Movie Nation

“Maleficent: Mistress of Evil,” aka “Maleficent 2” underwhelmed — for a Disney franchise picture — on its opening weekend, pulling in $36 million when projections were for it to be well into the $40s.

It’s on a lot of screens, and managers I’ve spoken with this week say it’s drawing nicely. Still, any falloff over 50% this weekend and “Joker” will edge it to return to #1 at the box office.

Both films should do around $17 million, so we won’t know for sure until Sunday. It’s going to be that close.

“Joker” is already the biggest R-rated hit ever, over $900 million globally.

“Zombieland: Double Tap” slightly over-performed expectations last weekend. It could clear another $14 this weekend, says Box Office Mojo.

The new horror film “Countdown” isn’t great, isn’t terrible, and could connect with its audience. $10 million appears to be its ceiling, but you never know.

Mixed reviews and a known, but not box office cast headed by Naomie Harris, Tyrese Gibson and Frank Grillo, mean that the cop chased by bad cops through New Orleans thriller — “Black and Blue” will not manage $10 million — $8 million is projected. I thought it a solid genre pic, and think it deserves better. Word out mouth might help.

“The Current War” had to be reedited to warrant any sort of release at all. It’s on its third studio. Harvey Weinstein butchered it and abandoned it in the middle of the uproar over his decades of sexual assaults. “The Director’s Cut” is pretty good and worth your time, the best of the new releases this weekend. Will anybody see it? Benedict Cumberbatch/Tom Holland/Nikola Tesla-Nicholas Hoult fans?

Michael Shannon’s people will show up. Near the top of the list of “Best Actors to Never Win an Oscar.”

“Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” returns to 1500 screens with four more scenes, a bit more of Rick Dalton’s “Bounty Law” TV show acting and some other material. I thought it was long enough as it was, but hey.

The chilling and beautifully acted “The Lighthouse” goes into wider release.

Horror anthologies are nothing new, with “The ABCs of Death” and “VHS” series giving indie filmmakers in the genre a chance to pitch in on a collection of short films, connected by theme.

Calling “Portals” a science fiction anthology doesn’t reflect its true nature or genres of origin. It’s closer to horror.

At times resembling a zombie picture, with a “2001” prop as its centerpiece, it suffers the usual anthology issues of pacing, from short film to short film, even as it feels somewhat more cohesive in telling one basic story.

That story, though? Kind of a yawner.

The gist — a science project to create a “manmade black hole” has gone awry, a framing “mockumentary” debriefing a couple of Brits explains. The global power grid crashed, and these mysterious monolithic “doors” start popping up.

And what did rocker Ray Manzarek say? “There are things you know, and things you don’t…And in between are…The Doors!”

What’s on the other side of these “Portals?”

We follow a family (Neil Hopkins, Deanna Russo, Ruby O’Donnell) as they make a not-that-frightened evacuation. Cities are emptying the world over, for some reason.

Where are they fleeing to? Are they no portals in boondocks?

Adam has no sooner told their little girl (O’Donnell) that “As long as I can see your faces, we’re safe,” when this portal pops up in the middle of the highway through Joshua Tree National Monument, and they crash. “The Other Side,” directed and co-scripted by Liam O’Donnell, is about Adam’s post accident hospital stay, the weird thing that happened to his eye, and his “lone survivor” status, what he saw on “The Other Side.”

What happened to his wife and daughter? There’s something fishy about this “hospital.”

“Call Center,” directed by Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale of “The Blair Witch Project,” goes to a 911 center just as this event is happening. Panicked callers want to know what’s going on, what they’re seeing and if they should be afraid.

When a portal opens in the center itself, some will be invited through, others blocked, and the more impressionable will hear voices and get instructions on forcing others through. The panic outside now comes into the center with them, as violence and desperation to reach their own loved ones puts employees in conflict.

And in “Sarah,” two sisters in Jakarta, Indonesia (Salvita Decorte, Natasha Gott) are bickering over who’s pregnant, who just lost a baby and who is having a rougher time of it when the lights flicker, the portals appear and SOME Indonesians go Full Zombie as a result.

This is the action-filled third of the film, although the head-exploding bit turns up in one of the other two threads of the story.

