Movie Nation

In my mind, at least, Tom Everett Scott went straight from “Shades,” the cool, turtle-necked drummer in “That Thing You Do” to middle aged man “dad” roles, with barely a “boyfriend of the leading lady” in between.

So it’s a little jarring, if not exactly refreshing, to see him more hardboiled than usual in “Collusions,” a slow and pokey murder mystery set among corrupt cops, corrupted prosecutors and a never-seen mobster whose case “can get me to the bench,” one Assistant District Attorney figures.

Scott plays Martin, an LAPD detective whose partner of ten years, Sean, is “missing” for much of the film. In flashbacks, these two are tight, given to profane bitching sessions about the fey names for paint colors and a routine borne of years of dangerous work.

“You ready to go and maybe not come back?”

“Every day.”

The film’s slack pace isn’t helped by the constant back-and-forth/flashbacks-and-more-flashbacks script.

Sean (Jamison Jones) was last seen by his girlfriend, ADA Lindsay (Kelli Joan Bennett). They had a fight, and she has the bruises, busted lip and missing tooth to prove it.

Sean is a drinker with a temper, and Martin’s loyalty points him toward getting Sean “some help before he loses his badge.”

Lindsay is cagey, and in her flashbacks we see her angling to make her career with this high profile prosecution of that unseen kingpin. But one of her higher ups (Brynn Thayer) dangles a judgeship in front of her. “A bribe?” No, “a threat.”

And then there’s the Fed (Steven Culp of “Desperate Housewives,” “Thirteen Days”) who figures in all this, the threat of “justice” looming over a lot of people who seem willing to bail out of getting the bad guys because of careerism, bribes or threats or both.

Key grip and second time feature director Anthony Vietro (1998’s “The Perfect Leave” his other directing credit) makes this moderately twisty/turner police procedural the slowest 83 minute movie of the year.

Much of it is about the affair Lindsay was having with Sean, a guy who has to be reminded that “She’s not your girlfriend. She’s part of your job.”

There is no pace, little suspense and violence that arrives so late, and in such a muted form, that it only merits a shrug from any viewer still upright and awake into the third act.

It’s all talk talk talk talk talk, like a “Law & Order” with all the commercial breaks, shots of cops and attorneys getting in and out of cars, and the infamous electronic “DUN DuN” removed.

But Scott, last seen as Alicia Silverstone’s other half in “Sister of the Groom,” shows a menace that the movies don’t often let him play.

Making him one of the “bad people” in a tale where “bad things happen to bad people” works. If only the rest of the movie had.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Tom Everett Scott, Kelli Joan Bennett, Steven Culp, Tembi Locke, Jamison Jones and Brynn Thayer.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Vietro, script by Monica Zepeda. A Boomerang release.

Running time: 1:23

One of the great character actors, the definitive “Frankenstein’s monster,” the one and only narrator of the only “Grinch” that matters, Boris Karloff gets a documentary tribute on Sept. 17.

“Confetti” is a pleasantly syrupy “a mother’s love” wish fulfillment fantasy, a story of how far one Chinese mom will travel to get her child the educational help she needs.

Writer-director Ann Hu’s film may play as far-fetched, sometimes extremely so. But that’s what “wish fulfillment fantasies” traffic in — the implausible making impossible dreams come true.

We meet the adorable moppet Meimei (Harmonie He) on her first day in school in a small city in China. Her mother Chen Lan (Zhu Zhu of TV’s “Marco Polo”) watches her during that first day, listening through the window when she can.

“Tiger Mom?” You bet. She’s also the school custodian. And she grimaces at her child’s difficulties, the cruel teasing of her classmates. Meimei can’t read or write and seems unable to keep up. “You should look for other options,” the callous principal says (in Chinese with English subtitles). “Your daughter’s not a normal kid. Just accept it.”

But Meimei’s American-born English teacher (George C. Tronsrue) picks up what she’s seeing in the English alphabet and is more encouraging. She “learns differently.” He uses this word the family has never heard — “dyslexia.” And if there are no schools in China that could help, he knows there are some in America, in New York where he came from.

There’s nothing for it but for Chen Lan to take her to America. But she and her tailor husband (Yanan Li) are poor. Chen Lan has no marketable skills, only a vague notion of joining the cousin of a friend at a New York “clothing factory” (sweatshop).

