Movie Nation

Here’s what we know so far. Thursday night, “A Quiet Place II” did over three times the business that “Cruella” did.

As of end of the evening Friday, “A Quiet Place Part II” has tallied $19.3 million. “Cruella” started Saturday with $7.7 million in sales.

Both are on a boatload of screens. A TON. Over 3700 for “Quiet Place,” with “Cruella” a couple of hundred less.

“Cruella” is also showing on Disney+, which considering its pace and length, is the best place to watch it. So Disney will be declaring it a hit no matter what.

This “official” start to summer is a lot closer to resembling other summer opening weekends. Figure “Cruella” to finish Monday with just over $20 million, “A Quiet Place II” over $40. Box Office Pro is saying as much as $60 over four days. Are people that “over” the pandemic that this many will show up? I’m thinking maybe $45-50 would be the top end.

Not staggering numbers by 2019 standards, but depending on how the Sunday-Monday audience pans out, a lot more of a sign that people are going back to the cinemas.

What would horror screenwriters do without murderously sadistic millionaires? They’re so very handy when you’re trying to concoct a means for putting say, eight reality TV and streaming show stars in a “Funhouse” where online viewers can revel in them slaughtering each other.

Actor turned writer-director Jason Lee Williams (“The Evil in Us”) tries on that tired trope as the “brains” and bucks behind “Furcas’ Funhouse” in his foot-dragging variation on the “And then there were none” theme.

It’s a not-quite-soulless slaughterhouse thriller with dull deaths, drab staging and funereal pacing. So even the visceral promise of its premise fails to pay off.

Valter Skarsgård, Khamisa Wilsher, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Christopher Gerard, Karolina Benefield, Amanda Howells, Mathias Retamal and Dayleigh Nelson portray assorted “personalities” recruited for this show that almost celebrates the golden age of “fame whores.”

One’s an MMA fighter on the ropes, another is a ruthless celeb gossip blogger, one’s an Instagram bombshell, another’s a reality bachelorette, and so on.

They all wake up, drugged, in a remote, sealed-off mansion filled with cameras where they will fraternize, “confess” their true feelings to viewers in a booth and “compete” for a $5 million prize. They all had agents who arranged this, so they have no idea what “only one of you will be with us to collect the $5 million prize.”

Still, “It was in your contract.”

Our oligarch (Aussie Jerome Velinsky of “The Evil in Us”) loves Beethoven and appears to his contestants as a CGI talking panda, serving up exposition, endless “rules” and “competitions” (“Pinata Party” involves beating somebody to death while blindfolded and not realizing you’re doing it), insults about each of the eight’s backstory and popularity polls results from online viewers telling us who gets to fight to the death, or face torture and and execution.

There’s TV “coverage” that looks little like real cable TV, a flippant, “This must be fake” youtube “reviewer (Bradley Duffy) snarking away about the show, shots of slack-jawed viewers of all ages gulping down this latest serving of “the Kardashianization of humanity,” and an ever-shrinking populace of “Funhouse” contestants, who don’t resist this dehumanizing murder-for-entertainment, unless you count whining about it as “resistance.”

“We had a DEAL!”

And there’s the “outside” search, by police, for where this mass murder is being staged, as drably-handled as everything else.

The surprises don’t amount to anything that improves our appreciation of what’s happening, although a couple of the players — Gerard’s MMA fighter “Tombstone,” and Wilsher’s utterly out-of-her-depth “Bride to Be” star in a kill-or-be-killed “game” — stand out.

There’s an audience for this sort of crap — bloody hackings, dismemberments, sex and (female) nudity. But even fans will be put off by the moronic “sermons” by the pontificating rich guy/panda and the “Moonlight Sonata” pace of a no-fun-allowed “Funhouse.”

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Valter Skarsgård, Khamisa Wilsher, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Christopher Gerard, Karolina Benefield, Amanda Howells, Mathias Retamal, Dayleigh Nelson, Bradley Duffy and Jerome Velinsky

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jason William Lee. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:46

Can’t tell a lot from this clip, as it is seriously generic in the first act get up and get going tradition.

