Movie Nation

“Spider-Man: No Way Home’s” Thursday’s afternoon and evening “previews” took in over $50 million in ticket sales in North America. And Friday’s all-day take was even better — over $70 million.

That makes for the second best “opening day” ever and puts this blockbuster in the “blockbuster” category before the sun sets on Saturday of its opening weekend. It’ll clear $245-$250 million by midnight Sunday, Deadline.com projects.

That’s not as much as “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” but for a movie in the bitter end of a pandemic, it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Whatever Disney has in its Marvel stable, it’s always been Sony that had the one can’t-miss gold mine in that comic book catalog — the teen web slinger with a heart, a bad rep and a guilty conscience.

Reviews didn’t help or hurt it, because the fanoisie were always going to turn out.

The all-star/guest-star/”greatest hits” cast made this the surest of sure things this side of an “Avengers” picture.

“Nightmare Alley” has good reviews of its own, a sparkling cast and Guillermo del Toro behind the camera. And it’s earning table scraps — maybe $3-3.5 million on its opening weekend.

That won’t best “Encanto” ($6.6), “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” ($3.6) or “West Side Story” ($3.4 million).

The Indian wide-release “Pushpa: The Rise” is the only other new release to clear $1 million and crack the top ten.

Let’s cut to the chase with “The King’s Man,” shall we?

The movie doesn’t come to life, pop off the screen and make any impression at all until Rasputin shows up.

All this other “origin story” of the Kingsman SECRET secret service, its founding during the bloodbath that was World War I, is mostly just stuff and nonsense, and bloody dispiriting nonsense at that.

But when Lord Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) and his teen son Conrad (Harris Dickinson of TV’s Getty series, “Trust”) are shipped off to Russia to deal with this “mad monk” who has the Tsar’s ear, “King’s Man” comes to dark, deathly and damned funny life.

Rhys Ifans is charged with bringing the fun to this stolid, self-serious comic book adaptation. And the scruffy beanstalk who stole “Notting Hill” is just the man for the job of The Monk The Russians Could Not Kill.

Every plummy turn of phrase, delivered in silly Slavic-accented English, tickles.

“You dare to QVESTION ze vessel of ze LORD?”

With a little help from stunt doubles and special effects this Rasputin does a manic Russian sabre dance set to…Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.”

And as villains go, Rasputin was the Michael Myers of his day. He took a licking and kept on ticking.

Ifans’ turn, making the mystic someone with a hint of actual supernatural healing powers, a sweet tooth and a taste for sex of every and all varieties, is a hoot. He’s so good that he almost stops this two hour and 11 minute death march cold. And “stopping” is the last thing this monstrosity needed.

It’s not really the cast’s fault. Well, not much their fault. Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn has an impossible time of making the run-up to The Great War anything but tragic. The crowned heads of Europe hurtle towards the inevitable, with Rasputin, Lenin, Gavrilo Princip and his co-conspirators, the out-of-date Lord Kitchener (Charles Dance) either hastening the disaster, or unable to forestall it.

A cute touch — having Tom Hollander play the cousins King George, Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicolas — a pointed reminder of the political system that helped cause the war, and was mostly destroyed because of it.

Fiennes plays Britain’s most famous landed and titled pacifist, a man who lost his wife as they tried to provide aid to the victims in a South African concentration camp during the Boer War. Lord Oxford’s vow to keep their son safe is why he won’t allow young Conrad to enlist in 1914. He sees the war that this quickly became, a mass slaughter meatgrinder trapped in the trenches of Flanders and France.

“It’s not fighting. It’s dying.”

But when Kitchener summons him to form this back-door spy service to manipulate events and alter the course of history, the Oxfords are on board. Scheming, spying, bespoke tailoring and derring do ensue.

Truth be told, the movie never crawls out from under the pall of those opening acts. It’s hard to lighten the tone after your movie starts in a concentration camp and stumbles into the trenches.

Fiennes is a terrific actor who never gets to play the droll touch the movie desperately needed. Dickinson is rather lost in the scale of it all, not having the screen charisma to carry his share of the load.

Gemma Arterton and Djimon Hounsou, as other enlistees (and servants) in “the service” just add to the whole asinine noblesse oblige of it all.

If the world learned nothing from that war and bloody century that followed, and apparently it learned little, it should have been that the rich and entitled classes made these messes and profited from them, with or without a little self-serving self-sacrifice on their part. And no comic book faked history — including well-staged archduke assassination attempts — can shake the gloom off that.

“King’s Man” doesn’t send up the tragic comedy of the start of The Great War, doesn’t rewrite history in any particularly interesting, illuminating or entertaining way. It just gets stuck in the mud, like the millions whose lives were squandered in it.

