Movie Nation

It’s become old hat to refer to any Emma Thompson performance these days as a crowning achievement in her screen career.

But if Helen Mirren was born to play “The Queen,” she simply had to age into the part, the actress’s actress Thompson is so naturally imperious as an I-won’t-be-second-guessed children’s court judge “The Children Act” that you’d swear that’s what she’s been doing, between movie, these past few years.

As Mrs. Justice Fiona May she is a workaholic, taking her Solomonic duties and herself seriously. She’s deciding custody, weighing court efforts to retrieve children removed from Britain illegally and when we meet her, wrestling with a very public case about conjoined twin babies.

“The welfare of the child is paramount,” according to the opening lines of Britain’s “Children Act,” and it is her cover for a wide range of publicly controversial rulings — deciding that the parents don’t get to choose not to separate twins who won’t live long without such surgery. As thoughtful as “My lady’s” rulings are from the bench, “the logic of the lesser of two evils” and all that, when she gets home it’s “I’ve given instructions to slaughter a baby,” she tells her American husband, a college classics professor played by the great Stanley Tucci.

Jack, however, is feeling neglected. And when he announces “I think I want to have an affair,” Fiona — “Fee” — is aghast. She doesn’t have time for this. He has a paramour picked out, and that’s that. Her only dismissive riposte is “I can’t believe how cool we are.”

Weekend duty at the court gets her mind back on work, the sudden call by a hospital trying to save an under-age-of-consent leukemia patient. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness and he’s refusing a blood transfusion.

The judge and the court hear from a hematologist, irritated by the boy and his parents’ posistion, and from the kid’s father (Ben Chaplin, sensitive, working class and passioate) who explains that they all believe the soul is in the blood, and “transfusions pollute it…It belongs to God,” and therefor it is wrong to accept blood from another.

This is going to be a tricky one, something the distracted judge — she is also an enthusiastic piano accompanist at annual legal profession parties — will have to weight carefully. She’s always short with her all-serving clerk. Now she’s downright snippy.’

The court case is the most interest section of this Richard Eyre film, based on a script by Ian McEwan, who wrote the novel it’s based on. The arcanna of the British legal system — the robes, the wigs, the works — is showcased, as is the belief system of Jehovah’s witnesses.

A passionate lawyer for the parents cites “Common Law, privacy and precious dignity” as what’s being debated here. The lawyer for the hospital reminds one and all just how secular Britain can be. arguing that “a religious cult” has convinced the kid to become “a pointless martyr” based on their interpretation “of an Iron Age text (the Bible).”

It’s when the judge takes the unusual step of going to see the lad (Fionn Whitehead) that Eyre’s film — he did “Notes on a Scandal” — takes a turn for the loopy. Adam is charming, breathlessly arguing for his sanity, his personal sanctity and against her acting as “an interfering busybody.”

He reasons with her, explains the merits of belief, that deep-seeded sense of right and wrong his upbringing gives him. And will not let her leave without playing her something on his guitar.

They duet on a folk song setting of a Yeats poem. Seriously.

And after she high-handedly does what she always does, rules from on high and thus “saves” his life, Adam only gets clingier. She has closed one world off to him and he’s scrambling to replace it with another, built on her “wisdom.”

The moral quandary of the film is interesting, but Mrs. Justice Maye’s role in it is more so. As she struggles to treat her marriage’s problems with the same edict-like finality, she fends off Adam’s post-court pleas and moves on to the next pronouncement.

Thompson plays the judge with a brittle, icy edge, firm with Adam even as you can see his plight has reached her humanity. Her performance pulls it back from “loopy” and the movie passes muster on the strength of that.

The domestic melodrama has sparks thanks to the fortuitous pairing of the Oscar winning Thompson with the formidable Tucci. What could play as trite and trivial next to the Big Issues weighed in the other scenes has actual gravitas thanks to the performers.

Thompson also plays the piano and sings, here and there, showing this iron-willed judge’s vulnerability as she does.

