Movie Nation

“Vox Lux” is “A Star is Born” for the bubblegum babies of pop.

Brady Corbet’s screen drama, presented as a quasi-operatic epic, begins with tragedy and the fluke that turns a survivor of that tragedy into a pop diva. The third act is a tour de force concert scene which checks another item off that mental list, “Is there nothing that Oscar winner Natalie Portman can’t do?

The prelude — a prologue, really — consists of a 1999 school shooting in New Brighton, Staten Island. That’s where 13 year old Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) settles in for music class, when a freshly-skinheaded classmate shows up with a semi-automatic weapon, a Ford Explorer loaded with a bomb and a grievance unspoken.

He pretty much wipes out the class, despite Celeste’s pleas that “You don’t have to do this.” They all know that. They all ignore it.

But Celeste survives, albeit with a bullet lodged in her spine and pain medication that she’ll be taking for life. Her grim recovery includes picking out tunes on a portable keyboard with older sister Eleanor (Stacy Martin).

When she’s well enough to attend a memorial service/vigil, Celeste performs her plaintive teen dirge to grief. The TV news crews there capture it, and a star is born.

The story settles on more familiar ground — getting a manager (Jude Law), staying in New York and traveling to Europe with only her sister as her chaperone, growing up entirely too fast, locking in with Swedish pop producers of the Britney Spears era Stockholm pop music factory, asserting herself and making the sorts of mistakes kids of that Britney/Timberlake/Xtina/Rhona and JC era made.

But Celeste was never on “The Mickey Mouse Club.” Her “hook,” her ticket of entry to fame, was tragedy. That gives her 14 year old gravitas.

Jennifer Ehle plays the image-managing record company publicist who sets her up with a choreographer and pushes “in store performances” and other ways to reach her audience. Her manager may say “Half the time, I forget you’re a kid,” but “The Publicist” (supporting characters are stock “types,” without names) gives her adult-to-adult candor.

“Before we go making a lot of plans together,” she says, let’s realize that stardom and an enduring career are long shots.

Celeste Montgomery, thanks to what’s she been through, realizes that. She and her rock of support, the allegedly goody-goody big sister Ellie, get what they can out of while the getting is good. An underage bender in Stockholm is the first of many.

The Musician (Michael Richardson), a metal guitar player, is Celeste’s first “adult” romance, with all that implies.

“You make the same sort of music the boy who attacked me listened to,” should be a turn off. It isn’t.

“Act II/Regenesis” is where Portman shows up, the jaded pop diva with a teen daughter of her own (Raffey Cassidy again) whom she’s letting her sister raise while Celeste records her “Vox Lux,” literally “the voice of light.”

Portman chews up a Staten Island accent as this not-quite-burned-out pop star, a 30something woman out to top her past with a lavish spectacle of a tour, one she’s launching with a day of press interviews, a press conference and a show in her hometown.

Except terrorists, wearing masks seen in Celeste’s first music video, have just shot up a Croatian beach.

“Vox Lux” is an odd amble through the peaks and valleys of a pop career, the bubble of isolation that one settles in, the personality that traps you — as you are, at that age — forever.

Willem Dafoe provides sardonic narration that gives us American history, Celeste’s history — “Her family was on the losing side of Reaganomics” — and the history of post-war Swedish pop. But that narration also provides context with bite, how “Celeste’s loss of innocence strangely mirrored the nation’s.” She is “prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present” at 31.

Rarely is voice-over narration in a film more than a filmmaker’s crutch. Making it droll, as Corbet does, just makes that less obvious.

Portman lifts a fairly humdrum film with a performance built on life experience. She too, grew up too fast, was dealing with the press in her early teens, sexualized at 13 in “Leon: The Professional.” I know. I first interviewed her about that film in 1994.

As Celeste, she affects boredom, even at the most thoughtful questions she’s asked. She bristles at any connection to the Croatian shooting and embraces her past victimhood to end that argument.

“I used to be treated like I was a hero.”

Adult Celeste insults and humiliates the sister whom she shoved into the background, even as her own daughter reminds her “You have everything she ever wanted.” As a mother, she gripes about what “giving the gift of life” cost her  — sarcastically, to her daughter. Mom’s got to stay skinny and sexy, got to abandon the past because in our culture, “The past is UGLY.”