Only Rhys Ifans’ performance — silly, sinister and over-the-top — suggests that anyone involved “got the joke,” as it were.

Rating: R for sequences of strong/bloody violence, language, and some sexual material

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Harris Dickinson, Gemma Arterton, Djimon Hounsou, Charles Dance, Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans.

Credits: Directed by Matthew Vaughn, scripted by Matthew Vaughn and Karl Gajdusek, based on the Mark Millar comic book. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:11

There are worse ways to spend a holiday matinee than sitting with the kids watching and singing along with a “Sing” movie.

“Sing 2” is just as long, just as childishly-plotted and almost manic in its haste to hurtle from tune to tune. But it’s harmless and harmonious, which is the bottom line all parents look for when entertaining the 8-and-unders.

“Say a Little Prayer” all you want, but what other movie can you imagine that would have the nerve to serve up Reese Witherspoon as a pig covering Ariana Grande, she wolf Halsey singing Alicia Keys’ “Girl on Fire” and a porcupine-voiced Scarlett Johansson putting heart and soul into “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For?”

A little Rodgers & Hammerstein (“Something Wonderful”), a dab of Steve Miller (“Abra Cadabra”), a slice of Steve Winwood (“Higher Love”), a blast of Prince (“Let’s Go Crazy”), a sample of The Struts (“Could Have Been Me”) and a cold cool splash of Coldplay (“Sky Full of Stars”) whiz by in a musical blur sometimes performed by the original artists, but most often covered by the singers/actors playing animated “all creatures great and small,” critters who just want to “put on a show.”

That’s our plot. Koala Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) is still out to prove that “You’re Never Too Small to Hit the Big Time” (song idea for MM for “Sing 3” — Webb Wilder, look’em up). But he and his little band of dreamers — porcine Rosita (Witherspoon) and Gunther (Nick Kroll, the comic highlight), timid elephant Meena (Tori Kelly), singing gorilla Johnny (Taron Egerton) and guitar goddess Ash (Johansson) — still haven’t proven themselves in “the entertainment capital.”

A talent scout from there blows them off. So there’s nothing for it but to catch a bus to Redshore City and make their pitch to the impresario himself, the short-tempered white wolf named Mr. Crystal (Bobby Cannavale).

He isn’t bowled over, but Gunther’s mad notion of a sci-fi musical revue, “Out of this World,” changes Crystal’s mind. One condition? They’d better deliver the leonine legend Clay Calloway (Bono), a once major figure in music whose tunes they want to use, in person, singing a role. One later condition? Crystal’s daughter (Halsey) wants to be in the show, too.

The big parent appeal of this impressively-animated spectacle is the song line-up, tunes many who grew up in the ’90s-2000s and now have children of their own will know by heart. No, not everyone will recognize the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“Heads Will Roll,” covered by ScarJo), but the Weeknd’s “Cant’ Feel My Face” is represented, Bomba Estero is here, and Billie Eilish and Elton John.

The movie surrounding the tunes isn’t all that, despite Illumination’s dazzling, colorful animation. But the ensemble crooning “Where the Streets Have No Name” and Shawn Mendes’ “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back” makes the time and the movie fly by so fast that you won’t mind.

Rating: PG for some rude material and mild peril/violence

Cast: The voices of Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Scarlet Johansson, Letitia Wright, Nick Kroll, Halsey, Bobby Cannavale, Taron Egerton, Tori Kelly, Pharrell Williams and Bono.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Garth Jennings. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:50

Major points for style and just plain kinkiness go to Canadian Bruce LaBruce for his latest cinematic toying with taboos, “Saint-Narcisse.”

When you see and review 1,000 movies a year, any filmmaker who makes you sit up and go, “Well, that’s weird” and “never seen THAT” gets to take bow.

The director of “Gerontophilia,” the “gay ‘Harold and Maude,'” the groundbreaking queer horror film “Otto: Up with Dead People” and the controversial “L.A. Zombies” crosses lines again with a film that takes “self-love” to a dark and twisted extreme, and has a little fun with it along the way.

Dominic (Félix-Antoine Duval) is “a beautiful guy” who doesn’t need to be reminded of it by strangers. He can see that in the mirror, which he stares into a lot more than is wholly healthy. Dominic is 22, lives with and takes care of his Quebecoise grandmother, fending off her “When are you getting married?” questions, fantasizing about having instant, impulsive sex with any random fellow beauty he runs into at the laundromat.

The thing is, the real pleasure in that imaginary raw-dogging is in spying the shocked passers-by looking in the window, and seeing his own gorgeous reflection in “the act” in that window.

