Movie Nation

An Irishman beat Bram Stoker to the whole fangs, bites, stake-in-the-heart business way back in the golden age of “vampire fiction.” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” came to print a quarter century before “Dracula.”

It’s been turned into an opera, comics, anime and many a movie over the past century, and more adaptations are in the works. It’s about a lesbian vampire, so you can see the attraction.

Editor-turned-director Emily Harris (“Borges and I”) serves up a stately, austere and pretty period piece version that plays up the attraction and dabs its finger in blood. It may be the dullest vampire movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been bored by the best.

Lara (Hannah Rae of TV’s “Broadchurch”) is a daydreaming motherless teen whose stern governess (Jessica Raine of “The Woman in Black” and TV’s “Call the Midwife”) can’t keep her attention and can’t resist binding and tying her left hand behind her back.

It’s the mid-19th century, and Lara is naturally inclined to do everything with her left hand. Miss Fontaine isn’t having that, what with “the Devil” having use for “the left hand”of darkness. Lara has curiosity about books in her father’s library, books on anatomy, and such “images are NOT for a young lady.”

Another caning it is.

Lara has been desperate for company, way out in the country. A young lady, Charlotte, is expected. But when she doesn’t show up, Lara blames herself, suggesting “I called the Devil” by wanting her to arrive so badly.

Damned if a carriage accident doesn’t put another young woman (German actress Devrim Ingnau) under her roof. She is in shock. Her driver was killed.

“She’s perfect, except she can’t speak.”

Lara dreams about her, about the driver, and then stumbles into her in the dark of night. She can speak! What’s your name?

“You choose.”

“Carmilla” it is.

As they bond and spend hours off by themselves together, Miss Fontaine and the doctor (Tobias Menzies) fret. There’s talk of “rumors, superstitions,” and that for which “there would no medical remedies.”

Adapter-director Harris frames her subjects well, but fails to find much that is spooky about any of this, even in her many night scenes. The heavy lifting of recreating 19th century Britain (no Irish accents) seems to have taken up all her attention.

The young stars aren’t particularly engaging  while we sense their curiosity about one another, there’s little chemistry or heat in a relationship that’s supposedly all about that.

Not a lot happens, and when it does, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before and done with more terror, fire, sexuality and suspense.

MPAA Rating: unrated, blood and violence, erotic content

Cast: Hanna Rae, Jessica Raine, Tobias Menzies , Devrim Lingnau and Greg Wise

Credits: Written and directed by Emily Harris , based on the novella by Sheridan Le Fanu. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:34

A July 24 release, bit of a departure for Ms. Slate.

The iconic fashion, art and portrait photographer Helmut Newton (1920-2004) described himself, half-dismissively, as “a professional voyeur.” Elaborating, he said “I photograph a body, a face, legs…”

Always women. Typically nude. Often provocatively posed and photographed.

One of his favorite models, Grace Jones, cackles when she remembers that “He was a little bit pervert, but so am I!”

She hastens to add words that others in the new documentary, “Helmut Newton: The Bad & the Beautiful,” echo — “Never vulgar. NEVER vulgar.”

Another actress/model who came under his gaze, Isabella Rossellini, sees “an attraction to and anger towards” his subjects. The fashion editor Anna Wintour notes how he found “a type,” the “Helmut Newton woman,'” “tall, blonde, lots of lipstick.”

Thin, young and inutterably gorgeous kind of goes without saying.

German TV director Gero von Boehm plays snippets of Newton interviews, on camera and for radio, in the film. He opens with a challenge Newton gave him, basically from the grave.

Photographers “”are terribly boring people,” Newton confesses. Movies about them? “Terribly boring” too.

Director von Boehm paints a layered portrait of an artist who might very well be “boring” compared to the image we developed of Newton from his photos — oversexed, perverse, devouring the most beautiful women in fashion and film with his camera.

Then we watch him work — “Give me ATTITUDE.” We see the icy glares, the malevolent stares. Model after model talks about how “strong” and in control he made them feel, even nude, even at the tender ages many models achieve success in their profession.

And Rosellini speaks of how “in control” on the set Newton’s wife, June (seen and heard here, too) was, while Helmet “got to play with his toys,” joke around and keep the models at ease.

Newton cracked to an earlier interviewer that “I’m not going to tell you all that,” the full story of his life, his passions, phobias and romances. He was saving that “for people who have more money than you.”

