Movie Nation

An “Orphan” sequel? The movie about the diminutive Eastern European girl with a sad case of the psychopaths?

It’s a little late for that. The original came out in 2009, and Isabelle Fuhrman — who gets plenty of work without sequels — isn’t 14 any more. I mean, come on.

That’s the prevailing sentiment for the first half or more of “Orphan: First Kill,” which brings our Estonian murderess back to North America for more mayhem. It’s bloody, and bloody ridiculous, and playing with camera perspective to make Fuhrman hobbit-sized is kind of an eye-roller, as effects go.

But we know the estimable Julia Stiles is in this thing. And in our minds, we make a covenant with the great performers. Stiles, who classes up everything she touches, had to see something in this. Julia won’t let us down. In Julia we trust.

And damned if she doesn’t deliver, as this grim march through murder curdles from Grand Guignol to laugh-out-loud hilarious.

A movie with the most cynical motives and barely any justification for existing turns into something fun.

Screenwriter David Coggeshall and director Willian Brent Bell go to a helluva lot of trouble figuring out how to get the much older, even more-cunning “Esther” out of a snow-covered Estonian hospital for the criminally insane, onto a computer where she can swap identities with a missing girl, and into America.

They remind us of the dwarfism that was the Big Reveal in “Orphan,” that this “child” is actually an adult. Then after finessing that, they park her back “home” with a rich American family (Stiles, Rossif Sutherland and Matthew Finlan) whose daughter disappeared years before. “Esther” is back!

The child’s disappearance left her painter-father (Sutherland) bereft, and the detective (Hiro Kanagawa) they leaned up to track her down frustrated. But now that she’s back, Allen can pick up the brush for his black light luminescent paintings (Don’t tell Julian Schnabel about this!), champion fencer big brother Gunnar can go back to looking after her and Mom can revel in the light, purpose and even romance that this return heralds.

Or can she? Might the detective, or the family shrink or something or someone else trip up our little piano playing pickpocket? Has Esther gotten even better at covering her tracks?

The first two acts set up the challenges and deliver violence and manage to become a serious drag. The third act to “First Kill” finally manages a jaw-dropping moment or two. But mostly, it’s about over-the-top laughs, and Stiles and Fuhrman throw themselves at it with all the “I have profit participation” gusto they have in them.

No, it’s not subtle, not droll or particularly arty. It’s not even all that horrific, despite the grisly nature of the violence.

But it is something to see. And Julia Stiles, dear, you’ll have to forgive us for ever doubting you.

Rating:  R for bloody violence, language and brief sexual content

Cast: Isabelle Fuhrman, Julia Stiles, Rossif Sutherland, Matthew Finlan and Hiro Kanagawa.

Credits: Directed by William Brent Bell, scripted by David Coggeshall. A Paramount+ release.

Running time: 1:39

Oprah gets behind a documentary about one of the greatest actors of his generation, Sidney Poitier.

Reginald Hudlin directed it and appears to have talked to everybody we want to hear from.

A lot of famous faces singing his praises, a slice of the adorable rivalry/friendship with Harry Belafonte, a lot of Poitier himself talking about his life and career, and a lot of tears, just in the trailer for this Sept. 23 Apple TV release.

A rich kid faces his drug-dealing, drug-using, lie-to-everyone reckoning at a slow-jog in “The Runner,” a lurid, dazed and guilt-ridden thriller starring Edouard Philipponnat.

Director Michelle Danner’s latest builds to a solid finish at a lurid, extravagant party where the threat of doom hangs over the proceedings. But that follows a narrative that’s often adrift, weaving in so many flashbacks it’s sometimes tricky to figure out when the fictive “present” is.

Philipponnat, a Chalamet beauty who figured in “House of Gucci,” is Aiden, son of a well-off businesswoman (Elisabeth Röhm, of “American Hustle,” TV’s “Jane the Virgin”) who — when we meet her — has just called the cops on her only child. He’s blitzed and dealing, and he’s no stranger to Det. Wall (Cameron Douglas).

Ever-traveling Mom’s “scared straight” dreams are a delusion. Wall has enough on this kid to lock him away. The fact that he doesn’t, that three months later Aiden is back to his old tricks without so much as an ankle bracelet, is our clue.