Young Whitehead (“Dunkirk”) makes Adam almost laughably overbearing, in an overeager boy’s way. The writer McEwan gets across what the kid’s about in a scene or two, and gives us one or two more for good measure.

This certainly played differently in the UK than it will in the US, where children’s rights appear to have more latitude, even if they can seem even more at the mercy of the caprices of the judiciary.

But what translates on both sides of the Atlantic is the acting, especially Thompson, finally starting to get the roles the Great Mirren began to land at her age, crowning yet another film with the latest in a long line of subtle, layer performances.

MPAA Rating:R for a sexual reference

Cast: Emma Thompson, Fionn Whitehead, Stanley Tucci, Ben Chaplin

Credits:Directed by Richard Eyre, script by Ian McEwan. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:45

John Goodman, Vera Farmiga, Madeline Brewer, D.B. Sweeney, Machine Gun Kelly and many others star in this sci-fi tale about an idyllic, worry free, poverty free future that is anything but idyllic.

I have to say, the giveaway at the end of the trailer to “Captive State” kind of deflates it. Next March, we’ll see how timely it still seems.

The Dutch Nazi Meinoud Rost van Tonningen smirks as he schools his German overseers about how things work in the Netherlands, even under German occupation.

“In this country, only the sun rises for free.”

If there is a Dutch Resistance, somebody is paying for it. Escaped political prisoners, Jews and others in hiding? Who buys their food and fuel for their stoves? Who financed the railway strike that crippled the movement of German troops and supplies?

The Dutch Collaborator in Chief doesn’t have to say what Deep Throat would famously say during Watergate — “Follow the money.”

“The Resistance Banker” is a Dutch film (in Dutch and German with English subtitles) about the logistics of resisting evil, the simple dollars and cents, or guilders and cents, of running an underground economy — paying men to fight, women to print and smuggle resistance newspapers — the cash, borrowed on credit, conjured up by those left behind to live under the Nazi terror, but guaranteed by the Netherlands Government in Exile in London against the day when the Germans would be wiped out or chased out.

Oh yes, “heroic bankers” is a new twist on the age-old Life Under Occupation thriller. But the tropes of what one hesitates to call a “genre “when this story is actual, historical fact are all here. Yes, this really happened and these are the people who made it happen.

As usual, we see jack-booted Nazis, furiously searching for those sabotaging, assassinating or simply talking and writing about the day they’ll be free. They face the embattled underground of brave but fearful, paranoid but purposeful members of a society, most of whom would have hidden Anne Frank, but any number of whom would have ratted her out for cash and official favor. There are traitors, betrayals, narrow escapes, murders and torture sessions, fake IDs and secret meetings, too many broken up when the Nazis are tipped off by a turncoat.

But Joram Lürsen’s film, concocted by a large team of screenwriters, has bankers wrapping wads of cash around their torsos, stashing boxes of bills in wine cellars and forging government bonds to float their next needed influx of guilders. It includes snatches of German raids, shootouts, street hunts and street executions, mass shootings in the snow and tiny but telling acts of disobedience.

And it has interrogations, including the one that frames the story. Gijs van Hall (Jacob Derwig) wants to know if he’s being “charged with anything.” No, they just want to know “how you did it.” So he tells “them.”

His brother and fellow banker Walraven van Hall, “Walli” (Barry Atsma, animated and sweaty) was just 35 in the second year of the German occupation  when he was approached by a former Navy man (Raymond Thiry). Friends and business associates are disappearing, and a Jewish family he had dealings with has just committed suicide.

“Mr. van Hall, don’t you agree that it’s time to fight back?”

Walli used to be a sailor himself, and now in the darkest days of Occupied Europe, he has a chance to do something. It begins with an underground Seaman’s Fund, to feed and take care of the families of Dutch sailors serving the Allies out of Britain.

But it grows into a nationwide network of cash transport, printing operations, financing the spiriting of downed pilots out of the country and paying upkeep for those in hiding.

