Movie Nation

On television?

No. On HBO.

A top drawer writer/director, solid A-, B+ list talent and a haunted house seemingly designed by Maurice Escher class up the mildly-scary thriller, “You Should Have Left.”

It has an A-picture gloss and sophistication often missing from the genre. The dialogue crackles, the situations the stuff of many a domestic melodrama. And the ending makes logical sense, even if the pathos and sucker-punch frights, the terror of real violence, are missing.

Kevin Bacon plays the older, wealthier Angelino who has nabbed himself a much younger movie star wife (Amanda Seyfried). But in this family, “nightmares” are the shared trait. Even six year-old Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) has them. The picture opens with her alarmed at a noise she hears in the night, getting up to close a door, and muttering, in the manner of all Hollywood six-year-olds.

“God dammit!”

The whisper in her ear corrects this behavior, or should.

“Don’t curse, unless you wanna BE cursed!”

Susanna (Seyfried) is in the middle of a shoot, fussing over her husband’s poolside habits like the ultimate “child bride” (or trophy wife).

“Old man…SUN block!”

Theo smiles this off, and suffers the petty humiliations of being denied a visit to the set by some functionary who figures “You’re her father?” Mercifully, Theo can only hear the sex scene that is the order of the day.

But there’s a break between films coming up. Let’s rent a place, and as the British house-hunting show puts it,“Escape to the Country.” They grab a posh “pile” in rural Wales, sight unseen, via an Internet ad.

It’s mysterious and modern, austere and chilly. The rooms are a veritable Escher maze of brick and dim lighting. Perfect!

The dynamics of the family will be put to the test by this place, whose history is muttered by the fussbudget local shopkeeper (Colin Blumenau) Theo meets in what he jokingly calls “The Village of the Damned.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak Welsh,” the American gripes.

“That was ENGLISH.”

Right.

The older man is suspicious of his younger wife, who giggles too much in her many phone conversations with her director. And he’s stuck answering the BIG questions emanating from the six-year old.

“Daddy, because you’re old, you WILL die before Mommy, right?”

Ouch.

“Why do we have to die at all?”

“Life is not survivable.”

The kid is the first one to hear things in the house. They never believe the kid, do they?

The shopkeeper asks the one question that should set off alarm bells –“Anything happen, yet?”

Theo doesn’t exactly shrug any of this off. He’s just consumed with worry that he’ll be recognized. He has a past.

You cast accomplished actors in films like this to get more emotion out of what is too often a formulaic genre. The dividend here is an absolutely real connection between father and daughter. Watch Bacon’s interactions with young Miss Essex. They’re so natural we buy in instantly.

Seyfried gets to send up her screen sex kitten image, playing an actress who complains about her director wanting her to get naked “again,” for scenes that come off “kind of porny.”

Adapter-director David Koepp scripted “Jurassic Park,” a “Spider-Man,” a “Mission: Impossible” and a string of (mostly) hits, the witty “Ghost Town” among them. The dialogue here positively sparkles, characters have realistic motivations and close-to-the-bone reactions to strains in their relationships.

But underplaying the terror of facing the supernatural is always a mistake.

The effects are stark and simple. Mirrors misbehave. A creeper wanders the shadows. How far would YOU go to wake yourself up from every parent’s worst nightmare?

It’s all rather less than the sum of its parts, but the first two thirds of “You Should Leave” impress and engross. It’s a pity we don’t get to see it with an audience. Because if there’s one thing that amplifies tiny frights, it’s other people overreacting as if they’re scared out of their wits.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, disturbing images, sexual content and language

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Amanda Seyfried, Avery Tiiu Essex, Colin Blumenau

Credits: Written and directed by David Koepp, based on the Daniel Kehlmann novel. A Universal/BlumHouse release.

Running time: 1:33

A teenage girl’s coming of age story shines a light on Korean sexism, educational Darwinism and the afterthought that girls seem to be there in “House of Hummingbird,” a sweet and forlorn “year in the life” drama.

The debut feature of Bora Kim is a period piece. She uses an eventful year in Korea — 1994 — and parks the downtrodden, failing student with limited expectations Eun-hee (Ji-hu Park) in it for a drama about the events that could make or break her.

Eun-hee lives in a violently dysfunctional house where her doted-on older brother Daehoon is being tutored and nagged towards college, an academic achievement that might be beyond his reach. He takes out his frustrations on his littlest sister. He learned the violence not just from his father (In-gi Jeong), we come to believe, but from the culture.

Older sister Suhee is still in school as well, but she’ll do anything to not be around the house, only showing up for meals and helping with the family’s baked goods business.

Eun-hee is as badgered as the other two, forced to take an after school “cram class” (tutoring) even though her girls’ school classmates have already singled her out as “housemaid” material.

She’s naively seeing her first boyfriend, who doesn’t seem to want to show her off in public. And even that is just another distraction weighing her down.

Insulted, humiliated or just ignored in class, passing notes instead of taking notes in the tutoring sessions with her pal Jisuk, doodling comic book characters when she should be paying attention, it’s all coming to head.

The headmaster’s pep talk to the kids should put the fear of God into the lot of them.

“Today is the first day (on the road) to your death!”

That’s a lot to carry on your shoulders. Eun-hee is only 14.

Over the course of this year, there will be karaoke sessions with her one or two friends, heartbreak and betrayal, misbehavior and tragedies. And there’ll be a health scare, something it takes a while to get her distracted, depressed mother (Seung-Yun Lee)

The year’s sole saving grace? Her new cram course tutor in Chinese, Miss Yong-ji (Sae-byeok Kim) takes her seriously, doesn’t berate her or raise her voice.

