Movie Nation

The little girl repeats her grandmother’s directions as she writes down the recipe.

“Three eggs for fertility,” she says. “One kilo of fliur for life. Five hundred grams of sugar for a sweet life. And baking powder…for a fluffy cake.”

Because in 1990 Iraq, no one dares not bake “The President’s Cake” for Saddam Hussein’s birthday. His name and his photo are everywhere, because that’s what dictators do. His birthday, April 28, is a national holiday, celebrated under the dire international sanctions and air raids of the run-up to the Desert Storm invasion that coming summer.

Writer-director Hasan Hadi’s film — titled “Mamlaket al-qasab” in Arabic — is a child’s picaresque quest to round up the ingredients for that mandatory baked good for the mandatory party set to take place after the mandatory street rallies and marches.

“With our blood and with our souls,” the people chant (in Arabic with English subtitles), “we sacrifice ourselves for Saddam.” And so some 50,000 Iraqis did.

But Hadi’s debut film, which was shortlisted for the Best International Feature Oscar this year (it didn’t make the final cut) finds sweetness and even humor in a child’s eye view of repression and the life-or-death consequences of living under an outlaw military dictatorship in a place where there’s oil the more developed world wants.

Hadi immerses us in the riverfront lives of nine year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) and her “Bibi” (granny, played by Waheeda Thabet). Life’s basics aren’t easily had as price hikes hit the poor the hardest.

Lamia’s mustachioed martinet of a teacher (Ahmad Qasem Saywan) reminds one and all that he can “turn your whole family in” and make you disappear if you don’t toe the line. As he draws lots to determine who will bring the fruit, who will clean the classroom and who brings the juice, Lamia learns the value of prayer. She gets chosen to take on the ruinously expensive cake.

“I prayed, but it didn’t work.”

She takes her pet rooster Hindi and joins Bibi as they row their canoe up to a spot where they can hike to the road and then hitchhike to the city.

Her bestie Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) is already there, but his quest involves picking pockets for his one-legged war-vet dad. Still, he’s a handy kid to know when it turns out her broke, exhausted granny has brought Lamia here to give her to another family. No cake burden, and her fascist teacher can stuff it, or it’s closets Arabic equivalent.

Lamia flees and she and Saeed have a day of encounters both friendly (a helpful mailman played by Rahim Al Haj) and fraught, as the military is everywhere and ignores “peasants” only when it’s not interested in repressing them, and the city is full of thieves, hustlers and pedophiles.

A pot-bellied grocer sexually bargains with a very pregnant young woman over her bill. Stall-operators in the bazaar are threatened with eviction and pass on their irritation to would-be customers.

Money changes hands, but is it real or “forged?” The bakery the kids flash cash to declares it “forged” and takes it and keeps it. They’re just kids, after all. What can they do?

And Hindi the rooster is constantly under threat from thieves and butchers.

Young Nayyef makes a fine embodiment of an innocent in the big city, learning the take-or-be-taken ethos and how useless an unchallenged military police is at everything other than hanging Saddam posters.

“You think you’re the president’s daughter?”

Hadi lets us fear for her, for Saeed, her Bibi and her rooster. And even if the surprises are few, the plot twists have a comforting subtext that leaves us with the hope that for Lamia, things might just come out all right — with or without baking “The President’s Cake.”

Rating: PG-13, sexual situations, children imperiled, profanity

Cast: Baneen Ahmad Nayyef, Waheed Thabet Khreibat, Sajad Mohamad Qasem and
Rahim AlHaj

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hasan Hadi. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:44

Way back in olden times — mere months after Australia’s plot to destroy America was set in motion — I trekked to Hollywood for a holiday season chat with the folks who had this new horror film they were ready to unleash upon the world.

It starred a young actress from TV’s “Party of Five,” with one of TV’s “Friends” in support, although she couldn’t be bothered to promote this mere horror movie to the press. Drew Barrymore had a killer opening-scene cameo.

And it was presided over by the realtor from “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Wes Craven, who admitted that yes, when he first read Kevin Williamson’s script, he sent it back to him all marked up like junior college term paper — grammatical corrections by the score.

Williamson, soon to a be force in horror cinema and evening TV soaps (“Dawson’s Creek”), dished on how funny (and embarassing) that was, and on the “real age” of his East Carolina University drama classmate, Ms. New to Stardom Sandra Bullock,

Simpler times.

