Movie Nation

“Blackbear” opens as a not-quite-convincing Marine snipers captured in Afghanistan thriller and transitions to a melodramatic mixed martial arts “I gotta fight to pay for my buddy’s VA care” tale.

Taliban fighters (dressed as ISIS, but in the Shati-Kot Valley of Afghanistan) speak in the lurid, verbose threats of Bond villains.

“You cannot die too soon. You would ruin our FUN” and “my EXPERIMENT,” the torturer sneers. He injects our captured sniper team, Bear and Cowboy (Scott Pryor, who also scripted this, and Darrin Dewitt Henson).  This is the GOOD stuff, he purrs.

She will be your greatest lover…and your WORST enemy. Your love for her will never go away!”

So even escaping from the captors won’t be enough. Months later, Cowboy is still in the hospital, suffering from a slow poisoning of that day. He needs to get on an experiemental treatment program, or he’ll die.

Bear? He’s using, sleeping on the streets, trying to pick up with the girlfriend he ditched years ago (Sara McMann), hoping to make up with her dad at least.

Because “Dad” is Coach Bronx, played with his usual relish…and chili, onions, mustard and ketchup — ALL the fixin’s — by Eric Roberts.  Coach was Bear’s mixed martial arts coach. And he won’t train him again. He won’t. Nope.

“You can’t be SERIOUS about fighting again!”

Bear needs the cash from underground cage matches to save Cowboy. He’s got to get clean, get back into shape and get out there in The Basement, where the off-the-book brawls are staged.

He’s got to WIN, you understand me? Or throw the fights when the need arises!

The scenario is pro forma, the dialogue trite and the fights often staged at walk-through speed. Some of the performances are achingly amateurish.

As we’ve seen a version of Afghanistan that has hardwood live oaks and scrub pines and looks like South Carolina, we shouldn’t have gotten our hopes up.

The picture was originally titled “Submission,” which makes more sense. That’s what happens when you’re about to choke out, or give in to a higher power to save your friend.

“Blackbear” is the white guy. “Cowboy” is the black Marine. They went with those nicknames just to dodge stereotypes?

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, substance abuse

Cast: Scott Pryor, Darrin Dewitt Henson, Lorynn York, Ovince Saint Preux, Sara McMann and Eric Roberts

Credits: Directed by J.M. Berrios, script by Scott Pryor. A Gravitas Ventures/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Maxine Trump is a documentary filmmaker who filmed “To Kid or Not to Kid” to justify, in her mind and perhaps ours, her decision to remain childless.

“Well,” you think, “surely that’s her own business, and who does she have to justify herself to? In this day and age? I mean, really!”

But you’d be surprised. OK, shocked. The pressures, in the media, from “the baby economy,” from friends and relatives, from GOVERNMENTS, is out there. And it’s not subtle.

“To Kid or Not to Kid” is an engaging personal essay documentary about not having children, complete with interviews, arguments, hard data and sound reasoning coming from both sides of the debate. It’s all aimed at figuring out what Trump — no relation — will decide as she is now in her 40s and “the clock is ticking.”

She opens with a summary of how she’s lived her life — globe-trotting, living close to the edge, finding filmmaking — and how children never entered her mind. She bears the scars from the removal of a gangrenous fallopian tube in her teens, shares the news that she was told she might have a few miscarriages, should she choose to get pregnant, and reveals that she and her sister feel they held their mother back when she had them “too young.

But she’s married, and she and husband Josh Granger haven’t had “that talk.” “To Kid or Not to Kid” is about that conversation, the schism her earlier outspokenness caused with a friend and the societal pressures to procreate that some see as a strain a crowded planet hardly needs these days.

“Selfish” is the word she confesses she used that cost her the friendship of a new mother she’d been close to forever. It’s a word bandied about a lot by “both sides” of this discussion.

But when Pope Francis says “The choice to not have children is selfish,” when a running montage of TV chat and “news” shows echoes it, with “Fox and Friends” declaring “Childless women can never be happy,” you see where the heat is really coming from.

Oh, and your Holiness? Look in the mirror.

Using the internet to research the subject takes her to Megan, a young woman trying to get approved for tubal ligation/sterilization surgery, against the apparent will of the medical establishment she is dealing with in the UK.

Trump finds her way to the “Summit for Women Without Children” and finds fellow true-believers, more witnesses for the “pronatalism” bent our culture and our global economy push on women.

