Movie Nation

Not every Valentine’s Day release is, well, romantic. There’s room for “bromance,” and dentist-patient bonding, too. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Athlete/non-athletic guy twice her age? We’ll see.

The second weekend of a blockbuster is almost as telling as the first, in terms of its “legs” — its ability to sell tickets for a month or more.

A good “hold” — the lower the percentage of ticket sales fall-off from week one, the better. A 50% or less drop is good to great — Pixar numbers. Anything over 60% means word of mouth isn’t helping, repeat business isn’t happening.

“Bad Boys for Life” had a huge opening weekend,$62.5 million over three days,with a big Martin Luther King Day turnout the following Monday. It is on track to do $33 million on its second weekend, as of Friday night. That’s a not-good/not-disastrous 62%+ falloff.

That huge opening weekend will push it over $119 million, all-in, by Sunday.

“1917” is losing only 35% of its turnout, weekend to weekend. It’ll earn $15 million+ this weekend, and should continue to sell tickets up through the Oscars. It will clear $100 million today (Saturday) and be over $103 by midnight Sunday.

The two wide releases opening this weekend are seeing widely differing turnout.

Guy Ritchie’s return to gangstering, “The Gentlemen,” is on pace to clear $10 million, maybe a little more, by midnight Sunday. Mixed reviews for that one. Very guy-oriented, a little Sinophobic (Gangsters are racists. Go figure.), entirely too chatty, I thought. Slow. In the parlance of Ritchie-speak, “a Brexiting geezer’s movie, it is.”

The other new title, “The Turning,” shows that people who avoid Henry James novels in school aren’t going to show up for a horror movie based on one in the theaters — again. The oft-filmed “Turning of the Screw” earned poor reviews and will have tallied only $6-7 million by midnight Sunday.

“Little Women” and “Knives Out” and “Just Mercy” are still in the top ten. Imagine how well “Just Mercy” would have done had they opened it early enough to tally a few Oscar nominations.

It may be set in the post-Kurt Cobain suicide 1990s, but you don’t have to be an American Literature major to spy “The Turn of the Screw,” the novel by Henry James, in the Gothic horror film “The Turning.”

The phrases “haunted nanny” or “spooked governess” are a dead giveaway to any “Jeopardy” watcher. The least boring novel by the 19th century novelist, infamous for his paragraph-long/parenthetical-digression sentences, has been the adapted for the screen over a dozen times over the decades.

Instantly-recognizable it may be. And nailing down the tone has rarely been a problem. “Gloom” isn’t the only approach, but it’s the safest when you’re dealing with a young governess (Mackenzie Davis of “The Martian”) trying to teach a motherless child of wealth (Brooklyn Prince of “The Florida Project”) and cope with her touchy housekeeper (Barbara Marten) and possibly-psychotic teen brother (Finn Wolfhard of “It” and “Stranger Things”).

Is governess Kate seeing ghosts in mirrors, windows and the bottom of the pool? Are the bumps in the night she’s hearing malevolent spirits? Is Miles (Wolfhard) out to cause her harm?

Or is it all in her head, because we’ve met her mother (Joely Richardson) in the asylum and even in Henry James’ day “It runs in the family” was totally a thing.

But music-video director turned music movie (“The Runaways”) director Floria Sigismondi does a poor job of doling out that doubt, and rather disastrously mishandles the finale. The “gotcha” moments play as over-familiar tropes, even if their inspirations were more potent in James’ day, But even back then people had to know he was no Edgar Allan Poe.

Kate is a young woman who leaves her teaching job, her roommate and her mad-artist mother in the mental hospital to take on this gig teaching the scion of rich parents who died some time before.

“You don’t know what it’s like to grow up without parents,” she tells the roomie (Kim Adis). As we take a gander at Kate’s mother, we figure she’s just speaking metaphorically. Mom’s not all there.

Housekeeper Mrs. Grose warns her that she’ll be dealing “with thoroughbreds,” and to try and act like it. Flora (Prince) is only mildly precocious, with a practical joking streak. So much for superior breeding.

