Movie Nation

Strip the poetry out of “Hamlet,” and the soliloquies.

Retell the tale from a tragic character’s point of view.

Yes, it’s been done before. And Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” had more zing to it than “Ophelia,” Clare McCarthy’s film version of the Lisa Klein novel.

But sumptuous settings, a good cast and some clever if not exactly genius back-engineering and re-imagining make this bastardized Bard at least worth a look.

It gives us the chance to see if Daisy Ridley’s “Star Wars” grimace is her go-to move, and lets us reconsider Queen Gertrude’s culpability and ponder the mechanics of Shakespeare’s play by rearranging them in a single exercise in changing the focus.

Ridley has the title role, seen in the opening as we remember her, lovely, pale and drowned in a pond.

But “I was always a willful girl, who followed my heart and spoke my mind.”

Ophelia grew up in Helsingør, a commoner who lost her mother early but was raised to be a lady in waiting for Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts). She never lost the urge to be outdoors and on her own, never shed her fondness for dips in the pond.

The Mean Girls of Court keep her in her place — “She smells of garden soil…Ophelia, you dance like a goat.”

But doting on the queen, running secret errands and interpreting Medieval tapestries, she becomes the favorite. Fret not about the Mean Girls, the Queen counsels.

“Have you seen how the hens in the yard peck at each other?”

Standing in the shadows, sneaking into banquets, overhearing confidences, Ophelia hears much and sees much, before and after she falls under the gaze of Prince Hamlet (George MacKay).

She hears the first come-on Claudius aims at Gertrude — “In law, I am your brother. I was never much for law.”

What Ophelia knows and hears will come in handy. Eventually.

Claudius (Clive Owen) is the long-haired brother to the king, the life of the party, given to insulting the heir to the throne (the “Prince of Denmark”).

“To the prince, may he someday rise from his mother’s lap.”

Hamlet first spies the pale but fiery Ophelia having one of her dips. Their banter is clever if not witty enough to quote at length.

“Beauty turns men to beasts.”

“You are a lady in waiting. Learn to ‘wait.'”

“For what?”

“A husband, of course.”

Australian director Claire McCarthy (“The Waiting City”) delivers us to the familiar plot points and action beats in a Middle Ages of stone and steel, wood and leather, garlands and brocade with white peacocks wandering the courtyard of these gorgeous Czech locations. Courtiers like Ophelia’s dad Polonius (Dominic Mafham) and brother Laertes (Tom Felton, a stand-out in this cast) haunt the interiors.

This Ophelia is the first to see the ghost on the battlements, and no delicate flower submitting to Hamlet’s flirting.

“Do not play with me.”

Still, she ignores Laertes’ heartfelt warning — “Ophelia, be afraid, afraid of all he can take from you!”

There’s a tin-eared recreation of the father-son “Neither a borrower nor lender be” lecture that Polonius gives Laertes, with lots of familiar action staged here offstage. The origins of Hamlet’s plan to be “mad North-northwest” (faking it), Ophelia’s ulterior motives and the poison brewing witch (Watts, again) never seen in the play have their day.

The swordfights are properly fraught, and every so often a lovely line makes its way into generally pedestrian dialogue.

“You’re a very bad girl, to be so good.”

To Horatio (Deven Terrell), who has just expressed the desire to become a doctor.

“I have no interest in becoming some man’s anatomy lesson.”

And director McCarthy stages a red shadow pantomime that’s the best filmed version of “the play within a play.” Ever.

Every new pale English rose of the theater or cinema wants her shot at playing Shakespearean women, and Ridley makes this re-interpretation of the character confident but unpolished, and unlike Mr. “To be, or not to be” is decisive. It’s a reassuring if not career-making performance, as I’ve been underwhelmed by her work “a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away.”

I can’t say this was dazzling, as it goes rather wrong here and there, and completely off the rails in the epilogue. And MacKay, last seen in the WWII misfire “Where Hand’s Touch,” seems representative of a generation of skilled but colorless British leading men (Taron Egerton is their poster lad).

But when Hamlet, feigning madness, tries one last time to warn his beloved, Ridley’s “Ophelia” is assertive and fascinating enough that we’re glad she ignored that demand.

