain? I may have to look up the original.

“The Return of Tanya Tucker” isn’t a documentary for people who don’t like triumphant comeback stories. If you can’t get choked-up at “I survived fame and its excesses and lived-to-tell-the-tale” stories, just mosey along.

And if you think Tanya Tucker lost that “outlaw” label and turns all soft and cuddly in her dotage in this film about her recording her first LP of new music in over a decade, you’re missing the tequila and grapefruit juice shooters she’s doing between takes, pardner.

The first image in Kathlyn Horan’s documentary is Tucker, who turned 64 Oct. 10, in close-up, her face showing all the miles of decades of hard living, her white hair splashed with pink and her voice seasoned with more whisky — or tequila — and cigarettes that one can count. That’s a promise that this upbeat and sentimental film makes about honesty, a promise that it keeps.

Maybe Horan and her on-camera alter ego, singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile won’t dig deep into the tabloid years, the “wild child” behavior and all that. But this will be a candid portrait of a singer long gone from the spotlight being yanked back into it by her biggest fans.

They would be Carlile, famous for “The Joke,” from her four-Grammy Award-winning album “By the Way, I Forgive You” and her producer, Shooter Jennings. The two of them go all fangirl/fanboy over Tucker when they meet her in the film, bringing her back into the studio for an album that would quickly be heralded as Tucker’s “comeback.”

The idea, Carlile tells “TT” and us in the Sunset Sounds studio in LA, is to give Tucker the same treatment producer Rick Rubin gave Johnny Cash for his iconic “American Recordings” LP. Do a record that gives a legend her due, in other words.

Horan’s film — she’s also done documentaries on women in prison and The Indigo Girls — blends the biography of a country music star who has been on stage, on TV and in the limelight since she was 13, with footage of pre-pandemic efforts to make the album “While I’m Still Livin'” of new Carlile-and-Co. penned songs, with one — “Bring My Flowers Now,”– co-written by Tucker and Carlile.

We see snippets of scores of TV appearances, home movies and TV interviews that recount Tucker’s rise from trailer park poverty in Wilcox, Arizona, to her “discovery” by Mel Tillis, that heartbreaking career-defining hit (“Delta Dawn”) and all that came afterward, much of it lived in the public eye. I counted a couple of different “60 Minutes” profiles along with a nervous appearance on Tom Snyder’s “Tomorrow” show in the cavalcade of TV chats detailing her “life of the party” years, battling depression, dating many much older country music stars (most famously Glen Campbell).

“I sowed my wild oats” like anybody else, Tucker admits. But ” did it on the cover of the (National) EN-quirer!”

The magic here is seeing an established star like Carlile go full-blown fangirl on her idol. She flatters “TT,” gushes, and Tucker takes to her in an instant. Carlile analyzes Tucker’s voice, makes a few comparisons to other Women of Country, and they launch into an impromptu cover of Tammy Wynette’s “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” and trade verses of a song Carlile suggests Tanya record. Carlile gently directs Tucker towards the sort of LP she think will make a mark, joins her in the recording booth simply for encouragement and swaps tequila shooters with her to keep the good vibes going.

“I’ve had a f—-g HEADache every day I’ve been in here with you,” Carlile laughs. Then she relates how for a girl growing up, uncertain of her sexuality and her place in the world, Tucker was an inspiration.

“Tanya was TOUGH.”

The whole affair is just delightful. Even the hint of a little of Tucker going astray and sabotaging herself, a big subtext of the Keith Richards/Chuck Berry doc “Hail Hail, Rock’n Roll,” is just that — a hint. There’s little conflict here, just good times, good tunes and a finale that you won’t see coming if you don’t remember what happened with this record. I interviewed Tucker 20 years ago when she was still touring but had given up on recording, and had lost track of her since.

But even if you do know how this story ends, it’s beautifully touching seeing and hearing somebody who’s been through the fame, celebrity and cocaine wringer, just grateful at the victory lap her biggest fan provides for her.

Rating: R for (profanity)

Cast: Tanya Tucker, Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kathlyn Horan. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:48

De Niro and Huston are local lawmen on the front lines of the Oxy crisis.

John Malkovich and Willa Fitzgerald also star in this one, due out Dec. 2.

A two hour and thirty-eight minute deep dive into the life and downfall of an exacting, mercurial lesbian classical music conductor might be the motion picture definition of “a hard sell.”

