Movie Nation

“Devil’s Whisper” is a demonic possession thriller with a Spanglish twist. This time, the family under threat has history with this demon, has a kid aspiring to become a Catholic priest under its own roof, and the curses and warnings about that demon are in both Spanish and English.

It’s not terribly scary, though the money spent on this version of the ghoulish, ghostly “Slenderman” monster (they’re always skinny) was worth it.

Alex (Luca Oriel of TV’s “Shamesless”) seems like the perfect son. He’s taken to his fireman stepdad (Marcos A. Ferraez) and idolizes his hip, war-vet priest (Rick Ravanello), so much so that his upcoming Confirmation could very well be his first step toward the priesthood. Even his confessions are PG, PG-13 at best.

“Bless me, Father. I snuck into an R-rated movie with my friends.”

“Why movie, my son?”

“Mad Max.”

“Yeah, I LOVED that.”

But the move to their new house got Alex poking around grandma’s old armoire. That’s where he finds the box with no lid. And after he and stepdad almost short out the lights trying to saw it open, a crucifix pops out. Alex puts it around his neck.

You don’t have to be Catholic to know there’s trouble coming. He sees a specter in his closet, streetlights pop on and off. He hears the “Devil’s Whisper.”

I like the way the film presents the kid as idealized — so devout he won’t “Swear to God” as a teen promise — and then humanizes him. He, like stepdad, lets the occasional cussword out. He lusts after the slightly older Lia (Jasper Polish), a girl who could…teach him things.

Teen drinking, peeping tom exploits with his pals (Don’t try this at home, kids.), kids flipping each other off in church, and all this is BEFORE he gets those Satanic circles under his eyes, before he goes bad.

The story’s secrets are dull, the remedies (priest, shrink) duller, the resolution is tried and true and trite. The lead is more adequate than charismatic.

That applies to the picture, as a whole — almost adequate.

But the depiction of a child turning into a rebellious teen, with a demonic twist, works.

If you’re a demonic possession movie completist, if you simply must see everything in this worn genre that crosses your path as it crosses itself, you could do worse.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, demonic frights, alcohol abuse by teens, and profanity

Cast: Luca Oriel, Rick Ravanello, Tessie Santiago, Marcos A. Ferraez, Jasper Polish

Credits:Directed by Adam Ripp, script by Adam Ripp, Paul Todisco, Oliver Robins. A Vega, Baby!/Sony Home Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:25

He’s been champion of the actor’s art, a great interview and on chat shows from late night TV to “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” a charming and hilarious mimic.

His Oscar-winning career got a third act streaming-TV boost from the Netflix remake of “House of Cards.” Check out his credits. They’ve been piling up in the years since that viperous turn altered his profile.

But it’s all ending, and with shocking abruptness, for Kevin Spacey. The accusations are piling up faster than Larry David can say “He’s the Gay Goy Weinstein.”

I have no take on what the legal implications of his actions — civil or criminal — might be.

But chatting with film buff friends, my first thought on all this was, “It’s going to end him.” Whatever the sins of others, this involves minors, and his “apology” offended every gay person who has fought the lingering image of the gay pedophile who only wants to give boys “experience” (Netflix “L.I.E.” if you want to see that endorsed).

Netflix pulled the plug on Spacey’s hit DC power/sex/intrigue series.

Will his Gore Vidal bio-pic “Gore” ever see the light of day?

And now he’s even being edited out of movies he has in the can. “All the Money in the World” has recast Christopher Plummer in the part and is reshooting Spacey’s scenes.

I’ve interviewed him several times over the years and never noticed anything untoward in his behavior. He puts on his “press face” with the best of them, telling stories of taking his dog to out-of-town tryouts for a play in Winston-Salem, where I used to live, laughing at how he would sneak the dog into the nice hotel where the production put him up. He propped up a failing British theater company, has always been complimentary about co-stars (whatever one heard about power-struggles on the set) and never tired of talking about the craft.

