Movie Nation

“Mom! That ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is staring through the gate again!”

Words NOBODY wants to hear. Even if you’re a fan of the original “Girl,” Noomi Rapace, being a bit afraid of her, in or out of character as Lisbeth Salander, is part of the bargain.

In “Angel of Mine,” Rapace stars as another “Lisbeth.” Only this Lisbeth is called “Lizzy,” she’s Australian and she’s mad in the saddest way you can imagine.

It’s all going wrong for her. Newly-divorced, losing custody of her 12 year-old son (Finn Little), low woman in the pecking order at the makeup store in the mall, it never ends.

“You haven’t been doing so great,” is all the ex (Luke Hemsworth) can say. He’s not rubbing it in. Their son “feels your darkness, Lizzy!”

No wonder she’s shaking prescription pills out of the bottle when we first see her.

Lizzy is carrying a terrible burden, one which has taken over her life, ended her marriage and threatens her tenuous relationship with her boy. It’s when she takes the kid to a birthday party at a friend’s house that the mystery starts to unravel.

She fixates on a beautiful little girl there, and Lola (Annika Whiteley) becomes the driving obsession of her life.

Rapace gives Lizzy an offhand caginess that serves her well as she lies to the child’s mother, Claire (Yvonne Strahovski) about being interested in buying their house, about being still married, about being manager of that makeup store.

Every time Claire’s back is turned, Lizzy is with Lola. “We look alike!”

Her ex is over it, her son complains of her “crying all the time…You never get anything done.”

But Lizzy has something she WILL get done, in the “Hand that Rocks the Cradle” tradition.

Director Kim Farrant (Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes’ “Strangerland” was hers) tries to maintain suspense, and when there’s a little girl in perceived jeopardy, that shouldn’t be hard to do.

But Rapace has this brittle vulnerability that comes through, even when you’re scared of her. We pity Lizzy, hope against hope she won’t cross yet ANOTHER line with this family she’s stalking, wait for an intervention, expect her to get help.

I found myself rooting for her not to get yelled at, not to be found out in her furtive surveillance (stalking). She is, after all, the Girl/Woman with the Dragon You-Know-What — scary, and sympathetic.

The only real twists to this tale are ridiculously easy to predict, as they seem as recycled as the rest of the movie. They take a turn towards “Let’s surprise them, even if it’s the most gutless direction to take the movie in.”

Rapace is always good, in big budget features or films of more modest budget and ambitions, like this Australian production. She and Strahovski pair up as rivals so well that you say a silent prayer that the picture doesn’t lose its nerve.

But of course, it does.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexuality and brief nudity

Credits: Noomi Rapace, Luke Hemsworth, Yvonne Strahovski, Annika Whiteley

Credits: Directed by Kim Farrant, script by Luke Davies, David Regal. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:37

Director and co-writer Scott A. Hamilton makes a big deal out of his debut feature, “What Death Leaves Behind” being an example of “non-linear” storytelling.

Such movies employ tricky timelines, sometimes employ the rare “flash forward” along with that hoary cinematic device, the flashback.

But Hamilton — no, he’s not the figure skater — oversells the gimmick in this interesting, somber but slower-than-slow fantasy-thriller. He even defines it in an opening title.

It’s just that it’s not that “tricky,” and the trick adds little to the proceedings. He’d have been better served amping up the suspense, peppering in more action, getting characters to speak and interact with a lot more heat.

I like the title, and I guess the working title — “The Kidney” — was a bit too “Spoiler Alert.”

Screen newcomer Khalil McMillan is our protagonist, a man we meet as he leaves he little girl behind in a convenience store to go outside and pummel a seeming stranger.

Flashback? Or a flash-forward?

In the movie’s fictive present, Jake Warren (McMillan) is a quiet, unassuming married man who is slow to move, slow to do most anything. It’s the source of what we take to be comic friction with his wife (Shaira Barton).

“I didn’t ask for help!”

But Jake’s not slothful, just a man conserving his energy. He has kidney failure, and stays on the books at his uncle’s HVAC business, working in the office, so that he has insurance and can have dialysis.