Oddly, Kate discovers that Flora is “doesn’t ever leave the property.” More oddly, Flora’s doting older brother Miles shows up — kicked out of boarding school, mid-term.

The cheap shocks and general creepiness, hinted at before, gain momentum with his return. Kate hears about previous hired help who have died. And she stumbles into the diary/teaching progress planner of her predecessor governess. Her anxiety and nightmares increase.

There’s a bottom-line to any horror tale, and that is “Does it deliver frights?” I counted one somewhat hair-raising moment, and a whole lot of jolting close-ups accompanied by a shrieking soundtrack and a scattering of Ms. Davis going all wide-eyed moments.

The viewer’s impulse is to fear for Kate, to be enraged at or suspicious of Grose and Miles, and wonder what Flora’s deal is. Is she victim or ringleader?

But there’s no terror, here. None.

Perhaps, before one more version of this novel is committed to the screen, some enterprising film executive with the power to secure financing or “green light” the project should read the bloody book and figure out if it has any currency in the age of “Paranormal Activity” or “Halloween” sequels or reboots.

Because damned if I can think of a filmed version of it that works, and I’ve seen a few.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for terror, violence, disturbing images, brief strong language and some suggestive content

Cast: Mackenzie Davis, Brooklyn Prince, Finn Wolfhard, Barbara Marten and Joely Richardson

Credits: Directed by Floria Sigismondi, script by Carey W. Hayes and Chad Hayes, based on “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James.  A Universal release.

Running time: 1:34

The role-playing action/fantasy video game “NiNoKuni” earns an amusingly nonsensical screen “origin story,” thanks to Netflix.

It’s faithful enough to the game — one supposes — to merit the interest of fans, and as it was directed by a “Spirited Away” animator, it has anime bonafides that might warrant the attention of genre fans.

As a stand-alone movie, it’s both representative of the genre-medium, and a bit of a shrug. All anime is not created equal, and this derivative cosplay-oriented eye-candy is a “meh” of a movie.

Three friends in Tokyo get tangled up in the interrelationship between two worlds.

School jock Haru and winsome Kotona are teen sweethearts. Yu, confined to a wheelchair since childhood, can only pine for her.

Then a mysterious, masked red-eyed wraith stalks her and stabs Kotona. Yu and Haru, trying to save her, are whisked — in a moment of peril — into this other world of dog men and dragons and elvish pole dancers (Hah!), magic daggers and translucent flying boats and giant edible mosquitoes.

“It must be a dream, right?” “Some kind of high tech theme park?”

But “It’s too real for cosplay!”

The lads try to save the Kotona look-alike, Princess Astrid. Only Yu can prevent Princess Deaths by Curse. Apparently.

He can walk in this world, and the princess is ever-so-grateful. Get that girl into a swimsuit! You know, for the magic “spell-blocking” dance in the water. Totally logical and justified.

The guys bounce back and forth between the worlds, contending with every fresh threat to Kotona or the princess as they do.

And in the fantasy world, a war is coming and anybody over the age of six will spot who the enemy spy is in the Magic Kingdom.

There isn’t much to this nonsensical “game” movie for adults, but as Netflix “originals” go, some effort was made and it’s passable background video noise or a suitable mobile device distraction for the kids if you’re waiting for a plane.

But nothing more.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, action violence

Voice Cast: Depends on which language you watch it in.

Directed by Yoshiyuki Momose, script by Akihiro Hino. A Warner Brothers/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

A gritty, needy fever dream of New York “fame” comes our way Feb. 21.

“Airplane Mode” is a shiny little rom-com bauble from Brazil that strains and strains to find a laugh.

It’s about cell phone addicts, “influencers,” fashion, family and finding love where the pace of life is a lot slower than in the big city. So it’s an incredibly old-fashioned comedy dolled up in “this year’s fashion” accessories.

Larissa Manoela is Ana, who lives at home. Her life is a life-streamed/selfie-packed Instagrammed blur of fashion, makeup, staged events and staged romance.

She seems to live at home because who has the time to move?

“True Fashion” is her ethos and True Fashion is her Sao Paolo employer, a youthful clothing company ruthlessly run by Carola (Katiuscia Canoro), who has Ana under contract for a reason. She’s insanely popular on the web, and what she wears EVERYbody must wear.

