Movie Nation

An upscale ghost story slated for late August release, this looks damned creepy.

A good actress can make you believe in ghosts.

Southern drawls lure English actors like soccer hooligans hunting for that next warm beer.

And truth be told, when “Game of Thrones” siren Emilia Clarke trots out her Kentucky/Appalachian accent out in “Above Suspicion,” I have to say, I was intrigued.

“The worst thang about bein’ dead, you got too much t’ahm t’thank.“

OK, that’s a mild exaggeration. Granted, she hits words like “et” entirely too hard when she’s barking out “The kids ain’t et,” and either her or her screenwriter figure “whilst” was never abandoned by the single-wide/dirt-poor Scots-Irish of Appalachia whilst I would beg to differ.

But otherwise, Clarke seems right at home in this Hillbilly Heroin Gothic tale of criminals, spreading despair, an over-eager FBI agent and the local vamp who figures she can snitch and sex her way out of a the holler she’s trapped in.

Clarke plays Susan Smith, a Pikeville, Kentucky local who narrates her story from the grave. She was there — in 1988 — when mining finally coughed up its last coal dust and the town turned to pot — and oxy and coke and bank robbing.

It’s the bank robbing that perplexes the Feds. Pikeville has an FBI office largely because a lot of unemployed good ol’boys are taking their chances on robbing the teeny, tiny penny-ante banks scattered through the mountains and hills.

“I guess even the banks around here are broke,” Susan quips. She’s divorced, with two kids she gives barely a thought to, living in the same house with her ex, Cash (Johnny Knoxville) and “perpetuating fraud,” collecting welfare checks from two states — West Virginia and Kentucky.

She splits the money with Cash, who makes his real “living” selling drugs. But their dump of a home is big enough to harbor a fugitive or two, such as her younger brother — who ends a bar fight by shooting the other fellow in the parking lot.

But Susan has her eye on bigger things and better days. “All I ever wanted to do was get out of Pikeville,” where there are just two ways to make money — “the funeral business, and sellin’ drugs.” Her escape route appears in the handsome new FBI agent Mark Putnam, who looks “like he stepped out of a magazine,” aka like hunky Jack Huston.

Forget that he’s married with a new baby. Hell, she’s forgotten her own kids, more or less. She sets herself up to be “useful” to him. And that includes snitching on people under her own roof.

There’s a myopia about Susan that fits her MO to a T. She’s an addict, not a wasting-away, pale and gaunt meth-mouthed mess, but she loves her cocaine. Her focus is on herself — her wants, her needs and her rewards. And Clarke, treated to every flattering close-up in director Philip Noyce’s (“Salt,” “Catch a Fire,” “The Giver”) arsenal, devours the poor family man, and any other man she needs something from, with just a look.

As she gets in deeper and the double-crosses start to add up, we start to wonder how she winds up the way she narrates in that opening scene — dead.

I never got into “Game of Thrones,” but it was obvious in the romantic comedies people have tried to put her into (“Me Before You,” “Last Christmas”) that cute, bittersweet romances weren’t Clarke’s forte. “Above Suspicion,” whatever its problems, gives her a role to sink her teeth into, and she’s damned credible in it.

Being a “true story,” there’s a clumsiness to its “fact-based” obsession with, for instance, locales. The narrative is often interrupted by pointless graphics denoting where this robbery or that arrest or “safe house” is located. The story doesn’t have a rhythm to it.

But the under-filmed milieu is riveting, a dead-end world or shuttering stores, decaying houses and lives that turn into traps so slowly you don’t see it happening.

One day, you’re blithely helping the coal companies cut the tops off your mountains (an abandoned mine is one place Susan has her “meetings” with Jack). The next, the company’s gone, the town’s dead and they didn’t even leave you with clean water, gorgeous scenery or educated kids when they skedaddled.

Thanks, Mitch.

Huston — the most recent “Ben-Hur” — gives Putnam the furtive eyes of a late-starter FBI field agent out to do whatever it takes to get promoted out of this dump. He recognizes a fellow striver in local deputy McCoy (Austin Hébert, quite good), who “got that family habit of holding a grudge” and who takes bank robbing personally.

