Movie Nation

“The Guilty” is a solidly suspenseful police procedural thriller about a 911 call and what the dispatcher goes through to end the tragedy unfolding on the other end of the line.

Like other films of this subgenre — Halle Berry’s “The Call,” for instance — the action takes place in “real time,” from just before that dispatcher (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets the endangered woman on the phone, to that situation’s conclusion.

The first twist here is that LA operator #625, Joe Baylor, is a demoted LAPD cop, and the second is that he’s about to go through some things that have nothing to do with this temporary duty. He’s due in court, defending his career, the next day.

This adaptation of a Swedish thriller (“Den Skyldige”) takes us and Joe on something of a roller coaster ride of panic topped by panic, as caller “Emily” (the voice of Riley Keough) is unable to speak freely, and Joe snaps into his training like a seasoned professional, asking “Yes or no questions” to ascertain her threat level.

“Do you know the person you’re with? Do they have a weapon? Have you been abducted?”

“Guilty” sticks with Joe, barking rudely at his colleagues in the call center, scrambling to dispatch California Highway Patrol, trying to ascertain the make, color and type of vehicle Emily is in, guessing who is driving the car and has taken her, directing CHP to the highway they’re on.

A big complication and new California wrinkle in this Antoine Fuqua (scripted by Nic Pizzolatto) adaptation? The mountains around the city are on fire. Emergency services are overwhelmed. There’s smoke and ash and it’s the middle of the night. Just ID’ing a vehicle under those conditions is going to be nigh on impossible.

The script and Gyllenhaal’s performance of it establish Joe’s character in a few quick strokes, mostly earlier calls. He has the arrogance we’ve come to associate with the badge and an irritability earned through years of experience.

The caller in a stoned panic over the hellish breathing conditions and confusion of an apocalyptic fire gets a little “I understand, but it’s your own fault, isn’t it?” A bicycle who’s chosen this moment to get earns an even more snappish “don’t ride your bike drunk, ass—e!”

Joe reaches out to officers on duty (Ethan Hawke voices his sergeant and former watch commander, Eli Goree plays his old partner), tries to get his ex on the phone so that he can tell his daughter “Good night,” fends off calls from a persistent newspaper reporter and becomes more agitated as the night wears on.

That’s when he starts crossing lines, urging others into dangerous, unadvisable actions or behavior that breaks the law.

Some of the third act twists in this I went with, and some seem inorganic — shoved in as a way of piling up surprises.

The heated arguments with assorted other dispatchers in his office, and on the phone from other agencies, point toward “maybe this isn’t the job for you.” And yet the guy’s experience in the field sends him to the right database here, the right “guess who took her” there.

Gyllenhaal makes Joe fascinating to watch, pretty much first scene to last, pretty much stuck in one location and on (more or less) one set. Joe curses and barks at other adults, but he softens considerably when he gets Emily’s little girl phone, assuring her that everything’s going to be OK, trying to convince her that “we,” the police, “we protect people who need help,” even if the kid isn’t buying it.

The ground covered is a tad overfamiliar, Gyllenhaal’s reactions predictably over the top and even the tropes of the genre (“real time”) can seem unsurprising and overplayed. But Fuqua makes every minute of screen time count, maintaining the suspense and claustrophobia even in those stretches where he takes the foot off the gas.

Rating: R, for language (profanity) throughout

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Christina Vidal and Adrian Martinez, and the voices of Riley Keough, Peter Sasrgaard, Ethan Hawke and Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, scripted by Nic Pizzolatto, based on the Swedish film “Den Skyldige,” scripted by Emil Nygaard Gustav Möller. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

George MacKay, Lily-Rose Depp and Paddy Considine star in this mental hospital romance between people suffering from species identity disorder.

Who knew, right?

This one, from the director of “Nocturnal,” comes out Dec. 3, in limited release.

This holiday release looks lovely.

“Venom: Let There Be Carnage” is wanton slaughter lightened by monstrous zingers delivered in a growl that needs subtitles, a colossal waste of talent in front of the camera and not exactly a resume builder behind it.

Seriously, I hope the talented Tom Hardy bought himself an island — or a better agent — with this.

This noisy, collateral damage-cluttered sequel lives down to its name as a second alien “Symbiote” like Venom, named “Carnage,” takes up residence inside of Woody Harrelson‘s elaborate wig. Woody plays a serial killer named Cletus Kasady.

