Movie Nation

Hey Jude, what’s with the doll?

You’re a big boy, turn out that night-light.

Remember, the voices are just in your head. Just stick to your bed. And never forget the doll’s rules. Or you know, he’ll kill you…

It’s back to Jolly Olde for “Brahms: The Boy II,” a horror sequel about the Victorian collectible with the insanely-lifelike green glass eyes, a doll that doesn’t walk and doesn’t talk.

Not to YOU, anyway. Not if you’re the parents (Katie Holmes, Owain Yeoman) whose beautiful little boy (Christopher Convery) has dug up this doll in the woods near a familiar English estate.

Jude, the kid, stopped speaking after a home invasion that almost got Mummy killed back in London. He was a normal child with the most grotesque Tim Burtonesque wall decor, “too big for a nightlight” when we meet him, a lover of pranks he likes to play on Mum.

One violent robbery later and this is the family where trauma lives. Liza has headaches and nightmares and Jude’s stopped talking. His shrink (Anjali Jay) can’t fix him. He just scribbles notes on his pad, in between pages upon pages of the most morbid memories of that awful night scrawled in alarming drawings.

The “fresh start” in the country isn’t one the moment the kid is summoned by a voice to dig up the doll from hell in the woods.

What’s the dolly’s name, son?

“Brahms” he writes. “Like the composer,” Dad says. “How’d you come up with that?”

“He told me.”

As is the way of such formulaic horror, the adults are slow to take the kid’s warnings that the doll is talking to him, that Brahms is “angry” if you break his “rules” (“No guests.” Brahms must take his meals with Jude. “Never leave me alone.”).

The groundskeeper of the old estate next door (Ralph Ineson) seems to recognize the doll. And the guy’s Alsasian can’t stop growling. He knows.

There is one seriously suspenseful scene in the script, and it’s suspenseful because the trailers to the movie have given it away. Nothing else in it is scary, and the third act’s a career-killing embarrassment.

There’s little rising panic, paranoia or questioning her sanity in Holmes’ performance as the mother. She has to be wondering if this doll is freaking her out because of her own fragile state. Aside from soft focus wooziness effects, Holmes doesn’t do justice to this.

Fiercely protective Mom? That she acts the hell out of. The kid isn’t nearly creepy enough. The movie might work better — or just a tiny bit better — if he was absorbing more of the doll’s malevolence.

As it is, this “Brahms” is a lullaby of horror, lulling you to sleep without any threat of nightmares.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for terror, violence, disturbing images and thematic elements.

Cast: Katie Holmes, Christopher Convery, Owain Yeoman, Anjali Jay, Ralph Ineson

Credits: Directed by William Brent Bell, script by Stacy Menear. An STX release.

Running time: 1:26

“Rag Doll” is a boxing-my-way-out-of-a-jam drama that flirts with being interesting, in between passages of middling melodrama and wilder, illogical “Nobody’ll see THAT coming” surprises.

It’s a fight picture of slo-motion bouts (for the most part, hides the skill levels of the fighters), obstacles that build, misery upon misery, and a whole lot of stuff that happens off camera when less interesting stuff is what we’re often treated to on camera.

The twist here is that the mixed martial arts fighter is a woman, a pale redhead named Nora Phoenix (Shannon Murray of “The Maestro”). And the stuff she’s dealing with, man…

She’s got a sick mother (Stephanie Erb) who makes jokes about dying.

“Who wants to sit around and watch me fall apart?”

She’s broke, even though she works as a hotel maid and turns tricks on the side. The other maids hate her “lazy” guts.

And she trains. “Ok, let’s see some Jiu JITSU!” her trainer (Dot-Marie Jones) bellows. Nora’s appearance has earned her the nickname “Rag Doll” at the gym. But she’s a ready-to-suffer sparring partner/punching bag for contender Aisha (Roxana Sanchez).

Oh, and she’s attracted to Aisha. Anything I’m leaving out?

“Rag Doll” follows Nora on a downward spiral, disinterested at work — and exhausted — appeasing her mouthy mom’s caregiver and dealing with the unwanted attentions of an Uber “guy who is well-balanced on his meds” (Dante Basco), a nice man who paid her mom’s co-pay at the pharmacy once.

Sanchez is a far more convincing fighter than Murray, Erb is one of those too-healthy-looking dying actresses.

Basco? He gives the fussiest, most mannered and irritating nothing of a performance I’ve seen in a while.

Seriously, if the script does you no favors, adding vocal tics and stammers and fidgets — he IS supposed to be medicated — isn’t going to help.