One day, Yong-ji sings a mournful injured-in-the-workplace song, another day she explains Chinese poetry.

“How many people do you know?” She gets an unreasonably high answer. “And now how many of them do you understand? How many of THEM understand what’s going on inside you?”

“House of Hummingbird,” in virtual cinemas (for instance, on your local art cinema’s website) on June 26, lets the momentous events of ’94 (a North Korean dictator dies) pass behind the teens trying to figure out what it is that they’ll be doing for the rest of their lives, when they’ll flower and when life will start to seem worth living.

The girls experiment with smoking, shoplifting, French kissing and thoughts of suicide as they consider the future laid out for them, a marriage where “you’re each other’s furniture,” or some sort of career — but only if you get into Seoul University somehow.

Bora Kim lets the story unfold in its own time, allowing for interludes — Mom’s drunken brother shows up to apologize for sucking up all the family money and energy from her as he was shoved into a life and career he wasn’t smart to handle — and plenty of teen distractions.

It takes a solid hour before we get a hint that maybe Eun-hee isn’t a complete dolt and slacker. “House of Hummingbird” is more interested in the limitations Korea’s patriarchy puts on her than her actual potential, more alarmed by the intense pressure even kids who fall on the “not-the-brightest” end of the spectrum are put under.

The film meanders a bit, and dawdles a bit more. But its compelling and unblinking portrait of a girl’s life, her expectations, prospects, obstacles and second class status announce Ms. Kim, its director, as a talent to watch as a chronicler of female life another of Asia’s “Miracle Economies.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Ji-hu Park, Sae-byeok Kim, Seung-Yun Lee and In-gi Jeong

Credits: Written and directed by Bora Kim. A Well Go/Kino release.

Running time: 2:18

From Variety — AMC Theatres Reverses Course, Will Require Guests to Wear Masks https://t.co/HHdhXmlp04 https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1274027621521797120?s=20

Netflix dips its toes into that most Japanese of film forms, anime, with “A Whisker Away,” a charming, whimsical fantasy that you’d never guess came from the country that gave us “Hello Kitty.”

It’s a body-switch tale about a manic teenage girl who obsesses over a boy, and is lured into getting close to him by taking the guise of a cat.

Miyo (voiced by Mirai Shida in Japanese, with English subtitles) is impulsive and given to acting out. Her mother left her father, and dad’s new live-in girlfriend is a bit young and green to be stepping into mothering.

Miyo crushes on classmate Hinode (Natsuki Hanae). Hard. As in hip-check in hockey or hoops hard. “Sunrise attack!” she shrieks, tumbling into him each morning at school. She can’t tell how embarrassed he is by this.

Maybe the nickname everybody else in school has given her should be her clue. “MUGE, Miss Ultra Gaga Enigmatic.”

Her 14-15 year old problems get the best of her, and she confesses “I hate this stupid world. I wish it would end soon.”

But this Buddha-sized cat she runs into sells cat masks. All she has to do is lend him her “human face mask” and she can see the world through cat’s eyes — literally.

As “Taro” she can get close to Hinode and see his life. She can also leap off roofs into trees, something she takes to doing as Miyo, putting the mask on mid-flight.

Of course, there’s a catch to becoming a cute cat. Several catches, beginning with “I need to wipe my butt” issues and carrying on through to the REAL cost of this “exchange.”

Studio Clorido (a “Pokeman” anime, and “Penguin Highway”) did the animation here, and while it isn’t as rich as the best Studio Ghibli outings, the detail and effects are better than your average TV anime.

Mari Okada’s script is a winner, offering up the usual slices-of-Japanese-life (“festivals,” meals, cats and school life). I wasn’t nuts about the finale, but the Fat Cat with the Masks is a grand creation, and the fanciful alternate world of cats, complete with a “Human Car Bar,” is wonderfully imaginative.

Cats have little more trouble slipping into human guises than humans becoming cats.

The movie may be mostly about teen love, but there are all these subtexts — adored pets and adoring pets who crave sharing their shorter lives with their one human, pet mortality.

The West may have long regarded the East as “inscrutable.” In Japan, they save that word for felines, who come off here as reserved, loyal, observant and aloof. On the money, to anybody who’s ever shared a life with a cat.

Money well spent, Netflix. Let’s see what else you’ve got.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG, fear, violence, smoking.

Cast: The voices of Mirai Shida, Natsuki Hanae, Susumu Chiba.

Credits: Directed by Jun’ichi Satô, Tomotaka Shibayama, script by Mari Okada. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

The Kansas City chain ignored movie going demographics and common sense in deciding to make its theaters COVID and MAGA friendly.

“AMC Theater CEO Adam Aron says their cinemas won’t require masks upon reopening because they didn’t “want to be drawn into a political controversy.”

https://t.co/zNjy9wzGMK https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1273763757592735746?s=20

Needless to say, Twitter is lighting this wingnut up. But as Regal and Cinemark have also said they won’t be requiring masks, it’s not wholly unexpected.

Cinemas, like most businesses, don’t want to scare off any potential customer. Younger people tend to be moviegoers, and more careless about COVID in general. The more rural you get, the fewer masks you see in stores and public places

But big city theaters are going to be dead empty on reopening because of this. AMC is broke as it is. This will hasten their demise, I dare say.

A staged Chinese stunt? A cover-up?

This one has me intrigued.

This July release gave birth to a trailer that is kind of diffuse and all over the place.

Stress? We know. A lot of chefs drink and have bad tempers? We know.

Love life issues? Check.

Might be good, can’t really tell. Can you? I don’t recognize anybody in “Nose to Tail.” TV actors I haven’t seen?

It stars Precious Chong, so of course it’s a dark comedy. That runs in the family.