Putnam sees man-eater Susan coming, but “crosses that line” for a shopping list of reasons, every one of them believable.

Knoxville, as he often proves in films set in his native habitat, brings a hardened-by-life authenticity to Cash.

Sophie Lowe, playing the “she HAS to know” wife that Putnam is cheating on, gives her character an earthy “Please don’t steal my man” mystery.

And the presence of Thora Birch, Omar Benson Miller, Chris Mulkey, Kevin Dunn and Karl Glusman hint at an ambition and allure (to actors) that the finished film doesn’t quite measure up to.

Unless you’re Billy Wilder making “Sunset Boulevard,” that “narrating from the grave” thing spoils the mystery and saddles your picture with more voice-over than “suspending disbelief” and losing yourself in the movie will allow.

Screenwriter Chris Gerolmo wrote “Mississippi Burning,” and co-created the combat series “Over There.” “Above Suspicion” has a similar choppy, violent vignettes quality. But Noyce isn’t able to turn this into a seamless, immersive film that makes you forget we’re watching a pieced-together story.

This halfway-there thriller still makes an excellent showcase for Emilia Clarke, shedding whatever “Game of Thrones” baggage she has left and hinting at the dangerous places she might yet take us.

MPA Rating: R for sexual content and drug use throughout, language and some strong violence 

Cast: Emilia Clarke, Jack Huston, Sophie Lowe, Thora Birch, Karl Glusman, Kevin Dunn and Johnny Knoxville

Credits: Directed by Philip Noyce, script Chris Gerolmo, based on a non-fiction book by Joe Sharkey. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:46

The finale to “Threshold,” a supernatural thriller about a junkie who figures she’s possessed, is a doozy — alarming, rattling and with a neat little twist that underlines its point.

And it’d have to be, considering the general snooze this siblings/bonding road picture has been pretty much in its entirety leading up to that. This may be the slowest-moving “road picture” or “thriller” on record.

It’s a classic “two hander” with Leo (Joey Millin), the older brother, driving cross-country with recovering addict Virginia (Madison West) chatting and reminiscing and every so often, seeing “evidence” that whoever it was that got Virginia “clean,” this “blood” ritual they put her through “bound” her to some random other guy.

She doesn’t use the word, but Leo figures “cult.” And her “evidence” for this supernatural “connection” is flimsy, and so flatly-played and subtle that maybe you’d have to be her brother to see anything remotely crazed, out-of-character and masculine in her mood swings.

He’s been sent West to fetch her, one more time, by her mother. He’s got his own issues, evidenced by the “just sign the papers” text message he gets from, we can assume, his wife.

Yeah, the parking garage of her apartment building is creepy. They all are. That random dude in a red cape who bolted past him in the hall? Nothing to see here.

And Virginia, writhing on the bed, convulsing badly enough for him to call the paramedics?

“Withdrawal,” he figures. Her abrupt recovery from that demanding food throws him a little. What’s the deal? Where are the needle marks?

“Honestly? I’m possessed.”

She’s in bad shape, or so she says. This guy “bonded” to her in that ceremony, “I can feel what HE feels.” And it’s alarming.

Leo promises to “find this guy” with her, going back to Cult Central to do it. What he tells their mom on the phone is that he’s “driving her to rehab.”

So a seventh-grade music teacher in his somehow mothballed, sticker-covered college Toyota and his pretty, rattled and mercurial-moods sister drive off into the sun…rise? All the locations are kind of vague, although we see snow-capped mountains and she buys pumpkins because “Halloween” and all that.

Because lots of us stop on road trips to carve jack-o-lanterns in roadside motels.

Virginia’s worried about having my head spin around, and crab-walking and s—.” Leo’s constantly trying to get across the idea that it’s “all in your head.”

Every now and then something a little out of the ordinary happens. But truthfully, it doesn’t happen often enough.

The “evidence” is scanty, the acting — with the characters abruptly returning to “normal” as if nothing has happened, as indeed little has, after each “incident” — is rather drab.

