Movie Nation

“The Mothman Legacy” is a soberly straightforward account of the 1960s Point Pleasant, West Virginia supernatural “creature” that spawned books and movies, most famously, “The Mothman Prophecies,” a 2002 feature which starred Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Debra Messing and Will Patton.

Writer-director Seth Breedlove takes the utterly credulous tack in tackling this phenomenon, hearing out eyewitness accounts, throwing a few special effects at the screen, as well as lots of sketchings and lurid watercolors depicting what this “man-sized insect” or “bird man” (the first descriptions) might look like, laying out a timeline of alleged sightings and tying the creature’s arrival (not limited to West Virginia) to assorted disasters.

Is the Mothman a harbinger of doom? The Silver Bridge collapse killed over 60 people in Point Pleasant just after the first reported sightings of the creature in the mid-60s. A TWA Jet crash (illustrated with a still photograph of a TWA Lockheed propeller plane) followed one person’s sighting.

Breedlove has interview subjects tie the Mothman to Celtic folklore and the Scots-Irish who settled that part of the world, and documents some of the ways Point Pleasant has exploited its notoriety — a statue in town, a museum of Mothman lore, an annual festival. It’s an Appalachian Roswell.

But his film fails to do even the most basic things to lend it credibility. He’s not going for a “mockumentary” here, and he avoids having even the barest hint of fun with this whole dying-town-exploits-supernatural-hook for tourism thing.

People talk about the author of the book that popularized the Mothman and his “prophecies,” John Keel. But there are no extant TV or audio interviews of him included in the film.

The endless recreations and re-imaginings of a creature that some speculated might be a sandhill crane or large screech owl, mistaken for something larger in the dark, don’t hide the fact that there’s no “bigfoot walk” footage, no still photos even. The faked Mothman on a water tower, etc. shots aren’t identified as “recreations” either.

So Breedlove isn’t playing straight with the viewer, not in the least.

We visit an actual spot or two where a sighting occurred, but those visits are aren’t spooky, and even the creepy “what I saw on the road” or “heard, like it had fallen from helicopter” on the roof anecdotes fail to chill.

The documentary leans most heavily on museum curator Jeff Wamsley, a poster child for “supernatural fanboy over 50” and his daughter, Ashley. He set up a website, shortly after “The Blair Witch Project” came out, and two years before the first “Mothman” movie. No mention is made of how the two are related — the wholly “faked” event filmed and marketed online, paving the way for the “Mothman” following a similar path to the screen.

The screenwriter Richard Hatem is here, and while it’s asking too much to try and talk one of the film’s stars, I wonder if they even tried. Hell, there’s not even a clip from the movie. Any of the movies.

For the dry and straightforward approach to pay off and “sell” this extraordinary claim to viewers, the gullible and the skeptical, there have to be “real” gotchas, old interviews (surely some of these were taped) and not just a narrator, boring us to death with the function of “stories” within human culture, and mentioning “Jeff re-interviewed many of the eyewitnesses.” No tape of those “interviews” either?

Lacking that “original” source material (a few newspaper clippings don’t suffice), this “Legacy” is impossible to accept as a journalistic documentary” and not entertaining enough to pass for “mockumentary.”

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jeff Wamsley, Ashley Wamsley, narrated by Lyle Blackburn

Written and directed by Seth Breedlove. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:17

Viola and Chadwick, an Oscar contender from Netflix.

Seth Rogen, a comedy mocking a dictator and an international incident.

It’s cinematic ancient history now, but “Medium Cool” was a docudrama that caused quite a stir in its day. Haskell Wexler, a cameraman, took us inside the protests, riots and media circus that was the 1968 Democratic National Convention to tell a story of a reporter caught up in that maelstrom. In essence, he embedded an actor (Robert Forster) in a real news event and telling a fictional story that reflected and dissected what we’d seen on our TV screens during that turbulent time.

