It’s a silent nightmare in New York when monsters appear and ravage the world – but it’s an exciting ride when it’s back on the big screen. 

White knuckle thrills abound in A Quiet Place: Day One, the new horror adventure from Paramount that’s infinitely stronger than a franchise spin-off movie has any business being.

That’s thanks to two luminous, dedicated talents: the first is writer and director Sarnoski, taking over from A Quiet Place franchise creator John Krasinski (who, in a funny contrast, made the family film IF this year instead), and the other is Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Sam, the woman on a quest for pizza and a happy memory.

Instead of following the main cast from the popular 2018 and 2021 films, Nyong’o leads a smaller scale quest looking at Sam, a dying cancer patient, who unluckily gets trapped in Manhattan on the titular “Day One” when the auditory alien monsters arrive and begin an apocalyptic takeover of Earth.

(For those unfamiliar: the monsters from the films are an unknown species of predators who eat humans, but they’re blind and can only detect prey if they make sound.)

Audiences saw a small taste of that day in the prologue for 2021’s Part II, but that was in a small, midwest town. But this time it’s the millions of people in New York all being threatened at once, and some of the chases and crowd-crashing scenes are scarily tight.

Sarnoski’s eye for terrorizing vignettes and setting up smart, scary obstacles for Sam throughout the city is endlessly creative and exciting. Crashed subways, abandoned buildings, power outages and some wild weather all pose scary, sound-like obstacles that’s more gripping than the last.

The real standout is Nyong’o, who almost never leaves the screen throughout the 90-minute film. Her conviction and fear are so palpable and engaging that audiences can’t help but get invested in Sam’s survival. 

A premise of Sam wanting one last moment of peace before either the aliens or her cancer gets her may sound like too simple a premise. Under the careful nuance of Sarnoski’s direction, the team has made both a bright and bleak thriller that’s great summer entertainment.

What’s most compelling in the script are the moments when, despite the disaster, Sam (and her scene-stealing cat Frodo) is appreciating the small signs of life in the desolate city. Even though things literally couldn’t be worse, somehow Sam still has some small hope left.

Audiences will gasp and jump at this latest silent screamer, and if the quality control is this good, there will likely be more quiet places to find even after three movies. I’m certainly excited for what this world brings next.

A Quiet Place: Day One

8 out of 10

Rated PG, 1 hour, 36 minutes. Horror Adventure Thriller.

Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski.

Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Jospeh Quinn, Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou and Frodo the cat.

Now Playing at Cineplex theatres.

Once upon a time, the collected works of music journalists, film critics and other cultural correspondents appeared with regularity on the literary landscape.

We relied on their observations to make sense not only of the art we admired and the artists who created it but of the times we lived in and the places we felt at home.

Now? Not so much. The way culture is celebrated, disseminated and reported on has changed, probably forever.

So when a book like “Running With the Devil: Essays, Articles & Remembrances” by John Albert appears on the horizon, it feels as anachronistic as a sailing vessel flying the skull and bones.

But John Albert was no ordinary writer.

When he died suddenly from a heart attack last year at the age of 58, he left behind a body of work scattered across the pages of books, anthologies, literary journals and alternative weeklies. His friend and editor, Joe Donnelly, hit on the idea to assemble these pieces in a collection.

“Almost as soon as John died,” Donnelly said, “I started thinking about the responsibility to preserve his writing legacy.”

Donnelly approached their mutual friend Iris Berry, co-founder of Punk Hostage Press, about the project. She didn’t need to be convinced.

“There always seemed to be a kind of magic surrounding John Albert,” Berry said. “A mystery and a charisma that I can’t explain. He definitely left us too soon.”

It’s only fitting, then, that “Running With the Devil” will receive a grand, old-school book launch at Wacko Soap Plant from 3 to 7 p.m. on Sunday, June 30.

Berry and Donnelly will be joined by a crew of underground all-stars that includes Jesse Albert, Jennifer Finch, Brett Gurewitz, Ben Harper, Keith Morris, Arty Nelson, Jerry Stahl, John Waldman and Justin Warfield.