Cutting back and forth between stories implies suspense will build in each story as the ramifications of this “event” unfold. There’s a little of that in the call center, a middling reach for paranoia in “The Other Side” and amped up action in “Sarah.”

But the choppy structure, different directors with seemingly no clear role of the function their segments should serve — each building on the one before, suspense-wise, would be nice — and the diffuse nature of “the threat” rob this anthology of urgency, menace and, well, coherence.

We can’t follow any story long enough to connect with the characters and invest in their plight.

A few challenging scenes, a cool “portal” effect, and some zombie (ish) mayhem result.

Hopkins makes an interesting, confused and increasingly dubious victim/hero/survivor.

But the whole doesn’t answer any questions, not that it asks any interesting ones in the first place.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphic bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Neil Hopkins, Salvita Decorte, Natasha Gott, Gretchen Lodge, Shelye Broughton, Paul McCarthy-Boyington and Ptolemy Slocum

Credits: Directed by Liam O’Donnell , Gregg Hale, Eduardo Sanchez,Timo Tjahjanto. Script by Liam O’Donnell, Timo Tjahjanto, Sebastian Bendix, Christopher White. A Screen Media release.

running time: 1:27

The best one-stop-shopping for all your box office info just got swallowed by the authoritative website for cast, crew, credits, etc.

And Box Office Mojo as part of “IMDB Pro,” looks slicker, I will say that for it.

The long-established BO Mojo uses the same data, reported by the studios, on film box office performance.

And every weekend, Box Office Mojo, Variety, Deadline.com and others speculate — based on studio marketing tracking numbers tips, web traffic to see movie trailers, and other facts, and HUNCHES, to guess what the top movie will be and how much the top ten films will earn, week to week.

It’s not an exact science, but it’s rare that a film seriously over or underperforms expectations. “Joker” was a bigger hit than anybody expected, “Maleficent 2” was not as big, for example.

Curious to see if most of BO Mojo’s data ends up behind an IMDB pay wall. That site links to Metacritic reviews (Thanks for that), and puts a lot of effort into video (meh) movie junket interviews.

Everybody’s looking for new revenue streams, and evolving is smart. And as I say, the slickness of the new presentation and design works.

“Countdown” is for those horror fans who like their drinks straight, no chaser.

Nothing too fancy. Not too much “explaining,” none that has to make any sense, anyway.

Nice and cheap (a $6.5 million budget). Cast good-looking unknowns (Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway), save for the creepy doctor (Peter Facinelli of “Nurse Jackie”).

Use comics in key supporting roles, for laughs — the cell phone repair whiz (Tom Segura), the geek priest who got into the Holy Catholic Church for the Latin and the demonology (P.J. Byrne).

Get your jolts, and this one is “jolty” in the extreme, the old-fashioned way –shrieking sound effects (including a ring tone), abrupt, shocking edits, and shadows.

Effects? Yank somebody out of the frame — across the floor, or up to the ceiling.

And hire the right master of the macabre to design your creature costumes, makeup and effects. Here, it’s Ehsan Bigloo, who conjures up assorted wraiths, demonic corpses and a genuinely chilling Grim Reaper, cape and cowl, Satanic hands, everything but the scythe.

First-time feature writer-and-director Justin Dec makes the jump from “miscellaneous crew” credits with this latest variation of “the killer app,” a horror subgenre involving the cell phone as harbinger of death (“One Missed Call,” “Cell,” etc.).

Here, it’s a new “Countdown” app that has all the kids abuzz.

“If you could know exactly when you’re going to die, would you WANT to know?”

You know “kids.” Sure. Download that bad boy. “Accept” that “User Agreement.” “Fine print?”  Who has time to read anything longer than a tweet?

Some get the good news of lives of great longevity. Others? Days. Hours. Tick tick tick tick…

“Countdown” doesn’t just count you down to your untimely demise. It all but takes over your phone. It’s malware you seemingly can’t delete — like MacAfee, only free.

And it hits you with these shrieking, insistent “alerts.” Especially when you try to alter your fate by cancelling a trip, ducking out of a car whose driver is drunk, etc.

If we learned nothing else from the “Final Destination” franchise, it’s that “death’s grand design” will not be thwarted. Dodge a drunk driver here, get yanked into the air and dropped on a tub there.