“I told you to get to a nunnery!”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for a scene of violence/bloody images, some sensuality, and thematic elements

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Naomi Watts, George Mackay, Tom Felton and Clive Owen

Credits: Directed by Claire McCarthy,  script by Semi Challas, based on a novel by Lisa Klein .  An IFC release.

Running time: 1:46

“Midsommar,” the latest horror experiment by Ari Aster, the director of “Hereditary,” is a disturbing, patience-testing, rule-bending and frustrating film, one more to be contended with than passively enjoyed.

And that appears to be the point. It’s about passivity.

It’s a cult tale of the “Wicker Man” school, in which those set up to be victims take no active role in their fates.

Very anti-Hollywood, almost un-American in that regard. “American Exceptionalism” in the movies often takes that tack. We don’t take things lying down, we tell ourselves.

Characters’ “special skills,” foreshadowed with care, don’t have a bearing on how they cope with what’s coming.

We and they trust Scandinavian strangers. What harm could come from the country that gave us “ABBA?” They observe at what we think is a dispassionate remove, that isn’t removed at all. That horror trope that characters’ flaws — addictions, narcissism, cruelty, etc. — ensure they “get what they deserve” are almost upended. Unless you believe we all get what we have coming to us in the end.

Dani (Florence Pugh) is the neediest girlfriend ever. We meet her on a wintry night as she’s frantically calling and texting everybody she knows.

She’s in a panic over a cryptic, menacing email from her sister. Long-suffering boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) talks her off the ledge with another “It’s just her trying to get attention” that is almost helpful. He seems well-meaning, then we hear him griping to his friends. Dani and her family dramas are maddening.

But Dani’s intuition is spot on. She loses her entire family that night. In “Midsommar’s” most wrenching scene, Pugh shows us the gulping, gasping, inconsolable grief of the truly crushed.

Months later, guilt-ridden Christian still hasn’t found an exit strategy for this years-long co-dependent relationship. He’s planned on joining his fellow anthropology doctoral student Josh (William Jackson Harper) and their partying pal Mark (Will Poulter) at Swedish student Pelle’s (Vilhelm Blomgren) primitivist Swedish commune.

Christian didn’t want to tell Dani. Dani winds up guilting him into coming along.

At Hälsingland, the inhabitants live, work and worship together, a religion they document in ancient runes and base on ancient traditions of humans and Earth in harmony.

And when the four Americans and two young Brits arrive as guests, they’re given magic mushrooms, which only Dani resists taking.

Don’t get your hopes up, because it’s just for a minute. Peer pressure is a dangerous thing.

There are signs things are a bit off there — the oddly (sexually, violently) graphic embroidered sheets, the many drugged snuffs, teas, etc. they partake in, the games they play when they’re not line dancing.

“Skinning the fool.”

Josh, the expert on these sorts of shared cultural rituals worldwide, seems clued in on what’s going on and what’s to come, but is only here to smugly, self-servingly observe, not intervene.

Christian is out of his anthropological league, as are the rest.

What follows is predictable, but still by turns quaint, bizarre and shocking. And the reactions, “It’s just a tradition/cultural thing” are straight out of apologia for everything from Islamic stonings and beheadings to Inuit seal pup head bashing and Whoopi Goldberg’s infamous defense of footballer Michael Vick’s brutish dog-fighting ring.

“It’s their culture!”

The passivity of one and all is more gullibility than drug related. If they don’t have their suspicions, they should. The events to come are just so far outside what their upbringing, culture and stereotypical view of Swedes are that their instincts don’t work.

That human/American opiate that such tales traffic in, “There’s always hope” and the view “I/We could never fall for THAT” or “take THAT lying down” is missing. We’re all exceptional. Except, we aren’t.

Yeah, this could be about Trump. And Brexit. And crimes against humanity, what people will quickly start to regard as “normal” and what tolerating the intolerable will get you.

Poulter (of “The Revenent”) provides the sole comic relief, though some of what we’re shown has a certain head-slapping laugh at grim surprise quality.

Aster’s film, not unlike “Hereditary,” has a pitiless quality that keeps it at arm’s length. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” is his ethos.

I can’t say I enjoyed it, but “Midsommar” did what the Midnight Sun does to anybody who first experiences it. It kept me up all night.