A very long set-up shows us this life, of treatments, arguments over money, support group meetings. Jake’s on the waiting list. Then Jake is off it. He has a kidney.

That’s when his troubles really begin.

Jake has dreams where he’s sitting in a pool of light watching this heated, violent argument between a heavily tattooed man and just as tattooed woman.

The nightmares open up, and Jake starts digging into what’s going on. Might it be “cellular memory?”Could the kidney donor’s life and death be unfolding in his dreams?

And how does this tie in with the constant flow of news reports, a serial killer on the loose in their corner of Pennsylvania?  

Those connections become clearer in the drip-drip-drip script that drives what we call the “action” of the picture, which has entirely too little of that to recommend it.

There have been horror movies on this subject before. “The Eye” was one, and “Body Parts” and “Tell Tale” and so on. None were told with “non-linear” stories.

So what we’re left with is an intriguing concept for a story, so slackly told that it feels as enervated as Jake is pre-transplant.

There’s not much in the way of action to draw us in. Supporting characters are thinly drawn, the killings — when we start to see them and not just see them reported on “the news” — are dull.

“What Death Leaves Behind” isn’t much of anything we’ll remember it for.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Khalil McMillan, Christopher Mann, Vincent Young, Erin O’Brien, Alexandra Tydings

Credits: Scott A. Hamilton, script by Chad Morton, Rachel K. Ofori, Scott A. Hamilton and Nico Giampietro. A, Artists’ Rights release.

Running time: 1:27

Yeah, it sounds icky. It’s hard seeing the trailer and reading the short summary on IMDb and figuring out ANY way they can make this worthwhile, judgemental and cautionary.

Will the British seaside scenery make it seem less so?

“Scarborough” opens Sept. 13, limited release.

Ridley Scott directed it and gained fame because of it.

It made Sigourney Weaver’s career.

Action auteur Walter Hill was a much bigger name at the time it came out, and was a producer on it. He’s the guy who said, “Make Ripley a woman.”

But there’s a lot more history to the creation of what I think is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. Still.

This documentary rolls out on various platforms in early Oct.

That’s some catch, that Catch-22.

Unless you’re British, of course. There the biggest catch of them all might be “The Official Secrets Act,” a sweeping anti-leaks law that makes the mere act of defending yourself from charges that you let state secrets out of your hands is pretty much illegal.’

Non-disclosure forms mean you can’t even discuss what you do for the government with your lawyer, preparing your defense.

Not that this stopped Katherine Gun. As played by Keira Knightley in “Official Secrets,” she’s a woman of conscience and considered impulse, who’d shout at the TV coverage of the rushed, relentless and patently dishonest rush to war with Iraq in 2003.

“BLOODY LIAR!”

Bush or Blair or Colin Powell, it didn’t matter. When you’re in “sig-int” (signals intelligence) and you can read emails, dispatches and communiques from U.S. National Security Agency officials detailing how facts will be bent, foreign countries will be blackmailed and other chicanery used to justify George W. Bush’s war, a civil servant like Kat Gun is on the horns of a dilemma. Allow this to go on, or expose this “illegal war” (as detailed in British law) by any means necessary.

The latest political thriller from Gavin Hood, the South African director who gave us “Tsotsi,” “Rendition” and “Eye in the Sky” (an a “Wolverine” movie) is an arcane, somewhat static docu-drama about the real-life struggles of Kat Gun. She did not come to her “treason” easily. And it’s about the wary and tentative way the Observer newspaper and reporter Martin Bright (former Doctor Who Matt Smith) approached the leak, and “official” acts to intimidate and punish her and — a separate issue — actually prosecute Gun under the broad “Official Secrets Act.”

The film isn’t quite as dry as a history lecture, enlivened by some empassioned performances by an A-list of British character actors, including Smith, Ralph Fiennes (an activist lawyer), Tamsin Greig (an editor), Jeremy Northam (head of the office charged to prosecute), and Matthew Goode and Rhys Ifans as Jekyll and Hyde reporters coming at the story from different perspectives.

Politically, you can see why they signed on. It’s an important story that roiled Britain for a decade and forever stained the reputation of Tony Blair. For Americans, seeing all the intercut news footage of speeches, U.N. testimony and the bums’ “rush to war” this is about, it’s a reminder to banish the phrase, “W. wasn’t so bad, was he?” from conversation.