Elizabeth Lail is a nurse whose patient, grimly awaiting his “Countdown” clock to wind down, probably in surgery, convinces her to offhandedly add this new app and unthinkingly click “accept.”

When the patient dies — a prologue sets up”the app that decides when you die inevitability” — Nurse Quinn, Medicine Woman has a moment of doubt. She won’t reach “worry” and “panic” until later.

The tech-nerd cell phone “doctor” (Segura) is awfully droll about how Quinn, and another panicky customer (Jordan Calloway) have been suckered in to this obviously fake app designed to scare the life out of you. But Quinn and Matt are seeing things. And people are dying.

It takes two priests, one referring them to another, the demon “expert,” to get some answers.

“The Bible is like, the ULTIMATE graphic novel!” Father John (Byrne) enthuses. Best line of the movie. Demons in chapter after chapter, descriptions, myth and apocrypha thrown in.

There’s a #MeToo set up, with a creeper doctor (Facinelli), and attacks that the new couple, bound by the shared threat, face together, along with demonology-based “solutions” and an ending that isn’t the worst “How do we write a way out of this?” I’ve seen.

It’s not highbrow entertainment. Movies like this always feel “designed,” like a theme park ride — story beat, JOLT, exposition exposition JOLT, etc. But “Countdown” manages the bare minimum — the occasional shock, characters we root for, thanks to the actors playing them, and situations fraught enough that the audience is talking back to the screen.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for terror, violence, bloody images, suggestive material, language and thematic elements

Cast:  Elizabeth Lail, Jordan Calloway, Talitha Eliana Bateman, Peter Facinelli, with P.J. Byrne and Tom Segura

Credits: Written and directed by Justin Dec.  An STX release.

Running time: 1:30

Artists, the old saying goes, “pound the same nail over and over again.”

For the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, that nail often has fingernail polish on it.

“Pain & Glory,” his 22nd feature film, finds the 70 year-old legend in a reflective mood, an old man played by a handsome alter ego (Antonio Banderas) musing over his bad back, his migraines, his aching joints and his seized esophagus, a veritable recluse who no longer creates, but is ready to reconsider his past work in a new light.

His fragile health and a newly restored version of his great success, “Sabor (Taste)” has Salvador Mallo ready to forgive the film’s star, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia), whom he feuded with long ago. An actress Salvador used in his films (Cecilia Roth of “All About My Mother”) puts him in touch with Alberto, a less employed actor holed up in the picturesque tourist town of El Escorial.

They reconnect, forgive and forget. And it turns out, the issue the two had way back when offers some relief to Salvador now. Alberto loves his heroin, and has managed it for decades. Salvador finds pain relief with him as they “chase the dragon.”

And in flashbacks, some of them drug-induced, there she is, the woman (played by Penélope Cruz) who “made me who I am,” the mother whose influence drove the alter-ego filmmaker’s life and work just as it did the real director here, the one who gave us “All About My Mother” and “Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom,” who all but invented Spanish queer cinema in the process.

There’s an almost Fellini-esque magic to some of these childhood memories of a mama’s boy whose life in the arts began in the Catholic Church — a boy soprano soloist in the school choir, picking up his voice from his mother, who’d sing with the other women as they did their laundry in the river.

She was underwhelmed by the life they led, moved to Paterna by his laborer dad, living in one of the town’s famous cave houses. Jacinta (Cruz) lamented the rough-hewn walls, the dirt floor, the window skylight that let the rain in. Her mother lectured her, “Yiou live in catacombs, like the ancient Christians!”

And little Salvador loves this adventurous lifestyle, exchanging his book learning for writing lessons he gives a local teen (César Vicente), who whitewashes their walls and inadvertantly lets little Salvador realize that maybe he likes boys instead of girls.

In the present day, Salvador has nothing but the past. “I cannot film in this condition. Without filming,” he says (in Spanish, with English subtitles), my life is meaningless.”

But he has this autobiographical script that Alberto reads, one that could be staged as a one-man show. Let me “play you,” the actor begs, between sessions of “chasing the dragon.” Will this pull our hero out of his funk?

There’s little emotion to all of this, and aside from a brief moment that flirts with “joyous,” even the flashbacks lack the brio and abandon characteristic of Almodóvar’s signature films.

