Movie Nation

So many road trip comedies and only one lifetime to get through them all.

It’s a conundrum, a dilemma for anybody who cherishes the genre as much as I do.

On a sliding scale, “The Long Dumb Road” is closer to “The Guilt Trip” or “We’re the Millers” than “Midnight Run,” “Nebraska,” “Sideways” or any of the acknowledged recent classics of the genre.

It’s a scruffy road comedy that isn’t quite scruffy enough, even though it co-stars eternally shambolic Jason Mantzoukas, currently not-shaving and appearing on “Brooklyn-Nine-Nine” and “I’m Sorry.”

But a little chemistry always makes the trip bearable, and pairing him with Tony Revolori (“The Grand Budapest Hotel”) pays dividends in this affable amble across the American Southwest.

Affluent suburban Texas teen Nathan (Revolori) is off to art school, vintage Pentax 35mm camera in hand, minivan loaded for life in LA. It being an old minivan, it doesn’t make it out of Texas.

Luckily for the kid, there’s a garage close by. And Richard (Mantzoukas) is just in the process of melting down (LOUDLY) and quitting. The best way to pay him when he gets the van running again is to give him a lift…”just 45 minutes up to road, place called Alpine.”

If you know your road comedies, you’ll know that “45 minutes” is an illusion, that “just drop me off anywhere” will not hold.

And if you know the genre, you’ll know to expect the “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” mismatch.

Nathan is sheltered, uptight and flush with his parents’ cash for the trek. Richard, he of the greasy t-shirt beneath the stained hoodie, a riot of hair, wild eyes and manic patter? He’s the opposite.

He leaps from “Wanna a road brew?” (he keeps a beer bottle in his shirt pocket) to “So what’s your story? You party?” to “Wanna share this pretty rad jazz cigarette?” (coolest name for a joint) to “You’re an artist? So what’s your philosophy? What have you got to say?”

The two make a mid-winter (no snow) journey from Texas in the general direction of LA, with inter-titles signifying stops along the way — Marfa, Texas, Las Cruces, Truth or Consequences, Albuquerque, Gila, Silver City…

And with the stops come mild misadventures straight from the road comedy screenwriting app — bar fight, robbery, tracking down an old love, new romance, car troubles and the kindness of strangers.

When the formula is this tried and true a movie has to get by on chemistry and its banter.

Favorite movie? It’s “The Graduate” vs. “Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.”

Richard somehow doesn’t realize there were MORE “Fast and Furious” movies, that series co-star Paul Walker died.

“Dude, you’re blowing my mind!”

Nathan? He’s never been to Richard’s impromptu choice of next destination — Vegas.

“Dude, all the best hookers are in strip clubs.”

Music? Nathan has this iPod his ex-girlfriend gave him.

“There’s like three Indigo Girls records on here. Is that why you dumped her? ‘Cause I totally get it.”

The meet-up with the long lost flame goes so very wrong that it gets “Long Dumb” off on the right foot. An ill-fated meeting with one of Richard’s old running mates (Ron Livingston, amusingly cast against type) is an unexpected laugh.

Mantzoukas makes Richard a mercurial mess, disarmingly charming one second, self-sabotaging (and Nathan sabotaging) the next. He poses for Nathan’s camera — “This is America at its purest, dude.” His philosophy? “Friends, shelter and a little bit of food in my belly.”

Richard is going to put Nathan’s declared eschewing of his “pretty sheltered life,” planned from SATs to college to marriage to its severest test.

Nathan will be like “my little brother. I’m gonna teach you everything…rip the condom off’a your mind.”

Richard’s lived 35 years just rolling with the punches, adrift, a guy with “We GOT this” answers for everything.

“You need to be more zen about how things happen,” he preaches. But remember, he’s an idiot.

“This is so stupid.”

“I know, right? Let’s do it.”

Director and Hannah Fidell and her co-writer Carson Mell remade their short film “The Road,” and had just promise in that script to get Livingston, Taissa Farmiga, Grace Gummer and Pamela Reed on board.