Knightley plays the real-life Gun, a translator who wrote reports summarizing the intelligence she was focused on, as increasingly enraged about the news coverage she could not tear herself away from at home with her Muslim immigrant husband (Adam Bakri).

She knows there are no ties between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida, and at some point she’s going to stop venting “It doesn’t make any bloody sense!” to her mate and get up the gumption to get some proof out to the public.

“At least my conscience will be clear” isn’t what the intermediary (MyAnna Buring) recieving this printout wants to hear. There’s prison awaiting anybody who touches it.

And even after reporter Bright talks his “We officially ‘support the war'” editor (Conleth Hill) into publishing the bombshell, it’s not like history will be changed.

“Give me 400 words the average reader will undrstand!”

Online American conservative war boosters like Matt Drudge devoted themselves to debunking the leak.

Then come the “official” interrogations.

What Hood’s movie does best is capture the contrast between Gun and the likes of Edward Snowden, a woman of conscience who eventually faced the music over her actions. You’re more credible if you get a lawyer and take your fight into court.

Knightley gives us Gun second-guessing herself, quaking in fear at what is facing her and her perfecfly-deportable husband, and then flashes of righteous fury about why she did it and the law-breaking she was exposing.

She’s always good, and sometimes she’s just dazzling.

Fiennes has a nicely-pitched wariness in his “Liberty” (a British “innocence project”) lawyer, part of an entitled class of high-end barristers who all (even his class-friend, official foe, Northam) weekend in their cottages on the coast.

Ifans is the shouting sound and fury of an activist reporter, Ed Vulliamy, Goode nicely contrasted as the connected, cautious one sent out to get “confirmation” of this or that when Ifans’ Vulliamy can’t be trusted with that task, word “from a good friend of a strusted friend…”

Smith’s Bright is the least interesting in the lot, as earnestly but drably played by the actor. But even he has his  moments.

There’s plenty of arcane intel slang for spy thriller geeks, the inevitable oblique conversations with “We didn’t exactly have a conversation” insiders. Anybody used to the masterworks of John LeCarre will recognize the tone, the tiny drips of exposition adding up to a puddle.

The arcana extends to questions of British law and press freedoms, which are different from what we see in the U.S.

The film touches on class, politics, journalistic ethics (and blunders) and the natural skepticism any reporter must bring to a story that fits your own politics or narrative. It’s pace is rather too much like the British TV “State of Play” to be a lively big-screen experience. But as somebody who loves intel arcana and journalistic debates, I found much to enjoy here.

“Official Secrets,” despite its blasé title, despite the fact that this “true” story isn’t on a LeCarre level, in spite of its paucity of dramatic outbursts, is still a most engrossing history reminder.

Whatever forces in America, from the Bush Administration to its Dixie Chicks-banning media minions, were doing to march us off to war, in Britain the vast majority were against the coming slaughter. And there were civil servants and journalists willing to speak out, no matter what “Catch-22” might await them.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans, Adam Bakri, Matthew Goode and Jeremy Northam

Credits: Directed by Gavin Hood, script by Gregory and Sarah Bernstein, and Gavin Hood based on a book by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell.  An IFC/eOne release.

Running time: 1:52

“The Fanatic” deals a glancing blow to the golden age of the Fan Boy via a cautionary tale that smacks of the way society used to look at that sort of obsessive, socially awkward cultural cliche that’s too into comic books, GI Joe, Pokemon cards and anything else that most adults leave behind in childhood.

Except, of course, for sports fanatics, who still get a pass.

It’s a dissonant and clumsy if eerily accurate portrayal of a social “type” that really exists, even if its most ardent members are decades younger than John Travolta, who has the title role here.

Travolta is Moose, an Angelino “on the spectrum” who spends his meager savings on anything Hollywood collectible. He’s as into horror and sci-fi as any “Ain’t It Cool News” junkie. And being in Hollywood, he’s close enough to many of those he admires to collect autographs, get this or that memento signed.