Charming, chilling (he’s made a great villain over the years), he’s always seemed an urbane, acting version of his character in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” cultured — but with secrets.

As in almost every case in this current flood of sexual abuse scandals, “patterns” and “power” are the common threads. Weinstein, Toback, Polanski? Not isolated incidents, but patterns of predatory behavior — many victims.

And Spacey is facing the death penalty his profession, so dependent on public goodwill, metes out.

The only problematic part of that punishment is the way some have dodged judgement — until now.  As any doubt evaporates, with multiple accusers emboldened to come out now that the world will listen, some longtime whispered-about (or accused) alleged offenders are paying the price and others, not yet.

When will Switzerland and France get a clue about Polanski? Don’t give me the “He’s too old to assault underage girls any more” defense. Lame. And Woody Allen? All those stars lining up to make his increasingly tone-deaf pictures?  How is that justified in this climate?

Spacey’s career might be justifiably over, but if Hollywood is finally addressing this cloud (Why was convicted offender Victor Salva repeatedly re-employed?), Toback’s, Polanski’s and yes, Woody Allen’s careers are worth questioning. Power and patterns of predatory behavior are what you look for. Will they have the guts to treat every offender the same, at long last?

Long before “Seinfeld” gave us “Festivus,” “feats of strength” were a regular feature of vaudeville, touring circuses and The Roaring ’20s.

That was the heyday of  “The Mighty Atom,” a steel-bending, car-pulling (with his teeth, or his hair), chain biting (in two) 5’4″ 148 pound dynamo whose story is classic “98 lb. weakling” legend.

His exploits alone made him worth remembering, but the fact that he was Jewish has made Joseph Greenstein’s life the subject of magazine articles, books and documentaries.

After all, jokes his grandson Steven Greenstein, “The list of Jewish superheroes is kind of low,” in the documentary he made about his grandpa.

“The Mighty Atom” is an engagingly adoring film featuring lots of interviews with other Greensteins (Joseph’s fellow-strongman sons) that takes a lot of what Joe did and said at face value. And even though, in the film’s closing act, they admit that Joseph lied about his age to make his feats seem even greater than they were, you accept their credulity at face value.

The unquestionable claim they make, as a family, is that “there was a touch of P.T. Barnum” in the man.

And yet there’s film footage of Joe stopping an airplane from taking off, yanking a car down the street by his teeth or hair, bending railroad spikes and turning steel bars into “scrolls,” curls of metal.

An expert on biomechanics from Texas State U. talks about the parameters of human physical strength, and how Joe might have done what he claims he did.

A team from Bradenton, Florida’s MOTUS Academy may show how difficult it is to replicate Joe’s stunts (using a modern day strongman and motion-capture technology to measure the power generated by hands, thumbs and grip necessary to bend a horseshoe.

And a higher-up from Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, where The Mighty Atom’s exploits were heralded in print and in their “Odditoriums” all over the world, recounts their verification.

“If it’s in Ripley’s, it’s real.”

Still, the more skeptical among us can question the man’s origin story, running away to join the circus as a tubercular shrimp, mentored by a circus wrestler, learning (on location) the secrets of diet, training and focus of India and Asia, getting his “big break” by changing the tire on Harry Houdini’s car in 1920s Galveston, Texas.

“Did it without a jack,” his son Mike (also an elderly strongman) marvels. Joe just “picked the car up, with Houdini in it,” pulled one tire off and put another on.

“The Mighty Atom,” largely built around those interviews and a 1967 radio talk Joe gave to WNBC in New York, wanders off topic from time to time. Other strongmen show off their specialties, a young woman relates how she lifted a car that had fallen on her father. There’s speculation that the Jewish creators of “Superman” might have been inspired by The Mighty Atom’s well-publicized exploits.

