Movie Nation

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

Gloomy, sad and a tad hard to follow, “The Last Thing Mary Saw” is a period piece that equates persecution of same sex attraction with the war on “witchcraft,” this time in a pre-Civil War religious sect in rural New York.

First-time writer-director Edoardo Vitaletti prioritizes tone over frights, quiet over noise and violence meted as “correction,” punishment for those who tumble in “The Temple of Earthly Desires.” I can’t say it quite comes off, but it’s serious-minded enough to attract an accomplished cast and never breaks the spell it sets out to cast.

Stefanie Scott plays Mary, a daughter born into this sect, in which the preacher (Tommy Buck) is subordinate to The Matriarch (horror veteran Judith Roberts, who’s worked for David Lynch and Woody Allen over her long career).

Something’s happened to Mary when the film opens, and a constable (David Pearce) is trying to get past the sect’s accusations and find out why she’s been blinded.

“She is no devil,” he protests.

But as the flashback that tells her tale begins, her father insists “our daughter’s ears are deaf to the Lord’s preaching.”

Mary has a thing for “the maid, Eleanor (Isabelle Fuhrman), and the Matriarch’s decreed “correction” begins with forcing her to kneel on rice, and escalates from there.

There’s a book about Bethabara that the two lovers pore over, one that seems to touch on the story of Ruth and Naomi, the famous same sex couple in the Bible. The young women dream of fleeing, but looking at The Guard (P.J. Sosko) and remembering how he was kept from escaping, they lament their fate, as does he.

“Fear and weakness keep us here,” he says, “not devotion.”

As the women steal away for alone time and scheme a way out, an “intruder” (Rory Culkin) is summoned, the supernatural makes itself known and “correction” turns to retributions and reprisals.

Culkin, in films since “Richie Rich” in the 1990s, brings a quiet menace to a movie that’s already brimming over with that. The leads, Scott (“Insidious Chapter 3”) and Fuhrman (“Orphan”) have horror bonafides, but have few scenes that might have given them a chance to up the empathy ante, or that titillate or terrify.

Vitaletti has good players all dressed up in period garb, but gives them no place to go.

Rating: unrated, horror violence

Cast: Stefanie Scott, Isabelle Fuhrman, Judith Roberts, P.J. Sosko and Rory Culkin.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Edoardo Vitaletti. An Arachnid Films release.

Running time: 1:29

The producers are premiering it in LA on Aug. 28. Any takers?

“Don’t Breathe 2” is the most gruesomely violent major motion picture since, well, “The Suicide Squad.”

A sequel to a horrific thriller that demonstrated the chilling power of silence, co-creators Rodo Sayagues (who takes the directing credit this time) and co-writer Fede Alvarez opt for a bloodbath this time around as they flip the script and make the victim/villain of the first film the avenging hero of the second.

That would be Stephen Lang‘s ex-Navy SEAL Norman Nordstrom, a blind man who is not to be trifled with in a fight in the dark.

The stakes are higher, from the start, but the plot is nonsense that sounds like a Red Bull-fueled brainstorming story meeting where they kept every idea anybody tossed out.

Our gang of unsuspecting villains are meth cookers serving the hellscape of Detroit’s infamous organ harvester, a doctor (Steffan Rhodri) who forgot his Hippocratic Oath long ago. Oddly, that plot element is pretty much pushed aside.

Because the gang leader, Raylan (Brendan Sexton III), who oozes menace from every smelly, oily pore, if on the prowl for someone, perhaps the tween girl (Madelyn Grace) he checks out at a public restroom.

We’ve seen Miss Phoenix “training” with her Dad (Lang) in the opening scene. They may live in Detroit’s pyromania belt, but she’s at home on the mean streets thanks to that training.

“Never take anything for granted,” he counsels. “God will take it from you.”

But with Dad and their pet Rottweiler looking out for her and even home-schooling her, what could go wrong? A home invasion and night of slaughter, mayhem, fire and firearms, for starters.

Lang brings what dignity he can to Nordstrom, sort of a “blind swordsman” figure, only with a darker past, some of which we saw in the first film, some suggested by revelations here.