And here we are, 30 years later, still talking about “Scream” and Ghostface masks and Neve Campbell’s Sidney and phoned in threats and Kevin Williamson’s bank account and whatnot.

“Scream 7” did a robust $7.5 million Thursday night and that folded into what Deadline.com is calling a $28 million Friday. That points to a $58-61 million opening weekend, the best-ever for this 30 year old franchise.

The Gaza-supporting stars of the most recent “Scream” outings were ditched, and there have been calls for a boycott. That isn’t happening. Young folks would rather skip voting over a genocide than miss a an ever-recycling slasher picture sequel when the people who run Paramount fire the Gaza-protesting stars. Apparently.

And reviews be damned, because this nut-with-a-knife-and-mask franchise hasn’t had a new idea in forever. Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox are back, after all.

That’s the only wide opening this weekend, so the animated holdover “GOAT” ($11.75) is set for second, with “Wuthering Heights” ($7 million will take it over the $70 million mark), the limited release “Twenty-one Pilots” concert doc ($3.6),”EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert” ($3.4 — well over $7 million now, because Elvis is still the King), “Crime 101” ($3.3) and “I Can Only Imagine 2” ($3.1), with Sam Raimi’s “Send Help,” Kevin James’ “Solo Mio,” “Zootopia 2” fleshing out the top ten.

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” may finally exit the top ten. Maybe not. It just cleared the $400 million mark.

I’ll update these figures as more data comes in Sunday.

Flashes of anarchic wit and the odd zinger or sight gag brighten up “Operation Taco Gary’s,” an indie sci-fi farce in the tradition of “Safety Not Guaranteed” that plays like a redneck “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

The debut feature of writer-director Michael Kvamme — who’d rather go by “Mikey K” — borrows from everyone from John Waters to John Wick and stars “Red Rocket” fireball Simon Rex and Jason “American Pie” Biggs as himself.

And if it all that promise doesn’t come together or amount to much more than the occasional laugh, so be it.

“Schitt’s Creek” alumna Dustin Milligan is the mild-mannered paleontologist Luke whose moving-day is interrupted by a visit from his crazed, medicated and ever-so-estranged brother Danny (Rex). As we’ve met Danny in a neck brace and cast/boot staring down some unseen menace about to run him over, we expect the worst.

Luke’s moving to Ottawa, Canada. Danny’s off his meds and looking for an excuse to tag along. He’s the conspiracy nut’s conspiracy nut. Danny knows that things are not as they seem and that the strange slew of deaths of celebrities — Jason Biggs is the latest — is not what it seems.

“The ‘boy who cried wolf’ was a pesonal hero of mine!”

Next thing Luke knows, he’s been kidnapped and dragged to a Taco Gary’s because they’re a “neutral” zone where the aliens won’t get you, where the reconnection with even-crazier Klyle (Tony Cavalero) must be made because he has a van, and any guy who spells his name “Klyle” “because it’s harder to trace” knows what he’s doing.

God knows, Danny doesn’t.

“As you can see, he has either been dragged off by several people, or one perso who’s really good at break dancing!”

Tag-along Allison (Brenda Song of “The Last Showgirl” and TV’s “Dollface”) is here to keep the peace between the crazies and Luke’s understandable meltdowns over their craziness.

There are tall, John Waters-skinny aliens called “The Elders” who’re running some sort of scam with the world’s elites, which gives the picture a timely Trumpstein Files appeal. And they’re in on the joke, too.

“We travel… by SILVER Sonic,” one elder (Doug Jones) declares.

Yes, it’s an off-the-lot Chevy econobox.

Bits of pieces of this “accept the absurd” farce play, but it never adds up to “romp.”

Cheesy Charlotte, North Carolina locations come nowhere near mimicking Canada, so the “border crossing” one and all fret over is minimized if not utterly abandoned.

The “No one believes the truth any more” messaging may be timely, but this isn’t satire or even “high concept” silliness. It’s just an antic collection of almost-random scenes not-quite-sprinted-through by Rex, Cavalero and Milligan and slow-walked by Biggs, who is, as always, a good sport about it all.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity, lewd humor

Cast: Simon Rex, Dustin Milligan, Brenda Song, Tony Cavalero, Arturo Castro, Doug Jones and Jason Biggs.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mikey K. (Michael Kvamme). A Chroma release.

