Movie Nation

“No Escape Room,” the latest horror riff on the “escape room from Hell” theme, has the building blocks of a solid genre thriller.

Five people undertake a mysterious small town escape room experience. The puzzle-it-out clues are challenging as all get out and the house’s clockwork trapdoors, hollow walls and hidden recesses are given a workout.

But something supernatural starts to happen and…there IS no ESCAPE!

The best ways to botch that are failing to keep the cast’s energy up, set-up to set-up, letting them slow-walk something that by definition and design is a fast-paced “ticking clock” thriller. Pay more attention to the sets in wide shot than the imperiled characters in unnerving close-ups. Put more effort in the clues and clever ways designed to solve them (numbers written on the whirling blades of a ceiling fan, only decipherable is you can figure out what in the room might give you a strobe effect) than you do to pacing.

Pedestrian shot selection and editing finish off any sense of “urgency” that the story is meant to generate.

“No Escape Room” probably went wrong in the storyboard process. Pre-planning is a must for any shooting script. On a tiny budget with a tight schedule, as Hitchcock preached, a detailed shot-by-shot storyboard can ensure you get what you need for the editor to make your thriller just fly by.

The story? Disinterested, lip-glossed/phone-distracted teen (Jeni Ross) takes a day trip to the country with Dad (Mark Ghanimé). Horseback riding is out, a car breakdown leaves them in a small town which has a garage, a diner and apparently, an “escape room” in a Tudor style mansion outside the town limits.

Kathryn Davis plays the escape room nerd, the one who keeps saying “You guys are new to this” and who refuses to take what they find themselves going through at face value, all “part of the show.” Hamza Haq is her disinterested boyfriend and Dennis Andres plays the wild card, the guy who jokingly calls himself “a plant, part of the show,” but who isn’t.

“So is that a clue, or just really good ‘atmosphere?'”

They surrender their phones and set off on their hour-long quest to “free” five people who “disappeared” in the clutches of “The Inventor” long ago. And then weird stuff, seeing and hearing “echoes” of themselves in mid-escape, in future escape, in their death throes or what have you throws them off.

The lighting and set design and decor are striking. There’s a preview “movie” on 8mm celluloid that is properly surreal and creepy.

But the clues are more interesting than the deaths or near-death-experiences, the characters as thinly developed as they often are in such genre pictures and the resolution has a fillip meant to make us forget how drab and lifeless most of what preceded it was. It’s not terrible, just not up to snuff.

The best advice for getting out of this “Room” is don’t ever go in it.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Jeni Ross, Mark Ghanimé, Hamza Haq, Kathryn Davis, Dennis Andrews and Brianna Barnes.

Credits: Directed by Alex Merkin, script by Jesse Mittelstadt.A Marvista Film on Netflix

Running time: 1:25

This trailer has a touch of whizbang about it and is slated for Jan. 2022 release.

And for those keeping score at home, the presence of Penelope Cruz and Lupita N’Yongo means this has two Oscar winners in its cast.

Teaching and treason in the run up to The War. This looks promising.

A grave injustice has been done by a heartless, greedy and smug villain.

A corrupt, easily-gamed system has been twisted and an old woman’s freedom and fortune have been stolen.

And as you watch, slack-jawed, as “I Care a Lot” takes its deep dive into dark comedy, you wonder how this wrong will be righted, who will save the day, rescue the victim and right wrongs?

The Russian mob, maybe?

This clever and darker than dark thriller gives us villains to hiss at and villains to root for. But at the end of the day, when evil is done and hope is thin, “justice” and revenge blur. In the movies, at least, we bay for an avenger to spill some blood.

Writer-director J Blakeson, who gave us the Gemma Arterton thriller “The Disappeareance of Alice Creed,” stacks the deck and deals the cards in this mean, improbable laugh-out-loud thriller. And the first way he stacks that deck is casting.

Rosemund Pike is Marla Grayson, a guardianship attorney who is there to make late-life decisions for senior clients. She takes guardianship of those deemed unable to care for themselves by their doctors and a family court judge. Don’t challenge her in court for putting your father or mother in a home when you wouldn’t make that hard decision for her. Don’t blame her for draining her finances as she does. Don’t show up unprepared for a little courtroom shaming, a lot of tough love and a few cozy “the court decideds” snapped out by her favorite judge (Isaiah Whitlock Jr.), who never finds her anything but reasonable.

