Another Colleen Hoover romance

  Reminders of Him, the latest adaptation of a best-selling Colleen Hoover novel, takes us to Laramie, Wyoming, but the film could have been shot anywhere, a clue that we might have wandered into formula territory.

  The characters in Reminders of Him don't seem rooted in any specific landscape or location; they spring from a blueprint built around romance and obstacles, ingredients that have been seasoned with tragedy.

  Maika Monroe (Longlegs) gives a credible performance as Kenna, a young woman who, at the film's start, is released from prison after serving five years for vehicular manslaughter while driving under the influence. Kenna's boyfriend, Scotty (Rudy Pankow), was killed in the accident. 

  Guilt-ridden and shaken, Kenna pleaded guilty -- even though the situation turned out to be more complicated than initially suspected. 

   The newly released Kenna has one goal. She wants to see her daughter (Zoe Kosovic), a girl who was born in prison and taken from her. She has never held the child, who’s being raised by Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), Scotty’s unforgiving parents. They've structured a legal arrangement to keep Kenna away from her daughter Diem. 

    That's plenty of dramatic fodder. But what’s a movie such as this without romance? Enter Ledger (Tyriq Withers), a childhood friend of Scotty’s who owns a local bar. Ledger didn’t know Kenna previously because when Scotty was courting her, he was trying to launch a career with the Denver Broncos. When he blew out a shoulder, his athletic career crashed. By the time he returned home, Scotty already was dead.

    All drama hinges on some sort of contrivance; in Reminders of Him, they're awfully transparent. For five years, Ledger has been developing a close relationship with Diem, serving as a kind of surrogate father — at least that’s how he sees it.

     Kenna and Ledger know their relationship will threaten Ledger’s bond with Scotty’s parents and with Diem, who’s as cute as the kitten Kenna's landlady gives her when she moves into the low-rent but  ironically named Paradise apartments.

      At various times, Kenna narrates the film, reading excerpts from the notebooks she began to fill in prison. These consist of letters written to her late boyfriend.

     The supporting characters include a charmingly blunt young woman with Down’s syndrome (Monika Meyers) who Kenna meets when she lands a job bagging groceries.

   The story unfolds in predictably delivered slices that don’t grate on the nerves but unfold smoothly in the hands of director Vanessa Caswill, working from a screenplay by Hoover and Lauren Levine.

     Neither offensive nor deep, Reminders of Him glides past complexities that might have made for a more involving story. The movie follows on the heels of two other Hoover adaptations, It Ends with Us and Regretting You. It improves on the latter but isn't as strong as the former. 

     Hoover’s fans evidently are devoted enough to propel these movies into the profit column, even when they feel, as this one does, more anemic than any melodrama should.

       

She's needy -- and she's a stalker

Isabelle Huppert goes over the top and so does director Neil Jordan's Greta.

If you were looking for someone to play a woman able to shift from maternal to menacing without missing a beat, someone who knows how to sell weird and creepy, you'd have to look no further than Isabelle Huppert, the French actress who -- no matter what roles she plays -- refuses to yield all her secrets.

In a performance that builds toward over-the-top madness, Huppert dominates director Neil Jordan's Greta, a thriller with horror movie flourishes that increasingly sacrifices sense for emphatically expressed shocks.

Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy) knows how to engineer a movie's jolts, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's always able to get beyond them. Put another way, Greta becomes increasingly insubstantial and incredible as it unfolds.

The story hinges on a promising conceit. Chloe Grace Moretz's portrays Frances, a young New Yorker who discovers an abandoned purse on the subway. A recent college grad who works as a waitress, Frances insists on returning the purse despite the objections of the well-heeled roommate (Maika Monroe) with whom she shares a SoHo apartment.

Frances' mission takes her to Brooklyn where Huppert's Greta lives in an apartment that's tucked behind an archway that isolates it from the rest of the street.

Jordan has no interest in making a movie about a good Samaritan so it's only a matter of time until the apparently grateful Greta turns into a stalker -- and worse. Greta claims to be like gum; i.e., she sticks to things -- or more accurately to people.

Having recently lost her mother, Frances proves vulnerable to Frances' initial proffer of friendship, but Greta already has gone off the rails and her runaway personality soon threatens to crush Frances. As Greta's stalks Frances, a nuisance morphs into a nightmare.