“Annette” opens July 7 in la belle France, with Simon Helberg. Opera singer and stand up comic have a kid with a “gift.”

“So May We Start,” Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard and a taste of “Annette.”

You’d think we’d explored all the possibilities of being trapped in a small space with time running out in “Buried,” and all the emotions of a life circumscribed by such limitations in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

Ah, but have we been served those dishes in a sci-fi setting?

Thus, “Oxyegen (Oxygene),” a French thriller of limited setting and limited interest, a pretty good film that exhausts its chances to generate interest entirely too quickly for my taste.

This Around the World with Netflix outing is 100 minutes long, and I figure it hits the wall at 60 minutes and never punches its way through it.

Melanie Laurent (“Beginners,” “Now You See Me”) plays a woman who wakes up in a chrysalis, gasping for breath until the thin web of whatever tears and she can gulp down air.

She is confined, wrapped in that sheathing, restrained and with tubes and monitoring patches all over her. Her confinement is in a hi-tech white bubble with smooth, curved lines, like a coffin designed by Steve Jobs. And it talks to her with a disembodied voice (Mathieu Amalric, of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in the French-language version).

She can speak, but she has no memory of how she got here, and not even her name. She fees just enough of herself to start arguing with the soothing computer voice that calls itself MILO.

“Would you like a sedative?”

“Let me out, let ME OUT!”

She quickly ascertains she’s in some sort of life support cryogenic pod, that it has failed and her oxygen is running out. MILO is a machine, so he can’t tell her who she is, just her pod-“biological unit” number. But little flashes of memory start to piece that together.

And if she asks the right commands, she can start to reason her way out of this, because she’s no dummy. She asks for and gets through to the police. Except she has no idea who she is or where she’s being kept.

There are gadgets within the pod designed for her “care,” but that could hurt her. As she starts to unplug this and break that, she gets a stern warning from MILO.

“Damaging a cryosalide unit is a European Federal offense, punishable…”

Never mind. She’s got to get the cops to come get her, got to help them find her, got to remember things like the “husband” (Malik Zidi) she sees in her mind.

And she’s got to outsmart that digital bastard MILO, who can’t be reasoned with but who might be circumvented if she asks the right questions and figures out the right commands.

Director Alexandre Aja made his name in horror films such as the classic “High Tension” and the recent gators-in-the-hurricane-flooded house thriller “Crawl.” He’s used to creating suspense and telling stories with the walls closing in around his heroine.

Which is what he manages here…for about an hour.

As the film starts to explain itself and leaps of logic have to clear canyons, I found myself wondering about dinner, what the French version of “The Simpsons” (Melanie Laurent’s dad voices Ned Flanders and Mr. Smithers, in French) and which of this picture’s third act climaxes will be the real one?

MPA Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Mélanie Laurent, Malik Zidi with the voice of  Mathieu Amalric

Credits: Directed by Alexandre Aja, script by Christie LeBlanc. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

A pretty young French musician tries to surf the coming electronica wave in Paris in “Le choc du futur,” a “musician finds her sound” tale set in 1978.

The film isn’t a tale of triumph over adversity, paddling against the musical current or getting in on the ground floor of a sound that would come to dominate music, although all that is in here, with lip service paid to the “bourgeois” music of the present — disco and guitar rock.

“You know the ’80s are coming,” Ana (Alma Jodorowsky) shouts (in French with English subtitles) at some grizzled producer/naysayer (Philippe Rebot) whose commercial she has just blown off.

“Le choc” is about “the future,” but also about the sexist, retrograde environment Ana is trying to make her music in. Guys are hitting on her, dismissing her, making excuses for her and reminding her how unheard of it is for “a chick to do music” and know how to manipulate the much-more complex synthesizers of the time.

