Featuring ‘Mother Mary,’ ‘Over Your Dead Body’

Hollywood keeps making generic biopics of musicians.

All apologies to “Michael,” but I got my fill of them sometime around “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Really though, the genre needed a reset after “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” laid waste to this brand of by-the-numbers filmmaking.

So, instead, I watched two movies in theaters that probably won’t be in theaters by the time you read this. So maybe rent them eventually?

"Mother Mary" a daring, divisive musical

Essentially a two-hander between Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, “Mother Mary” focuses on a spiraling pop star who recruits her old friend and fashion designer to craft her “comeback” look after a traumatic onstage encounter. What sounds like a superficial ask becomes an exploration of a broken creative partnership. Also, ghosts!

Writer/director David Lowery seems attracted to unusual ghost stories (see “The Green Knight,” “A Ghost Story”), this time combining haunting visuals with pulsating original pop music sung by Hathaway and written by the likes of Charlie XCX, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs.

Hathaway tends to thrive in her most demanding roles, and “Mother Mary” tasks her with singing, dancing and severe emotional breakdowns. It’s compelling stuff for a movie that dabbles into the abstract more than many moviegoers wish to venture. Outside of a false final note, the movie continues Lowery’s streak of contemplative, visually arresting filmmaking.

"Over Your Dead Body" a bloody amusing but overlong affair

Count me as probably the single most excited person to see Jorma Taccone’s third directorial effort. Taccone, a member of “The Lonely Island” comedy act, previously directed the feature length “MacGruber” movie and the “Lonely Island”-adjacent mockumentary “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping;” basically two comedic masterpieces.

“Over Your Dead Body” is the American remake of the Norwegian dark comedy “The Trip.” It stars Jason Segel and Samara Weaving as a married couple who spend the weekend at their remote cabin… and try to murder each other for insurance money.

The first half of the film milks this premise with enough wickedly amusing banter before shifting into a thriller that implicates a few uninvited guests, notably Timothy Olyphant and Juliette Lewis. Both performers anchor the film’s shift into gruesome torture and fight sequences, which remains tinged with enough humor here and there to make the gore land as cartoonish rather than disturbing.

It works well for about 75 minutes before the plot spins its wheels and repeats the same bloody gags. The cast holds it all together, though it should be noted that Taccone was NOT a credited screenwriter on the project, and it shows.

Bonus! ‘Apex’ on streaming! Forgettable!

One of the funnier gags in “Over Your Dead Body” is an aside about the quality of streaming movies compared to theatrical releases. It’s fitting, then, that I encountered the joke on the same day I watched “Apex,” the new “blockbuster” on Netflix that finds Charlize Theron being hunted by a serial killer (Taron Edgerton) in the Australian wilderness.

“Apex” certainly looks expensive at times, and the film boasts A-level onscreen talent. Yet, everything about “Apex” is otherwise generic and lifeless. From its all-too-familiar prologue to its repetitive hunter-prey chases, the film offers same old thing from dozens of other movies. A shame that many more eyeballs will see “Apex” despite its utter lack of theatrical worthiness.