“Rag Doll” is at its most involving when it’s depicting the simple struggle of keeping all these wolves at bay — depression, doubt, poverty, etc. The fights, including “the big tournament,” are cliches right down to the ringside “coverage” of a small time event that isn’t on TV, but the “announcers” treat it that way.

Very “Bad News Bears/Pitch Perfect.”

Murray is kind of “indie film convincing” in the octagon (cage matches), but comes off too fragile to get in there and throw a punch. The wrestling part of the training, close-ups and sound effects of tendons straining, is far more realistic. And that’s due to editing.

She and the film collected a few lesser film festival prizes over the last year. Needless to say, I don’t see it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, MMA violence, profanity

Cast: Shannon Murray, Stephanie Erb, Roxana Sanchez, Dante Basco, and  Dot-Marie Jones

Credits: Directed by Bailey Kobe, script by Darren Longley.  A DoubleEntente release.

Running time: 1:44

The messaging in “Rich Kid$” might be heavy-handed, preachy even. The plot twists can be melodramatic and predictable. It’s still a fine indie calling card for all involved — in front of and behind the camera.

It’s “The Breakfast Club” meets “The Bling Ring” with a barrio accent, a well-acted day of escape for poor teens sampling the life of “los ricos,” “the rich folks,” just for a day.

It hangs on one question, just thrown out there in the middle of a pool party in a McMansion that turns into breaking and entering.

“So when did you find out your family was poor?”

Matias (Gerardo M Velasquez) has known for a while. His family getting evicted on this Labor Day morning confirmed it.

He spends just enough time pondering the problem to dive into teenage denial. He runs into somebody who knows a gated house with a pool. The “gringos” aren’t home. Pool party!

Nervous wreck cousin Steve (Justin Rodriguez) thinks they’ll get out without incurring extra risk. Then Matias invites smart Vanessa, bookish Izzyy and sexy Jasmime (Michelle Magallon, Naomë Antoinette,  Alessandra Manon) over.

“Today, this is all ours! Today, we are ‘los ricos!'”

It’s a party! Romping in the pool, raiding the owners’ bar and emptying his bottles of Midori and what not.

And might romance be in the air? Matias has been sweet on Vanessa since childhood.

But local shoplifter/thug Carlos (Ulysses Montoya, terrific) gave Matias a cell he lifted from “Wally Martinez” (WalMart). He’s owed a favor. When he shows up, things have nowhere to go but “wrong.”

“Oh my God, this is just like GTA!” That’s “Grand Theft Auto” for the uninitiated.

The kids have personalities that add to the “types” they’re playing. Vanessa is a feminist, in addition to being the “one who most wants to get out.” Matias is smart, too, but he’s the king of “You can’t let Carlos DO that to you” to Steve, when Matias is just as intimidated by the “hard” guy as his sniveling cousin.

The David Saldaña, Laura Somers script (which she directed) takes corny turns — “Let’s get dressed up” in the rich folks’ cloths, “Let’s play ‘Truth or Dare!'” But it sometimes transforms those teen-party-picture cliches into something sharper.

The slang is solid, and it’s un-PC but funny to see kids recalling their parents’ Mexican toast.

“Arriba, abajo, al centro y pa’dentro,” “Up, down and in the middle, bottom’s up!”

“Rich Kid$” made a little noise on the festival circuit. Parking it on Netflix should be a “Hire me, I’m good” ad for everybody involved.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, alcohol and marijuana abuse

Cast: Gerardo M Velasquez, Justin Rodriguez, Michelle Magallon, Naomë Antoinette,  Alessandra Manon and Ulysses Montoya.

Credits Directed by Laura Somers, scripted by David Saldaña, Laura Somers. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Not previewed for critics, Katie Homes is the big name in the cast.

But it could be great, right?

This murder mystery — Or was it an accident? — set around an IPO that could make a lot of people rich has a sparkling cast and is based on a best seller.

“Human Capital” will have limited release on March 20.

There’s a warm emotional payoff at the very end — the VERY end — of Pixar’s latest, “Onward.” It’s about fathers and sons, father figures and brotherly love. And it’s about 90 minutes too late to save the movie.

We’ve already been through 90+ minutes of a mashup of every wizard, witch, magic and sorcery trope blended into a story of elvish teens trying to have one more conversation with their long-dead father. The ugly truth of their “quest” is there isn’t a laugh in it.

This may not be Pixar’s worst movie — anything with “Cars” or “Planes” (they try to deny the lineage of that “Cars” spinoff, not having it) in the title, or “Monsters University” own that label. But it sure feels like the weakest.