But von Boehm uses old interviews, still photos and archival footage to tell the story of a German Jew whose artistic aesthetic was formed in the Weimar (decadent, expressionist) and Nazi Germany (fascist idealization of the human body) he grew up in.

We hear about his mentor, his influences, his escape to China and then Australia (where he met June).

And we get an idea of how he held onto that aesthetic until, in the late ’70s, it came into vogue and “Vogue.”

Throughout, the master comes off as more playful than Annie Leibowitz or Herb Ritts, with something of the Robert Mapplethorpe “provocateur” about him.

We see him work — shoots with Sigourney Weaver and whatever model was that week’s “fresh new face.” And Jones and others marvel at him realizing this or that truth about “the light” and shadows and “message” he was getting across, waiting until that perfect moment when his vision became (thanks to the shifting sun, often) his reality.

The emphasis here in on the nudity and art photography, but there’s just enough of the portraiture to tell us he had that Leibowitz eye for the essence of his subject — right wing French political leader (unknowingly posed, with his Dobermans, the way Hitler was photographed with his German shepherd) or ’60s icon turned grand dame of pop, Marianne Faithful.

It’s a fun, generally brisk biography, one whose tone might be the artist’s credo. Newton declared that there are “only two dirty words” in any of the three languages he spoke — “art” and “good taste.” He never let either limit what he was trying to say.

And 15 years after his death, who’s to say those words don’t apply to his most daring shots?

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity

Cast: Helmut Newton, June Newton, Grace Jones, Charlotte Rampling, Marianne Faithful, Hanna Schygulla, Anna Wintour, Claudia Schiffer and Isabella Rossellini.

Credits: Directed by Gero von Boehm. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:22

Damn this is fun.

“Mucho Mucho Amor” is a documentary that takes many of us back to that first time we caught a load of Walter Mercado, Puerto Rico’s astrologer to the masses, a Liberace/Elton/Cher flamboyant showman who brought old school TV theatricality to telling the world its star-sign forecast.

No matter who you are — Hispanic, Anglo, African American or Brazilian — if you channel surfed your way past a Mercado appearance, all capes and robes and jewels and hair, you stopped. And you remembered.

“What? The? Hell?” you’d ask, or maybe your jaw would just drop, because words failed you.

I distinctly remember stumbling across a newscast, “Primer Impacto,” and watching to test my Spanish comprehension. “Time for the forecast,” I think I understood. But wait, this isn’t WEATHER? They’re giving us a little “Walter Mercado y los Estrellas? (Walter Mercado and the Stars?)”

“It’s Paddy Chayevsky’s ‘NETWORK’ prediction come true!” I thought. A journalist couldn’t help but bemoan that a whole “newscast” was being undercut by cheesy “star sign” forecasting hokum.

But isn’t any sports fan tracking “betting picks” on an NFL preview show consuming the same sort of piffle?

And Mercado — florid, theatrical gestures and magnificent ’70s red hair flaming out of the screen — was just hilarious, if also relentlessly upbeat.

“Mucho, mucho MUCHO amor!” he’d say, piling on “muchos” to his sign-off and catch-phrase. There truly was nothing on TV like him. Not even in Japan.

This “Legend of Walter Mercado” film by Cristina Constanti and Kareem Tabsch begins with a tease, a “Whatever happened to” mystery that isn’t all that mysterious.

No, he isn’t dead. No, he didn’t go into hiding in Mexico, “closing the door” as one said of Garbo, “not wanting to grow old on camera” the comic Eugenio Derbez speculates. But we know what happened, and the gossip and conspiracy theorizing is just for the forgetful.

“The Legend of Walter Mercado” tells his life story, a rural Puerto Rican kid who didn’t “do what the other boys did,” who went to college in San Juan to study dance and acting.

He’d been thought of as something of a faith-healer in his hometown after miraculously breathing “a dead bird back to life.” “Discovered” on a San Juan stage, turned into a telenovela actor, and then, as a one-off promotional gimmick — becoming a TV astrologer — the arc of a life traced here is both unique and familiar.

No, no one went as far and fast and high as he did as an astrologer. But yes, there were familiar pitfalls along the way, the stereotypical predatory manager who got him rich and then tried to take it all.