Memorabilia store manager Aaron (Josh Richman) sells to him and indulges him his eccentricities. Hey, clientele like Moose come with the territory.

“I can’t talk too long. I gotta pooh.”

Antic, childish, tactless, pleading, Moose travels the city by scooter, dresses in the uniform of his tribe — Hawaiian shirts and baggy shorts — and slaps his head in frustration at any interruption in his manic pursuit of the trophies of his obsession — celebrity interaction, and the proof (selfies, autographs) of it.

Moose just HAS to have the very jacket that one of his idols, Hunter Dunbar, wore in “Space Vampires.” If only he can get it signed!

But $300 just gets him disappointment, as he catches Dunbar (Devon Sawa of “Final Destination,” nasty and buff) at a signing, but misses his chance.

But since another person who indulges Moose is Leah (“DeGrassi High” alumna Ana Golja), a celeb journalist of the video stalkerazzi TMZ school, and our story’s narrator. Thanks to her, Moose has a second shot at Dunbar, at a party.

“Some sort of deaf-mute pervert,” Dunbar mutters once. “Some sort of freak autograph hound that won’t leave me alone,” he says on second meeting.

Finagling a third shot at the elusive, not-quite-a-has-been Dunar is what sends the movie star over the edge.

“How about I sign your face with my f—–g fist?”

And that’s when Moose crosses that line that every celebrity fears any given stranger could cross — violence.

“I am NOT a stalker, I AM A FAN!”

What interested Travolta and more to the point, Limp Bizkit rocker turned co-writer and director Fred Durst, is the ugly edge of the symbiotic relationship between fans and the objects of their adoration.

To the stars, having to deal with “your freaky little hobby” comes with the territory, that whole “Without you, I’m nothing” thing.

To the pursuers, a “Please take more time to show your fans how much you care about them” is punctuated with “celebutard” when they don’t get what they want.

Travolta is saddled with a character speaking dated but, in his case, almost age-appropriate slang  — “Oh oh, this is really RAD.”

Moose is an object of pity and mockery, visiting the open bar at the party and  expecting a “strawberry milkshake, with real ice cream.” 

So much of this ground has been covered in movies such as “The King of Comedy” and every picture named “The Fan” or words to that effect that “The Fanatic” narrows into a simple character study by Travolta. That’s not enough, and what’s here is as quaint and dated as many of the words that come out of Moose’s mouth.

Moose talks too loud, misses every social signal and has been obsessed like this since childhood (seen in flashbacks). He makes pocket money as a British bobby (cop) street performer.

Lot of demand for that on Hollywood Boulevard (Actually, Birmingham, Alabama, a pretty good stand-in). Apparently.

He has rivals who out-hustle him in hustling the tourists, but despises them because, “You don’t respect the Boulevard and you don’t respect the fans!”

“The Fanatic” veers between corny and creepy, and its third act surprises only up the “ick” factor. Sawa makes his irritable actor a little more than a “type,” but not much more.

It all plays Old Hollywood dated, with a near child, Leah, playing the jaded Tinseltown “Sunset Boulevard” narrator.

“They say you should never meet your heroes. But meeting them is not the problem. It’s when you get too close.”

There’s so much that seems off here that running through a mental list of “fixes” gets exhausting. Should “The Fanatic” have ever gotten off the ground? It lurches along, over-reaches for themes and never quite gets a handle on the promising ones.

I could see Jackie Earle Haley as Moose, 25 years ago. He’s more the “type,” and can be fearlessly nasty. Travolta’s edge in most villain roles always feels like a vamp. To that point, “The Fanatic” feels kind of gutless in the ways it backs into its violence, and backs into the sadism that comes with it.

But hell, it took DeNiro two shots at this sort of nut to find the right tone and edge.

Moose feels like an accurate portrait. He is not violent by nature, just loud, over-excitable and monomaniacal. More to the point, he’s simply not that interesting, more a cultural cliche at this point than anything else.

The only viewers he’s guaranteed to make cringe are the fanboys he’s sending up.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, and language throughout

Cast: John Travolta, Devon Sawa, Ana Golja

Credits: Directed by Fred Durst, script by Dave Bekerman, Fred Durst. A Quiver Distribution release.

