Movie Nation

Inspired by a “true story” documented on twitter (ahem), this has a “Spring Break” vibe — sexual and dangerous and dirty.

“Hoeism” is the word they’re using to market it.

Coming this summer.

Hey, they’re marketing this as a “Good Friday” horror release set to dominate Easter Weekend. Well, everybody who doesn’t go to “Kongzilla” will want to see this, right?

So yeah, I get to use “Maundy” for maybe the first time in my life.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a cynical “Night Stalker” like a tipsy journalist specializing in the supernatural?

Totally down with that. I’d call it a series pilot. Morgan could be perfect for this.

“Entre Nos” presents a fairly conventional view of the American immigrant experience. But the intimacy in its portrayal of co-writer and star Paola Mendoza’s bitter arrival in New York is striking, as is the poignancy in her portrayal of her mother, a classic “against the odds” heroine in a story about playing the hand life deals you.

Appropriately enough, the film begins with a card game in their Queens apartment, with their dad (Andres Munar) and his brother (Eddie Martinez) playing, and little son Gabi (Sebastian Villada) sitting in.

“Watch out for your Pop,” mom Mariana (Mendoza) warns (in Spanish with English subtitles). “He’s a cheat.”

Any good natured laughing that crack off has the edge of exchanged half-dirty looks. Dad just brought them here. Before that, he moved them around Colombia a few times.

And before you know it, Antonio is explaining away his latest “got home late” with “I was celebrating. I got a new job. In Miami.” The twist this time? “I’m going alone.”

Whatever Mariana is thinking about his promises to “make some money,” then he’ll send for her, their little girl Andrea (Laura Montana) and Gabi, we know better. This latest move is his way of bailing out altogether.

If there’s an overarching flaw to “Entre Nos,” it’s that it’s bigger plot points are all that predictable, that obvious. Everything about the movie is given away in the foreshadowing in that opening scene — the personalities of the kids, Mom’s one special skill, Dad’s feckless, faithless nature.

What’s arresting here is the details we’re shown in the downward spiral of their experience. The husband’s brother takes some responsibility just long enough to change addresses himself. Their bus tickets to Miami are just out of reach, not that they’d be sure to even find Antonio if they did.

Mariana has no support system, no marketable skills, no family to call on for help. None of them has been there long enough to grasp English, although Gabi, 8 and left to babysit his sister all by himself as Mom job hunts, has mastered American profanity, which he teaches to little Andrea.

No steady job means they lose their apartment. Homeless and totally broke means they start collecting deposit recyclables just to eat, sleeping in the park or wherever they can find cardboard.

The crises pile up, the kids act out, the despair grows. Even those who might help (indie cinema icon Sarita Choudhury plays the manager of a cheap motel) can’t break New York character and make themselves generous.

And yet we sense that this mother will do what mothers do — persevere. She can’t give up, even as layers of her pride and sense of self-worth are stripped away. Because that jerk dumped her with two kids and no money in one of the most expensive cities in the hemisphere.

Mendoza, playing a version of her own mother, doesn’t let the woman come off as a saint. She is naive, trusting and she has a temper. She has reason to expect better. But she can’t wallow in that.

The lack of big twists or even deeper dives into despair park this film in the area of cinematic comfort food. But “Entres Nos (Between Us)” like the characters it portrays, wins you over with its warmth, its pluck and its optimism, that thin hope that brings so many here. Tomorrow things could get better.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult themes, profanity

Cast: Paola Mendoza, Sebastian Villada, Laura Montana and Sarita Chouduury

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gloria La Morte and Paola Mendoza. An IndiePix/Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:20

Ed Helms and Patti Harrison star in this one, which opens April 23.

An Ed Helms comeback?

It’s Sean Patrick Flanery vs Nicolas Cage’s son in “Assault on VA-33,” a half-hearted, half-assed “Die Hard” in a VA hospital shoot-em-up.

“Boondocks Saints” alumnus Flanery, emerging as the ginger-haired B-thriller (sometimes C) rival to Frank Grillo, plays a battered, traumatized and triggered veteran who stumbles into a plot to kidnap a general, shoot a bunch of people and free a Russian mobster/terrorist’s “baby brudder.”

Weston Cage Coppola has little of the “unstable” allure of his crazy-when-he-needs-to-be dad as the villain who has planned this caper to free that sibling, but eez saddled with barely-competent henchmen, and one zeriously zilly accent.

“Eye vish eye vas dealink vith professionals…Eef you are goink to do zis wit brutality, make sure eet ees focused.“

Daddy teach you that?

Gina Holden is the VA psychotherapist wife of our hero, one of the hostages. And Michael Jai White is the skeptical suburban police chief who takes a LOT of convincing before springing into action, if that’s the right word for it. “Black Dynamite” needed a lot more to do here.

And he’s not alone. The fights are walk-throughs, the extras telegraph their beatings/deaths and the director Christopher Ray, famed for “Two Headed Shark Attack” and “Dick Dickster,” loses track of our hero for most of the first two thirds of the movie.

He’s all about the bad guys, who joke around, execute people, are sloppily seal their fates as if they’re upset they were dragged out of the hair salon for this.

Pretty bad show, all around.

MPA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Sean Patrick Flanery, Michael Jai White, Gina Holden, Weston Cage Coppola, Brittany Underwood, Rob Van Dam

Credits: Directed by Christopher Ray, script by Scott Thomas Reynolds. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:29

“The Sound of Identity” makes its way to streaming June 1.

“A Week Away” isn’t the most original idea for a movie. A summer camp comedy? At church camp?

But making this a musical and thus one of the most ambitious “faith-based” films in years, mark this “Week” down as a “really good idea” for Netflix.

Shot in and around Nashville, with tunes ranging from borderline insipid to covers of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith’s biggest hits, with just a whiff of autotune from the fresh-faced cast, it reminds us there are still audiences for Netflix to make inroads with.

It’s not edgy enough for kids looking for “Kissing Booth” and the sexier Joey King fare of previous years. The laughs are cornball and the performances are diabetic coma sweet. But “wholesome?” Relentlessly upbeat and apolitical? Give’em that.

Will (Disney Channel vet Kevin Quinn) is an orphan punk on his way to “juvie,” when he’s given one last chance with Kristin (Sherri Shepherd) and son George (Jabril Cook) at Camp Aweegaway (subtle).

Camp director David (David Koechner, taking a stab at playing PG) is into “Braveheart” campfire ceremonies and “Apocalypse Now” references.

“I love the smell of PAINTball in the morning!”

As the camp is assigned tribes — Crimson Angel, Azure Apostle and Verde Maximus) –Will gets sweet on the director’s daughter (veteran child actress Bailee Madison), lies about his background and tries to coach George into making time with cute “Jesus Freak” (Will’s term) Presley (Kat Connor Sterling).

“I’ll never be the guy who gets the girl,” George whines. “I’m Ducky.” He needs a “John Hughes makeover montage” to have a shot.

The kids trash talk/rap their tribal rivalries — “Red’s gonna beat you, Red’s gonna score, Red’s gonna BEAT you, God LOVES us more!”

The kids do what kids do in such syrupy summer camp (PG) romances. There’s a little melodrama, tears, a crisis of faith.

At least the adults take a shot at bringing the funny. Shepherd does that bug-eyed freak out thing she does so well.

“I will COME at you with the WRATH of God!”

All of which add up to nothing much that’s fresh to see or hear here, a near miss. But that doesn’t mean the intent isn’t smart. A couple of better tunes, a more original setting and performances with more POP than “pop” and Netflix could serve another niche Hollywood is struggling to reach.

MPA Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Kevin Quinn, Bailee Madison, Jabril Cook, Sherri Shepherd, Kat Conner Sterling, Iain Tucker and David Koechner

Credits: Directed by Roman White, script by Alan Powell and Kali Bailey. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

“Voices” opens with a moment of what looks like torture porn — two women, strapped down or strung up, trapped by some unseen tormentor.

But that fictive present is abandoned for most of the rest of this sleepwalking, sleep-inducing thriller. As director and co-writer Nathaniel Nuon wrestles with child abduction, the unquiet dead and the torment of a blind psychotherapist who hears them, the single word that comes to mind is “adrift.”

It’s a horror tale of of limited chills, or attempted chills, unnecessary scenes giving the leads more chances to show off their good looks and limited skills.

