Movie Nation

“Room 203” is not the first “haunted room” thriller.

This Japanese game company-produced adaptation of a Nanami Kamon novel isn’t set in a hotel as in “Room 237” in “The Shining,” or “1408” in the adaptation of a Stephen King story that starred John Cusack. In North America, we refer to rooms in apartment buildings as “Apartment 203,” but no matter.

A couple of college-age friends move into this historic mid-rise with one particular room that has a bloody history to it. Not that coed journalism student Kimmy (Francesca Xuereb) or the “bad influence” (her annoyed parents’ words) aspiring actress and big-time partier Izzy (Viktoria Vinkyarska) are told that.

No, the creepy landlord Ronan (Scott Gremillion) leaves that out. As we’ve already seen blood spilled from the never-mendable gaping hole in the wall in the film’s opening, that seems like a deal breaker.

New tenants move in, try to hang a picture, the hole reopens and the most curious reach in to see what’s inside. The fools! Horror follows.

There’s this strange necklace tucked into the wall and a haunting music box in the “pre war” furnished apartment. Once those totems are out in the open, weird things start to happen — nightmares, noises, and in Izzy’s case, a bar pick-up who dies and disappears while she’s sleeping a buzz off.

Being a journalist-to-be, Izzy is encouraged by a classmate (Eric Weigand) to “dig” and “investigate” the building and room 203 in it. But we’ve already seen the hole, the oddly-menacing stained-glass window, and met the landlord and heard “the basement is OFF limits to the residents.” Something bad happened here, something fated to be repeated over and over again until…rezoning?

Director Ben Jagger (“Corbin Nash”) starts this story off slowly and never really picks things up. The plot isn’t particularly original, inviting or logical. The threats are lethal to those in the roomies’ orbit, but let’s keep the two repeatedly-threatened cute coeds — OK, one isn’t enrolled — alive for the third act.

The “investigation” points straight to a crime and some supernatural mumbo jumbo of the J-horror variety.

The acting isn’t bad, but the characters are “types” and the dramatic/traumatic back story is as generic as everything else here.

There are thrillers that build toward a climax and thrillers that blow the ending after succeeding in creating suspense. “Room 203” never really gets up a head of steam and just sort of peters out in a predictable, anti-climactic finale.

If you don’t check in you won’t have to check out of “Room 203.”

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual situations, alcohol abuse

Cast: Francesca Xuereb, Viktoria Vinyarska, Eric Wiegand and Scott Gremillion

Credits: Directed by Ben Jagger, scripted by Ben Jagger, Nick Richey and John Poliquin, based on a novel by Nanami Kamon. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:44

Cruz is a famous “critic’s darling” filmmaker readying a new project, Banderas and Oscar Martinez as actors willing to go through some things to be in it.

This looks pretty funny and is coming our way in June, from IFC.

Viggo, Seydoux and K-Stew. June.

A real grabber tease of a trailer, I must say.

Griego is a Buenos Aires TV producer running his legs off the keep his long-running confrontational reality show, “Hoy se arregla el mundo” on the air.

He’s forever putting out fires, jetting abroad to sell his shows to other South American countries and fending off his station’s boss, the impertinent son of the late owner of the place.

So he’s barely got time for this kid whose custody he shares with the boy’s mother, Silvana. When she asks him to watch Benito for a few days, he can’t recall which school to pick him up from, or even what grade he is.

Griego (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is entirely too self-absorbed and distracted to be a good dad. Silvana (Natalia Oreiro) plans to move with the boy to Madrid for work, and Griego can’t be bothered to look up from checking his phone messages to respond.

“What’s in your chest, Griego?” It’s a fair question, because “a heart” isn’t the obvious answer. Doesn’t he care?

“He’s my son!” “Are you SURE?”

That’s a helluva note to end a dinner conversation with, seeing as how they never married and the guy never really bonded with the kid. But in melodramatic terms, that’s the perfect spot for her to storm out of the restaurant and get run over by a car.

