Movie Nation

The delight of discovery and element of surprise were all used up on “A Quiet Place.” And that’s not just true for viewers. In the sequel’s prologue, the cast gives us the distinct impression that they can’t “unring” that bell, either.

As you’ve seen in every trailer, “A Quiet Place Part II” opens with a short, punchy “Day 1” prequel — the Day the Monsters Came and wrecked the world, Millbrook, New York and a tense little league game underway there.

From the instant, reflexive reactions of parents Evelyn and Lee Abbott (Emily Blunt and writer, director, husband John Krasinski), you’d swear it was Day 201, as they seem to “know” more than their characters should about the crab creatures who track them by sound and inefficiently slaughter the human race for reasons which are never crystal clear.

The cowering-in-place is true to life, but the muffled silence is not just shock. Everybody in the cast saw the first film, apparently.

But Krasinski still manages to back-engineer a tight, affecting sequel that is even quieter — brilliantly using the silence that deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) experiences this horror in — and even noisier.

Where the first film dropped us into the cleverly under-explained “world” this family was struggling to survive in, this one picks up the survivors — who barely have time to mourn the death of Dad, which ended the first film — on “Day 474” as they flee the farm they’ve been hiding out on, taking what Dad learned about the invaders and what Mom figured out about keeping her now-three (don’t forget the baby) kids alive with them.

Daughter Regan is her Dad’s child — intrepid, a tween who understands the DIY engineering that gave them the answer to fighting back, “feedback,” manufacturing “tinnitus.”

Mother Evelyn is still bandaged, battered and barefoot, as are they all.

And middle-child/oldest son Marcus (Noah Jupe) is still the accident-prone one, the one not-at-all cut out for surviving this, a simpering, whimpering child who seems doomed to a Darwinian reckoning.

Cillian Murphy is the neighbor, whom we meet at the Day 1 ball game, who has survived the death of his entire family, embittered and cowering in the abandoned steel mill where he used to work.

“There’s nothing left,” he whispers after watching-not-helping them escape a fresh, noisy calamity. And “the people that are left, what they’ve become, they’re not the kind of people worth saving.”

We wonder how much he’s talking about himself.

But a chance scan of the family radio reveals that a Bobby Darin fan is still out there, broadcasting “Beyond the Sea” over and over again. Regan has to know if there are others, if they can help and if they’ve found a way to get life back to “normal.”

Yes, there’s a pandemic subtext, right out in the open, in that land where FM radio lives on and they still play 45s over and over again.

Krasinski’s set-piece this time is a neatly intercut three places people in this story are in peril, each facing a nearly insoluble and potentially fatal dilemma. And he gives the picture a sweet coda that is as emotional as anything in the first movie.

That, and bringing on two fine actors — Murphy and Djimon Hounsou — to supplement an already stellar cast — make “Quiet Place II” worth watching.

It’s more slackly-paced than the original, lacks its surprises and the terrifying peaks that the first script hit. The “back-engineering” and “suspend disbelief” science and technology and character behavior shows, often to clumsy effect.

But the “Quiet” once again drowns out the “noise” in this, the best creature feature of our times.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for terror, violence and bloody/disturbing images. 

Cast: Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Cillian Murphy, Noah Jupe, John Krasinski and Djimon Hounsou.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Krasinski. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:37

Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, Lena Headey, Carla Gugino and Paul Giamatti also star in this hit woman action comedy.

A “Shoot em Up” or “Harley Quinn That doesn’t suck?”

Angelino grandson, a workaholic who toils in finance, is told “Let’s go for a drive” by his grandpa, who takes him out to the desert. He speaks of Old Mexico, or at least the Mexico he left to emigrate to the United States. The kid may speak Spanish and be close with his large extended family. But he doesn’t know his roots.

Grandpa mentions a couple of places in Mexico City that he remembers fondly, and gives the kid an order.

“Go back and take a look,” he says. And then, he dies.

