Movie Nation

A young man with a gun breaks into a Warsaw TV studio on New Millennium Eve, figuring to deliver a message or manifesto to the masses in “Prime Time.” But that’s not the way things work out in this mildly-suspenseful Polish thriller, a film that manages to be derivative and different, although not in ways that make it worth recommending.

In this violent grab for attention, our troubled, unstable gunman (Bartosz Bielenia) hasn’t picked his time to shine with much care.

Money Monster, Network

It’s the end of a millennium, and New Year’s Eve. Everybody’s out partying. Everybody else is out of reach. The president will be speaking shortly. And even if the world-weary new producer (Malgorzata Hajewska) hadn’t cut off the live feed the moment young Sebastian burst in, he’d have a helluva time getting anyone’s attention.

Interviews with Polish youth reveals a wide range of plans to “leave” the country. The show Sebastian interrupts is a popular phone-in giveaway program. A “winner” keeps bleating “Hello? Hello? Did I win?” over the PA system as he seizes hostess/newscaster Mira (Magdalena Poplawska) and handcuffs her to the security guard he took hostage to get in the studio.

What’s his beef? What’s he determined to say? The control room takes on a late Soviet bloc nostalgia as the network security chief declares “Totally not my job, armed assault (in dubbed English, or original Polish with English subtitles). We check IDs,” that’s it.

Over the course of this only faintly-tense evening, Sebastian rants to “go live,” and Laura, the producer, resists those in the control room who suggest they acquiesce.

“And if he shoots Mira or the guard in front of the TV audience, or blows his brains out or screams ‘GAS the JEWS’ or does the Hitler salute?”

Nope. No nationwide audience for you, kid. And then SWAT arrives, two negotiators (Cezary Kosinski, Monika Frajczyk) take over, and the night wears on.

Director and co-writer Jakub Piatek might be trying to make points about cries for help and attention, about media’s toxic allure. But too little of that gets, and too much that’s familiar from other hostage tales, from “Dog Day Afternoon” to “Money Monster,” just plays as tired.

Even Sebastian’s chat with his un-summoned father (Juliusz Chrzastowski) going South, with the old man taunting the kid, feels like something we’ve seen before, because we have.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Bartosz Bielenia, Magdalena Poplawska, Andrzej Klak and Malgorzata Hajewska

Credits: Directed by Jakub Piatek, script by Lukasz Czapski, Jakub Piatek. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

As somebody who’ll laugh at any word that comes out of Alec Baldwin‘s mouth in that bossy, Wall Street bull-in-a-china-shop Jack Donaghy (“30 Rock”) voice, I laughed and laughed at “The Boss Baby.”

An animated tale of a bossy, business-suited baby taking charge of a threat to babies everywhere by leading his stunned older brother on a secret mission, with dialogue riddled with Baldwin in-jokes (his “Glengarry Glen Ross” hardcase sales chief)? Hilarious.

 “Put… that… cookie… down! Cookies are for closers!”

But here we are, four years and one 50 episode-run TV series later, and the “Boss Baby” is out of laughs. And those who would further profit from the Baby with Baldwin’s Voice gag are hard-pressed for ideas.

“The Boss Baby: Family Business” is a sequel to the TV show and the earlier movie, with an adult Theodore Templeton (Baldwin still) tearing up the business world, too busy to marry, quick to over-gift brother Tim (James Marsden) and his family (Eva Longoria) for the times he’s not there with them.

Tim’s recovered/forgotten that Theodore was once the diapered top agent/”fixer” for Baby Corp., and has a little girl of his own — Tabitha (Ariana Greenblatt) — and a new toddler in the house.

Guess what? Baby Tina has the same calling Theodore once had. And she’s voiced by comedienne Amy Sedaris like a baby on Red Bull and a deadline.

“I’ve been on hold so long I’ve got a TOOTH coming in!”

There’s a new threat to babies, and it’s coming from this Acorn Corp, a “Little Einsteins/Baby Geniuses” operation designed to maximize every child’s potential and run by this expert (Jeff Goldblum, of course) who shames parents everywhere with “The only thing holding your child back is YOU.”