Running time: 1:25

Priyanka Chopra Jonas furies through fight choreography and Karl Urban makes a worthy villain even if all the CGI in the world can’t make Australia look like “the Caribbean” in the the brutish, humorless pirate picture “The Bluffs.”

Co-writers Joe Ballarini and Frank E. Flowers (who also directed) cobble together characters and cliches from many a pirate tale for this ham-fisted affair, which sacrifices fun for fighting and sinks like a stone.

Set a dozen years after “Pirates of the Caribbean” had been wiped out — the 1840s — the film’s novelty is draping murderous cutthroats in ninja black and giving a few of them scoped sniper rifles and revolvers.

There was a time when the only pirate whose (single shot muzzle-loading) pistol fired repeatedly was Errol Flynn. But not here.

The dread pirate Connor (Urban) lost his treasure and is damned determined to find it. His multi-national crew (Temuera Morrison plays his “quartermaster”) is content to ride down tiny merchant ships and capture Captain Bodden. But when Bodden appears to have a sample of Connor’s gold in hand, Connor knows the island paradise of Cayman Brac is where his booty is hidden.

That’s a multi-cultural “emancipated British colony” of peaceful folks with barely the wherewithal to defend themselves save for a plan to summon British help with a signal fire on “The Bluff.” Fat chance of that, with snipers and scouts leading the slaughter on Captain Connor’s behalf.

But Ercell (Chopra Jonas), Bodden’s wife, stops fretting over his sister’s (Safia Oakley-Green) plans to sneak off with a sailor and gets her “hobbled” (on crutches) son (Vendante Naidoo) hidden. In a flash she’s kicking ass and letting one and ll know that “Aye” and “arrrr,” she used to be a pirate herself.

There’ll be no “booty” surrendered here, mates. Let the body count begin, “Captain.”

“Don’t ever call me that again!”

There are plot points — an attack on the homestead, a cave full of treasure, etc. — borrowed from every swashbuckler from “Treasure Island” to “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

But the blood-spattered Indian superstar isn’t in it for fun.

“Are you injured?” “Not as bad as them!”

Landscapes and ships at sea alike are faked and obviously so for the settings.

The subplots are even less interesting than the plot, and not allowing Urban a few moments of quipping, glint-in-the-eye villainy is as big a shortcoming as not scripting India’s most popular actress better one-liners.

Director Flowers doesn’t allow himself or anybody else the leisure to stop and smell the roses or crack wise. He wrote the “Bob Marley: One Love” movie, but there’ll be no accurate history here. And the director of “I Wish I was Gay” appears to have no sense of humor.

The only “playful” thing about this bloody-minded bore is the title, an intended “play” on words. And even that doesn’t play.

Rating: R, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Karl Urban, Temuera Morrison, Safia Oakley-Green and Ismael Cruz Cordoba.

Directed by Frank E. Flowers, scripted by Joe Ballarini and Frank E. Flowers. . An MGM release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:43

Impressive stunts, car chases and crashes and creative ways of killing compete with a laughable collection of cute action “comedy” cliches in the French thriller “The Orphans” (“Les orphelins”).

It’s essentially an Alban Lenoir/ Dali Benssalah “buddy” picture in the “buddies who don’t get along” genre — “48 Hrs.,” “Midnight Run,” etc. It flips from momentarily plausible to formulaic and ridiculous early in the first act and a parade of tropes of the genre trip it up every time there’s even a hint that this sometimes entertaining pursuit picture could recover.

Driss (Bensallah of “No Time to Die” and the “Street Flow” thrillers) and Gabriel (actor and writer Lenoir of “The Wages of Fear” and the “Last Bullet” thrillers) grew up in an orphanage, but had a falling out “twenty years” ago.

“Eighteen.”

One became an undercover cop, the other an “ex special forces” freelancer on the other side of the law.

The only thing that could bring them back together to The Wild Broom Children’s Shelter is an urgent plea from the woman there who raised them, Fanny (Anouk Grinberg).

There’s been an accident. Their shared orphange crush, Sofia, died. Her 17 year-old daughter Leïla (Sonia Faidi) — who was driving — survived.

Complications? Only she saw the face and car of the driver who caused the wreck. She’s reckless, a fury in her martial art of choice, the French sticks-as-swords dueling of “Canne de Combat.” As she’s 17, the two orphan “brothers” each wonder in they could be her father.