Dominic walks the streets with a Polaroid instant-camera, snapping shots of himself from different angles in different locations, handing those snaps to strangers. It’s 1972, and he’s just invented “the selfie” and “Instagram.”

But grandma was holding out on him, something that only becomes clear after her death. She and his late father raised him, telling him his mother died. But locked in a strongbox in granny’s closet is evidence to the contrary. His mother is alive. She sent letters. There’s nothing for it but to motorbike to distant Saint-Narcisse, meet the woman in the woods the locals call “a witch,” and meet the much younger woman “who never seems to age” living with her.

Once there, camping out in a cemetery next to a grave with his name on it, he figures out that other people were told HE was dead.

And then there’s this secretive and seemingly perverse “order” of Catholic monks secluded in a monastery on the edge of town, a group he spies on as they smoke, skinny dip and horseplay the way you’d never imagine monks carrying on.

The bilingual Félix-Antoine Duval — the film is in English or subtitled French — makes a curious, confused and yet cocky leading man out of Dominic. He has the confidence of the beautiful-and-I-know-it, brashly stripping and taking an outdoor shower in front of the furious young woodswoman (Alexandra Petrachuk) he finds his mother living with.

Mom (Tania Kontoyanni) has but to look at him to “recognize my own son.” The power struggle that ensues in that house is but a sideshow for the self-absorbed, self-loving bisexual Dominic. He spies one of those monks, and eventually we figure out what or who has his attention.

LaBruce feeds us three points of view, slipping away from Dominic to show us mother Beatrice and lover or daughter figure Irene’s quarrels, and the kinky intrigues of the Saint-Narcisse monastery, where paranoid Father Andrew (Andreas Apergis) may have reasons for his paranoia.

LaBruce juxtaposes the beautiful/accusatory Jesus hanging on the cross in that monastery with the goings-on there, and in the movie in general.

He pokes heteronormative judgement and homosexual narcissism in equal measure.

With “Saint-Narcisse,” he gives us a young man’s search for his identity, an early ’70s “know yourself” fanatic who feels incomplete for reasons he can’t put a finger on. He will find answers, and what he does with that “discovery” will be merely the latest and greatest taboo Bruce LaBruce gets around to in his unsettling and faintly amusing riff on sexual identity and the outer limits of searching for it.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Félix-Antoine Duval, Tania Kontoyanni, Alexandra Petrachuk and Andreas Apergis

Credits: Directed by Bruce LaBruce, scripted by Bruce LaBruce and Martin Gerard. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:41

“Son of Monarchs” is a contemplative character study of a molecular biologist who studies the Monarch butterflies that winter in and around his hometown of Angangueo, Michoacán. He studies them at a university in New York, and when he’s summoned home for the funeral of the abuela who raised him, he relives some of the trauma that made him leave and copes with unfinished business with the older brother who stayed.

The latest from the director of “The Fly Room” continues his insect-centric character studies with a movie that doesn’t openly lay out where it’s going or what it’s about, but gets everything it can out of its backdrop, the annual, instinctual migration of Monarchs from all over North American back to their ancestral home to the Rosario Sanctuary and points near it in Mexico.

When you name your little boy “Mendel,” after the famous mathematician/geneticist, you’re pretty much setting his course for life. In flashbacks, the adult Mendel (Tenoch Huerta) remembers roaming the butterfly-covered forests with older brother Simón, bombarding his sibling with questions about the butterflies who fly there, secure the next generation and die.

A lot of Mendel’s questions are about life and the afterlife. There’s a reason their grandmother is raising them. Something happened to their parents.

In present-day New York, Mendel experiments with Monarch wing colors and patterns, looking for the genes that determine this or that, looking for the perfect color to use in his tattoo tribute to the winged creatures who make his hometown a tourist attraction. He’s a star pupil of his mentor (William Mapother), but a lonely loner, wholly consumed by his work.

Back in Mexico for the funeral, he participates in rites for his grandmother, rituals from the Day of the Dead. He catches up with childhood chum (Gabino Rodríguez) who joined him in the costumed festival celebrating the butterflies when they were little.

We pick up on the bad blood between him and his brother (Noé Hernández), the auditory flashbacks that capture the sounds of a flood, desperation, the modern day schism caused by the mine where his brother works and it and the “gangs” who run it ruining the habitat for the most famous of all butterflies.

Back in New York, we witness a tiny break in his work obsession when Mendel takes up with a social worker (Alexia Rasmussen) whose hobby is mastering the flying trapeze. New York, where any and all “passions” are indulged.

