Movie Nation

So Will Smith starred in the second film based on Richard Matheson’s “I Am Legend,” the version that actually used that title.

The one starring Chuck Heston? “The Omega Man.”

Now Will’s got another trip to the sci-fi well, “Gemini Man,” about an assassin cloned by Big Brother (Clive Owen is Big Brother’s cousin, twice removed) and forced to face the younger version of himself.

Early word on this has been bad, but Smith’s overcome “bad” or at least “listless” (“Aladdin”) before.

“Gemini Man” opens Friday and may be hard-pressed to chase “Joker” off the top of the box office mountain. Because “Joker” just set another Oct. record — best Monday in Oct. EVER.

Documentary filmmaker Louis Schwartzeberg, of DisneyNature’s “Wings of Life,” didn’t need to add “The Magic Beneath Us” to the title of his “Fantastic Fungi.”

We were already thinking, “Oh, it’s a magic mushroom movie.” He might as well have titled it “Shrooms,” am I right?

And yes, this documentary about the many beautiful and often utilitarian types of mushrooms on Planet Earth gets around to the “mind/consciousness expanding” corner of the story. Not every expert here counts that as the source of their fandom.

But in the latter third of this eye-opening and sometimes eye-popping film, we do hear from our fair share of long-bearded prophets from the ’60s and ’70s, extolling the virtues and even the biochemistry of that part of fungal world of edibles, inedibles, decay-inducing, pollution-eating lifeforms of the Basidiomycota and Agaricomycetes divisions.

They exist “somewhere between plants and animals,” one of the legion of professional and amateur mycologists (mushroom experts) weighing in here declare. And they have uses all across the spectrum, from basic biodiversity to culinary treats to the darned thing growing out of that rotten log that could cure cancer and treat Alzheimer’s.

TED talkers (Paul Stamet) and foodies (Eugenia Bone, Michael Pollan) sing the song of ‘shrooms — no, they do NOT like them so labeled, connotations you see — and immerse us in the world these fungi made, and how humanity might have been shaped by our primate ancestors ingesting mushrooms that promoted Big Thinking.

There we are, back to the ‘shrooms thing.

Stamet is the central interview subject here, an amateur mycologist who has turned himself into one of the world’s leading experts in the field. His TED talk was “Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World,” and he makes a great case.

And yeah, some of his initial interest might have come from the psychedelic side of things. The film’s overall “heightened consciousness” of “profound experiences” bent spins out of that.

But this movie is fascinating on a lot of levels, not just what the Mayans and Native Americans of North America knew about fungi with mind-expanding properties.

Schwartzberg points his time-lapse camera at fungi growing, devouring rotting flora and (a dead rat) fauna, at stunning bioluminescent mushrooms and this “icicle-like” mushroom, Hericium erinaceus, “Lion’s mane,” whose nerve-growth stimulating properties could hold a meaningful treatment for Alzheimer’s.

We’re told that research and breakthroughs in the study of mushrooms make preserving old growth forests a matter of human survival, and we’re soberly reminded that every mass extinction event on Earth has had one certain survivor. The damned mushrooms will be here long after we’re gone.

There’s a poetic, credulous narration read by Oscar winner Brie Larson that summons up “the pulse of eternal knowledge” that grows out of the rot and hurls spores into the air, and makes a fantastic pizza topping along the way.

The viewer can bring his or her own skepticism to the “cured my stuttering” and “cured my mom’s cancer” claims of Stamets, while still hoping the hard research into applying these “natural” cures to what ails us proceeds with all haste, with as little involvement by Big Pharma as possible.

If you can grow something to treat your anxiety in your compost heap, who needs Bayer, Merck, GlaxoSmith this or CVS that?

The answers to what ails us might be right there on the forest floor — mushrooms, not just for Pizza Hut and Timothy Leary disciples any more.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Paul Stamets, Mary P. Cosimano, Andrew Weil, Suzanne Simard, Michael Pollan, many others — narrated by Brie Larson

Credits: Directed by Louie Schwartzberg, script by Mark Monroe. A Moving Art release.

