Movie Nation

Who knew there was a “best second weekend ever” record?

Apparently there is. And “Avengers: Infinity War” has it.

It’s falling off aout 45% first to second weekend (an average decline) and heading towards $115 million or so, based on Deadline.com’s Friday night estimates. Saturday could change that (Deadline is way off, on occasion, WAY underestimated “Infinity War” last weekend, for instance).

Pantelion’s latest Eugenio Derbez vehicle is finding its audience. It won’t hit the $15-16 million it was projected to unless Saturday’s Latino audience blows up. It might. But right now, $13 million looks like all the “Overboard” remake will manage.

“Tully” is enjoying some pre-Mother’s Day attention. Not much, though. It’s on a generous helping of screens, got overly generous reviews (“Hug your mother” is in several of them, the dizzy dears) but isn’t all that. Charlize Theron reminded me of her turn in “Monster,” which she filmed here. I walked by her on the set on that movie and she was so made up and dressed down I didn’t recognize the South African model/actress. At all. Here, she’s weighed down with pregnancy and the life she’s chosen, depicting Motherhood as the draining, stressful health-crushing burden it can be.

But Theron, writer Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman are not the draw Focus Features thought. A $3.5 million take from 1353 screens is a piddly $2586 average. Nothing to celebrate. They should have platformed it — five cities this weekend, WIDE next weekend. Oh well.

Electric Entertainment’s great concept/weakly-executed Dean Devlin/David Tennant thriller “Bad Samaritan” did half the business on 700 more screens. Not enough “Doctor Who” fans out there to make this one hit. Under $2 million, based on Friday.

“Black Panther” should reach the $700 million mark by next weekend, and fall out of the top ten as it does.

“A Quiet Place” is rolling towards a $175-200 million take, all in.

“I Feel Pretty” is hanging in the top five, closing in on $50. “Rampage” probably won’t hit $100.

Every day I sit down with some piece of cinema or other and puzzle over the last of that movie’s opening credits.

“Directed by…Joe and Anthony Russo, Olivia Milch, Deon Taylor.”

Who? A generation, maybe two generations, of accomplished, smart and indeed visionary directors have dropped from the screen. Hollywood, in cost-cutting/control-seizing mode, has simply disappeared them — or exiled them to streaming video or cable.

Andrew Niccol was an in-demand writer (“The Truman Show”) before making his mark as a director of stylish sci-fi in “Gattaca,” “In Time” “S1m0ne.” Not great films, frankly, but competent, thoughtful and distinct-looking movies that had a look, a cast and a chance to make a distinct statement.

His last theatrical feature, “Good Kill,” was a drone-pilot quickie starring his muse, Ethan Hawke. Now Netflix has given him cash and license to make “Anon,” a little “not-that-far-in-an-alternate-future” thriller with a look that instantly says, “Niccol” to the cognoscenti.

Fashions just a tad ahead of the curve, retro-futuristic cars (vintage Mercs, Citroens and Toronados), bleak blue-grey skies and tech that loads visual ID, messages, technical data and advertising right on your eyeball.

Everybody’s on everybody else’s eyeball. Except, as Det. Sal Frieland (Clive Owen) discovers one day walking to work, for this one stranger.

“Unknown: Error,” his eyeball readout tells him as she (Amanda Seyfried) passes.

This woman is depriving the world of her ID on the grid. No GoPro in-your-head video recording capabilities, which makes police work darned easy.

People are dying in the Big Impersonal City. Their “re-cog” eyes short out when the killer walks into their midst. They can’t “see” the criminal even if they can’t sense the danger.

“What’s the world coming to when our murderers won’t tell us who they are? Who can HACK a human?”

The cops must rely on shoe leather and memory to figure out who this killer for hire might be. Because she’s erasing her tracks.

Sal and his partner (Colm Feore) need to find a “fixer,” the woman erasing IDs, backgrounds and memories. Sal sets a trap. But is “she” (Seyfried) the one falling into it, or the person setting it?

Niccol, as is his wont, loses himself in the suits, the sex, the pristine, austere post-modernist sets, the lighting, the voyeuristic footage (what the eye, of victims, cops or the killer, “sees”) and the graphics. The heads-up display is quite convincing and very much within the realm of the possible — Google Glass in your eye, maybe Google Glass 4.0.

Owen has a smoldering, moist-eyed yet butch presence. But he’s rarely more than mildly interesting on the screen, which explains his many shots at The Big Time and their limited success.