That’s what Miguel Silveira was going for in “American Thief.” Hackers and conspiracy buffs collide in the run up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, people manipulated into taking actions that destroy the public trust and roil internecine discontent, and thus might help some foreign entity rattle America and reduce our status in the world.

As if that could ever happen.

It’s a cryptic, gloomy and paranoid thriller about hackers, election interference, the omnipotent personal data mining resource of the Internet, how it is used against us by marketers and how foreign operators can use that same data to turn us on each other.

Ben Becher plays a seriously paranoid conspiracy “nut” living in a van, vlogging his “Man in a Van” Jeremiads onto the World Wide Web. He’s something of a mad prophet of the digital era, video lecturing his followers with Deep Truths about Big Data.

“What we buy, what we do, where we go when we do it, who we do it with, ALL of that information is being saved and stored in a building like that” he inveighs, pointing his camera at a generic Manhattan high rise. “The marketing algorithms are just the tip of the iceberg.”

The big question of our age is “What is going on?” Even Hunter doesn’t know that. He’s just asking the questions, dropping onto and off of the grid in his quest.

Toncruz, Diop and Meeks are young hackers seeking their own truths. The youngest of them, Toncruz (screen newcomer Xisko Maximo Monroe), is adept at breaking into servers or individual computers, pranking random people who “think they’re safe” by luring them into clicking on that one link that allows him to harvest their password, so he can steal their intimate photos or whatever and scare the hell out of them.

His fellow hacker Meeks (Julia Morrison) watches and learns, his nerdy pal Diop (Khadim Diop) eggs him on in Toncruz’s more cautionary-than-predatory version of the “Fappening.”

They’re tuned in and wired, and politically aware enough at 20 (or so) to attend rallies, speeches and organizing meetings for various causes in the days leading up to the election.

“No one LISTENS,” they complain to each other after another attempt at warning the masses about what “the government” has on you. They want to take action, but for different reasons. Toncruz is all about payback.

“It can’t be about revenge,” Diop counsels,” It has to be about JUSTICE.”

But Toncruz is also using his hacking for something more personal. He breaks into the NYPD system to track down a policeman acquitted of shooting a black man during a routine “stop and frisk.” The man was Toncruz’s father, and the old video archived on the case shows he was there as his dad was killed trying to shield him from a trigger happy cop.

These are smart people tapping into “the great question of our time” from different angles. And that makes them online risk takers. All of them start getting mysterious messages, mid-hack. Somebody has “made” them. What does that someone want? And how does it figure into Toncruz’s past, America’s election and our enemies in the world?

Brazilian born, this isn’t director Silvera’s first docudrama. His “Carnaval Blues” told a fictional story within the whirl of Brazil’s famous festival/bacchannal. Here, he weaves street and park (public speech) footage of his actors mixing in with the witnesses to the historic 2016 presidential election with archival news footage, and the odd deep dive into the Internet for old Black Panther speeches from the early ’70s, into his narrative.

The conspiracy here is more far-fetched than fascinating. And the film’s brief running time means we don’t follow the characters deeply into any story thread. The film plays like a long prospectus for a story that will be considerably more involved and engrossing, and probably 30 minutes longer when it’s fully fleshed out.

I like the technique and the idea of the story being told more than I like the story itself, in this case.

“American Thief” has disillusioned Bernie Sanders fans fuming about their ballot choices, dismayed Clinton and one could argue democracy fans not able to hide their shocked faces on Times Square, tearfully passionate activists beginning the process of resisting and a fictional story that ties to Stuxnet blowback.

Sure. Why not? There’s just not quite enough here to make all of that a film as coherent and dramatically satisfying as it is disquieting.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Xisko Maximo Monroe, Khadim Diop, Ben Becher, Julia Morrison, Josefina Scaro

Credits: Directed by Miguel Silveira, script by Miguel Silveira, Michel Stolnicki. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:18

Sometimes in movie romances, Ilsa leaves Rick, Andie chooses rich Blane over true-blue Ducky and some poor woman ends up with Adam Sandler.