And as he’ll be the first to tell you, “People LOVE serial killers!”

Cletus killed lots of folks over a long period of time before Carnage came calling. And he got caught and is now awaiting execution in San Quentin. Yes, he’s so evil that California amended its death penalty laws just for him.

That’s how hapless reporter Eddie Brock (Hardy) ends up in the cell block with an exclusive interview. And that’s when the serial killer takes a bite out of the reporter (hazard of the profession) and that bite is what creates Carnage.

Shy, mopey Eddie still misses Anne (Oscar winner Michelle Williams), but she’s taken up with the more suitable Dan (Reid Scott).

Even Cletus has a lady love. Or had one. He’s obsessed with reconnecting with his equally-disturbed other half, Francis (Naomie Harris). Does he know her “special power?” He will when they get back together. There’s a reason he names her “Shriek.”

Stephen Graham is an actor ill-suited for comic book movies trapped in a comic book movie playing a cop trapped between a dangerous reporter and a dangerous serial killer.

Venom? He’s still a nag, calling his host body a “loser” for losing his girlfriend and refusing to sate his symbiote’s appetites for human flesh and brains.

“We should out there, protecting the city — LETHALLY!”

Eddie just wants to set boundaries.

“This is a ME thing, not a WE thing.”

Bodies are flung about, pierced, beheaded and generally violated as our two symbiotes act up and act out on their way to their host-and-symbiote showdown.

Actor-turned-director Andy Serkis delivered a noisy, bloody and brisk visit to this corner of the Marvel universe. All these characters, all this “carnage” and he only burned through 98 or so minutes of our time. But that’s still 98 minutes wasted.

The story’s simple through line exposes how inept screenwriter Kelly Marcel (“Fifty Shades of Grey” is quite the um, recommendation) is about finding entertaining things to show us as we march from Point A to Point B.

Serkis works in a Hunchback of Notre Dame, with a King Kong chaser, visual homage. But the fights are in the hands of digital animators, with all the brawls staged in gloom and the action lapsing into a blur.

The ladies acquit themselves well, with Williams finding the humor in all this mayhem and Harris (Miss Moneypenny, to you.) committing heart, soul and voice to Shriek.

But if most comic book adaptations have trouble being “about” something, the “Venoms” have that problem in spades. This is, what, Eddie Brock killing his way out of his shyness?

Every beef anybody might have with the genre is writ large in the two “Venom” movies, something “Let There Be Carnage” underscores with extreme prejudice. This is visually incoherent ugliness played for laughs that just aren’t there.

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language (profanity), disturbing material and suggestive references

Cast: Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Naomie Harris, Reid Scott, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu and Woody Harrelson.

Credits: Directed by Andy Serkis, scripted by Kelly Marcel. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:38

One cannot help but be struck by what a beautifully animated film “The Addams Family 2” is.

From the photo-realistic scenery (including The Grand Canyon), the sheen on Gomez Addams’ hair and suit, the marvelous baroque-meets-art-deco design of the family RV, the cute visual take on Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoon characters down to the ghostly-ghoul buttons on Uncle Fester’s overcoat, Cinesite Animation really outdid itself here.

The story, a sort of Wednesday’s tween rebellion inspires a cross country family road trip? Sure. Fine.

But the sight gags and one-liners? There’s barely a laugh in the thing, and I’m not kidding about that.

A Big Name Voice Cast has almost nothing even faintly amusing to say or play. The overall tone is pleasantly light, but the giggles are all gone.

I almost chuckled when Morticia (Charlize Theron) lectures Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll) about diving into dinner.

“Fester, now, let’s wait for the children.”

“Children? I thought we were having CHICKEN?”

And the best sight gag, a variation of one edited out of the original film, has Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz) finding a fresh way to torture brother Pugsley (Javon Walton, this time) at the beach. That elaborate sand sculpture she’s luring him into?

It’s a guillotine made of sand.

The first act sets up Wednesday’s general disdain for all things “family,” Gomez in a panic over it, Wednesday’s school science fair experiment attracting the attentions of a tech billionaire (Bill Hader, wasted in the part) and his minion (Wallace Shawn) and the suggestion the girl might have been switched at birth.

Wednesday? She’s in a mild-mannered tizzy over the participation trophy nature of the science competition, in which she mixed the DNA of her brilliant pet octopus with that of dim bulb Uncle Fester.