But even if you take all this as pure hokum with a heaping helping of hype, Greenstein’s documentary about his grandpa (and still muscular Uncle Mike, pulling cars on TV at 91) can be savored for its recollection of American live entertainment during the Jazz Age, and for a family legend that, if it isn’t the literal truth, is still too colorful and entertaining to not repeat.

MPAA Rating: Unrated

Cast: Joseph Greenstein, Mike Greenstein, Steven Greenstein

Credits: Written and directed by Steven Greenstein. A Squad 47 release.

Running time: 1:15

Not everyone who survived the Holocaust is cut out to bear witness on it for the rest of us.

Some never got over the trauma, never wanted to mention it, even to family, never wore short sleeves so that others could see the numbers tattooed on their arms.

“A normal person would not understand” these “horrible, horrible things,” many might say.

That was Sonia Warshawski for much of her life. A Polish Jew who survived three death camps, as a teen, she married another survivor, emigrated to Kansas City and with her husband, John, ran a tailoring shop there.  They raised their kids, who didn’t want to ask about the “hell” they’d been through, even though John would wail in his sleep.

“I keep myself busy,” Sonia says to this day, 92 and still driving her ancient Oldsmobile to work, tailoring to fiercely loyal customers. The work “keeps me from thinking about it.”

But as Sonia became “the last Holocaust survivor in town” able to speak, she took it on herself to do just that. The tiny Polish woman whom her granddaughter (filmmaker Leah Warshawski) nicknamed “Big Sonia” is the subject of a moving, engaging documentary that asks a very hard question. As the last of these survivors is silenced by age and death, who will bear witness?

Leah and co-director Todd Soliday build this genial, unsurprising film around a long public radio interview with Sonia, their own interview with her, animated needlepoint illustrations inspired by Sonia’s way of using that hobby to remember, and her many public speaking engagements, in and around Kansas City.

We meet fellow survivors and her children, who recall how ashamed they could get when they realized they were giving a parent who had been “in hell” a hard time. And we see Sonia speak to high school kids, who break down in tears, to prison inmates who admit, “She’s a LOT tougher than I am.”

Sonia figures “if I can reach their hearts,” maybe some of these touch-and-go audience members will “make a change in their lives.” Whatever else she offers in her stories of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Majdanek, she stands as a testament to human survival, the ability to recover and carry on.

Conveniently, the film offers one last struggle facing this woman who has literally seen it all. The last tenant in a dead shopping mall, she faces eviction. If you think that can stop her, you haven’t been reading along as carefully as I’d hope.

The animation is the one novel element to this, a familiar sort of film on a most familiar subject. But the movie lets its subject — Sonia —  be its strength, and if you’ve ever had the privilege of meeting a survivor willing to talk about what they experienced, you know how smart that decision was.

I’ve interviewed several over the years, and like Sonia, it seems like every city I’ve lived in had that one person willing to talk, in heavily-accented English, and could hold you spellbound with just an image painted with words.

As the last of these, the toughest humans among us, finally die off, films like this will be our main resource against deniers, our last reminder that tiny women like “Big Sonia” experienced the unbelievable, and lived only to tell the future what happened.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with Holocaust descriptions and imagery

Cast: Sonia Warshawski, her siblings, children and grandchildren

Credits:Directed byTodd Soliday, Leah Warshawski. An Argot release.

Running time:1:33

Before Watergate, the story that made the once-sleepy, provincial Washington Post’s political reputation was the publishing of “The Pentagon Papers.”

Steven Spielberg has rounded up Oscar winners Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, and vast collection of top flight character actors (Hey now, Bob Oedenkirk!), naturally including Bruce Greenwood (Can’t do a political movie without our favorite Kennedy look-alike) to tell this dramatic, timely story about a newspaper that now has “Democracy dies in Darkness” as its motto.

Christmas.

Kenneth Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express” shimmers off the screen, a film that luxuriates in luxury. It has scale and detail, “Zhivago” lush in every frame, care in every dazzling and perfectly appointed camera angle.