Seyfried works a lot more, but all too often on pictures like this — a character of limited emotional range, a little nudity, and on to the next job. That would be “Mamma Mia 2.”

It’s the story and the tone that turn “Anon” into a droning affair, sort of imitation Kubrick, more mise en scene than action, a cat-and-mouse match that doesn’t play up that battle of wits because that’s harder to write than endless camera placement instructions, conference table debates and shootings.

“Anonymity is the enemy” is a fascinating subject to poke at, though.

“They try to look, I try not to be seen.”

“They say it’s for our own safety.”

“Then why don’t you feel safe?”

I wish I could call it a Niccol “comeback,” though it isn’t, wish I could say I was riveted to the screen by the suspense and thought-provoking discussion of memory, privacy perception and data mining.

But I wasn’t. It’s no “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” no “Gattaca,” even. Visually striking, thought-provoking yet emotionally drained, “Anon” is just too empty to make one care.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence, bloodshed, sexual situations

Cast: Clive Owen, Amanda Seyfried, Colm Feore

Credits:Written and directed by Andrew Niccol. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

Old enough to play a soldier’s mom, now. A good stretch for Aniston. Alden Ehrenreich, the new Han Solo, also stars.

Looks challenging, intense. Tye Sheridan, Jason Patric and Jack Huston also star.

Joaquin Phoenix makes a triumphant return to the big screen with the haunting, harrowing and hallucinatory “You Were Never Really Here,” a hit man thriller from the director of “We Need to Talk About Kevin.”

Lynne Ramsey, working from a Jonathan Ames (TV’s “Bored to Death” was his) novel, has found fresh ground to plow in a genre that long ago ceased to promise anything new.

From time to time, I’ve been asked to help judge student filmmaker competitions, and rare is the weekend when these aren’t stuffed to the rafters with hit-man tales. Seeing scads of these genre pieces at once points you to the narrow confines moviemakers create them in. The tropes all go back to John Woo (“The Killer”) and Jean Reno (“The Professional”).

They’re loners, silent, uncommunicative and inconspicuous, blending in. “Joe” (Phoenix) is like that. He’s bearded, doesn’t talk much goes about his “work” with the efficiency of the well-practiced. We meet him in a hotel room, cleaning up. He washes the blood off the tools of the trade (a ball-pein hammer), careful not to spatter anything beyond the plastic he’s laid out. He burns paper evidence, careful not to set off the smoke detector (covered in plastic).

The plastic has another use. Joe covers his head in it, to the point of near-asphyxiation. An erotic kick, or reliving a childhood trauma? Flashbacks start to give that away.

Hit-men always have intermediaries, guys who set up the contracts and handle the money. Watch HBO’s “Danny” with Bill Hader, or Luc Besson’s Jean Reno masterpiece, “The Professional.” Joe gets the call from McLeary (John Doman) and collects his cash from bodega owner Angel (Frank Pando).

Hired guns are paranoid. They have to be. Joe is rattled when a teen employee of Angel’s makes too much eye contact.

Inevitably, they have some “soft spot” secret, a pet cat or a favorite plant (“The Professional”) at home, in Joe’s case — his elderly, infirm mother (Judith Roberts). She’s always asking him about “your girlfriend.”

“Janice? My girlfriend from 20 years ago?”

They’re unsentimental, but a LOT of movie hit-men have “a code,” “No women, no kids,” as Chow Yun-Fat put it in films like “The Replacement Killers.” Joe doesn’t own up to this, but when he takes a job, rescuing a senator’s daughter from a pedophile sex slavery ring, that becomes his ethos.

Child sex slavery rings are an Internet and movie meme, at least partly because of scandals and rumors of scandals that permeate the Internet Hollywood gossip scene. 

Joe’s orders are to get this kid back, and the senator (Alex Manette) adds, “I want you to hurt them.”

Ramsey, like many tackling this genre before her, revels in Joe’s prep-work. There’s always a trip to the hardware store — duct tape, pull-ties, and a ball-pein hammer.

We’re not meant to think this hardcase is any sort of deep thinker. He wears hoodies, takes the stairs and not the elevator to meetings and doesn’t engage in smalltalk.

He doesn’t over-plan. He’s got that ball-pein hammer. He’s seen “Old Boy.” He knows how injurious and lethal that simple tool can be. Ramsey shows us, via closed circuit TV footage (no sound) and off-camera (sound only) just how much mayhem a bulky, hot-tempered brute like Joe can stir up with just that hammer.