And she’s got to stay in the saddle, performing and touring, with many mouths to feed — people depending on her — and a music business model that’s in shambles isn’t making it any easier.

Actor turned writer-director Brady Corbet takes us down this familiar road with pace and pathos, if few genuine surprises. He’s no more discovered something new in the “Star is Born/Star Endures” saga than Bradley Cooper, but he stages bracing concert scenes (Sia wrote the songs, Portman sings them in a Sia-style) in the Madonna/Gaga/Britney in Vegas manner — lots of dancers, vividly realized backstage rituals before the show.

But Portman so energizes the film you wish she’d shown up earlier than the midway mark. Covering ground this familiar cannot help but be a little tedious, and it might made the chilly, remote “Vox Lux” a film we could embrace if her empathetic star power and charisma were a bigger part of it.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some strong violence, and drug content

Cast: Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Raffey Cassidy, Willem Dafoe, Stacy Martin, Jennifer Ehle, Christopher Abbott

Credits: Written and directed by Brady Corbet, songs by Sia. A Neon release.

Running Time: 1:53

We see the signs of trouble between Lauren and Tom, even if they themselves cannot.

She’s just turned 30 and her live-in boyfriend of five years is a sweet, passive skinny dweeb, a chronically unemployed city planner.

Her parents are divorcing, but not splitting up and that has Lauren fretting that this could happen to her, that she and her love could drift into the “roommate” zone.

And her suggestion, that they start “goal-setting  striving for the best for ourselves and each other,” means she should work on her French (they’re Canadians). Tom?

“You can get serious about finding a job, working out and making new friends.”

For starters.

And then a hunky fling from her past shows up at the office and reminds her what a take charge guy is like.

But sure, everything’s peachy, “Great Great Great” as they tell each other, friends and relatives.

“Great Great Great” is an intimate three-hander, a love-triangle tale tarted up with sex (those darned Canadians), psychology and the complexity of the human heart.

Lauren, played by co-writer Sarah Kolasky (“Liar”), is confused about what she wants and sets out to make at least one of the men in her life fulfill her needs and fantasies.

Failing that, she’s going to keep sleeping with them both.

Tom (Dan Beirne of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Fargo”) is a bit defeated by the job hunt, drinks and plays with LEGOs all day and hopes to finally get that call back offering him work. It never seems to happen, and he’s stymied. Any plans that he might have to marry Lauren are, like everything else, put on hold.

Lauren finds herself making little digs at Tom’s financial status to friends and family.

And then pushy, assertive former fling David (Richard Clarkin of “Goon”) is given the managing job at Workspace 45, a business incubator where she works.”You and me are going to make a good team” he purrs, and she all but swoons.

David is everything Tom is not — Type A, “I KNOW you’re attracted to me” and “You don’t WANT me to be a good boy” and all that.

And Lauren, sexually harassed or not, buys in. Sure, she tries to amp up things in the bedroom with Tom, assuaging her guilt and maybe making him over in more of David’s image.

Sure, that’s icky. But she’s got her needs and priorities, right?

“I would sell my ovaries for a macaroon right now.”

“Great Great Great” finds humor and pathos in Lauren’s over-eager two-timing. She’ll take charge and give Tom a little taste of the uniformed schoolgirl fantasy, add a little dirty talk and wild abandon to their sex lives.

But that’s after she’s taken a naughty schoolgirl selfie to send to David.

She’s engaged, “but it’s not serious.” “We’re committed to each other,” but there’s an empty supply room just downstairs from the office. With a door. And a lock on that door.

Not enough is made of the masculinity contest between the two guys, and Lauren’s easy acquiescence to David’s come-ons — lying to Tom, her friends at work and herself — suggests there’s more going on here than simple impulse, more that should have been developed.

The sex scenes have a strained sense of fun about them, one partner trying too hard, the other bowled over. The pain, when it comes, feels real, unforced and complicated partly because Tom does seem like a guy with a limited ceiling in pretty much every regard.

Kolasky makes Lauren sexual to the point where her sexual impulses confuse her. Is is biology that draws her to David? Is the hypocrisy of her reaction to her parents’ divorce weighing in her actions?