But it’s hard to see anything at all to this without Mantzoukas. He’s the beating heart of the comedy and the soundtrack to the film, rarely shutting up long enough to take a breath, collect his thoughts or plan ahead.

Whatever everybody else is doing, he sounds like he’s improvising, making this up as he goes along. He’s just the sort of guy you’d pick up hitchhiking — probably harmless, entirely too chatty and just edgy enough to make you plan your next rest stop where you can hopefully ditch him.

Provided the car starts when you’re making your break.

MPAA Rating:R for pervasive language, sexual content and some drug use

Cast: Tony Revolori, Jason Mantzoukas, Grace Gummer, Taissa Farmiga and Pamela Reed

Credits:Directed by Hannah Fidell, script by Hannah Fidell and Carson Mell A Universal release.

Running time: 1:30

Seems like just yesterday that Keke Palmer was making her big screen lead debut in “Akeelah and the Bee,” playing a tween who masters spelling bees with the help of mentor Laurence Fishburne.

Here she is, a dozen years later with the title role again — “Pimp.”

They grow up so fast.

“First time I sold p—y I was ten years old.”

Violent, raunchy and raw, sexual and street-wise, “Pimp” is straight-up exploitation, a serious departure for the starlet, would-be pop star and 25 year old veteran of the screen trade.

And for gritty, lowdown exploitation, it’s not bad. Writer-director Christine Crokos has built a solid star vehicle for Palmer on the bones of lurid ’70s blaxploitation cinema.

“Hard” is the byword for this world, and the scene is set with our anti-heroine’s voice over narration. Wednesday, “Wen” for short, grew up in the life — Daddy (DMX) was a pimp who taught her the trade, Mom (Aunjanue Ellis of “Designated Survivor”) was a hooker-junky who gave up street walking, but not junk.

Daddy’s premature death put Wen in charge of her own operation, and she’s had to get tough, fast. She has the tattoos, the facial scars and lean, hard lines of an athlete, and the scariest dreadlocks ever.

“I was just one’a them boys, learning this game.”

And she has, taking Daddy’s big piece of advice seriously.

“Never let a b—h get close to your heart.”

Wen’s love since childhood has been Nikki (Haley Ramm). She was a neighbor, a junkie’s daughter, too. And she’s grown up to be a thin bombshell Wen keeps and has promised to take care of. But no, she’s not one of her “girls.”

That changes when Momma’s latest bail money leaves them broke. Nikki makes the pitch herself — “It’s just business.”

Wen doesn’t like it, but she listens. After all, what else did Daddy say? “Once you’re in this game, you’re in it for life. Only thing you can trust is money.”

To Daddy, now to Wen, “Money meant love.”

But putting Nikki on the street — with Wen’s rudimentary instructions — set the stage for the conflict to come. As any pimp knows there can only be one “top” girl. And Wen sees even more dollar signs in the Beyoncé-alluring pole-dancer/hooker Destiny (Vanessa Morgan), a bombshell already in demand, already with a pimp but with eyes for Wen that go beyond the bottom line.

“Dreams are free, but the hustle’s sold separately.”

For all the tough, fatalistic dialogue and nuts and bolts of streetwalking, all the meaty settings (brothels, hotels, an off-the-books firing range), “Pimp” could easily have toppled into laughable, an arch swing-and-a-miss at sending up a genre.

But Palmer makes herself over for this part and makes it work. When we see Wen practicing being hard to the mirror, doing her version of “You talkin’ to ME?”, we can hear the brass coming out in Palmer’s voice. We believe her as Wen, getting in over her head, proclaiming her love for Nikki and hopes for getting them out of there, and naively getting played.

She is almost surely overmatched when the villain who controls Destiny’s destiny shows up.

Edi Gathegi of “Gone Girl” and “X-Men: First Class” makes a great villain, an amoral, psychotic sociopath. “Kenny” has done the math that shows what a life on the street is worth, knows what he can get away with and is blindly, murderously ruthless.

Consequences? Once he has violence on his agenda, he never thinks about those.

