Movie Nation

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

So a comic book movie that has more to do with “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy” than Caesar Romero/Jack Nicholson/Jared Leto or their ilk swamped the record held by Spider-Man’s negative mirror image, “Venom.”

“Joker” earned $93.5 million, some $13.3 million more than “Venom” did just last October.

An R-rated, violent Tour de Phoenix and (Todd) Phillips alters the fall box office landscape and makes one wonder it it will top “Venom’s” all-in ($213 million and change, seems within easy reach) take.

“Judy” added 1000 screens or so, suffered a steep drop in per-screen average, and out-performed modest expecations to top the $2.9 million it took its first weekend (lower than projected), a $4,445,000 take this time out. Over $9 million by midday Monday, I figure. It’s looking like an $18-20 million hit, depending on that older audience showing up before it loses all its screens within a few weeks. That might be a long enough run to make it an Oscar contender for Renee Zellweger. 

“Abominable” managed a second weekend $12, “Downton Abbey” A third weekend $8, and “Hustlers” could hit $100 million next weekend.

The Indian action film “War” cracked the top ten on just 305 screens. I will try to catch that one next week, although it’s not showing at any cineplex particularly convenient to your average Orlando moviegoer.

We can look away from Syria. We have that option.

But for those trapped there, in the civil war that’s devolved into a murderous campaign of government reprisals, “There is no way out.”

Filmmaker  Feras Fayyad (“Last Men in Aleppo”) frames “The Cave,” his story of the underground world of Al-Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascas, with dreamy, almost beautiful images of caves and the sea, and the poetic voice-over narration of a young woman, Dr. Amani.

Everything within that framed opening and closing “The Cave” is grittier, pragmatic, the few remaining doctors, nurses and others struggling with triage and field surgery in DIY operating rooms and the tunnels that connect them.

As Dr. Amani treats a bloodied toddler, she asks a colleague, (in Arabic, with English subtitles) “Is God watching?”

Nurse Samaher cleans instruments and operating tables, pitches in on the cooking and copes with complaints about the food with “I’m cooking in a dangerous place,” give me break.

And every so often, they flinch, looking at the ceiling, or on a rare moment outside, at the sky?

“Russian warplane?” everybody wonders, having learned to identify their murderous tormentors by sound. “I hope they all burn in hell…May God destroy the Russians!”

Fayyad promises, with opening shots of gloomy, eerie shafts and scenes of the maps of the extensive tunnel network that was expanded and dug out after the civil war began in 2013, a movie about an underground world, lives lived in hunched over survival mode. He would up limiting his film to the underground hospital, where the injured and dying are brought every day and certain to be the most dramatic element in this subterreanean world.

Dr. Salim props his iPod up on a shelf, video of Seiji Ozawa conducting warhorses of the classical music repertoire. He tries to calm a patient who frets, “Am I going to be alright?” with “We don’t have anesthetic. We have music.”

The flinching at every alarming sound — even at a passing motorcycle — is a constant reminder of people doing righteous work by tamping down relentless danger and fear.

“Maybe the bastards will stop bombing” is but a faint hope. Still, staff copes with the stress with humor — a makeshift birthday party here, a comical threat from the surgeon to the nurse there.

“Give me something sterile so I can hit you without causing an infection!”

Their forebearance extends to the society Dr. Amani is trying to save, where the male husband of a patient demands to speak to a “male manager” of the hospital, questioning her competence and the mere fact that a lady doctor exists in the Islamic patriarchy that is much of the Middle East. A male colleague tries to calm troubled waters, but Dr. Amani finally has enough.

“No one can tell me not to work!”

She lets us hear a little of her story, the medical school education that was almost complete when the war broke out, how “men in our society” are still holding women like her back, in the midst of a humanitarian crisis.

And most encouragingly, we see her giving a pep talk to a little girl, advising her that “We don’t have to be ordinary. We need to do something important!”

The grace notes don’t obscure the ugly situation we’re shown here. It’s not  compact, perfectly organized film, but “The Cave” is an honest fly-on-the-wall/cinema verite portrait of a place and a couple of the people working in it.

As with his Aleppo movie, Fayyad’s message to a deaf world wrapped up in more crises than it can cope with is “DO something.” But there’s a resignation here as well. Nothing will be done. All that be done is to flee from Assad and the Russians and let them do what they will to those left behind, ISIS or civilian, soldier or toddler.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, scenes of wounded and dying victims of war, many of them children.

Credits: Directed by Feras Fayyad, written by Alisar Hasan, Feras Fayyad. A National Geographic release.

Running time: 1:37

The sheer savagery of the fights is the selling point of “Avengement,” kickboxer turned actor Scott Adkins’ latest thriller with stuntman turned director Jesse V. Johnson.

It’s a step up from their “Debt Collector” punch-em-up, more polished.

But if you come for the fights you have to stay for the fights. It’s just that there’s an awful lot of cockney trash talk in the endless ENDless flashbacks in this static, almost stage-bound convict-out-for-revenge tale.

Adkins is Cain Burgess, an MMA fighter who failed to throw a fight, way back when. His brother Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass), a London loan shark, was among those most burned by that blunder. The chit that brother Linc called in was a little crime he expected “baby bruvva” to do. And that’s how Cain got nicked, as they say.

Belmarsh Prison, “The Meatgrinder,” is where the fighter hardened into a kill-or-be-killed survivor. And when he escapes, who’s he looking for? Big bruvva, and big bruvva’s whole gang.

You can see why Johnson (“The Hitman Diaries: Charlie Valentine” was the first film of his I noticed) would want to mess around with story structure to make this straightforward punch your way to “Avengement” more interesting. But parking most of the action in a pub/mob-club where Cain holds assorted villains hostage while he laboriously tells them how he got all these scars on his face and body is a blunder.

“Avengement” is all action beats — a delayed account of how Cain escaped, every police beating, every prison riot started as a cover to kill him on the catwalks, in the cafeteria, in the yard — and thick-accented Cockney exposition between bad guys, threats, insults, profane dismissals.

And as much as many of us enjoy the slang — “You and your silly ‘panto’ (pantomime, a British holiday storytelling tradition), a bloke having his first pint in years engaged “in some wishful drinking,” as he tells the story of how “the prodigal bruvva returns.”

The fights are furious and occasionally logical, although there’s an awful lot of “You have YOUR turn with him before I take a swing” nonsense you see in brawling movies.

And some of the humor, much of it coming from the poseur among the mobsters (Thomas Turgoose of the skinhead drama “This is England”), brings a smirk, especially when Cain’s storytelling runs on and on and, well, they’re in a pub and yes they had several pints before he pulled a sawed-off shotgun on them.

“To be fair, NONE of us had planned on being held hostage today.”

Adkins is better here than he’s been in other leading man roles, although casting his American “Debt Collector” co-star Louis Mandylor (as a cop) just reminds us the Brit has fists of fury, hardened good looks and not a lot of screen charisma to go with them.

He’s acted and earned his way into Jason Statham C-movie territory, and “Avengement” invites a comparison with the “Hobbs & Shaw” star that still does Adkins no service. He’s still dull every time he stops swinging his fists.

Still, if what you’re looking for it fists of fury, he can provide them. And if you’re looking for signs that a guy who is playing heavies in small roles in big budget pictures is growing as a performer, that he and Johnson have gotten better since “Debt Collector,” just not all that much, “Avengement” is going to be your kind of movie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Scott Adkins, Craig Fairbrass, Thomas Turgoose, Nick Moran, Kierston Wareing and Louis Mandylor

Credits: Directed by Jesse V. Johnson, script by Jesse V. Johnson, Stu Small. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:27