MPAA Rating: R (graphic violence, nudity, hallucinogens, profanity)

Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Gunnel Fred, Isabelle Grill and Will Poulter

Credits: Written and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:20

There’s no mistaking that sound, the crisp tone, “clear as a photograph,” the super-human range and otherworldly musicality that could be no one but Luciano Pavarotti.

Seeing him in concert or in an opera could be, even for a casual fan, a transformative experience. It was if he himself was shocked at the music emanating from his mouth — that little pause after every aria, before the explosion of applause, would catch just a hint of “I can’t believe I just did that, can you?” in his eyes.

Marry that voice to that ever-beaming face, hair and beard dyed Elvis/Reagan black, a beaming, huggable Italian teddy bear, and you had a singular star, a giant among mere mortals who loved freely, embraced warmly, laughed with ease and lit up a dressing room, a concert hall, a stadium or TV show — so many TV shows.

Ron Howard’s documentary “Pavarotti” is a celebration of a life lived to its fullest, a man who loved singing and generously passed on what he learned and even founded schools and competitions to further that aim, a superstar who spent a good portion of his latter career giving himself and a chunk of his fortune away, and a man who loved his family — and other women — as much as he loved pasta, a guy who almost always looked like he was having the time of his life.

“Life’s too short,” a record company exec remembers him shrugging off some fresh legal tangle the tenor had gotten himself into. That ethos was contagious.

He knew, he said many times in a thought echoed by those closest to him, that what he had was “a gift from God.” And far be if for him not to appreciate that, to give it to the masses, and to enjoy himself as he did.

I interviewed him once, and saw him in concert a couple of times. But oh, to have been a fly on the wall for his first (already a star) big recital tour, to small U.S. cities in the early 1970s, “The King of the High Cs” enjoying seconds and thirds at buffets with his tour manager at America’s Holiday Inns.

Documentaries are wholly reliant on their subjects for broad appeal, and in the charismatic Luciano, Howard has a winner. The Oscar-honored filmmaker captures the emotional highs that seemed to follow Pavarotti like his very essence, his lack of self-seriousness and gregarious, that liberating sense of play.

Howard knocks this can’t-miss subject right out of the park.

Start with all the singing, the vocal gymnastics of his most demanding roles, the hilarious playfulness he brought to “showing off” while breezing through “O Sole Mio” with other, competitive tenors on stage with him.

As Luciano’s first wife, Adua, jokes (in Italian, with English subtitles), “Who would not fall in love with the voice of Pavarotti?”

Drawing on decades of Pavarotti documentaries and interviews, weaving in rare footage of him starting out, the son of a baker and choral tenor in Modena, Italy, and gathering his two widows, two best-known mistresses, a couple of daughters, concert promoters, critics and peers to tell his story, Howard gives us a Smithsonian-archivable film portrait that’s entertaining, start to finish.

The barrel-chested kid, born before World War II, won competitions, made startling debuts (“La Boheme”) and sang his way to the top in about a dozen years.

The schoolteacher’s life he began in young adulthood only came back to him after he’d made it, when he applied himself and that big, loving personality to master classes — often filmed and preserved for posterity.

And at some point, right around the time he started booking recitals and concert tours — just Luciano, a pianist, a tie and tails and white handkerchief — he transcended opera and became just “Pavarotti.”

Decades later, he topped even that with a one-off night with “Three Tenors,” a simple show of the three great tenors of the age that mushroomed into a supergroup –Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras, “the biggest band in the world,” Bono of U2 marvels.

Placido Domingo says “The voice is a very jealous and demanding woman,” and Pavarotti chuckles that “She is the prima dona of my body!”

Phil Donahue tried to resist Luciano’s cooking on TV in the ’70s.

Bono tried to fend off his charm offensive, to get him and U2 to write a song for charity that they could perform at one of his endless “Pavarotti and Friends” benefit concerts. Bono failed.

Spike Lee looks intimidated, for maybe the first and last time in his life, as they unveil a charity school bus Pavarotti has paid for.

He was perpetually homesick, and packed mountains of Italian food and a whole entourage up with him when he traveled.

Amusingly, the Pavarotti depicted here is uncannily like the one feature film he starred in. “Yes, Giorgio” cast him as a beloved, world-famous tenor, a womanizer who (unlike Pavarotti, most of the time) referred to himself in the third person (“Fini”) as he propositioned the ladies.