His wife (Fockeline Ouwerkerk) disapproves, “But of course you must do it.”

Even his buttoned-down banker brother Gijs is enlisted, but only Walli has the cool code name. He’s explained his seafaring past to his little boy on a Sunday sail on the Zuiderzee, wishing he could have been a pirate instead of a banker. Who? “Like Van Tuyl,” a famous Dutch pirate of the Age of Sail.

Walli is Van Tuyl, criminal mastermind of moving money around under the noses of the Germans (“We’re smarter than the Germans, anyway.”) and his penny-counting Dutch banking masters — some of whom are on board his scheme, most of whom are too fearful and entirely too comfortable to share the risks.

It is “bank fraud,” after all, they point out. Patriots.

“The Resistance Banker” takes the time to show just to what extent life went on for the rich and connected under the Nazis, the clubs that were still open, the cars they could still drive, the lifestyle they could still afford and the cinemas where they could go and secretly meet amidst the latest newsreels hailing the achievements of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, even as the war turns decisively against them.

“I’ve seen this one,” Walli jokes to his comrade, Jaap (Jochum ten Haaf) when he gets up to leave. “Too many ‘bad guys.'”

There’s little of that “Great Escape” levity, here. This is deadly serious business. Even as they’re outsmarting the “best people” the enemy has on duty with bluffing brinkmanship and native cunning, repeated reminders of the stakes pop up.

People die, and as the Nazis retreat all over Europe, their desperation and that of their otherwise doomed collaborators rises. Manhunts and mass shootings increase, and the Allies are always just over the horizon, liberation so close but (for many months) just out of reach.

It’s all a bit too financial in the early acts, which makes “The Resistance Banker” informative and novel, but also patience-testing. It even manages the occasional poetic touch — memories of small boat sailing and the tragedy that almost separated the brothers in their youth. The serious action beats, the tragedies that loom for many of those with the guts to try this, that’s all in the very long and grueling second half of the film.

But the acting is across-the-board solid, and there’s entertainment value in having Gijs sputter, “We’re BANKERS, not Resistance fighters,” and righteous delight in rounding up the kids to watch the scheduled “fireworks” — the sabotage of a records repository that allowed the Nazis to more easily ferret out communists, Jews and veterans who might be inclined to fight back.

It doesn’t stand with the more exciting Dutch films on this era and on this subject, “Soldier of Orange” and “Black Book.” But it fills in a little more of the picture of how those soldiers fought, who paid for the Black Book and bought the car, filled the tank and rented the safe house. And it showcases the long-unknown risks even the money counters were willing to take to fight tyranny.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:Barry Atsma, Jacob Derwig, Pierre Bokma, Fockeline Ouwerkerk

Credits:Directed by Joram Lürsen, script by Marieke van der Pol, Michael Leendertse, Joost Reijmer, Thomas van der Ree, Matthijs Bockting, Pieter van den Berg. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

This Errol Flynn film biography, a little swashbuckling and with just a hint of silly, seems more malnourished than anything else.

Will it even play in the states? I get it. If you’re going to make a movie about the guy, it should by rights be made in the land of his birth by his fellow Aussies.

As Flynn’s tortured history and disreputable personal life enter into it, you’d think they could have landed a few bigger names for this Russell Mulcahy film. David Wenham and Callan Mulvey and Dan Fogler are in the credits. But…that’s it.

Then again, wouldn’t Mel Gibson be the first fellow you’d approach about directing it and not the fellow who peaked with “Highlander” way back in the last millennium?

“In Like Flynn” opens in Oz on Oct. 11. 

Matt Bomer, Damien Young and Edie Falco co-star in this October thriller about the lengths — crowd funding bribes, publicity, legal and extra-legal — a mother goes to in order to retrieve her kidnapped war correspondent son.

“Viper Club” is slated for Oct. 26 release by Roadside Attractions (aka “Don’t get your hopes up about our movie.”)