But we watch doors opened, money lent, allowances made and a tech who came over to fix her wall-sized synthesizer/sequencer set-up as a favor then agree, without his bargained for “kiss,” to lend her one of the first beat-boxes ever made. Ana may not be “working it” to get her way, but she’s certainly using her looks to get to “yes.” She’s playing with a double-edged sword.

She is staying in a “friend’s” flat, and using all “his” electronics, although at least she brought her own keyboard. She blows off deadlines and still hopes to have something to play for the record company heavyweight she’s invited to a big party tonight — in her friend’s flat.

Idealistic, impatient, inspired and spoiled, she has yet to learn “the artists who succeed are the ones who check their answering machines.” And “they” have yet to learn that the sound of “today” isn’t “Le choc du futur (the shock of the future).”

Jodoroskwy’s focused performance has moments that mirror Ana’s tightrope walk. An opening scene has the star of the notoriously sexy “Blue is the Warmest Color” exercising, unself-consciously, in her underwear.

The film star is playing up her sexuality the way the character is constantly being reminded of the same thing. “You’re a pretty girl, you should be a singer.”

The character’s a tad irritating, in that “doors open for beautiful women, and still they complain” sort of way. But she’s intriguing, in that “Will she ever get off her lazy ass and do the work” sort of way.

One fun scene scene has Geoffrey Carey as a friend, an older British record collector, come in and show off the new electronic LPs he’s scored, the true pioneers in this transition from electronic “space music” and disco to New Wave, which would synthesize the two. Here’s the latest from the Belgian Aksak Maboul. And there’s this “great new band” in Sheffield, Human League.

The enduring French disco queen Corinne plays herself as an early-adaptor of synthesizer-backed disco-pop.

And then there’s the singer (Clara Luciani) who improvises lyrics and a vocal style to front Ana’s “new sound” — dreamy, breathy, romantic. It’s kind of a backhanded compliment to suggest just how little might have gone into creating a beat and rhythmic sound textures of electronica, and even less that went into the lyrics.

But Ana is preaching about the coming “new way” of listening to music and performing it, suggesting “trance” music a decade before that was born.

This brief, fictional film doesn’t have the scope or the ambition and intent to be the last word on a music and an era. It’s not “24 Hour Party People,” after all. “Le choc du futur” still does an engaging job of introducing a time and a place, and just what a woman like Ana might have to put up with, on top of getting people to accept her “future,” to make a mark in music.

MPA Rating: unrated, drug use, profanity

Cast: Alma Jodorowsky, Philippe Rebot, Clara Luciani and Laurent Papot.

Credits: Directed by Marc Collin, script by Marc Collin, Elina Gakou Gomba. Now streaming on Film Movement+.

Running time: 1:18

What a peculiar, sometimes bizarre movie “Homunculus” is, a brain-experiment sci-fi thriller that lurches between dull and downright revolting.starts with graphic brain surgery, crosses into “creepy,” and freely-acknowledges that when it does, as it dabbles in the Japanese obsession with uniformed “schoolgirls,” and goes gonzo gross, before settling into sheer tedium.

This Around the World with Netflix thriller starts with graphic brain surgery, crosses into “creepy,” and freely-acknowledges that when it does, as it dabbles in the Japanese obsession with uniformed “schoolgirls,” and goes gonzo gross, before settling into sheer tedium.

It’s about a homeless guy (Gô Ayano) who lives in his ’60s Mazda, occasionally socializes with the homeless encamped in a nearby park and gorges on big swathes of the menu when he deigns to go out.

He’s got money, everybody says. But he’s living like this. He must have his reasons.

They don’t become crystal clear when he’s approached by a pierced, pushy street punk (Ryô Narita) who turns out to be a “rich kid doctor.” He wants to do a little ancient brain surgery on Nokoshi, and eventually gets to the heart of his pitch.

“Do you ever feel alive?”

Nokoshi ignores the dangers of the most invasive of surgeries, the dubious credentials of his pitchman and Ito willingness to resort to extortion, and agrees to the surgery.