Forgotten. And then, wouldn’t you know it? Those damned Millennials rediscover him!

And who’s the most famous Puerto Rican Millennial of the moment? Actor, dancer and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda is the starstruck fanboy whose meeting with Mercado, and subsequent collaboration, would lead to a big public celebration of this aged/ageless icon via a fashion show (his vast wardrobe, some capes designed by Mizrahi and Versace) and dance exhibition.

Gay activists talk about Mercado, defying Latin machismo and homophobia, as “a (caped) superhero” who “gave me hope.”

Derbez, the Mexican comic and film star, is unashamed about owing much of his fame to a swishy Mercado impersonation he did on his TV show.

And there, at the center of it all, put-together (he does have one moment, bald, sans wig) and overdressed in his deliriously over-decorated San Juan home, is Mercado himself.

His private life he always kept private, aiming all his efforts at his face — Botoxed to the max –his image (“glamorous…mesmerizing”) and his shtick.

“To serve, to give the beautiful message of love and peace” to his “disciples.”

Such is his sweetness and lack of guile that among the many friends, relatives, colleagues and fans interviewed here is Guillermo “Bill” Bakula, the manager who tricked Mercado into signing away his name, back catalog and image to him. He doesn’t own up to doing anything wrong, but he won’t say a discouraging word about his former employer, either.

The film runs out of things to say in its latter third as it gets caught up in Walter’s “appreciation” staged in Miami. That tends to bog down what can only be appreciated as a lovely, loving “victory lap” for an icon of Latin America and Puerto Rican culture.

Cast: Walter Mercado, Bill Bakula, Lin Manuel-Miranda, Eugenio Derbez

Credits: Directed by Cristina Constanti and Kareem Tabsch.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Jesse Williams and Jordana Brewster also star in this thriller about comic book writers who wonder about the connection between their work and“Random Acts of Violence.”This one opens Aug. 20.

The culinary term “Nose to Tail” is a philosophy — a chef who turns her or his talents to finding a use for everything in a purchased carcass in the food served at the restaurant.

You don’t have to go to Spain any more to be served a bull’s tail, ears and snout, for instance.

In the Canadian dramedy “Nose to Tail,” Chef Daniel, taken to sweaty, intense self-absorbed extremes by Aaron Abrams, applies that philosophy to people, too. He uses them up entirely, leaving little to waste in pursuit of what his ego convinces him is his “vision.”

His unnamed Toronto fine dining establishment is underwater and almost beyond resuscitation. But he’s convinced this one day will make or break him. IF he can put off the landlord a little longer. IF he can hang onto staff. IF he can get his hands on the finest ingredients available — the freshest carrots, talk his supplier down on the price of that prime, Mangalitsa hog. IF he can avoid childcare issues pushed by his French Canadian ex-wife (Carolina Bartczak). IF he can brush off his hostess/lover Chloe (Lara Jean Chorostecki), who is trying to give him PR info he needs to know, and get an idea of what the nature of their “relationship” is.

IF he can only plan, polish, cook and serve the seven course meal of his life to a group of well-heeled investors, each course paired with wine, the entire presentation introduced by him in his minimalist, “preserve the mystery” style, entrees that “have stand-alone integrity.”

That “one meal that can save my business” trope is as old as “Big Night,” and it turns up everywhere. What makes or breaks “Nose to Tail” will be the details of the milieu, and our fascination with the egomaniac most at home in it.

Watch Daniel dismember that pricey pig, hear him eviscerate his chef de cuisine (Brandon McKnight) for wanting to move on and run his own kitchen elsewhere.

“JUDAS!” is the printable part of that tirade, and as we’ve seen Dan berate Keith for not being there all night, with the same passing-out-at-his-desk dedication Daniel is convinced he brings to the gig, we can understand why Keith is leaving. As we’ve also seen Daniel still-instructing this dishwasher that Daniel turned into a rising star cooking talent to be reckoned with, we kind of get his point, too.

And on tonight of all nights!

Daniel chews out liquor suppliers, and chews out his trusted sommelier (Salvatore Antonio) for telling him that none of them will extend him credit, any more.

Daniel goes toe-to-toe with a self-important food blogger (Lauren Collins), who seems to revel in baiting him and gives as good as she gets.

