Movie Nation

It’s a documentary about a little girl found hanging from a swing set in rural North Carolina in 2014. Accident or a modern day lynching? Jacqueline Olive’s award winner opens in limited release Sept. 20.

It’s the endless costume changes, the ornate extravagance, the pastoral idylls and the Christmas Village quaintness of it all.

There’s the jewelry, the flapper bangs, the scrubbing, trimming, boiling, polishing and smug sub-minimum wage satisfaction of the servant classes at having done a menial job to perfection. And we cannot leave out the bemused smirks of the ruling bluebloods when they realize no one’s there to pour their third cup of tea, but they can manage perfectly well on their own, thank you.

Class conscious without the class conflict, or much of it, deference to one’s “betters,” we get the idea that even the “betters” are cowed in the presence of royalty — “You’ve seen their majesties. Let that be enough!”

The withering put-downs, the sense of place and propriety, upstairs — “Royal women are not meant to grin like Cheshire cats!”– and downstairs — “I will pour wine for the Queen’s sweet lips!” — it’s all here.

And the snobbery! Oh, the snobbery!

But at some point, you abandon the eye-rolling archness of it all, on orders of your opthalmologist. You stop gritting your teeth at this to-the-manner-born soap opera and its celebration of noblesse oblige among the English in-bred, and just give yourself over to “Downton Abbey,” the big screen epilogue to the hit BBC and PBS TV series.

Julian Fellowes’ TV event becomes a big screen extravaganza that does justice to the series and fills a larger screen with its scope, but little more.

Hopes that he might conjure up something more like the tighter and funnier Robert Altman film he scripted that inspired “Downton,” “Gosford Park,” fall by the wayside. Dreams that we might see the Crowleys, Lord and Lady Grantham and the rest, coping with say, the comeuppance of The Great Depression, or pitching in to lend land and labor to “Their Finest Hour” — the World War II years, will have to wait for a future sequel.

No. Here, we’re treated a giggling reminder that it’s Maggie Smith’s world, and these other toffs are here just to provide mares and stallions — clothes-horses all — for her to insult. And that’s what made the damned thing fun in the first place.

Fellowes concocted a bloated, melodramatic story that services every character, pairs many up with fresh foils and puts everybody on the dance floor for the finale.

Finally, after all these years, we get a dose of what the lesser nobility go to all this trouble, all this expense, what they kept these immodest, immense houses for — the chance of a royal visit.

That’s the ingenious crucible here, the arrival of notice that the King and Queen (George V and Queen Mary) will be making a tour of Yorkshire, and they need a place to crash for a night or so.

The flurry of activity that sets in motion, the pride that wells up in family, staff and the village that depends on the Great House for so much of its livelihood, make a marvelously compact stage for all the dramas that have played out here in the years on TV that led up to this moment in 1927.

“We can still put on quite a show when the need arises,” Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) quips in a room crammed with silverware.

The people doing all that prep work may be in a tizzy, but there’s still time for “republican” vs. “monarchist” debates in the kitchen, where mouthy Daisy (Sophie McShera) can avoid talking about marrying a butler by getting her anti-monarchist back up to the cranky cook, Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol), who isn’t having it.

“It’s the King of England! They’s only one’a them in the world!”

Mary orchestrates a few more humiliations for gay butler Mr. Barrow (Robert James-Collier), the biggest of which is her panic in bringing back the retired Carson (the regal Jim Carter), fetching him from his days of gardening in shirt, tie and vest to supervise.

The fresh conflict comes from the imperious royal household staff who insist on taking the place of every single one of Lord Grantham’s servants. Almost every Downton hired hand has a bone to pick with somebody attached to Buckingham Palace.

The privileged few? They have fresh intrigues over another inheritance, an ancient family feud between the Dowager Countess (Dame Maggie) and her cousin, a Lady in Waiting to the Queen, Lady Bagshaw (the formidable Imelda Staunton).

Baroness Merton (Penelope Wilton) takes one last stab at mediating a Dowager throw-down.

“There’s no need to argue.”

“I NEVER argue. I explain.”

Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael) frets over one more ball gown. Irish widower Tom (Allen Leech), the commoner who married into the clan, gets a few more dashing and egalitarian moments.

The Lord and Lady (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern) may have less to do, but that makes way for the actual royals with their royal troubles to throw their weight around. There’s unhappily married Princess Mary (Kate Phillips) and Kingly concern for the absent playboy Edward, who would one day fall for the wrong woman and abdicate.