“Caring, sir, is my JOB,” she preaches. And the wall of her office is decorated with legions of clients under her “care” and subject to her billings. Marla cruelly and ruthlessly uses and abuses the law, and she does not play fair.

“Playing fair is a joke invented by rich people to keep the rest of us poor.”

“Gone Girl” Pike is what we call “on the nose casting.” Calling the blonde, imperious and unflappable Marla a “bitch” just gets her feminist back up, and does a great disservice to dogs. A dog wouldn’t do what she does.

And then one day, she lands a “cherry,” a little old lady of means and no known family served up by a colluding, corrupt doctor. As she’s played by sweet little Oscar winner Dianne Wiest, well, we fear for her and grit our teeth over the swank “care facility” and its armed guard, locked bulletproof glass doors, the medications used to “control” her, the cell phone that’s taken from her and the smirk of the monster who put her here.

“No known family” is key. Because there’s family, and once he (Peter Dinklage, in Hitler hair and goatee) finds out, there’s going to be hell to pay. This guy scares people. This guy hurts people. And when he sends a smarmy, oily attorney (Chris Messina) to point out this “mistake” to you and your business and life partner (Eiza González of “Baby Driver,””Hobbs & Shaw”), maybe you ought to listen.

The most delicious scenes in “I Care A Lot” let us revel in the oblique threats and counter threats, the escalating measures each side takes in the tug-of-war that begins with this meeting of legal minds.

“She has very powerful…friends,” oily attorney purrs, “who can make life very…uncomfortable for you.”

Is that a threat?

“That’s just…data for you to collate.”

Marla won’t be bluffed. And we’ve established that she bristles at any hint of “threats from a man.” Game on, with a drugged, imprisoned senior citizen — her house and car sold to “pay her bills,” her safe deposit box looted — as the pawn.

That senior? The drugs wear off just enough to make the only threat that matters to Marla.

“You’re in trouble NOW!”

Blakeson sets his comic thriller just within the realm of the plausible, just outside the probable. If you haven’t dealt with elder care bureaucracy, any lawyer dealing with elder-care issues, an estate attorney, a nursing home that gives you cause for alarm or suspicions, you will.

That’s what makes its predatory lawyer/anti-heroine so infuriating. Pike just bathes in our loathing, poker-faces her contempt and takes Marla over the line. Marla knows she’s doing wrong, but is so good at “projection” that she “whatabouts” her way out of every moral quandary.

Dinklage gives us an avenging angel with a sweet tooth, a bad temper and a soft spot for “Momma.” Damned if we don’t root for the Russian mobster to have his justice and teach this hateful predator a lesson. But even a mobster has got to at least try and “keep it legal.”

The third act lurches into “get out of jail free” cards, illogical reactions to the threat of imminent death, twisty “escapes” and what not. “Care” made me stop caring for a bit there.

But Pike, Dinklage and Blakeson never let up on the evil they’re willing to show, the judgement they withhold and the “justice” that seems, increasingly, like a distant mirage we can only glare at in bitter rage and no bemused resignation.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout and some violence 

Cast: Rosamund Pike, Peter Dinklage, Eiza Gonzalez, Diane Wiest, Chris Messina, Isaiah Whitlock, Jr.

Credits: Scripted and directed by J. Blakeson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

Just our luck. We finally get a decent disaster movie, and it arrives in the middle of a pandemic.

Some people saw it, but most theaters were closed, so the vast majority of us missed the apocalyptic effects, high tension and narrow escapes of “Greenland.” At least now it’s coming to home video.

Gerard Butler, a sturdy presence in larger-than-life spectacles, anchors a good cast in what one has to say is a most topical and grimly plausible “end times” thriller. He plays an Atlanta-based structural engineer who must save life, limb and family when Comet Clarke comes calling.

But there’s trouble at home, problems in his marriage to Allie (Morena Baccarin, “Deadpool’s” better half). Seven year-old Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) is concerned, but perhaps more worried about this fragment-filled comet that’s heading for Earth.