A Danish public service announcement urging procreation is played, and such PSAs air in Italy, Hungary and India of all places.

Snippets of female comics’ stand-up acts, with jokes about being childless, and a clip from “The Handmaid’s Tale” play under data about the percentage of countries that restrict birth control.

Stigmatized politicians — women who lead or have led Britain, Germany and Australia — face questions and attacks for not having kids.

And still Trump is on the fence, or not really.

“I could lose my identity if I have kids,” and “What if I regret NOT having a kid?”

Will she or won’t she? Her film is serious about the subject, but it looks for and finds the odd moment of humor in her “journey.”

A frank admission that she and Josh have “just had (reckless) sex” scores the biggest laugh of “To Kid or Not to Kid.” “Morning After” pills make her sick, Trump confesses. Well, it’s “better to be sick for a day than sick for twenty years” she jokes.

Well, if THAT’S how you feel about it…

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Maxine Trump, Josh Granger, Bryan Caplan

Credits: Written and directed by Maxine Trump. A Helpman release.

Running time: 1:16

They’re not wrong, of course, this comic “men’s movement” podcaster and the conservative activist and writer who call their tour, and the movie about it, “No Safe Spaces.”

Even if they’re inclined to cherry pick their examples. Even if they “straw man” their opponents. Even as they mis-characterize the debate on their own terms and flood the screen with white “free speech experts,” irate conservative speaker’s fee junkies who see their livelihoods threatened (like our hosts, and Ann Coulter) and hurt and wounded young, white female and male College Republicans who are on the receiving end of boycotts, protests and even riots over the folks they invite to speak on certain college campuses.

There are corners of academia and the kids who inhabit it now who are almost certainly crossing lines about free speech, ignoring the value of civil debate in a free society in their determination to not be offended, insulted or “triggered.” It’s a shout-the-other-side-down era, and if you don’t think “both extremes do it,” you’ve never walked by a Proud Boys rally. Not that “No Safe Spaces” mentions that.

It’s just that mutual admirers Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager, two smug, smirking jerks having a conservative ‘free speech” circle smirk, aren’t the guys to host such a debate and give it a high-minded fair hearing in this most divisive of eras.

“No Safe Spaces” is a documentary that incorporates mockery into its mutually admiring web phenomena hosts — assaults on everything from affirmative action to “cultural appropriation,” making its case with a peppering of clips from speakers on the left (Bill Maher, Obama, Cornel West) and a much larger sample of those on the right, a faux “Schoolhouse Rock” defense of the First Amendment and an action cartoon ridiculing “social justice warriors.”

It’s all to make the case that free speech itself is being menaced by “fascists” on the left toting “Bash the Fash” (fascist) signs as they protest appearances by free-speech enemy Peter Thiel (rich guy who destroyed Gawker Media), Brit polemicist and alt right poster boy Milo Yiannapoulos, right wing firebrand Ann Coulter and others.

There’s stuff meant to be funny, but didn’t even summon a chuckle from the aged white target audience I saw the film with. Perhaps they were satisfied in other ways.

There’s no attempt to engage with or get the actual point of view of those speaking out against “hate speech” and its most successful purveyors, just shrill and often dimwitted college kids having shout-offs in public spaces at Yale, Berkeley, etc.

Carolla suggests this mass silencing is “unAmerican,” and that it defeats the purpose of free speech, which is where “everybody” gets to speak and “the best idea wins.”

That’s disingenuous at best. Last time I checked, conservatives are the ones pushing every vote-suppressing trick under the sun to insure only their “best idea” ever has a shot. There are whole networks devoted to conservative views, and any that don’t follow that narrow idealogical path are condemned as “fake news” by…conservatives. A racist is in the White House, spreading lies with his every public moment. A Jewish white nationalist is in charge of U.S. immigration policy. TRUTH and FACTS are what’s under attack. You’re not going to get a lot of either of those from the “victimized” speakers here.

That includes our hosts. What is their “No Safe Spaces” tour but a safe space for conservative “snowflakes” to hear their unfiltered, unrebutted opinions that everything they hate about “The Other” from Fox News is true and an outrage?

Look over the audiences glimpsed at their events shown here. Not a diverse crowd.

Prager ticks off a list of every name/label slapped on him, taking particular issue with “Nazi.” “I’m JEWISH” he declares, listing his (Israeli born) bonafides.