In a world where centaurs and trolls, ogres and elves, flying unicorns and fire-breathing dragons never went away, science and industry have made lives better and “the magic faded away.”

Ian, voiced by “Spider-Man” Tom Holland, is turning 16 — friendless, with a bucket list that includes making friends, learning to drive and the like.  Mom (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, but not that I could tell) dotes on him, worries about her boys growing up without a father.

But she’s dating a corny centaur cop (Mel Rodriguez). Older bro Barley (the unmistakable Chris Pratt) is a bit distracted, too. And an embarrassment. He’s “taking the world’s longest ‘gap year’ (as Mom puts it), and WAY too into role playing games like “Quests of Yore.” He swears that all this magic stuff in the games “really happened.”

Contrived plot point number one is their late father’s decision to leave them a present to open “when both of you are over 16.” It’s a wizard’s staff. Accountant Dad liked to dabble, apparently.

Super-enthusiastic Barley has this idea to bring Dad back though a “visitation spell,” but he can’t make the darned thing work. The staff, like a wand at Oleander’s wand shop at Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter,” choses who gets to use it. Ian it is.

Clumsy fan-boy Barley interrupts Ian’s version of the spell, breaks the staff’s “Phoenix Gem,” and darn it — Dad only half-materializes. They’ve got 24 hours to find another Phoenix Gem to get their brief reunion with the father Ian never met.

They pile into Barley’s beater of a van and set off on their quest, stopping at The Manticore’s Tavern for directions. But it’s a theme-restaurant and the Manticore (I didn’t recognize Octavia Spencer‘s voice at all) is no longer the fearsome winged lioness of legend. She’s a restaurateur.

Style points to Pixar for casting potentially funny people in their leading roles. Major demerits for never giving them anything funny to play or say.

A manticore knocking back energy drinks? That’s all you’ve got for Oscar winner Octavia Spencer? Holland was a pointless expense for a blandly-written role any teen-to-20something could have played.

The animation’s good, lovely but not dazzling. There’s a spirited chase or two, not much payback for a movie that demands nearly two hours of your time. The best gags are the Harry Potter referencing stickers papering Barley’s van, “Gwinivere.” “Baselisk” is a band name in this universe. Disney’s still mad it didn’t get the Wizarding World?

A mock street sign sticker almost got a chuckle out of me — “None shall pass.” That’s a little “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” gag that the late Terry Jones would appreciate. John Cleese will.

Barley endlessly reciting spells he’s memorized, the “rules” of this one or that one, and delivering the picture’s overt message — “You have to take risks in life to have an adventure” — are no substitute for wit, originality or narrative drive.

You have to be very young to figure “Onward” has either of the last two. And even tiny tykes are unlikely to find this funny.

MPAA Rating: PG for action/peril and some mild thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Chris Pratt, Tom Holland, Julia Louis Dreyfuss and Octavia Spencer

Credits: Directed by Dan Scanlon, script by Jason Headley , Keith Bunin and Dan Scanlon.  Walt Disney/Pixar release.

Running time: 1:54

The newly-reissued “Come and See” is a crash course in Soviet cinema history.

Here it is, from Eisenstein until the Iron Curtain parted (briefly), a 1985 summary of Soviet acting, directing, technique and the obsessions of the culture, all in one sweeping epic.

It’s shot in old Academy aspect ratio, features actors staring straight at the camera, grim reality blended with romantic idealism in a movie repressed and controversial at the time because it dared to puncture the official State myth about the common heroism of Soviet resistance to the Nazi invaders.

Set in Belarus in 1943 as the tide of the war is turning, it’s about a boy of about 14 (Aleksey Kravchenko) who revels in playing war games with a younger friend, digging in the abandoned trenches for treasure from the abandoned defensive positions there.

Then he digs up a rifle. That’s his cue to join the partisans, still fighting the Nazis on this fringe of the front lines.

But Flyora’s plans send his widowed mother (Tatyana Shestakova) into understandable hysterics.

“Think of yourself son,” she cries, when she means “Think of US.” She has a few farm animals and twin little girls to cope with — in a war zone. She needs help and even the unlikely protection of her little man. “Have you no HEART?”

Apparently he doesn’t. He’s got the recruiters at the door, ready to take him away. Her cries fall on deaf ears, his partisan comrades barely bother reassuring her — “We’ll keep him warm.” They take the family cow, and a turkey. And they’re off to the forests.