That’s the launching point of “Tell me When (Dime Cuándo Tú),” a tepid romantic comedy built around a bucket list that Grandpa Pepe (screen veteran José Carlos Ruiz) kept in his diary. Grandson “Will,” who needs to go by Guillermo (Jesús Zavala) or “Guillermito” when he’s with family, will leave his seven day a week job and follow that list as he is forced to “experience” the things in life he’s missed.

“Get drunk on mezcal.” “Sing with mariarchis.” Visit the Fine Arts Palace, see the Main Square, the Blue House and the Satellite Towers.

You’ll stay with Danielle (Ximena Romo) his grandma and her friend Luci, Danielle’s granny, dell him. She’s show him around.

Guess what else is on Grandpa’s list?

There are little chuckles around the edges of this limp noodle of a comedy, and just a hint of romance to it. It should be bubbling over with both.

I only laughed at the crude and profane advice naive Will gets from older relatives back home and the daft attempts of Dani’s relatives in Mexico City — the gay restaurateur Beto (Gabriel Nuncio) included.

The leads are cute, but don’t have much chemistry, with Zavala especially coming off more dull and charmless than the role requires.

Ideas such as the bucket list, grandpa’s fondness for capturing memories on Polaroids and the like are introduced and forgotten as the no-heat-here romance takes center stage. A weaker plot point, Danielle getting her big “break” as understudy when the leading lady (real stage actors and directors plays themselves), is played-up, to little effect.

Veteran producer and first-time director Gerardo Gatica González even shortchanges what should be the movie’s no-brainer subtext, the sights of Mexico City.

Without that, “Tell ME When” doesn’t even work as travelogue.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Jesús Zavala, Ximena Romo, Gabriel Nuncio, Juca Viapri, Verónica Castro, José Carlos Ruiz

Credits: A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Whatever else this fellow Will Smith — no, not THAT Will Smith — has going on in his life, he tells a helluva yarn.

And that “yarn,” about a mysterious neighbor he barely knows leaving a large and expensive stamp collection with him with an “If anything should happen to me” proviso, instantly drew in documentary filmmaker William Saunders & Co. It sent them on a four year odyssey, with Smith, to track down where these stamps came from, their value, and who this Russian accented fellow, Roman No-Last-Name might be and how he came to have them, and stash them with a near-stranger.

“The Penny Black” is an utterly-engrossing might-be-true-crime docu-mystery, a film laid out like a private eye thriller (they even hire an Archer Agency detective in LA, shades of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer), a story with big money, competing agendas, shady characters and a classic “unreliable narrator.

I mean we think, as the filmmakers do, that we can trust this Smith fellow. But can we? The fact that he has no visible means of support in a crazily expensive city, that his dad was a document forger/embezzler and that Will uh, goes through some cash, makes us wonder.

Everything about the film — from its shadowy recreations of what could be home movies of Will’s past to the score (dulcimer plunks that sound like we’re watching an espionage thriller) — screams “Trust NO ONE,” no matter how honest they seem.

The world’s first postage stamp, a British “penny black,” is among the collectibles in the big albums that this Roman fellow dropped in Smith’s lap. According to Smith, anyway. But that 1840 marvel isn’t close to being the most valuable stamp in the collection.

“The Penny Black” lets Smith tell the strange story of how he got the stamps, and then follows efforts he (and the filmmakers) undergo to ascertain their value at stamp shows and auctions, their provenance and just where this “Roman” fellow got off to.

Smith’s matter-of-fact disclosure of how he came into possession of them all gives him a “sketchy” vibe, one that he never quite shakes as months and years go by, he moves a couple of times, takes up with and breaks up with a girlfriend and reveals “gifts” he’s received to prop him up.

“I sold a few stamps,” he jokes, reading the film crew’s mind, and ours. “A gift,” he corrects.

As the years go on and they hire that “Archer Agency” PI and track a down folks who reported a big stamp heist years back, Smith and Saunders build the unseen “missing” Roman into a Harry Lime of “The Third Man” sort of figure — larger than life.

And Smith, who rather casually dismissed the shady seeming nature of their original exchange and shrugged off any idea he might have taken possession of something that could get him arrested or killed, finally seems to fret and worry over what he’s done and what they might uncover.