Griego, the producer of a show that stages fights between neighbors over wi-fi and father-and-daughter over her vegetarianism, has a kid he’s neglected on his hands, one he’s indifferent to and so unsure about he takes a DNA test. It’s negative.

“Today We Fix the World,” taking its name from the daffy “faked” show Griego produces, is about not-really-your-father heartlessly breaking that news to a fourth grader, and then teaming up with that kid to try and figure out who his real dad is.

Sentimental and cute, a tad slow and not nearly as amusing as its premise sets us up for, it still plays, a downbeat little comedy with some slapstick, a smattering of showbiz and a lot of heart.

Take the way Griego breaks the news to to Beni (Benjamín Otero). He’s so clueless he says “Would you like to go get a cup of coffee (in Spanish, or dubbed into English)?” Griego warns the kid this is “going to hurt,” like “getting vaccinated.”

“I’m not your father,” he says. “It didn’t hurt,” the kid snaps back.

The child just lost his mother, and his not-my-dad is unloading “You have no idea how many problems I’m dealing with right now” on him.

“Fix the World” follows their quest, picking up clues from Silvana’s cell phones, interrogating her guidance-counselor pal (Charo López) without revealing their secret to her, avoiding the subject with Beni’s well-heeled, high-finance player grandma.

They start visiting suspects “from nine years ago” — the choreographer, the painter, the sleazy psychotherapist, a clown at the famous Republic of Children Argentine amusement park.

That last one is the film’s funniest bit, a peek into the horrific excesses of a gang of clowns, who protect their own from outsiders, be they tourists or guys trying to figure out if one of them fathered a child.

The TV show’s tribulations are a big distraction for Griego and an almost amusing one for the film. He keeps a lawyer, a doctor (who feeds him pills) and even a hypnotist on staff for the various stunts they stage daily on a series that is dying the ratings even as Griego is traveling the country, looking for a man who looks like “his” kid.

Even though we know where this is going to end up, Mariano Vera’s script gives that finale a final poignant twist or two, and director Ariel Winograd (“The Heist of the Century,” “Ten Days Without Mom”) keeps the tone light and sentimental.

Sbaraglia (“Pain and Glory”) walks a deft line between contemptible and worth saving from himself. We buy his character’s emotional journey, from an unwanted burden to a child he wants the best for.

It doesn’t all come together as neatly as it might have, and there are potential laughs and screwball moments left dangling. But Winograd sticks with what he knows, sentiment, and makes this “Fix” stick.

Rating: TV-14, drug abuse jokes, adult situations

Cast: Leonardo Sbaraglia, Benjamín Otero, Charo López, Martín Piroyansky and Natalia Oreiro

Credits: Directed by Ariel Winograd, scripted by Mariano Vera. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

You can’t blame his fans for praying for a new film, premiering secretly at Cannes.

Nobody wants him to bow out with “Inland Empire” as his last big screen credit.

Perhaps America’s greatest annual music festival celebrated its 50th installment a couple of years back, and promptly went on hiatus for two years, thanks to COVID.

The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival came back this year, and hot on its heels comes “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,” a documentary about how the festival came to be, an essay on a city and its musical history built on musical highlights of that 50th anniversary event, and a film that finishes with a bit of its triumphant return in 2022.

Co-directors Ryan Suffern (the recent “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” Bee Gees doc) and celebrated producer/director Frank Marshall take us onstage with the performers and catch up with scores of the folks who made and continue to make this epic gathering of hundreds of thousands happen, and backstage for this thorough overview of what makes the Jazz & Heritage Festival a singular event.

It’s “the world’s greatest backyard party” set in “the only unique city in America,” featuring a multi-national/multi-cultural musical gumbo on stage, and the culinary delights of a legendary food town — gumbo included — everywhere else at the city’s Fairground Race Course every spring.

It was first proposed during the “Jim Crow” 1960s, founder George Wein recalls, but didn’t come to life until “that changed.” The idea? Feature the music of the city, the people of the city and its food, “and the world will come.”