Running time: 1:21

In “Entangled,” we can size up Marin, played by Ana Girardot, by what we see and hear. Or we can let “what happened to me” make up our minds for us.

What happened to her was a miscarriage.

“It hurts,” she says, in a French-accented voice-over that plays like a long letter or email she is sending to her boyfriend of many years Mark (Peter Mark Kendall). She hates that he wants to “act like nothing happened.”

But she doesn’t want to talk about it. She keeps him at a distance, living on her own in a posh Manhattan apartment.

She hates when he and others ask “if I feel better.”

And she gets really mad when one of Mark’s friends’ wives offers the feeble comfort of “I am so sooo sorry.”

Confronting Mark later, it’s “Who do you think you are telling them about MY miscarriage?”

Her therapist has to hear that Mark “doesn’t get what it is like for me,” even though the shrink knows things Marin won’t say to Mark, her “secrets.”

“I’m tired of being in my head. When I look at myself, I see negative space.”

We begin to, as well.

“I want to see myself through someone else’s eyes.”

Way ahead of you there, dear.

We’ve seen just enough of Mark in the office, chatting with friends about Marin, how she “needs space/needs time,” to wonder if he’s cheating on her. With say, his stunning assistant or somebody else his less ethical married pal invites to their table in whatever bar they’re “working late” at this night.

Marin? “I just want to touch someone new.”

First-time writer-director Milena Lurie seems to want “Entangled” to be a portrait of the emptiness Marin feels in recovering from this most solitary of traumas. What she’s managed is something far less flattering and indulgent.

As we hear Girardot’s plaintive, flat-voiced narration — “Escobar: Paradise Lost” is her most famous credit in North America — we’re treated to Marin showering and pondering, Marin taking a soak and musing, Marin getting dressed in her too-sexy underwear, Marin hanging out at a fashion shoot with friends and peers.

A model? Maybe. Something or someone pays for that penthouse.’

She summons a pal (Lucy Walters) with a simple “Can you come over?”

She shares an erotic dance with another model-beautiful woman at a bar-party.

She reconnects with a French ex (Grégory Fitoussi) who finds an excuse to “be in New York.” And when he’s late, she lets herself be picked up by a charming, rich bar prowler (Jonathan Cake).

And at some point, for me it was distressingly early, you check out of Marin’s plight, her fragile emotional state, and pick out everything beyond her great looks that just…grates.

As pretty as everything and everyone are in this vapid film, there’s nothing to disentangle here, no empathetic performance to cling no matter what sympathies we bring to someone going through this.

MPAA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual situations, smoking, alcohol, profanity

Cast: Ana Girardot, Peter Mark Kendall, Lucy Walters, Grégory Fitoussi and Jonathan Cake.

Credits:Written and directed by Milena Lurie. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:32

You may think you know Lupita Nyong’o, Oscar-winning star of “Twelve Years a Slave” and “Us.” But you haven’t seen her at her funniest, fiestiest and sweetest until you’ve plunged into the comic horrors of “Little Monsters.”

As kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline, she protects her tiny flock like a mother hen, brooking no nonsense from these five year-old Aussies.

“One two three, eyes on ME!” she commands, and their response is always “One, two, eyes on YOU.”

They adore her, are charmed by her ukulele playing and utterly beguiled by her singing. You haven’t heard Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Up” til you’ve heard Miss Caroline’s ukulele sing-along version.

They have a connection, which is especially important when she’s trying to keep her dozen charges alive during a zombie outbreak while on a field trip, and convince them it’s all a game, and that they’re winning.

That blood all over her lovely yellow dress?

“I got caught in the middle of a jam fight!”

“YAAAaaaaaaaayyyy!”

Writer-director Abe Forsythe’s break-out zombie romp may be structured around Dave (Alexander England), a lazy, loutish 30something guitar player who’s never given up his Flying Vee, never given up his metal band, God’s Sledgehammer, never held a real job.