Again, Stephen Miller, white nationalist in the White House setting immigration policy — Jewish.

Prager brings on famed lawyer and Fox News fave Alan Dershowitz, presenting him (at Dershowitz’s insistence, no doubt), as a “liberal.” This undercuts every other political label the film doles out to its “experts.” Perhaps Prager should be more concerned with the label “liar.”

There is a seriously flawed assumption at the heart of “No Safe Spaces,” that these screeching women and men (many of color, in the clips shown) are silencing public debate with their ill-conceived protests. The idea is that a great debate is being avoided.

That’s naive. This isn’t the 1960s, when Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley squared off on network for a generally civilized discourse on the politics of left and right.

And it’s not like Adolf Hitler toured Germany in the Weimar ’30s, defending National Socialism in on-stage arguments with liberals, communists, Christian conservatives and capitalists.

Conservatives don’t want debate. They want “safe spaces” where they can deliver their “message” without rebuttal, ridicule and fact-checking on the fly. The echo chamber of this film underscores that.

There I go, characterizing the other side for them, Dennis Prager’s straw-man bread and butter.

But as I’ve said, it’s a shrill time with an awful lot of shouting going on. And in no way does this lopsided, BS “safe space” coveting agitprop contribute to fixing that.

Sometimes, shouting is the only way to burst the bubble you’ve blown around yourself. And if tens of thousands of baseball or mixed martial arts fans make Trump cry when he finally hears the boos of a country that hates him? Not a bad thing. “No Safe Spaces” cuts both ways, doesnt it?

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some language and brief violence

Cast: Adam Carolla, Dennis Prager, Bern Shapiro, Dave Rubin and Van Jones

Credits: Directed by Justin Folk, script by John Sullivan. A Dangerous Documentaries release.

Running time: 1:35

This could be our Peak Nic Cage moment, a “meta” movie about the real Nicolas Cage caught up in some Nic Cage movie style nonsense. Debt, sleazy operators, an Oscar winner reduced to taking any gig he can get. All here.

https://t.co/B4qUT1gXbz https://twitter.com/RottenTomatoes/status/1195693752725032961?s=20

Give the people a great movie that isn’t a franchise, that has nothing to do with grown women and men in tights, and is over 2 and a half hours long, and the people will come.

IF it is an “event,” IF it has a dazzling pair of leads and impressive support, IF it is a prestige picture that might be the Best Picture of the year, that is.

“Ford v Ferrari” is all of those things, an it is opening at an impressive $28 million. Not “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” money, but it should have have a nice long fall into winter run.

“Charlie’s Angels,” rebooted again after 20 years, have passed their expiration date. Kristen Stewart and two nobodies star in a competent and empowering but joyless Enterprise, as I said in my review.

Audiences could smell the cynicism and are staying away. It every Girl scout troop in America goes on Sat. and Sunday, it might clear $11. Right now? Elizabeth Banks has directed a bomb.

“The Good Liar”;opened wide, which is I guess a strategy for making your money off a dull and predictable Big Con thriller starring the great Dame Helen and the Great Sir Ian. It may clear $3.

A platformed release can’t save a misfire. Variety was naming it as a best picture and best director contender, sight unseen, as late as last weekend. Nope.

“Midway” will earn another $8 million and should hold screens throgh the end of the month. Somethin to take Dad to over Thanksgiving, if “Ford v Ferrari” is too long of an investment.

“Doctor Sleep” is still snoozing. Word of mouth didn’t help it or “Last Christmas” or “Playing with Fire” survive their second weekend.

https://deadline.com/2019/11/ford-v-ferrari-charlies-angels-weekend-box-office-1202787070/

A common pitfall of animation start-ups is spending their money on famous names as voice actors instead of higher end animation and better gag writers.

But Netflix upends that standing rule with its first animated feature, “Klaus.” Casting Jason Schwartzman as the voice of the lead, a postman from the past who “discovers” Santa and helps invent the holiday tradition of writing letters to Santa for presents delivered on Christmas, was inspired.

This isn’t one of those one-liner loaded Dreamworks cartoons. But Wes Anderson pal Schwartzman, with his quirky line-readings, eccentric pauses and the like, makes every line funny or at least light-hearted enough to come off.

In the old country in the fairytale early 19th century, Jesper is the lazy son of the postmaster general of the Royal Post Office.