Ask anybody who’s owned a sailboat and they’ll tell you — There are days you’re dead-to-rights CERTAIN this sumbitch is trying to kill you.

Here’s a thriller about a guy who stumbles across a 38 footer in the fog, “Adrift” as Shailene would put it. And after he boards, “All is Lost,” as Bob Redford would say.

“The Boat” looks like a cross between “Christine” and “Dead Calm.” As as there’s a sailboat in it, I’m down with that.

Obsessive teen love — is there any other kind?

It can get out of hand in a heartbeat. Especially when the crush is on a “Hearthrob.” Especially when the guy with the crush on the hearthtrob is focused, M.I.T. bound, inexperienced and obsessive by nature.

Writer-director Chris Siverston (“I Know Who Killed Me”) tries his hand at another thriller set among the young and the restless with this dreamy, moody tale of “Endless Love” leading to violence.

And even though it’s got a novel setting (Tacoma) and some sharp observations to make about personalities, set for life in your teens, learning that every choice has consequences and escaping the judgments of your past and “reputation,” it fails on the most simplest levels.

It’s a low-energy thriller that doesn’t build suspense, leaves little that’s “mysterious” and fails to make us fear for the heroine by giving her most of the clues we the viewer have been shown, and having her remain oblivious to what the film posits as her existential threat.

That class valedictorian she’s summer slumming with? It’s the smart, quiet ones you have to watch out for.

Aubrey Peebles of “Sharknado” and TV’s “Nashville” stars as Sam, our narrator, fresh out of high school and pretty much out of boys to tempt among her peers. She has “a reputation.”

That’s the only thing about her that smart kid Henry, played by Keir Gilchrist with more hostility than lonely valedictorian nerdiness, knows. “SLUT” is what he writes in his journal the day he runs into her on the beach where she’s just been shunned at a memorial service for a classmate who used to be her best friend.

Him? She knows just as much about him as everybody else in class, at least in her party until we hook-up crowd — “Valedictorian Henry.” When he brushes her off by suggesting guys like him are “Dark Matter” in the universe of their school — unseen, ignored — she gets her back up. She’s not having his “wise sage schooling the class bimbo” nonsense.

Henry is smitten. And “smitten” in a thriller is code-language for “obsessed.”

He observes, makes mental notes, reasons out a stragetgy. Her car won’t start after her shift at the diner, Henry’s there to give her a life home. He apologizes for judging her and underestimating her. That’s flattering.

“I think I’d like to ask for your number.”

The innocence of their “FIRST DATE” (a inter-title) is only faintly chilled by Gilchrist’s button-his-shirt-to-the-top creeper-style performance of the part. He’s like a scary Justin Long.

Sure, she’s lovely, with the Kardashian vocal fry of the unread, the bored and too-cool-to-care (Peebles has something of a Margot Kidder as Lois Lane quality). All the boys are drawn to her and a lot of them suggest they have “history.”

But she’s like any other problem this aspiring bio-engineer (his mom’s choice of major) approaches — solvable.

Sam doesn’t know Henry ensured her car wouldn’t start. She doesn’t see him snooping into her phone. She certainly doesn’t know he’s hacked it — more “research” into what she’s like and what she likes and who Henry’s competition might be.

Siverston populates the picture with reliable high school “types” — the mean girl twins (Rebecca and Caroline Huey), the hunky teacher that the girls lust for (Peter Facinelli of the “Twilight Saga”), the persistent ex-beau party boy Dustin (Jimmy Bennett) and that guy’s boorish, jockish pal (Tristan Decker).

“My man, give her the hiccups, yet?”

Siverston undercuts the “I’m dating a sweet, considerate guy — for a change” charm far too early, gives away the game even as Sam’s mom (Ione Skye of “Say Anything…” way way back when) is swooning over this young gentleman with great potential who is doing wonders for a daughter whose self-esteem issues have her on a community college, service sector track, if teen pregnancy doesn’t get in the way.