“Sons of Monarchs” is the sort of understated indie drama that leaves you with a wish list as you watch the closing credits.

I wish this tale told in Spanish (mostly) had more directly tied the butterflies’ fate to Mendel’s, wish there’d been more overt connection to these butterflies, “spirits of the dead” in Mexico, to Mendel and wish he’d taken a more out-front role in securing their habitat and survival.

But that’s another movie. What’s here is more subtle and intimate, getting at the trauma obliquely, making the migrating butterfly connection only in the vaguest sense.

Huerta, seen most recently in “The Forever Purge” and “Narcos: Mexico,” gives a poker-faced performance with just a hint of soul sneaking through.

And his writer-director, filling in butterfly tourism (festivals, etc) around the edges, makes the “Son of Monarchs” metaphorical point clear enough — eventually. He’s too interested in the biology of it all — chrysalis dissections, color at the genetic level — to make his point more overt.

It’s not a great film of deep insights into the human condition. But Gambis has found an arresting backdrop for a quiet, human story of loss, regret, guilt and work distraction, a movie well worth checking out just for the butterflies.

Rating: R for language (profanity)

Cast: Tenoch Huerta, Noé Hernández, Alexia Rasmussen and William Mapother.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alexis Gambis. An HBO Max release.

Running time: 1:37

“Night Teeth” is another one of those vampire movies more concerned with “rules” and exposition and “explaining” how this world operates than most of the elements that make such genre pictures work.

The pacing is funereal, the reactions — or under-reactions — of anyone confronted with the realization that this blood-sucking creature of legend actually exists and lives in tony neighborhoods all over LA, are shockingly tame.

The action? Hit or miss, although I have to give credit the writer and director manage a bang-up climax. Sure, they blow it with an anti-climactic coda. But that’s to be expected. Horror movies aren’t allowed to make graceful exits. Not when there’s the chance to “get a franchise” out of this.

Jorge Lendeberg Jr. of “Bumblebee” is the hip-hop crazed college kid who takes his brother’s car-service Escalade out and picks up “Children of the Night” on the prowl for uh, fresh blood.

Benny dons the suit and tie because his brother, Jay (Raúl Castillo) has other concerns. Somebody snatched his girlfriend. That can only mean the vampires broke the long-standing peace between themselves and the Gangs of LA. Unknown to Benny, Jay is something of a peace-keeper in Boyle Heights.

But Jay had no idea that the clients Benny is summoned to pick up would be Blaine (Debbie Ryan) and Zoe Moreau (Lucy Fry). Rich, entitled, pouty and rude, they hand over the addresses of five parties and clubs which they plan to hit tonight, with the proviso that they “get to the last stop by morning…Non-negotiable.”

That isn’t the first “rule” the viewer has been treated to. And it won’t be the last.

To wit, vampires can stay in LA if they “Don’t let humans know we exist” and “Don’t feed on the unwilling (a kinky town expects no less)” and “Never ever enter Boyle Heights without permission.”

The kid spies the ruby token that the ladies use as admission to every place they go. He spies messages on a carelessly unlocked cell phone that reveals they know his brother, and think that’s who is driving them around. He spies the sack of money the ladies acquire, and notices it’s got blood on it.

And then a scream from inside a building, a quick peek inside, and…the horror, the horror.

Lendeberg had to master acting ongreen screens with digitally-added Transformers for “Bumblebee.” But he never comes anywhere near registering the terror, panic and shock Benny should experience when he sees club prowling hotties biting into bros who know what’s coming, but don’t expect it to be gruesome and terminal.

Ryan’s Blaine becomes the vampire to take a fancy to the innocent “driver,” and feels the need to “explain” their “world” and its rules to him, even though this question suggests why she feels this free.

“What would you do if tonight was your last night on Earth?”

Alfie Allen plays the vampire villain, Victor, who has broken the peace, and Sydney Sweeney and Megan Fox show up as vampires figuring they’ll take Victor down a notch or three.

The dialogue is littered with innuendo — “He gives real good…blood.” Mostly, it’s just snide putdowns of “your kind” by “out kind,” and terminal but tepid threats.

“She can drain your whole body before you pull the trigger.”

Still, as I mentioned above, the action beats are OK and the climax is cleverly conceived, even if so much that comes before it is dull and credulous, with Lendeberg never once registering an appropriate reaction to this supernatural horror that’s just been revealed to him, in all its gory glory.

Rating: TV-14, bloody violence

Cast: Jorge Lendeberg, Debbie Ryan, Lucy Fry, Raúl Castillo, Alfie Allen, Sydney Sweeney and Megan Fox.