And then there’s “the hottest food truck in town,” setting up shop just across the street from his gastronomical Mecca, a poke-in-the-eye reminder that he’s not the young, the new, the hip young trend-setter he once was.

Abrams, of TV’s “Hannibal,” chews up these chewing-outs and plays up all the elements that have made the guy who he is — ego, culinary training, an inheritance-financed eatery that he is slaving over, but raging, drinking, abusing and pill-popping into oblivion.

Chorestecki, who like Abrams had a supporting role on “Hannibal,” suggests someone wise to the ways of this world and the perils of an “office romance” within it, but flinty enough to to endure it, recognizing talent and making emotional allowances for it.

Writer-director Jesse Zigelstein gets points for detail and narrowing the focus of his debut feature. He loses points by covering over-familiar ground in a story whose dramatic arc is as pre-ordained as a menu.

“Nose to Tail” winds up as a mixed-bag, with not enough kitchen detail to reward foodies, an under-developed supporting cast, most of the staff characters reduced to barking “YES chef!” the way we’ve seen them follow orders in scores of kitchen-centric tales that preceded it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Aaron Abrams, Lara Jean Chorostecki, Salvatore Antoni,  Lauren Collins  and Brandon McKnight.

Credits: Written and directed by Jesse Zigelstein.   A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:22

A young, gay and lovelorn filmmaker tries to confirm he didn’t just die or go into a monastery after making a splash with his debut film, by releasing and publicizing his second.

We finally get Simon Amstell’s“Benjamin” in streaming release July 24.

The comic book adaptation “The Old Guard” is more interesting for its “changing of the guard” politics than anything it puts on screen.

Netflix made it, wrote a big check for a franchise built around Oscar winner Charlize Theron, with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Matthiaas Schoenaerts in support. Theron and Netflix put a woman behind the camera, Gina Prince-Bythewood, who hasn’t had the sort of career opportunities a debut like “Love & Basketball” should have given her.

Rising star KiKi Layne (“If Beale Street Could Talk,” “Native Son”) was cast as the heroine-in-training.

There are gay characters, and maybe a gay-curious one. “Woke?” It’s Red Bull woke.

There’s good fight choreography and the sheen of a generally-polished action/espionage/travelogue about it.

But the movie? A great big fat meh — no men or women in tights and capes, but nothing much new in comic book movie terms.

Theron sports a world-weary resignation under her stylishly butch haircut, jet-black forelock flopped over one eye, as “Andie,” “boss” of a four person commando team.

“I’m just so tired of it,” she narrates under the opening image, of her bleeding out on the floor of some terrorist lair in Sudan. Not her first time, in other words.

That’s the gimmick here — immortality. Shoot her and Booker (Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) to pieces, and it’s to no avail. They Chumbawamba their way back into the fray.

Then, they’re betrayed. A bio-med billionaire (Harry Melling, the most “Meh” of all) is after them for reasons which you don’t have to read a comic book to guess.

Can “The Old Guard” fight its way out? Can this newly-discovered recruit, a Marine named Nile (Layne) who didn’t die after getting her throat cut in Afghanistan, save them?

I hunted through the credits to be sure to throw kudos where they’re due. No, not to the director (drab, flat storytelling and shot selection) or to Charlize’s hairdresser, but to fight choreographer Daniel Fernandez, who gets this cast and their stunt doubles into some wonderful brawls.

A “Let’s introduce ourselves” fight between Andy and Nile on an old propeller-driven cargo plane uses the space and the ladies and their fists to great effect. It’s a movie with samurai and broadsword slaughter, because these people have been doing this a VERY long time, remember.

Check out the designer battleaxe Theron’s Andy sports.

But it’s always much easier and less time consuming to dispatch villains with guns, so that’s what they do. It’s also lazier and less interesting, cinematically.

The screenplay, by one of the co-creators of the comic, hits the “Let us now praise the leading lady” lines comic-book hard. Most of them are delivered by Schoenaerts.

“That woman has forgotten more ways to kill than entire armies will ever learn.”

Yeah. She bad.

The sexuality stuff is played up to a degree that flirts with pandering. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

But here is the empty space in the middle of movies like this. We know they’re immortal. There are no stakes unless — take a guess, ding ding DING — that’s right, there’s a chance they could LOSE that immortality. And, you know, die.

Granted, take away that supernatural nonsense and what you’re left with is a Netflix action movie starring Chris Hemsworth. Franchise-opener or not, this is as forgettable as that one.