And then she figures out who the stoner/punk (Guillaume Soubeyran) was who caused her mother’s death. She steals the cop brother Gabriel’s service pistol and slips past a cadre of armed guards in a Riviera mansion owned by a private security firm dragon lady (Suzanne Clément) to get her revenge.

Let the wild rumpus — and the kidnapping, threats, gunfights and chases — begin.

The problem with formulaic films of this genre is that it all plays as pre-ordained, with most every character and plot element cut and pasted from an outline cluttered with cliches.

The brothers and the now-orphaned girl have “special skills.” There’s a cop “car with character” (a ’70s Capri), a handy “cottage/cabin/safe house” where the chased can hide out, convoys of black SUVs (OK, ONE is grey). a hidden arsenal to be opened and a succession of gunfights with their endless-shot ammo clips that all magically empty out at precisely the same moment.

Minions are mowed down and the Mother of All Evil Oligarch Mothers leans on her minion-in-chief (Romain Levi) to kill or capture one and all before we or they or this movie of moveable mayhem ever catches the eye of French police.

Benssalah and Lenoir have great “You and me against the world” chemistry, especially in the brotherly brawl scenes, so you can bet your last Euro they’re thinking “sequel.”

Four credited screenwriters flash a few “She looks like ME” and “She got it from ME” jokes about who
Leïla’s father is. Even the dialogue is rotten with cliches.

“I have an idea,” Driss purrs, in French with English subtitles, or dubbed. “You won’t like it.”

Actually, you might. The leads make it all likable and the stunts and editing are first rate even as stuntman-turned-director Olivier Schneider (“GTMax”) fails to deliver a single surprise or even delay this or that inevitable cliche.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, smoking and teen smoking

Cast: Alban Lenoir, Sonia Faidi, Dali Benssalah, Suzanne Clément, Romain Levi and Anouk Grinberg.

Credits: Directed by Olivier Schneider, scripted by Alban Lenoir, Nicolas Peufaillit, Jean-André Yerlès and Olivier Schneider. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

The great Irish character actor Brendan Gleeson was a mere lad — a slip of a thing — when he “burst” on the cinema scene in the mid-’90s.

Ah, who’re we kidding? He was a great, grand and jolly galoot of 30 years with sideburns long enough to make Elvis weep when he took over “I Went Down,” an Irish action comedy that prefigured the roles that would forever fix his image in the public eye.

John Boorman’s mob drama “The General” would “make” Gleeson’s big screen reputation. He’d played Irish revolutionary Michael Collins for Irish TV and had a supporting role in the Liam Neeson star big screen vehicle “Michael Collins.” But Gleeson had stolen a scene or two from that mug Mel Gibson in “Braveheart,” and “I Went Down” would very much cement the big, burly redhead with range’s sweet spot.

As the 2000s would prove, from “In Bruges,” “The Guard” to “The Banshees of Inishirin” and a few turns as Mad Eye Moody in “Harry Potter” pictures, nobody’s better at big and menacing, amused and amusing than Gleeson.

“I Went Down” is a gangland road comedy/buddy picture set in Ireland, a wisecracks-and-violence tale that prefigured the sorts of movies that Guy Ritchie would be making in the UK two years later starting with “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.” It’s not as violent, jumpy and antic as anything Ritchie made. Slack pacing and a general cheerfulness in its thuggery marked it as distinctly Irish. And if nobody heard much from director Paddy Breathnach afterwards, that wasn’t just because most couldn’t pronounce his name.

But the droll tone and the inspired casting of Gleeson as a lazy, reluctant hunk of mob muscle recommends this 1996 Dublin to Cork odyssey.

Peter McDonald (“The Batman,” TV’s “The Penguin”) is the unfortunately-named Git Hynes, nobody’s idea of a hardened criminal but just finishing up a prison sentence he accepted out of duty.

His girl (Antoine Byrne) is determined to convince him to accept that she’s moved on — to his best mate, Anto (David Wilmot). So that’s just what Git does — accept it.

And as Anto’s in hock to a local mobster Tom French (Tony Doyle), Git is obliged to defend him from French’s goons. It’s just that poking out a goon’s eye puts him in French’s debt.

That’s how Git comes to be sent south to Cork to meet with a “friendly face” who’ll help put French in touch with a bloke named Frank who also has some sort of obligation to the mobster. Nothing about this task proves easy, as the big mug Bunny Kelly, played by Gleeson, will be Git’s minder-driver-enforcer on the quest.