A funny “tell” of indie cinema of the past twenty years is how badly inexperienced actors are at smoking. Well, at least we’ve raised a generation that isn’t lighting up.

The picture is Toyota-paced and Toyota dull. An intriguing premise fritters away with each, long discourse about his college metal band and her shock that A) he’s married, B), he’s got a little girl, C) he’s divorcing and D), wait, “You married ‘Zamboni girl?”

And no, a mid-trip karaoke bar break is never a way to liven things up.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Joey Millin, Madison West

Credits: Directed by Powell Robinson, Patrick Robert Young, scripted by Patrick Robert Young

Running time: 1:18

SCENE: Generic “horror movie” sitting room — rough-hewn Irish doorjambs, stained, peeling and faded wallpaper with “shadows” of items formerly hung on it, a withered wreath and a sinister painting illuminated by a single, battered table lamp on a battered table.

ENTER: A young woman, a dead-eyed teen in a nightgown, holding an even more sinister rabbit drummer toy in front of her.

As it approaches this corner or that doorway, the nightmarish rabbit bangs its drum and the girl’s nose bleeds.

It the toy possessed? Is it a boogeyman detector, clicking like a Geiger counter at the presence of danger?

“Caveat” takes that promising set-up and doesn’t manage much more than that for frights. A psychological thriller with supernatural touches, Damian McCarthy’s Irish production is about darkness and memories, grudges and guilt. And much of it — far too much — takes place in the basement or behind the walls of this remote old house on an Irish island.

It’s so static that it’s frustrating, more spooky than actually scary.

Isaac (Jonathan French) is just “getting out” of a hospital, we assume. He’s had…issues. Is Barret (Ben Caplan) his only friend, or a friend at all?

He’s got a job,” baby-sitting” he calls it. His brother’s daughter needs looking after. She’s a teenager, and Barret confesses that “She’s got some psychological problems,” when half-pressed. But as he’s offering “200 a day,” even an Isaac fresh out of a hospital smells a rat.

“There’s got to be more to it than that.”

No no. Well, her Dad killed himself.

Then they meet for the drop off. Olga, it turns out, lives in a remote house on an island.

“You never said anything about an island!“

Did too!

“I can’t SWIM.”

And after Barret rows him across, he hands over this leather straight-jacket looking thing. A “uniform, like” Barret coos.

“That’s not a uniform. It’s a LEASH. And I’m not wearing it!”

But wear it Isaac does, complete with a chain that reaches all the way into the basement where catatonic Olga (Leila Sykes) lives. Barret offers just a final word or two of explanation.

Nothing else lives here, save for foxes. When they cry, they sound like teenage girls.

“Ever heard a fox cry? Or a teenage girl?”

Isaac has a hard time processing that question as he settles in to his “five day” babysitting gig, strapped into a leather straightjacket, easily creeped-out by the noises, the odd peep holes in the walls, and Olga, who isn’t as catatonic as Uncle Barret maintains.

Much of “Caveat” — entirely too much — is set in darkness — light piercing through holed walls, a basement which may offer “answers,” a crackling old intercom that allows the two to communicate, once they establish Olga can speak. Figuring out she has a crossbow, that this “Dad’s suicide” story has more to it, and how her mother and others fit into it might add up to a compact, compelling thriller.

It never does. There are long, slow-moving explorations and encounters, attempted escapes and acts of violence, a mystery that has several possibilities as to who is “guilty” of putting Olga in this spot and in this fix, and by extension, who wants Isaac there.

It’s all rather less than the sum of its horrific parts. But damn, that fox “crying” sound effect is chilling. And that rabbit toy? Bring that into the “Annabelle/Insidious/Amityville” universe and we’ll talk.

MPA Rating:

Cast: Jonathan French, Leila Sykes, Ben Caplan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Damian McCArthy A Shudder release.

Running time:

A little fighting back against the horror, from Quiver May 21.

Over his comic lifetime, Billy Crystal has made more people laugh in more venues than just about anybody alive. Stand-up to sitcom, “Saturday Night Live” to Oscar host, one-man Broadway show to movies, he’s created and forgotten more characters and laughs than any mere mortal could ever remember.

