Movie Nation

The phone rings, and horror of horrors, it’s a LAND LINE. What’s worse, she has no Caller ID

“Who is this?”

“It’s THE DEVIL!”

She’s been ducking his calls.

“Just leave me alone!”

“Not until I have your SOUL. Bwah-hah-hah-hah!”

The best Devils all sound like Satanic clowns, especially on crackly phone lines. Especially in cheesy demonic possession horror tales like “Possession Diaries.”

It’s an amateurish D-list thriller about a young woman (Katherine Munroe) who starts a vlog — a video diary to let the world know that “demonic possession is REAL.”

No, you guys. She says the room she’s vlogging from just got “SO COLD.” How could she be faking that? You guys? How?

Something’s going on with Satan. He’s spamming his way from phone to phone (Damned LAND LINES.), possessing people like Rebecca, driving her crazy.

She’s seen shrinks and priests, she tells her “fans.” Maybe this is all in her head, but if it is, we can guess how that happened.

If you’re having demon-in-the-forest nightmares (the cheesiest green screen this side of 1989 CNN), fearing for your mortal soul, maybe take all the HALLOWEEN decorations down in your apartment. Just saying.

Hearing icky noises from the Jack-O-Lantern you carved and keep INDOORS with you? Maybe don’t stick YOUR FACE right up against it. You know, take the most basic precautions.

It all started with a Ouija Board, not that we get to SEE how THAT happened. Too much trouble, too many…effects.

Rebecca gets comments, skeptical and supportive, on her live-feed. Not that we can read those in real time, like in a more polished picture like the John Cho thriller “Searching.”  There’s no shame in not having the budget or know-how for that.

But wanting to maintain a consistent, computer screen camera POV, and not being able to figure out how to manage that? Come on.

“This is not a movie,” Rebecca (Munroe) complains. And she was on the set. “I am not an actress!” Don’t be so hard on yourself. “Everything you’re going to see is real!”

Not. Even. Close.

“Possession Diaries” follows our heroine through a few days of haphazard vlogging, looking increasingly haggard from the lack of sleep, wearing creepy veins makeup that wouldn’t pass muster in most movies and occasionally talking in the Devil’s voice, picking up a knife and threatening her boyfriend.

If gnarled, red hands were reaching up and grabbing you from under your bed, and a guy with Halloween party horns was raping you, you’d be stressed too!

“Is there anything I can do to fix this? Just go back to Hell where you belong!”

Satan isn’t having it.

Neither are the makers/distributors of “Possession Diaries.”

It’s never as easy as asking nicely, is it?

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Katherine Munroe, Johnny Ortiz, Monica Engesser, Eileen Dietz, Stephanie Kaczmarek, Noel Gugliemi,  and James Russo

Credits: Directed by Juan J. Frausto, script by Juan J. Frausto, Rich Wealthy. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:27

“Poms” was critically eviscerated, so maybe Diane Keaton, who loves to work and still can get movies made with her name on them, will get a break with a UK comedy.

“Hampstead” (June 14) co-stars Brendan Gleeson as a man the pretty widow Keaton meets as he is about to be tossed off a valuable piece of land.

Looks very cute, and as it’s from IFC, it promises to have a bit more to offer than much of what the Oscar-winning Keaton’s filming these days.

A high school teen tries to cope with the death of her sister.

The fact that “He was the last person to see her alive,” and there’s uncertainty about how she died, that eats at her.

“You didn’t know my sister. My parents didn’t know my sister. I BARELY knew my sister!”

Seeing Zoe’s shrink? (Ken Jeoung, not in the IMDb credits)

Sister Echo  (Laura Marano) is looking for answers, even if she wasn’t capable of “Saving Zoe.”

VOD in July.

They’re both as pretty as they can be, and the camera just loves Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton, so lots of swooning close-ups.

They play characters with inner conflict and drama built in to their “Meet Cute” moment, with a clock ticking towards a deadline that could break them up before they get started.

But if you’re waiting for that heartbeat-skipping moment that big screen romances have to deliver to come off, don’t bother your cardiologist. “The Sun is Also a Star” can’t deliver one.