When the emergency alert message comes in that John, Allie and Nathan “have been selected,” ordering them to Robbins AFB in Warner-Robbins, the background noise the adults haven’t been locking in on hits home. Things are about to get “real.”

The film is about their quest to get there, or find alternative transport to Greenland, where the government set up a survival bunker after watching “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon,” and we first heard the phrase “planet killer.”

“Angel Has Fallen” director Ric Roman Waugh, who took over this STX production when Neill Blomkamp backed out, keeps “Greenland” in motion and the script (by Chris Sparling, who “Buried” Ryan Reynolds) keeps our characters in peril.

If it’s the death raining from the skies, it’s the Darwinian response Americans expect when the chips are down. Separate the family to increase the number of obstacles — the xenophobic, the conspiracy-minded — with everybody’s inner-goon coming out with doom hanging over them.

Those “we were selected” wristbands create a short term class war. Tearful pleas from neighbors, chaos at the various departure points and periodic rains of fire all stand in their way.

The level of organization, the duty-bound military sticking to their jobs, the NASA briefings (heard, not seen), all create a texture in Waugh’s tapestry of gloom and doom.

The most chilling moment comes early as John and Nathan turn their eyes to see what everybody is gawking at skyward. It’s an air armada, the first signs of an evacuation that nobody has been told about…yet. It reminded me of that scene in “The Day After” when a crowd at a Lawrence, Kansas football game stares at missiles heading skyward. A real “Uh oh” moment.

The best movies in this genre feed us dread, dangle hope and hit us with pathos. Scott Glenn provides that as Allie’s aged father, an old man on the farm with The End in sight.

Pictures like this have their formula and are careful to leave no trope unturned. Why? Because the formula works and we know that. We wait for those tropes, like comfort food. “Earthquake” to “2012,” “Deep Impact” to “The Wave,” from bloated and dumb to plausible and smart, disaster filmmakers defy our expectations and cravings at their own peril.

“Greenland” doesn’t often surprise, but it never disappoints.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of disaster action, some violence, bloody images and brief strong language 

Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn, Andrew Bachelor and Hope Davis

Credits: Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, script by Chris Sparling. An STX film, a Universal Home Video release.

Running time: 1:59

This looks like the best big screen role Jeremy Piven’s had in forever. Duplicitous, a little hapless, accented. Damn. Look at this. A March release.

One hundred and twenty-seven years of boxing pictures, and a little indie film comes along and shows us the ring in ways we haven’t seen before.

“In Full Bloom” is a patient, simple post-war parable of fighters — cultures in collision, dreams and disappointment.

It’s set in Japan and is filled with beautiful images of a fighter training in a snowy Japanese winter, another reason I always say “I’ll watch anything set in Japan. Anything.” It traffics in more boxing film tropes than you can count. But it is the film’s dreamy “big fight” climax that sells it, light heavyweights going at it in a pool of light in a darkened arena, a blur of close-ups, slo-motion, the whooshing of wind and the gasps of exertion.

The fight has been set up to give Japan’s champion, Masahiro (Yusuke Ogasawara, making his film debut) another win as champ. The American Clint Sullivan (Tyler Wood, also a screen newcomer) has taken some losses, something the Japanese press pounces on at their joint press conference.

“Masahiro is a great warrior and an honorable man,” Clint says, tactfully and humbly, as if he knows the culture. Maybe he does. In flashbacks, we see Clint spent some time in uniform, fighting the Japanese with his Thompson submachine gun.

But it’s not long after World War II, and “The Hope of Japan” cannot let the home crowd down. That’s Masahiro went into the north, into the mountains to find the famed reclusive trainer Tokugawa (Hiroyuki Watanabe).

“Americans are like dogs,” the champ says (in Japanese with English subtitles). “All bark and no bite.”

The sage Tokugawa sets him straight. He makes the champ catch fish with his bare hands for reflex training, and spar in the snow, trying to land a blow on the wily old “master” as he does. He keeps slapping Masahiro in every exchange.