So he’s earned the indulgence of a movie — more than a few — that simply don’t work. Well, he certainly thinks so.

That’s what “Here Today,” an indulgence about a comedy legend indulged with a head writer gig with a TV sketch show, a guy who’s lost his fastball, curveball and spitball and who is hiding the fact that he’s losing his memories to dementia.

Crystal stars in it, directed and co-wrote the adaptation of an Alan Zweibel (“SNL,” “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”), playing a comedy icon who might be a shell of his former self, but hoping to hang on to just enough of himself to get through a memoir. His best hope? This stranger (Tiffany Haddish) who won lunch with him at a charity auction.

Whatever else Crystal accomplishes with this movie, he’s created a nice half-normal “acting” job for Haddish, who sheds some of her wild-woman persona to play a singer with a cover-band specializing in jazz novelty tunes (Fats Wallers’ “Your Feet’s Too Big,” etc.), someone who doesn’t know who this guy she always addresses as “old man” is, but who sees the signs and takes a compassionate interest in his well-being.

The movie surrounding them? It flirts with “insipid,” and is about as funny as a teenager’s funeral.

The best laugh for this story of a writer who pushes his half-awed junior writers to look for “the right kind of laugh,” is a sight gag — a digital bit of face contortion meant to mimic SOMEbody’s shellfish allergy at that awkward “meet cute” lunch. The worst? Almost everything else.

Comic polymath Charlie Burnz, who keeps post-it notes on pictures of his family so he won’t forget their names, talks Emma the singer into visiting New York’s version of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. They can’t find so much as a giggle among wax statues of the famous and infamous.

The running gag of the TV show “This Just In” where Charlie is the producer’s mentor and eminence grise to the “kids,” is that one performer has such tin-eared intonation that he ruins many a sketch and pretty much every punchline — “SUB-peona,” “MITCH McConnell.”

HILarious.

Charlie mentors a struggling Harvard Lampoon alum whose sketches are failing to get on the air, and even the “improved” sketches are painfully unfunny. Nobody in those scenes, from the writer’s room to the “live” performances, is remotely funny.

It’s like the comic icon who made the Oscars he hosted all about him was too insecure to cast anybody else, other than Haddish, who’d make an impression. Cameos by Sharon Stone, Kevin Kline, Barry Levinson and Bob Costas, playing themselves in a “tribute,” merit a smirk, at best.

Those cast as Charlie’s not-quite-estranged family (Penn Badgley and Laura Benanti play his kids, Louisa Krause his late wife in flashbacks) barely register. Actress-playwright Anna Deveare Smith plays his sober-minded doctor.

The script is littered with — literally — throw-away jokes from the last century. “There’s this new invention called a ‘computer.’ You might want to try it.” “Throw-away line” is too generous a description for much of it. “Litter.”

But Haddish, toned down and not trying too hard, brings an offhand charm to Emma. Haddish isn’t much of a singer, but she’s game and confident and puts over a cover of “A Little Piece of My Heart” at Charlie’s grand-kid’s bat mitzvah that makes us wish the movie was about her, struggling to make a go of it with a seven piece cover-band in the Big Apple.

The over-arching theme here is cherish the memories you’ve acquired over a lifetime, the good and the bad. Because they’re “Here Today” and gone tomorrow. Our memories of Billy Crystal won’t be tarnished by one more unamusing, heartburn-not-heartwarming comedy.

But there’s no denying the evidence on the screen. He USED to be funny.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for strong language, and sexual references.

Cast: Billy Crystal, Tiffany Haddish, Anna Deveare Smith, Penn Badgley, and Nyambi Nyambi

Credits: Directed by Billy Crystal, script by Alan Zweibel and Billy Crystal, based on a short story by Zweibel. A Sony/Stage 6 release.

Running time: 1:57

The movies have always been glib in how they depict mental illness. And there are a few minutes at the beginning of “Paper Spiders” where you can wonder if we aren’t about to be treated to more of the same.