You are a thirsty plant. Fini can water you.”

Howard cannily begins his film with grainy home video footage of Pavarotti taking a detour from a Brazilian tour date, dragging his posse with him up the Amazon to visit a remote but storied theater where the great Enrico Caruso once sang.

It’s locked, and they track down somebody with the key. There, with no stage crew, no lighting, just his traveling accompanist and an audience that started to gather, walking in from the street, he sings — an egoist, sure, but reverent for the tradition he is carrying on, singing on the same stage as Caruso, and effortlessly unleashing an aria out of sheer, unrehearsed joy.

There’s never been a career like Pavarotti’s.

No singer, no actor, no artist in any field has ever come to embody that field, envelope it, popularize it and make his name as synonymous as the art form itself.

“The King of the High Cs” he was named. “King of Superlatives” is more fitting.

Ron Howard has made a sublime movie that shows just why that was, and what a rare talent and rarer figure was in our midst until 2007.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief strong language and a war related image

Cast: Luciano Pavarotti, Adua Veroni, Placido Domingo, Bono, Jose Carreras, Nicoletta Mantovani, Lorenza Pavarotti, Madelyn Renée Monti, Zubin Mehta

Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, script by Mark Monroe and Cassidy Hartmann. A CBS Films release.

Running time: 1:54

They used to call Hitchcock “The Master of Suspense.”

Gary Dauberman is no Alfred Hitchcock. Not yet. But the directing debut of the fellow who’s been conjuring these haunted doll “Annabelle” movies makes his directing debut in a stylish and above all else suspenseful third film in this corner of the “Conjuring” universe — “Annabelle Comes Home.” 

The screenwriter of “It” has delivered a chiller with genuine chills, dread and just a dash of heart.

The chills come from the usual things that go bump in the night, a simple tale about a haunted girl, her baby sitter and the babysitter’s rules-busting friend who unleashes the horrors of a locked room packed with a demonically-possessed typewriter, wedding dress, piano and most dangerous of all — the doll they call “Annabelle.”

The heart comes from Dauberman & Co.’s success at sentimentalizing those old school carny hustlers, Lorraine and Ed Warren, the original “ghostbusters,” into folk heroes fighting the good fight with only their legends (“Amityville”) as reward.

We first met them in “The Conjuring” (2013), old school paranormal investigators played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson. With the “Annabelle” movies, they’ve been promoted to full-time guardians, keeping of the forces of darkness at bay by locking up haunted artifacts in a room of their New England home, with lots of signs warning “keep locked” and “Stay Out” and the occasional splash of holy water to maintain the status quo.

In “Annabelle Comes Home,” they’re busy with lectures, travels and exorcisms. Lorraine, the one with The Sight, sees dead people — in passing cemeteries, standing by cars they just wrecked.

Farmiga, one of the best actresses to grace any modern horror picture, gives these B-movie moments A-movie pathos.

Ed is the pragmatic true believer, keeping them on task and on the road.

Which is why they won’t be at home this 1971 weekend, leaving Daughter Judy (Mckenna Grace) with their favorite sitter, good girl Mary Ellen (Madison Iseman).

Every good girl has to have a going-wrong BFF, and that’s the wild child Daniela (Katie Sarife), wound up and ready, willing and able to get her pal into the arms of the goofy dreamboat who’s too shy to ask her out — Bob (Michael Cimino, no not THAT Michael Cimino).

Daniela is hellbent on inviting herself over. Daniela is deathly curious about what the Warrens do for a living. Daniela REALLY wants to get into that artifacts room.

Daniela has her reasons.

And on this night, Daniela’s going to get her wish and all hell — or at least that Doll from Down Below, locked in a display — is going to break loose.

The period details, from the earth-tone, brass, glass and wood Mid Century Modern (“Mad Men”) furniture to the costumes and music, are spot on.

The artifacts are a mix of the quaint and the cliched.

The kids’ reactions to the rising terror have all these horror conventions — “rules” — to abide by, which lessens the pleasures of the movie-watching experience just a smidge. Judy sees dead people, and hides that fact. Daniela finds a key, and hides that fact. Stuff starts to hit the fan, and nobody calls the cops or warns anybody else in the house. Etc.

