The Raven (2012) and Me and Orson Welles (2009)

Two famously eccentric American artists who burnt fast and hot get the fictional film treatment in “The Raven” –- with writer/poet Edgar Allan Poe playing super sleuth over a series of murders related to his writings –- and “Me and Orson Welles” -– with the actor/director as scoundrel muse to a plucky “High School Musical” hero. 

As Poe, John Cusack does that arched-eyebrow John Cusack thing he always does, and he’s flat out wrong in the role. The plot is a grisly rehash of “Se7en” stitched onto a carbon copy of Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes,” with a villain that’s dull as rag paper. Worse bit: Poe is shown playing with a pet raccoon. Director James McTeigue thinks he’s still filming “V for Vendetta.” Fawkes that. 

“Me” focuses on a teen drama protégé (Zac Efron) as he cons his way into a gig at the Mercury Theatre for the renowned staging of “Julius Caesar.” Christian McKay plays Welles as madman, genius, romantic, cad, screw-up, and artist, and brilliantly crushes every scene, but with “Tiger Beat” poster boy Efron in the lead pining for a smirking bored Claire Danes, the film sinks. 

Poe and Welles would torch these films. Raven: C- Welles: C+

Time Lock (1996)

“Time Lock” is the kind of awful where you laugh not at what’s on screen –- OK, I did a bit of that -– but at yourself for foolishly waiting for something good to occur, a hint of brains from the folks in the credits. No doing. 

First: There is no time lock in “Time Lock.” Rather, we’re in the “‘Die Hard’ on a …” genre, where the unlikely hero (comedian Arye Gross) is a computer hacker sent to a space asteroid prison that’s taken over by a ninja-type (Jeffrey Meek) out to free his criminal mentor (Jeff Speakman). Robert Munic directs with a sledgehammer, every scene garishly louder than it needs to be, and every actor off his leash to just go nuts and make it look good because no one wants to waste film. Gross cracks jokes, flails arms, and does tricks. Magic, I mean. Not sex acts. 

A WTF scene: Our hero sets ninja guy on fire -- fully engulfed -– and in the next scene the dude has not a hair out of place. I thought of “Highlander.” Even for 1990s low-brow sci-fi fluff, “Time Lock” is a time killer. D

Jumanji (1995)

I disliked “Jumanji” when I saw it in theaters. I cannot recall why: Too much newbie CGI, or just an irritation with Robin Williams running loony? But with this second viewing, I like its goofy innocence. 

The story: Orphans Judy (Kirsten Dunst) and Peter (Bradley Pierce) arrive in a New England town with their aunt (Bebe Neuwirth), a woman who can renovate an entire derelict mansion in one day. Sorry. That is not the plot. 

This is: The children find a centuries-old bored game called “Jumanji” in the attic, begin to play it, and out comes jungle beasts and bugs, and a bushy man (Robin Williams) who once was a boy in that same house, trapped in the game for decades. The rest of Joe Johnston’s film follows the trio -– Dunst, Pierce, and Williams -– keeping the board game’s animals, vines, and raging waters in control. 

It’s a playful film, not afraid to break the fourth wall, and let kids in on the joke of goofy fun. I cringed again at David Allan Grier’s policeman, all big eyes. It rubs wrong. I may have been wrong in 1995. B+

Highlander (1986) and Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991)

Has there ever been a fantasy franchise with such a genius hook more crapped from the beginning than “Highlander”? I love the premise: A 16^th century Scottish warrior is killed in battle, but arises from the grave whole and healed for he is Immortal, an ubermensch race known only to their own kind. They are determined to kill one another until only one is left. 

In the original, hero Connor McCloud (Christopher Lambert) learns of his powers, lives for centuries, relocates to New York, and finally must battle Clancy Brown as Kurgan, which means He Who Cannot Enunciate. 

The plot is good, but the cheap dialogue and director Russell Mulcahy’s relentlessly vulgar metal-band rock video antics are blinding. This bargain-bin Michael Bay never lets his actors or story breathe being too busy shattering glass and blowing up water. Sean Connery as an Egyptian-turned-Spaniard mentor living in Scotland is some kind of painful joke, and the man is dressed like a bed pillow. But it’s all watchable. 

Not so DOA sequel “Quickening,” a cinematic cluster-fuck from the start that rewrites the Immortals as time-traveling aliens in a story too baffling to explain. Michael Ironside looks ashamed as the villain. 

Original: C+ The sequel: F

Amour (2012)

Michael Haneke’s “Amour” is the painfully grim picture of Parisian octogenarians struck helpless as the wife suffers a series of strokes and tumbles into the purgatory of dementia, lost under a thick sheet of ice. 

Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), the wife, was a piano teacher. In the first scenes, her eyes and spirit vibrate with light as she and her husband (Jean-Louis Trintignant) attend the concert of her former pupil. It’s at breakfast she has her first spell. Her eyes go vacant. I saw that vacancy in the eyes of my grandmothers. This film crushed me. Georges, the husband, cares for Anne every moment, feedings and diapers. Strain breaks him. Guilt shames him. He stretches his love over the widening chasm between himself and her. 

Haneke has made a film about love and honor that defies, but cannot overcome an ultimate horror -- joyful love turned to torture as one half of a beautiful whole withers. No hope. Only an absence of help, cure, or god to end the misery. Our leads are amazing, creating a fully realized couple surrounded by an apartment brimming of a shared life. Riva was robbed a Best Actress Oscar. An exceptional work. A

The Impossible (2012)

“The Impossible” follows a family dragged low by one of history’s greatest disasters: The 2004 tsunami that killed 300,000 people in Southeast Asia. Director Juan Bayona and Sergio Sánchez (both of  “Orphanage”) make this true story horrifying real as they place us inside the deadly wave with the characters as they fight not to be drowned, crushed, or impaled. 

Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts -– both fantastic -- head the wealthy Brit family and when disaster hits, parents are separated. Mom with an older boy, dad with two younger sons. Mom is sickeningly wounded. Dad is sickeningly worried. Bayona and Sánchez make their ordeal personal, like the family swept up in Wouk’s “Winds of War.” 

But wait. The real family in this tragedy was Spanish -- not WASP -- and every major character we follow in this tragedy is WASP. The indigenous locals? Side characters. Helpers. Magic negroes, to be bluntly nasty. 

Great as this film is, these diversions choke like a swallowed stone. The movie studio trusted a Spanish team behind the camera, but not in front. Yes, movies (“Argo”) constantly shuffle ethnicities, but here with so many nonwhites killed, getting past that hump is … impossible. B

The Untouchables (1987) and Gangster Squad (2013)

Double bill: Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” with Elliot Ness versus Al Capone, and “Gangster Squad,” with L.A. cops against Mickey Cohen. Both are true cops-and-mobs stories repainted with Hollywood final blowout action scenes. Why allow Frank Nitti his suicide when Ness can toss him off a building? “Squad” plays looser with truth. 

Such is film. Facts hit the floor faster than bodies. In 200 words, my take downs on these mob take-down films.

“Untouchables” –- also based on the rah-rah TV show – follows Eagle Scout/U.S. Treasury agent Ness (Kevin Costner) as he brings in three like-minded heroes (Sean Connery as wise old cop, Andy Garcia as hothead cop, and Charles Martin Smith as nerd cop) to nail Robert De Niro’s Capone. Smart casting and smart-looking film. 

It smells of Chicago and spent bullets. De Palma and screenwriter David Mamet put us in gorgeous locales -– trains station, courthouses, and filthy red alleyways. Dialogue pops like spent lead: Connery barking about knives at a “gun party” is classic. 

I was 13 in ’87 and this became my Instant Favorite Film. The violence, male bravado, scope, and that shoot-out on the stairs. It’s a stellar cops-and-gangsters fantasy for… teenage boys. I’m wiser now, and the red-blood love has waned. This is a sloppy-ass film riddled with dubious continuity errors -– moving corpses, that wondering elevator in the assassination scene, a terrible voice dub throughout, and logic tossed aside in a courtroom finale. Too many scenes make me cringe. 

Was De Palma so in love with his own (admittedly great) style, he forgot the importance of details? Hell if I know. Costner is too fantastic to care. B+

“Squad” whiffs fake as “Untouchables” feels immersed in Chicago lore. You can smell the wet paint. I read Ellroy. Call me biased. Josh Brolin is WWII Army Special Forces vet John O’Mara, now a cop assigned to stop New York-bred Cohen (Sean Penn) from becoming the West Coast Capone.

O’Mara is very Ness to the point I believe writer Will Beall watched “Untouchables” on repeat. Lines are lifted whole. O’Mara also has his three heroes: Robert Patrick as wise old cop, Ryan Gosling as hothead cop, and Giovanni Ribisi as nerd cop. Toss in retro-progression with Anthony Mackie as a black patrolman and Michael Pena as a Hispanic flatfoot named Navidad. (Cringe.) 

Plot: O’Mara’s guys shoot the shit out of Cohen’s guys, who do the same back. Penn is comically spittle-tossing evil, his performance falls into hysterics. I laughed my ass off when a ridiculously dickensesque shoeshiner gets whacked. I gather director Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland”) wasn’t going for giggles among the blood and rape. 

As Ness says, “You aren’t from Chicago.” Do not pretend. C