We may have forgotten that people used to compare Branagh, with his love of Shakespeare and flair for camera technique, with Orson Welles. Here’s an eye-popping reminder that the director of “Henry V” and “Thor” knows how to have fun with an Agatha Christie whodunit.

But silly? Old fashioned? Oh my, yes. From its stock characters, who reveal everything we need to know about them in a perfectly-coiffed and costumed look, to the epic melodramatic flourishes that curl through the picture like hero detective Hercule Poirot’s immaculate mustache, rest assured that here is that holiday movie you can take mom — and grandmom — to on Thanksgiving.

Branagh plays Poirot like a fine Christmas ham, from Smithfield by way of Brussels.

“Forgive me, I am Bel-JEE-un,” he purrs, correcting everyone who mispronounces his first-name. No, not Hercules.

“Err-CULE Poirot. I do not SLAY the lions.”

He sees all, but he isn’t just some human databank like Sherlock Holmes. “I can only see the world as it should be.” Anything else stands out, imperfection — alteration — those add up to clues.

The film opens in delight and wonder as Poirot puts on a quick show at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. A rabbi, an imam and a priest are accused of a theft, and “only the (self-described) greatest detective in the world” can crack the case (and the groaning joke about those three) in an instant and placate the city’s quarreling religious factions with his solution.

He’s off to Istanbul, soaking up the pastries and great kitchens of the finest hotels that 1934 has to offer. Then, his scoundrel of a young friend (Tom Bateman) secures him a place on the world’s most exclusive train — the Orient Express. The ever-“exhausted” Poirot can restfully ride the rails through the Balkans, Austria and France in style with a crowd of only the best sorts of  people.

Well, not exactly.

An American “art dealer” who fears for his life (Johnny Depp, scarred and Capone-ish) tries to hire Poirot for protection. Poirot demurs, and the aptly-named Ratchett turns up dead in his sleeper car.

Who did it? His private secretary (Josh Gad), valet (Branagh’s good-luck charm, Derek Jacobi), the governess (Daisy Ridley of “Star Wars”) or her doctor/lover (Leslie Odom Jr.)? Or was it the racist Austrian engineer (Willem Dafoe), the aging, oft-married socialite (Michelle Pfeiffer), the pious but two-fisted missionary (Penelope Cruz), the Russian princess (Judi Dench), the Latin chauffeur (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the hotheaded dancer/count (Sergei Polunin)?

Branagh, to his credit, doesn’t force us to mull over the possibilities. He runs us past them at a near gallop, dealing with each necessary interrogation scene briskly, with witty banter and extreme close-ups glossing over the cliched “My life story” semi-confessions.

Everybody lies, everybody has a secret and intrigue piles upon intrigue, with the odd bit of flirting, even though Poirot knows “ROMANCE nev-airrrrr goes un-PUNISHED.”

The ending is laugh-out-loud ludicrous, and the stops (the train gets snowbound — imagine that) dictated by a very old formula.

But it is the stylish journey, mon amis, that matters , not the destination.

The players, to a one, play this as the lark it is, with Pfeiffer, Gad, Jacobi and Cruz standing out. Branagh, the rake, lets his camera develop a crush on Ridley.

But if Sir Kenneth doesn’t make you laugh as your plummy tour guide through all this coincidence, melodrama and holiday ham, turn to mom. She’s the one who’ll get the hoary archetypes from the day when literature, at least, gave us celebrity detectives. She’s the one who’ll appreciate crime-solving braggadocio, Agatha Christie-style.

“Eef it were EAS-ee, I would not be FA-mous!”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and thematic elements

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench Penelope Cruz, Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi

Credits:Directed by Kenneth Branagh script by Michael Green, based on the Agatha Christie novel. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:54

Barbara Kopple is one of the legends of documentary filmmaking. “Harlan County, USA,” a riveting cinema verite account of a bitterly fought miner’s strike in Kentucky, collected an Oscar in 1976. “Shut Up and Sing” was a stinging remembrance of the price country music’s Dixie Chicks paid for speaking out against a war and an incompetent president.