Not with the luminous Shahidi of “Black-ish” paired up with Melton, of “American Horror Story” and “Riverdale.” You don’t have to deliver “You had me at ‘Hello,'” but if you’re doing that magical “We just have tonight/today” “Before Sunrise” thing, you’ve got to come up with something, ANYthing that makes us root for these two crazy kids.

If you look at director Ry-Russo Young’s credits, you can see why she was hired. “Before I Fall” was a genuinely touching “re-live your last day over and over again” teen drama/romance, the movie that made a star out of Zoey Deutsch.

But Nicola Yoon’s novel foils her and screenwriter Tracy Oliver (“Girls Trip”), pigeon-holing them into a not-quite-insipid romance about an immigrant about to be “self-deported” and a son of immigrants trying to be a poet and a romantic when his parents just want to get him into Dartmouth and into surgeon’s scrubs.

“Not quite insipid” doesn’t rule out insipid touches, like having our heroine, Natasha (Shahidi) narrate her love of “a city filled with humanity,” which she cannot bear to leave.

She’s been in the U.S. for nine years, has no trace of her parents’ Jamaican accent (a pity) and is a high school junior hoping she can find a reprieve her parents did not on this, the day before the family must go back where they came from.

“Accept destiny,” her dad (Gbenga Akinnagbe ) orders. “We g’wine home!”

Maybe a compassionate INS agent, perhaps a helpful lawyer?

It’s a big day for Daniel (Melton), too. He has his alumni interview, talking to a Dartmouth grad who will question him about why he must simply MUST go there and why he was born to be a doctor.

His Korean immigrant parents run an African American hair care store, and pin all their hopes on him and not his tattooed punk older brother (Jake Choi).

Daniel is obsessed with kismet, serendipity, destiny or fate — whatever it is that will change the course of his life. He’s looking for a deus ex machina, a miraculous coincidence to “save” him from a future he doesn’t embrace.

Seeing a very pretty girl on the street with “Deus ex Machina” embroidered on her jacket is exactly that. He stalks her until that moment when a Beemer almost runs her over at a crosswalk, and their fates are joined.

He’s ready for “their” destiny. She’s busy.

“I don’t believe in love,” she huffs. She’s all about chemistry, biology and “the scientific method.”

He wants a day to make her fall in love with him, she gives him…minutes.

The story that follows is meant to reinforce his insistence that “fate is real,” or at least get the aspiring astronomer Natasha to accept that there’s a multiverse where their lives and futures are intertwined.

As the camera lovingly closes in on Natasha’s flawless makeup and sexy haircut, we get it.

The movie, though, doesn’t. The distractions of their long day of missed appointments, “my favorite place” misadventures, etc., does nothing to create a real spark between these two or between them and the audience.

Coincidences alone do not a romance make. No, there’s virtually nothing funny here, so calling this a “romantic comedy” would be an even bigger mistake.

The most interesting scenes are flashbacks to how their parents met and then came to the United States, and Daniel’s clever explanation of how Koreans came to be such reliable makers and sellers of African American wigs and hair-care products.

The subtext of “The Sun is Also a Star,” brought to the fore as Natasha fights for the right to stay in the U.S., is out in the open but given the soft sell. Shahidi never gets across the desperation that would help Natasha make her case that America “these days” (Trumpism) isn’t treating people like her fairly.

The parent-child conflicts have a little crackle, NYC looks lovely and the leads are pleasant enough to spend time with.

But that “X-factor,” which Daniel throws in to his calculus about whether they should be together? The thing he insists, “Trust me, we have it” to Natasha?

Trust me. They don’t.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive content and language

Cast: Yara Shahidi, Charles Melton, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cathy Shim and John Leguizamo

Credits: Directed by Ry Russo-Young, script by Tracy Oliver, based on the novel by Nicola Yoon. A Warner Brothers/MGM release.

Running time: 1:40

“John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum” raises the bar on “relentless.”

The third film in this Keanu the Killer franchise is all fights, all chases, slaughter and mayhem and dollops of drollery delivered by a cast with a few new faces and one that’s wearing a perpetually scraggly beard to hide his middle age jowls.

Action-packed and production designed to death, ducking and parrying through an arcane hitman/hitwoman universe of its own creation, a world of “fealty” and “service” both “under the table” and from “The High Table.”