“You know how long it took to PRESS this uniform? I don’t either, but SOMEbody took the time…”

Dad sends Jesper away to prove himself, to the furthest reaches of civilization — snowy Smeerensburg. He’s got to get the post office there up and running, and deliver 6,000 letters before he can even consider getting promoted back into the real world.

And those 6,000 letters never look more out of reach than the minute he is dropped off by the smart aleck ferryman (Norm MacDonald). Nobody here writes. The whole town is wholly consumed by an ages-old feud.

Everybody fights everybody else. Constantly. The factions are led by Mrs. Krum (Joan Cusack) and Mr. Ellingboe (Will Sasso). They all have mailboxes, but near as we can tell, they’ve never been used.

Jesper has to trick a small child into buying a stamp just to MAIL back a drawing the child made that blew out of a window and into the wannabe postman’s hands.

And that little act of, well, extortion sets our whole story in motion. That first “letter” falls in the hands of the inhabitant of The Woodsman’s Cabin, a hermit’s house Jesper stops at trying to drum up some business.

The woodsman (J.K. Simmons) is a hulking, white-bearded figure who loves his axe and has filled his trees with birdhouses (“Totally normal…not a symptom of mental illness in ANY way.”) and his cabin with toys he’s carved, hammered, painted and stored. And he gives Jesper a package to deliver to the lonely child whose forlorn drawing touched him.

Boom! There it is, Santa’s “Origin Story,” just like The Joker’s — without the facepaint.

The little boy gets the first-ever gift in Smeerensburg. His peers see it and want a toy of their own. Who do they write to, again? And hey, “We don’t know HOW to write! Who can teach us?”

The postman isn’t the only useless civil servant in Smeerensburg. Alva (Rashida Jones) was hired to be a teacher.

“I took a teaching job at a place where people don’t send their kids to school!”

She makes ends meet as a fish monger.

“Can we open a window in here? I can’t…really pretend…any longer…”

So the teacher is reluctantly recruited to teach the kids how to write letters to this woodsman, “Klaus,” and the postman has to convince this Klaus fellow to donate his toys. And Klaus, naturally, wants to come along for the deliveries.

The postal coach has to lose its wheels to become a sleigh, the tired nag pulling it replaced with reindeer, and bit by bit, Jesper adds to the myth. Gifts are left next to the fireplace. Maybe in a stocking you hang from the mantel.

Bully writes for a toy? Maybe we just drop lumps of coal in his stocking.

“‘Naughty list’ he calls it.” And whispering, “TRUST me. You do NOT want to be on the naughty list!”

The back-engineering of the holiday traditions are ingenious and offbeat. Anybody over the age of five will jump just ahead of the story, here and there, seeing “Oh, THAT’s going to be Santa’s Workshop,’ and ‘THIS is where Santa gets his helpers in the workshop.”

Cute.

The look of the animation is an angular, broad and slightly under-animated hybrid of Chuck Jones and Tim Burton’s styles. “Klaus” is closer to old TV specials animation than the lush CGI of Pixar, Sony, Blue Sky or Dreamworks.

It’s not remotely as polished as the earlier contenders in the animated children’s film field, but “Klaus” is good enough to have earned a theatrical release, on a par with MGM’s “The Addams Family,” in any event.

An annual holiday classic? Probably not. But you can count on a return visit from “Klaus” every holiday season, as long as there’s a Netflix.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Jason Schwartzman, Rashida Jones, J. K. Simmons, Joan Cusack, Will Sasso and Norm McDonald

Credits: Directed by Sergio Pablos, script by Zach Lewis, Jim Mahoney and Sergio Pablos. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

The latest “Charlie’s Angels” reboot acknowledges its place in the Farrah Fawcett to Cameron Diaz to Kristen Stewart continuum. The “Townsend Agency” has had many Angels, many Bosleys.

It opens with a documentary montage of girls competing at sports, tackling big challenges and taking their rightful place at the table. So yes, it’s empowering, after a fashion — with plenty of nods to sexy fashion.

And the action scenes in the film demonstrate, again for the slow-learners, that actresses (and their stunt doubles) can handle fight choreography and action beats as well or better than any man.

Actress-turned-director (and co-star) Elizabeth Banks might be more at home in comedies, in front of (and in the case of the last “Pitch Perfect”) behind the camera. But she’s never less than competent at staging brawls, gun battles, The Big Heist and the Clever Con.