Maybe he’ll “remember what you forgot” after this trepanation — trepanning, boring a hole in the skull (seen in “Master & Commander”). Maybe he’ll discover a sixth sense. There are all sorts of possibilities when you pop the bone off the lid of your noggin.

“ESP, psychokinesis,” Ito teases, dubbed into English or in Japanese with English subtitles. “Give me seven days and I’ll give you a reason to live!”

What he actually gives Nokoshi, aside from a big band-aid covering the hole in his forehead and the recovery of “memories,” is the ability to see people as “homunculi,” beasts as they really are. Some are made of sand, others of water. They can be walking chains or “empty” creatures covered in sunglasses.

Nokoshi knows the yakuza whom he confuses for a robot has a gigantic emotional scar he’s based his life on. His threat of violence can be turned on his by twisting his mind.

This school girl (Seiyô Uchino) who moonlights in a peep show (the school uniform fetish) has hang-ups that come off as pervy older man wish-fulfillment fantasies. I’m not overstating it in saying this borders on nauseating.

The performances never quite achieve “compelling.”

And the action of the first half of Takashi Shimzu’s film — based on a manga, of course — is abandoned for far duller later scenes and acts, less sick or sickening, but not thought-provoking enough to hold interest.

That’s how the film leaves you, with a wincing realization that “That’s it?”

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual violence, sexuality and profanity

Cast: Gô Ayano, Ryô Narita

Credits: Directed by Takashi Shimizu, script by Eisuke Naitô, Naruki Matsuhisa and Takashi Shimizu, based on the manga by Hideo Yamamoto. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

Annasophia Robb, Minks Kelly, and as a young Meyer Lansky? John Magaro.

Emily Blunt, The Rock, CCR, and “a tree” with “powers.”

Did I mention the U Boat?

So the cut and paste screenwriters have seen “The African Queen” and “Murphy’s War?” And every Disney movie with a whiff of magic?

We toss the phrase “Kafkaesque nightmare” out whenever we or someone we hear about is buried under the impersonal, uncaring bureaucracy of government.

But what does that really imply? It denotes a solitary human, a “citizen,” trapped in the maw of the machine of government, a machine that is deaf to your pleas, batting you around like a toy, chewing you up and spat out in the process.

That’s what happened to Anthony Bryan, one of the many thousands of longtime British residents forced, by the Conservative government there, to prove they belonged after decades of living, paying taxes and raising families in a country that lured them there with the promise of citizenship.

“Sitting in Limbo” is a British immigration debacle that is the very definition of “Kafkaesque nightmare.”

Bryan, like many others, found himself “Sitting in Limbo,” as this British TV film is titled. We see Bryan (Patrick Robinson), pushing 60, after spending half a century in his adopted country, kicked out of his job, ordered to report back to The Home Office “every fortnight,” while his status was “examined.”

Forced to submit, resubmit and submit a third time an ever changing array of paperwork, arrested and held in detention not once, but twice, and treated with a callous disregard for humanity, human rights and simple decency that Franz Kafka would easily recognize, his true story became the linchpin of Britain’s “Windrush Scandal.

The idea was to create a “hostile environment” for immigrants, a sort of ethnic cleansing by harassment of people deemed politically and legally vulnerable, a policy which apparently Donald Trump’s minions wanted to mimic when he held power.

Depressed, depopulated Britain invited immigrants from its colonies in the decades after World War II ended. That’s how Anthony Bryan arrived, at age eight, in the 1960s. Stella Corradi’s film lets us see him scramble to reconstruct that history to satisfy a widening selection of bureaucrats who either lose or ignore the paperwork submitted, or simply change what they expect him to produce.

“It’s up to you to provide evidence to support your claim,” one functionary snaps.

But you try tracking down school records from half a century ago, a passport of similar vintage, birth certificate from Jamaica.

Bryan sees his life ground down — forced out of his job because of his “status,” locked up with expensive lawyers as his only recourse, abruptly released without so much as “an apology,” asked for “proof of paternity” for his children.