Running time: 1:29

“Bittersweet” could be the ultimate single-word “spoiler alert” for any screen romance, aside from the fact that it’s almost a given in the genre.

That’s true even in same-sex romances, as “The Blonde One” reminds us.

It’s an Argentine tale of smoldering looks and sexual discovery, not quite of the more confining and worn out “coming out” genre, but still a story of those first smoldering looks, “first contact” and all that comes after that.

Juan (Alfonso Barón) likes his girlfriend, likes his beer, loves watching futbol with his mates in his roomy two story flat in suburban Buenos Aires.

And he’s got a new roommate, a guy from down at the furniture building shop. It’s Gabriel, Juan tells his burly pal Leandro (Charly Velasco).

“Gabriel?” Leandro asks, in Spanish with English subtitles. “Which one?”

“Un rubio,” Juan says. “The blonde one.”

Gabo (Gaston Re) is an introvert, a bookish sort keeping to himself as he reads Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man.” He’s got a little girl in second grade in a nearby town,  being raised by his doting mother.

The roommates and co-workers have an awkward rapport. There’s lots of silence in Juan’s place when they’re alone. He may give his roomie his most fetching grin, but he’s not even getting mixed signals from Gabo. No signals at all is more like it.

Neither grimaces when pals from work show up to watch soccer. Dopey, tactless Leandro is bad enough, talking over the action, yammering on about women when they’re watching a movie.

Older Mario (Fabio Zurita) hasn’t quite joined the 21st century. It’s “Better my son is a homosexual than my daughter a lesbian,” and other such slurs fill his anecdotes. “Weak fathers bring up queer sons.” The guy can’t keep his homophobia to himself.

And why should he? None of their circle of friends seem to suspect a thing of Juan and Gabo.

It’s just that Juan likes to parade around the place nude after sexing up his girlfriend, and Gabo steals a glimpse. And Juan notices Gabo stealing those glimpses.

That sets our affair in motion, a slow-starting, torrid-turning thing that goes the way such things go, through the heat of lots of sex all the way to the other end of the line.

There’s little that’s novel here, a few words of just what the limits they might put on what they have going on might be, here in the Capital of Latin Machismo.

I like the way writer-director Marco Berger (“Plan B,” “Taekwondo”) parks the two standoffish roomies in the frame, especially on the trams that take them home from work, or out to the bars. They’re so close their faces overlap, underlining that queer cinema cliche of a couple that doesn’t just start to look like each other, they’re attracted to somebody looks a bit like them, who has the same taste in facial hair and T-shirts.

The arguments are over the usual things — “Don’t make me explain myself like you’re my girlfriend!”

There’s little that’s light here, but I was still reminded of the early films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who began his career in the heady years after the repression of the Franco regime.

Like Almodóvar, Berger shows us lots of sex in a way that suggests the newly liberated. “I do it because I CAN.” If “The Blonde One” plays a trifle long, that could be due to the half dozen or so sex scenes, growing more explicit as the picture progresses. 

They’re still repetitive even if you can understand why they’re here. They give the film a dated feel, covering ground we’ve seen covered too many times before.

The leads play everything close to the vest. There’s nothing flamboyant in their demeanor, just the odd moment when each registers a hint of hurt at something the other just said or did.

Still, the story’s minor twists don’t mask the feeling that we’ve seen this romance before, many times. Sometimes straight, sometimes gay, but generally in English.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, smoking, alcohol use

Cast: Gaston Re, Alfonso Barón, Charly Velasco, Fabio Zurita, Malena Irusta

Credits: Written and directed by Marco Berger. A TLA release.

Running time: 1:51

You should be.

Proceeds benefit the ERA Coalition.

#Oscarmom Patricia Arquette is rocking one and pushing everybody else to shirt up.

The Emmy goes to…the future is female…and the torch has been passed.

Can you wear it as well as #Oscarmom? Maybe after a few pushups…

Here’s your link love- https://t.co/2cCOvUORcA https://twitter.com/PattyArquette/status/1166134742992818176?s=17

Natalie Portman’s the astronaut who experiences something akin to what the late, great Douglas Adams called “The Total Perspective Vortex.”