Kristen Stewart, Naomi Scott (“Aladdin”) and Ella Balinska, a British actress best known for the TV series “The Athena” but little known in this hemisphere, are put through their paces with skill.

But damn, this thing is pretty much joyless — no fun at all. Reports of Stewart’s gifts as a budding comedienne have been wildly-exaggerated, the one-liners don’t land and the story’s a non-starter and a bit of a downer, to boot.

The new Angels and their fight-teacher Bosley (Djimon Hounsou) spring into action when an engineer, Jane (Balinska) turns whistleblower on this dangerous new energy tech she’s helped develop that’s about to be released to the world.

Her sexist, credit-hog dunce of a boss (Nat Faxon) dismisses her concerns. If only she could get the word out.

But the moment the Angels make contact, the whistleblower is targeted. A pitiless assassin (Jonathan Tucker) is on her trail.

And the just-retired Bosley (Patrick Stewart) is onto something, too. Will new Bosley (Banks) help them make their getaway and save the day?

Whatever the benefits to the picture’s sex appeal, guys instinctively mistrust any female-lead action picture where too much attention has been paid to hair and makeup and heels and cleavage and short skirts and bare-midriff costumes. “Ocean’s 8,” anyone? Still, it tells us that everybody should be on the same page about this enterprise. It’s meant to be candy-colored escape, action-oriented fun.

But death is treated as glibly as in any vintage Schwarzenegger actioner, and even the funny lines get lost in the scuffle.

“You swiped RIGHT,” Stewart’s sexually ambiguous Sabina snaps at one quarry she’s about to drop. “I’M your girlfriend now!”

How’d you get that ID, MI-6 alumna Elena (Scott)?

“I compressed his carotid and de-oxygenated his brain stem!”

Just flies off the tongue, doesn’t it?

The film changes locations — Rio to Hamburg, Berlin, Malibu and Istanbul — as often as our heroines change costumes.

The caper moments have a comic snap to them, the straight action bits a sense of unreality — except when people die. The villains, save for Tucker, are colorless.

Then again, it looks like one and all had fun taking on this action vamp. But you know, the Diaz, Lucy Liu and Drew Barrymore “Angels” movies were fraught with tantrums and tensions on the set. Legendary for it.

But the movies? Both of their “Angels” outings were more fun than this.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for action/violence, language and some suggestive material

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Elizabeth Banks, Naomi Scott, Ella Balinska, Patrick Stewart, Sam Claflin, Chris Pang and Djimon Hounsou

Credits: Written and directed by Elizabeth Banks. A Sony Columbia release.

Running time: 1:58

“The Warrior Queen of Jhansi” is a respectable B-movie from India about a heroine of “The Mutiny,” the 1857-58 Indian Rebellion against the rule of the British East India Company and its British soldiers.

Ambitious, if choppy, flatly-acted and less inspiring than was its intention, it is the story of Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, who resisted the all-powerful East India Company’s efforts to annex her princely state after the death of her husband,bstripping its independence and the succession of her stepson.

Devika Bhise has the title role, a genuine warrior queen who galloped into battle with her troops, fought with sabre and bow, and coined — the film says — the term “freedom fighter” in her quest to free her people from the British corporate and colonial yoke.

When widowed and threatened by the ruthless, racist Company Man (Nathaniel Parker), unappeased by the sympathetic British soldier (Ben Lamb) who acts as go-between, the young Rani lets her temper show.

“I would remind you I am no stranger to battle.”

Trained with sword, rifle and bow since childhood, she was ready to fight.

But the action is slow to come in this “Warrior” tale. There’s much intrigue, a whole lot of chewing out by Queen Victoria (Jodhi May) directed at Lord Palmerston (Derek Jacobi) of “the greatest company in history.” The Queen has Indian sympathies driven by an Indian Muslim attendant, as “The Warrior Queen” seems to be moving the timeline up for the “Victoria & Abdul” story — which happened decades later.

Years pass, and yet the dead maharaja’s adopted son, whom the Brits signed off on as heir to the throne (Jhansi was a British-allied state), doesn’t grow up. At all.

The picture slips into a confused murk during the interval between when The Company first decided not to recognize Rani’s family succession and the beginning of the rebellion. The Rani must find alliances before the British finally attack.