Sure, Ana studied clothing design in school, but who has time to MAKE when just “showing” what others have made, and gushing over it in vlog posts, is so much easier?

She’s paired up, romantically, with a stylish and stylishly flaming designer — just to get the page-views. If a “break-up” is good for business, that can be staged, too.

But Ana’s phone is her undoing. How many wrecks can she have in one month? Her parents know about eight, from the DMV. That isn’t counting the one she has the morning we meet her, or the Fiat-flipping fiasco that ends her day.

“Court ordered” loss of license, and removal of her cell phone is all there is for it. And sending her off to her estranged grandfather’s house in the “no cell reception” hinterlands is just a way to remove temptation from her reach.

The country is where car-restorer, widowed Grandpa Germano (Erasmo Carlos) can teach her to wrench, to “make” instead of “show.” It’s where “hick” baker João, played by André Luiz Frambach, can show her the joys of being “geniune” — the simple pleasures of a country fair.

All of this sentimental crap is straight out of the 1940s, and the only people who buy into it — in Brazil, Britain or the U.S. — are old folks and those “left behind,” trapped in the villages and small towns everybody else has fled. As if the country is the only place you can “know yourself,” as Ana claims.

Nonsense, says the villainous Carola. “Oh sweetie, knowing yourself is the first step to self-loathing!” (In Portuguese, with English subtitles, unless you switch to the “dubbed into English” mode.)

That’s it, the only funny line in the entire movie. There’s a cute twist in the third act, and an utterly predictable “betrayal” or two, and “getting even” scheme.

Every action, event and character in the movie could be predicted by a tween who has seen more than four movies in her life. It’s “obvio,” as they say in Brazil.

Entirely too “obvious” to ever be funny.

Manoela is cute and perky and probably web-friendly. But as Ana learns in “Airplane Mode,” honey — that’s just not enough.

MPAA Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Larissa Manoela, Erasmo Carlos, André Luiz Frambach, Katiuscia Canoro

Credits: Directed by César Rodrigues, script by Alberto Bremer and Alice Name Bomtempo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

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Reviews for Guy Ritchie’s “The Gentlemen” have been on a par with “Bad Boys for Life.” It stars Oscar winner Matthew McConoughey, Hugh Grant, Michelle Dockery, Henry Golding, Colin Farrell and Charlie Hunnam — none of whom have the box office clout of Will Smith. Not even lumped all together.

Well, throw in Eddie Marsan. But still…

STX is releasing the Miramax film (no longer affiliated with the Weinsteins, but still Wein-stained), and has done OK with it overseas. But it’ll be lucky to clear $10-11 million on its opening weekend in the US.

And don’t count on China for any cash, as they’re closing cinemas to halt the latest “Outbreak” there.

“Bad Boys for Life” will lose most of its opening Martin Luther King Weekend blockbuster bounce, but should still do $25-30 million — $28 million says Box Office Pro.

“1917” will still be in the teens, “Jumanji” and “Star Wars” will be fighting “Gentlemen” for fourth, fifth and sixth places in the Top Ten.

“The Turning” is the other wide release this weekend — not previewed for critics, the early reviews have pounded the nanny-under-supernatural-assault thriller. It’ll be lucky to do $5. I will get to that one today.

The Vietnam Vets/Medal of Honor drama “The Last Full Measure” won’t be on enough screens to make much of a dent in the box office. Middling reviews are pushing that one.

The Best International Feature Film Oscar, formerly titled “Best Foreign Language Film,” is going to Korea’s “Parasite” this year. Bong Joon Ho’s social satire is the closest this thing year’s Academy Awards have to a sure thing.

But Poland’s entry in the category, “Corpus Christi,” is a minor miracle in and of itself. Warm and faith-affirming, predictable — with just enough edge — it’s a bracing delight in the middle of decades of stories of Catholic Priests Behaving Badly.

Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia) is a hollow-eyed, hollowed-out young man finishing up his term in a Polish juvenile detention center. He goes along to get along with the awful routines there, standing watch while the prison toughs carry out sexual assaults, dreading the return of a thug who has a murderous grudge against him.