Where will they get the money for them to fly over? Teacher Thomas may arrange for them to stay with a friend, but how will they manage, with the costs of living in New York, the language barrier, all of it?

“Wish fulfillment fantasy” implies a certain “magical thinking” to all this. The costs aren’t considered, and Meimei is some sort of savant when it comes to learning English. She can translate for Mom.

Their hostess, a wheelchair-bound writer (Amy Irving) is skeptical about their quest, and about how useful they’ll be in her life, paying for their room and board with “help” she doesn’t think they’re capable of as they don’t speak English and have Chinese (slurping) table manners.

And the public school that accepts immigrant Meimei, no questions asked, may flatter itself in being “special needs” friendly. But Meimei is not improving and Mom is getting more frantic about it getting “too late” to make her daughter “normal.”

Of course there’s a pricey private school (Helen Slater plays the principal) that would be better.

Hu, who directed “Beauty Remains” and “Shadow Magic,” just waves her directorial wand at some of the natural, believable obstacles facing mother and daughter in this strange, expensive land, at the father and husband left behind. Voila, the problems are “solved” or simply ignored.

There’s value in movies that depict America as still-welcoming of immigrants in these divisive times, but “Confetti” (the title has to do with how Meimei sees letters, and processes information) rubs almost all the edges off.

That makes for a dramatically less dramatic story than this might have been. The odd interesting peek inside China’s mass production, assimilation-oriented educational system, a cute quip about “You know Chinese parents” from a Chinese-American tween who “translates” for their first principal and a testy, hubristic dig about “America is ranked 36th in the world in education” from a Chinese principal are the most interesting moments.

Zhu Zhu’s “Chinese parent” scenes have some edge and America-judging impatience about them.

But Hu is too often content to have psychologists and educators rattle off lists of names of people known or thought to have dyslexia, or show the little girl’s instant grasp of English, mastery of personal computers and the like.

I wish this wish-fulfillment educational fantasy had been realistic enough to make me invest in the characters and doubt the outcome of their hopeless quest, just a little.

Rating: Unrated

Cast: Zhu Zhu, Amy Irving, Harmonie He, Yanan Li, George C. Tronsrue and Helen Slater

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ann Hu. A Dada Films release.

Running time: 1:29

A testy teen goes to stay with her Thai granny in this Sept 1 release.

Looks cute.

“Overrun” is 109 minutes of every action pic cliche under the sun, and a heist set in a mausoleum, which I have to admit I’ve never seen before.

There’s a safe in the mausoleum. It’s guarded by inattentive Russian mobsters, the best kind, and a sassy tech nerd is the body cam “eyes” our hero uses to break in. So we’re back to “cliches” in a flash.

“You gotta love the Russians!”

It’s a picture populated by Bruce Dern, playing a Russian mob boss without a hint of the accent or language facility his son has. That’s the son (Nick Benseman) who’s killed by mobster Ray (Robert Mianno), who then pins it on this ex-military “extraction expert” Marcus (Omid Zader) he blackmails into robbing that guarded mausoleum for him.

There are comically “colorful” hit men (Noah Felder, Michael Wayne Foster, Kevin Makely) and women (Monette Moio) sent after Marcus. William Katt, Johnny Messner, Haley Strode and Chris Kallman play jokey, incompetent cops.

And then there’s the reason Marcus is blackmailable. The mob has his sister (Chelsey Goldsmith).

Zader is a lump of a lead. But we also see actors playing cops and pulling the trigger for the first time in their screen acting lives. We hear them reaching for cornball one-liners.

“Have fun dying, Dobbs!” “You can’t kill a cop!” “Oh no? Watch me!”

“You’re not dead, kid!”

And there are not one but TWO tech helpers, New School Augy (Jack Griffo) and Old School Doc (Nicholas Turtorro), guys who direct Marcus into and out of jams.

“On your right. No, your other right.”

Ok, THOSE two are kind of funny.

The rest? Even the “bad guy’s BRIEFCASE” is a cliche.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Omid Zader, Johnny Messner, William Katt, Jack Griffo, Robert Miano,
Chelsey Goldsmith, Haley Strode, Nicholas Turturro and Bruce Dern

Credits: Directed by Josh Tessier, script by Roberto Ahumada, Victoria González and Craig R. Key. A Strike Force release.