Crokos isn’t taking us anyplace the movies haven’t been before, but with “Pimp” she’s produced a mean, lean and unsentimental portrait of this life and those who live it and die it.

And Palmer? This is going to change how people look at her and who hires her, if there’s any justice to Hollywood.

MPAA Rating: unrated, strong sexual and violent subject matter, profanity

Cast: Keke Palmer, DMX,  Vanessa Morgan, Haley Ramm, Edi Gathegi, Aunjanue Ellis

Credits: Written and directed by Christine Crokos . A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:26

As ER nurse Helen Sterling, Susan Sarandon has to be cagey with her emotions, never giving in to false hope or personal connection to the daily onslaught of the dead and the dying, and those who survive them.

A nurse with decades of experience, she might be the right one to counsel the green young Iranian doctor (Amir Malaklou) on how to tell parents “the worst thing they will ever hear,” that their child has died. Another parent she’s just as blunt with her words of comfort.

“You can keep her on the respirator as long as you’d like.”

But as tough as that exterior is, as many times as she says “I can handle it,” Helen’s handling of her big secret is lacking, and at the heart of the problematic drama titled “Viper Club.”

Her son, a freelance Youtube war correspondent (Julian Morris), was taken hostage in the Syrian civil war. The terrorists who have him have her number. They want $20 million for her boy. They text her with their demands.

And the F.B.I. (Patrick Breen) and State Department (Damien Young) experts she confers with — separately, as in “Don’t you guys talk to each other?” — have told her to keep this a secret, a way of bargaining with and winning Andy “the infidel’s” release.

Director and co-writer Maryam Keshavarz (“Circumstance”) struggles to gin up the drama in the Byzantine hostage half of the story while letting the hospital half of the tale take it over. And casting Edie Falco, the Once and Future “Nurse Jackie,” as a wealthy woman who got her son freed and promises Helen she can help her do the same, just reminds us of how much more convincing an actress who had years to perfect her stethoscope technique was in this guise than the Oscar winning Sarandon.

Helen sees Andy everywhere; hallucinating him here, remembering him in flashbacks there. How he grew up with a British accent is anybody’s guess.

Helen’s solitary life makes it easy for her to lie when colleagues ask, “What’s going on with you?” She lies to get days off to meet with the rich go-between, a woman who insists she did not do what is against U.S. law in such situations and pay ransom to free her own son. It’s all part of the class privilege she wears like her  designer winter coats, the “tea service” with champagne she orders for them on their first meeting.

Matt Bomer plays one of Andy’s colleagues, the visible face of what conflict reporters call the “Viper Club,” shared group-sourced online information and collective experience — how-to help for everything from hiring a local guide to the safest places to eat or room in any given combat zone.

And their advice? “The F.B.I.” is a bunch of “idiots.” It’s in their interest to keep a kidnapping overseas quiet. When Mr. State Dept. mutters about keeping “politics” out of this, Helen doesn’t get that he’s politicized the kidnapping already by covering it up.

“It’s not politics! It’s my son!”

Even these moments, with Helen trying to get “urgency” into officialdom’s vocabulary, getting her back up to try and move the ball down the field, work out something to free her boy, have a muted, can’t-show-emotions/ can’t-lose-my-cool feel.

Yes, we want that and I’d argue that the movie needs it. But Helen isn’t wired/scripted/played that way. Thus, “Viper Club” is too muted to come off.

This Youtube financed release just muddles through far too much of its running time, setting up a parallel story about a young gunshot victim Helen allows herself to give extra attention to, even though her situation is as hopeless looking as Andy’s.

Sarandon is always a compelling presence, but too much is left unsaid and unplayed here to pull us in. “Viper Club” needed action, suspense, more pathos and forward motion. She tries  to do it all with her eyes, and it’s not enough.

Some have used the film’s finishing touch as an excuse to excuse the tedium that precedes it. They find film’s finale “surprising.” Really?