Grace is decent at playing the child-in-peril, but doesn’t give us the unadulterated terror of the “hunted” in “Don’t Breathe.” Nobody does.

The giant hole at the heart of this twisted tangent of a sequel is the silence. In “Don’t Breathe,” the young interlopers who broke into the blind man’s house, only to be hunted down in near pitch darkness, had to hold their breath to avoid detection. That spread to the audience, breathlessly anticipating how the man with heightened other senses would track his prey.

There’s virtually none of that here. The villains have no learning curve, never figure out that white noise is their ally as much as turning the lights on could be.

And despite the savagery of the fights, there’s nothing satisfying in this slaughter, a movie which spills blood and spatters gore because it’s out of other ideas.

Rating: R for strong bloody violence, gruesome images, and language

Cast: Stephen Lang, Madelyn Grace, Brendan Sexton III, Stephanie Arcila and Adam Young

Credits: Directed by Rodo Sayagues, script by Fede Alvarez and
Rodo Sayagues. A Sony Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:38

Ryan Reynolds rules the box office this weekend, with the Formerly Fox/Now Disney release “Free Guy” blowing up to a $28 million debut.

Not a franchise (yet) or sequel (ditto), not showing anywhere but in theaters, and killer RR promotion of the project paid off.

Yes, Shawn Levy’s a bit of a hack, but Mr.”Night at the Museum” brings home the Canadian bacon.”

“Don’t Breathe 2” cleared $10 million, less than half what the original sleeper hit opened with.

“Jungle Cruise” in its third weekend managed $9, edging the under performing “Respect,” which managed $8.

“The Suicide Squad”plunged from a half decent opening to a nose dive second weekend. $7 million.

“Free Guy” out opened it, and “Space Jam” will take in a lot more than James Gunn’s block bust…

At least HBO Max maxed out with it, right? Right?

This is a “Snydercut” bust.

“Beckett” is a piece of pulse-pounding poppycock whipped up as a star vehicle for John David Washington. It’s got enough going for it that I’d like to recommend it. But I have reservations. Boy, do I ever.

The title character and his girlfriend (Alicia Vikander) are touring Greece in the off-season — winter. But protests in the country, beset by debt, an immigration crisis and just a whiff of violent strains of nationalism, are always in season. That’s why Beckett and April have abandoned Athens for the ruins and mountain scenery of the north.

That’s where they are when he dozes off at the wheel, rolls their rental SUV, and wakes up in a hospital. April has died, and Beckett is all alone with the guilty knowledge that it was his fault. He can’t even admit to her family that she’s dead, yet.

Alone in a country where he doesn’t speak the language, he can’t even grieve properly.

A local cop (Panos Koronis) is there to make matters worse. Beckett saw something before passing out, and that gets the cop’s interest.

When our weepy, broken-armed tourist revisits the accident scene — the Chevy rolled into a house — and a woman starts shooting at him, the cop joins in. For an African American, just like…home?

“There’s nowhere to ruuuun, Beckett,” he shouts, like every C-list villain in screen history.

But there is somewhere to run, as Beckett flees cross-country, hoping to get to the sanctuary of the American embassy, and hoping as well to figure out who these people are who want him dead, and why.

The screenplay’s great virtue is in making our hero Everyman. He’s not Liam Neeson or any variation of the “man with particular skills” cliche. But tech guy Beckett endures shootings, stabbing and beatings as he makes insane, self-injuring leaps in his dogged determination to survive.

Nothing is made of him trying to lay low in a country where he stands out, even without the arm cast and blood stains.

The screenplay’s silliest shortcut is the way it dispenses with the language barrier. Shouting “Do you speak English? DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” is all it takes for this hunter, that beekeeper, those activists, to display their mastery of another tongue.

Director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino (“Antonia.” was his) stages some splendid fights and decent escapes. But most of them have a whiff of “far fetched” about them, as do the trite tropes that turn up in the plot.

And then there’s the matter of our leading man. I’m trying hard to like Washington, or at least hope he gets better film to film. His acting indicators are obvious, with too many gestures and looks playing as clumsy and unschooled. Take away his father Denzel’s good name and he’s just another good-looking failed jock, still not much of an actor.