No kidding, who needs more “Matrix” when Keanu & Co., Laurence Fishburne included, are giving more than fair value in these stunt-man spectacles?

“Parabellum” — it’s Latin and it’s explained in the picture — takes place at the end of “John Wick Chapter 2,” and chases our “ex communicado” killer from the sanctuary of New York’s Hotel Continental, where he broke the rules and killed a foe under its consecrated roof, to Casablanca.

John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is pummeled, stabbed, shot at, kicked through glass and knocked off a roof.

“Over a dog? A car?”

That’s what all his foes want to know. And if you remember the first film, yeah, it’s like that and it was over a dog. He leaves the new pit bull he acquired in the last film to seek help from a Russian gypsy mobster who is a ruthlessly bloody ballet director (Oscar winner Anjelica Huston), and an old colleague whose secret weapons are attack dogs (Oscar winner Halle Berry).

Wick seeks some relief, a “parlay” perhaps, a negotiation out of this jam he was pulled into, murderously and reluctantly.

But hey, even the villains are, you know, fans. Especially the sushi chef and martial arts teacher/gang leader named “Zero,” a dazzling fighter given great charisma, wit and malice by Mark Dacascos (the new Wo Fat on the “new” “Hawaii Five-O”).

He’s my favorite new character, although Berry’s Sofia kicks major butt in her fights and shootouts. And if we learned nothing from John Wick himself, it’s don’t mess with an assassin’s dog(s).

Of course, the manager of the Continental (Ian McShane) is drolly following John’s exploits with perfunctory “Jonathan, Jonathan, where ARE you going?” for much of the movie.

In this game of assassin’s tag, with every hitman in New York chasing the $14 million+ now on Wick’s head, The Continental is “home base” and safe harbor. John may have to avail himself of it, and the peerless discrete assistance of the concierge Charon, turned into maybe the coolest character in the series by the steely and stoic Lance Reddick.

I nominate Charon for the character best-suited for a spin-off.

The script is all “Your ticket will be paid in blood!” and “Never seen a man fight so hard to wind up back where he started!”

Nothing like joking about the circular, repetitive nature of the “plots” of these shoot-em-up martial arts video game movies in the dialogue.

Martial artist and stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski always makes the fights in these films memorable, and does a decent job of keeping “Chapter 3” leaning into the frame, hurtling forward. There are pauses, which don’t so much allow us to catch our breath any more than they allay the weariness the endless mayhem creates.

There’s no hiding the stunt doubles in scenes shot in video-walled glass rooms with glass floors and glass display cases, any more than you can’t NOT see the padding Reeves himself wears for these epic fights, which grow more impressive as the picture goes on.

But back to that “raises the bar” business. During lulls I kept thinking of all the action movies this one bests, at least in its fights and chases (on motorcycles, on horseback). the next “Mission: Impossible” has its work cut out for it, James Bond may have his license revoked and the “bullet time” from “The Matrix” is nothing compared to what a bullet from a silenced automatic weapon does under water.

Reeves hasn’t really discovered Eastwood’s secret, that his best work is done without talking. He’s still a bit of a stiff, and God knows the wear and tear shows in Wick’s wounded sprints in “Chapter 3.” He runs like a middle aged man, which he is.

But “John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum” still gets a bloody job done, and still merits all the fan-murderer adulation our anti-hero gets every time he meets a new hunter hoping to cash in that reward money.

“Over a dog? A car? Really?”

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

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Anjelica Huston, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Asia Kate Dillon and Lance Reddick

Credits: Directed by Chad Stahelski, script by Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins and Marc Abrams. A Summit/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 2:10

Long title, longish movie. Hoping for the best.

I can’t recall ever truly hating a Johnny Depp star vehicle, and I’m not going to start with “The Professor.”

But I’m tempted.

It flirts with being offensive, but falls short. It’s not entirely maudlin, not wholly misogynistic, but close enough.

And he’s mildly diverting in the part, playing a coasting-on-tenure/drifting through marriage college English professor who gets a cancer diagnosis in the opening scene and takes the same attitude towards his life that he abruptly hurls at his class.

“From here on out, we’re going to be doing things differently.”