Running time: 1:49

The trick that television plays on viewers hit me one day in the ’90s after wrapping up an interview with “Family Ties” star Michael J. Fox.

He was touring in support of his aging-well romantic comedy “Doc Hollywood,” and was at the end of his day of meeting various members of the Southeastern entertainment press As I was walking out, I turned on my heels with the thought “Wonder if he’d want to grab a drink?”

That has never happened before or since, something you can put down to Fox’s disarmingly open screen persona, and the fact that people of his generation watched the Canadian grow up on TV. We feel we “know” him.

That affability served him during a long acting career, and gilded his private image as well. I ran into him later as he watched his wife, Tracy Pollan, co-star in an out-of-town tryout of Neil Simon’s play “Jake’s Women” (with Alan Alda), still absurdly approachable in the lobby of Winston-Salem, N.C.’s Stevens Center.

His public disclosure that he’d been diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s hit his fans hard, stifled his career and as he discloses in his latest memoir, “No Time Like the Future,” has finally led to a second and this time “permanent” retirement.

The author of “Lucky Man” and “Always Looking Up” is still “looking up” in his latest, even as his world shrinks around him a little more each day.

He writes of ending his first “retirement” when his old friend Bill Lawrence custom wrote him into “Scrubs,” leading to Emmy winning and Emmy nominated appearances in “Boston Legal,” “The Good Wife” and the like. His hilarious turn on Larry David’s “nothing is sacred” series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is recalled with self-mocking glee.

He speaks of the difficulties in reinventing himself — a broadly physical and facially/vocally expressive actor — into something else. He writes lightly and emotionally about his family, his health struggles and the “uncles” like Bill Murray and others who dragged him onto the golf course, a sport he took up long after his Parkinson’s diagnosis.

Fox doesn’t apologize for his privilege, the profile that let him not only start a very successful foundation aimed at studying the illness that hit him but didn’t stop him, but gave him legions of famous friends, posh vacations among the elite, a safari to Africa and a documentary about his visit to the “gross national happiness” paradise, the mountain kingdom of Bhutan.

The real value in these memoirs is in his simple, uncluttered eloquence in describing the progression of his disease, the pratfalls he takes and grueling therapy he is subjected to just to keep going. I can’t imagine anyone, freshly-diagnosed or well into the Coping with Parkinson’s Wars, not taking some inspiration or at least solace in his story, identifying with the difficulties anyone — rich and famous or humble and alone — faces, first among them, the idea that your mortality is staring you in the face every minute of every day.

He’s still available to his public, still raising money by maintaining a profile, so don’t hesitate to say hi. But as he’s related many times over the years, and in all his books, he’s long on the wagon. There’s no point in trying to buy him a drink.

NO TIME LIKE THE FUTURE: An Optimist Considers Mortality. By Michael J. Fox. Thorndike Press. 363 pages.

Austere and positively chilling in its austerity, “The Night House” is a haunted house tale with a tasty twist or two to go along with the usual thumps, bumps, disembodied voices and words written on a steamed-over window or mirror.

It’s another thriller that reminds us of the importance of casting. Good actors get across the deflating shock of grief, the jaw-dropping dismay at confronting the unexplained and the terror of being attacked by it.

Rebecca Hall of “The Town” and “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” brings subtle shadings to the widowed Beth, who starts wondering if the house her architect husband built has been haunted by him after his death.

We meet her on the day of the funeral, dumping the proffered covered-dish consolations of neighbors into the bin, hunting down that last case of brandy in the cellar to watch and weep over old home videos with.

A teacher, she unloads — ever so nicely — on a helicopter parent when she goes back to work, describing the way Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) , her husband, “stuck a gun in his mouth” on the lake out behind their luxurious, custom built home.

But things are happening, and she can’t be certain if they’re “real” or brandy-coated dreams. She gets text messages. Their stereo system kicks on by itself. Knocks on a door, thumps in the walls, and footprints on the dock make her wonder if there’s such a thing as ghosts.

His bloodstained suicide note, just the conversation starter to bring to “drinks” with colleagues after work, seems to suggest no clues, just “you were right” and “You’re safe, now.”