His longtime partner Janet (Nadine Marshall) is the one quicker to anger at his treatment. They can joke over the fact that they never got married, which would have spared him this assault on his status and life.

“You should have gotten down on one knee years ago.”

But this is deadly serious business, as we see from the his confinement, and the news coverage that broke out about it in the film’s third act.

“Sitting in Limbo” isn’t on a par with the fine West Indian history/slice of life series Steve McQueen did (“Small Axe”). The acting is convincing, but this calamity isn’t given the pathos it deserves, although Robinson’s simmering outrage is palpable, even though his Bryan knows full well that the minute he loses his cool “they” have their excuse to summarily ship him out.

“It’s like I’m having to beg to stay in my own country.”

The film is best at putting a human face on the faceless “immigration debate,” in Britain and pretty much anywhere else. And Robinson, portraying shock, deflating defeat and helplessness in the maw of the machine, makes one compelling case among countless thousands by showing Anthony Bryan’s patience, forbearance and broken-hearted outrage that “my country” could do this to him.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Patrick Robinson, Nadine Marshall, Pippa Bennett-Warner and C.K. Beckford

Credits: Directed by Stella Corradi, script by Stephen S. Thompson. A BBC One production, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

Dennis Quaid plays a crusty, rummy old salt forced to help kids win a cash-prize fishiny tourney so that they can save their orphanage in “Blue Miracle,” a “true” tale of Cabo San Lucas.

OK, “true-ish.”

Cute? Certainly. Cloying? Sometimes. I mean, come on. Orphans.

Faith-based? Kind of. A little boy has taken the advice that he should nail his prayers above a door if he wants them to come true. You know what that means.

But stars Jimmy Gonzalez, Quaid and others give fair value and director Julio Quintana (“The Vessel”) manages a mystical moment or two and a sentimental moment or three. And it finishes really well. Really well.

So it may not be a prize-winner, but it’s not exactly chum, either.

Gonzales, finding a sweet variation of his “Mayans M.C.” TV biker thug, plays a guy who has rechanneled a wayward youth, married and runs a private orphanage in Cabo. Wife Becca (Fernanda Urrejola) helps “Papa Omar” preside over the unruly boys of Casa Hogar (“House Home?”)

But the bank is knocking at the door, a hurricane floods the place and they’re in the hole. A lot.

The annual Bisbee’s Black and Blue Fishing Tourney could be their salvation. But only after the wily director of the tourney (Bruce McGill) enters them to get past-winner and drunken, half-broke has-been Capt. Wade off his back about “waiving the entry fee.” Team Casa Hogar it is.

Wade to Papa Omar — “You and your three least annoying orphans” should show up, board his battered boat, “Knot Enough,” at dawn. And away we go.

The kids are a collection of “types” with names to match. Hollywood, Wiki (the smart one) and the new guy, the thief, the one who calls himself “Moco” (“booger”) are Casa Hogar’s last hope.

Complications? Wade has a sad, obsessed past. Omar has issues with being at sea, with fishing with a father figure. He has nightmares about just that. And the kids? What’re the chances any of them can swim?

There’s a lot of sass, back-talk and wisecracking, none of it all that funny. But they all really want to win this thing for Tweety (Steve Gutierrez), who took Omar’s suggestion about writing down prayers and nailing them above the doorway so literally that he’s sure they’re going to boat the biggest marlin of them all.

A single decent twist and a pleasant lump-in-the-throat finale are what you get for your time, here. Not much, but not a lot of family friendly movies do better. And not bad for a movie about a rich man’s “trophy fish” sport. Let’s hope they didn’t waste any blue marlins making this.

MPA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Jimmy Gonzales, Dennis Quaid, Fernanda Urrejola, Miguel Angel Garcia, Nathan Arenas, Dana Wheeler-Nicholson and Bruce McGill.

Credits: Directed by Julio Quintana, script by Chris Dowling, Julio Quintana. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35