Albert emerged from the exurbs of Los Angeles and embraced the city in all its guises. He was an early member of Christian Death and Bad Religion, two bands whose names suggest a spiritual affinity, or at least a consensus, but couldn’t be more stylistically dissimilar.

He wrote about discovering Black Flag and embracing punk rock with pulp panache: “I have cut my hair short and can’t stop smashing windows.”

“In the Black Flag piece,” Berry said, “I love how he writes about the transition into punk rock in great detail. It affected everyone around him, especially his parents and friends. Throughout history, parents have always been horrified by their kids’ choices, but the punk movement was one of the toughest and John articulated it so well.”

Albert was so much more than a former musician and occasional music writer. As a recovering addict, he found salvation in sport: first and most famously through baseball, which he wrote about in “The Wrecking Crew: The Really Bad News Griffith Park Pirates.”

Writing about a team of recovering addicts, washed-up rockers and miscellaneous oddballs, he captured something magical about L.A.

“He made sense of Los Angeles in a sort of Didion-esque and Eve Babitz way,” Donnelly said. “His best subjects were his friends and the people in his circle, and he had a unique window into Los Angeles during that time and place.”

As Albert’s interests and experiences expanded, so did his writing: He wrote about surfing, living with Hepatitis C, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As Keith Morris, founding vocalist for Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, puts it: “John was a stud prince rawker and had a great knowledge of all sorts of happening stuff.”

Albert had a knack for writing about things that had been overlooked or pushed to the margins, and by training his lens on them helped make them culturally significant again. In a city that runs on hype, Albert was more interested in those who’d opted out, been left behind or were kicked to the curb by the dream factory.

John Albert.

(Susan Tyler)

“He was a throwback,” Donnelly said, “a punk-rock George Plimpton. He was in the mix of life and wrote from the perspective of lived experience, and not just helicoptering into an anthropological survey of something. He actually knew of what he spoke.”

Although he wasn’t a sentimental writer, Albert wrote with great humor. His sarcasm could be devastating, but he saved it for those in his inner circle, the people he loved most.

“John was such a talented writer,” said Berry. “He remembered so much. The feelings, the details of the feelings, and the places. He slides from comedy to tragedy and back to comedy with such grace. He was a true storyteller.”

One of the many tragedies of Albert’s untimely passing is that we have been deprived a book about fatherhood in 21st century L.A. Albert loved his son, Ravi, and all the proceeds from the collection will go to him.

“Getting to publish his book, ‘Running With the Devil,’ is bittersweet for me,” Berry said. “I’m honored to get to publish him, grateful to Joe Donnelly for bringing it to me and for editing it. I just wish it was under different circumstances. But knowing that it’s for his son, Ravi, is everything. As my mom would say, ‘It’s definitely a mitzvah.’”

Join Iris Berry, Joe Donnelly and friends at Wacko Soap Plant, 4633 Hollywood Blvd., on Sunday, June 30, from 3 to 7 p.m.

Jim Ruland is the author of the novel “Make It Stop” and “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records.”

With “Kalki 2898 AD,” Telugu cinema filmmaker Nag Ashwin rifles through a century of sci-fi and fantasy extravaganzas to create a wildly uneven mashup of everything from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” to Marvel Comics movies, underpinned by elements from the Hindu epic poem “Mahabharata.” It’s billed, perhaps optimistically, as the first chapter of the Kalki Cinematic Universe franchise — which makes it part of a larger trend, since it launches the same weekend that Kevin Costner’s multi-film “Horizon” saga does in the U.S.

International viewers unfamiliar with the specifics of the ancient Kurukshetra War between the Kauravas and the Pandavas — think Hatfields and McCoys, only with chariots and spears — may want to brush up on Indian mythology before approaching “Kalki 2898 AD,” if only to make some sense of repeated references to that clash. Such foreknowledge could be especially useful during the CGI-amped opening scenes that illustrate how Lord Krishna cursed the warrior Ashwatthama to an eternal life as punishment for a grave misdeed, but allowed him a shot at redemption if he someday assisted in the birth of Kalki, the tenth and final avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu.