“How can there be a WINNER if nobody LOSES?”

Her sulking is what inspires the road trip. First stop, Niagara Falls, “the great wonder of the world that kills the most tourists!” Having fun, Wednesday?

“I’m staring at Canada, if that answers your question.”

The family hits Miami Beach, San Antonio (where Wednesday is booked into a “Little Miss Jalapeno” pageant, almost funny) and onward, chased by the persistent minion of the tech billionaire even as Uncle Fester slowly morphs into an octopus, one prone to “toilet” (octopus ink) accidents.

As Wednesday might put it, “Hilarious.”

Three writers are credited on the script, and from the looks of things, many more were needed to joke this up. A good kids’ cartoon silences its underaged audience between laugh-out-loud gags. This doesn’t. There’s barely enough going on to hold their attention, judging from the crowd I saw this with.

It’s understandable that MGM would want to make a sequel to their sleeper smash of a couple of years ago. It’s laudable that they stuck with the same animation house that made that one, giving them another fine visual showcase. But it’s unforgivable that MGM would do a rush job sequel and waste all this glorious animation on a corpse of a kids’ comedy.

Rating: PG for macabre and rude humor, violence and language

Cast: The voices of Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloe Grace Moretz, Nick Kroll, Javon Walton, Bill Hader, Snoop Dogg, Bette Midler and Wallace Shawn

Credits: Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon, scripted by Dan Hernandez, Ben Queen and Benji Samit. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:33

“Memoirs of a Black Girl” is an earnest micro-budget indie melodrama, a “film festival film” of earnest intent if modest means.

If the ambition to punch above its weight were enough, it might pass muster. But unpolished performances, incessant and inane voice-over narration and obvious plot twists pointing at an equally obvious conclusion ensure that it never escapes its featherweight class.

Khai Tyler stars as Aisha, an over-achiever in her corner of Roxbury, Boston, a teen with Harvard dreams.

Her working class Caribbean mom might not be able to make that wish come true. But there’s a big scholarship in play. If Aisha can maintain her perfect grades and ace the SAT, everything might work out for the best.

But there’s a corner of this predominantly Black high school that hates her “Wikipedia” guts. Mean girl Rudi (Juliette Estime) and her posse have it in for our girl. Grades, her supportive teachers, her BFFs Marcus (Nicholas Walker) and Marisa (Carolina Soto) and “Black girl magic” might not be enough to change Aisha’s destiny.

First-time feature writer-director Thato Rantao Mwosa hurls one melodramatic obstacle after another at our heroine. Her brother’s (Juvan Elisma) always in trouble with the law. And there’s that one time she has to go to the bathroom mid-class, and gets bathed in the scent of pot that Rudi and her minions are smoking, threatens to bring her dreams to an end.

When she’s accused, there’s nothing for it but to “rat them out.” As we all know how impossible it is for a school to keep a secret, Aisha finds herself dealing with online and bus-ride harassment and threats.

We may have heard “Snitches get stitches” a thousand times before, but when drug confiscations, expulsions and arrests compound this “snitching,” we can see Aisha is in serious trouble.

Mwosa does her best to put our heroine in peril, but weak performances — especially by the heavies — defeat her. We never truly fear for Aisha’s fate.

Marcus is, of course, gay and his parents don’t know. Of course. The film’s one light moment might be subjecting the kid to his parents’ and church’s attempts to “pray the gay away.” Even that seems pre-ordained, as if every high school movie has to have not just a character like this, but this very character facing the same treatment such characters have faced in films for 30 years.

The high school depicted here never seems real, the bane of many a tiny-budget motion picture. But how much does it cost to loop in students-in-the-hallway noise to make the place feel lived-in? More attention was paid to the hip hop included in the score than the actual soundtrack. Dudley High sounds like the waiting room of a funeral parlor.

Voice-over narration is a crutch a lot of inexperienced filmmakers lean on, and Mwosa doesn’t escape that trap. She’s constantly having Tyler narrate scenes that visually make the points that the narration is merely repeating, or serve up sentiments that sound trite when someone allegedly high school age announces them to the world.

That goes for the rest of the dialogue. You can appreciate “This ‘aim for the stars’ stuff is for rich white girls, not me” for its sentiment, not for its eye-rolling obviousness and unoriginality. Almost every word out of a teacher’s mouth in this is “After School Special” insipid.

