Movie Nation

Look at this wish-fulfillment holiday comedy trailer and tell me this doesn’t look like something Hudgens would have made six years ago.

Maybe every generation puts its unique stamp on “the romantic comedy,” but odds are that each new posse just figures out what Jane Austen knew 200 years ago.

Thus, “The New Romantic,” a thin collegiate romance hung on the “sugar babies” concept. You’ve almost certainly heard of this college-coed-seeks-sugar-daddy phenomenon. “New Romantic” summarizes its appeal and takes the most predictable path to showing our sugar baby the down side.

Blake, played by Brit actress Jessica Barden of “Far from the Madding Crowd,” is 21 and looks 14 — 15 tops. She’s a rising senior with a sex column in the school paper, and the most boring sex life on campus.

She knows that her dad met her mom without Googling her or finding her on Match.com with a “witty bio” attached to her picture. That fact and “an unhealthy binge of Nora Ephron movies” in her youth has her idealistically wondering “What would my love story be?”

Which is why her “Hopeless Romantic” column is about to be canceled.

“It’s time to say goodbye to ‘grand gestures,'” she narrates, presumably from her column. “The grandest it gets these days is swiping right or left.” Cynicism doesn’t sell or lure the lads.

Her “foosball meetups” with college guys “who don’t even know how to go on a date” any more isn’t finding readers. Roommate and best friend Nikki (Hayley Law of “Riverdale” and “Altered Carbon”) sums it up in a sentence.

“You write a sex column with no sex.”

Then a mix-up with driver’s licenses at the liquor store introduces her to Morgan (Camila Mendes, also of “Riverdale”). And Morgan — put together, well-dressed and plainly coddled, is her introduction to this life of well-heeled men looking for young (very young) women, sex and dates without complications.

Why? Have you priced a college degree lately?

Yes, “Young girls are prostituting themselves to pay for college,” but once Blake moves past judging, she gets an earful on the upside. Morgan gets jewelry, fashion and “gifts” to the tune of $67,000 from the man she’s seeing.

And Blake? She’s pretty and Morgan is sure she could handle this, should she want.

“Am I a prostitute? No. Am I a gold digger? Maybe.” Morgan huffs that she’s “having a better time than these girls who get nothing more from a one night stand than the occasional pregnancy scare,” and unlike them, she’s not graduating under “a mountain of debt.”

That’s how Blake meets Ian (Tim Sharp), a well-off college professor looking for a student (not in his classes) he can carry on with.

As “Pretty Woman” and Jane Austen references pile up, as the “chivalrous” older man bedazzles Blake’s life, she writes about it and rationalizes.

“Wealthy older people supporting struggling younger ones is nothing revolutionary. Read any Jane Austen novel…Why does our society hate ‘gold diggers?’ Maybe relationships aren’t supposed to be about love, but about survival.”

And maybe she’ll get a college journalism prize for her suddenly edgy and topical column, a prize coveted by the one classmate/school paper colleague (Brett Dier) to show a romantic interest in Blake, “prostituting” herself or not.

There’s wit and the spark of life in the relationships Blake has with her peers in this world, funny little lectures on journalism — “Follow the story, not your feeling.” — from her older classmate/editor (Avan Jogia). “It’s not ‘This American Life,’ but it’s something.

Law handles the laid-back, effortlessly cool BFF role with panache. Blake bicycles to her assignations with Professor Ethics Violation. He gives her alternate transportation.

“A sex moped?” “A HOped!”

Writer-director Carly Stone (she writes for TV’s “Kim’s Convenience”) delivers a few clever turns of phrase, the odd cute joke and a knowing connection to college life’s modern pitfalls, where getting “black-out drunk” leads to “one night stands,” hazards only combated with “study drugs.”

“Big gestures” might be dead, but the attempt is worth a new verb to these kids — “We’re ”Sleepless in Seattling!'”

But I could do without the cliche of older academic explaining why vinyl is better than digital to a coed.

And Ms. Barden, 25 now but still looking like high school freshman year is right around the corner, creates an obstacle at the center of “The New Romantic” that she has little control of. She looks like a child. And putting her in the arms of an over-30 actor is just plain creepy.

Thank heavens they had the good sense to not get the least bit graphic with this, despite the subject matter.

Kudos on the mastering the accent and all, and she and her castmates do all right by the few bits of biting banter they get to play.

But parking a woman who looks like a pixie in on her way to junior high Spanish Club hobbles the marginal film that “New Romantic” was always destined to be.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, drug references

Cast: Jessica Barden, Hayley Law, Annie Clark, Eva Link, Darren Eisnor, Brett Dier, Greg Hovanessian

Credits: Written and directed by Carly Stone. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:22

I wish to Blitzen Universal would leave “The Grinch” alone.