When ESPN wanted to tackle the history, money and power of Yankees ownership during its glory days, Kopple came in to film the “30 for 30” “House of Steinbrenner.”

So there are expectations built into any film she puts her name on. As “A Murder in Mansfield” begins, the mind races about where she might go with this recounting of a 27 year old murder case.

An Ohio doctor is accused of bludgeoning his wife to death, burying her under the concrete floor in his basement, so that he could marry his pregnant mistress and not pay alimony in doing it. And the star witness for the prosecution, the person who seals his fate is his 12 year-old son.

In courtroom footage, young Collier Boyle is composed. He answers questions in the polished language of an adult. He uses terminology that seems straight from TV courtroom dramas, and when he stumbles off-script, he giggles and corrects himself.

When the big questions lead to the dramatic accusation, what he heard, what he was sure had happened, he turns, with theatrical flair, to the jury — Or is it the camera? — to finger the man who bludgeoned and buried his beloved mother.

This footage is so dramatic, so loaded that you can see why Kopple would use it. Is she setting us up for an expose of the justice system, how very young witnesses can be coached to win (perhaps unjust) convictions?

No. The doctor, a murderer without remorse, did it. When you’ve bought a jackhammer a couple of days before committing the crime, that’s about as clear a case of premeditation as we could ever hope to see.

What Kopple and aspiring filmmaker Collier (who now goes by Collier Landry) are interested in exploring here is the ripple effect of a single act of violence, the lives overturned, the chasm left in lives by the sudden loss of a mother, a friend, a pillar of a community.

Collier wanted, back then on the witness stand, to “do right by my mother,” who indulged him, took him with her everywhere and was raising him in her image — a mamma’s boy who appreciates the finer things (Louis Vuitton handbags, etc). Now he’s looking for closure, to meet the adoptive sister that the state separated from him when their father was convicted, to renew acquaintances with families that took him in, the detective who investigated the case, others who knew his mother.

He wants to wring a confession and sense of remorse from his estranged (adoptive) father, a man who tellingly nicknamed him “Stupid Little Fat Boy” in his childhood. Collier wants revenge.

And if none of that sounds terribly compelling, feel free to check out of this review right now. Because, in all honesty, it isn’t.

Collier talks the new owners of his parents’ house into letting him tour it, and dramatically points out where the crime was committed, how near he was to dying the same night (or perhaps later, as his father wanted to take him on a “vacation” to Mexico). He hears from the people who took him in, who remind him of the curious questions he asked after moving in — their income, how many Louis Vuitton bags the foster mother owned.

He never meets and renews his relationship with the much-younger sister whom he claims actually witnessed the murder.

Basically, this is a film that directs us to a final confrontation with the still-imprisoned father (whom Collier vouched for in parole hearings), trying to wrangle a blunt admission of his guilt.

Landry doesn’t make the most riveting tour guide through all this, even in the most emotional moments. He comes off as affected and effeminate in the archival footage at age 12, and that’s just as glaringly obvious (and unaddressed in the movie) now.

The best footage is that courtroom coverage in the film’s opening, and an absolutely chilling police video of the basement search, the digging and the discovery and removal of his mother’s body, something Landry sees for the first time, on camera.

It’s just awful, and you can see the film’s thesis — a crime of violence rippling through lives and through time — in just that scene. Who could know somebody murdered like that, and the details of it, and not be scarred for life?

It’s a shame that the rest of “A Murder in Mansfield” is so utterly routine, strictly cable TV “true crime” filler. Kopple has done better, and in the decades since she became a documentary film icon, many others tackling similar subjects have as well. “Mansfield” feels incomplete, reality TV that doesn’t quite the deliver the drama.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic crime scene photos, murder discussed explicitly.