MPAA Rating: R for language and some disturbing images

Cast: Susan Sarandon, Matt Bomer, Edie Falco

Credits:Directed by Maryam Keshavarz, script by Maryam Keshavarz, Jonathan Mastro. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:49

I remember like it was only this afternoon — which it was — that moment when the well-cast, realistic and sometimes moving mom’s-got-dementia drama, “What They Had,” goes straight off the rails.

It comes after daughter Bridget (Hilary Swank) has flown from California with daughter Enma (Taissa Farmiga) to help in-town brother Nick (Michael Shannon) talk Dad (Robert Forster, never better) into putting their “stage six” mother (Blythe Danner) into The Reminiscence Neighborhood, a “remembering home” for people like her.

Well, that’s what Bridget, “Bitty” to her family, was supposed to do. Overwhelmed Nick has been trying to get “I’m not putting MY wife in a nursing home” Dad to buy in.

But Bitty loses her nerve. Not that she doesn’t see the need. Mom was just found riding the El (Chicago) in the middle of a blizzard with little more than night clothes on her back.

But that debate, the meat of the movie, is undone with Bitty’s even-more-personal crisis. She’s bored with her husband (Josh Lucas, who is doing too many of these “also ran” guys these days). So in the middle of all this drama, with unsentimental Nick making all the plans, putting everything in motion only to have Dad veto it, with her own daughter dropping out of college and her mother flipping from lucid to childish in the middle of every scene, Bitty decides to hit on a cute guy from the old neighborhood.

Right.

Forgive the fact that actress turned writer-director Elizabeth Chomko is bad at history and math. Dad is driving around in a ’60s GTO with a broken convertible top in the middle of a Chicago winter. No, he’s not driving the Camry.

“I’m 75 years old. F— the Camry!”

So Dad’s 75 and billed as a Korean War vet. He’d have been seven when it started, ten when the shooting war ended.

Get over the melodrama of Emma’s collegiate misery. It was chef-mom’s dream to go, and Emma isn’t having it. Boo hoo.

Pay no attention to the movie’s climax, because there’s a whole third or fourth act (I lost count) that follows it.

And try to ignore how cute Movie Dementia always is when compared to the real thing. Danner is adorably daft, if not quite problematically so.

That little “Lemme start an AFFAIR in the middle of all this” is the boner of all screenplay boners.

Shannon is formidable in his had-enough, let’s be realistic because “We all know how this is going to go” approach to getting mom settled, with plans that put Dad close by.

Swank doesn’t have as much to play, just a lonely wife wishing she and her husband could have the intense connection her parents did, “What They Had.”

Forster is a rigid, fuming force of nature as Bert, a man hellbent on taking their annual trip to Florida, clinging to this woman he’s loved for 60 years (again, math).

We’re all going to deal with this, most of us twice — once as the children making those “power of attorney” decisions, once when we’re the ones being put into a home. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with finding the lighter moments of this insanely stressful decision and implementation of that decision.

I just drove through a hurricane and a flash flood to move an aged parent into assisted living, so I was inclined to cut “What They Had” a break.

But from the moment Swank, never the best at batting her eyes, has to play alluring to a guy with a crush on her just to feed her ego in the middle of a loud and contentious family debate and crisis, “What They Had” spirals right down the drain — another movie for a more mature audience undone by immaturity.

And bad math.

MPAA Rating: R for language including a brief sexual reference

Cast: Hillary Swank, Blythe Danner, Michael Shannon, Robert Forster

Credits: Written and directed by Elizabeth Chomko. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:41

It’s not the editor, but the editing strategy that undermines “Beautiful Boy.”

This sensitive retelling of the true story of journalist David Sheff and his son Nic, a drug addict whose crystal meth mania became two books — one written by the father, the other by his aspiring-writer/recovering addict son. Those dual narratives might account for the film’s choppy, disjointed feel and flow, a powerful and almost certainly compelling and intimate drama about parenting, personal responsibility and the shock waves that spread from one addict through an entire extended family.

Rarely has a film with alleged Oscar pretensions felt more “meh.” Sympathies are undercut, “big moments” are countered with off-key ones and suspense is frittered away like an addict’s college fund in this, the most scenic movie ever made on this subject.