Damned if the world didn’t.

As one enthusiast declares, “Everybody eats and everybody dances,” and Jazz Fest — featuring jazz, pop, zydeco, World Music, funk, blues, rock, gospel and pop (check out Katy Perry in her winged spacesuit bustier joining a huge Gospel choir for “Oh Happy Day”) hurls them all together for a week of thousands of singers and musicals and tens of thousands of fans.

Exhibit A in the show’s cross-cultural appeal might be Caribbean-influenced country-pop star Jimmy Buffett, “consistently, our biggest draw” longtime director Quint Davis enthuses, bringing huge crowds of older white “yacht rock” Parrotheads into an environment where “passing from stage to stage, you can’t help but be exposed” to unknowns, local legends, African acts and African American Gospel choirs.

Pitbull marvels at the food and audience blend and its connection to his Cuban heritage — “I think all our arteries will get clogged (Jazz Fest) day!” The Marsalis family and other members of New Orleans music royalty take to the stage to pay tribute to their father, Ellis, playing with him one last time, Boyfriend brings her loopy stage show in and Trombone Shorty brings down the house, year after year.

Everything about the event “is still handmade” Davis insists, something that became obvious after Hurricane Katrina almost washed the city away, and again after COVID shut the festival down for two years.

The film captures the essence of an event that “ties the city together,” with Bruce Springsteen showing up among many others after Katrina to re-launch the festival, Rev. Al Green choosing Jazz Fest to return to public (secular) performance and Mr. “Margaritaville” welcoming the world back to New Orleans as the pandemic subsides.

A real music lover’s treat, this film.

Rating: PG-13 for brief language and some suggestive material

Cast: Interviews and performances with Pitbull, Jimmy Buffett, Samantha Fish, Brnaford Marsalis, Trombone Shorty, Al Green, George Wein, Big Freedia, Tarriona “Tank” Ball, The Revivalists, Quint Davis and many others.

Credits: Directed by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:35

Caught this trailer before a showing of something the other night, the latest from the writer-director of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

Lovely. Neon has it, of course.

How do you screw up Shakespeare’s hilariously malleable feuding couple farce “Taming of the Shrew?”

If you’re the Polish team behind their cleverly-retitled modern setting of the tale, you put all your efforts into a stupidly complicated story and a lot less in shrewishness.

“The Taming of the Shrewd” is about a not-nearly-irritable-enough just-cheated-on bee scientist from Chicago who comes home in a not-quite-fury to throw a monkey wrench into a dying furniture firm’s plans to buy the valley where she grew up, set up her “smart” beehives and renounce men in general and the one hunk in particular that two factions want to seduce and distract her into changing her mind.

Shakespeare’s play was complicated, with competing interests hiring an unflappable and unsuitable suitor to marry an old sister so that one of them could win the hand of her beautiful, sweet and companiable younger sister. This is needlessly complex on a whole other level.

“Kiss me, Kate” becomes Kaska (Magdalena Lamparska), the loutish seducer Petruchio is “Patryk” (Mikolaj Roznerski) and the sweeter younger sister and assorted other bits of business are switched around, but you can glimpse the Bard of Avon here and there around the edges of this sex farce that’s more sexy than farcical.

The schemers begin with Patryk’s older sister Agata (Dorata Landowska), who needs a loan to save the family company so that they can sell the Persian Gulf States furnishings made from the rare buried “bog wood” of Zakopane. That’s a tourist village whose biggest landowners are the frenemy blowhards Jedrus (Tomasz Sapryk) and Wacus (Piotr Cyrwus). They’re ready to sell and Agata has the loan to buy.

Damned if Kaska’s letting that happen. She, like the locals, doesn’t know the real reason Agata covets their valley. Nor does Agata’s ne’er do well brother Patryk, whom we meet getting shaken down by a loan shark’s enforcer.

Agata arm-twists Patryk into taking one for the team and “persuading” Kaska to change her mind. The local louts audition a number of other eligible bachelors to do the same thing, but Patryk persuades them to hire him as well.