Credits: Directed by Adam Randall, scripted by Brent Dillon. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

A $50 million opening afternoon/night in a pandemic?

That’s not as good as “Avengers: Endgame,” which confined its showings to Thursday “night” previews and raked in $60 million. This “Spider-Man” started its showings at 3pm — two more showings added to the “night,” on average.

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens” pulled in $57 million not all that long ago.

I ducked into a suburban multiplex’s 5pm showing before my “Matrix” preview last night in America’s Vacationland. A 75% capacity house, and the movie played — even the lamest jokes landed, hoots and hollers at every “returning” character.

This beast is going to eat Christmas moviegoing up, leaving scraps for everyone else.

The first grabber moment comes during a college party at a wealthy friend’s house, the perfect place for (Chloe Grace Moretz) to be just after she’s urinated on a stick. She and boyfriend Sam (Algee Smith of “Detroit”) may be shocked. He may be rattled that his rushed proposal has been shot down. She’s upset because, as she tells a friend, she’s got this problem and she’s not even sure he’s who she wants to be with.

Maybe we noticed the waiter whose reflexes are entirely too quick for a beer pong ping pong ball hurled his way as he efficiently works the room with drinks and tidying up duties.

A noise, a flickering of the lights, and “the event” begins. That waiter starts slaughtering all the privileged kids who have paid him no mind all night. All over the city, all over the world, lights are going on, screams are piercing the night sky. The androids who make life easy have started their own Judgement Day. It’s the robot uprising.

Pregnant Georgia and a guy she’s not even sure she loves and can depend on are on the run, scrambling to survive, to make their way to this or that rumored safe harbor — Boston? Korea? — and to get help delivering that baby on board.

Writer-director Mattson Tomlin’s “Mother/Android” is a straight up mash-up, “Terminator” meets “Children of Men.”

Human babies are rare things, which is what the whole “sanctuary” in Korea is about. They’ve been through the zombie apocalypse (“Train to Busan”) and coped with monsters in the rivers (“The Host”). They’re more prepared for the robot apocalypse, I guess.

Tomlin takes us through the generic dystopian landscape of collapse and decay, an Army descended into Darwinian anarchy with survivors hiding in forests in “No Man’s Land” while trying to find their way in to the “fortress” that Boston has become.

Who can you trust to be human? Are there humans you can actually trust?

Tomlin spent most of his screenwriting time working out the logic of a machine-driven takeover. Having no souls, no morals or sense of self-preservation, the electronic “hive” mind would work more like bees than zombies, the attainment of a group goal is paramount, “individuals” don’t matter. Machines don’t have angst over self-sacrifice.

Moretz can make most any character compelling, and we get little glimpses of Georgia’s self-preservation panic that should shift to protective mothering. But with no support system to reinforce that, are we still wired biologically to make that leap? The movies generally assume that to be the case. I don’t think “Mother/Android” does, which is an interesting twist.

Smith’s Sam has a simpler arc, a guy in love and acting out every chivalrous, heroic and self-sacrificing thing he can come up with to get baby and mother to safety. Sam gives us the sense that he’s making this up as he goes, maybe mimicking behavior he’s seen in movies. It’s “expected” of him.

As a filmmaker, Tomlin (“Solomon Grundy”) does a good job with the chases, violence and suspense. But he’s too reluctant to abandon the “Terminator” voice-over narration and hard-pressed to do much that’s new or interesting with this survival quest plot.

That makes Mother/Android” something of a mixed bag. But with Moretz here to ensure it’s at least a story we invest in, bringing emotional heft to the moments that beg for it, this nothing-special dystopia manages the bare minimum that fans should expect from films of this genre.

Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Chloe Grace Moretz, Algee Smith, Raul Castillo and Kate Avallone

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mattson Tomlin, scripted by A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:50

A guy writing a more famous guy’s biography. And?

This one rolls out Feb. 25.

There are few genuine competitors for the title “Most Quixotic career after winning an Oscar.” Nic Cage would seem to have it locked down. Cuba Gooding Jr. And Mo’nique are great examples of how hard it is to find work that measures up to a defining performance.

Adrien Brody? He marches to his own drummer. He’s not the workaholic Cage became, which in Cage’s case is thanks to tax issues and a desire to never be at rest and lost in his own head.

Brody still attracts the attention of good directors. Wes Anderson always has a role for him. But he’s not really a movie star. He can’t sell tickets based on his name in the credits.

“Clean,” which Brody produced, has him playing a recovering junkie with a fervent desire to keep his head down and get past “one day at a time.”

Then he’ss triggered into trying to save someone else. Is this junkie a man with “particular skills?” Could be.

We’ll find out Jan. 28.