Flyora finds himself in a tougher, rougher version of the partisans we saw in the Jewish resistance drama “Defiance.” Their leader (Liubomiras Laucevicius) reminds the veterans, and indoctrinates “the new recruit” as to what is expected — a reckless, patriotic disregard for you own safety — and what they’re up against, “total war” a fight to the death against an enemy bent on extermination.

This isn’t “playing war.” Flyora has to give up his boots to a more experienced fighter and finds himself left behind with the camp as the company-sized force marches off. It’s just him and nurses, including the teenage one (Olga Mironova) whose heart the commander just broke.

German paratroops and an accompanying air raid has Flyora leading Glasha to his old village because he knows “the perfect place to hide” (in Russian, with English subtitles).

Bombs chase them into the swamp, machine gun fire splinters the trees all around. There’s barely time for a rainy day reverie before they get to the village and Flyora takes her to his house where he insists they eat the meal left on the table.

“They’re not around,” he says of his family and the villagers. Glasha figures it out long before she distracts him to prevent Flyora seeing the pile of bodies behind the barn.

His mother was right. And this is but the beginning of his unhappy odyssey through a war zone, taking on mentors (Vladas Bagdonas), barely surviving every miscalculation, meeting the enemy in the flesh.

Stylistically, the images are grey, muddy and realistic in the extreme. Did director Elem Klimov (he did a well-regarded 1981 “Rasputin”) use “live fire” to get the bombing/machine-gunning effects?

The voices sound looped (dubbed in off-set), common in much of European cinema but generally abandoned by in the rest of Europe by the late 1960s.  And the acting is Noh Theater-broad, tending towards over-emotive declarative speeches.

Visually, “Come and See” still has a whiff of “State of the Soviet Art” in its gloomy, over-saturated colors and analog effects.

But even if the acting and sound make it dated, they don’t blunt the provocative anti-war message Klimov and his crew were getting across. “The Great Patriotic War” was Stalin’s last lie. Heroic, fatalistic partisans preyed on everyone to stay alive, and were encouraged to do that by The State.

Helpless civilians struggling just to keep themselves alive and their elderly parents or their children safe long enough to reach adulthood were held in contempt.

And there’s nothing romantic about “total war” — losing it, or winning it.

MPAA Rating:unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Liubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas and Tatyana Shestakova

Credits:Directed by Elem Klimov, script by Ales Adamovich and Elem Klimov. Janus release.

Running time: 2:23

The KKK opens a museum whitewashing its history in a South Carolina town, and a pastor tries to blunt its message by reaching out to a grand dragon. Garret Hedlund and the omnipresent Andrea Riseborough also star.

Imagine a nightclub that’s a mad melange of old school burlesque, classic balladeers and jumped-up Portuguese Latin rock, of strippers and stand-up comedy with an occasional dominatrix.

It’s old fashioned showbiz set in a mobbed-up milieu with “Goodfellas” decor, way too many “Sopranos” alumni and an actual daughter of Bobby Freakin’ DeNiro.

Can’t exist anywhere except for “Sin City,” right? A neon netherworld version of New York where all these dese-dem-dose actors have to be imported to Lisbon, where there’s no hint of “fado” but the street signs and police sirens are strictly European Union Portugal.

That’s “Cabaret Maxime,” a lurid lounge where Bennie Gazza (Michael Imperioli) presides, putting on a show like nobody ever put on a show. You’d pay to see a night of strippers with tigers, a hot band, bustiers and the last comic and MC to still tell comic stories (John Ventigmilia).

Three things about this cabaret, invented by Portuguese New Yorker writer-director Bruno de Almeida (“On the Run,” Operation Autumn”) , are worth noting.

One, I’d pay good money for an evening in a joint like that. So might you. The cover charge would have to be in the multiple C-note range for them to break even, though.

Two, the movie’s an odd catalog of cliches, over-familiar “running a night club with mob influence” riffs and dialogue that sounds improvised, often feebly.

And three, go back to point one. This setting, this set-up and this cast would make a pretty cool cable series, a “Sopranos” with a house band, a few tenors, coloraturas and altos to go with the strippers and wise guys.

As Bennie says at one point during the movie, “Not sure I get it, but I’ll drink to it.”

Bennie’s running this place at the pleasure of his made-man landlord and watered-down liquor supplier, Mr. Gus (David Proval). He’s married to his star attraction, emotionally troubled dancer/stripper Stella (Ana Padrão).

“Remember, Stella means STAR!”

He books acts through the ever-enthusiastic goof, Ripa (Mike Starr).