And if it can happen in Hollywood, why not in Indonesia?

“Love Like the Falling Rain” is a dull, bloodless romance that drifts into the insipid zone, so bereft of heat or charm that it almost doesn’t matter that the “hero” is a heel to Miss Right, because he can’t stop loving his “best friend,” the one who dates everybody else in school before she’ll even consider him.

Attractive leads, lovely Indonesian scenery, and endless scenes in an ice cream shop can’t hide the fact that “Vin” (short for Kevin), our narrator, is mooning, whiny sap over Nara, who REALLY wishes he’d fall for his enviro-science club colleague so that she can get on with dating the brooding rock climber Ned (short for Juned).

For Vin (Jefri Nichol), his cute neighbor Nara (Aurora Ribero) is “the first girl to make me understand what love is.”

His understanding? Give a girl a ride to school (private high school, I think) on your bicycle every day since forever, be her confessor/helpmate, perpetually trapped in “the friend zone,” and if you’re lucky, she’ll tell you how she pines for Niko. Or Bimo. Or when she gets around to him, Ned (Axel Matthew Thomas).

Vin can’t blurt out how he truly feels, but damned if he send every signal but that. He sulks. He begs. He stalks off. Nara either doesn’t have a clue, or is hellbent on pretending she doesn’t see his attachment because that would mess up her “best friends forever” dream.

Her “Why haven’t I heard about your love life?” might work for the truly naive. But as self-centered as Nara comes off, you’ve got to wonder how she would have even noticed.

Rude, short-tempered Ned is carrying some grudge at the fairer sex. Naturally, he’s catnip to Nara. But no worries. She wants him to date Tiara (Nadya Arina), who is in his “One Tree, One Million Benefits” initiative work group. And if that’s what Nara wants…

The performances are so bland that the viewer is even less likely to “root for” this or that couple, an essential in movie romances.

We’re left grasping at straws — sometimes literally. Among the little slices of Indonesian teen-agerdom is the ever-green Vin impressing Tiara by politely asking the waitress at a cafe, “Please don’t use straws.”

The third act’s melodramatic turns do nothing to change our minds about who should end up with whom. Perhaps the cultural disconnect is driving this, as this was a popular novel before Netflix bought the rights to make it an Indonesian film.

So many romances have ended with the couple soaked to the skin in a “We’re so in love we never noticed its raining” downpour. “Love Like the Falling Rain” just makes one want to give everybody a towel and send them home.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Jefri Nichol, Aurora Ribero, Axel Matthew Thomas, Nadya Arina

Credits: Directed by Lasja Fauzia, script by Piu Syarif and Upi Avianto, based on a Boy Cando novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

“Synchronic” is a time-travel thriller with high stakes and genuine pathos. And all of that is conveyed in a gripping performance by Anthony Mackie, who takes this too-rare leading man role to its emotional limits.

The set-up is screwy and simple, the setting riveting and the key ingredients are not necessarily what the picture is about, but pivotal to its power.

Mackie and Jamie Dornan co-star as paramedic pals working their way through a New Orleans over-dose epidemic.

Dennis (Dornan) is a family man, with an infant and a teen daughter as compensation for a marriage (Katie Aselton) he’s constantly complaining about.

Steve? He’s a loner and a Lothario, waking up in a lot of different beds. Tara (Asleton) explains Steve’s “situation” to the baby she brings to a group picnic.

“Look babe,” she coos, “Uncle Steve’s sitting ALL the way over here because he slept with all Mommy’s friends before they married those men over THERE.”

Work nights are nightmarish — junkies and corpses and little wrappers of this “designer drug,” Synchronic lying near many of the victims.

Steve finds out what the drug does long about the time he finds out he’s got a health issue, and just as they stumble across an OD at a party where Dennis’s daughter Brianna (Ally Ioannides) was last seen.