A clingy, widowed Mom (Lili Taylor) makes inappropriate remarks and superstitious dismissals of the school to her half-smothered daughter (Stefania LaVie Owen) as the kid checks out a prospective college. It’s really all about Mom.

“Why did I push you to make straight As? I just pushed you right out the door.”

But any cutesie “Terms of Endearment” delusions go right out the door, and in a hurry, as mother Dawn’s delusions become manifest, manic and overwhelming, threatening to derail daughter Melanie’s future and turn her present into a living hell.

“Paper Spiders” is a bluntly-realistic portrayal of how a lone teenager might cope with or compensate for such a situation, and where she can and frankly cannot expect to find help when her only parent goes crazy.

Driven by a sober, case-study-real and wild-eyed performance by Taylor — from “Mystic Pizza” to the new “Perry Mason” one of the finest actresses of her generation — and anchored in the overwhelmed kid Stephanie LaVie Owen (“I’m Dying Up Here,” “Krampus”) shows us, this sad, anxiety-inducing drama about what results from Mom’s mania is a veritable tutorial on “Mental Illness Hits Home.”

Melanie is a smart kid — class salutatorian at Erie Canal High. She’s always written-off Mom’s quirks as “neurotic.” But she’s just reached an age where she can see more and process it with growing alarm.

It “starts” with the new neighbor Mom instantly gets into a feud with. She becomes convinced “he” is watching them, throwing rocks, sneaking around and into their house and worse. Melanie takes all of this seriously, up to a point.

Mom calling the cops is a tipping point. Hiring a private detective (Max Casella) is the next “logical” step.

Seeing Dawn at work with an aging, long-suffering lawyer (David Rasche), we wonder how long it’ll be before she snaps there and that job is gone.

Melanie seeks help close-at-hand, from the school mental health counselor (Michael Cyril Creighton).

“I’m here because of my Mom” earns a “Me, too” from him. He veers between flippant and uncaring to consulting a textbook for a “diagnosis” and then dithering on beyond his pay grade.

And then there’s the obnoxious, hunky new rich kid at school (Ian Nelson), a “playa” who zeroes in on Melanie. He’s persistent, drives a BMW convertible and always has a flask or water bottle spiked with vodka. Considering the other “issues” in her life, Melanie starts to give in a little.

That too, by the way, is textbook behavior.

Director and co-writer Inon Shampanier (“Beautiful and Twisted,” “The Millionaire Tour”) makes us anxious for Melanie, and LaVie Owen makes us fear for this sweet kid unable to figure out how to help her mother and trapping herself with a feckless boyfriend who will either lean on her for sobriety or drag her into the bottle, bong or brownie with her.

Every movie hits every viewer a little differently, and this one pulled me right in. This is exactly the way such situations often play out — tirades, paranoia, threats of involuntary commitment, a child forced to make adult decisions.

Shampanier keeps the anxiety level high all the way to the closing credits, offering a little hope but taking incredible care to highlight the “no easy choices” and “no end in sight” difficulties facing Melanie, and the lesson that Mom “didn’t choose to be mentally ill, any more than somebody chooses to get cancer.”

This is a scenario with no villains — not Mom, not the neighbors Mom suspects, not the potentially-predatory PI she hires, not even the half-clueless-but-trying school counselor.

And as “Paper Spiders” suggests, it’s not just the terror that witnessing this sort of breakdown creates, it’s the relentless, insidious nature of the illness and the utterly deflating realization that doing this or doing that is awful, and taking no action is worse.

The cast and filmmakers have made a very good movie about a very tough subject. and somehow have managed to never cop out once by showing us easy answers.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, teen drinking and sex, profanity

Cast: Stefania LaVie Owen, Lili Taylor, Peyton List, David Rasche, Ian Nelson and Max Casella

Credits: Directed by Inon Shampanier, script by Inon Shampanier, Natalie Shampanier. An Entertainment Squad release.

Running time: 1:50

Another May 7 release, a thriller, that literally just popped up on the date.

Reviewing this Lili Taylor comedy, opening Friday, shortly.

You will recognize the stand-up faces, if not necessarily the names they go by in this late June release.