Owen’s blueprints take on an M.C. Escher quality.

But a hunt through his phone suggests other mysteries, perhaps other women, that she has to figure connect to the noises, music, lights and other phenomena.

“I didn’t think we had secrets.“

The “explanations” in this Ben Collins/Luke Piotrowski script (“Super Dark Times” was theirs) might be the most conventional element in this David Bruckner film. But the director of “The Ritual” and his star wring a few jolts and a dollop of pathos out of it.

Sarah Goldberg is nicely empathetic as the colleague who worries about Beth, and Vondie Curtis Hall is the neighbor worried she’s losing it, or that she might dig until she finds something that is neither helpful nor safe.

“You can’t unknow what you know.”

“The Night House” serves up the subtle horror of expectations, invites us to join our heroine in fearing the worst, perhaps simply resigned to it. And Hall makes everything we see and that Beth experiences credible, which may be the creepiest thing about it.

Rating: R for some violence/disturbing images, and language including some sexual references

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit and Vondie Curtis Hall

Credits: Directed by David Bruckner, script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:48

John Malkovich, Lori Petty, Ruby Modine (you know who’s daughter) and Julian Sand star in this post apocalyptic thriller, due out Oct 1

We toss that phrase around horror films a tad cavalierly — “skin-crawling.” But here’s a feature that earns that label. If you aren’t squirming — or a least itchy — watching “Mosquito State,” you must have never encountered a mosquito in the wild.

It’s about high finance, unpredictable markets, madness and computer modeling those unpredictable markets.

Richard or “Dicky” Boca (Beau Knapp of “The Good Lord Bird”) is the man whose “honeybee model” is proving flawed in the shaky days of 2007, leading to the financial meltdown of 2008. No one in his office will listen, but fate turns him toward other entomology and he gives his increasingly unhinged life and mind over to mosquitoes.

Will they bleed him out before the markets bleed his firm dry?

The film is not nearly as cut and dried as that, with much left unspoken or inferred in hallucinogenic images of Richard, staggering about his Manhattan penthouse in his tidy whiteys, drinking his too-valuable “investment” wines, giving mosquitos access to his ever-swelling epidermis and the run of the place.

Perhaps a woman triggered all this. Lena (Charlotte Vega of “American Assassin” and “The Bookshop”) is a student of wines and water conservation who seems destined — or ordered — to meet Richard at a company sponsored birthday party. The boss (Olivier Martinez) calls him his “golden goose,” and that means he shrugs off Richard’s quiet, on-the-spectrum anti-social behavior.

But our analyst/computer-modeler is rich, so the forward young wine expert invites herself to his stunning and austere apartment — he has but a single wine glass — and charms her way into his head.

As he obsessively tries to get back in touch with her, he notices lurches and starts in the market that his mathematical “honeybee” model didn’t predict. The woman, the markets and that damned mosquito who got down his shirt and into his apartment send Richard over the edge, raising mosquitoes and wearing the giant welts to prove it as he rages at the stock volatility he could not predict.

Filip Jan Rymsza is a filmmaker who likes the “fever dream” side of the cinematic tracks. He got a producing credit for getting Orson Welles’ disjointed, faintly dreamy and unfinished “The Other Side of the Wind” into some form of releasable shape. Rymsza’s two earlier directing credits, “Sandcastles” and “Dustclouds,” get that “fever dream” label as well.

Rymsza tends toward the obscurant here, stirring in office politics, where a rival labels Richard “the dumbest smart guy I know,” the politics of America in that 2007-2008 window and the warnings that Wall Street’s lifeblood is predation, creatures like sharks or mosquitos, can never stop feeding, even if they’re sealing their own fate.

“If we stop, we die.”

It doesn’t all coalesce into a coherent film. Breaking the story into cutesy “chapters” — “The Pupa,” “The Blood Feast,” “The Larva” — is a favorite crutch of second-rate screenwriters (I see three C-movies a week so ordered.) and doesn’t help it make sense. It just helps us count the “stages” until we know we’re at the end.

But Knapp throws himself into this character, giving us unhinged and letting us figure out the reasons for Richard’s derangement.

We may not buy the gorgeous wine expert indulging his attentions, although “mercenary” comes to mind. And we may get no clue about how these insect-based create-order-out-of-random volatility models might work.