Professor Richard Brown is going to drink. He’s going to womanize, when practical. He probably ran out of you-know-whats to give sometime before. But getting that news on the same day his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) tells him she’s having an affair with the college president, a “nutless sack” (Ron Livingston), was kind of the last straw.

And he’s only starting with muttering the f-bomb at faculty meetings (Danny Huston is the department chair and his best friend), later wading into the duck pond bellowing that same word at the heavens.

No. Routine won’t do.

Richard’s journey is tracked through cutesy interludes — “Chapter I: I have something to say,” “Chapter IV: It’s really starting to kick in.”

He weeds his class of drones, slackers, future “government workers,” “corporate whores” and the like. The few left are to pick one book they haven’t read, a classic, analyze and do an oral report on it. But first, Richard must make time for “an emotional bender for 72 hours.”

He doesn’t tell his unfaithful wife and college-age daughter (Odessa Young of “High Life”), because each is caught up in her own thing. Daughter Olivia has picked this very moment to come out. Mom dismisses it as just a phase, but Dad is the very picture of seen-the-light/concerned-supportive parent.

And his class teeters on the edge of degenerating into chaos, as he asks them to procure weed for him and he takes them out drinking, all part of a flailing last ditch attempt to “reach into our lives and try to extract some sort of wisdom” from it all.

Richard is a fairly tedious character — sexist, intolerant of feminist/lesbian lit and that one feminist student whose “co-op lifestyle” his assignment is shaking up.

He has little more to confide to this best friend other than “I’m only mildly disappointed in myself…Just let me die alone. Let me die in peace, ride this thing out.”

Depp, who has finally taken to showing up for roles appropriately groomed, cuts a fine figure as a college prof on a Life’s End bender. He’s had far too much practice playing drunks for this to be a strain.

But Richard is singularly undeveloped and uninteresting. Why would a coed like the one played by the sassy starlet Zoey Deutsch remain in his class, much less pursue his company and/or guidance after hours?

His dictum that they all remember that “each and every moment, we are composing the story of our lives” and are thus obligated to “make it an amiable read, or at least an interesting one” is not advice he’s ever followed or ever will.

The women are singularly dull in this contrivance by the director of “Katie Says Goodbye” (which starred Olivia Cooke). Sculptor-cheater wife, female students as objects of scorn, shallow wives and harridan colleagues (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), they’re a sorry lot in writer-director Wayne Roberts’ eyes.

Depp’s charming way with Richard taking his leave to “explore a smidgen of infidelity” doesn’t go far enough (having sex with a barmaid in the bathroom) toward making him loathsome. Because that, at least, would be more intriguing, given the character and the movie more edge. He never quite achieves that.

The few one-liners that land are a pallid assemblage, too.

“I have cancer. It’s all right. Everyone my age has cancer.”

“We’re well-to-do middle-aged WASPs, we can get prescriptions for anything.”

Writer-director Wayne Roberts shows little imagination in any character, any situation, any academic cliche. He has Richard drive a 1980 Mercedes diesel because, I guess, nobody thinks college professors drive Saabs any more.

At least Roberts didn’t get his way in titling “The Professor.” The director of “Katie Says Goodbye” was sure he’d get to call this “Richard Says Goodbye” (the print I saw was so-titled). That’s enough to make anybody plunge into a duck pond and hurl a few f-bombs at the heavens.

MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content and some drug use

Cast: Johnny Depp, Rosemarie DeWitt, Zoey Deutch, Danny Huston, Siobhan Fallon Hogan

Credits: Written and directed by Wayne Roberts. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:30

This is the July 3 horror tale from the director of “Hereditary,” Ari Aster.

A little “Wicker Man,” a little “The Witch,” a bit of Scandinavia isn’t all that inviting, eh?

You need to see “The Biggest Little Farm,” and not because that many of us have the energy, gumption and chutzpah to emulate what we see here.

Everybody needs to see this lovely little documentary because of its optimism, a bracing island of hope in a tidal wave of news about the slow motion environmental disaster unfolding around us.

Here’s a movie about the pursuit of balance in nature, the infallibility of biodiversity  and the glories of compost.

What cameraman and filmmaker John Chester and chef, blogger and “eat local” advocate Molly Chester did was restore a barren, neglected farm in Moorpark, California, leading by example as they launched an experiment in biology, labor and market-driven farm-to-table capitalism.