But there are complications with the contract. Cops are involved. Blowback is quick and ruthless. Joe suffers (he’s injured on every job), he grieves and he sticks with it.

“No women, no kids” he must think. In between the flashbacks, hallucinations and moments where he’d just as soon end it all, with a plastic bag or a well-timed step in front of a New York elevated train.

That depiction of the psychic toll this work would take on a person, and the traumatic past that might make one consider hurting people for a living, is what lifts “You Were Never Really Here” clear of its genre.

The true-story hit-man movie “Ice Man” followed a pitiless killer by day, a soul-dead assassin, who keeps that life from his wife and neighbors. Joe was broken as a child, and military service, with the unrelenting horrors of a war zone, reinforced that.

Phoenix is equally adept at delivering the savagery this man summons, on demand, and the brooding talk-to-himself, cannot-trust-what-he-sees inner turmoil of a made-not-born sociopath. Ramsey keeps the camera tight on him for much of the movie, letting his eyes do the acting.

It’s a compact, perfect performance in a tight, tense genre picture that manages just enough twists and surprises to separate it from the hired-killer-movie pack.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, disturbing and grisly images, language, and brief nudity

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Judith Roberts, Ekaterina Samsonov, Frank Pando, John Doman

Credits: Written and directed byu Lynne Ramsey, based on a Jonathan Ames novel. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:29

That damned “Avengers: Infinity War” swallowed the last vestige of box office innocence with its record-breaking $258 million opening last weekend.

It’s earned $340-350 million in the U.S. alone. In a week!

Surely this cannot continue. Unsustainable. All that. I mean, “Black Panther” was a phenomenon, hanging onto audience for months as it marches toward $700 million, domestic.

So expect “Infinity War” to have a fall-off closer to the latest “Star Wars” movies, whose records it vanquished. A 50% drop is guaranteed, 60% more reasonable and if it’s not getting repeat business, expect even more of a plunge.

Box Office Mojo is figuring a 44% fall-off is a safe bet — $116 million or so. Use that as your benchmark. If it earns less than that, it’s starting to wane as Marvel fans brace for “Deadpool 2.”

Box Office Guru figures a slightly steeper drop, down to “only” $108 million.  I’m guessing that’s closer to the mark, low $100s.

Curious to see how Eugenio Derbez’s remake of “Overboard” makes out with his Latino audience here in the U.S. The movie’s dull, he has zero chemistry with Anna Faris and yet he’s popular enough to promise a $15 million or so opening weekend, prognosticators tell us.

“Tully” has another wave of enthusiastic Jason Reitman/Diablo Cody/Charlize Theron reviews, and should stick around for a few weeks. Not from me, but SOME folks are crazy for it. It won’t open big — $5 million would prompt champagne cork-popping at Focus Features. Theron isn’t big box office, and she’s not at home in comedy. I’m guessing $4, tops.

The badly-acted serial killer thriller “Bad Samaritan” is opening on more screens, and David Tennant has his fans. If everybody’s seen “Quiet Place” and “Truth or Dare” it could manage $5.

I must confess to being mostly immune to the charms of “Tully,” basically “Nanny McPhee” as filtered through the foul-mouthed whimsy of Diablo Cody.

Screenwriter Cody re-teams with her “Juno” and “Young Adult” director, Jason Reitman and they both take another shot at making Charlize Theron warm and funny (“Young Adult” ) with this somewhat upbeat wish fulfillment fantasy about an overwhelmed mother who gets help from an always-beaming, upbeat and nurturing helper in the guise of a hippy chick “Night Nanny.”

So as I said, “Nanny McPhee” with F-bombs.

But as the picture celebrates the horrors pregnancy and child-rearing visit upon the female body, and Cody muzzles her usual style under a script that lets Reitman just show us the trials of motherhood instead of having it explained to us in Cody’s trademark saucy, sarcastic banter, you go with it. Sometimes, anyway, even if you suspect Reitman is covering for a script that doesn’t pop the way “Juno” did.

Theron is Marlo, who’s just taken her third maternity leave and is so overwhelmed with the two kids she and Drew (Ron Livingston) already have that “What were they THINKING?” is never far from anybody’s mind, onscreen or off.

They have a school-age daughter who is already somewhat neglected, because their son (Asher Miles Fallica) is more than a handful for them, and for the posh private school they’re sending their children to.