But the “suspense” I began this review talking about is in most every scene. Dauberman takes his time getting the parents out of town, clings to the creepy silences of a house that has spirits moving this or that, darting here and here, and makes anticipation the most dreaded element in watching “Annabelle.”

Keep those crucifixes handy, kids. You’ll never know what’s unleashed next.

The effects are mostly of the simplest variety, the foreshadowing leaves just enough surprises to make things interesting.

The album that Mary Ellen keeps on the stereo, the one that sometimes starts playing on its own, is Badfinger’s “Straight Up,” the one that had “No Matter What,””Baby Blue” and Day After Day” on it. Listen to how composer Joseph Bishara builds suspense in one of those “record player starts by itself-song keeps going” moments by repeating, over and over, the piano bridge to the lilting “Day After Day.”

It grows more sinister by the second.

Not to oversell this paint-by-numbers genre picture, which has some good performances and some perfunctory ones, but little moments like that and Farmiga’s motherly, can-do approach to the supernatural as Lorraine, and you’ve got a horror movie that pulls you in, bumps you back into your seat and almost brings a tear to the eye.

And nobody’s entrails have to be splayed all over the wall, no woman gets tortured and evil may or may not triumph. But we’re secure in the deead that it’s never really vanquished, either.

MPAA Rating: R for horror violence and terror

Cast: Mckenna Grace, Madison Iseman, Vera Farmiga, Katie Sarife Patrick Wilson and Michael Cimino

Credits: Written and directed by Gary Dauberman. A Warner Brothers/New Line release.

Running time: 1:46

“Running” has precious little to do with “Running for Grace.”

It’s a slow, old-fashioned romance without much in the way of romantic spark, and a coming of age tale that takes its sweet time getting around to that maturity.

The script is limp to the point of soggy, lacking little in the way of melodrama but not creating dramatic tension or suspense about what is to come.

But the novelty of the setting, the stunning above-the-clouds mountains of Hawaii during its coffee-growing heyday, and a poignant subtext about belonging and tolerance make this 1920s period piece almost worth your trouble.

Matt Dillon is the grumpy new doctor brought to tend to the coffee plantation village just after World War I. The Spanish Flu has just torn through the place, taking the wife of the plantation owner (Nick Boraine) and the coffee-picking mother of a little boy of mixed race (Cole Takiue).

Jo is the kid’s name, the product of a love affair between his Japanese immigrant mother and “a haole,” a white outsider nobody but her knew.

Her death is secret, and he’s barely of school age when he’s forced to fend for himself, rejected, our narrator (Rumi Oyama) tells us, for being “half-breed” and “bad-luck” among the Japanese on the “island within an island” (above the clouds), a “bastard” to the few whites there who notice him.

Two-fisted Doc Lawrence (Dillon) may not be happy about the crash in coffee prices that means he’s to earn a fraction of what he’s been promised by Danielson as village physician. He’s facing a language barrier and superstitions when it comes to treating the Japanese.

But he solves two problems at once when he figures out the kid is bilingual as well as bi-racial. The superstitious locals are going to have to accept Jo, because he’s the doc’s new translator and “medicine runner.”

Years pass, with Doc forever frustrated by “racial integrity guidelines” that won’t let him adopt the kid, who has grown up to be the doctor’s trusted, medically-competent assistant and the fastest runner in the hills, racing against buggies and later, against Fords.

From the first time Jo (played by Ryan Potter as a young adult) set eyes on the plantation owner’s daughter Grace (Olivia Ritchie), he was smitten.  But no “bastard half-breed” has a prayer with the blonde girl, at least not in the eyes of her racist dad.

The Ford in question belongs to a new doctor summoned by Danielson to serve the white folks of his world. Dr. Reyes is given a drunken, bluff swagger by Jim Caviezel. He could use a helper, too. Will Jo fall for the flashy newcomer and change allegiances? Will Grace?

Give director Daniel L. Cunningham and co-writer Christian Parkes credit for NOT making this about a kid who runs his way to fame and glory. Perhaps you thought, based on the title and the trailer, that’s the direction it would go in. I know I did.

Cunningham (he did “The Seeker: The Dark is Rising” and “To End All Wars”) loses himself in the setting, sampling the transplanted Japanese culture and the rainforest village life and nuts and bolts of coffee growing and harvesting it on mountaintops before electricity reached them.