The scene-stealer might be the world famous kiddie entertainer Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad, a hoot), an insipid singer and hyperactive bundle of fun who is filming on location at the petting zoo Miss Caroline’s kids, including Dave’s nephew (Diesel La Torraca, I kid you not) are visiting for a field trip.

“I learned Meisner from Pacino! AL!”

But once the “virus” escapes from the neaby U.S. test facility, once the dead are biting the living and making more living dead, the movie belongs to Miss Caroline.

It’s a zombie comedy, so the laughs come in mostly very familiar places, with cracks about “Children of the Corn” and “Meals on Wheels” from the American entertainer, and American GIs asking their commanding officer the most important question in any zombie apocalypse.

“Fast zombies or slow zombies, SIR?”

Forsythe sets us up for something even more conventional before that, a mismatched rom-com in which Dave is kicked out of his girlfriend’s life and becomes the most inappropriate role model for his single mom sister’s (Kat Stewart) bullied, allegeric boy Felix (La Torraca). F-bombs, violent VR video games, dragging the kid into his struggle to reclaim his lost love Sara (Nadia Townsend).

A strident but amusing opening credits sequence has summed up that dead-end relationship as an endless argument and Dave as a loser with no prospects.

The first big laugh comes as Dave sorts one “bully” problem with a classroom door.

But Miss Caroline makes everyone want to do better. And when the dead feast on the living, it’s no heavy metal buffoon or diva of kids’ TV who must take charge and save little bodies as she’s shaping little minds.

She is adorable, and she makes “Little Monsters” the most adorable midnight movie/cult comedy/zombie farce you’ll see this year.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody zombie violence, crude sexual content, language throughout and brief drug use.

Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Josh Gad, Alexander England, Kat Stewart and Diesel La Torraca.

Credits: Written and directed by Abe Forsythe. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:33

“Lady-Like” is the kind of cute-coeds-act-coarse comedy that calls for us to revive a word that isn’t used enough these days.

“Blowsy.” That’s the best six-letter description of anti-heroine Allie (Stephanie Simbari of “Coldwater”). Park her character somewhere below “trollop,” somewhat above “floozy” or as the kids say these days, “skank.”

“Blowsy” Allie isn’t a comment on her fixation with oral sex, or talking about it with BSSF (best sorority sister etc.)  Kort, blandly-played by Allie Gallerani of “Professor Marston and the Wonder Wome.”

Allie is brash, brazen, too young to be a hussy but collegiate enough to refer to her “sloppy sophomore sandwich” as something she’s “not going to judge” herself for.

She oversleeps, slacks off, texts and giggles about texting in class, spends Daddy’s money and counts the days until she and Kort take their summer break trip to Europe. “No boyfriend” until she gets back, she vows. She needs to knuckle down if she’s going to het that Mrs. Degree, the house in Chevy Chase, the husband in the State Dept. in D.C.

And frankly she’s a little shocked when Kort suggests SHE could apply herself and get all that on her own. She’s even more shocked that Kort didn’t take her overbearing declaration as an edict for them both.

Kort meets a handsome lacrosse player at their DC area college (filmed at Princeton and in and around Washington). And she dares to fall in love.

“Lady-Like” is about Allie’s abandonment spiral after Kort finds her some “Nantucket nector,” Daniel (Zak Steiner).

That’s not a helluva lot to hang a college rom-com on, but writer-director Brent Craft loses himself in this male wish fulfillment fantasy about what college girls are REALLY like and Simbari, a firecracker who plays this kid like the 30ish, confident woman she was when she was cast, makes the best of it.

The film has the tinge of “The Male Gaze” about it, although the raunch is almost entirely verbal. Craft’s foul-mouthed farce has some winning lines, girl-talk interrupted by sorority sisters’ demanding “Are you guys gonna ‘scissor’ all night, or are we gonna PARTY?”

Have a drink. “I call this the Ben Affleck. Because you drink this, you’re gonna be GONE girl!”