There’s a little backstory, with hints of historical righteousness about it.

“Are you good guys, or bad guys?”

“Depends on the century.”

But the entire affair plays as pro-forma, pre-ordained, pre-digested and pre-dictable.

Rating: R (for sequences of graphic violence, and language)

Cast: Charlize Theron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthias Schoenaerts, Kiki Layne, Marwan Kenzari, Harry Melling, Luca Marinelli.

Credits: Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, script by Greg Rucka, based on the comic book by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernandez. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:05

Love this guy. I follow him on Twitter. VERY outspoken liberal.

I don’t watch the HBO series he’s currently in. But I recognize him. Do you? Another clue. My name and what an actor who has the same name is most famous for. David Hedison co-starred in his films in this long running franchise. Mr Voice-Over is the new David Hedison.

The new Joe Don Baker and Jack Lord, too.

Got it?

The midway point in the low-budget sci-fi thriller “Volition” is a real make-or-break moment. It’s there that this film about a clairvoyant who tries to avert the doom he sees in his future takes a turn and adds on baggage.

Midway is where director and co-writer (with his brother Ryan) Tony Dean Smith decides to graft on a second sci-fi sub-genre to the whole “sees the future” thing. Of their own volition, they give themselves a “do over” element that could easily derail their lean and gritty tale of a seer who gets mixed up with the mob.

But the performances save it. The pathos of the picture pays off. And the puzzle that the Smiths create doesn’t slow down the panicky pace enough to stop it in its tracks.

Adrian Glynn McMorran (Murmur on TV’s “Flash”) gives a sardonic and scruffy Sam Rockwellish take to our hero and narrator, James.

His life? He’s “stuck, watching the re-run,” the fate of someone who sees snippets of his futur —  if he answers this door-knock, ducks that punch or places what he knows will be the right bet.

“If this was simple to explain, I’d do it.”

So he doesn’t. Not even after he’s “rescued” a woman (Magda Apanowicz of “The Green Inferno” and “Caprica”) living in her car from a mugging.

The low-rent mobster Ray (John Cassini) whose front business is a window warehouse? He doesn’t need an explanation. He and James go way back.

“I need you to do that thing you do inside that head of yours.”

He has this diamond score he got from “The Zimbabweans” he needs James to “move” for him. And his cousin Sal (Frank Cassini) will be there to ensure Jimmy doesn’t get any big ideas.

But there are “big ideas” and betrayals. Blood will be spilled, diamonds will disappear, James will consult “Professor Fruitloops,” his “stepfather” (Bill Marchant), and the picture will almost get out of hand, because of that midpoint twist-too-far.

The South African Smith brothers graduate from Canadian TV movies with a film that dispenses with a lot of more conventional elements to zero in on the matter at hand — that awful fate that James sees in his future and how he can avoid it.

It’s a far more interesting film when it’s just focused on the clairvoyant and his machinations to get enough to pay the rent, pay for drinks and generally stagger through life. Even the “big score,” which promises to be a life-changing payout, doesn’t hold that much interest.

James is fascinating in how myopic he is, literally and figuratively. His foresight is narrow in focus, limited enough that he can’t see every ripple that will cross his path from his every action.

The script’s intellectual and moral debate about “fate” and one’s ability to alter or not alter it, is far less compelling than the simple routine of how somebody would use this special talent in unchallenging and limited ways, just to get by.

“All skill and no will,” is Ray’s put-down for the way James lives.

McMorran’s performance suggests the damage this has done to this man’s life, the burdens he carries and the self-medicating he does just to stay in “the present.” Even seeing the near future with an attractive woman is a losing proposition. Where’s the challenge to be at your best when you’ve already seen this play out?

But the Smiths make a classic supernatural thriller mistake with that midpoint twist. “Volition” turns all puzzle and “explanations,” when simpler is always better.

At least they and McMorran keep the focus on James, a character who remains magnetic even if the filmmakers are hellbent on erasing “enigmatic” from his resume.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Adrian Glynn McMorran, Magda Apanowicz, John Cassini, Frank Cassini and Bill Marchant.

Credits: Directed by Tony Dean Smith, script by Tony Dean Smith and Ryan W. Smith. A Giant Pictures release on Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, etc.

Running time: 1:32