He serves up sweeping pans from the people in the story to the sweeping vista of Hawaiian mountains.

The story, though, could use some work. A lot of it.

Narrator Oyama also plays Grace’s nanny and guardian, and has too little narrating to do and too little to play within the narrative to suit her character’s role in the drama. Juliet Mills stands out in the supporting cast as the imperious mother of the plantation owner.

The early scenes are the best, with the little boy stealing to survive, shunned by one and all, even the sick, even when the doctor insists on having his help on house calls.

And the child’s amusingly inexact translations are the film’s only dollop of humor.

Dillon and the script give the doctor an ahead-of-his-time tolerance that makes him the warm, comforting center of the picture in the early going.

“C’mon. You’re gonna live with me.”

More could have been done with all the racism sampled here, especially in the later going. If Jo is in fact so accepted by one community, what excuses the other one from doing the same?

I loved Caviezel’s rare bad guy turn as the tipsy, swaggering blowhard doing the Charleston, smoking Turkish cigarettes and impressing only the Danielsons. Well, save for Grace and her nanny.

But the Doctor vs. Doctor confrontation is pushed back into the third act, far after I’d lost interest in waiting for it.

The entire picture is beautifully shot, from sunny or gorgeously volcanic fog-shrouded exteriors to the diffuse light interiors, “Running for Grace” looks like a hazy memory of a long lost time.

But as the romance is pulled to the fore and events take every melodramatic detour under that foggy sun in the third act, the picture’s shortcomings start to grate.

The title isn’t just NOT about running, it’s not about “Grace” in the literal or Biblical sense either. The misnomer of a title, coupled with the presence of “Passion of the Christ” star Caviezel suggests an attempt to pitch this as a faith-based drama.

It isn’t.

With the romance not clicking and the resolution lacking much of anything that tugs at the heartstrings, “Running with Grace” never rises above “Walking in Place.” And that, as you know, never gets you anywhere.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Ryan Potter, Jim Caviezel, Olivia Ritchie, Matt Dillon, Juliet Mills.

Credits: Directed by David L. Cunningham, script by David L. Cunningham and Christian Parkes. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:50

James Bonds most badassed Moneypenny is paired up with a “Fast and Furious” veteran for this cop thriller.

She plays a Detroit cop who stumvles into fellow Blue Lives killing a drug dealer they were in business with.

The chase is on. An Oct. Release.

The buzz is that A24 has itself the scariest movie of the summer. Early summer, late summer or…”MIDsommar.”

A little “Season of the Witch” with cultish Swedes (Hey Bergman died, ABBA got old and SAAB stopped making cars — they’ve got to do something to stem that Midnight Sun fever).

Scarier that a haunted doll? Scarier than “Chucky,” at least, is my guess.

My review of “Annabelle Comes Home” posts at 5 eastern. So we will just have to see.

Not my favorite Miyazaki, but a fun fact…noted by Variety
“China Box Office: ‘Toy Story 4’ Beaten by Old Animated Film ‘Spirited Away’” https://t.co/Pld48hFiep https://twitter.com/Variety/status/1143097958780604417?s=17

Those $140 to as high as $200 million opening weekend predictions for the pointless anti-climactic “Toy Story 4” proved to be our collective reach f a pie the sky. Disney Pixar, which as Deadline.com points out, normally opens it’s summer moves on Father’s Day, waited a week and saw that decision blow up in their faces.

As I said in my review, there’s nothing in this sequel that we haven’t seen before, funnier and more touchingly rendered in three earlier films. Audiences suspected as much. No best Pixar opening ever, no second best Pixar opening ever. Adjusted for inflation, this is underwhelming even by “Toy Story” standards.

Another brand name franchise showing itself out of date was the “Child’s Play” reboot. $18 miion projected, a million Mark Hamill and Aubrey Plaza promotional interviews and it barely cleared $14.

“Aladdin” keeps making money. “Anna” did not.

A Luc Besson bust, with or without “MeToo” blowback over rape and harassment charges.

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

We take these critters seriously in the Too Much Sunshine State.

And when we don’t, our obit makes the news. July 12, gator luggage starts sounding like a good idea.