The twinkly British character actor Simon Jones makes a fine, white bewhiskered George V, even if one suspects the once-and-always Arthur Dent of British radio and TV’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” has never been on a horse before. Which sovereigns must mount for royal parades, you see. And Geraldine James lends gravitas to a Queen Mary the script makes the very model of kindness and understanding.

Director Michael Engler and the script take their damned sweet time about getting this lumbering beast up on its pedicured feet, the better part of an hour.

The film’s clutter of characters and all the moments set aside for backbiting and bickering serve a purpose — they set up a house staff coup plot, sexual and political intrigues and a cringe-worthy faux pas that is the absolute highlight of the comedy.

Fellowes is better than most at turning stately, slow episodic TV storytelling into a feature film. He doesn’t cut characters or witty lines. But narrowing the period of time and the scope of the plot makes the film work and march forward.

Stille, if you don’t know the series well, you’ll need a program to keep track of who is doing what to whom.

Change is, as always, in the air. Working folk are expressing themselves, mouthing off and demanding a seat at the table. And — bless their hearts — the Crowleys are chafing at the responsibilities, the expense, the dated, reactionary politics of their ruling class, the oblige of their noblesse oblige.

Much of that plays like politically correct lip service, and like much of this “Downton Abbey,” feels unnecessary. But that’s the thing about a cinematic feast for the eyes and the ears like this. You trim the fat, you run the risk of making the whole meal tasteless and dull.

And one mustn’t do that. What would the best sorts of people think?

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some suggestive material, and language

Cast: Michelle Dockery, Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Jim Carter, Matthew Goode, Imelda Staunton.

Credits: Directed by Michael Engler, script by Julian Fellowes. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:02

The dire state of water here on the Big Blue Marble, or what happens when the ice melts.

Years ago, I had a lunch interview with the journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal (“The Hurt Locker”) as he passed through town promoting his second film with Kathryn Bigelow, the Hunt for Bin Laden epic “Zero Dark Thirty.”

The conversation wrapped up the way these things usually do, with “What’re you doing next?”

He launched into a lovely and lengthy description of what he hoped he and the director would wrestle onto the screen, a tale set in the middle of nowhere South America — the lawless drug lords/smugglers’ jungle where several countries’ borders intersect, the “Triple Frontier.”

He and Bigelow found it far easier to get their grim story of police murders during a race riot, “Detroit,” (2017) on the screen. From the looks of the “Triple Frontier” that finally was filmed, for Netflix and without action auteur Bigelow behind the camera, they never did get a handle on a story that takes us there.

J.C. Chandor (“All is Lost”), a fine director and writer in his own right, directed and co-wrote what turns out to be an utterly generic yarn about warriors pulling a heist.

Yes, they’re robbing a drug lord. But they plan on assassinating him as well. So even though they’re not “wearing that flag on my shoulder,” they’ll be performing righteous work and doing the world a favor.

Yes, the amount of money is insane. Greed gets the better of our heroes.

Yes, there’s a woman insider, an “informant,” who can get them close.

The plan is elaborate, and elaborate plans go wrong — in the real world and especially in the movies.

And yes, we must have the obligatory “I’m getting the band back together” assemble-the-team scenes in the opening act.
Oscar Isaac is Santiago, the U.S. “asset” working closely with law enforcement in South America as they hunt the elusive drug lord Lorea.

He’s always half a step behind, despite Santiago’s efforts to protect his best source inside — Yvonna (Adria Arjona).

But when she gets a “promotion,” he sees his best chance yet. And the fact that she’s doing money handling, he sees a score — legal, or at least quasi-legal — that sweetens the deal.

With the promise of a government guaranteed percentage of the take, the guy his brothers in arms nicknamed “Pope” tracks down the old gang with a piece of work that could get them all paid. Millions are at stake.

“Do we finally get to use our skills for our own benefit?”

That gets the attention of the reluctant retiree turned real estate agent “Redfly” (Ben Affleck), of “Ironhead,” (Charlie Hunnam), a by-the-book commando turned officer who gives pep talks to younger commandos to keep them from leaving government service to become “contractors,” his swaggering, whooping, cage-fighting younger brother (Garrett Hedlund) and a cracker jack pilot (Pedro Pascal) who lost his license, but doesn’t need one “where we’re going.”

The formula, chiseled in stone in combat films (“The Dirty Dozen”) and Westerns (“The Magnificent Seven”) since “The Seven Samurai” laid it out 70 years ago, always makes for a watchable film, even if it as predictable as a Rolex.