“The only way to kill a fighter’s pride,” the old man intones, “is with a good bitch slap!”

There’s a lot of “intoning” here, with much of the dialogue taking on a theatrical gravitas. Voice-over narration about the allegory of cherry blossoms — like life — short-lived and sweet, isn’t quite eye-rolling. But it comes close.

The Yakuza (Japanese mafia) have an interest in the fight. Clint has gnawing doubts and personal issues. Will he be up to the challenge of Masahiro’s unconventional training? Will the Yakuza accept anything other than a Masahiro victory?

“They won’t let you win,” Clint’s manager (S. Scott McCracken) informs him.

“Well it’s not up to them!”

The training sequences have the barest hint of novelty to them. But the fight, when the bell finally rings, is a fascinating exercise in watching first-time feature directors problem-solve, block, stage and light a fight, and serve up a fascinating “long count” hallucination, in ways we haven’t seen before.

They pull that off, and that goes for the movie, too. I’ll not oversell this here. It’s still a genre picture and hard-pressed to serve up much that’s fresh. But they find some interesting touches and make it work.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Tyler Wood, Yusuke Ogasawara, Hiroyuki Watanabe, S. Scott McCracken

Credits: Scripted and directed by Reza Ghassemi, Adam VillaSenor. A Dozo release.

Running time: 1:29

Serj Tankian is one of those rock stars who has decided to use his fame and his voice to speak out on political issues he finds important. The lead singer for the LA metal band System of a Down is one of those guys “with a chip on his shoulder,” his bandmates admit.

Sometimes that comes through in the lyrics to anti-Iraq War songs like “B.Y.O.B.” and “Boom.” And sometimes he interrupts his often-screamed lyrics, sung over the din of drums and electric guitars, to talk about geopolitics, genocide, freedom of speech and human rights.

“Truth to Power” is a documentary-length profile of Tankian’s activism, about “using the power of celebrity to get real political change.” He is, his friend and fellow rocker-activist Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine) says, one of those guys “moving the goalpost of the ideas that you can talk about in popular music.”

And the main idea Tankian wants to talk about is the Armenian genocide of 1915-16, getting the world and especially the Turks — who committed it — to admit that it happened.

“Truth to Power” is too brief to get deep into that issue, or even that deeply into Tankian’s life (we don’t meet his family). But it does present an interesting portrait of an artist speaking out, stepping into it every now and then, sometimes irking bandmates and fans with his outspokenness.

At one point he reads the critical comments from the band’s website from fans wishing he’s put a sock in it and get busy on a new album.

Garin Hovannisian’s film has Tankian give a history of the band, their “discovery” by producer/sage Rick Rubin and explosion in popularity on the cusp of 9/11. Rubin appears here, urging his star to speak his truth and keep at it, no matter the blowback.

And as you’d expect, when you’re broaching controversial subjects in the Middle East, there is blowback. We can guess why we’re not seeing Tankian’s wife and son. When you criticize Turkey and its Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, there will be threats.

As he and his bandmates talk about their music and their impact, anecdotes about business arrangements with Atlantic Records that fell through because of founder Ahmet Ertegun‘s philanthropic support of Turkish genocide-denial organizations, and radio conglomerate bans of their music come up.

The bracing thing in this story is how this alt-metal act handled that Dixie Chicks treatment. Tankian pushed the release of their song “Boom,” protesting the impending invasion of Iraq, as a music video — directed by Michael Moore. In your face? You bet.

“Truth to Power” gives us a bit of Serj lobbying Congress and recalling his publication of a thoughtful, heartfelt and ill-timed 9/11 “reasons it happened” explainer that led to a Howard Stern bulldozing as he tried to defend himself. And we see him get himself involved in Armenian politics in Armenia itself, despairing at the country’s anti-democratic turn, reveling in the people power of the country’s “2018 revolution.”

Fans of System of a Down already know a lot of this, I dare say. For everyone else, “Truth to Power” never gets much beyond giving us a brief primer Tankian’s activism, a sampling of their songs and a taste of his solo passions — writing a musical, performing with a jazz band and an orchestra, painting.