“Mosquito State” still holds our attention, a visually arresting, fascinating failure that may have you reaching for the calamine lotion before it’s over.

Rating: unrated, kind of gross

Cast: Beau Knapp, Charlotte Vega, Jack Kesy and Olivier Martinez

Credits: Directed by Filip Jan Rymsza, script by Filip Jan Rymsza, Mario Zermeno A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:41

Ida is traumatized, wracked by guilt over the accident that just killed her mother. She’s all alone, and her social worker has told the 15 year-old with “addiction” issues that her aunt will take her in. Ida’s protests that “I don’t know them” fall on deaf ears.

And her first clue to just how wrong things could turn comes the moment she walks into her aunt’s house, as Auntie affectionately kisses Ida’s youngest cousin, muscle-bound and glued to a video game.

“You’re too baked, sweetheart.”

Before she knows what hit her, Ida is immersed in this family’s vices — smoking, clubbing, drinking — and its profession. The three sons, Jonas, David and Mads? They’re “collectors,” enforcers for some loan shark or other nefarious enterprise.

Ida, struggling to not make waves, forced to fit in and do ride-alongs, is lost in the “Wildland” that this functionally dysfunctional family lives in.

“Wildland,” titled “Kød & blod” in Danish, is Denmark’s version of “Animal Kingdom,” the Australian thriller that became a long-running TV series. It’s not as good as that harrowing 2010 movie, which featured Guy Pearce, Jacki Weaver and Joel Edgerton. But it’s a fascinating variation on a theme, and a movie that reveals cultural differences in the ways its veers away from what was plainly its inspiration, if not its actual (uncredited) source material.

Sandra Guldberg Kampp (Netflix’s “The Rain”) makes a gawky, introverted Ida, a kid whose own problems (the “addiction” is mentioned just once) take a back seat to the ones she takes on when she moves in with Aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen of TV’s “Westworld”).

Ida sees a woman who is affectionate with her three sons, doting on the youngest, Mads (Besir Zeciri), and almost utterly unconcerned with the way the trio turned out.

“Almost.” Because while eldest son Jonas (Joachim Fjelstrup) may be the “boss,” with a partner (Sofie Torp) and a tiny baby, all living with “Mom,” middle son David (Elliott Crosset Hove) is adrift, with hinted at substance abuse problems of his own and a bubbly girlfriend (Carla Philip Røder) his mother does not approve of.

Ida witnesses the kisses, and the slaps that govern this clan, the bullying oldest brother Jonas uses to keep the others in line. And she tries to fit in, be one of the boys, doing shots in the clubs, riding along on collections.

But the alarm bells go off in her head just enough for us to see her humanity. Jonas offering a little girl a ride seems a lot less menacing with Ida in the car. Him giving the girl a threatening note to give her father should shake her more than it does.

“What if he doesn’t have the money?”

“Once I talk to the kids,” Jonas purrs (in Danish, with English subtitles), “they usually do.”

Kampp delivers a poker-faced teen take on Ida, a kid numbed by loss, guarded and fearful at what she’s been thrown into. Ida sees the way the neighbors look at her and this house, sees the general amorality and manipulations of Bodil, and panics just when you think she should.

But who can she turn to? Who can she trust to not get her killed if she talks to the police? And who will she have if she rats out this mob?

“Wildland” lacks the fireworks of its inspiration, “Animal Kingdom,” and the larger-than-life turns by Jacki Weaver in the film and Ellen Barkin in the TV series, playing the gang’s matriarch.

Røder plays the most empathetic character and makes her a more upbeat, less-clued-in version of Ida — the surrogate for the audience in this tale.

And Fjelstrup, a veteran of Danish TV, gives a smiling menace to Jonas.

Other characters seem more thinly developed, and the story’s paucity in terms of big surprises work against it. But first time feature director Jeannette Nordahl puts us in Ida’s shoes and makes us ponder her uncertain fate just enough to make “Wildland” work.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, some of it involving a teen, smoking, profanity

Cast: Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Joachim Fjelstrup, Elliott Crosset Hove, Besir Zeciri, Carla Philip Røder, Sofie Torp and Omar Shargawi

Credits: Directed by Jeanette Nordahl, script by Ingeborg Topsøe. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:28