The 1966 TV special was compact perfection, a minor masterpiece to remember legendary animation director Chuck Jones by. You’re never going to improve on having Boris Karloff as your kindly-spooky-sweet narrator or Thurl Ravenscroft’s bone-tingling crooning of “You’re a Mean One, Mister Grinch,” by composer Eugene Poddany.

But “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” isn’t just a short film (based on a beloved book) American families are tickled and touched to the point of tears by every holiday season. It’s a property, part of a brand. And Universal has every right to try and wring more money and improvements to its theme park Seuss attraction out of the green furball every few years.

They go back to animation for this latest incarnation, a bright and shiny toddler-aimed bauble with slapstick gags, more characters, more “acting” than storytelling, updated rhymes to the songs and no emotional connection whatsoever.

It’s perfectly passable as eye candy and children’s entertainment, so long as you’re sure they have no memory of the Chuck Jones original. This one’s heart is three sizes too small.

Critics can embrace it as that rare chance to chew on Benedict Cumberbatch a bit. Brother Brit took a paycheck here and in a rare bad career move, has nothing to give to the part.

His Grinch has “Garlic in your soul,” but a more-explored connection to Who-Ville. He showers, dashes on a splash of Cold Spice and goes shopping there — even though it’s the holidays, because he’s eaten up all the food in the cave-home he shares with his puppy Max.

“How much emotional eating have I been DOING?”

This Grinch has an alleged friend (not reciprocated) down in Who-Ville. He’s voiced by “Saturday Night Live” mainstay Kenan Thompson.

And the new Grinch has a back story, a little Dickensian motivation for why he hates Christmas. Adults always inferred that in earlier versions, and kids who’d seen “A Christmas Carol” could make the same Scrooge connection that Dr. Seuss did all those decades ago. But here, let’s spell it out for everybody.

Who-Ville is a veritable gingerbread castle of a town, presided over by Mayor Angela Lansbury, who has decreed that this Christmas has to be “Three Times” bigger and better than the last.

And little Cindy Lou Who (Cameron Seely) is a sassy, sledding bundle of rambunctious wonder who needs to get an audience with Santa because she’s worried her single mom/working mother (Rashida Jones), a nurse, needs a break and won’t get one in the gig economy.

You know the rest, the story arc from “a heart, two sizes too small” has to be moved from cynicism over the grinding commercialism of the holidays to embrace “the True Meaning of Christmas,” thanks to the Whos’ devotion and unshaken faith.

Because, you know, he’s stolen everything Xmas related in that mission to “stop Christmas from COMING.”

A novel approach — The Grinch’s mathematical and technological way of ripping off every house in Who-Ville (he counts them, counts the hours he has to pull off the heist, etc.), The gadgets he and Max employ are Seussian whimsy incarnate.

Cute touches — having Thompson’s character introduced as he offhandedly sings “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” from the “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer” Rankin/Bass TV special of the ’60s, letting The Grinch work out his loneliness at a Seussian pipe organ pumping out “All By Myself.”

There’s enough Christian Christmas music in this version to warm an icy Megan Kelly heart.

The Whos have their own expletives when The Grinch knocks over their snowmen or swipes that last jar of Who chutney from the grocery.

“Oh…Sugar plum!”

The updating of the narration works — “Safe in his cave and apart from the fray, he reminded himself ‘It is better this way.” But having Pharrell Williams narrate and sing the beat-boxed update of “You’re a Mean One” won’t warm anybody’s cockles.

It would have improved the film to ignore market research and hire grumbling, bemused and singing (sometimes) baritone Keith David to take over the storytelling narration. Williams is too light and ordinary sounding to make the “storyteller” work.

But this “Grinch” isn’t about aesthetics or shelf-life or making anything memorable, something Universal has managed with recent “Horton Hears a Who” and “Lorax” adaptations.

It’s as forgettable as the torn wrapping paper piled around the tree 15 minutes into Christmas morning.

MPAA Rating: PG for brief rude humor

Cast: The voices of Benedict Cumberbatch, Rashida Jones, Kenan Thompson, Cameron Seely and Pharrell Williams

Credits:Directed by Yarrow Cheney, Scott Mosier, script by Michael LeSieur and Tommy Swerdlow, based on the book by Dr. Seuss. A Universal/Illumination release.

Running time: 1:26

The safest way to review the new “Suspiria” is to remember the old “Suspiria” (1977) and bow out with an “It’s not really my thing.”