Because cholera holds them at bay for a while. Eventually, though, led by Sir Hugh Rose (Rupert Everett, unenthused), they march. The great siege begins, the cannon roar and The Rani charges into action, a sabre in each hand.

Bhise (“The Accidental Husband,” “The Man Who Knew Infinity”) is fine in the action scenes, less interesting in the assorted ladies-in-waiting/confer with advisors/negotiate with the British officer interludes.

Her fiery moments of “Do NOT presume to tell me what I can and cannot do,” her speeches to rally the troops with tales of “rivers of blood…flowing through our motherland” are nothing special.

Bhise’s mother, actress and producer turned director and co-writer Swati Bhise, doesn’t demand more from her, and the film she conjures up is often exposed as a malnourished polemic about British racism, sexism and Anglo-Christian supremacy as resisted by this Brahmin born royal.

Not that epic, in other words.

Most of the fighting in this two year rebellion, sparked by British decisions to force Muslim Indian East India Co. troops to use paper cartridges sealed with animal fat for their rifles, is kept off camera in this would-be epic.

There are continuity errors, and not just having the same little boy play the young prince in scenes set five years apart.

Parker is agreeably vile as the “racist Brit,” the one who fumes “We owe these vulgar natives nothing. They’re barbarians!” Jacobi’s East India chief tries to charm Victoria with the notion that they’re “civilizing” and “converting to Christianity” the vast, fractious subcontinent that this extra-governmental corporation is running.

May’s Victoria gets her back up nicely. If only Bhise exhibited this sort of confident fury as Rani.

“The Warrior Queen of Jhansi” is educational only if you take to the Internet afterwards to look up the details I just filled in, allowing you to realize the corrections that needed to be made to the film’s account.

The entire enterprise has a tentative feel, with the elder Bhise more confident directing dialogue vignettes and the combat than with handling the sweep of the story, which feels incoherent, as often as not.

And as unemotional as most of this depressingly uninspiring, blood-stained tale is, you have to wonder what’s missing, and how the filmmaker can presume to tie Rani’s heroic struggle with the eventual independence of India, which came almost 100 years later.

She had to be more charismatic than this to inspire over the ages.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence

Cast: Devika Bhise, Jodhi May, Rupert Everett, Nathaniel Parker, Derek Jacobi, Arif Zakaria, Siyaa Patil and Omar Malik.

Credits: Directed by Swati Bhise, script by Dekia Bhise, Olivia Emden and Swati Bhise. A Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 1:42

For those who haven’t been paying attention, Indian films and movies set in India have been showing up on screens nationwide with increasing frequency.

Few have made much of a dent in the US box office, but the Subcontinent Diaspora in North America is large enough to justify the effort.

“The Warrior Queen of Jhansi” is a piece of Indian history about Manu, a woman who resisted the corporate tyranny of the British East India Company, became queen of her state and leader of an army that included women.

Looks fun. 2400 plus screens have this, so Roadside Attractions is gambling that it will have wide appeal. Let’s see if it should.

The star power, stellar reviews and awards season cachet of one of the best pictures of the year should be enough to ensure “Ford v. Ferrari” will own at least one weekend at the box office.

Tracking interest — retweets, YouTube views of the trailer, IMDb pageviews — point to a $20 million plus opening for this prestige picture about racing and iconoclasts changing the culture of a huge corporation.

But after “Doctor Sleep” underwhelmed last weekend, does this very guy-centric dramedy seem like such a sure thing?

Elizabeth Banks, Kristen Stewart and Patrick Stewart are rebooting “Charlie’s Angels,” but does that star power add up to anything like a sure thing? No. It could do $13, Variety and Box Office Mojo are saying. It could be a surprise smash. Remember “Hustlers?”

“The Good Liar” had awards buzz..until critics saw it. Older cast, limited box office appeal, it feels like a limited release that is opening wide. I don’t think it will manage the $6 to 7 million projected for Dame Helen and Sir Ian’s handiwork.

“The Warrior Queen of Jhansi” is opening wide with limited buzz, promotion, etc.

If “Midway” has another good weekend it will clear the $35 million mark since release by midnight Sunday.

I figure “Playing with Fire” will bottom out, and “Doctor Sleep” will show little sign of waking up.

Will the top ten clear $100 million all together? Box Office Mojo says “No.”But let’s hope so. There are some good choices out there.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/article/ed3765437444/?ref_=bo_at_a