The plaintive but bemused solo piano score of David Arcus and understated, just-the-basics direction by Kolasky’s longtime collaborator Adam Garnet Jones allow “Great Great Great” to come off, a winner by a hair. But Kolasky paints a memorable portrait of the difference between “what women want” and “what women SAY they want.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, mild violent and profanity

Cast: Sarah Kolasky, Dan Beirne, Richard Clarkin

Credits: Directed by  Adam Garnet Jones, script by Adam Garnet Jones and Sarah Kolasky  An Ammo release.

Running Time: 1:20

“All the Devil’s Men” is a great title for an action picture. It suggests mercenaries, “special ops,” assassins and rogue secret agents.

Which indeed “All the Devil’s Men” has in abundance.

Of course, it’s all downhill from there. But again, the title will pull a lot of people in. So call that a “win,” anyway.

It’s a convoluted thriller set to the “pfft pfft pftt” of automatic weapons with silencers, a tale of traitors and assassinations and acronyms and jargon, with a nuclear prize and Mr. “I work alone” hunting down the bad guys even though he’s proven right every time a fresh partner is stuffed in a body bag.

 Milo Gibson, who has the blue eyes and can grow a mean beard but lacks the screen charisma of Daddy Mel, stars as Collins, the Bounty Hunter the CIA calls when the CIA’s own become turncoats.

Leigh (Sylvia Hoeks) is his testy “Control” agent (boss). And William Fitchner, last seen as the charismatic character actor trapped on “Top Gear America” between two young car boors, is Brennan, the cynical old hand assigned to help Collins track down the traitor McKnight (Eliot Cowan), who has been radicalized by his years of exposure to Islam. He’s “third on the president’s KILL list!”

Say what now?

 Gbenga Akinnagbe (He worked with Gibson’s dad in “Edge of Darkness) is Pete, the third member of this team of bounty hunters, the loose cannon.

“Who’s a bounty hunter? I’m a shadow warrior!”

Their banter is all “XO” and Ex-Fil” and “OP” acronyms and special ops jargon about “third rate Haajis” and “Tangos” (terrorists) and cracks about Collins needing to get out — now. He’s just “a messed up war junkie who can’t go home because you guys won’t let’em…Go home, meet your kid, Mike!”

They track their rogue via his one known acquaintance, Deighton (Joseph Millson of TV’s “The Last Kingdom,” impressive in this part).

“It’s not personal. It’s just business.”

“What part of murdering my friend isn’t personal? I’ve gonna put you down, D.”

“Devil’s Men” has lots of shootouts, almost all of them featuring guys spitting at each other with silenced-pistols and “longs” (rifles). Only the last gunfight pops the silencers off. What, they didn’t have the right permits for making a lot of onscreen firearm noise? (It’s all looped in post-production, anyway.)

It’s another movie that plays up the possibilities that bad guys can hack your door locks (locking a quarry in so you can sidle up and shoot him through the window).  Movies of this genre tend to emphasize the efficient, all-knowing lone killer. But I kept thinking about the vast support team that must be stashing his getaway cars and providing his tech and limitless supply of ammo. THAT’s a movie I’d like to see — We Also Serve who Stock Up the Safehouses.

Collins is given personal demons. He has to take “Go pills” to keep his focus and energy up. Writer-director Matthew Hope’s one nod to “style” is having Gibson’s Collins launch into a screaming jag — seen, but not heard, with only a plaintive chord on a synthesizer to reveal his anguish.

Again, permitting issue?

The final firefight is an Old West shootout in a vacant lot (torched cars, etc) with a lot of orders explaining the order of battle in such affairs.

“Keep your spacing. Kill anything that moves!”

“Mag change! Move MOVE!”

Followed, in the best John Wayne/Robert Mitchum tradition with “What say we settle the old fashioned way!?”

Through it all, our hero’s blue eyes pierce out of a face covered in blood, battered and not yet beaten. Milo looks a bit like his dad, more like Gerard Butler’s kid. Kind of a dull leading man, I have to say.

I liked the odd bad guy line — “Empires are destroyed from within. I am merely hastening the process.”