Aiden is cutting class and deaf to the tough-love pleas of his track coach. He’s rolling in a G-Wagon and rolling in cash thanks to the connections of his running mate Blake (Nadji Jeter). There’s that One Big Deal they’d like to seal at a party they throw during another of Mom’s business trips.

But on this long day, as Aiden lurches between manic and stoned, sleeping with his working class girlfriend (Jessica Amlee) and absorbing the “Get us that juice, kid, we’re going to STATE” threats of the jocks, flashbacks tell us how this entitled kid got to the moment.

Philipponnat is so into character, playing a semi-plastered, mumbling teen, that his enunciation is subtitles-needed sloppy. Maybe it’s the callow, dislikable character, but he doesn’t register much beyond the $500 haircut pretty-boy level.

The stand-out performance here is delivered by Eric Balfour as the drug dealer they call Local Legend. His “meet” with the up-and-comer is a biting, touchy exchange full of contempt and class resentment and Balfour (TV’s “The Offer”) just crushes it.

Douglas makes a properly sinister, play-the-angles cop and if you close your eyes, you’d swear Michael Douglas’s son was “Drugstore Cowboys” era Matt Dillon.

But Danner, of “Hello Herman” and “Bad Impulse,” cooked up a sadly unsurprising story with screenwriter Jason Chase Tyrell and all the pretty people and pretty settings and flashbacks can’t finesse “The Runner” into something it’s not — tense and compelling.

Rating: R, violence, teen Drug and Alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Edouard Philipponnat, Elisabeth Röhm, Cameron Douglas, Nadji Jeter, Jessica Amlee and Eric Balfour

Credits: Directed by Michelle Danner, scripted by Jason Chase Tyrrell. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:44

Emily Watson stars in this one.

What more do we need to know? It’s A24. Always worth a look. Always.

Sept. 30.

You think you know the “original” “found footage film?” You’re wrong if you think that was “The Blair Witch Project,” the breakout blockbuster in the genre, still probably the most profitable film ever made.

But no, that “first” would be “The McPherson Tape,” a micro-budget and for years little-seen alien abduction thriller shot, VHS “home movie style” and turned into movie back in 1989.

In the documentary “The Found Footage Phenomenon,” now on Shudder, we learn that fact, and that the term “found footage” wasn’t coined until years after “Blair Witch,” which came out ten years after “McPherson.” “Blair Witch” co-director Eduardo Sanchez mentions that before the label, “we just called it ‘POV cinema,’ ‘first person cinema'” and the like, before horror’s version of the “mockumentary” got a label all its own.

A lot of filmmakers and the occasional author/expert on the phenomenon that gave us “Paranormal Activity” and its many sequels and imitators show up here to talk about “the camera as another character” and of the “fake” genre of frights “supposedly shot in the real world,” and the communal “lie that we all share in while we watch” these films.

“Diary of the Living Dead” is mentioned, in which George A. Romero tried to make his mark as one of the godfathers of the genre (there are “first person” sequences in his “Night of the Living Dead”), and a lot of the pre-history of this “faddish” phenomenon is laid out, placing the films within the horror tradition of “Dracula” and Steven King’s “Carrie,” literary “first person” horror using letters/reports/court filings about supernatural things that “really happened” as a literary device.

The “snuff cinema” of “Mondo Cane” and grisly imitations like “Cannibal Holocaust” led to the BBC “sanctioned” (a “presenter” starred in it) “Ghostwatch” and a camera crew capturing (fake) “first person murders” of “Man Bites Dog.” They all owe something to bits of 1960’s Michael Powell shocker “Peeping Tom,” which is folded into this documentary that becomes a blur of talking heads and a drone of repeated points hammered home, a bit of back and forth among filmmakers about who-did-what-first in this or that corner of horror and leading to too-short snippets of the actual films.