The house band is Ena Pá 2000, with guest guitarist Phil Mendrix, but the songs cover decades of American (and European) pop, with balladeer Sandro Core taking a bow.

Then, these goombahs (Nick Sandow, Anthony Siciliano and John Frey) set up a tacky “high end” strip joint across the street, and the trouble starts.

Virtually everybody in this with extra vowels in his name was on “The Sopranos,” so you kind of know every place “Cabaret Maxime” is going to take you long before it gets there.

It’s a somewhat flippant spin around the mob-backed-nightclub block, with violence that seems preordained without the care of “consequences” that might come later.

But like Mr. Gus says, “You get old, you make’a coupla bucks, then you die.” Why sweat logic or extravagantly pricey overhead or dialogue that struggles with “When’s the last time you had a good tomato?”

The cast is game, with Imperioli and Ventimiglia, Sandow and the Portuguese Padrão standing out.

The players, the colorful milieu and the parade of nightclub acts make this a fun if somewhat undigested night out, chased with a hangover.

To Bennie, to me, and maybe to you — Who knows? — all that matters is this.

“I’m not a pimp. I’m in SHOW business.”

Sometimes — badda-bing, badda-boom — that’s enough.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, sexual situations, alcohol abuse

Cast: Michael Imperioli, Ana Padrão , John Ventimiglia, Drena De Niro, Nick Sandow, Arthur J. Nascarella, David Proval, Mike Starr

Credits: Directed by Bruno de Almeida , script by Bruno de Almeida  and John Frey. A Giant Pictures release.

Running time: 1:35

The austere beauty of “Vitalina Varela” is in faces of its characters, the darkness that envelops a corner of Lisbon tourists rarely see.

It’s a somber, lyrical and relentlessly understated meditation on grief and a grudge, the story of a wife from the Cabo Verde Islands, a former Portuguese colony, who finally flies to Lisbon to join her husband. She’s been “waiting for my plane ticket for forty years,” Vitalina says (in Portuguese Kriol, with English subtitles).

She arrives three days after his burial, greeted at the airport by a striking Greek chorus of Capo Verdean expats who knew Joaquim. They are the airplane’s cleaning crew, who tell her “There is nothing for you in Portugal. Go home.”

In tenements of perpetual shadow, stark stucco walls without paint or decoration, she comes to the house where Joaquim lived, meets with and feeds mourners and starts to piece together the life that he had — a house with a leaky roof he never fixed, other women. If she’s looking for “closure,” Vitalina would never admit it.

“I won’t cry for no wretched man.”

Men who knew him talk of his dreams of fixing up the place for her arrival. But she knows better. When no one else is around, she growls her mistrust at the corpse she was not in time to verify. “Are you buried in the ground?”

Vitalina looks to the palsied priest (Ventura) for answers, but he has none. He has struggled to keep a hovel of a church going, to forgive himself for the sins of his past and failings on behalf of his flock. But “there is nothing sadder than a priest in this place…Nobody helps us.”

If Vitalina wants to speak with her husband, she must learn Portuguese, he insists. She can walk the dark, narrow streets and overgrown paths, looking for signs of him, for his body, but “there is nothing left for you here. The door has no lock.”

The screen compositions — almost all of them shrouded in darkness — are one perfect image after another. But the story is as spare and relentlessly shadowy as the images writer-director Pedro Costas and cinematographer Leonardo Simões conjure. Few characters are identified by name, relationships are sketchy, motives for any moment that isn’t Vitalina muttering in the dark about Joaquim’s formerly industrious nature abandoned for the skirt-chasing that brought him to Lisbon, are vague.

The film is a sort-of sequel to “Horse Money,” a Costas film in which Vitalina Varela also appeared and which is where we first learned of her sad married past — a husband who left for Lisbon and who never sent her the promised plane ticket to join him.

All of which tend to subsume the current film’s story and make “Vitalina Varela” inexcusably obscure. Beautiful as it is, it won’t be to every taste.

But there’s a richness in the title character (playing a fictionalized version of herself) turning this milieu bleak and forbidding with her brooding arrival. And there’s regret and recompense in the fleeting glimpses of daylight that arrive as she starts to assert her will — for a proper funeral — and remembers the poor but promising past they had back on those rocky, waterless islands off the coast of Senegal.

MPAA Rating: unrated, death and smoking images.

Cast: Vitalina Varela, Ventura

Credits: Directed by Pedro Costa, script by Pedro Costa and Vitalina Varela.  A Grasshopper release.

Running time: 2:03