Pepper the collection of tough guys with tough guy dialogue.

“Hell, you’ve been shot four times!”

“Five.”

The homoerotic brotherly bonding of warriors is sealed with a smirk.

“Are you in?”

“You know I am. I go where you go.”

That makes for an action picture that is perfectly watchable, and perfectly generic. There’s not a surprise in this thing, from the “one last mission” to “the code” (which they violate) to the “Treasure of Sierra Madre” pitfalls of confronting that much cash to the tough talk of men at arms.

That runs from “I miss this” to “Stock boy job at Walmart’s starting to liok pretty good right now.”

Hedlund has the best lines and makes a great case for future employment in movies of this genre. Affleck is reliably reliable in such roles, Pascal (of TV’s “Narcos”) impresses and Isaac is more prepped for action here than he was in “Operation Finale” or the “Star Wars” movies.

Hunnam has the flattest character to play, something that doesn’t help a guy who always comes off as a less interesting, less fun version of Hedlund, even in movies where they don’t co-star.

As for the movie? “Netflixable” to me means anything that kills a couple of hours while I’m waiting to see where the hurricane hits. “Triple Frontier” does that. But nothing more.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language throughout

Cast: Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, Adria Arjona

Credits: Directed by J. C. Chandor, script by Mark Boal and J.C. Chandor. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

The comic Jim Gaffigan takes a deep dive into the dark side with “American Dreamer,” an almost relentlessly downbeat character study in despair. It’s a thriller with no hero, just a funnyman who tosses aside his amusing baggage even when he desperately needs it just to keep our sympathy from start to finish.

Things weren’t always this bleak for Cam. He had a wife and son, had a job in tech, had a nice new Impala.

Now he’s piling up the miles on that Chevy for Hail — Lyft or Uber by another name — in Norfolk, Virginia.

He can paste on a smile and try to make small talk. That doesn’t keep the cheap locals from stiffing him out of his tip.

The wife (Tammy Blanchard)? He can’t just show up, hoping to see his son, to give him a toy car he picked up on impulse at a discount store. She calls the cops on him the moment he rolls into the driveway.

“Sir, I need you to calm down.”

The good job and marriage are long gone. He’s behind on child support, slack-jawed, deflated and defeated.

“I’m doing great!” doesn’t have the ring of truth when he’s calling a sibling to beg for cash, putting on a brave face for a former colleague about his job loss, “that whole thing that happened.”

His wife and brother provide the final clues — “Are you taking your medication?” “You need to be in some kind of facility.”

Thank goodness he has a side hustle, driving “off duty” for this guy who likes nothing better than an unassuming, late model Chevy where he can stash the bag in the trunk, driven around by a pasty-faced redheaded 50 year-old.

Mazz (Robbie Jones, fierce and cruel) is a drug dealer, not shy about trotting out the menace or whipping out a pistol, a man who wears his street cred on his game face. Cam is just another minion to him, a $200 a day driver.

“Turn that frown upside down, n—a! You alright!”

He brutalizes underlings. Cam he just bullies. Maybe that’s why the guy at his wit’s end, who shows flashes of compassion and hints of an unmedicated temper, decides on a half-assed kidnapping scheme to score some quick cash.

I only have to use the word “toddler” to touch on the dread that hangs over “American Dreamer” the moment this crime against a criminal enterprise begins.

We can only hope that the compassionate and caring Cam let us see earlier will save one and all. But as the mayhem he unleashes unfolds, a frantic trigger-happy hunt through port town Norfolk’s underworld, it’s just Jim Gaffigan’s affable on-stage persona that we cling to. We hope against hope that things will work out, that we can root for this on-the-spectrum wreck whose actions wreak havoc.

But Gaffigan is so far removed from that pre-“Dreamer” persona that he makes this leap an impossible one. His reactions to the horrors he overhears and sees, which he has to know he’s caused, have a touch of shock about them.

Cam seems numb or dumb to it all — the pistol whippings, threats and executions. His lack of empathy is contagious. Why, exactly, are we pulling for him?

Co-writer/director Derrick Borte (“The Joneses”) gets a spot-on turn from Robbie Jones (“Hurricane Season,” TV’s “The Fix”) and from Isabel Arraiza as Mazz’s baby mama. And he gives Gaffigan some great scenes showing how low he’s fallen.

“You look like s–t!”

“No I don’t!”