Bunny dresses the part — oversized black leather sports coat, ugly shades and epic sideburns, with a pair of white two-tone loafers he’s curiously fond of. The cars he drives are mostly beaters, and as he can’t even get the gas cap open, it’s obvious he’s stealing them.

Bunny’s the unsentimental sort. In this world, anybody’s “word’s no good. ‘Truth’s’ not important.” Don’t overthink this, he advises. Don’t listen to the guy they pick up and stuff in the trunk. “Just a job.”

You take Bunny seriously even though too much about him says not to, starting with his name. Sure, he has a revolver. He’ll even show you how to work the thing, load it with bullets and such. But he’ll charge you for every shot you fire.

“You’ll know when I’m jokin’,” he cracks. “Cuz it’ll be REALLY funny.”

The unlikely duo misses meetings and misreads signals. This earns Git a busted nose and forces Bunny to do what he never does — put down the paperback he’s always reading and question “the job” and listen, however reluctantly, to the mark (Peter Caffrey) they pick up, or rather fetch from others holding him hostage.

And shots are fired, usually to amusing effect.

Connor McPherson’s script doesn’t reinvent the wheel, or the mob-buddy/road comedy. Breathnach’s direction is unfussy even as he shows few signs of knowing when to get out of his own way. This material is a 90 minute movie in a 107 minute package.

And yet it works and it plays, largely thanks to its garulous co-star. For Gleeson, a die was cast.

He continues to be terrific in dramas — winning an Emmy for playing Churchill (“Into the Storm”), adding heft and pathos to “28 Days Later,” gravitas to King Duncan in the Denzel/McDormand/Joel Coen “Tragedy of Macbeth” and star in Stephen King’s “Mr. Mercedes.”

But his Oscar nomination came from “The Banshees of Inishirin,” and his work with Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael McDonagh (“The Guard,” “Calvary”) showed off not just Gleeson’s range, but his ability to find wry fun in even the most deathly serious characters and turn that Irish brogue loose on lines made all the more amusing for the way he says them.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Peter McDonald, Antoine Byrne, Tony Doyle, David Wilmot and Peter Caffrey.

Credits: Directed by Paddy Breathnach, scripted by Connor McPherson. A BBC Films/Lionsgate release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:47

If you’re hell-bent on seeing at least one cast away samurai fights off 13th century cannibals this year, you might as well make it “Lone Samurai.”

Writer-director Josh C. Waller’s action picture has polished production values, striking locations and a cryptic vibe that suggests maybe all this head-chopping that we’re watching is all in our hero’s head.

Misleading one into thinking “This is a Japanese samurai take on Ambrose Bierce” is giving the film too much credit. But the first act is mythic and mysterious enough to lure us in, before the cannibals show up, the implausibilities pile up and the holes in the plot turn out to be a lot bigger than anything a katana sword would make.

The Okinawan model-turned-actor Shogen is our samurai, a survivor of a suicide mission to save Japan from one of the attempted naval invasions of Kublai Khan and his Yuan Dynasty minions. World War II buffs will recall that the kamikaze pilots deployed at the end of that war were named for the “divine wind” storms that kept the Mongols from coming ashore.

Our unnamed samurai was interrupted in his savage attack on an invasion ship when it foundered. He was impaled by a plank as it sank, so job one when he washes ashore is a little self-surgery to get the wooden shard out and the spurting wound bandaged and all but forgotten.

He’s on a deserted island with no hope of rescue and only komodo dragons for company. He hallucinates two “samurai pirate” boys that we take to be his sons, and has visions of his wife (Yumari Ashina). He write poems, first in his mind, then in charcoal on the stones beneath waterfalls and the like.

He finds half a sword embedded in a piece of flotsam and strains to fetch logs. Is he a Robinson Crusoe setting up housekeeping on this island? No. He builds a Torri gate which he plans to commit seppuku under.

Perhaps he doesn’t know his “suicide mission” succeeded.

But primitive islanders capture him and take him to their lair in the caverns of a nearby archipeligo. Their war leader (stuntman/actor Rama Ramadhan) crows to one and all that “There is no escape but through my stomach!”

Our hero ponders his fate, scrawls a little poetry, and settles on his play “pirate” sons’ edict.

“Nothing less than their heads” will do. His guards are the ones who find out the hard way.