On the other hand, moviegoers throughout the world should have no trouble identifying (and in many cases appreciating) Ashwin’s numerous visual and narrative allusions to “Dune,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Star Wars,” “Black Panther,” “Blade Runner,” “Mad Max,” the Harry Potter movies and a dozen or so other pieces of intellectual property. Extended and unwieldy hunks of “Kalki 2898 AD” are devoted to world-building and character-introducing in parallel plotlines that take a long time to intersect. As a result, there are too many sluggishly paced stretches where the passing of time is keenly felt and the storyline is obscured by confusion. But the aggressively spectacular (and, again, CGI-intensified) action set-pieces are generously plentiful and undeniably thrilling, and the lead players are charismatic enough, or over-the-top villainous enough, to seize and maintain interest. Will that be enough to justify two followup flicks? It’s hard to say from early box-office reports.

After the fateful encounter on the centuries-earlier Kurukshetra War battlefield, “Kalki 2898 AD” fast-forwards a few thousand years to Kasi, a familiar looking but impressively detailed dystopian slum described variously as the first and the last viable city on Earth. High above the huddled masses, there is the Complex, a humongous inverted pyramid where, not unlike the elites in “Metropolis,” an Emperor Palpatine lookalike ruler named Supreme Yaskin (Kamal Haasan) and other members of the in crowd savor an abundance of luxuries — including, no joke, their very own ocean — while served by manual laborers recruited from below.

Bhairava (Telugu superstar Prabhas), a roguish bounty hunter who rolls in a tricked-out faux Batmobile equipped with a robotic co-pilot, yearns to earn enough “credits” to buy his way into the Complex, where he can crash the best parties, ride horses through open fields and avoid all the debt collectors hounding him in Kasi. He seizes on the opportunity to make his dreams come true when a colossal reward is posted for the capture of SUM-80 (Deepika Padukone), an escapee from the Complex’s Project K lab, where pregnant women are routinely incinerated after being drained of fluids that can ensure Yaskin’s longevity.

While on the run through a desert wasteland, en route to the rebel enclave known as Shambala, SUM-80 is renamed Sumati by newfound allies and, more important, protected by the now-ancient Ashwatthama (Amitabh Bachchan), who has evolved into an 8-foot-tall sage with superhuman strength, kinda-sorta like Obi-Wan Kenobi on steroids, and a sharp eye for any woman who might qualify as the Mother, the long-prophesized parent of — yes, you guessed it — Kalki.

Bhairava and his droid sidekick Bujji (voiced by Shambala Keerthy Suresh) follow in hot pursuit, and are in turn pursued by an army of storm troopers led by Commander Manas (Saswata Chatterjee), a cherubic-faced Yaskin factotum who always seems to be trying a shade too hard to exude intimidating, butch-level authority. Ashwatthama swats away the storm troopers and their flying vehicles like so many bothersome flies, and exerts only slightly more effort by warding off Bhairava and his high-tech weaponry. (Shoes that enable you to fly do qualify as weaponry, right?)

For his own part, Bhairava has a few magical powers of his own, though it’s never entirely clear what he can or cannot do with them. After a while, it’s tempting to simply assume that, in any given scene, the bounty hunter can do whatever the script requires him to do.

But never mind: He and Ashwatthama do their respective things excitingly well during the marathon of mortal combat that ensues when just about everybody (including Manas and his heavily armed goons) get ready to rumble in Shambala for the climactic clash.

All of which may make “Kalki 2898 AD” sound a great deal more coherent than it actually is. Truth to tell, this is a movie that can easily lead you at some point to just throw up your hands and go with the flow. Or enjoy the rollercoaster ride. And if this really is, as reported, the most expensive motion picture ever produced in India, at least it looks like every penny and more is right there up on the screen.