But you miss “Tár” at your own peril.

Consider what Cate Blanchett does in creating and presenting the title character, Lydia Tár, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic whose classical music career has dashed through permanent positions and guest-conducting gigs at most of her profession’s greatest ensembles, including America’s “Big Five” — The Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony and Boston Symphony.

Blanchett’s Lydia is brittle, brilliant and considered in every public moment. It is a self-aware performance of a performance. We see her get her “game face” on in the rare less guarded moment. But to everyone from her long-suffering assistant (Noémie Merlant) to her symphony board, her mentor (Julian Glover, ancient and in fine form), her musicians to her wife (Nina Hoss), she is “Tár,” a woman of accomplishment and self-confidence, all-controlling and all-knowing. If she wants to be considered more than “a gender spectacle” in the ancient and austere boy’s club that is orchestral conducting and music directing, she has to be.

It’s all put on peacocking display in the opening scene of writer-director Todd Field’s (“Little Children,” “In the Bedroom”) study of a powerful character put under duress. It’s one of those New Yorker-sponsored “An Evening With” chats, and Lydia hops from English to phrases in German, French and Italian with fluent ease, swooning over her “inspiration,” “Lenny” (legendary New York Philharmonic conductor and TV educator Leonard Bernstein) and dissecting the works of their shared orchestral passion, Gustav Mahler.

She’s about to finish recording a complete cycle of Mahler symphonies with “The Five,” as his fifth symphony is insider-labeled here. She has a memoir, “Tár on Tár,” coming out. She teaches conducting at Julliard when she isn’t at home in Berlin, with her wife — who is first chair violin with the Berlin Philharmonic — and their little girl, Petra.

And the person who makes all this work is her musician and aspiring conductor assistant, Francesca (Merlant), who might be the source of the faintly-snippy candid photo-and-video texts we see from time to time. The impatient, imperious Lydia may have a few friends — Mark Strong plays a conductor and colleague who helps with her foundation. But Francesca is who lets Tár be Tár.

Lydia is ready to dump her older, fussier associate conductor (Allan Corduner). She continues to bend, shape and hire this pinnacle of orchestral music to her will. But German law gives her players a lot more power in their relationship than is common elsewhere. And there’s something bubbling below the surface, something unpleasant whose nature we can easily discern and whose direction any movie-lover can guess. Lydia Tár is about to “go through some things” as we say these days.

“Tár” doesn’t set out to be a movie for everyone. But if you’re into classical music and know even just a little about this world, it is a film to be savored and treasured. The banter — touchy negotiations with “DG” (classical music label Deutsche Grammaphon records) over whether they’ll record this Mahler symphony “direct to (vinyl) disc,” discussions of “musical grammar” and “atonal tension” and snippy remarks about this famous name or that one (a dig at conducting rival “MTT,” Michael Tilson Thomas, another Follower of Lenny), discussions of “signal to noise ratio” — sparkles and immerses.

We hear snippets of an appearance on Alec Baldwin’s podcast, lots of NPR and hear and see Tár in action with her Julliard students and endless scenes of her working and rehearsing her orchestra. Blanchett is so animated, exacting and convincing I dare say she could fake her way to any podium on Earth after this.

Lydia composes and makes notations on scores while at the piano, her keener-than-keen ears relishing silence but absent-mindedly matching the tones of a doorbell on the keys.

The milieu is complete, three-dimensional and so spot-on we’re ensconced in it with her.

The viewer notes that violinist-wife Sharon is highly strung and medicated, that little daughter Petra (Mila Bogojevic) calls her parents by their first names. And then we see Lydia take her to school and have a word with another seven year-old girl who is bullying her daughter.

In perfect German, she tells the child “I am Petra’s father.” And then she gives the mean girl the most cold-blooded threat you can imagine.

If we haven’t guessed before now, before her dismemberment of a Julliard student too “woke” for her tastes, we figure it out here. Lydia Tár destroys people.

“Tár” is, as mentioned, quite long for a story as compact as this one. Field almost drowns us in details — Lydia’s visit to her tailor, Lydia looking over hundreds of other classical music album covers before deciding how to pose for hers.

At times I wondered if Field was leaning into “U-Haul Lesbian” stereotyping a tad too hard — chilly parenting, bitchy callousness, “re-invention,” infidelity, that Diane Keaton-meets-Ellen wardrobe.