Nobody knows anybody else’s hand in this poker game. And only Kaska’s scientific brain, her common sense and her temper can stop them.

Alas, there’s not enough “temper” here, just Kaska sizing up Patryk and enjoying humiliating his efforts to get to her. He gets locals to do all the manly things he wants to use to impress her — firewood chopping for her cabin, etc. And he just stands there, shirtless, waiting for her to succumb.

You can see possibilities here and there, but for the most part, this “Shrew(d)” bogs down in the details. All these people, all those agendas and there’s no “door slamming farce” staging or pacing to make this adaptation of an admittedly Neanderthal comedy by Shakespeare come to life.

Mountain goat attacks, bee shenanigans, squabbling conspirators and boorish local tourism appeals from a town that isn’t quite popular, isn’t really quaint and is not the least bit funny in itself hobble this already-too-tame “Taming” from start to finish.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Magdalena Lamparska, Mikołaj Roznerski, Piotr Cyrwus, Tomasz Sapryk, Dorota Landowska and Dorota Stalińska

Credits: Directed by Anna Wieczur-Bluszcz, scripted by Hanna Węsierska, Wojciech Saramonowicz, ever-so-loosely-based on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew.” A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

A couple of things you might guess about a redeemed-by-faith story co-starring Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson.

It’s going to have edge, because Wahlberg’s voice is best-suited for swearing. And it’ll be Catholic, because Gibson’s love-hate affair with what was once his mother church is as well-documented as his other personal struggles.

You can’t say “Father Stu” isn’t that unicorn of faith-based film, a movie that sounds and feels like a slice of real life. People — especially Wahlberg in the title role — curse like the disgraced former president and drink like…Mel Gibson. This goes on, first scene to last.

There’s blue collar poverty, frustration and impulse control. Violence takes many forms — lashing-out fistfights, “boxing as a way out” and drunk driving accidents. Sex is a goal, love almost a byproduct.

Yes, this R-rated drama feels real and lived-in. And Wahlberg goes all-in bringing this mug who found faith to life. If only that was enough.

Stuart Long is a Fu Manchu’d boxer when we meet him, a Montanan getting the straight dope from his doctor that “Your body is telling you not to fight.” His mother (Jacki Weaver) is glad to hear it, but Mr. “No regular job for me” isn’t having it. Then he is.

He was “all-in” on the boxing thing, seen in a long opening montage of fights. He now decides the time is right to go to Hollywood, “cash in my face instead of my fists.” He doesn’t require much money to travel.

“I don’t need a month to ‘make it!'” And he doesn’t need to get in touch with his estranged Dad (Gibson) already out there among the “communist…fascist hippies,” an alcoholic construction worker who — like Stu and his mom — never got over the death of Stu’s kid brother at five.

That may be the most heartfelt element of “Father Stu,” its depiction of a wound that never heals. Whatever dreams of singing fame Stu harbored as a kid, boxing became more his speed — an outlet for violence. However much his Dad enjoyed his PBR back in the day, it and whisky morphed into his medication afterwards. And the entire family’s rank contempt of religion was born when that kid died.

In LA, Stu gets a job at the meat counter of a market, hitting up every single customer with “You work in movies? You in show business?”

His auditions include “casting couch” come-ons and outright rejections.

But his head is turned by that one customer, soulful and sexy Carmen (Teresa Ruiz), whom he stalks to her Catholic Church. A manic “all-in” guy with a pseudo-charming patter — “How’d you find me?” “I asked God to help!” — Stu gives Carmen the full-court press.

“I’d wait 40 years in the desert for you.”

Standing out like a sore thumb at church doesn’t change Stu. He’s still a brawling barfly, still a foul-mouthed lout. And Carmen? She’s “a good Catholic.” She insists she’s not sleeping with him before marriage.