It’s as if Banderas is taking Salvador’s own advice to Alberto-the-actor too literally. “The better actor is not the one who cries. It is the one who fights to hold back the tears.”

We aren’t given much to cling to here. Even the infirmities of old age are only portrayed as a stiff slowing down, and the depression that comes with that.

The locations — especially Paterna — can be striking. But generic doctor’s offices and apartments weigh the film down visually.

As the filmmaker, on screen and behind the camera, reflects on “the cinema of my childhood,” we hope for something more picaresque, a hint of “The 400 Blows” or “Cinema Paradiso.” Something more colorful and childish. “Fellini-esque.”

Almodóvar can’t be bothered with that. He never seems more like an old man than when he lets his film wander into old man complaints — that litany of physical ailments that we all obsess over as we age.

The sentimentality — for his mother, his formative childhood, an old lover — is what interests Almodóvar, here. And while it’s great that longtime collaborators Cruz and Banderas showed up to help him walk down memory lane, it’s not the most interesting cinematic journey he’s taken us on.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, some graphic nudity and language. |

Cast: Antonio Banderas, Asier Etxeandia, Celilia Roth, Leonardo Sbaraglia and Penélope Cruz

Credits: Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:53

For someone who gripes that a big problem with Hollywood these days is its abandonment of proven, visionary directors, this is sobering.

Ang Lee has been given a lot of chances to deliver the goods since “Brokeback Mountain,”none bigger tha a Will Smith actioner with lots of effects.

Virtually every picture he’s made has been a critical flop and box office bust.

The red ink from “Gemini Man” could have financed five “Brokebacks.”

Via THR

https://t.co/svnGEb5czB https://twitter.com/THR/status/1187288897476349953?s=17

It wasn’t anybody’s idea of a classic, not even the best kiddie movie about witches of its day.

But “Hocus Pocus” has aged well, as have its stars– Bette, Sarah Jessica P. and Kathy Najimy. Will they be on the now planned sequel, 26 years later?

You’d think the plan would be for a prequel.

Disney mines more of its archives for product is the real story here. Originality is dead at Disney. Blockbuster remakes of animated classics is what the Mouse — especially its accountants — is all about.

https://t.co/weNqDVGxkY https://t.co/zPESlwPIt3 https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1187292675734724608?s=17

Yeah, more youngsters menaced by a “killer app.”

Embargo on reviews for this one, so mum’s the word about its quality until Noon Thursday.

Real vote of confidence there, STX. A horror movie that works has nothing to fear from critics.

The narcotized normality of suburbia takes a pastel-colored pummelling in “Greener Grass,” a daft and dark comedy from two alumni of the comedy troupe, Upright Citizen’s Brigade.

That shared credit, where Dawn Luebbe and Jocelyn DeBoer connected, tells you what to expect — broad, scattershot, random and deadpan swipes at faddish, amoral and faintly repellant suburbanites. It won’t be to many tastes, but this “Stepford” meets “The Prisoner” in “The Truman Show” satire is engineered for cult status, and sure to own it.

In an unnamed planned community where life is so insulated that everyone knows everyone, and everyone must use the same orthodontist (Braces for all!) , everybody gets around in golf carts and every single person is too polite — or meek — to be the first to roll through a four-way-stop.

It’s a community where routine seems…routine, it is impulse, bend-over-backwards politeness and easy on-the-fly shaming drives society.

And what they get used to, accept as normal? Wow.

A murder by a bag packer at the local market is shrugged off, even as cops in the cutest teal uniforms (Shorts!) stake the place out in plain sight.

Provincialism rules, conformity and how to achieve it is the norm.

And Jill (co-writer/director Jocelyn DeBoer) and Nick (Beck Bennett of “Saturday Night Live”) spend their smiling, conforming lives a tad mortified. Their kid, Julian (Julian Hilliard) just isn’t right. He’s unfocused, scattered, highly strung and marching to his own one-armed drummer. He treats all physical contact as an attack. That makes him the perfect soccer “flopper.” But his random shrieks and wails go up in volume when a game of catch with Dad goes terribly, if not remotely injuriously, wrong.

Jill spends her life apologizing, at least in part, because of Julian.