It’s “The END of childhood” as pampered, coddled American babies know it. And Acorn and Dr. Armstrong must be stopped! There’s nothing for it but to de-age Theodore, and Tim too (by accident) so that they can go undercover as infant and sibling at the Acorn Academy.

Get in, get the dirt, foil the bad guy, get out.

“Who wants to play ‘Shawshank?'”

There are a lot of voices I adore in this, Goldblum especially. And he milks this Dr. Armstrong with every plummy vowel, in every language, that the character pronounces.

It’s still the Baldwin show, with cracks about “Norma Rae,” “Night of the Living Boomers,” shots at public radio (Baldwin’s had shows there over the years) and singing “Strangers in the Night” in something not unlike his Tony Bennett impression.

“What a buncha diaper-sniffers” and “What the frittata?” are the caliber of one-liners.

The entire affair isn’t terrible, just a drag. Truth be told, they’ve taken this idea and pounded the cute right out of it. Time to put the pacifier in this boss baby and move on.

Cast: The voices of Alec Baldwin, James Marsden, Amy Sedaris, Jeff Goldblum, Eva Longoria, Lisa Kudrow and Jimmy Kimmel

Credits: Directed by Tom McGrath, script by Michael McCullers based on characters created by Marla Frazee. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:47

It’s not “‘Groundhog Day’…technically.” Still, “that’s close enough.”

But “Long Story Short,” remembering it might help Teddy out. He’s the king of “waiting” and suddenly his life with his beloved Leanne is rushing by, one lost year at a time. He woke up the day after their wedding and one year was gone. A nap made another circuit of the sun just vaporize, a tumble into a kiddie pool takes away another, and so on.

And he’s not able to articulate what’s going on with his life, “traveling through time,” not that anyone else can tell. Because no one — not the wife who’s sharing that life with him and sees him all through that year that he’s just missed, not his best friend Sam, not the baby he didn’t realize he’s fathered and is supposedly raising — sees any evidence of that.

Except for that once a year, on their anniversary, when Teddy goes mental and can’t recall anything that’s gone on or all that’s gone wrong. Teddy’s marriage, friendships and life are getting away from him.

Rafe Spall is properly befuddled and exasperated as Teddy, a guy not able to cope with this curse or whatever you call it. Zahra Newman plays his straight man, long-suffering Leanne, the one who is witness to the years that pass as Teddy “forgets” their anniversary (He hasn’t. He can’t.), or at least forgets to buy a proper anniversary present as their marriage crumbles because Teddy is literally “never there” for it.

Writer-director Josh Lawson, an actor (“Mortal Kombat”) who also has a small role in “Long Story Short,” is dipping his toe in “About Time/Time Traveler’s Wife/Click/Groundhog Day” waters with this downbeat, wistful rom-com.

The script freely acknowledges its antecedents, because Teddy and best pal Sam (Ronny Chieng) break it down. All Teddy has to do is make things right, finally have “that perfect day” like Bill Murray in that Harold Ramis classic, and this will end.

“You DO know it’s not a documentary, right?”

But that “work out how to make this right” bit is just mentioned. Life doesn’t give you second, third, and three thousandth chances like that. It just passes you by.

Lawson’s Australian comedy begins with an epic “meet cute” that begins with mistaken New Year’s Eve kiss and ends with an epi pen. Confessions of true love at a cliffside cemetery — Teddy’s Dad died before he finally got around to proposing to Leanne come next.

And then “The Stranger” (Noni Hazlehurst) overhears them, and offers the workaholic, put-off important things, always “waiting” Teddy a gift. Only he doesn’t realize that or remember it.

Cynical Teddy has to learn big life lessons in what amounts to a day-long rush — aging but unchanged, scrambling to hang onto the great love of his life, friends and the like with mere hours to figure it all out.

You almost certainly have to have a few years on you to “get” or at least empathize with “Long Story Short,” which is “Where’d the time go?” writ large.

Spall’s antic act is fun, but the script doesn’t lean that way. His deft way with throw-away lines like “How young can you get Alzheimer’s?” is here just enough to lighten the mood.