Cryptic, creepy, sexually asexual, gory and grotesque, it’s Reason One to back away — carefully, with an eye towards an exit — any time you’re cornered into a conversation with a Dario Argento cultist. The first film and the entire canon of Argento was and is most disturbing in the sorts of lost souls slavishly drawn to it and him.

The second tack to take is acknowledging that in poker, we call it a “tell.” In coal mines, it’s canaries who give away the game. And in movies, the presence of Dakota Johnson is the surest sign you’re in for something that grates and fails, a tease that renders the sexy off-putting, the potentially compelling dull. She’s uncanny for her knack of turning up in bad movies, made worse (usually) by her presence.

Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name,” “I Am Love”) gives us a challenging puzzle  of an indulgence that rattles on and on, like a hearse with blown shocks, well past its point of resolution. Those inclined to treat everything he does as The Italian Cinematic Renaissance will give him the benefit of the doubt — stunt casting, insert shots of eyes-averting gore interrupting the underlit perpetual gloom of Berlin in mid-Cold War.

It’s always raining in horror movies with this much pretense.

I cut no such slack. He’s always needed editing, never more so than in this time-suck.

“Suspiria’s” “Six Acts and an Epilogue” structure begins with an opening act that is more a prologue. Chloe Grace Moretz plays a manic/panicked dancer whose Jungian psychotherapist, Dr, Klemperer, lets her show up unannounced and bounce off his walls —  sharing her mid-freak-out journal, her dreams and her fears that this Markos Dance Company she’s joined in Berlin is killing her and others who come into their clutches.

“There are WITCHES,” she insists, giving the game away in the opening ten minutes. “They’ve been underground since The War!” It’s 1977, and Germany’s Awfulest Generation hasn’t died out yet. There were witches in their ranks.

Patricia leaves the scene. Enter Susie Bannion (Johnson), a naive devotee of Viva Blanc, the genius behind the all-female company. She has no references, but her writhing, arhythmic dance — contortions, leaps and crawls — sells Blanc (Guadagnino muse Tilda Swinton) on her. She will replace Patricia in the company. And then Olga.

No, let’s not talk about “what happened” to them — terrorism, hijackings, bombings and kidnappings are all over the TV. Let’s assume it had something to do with that.

But as Susie half-innocently immerses herself in the womynist culture of the cultish company and Dr. Klemperer tries to get the police interested in what his missing patient said about the corps, the Ohio girl finds herself drawn into intrigues and wrestled to the floor by unseen, gnarled hands reaching up from “below.”

As the choreographer, assistants and matrons of the Markos cackle in their “Last Supper” staged meals that play like an infamous cooking scene in “Macbeth,” as cops are seen helplessly nude and humiliated, under a spell cast by the witchy women, Susie loses herself in the collaboration and the art which — as we’ve seen “The Red Shoes” and “Black Swan” — is what dancers do; lose control of their destinies and lives to The Dance.

I loved the chilling decay of the production design, calling to mind the great German cinema of the ’70s. The nightmarish fashions aren’t hurt by flashbacks of Susie’s Amish childhood — a brutally repressive farm life where she could only dream of travel and dance. The ’70s Amish here, with their tractors and what not, are more Mennonite, no matter what Susie says to Madame Blanc and her harem of harridans.

The Dance itself is striking, powerful. The rituals of “The Company” are even more fascinating with thi film’s “toil and trouble” subtext. Blanc kisses each dancer in greeting at every rehearsal, her directions to them are vague and yet specific enough.

But as Susie takes over “The Protagonist role” in “Volk,” the show the ensemble is reviving, noting that she memorized it by watching film footage (pre Youtube and pre-VCR) of it “over 100 times,” and the dancer she’s replacing in the role is seen shoved into an empty rehearsal studio where unseen forces drag, hurl, yank and tear her until she’s a bag of broken bones and meat, all carried out in time to Susie’s movements in rehearsal down the hall, as blood spurts and is spat out, as designer meat hooks drag the body away, the viewer is faced with a stark choice.

Stick with this and try to rationalize whatever “Suspiria” is saying about art and dance and witchcraft and feminism to justify two and a half hours of unerotic, opaque ickiness and puzzles we’ve worked out (Don’t look at Dr. Klemperer, listen to the voice).

Or do we join those who decide “This just isn’t worth the trouble?” Because it’s possible to “get it” and enjoy the (brief) challenges of Guadagnino’s vision and wish somebody would challenge him in the scripting, shooting and editing stages, to get to the damned point, and once he’s made it, move on.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing content involving ritualistic violence, bloody images and graphic nudity, and for some language including sexual references

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Chloe Grace Moretz

Credits:Directed by Luca Guadagnino, script by David Kajganich, based on the Dario Argento film’s characters. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:32

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.