She’s been to space, seen how insignificant she and her corner of the world is within it, and is desperate to get back out there.

Ellen Burstyn, Jon Hamm, Nick Offerman, a very cool cast and that damned Beatles tune quoted on the soundtrack. “Lucy in the Sky” has it all, and maybe — after Toronto — a hint of Oscar buzz.

But we shall see.

Oct. 4 release.

Science fiction doesn’t have to be pricey to put up on screen. There have been plenty of low-budget dazzlers — “Prime” in the U.S. (Utah, I think),  “Alien Raiders,” “Timecrimes” from Spain leap to mind.

All it took to make “Empathy, Inc.” was a couple of dentist’s chairs, helmets with a lot of wires attached, some outdated computer (code typing) graphics and a syringe.

It’s a black and white sci-fi chiller that doesn’t quite come off, doesn’t have nearly the sense of discovery or surprise you’d hope for in a story of the Next Big Thing in virtual reality (VR). But the effects, which include a black construction paper “mask” for the lens (shrinking the frame into unsettling DIY “virtual” vision), give it the grounding in reality that all such movies require from the get-go.

We catch up with Joel (Zack Robidas) just as his Silicon Valley start-up crashes. The scandal sends him and actress wife Jessica (Kathy Searle) “back East” to live with her overbearing parents (Charmaine Reedy, Fenton Lawless).

Fleeing to a local bar is where he runs into old acquaintance and corporate fundraiser Nicoulas Veezy (Eric Berryman, sharp). Joel hasn’t forgotten the guy’s nickname, “Sleazy Veezy.” But he’s desperate. And Nicoulas has a pitch and a business card — “Empathy, Inc.”

A VR whiz he knows has dreamed up this “next step” tech that will allow “high end clientele to learn what it feels like to be underprivileged,” to gain “perspective.”

Rich people can “Walk a mile in the shoes of the less fortunate” and feel better about whatever they fret over in their own lives.

Okaaaaay.

Joel meets scientist Lester (Jay Klaitz, a creepier Dan Fogler) and gets a trial run, after first hearing “The Rules” (every horror or sci-fi film like this has them).

“Stay in the environment you wake up in. Don’t open any doors…Avoid mirrors at all costs!”

Side effects can include delusions and flashbacks.

Joel sits in a dentist’s chair, dons a helmet, gets an injection and wakes up in the (frame-masked) world of an impoverished old man. Dazzled, he talks his in-laws into investing.

But his second “trip” is even more disturbing. And things happened that he doesn’t remember. He starts to suspect that Sleazy Veezy and ill-tempered Lester aren’t telling him the truth.

Director Yedidya Gorsetman, working from a script by Mark Leidner, drops the masked lens conceit for Joel’s later “trips,” shedding the limitations of that First Person POV, but loses what’s unnerving about the process (your view and understanding of that view is limited and more alarming because of that).

We also shed the whole “avoid MIRRORS” thing too quickly for comfort.

That said, the screenplay sets up an intriguing journey to send its anti-hero on. Joel lacks the very thing that’s on that business card. He sees himself one way, and is puzzled when others say that he, or his avatar, is going out in the world and ill-using others.

Because Joel has been doing that in his business dealings for years.

The central question of the Empathy, Inc. pitch is “If you could be someone else, without consequences, what would you do?”

“Empathy, Inc.” (in limited release, Sept. 13) has the compactness of a Poe short story or a “Twilight Zone” parable.

But its third act surprises aren’t surprising at all. Suspense is created when the audience is a step ahead of the heroine/hero, not five steps ahead.

The violence that comes seems a contrivance. Desperate people have several hurdles to clear before they reach that “I’m going to KILL you” step, which the film deprives us of.

And in all honesty, the performances rarely rise to the occasion, although I bought into one or two moments of rage and a nicely played scene with pathos built into it.

Not a lot of money was risked on this one, which makes it easier to write off as “Nice try. Take another shot.” But I sincerely hope they do.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Zack Robidas, Kathy Searle, Jay Klaitz

Credits: Directed by Yedidya Gorsetman, script by Mark Leidner. A Dark Star Pictures release.

Running time: 1:35