Modern redemption stories — on screen and in life — often hang on that one “big mistake” a character makes that turns a Chuck Colson or whoever towards religion. Stu’s is a tipsy motorcycle wreck that has the Virgin Mary visit him, lying on the pavement.

Next thing you know, he’s baring his coarse soul in confession, admitting he messed up in bedding Carmen, and deciding to join the priesthood.

Just. Like. That.

The movie, which gives us an hour of backstory to get to the point, is about how nobody takes Stu seriously, everybody questions his motives. There’s the shattered Carmen, who hoped to marry him, his foul-mouthed faith-hating mother and cynical, hard-drinking father, and eventually, his “You can’t fool God” fellow seminarians who rain on his Easter Parade.

Malcolm McDowell makes a fine impression as the aged monsignor reluctant to admit an older, problematic candidate with a lot of language and impulse control issues, and a police record. But with a common man’s grasp of faith and ability to cut through the flowery language to get at Biblical truths, Stu will not be denied.

It’s good to see Wahlberg showing some real ambition in a role, escaping the B-movie action pictures that seemed to be his career path of late. Weaver and Gibson are nicely paired-up and help give “Father Stu” that edge that I’ve long missed and complained about in this genre.

But Wahlberg’s patter performance highlights what a glib enterprise “Father Stu” is.

First-time writer-director Rosalind Ross leaps into features with a shallow, overlong picture on a colorful character who doesn’t lose much of that color as he is taught and severely tested en route to the priesthood.

“Father Stu” has funny, flippant dialogue and a smart, coherent visual strategy — lots of close-ups and extreme close-ups of one and all.

But there’s plenty of dead space, scenes that don’t advance the plot or just reinforce what we’ve already seen expressed and explained in many scenes before them.

The film has its best moments in the long run-up to the Big Conversion, and struggles afterward to justify “Why is this fellow worth a movie?” It climaxes with an agonizingly drawn-out finale that is neither touching nor definitive proof of why Father Stu got a pass to the priesthood or why this intimate, small world/smaller impact “personal” journey is worth over two hours of our time.

Wahlberg and the movie are likable enough, but overstay their welcome like a priest or pastor who never mastered the art of wrapping things up.

Rating: R for language (profanity) throughout.

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Mel Gibson, Teresa Ruiz, Jacki Weaver, Carlos Leal and Malcolm McDowell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rosalind Ross. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 2:04

Return with us now, to the Wizarding World and the latest wagonload in the content caravan of “Fantastic Beasts,” another prequel that serves as a place-holder film more at home on Warner Brothers’ accounting books than in J.K. Rowling’s.

“Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” lets Jude Law bring a fine gravitas to the Wizard Who Would Run Hogwarts and casts Mads Mikkelsen as an upgrade from canceled Johnny Depp as Grindelwald, the villain of this latest never-ending “trilogy.”

The final showdown may be anticlimactic enough to make even the cosplayers who show up for this wonder “What the hell was the point of all that?” But these pictures have settled into a gorgeous digitally-augmented alternate reality, recognizably period piece but distinctly alien. Here that’s a reality where wizards work through their differences as we know that in their world the Muggles (mostly unseen) are wrestling with the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, or their modern counterparts.

“The Secrets of Dumbledore” has the ambition to be “about something,” where “peaceful transition of power” is lamented with nostalgia, in which the characters and those of us watching them wish for justice and not open-criminals “absolved of” their “alleged crimes,” for leaders who “Do what is right, not what is easy.” We’re repeatedly reminded “Dangerous times favor dangerous men.”

But damn, this thing is a mess. A “story” that barely deserves that label takes forEVER to get going, a vast clutter of forgettable characters are played not by the legends of British cinema, television and theatre who populated the Harry Potter films, but by not-yet-wholly-established “stars” like Callum Turner, Jessica Williams, Alison Sudol and Poppy Corby-Tuech.

You need a scorecard, or have the books memorized, to keep track of who’s who.