None of this film’s shortcomings took me totally out of it. Movies on the lam are my favorite. I was drawn into the story, in spite of its “Oh come now” moments when our hero gets a break, or avoids having every bone broken by doing something nobody who has a choice would hazard.

But this is Washington’s fourth major starring role, and nobody seems willing to tell him he’s the weakest link in most of the movies he’s landing, or convince him to do something about it.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sexual situations

Cast: John David Washington, Alicia Vikander, Vicky Krieps and Boyd Holbrook

Credits: Directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, script by Kevin A. Rice. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

When you put a fun, well reviewed movie starring a beloved actor into theaters and not on TV, a lot of people will show up.

That’s the lesson from this weekend, as “Free Guy,” a comedy, matches what “The Suicide Squad, a can’t-miss comic book adaptation, ” did last weekend, roughly $26.5 million.

“It’s heart-warming to see people respond to ‘heart-warming,'” Van City Reynolds just tweeted.

“Squad,” streamable as well as in theaters, is a blockbuster that wasn’t. And it is plunging off a cliff on its second weekend, so let’s hope those HBO numbers make up for a 70-80% falloff — to $8 million — in ticket sales.

That’s behind “Don’t Breathe 2’s” $10 million+, the 9 million+ “Respect” is managing and the $9ish “Jungle Cruise” is pulling down on its third weekend.

James Gunn might be grimacing a bit over this.

Much of the enduring pop and rock of the 1980s had this shimmering, sunny sheen and rhythmic bounce to it, and that wasn’t just a product of the end of disco and punk as they were absorbed into New Wave and the New Romantics. Nor can you attribute it simply to the transition from analog recording to the pristine reproduction of digital.

From “I’m Still Standing” to “Walk of Life,” “Sailaway” to “Reflex,” everybody from Phil Collins and Boy George to Earth Wind & Fire, Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder, Dire Straits and James Taylor recorded on the under-populated West Indian island of Montserrat, at Sir George Martin’s remote live-in studio in paradise, literally “Under the Volcano.”

Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder harmonized to “Ebony & Ivory.” The Police peaked, and then took their final bows as a recording band there. The Rolling Stones shook off the “oldies act” label one last time with “Steel Wheels” and Jimmy Buffett, the second artist to record in AIR Studios Montserrat, provided the sing-along anthem for the place, which operated from 1979-1989 — “Volcano.”

That volcano, Soufrière Hills, was “the presiding spirit over the island” and their recording sessions there, according to Sting of The Police, who conjured the masterpieces “Every Breath You Take” and “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” at AIR, and shot a frolicsome music video to accompany the latter on the island.

Martin, already a legend for having recorded The Beatles, dreamed up the ultimate “artist friendly” recording experience where extremely famous people could escape the world, the press and their fans and record in a place with a state-of-the-art studio, a view, a pool, “banana hammock” friendly beaches, rum punches and wind surfing lessons.

“There was no rush,” Verdine White from Earth Wind & Fire (the “Faces” LP) recalls. “There was no clock.”

It was “like living in a surrealist painting,” Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes says. “Black sand, giant iguanas.”

Elton John “got the band back together” and turned out his seminal MTV era LP “Too Low for Zero,” composing with Bernie Taupin “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” and “I’m Still Standing” (inspired by a stoned colleague’s protests that he was still on the job).

The Police peaked with their “Ghost in the Machine” and “Synchronicity” LPs, clashing with each other as they recorded their era-defining albums in Montserrat.

And after they finished, Sting stuck around “for a holiday,” and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits asked him in to do the “I want my, I want my, I want my MTV” bit on “Money for Nothing,” one of the hits that made “Brothers in Arms” the LP that put that band in the Rock’n Roll Hall of Fame.

“You can hear the island” all through the LP, band member John Illsley says. Especially on the dreamy, laid-back “So Far Away From Me,” with its oceanic breeze synthesizer and calypso -tinged guitar.