Cast: Collier Landry, Dr. John Boyle

Credits:Directed by Barbara Kopple. A Cabin Creek release.

Running time: 1:29

Remember all that fuss, the actors who quit “Fifty Shades of Grey” before the cameras rolled?

Whatever the financial payoff, three films into this franchise have proven this much. The sterile, kinky female wish fulfillment fantasy trilogy hasn’t made stars out of Dakota Johnson or Jamie Dornan.

The films, collectively (“Fifty Shades Freed” opens Valentine’s Day) play like “Showgirls” without Vegas, “Pretty Woman” without Hector Elizondo.

Sex without heat, “love” without actors who convince us of it, fabulous wealth — on screen and off — painting over the problems.

Two children, separated by half a century, experience the marvels of the Big City as they explore it, alone, in “Wonderstruck,” Todd Haynes’ fanciful film of the Brian Selznick novel.

Adults are invited to tap into the magic of childhood adventure, the magical realism that connects these kids across the ages. Kids may be challenged by its arcane history, its connections and coincidences and its pacing, but rewarded for paying close attention to the mystery the movie asks us to help solve.

Ben, played by the properly mop-topped Oakes Fegley, has just lost his mom (Michelle Williams) and his hearing. He’s haunted by nightmares of wolves chasing him through the snow, and by a book about the history of museums — which began as “Cabinets of Wonder,” assembled by collectors of the curious, the odd and the historically/scientifically significant.

That draws him to New York, deaf and too-young to buy a ticket, with Midwestern “victim” written all over him in the predator-ridden Rotten Apple of the mid-1970s.

Fifty years earlier, Rose (Millicent Simmonds) leaves her New Jersey home and makes a similar trek on a similar quest. There’s a stage and silent screen actress (Julianne Moore, perfect in a two-role performance) she’s obsessed with and determined to meet, perhaps backstage in her latest production (a Louis XIV period piece)

The kids don’t know of one another’s existence.  They don’t communicate across time. But they’re connected. The movie makes that plain even as it takes its sweet time laying out the clues that cement that bond.

Haynes (“Far From Heaven”) is most at home in the seedy ’70s, marching Ben through a city he can only gape at in awe. He can’t hear, but he finds a friend (Jaden Michael, a sparkling, open-hearted presence) who stashes the broke, homeless newcomer in the Museum of Natural History, where Jamie’s dad works.

Ben’s sometimes perilous (this was pre-Americans with Disabilities Act NYC), often-silent Polaroid-tinted journey contrasts sharply with Rose’s cacophonous black and white world of trolleys, horse-drawn carts and smokey, noisy 1920s automobiles.

Selznick’s tale keeps these stories apart, but points toward the connective tissue. “Where do I belong?”

Yes, the New York Worlds Fairs play a role, as does that book. The story intersections only peek out, here and there. And the film, which plays a bit long, leads us up blind alleys that serve no real purpose.

But “Wonderstuck” still lives up to its title, an almost enchanting, always fascinating story that reminds us that “Six Degrees of Separation” often overstates that distance, that the past is a lot closer to the present than we think.

MPAA Rating:PG for thematic elements and smoking

Cast: Millicent Simmonds, Oakes Fegley, Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Jaden Michael

Credits:Directed by Todd Haynes, script by Brian Selznick, based on his novel. An Amazon Studios/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:56

In the interest of transparency, and perhaps to avoid shipping out another form email to a studio publicist irate over which “embargo” they’ve placed on whatever movie they have entering the marketplace, let me put a few thoughts down here on this subject.

News embargoes are what producers — of cars, books, TV shows, electric lawnmowers and movies — use to control who gets to talk about their product and when.

They want to control the flow of information about their product, want it to peak just as it is available to the general public — information released just early enough to build anticipation, just late enough where a bad notice cannot kill that product in the marketplace.