Sunday morning Mass is his break from routine. Father Tomasz (Lukasz Simlat) lets him help set up the service and relies on him to sing the Twenty-third Psalm every week.

But that dream Daniel has about the seminary is misguided, at best. He’s not the type, we think. Father Tomasz reminds him (in Polish, with English subtitles) that “no seminary takes ex-convicts” like him. No, the job at a distant sawmill is the best he can hope for upon release.

As if to make the good Father’s point, Daniel swipes a clergical collar, shirt and outfit when he checks out. He ducks into town long enough for a sex, drugs, punk-rock and booze binge, and boards the bus.

But his long walk from the bus to the mill lets us see his despair at this future. Everybody he meets guesses his story — ex-con, sawmill bound. His quick look-over the place firms his resolve that it’s not for him.

Becoming a fake priest? That happens by accident. He ducks into the local church, misses the final mass of the day, and when the pretty daughter (Eliza Rycembel) asks him what he does as he assures her he is NOT working in the mill, he improvises.

“I’m a priest.”

“And I’M a nun!”

Nothing impresses the ladies like a collar. Father uh, TOMASZ he calls himself, lying just well enough to pass muster with the aged vicar (Zdzislaw Wardejn), who basically invents his story with the questions he asks”Father Tomasz.”

He’s just out of seminary, and he’s on a wandering pilgrimage through the parishes of Poland. Come, help me with mass. Hey, I’m not feeling well, take confessions for me, wouldya?

Director Jan Komosa and screenwriter Mateusz Pacewicz trot Daniel and the viewer through a lot of predictably adorable “learn to be a priest on the fly” gags — Googling “How to take confession” on his smart phone, etc.

But Daniel, who won’t talk about why he was in prison, told this lie for a reason. You can’t call it a “calling,” but something about the robes, the responsibilities and the power of the position intoxicates him. As he’s parroting the last sermon we heard Father Tomasz give to the inmates in the prison, Daniel gets carried away.

And so does “Corpus Christi.”

Because for all the lighter touches, the predictable stations of the cross of such movies (fear of discovery, romantic temptation, “tests”), this is a town still in mourning for a terrible car accident that took several of its young people.

People are hurting, and hurting each other with blame. Daniel’s tossing common sense in the Confessional, and at Mass. How hard can healing this rift be?

Bielenia beautifully pitches his performance to match Daniel’s state — hollow-eyed and hollowed-out at first, with the ex-con’s avoid-eye-contact condition —  beatific, self-righteous and cocky as the circles clear up under his eyes, he finds his purpose and starts to flex his priestly muscles.

He’s “the cool young priest” who can drink beer and smoke with “the kids,” and he’s noticing the lovely, sad Eliza (who lost friends in the wreck) noticing him.

I found the entire enterprise a touching, rough-hewn delight, never sparing us the explicit sex and violence of Daniel’s life “before,” moist-eyed in seeing how his “outside the collar” thinking is a tonic for a tortured town that needs to move on.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, strong sexual content, profanity, alcohol abuse and smoking.

Cast: Bartosz Bielenia, Aleksandra Konieczna, Eliza Rycembel

Credits: Directed by Jan Komosa, script by Mateusz Pacewicz

Running time: 1:55

Lisbon’s slums are the backdrop for a Pedro Costa’s acclaimed story of a woman from the Cape Verde Islands searching for traces of her late husband in this Feb. 20 release.

“The Gentlemen” is vintage Guy Ritchie, an old-fashioned/new-fangled mob tale of the “Snatch,” “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” Cockney comedy with lots of killing thrown in.

None of this “Aladdin” nonsense. It’s “RocknRolla” — the entertaining but weak third film in his early gangland trilogy, and most apt comparison here — all the way.