Maybe that explains her chat at the soccer game with bestie Lisa  (co-writer/director Dawn Luebbe). Jill’s second baby, Madison, is on her hip. Nothing gets by Lisa.

“Oh, I didn’t even notice you have a baby!”

“We wanted to try something new!”

Lisa wishes she had a newborn.

“You want her? TAKE her! She’s yours now!”

“Thank you SO much!”

“ENJOY!”

Baby Madison becomes Baby Page, just like that.

Vapidity is not gender-specific, here. The couples mix up their mates (Neil Casey plays Lisa’s husband), but only after a little competitive public displaying of affection at a cookout.

Nick’s new passion is their new pool, whose water he tinkers with and tests until he’s at the point he carries gallons of it around with him.

“Here, TRY this!”

In that setting, the most bizarre occurrence of all barely registers with Jill and Nick. Julian, in one of his many moments of attention-grabbing drama, plunges into the pool at Nick’s 40th birthday party. He emerges as, well, a Golden Retriever?

Jill, ever-rattled, always-apologizing, just goes along with it. Nick? He’s lost a son who can’t play catch, who wets himself in fear on a daily basis in second grade, who ruins every soccer match with his flopping. But he’s gained someone who wants to play with dad, frolic and a natural canine athlete.

Nick is overjoyed. So what if Julian is kicked out of “Rocket Math?”

“D’you think he was going to be an accountant?”

“Greener Grass” rides this randomness, and a lot of insta-shaming moments from Lisa — who won’t give back Jill’s baby, even though Jill doesn’t want to be “an Indian giver.”

“You can’t SAY that now!” Lisa’s up on everything people aren’t allowed to do or say any more. And she’s not alone. It’s the lifeblood of this place — shaming over potluck dishes, over the boy whose parents let him watch “Kids Play with Knives” and who learned to swear and act-out from it.

What I can’t say is that “Greener Grass” is much of a movie, that it held together for me. It’s like three “Upright Citizens Brigade” episodes, built on a common cast and haphazzardly selected themes, barely jelling into a “story.”

Still, see “Greener Grass” for the set pieces. The teacher, Miss Human (D’Arcy Carden) sings a ballad about her sharecropper/spree killer mother, accompanying herself on her class guitar — which she’s plainly not playing.

Lisa, on a whim, grabs a soccer ball, shoving it under her dress and letting this world see she’s pregnant (carrying that joke all the way to term).

Neighbor Kim Ann (Mary Holland) lets the world know she’s divorcing by having people over as her husband packs his things into their golf cart.

“Sit. I made lemonade. We’re watching.”

No, set pieces don’t make a movie, and there’s a struggle not to let anyone have a character arc, make a journey into self-awareness. They almost let it happen, but don’t.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe, Beck Bennett, Julian Hilliard, Janicza Bravo, Neil Casey, D’Arcy Carden

Credits: Written and directed by Jocelyn DeBoer, Dawn Luebbe.   An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:36

Now it’s Ken Loach, veteran of the British film scene, who burns Marvel Movies a new one.

The director of “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” “Bread and Roses,” “Jimmy’s Hall” and many Celtic-flavored dramas in the UK, has added his complaints to those of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Loach, correctly, I have to say, called the output of the blockbuster building Marvel Studios “commodities, like hamburgers.”

One of the consequences of the rise of comic book blockbusters is the loss of status, vision and control in the title “director.” Hollywood isn’t producing directors with any staying power, treating rising stars as nothing special, ignoring the legends of the profession.

Overseas, and in indie film, directors are still auteurs. Hollywood? Get us The Russo Brothers, or somebody from TV (British TV, preferably, as in the Potter pictures) — somebody CHEAP who can make the trains run on time.

And if you say, “Ken Loach? Who’s he?” That’s on you. Loach, Leigh, Holofcener, legions of directors with style, distinct voices, who insist on making movies ABOUT something, have no place at Marvel, or at Disney — which has become a blockbuster remake or bust studio. Joe Johnston, Ken Brannagh, Jon Favreau, Joss Whedon and Patty Jenkins all had “names” before taking on comic book directing duties. But while thus employed, all they could stamp their projects with was a little cute dialogue and a vague notion of a point of view.

Marvel and its ilk are the death of auteurism, and directors who claim that label are rebelling. No matter how old they are.