Despite his dabbling in many indulgences, Serj Tankian doesn’t come off as shallow or particularly superficial here. But this documentary almost does.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Serj Tankian, Rick Rubin, Shavo Odadjian, Daron Malakian,  John Dolmayan and Carla Garapedian

Credits: Scripted and directed by Garin Hovannisian. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:19

A compelling lead who looks a little like Lady Day and sounds a lot like her, even when she sings, and a story with all the pathos built into it makes for a generally compelling screen biography of jazz icon Billie Holiday.

Lackluster direction and a shambolic script won’t make anyone forget “Lady Sings the Blues” or the recent documentary “Billie.” But “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” takes an original tack, making the case for her as a Civil Rights martyr persecuted by racist, vindictive Federal drug enforcement. That’s both a draw and a major drawback of this latest mixed-bag movie from Lee Daniels (“Precious,” “The Butler”).

In basing the script on a non-fiction history of the War on Drugs, “Chasing the Scream,” Daniels and actress-turned-screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks (“Girl 9,””Their Eyes Were Watching God”) avoid spending rights money on the many fine Holiday biographies or scholarly history of the anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit” that Lady Day made famous. Cheaping-out resulted in a seriously disorganized, disjointed jeremiad that makes an impression and makes its points almost in spite of itself.

Grammy nominee Andra Day is Billie, and comes close to perfecting the intonation and affectations of Holiday’s singular voice — that timing, the little hiccups she twisted into the lyrics. This is a Billie who rarely looks the heroin-addled wreck barely keeping it together long enough to be a legend that is common in Holiday portraits. Her Billie seems sober enough, has a temper, isn’t shy about reminding us of the emotional scars that keep her abusing drugs and bouncing from one abusive relationship to another.

Flashbacks reinforce that, sketches of a childhood of abuse and coercion into prostitution.

The framework of the story is that most exhausted device, an interview, this time with a flamboyantly gay fan (Fictional?) radio interviewer (Leslie Jordan).

Lady Day half-retraces her career in this interview, building this narrative not around the major abusers in her life, husbands (Erik LaRay Harvey) and managers (Tone Bell), but around the Federal narcotics agent (Trevante Rhodes of “Moonlight”) who dogged her footsteps for years. Jimmy Fletcher gets out of the Army at the end of World War II, goes to see Holiday in concert, tries to get close to her and eventually does.

She figures out he’s a Fed, but falls for him (in this story) as he in turn recognizes that his racist boss, Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund) has a vendetta against her and that the entire Federal government is out to stop her from singing “Strange Fruit.”

That’s more truth than fiction, but not remotely the literal truth.

The film skips back and forth in time, tracing the postwar decade-and-a-half of Holiday’s life and career, using drugs and misusing her band (Tyler James Williams plays her most famous accompanist, Lester Young), having a fling with movie star Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne) and falling in and out of an affair with the Fed who may have her back, or may be hellbent on putting her away.

“Be careful with this feeling. This love right here, baby, it won’t love you back. I promise.”

Love eludes her, something that impacts even her sexual appetites. “God Bless the Child,” one of her most famous numbers, wafts through the score in scene after scene, underlining how alone she is and how “got his (or her) own” is what matters.

The downward spiral is gradual, only truly evident near the end. But the persecution, the arrests and warnings about “that song,” are ongoing.

Day is quite good in a performance that de-emphasizes histrionics (mostly) and plays up Holiday’s self-preservation instincts. Her band is constantly griping about getting paid, as is her costumer (Miss Lawrence) and hairdresser/personal assistant (Gabourey Sidibe of “Precious”).

There’s some graphic drug abuse, some raw sex and a lot of music in the film, with “Strange Fruit” as the one number that Day performs, start to finish, in the third act. You can feel that this was what all involved wanted to be their organizing principle to the narrative, that song. But it isn’t.

Daniels is a seriously miss-or-hit filmmaker, and when he misses, he reaches for explicit sex and sexuality to save him. See “The Paperboy.” Or better yet, don’t. “Billie Holiday” treads lightly on Lady Day’s bisexuality and wallows in “likes it rough” nudity to make an obvious point about her inability to love.