The violence is laughably short of anything a stunt crew or much better actors could have faked.

All that said, the picture moves and the story unfolds apace. The characters, “types” or not, are engaging and the players make us care what happens to them, somewhat.

But that label “film festival film” kept popping into mind watching “Memoirs of a Black Girl,” as in “This isn’t bad. It’s exactly the sort of little film we root for at film festivals.” It’s just not good enough to warrant release outside of them.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity.

Cast: Khai Tyler, Nicholas Walker, Carolina Soto, Juvan Elisma, Juliette Estime

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thato Rantao Mwosa. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:16

Perhaps your first reaction upon stumbling onto “The Assignment” was the same as mine.

“How did THIS trainwreck escape my notice?” in 2016-17 when it was released?

But right there in the opening credits, we see that “Warriors” and “48 Hours” and “Wild Bill” director Walter Hill is in charge. And it’s showing us a solid B-list cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, Anthony LaPaglia and Tony Shaloub.

And hell, it’s not every day that star Michelle Rodriguez gets to play full frontal nudity scenes as a male, and a female.

Yes, this is “that” movie, one labeled “transphobic” thanks to its subject matter — a hitman (Rodriguez) kills the wrong person, and wakes up a trans woman thanks to a skilled and vengeful sex change surgeon (Weaver).

The protests over this seem misguided, but I’m not transgender and can make no claim to extra sensitivities on the subject. You look at that cast and you know there’s no way they saw it those terms.

It’s just a very bad movie, so bad that it probably ended an aged action director’s career, as Hill’s “Dead for a Dollar,” his follow up, was filmed and is still listed as in post production five years later.

If, like me, you saw “The Warriors” and found it a life-changing film, you can see straight off what Hill, who co-scripted this, was going for. He did “Johnny Handsome,” a criminally-neglected modern film noir that’s well worth tracking down. It’s about a career criminal, a born underling, whose life is changed when a plastic surgeon (Forest Whitaker) transforms him into Mickey Rourke.

But everything about this story goes wrong, almost from the start. The opening tough guy voice over doesn’t sell it or Rodriguez as a hardboiled, soul dead contract killer. Michael Shannon’s “Iceman” is the definitive, realistic archetypal mob murderer-for-hire.

Just meeting Rodriguez as Frank Kitchen renders the film “nothing I’m sitting through” in those first scenes, “full frontal” or not.

The frame of the movie is a shrink (Shaloub) interviewing the straight-jacketed, imprisoned doctor (Weaver) who did the deed. She’s in prison, telling a story.

That’s deathly dull. And no matter how many flashbacks, not wholly artless in their execution, they can’t overcome that duller than dull framework, the banal dialogue, the sense that a lot of people involved maybe had second thoughts about the whole enterprise (perhaps they did decide it was transphobic) once filming got under way.

As Hill was a producer on the original “Alien” franchise and is widely credited as the smart cookie who said “Let’s make Ripley a woman,” thus ensuring its place as a landmark sci-fi/horror thriller and making Weaver a full fledged film star, we can see how “Assignment” came together.

But the question it never fully answers is why?

This had any number of ways it could have been improved in script and pre-production planning. Have Frank Kitchen make the decision to undergo the sex change to escape those hunting him down is a start. Introduce Rodriguez as the post sex-change Frank, sexually active and still into women, perhaps seeing the need to cover her tracks by killing off anybody who knows her secret.

Yes, transgender characters can be villains. And shifting the movie to the present day would limit Rodriguez’s scenes as a somewhat unconvincing man, thinning out the flashbacks where that is necessary.

But again, going back to “Johnny Handsome,” I see what Hill saw in this idea and its not as dubious as it seems in this form.

Scene after scene of that underworld milieu (LaPaglia is right at home here) is rendered laughable by “Frank” not convincing anyone he’s butch enough to be a butcher.

Hill made a science fiction film (“Event Horizon”) that was so bad he took his name off it. This is, if anything, worse. This isn’t “Peeping Tom,” a daring if misguided and transgressive thriller that all but ended the career of Michael Powell (“Black Narcissus,” “The Red Shoes”). It’s a disaster that just besmirches the memory of films from “Hard Times” and “The Driver” to “Southern Comfort” and “Last Man Standing.” Damned shame Walter Hill had to go out like this, “transphobic” or not.