And what Chester did was document that with his camera, explaining the changes, reveling in the learning curve and marveling at how land, nature, animals and people can be healed by getting back to the farming we used to know how to do, almost by instinct.

He’s made an informative, inspiring film, joyous in its intimacy, fraught in its various crises, one filled with love, adorable critters, challenges, tragedy and triumph.

In more ways than a mere review can recount, it is the most American movie of 2019, wearing its optimism in every gilded, rain-speckled, sun-flecked frame.

The Chesters were plugging along in their personal and professional lives until the day this rescue dog they took in got them evicted from their Santa Monica apartment.

Their plans to “build a life of purpose together” changed, and Molly led the way. Her “infectious” enthusiasm for food, raised with love and care, and her idealistic notion of a farm, “like something out of a children’s book,” pulled them towards rounding up investors and setting out to launch Apricot Lane Farm, 200 acres that would be tended “in harmony with nature, like a traditional farm from the past.”

Farming has radically changed in the past 150 years, and that created skeptics all around them (quoted, but rarely seen) as the couple took on a foreclosed, arid and dead orchard, with a house on property, surrounded by factory farms.

“Biggest Little Farm” recounts the years it took them to turn it into something that worked. They did some homework, but more importantly, they found themselves a sensei, a guru in this “farming the way it was” ethos.

John narrates the film and his skepticism about this eccentric hippy “back to nature” prophet, Alan York, is evident and repeated, time and again.

York’s “It’ll take care of itself,” like “a flywheel” —  self-sustaining so that “it’ll be like surfing” once the place it on its feet, seem delusional, pie-in-the-sky pollyanna-ism.

“Diversify! Diversify! Diversify!” York preaches. There’s “never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over,” if they get something wrong or nature provides unhappy surprises.

But Molly’s all about this sunny York, and John buys in. They put in scores of stone-fruit trees, from peaches to cherries, endless varieties.

They plant “cover crops,” grass and clover, to heal the soil around the trees.

They buy chickens and cows, goats and sheep, to produce revenue but more importantly, to poop.

“Compost was our gold!”

The idea, as pitched by York, was to “emulate how natural ecosystems work,” to let nature find its equilibrium in a farm with a pond for ducks, a house for hens and sheep and cattle grazing amidst the orchards, rebuilding dead soil into something rich and productive.

Worm farming for “compost tea,” putting catfish in their pond, adding herding dogs to help, it all fits together.

Until the predators and “pests” start showing up. The Chesters are tested by snails and starlings, maggots and gophers and worst of all — coyotes, the spree killers of many a henhouse or duck colony.

Chester uses animation and gorgeous natural photography to capture nature returning to this near-desert corner of Southern California. The bees swarm in, and soon all creatures great and small gravitate to their tiny Garden of Eden — gophers to marmots, badgers to bobcats.

There’s a rich tradition, perhaps unique to the United States, in books on this sort of transformation, all harking back to Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac.”

Every generation, it seems, has to be re-introduced to this lesson of “letting nature heal” our scarred land, because every generation needs it. Farming has turned industrial, monocultural and chemically dependent.

Maybe the swelling population of the country and the planet demands this scale and efficiency. But maybe there’s another way, “Biggest Little Farm” says.

Granted, not everybody will find the dogged work, sometimes solitary lifestyle and grimmer aspects of dealing with food on such close, life-and-death terms appealing.

And I’d love to see the ledger books on this place, from the investors who got them started to the labor force the Chesters recruit online (“Learn to farm” interns? Volunteers?), which makes one wonder about their actual bottom line.

But “The Biggest Little Farm” is so touching it’ll make you cry, so inviting it’ll make you yearn for something in your life as fulfilling as the healing power of making the barren green, from tiny plots of backyard to a warming and drying planet.

MPAA Rating: PG for mild thematic elements.

Cast: John Chester, Molly Chester

Credits: Directed by John Chester, script by John Chester and Mark Munroe.   A Neon release.

Running time: 1:31

“Wild Nights with Emily” is a makeover of the image of legendarily “sad,” “loveless,” “reclusive” “spinster” poet Emily Dickinson.