But his star doesn’t give us anything to cling to when the s–t hits the fan. As with Borte’s other films (“London Town”), there’s a disquieting lack of connection, a remove from the humanity of it all that may be by design, but weighs on the film and makes our experience of it a lot like Cam’s experience of life — deflating.

Why exactly do we root for him? Because he’s a disaffected white guy on a downward spiral, so whatever carnage he causes in this Afro-Latino world he dabbles in doesn’t matter?

Gaffigan is getting a lot of credit for trying something this grim, and while it’s deserved, it seems a bit beyond his reach. Something closer to Will Farrell’s “Everything Must Go” performance would have helped here — a lighter touch, flashes of humanity, pathos.

“American Dreamer” is riveting to sit through, but too pitiless to embrace.

MPAA Rating:R for disturbing material, violence, some strong sexual content, pervasive language, and drug use

Cast: Jim Gaffigan, Robbie Jones, Isabel Arraiza, Tammy Blanchard, Alejandro Hernandez

Credits: Directed by Derrick Borte, script by Derrick Borte, Daniel Forte A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:38

A “big city” cop comes home to visit her dying father and is drawn into a mystery that dates from her high school days in “HELLmington,” a moody, well-acted but generally inconsequential thriller in the occult subgenre.

If it holds your interest, thank the cast and the tone. If it disappoints here and there, and features an utterly botched and obvious ending, well you lose some and you win some.

Nicola Correia-Damude of “The Strain” and “Shadowhunters” is Sam Woodhouse, summoned home by her police chief Uncle Rupert (horror legend Michael Ironside) because her retired prison-guard dad is dying.

Sam is on medication, is estranged from her father and is carrying around something with her other than a badge. Dad (Andre Bussieres) blurts out “KATIE OWENS” as his dying words. Maybe that’s a clue.

Samantha certainly thinks so. Katie was a classmate she had a big beef with nine years before. Katie disappeared. Somebody knows something, and apparently that somebody wasn’t Sam, who had left town.

So she starts asking around. And she wonders about her meds, because she was sure she saw a hooded figure wearing a ram’s head in the hospital as her father was passing.

She catches a glimpse of such a figure again when she visits the one-time prime suspect (Munro Chambers), a squirrelly sort who lives in a house in the woods who, like everybody else in HELLmington, offers Sam a drink.

“Not every woman I’m with disappears!”

Sam pulls the file, digs, wonders about the death of Katie’s father, a prison guard like her own, and puzzles over what was eating at her old man so much that he blurts this missing woman’s name out on his deathbed.

Filmmakers Jay Drakulic and Alex Lee Williams (of TV’s “#VitalSignz”) pepper the script with “Twin Peaks” eccentrics. There’s the occult expert professor (Yannick Bisson) who moonlights as a taxidermist (stuffed critters are everywhere). Maybe he can make sense of these symbols, these mysterious “Revennians” Katie might have gotten herself mixed up with.

Oh, and Rupert is a customer in his other business.

“You tell your uncle his pickerel’s ready!”

Sam interrupts the quirky motel clerk (Shannon McDonough) as she’s doing her online German lessons, interrupts her again when an occult symbol is drawn on her motel room wall — in feces — and gets her attention a third time after Sam fights off a murderous intruder.

Flashbacks and archived video files (HELLmington High School, class of ’99) fill in some of the mystery. They introduce more suspects, more intrigue. And Correia-Damude is an interesting enough presence that it would have been intriguing to see this play out as a simpler police procedural.

As it is, the plot lost me, here and there. And as I said, the ending is one of those story elements every character in “It Chapter Two” ridicules when they’re talking about the writings of novelist Bill (James McAvoy). It sucks in a total cop-out kind of way.

It’s never more than occasionally creepy even if it holds one’s interest long enough to complain about that ending.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, substance abuse, nudity

Cast: Nicola Correia-Damude, Michael Ironside, Gabe Grey, Angelica Stirpe, Yannick Bisson Michael Ironside,

Credits: Written and directed by Alex Lee Williams and Jay Drakulic. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running tine: 1:23

A big hit at Cannes an October release from A24.

Was this the performance that made Pattinson an apt choice as the next brooding Dark Knight?

Laurence Fishburne is a prison warden haunted by the past, forced to deal with flashbacks to his past sins as his infamous place of work is about to be imploded in “Imprisoned,” a tale set and filmed in Puerto Rico.

It’s a ponderous melodrama of love, loss, revenge and mass injustice, a wholly fictional tale about an abusive system whose abuses extend to the gallows, which that warden once eagerly employed in a mad rush to empty his death row before changing political tides ban the death penalty there.