Steve Carell is David, an indulgent dad given to singing John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy” to son Nic from an early age. Nicolas was the son of his first marriage (brittle Amy Ryan is the first wife) who turns out to be the best older stepbrother ever when Dad’s remarriage (earthier Maura Tierney plays Karen, an artist) produces two moppets whom Nic (Timothée Chalamet) dotes on like puppies Dad just brought home.

Nic’s dad writes for Rolling Stone (among other publications), so the kid has access to all the best music and an affluent lifestyle in the most beautiful part of coastal California. But Dad tilts towards “Your best pal” in his parenting. “Let’s go surfing!” Let’s bang our heads to Massive Attack!

And then the kid counters with, “Let’s smoke this joint together, Dad.”

Nothing to worry about, right? We’re not still selling that “gateway drug” thing, are we? Not in San Francisco. Not at Rolling Stone!

“It takes the edge off stupid reality,” Nic says. Uh-oh.

As Flemish filmmaker Felix van Groeningen’s film skips back and forth through flashbacks and a floating fictive present that’s not a straight-forward narrative, we see David remember these moments and read into them the second-guessing that has to come with it.

The sweet kid is in rehab at 18 with a veritable cornucopia in his veins. We know now what David and Nic did not. That 28 days is not enough to break the meth habit.

We share David’s utter contempt for the rehab folks who excuse this failure with “Rehab is part of the recovery.” But being a journalist, David snoops around Nic’s room, his journals, and picks up clues. He buys a meal for another addict on the street to get a sense of the allure and consults with an expert (Timothy Hutton) who thinks he’s being interviewed for The New York Times Magazine, an expert who points out the deadly chemistry that makes meth so hard to shake.

Chalamet (“Call Me By Your Name”) is the very picture of mercurial in this part, gushing with enthusiasm and sweetness with his step-siblings one moment, lying, cheating stealing and relapsing the next. He’s got the guilty face of a student using the school library computer to look up “How to shoot up safely,” and the amorality of a junkie who thinks nothing of helping his college girlfriend (Kaitlyn Dever) learn to cook and shoot up, and then overdose. Chalamet manages a stoned-manic swagger as he insists on being “on my own” in his teens, and cadges cash to sustain his death spiral.

Tierney and Ryan play interesting “mother” contrasts and have some of the best scenes in the movie. Karen has to protect her own children, but something else kicks in when Nic and the girlfriend flee their house. She chases them down, weeping. Ex-wife Vicki (Ryan) didn’t get custody, but seems like Nic’s LA lifeline when the chips are down. If only she could break off the same fight she and David have been having for years.

Carell has the biggest part and he gives a most uneven performance in it. His David is a rational man more inclined to lose his temper over Nic’s evasions and others’ failure to watch the addict like a hawk. Carell’s emotional meltdowns seem forced and tepid and remind us we’ve never really seen him master that.

Only small pieces of the rehab experience seem novel here. I’d never heard of “The Three Cs” before — “I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I cannot cure it.” All part of that surrendering to a higher power thing, and letting yourself off the hook just enough to get better.

But when Nic jots in his journal about the shame his drug use causes him and how he uses more drugs to forget the shame, you have to think, “Yeah, it’s like that.”

Director/co-writer van Groeningen (“The Broken Circle Breakdown”) is out of his depth (that choppy editing) and treats this production like a Belgian kid at the Hollywood Buffet. The soundtrack is so littered with (pricey rights) songs you can tell he’s spending Other People’s Money, and some are so on the nose (Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” Perry Como covering “Sunrise, Sunset”) that they make you wince.

But it’s the cutting that undercuts this son’s journey through addiction and his father’s all-but-helpless response to it. The wind goes out of the movie’s narrative moment and the air leaves the balloon of Chalamet and Carell’s performances which we watch deflate as we lose too much of our sympathy for their story.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content throughout, language, and brief sexual material

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Steve Carell, Maura Tierney, Amy Ryan

Credits:Directed by Felix van Groeningen, script by Luke Davies and Felix van Groeningen, based on books by David Sheff and Nic Sheff. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:00

“The Nursery Man” is a period piece about a house haunted by somebody glimpsed by the grownups, but whom the children have every reason to fear.