“Found Footage” is interesting in so far as it sets certain records straight, but overloading it with interviews means there’s a lot of talk about how the confluence of video-then-phone cameras capturing shocking bits of post-9/11 reality and the spike in screen violence thanks to late ’60s/early ’70s coverage of The Vietnam War. But devoting any time here to the tenuous connection the genre might have with snuff films seems a serious case of mission creep. Most of these films aren’t really “shockumentaries,” even if they’re a somewhat dubiously legitimate antecedent to their existence.

Precious little is done with how such films achieve their effects, and how those effects mimic “home movies” and Youtube “reality” and heighten their impact with fans.

What co-directors Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott have filmed is a collection of testimonials making their case, a lot of people talking up essential, historic entries in the genre, and a staggering amount of repetitious visual clutter and chatter.

Cut one third of the interviews out, let Alioto, Sanchez and a few others give detailed accounts of what they were trying to achieve and why, and show lots of footage of the filmmakers doing what they set out to do and experts commenting on the context of the times, the tech, etc., and you’d have a more watchable, more focused film.

Rating: unrated, horror violence, some profanity

Cast: Interviews with Eduardo Sanchez, Patrick Brice, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Dean Alioto, Shellie McMurdo, Aislin Clarke, Lance Weiler, Stephen Volk, many others.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:41

Chris Bridges plays her brother, a family “homeless” and on their way to Houston when they cross paths with a drug deal gone wrong.

Interestingly, Chris isn’t the only guy named Bridges in the trailer. Jeff’s brother Beau is a sheriff.

Sept. 9.

My stars, those Fuica brothers love their slo-mo. And 360 degree pans.

And illogical plotting. And really bad dialogue.

“Is…he dead?” “What does it LOOK like, genius?”

And they’re learning to love self-distributing their handiwork. Apparently.

“Camping Trip” is a bloody-minded and hilariously-illogical thriller about two swinger couples — those darned Canadians, always having more fun than the rest of us — who stumble across a pile of (Canadian) cash while on a COVID camping trip in some remote camping/canoeing friendly park.

Boisterous, impulsive Ace (Alex Gravenstein) and French (or something) accented Coco (Hannah Forest Briand) are hooking up — mid-lockdown — with partying suburbanites Polly (Caitlin Cameron), she of the Aussie (I think) accent, and Enzo, played by writer and co-director Leonardo Fuica, a Chilean-Canadian trying to sound Italian.

Once in the woods, they paddle, practice archery and “swing” until they stumble across a body, because some vaccine researcher (Ben Pelletier) has chosen these woods as the perfect place to make a buy from a couple of thugs (Jonathan Vanderzon and Michael D’Amico).

That meeting place is as illogical as the thugs killing the “doc” without getting paid, as illogical as the cover story burly Orek (D’Amico) feeds the once-happy campers about “staying the night” with them, as absurd and ugly as everything that happens next.

The Fuicas have been making movies for years (“La Run” wasn’t their first, and it came out in 2011) and yet much of what we see here has a new-to-film-school “Play with jump-cut montages and dissolve montages, let’s-see-if-we-can-stage-a-360-degree-pan and how MUCH slo-mo is too much?” naivete.

It’s all as “off” as the Fire Island hairdresser haircut “swinger” Enzo rocks and the weird, seemingly put-on accents of almost everybody.

This “Camping Trip” is the oddest blend of “Look what we’ve learned now” showing off and rank filmmaking incompetence I’ve seen in ages.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Leonardo Fuica, Caitlin Cameron, Alex Gravenstein, Hannah Forest Briand, Ben Pelletier, Jonathan Vanderzon and Michael D’Amico.

Credits: Directed by Demian Fuica and Leonardo Fuica, scripted by Leonardo Fuica. A Fuica Films release.

Running time: 1:46

Good to see Julia Stiles again, love to see more of her. Isabelle Fuhrman still brings the scary.

In theaters and streaming Friday.

Minot, North Dakota’s finest — Josh Duhamel — is the master of disguise, a Michigan “Bandit” who robbed every bank in Canada, more or less. Elisha Cuthbert’s the woman who has his attention, Mel G is the old crook full of backing cash and sage advice.

Not sure of the release date. Quiver has it. Maybe now?

Sharlto Copley is one of the co-stars.

This one opens Friday. Looks popcorny. Could be fun.