He wakes up to a pregnant Leanne, and then is offered a baby girl he’s never met and expected to know her name.

“Tal-LUH-lah!”

“F— off, it is NOT…” Tallulah’s “not a name. It’s CHILD abuse!”

But as the years rush past, putting off the honeymoon they “never have time” for, going to the job he hates and promises to quit, and his iPhone becomes his only archive to the love, life, births and death he’s missed, Teddy’s “Groundhog Day” takes on the air that the original “Groundhog Day” took on — an intimate tragedy.

It’s a slender film with simplistic “live your truth” and “YOLO” messages, but Spall and Newman and Dena Kaplan, as the ex-girlfriend who wore the same dress on a New Year’s Eve that led to Teddy kissing Miss Wrong who turned out to be Miss Right, give it the heart and pathos it needs to pay off.

“Long Story Short,” here’s a rom-com that’s worth your time.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout 

Cast: Rafe Spall, Zahra Newman, Ronny Chieng, Dena Kaplan, Josh Lawson and Noni Hazlehurst

Credits: Scripted and directed by Josh Lawson. A Canal+ film, a Saban Films release

Running time: 1:35

Giggles galore…

Here’s the trailer, featuring a seriously untested lead (you know the story) and a show creator whose movie career has been curtailed because he’s not comfortable with the form.

A season’s worth of characters and plotlines in a 100 minute movie does nobody and nothing justice. Watch “Not Fade Away” to see what I mean

But Farmiga as Mama, Bernthal and Nivola and Ray Liotta? And a co writer to make it a “movie” script?

It could work. Provided Michael Gandolfini doesn’t stink up the joint.

Oct. 1, the “Downton Abbey” of mob series gets a movie.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a290pgxuemE

Look for this no-name-stars comedy July 30.

Well, knock me over and take my movie reviewing license for a year. A good Megan Fox movie? Will wonders never cease?

Just this week, the long-ago flash in the cinematic pan was desperately floating “date Angelina Jolie” suggestions as a way of making herself relevant again. And there are plenty of moments in “Till Death” where the “Transformers” break-out, “Jennifer’s Body” bust reminds us she’s not the best actress sending head-shots around town.

But damn, this lean little thriller works. And she’s not half-bad in it.

Fox plays a wife cheating on her lawyer/husband (Eoin Macken) — and on her anniversary, with a colleague of his (Aml Ameen) no less!

Emma’s told the guy “We can’t do this any more,” and not in the most emotional voice you’ve ever heard. But hubby is giving her hints that he suspects, the way he leaves words hanging in sentences.

“I KNOW…things haven’t been great between us.”

Still, there’s an anniversary dinner, gifts and all. And then “a surprise.” She’s blindfolded as he drives her out into the winter countryside, far away from the city. As we’ve established that Emma met her spouse after being kidnapped — husband Mark had the case file out on his desk — “blindfolded” anything isn’t the most thoughtful surprise.

But they’re going to the lake house — rose petals and candlelight.

A little wine and makeup sex and…she wakes up to a cold house, and a couple of other surprises. He’s handcuffed himself to her. And then he splatters his blood and brains all over her pretty face.

Mark has plotted a murder suicide. He’s hidden her clothes, shoes included. He’s killed the heat in the house. And that’s just a start. She’s trapped and doomed.

After SERIOUSLY under-reacting to the trauma of his suicide and the harrowing nature of her dilemma, Emma tries to shoot the handcuffs off (without first searching him for the key), and realizes there was but one bullet in the revolver.

“I’m gonna cut myself free from you if it’s the LAST thing I do!” only works if there are “sharp objects” there to cut with. Mark has covered all the bases.

And he’s left messages for others, summoning them. Emma is about to confront more people who wish her harm, more obstacles to her survival. NP, she figures.

“I was dragging around your lifeless corpse long BEFORE you put a bullet in that deranged heads of yours!”

Screenwriter Jason Carvey (“New Wave”) and first-time feature director S.K. Dale invent all sorts of details that Mark has seen fit to handle to make escape impossible — a drowned phone, etc.