The kindergartener melts down in a flash, flips out if Mom so much as drops him off in a different parking lot and utterly freaks at loud noises.

All this affluence around them and supposedly expert teaching staff, and nobody uses the phrase “on the spectrum?” Everybody calls him “quirky,” but we know better.

The house is a wreck, meals are frozen, and Marlo wears her disappointment with this life and her struggle on her face, her shoulders and eyes.

“Such a blessing,” she says of the pregnancy, not meaning a word of it. Tell her she’s glowing — it’s the law, after all — and she might just go off.

“Really? I feel like an abandoned trash barge.”

But Marlo’s well-off brother (Mark Duplass) and his aspirational wife (Elaine Tran) have this great idea for a baby gift — a night nanny, “a bougie thing only rich a——s do.” People like them, in other words. The night nanny comes in and tends to the baby overnight, letting the parents get the sleep that keeps parenthood from shortening your life.

After a lot of resistance, Marlo agrees. And when the younger version of herself — tall, blonde Mackenzie Davis of “The Martian” — shows up, it’s as if Mary Poppins has stepped off the screen and come to make Marlo’s world right.

“I’m here to take care of you,” she says, always beaming. And damned if she doesn’t.

“Tully” cleans as she coos and clucks to the infant, sharing little pearls of wisdom in a steady torrent of grad-student trivia.

“I’m like Saudi Arabia. I have an energy surplus!”

The transformation in Marlo is immediate. She smiles, she gets a handle on things, the discouragement in her eyes fades. A little.

Because Tully is not just her helper and caregiver, she’s her doting confessor. Here’s someone you can tell, “If I had a dream that didn’t come true, I could at least be pissed at the world.”

This isn’t Cody’s most witty script, and the Oscar-winning Theron isn’t the most gifted at delivering these warmed-over one-liners.

“You’re like a book of ‘Fun Facts for Unpopular Fourth Graders.'”

Theron is better at the meltdowns and righteous tirades Marlo has when confronted with a world that isn’t as accommodating and sympathetic of the plights of motherhood as it should be.

And that stance, by the way, explains this picture’s mostly-adoring “Hug your mom” reviews. It’s got a righteous motherhood subtext that trumps, to some, its generally dull and predictable story arc. That, and Theron’s usual commitment to dressing down, ALL the way down, for a part.

Ignore one “Knocked Up” sequence, try not to notice how much of what we see is handled in cute montages, smile at the sensitive pop tunes (a cover of the Bond theme “You Only Live Twice” is key), try to recall one exchange as funny as this one between the affluent brother and his sister.

“We’d stay, but Emily (their kid) has a talent show.”

“Oh, what’s her talent?”

“Pilates.”

An hour in, the picture stops in its tracks and gives away The Big Reveal, where it’s taking us, in a jarringly abrupt moment only ex-stripper Cody or some NON-mom in the Hollywood Bubble (Reitman?) could find “normal” and believable.

That’s when I checked out of “Tully.” You don’t grade a motherhood dramedy on the curve just because Mother’s Day is coming. Even if it’s “Nanny McPhee” with F-bombs.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexuality/nudity

Cast: Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Ron Livingston, Mark Duplass, Elaine Tan, Gameela Wright, Asher Miles Fallica

Credits:Directed by Jason Reitman, script by Diablo Cody. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:36

New-to-the-business Electric Entertainment Studios wisely chose to center all the advertising and hype for their serial killer thriller “Bad Samaritan” around the villain. David Tennant is the most popular “Doctor Who” of recent vintage, a regular of British TV and sometimes stand-out supporting player in Hollywood films.

And he’s the whole damn movie here, all lip-smacking, bug-eyed bad guy surrounded  by REALLY bad supporting actors. No kidding, if ever you see a doomed woman, held hostage by a “Silence of the Lambs” type act this unconcerned, or her rescuer show this little panic, and the cops he tells about the “Fifty Shades” of bondage, torture and murder chamber he’s seen demonstrate this little urgency, feel free to ask for your money back.

It’s a thriller directed by veteran producer Dean Devlin (“Independence Day”), and lacking all the cash and bloat his productions usually boast, he’s at a loss as to what to do with actors.

Fortunately, he has Tennant, diving into the birdlike obsessive paranoia of Cale Ehrendreich, a Maseriti-driving Portland prick who can’t help but be rude to the underlings. That turns him into a “victim,” robbed in the old valet parking scam. You know, they take your car, use your GPS to find your house and the car’s garage opener to sneak into it while they know you’re out for dinner.