That renders “United States vs. Billie Holiday” a movie you can appreciate on its own terms, especially if you know her story well enough to do the organizing Daniels and Parks don’t. But it’s a bio-pic that keeps its brilliant, sultry, complicated subject at arm’s length.

This was talked up as an Oscar contender, purely by virtue of its subject and star. It isn’t.

That doesn’t mean this fascinating performance and defensible if not wholly coherent message and point of view isn’t worth seeing. It is.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, explicit sex, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast:  Andra Day, Trevante Rhodes, Garrett Hedlund, Gabourey Sidibe, Tyler James Williams, Natasha Lyonne, Tone Bell, Leslie Jordan and Erik LaRay Harvey

Credits: Directed by Lee Daniels, script by Suzan-Lori Parks, based on a book by Johann Hari. A Hulu release.

Running time: 2:10

What fresh MERDE is this?

A manic, gasping coke-fueled farce, “The Misadventures of Hedi and Cokeman” is the French anti-stoner comedy.

As in, Cheech & Chong and Harold & Kumar never ever got this worked up.

Raging, guffawing, punching and tumbling, insulting and slapsticking, it’s about two loser druggies who finally get the chance to make bank via drug dealing. But little in their half-assed, semipro experience in the trade has prepared them for this.

I mean, you name yourself “Cokeman” (Nassim Lyes, who co-wrote the script), bounce around as if you’re one-toot-shy-of-an-overdose and venture out in public in a stocking cap, fur coat and urine-stained untidy whiteys, it’s not like the cops aren’t going to notice.

Cokeman is the sort of maniac who blusters and threatens and flips-out on everybody who comes to his door. Are you…the COKEman?

“C’mon over here, aardvark face!” is funny, in French or in English subtitles. Drugs? Sure, lemme scrape a little white paint off my fridge. Are you high yet, “expert?”

Dude’s nose is bleeding, he’s hallucinating and has no idea he’s just snorted paint. Is it supposed to be like this?

“Quit THINKING, bro. It’s bad for your high.”

His always-beaten-up, hapless Franco-Algerian pal Hedi (Zappa-nosed Hedi Bouchenafa) drops in and they’re off to his “gold digger” sister Zlatana’s (Nina Kepekian) wedding to a rich drug lord, Arsène van Gluten (Fred Testot). Zlantana bullies her new spouse into giving the boys a gig.

They’ll move his weed for him. But not that weak Zeub Zebi stuff. Noooo. “Mojo Mango,” Zlatana insists.

What can go wrong? Pretty much everything. But as they get more chances to make this work, recruit street-corner dealers to work for them, get a little money and get greedier for more, we know they’re headed for a fall because we just know they Paris police are going to notice.

“Van Gluten won’t be ‘sticking’ around for long!'” as one Caruso-loving cop crows.

“Misadventures,” titled “En Passant Pécho: Les Carottes Sont Cuites” in French, is just exhausting. But as it pounds away at one-liner insults, drug consumption gags, sight gags (Tommy Chong-sized blunts) and slapstick — a blind dude with a beef comes after them with an RPG — as Lyes’ maniac laughs grow louder and more insistent, as Viagra-fueled violence enters the fray, it wears you down.

It even wears down the cast. One hilarious bit has veteran character actor Testot, as a drug lord who employs singing, dancing “Zulus” as his security, just snapso.

“Why did I AGREE to this stupid movie? I’m so ASHAMED.”

Not that this gets him off with his “Zulus.” They don’t like being called “Zulus,” for starters. This movie isn’t paying them enough to take that racist crap, they will have us know.

As characters “break the fourth wall” and break up a police raid, “Misadventures” takes on the air of many a “no rules” comedy that came before it — “Kentucky Fried Movie” all the way back to “Hellzapoppin.” Not that it’s in their league, just in their style.

Wearing it may be, but a dozen chuckles and half a dozen big laughs make this French farce almost worth the subtitles.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, lots and lots of drugs, violence, profanity

Cast: Hedi Bouchenafa, Nassim Lyes, Fred Testot, Julie Ferrier, Thomas Guy

Credits: Directed by Julien Hollande, script by Julien Hollande, Nassim Lyes. A Netflix release.

Running time: