Movie Nation

We’ve seen so many variations on that “stalked on the highway” plot that it’s rare that one punches through and makes itself stand out.

The pulse-pounding third act of “Alone” puts it right up there with “Breakdown,” if not quite in realm of “Duel,” still the undisputed masterpiece of the genre.

And Jules Willcox, its star and motorist-in-distress, gives a performance of fear, injury, fury and rage that totally sells this.

She plays Jessica, a woman fleeing the big city in her Volvo wagon, U-Haul trailer tucked in behind. She didn’t even tell her parents she was leaving.

We don’t find out, right away, what she’s leaving behind. And we don’t really know where she’s going. But you know if it’s a highway stalker thriller she won’t be taking the Interstate.

Jessica does almost everything right. The jerk going one-third the speed limit on the mountain road she was on didn’t like being passed, and endangers her life. She doesn’t forget, even as he turns his Grand Cherokee onto another route.

Of course he (Marc Menchaca) tracks her down again. But she won’t open her window to accept an apology she and we know is insincere. Still, she talks to him. Her only mistake.

“Scared you a little bit…Where you going? You have a name?”

She moves on from this second encounter, and later, when he expects her to stop as he feigns a breakdown (with his arm in a sling), she’s not buying that either. But eventually, he gets the drop on her.

Volvo’s get lousy mileage, kids. And every time you stop for a smoke could be your last.

Assaulted, kidnapped and barefoot, Jessica can’t plead her way out.

“You can let me go. I won’t tell anybody.”

“You think you’re the first one to say that?”

She’ll have to use her wits and her inner resolve to escape this brute.

B-movie and TV director John Hyams keeps the film on its feet, makes great use of what look to be Canadian north woods locations and keeps the camera tight on Willcox (TV’s “Bloodline”), who finds her inner Carrie-Anne Moss with this ferocious turn. We root for her and fear for her and cling to the hope that every injury, every wrong done her will be repaid in blood and rage.

The Mattias Olsson script portentously titles chapters “The Road,” “The River,” etc. And he falls into the “talks too much villain” trap, filling the soundtrack with bad guy claptrap.

“You know what I can’t stand? COWARDS!”

But “Alone” still takes a simple premise and smacks us around with it for 95 reasonably suspenseful, thrilling minutes. And that’s enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Jules Willcox, Marc Menchaca, Anthony Heald

Credits: Directed by John Hyams, script by Mattias Olsson. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:38

Her name is Lucy. Or Louise. Lucinda. Maybe Amy?

She’s a med student, or studying physics or gerontology, a poet or a painter, a film critic or a waitress.

And she lives in her head, narrating everything about this uncomfortable mid-winter road trip with her boyfriend of six weeks.

“What’s the point of going on like this?” she (Jessie Buckley) wonders. “It’s not going anywhere.”

“I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” she says, but only in her head, and not to the guy driving through a near-blizzard for her to visit his parents.

Yes, “Jake” (Jesse Plemons) is smart, “educated,” perhaps a physicist himself, maybe a painter — if you believe his brittle, smiling-through-the-misery mother (Toni Collette). But every time Jake opens his lips, monotonously mouthing arid banalities or pretentiously quoting Wordsworth or Emerson or David Foster Wallace, she dies a little.

God knows the viewer certainly does.

Charlie “Adaptation” Kaufman’s take on Iain Reid’s novel is cryptic, creepy and clever enough. It’s about loneliness and the risks entailed in ending it, maybe the risks one takes by doing nothing. And Kaufman uses age makeup, dance, unexplained interludes, animation and “Oklahoma!” the musical to make his points and send viewers online searching for answers to his “mystery.”

“The Young Woman” experiences an afternoon and evening driving far into the country to visit those farm parents (Collette and David Thewlis), react to their son’s indulgence of their eccentricities, and witness the ugly flashes of temper they bring out in him.

Mom tries so hard — too hard — “I am SOOoooo glad Jake found someone!”

Dad is a sometimes foul-mouthed curmudgeon, excusing the disastrous state of the livestock the same way he taught Jake to sugar-coat it.

“Life can be difficult on a farm.”

Through the uncomfortable drive there, the visit and the trip back home, the young woman is subjected to a troubling, argument-pierced meal, hallucinatory changes in her hosts –aging one moment, turning up younger the next — and the growing feeling that she’s ridden here with a “creeper” who won’t take her “Take me home” pleas seriously.

She seems like an unreliable narrator, or is she meant to be the narrator at all? All that voice-over (constantly interrupted by Jake attempting to make conversation), and yet, is this really her story?

Maybe it’s really about socially-awkward Jake, the gloomy idealist who believes “There’s someone for everyone.”

And then there’s the “janitor” (Guy Boyd) we see from time to time, cleaning a school, watching a crappy romance “Directed by Robert Zemeckis” on his lunch break.

To say nothing of the ending of “Ending Things,” which many an online or podcasting wag is interpreting, mainly by referring back to Reid’s source novel.

A telling moment — Jake badgers “Lucy/Louise” into reciting her new poem, “Coming home is hard” even with “a wife of a wife-shaped loneliness” waiting for you there. Hard to get happy, or optimistic, after that one. The title isn’t just talking about ending a relationship, is it?

The forlorn landscape (barely glimpsed), the menacing isolation of a blizzard on a country road late at night, the “boyfriend” who takes a shot at singing “Baby It’s Cold Outside…”

“You’re quoting a RAPE song to me?”

It all feeds into the overwhelming melancholy of the piece, where marriage and relationships, farms and farm food and farm families and the cozy comforts of “Oklahoma!” (including a rarely heard “trunk song” cut from the show) are upended and our unheroic heroine puzzles over just what life and “love” are all about, and if the risks one takes by diving in are worth it.

Plemons taps into deep reservoirs of charmless sadness as Jake. And he sings.

The Irish Buckley (“Wild Rose,” “Doolittle”) makes a fine surrogate for the viewer and tour-guide through the mind of Reid as interpreted by Kaufman. And if “The Young Woman” seems more perplexed than alarmed or depressed, that’s by design, too.

There’s none of the wistful romanticism and dark whimsy of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but plenty of the deranged storytelling of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” — minus the giddy playfulness Kaufman worked into those scripts.

You’ve got to be in the right frame of mind for “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which can be as much a downer and a chore as “Anomalisa” or “Synechdoche, New York.” In the end, it’s a morose puzzle of a tale that one can appreciate, even if you don’t mind if you never see it again.

MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Jesse Plemons Toni Collette, David Thewlis, Guy Boyd and the voice of Oliver Platt.

Credits: Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, based on the novel by Iain Reid. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:15

Brendan Gleeson looks like a defining Trump impersonation, not a cute caricature.

Jeff Daniels ennobles James Coney just in the casting, when the guy is plainly a weasel.

But this limited cable series looks quite good, for those who remember much earlier crimes and outrages when we get fresh ones on a daily basis.

What an odd duck of a kids’ comedy “H is for Happiness” is.

This Aussie confection tests one’s patience and foils attempts at interpretation. It takes forever to get going, and tends to balance every potentially giddy moment with a glum and depressing one.

Annoying, omnipresent voice-over narration grates on the nerves, a grieving, broken family resists every “cute” break from their grief and bitterness, and all the sight gags and attempts at jokes are sprinkled in to break the mood.

A teacher with a wacky lazy eye, and her martinet of a “relief teacher” (substitute) are juvenile plot devices, but hilarious.

“Do NOT mistake me for a human being!”

And then there’s the boy who hand-crafts what he figures (with some prompting) every twelve year-old girl wants for her 13th birthday — beach-ball inflatable artificial breasts.

It’s “Bridge to Terabithia” dark with a Down Under accent, and with so many whimsical touches that we figure that the filmmakers were hoping for a comedy, even if they settled for “just occasionally charming.”

Daisy Axon is our heroine, an over-eager teacher’s pet named Candice Phee. We meet her as her teacher-with-the-lazy-eye (Miriam Margolyes) is charging her class with taking an assigned letter of the alphabet and turning it into an autobiographical essay to be performed at “Open Day” (Parents’ Day) assembly.

“A is for ‘assignment,'” freckled, pony-tailed Candice narrates, redundantly. But maybe she can do something with it that will fix her family.

“Everyone is miserable,” she admits. And when we meet her Mom (Emma Booth), still drowning in grief over Candice’s three-years-dead baby sister, we get it. Dad (Richard Roxburgh) has checked-out, too. He’s lost in grinding work, sad but also bitter that “Rich Uncle Brian” (Joel Jackson), his brother, cheated him when the tech company they co-owned sold.

“C is for ‘court case.'”

Bubbly chatterbox Candice isn’t popular at school. The queen mean girl (Alessandra Tognini) has nicknamed her “SN,” “special needs.”

Even school newcomer and new friend Douglas (Wesley Patten) wonders about her, telling his Mom (Deborah Mailman) something that makes her ask, “You are autistic, aren’t you?”

No. But when always address your uncle as “Rich Uncle Brian,” and Douglas as “Douglas Benson from Another Dimension,” you can see how people might be confused.

That last one, though, is all on Douglas. He’s sure that a fall from a tree sent him into another dimension, with a stand-in mother, the works. He’s all about solving this “multiverse” dilemma.

How will Candice mend her broken family, heal the rift between her dad and his brother, make Douglas want to stay in this dimension and deliver the perfect “Open Day” presentation as her crowning achievement?

How will Douglas’s inflatable boobs “gift” figure into all that?

Veteran children’s TV writer Lisa Hoppe scripted this, and first-time feature director (and Aussie TV vet) John Sheedy never quite gets a handle on the myriad moods and shifting tones this tale entails.

Hurling a relentlessly upbeat and enterprising tween at depression and grief, bitterness and loneliness is a tough sell.

The whimsy feels forced and random. There’s a pony in the forest where Candice and Douglas Benson from Another Dimension wander and debate multiverses, and a cross-dressing costume-and-party shop proprietor turns up.

Cute. And?

That pretty much goes for the whole movie. “H is for Happiness” prioritizes “”feels” over coherence, weird-for-weird’s-sake touches over character development, while expecting endless voice-over narration to caulk over the cracks.

It doesn’t.

MPAA Rating: unrated, childhood trauma, an accident, scatological humor

Cast: Daisy Axon, Miriam Margolyes, Emma Booth, Wesley Patten, Joel Jackson, Deborah Mailman Richard Roxburgh and Alessandra Tognini.

Credits: Directed by John Sheedy, script by Lisa Hoppe. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:38

Mississippi-born filmmaker Jaclyn Bethany tells a story of love, madness and betrayal in “Indigo Valley,” adapted from her short film of the same title.

The original film was set and shot in Iceland. The feature-length version, alas, is not.

Bethany starred in both films as well, and uses the feature film to give herself many, many more brooding closeups capturing the mania her character — apparently a former child actress — lives with.

Closeups reveal many things; like an actress who telegraphs her gestures, so mannered in that every sense-dulling second, with every glower in a mirror, every theatrical splashing of water in her face, every over-considered, halting line reading, an inescapable truth faces her and anybody sitting through the 75 minutes of “Indigo Valley.”

She’s a bad actress.

And all that screen time she gives herself, all those close-ups? It’s all for tone and does nothing in terms of telling or advancing the paper-thin story.

Impulsive, sad Isabella (Bethany) is just the person you want to check out of rehab and take with you on your honeymoon to a dude ranch out West. That’s what her estranged sister Louise (British actress Rosie Day of “Outlander”) does, with the blessing of her new husband, John (Brandon Sklenar of “Mapplethorpe” and recently, “The Big Ugly”).

Isabella fumes and tries to push the sister propping her up away. She picks up an employee of the ranch. She has a lot of flashbacks, as do Louise and John. We see how the painter Louise met the violinist John. And we see Isabella’s troubled connection to their early days together. She is obsessed with…somebody.

Isabella, as a character, is damaged, dazed and frankly dull. The lack of conversation in the film masks this only so much. Montages of her pink-haired youth — whispered madness or mournful pop underscoring them — don’t further illuminate the character, or explain her supposed appeal, sexual or otherwise.

“Life is made up of these kinds of moments,” she intones, at her most profound. “Sometimes we don’t understand them. Sometimes we do.”

Damn. I’m hustling across the bar to meet up with this Algonquin Roundtable conversationalist. Yes, the delivery of that line is as flat as the line itself.

There’s the germ of an idea here, about a short film’s worth. A full-length feature only exposes a sea of shortcomings. This is a “vanity project” in the worst sense of the phrase.

Cast: Jaclyn Bethany, Rosie Day, Brandon Sklenar

Credits: Written and directed by Jaclyn Bethany. A Giant Pictures release.

Running time: 1:14

“Wan” and “bloodless” are the first words to leap to mind about this online dating/lawsuit-over-online-dating romantic comedy.

“Love Guaranteed” starts out on life support and never comes out of the coma.

It’s a creaking and sentimental followup by the screenwriters who gave us “Falling Inn Love,” and a star-vehicle for Rachel Leigh Cook, who broke into films with “She’s All That” in the last millennium.

A few promising gimmicks, a wilted one-liner or two, an easy rapport that never quite achieves “chemistry” between the leads, Cook and Damon Wayans, Jr., and a well-cast villain are what it has to offer.

Nothing funny or particularly charming is made out of any of those ingredients.

Cook is a crusading and struggling Seattle “civil litigator,” plucky but a little slow to figure out “sticking up for the little guy” isn’t all that lucrative when you’re not a megafirm of “ambulance chasers.” She drives a salmon-and-rust colored Karmann Ghia and her staff is always job hunting. Broke.

Wayans is Nick, the client who could change that. He’s been spending good money on this dating site, Love Guaranteed. He’s gone on 986 dates, spent money on decent restaurants for breakfasts, lunches and dinners. “Love” may be “Guaranteed,” but it hasn’t worked out for him.

Let’s sue!

Nick comes off as an “obnoxious, gross…shameless opportunist.” But hey, Mama’s Karmann needs work. Pay the bills.

The cleverest conceit here is how Nick, “dating in bulk,” names those dates “like ‘Friends’ episodes.”

“The One Who Talked About Cats,” “The One Who Brought her Parents” and “The One Who Got Drunk and Tried to Fight the Bus Boy” weren’t winners. Love Guaranteed, part of the “lifestyle empire” of influencer Tamara Taylor, has “guaranteed” right in its name. Slam dunk lawsuit, right? And Heather Graham plays Tamara. She’s sure to bring laughs, right?

Cook comes off as game but out of new ideas for how to make “plucky” and “idealistic” and “lonely” fresh.

Wayans has been cruising along on the famous name for a decade and has yet to make any sort of impression on the screen. Inoffensively bland, “safe,” and not able to land a punchline have become his screen persona.

Only Graham has the chance to cut loose, let her “spiritual seeker” Buddha-misquoting Bethenny Frankel-wannabe stick and jab. It’s the most colorful character here, and there’s not enough on the page for her to play.

It turns out “Love” isn’t “Guaranteed,” any more than laughs, relatable characters or anything else.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Rachel Leigh Cook, Damon Wayans, Jr., Heather Graham

Credits: Mark Steven Johnson, script by Elizabeth Hackett, Hilary Galanoy. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

It will be hard to top Rose Byrne’s canny, sexy take on the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, one of the standout performances in Hulu’s “Mrs America” series this past spring.

Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore, and two younger actresses will take a shot in Julie Taymor’s “The Glorias” bio pic, coming to theaters and streaming on Sept. 30.

Janelle Monae and Timothy Hutton also star.

Bette Middler as Bella Abzug? On. The Nose. Not a pun, either.

In the canon, it’s listed with “the problem plays,” those Shakespearean works treated as comedies but with death, troubles and darkness lain o’er the “true love tested” proceedings.

Resetting “Measure for Measure” in modern day Australia, in the gangland apartment projects of new immigrants and old hoodlums, may not be the most graceful adaptation of the Bard’s works. But if nothing else, it captures the melancholy, the later-life appeals for mercy and tolerance that crept into Shakespeare’s thinking and writing.

So no, the poetic turns of phrase aren’t literally here — “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall…Condemn the fault and not the actor of it?” No “Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.,” either.

But the point remains, even when the Duke, here a sickly old gang boss played by Hugo Weaving, is grumbling about roots and remembering where he came from. He tells a subordinate “People who don’t know where they are can’t know WHO they are.”

Weaving anchors the actor-turned-director Paul Ireland’s film in somber reflection and resignation. And I have to say, after a fashion, he makes it work.

Duke is in the last days of presiding over his empire. But his lieutenant, Angelo (Mark Leonard Winter) has been shifting the focus to meth dealing. And when we meet them, that blows up in their faces. A junkie shoots up the courtyard just below the Duke’s penthouse.

That violence is what throws Claudio (Harrison Gilbertson of “In the Tall Grass”) in the path of Jaiwara (Megan Smart of “Breath”) — literally. He shoves her out of the way of the ranting, racist and stoned shooter. Romance blossoms.

That’s a problem because Jaiwara isn’t just an immigrant, and a Muslim. Her brother Farouk (Fayssal Bazzi) is a gang leader in his own right. He doesn’t know Claudio saved his sister, only that he and his mother (Doris Younane) cannot have Jaiwara stepping out with an infidel. Her confession to her mother is quiet, reluctant and heartbreaking.

“I’m sorry mother, but I love him.”

Retaliation against the unaffiliated kid is swift and brutal, and ongoing. He winds up in prison, framed by the gang-friendly crooked cop (Malcolm Kennard). Somebody needs to step up and save him. Who has the juice, and the mercy hidden deep in his soul, to take pity on an innocent?

There’s no sense at all laying Shakespeare’s work alongside the Damian Hill/Paul Ireland screenplay. But you can sense the Bard in scenes, characters and clever plot twists.

Weaving, now the Grand Old Man of Australian Cinema, with “The Matrix” and “Lord of the Rings” franchises long behind him, gives a tender toughness to Duke, a conniver who pretends to go on vacation, but instead hides out in that penthouse tracking the others’ actions via his CCTV system.

Interesting way to make a character omniscient.

“It’s a bloody castle,” where he lives, he’s assured. “It’s a PRISON,” to him.

But watch him soften, just a little, at seeing young love undone by intolerance, heartless underlings and circumstance.

Winter (“The Dressmaker”) conveys the oily ruthlessness who remains loyal, even as he feels licensed to act with impunity.

The script may have Smart Westernize her Middle Eastern refugee a tad more than can be easily believed. But the guy saved her life and loves Childish Gambino. What’s not to fall for?

I haven’t seen “Measure for Measure” on the stage in years, but the rough shape of it forms in the mind watching this adaptation, its hits (characters) and the reasons it’s called “a problem play.” And those bones, a poignant romance, betrayals and mercy coming from the most unexpected places and vivid characters, pretty much save this film, or at least make it watchable.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug content, profanity

Cast: Hugo Weaving, Megan Smart, Harrison Gilbertson, Mark Leonard Winter, Doris Younane and Fayssal Bazzi

Credits: Directed by Paul Ireland, script by Damian Hill and Paul Ireland, based on the play by William Shakespeare. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:47

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Mel’s been tested all her life. It started with her Daddy (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) on the track.

“You body always fights against you,” he’d growl, as teen Mel whimpered in pain. “It doesn’t tell you what to do!”

She ran and ran and found purpose. And now, she’s running the (never-named) Appalachian Trail, tearing off 200 mile pieces of it every eight days.

Sister Chloe (Tiffany Renee Johnson), doing her support, catching up to refresh her supplies at every stop on her “grand adventure,” wonders “What’s this about?” And “Mom told me to tell you you’re wasting your life.”

But Mel (a fierce Celeste M. Cooper of “Chicago P.D.”) is focused, when she’s not having flashbacks about those years on the track. She’s pounding out the miles at a dead sprint, and taking the punishment.

That can only be a help when she faces her ultimate test, right? Sure, she misses the obvious warning bells, stumbling into two out-of-their-element criminals (Sean Patrick Leonard and Michael B. Woods) in the middle of nowhere. But if they don’t kill her, she’ll power through this nightmare with sheer will.

There’s a lot that’s entirely too-obvious in “Range Runners,” a trail-\running B-movie thriller with moments that defy common sense and villain’s lines that make you cringe.

“You like playing games, don’t you?“

The flashbacks — Mariah Gordon plays teen Mel — rather pointlessly over-emphasize Mel’s “preparation” for her gravest challenge. What they’re most successful at is stopping Philip S. Plowden’s thriller dead in its tracks. Repeatedly.

The script puts Mel in jeopardy, and sets us up for “the tables have turned.” But she comes off as physically confident, but head-slappingly naive at every turn.

Thuggish stranger meets her on the trail wants to see her prized knife? Sure, hand it over. Gets away from the bad guys, who have weapons and her food and backpack. Sure, let’s not make a quick, injured run to civilization. Let’s chase’em!

Cooper is solid in the lead, the villains are cartoons and any hallucinations that bring her sister into her predicament with her are the sorts of traps they warn you about in Screenwriting 201.

But the movie’s Achilles heel is pacing. Mel’s on a mission, galloping through the Appalachian “range” she’s running. Once the villains show up, the menace increases, but the urgency fades.

And then, damned if another flashback doesn’t show up and bring everything to an utter stop. Again.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Celeste M Cooper, Sean Patrick Leonard, Michael B. Woods and Tiffany Renee Johnson.

Credits: Directed by Philip S. Plowden, script by Devon Colwell. A DarkStar release.

Running time: 1:56