“Those heads on your shoulders are mine!”

A lot of things are disorienting about what should be a fairly straightforward action picture here. Nobody is called by name. The subtitled languages appear to be Indonesian and Japanese.

And the slim, Keanu/Eddie Redmayne-bearded Shogen doesn’t look like your stereotypical samurai. He’s willowy and doesn’t carry himself in the classic balls-of-your-feet, arms exercised to wield a blade stance. Shogen looks less Japanese here than Keanu Reeves did in “47 Ronin.”

That’s intentional, as this movie invites “John Wick” comparisons no matter how unworthy of those it is.

The Indonesian locations — sinkhole waterfalls leading into caverns, solitary beaches — are terrific and the production design is generally spot on.

But the fights let us “see” the stunt choreography as blades clash and clang and nobody thinks to just aim for the gut. Our shipwrecked warrior has weapons magically appear that we’ve not seen salvaged from the shipwreck or listed on a video game pop up menu on the screen.

B-movie writer-director Waller (“McCanick,” “Camino”) has never made a movie that’s been widely-seen or praised, and “Lone Samurai” doesn’t change that.

But he’s tapped into Indonesia’s dazzling locations and action production bonafides. Maybe somebody with a better idea and more skills to realize their “vision” will follow him there.

Hopefully with no painted-up Pacific islander cannibals in tow.

Rating: R, graphic violence and lots of it

Cast: Shogen, Rama Ramadhan, Yayan Ruhian, Fatih Unru and Yumari Ashina,

Credits: Scripted and directed by Josh C. Waller. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:35

The only new movie to open wide this weekend, the sequel faith-based music drama “I Can Only Imagine 2,” did passable Thursday night numbers and a middling Friday and appears headed towards an $8 million opening weekend.

The Sunday audience is often make-or-break for faith-based fare, and as this one features Dennis Quaid and Milo Ventigmilia, Arielle Kebbel and Sophie Skelton and John Michael Finley and is based on the further adventures of a Christian pop singer, we’ll see.

So the weekend will belong to the animated basketball comedy “GOAT” which held audience share and added $17 million. It overcame the second weekend of the Margot Robbie “Wuthering Heights ($14) and will surpass “Wuthering” — which finishes the weekend at $58 — by Tuesday or Wed.

“Crime 101” came in fourth with a $5.8 million take.

The Rachel McAdams star vehicle directed by Sam Raimi, “Send Help,” is set to finish fifth, adding $4.5 million,  pushing it over $55 million since it opened in January.

“How to Make a Killing” did over $3.5 million on limited release and finished sixth

A newly packaged Elvis concert film earned over $3 million in limited release and finished seventh .

“Solo Mio” leaves Kevin James out of the top five, it finished 8th.

“Zootopia 2” added over $2 million and inches closer to $425 million, finishing ninth and nearing the end of its theatrical run.

“Avatar: Fire & Ash” finished tenth.

“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” got pushed out of the top ten.

Documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville’s breakthrough film, “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” gave voice to those in the shadows of pop music, the backup singers who made good records great in the ’60s and ’70s. He’d been making music docs for over a decade when he discovered that magic formula and won an Oscar for the film.

He showed us Pharrell Williams’ life story in Legos, but the joy of “Piece by Piece” was Williams’ voice — the candid face Williams was able to show when all he had to do was tape record his story, home life and conversations with friends, family and collaborators.

That’s what he does with his latest film, telling the oft-told-tale of The Beatles through Paul McCartney, off-camera and candid in fresh audio-interviews. And we hear Linda Eastman, who married Paul and joined his second band, via lots of archival interview footage and home movies. As Linda McCartney, she inspired him to step back from Beatlemania to make time for family. He summoned her onstage to sing and play keyboards in Wings.

The revealing, entertaining and touching “Man on the Run” covers the decade between The Beatles’ breakup and the murder of John Lennon.

McCartney begins with a candid quip about any time he hears someone dragging on Paul McCartney.

“I tend to agree with them.”

So he allows himself to be self-critical. He admits that his years of telling journalists and the various members he recruited for Wings that he “just want to be in a band again” wasn’t entirely true. A collection of the players treated and paid “like sidemen” and who quit Wings verify “the kind of bastard I am,” McCartney jokes.

Neville’s first McCartney tune on the soundtrack is a dig in that direction, too. Not many would claim “Silly Love Songs” transcends its title or would be a tune that might lead off a McCartney tribute.