And then the threat level rises.

Fox has a hard time sustaining the terror her character should feel, or even faking (consistently) the uncontrollable shivers and shakes someone subjected to extreme cold, barefoot and underclothed in the ice and snow would experience. That comes and goes.

But this thriller plays, with realistic real-time problem-solving, melodramatic near-misses, violence and suspense.

We fear for the heroine, even if she’s not nobly heroic, and fret over her strength and cunning even as her resolve never wavers.

Not bad. Not bad at all. Maybe she won’t have to court Jolie after all.

MPA Rating: R for strong violence, grisly images, and language throughout

Cast: Megan Fox, Eoin Macken, Aml Ameen, Callan Mulvey, Jack Roth.

Credits: Directed by S.K. “Scott” Dale, script by Jason Carvey. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:28

The effect is more jarring than subtle, and it instantly sets “Black Widow” apart from your average Marvel comic book action movie.

We aren’t watching digital superheroes brawl in a blur of digital effects, digital backgrounds and the like.

There’s still a lot of special effects trickery, digitized aircraft and environments, augmented stunts and “Bugs Bunny Physics” in the leaps, tumbles and what-not our heroes and villains carry out and somehow survive.

But when Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh and Rachel Weisz and David Harbour go at it with legions of “widows” and other minions of the villainous Dreyko (Ray Winstone), including a monstrous “secret weapon” whom James Bond fans will recognize, they’re going at it. As in, there’s not just a fight choreographer (James Young) here. There’s a vast team of choreographers, stunt folks and trainers and using them gives the movie a visual coherence that most Marvel movies and every Transformers film lack.

The stars and their stunt doubles make “Black Widow” the most tactile of any Marvel movie. Punches land, actresses tumble, stunt-doubles execute twisty spins and kicks. “Super” heroics abound, but as Natasha Romanov’s “sister” Yelena cracks, unlike “god from space” (Thor), they’re going to need “Ibuprofen” when all is said and done.

We’ve been watching trailers to this movie for YEARS, it seems, as the pandemic held up the release. Fortunately, the only stuff those trailers give away is the “family” dynamic that Black Widow Natasha grew up in, cute “reunion” quarreling, and a few moments where our heroine strikes her “ridiculous (hair-flipping super-heroine) pose” and is thus “a total poseur,” or so says her little sister.

“Black Widow” begins in 1995 as the “family” — two young daughters played by Ever Anderson (Milla Jovovich’s kid) and Violet McGraw — are yanked from their Ohio home by their sleeper-agent parents (Harbour and Weiss).

Their boss (Winstone, in a big Stalin mustache and wig) has summoned them home as their covers are “blown” and Feds and S.H.I.E.L.D are hot on their trail.

But that “escape” is just the beginning of the girls’ “nightmare.” Their “parents” weren’t real parents. And in scenes ripped straight from the border camps imagery of America’s ongoing immigration debate, the girls — who aren’t real sisters — are heartlessly hurled into a “system” with no family.

They’re trained to become Black Widows, heartless post-Soviet Russian assassins.

In 2016, Natasha is laying low during “the Avengers getting divorced” timeline, but Yelena’s still on the job for Vladimir, murdering who she’s told, fetching vials of a red gas that Dreykov needs.

“Dad?” He’s in prison, the onetime “Red Guardian” bragging about his super-soldier exploits as he lays waste to every would-be arm wrestling opponent. “Mom?” She’s doing the Devil’s work somewhere else.

Time for “reunion” and “revenge!”

This has been a year where the go-to action film analogy has been “The Roger Moore James Bond” films, the lighter, jokier pictures in that long-running franchise. I know. I get Google alerts every time some wag sees “Roger Moore as Bond” in “Hit Man’s Wife’s Bodyguard” or “F9” or what have you.

Aussie director Cate Shortland (she did “Lore” and “The Berlin Syndrome”) and screenwriter Eric Pearson lean into that, showing the 1995 family catching “Moonraker” on TV, using a little “Moonraker” music at one point.

The tone is light, although the finished product isn’t remotely as funny as the laugh-out-loud jokey Joss Whedon “Avengers” movies.