So no, we’re not going to be disappointed that this isn’t garden variety horror, no “Lawnmower Man” sequel here. No firm release date, but given how malnourished this looks (decent costumes and setting, pedestrian cell-phone camera lighting, little known cast), we will see if a studio decides it merits unleashing.

Sure, it’s got food. Lots of it. It’s postcard pretty rural Italy, after all. Even homophobes have to eat.

Seems dated, by US standards. But “coming out” in Catholic-Berlusconi Italy was always going to be dicy.

“My Big Gay Italian Wedding” earns release outside of Italy in Germany and elsewhere starting in January. We may have to wait for Netflix to see it in North America, but as there a few laughs in the trailer alone, maybe not.

Here’s how open “Hollywood’s Worst-Kept Secret” was.

Earlier in my career working for newspapers in Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida, I’d hit several film festivals a year, including New York. I’d do junket weekends, chatting up the stars of this or that film — Miramax films included.

And among my friends in the film press, we’d openly joke about how Miramax, the studio run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, seemed to recruit their publicists from the same finishing school. Beautiful little clones in matching little black dresses.

Dealing with them constantly, you couldn’t help but get to know a few as friendly, helpful individuals — focused, sharp and ambitious. But when you didn’t see one you knew at New York after having seen her at Toronto, you learned not to ask after her twice. The looks of alarm and avoidance, the few I would chat with if they turned up doing PR for another studio giving hints about “Not an easy place to work” and “a bad place for WOMEN to work” told me all I needed to know.

But nooooo. Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Rene, Gwyneth and Damon et al could NEVER have known right?

Others have done TV exposes of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the birth of #MeToo and #TimesUp. But “The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst-Kept Secret” is the first feature documentary about it, a wide-ranging film that focuses mostly on Weinstein, but also on the shock waves that washed over everyone from Aziz Ansari and Billy Bush to Cosby, Spacey, Toback and Donald Trump.

It’s damning in its depiction of a culture “willing to look the other way so long as he was making a lot of people a lot of money.”

Brave victims from Ashley Judd (“He abused his power.”) on down the acting community’s pecking order speak out. Starlet Starr Rinaldi was warned, “Don’t be alone with Harvey,” but there were always people who could make that happen.

Former employees detail the enabling that went on — assistants cajoling women into compromising situations, CAA and other talent agencies “pimping” starlets for The Harvey Treatment.

Here’s footage of Uma Thurman, spitting out the words, “When I’ve spoken, in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting for when I’m less angry. When I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.”

Journalists like Ken Auletta talk about the “monster” reputation Weinstein wore, which few took seriously due to the endless parade of awards season “I’d like to thank Harvey Weinstein” speeches.

Actresses like Katherine Kendall note the damage he could do to a woman’s career (Hers and Judd’s are good examples.). Others, like Dominique Huett, tearfully confess, “If I hadn’t been in a vulnerable career space…I needed a break.”

That gives filmmaker Barry Avrich, a Canadian director whose “Unauthorized: The Harvey Weinstein Project” (2011) tells you how long he and his team have been gathering expertise on their subject, his chance to widen the scope of “The Reckoning.”

Hollywood scandal monger Kenneth Anger gives the history of “The First Casting Couch.” “Keystone Cops” producer Mack Sennett had it. Emma Thompson recounts the business’s “history of harassment and bullying and interference,” what her mother in a more delicate age referred to as “pestering.”

“Reckoning” talks to lawyers, psychologists and others about the nature of this abuse and harassment. Its effect is always the same — traumatized and “shamed” women, some of them (in Weinstein and Bill O’Reilly’s cases) paid off. Many were not.

Tippi Hedren (“The Birds”) quotes what her harasser, Alfred Hitchcock, threatened her with. “He said ‘I’ll ruin your career.’ And he did.”