In giving Linda McCartney “voice,” we’re treated to her utterly tone-deaf sing-alongs — not the infamous mike-feeds on stage reputing to mock her musical shortcomings that made the rounds, just her and Paul singing at home or in the rehearsal studio at High Park Farm, where they moved when he followed Linda’s post-Beatles-breakup advice.

“Let’s just go get lost.”

The rich American Eastman, whose marriage to “the cute Beatle” filled British streets with weeping girls and young women, is humanized and appreciated — a trouper who pitched in at her husband’s insistance and joined his band, but who had four children and toured without nannies, took photos and “made it all feel like family” even the members of Wings who quit admit.

She was there when he went on a post-Beatles drinking bender and when he stupidly packed pot in his luggage for Wings’ last-shot (he’d been banned after an earlier drug conviction) at touring Japan in 1980.

McCartney can laugh at “what an idiot” he was then (1980). But he settles more scores on the myth-vs-reality front about his lifelong friend John Lennon, who called The Beatles “a museum,” and quit the band.

“John broke up The Beatles. But I got the rap.”

Lennon’s insistence on the band’s hiring of shady operator Allen Klein to run their finances is rehashed and simple clips of Yoko Ono interrupting John in interviews about Klein and the breakup reinforce other theories for the split.

George and Ringo’s thoughts about all that aren’t covered here. They’re are all but invisible in this documentary.

But a subtext of this new account of an oft-told story emerges from the ’70s obsessive execessive cash offers, the endless reporting and (on Lorne Michaels’ “Saturday Night Live”) the begging and joking around about the elusive “Beatles reunion” so many craved.

“Man on the Run” lets McCartney underscore his case that it wasn’t necessary. He made some great music and his share of bubbly pop piffle in between long breaks. John created a handful of great songs despite his long sabbatical from recording and performing. George turned out classic tunes, and all of them pitched in to ensure Ringo had classics to sing and keep him on the pop charts.

The film resurrects little-remembered Wings hits — the Scottish-pipes flavored “Mull of Kintyre” — and revisits the glorious creation of “Band on the Run,” a whim inspired by a casual perusal of all the places EMI Music had recording studios in operation.

Lagos? Nigeria?

Concerts, TV specials, “sidemen” and music videos tell the story of Wings.

The most revealing biographical tidbits are culled from home movies and TV interviews from the farm after The Beatles dissolved, resurrecting the simple “family” life Paul and Linda craved and made their reality. Their children speak and honor their late mother and all she accomplished and everything she had to put up with when she joined his band.

“What am I doing, singing with Paul McCartney?” Linda herself asked, echoing the abuse she took from fans. As we hear her sing along with Paul and Denny in intimate, offstage moments late in the Wings run, you have to admit she got a lot better.

McCartney eventually outlasted his ’70s label as “the uncool Beatle” — a businessman, musician with a work ethic and sentimentalist whose music stumbled through maudlin and inane periods as he kept churning out the hits.

Thanks to Linda’s voice, and those of her daughters the sweeter portrait of Paul that emerges from “Man on the Run” goes beyond the “loving husband,”  “accomplished craftsman” and “songsmith” reputation and explains his prolific musical output from the ’60s onward. He works at it. But he’s never been a “workaholic.”

“We don’t ‘work’ music. We PLAY it. I’m a playaholic!”

Rating: R, drug content, profanity

Cast: Paul McCartney, Linda Eastman McCartney, Mick Jagger, Mary McCartney, Stella McCartney, Sean Ono Lennon, Nick Lowe, Denny Seiwel, John Lennon, Chrissie Hynde and Denny Laine.

Credits: Directed by Morgan Neville. An MGM/Amazon release on Amazon Prime Feb. 27.

Running time: 1:55

It comes as no surprise that the debut feature film of Werner Herzog had madness as its overarching theme. The half a century (and counting) of films that followed 1968’s “Signs of Life” would almost to a one show somebody cracking up or thinking about it.

Herzog would eventually settle on Klaus Kinski as his madman-muse, and travel to the ends of the Earth to show real people and fictional characters facing extreme situations. But there are themes, tropes and even character names (“Stroszek”) that would turn up in much of his later cinema in this award-winning debut.

“An artist is someone who pounds the same nail over and over again,” after all.

