From the original ride to now-three of film adaptations, Disney’s Haunted Mansion is properly cemented into the company’s spooky canon. This installment is in line behind 2003’s nostalgic Eddie Murphy chapter and 2021’s Muppets edition. Justin Simien (“Dear White People,” “Bad Hair”) directs this return to a Black-led live-action iteration of the story. 

The simple plot lends to simple execution across the board. Single mother Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) has moved into the antique house of her dreams with her nine-year-old son Travis (Chase Dillon). But not long after stepping into the home, they become blatantly aware of the spirited tenants occupying the creepy abode. Enlisting the help of grieving astrophysicist Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), priest Father Kent (Owen Wilson), medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), and haunted house expert Professor Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito), the gang hopes to put their heads together to rid the house of its supernatural tormentors.

“Haunted Mansion” is star-studded but shoddy at best. Despite the talent of writer Katie Dippold (“The Heat” “Parks and Recreation”), the script’s punchlines are forced and flat. Everyone is doled their share of one-liners, but Wilson and Haddish carry most of the weight. While Wilson often runs dry, Haddish delivers in her classic tone and cadence, executing flimsy jokes to her best ability. The script does toe the line of Disney’s boundaries, tossing in some light innuendos in a somewhat concerted effort to draw in more mature audiences.

Simien’s film does display its fun-loving origins in how the house can transform into a surrealist landscape. Halls that never end, ceilings that extend into impossibility, gargoyles, hidden rooms, and the ever-so-classic ghost-inhabited portraits recall nostalgia for the film’s classic Gothicism. “Haunted Mansion” boasts a handful of playful chases and spooky sequences, but they’re fleeting and soon bring us back to the film’s stuttering pace. It’s hard to find any true tension in “Haunted Mansion” until the climactic faceoff in the third act. 

Perhaps the greatest letdown of Simien’s movie is how little the cast delivers. The ensemble is brimming with lively, prolific candidates, yet the script hardly seems to keep this in mind. Their talents are either underused or misdirected. Stanfield’s Ben mourns the loss of his wife, his grief becoming a cornerstone of the story. Yet while we’ve seen Stanfield display emotional depth in other roles, every tearful moment feels like a soap opera, not on account of sentiment, but performance. There’s a sense of watered-down contrivance across the board. The forced, postured will-they won’t-they romance between Stanfield and Dawson showcases this also. And with seasoned comedic actors in Wilson, DeVito, and Haddish, too few of their comedy efforts actually hit. 

“Haunted Mansion” is constructed with the familiar bricks of a Gothic tale, down to the theme of grief that runs throughout. There’s a thoughtful examination of how grief makes us vulnerable while also being able to harness the power of that love to connect with one another and appreciate the lives we lead. There’s also value for family audiences in the nostalgic spookiness that rides along the surface. But with a repeated sourness in the film’s comedic efforts and a tragically misused ensemble, “Haunted Mansion” misses the chance to become a Halloween classic. 

In theaters now.

Imaginatively edited, sexually explicit, and filled with eloquent and often boisterous individuals of a sort who rarely get to claim a spotlight in documentaries, the trans sex worker portrait “Kokomo City” is a blast of creative freedom in an increasingly corporatized period of nonfiction filmmaking. It focuses on four trans women, Koko Da Doll, Daniella Carter, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver, interviewing them in their own homes and ordinary public spaces—sometimes glammed up, but more often with little makeup. The black and white imagery links it to a rich mid-century tradition of American documentaries (typified by films like the Maysles Brothers’ “Salesman” and Shirley Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason”) that focused on personalities and aimed for a fly-on-the-wall feeling. But the structure and editing have a punk rock midnight-movie energy, taking pride in flagrantly ignoring the (purely theoretical!) documentary filmmaking handbook of do’s and don’ts. The cheeky-blasé subtext is: If you don’t like what we’re doing, go watch a different movie.

“Kokomo City” is shot and cut by D. Smith, a Black, trans, Grammy-nominated producer who worked with Lil Wayne, Keri Hilson, and Katy Perry. Smith was ostracized by the music industry after coming out in 2014 and appeared on season five of “Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta,” a gig that she now regrets because of how she tried to stand out by (she says) somewhat caricaturing herself. She was also homeless for a while. This movie is a reclamation, a reinvention, and a return. It’s bursting with energy, it’s all over the place, and there are times when it sorta trips over its ambition. But it’s hard to pinpoint, in some faux-objective sense, what does or doesn’t “work,” because it isn’t trying to satisfy any criteria but its own. The whole thing is uncoupled from mainstream/”normie” life and bourgeois concepts of propriety, much like the New York- and Atlanta-based people it depicts. 