That pill — and this is the “silly” part — sends you on a trip, not in space but in time. Pop a pill and you might wind up on a plantation, in swampland before it was filled in to make modern New Orleans, in the Ice Age and contending with a conquistador, voodoo cult, Confederate soldier or hunter-gatherer.

Co-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead make great gritty use of the ruined parts of Louisiana, and the time travel bits — often at night — are atmospheric and spooky.

A hallucinatory and wordless prologue sets up the “trippy” nature of the film, and the principal effect — bodies perforated and dissolving from place to place. The shift to the “real” world of EMTs killing time between morbid calls by hitting golf balls into whatever vacant lot they’re parked next to is abrupt means we’ll go a long while before having any idea what that introduction was about.

The story’s stakes come from the ticking clock of Steve’s illness, the limited supply of pills and the chance that “the wild cards of fate” have sent Brianna somewhere in time, with only “armchair physicist (Hah!)” Steve to rescue her.

Mackie makes the quibbles with the “logic” of it all fade into the background with a performance begins brusque and bluff, and softens as he starts to experience the precious brevity of life and the wonders — and limitations — of this dangerous drug.

“Synchronic” scores a few points for its novel choice of “explanation” for its form of time travel, and a lot more for casting the right time traveler to say “Man, f— ‘Back to the Future!’ The past was HELL.”

MPAA Rating: R for drug content and language throughout, and for some violent/bloody images

Cast: Anthony Mackie, Jamie Dornan, Katie Aselton and Ally Ioannides

Credits: Directed by Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, script by Justin Benson. A Well Go Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:43

“Freaky Friday” meets a serial killer. Sounds like a job for Vince Vaughn.

New York set, Canadian made, “Wendigo” is coming for them.

Abe Applebaum is a 32 year-old has-been, a small-city Ontario burn-out who drinks too much and expects too little. That’s what life has taught him.

But twenty years ago, Abe was someBODY, a Willowbrook kid who gained local and national film as a sleuth, “The Kid Detective,” solving petty thefts, vandalism and the like. Then his 14-year-old “receptionist” Grace (Kaitlyn Chalmers-Rizzato) disappeared, and little Abe, local celebrity, was at a loss — helpless to help her or figure out her fate.

Abe, played with a depressed and utterly deflated exhaustion by Adam Brody (“Ready or Not,” “Promising Young Woman”), knocks back another drink and stares into the abyss of who he used to think he was and who the world sees him as now. “The world” includes his parents (Wendy Crewson and Jonathan Whittaker).

“We’re not bailing you out again.”

The ice cream shop owner who gifted him with “free cones for life” doesn’t hide his resentment any time Abe drops in for a freebie. The folks who still call on his “services” are missing cats, trying to figure out if their dad is gay or if the classmate who claimed he spent his summer in training camp with The Mets is lying.

And his Dad wants to know if he’s even bothered to raise his rate.

“Do you still charge a QUARTER?”

“The Kid Detective” is a soft-spoken, deceptively wry Canadian variation of the time-honored trope of private eye fiction — a gumshoe in need of redemption, sobriety and that one case that came give him back his long-MIA mojo.

A high school girl (Sophie Nélisse) has that case.

“Somebody murdered my boyfriend.”

And even though Abe’s ready to remind anybody who doubts him “I’ve closed over 200 cases,” even though we’ve seen evidence of his logical, studied powers of observation, deduction and drawing conclusions, we and he know he’s way out of his league.

Evan Morgan’s script takes its time getting on its feet, saunters through the middle acts and quietly sets up and delivers a finale that starts surprising and turns shocking and then more shocking.

Caroline (Nélisse) is the audience’s surrogate, the naive kid Abe impresses with his smart questions, his cunning (unlatching windows of houses he might want to “visit” again) and his seeming grasp of the “psychological integers” of every case.

He can’t call on the cops, his Goth receptionist (Sarah Sutherland, Kiefer’s daughter) is useless and for all his acumen about knowing WHAT to do, he’s a big clumsy actually DOING it.