All of Warner Brothers’ cost-economies in this cash cow come home to roost in this two hour and twenty-two minute bore, none more telling than sticking with British TV director David Yates, whose “trains-run-on-time” helming of the last “Potter” pictures and the entire “Beasts” franchise has reduced the films to efficient, colorless style-starved fan-servicing “content,” a time-killing anchor to a Warner Brothers or Pluto TV “Wizarding World” streaming channel of the future.

Even shedding one of the outsider-looking-in irritants of the series, the many actual-named “Fantastic Beasts” — a maddening “Let’s look up what claptrap J.K. dreamed-up to call this or that hybrid of mythic critters, and how to spell it” — points to this ponderous picture’s failings.

This outing, only the magical all-seeing deer-goat “Qilin,” pronounced “Chillan,” as in “All God’s Chillan want the Qilin to pick a new leader of the Confederation of Wizards,” is identified by name. Praise be. Other crablike beasts, tentacled prison Kraken, skittering this and wandering-through-the-background that aren’t labeled. That’s the only thing that keeps “Secrets of Dumbledore” from edging towards the four hour mark as a movie.

At least we all know what a phoenix is and why it’s symbolically in the background of many a scene.

The plot — the murderous Grindelwald, now played by Mads and not Captain Jack, is on the lam and plotting away. It’s a winter in the Muggles’ late 1920s, and veteran wizard Albus Dumbledore (Law) and academic wizard Lally Hicks (Williams, of “The Incredible Jessica James”) are assembling a “team” to foil him.

That team consists of biologist and “Fantastic Beasts” author Newt (Eddie Redmayne), his brother Theseus Scamander (Turner, of “Assassin’s Creed”), Newt’s plucky assistant Broadacre (Victoria Yeates) and the comical Brooklyn baker-Muggle Kowalski (Dan Fogler).

They’re to “save the world” from Grindelwald, who is still bound by “Blood Troth” to his long-ago lover Dumbledore. They’ll need magic, Newt’s bottomless suitcase and a little Brooklyn “three card Monte” trickery to manage that.

There are, of course, other Dumbledores, a fresh LeStrange and younger versions of others played in the Potter pictures (Fiona Glascott is a younger Minerva “Maggie Smith” McGonagall). Casting relative unknowns in so many roles makes for a movie that’s puzzling to parse out for non-fans of the Rowling novels.

That character clutter is joined by scenes that serve no dramatic purpose and dialogue that rarely transcends the “I’ll have to ensure that my wand registration is up to date.”

I like the fact that Rowling & Co. sought to make the connection between the roiled world we live in, with power-mad and openly cruel Grindelwald elites seeking to “remake the world” as “our birthright.” The fascist-cultist-populist rallies of the political candidates for leader of the wizarding conspiracy are blunt and leave no doubt of their message.

Destroy everything, enslave everyone without a wand, and some with them.

A comic bit that involves a bit of scorpion/crab dancing by Redmayne and Turner, playing his bureaucratic brother tickles, as does some of the shuffling suitcase business.

But an “assassination attempt” is filmed as if all involved knew fans would be more interested in the banquet meal of floating plates leading around wizard food service staff, and lands flat. The digital “beasts” are impressive and forgettable, like far too many of the players in this piece.

That goes for this movie, delayed perhaps too long to maintain its thin memory connection to the long story thread Rowling & Warners were conjuring up. The passage of time makes this piffle passe.

Too many characters means there’s somebody for everybody to potentially identify with, but none of them have enough to do, with only Law and to a lesser degree Mikkelsen, who brings real contempt and menace to Grindelwald, making much of an impression.

Redmayne in particular must be desperate for a way out of this endless “EastEnders for Wizards” obligation. Playing one note has to be as tiring as watching it.

Rating: PG-13 for some fantasy action/violence.

Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Dan Fogler, Jessica Williams, Ezra Miller, Callum Turner, Alison Sudol, William Nadylam, Poppy Corby-Tuech and Mads Mikkelsen.

Credits: Directed by David Yates, script by Steve Kloves and J.K. Rowling, based on her books. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:22