The opening scene is an extemporaneous monologue about a sex worker taking a gun away from a client, intercut with hyperbolic recreations that have an almost Pop Art goofiness (like slapstick comedy scenes in a Baz Luhrmann flick). The monologue is filmed handheld and zoomed-in from several feet away from speaker, who is sometimes partly obscured by a doorframe. The framing makes the audience feel it has been granted privileged access to insider knowledge. This feeling persists all the way through through a politically incendiary closing montage with full-frontal nudity, filmed and cut in a way that makes it feel like a 1990s MTV video that MTV would have never dared broadcast. There are partial dramatizations of the subjects’ experiences on the job (some of which feature graphic sex scenes with cartoonishly loud sound effects) and low-key, no-fuss hangout scenes where you get to see intimate moments of a more mundane sort (grooming in a bathroom mirror, canoodling on a couch). Smith uses wall-to-wall underscoring in some scenes, a la Spike Lee, lending gritty documentary material a touch of Old Hollywood grandiosity. 

These markedly different bits sit next to each other in linear sequence, as in an anthology film comprised of short subjects. The movie is not interested in easing viewers out of one mode and into the next. The result feels not only justified but aesthetically right. The common element joining the subjects’ stories is a shared belief, rooted in experience, that most of the world ignores, exploits, or violently persecutes them (one section mourns trans women murdered by clients). So it makes sense that “Kokomo City” wouldn’t trouble itself with questions of appropriateness raised by anyone, even viewers from within the community who might object to how Smith puts certain body parts on display.

The film is aware of outsiders looking in and sometimes addresses them directly. But the material also looks inward at the Black and trans community and the places where it intersects—especially the bedroom. The film’s title is an allusion to blues singer Kokomo Arnold, whose “Sissy Man” includes the lines, “I woke up this mornin’ with my pork grindin’ business in my hand/Lord, if you can’t send me no woman, please send me some sissy man.” The interviewees are understanding yet critical of “trade”—the sullen, straight-acting men, married and single, who bottom with them in secret. “Gay panic” is often used as a defense by clients who know full well what they snuck out and slunk around to get, who cannot reconcile their public-facing macho presentation with the vulnerability and desires that they show behind closed doors, and lie, ghost, or lash out to protect their own illusions. “They wanna see a pretty-ass girl with a big d—,” Koko says. This past April, a few months after “Kokomo City” won awards on the festival circuit, Koko was murdered in Atlanta. 

Despite the often harsh realities of the life it captures, “Kokomo City” is a fundamentally warm and embracing work. It sets its own boundaries and finds peace within them. The loose-limbed, free-flowing approach to the stories lets each speaker become the star of whatever scene they happen to inhabit. Smith told The Guardian that one of her filmmaking influences was 2016’s “Joker,” especially the scenes that showed the title character living the daily grind without makeup. “I just wanted to re-create the narrative of what trans women truly are,” she said. “We’re human, and this is what we look like. We look like you, we’re fun, and we’re vulnerable like you, and we want love like you.” 

Midnight blues melt into velvety blacks, punctuated by motel signs, gleaming lonely neon sometimes blurred by rain or snow on the windshield. These aren’t national chain motels. You have to get off the interstate to find them. An old guy behind the front desk hands out the room keys and makes friendly banter. He doesn’t find it odd when a customer pulls up at midnight and rings the doorbell. People are on the move in this massive country, to parts known and unknown. They need a warm bed for the night, maybe a friendly face so the road won’t feel so lonely. Inside the chilly room, pink neon floods through the window.

These are some of the images in Morrisa Maltz’s stunning narrative debut “The Unknown Country,” a lyrical and poetic journey, as well as an actual journey, from the snowy wastes of South Dakota’s Badlands to the humid nights of the Lone Star State. Lily Gladstone plays Tana, an Indigenous woman setting out for Texas after her grandmother’s death. The story isn’t “filled in” until later, but the details are almost unnecessary. It is enough to know that Tana is grieving her grandmother and missing what she never had, a sense of an extended community. She drives across the great plains of America, visiting her Oglala Lakota family, people she hasn’t seen in a long time, attending her cousin’s wedding, stopping off in motels, and meeting people along the way. She’s alert to danger when necessary, and for Native women traveling alone, it’s always necessary. But Tana is also open to friendliness and kindness, as shown in a sequence in Texas when she meets a group of people at an outdoor bar and ends up hanging out with them all night, having carefree fun. It’s not an accident that “The Unknown Country” moves from the cold north to the warm south. It’s a process of healing and integration for Tana, who has felt disconnected from her family and, by extension, her entire community. 