Henry sticks up for Sam to his smarty-pants friends and won’t let her dis her community college choice “like it’s some consolation prize…it’s a college. You get out of it what you put into it.”

He’s whispering sciency sweet nothings in her ear and saying all the right things even as we, if not she, notice him noticing where her family hides its spare house keys.

We, if not she, recognize in an instant that Henry sees Dustin as a threat.

And we, as should she, know where this is all headed. But not really. Siverston escalates things into the realm of the ludicrous, even if he never has his cast pitch their performances to match the growing paranoia/hysteria and violence that follows.

Gilchrist (“It’s Kind of a Funny Story,””It Follows”) leaves no doubt. Peebles plays it as if Sam has no clue, despite being deep and smart enough to be way ahead of us in this regard.

The acting, like the tepid thriller it is parked in, is so mild mannered it lowers the stakes when it should be raising them.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, teen drinking and smoking

Cast: Aubrey Peebles, Keir Gilchrist, Peter Facinelli, Ione Skye

Credits:Written and directed by Chris Siverston. A Marvista release.

Running time: 1:26

Forget Elvis. Give no more thought to accusing Eminem.

“White Boy Rick” might be the ultimate cultural appropriator.

He adopted street argot — abandoning verbs almost entirely — embraced black slang and took on an African American-influenced wardrobe long before Marshall Mathers learned to rhyme.

White Boy Rick trafficked in illegal firearms and moved into crack cocaine when it proved to be the more lucrative business in a dead end neighborhood in a fast-decaying Detroit, where hope died in the ’80s.

A baby daddy at 16, with a junkie for a sister, he was an ethnic outlier, an early adapter of the most negative associations of a culture that wasn’t his but a class — poor and desperate — that was.

Warned that there was a difference between the attention black teens and men earn from the police, Rick was the white boy the Feds and local cops swarmed over. And further warned that there’s a BIG difference between “White Time” and “Black Time” when it comes to prison sentences, he wound up serving “Black Time.”

If his story seems familiar, we’ve seen it on big screens and small ones for decades, a cultural cliche, the most pervasive inner city African American stereotype there is. The white boy lived it.

The film based on this true story, directed by Yann Demange (”71″) is by turns swaggering and sentimental, cocksure and callow, the many moods of Rick himself, played with as word-slurring, naive bravado by screen newcomer Richie Merritt.

Even at 14 in 1984, Rick can spot a “fake” AK-47 (Egyptian made) at a gun show, and use that information to score himself really good deal on it. Rick Wershe Sr. (Matthew McConaughey, in a nuanced turn) taught him well.

But to what end? His wife left him, and she “left YOU too,” he reminds his kids. Rick’s already hustling, a stranger at school. Daughter Dawn (Bel Powley of “A Royal Night Out” and “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” stunningly transformed here) is a junkie, sleeping with any guy who can get her what she craves.

They might live right across the street from Grandma (Piper Laurie) and Grandpa (Bruce Dern). But the whole neighborhood around them’s gone to ruin. Gun dealing Dad is the only one to realize they’re not just surrounded by “lowlifes,” they’re “lowlifes” themselves.

He talks big and butch and dreams of getting into the Next Big Thing (a video store). Rick Jr.? He’s hanging with his friends, all of whom are black, with best friend Boo (RJ Cyler of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) a member of the Curry crime family.

To Rick, it’s the most natural thing in the world to roll into Curry HQ and hustle big boss Lil’Man (a smart and mercurial Jonathan Majors) some of those Egyptian AK-47s, “upselling” them silencers that gunsmith Dad machines in their basement.

But the kid quickly finds himself under the FBI microscope, strong-armed by agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rory Cochrane) into cozying up to the Currys, dealing drugs with them, attending Lil’Man’s mayor’s mansion wedding to the most gorgeous woman at the Skate and Roll rink, Cathy (Taylour Paige).