Giles Martin, son of George, recalls the “quirky” staff of locals, many of them musically inclined, as making AIR Montserrat “like staying in Fawlty Towers,” and Australian filmmaker Gracie Otto makes sure to include many locals — displaced by the volcano, that oddly enough, was not what killed the studio — among the interview subjects.

From dive “night club” owners, one of whom played host to a Stevie Wonder jam session (recorded on audio tape), staff at AIR to Davey Sweeney, the colorfully charming windsurfing instructor many of the stars remember with great fondness, we hear and see how they pitched in on harmony vocals, percussion and what have you, and enjoyed their encounters with the famous.

But it wasn’t the perfect fit for everybody, with the sailing, sun and rum-branded Buffett recalling the “colonial aspect to things,” Lou Reed (in archival footage) griping about the lack of “traffic” noise and Andy Summers of The Police lamenting how everybody in the band “entered into divorce proceedings” as they cut “Synchronicity.”

And still, “Under the Volcano” lacks some of the details, grit and personal dirty-laundry edge of the legion of earlier recording studio history documentaries — “Muscle Shoals” and “Sound City” among them.

Yet McCartney’s and Knopfler’s home movies, stills shots of parties, jam sessions and binges and the other footage rounded up here paints a winning picture of a time and a very sunny place — now gone — where the best of their era recorded the songs that defined it.

MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity, discussion of drug use

Cast: Sting, Jimmy Buffett, Nick Rhodes, Yve Robinson, George Martin, Stewart Copeland, Mark Knopfler, Davey Johnstone, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney

Credits: Directed by Gracie Otto, scripted by Cody Greenwood and Gracie Otto. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36

Distributor Gunpowder & Sky takes a shot at Netflix teen film turf with this latest spin on the classic “Cyrano de Bergerac,” coming out in early Sept. Better than “The Half of It” or “Sierra Burgess is a Loser”? We shall see.

Some good ideas and chewy, hardboiled dialogue don’t entirely go to waste in “Crime Story,” a thriller that barely transcends its beyond-generic title.

You have to buy Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss, in his reduced-mobility years, as a retired mobster still capable of roughing guys one half to one-third his age up. And you can’t, something writer-director Adam Lipsius fails to write around.

But at least casting him opposite Oscar winner Mira Sorvino, as the estranged daughter who became a cop and liaison to a Congressman, should have paid off. It almost does, save for the peculiar, weepy outbursts nature their relationship. It seems out of character for them both.

“I’m not finished yet” Ben Myers (Dreyfuss) narrates from a hospital gurney. “If I wake up, I’ll chose different.”

It’s that last day leading up to him in the hospital that “Crime Story” encompasses.

He’s an ex-con “twelve years straight” thanks to a sweetheart deal with the powers that be. But he’s old and enfeebled, and his wife “left me without going anywhere.” She has dementia. Getting a nurse he can keep to help out with her isn’t easy, as Ben still carries a pistol and scares people.

Ben has one junky daughter (Joanna Walchuk), hospitalized and disowned, and another — the cop — whom he was never close with.

And on this fateful day, he just might need one’s forgiveness and the other’s help.

A cagey old SOB, Ben notices the white panel “surveyor” truck parked across the street when he leaves, and the power steering fluid stain in his driveway when he gets back and finds his house ransacked and wife further traumatized. But he has a nanny cam, and it shows him the faces of the crooks who emptied his safe and took the rings off his wife’s fingers.

“I decided to do what I do.”

The geriatric hunt for revenge is fun, if absurdly far-fetched. The father-daughter debate, two Oscar winners going toe to toe in a dimly-lit Savannah bar, has a moment or two.

And the political and personal plot has twists aplenty, enough to make this worth watching, despite the odd moment of acting excess (from each star), slack pacing (matched to a smoky, jazz-blues score) and a somewhat less-than-wholly-coherent finale.

But the players can’t quite put it over and the writer-director can’t quite pull it off. It’s a thriller that shuffles when it needs to trot, simmers when it needs to boil and goes on after it needs to end.

MPA Rating: R, violence, language (profanity) and some sexual content

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Mira Sorvino, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Cress Williams

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Lipsius. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:39