It’s understandable, especially with costly cars, movies/TV shows etc. You want to do everything you can to ensure you make money off it, control “bad buzz,” and your deal with the devil is that you press the press to help you get the word out.

But sometimes the press isn’t going to like your Tesla/novel/Major Motion Picture.

Thus, embargoes, which in the motion picture world, have gotten completely out of hand.

Sure, movie reviewing/criticism has lost much of its punch over the years, and the audience has, in fits and spurts, shrunk — especially this year.

Now every studio, from the majors to the tiniest of the minors, wants to slap an embargo on reviews of their product. And everybody throws a different date on it. Everybody wants to cherry-pick who gets to review their movie, and get good reviews out before bad ones.

Sometimes, they embargo reviews before whatever they’re calling the “premiere.” Understandable, again. But a reason in and of itself to delay getting the word out about a project? No.

To be clear, I don’t work for these “flaks,” I work for myself — and you. Always have.  And I have a very low tolerance for this crap.

It’s bad enough when a Disney/Pixar/Marvel, Warners, Fox, Paramount, Sony/Tristar/Columbia/ScreenGems, Universal/Focus, Lionsgate or the doomed Weinstein Co. tries to unlevel the playing field and “control” what is said, by whom and when. Smaller studios are pulling the same nonsense, in imitation of the big boys.

And the big boys, for those following what Disney is trying to do to the Los Angeles Times, play rough.

Here’s an email I got with a screener link to a DOCUMENTARY released by a ONE OFF tiny distributor, just today — “Reviews embargoed for 11/12 at 7:45pm.”

Oh? What arbitrary set of circumstances dictate that you should SPRING your barely-released non-fiction (ever so tiny audience) upon the world at that time? Is it after the.director’s gone to bed, so she won’t have to see a bad notice? The dear.

That’s insane. There’s no set, generally agreed-upon day/date (two days before release, midnight, for instance) among this lot. Everybody has their own theory of when “buzz” and # traffic should peak for a film. It’s a load of bollocks, especially for tiny operators with next to nothing for a marketing budget for a movie.

They depend on reviewers to upload and play their trailers, because they don’t pay to put them on TV and theater chains only have so many spots to squeeze one in before a given “feature presentation.”

They depend on reviewers to generate ALL the interest their film garners. And then they want to force every review to post at whatever whimsically-chosen time some dope in marketing dictates. Aside from the innate stupidity of that (They think your average smart phone user will go through 25 movies whose reviews are all posted in the last hours before release? “Think” doesn’t figure into it.), it’s unfair and arbitrary for the people doing their heavy lifting for them — critics.

As a general rule, I respect the embargo. So long as that is made clear before I see the movie. These after-the-fact “By the way, there’s an embargo” emails that come my way if the studio publicist gets it in his or her head that I don’t like their movie, I laugh off. A “Please” in the embargo note is just a suggestion. I know you want all reviews of the movie to pour out at the same time. It never happens, and pretending that it does (aside from “Bad Moms Christmas”) is living in denial.

Seriously. Stop it.

People in my position have to take each movie/review/embargo on a case-by-case basis. I see it as “an embargo is either for everyone, or it’s for no one.” If there’s another review out there in the ether, by God I’m posting mine.

Publicists who cannot read a calendar and insist an embargo stay in force AFTER a movie has opened (in some markets, any markets) I ignore, maybe with a laugh.

Any outmoded model that hidebound studios stick to, that “the trades” get to post the first reviews, is bull. It’s not 1979 any more.

Fanboy sites getting first crack at this or that genre piece isn’t unheard of, but it’s a manipulation of the system, “band-wagoning” in propaganda terms. I don’t sit back and wait for some phantom date to pass in those cases. If I’m the first guy to pan a bad horror, sci-fi or comic book movie, I win.

Once a review of mine is posted, it stays posted — aggregated. That’s that. Not breaking the links.