But “All the Devil’s Men” kills off its most interesting character too soon and traipses past story beats so familiar that taking notes on the film (as I always do) seems superfluous. It’s not a good B-actioner. It’s routine in the extreme.

Screenwriters really have to move beyond “This is PERSONAL” as a motivation for every character — scores to be settled, closure sought via bloodshed.

Very Old Testament. But considering who Milo’s Dad is, maybe that’s appropriate.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, and for language throughout including some sexual references

Cast: Milo Gibson, Sylvia Hoeks, William Fichtner, Gbenga Akinnagbe

Credits: Written and directed by Matthew Hope. A Saban Films release.

Running time:  1:40

The rats know what’s coming. And the rats are running.

Kristian Eikjord (Kristoffer Joner) knows, too. And it’s eating him alive, given him the shakes and generally wrecked his sanity and his life.

Kristoffer’s a Norwegian geologist, the hero of “The Wave,” a Cassandra who warned that a tidal waves — tsunamis — in fjords were totally a thing and spent half the movie warning everybody and the other half dashing hither and yon to save his family.

Now it’s a year later, and Kristoffer has the shakes, much like the country he calls home. “The Quake” is coming. He just knows it. His marriage to Indun (Ane Dahl Torp) is done and even a long visit by his tween daughter (Edith Haagenrud-Sande) is more than he can manage.

Others are mapping the seismological events across Norway and shrugging off the tremors as “construction blasting” — but chief seismologist Johannes (Stig R. Amdam) is no more convincing arguing that in Norwegian (with English subtitles) than he’d be in English.

But it takes a colleagues’ death, testing the status of one of the country’s many highway tunnels, to push Kristoffer to action and put “The Quake” on the same level of pathos that “The Wave” managed.

He visits the home office of the dead geologist’s office and realizes he has no time for tact with the man’s daughter, Marit (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen).

“There are some things more important than daughters and family,” he tells her, when she sadly mentions what a workaholic and absentee Dad her father was.. Catching himself, he adds “He was trying to SAVE you, and many others!”

Every groan in a building, every cell phone alert, every odd action by a rat — or rats — makes Kristoffer twitch and flinch.

“Haven’t you ever had the sense that something is about to happen?”

Poor Marit has barely absorbed Kristoffer’s alarm at seeing her father’s mountain of research and core samples when she’s ferrying him about, barely an afterthought to him as he dashes off to warn his son, wife and daughter.

“It must be nice to just lie back with your feet in the air and have a little breakdown,” Ondun cracks at Kristoffer’s state. But when he says “I don’t mean to scare you” just as the lights flicker out, she’s inclined to take him seriously.

“The Quake” then proceeds much as “The Wave” did, with Kristoffer frantically calling family and colleagues in an ever more manic sprint through Oslo and environs, sounding the alarm.

Literally. He can’t risk coming off as the nut he seems to be, so he just hits the fire alarm to empty a building. He can’t get his son to respond to texts in the vast college lecture hall, so he calls in a bomb threat to the U.

That’s clever screenplay problem solving.

Characters are trapped in high rises, in the city’s glass-encased opera house. Glass decor is everywhere, not the cleverest touch in a city that was leveled by an earthquake in 1904 and is overdue for “The Big One.”

Director John Andreas Andersen masterfully builds suspense — a blackout here (eerie), rising water bubbling up through street drains, and those damned rats, who know what’s coming just as sure as Kristoffer and we do.

Sweeping aerial shots capture the topography of this corner of Scandinavia, and marvelously set up parallel events show us the principal characters are they face the mortal terror of the Earth literally trying to swallow you.

Kristoffer’s son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) struggles to calmly urge his college girlfriend to join him in leaving the lecture and is so Norwegian-polite he can barely bring himself to interrupt his increasingly irate professor. Kristoffer abandoned decorum thirty minutes ago, and Indun turns into a Tiger Mom when she recognizes that her nutty ex is right and their little girl is in danger.

Because the little girl has a mind of her own and makes the bad decisions of somebody panicked by a repeat of the events only her Dad could save her from a year ago.

Joner is quite good as a man who has teetered on the edge for a year, haunted by the memories of the 248 people he could not save from “The Wave.” The wild hair helps.