As it’s not a period piece and Puerto Rico actually abolished the death penalty (not for Federal crimes) in 1929, it lives or dies in the performances and the grim scenario writer-director Paul Kampf (“Brothers Three: An American Gothic” and “From Grace”) cooks up.

Both come up short.

We meet the warden in retirement, bald and pot-belled, living in a dumpy trailer, but moved to visit his former place of employment (the exteriors are the Castillos San Moro and San Cristobal in San Juan) on the eve of its destruction.

Wandering the wired-to-explode walls, he flashes back to a woman (Juana Acosta) and something she said long ago.

“What you did inside that place will be with your forever…forever.”

He met Maria when she opened a cafe, El Faro, (“The Lighthouse”) near the prison, an anti-death penalty activist who lectures the stranger on “second chances” and how “that should be on your mind every day.”

Her husband, Dylan (Juan Pablo Raba of “The 33” and “Shot Caller”) got such a second chance. He’s an ex-con who hires other ex-cons to work on his fishing boat, aptly-named “Penetincia.” Maria is grateful he got that chance.

The warden? He eyes the pretty wife, asks her if he knows her husband, and bad things start happening to Maria and Dylan Burke. Those bad things are aimed at putting Dylan back behind bars, and Maria under the thumb of a warden who sees the world and convicted criminals in stark terms, and himself as a man charged to carry out “the directives of the people.”

Dylan? He’s turned his life around and we see him act as nothing but conciliatory. An ex-con has to be that way. No trouble with the law is allowed, even if the local chief (the late John Heard, in what may be his last film to reach the screen) is sympathetic.

What unfolds is the generic prison picture war of wills, with prison riots, torture, and Esai Morales as the governor who illustrates the claim that “the death penaltiy is just a publicity stunt by politicians.”

Edward James Olmos is the Old Man of the Yard, not the first nor the last cliche this cliche-ridden picture is saddled with.

Fishburne rarely gets roles this prominent these days, and there’s an attempt by him and the script to show Warden Calvin’s point of view, to somehow temper his cruelty and criminal abuses of the system with his own grievances. That’s a bit eye-rolling.

The dialogue, in English and Spanish with English subtitles, is  prison picture boilerplate.

“I’m a different man.”

“Keep telling yourself that, convict.”

The warden, or at least the writer-director, has fond memories of “Cool Hand Luke,” where lines about “getting your minds right” were born.

The ticking clock nature of the third act is as slow as the rest of the picture, and thus it becomes a clock that stops. The lack of urgency renders the performances dramatically flat.

I’d say there’s a better movie in this material, but there isn’t. A warden violently, murderously framing an inmate, blackmailing the inmate’s wife, and he wants us to understand his reasons? Fishburne tries to do something subtle with him, but his character’s actions speak louder than his “Les Miserables” brooding.

Everybody else is painted in monochromatic shades — the righteous, loving ex-con, the saintly but desperate wife, the grizzled con, the poll-watching politician.

Nothing much here grabs us and drags us into the next scene, much less the following acts. “Imprisoned” never escapes its lack of drive, never takes on the urgency this scenario promises.

They had interesting locations, a decent cast, probably government incentive money to aid the financing, just not a script that was ever going to amount to much, even if perfectly executed.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, disturbing images, some sexuality and language.

Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Juana Acosta, Juan Pablo Raba, Edward James Olmos and Esai Morales

Credits: Written and directed by Paul Kampf.  A Cinema Libre release.

Running time: 1:44

Ewan M. is “Danny doesn’t live here, Mrs. Torrance,” all grown up.

Rebecca Ferguson, Jacob Tremblay, Cliff Curtis and Bruce Greenwood are in this Nov. 8 thriller.

Not a bad opening weekend.

Not a holiday weekend, not a “summer release,” almost three freaking hours long.

The $91 million “It 2” pulled only looks bad if you compare it to “It Chapter 1,” which pulled in over $123 million two years back.

And you know, if projections had this one opening at over $102.

Or over $92.

Expect the actual take, announced Monday, to shrink even more.

“Angel has Fallen” did another $6 for second place. The summer holdovers are exhausted.

“It Chapter 2” also won the per screen average, edging and then some the limited release Linda Ronstadt doc from Greenwich Entertainment.

“Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice” earned over $16,000 per screen

Should’ve put that one on a hundred screens, kids. We love that Linda.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/