The fluffiest scenes are the ones where Kort and Allie bond over trying on date dresses at a tony Georgetown “Forever 21” clone. “We’ve gotta have more Beyoncé, less Bea Arthur!”

The promiscuous sorority atmosphere is fleshed out with Olivia Luccardi and Corinne Mestemacher, finding just enough funny stuff in the script to say to make an impression.

“Is that a hickey? Who DID it?”

“No idea.”

“Lady-Like” feels oddly subdued for an R-rated comedy these days. That’s because it’s ten minutes shorter than its festival release cut. The dirtest scene was apparently omitted.

Probably wouldn’t have helped.

But Simbari, however the boys’ fantasy girls screenplay lets her down, makes the most of a starring role, a little Alia Shawcat bravado and vamp, a hint of Jillian Bell hurt. Find this woman better roles than this! Or a sitcom!

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual material and language throughout, and brief graphic nudity

Cast:Stephanie Simbari, Olivia Luccardi, Corinne Mestemacher, Zak Steiner and Beverly D’Angelo

Credits: Written and directed by Brent Craft.  A Craftsmen Media/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:22

Marin Ireland’s been a busy bee in the 15 years since she broke into film — “Hell or High Water” and “Sneaky Pete” are a couple of highlights on her resume.

Interesting that Jim Gaffigan’s agent is landing him all these no-budget dramas.

“Light from Light” seems to be a mildly spooky tale where you feel the weight of grief in the trailer.

“Light from Light” opens in limited release Nov. 1.

No matter what obsessed fans think, sequels have to stand-alone as films, stories that work in their own right. Relying on everybody seeing your new movie having seen the original film simply isn’t cricket.

That goes for every “Mad Max,” every “Tim & Eric” outing, every “Avengers” and every “Sinister Circle,” a Peruvian horror film that references, and quite heavily, “Cementario General” (“General Cemetery”), the 2013 film this one refers back to, not-quite-constantly.

It’s about a surviving relative of one of those “taken by robed” demons in the first film, a psychotherapist whose belief in science runs up against the supernatural as she tries to get to the bottom of what happened to her sister and what is happening to her mental patient mother while keeping her little boy safe in a city he doesn’t know.

Fernanda (Milene Vásquez) questions her profession after dealing with a Mexico City patient she could never help, a man who begs her to “Help me get out of here” (in Spanish, with English subtitles). “If you don’t he’ll KILL me!”

Someone, some-THING, was coming for him. We don’t have to guess whether or not it did.

Fernanda is widowed, and has a traumatized child at home. Julio (Matías Raygada) is suffering from “selective mutism,” ever since his father died. He won’t talk, a big reason he’s as obsessed with his tablet as he is.

When his mother drags Julito to Lima from their Mexico City home, the kid’s going to have a LOT to talk, or at least SCREAM about. The wraith he sees wandering the backyard of the family apartment building is his first clue.

Director Dorian Fernández-Moris (he also did “Cementario General”) manages the basics with some skill. The kid may insist (typing his plea “FEAR” onto his tablet) on sleeping in Mom’s bed. But that doesn’t keep him from wandering the halls, seeking the source of the skittering and footfall noises he hears in the middle of the night.

Julio, pal, make up your mind. You’re either too afraid to sleep on your own, or brassy enough to seek the source of the spookiness only you are witness to.

The demons haunting him have a thing for his iPad. There’s a tug of war over the charger cord with a gnarled arm and hand, a Close Encounter from The Other Side when he drops it under his bed.

Not being able to scream suppresses the poor child actor’s performance. Never for a second do we believe he’s in mortal danger, because we don’t see it in him. He’s not skilled enough to do it with gasping, eyes-bulging mime. The director doesn’t help him get the terror across.

Fernanda’s mother (Claudia Dammert of “Proof of Life”) is a danger to herself and her daughter during her visits. But pesky journalists like Alejandro (Marcello Rivera) have questions about what’s REALLY going on. Local TV is still covering the mass deaths of “Cementario General” years after the fact.