Yeah, the Feds are after the Currys, corrupt cops (“This Detroit, boy. If you ain’t on the take, you get took!”) and crooks high up in the administration of Mayor Coleman Young. They’re so desperate they’re willing to use a 14 year-old boy as an informant.

Not that Rick’s a snitch. He’s just doing what they say, and as he does, he gets deeper and deeper into the mob’s business (Eddie Marsan plays another Miami-based drug supplier, just as he did in “Miami Vice”) and social life (a weekend in Vegas to attend the ’85 Hearns/Hagler title fight.).

The son of a corners-cutting gun dealer hasn’t learned much about morality, and Rick is quick to pull a pistol and even fire it in anger, requiring an FBI bailout. His first taste of Curry violence rattles him. But he can’t see anything but the dire straits they’re in now and how “everything just gets worse.”

Merritt is great at conveying the insensate impulsiveness of youth. Of course he doesn’t wear a condom. Of course he’s “brave.” He doesn’t consider consequences, and only slowly awakens to the murderous mayhem his death-dealer Dad is putting on the street, and the utter amorality of his own decision to get into selling drugs.

McConaughey’s Rick Sr. is living a long, dark night of the soul — a drug-addicted daughter who flees him, cops who muscle his kid, mobsters willing to kill any and all of them if they get out of line and the grim realization that when he chose his lowlife line of work, he made the world more violent and worse for everybody in it. Rick Sr.’s darkest moment is realizing he’s not moral enough to rise above gun selling, not “hard” or brave or connected or smart enough to extract Jr. or anybody else from their predicament.

“White Boy Rick” starts out as playful as its title, teeters into sentiment as Rick takes on responsibilities with both his “families,” both of which he betrays, and drops into jaunty here and there as he absent-mindedly bargains with cops and killers and hits the street corner to make his and his family’s fortune.

“I’m lookin’ for a gun. Grandma keeps hidin’ mine!”

The script scores points about the racial injustice of drug laws of the era and plunges into moralizing in a third act that might turn maudlin, if we’d allowed ourselves to care that much about anybody in this sordid circle of sin and vice, “desperate” or not.

It’s not “Blow” or “American Gangster” or “American Made” even, not on that level of sobering (if sometimes comical) morality tale. But “White Boy Rick” still makes for a blunt reminder of just how low we all sank during the “Just say no” ’80s, when the only people punished for not saying “No” were co-enabled into saying “Yes,” and faced “Black Time” for doing it.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, drug content, violence, some sexual references, and brief nudity

Cast: Richie Merritt, Matthew McConaughey, Taylour Paige, Bel Powley, Jennifer Jason Leigh, RJ Cyler, Rory Cochrane, Piper Laurie, Bruce Dern, Eddie Marsan

Credits:Directed by Yann Demange , script by Andy Weiss, Logan Miller, Noah Miller. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:50

Garry Winogrand was a street photographer, somebody who found art in the real life he was documenting on the streets of New York, someone not unlike the more famous Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and his more infamous New York predecessor “Weegie.”

He shot tens of thousands of rolls, exposed over a million frames of film, and upon his death, left hundreds of thousands more undeveloped, unprinted and not-quite-forgotten.

He was “the original digital photographer,” “burning film” at an astounding rate, as if testing the thesis about how many monkeys it might take to type out “Hamlet.”

He made his bones as a commercial photographer, grabbing magazine images of celebrities and strippers, politicians and Americana.

And then one day, an influential art photographer and fan, John Szarkowski, landed the job of curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and pronounced Wino grand “the central photographer of his generation,” and parked him in the middle of an important exhibition also featuring Diane Arbus and Richard Friedlander. Winogrand became a star, a published artist, a teacher and lecturer.

The new documentary “Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable” offers a decent if superficial portrait of the man and a vast sampling of the work that identifies him, undeniably, as an artist. But it’s also an unintentional and somewhat backhanded essay on the caprices of modern art, how one gets to be famous in the insular world of New York galleries and the taste-making museums of the Big Apple.