Through it all, Brody wears the stubble of the “Out of f—s to give,” the battered sportscoat of private eyes since the beginning of time and the resignation of a man stuck being who he was as a boy, and starting to realize it. It’s a performance of sly wit, annoyance and alcoholic depression.

With its lesser-known cast, “The Kid Detective” was always going to get lost in the cinematic shuffle, with or without a pandemic closing most theaters. But Morgan and his new muse have concocted a whodunit that could give Hercule Poirot a run for his money in a contest for the year’s best mystery.

And let’s not forget this is Morgan’s debut feature. If Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”) sees this, he’s going to be looking over his shoulder.

MPAA Rating: R for language, drug use, some sexual references, brief nudity and violence

Cast: Adam Brody, Sophie Nélisse, Wendy Crewson and Jonathan Whittaker

Credits: Written and directed by Evan Morgan. A Sony/Stage 6 release.

Running time: 1:37

Fans of Liam Neeson’s late career revenge thrillers know to wait for that payoff line, which may vary in verbiage and accent, but never in meaning. Here’s the version in “Honest Thief,” delivered in a “not hiding me accent any longer” brogue.

“Agent Nivens,” he growls, “Aahm comin’ fer Yoouuuu.”

And there it is, that moment we’ve anticipated after which we can relax, now that the Big Man from Eire has got THAT out of the way.

Pretty much every other moment in “Honest Thief” is expected, too, alas. That’s another characteristic in Neeson’s “man of violence” movie dotage. The only twists to this — little character quirks and the like — are just dopey and off-topic, the stuff to make an action fan wonder “What’s up with that?”

Neeson plays Tom Carter, a “retired bank robber” who has let the love of a good woman (Kate Walsh of “Grey’s Anatomy” and the Netflix series “Emily in Paris) make him want to “come clean” and pay his debt to society.

But the FBI agents he’s negotiating giving himself up to let their heads be turned by the big haul of cash involved. Well, some of them. Robert Patrick is the honest agent who turns out to be the odd man out.

So Tom’s given up his cover and his cash and is on the lam anew in Boston, wanted for murdering a Federal agent. “Clear my name” is his objective. Protect “Annie” (Walsh) is another.

Staying alive while Agent Nivens (Jai Courtney, a fine villain) and Agent Hall (Anthony Ramos) hunt him, and their unsuspecting boss (Jefferey Donovan of “Burn Notice” and “Fargo”) supervises the search will be trickiest of all.

Neeson always gives fair value in such roles, but the problem with a film like “Honest Thief” is you’ve got to forget the “Taken” movies and every variation of those he’s made in the past 15 years for any of this to feel fresh. He’s always got “particular skills.”

The script is workmanlike, with the odd ridiculous moment on its way to the inevitable.

A stand-out failing of “Honest Thief,” which has visceral shoot-outs and a novel car chase, is the supporting cast. Walsh’s reactions to most everything this “good man” in her life does defies belief. We look at her face and listen to her voice for some hint this extraordinary and extraordinarily violent turn of events will rattle her.

Nah. She’s read all the way to the end of the script. Never let’s us see her alarmed.

Donovan is emasculated by giving his character a Shih Tzu he dotes on and takes to the office, etc. He’s good in the action scene he’s hurled into, and befuddled looking the rest of the time. Like Walsh, we know he’s better than this.

As for Neeson, who squeezes in the rare Euro or indie comedy or drama to remind us the talent and that’s still there, he’s fast approaching the point where we don’t know he’s better than this. Sooner or later, he’s going to give us what Walsh and Donovan do here — the appearance of an actor showing up for a check and not even pretending otherwise. ‘

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for strong violence, crude references and brief strong language

Cast: Liam Neeson, Kate Walsh, Jai Courtney, Jeffrey Donovan, Anthony Ramos and Robert Patrick.

Credits: Directed by Mark Williams, script by Steve Allrich, Mark Williams. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:39