Yes, something IS going on — with that mass death a few years ago, in that cemetery, in the hospital and with Fernanda’s family. But what in the name of Mia Farrow could it be?

There are a couple of decent hair-raising moments in “Sinister,” and a lot of dull rehashing, exposition and delays in getting to the point.

Take away the flashbacks and it might still stand on its own — teetering, not entirely upright, but not so reliant on the first film to really need all these flashbacks.

As pointless as they seem, we can guess why they’re here. There’s not enough movie in “Sinister Circle” without them. And something’s got to fill in the time before we get to the crappy cop-out ending.

MPAA Rating: unrated, horrific images

Cast: Milene Vásquez, Matías Raygada, Claudia Dammert, Marcello Rivera

Credits: Dorian Fernández-Moris, script by Adrián OchoaAn AV Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

The reason you stay through to the closing credits when reviewing a film is basic movie-reviewing ethics. It’s a rule.

Here’s another one. Never let a rom-com’s touching if obvious ending change your mind about the 90 minutes that preceded it.

“Carrie Pilby” starts feebly, soldiers on gamely and ends with the warm fuzzies. The reviewing cliche “mixed bag” was coined for comedies like this.

Bel Powley is a capable young Brit with impressive range, shining in films such as “Diary of a Teenage Girl” and “A Royal Night Out,” going amazingly trailer trashy look in “White Boy Rick.” But tackling the latest “so smart she/he isn’t socialized or connected to the real world” script — “Big Bang Theory” ruined it for everybody, kids — wasn’t her smoothest move.

She’s a rich-enough British transplant, living in Manhattan on Daddy’s dime, seeing a shrink (Nathan Lane) London dad (Gabriel Byrne) pays for, all to help her “be happier” with the life her skipped-grades, Harvard degree and 185 IQ has brought her.

A “normal” life?

“I’m NOT normal!”

The therapist wants to know if she “made any friends” this week. No, but she tore through another 17 books. He’d like Carrie to stop “rubbing your exceptionally high IQ in other people’s noses,” take the ear buds out so that she can’t drown the world’s noise with classical music warhorses (“Peer Gynt” suite, etc.) and engage the world.

“You’re such a contrarian.”

“No, I’m NOT.”

Dr. Petrov gives her a list. It’s Thanksgiving in New York, time for her to “Go out on a date, make a friend, get a pet, do something you loved as a child, spend New Year’s Eve with someone.”

Fine. Sure. Pet store? Goldfish, “two for one.” She names them Spencer and Katherine.

Dad arranges a job for her, proofing legal briefs after hours at a big law firm. That’s where Tara (Vanessa Bayer of “Saturday Night Live”) becomes almost a confidant.

And guys? That’s a cloying conceit of producer (“Mean Creek”) turned director Susan Johnson’s debut feature. Forget every rom-com about how “hard it is to meet someone” in The Big Apple. “Cute boys” are falling in front of Carrie at every turn.

Flirty waiter at her restaurant of habit, perky pet store clerk who cons her into taking two goldfish, cute neighbor (William Moseley of “The Chronicles of Narnia” films) who plays his didgeridoo in the alley behind their apartment building — they’re everywhere.

But being clinical-methodical and on that “Young Sheldon” spectrum, Carrie decides instead to “go on a date” via the personal ad that most offends her. She’ll show up the engaged jerk (Jason Ritter) who wants to “be sure” he’s making the right decision, marrying his longtime fiance in two months.

There are therapy sessions in between Carrie’s various smart girl/bad choices, flashbacks to a formative experience during her college years (Colin O’Donoghue) and Daddy issues to resolve on one side of the pond or other.

None of which distract us from the nakedly plain direction this is going. The script is so hellbent on taking us there that it underlines the big “tell” — how a young lady knows the man cares — and has Carrie utterly abandon her intellectualized moral code at the drop of a hat — or shirt.