At times, Jordan suggests the movie might make interesting use of its New York surroundings, but he's more committed to narrowing his focus to concentrate on the ways in which Greta terrifies an increasingly rattled Frances.

I'm guessing that Jordan was trying for a movie in which cruel developments offer twisted fun; i.e., entertainment through scares, outlandishness and at least one bloody gross-out.

But the absence of deeper mystery pushes everything onto Greta's slick surface, where it slides into territory that's not only farfetched, but implausible and, in a few instances, laughable.

Poor Stephen Rae: He's stuck in the role of a private investigator hired to search for Frances. You needn't have seen Hitchcock's Psycho (although who hasn't?) to know that Rae's screen time will be limited. His character's fate is as obvious as just about everything else in an overamped thriller that not even the always-intriguing Huppert can save.

No splash from predictable '5th Wave'

In what appears to be another hunt for franchise gold, The Fifth Wave is now reading across the nation's multiplexes. A big-screen adaptation of a 2013 novel by Rick Yancey, 5th Wave stars Chloe Grace Moretz as Cassie Sullivan, a high school student whose normal life is disrupted when an ominous alien spaceship appears above her Ohio hometown. Dull, predictable and, at times, laughable, The Fifth Wave turns Cassie into a quasi-action figure after she loses her parents; she's also put in a position where she must rescue her younger brother (Zackary Arthur) from soldiers who say (wink! wink!) that they're members of the US Army. Liev Schreiber portrays the commander who leads these supposedly helpful troops. Cassie eventually receives assistance from a hunky young man (Alex Roe), who learns about the girlish crush she once had on high school footballer Ben Parish (Nick Robinson). Just about every character seems to have been cut from typical YA cloth, and even the aliens are strictly off-the-rack: They're able to assume human form. Only Maika Monroe's Ringer brings any edge to the proceedings. She's a young woman who can out-tough any young man. Director J Blakeson occasionally allows the movie to fall into soporific lulls, and I wouldn't call it fun to see a perpetually troubled-looking Moretz running around with a semi-automatic weapon. Add a few medium-grade effects sequences depicting alien-induced catastrophes, and you wind up with a movie that may offer something to young fans of the novel and little for anyone else.

Horror in the quiet mode

It Follows treats horror as a sexually transmitted disease.

We've all seen plenty of movies in which sex mingles with danger, but few have so directly presented the perils of close encounters as It Follows, a movie that turns horror into a sexually transmitted disease.

Director David Robert Mitchell 's debut movie has received a great deal of attention, partly because it goes against the current horror grain of blood, gore and shock.

In my view, Mitchell's mood-reliant movie has been a bit over-praised, but it deserves credit for taking the usual starting point for teen horror -- sex as a transgression for which a teen-ager (usually a girl) must pay -- and pushing it into menacing terrain.

Mitchell's story revolves around Jay (Maika Monroe), a 19-year-old whose sexual encounter with a boy (Jake Weary) results in a singularly devastating consequence.

The young man is being followed by a strange, ill-defined entity that threatens his life and scares the hell out of him. The only way he can rid himself of this horrifying affliction is to pass it on to someone else through sex.

In this sexual game of tag, Jane suddenly is "it."

A disturbing premise sets up a situation in which Jay becomes keenly aware of everyone in her environment and so do we. That's the movie's biggest strength: It has us looking around every frame for trouble. It traps us in its disquiet.

The demon (I use the term as a kind of shorthand, although the movie never really tells us much about the "it" of its title) can appear in a number of guises and is visible only to the person who's being followed.

Once Jay realizes her predicament, she and her initially dubious friends must figure out a way to break the spell under which Jay has fallen.

This demon-busting crew consists of Jay's sister Kelly (Lili Sepe) and a couple of friends (Keir Gilchrist and Olivia Luccardi).

Fair to say (as many have) that It Follows is more in touch with the insistently eerie spirit of Korean horror than with American slice-and-dice cinema.

That's a definite plus, but I wouldn't say that the developments in It Follows are entirely credible, and Mitchell sometimes seems to be trying a little too hard to up the anxiety ante.

Still, if you like creepy horror, Mitchell delivers enough of it to make you wonder whether security is little more than illusion.

The score by a musician who calls himself "Disasterpeace" helps create the movie's eerie aura, although it sometimes sounds as if a jumbo jet has taken a drastically wrong turn and is roaring through your head.