“I’d hate to put myself in mortal danger over some f—–g stamps!”

Has he?

Dive into “Penny Black,” before somebody options this for a feature film noir, and find out.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Credits: Directed by William J. Saunders. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:38

Nov. 5, lots of new superheroes for those who need them.

Sometimes, they lose you in the finale. They over-explain their “motiveless murder” thriller, and the explanations don’t add up to anything other than “pitiless psychopath” or the filmmakers do something else to show they don’t know when to call it a day.

“Stalker” is a half-decent iteration of the popular “identify theft” thriller, starting with “pranks” and transitioning to house breaking, thefts, and utter identity destruction, all of it with a side order of murderous stalker.

It flirts with “stylish,” and is just paranoid enough — if a little slow — as we watch our new-to-California teacher/tutor (Vincent Van Horn) meet somebody nice in a bar (Christine Ko), take a rideshare back to her place, and see his life steadily unravel as the Ryde dude (Michael Lee Joplin) befriends him, clings to him and then turns on him.

Director and co-writer Tyler Savage samples all manner of ID theft horrors and pitches his movie somewhere in the “Cape Fear” to “Cable Guy” as B-movie range, switching points of view from hapless Andy (Van Horn) to predatory Roger (Joplin) as he does.

Van Horn’s Andy experiences the downward spiral of a life he’s lost control of, a wrong he cannot rectify. The performance captures a little sense of the despair (crawling into a bottle), a hint of the rage. Portraying a teacher, it’s a toned-down turn that feels something like a cheat.

The inevitable “I didn’t mean to trigger you” and Why are you doing this?” get our victim nowhere. The cops seem amused at the destructive “pranks” the apparent master criminal is able to pull on Andy. And cell phone expert gives him the “see this all the time” shrug.

“You got sim-swapped.”

All of which is set up in a workaday Los Angeles firmly rooted in reality. How would you “punish” a freelance tutor? Send him to bogus “appointments” (a drug dealer’s house) for starters.

But the “reality” and the suspense and the narrowly-defined “entertainment value” dissipates in an ending that talks its way out of any sense the story might have made and any sense of satisfaction the viewer might have hoped for.

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

Cast: Vincent Van Horn, Christine Ko, Michael Lee Joplin

Credits: Directed by Tyler Savage, script by Dash Hawkins, Tyler Savage. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:26

A dark comedy about serial killers and a support group, led by David Koechner.

This trailer really plays. Know why?ACTING! And we’re invested in the characters and this “Amityville” couple’s universe.

More interesting as another technical exercise in “making a movie look like your Facebook page,” “Profile” comes to screens too late to catch “ISIS Fever,” too obvious to quite come off.

I mean, if the average viewer sees things the cunning, media-savvy, nimble-fingered millennial reporter-heroine played by Valene Kane (TV’s “Gangs of London”) should see coming a mile off, the whole enterprise is undercut and fairly early on.

We “see” Amy hurriedly assembling an online identity, life and fake “profile” for a story her editor (Christine Adams, uncannily nerve-wracking) is riding her to report yesterday, if not before. It’s 2014 London, and the word wants to know why young women from all over Europe are flocking to Syria and becoming ISIS recruits, wives, concubines and/or suicide bombers.

How to report it? Lure a recruiter, engage with him in messages and Skype chats, teasing out the process of online “seduction” that ends with recruits stepping off a plane in Istanbul and into the violent, psychotic patriarchy of the Islamic State.

Amy reinvents herself as “Melody” and multi-tasks like a maniac, Youtube Hijab-wearing and “How to make yourself younger” makeup tutorials, Googling “How to make someone fall in love with you” and flipping from screen to screen, power-watching jihadist beheading videos and cutesy ISIS recruiting memes involving kittens and babies and toddlers posed with grenades, AK-47s and that omnipresent Islamic State black flag.

She’s in her mid-20s and trying to pass for 19-20, because IS fighters/martyrs like them young, virginal and gullible.