Something that publicists with small studios don’t seem to appreciate is how there are a limited number of hours in the day, days in the week, etc., and that any movie somebody takes the time to watch, takes notes on and then review, is doing them a favor.

I review 600-700 films a year — limited release documentaries, Monterey Media, Gravitas Ventures, Fox Searchlight, IFC, Film Arcade, Shout! Factory, STX, Netflix, Amazon Studios, Cohen Media Group — I get to as many as I can. For those reviews to be worth my trouble, they have to enjoy a longer shelf life to generate any traffic at all. That means I post the review on my schedule, not theirs.

Every week is jammed with pictures to review, posting them all the same day or the same two days does neither the movie nor my website any favors. I spread them out, writing while it is fresh in my memory, posting it within a reasonable period approximating opening day.

Over the 35 years or so I’ve been reviewing, I get blowback on this from time to time, but that’s the way it is. You want me to spend my time on your movie that’s opening in 6 theaters and going on PPV a week later, I am posting as soon as I’m done seeing it. Grow up.

Most recognize that any early review is like priming the pump. If I see other reviews rattling in for a film, I take a look at who is in that movie and what it’s about. That helps motivate me to track down a screening or a screener and weigh in on it with a review. Other critics do the same. Reviews snowball for movies we see others reviewing. Every week, a few tiny releases get no reviews at all. That’s another favor I’m doing them  — the studio, the publicist for that studio — pointing out, “Hey, this one’s worth your trouble, too!”

The latest ruffled embargo feathers are over a movie that opened in limited release on Labor Day weekend, the worst movie-going weekend of the year. This summer’s ticket sales were so low that Labor Day promised to be exactly what it was — the lowest turnout of moviegoers in decades.

No studio that expects to make a dime out of a movie ever releases said movie on Labor Day. None.

The Film Arcade had a wan, listless Lake Bell not-so-near-miss they were pushing to get reviewed, got it to me early, and I reviewed it. Not a cruel takedown, as I’m a Lake Bell fan, just a pan. A simple, deserved pan. And I had to hear about it from a harassing publicist for a solid week (I posted an extra week or so out).

The stakes were low, a movie that was never going to make a dime, a review whose online traffic (practically zilch) reflected that. But scores of calls and emails suggested the world would end if “I Do…Until I Don’t” wasn’t reviewed until the very cusp of opening day. I don’t bend in these cases. And the world? It didn’t end.

Publicists “punish” critics by denying us access to their product, and fair is fair. Disney is probably the worst at that, but Universal, Sony and others have been known to pull that on people like me.

You don’t have to show me your wares pre-release. Many movies aren’t previewed at all  (Hellooooo “Bad Moms Christmas.”). I see a lot of movies in theaters with paying audiences opening night. This irked Film Arcade contract publicist also handles Bleecker St. films, and he figures denying access to their product suits his Film Arcade tantrum as well. Not sure how Bleecker Street feels about that. They’re going to need help selling “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” and cutting them off from my take is their loss, not mine. Take Mom to “Orient Express.”

But again, I don’t work for them or him, and if I have to see something of theirs opening day, that’s their right. Mastering the art of the perfect, cutting-to-the-chase Rottentomatoes blurb is mine. I don’t trash good movies, no matter how petty their publicists, but there’s nothing wrong with taking a special glee is nuking a dog they’ve tried to hide from the paying public or its critic-surrogates. And that perfect blurb? That’s how you “win” Rottentomatoes over opening weekend. I’m very good at that, Bleecker St.

Nobody hides a movie they’re proud of, and whatever you think of reviewers/critics, the vast majority of movies desperately need the attention, ANY attention, a small movie gets from us.

Why else is my in-box jammed with pitches every single day?

Why else would a director I know be emailing for suggestions as to how he could improve the aggregate score of his latest? Every little sliver of spotlight helps. He knows it, I know it, and Mr. Film Arcade/Bleecker St. should know it.