Torp has a couple of great scenes and gives “The Quake” its high stakes and its urgency in the way she plays them.

The deaths, even random ones, are grim and gripping.

And the effects? Damned if this isn’t what an earthquake would look like.

“The Quake” has a taste of zeitgeist about it, with much of the world turning its back on science and a select few willfully rejecting fact-based data warning of this coming calamity or that one.

However “The Quake” plays in Norway, there’s a funny irony in making a story about a heroic geologist and shipping it to America, where we have an Interior Secretary claiming to be a heroic geologist himself, when he is neither, probably the least among his many sins. 

If you’ve seen “The Wave,” you know the story arc and can guess the action beats, built on a long tradition of disaster movie tropes. That “The Quake” can still grab, alarm and thrill is a testament to skilled storytelling, empathetic performances and effects that rewrite the book on how disasters play out on the big screen.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of peril and destruction, injury images, and brief strong language

Cast: Kristoffer Joner, Ane Dahl Torp, Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, Edith Haagenrud-Sande, Ane Dahl Torp

Credits: Directed by John Andreas Andersen,  scripted by John Kåre Raake, Harald Rosenløw-Eeg. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:46

If you loved the Norske disaster epic “The Wave” — and who didn’t? — this may be the movie for you. And me.

“The Quake” opens this month. That’s the way of all the good Norwegian films, alas.

Clever play on words title to “Happy Death Day 2.” Well-played, Universal.

Jessica Rothe returns for this sequel, sort of a morbid, comic take on “Groundhog Day” and other movies (“Before I Fall” with Zoey Deutch is a personal favorite) about being forced to relive the same grim day over and over again.

Looks like exactly the same movie, with Rothe playing the wise and death weary “guide to survival” for others, this time. Feb. 14, “Happy Death Day 2U” comes out.

Keanu Reeves plays a not-quite-mad scientist who brings his wife (Alice Eve) and kids back to life after a car crash.

And he apparently didn’t file the proper patents paperwork, as they’re about to be repossessed.

Entertainment Studios does what start ups always do — hire an available name, build a hokey movie her or him, skimp on the supporting players and hope for the best. “Replicas” is a Jan. 11 release.

The weekend after Thanksgiving is something of a lost weekend for Hollywood.

The only new release to open wide was a no-budget horror flop (“The Possession of Hannah Grace”) that won’t clear $6 million, despite having the phrase “new this weekend” all to itself.

“Ralph Breaks the Internet” took a somewhat steep 55% drop this first of December, and will only manage $25 million, still enough to easily win a slack stretch of moviegoing. It’s not great, word of mouth can’t be dazzling (non-Net Savvy kids won’t get the jokes), so it won’t have the legs of its predecessor.

You can say the same about “Creed II,” which is more middling “Rocky” movie recycling. the novelty of having an attractive young African American cast take over the story has worn off as “Creed II” is dropping 53%+ on its second weekend — from the $35 it took last weekend (it opened on a Wed. and made $69 over the five days) down to $16 or so.

That allows Universal’s “The Grinch” to edge it for second place, $16.4+.

“Fantastic Beasts” fell off a cliff, “Bohemian Rhapsody” did not.

And “Green Book” held audience and can cling to hope that it will make its money during awards season. It’s hanging around the top ten and is climbing out of the teens and could hit $20 by next Friday.

“Tyrel” is “Get Out” without the vast White Wing Conspiracy.

Take away the implicit threat, the science fiction satire of importing while souls into African American bodies and you’ve got a modestly disturbing story of not fitting in, of a majority culture making a minority among its ranks uncomfortable, maybe imposed upon.

And it all happens while “they” aren’t even aware it’s happening.

Chilean-born writer-director Sebastián Silva (“Nasty Baby”) gives us an intimate mumblecore (lots and lots of talking) allegory about the struggle to maintain your identity when everything around you seems to subsume it.

Tyler, played by Jason Mitchell of “Straight Outta Compton,” needs to get out of the holidays drama going on with his girlfriend and her mother. So he joins friends John and Nico (Christopher Abbott, Nicolas Arze) for a party weekend in the snowy Catskill Mountains.