But the casting is spot on. Finding two shortish actresses of great skill to pass for Natasha’s mother-and-sister, it’d be hard to top the Oscar winning Weisz (“The Constant Gardener”) and Oscar-nominated Pugh.

The British Pugh and American Johansson click in ways you’d never expect. And that’ll be handy, as they’re going up against “a man who commands the very will of others.”

That whole “free will” subtext, a new concept to our Russian anti-heroes, gets kind of lost in the mix. The “today’s politics” that come up in montages (reminding SOME people that Putin is still The Enemy) is fuzzy. The picture reaches its climax, stuffs in a coda to get us back into the Avengers timeline, and then adds a TV tie-in after the credits.

Marvel selling Marvel never ends.

But the stars make it a fun ride, even when the action goes “Roger Moore as Bond” goofy, even when Harbour is hitting a Russian-accented punchline entirely too hard, and even when Yelena relents and strikes her own “super hero pose.”

MPA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence/action, some language and thematic material

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, Rachel Weisz, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, William Hurt and Ray Winstone.

Credits: Directed by Cate Shortland script by Eric Pearson, based on the Marvel Comics. A Marvel Studios release.

Running time: 2:13

A pretty bad horror comedy briefly takes a turn for the better when its biggest “name” makes his “star entrance.”

“Let Us In” is advertised as a “Candyman/Slenderman” take on the “black-eyed kids” urban legend — pale, otherworldly children and teens who make dead-eyed/deadpan appearances before someone only to have them disappear or die.

Maybe it spun out of earlier horror movies like “Children of the Damned,” but now it’s totally a mythic “thing,” and a worldwide phenomenon.

But the movie is a tween-friendly goof on that legend. Kids are disappearing, a quartet of creepers dressed in black hoodies are to blame and our tween leads (Makenzie Moss and O’Neill Monahan) are playing with a radio transceiver, trying to contact aliens.

It’s the sort of film where “I think I just sharted” and “Emily, I’m quaking” and “I’ll even let you dress me up like a girl” and these “black-eyed kids” “smell really bad, like a mixture of really old cheese and butt” dominate the dialogue.

Even the black-eyed kids, whose go-to line for every victim is the perfectly-understated “Will you let us in?” break character and blurt out a deadpan “ouchie” if a victim dares to fight back.

So “Creepy, much?” No. Not at all.

But then our intrepid kid-investigators get a tip. They visit Mean Mr. Munch, the scariest old man in town. The well-turned-out recluse might have some expertise in the matter. And when they encounter him, he chills the giggly “You don’t have to be a little beyotch about it” right out of them.

“We appreciate you ‘letting us in.'”

The camera closes in tight on Tobin Bell, the original/accept-no-substitute “Jigsaw.”

“That supposed to be a joke?”

Filmmaker Craig Moss couldn’t afford Bell for long, and the movie he slaps up around this well-written and acted “explanation” scene is barely more than mediocre — attempted cuteness, everybody underreacting to a town-wide tragedy, figuring out how to “fight back” (lame and obvious), slinging slang and cracking wise.

The comedy isn’t funny enough to justify taking that tack and the would-be-scares are wholly undercut by the tone they settled on. Older viewers might be reminded of Chevy Chase’s Land Shark “Saturday Night Live” bits in the later “Let us in” demands of the black-eyed kids.

I kept expecting to hear “CANDYgram…”

But Bell classes up the joint enough to shame director and co-writer Craig Moss (the “Bad Ass” movies) into wishing he’d at least kept his black-eyed children as serious as Bell. “Deadpan” doesn’t work when your scary, monstrous villains let us in on their smirk.

MPA Rating: unrated, a little profanity

Cast: Makenzie Moss, Sadie Stanley, Siena Agudong, O’Neill Monahan, Conor Husting and Tobin Bell.

Credits: Directed by Craig Moss, script by Joe Callero and Craig Moss. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:23

The technical approach to this one has me intrigued. Might this appeal to the tiny the target audience? I think it might. September 17 we find out. https://youtu.be/4zH5iYM4wJo