And within moments, she’s posted the right picture and shared the right memes and videos and Abu Bilel Al-Britani, a Syrian fighter/true believer and recruiter has hit her with a “Salaam alaikum, my sister.”

Juggling screens and hastily donning a hijab, she covers a death’s skull tattoo on her finger (“It’s haram (forbidden in Islam)” she’s reminded by tech guy Lou (Amir Rahimzadeh), who is hastily coaching her through recording Skype chats for her story.

Because Bilel, whose “Al-Britani” gives away his jihadi origins as surely as his accent, is on screen and giving her the full-court press in a heartbeat. He’s a bearded 20something hunk played by Shazad Latif (“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) with the swagger of youth and the confidence of knowing “recent convert to Islam” and “young female” should make Melody putty in his hands.

He bowls her over with videos, braggadocio over his combat experience and insistent questions, pleas and demands. Amy isn’t the age she’s saying Melody is, so she plays along, slowing his roll with her own questions and when doubt, fear, overeagerness or technical problems and interruptions kick in, she disconnects “by accident.”

She catches her breath, deals with boyfriend/realtor Matt (Morgan Watkins) who checks in via Facebook messenger, Skype or what have you updating her on the apartment they’re to move into together.

Matt is over-organized, has the math of their living arrangement worked out to the penny, propping the freelance reporter up until she can win a job at the media organization she’s risking her neck for with this story.

She creates Melody with cheats — cutting and pasting other “why I converted” narratives she finds online, “friending” lots of people she finds with the right names and profiles to suit her new persona.

It’s this manic, real-time, type-type-Skype opening act that is the best thing in “Profile,” getting at the pressure a young person in the “gig economy” feels, journalistic shortcuts, the bum’s rush Bilel is plainly giving her, urging her to “come,” professing “paradise” and promising “marriage” in a mad dash to close the deal.

Amy/Melody sees what we see and hears what we hear. She’s read the “recruiting playbook” that others have exposed online, how IS recruiters work their magic. And yet she softens towards this good-looking, committed and confident young thug who promises her a life that square Matt can’t hope to approach.

Every interaction is fraught with danger and urgency, and as little journalistic tricks enter the conversation — probing his real identity, his real job with IS, his own journey from unhappiness to radicalism — she puts off her editor and Matt and everybody else, dragging out the reporting, almost as if she’s giving this bargain some serious consideration.

The energy in Timur Bekmambetov’s latest thriller — he did “Night Watch,””Wanted,” the “Ben Hur” remake, and produced the similar online thriller “Unfriended” — dissapates almost by default after that heady first act.

Amy is still frazzled and balancing several things at once in every chat. But as the days and chats go on, could she really be falling for psycho-Lothario’s line after seeing and hearing and reading him in that first, pushy conversation? After seeing his friends murder people on camera?

“Profile,” shot in 2018, also feels dated — not in the tech sense, but in the geopolitical one. Who talks about IS any more? The hundreds of jaded, lost Westerners who flocked to Syria almost a decade ago are cultural punchlines now, those who weren’t beheaded by their overlords or arrested when they tried to come home.

Still, Bekmambetov, working from a true story in a book by Anna Érelle, expands the possibilities of what we can do in creating suspense via simple exchanged messages and Skype conversations that need to hide as much as they reveal. Amy’s mad online multi-tasking will make most viewers feel old and slow, or that an attention span is a terrible thing to waste.

Remember that John Cho thriller about a man tracking his missing daughter down via her social media history, “Searching?” This is like that, until the energy fades and the journalistic credibility slips into “women reporters, always falling for the evilest guy” stereotypes.

Like that ever happens.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout and some disturbing images 

Cast: Valene Kane, Shazad Latif, Christine Adams, Morgan Watkins, Amir Rahimzadeh

Credits: Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, script by Britt Poulton, Olga Kharina and Timur Bekmambetov, based on the book by Anna Érelle A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:40

“The exchange, “You’re putting in your own septic?” “I think I can handle it” is horrific enough to the average home or single wide owner.

June 1, this bad boy becomes accessible to mere mortals everywhere.