Powley is a perky presence, and while Lane keeps his Funniest Man Alive persona under a beard, glasses and professional decorum and the assorted possible-beaus are the bland leading the bland, “Carrie Pilby” never rises to the level of hateful, or even annoying.

It never rises above mediocre, and that’s the problem.

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult situations, alcohol consumption

Cast: Bel Powley, Nathan Lane, Vanessa Bayer, Colin O’Donoghue, William Moseley, Jason Ritter and Gabriel Byrne

Credits: Directed by Susan Johnson, script by Kara Holden, Dean Craig. A Braveart Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

This is the one that showed at New York Comic Con.

Aged favorites back on CBS All Access Jan. 23.

I was never a fan of this series, but Patrick Stewart seemed to me criminally under-employed by Hollywood and British film over the decades. He should have gotten a shot at everything his pal Ian McKellen couldn’t get to.

Fascinating actor, lots of range, Man U fan. And here he is, in his most famous role, not quite retiring to a French vineyard, the way of Picards since time immemorial.

Critics with an uncommon affection for alliteration find movies like “House of the Witch” an embarrassment of riches.

It’s not that this haunted house tale is good, although it is perfectly watchable, in an empty-headed, empty-calories sort of way.

It’s the fun promised by the assorted quasi-creative ways the screenwriter and director find to dispatch the “dead teenagers” in this “dead teenagers movie.”

From boils to beheadings, drowning to — I was going to write “disemboweling,” but realized “No, that’s not accurate. We have seen nary an inch of intestines in this thing.”

And then, wouldn’t you know it? A disembowelment arrives. Several feet of intestine, “Scream” and “Dolemite is My Name” fashion.

It’s a poorly executed thriller, not wrenching any pathos out of any death, not ratcheting up suspense — ever — and failing to even get the “gotchas” to pay off.

Why show one of the half dozen teens who slip into the “haunted house” down the street for some Halloween hijinx and heavy petting reacting to seeing a ghostly woman in a mirror if you’re not going to heighten the moment with shrieking strings in the score? Just a mild mannered shriek from the coed in question.

Here are a few random lines jotted in my notes that tell the story and point to the word-processing (cut, and paste) involved in creating it.

“Get in there! Scare the crap out of some girls! You know how girls get on Halloween!”

“What’s that?” Something’s dripping from the walls.

“So, we’re like STUCK here? Ridiculous.”

“The chair…it MOVED.”

“If this place is abandoned, who’s cooking?”

A clever line can have double meaning in a horror picture. Who is “literally” cooking when you dip a ladle into that stew?

“This house is HAUNTED! And not like some Scooby Freakin’ Doo haunted!”

And then this line, shouted over and over again by the tough kid (Darren Mann) who’d rather become a mechanic than let his stepdad give him career advice.

“What do you WANT from us?”

Nobody stood out to me in this generic, young and pretty cast of “types” — the flirt, the girl who left town and came back, the prankster, the hot to trot couple, the black guy.

The “creative” ways to die are a grab bag from assorted recent horror stories, “The Ring” and “Mama” among them.

The coolest effect is the spectre of the house, a whirl of dust and smoke that manifests a soul-sucking, smoke-down-your-throat wraith.

And as somebody who hates movies with that over-exposed “LA look” from their locations, this Lexington, Kentucky film features some interesting on-site footage, and a pretty proximation of a Kentucky faux-Colonial with Antebellum flourishes 1920s mansion.

But we never feel any urgency in this story, never feel anything for the kids in jeopardy. “House of the Witch” showed up on SyFy before Netflix copped it. People probably forgot about the moment they saw it and are stumbling back onto on the streaming service. It leaves zero impression on the memory.

No wonder nobody reviewed it before now. But they were missing out on all the opportunities for onomatopoeia.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Emily Bader, Darren Mann, Michelle Randolph, Coy Stewart, Jesse Pepe, Arden Belle

Credits: Directed by Alex Merkin, script by Neil Elman. A Marvista release.

Running time: 1:27