Because Winogand, “a poet with a camera,” “a choreographer,” a man whose still photographs — mostly black and white — “moved” in the frame and documented the “Mad Men” era in New York like few others, was also selected for fame.

A pugnacious, motor-mouthed Bronx-accented “big city hick,” as one of those describing him says in the movie, often compared to the writer Norman Mailer, Winogand was a photojournalist who re-directed his eye in a more personal direction. And as the “artist” label welded itself to him, he got good at pontificating, oversimplifying what he did in the false modesty of the talented and acclaimed.

“All a photograph ever does is describe light on surface,” he’d say, in interviews and public Q & As and lectures. “It’s not lightning striking. It’s part of a process.”

Scores upon score of his shots illustrate “All Things are Photographable,” shots with immaculate compositions, striking images of people at airports, people with bandaged faces, tragedies observed obliquely, interracial couples at a time when that was rare, “liberated” (bra-less) women at a time when that was commonplace.

When he captured, developed and printed images of blurry people in the foreground, heads lopped off, “tragedy” photos that tell half a story without facts and details, he was “redefining composition.”

He figured out that labeling himself a Robert Frank and Walker Evans fan, even if his shots don’t really resemble theirs, was a way to be marked as in their class.

When he produced a book with an occasional leering quality about it entitled “Women are Beautiful,” he was widely criticized and reviled. But now, decades after his death, he can be appreciated for preserving, for all time, the look of his age — pre-Photoshop, before widespread cosmetic surgery, personal trainers and advances in dermatology, makeup and skin and hair care products.

His friends, biographers, curators and one ex-wife appear in “All Things,” mixed in with his images, archival news footage of the streets of the day (he shot in LA, Las Vegas and Texas, too) and snippets of public talks, TV interviews and on-the-street audio (Radio?) interviews. And the portrait that emerges is that of a lonely obsessive who compulsively took pictures “to see how something would look in a photograph” — hundreds of thousands of images. Millions.

If the work more often reveals him to be a great craftsman while those who champion him use phrases like “a philosopher about what photography is,” that’s just the price of that “artist” label and the place it was applied.

His obsessions, always finding people looking off frame, flicking his Leica up and snapping frame after frame when he’d see odd “chorus lines” of people, someone with a large bandage on his or her face, are fascinating.

But his fame is anchored in the fortuitously capturing the reaction the wheelchair-bound beggar earns on the faces of  young female passersby in Los Angeles, perfectly-framing a solitary sailor walking through snow along Battery Park in the evening, noticing the woman passed-out (hopefully) in a gutter front of a Denny’s as traffic whirls by her.

It takes little away from Winogrand to note that do that, he had to shoot more film than anybody else, even if in his later years, he never bothered to develop it — just like the utterly unheralded (during her lifetime)  photographer/nanny Vivian Maier.

Winogrand’s best stands with anyone’s. But as Sasha Waters Freyer’s just-revealing-enough film makes clear in its third act, when Arthur Quiller-Couch’s crack about editing, having the good sense and eye to “murder your darlings” is applied to him, Winogrand was for all of his career a photographer, for some of that career an artist and for too much of it “half a photographer” — not making art, not making prints. Just snapping and snapping away.

MPAA Rating:unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast: Garry Winogrand,  Geoff Dyer, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Susan Kismaric

Credits:Directed by Sasha Waters Freyer. A Greenwich Entertainment/PBS “American Masters” release.

Running time: 1:30

The news here isn’t that the shamed James Franco, who had so much work in the can before revelations about his predations on young to under-age women became public, has another movie coming out.

Or that he made a Western, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” for Netflix.

It’s that the Coen Brothers cast him, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Stephen Root and many others signed up for the Nov. Netflix release.

Six episodes about a man named Buster Scruggs is what the movie’s about.

And it’s almost reflexive, these days, to dig deep into the credits. There’s only one young woman listed in the cast, and one can only hope she avoided his attention during filming. At 35, she’s probably aged out of his pool of victims.