But Field and Blanchett have given us an unforgettable character presented in almost molecular detail, and a glorious, guts-and-Gustav behind-the-scenes plunge into a rarefied world few of us have so much as dabbled in or seriously wondered about, even if we know our Tchaikovsky from our Mahler, pianissimo from forte.

Rating: R for some language and brief nudity

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Nina Hoss, Noémie Merlant, Julian Glover, Sophie Kauer and Mark Strong.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Todd Field. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:38

The effects are decent, the acting desultory in “Prey for the Devil,” a School for Exorcists thriller that promises more than it delivers.

Consider the setting of Robert Zappia’s script, based on a story by Todd R. Jones and Earl Richey Jones. It’s the St. Michael the Archangel School for Exorcists in Boston.

I don’t know about you, but the minute I saw that, I thought “HOGWARTS for Exorcists? GENIUS!”

Alas, that may have been the idea, as this picture — like EVERY horror movie — is treated as a potential franchise. But the colorless students inside this “school,” the formulaic way exorcist stories are populated (there’s always a young victim, always a body count trying to “exorcise” her) play out and the generic CCTV, one-way-mirror “training” rooms, the panic buttons in every patient’s room tech in a hospital decorated by scores and scores of candles turn this tale into an exercise in tedium.

Jacqueline Byers of Showtime’s “Roadies” stars as Sister Ann, a nun/nurse at St. Michael’s, and a survivor of trauma herself. We see her childhood in the film’s opening scenes, chased, tormented and abused with a hair comb by her psychotic mother.

Sister Ann knew better. Mom wasn’t schizophrenic or “just” schizophrenic. That “voice inside her head” had to be…the DEVIL.

That had everything to do with Sister Ann’s choice of vocation, she lets the in house shrink (Virginia Madsen) at St. Michael’s know. But she’s not just here to be a nurse. She ducks into the all-male-priest classes of Father Quinn (Colin Salmon) to hear how the Mother Church is “losing a war that has been raging for centuries.”

Sister Ann would love to become female Exorcist Ann, although all the academics there know the Catholic Church had one 800 years ago — St. Catherine of Siena. And as Sister Ann comforts a child in their care (Posy Taylor), we see her point. Nobody else can talk to Natalie inside whatever is making her skitter up the walls like a victim of “The Ring.”

But as Sister Ann tries to put herself into the game, sneaking off with Father Dante (Christian Navarro) to try and treat his pregnant, possessed sister (best effects in the movie), diving into Natalie’s case, she runs up against the patriarchy in the form of the cadaverous Monsignor (the late Ben Cross) in charge.

Byers is a fresh-faced and freckled Canadian blonde who is perfectly credible as a nun with a purpose. But she doesn’t give us much to grab hold of in this character. With rare exceptions, she and most everybody in “Prey” underreacts to the impossible, terrifying and imperiling things they see. If you’re not that scared, why should we be?

Go back to “The Exorcist.” Even the grizzled veteran of the rite, played by the great Max von Sydow, flinches at what he’s witnessing. His younger apprentice (Jason Miller) may not want to let us see his fear, but he can’t hide it.

If the idea here is that everybody in this school has seen it all, do something with that. Failing that, you’ve got to let us see people, save for the most hardened, freaked-out by what’s going on. Just yanking characters and hurling them against walls or out of the frame down a dark and deadly corridor in the “catacombs” below the hospital (of course) isn’t enough.

Nor is hewing so close to “Exorcist” formula that we know the story beats before they drop.

Rating: PG-13 for violent and disturbing content, terror, thematic elements and brief language.

Cast: Jacqueline Byers, Posy Taylor, Colin Salmon, Christan Navarro, Ben Cross and Virginia Madsen.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Stamm, scripted by Robert Zappia. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:33

Mike Colter and Yoson An co star in this January thriller about a jetliner that crashes in the civil war torn Philippines and passengers are taken hostage.

Looks very Gerry and opens in January. Damn, that’s a lame title.

(My review of “Plane” is here.)

I think I cackled four times watching this trailer to a tale of a would-be rapper/ditched by his girlfriend, rounding up a crew for a heist, to impress that girlfriend and solve a few other problems.

“Four Samosas” has that “ABCD” vibe, “American Born Confused Deshi” young folks stealing from their unscrupulous elders in what looks like SoCal.

Dec. 2

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