Ritchie’s rounded up a lot of folks who can act tough and handle funny — Charlie Hunnam, Eddie Marsan, even Michelle Dockery (“Downton Abbey”), with an Irishman (Colin Farrell), an American (Matthew McConaughey) and a couple of reinventions. Hugh Grant tosses aside a lifetime of forelock-tossing, stuttering, posh romantic leads and turns amusingly sinister, or attempted sinister. And Henry Golding dodges the Hugh Grant bullet by ditching the “Crazy Rich Asians/This Christmas” fey romantic lead rep for a badass turn, playing a hothead named Dry Eye.

Oh yeah, there are some screwball street names — Lord George, The Coach, Trigger, Lord Snowball, Phuc and so on.

It’s built on slang and banter — pages and pages of plot and recitative, characters telling their portion of the story, making mob gorilla threats and introducing snippets of British street-speech to the larger world.

“When the Silverback gets more ‘silver’ than ‘back, he’d best move on. Before he gets moved on.”

All that speechifying slows down the works.

“Gentlemen” takes-an-entirely too-leisurely stroll through Brexiting Britainnia and the coming Legalization of Pot (“Bush,” over there, “cup of tea,” “white widow super cheese.”

It’s a marvel to listen to. But man, is there a lot of listening to do. And listening.

The story is framed in a blackmail pitch by sniveling private eye Fletcher (Grant), a verbose and probably-gay hireling of the UK’s notoriously vindictive print press. He’s strong-arming Ray (Hunnam) a top mob lieutenant to American-born/Oxbridge educated Pot King Mickey Pearson (McConaughey).

The third-year-film-student conceit to this “pitch” is that Fletcher presents his blackmail-worthy revelations as a screenplay he’s written that he expects Ray’s boss to pay a fortune to suppress.

Student filmmakers make movies about wanting to make a movie. Not that Fletcher is all hellbent to make it. The £20 million pounds he wants to NOT make it would work, too.

Fletcher, winking and flirting (Ray may be gay, too and UNinterested — adds some frisson to their scenes) through this pitch in Ray’s tony suburban designer house.

He knows Mickey is looking to sell out his Britain-wide pot network, lays out how Mickey has circumvented Britain’s land-shortage and land-“rambling” rights nationwide — Who could hide a grow farm in all that traffic? — and how he and his “Cockney Cleopatra” (Dockery) have their price and an American “Jew” buyer (Jeremy Strong).

But the Chinese mob run by Lord George (Tom Wu) and fronted by murderously ambitious Dry Eye (Golding) want in.

And then there are the brawling, boxing rapper-wannabes of the gym run by The Coach (Farrell). They’re black.

Ritchie has cooked up a racial stew of Cockney rhyming slang, spit-out rap lyrics, racist Chinese pidgin English wisecracks and veiled anti-Semitic jokes for this story of a rushed sale in “the puff game (pot)” before “the new gold rush” begins, with pot legalized with whoever controls Mickey’s empire having the leg up on the big, new market.

Landed gentry and their heroin addict kids, a boorish, crude and vengeful newspaper editor (Marsan), movie mogul, illegal firearms, from “paper weight” size to military-grade and lots and lots of funny lines dress up a story of social or underworld insults and the mob war that spins out of that.

So much bartering — “Unlike salt and pepper, it’s not on the table.” — much of performed by McConaughey, who drawls like an American who’s picked up the “you lot” affectations of Brit-speak.

And all this lawbreaking, with nary a bobby in sight.

“In France, it’s illegal to name a pig ‘Napoleon. But try and STOP me!”

It’s all so witty and quotable, with interruptions for the old Guy Ritchie ultra-violence and dark sexual kink, with shots aimed at the British press and British aristocracy and a whole lot of “foreign” people of color being fended off by white Brits and an American transplant.

Very “now,” in other words. Ritchie papers over a paper-thin story with artificial twists and very funny turns by the likes of Farrell, Grant, Marsan and Dockery.

He gives us a lot to chew on as text, and disturbing (Racist?) subtexts. And when the movie’s forward motion is as halting as a Hugh Grant stutter, we have entirely too much time, in mid-movie, to chew on it.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language throughout, sexual references and drug content

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding, Colin Farrell, Eddie Marsan, Jeremy Strong and Hugh Grant

Credits: Written and directed by Guy Ritchie. An STX release.

Running time: 1:53