The film’s promising elements, themes and subtexts no doubt played into Herzog’s ability to get this take on German troops occupying a sleepy Greek island during World War II financed and filmed. But the fact that he won a prize for the script years before it was made speaks to more than just his youth and producers’ reluctance to trust him as a director.

Herzog challenges the viewer as he must have daunted any financier with a film that damned near bores one to tears before its central character flips out and the endless reliance on tedious voice-over narration is finally abandoned.

A dozen minutes pass before the first banal words of dialogue interrupt the expositon-loaded narration. More than an hour goes by before we see the inciting incident that kicks off the action that takes up the third act. But Herzog uses those early acts to meditate on life and the human psyche and its capacity for compassion, and all but reinvent the image of the German soldier in WWII.

Gone are the barbarous, racist sadists (amped up on amphetimines) common in Western and Russian cinema in the half century after the war. Herzog takes us inside the boredom of occupation duty, the sleepy leisure of backwaters that the war passed by and the longeurs of enforced inactivity that might fuel madness among men in uniform.

Stroszek (Peter Brogle) is a paratrooper gravely wounded at the end of major combat in the invasion of Crete. He’s transported to Kos in the Dodecanese Islands to recuperate with light duty at the end of his hospitalization.

He falls for and marries his islander nurse Nora (Athina Zacharopoulou) and is assigned to guard the ancient, sprawling and empty fortress at the entrance to the harbor. He and the former scholar and academic Becker (Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg) and the ex-barkeep Meinhard (Wolfgang Reichmann) wander the ruins and Greek statuary broken up to build the walls of this Knights Hospitaller stronghold, contemplate the inscriptions on stones and eat and have “if the war lasts long enough” chats.

“If the war lasts long enough, I might have a baby here,” Nora offers (in German with subtitles).

But the dry, sundrenched island’s ruins, the fishing, its friendly-enough Turkish and Greek locals and a Roma (“Gypsy”) organ grinder offer only so many distractions. With only an arms cache captured from the local partisans to guard, inactivity has them all bored.

Meinhard starts muttering to himself. Stroszek is the one who snaps, and when it happens it’s abrupt and the consequences are pretty much immediate.

The performances are understated and subtle in the hour leading up to that psychotic break. And there’s a calm to the response of the 60 soldiers of the German garrison and their commanding officer (Wolfgang Stumpf) who have to deal with an armed madman with enough explosives to blow up this whole end of town, and any boat or ship trying to pass the fortress.

Herzog suggests the tedium of a long “patrol” in which Stroszek spies a valley filled with fanciful windmills triggers the final break. Windmills have turned up in later Herzog films as he’s admitted this island’s collection of them are among his favorite sights in all the film locations he’s worked on over the decades.

In adapting a story set in the 18th century’s “Seven Years War” — “‘Der tolle Invalide auf dem Fort Ratonneau,” “The Mad Invalid of Fort Ratonneau” — the romantic Herzog moved the setting to Kos because his archaelogist grandfather had spent time excavating the ruins before WWII.

There’s a musing quality to the film’s oft-action free shots of sunbaked hills and valleys and the long sections of dialogue free vistas allow the mind to wander and wonder what Herzog was thinking of as his story took shape.

As he doesn’t show us the combat on Crete or how Stroszek was wounded (Herzog plays a soldier carrrying the stretcher in an early scene), there’s no convenient contrast between the extreme stress of combat and the shock of enforced idleness and tranquility.

Is there a larger parable about Germany in WWII discernable? That’s not obvious either, despite the implied rush of combat and early victories and the deathly dull wait on an island Purgatory for the reckoning to come. We learn Stroszek tried to emigrate before the conflict started and failed.

Herzog’s later and more celebrated films had a hand in burnishing the reputation of this Berlin Film Fest award winner. But there’s no getting around the dulling nature of the early acts, the abrupt “break” and the perfunctory ending, or the empathetic reinvention of German soldiery that might have impressed the Berlin fest judges way back when.

And thank God Herzog outgrew the student filmmaker crutch of loading all the exposition of the picture into voice-over narration. The pictures and situations are supposed to tell the story, not some chap in a recording booth spoonfeeding us backstory and narrating explanations over the scenes we see play out.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Peter Brogle, Wolfgang Reichmann,
Athina Zacharopoulou,
Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang Stumpf.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Werner Herzog, inspired by a short story by Achim von Arnim. Tubi.

Running time: 1:31