Nico is a house flipper, and he’s filling this big, older weekend home with friends to help Pete (Caleb Landry Jones of “American Made”) celebrate his birthday.

But the first sign of trouble comes when Tyler and John run out of gas. The very friendly neighbor (Ann Dowd of “The Handmaid’s Tale”) sees them pushing the car, and in the FRIENDLIEST and most helpful way — asks a LOT of questions. Especially of “Tyler.”

The guys meet up, arrive at their getaway, and there are more people here than Tyler counted on — five liberal white guys, ranging from the older, gayer Roddy (Roddy Bottum) to the loose cannon Pete are thrown together without enough beds, little privacy and a LOT of alcohol for a weekend bender.

“You get a toddy and YOU get a toddy and YOU get a toddy…I’m the Oprah of hot toddies!”

“If you’re feeling the cold, you’re not drunk enough.”

Let the games begin. Literally. These guys are all about parlor games — picking slips of paper out of the hat requiring each to do Buffalo Bob’s “puts on the lotion” speech from “Silence of the Lambs” in a different accent; as the Nordic singer Bjork, for instance. Roddy takes offense at his pick, pretty much on Tyler’s behalf.

“Black accent? What does that even mean?”

When Tyler — and admit it, you’re thinking “Tyrel” is a more “black” name — cannot manage much of a black accent himself, we kind of cringe for him, and for the drunks who don’t grasp what they just did.

As the all-night carousing goes on, complete with REM sing-alongs, much more booze and  pot and endless invasions of personal space and impositions of forced bonhomie — even jerky Pete treats Tyler as a close friend and takes liberties with that status — Tyler figures out pretty fast that this isn’t his scene, man.

And then the next day, MORE white guys show up. At least the gonzo cultural appropriator Allen (Michael Cera, a hoot) bonds with Tyler. He’s one of those 30ish dudes who has absorbed enough black culture to be the token black guy at even the whitest of gatherings. Of course Tyler feels a hint of kindred spirit in him. Allen insists on it, and in his mind, bringing a Donald Trump piñata seals the deal.

“NEVER trust the white man!”

Or maybe it’s the booze talking. “Truth serum” may not help when you trying to drunkenly correct somebody’s staggering Brazilian capoeira (martial arts) demonstration. It doesn’t help much at all as Tyler feels more isolated, threatened, in manhood and identity terms, as the weekend goes on.

Silva doesn’t deliver explosions, here. As in life, things turn cringe-worthy and a sharp edge or two is revealed and the “party” goes on too long for everybody, or anybody (especially the host) to have a good time.

But he finds a third act surprise or two, and Mitchell makes a compelling overmatched hero, a black man grasping for lifelines, somebody who might reflexively have his back — in terms of racial identity. And if he’s getting that from Michael Cera, you know he’s had too much to drink.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jason Mitchell, Christopher Abbott, Michael Cera, Caleb Landry Jones, Nicolas Arze , Reg. E Cathey, Ann Dowd

Credits: Written and directed by Sebastián Silva   A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:26

If you’ve heard of Nevada’s infamous “Area 51,” Ground Zero in the “Aliens Have Visited Us” conspiracy web, it’s because of Bob Lazar. He’s the man of science who popped up on TVs all over the world in 1989, saying he’d worked there, he’d been involved in “back engineering” flying saucer power systems and propulsion and that he’d seen little bitty green men.

Ok, maybe they weren’t green. And maybe he didn’t actually see them, their autopsies and what not. He’s kind of walked that back. A little.

But it’s been 30 years, and as much as Area 51 has entered the culture, the font of Big Government Secrets that drove “The X-Files” and movies from “Independence Day” to “Paul” to all sorts of cartoons, no further “proof” of his “We WANT to believe” claims has been verified. Nothing important, anyway.

So four-named documentarian Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell decided to revisit Lazar, who runs a scientific supply concern in Gallup, New Mexico, and see if he could get him to back down, walk back or explain why the proof hasn’t come out in the three decades after he dropped his bombshell.

In “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers,” Corbell takes a shot at exploring what Lazar has convinced himself is true, how his “reality” might not be the same as ours. So he focuses almost entirely on Lazar, the polygraph tests and hypnosis he underwent over the years to “verify” his claims. Corbell interviews the Las Vegas TV reporter/personality and Lazar popularizer George Knapp (a producer on the film) about why he still believes Lazar.