The film goes into graphic descriptions of Weinstein’s crimes, and those of Louis C.K. and James Toback. Cosby is merely shown, along with Casey Affleck, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, all tossed together in the same parade of harassers and worse.

Dylan Farrow recounts her dismay at how #MeToo blew up and yet here’s Kate Winslet, still working with Woody Allen. Here’s Diane Keaton defending “my friend.” Dylan is the Mia Farrow daughter who accused Allen of molesting her as a child.

Men were bullied, cursed and threatened and director George Hickenlooper recounts, in almost amusing detail, the profane threats Weinstein hurled at him over his direction and editing of “Factory Girl,” about Edie Sedgwick. Weinstein wanted “the sex scene” re-shot, and gave explicit instructions about what he wanted to see. Any doubts you have that lurid sex scenes and strip club moments in movies are sops to pervy producers vanish with this account.

Two stand-out take-aways from “The Reckoning” stick with me. Most of the Miramax and Weinstein Co. “enablers” get off without being named. But the role of the NDA, the “Non-Disclosure Agreement,” in fostering this climate of unending abuse, is exposed. As is its most avid advocate, “wronged woman” attorney Gloria Allred. It’s implied that she prolonged this crime spree by insisting her clients settle, take a payoff and keep quiet.

She was colluding in “silencing women,” putting their lives and careers “under a cloud of shame.”

And then there’s Dr. Wendy Walsh, a psychologist who regularly appeared on Fox News with Bill O’Reilly until she accused him of gross, threatening, persistent and unwelcome sexual come-ons. She’s a psychologist and proceeds, as a victim with FIRST HAND knowledge, to analyze why men “with some narcissistic injury” from their youth expose themselves to women. Shame triggers arousal in a Weinstein, O’Reilly or Louis C.K.

It’s the most damning interview moment in a movie that has plenty of dramatic moments — that infamous Howard Stern/Weinstein interview, the O.J.-like helicopter chase of Weinstein fleeing (by private jet and Escalade) to “sex addiction rehab” in Arizona.

Journalist Kim Masters, editor at large at The Hollywood Reporter, recalls Weinstein trying to manage the decades of rumors by baiting and confronting her in an interview, provoking her to blurt out “I’ve heard you rape women.”

Rose McGowan raises a fist and actress Melissa Sagemiller (“Get Over It”) details her variation of a story we’ve heard repeated — the proffered ride, private jet flight, “let me walk you to the subway” — scores of times, Weinstein’s piggishly predictable MO.

Leonard Cohen croons “Everybody Knows” on the soundtrack. And Meryl Streep defends herself against #MerylKnew charges.

No, it wasn’t up to any single individual (Bob Weinstein or later Michael Eisner, maybe) to expose and stop this. But how could she, them or any of us, not know?

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual content criminal sexual behavior described

Cast:Ken Auletta, Jesse Berdinka, David Carr, Joan Collins, Alan Dershowitz, George Hickenlooper

Credits:Directed by Barry Avrich, script by Barry Avrich, Melissa Hood, Michèle Hozer. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:18

Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse play the star-crossed lovers fighting for their lives against a deadly disease, and fighting for the chance at love — in spite of the medical warnings.

“Five Feet Apart” looks like a genuine romantic weeper, and the trailer suggests it just might work. March 22 is when it opens.

A movie like “In a Relationship” kind of sits there, a bit thin on the entertainment side,  and sends us back to the basics, consulting with the hard and fast rules for a romantic comedy.

Shakespeare invented them, but he never patented that invention, so here they are.

If possible, the lovers must “meet cute.” 

There must be love, love that we root for and love interrupted. The lovers must face obstacles.

Friends must interfere, buck up and/or advise the lovers and if at all possible find love themselves.

The banter is best when it’s biting and sarcastic, the best “obstacle” to our couple.

“In a Relationship” breaks many of these rules, skipping the “meet cute” and never for an instant letting us think writer-director Sam Boyd is the New Bard when it comes to sparkling dialogue.

But it has a lived-in feel, a reality about it that despite the pretty young things of the cast skipping from NYC to LA, makes it feel authentic. This is how real people connect, misconnect, fight and bargain. And that’s almost enough.