Rating: R for graphic nudity, violence, sexuality, language and drug use

Cast: Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shaloub, Anthony LaPaglia

Credits: Directed by Walter Hill, scripted by Walter Hill and Denis Hamill. A Saban Films release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:35

Just a friendly reminder that Hulu’s amusing “true crime” podcast fans turned sleuths comedy “Only Murders in the Building” is wrapping up its first season, and it’s a hoot and you should be watching.

There is more to streaming TeeVee than “Ted Lasso,” after all.

I reviewed the show prior to its premiere, and as I said then Hulu provided eight of the ten episodes for review and I still had no idea “whodunit.”

Just saw the final two installments, and the creators/writers (Steve Martin among them) and stars Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez played fair with the plotting and clues (it makes sense) and find a lot of laugh out loud moments in reaching the climax and setting up the already-announced next season.

The appearance of Jane Lynch, playing a certain faded star’s stunt person, is a delight. Because Jane Lynch makes everything more delightful.

The threat of eviction from this “Murder, She Wrote” trio raises the stakes. Along with the fact that the killer might off one, two or three of them.

Short’s Broadway bust of a stage director is hilarious, right to the end.

And Martin does some physical shtick that rivals the best pratfalls of his youth.

It struck me that the somewhat gratuitous profanity was scripted in to ensure that they’d stand a little apart from the more geriatric, not-as-funny or edgy “Grace and Frankie” on Netflix. But I dare say it won’t scare off older viewers, even though it adds nothing to the show.

Fun stuff. Check it out if you’ve missed it.

British novelist Adam Nevill’s London-set novel “No One Gets Out Alive” is reimagined as an immigrant’s horrors of home delivered in a spooky rooming house in Cleveland in this Netflix adaptation.

Visual effects specialist Santiago Menghini makes his feature directing debut a movie of deep gloom, spooky tones and one big monster effect. But it’s a slow-moving, slow-to-frighten affair that struggles to come off as logical, coherent or particularly satisfying.

Mexican actress Cristina Rodlo — she was a major supporting player in “Miss Bala” — stars as Ambar, a new immigrant to wintry Cleveland, taking the first job she can find in a sweatshop even though she’s no seamstress, hoping against hope that an uncle she’s just met (David Barrera) can place her somewhere more promising.

Until then, she’s struggling to pass for “legal” and find a place to stay that isn’t a stickler for ID. That might be this boarding house she finds that might have once housed the Addams Family. Old, multi-storied and creepy, it’s run by the even creepier Red (Marc Menchaca), who tells her that only one other woman is a tenant there, when Ambar can plainly hear the voices of others among the strange, scary sounds late at night.

There are all these rooms — and the basement — that are “off limits,” Red insists. Specimen collections fill some of those spaces. A previous owner must have been the Dr. Welles we see in ancient, silent footage in the film’s opening, a digger/researcher who was looking into things in Mexico that might have been supernatural.

One of those “collections?” Moths.

Ambar’s scramble to get fake “papers” and set herself up for a better life with a better job consumes her hours away from this chilling place where she lays her head, and the first hour of the film. For comfort, she listens to her voice mail, plaintive messages from the mother she nursed through her final days back in Mexico.

So guilt and loss are on her mind, even as she’s wondering about whispers and cries from other “tenants.” Every dream is a nightmare, and every nightmare suggests there are ghosts of those who suffered their mortal fate at that address, perhaps simple kidnapping and torture, perhaps in some sort of ritual.

When she sees the candles, Ambar has her answer.

Menghini and screenwriter Fernanda Coppel take their sweet time, and then some, getting us to anything that could be remotely described as scary. A spooky commuter train ride, images of her dead mother coming to Ambar, all tease towards a finale that has a lot of action, if not a lot of logic.

The covenant filmmakers make with the viewer is that C is logically derived from A and B, that things to come are foreshadowed just enough so that when they arrive, they make sense and we’ve been a bit entertained along the way.

That isn’t the case here.

“No One Gets Out Alive” is more a director’s ominous looking show-reel than a coherent, frightening horror tale.

Rating: R for some strong violence, grisly images, and language

Cast: Cristina Rodlo, Marc Menchaca, David Barrera, Moronke Akinola and Vala Noren

Credits: Directed Santiago Menghini, scripted by Fernanda Coppel, based on a novel by Adam Nevill. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25