It’s “Drunk History” without the alcohol. It re-examines the “legend,” and tears holes in it with laughs based on rock solid scholarship.

Have I mentioned how much I love “Drunk History?” It can come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Comedy Central show seeing this movie that writer-director Madeleine Olnek (“Countertransference”) has cited the comic “History” as a big influence on this queer reclamation of Dickinson’s reputation from the erasures of a presumptuous dunderhead who established the “myth” of “The Belle of Amherst” that has endured despite a rising mountain of evidence debunking it.

“Wild Nights” has Molly Shannon as the adult Emily, a frustrated poet who has a devil of a time getting her hundreds upon hundreds of poems published in her lifetime.

“They don’t rhyme!”

Yes, one and all agree, especially Atlantic Monthly publisher and literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman of TV’s “Another Period”). “The rhymes are a bit…off. She could…work on them, perhaps?”

Two myths die hard in that meeting, that Dickinson was a longtime recluse and that she was obsessed with “posthumous recognition” for her 1800 or so poems. She got poems published, and she tried, all her life, to get more published. She met publishers in order to accomplish that.

The other myth that “Wild Nights with Emily” concerns itself with is her sexuality. She wasn’t some repressed, loveless spinster who missed her chance at “happiness,” thus inspiring the sadness of much of her writing.

Emily was in love, from her teens onward, with her friend and later sister-in-law Susan (veteran character actress Susan Ziegler of “Hello, My Name is Doris” and many, many TV roles).

We’re shown how that romance flowered when they were teens — Dana Melanie plays the curious Emily, crushing on Susan Huntington Gilbert (Sasha Frolova), who eventually reciprocates.

We hear from Susan’s daughter, who wrote and spoke of this love which her teenage self could see with her own eyes as she passed thousands of notes between the women, who lived next door to each other in Amherst. We hear and see (every poem is subtitled to make the words and meter stand out) the poems and passionate letters that buttress this view of Dickinson as America’s most famous lesbian poetess.

That we haven’t known this about her until recently is explained, too.

As narrator, giving a “women’s club” talk about “Emily,” whom she never actually met, we meet the woman who literally ERASED Susan’s name from poems and those letters. Mabel Loomis Todd is given a smiling, dopey certitude by Amy Seimetz (“Alien: Covenant,” “Stranger Things”) who plays her as delusional about her intelligence and the validity of her interpretation of “Emily,” and villainous in a self-righteous way one often sees in lady TV preachers.

She’s right, because, well, she just is!

Imagine having this fraudulent expert, even though she was plainly a fan, in charge of Dickinson’s legacy.

Susan married Emily’s brother Austin (Kevin Seal), had two children by him and insisted they build a house next door to Emily and her dotty sister Lavinia (Jackie Monahan) because her true love dwelt there.

Seal’s Austin is a complex blend of indulgent sibling and husband, and clueless cad. He had a years-long affair with Todd that mirrored his wife’s romance with his sister.

Olnek doesn’t have much in the line of kinky fun with the sordid goings on in Amherst. The picture reaches for a jokey tone in its casting, the odd situation or one liner.

“Your sideburns are in my eye!”

There’s a light mockery of other figures of the day, including some of her contemporaries in poetry — the mumbling Emerson, etc.

But the poems, many of which are sampled here, deflate most of the film’s efforts at deadpan lightness.

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me –

And even though the film is period-perfect, using actual locations and accurate costumes (hoop skirts are good for a laugh), “Wild Nights” suffers from a cell-phone video flatness in its cinematography, a little too “Drunk History” for its own good in that regard.

Shannon’s Dickinson is sharp and smart and a little exhausting (those her knew her vouch for that), Ziegler’s Susan devoted, aware of what’s going on if not entirely sure of how to characterize it and Seimetz’s Todd daffy in her wrongheadedness.

So it’s the players and the historical rewrite that recommend “Wild Nights with Emily,” not the wildness, not the nights nor the days, all of which are shot so flatly as to resemble a local PBS station’s production of “The Belle of Amherst,” circa 1985.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content

Cast: Molly Shannon, Susan Ziegler, Amy Seimetz, Kevin Seal, Brett Gelman

Credits : Written and directed by Madeleine Olnek. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running tine: 1:24