Emma Roberts, most recently in “American Horror Story,” is Hallie, a photographer’s assistant five years into her romance with Owen (Michael Angarano, “I’m Dying Up Here”).

“It’s been THREE years,” Owen, a video editor, counters.

A rise in his rent causes her to blurt out “Let’s move in together,” and Owen? He’s in that “No so fast, dear” place. They’ve settled into the foreplay turns into “Let’s watch a movie” stage of the relationship. At least they can agree on the first time “we hung out,” way back in their East (Greenwich) Village youth.

That’s where Owen’s best bud, Matt (Patrick Gibson of Netflix’s “The OA”) first met “Hallie’s hot cousin,” Willa, played by the latest beauty of the clan Hemingway (Dree Hemingway of “While We’re Young”). Willa is on her way to LA.

Matt’s been a bit obsessed, and is all set to renew their acquaintance. But when they all get together at a party, Willa — being unutterably gorgeous and aloof, has no memory of meeting Matt.

Hallie photographs the wrong guy, and Owen shifts from “I miss my FREEDOM” and “maybe we should cool it” to jealous rage in a heartbeat. It all comes to pieces so fast.

Matt? Trusting, needy and just gentlemanly enough to stand out, is REALLY into Willa and willing to push past his tentative nerdy earnestness to take a chance, he goes from “Sorry, I don’t recall” to sharing the coolest Uber in LA to actually having a shot with his dream date.

If you can call it a date.

I like the way Hallie and Owen fight. It’s about something, about differing visions of their future, the fact that she has one and he doesn’t. They know which buttons to push.

“So you just flat out don’t want to live with me?

“I’m not ready to settle down.”

“Stop pretending you care about something just so you can be mad about it!”

Willa loses her aloof cool after a kiss, and even a seduction-in-the-making in Matt’s teenage room in his parents’ house doesn’t blow the mood.

“I’m sorry about my twin bed.”

I know, she says. “I feel like a pedophile.”

“In a Relationship” then settles into dull and contrived — guys over-sharing everything, Owen diving into Mexican junk food and casual hook-ups (failed hook-ups as well), Hallie thrown together with a handsome actor (Jay Ellis) from an HBO sci-fi show she used to watch with Owen, and with others.

Drinking games, skinny dipping, casual flings and molly figure into their disconnected-but-still-connected relationship.

“I’m just happy to be here” needy/clingy Matt starts to realize his romantic dream isn’t all he wishes for. His big romantic gestures (She’s REALLY into the O.J. case, so he books her onto an O.J. murder tour) aren’t getting the reactions he expects.

“She’s like a cat that keeps asking you to pet it. And when you do, she just runs away.”

Random moments of dialogue register; an unhappy woman asking her female friends “Can we look at pictures of sushi on Yelp?” as a coping mechanism, Hallie blurting out “I feel like when you meet someone you know if you’re going to love them!” and Owen shutting down any uncomfortable conversation with “What did we say about fast-talking in the morning?”

To the writer-director’s credit, Willa isn’t painted as a generic cruel beauty. She’s conflicted, drawn to men who aren’t like the puppydog Matt seems to be.

“Am I Felicity?”

“Willa, we’re all Felicity.”

Every character has an arc, which is nice. But they’re all under-developed. Hinting that Hallie has ongoing anxiety issues that border on phobias, suggesting Owen has ambitions beyond editing wedding videos, the shifting dynamic of Willa and Matt’s affair are all interesting enough to pursue or develop without adding to the tight running time.

Too much of what is here feels like filler, not advancing the plot or our understanding of the characters as this cast performs them, not sparkling enough to lift the rom-com beyond “adequate.”

And I feel especially cheated as “In a Relationship” fails to answer that age-old question about Emma Roberts in the movies.

When will she stop taking eye makeup tips from Johnny Depp?

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Emma Roberts, Michael Angarano, Dree Hemingway, Patrick Gibson, Jay Ellis

Credits: Written and directed by Sam Boyd. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:32