And Corbell got Mickey Rourke to rumble a funny, dark and poetic narration in between the interviews, snippets of Bob interviewed “way back when,” animations and chunks of atomic bomb and space flight science films of the ’50s and ’60s.

“Memory is a mirage and mistress to desire.” “Beliefs are…stowaways in the imagination.”

Mickey should start his own church.

There are no real skeptics in “Area 51 & Flying Saucers,” just Corbell himself, who at times flirts with making this a personal essay about why he believes (or maybe has his doubts) about the claims of the two men, because at this point, Knapp is relying on the fact that “everybody in the world” carried this story to back up his own gullibility.

“The people who know him best believe him the most,” Knapp says (interviewed by phone), and Corbell confirms this one fact by talking to former neighbors and Lazar’s mother, who recalls her son’s teen years construction of a jet-engined powered bicycle (Lazar has a newer one he rides around in the movie). That proves…what exactly?

When the bookish, stereotypically nerdy Lazar is seen in 30 year old archival footage talking about seeing some guys in lab coats talking to little men, “gravity amplifiers, element 115” and “anti-matter reactors,” you wonder which comic books he’s closest to and how much “Star Trek” he has memorized.

Corbell all but crows in delight at showing Lazar a picture of U.S. government “bone scanning” ID technology that Lazar described, back in 1989, not the farthest fetched claim he made, but seemingly verified. But Corbell, a tattooed bearded hipster/believer who has named his filmmaking ventures “The World of Extraordinary Beliefs,” doesn’t show Lazar a fake mock up of the gadget first.

That would have been closer to a real “test,” see if Lazar falls for it — then show him the real deal. Corbell simply gives Lazar this one chance to say, “I told you so,” without actually testing him to verify that.

The film doesn’t need to see Corbell barking at his phone, “Call George Knapp,” but I guess if you can’t get the guy to sit down with you (Vanity? Embarrassment?), it’s a way of introducing Knapp and getting yourself on screen more as Corbell tries to “weaponize your curiosity.”

Lazar’s debunkers, “the people who despise him” is how Knapp portrays them, have punched holes in Lazar’s most easily verified claims — of an MIT/Cal Tech education. But when Los Alamos Labs said he never worked there, there are facility directories that list him.

Corbell asks the odd pointed question — “People say you saw an alien. Did you see an alien at S4 (one of the facilities at Groom Lake, Nevada, home of ‘Area 51’)?” But that’s only to allow Lazar to equivocate and take back at least one extraordinary claim, something he’s had thirty years to cook up an excuse for.

There are flying saucers there, he still insists. “Nine of them,” he says with Joseph McCarthy certitude, some of them “operational.”

“We have them. You don’t have to believe it, but we do.”

Lazar can get a little prickly about all the disbelief surrounding his claims that the government is still hiding what he says he worked on in an outrageous “suppression of science.” That explains Corbell’s kid-gloves approach, but doesn’t excuse it.

Lazar has been raided by the Feds and ridiculed by the scientific community, so a little paranoia and annoyance is understandable.

But in an era where wild conspiracies are a vital component of politics, when the future of the Republic and the Ecosystem is hanging on getting the gullible to let go of things that cannot be proven with facts, Corbell lets Lazar off the hook and seems to be building his own career out of “extraordinary beliefs” he can sell to the rubes.

Letting the guy say things he cannot prove — about “assassination attempts” and “nine flying saucers” and the like is one thing. Deciding that he really believes these things is another.

But not challenging his “reality,” while it may serve Corbell’s goals of becoming the Area 51 Filmmaker (if indeed that’s what he wants), is irresponsible and gutless.

Whatever he set out to do with “Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers,” the still questioning among us are left with “He seems like a high-functioning nut” if not a hoaxer. Still, tracking this modern myth back to its source is Corbell’s great public service.

All this hooey about alien autopsies, flying saucers and “the truth is out there” is based on the dubious testimony of one, lone conspiracy buff. THAT was the film Corbell could have made.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Bob Lazar, George Knapp, Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell, narrated by Mickey Rourke

Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:37