The masters of this caper are Derek (Carlito Olivero) and Irish immigrant Sean (Robert Sheehan of “Geostorm”). Derek is the punk with moxie, Sean the soulful thief out to make that big score.

But ducking into Mr. Maserati’s house delivers a lot more than just a stolen credit card. He sees a massive lock, which he opens into an “office” with walls lined with black plastic and a beaten, lashed woman (Kerry Condon) strapped into a vast muzzling harness.

A further poke around reveals a butcher room where the bodies can be chopped up for disposal. What to do, what to do?

Can’t call the cops because you’ll incriminate yourself and Derek, can’t break her out without the monster’s keys, and any second now he’s going to want his Maserati back.

Devlin packs the picture with filler, shots that don’t advance the story, and barely manages to maintain forward momentum. He fails utterly to hold our interest via anything other than anticipation of the next time Tennant gets right up in the camera, bug-eyed, and insists on the “correction” of anyone who fails to heed his character’s perverse discipline.

“I’m just a GUY,” he insists, in a dandy American psycho accent. He most certainly isn’t.

Sheehan sweats when he’s supposed to, but surely the victim has some idea of what’s in store, enough to make her “What do you want with me?” not sound like an incompetent audition for the part of would-be kidnapping and torture victim. Neither of them brings the urgency and desperation necessary to rope us into the movie, into their predicament with them.

A parallel story about the FBI’s investigation of disappearances in the region is flatly played as well.

New studios experience steep learning curves. Some figure things out quickly (See A24). Others get taken for a Hollywood hustle (CBS Films, et al).

Great villains make good thrillers, Hitchcock said. But he had the good sense to cast empathetic and talented movie stars as his heroes and heroines, too.

Electric Entertainment had better up the acting wattage if they want to play with the big boys. “Doctor Who” as a serial killer is never going to be enough.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language throughout, some drug use and brief nudity

Cast: Robert Sheehan, David Tennant, Kerry Condon, Carlito Olivero

Credits:Directed by Dean Devlin, script by Brandon Boyce . An Electric Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:51

About ready to toss in la toalla on the North-of-the-Border experiment with Mexico’s likable comic Eugenio Derbez.

The sweet-nature of his learn-to-be-a-dad farce “Instructions Not Included” are a distant memory, and “How to Be a Latin Lover” had more opportunities for laughs than actual giggles.

The deathly remake of “Overboard” pretty much seals the deal. An interminable amnesiac rich-guy-put-to-work romp that relies on Anna Faris to be his straight man, there’s barely a laugh in it, the only chuckles brought on when he loses his shirt for a couple of scenes where he vamps up his Jetskiing playboy alter ego.

Yeah, topless, he’s a riot.

He’s gone from being Mexico’s Rowan Atkinson or Eddie Murphy to Mexico’s Adam Sandler, or a version of a Sandler flunky, David Spade — as in more funny-looking than funny. And he’s the last one to realize it.

It’s a new version of of the old Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell screwball comedy about the rich person who falls off a yacht, gets amnesia and is “claimed” by the only poor slop to know how rich they actually are. They remade that kidnapping and holding the insufferable rich a labor hostage the only way they could in this #MeToo era — by swapping the genders of the protagonists.

Derbez is playboy Leonardo, an heir burning through the bucks on his motor yacht, “Birthday Present,” and abusing the onboard help (John Hannah is his major domo) as he does.

Among those he treats badly is steam-cleaner Kate (Faris), a widow with three daughters, two jobs and a need to pass her nursing exam so that she can give them all a better life.

When Leonardo has his accident, her pal (Eva Longoria) talks her into faking photos, faking documents and taking possession of her “husband” at the hospital — not for his money, because he doesn’t remember he’s rich, but for light housework, cooking and day labor in construction. Revenge comes in him putting in the first “honest day’s work” in his life.

Make “Leo” sleep in the garage, because he broke his AA promise. Don’t know if he’s a “pervert,” but we’ve had hints.

“Mommy, what’s a pervert?”

“It’s nothing honey.”

“Then can I have one?”

The way this must, by law, play out is that “Leo” must make himself useful, discover the true joys of life are family and hard work and being reliable, and learn how to cook and bond with the working class, making himself worthy of a woman like Kate.

There’s little novel in this set-up (Leo’s doctor references the first “Overboard.”), aside from the fact that nobody this rich and probably infamous could be anonymous in the Internet age, so the entire concept here is a big old bust.