In the corporate world, there’s a concept called “touchpoints,” places where a customer interacts with the company. On a human level, “touchpoints” are those random moments where a stranger becomes a friend, where a person behind a convenience store counter makes it a point to connect with a customer, not because they want anything, but because connection with humans is where it’s at. So much of our world seems now designed to help us avoid as many “touchpoints” as possible. “The Unknown Country” shows us what we’re missing.

Maltz uses her background in documentary to create a fluid hybrid of a film, where real people tell their stories in voiceover, people whom Tana meets once before moving on: a cheerful waitress (Pam Richter) committed to giving her customers a happy memory (the film is dedicated to her), a convenience store clerk (Dale Toller) who makes the reticent Tana crack a smile, and shares in voiceover his long-held dream of meeting a man named Cole … and damned if it didn’t come to pass! There are more voices: a man who walked away from a successful engineering career to run a motel with his wife, a dance hall owner in Texas who bought the place so that 90-year-old Flo, a local legend, has a place to dance every night. These voices, homey and intimate, fill the air as Tana drives. There are other voices, too, on the radio. The contrast couldn’t be starker: the voices of real people doing their best and the people on air, perpetuating division and conflict. Post-2016 reality doesn’t even need to be acknowledged outright. It’s in the oxygen.

The film was collectively conceived and written by Gladstone, Maltz, editor Vanara Taing, and Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, who appears in the film (and also produced). Gladstone interacts with people playing either a version of themselves or themselves outright. When Tana stops off to visit her cousin (Lainey Shangreaux), she is instantly welcomed by her estranged family. The Shangreauxs are still connected with reservation life (the “rez”), but Tana, from an urban environment, lacks that connection, maybe even shies from it. Tana attends Lainey and Devin’s wedding and plays with their child Jasmine (“Jazzy”), a lively girl who loves dancing and being silly. Lainey tells her story in voiceover, her teenage Romeo and Juliet romance with Devin, sneaking out of windows to see each other, getting pregnant so they had to be together. When Devin says his wedding vows, tears are on his face. These are all incredibly touching scenes, and Gladstone easily immerses herself in this family, smoking butts with her cousin outside and drinking beers in a local pub. She feels welcome, but she also feels her outsider status. Tana stares at a picture of her grandmother, taken in 1940 while on a similar road trip. What was her life like? What can be learned? How can she grieve?

There’s a key scene when Lainey and Tana go visit Lainey’s grandfather, brother to Tana’s grandmother. He and Tana walk through the winter twilight, and he senses, as wise, experienced people often do, Tana’s unanswered questions and her need to know her grandmother, to understand. He gives her a suitcase filled with her grandmother’s possessions. A cotton housedress. A photo. These prompt more questions than answers, pushing Tana on in her quest.

Andrew Hajek’s cinematography is awash in colors and sensitive to the nuances of light: cold or deep, harsh or soft. Lens flares are almost a cliche, but not how they’re used here. Light melts or refracts. Those dark blues and floating neon signs, the “O” of MOTEL reflected in the windshield, the monochromatic snowy landscape, and the deep colors of a windy twilight in the middle of nowhere, all this gives “The Unknown Country” an amazing tactile quality. You don’t watch the movie. You experience it through your senses.

Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” was peopled with giant names: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart. But Lily Gladstone, as the farmhand taking night classes, was the standout. Staring at her sleep-deprived teacher (Stewart) in the front of the classroom after riding her horse to class and sharing a coffee at a late-night diner … Gladstone gives a nearly wordless performance (as she does here, too), but Gladstone doesn’t need words. It’s all on her face. In “Certain Women,” her face told of a kind of yearning, the romantic nature hidden beneath the surface of a hearty woman who works with her hands. It’s so exciting to see her here, too. She doesn’t speak much, but her energy differs greatly from “Certain Women.” Her character here is shyer, and less confident, and her thawing out takes a little longer. It will be even more exciting to see Gladstone in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The ending scene doesn’t quite land, although the cathartic intention is apparent. What matters is Gladstone’s face, taking in the world around her and all those voices, telling us who they are, what they’ve been through. In the corner of a family photo hanging on the wall of the Shangreaux home is a small piece of paper with a quote from poet Mary Oliver:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

It’s really the only question.

Now playing in theaters.