Lilly (Valerie Jane Parker, tentative and remote) is a Mobile, Alabama shrink whose latest patient — a little girl who lost her mother — takes her back to her similar childhood experience, the accident that killed her mother and made her blind.

Flashbacks to her youth and dating years, which led to her marriage, feature Chloe Romanski and Jenna Harvey playing her at different ages, flashbacks that tell adult Lilly what she apparently forgot or never picked up on.

Her various “imaginary friends” as a little girl were ghosts, one even tricked the blind girl into playing “tag,” which wound up with her nearly drowning in a pool.

She experienced other moments where she was aware that something unnatural was in her presence, sometimes warning her not to get into this stranger’s car, other times less benign.

And now that’s happening again, more “voices.” Luckily her craziest patient (Jo Ann Olivera) is there to assert that “I have a gift” and the Lilly does, too. The unquiet dead are reaching out to her for some reason.

“I wouldn’t wish this on anybody,” Lilly complains, as she’s approached by a ghost who lost a baby and dreams of a naked old perv crawling under the covers with her.

As we work our way clumsily back towards that opening scene of peril, the picture drifts into childbirth classes and pervert come-ons and flashbacks within flashbacks — many involving the aunt who raised her (Ashley Bell) and way more detail about Lilly’s teen years than “Voices” needs.

And none of it works up so much as a mild fright.

MPA Rating: unrated, violent images, nudity, profanity

Cast: Valerie Jean Parker, Jenna Harvey, Chloe Romanski, Jonathan Stoddard, Claire Marie Burton and Jo Ann Olivera

Credits: Directed by Nathaniel Nuon, script by Nathaniel Nuon, Daniel Hathcock. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:48

She’s almost certainly expecting too much when she makes that first call.

“Hi Dan. I just wanted to say that I’m OK and that I’m back now.”

Knocking on his door just confirms it.

You can’t “just show up,” Dan barks. “That’s not how it works.”

And your daughter, “our” little girl? “She doesn’t remember you.”

“Like a House on Fire,” a quiet, downbeat and deflating drama from Canada is about a marriage interrupted, in Dara’s eyes, a marriage permanently broken in Dan’s.

Something — post partum depression, manic depression — made Dara (Sarah Sutherland of “Veep”) run away from Dan (Jared Abramson) and their infant daughter, Isabel. Now, two years later, the wayward wife has returned with some notion of everything going back to “the way it was.”

But whatever it was that made her flee, Dan took it hard. And he’s not taking her turn well, either. When Dara meets Dan’s new live-in love ( Dominique Provost-Chalkley), she’s taken aback. The fact that Therese is seven months pregnant pours salt on the wound.

We can see what she does. Dan didn’t waste any time.

But what Jesse Noah Klein’s quietly understated drama makes clear is that Dara gave everybody reason to think this rupture was permanent. The way her dad and stepmother (Michael Buchanan and Amanda Brugel) walk on eggshells around her, the pity and “understanding” in Therese’s voice all underscore just how “not yourself (Dan’s words)” she was.

And nobody wants to provoke that sort of behavior in her again.

“I’m just trying to help. I’m on your side.

We don’t know where Dara went — a mental hospital, probably. But as this movie progresses we get a taste of her mood swings, her panic attacks, her impulsiveness (making out with a teenager), her intensity of feeling.

“Everything felt wrong because ‘I’ did it,” she narrates to Isabel (Margaux Vaillancourt ), now four and wondering who this off-putting stranger is. “I loved you so much that I forgot to breathe. And then I ran out of air!”

Not a lot happens in “Like a House on Fire,” not a lot as in “not quite enough.” But Sutherland — Kieffer’s daughter, Donald’s granddaughter — makes the subtle shades of pain ache and Dara’s mystery well worth exploring in a story that feels too real to distance yourself from.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, adult themes

Cast:  Sarah Sutherland, Jared Abrahamson, Dominique Provost-Chalkley, Amanda Brugel, Michael Buchanan and Margaux Vaillancourt

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jesse Noah Klein. An Entract/Gene Theory release.

Running time: 1:25

If you remember your documentaries, you’ll recall that a certain Detroit singer was huge in South Africa in the late ’70s and onward. It’s still a little jarring for a 1981 period piece to confirm that, soldiers cleaning their rifles and singing this by heart.