The parallel story, with Leonardo’s scheming sister (Mariana Trevino), the one that “does all the work” at the company,  plotting to fake his death (raiding a campfire pit for ashes for Leo’s urn) has no spark to it, either.

And the colorful work crew Leo joins isn’t colorful enough.

Derbez has an audience on both sides of the border, and one cannot blame a guy for trying to reach out for new fans. But two hours of limp jokes in Spanish and non-existent ones in English should cow him into playing to his strengths, or at least improving his American representation. Otherwise, Hollywood will continue fobbing disposable ideas off on him, like some rube fresh off the boat, plane or bus.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for suggestive material, partial nudity and some language.

Cast: Eugenio Derbez, Anna Faris, Eva Longoria, John Hannah

Credits:Directed by Rob Greenberg, script by Bob Fisher, Rob Greenberg. An MGM/Pantelion release.

Running time: 1:52

Yes, she’s become a meme, idolized by generations of young American women, imitated to hilarious hip hop effect by “Saturday Night Live’s” Kate McKinnon, “Notorious RBG.”

But the movie “RBG”  just glances at that. But Betty West and Julie Cohen’s documentary gets at the accomplishments that made Ruth Bader Ginsburg deserving of her place on the U.S. Supreme Court, and celebrated for growing place within American culture.

“Celebrated” — that’s the only word for it. It’s a Ginsburg portrait, largely in her own words and almost exclusively those of her fans — her children, college classmates, peers, media figures, old friends, politicians.

She is a shy, quiet opera lover, a “horrible cook,” widow of a much more gregarious (and funny) lawyer-husband, a woman who almost from birth it was said, “She didn’t do small talk. She didn’t go girl chat. A deep thinker,” two old pals declare.

And she and is a boundary breaking legal mind for the ages. College in the Cornell of the 1950s — “Cornell was a preferred school for daughters…They kind of suppressed how smart they were,” facing sexism in Harvard Law School, already a mother, with a husband sick with cancer, and yet she still made The Law Review. Following her husband after he graduated and landed a New York law firm gig, she went to Columbia, getting a law degree that made her almost unemployable in New York.

It was as a Rutgers professor teaching 1960s “Gender and the Law” courses, getting involved with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. She took as her example, Thurgood Marshall’s approach to finding cases that could change Civil Rights law.

An Air Force woman here — “Nice girls didn’t file lawsuits,” former Air Force officer Sharron Frontiero cracks — another discriminatory law challenged there, and Ginsburg had her start — building the cases that moved America toward equal rights for women.

We hear the audio recording of her first argument before the Supreme Court.

“I ask no favor for my sex,” she quoted (and still quotes) 19th century Abolitionist Sarah Grimke, “all I ask of our brethren is that they take their boot our necks”

“She captured, for the (Supreme) Court, what being a second class citizen was like,” a colleague remembers.

Through a canny collection of cases — some wins, some losses, some focusing on gender discrimination against women, and in one memorable case, arguing for equal “mother’s benefits” for the surviving parent, the father, from Social Security.

“It was like knitting a sweater,” one contemporary says of her methodical case-law approach. All of this led to the day when President Bill Clinton cast out his notion of putting New York Governor Mario Cuomo on the Supreme Court in 1993.

The film uses home movies, testimony from Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings and interviews to build its portrait of RBG.

Senator Orrin Hatch reflects on how much disagrees with her now, and disagreed with positions then, and echoes the admiration he expressed way back then.

We also get a sampling of her highest profile opinions, beginning with the gender discrimination case against the State of Virginia and the state-supported all-male military school, The Virginia Military Institute.

Her children, James and Jane Ginsburg, humanize Ginsburg.

And NPR’s Supreme Court reporter, Nina Totenberg, Ginsburg’s biggest cheerleader, weighs in frequently about how her court persona and the meme version of RBG — underscored by Dessa performing her feminist rap, “The Bullpen” — is in contrast with the shy woman Ginsburg is in person.

Hearing her take apart, representing Virginia, future Solicitor General Ted Olson (on tape) is humbling. Seeing her triumphant return to the school decades later might move you to tears.

Her dissenting greatest hits, most famously in the twisted “logic” of the 2000 presidential election decision, are recounted. They have become more frequent and more biting as a very conservative Court dials back the clock on voting rights and the like in the past 20 years.

Catching the first time she sees SNL’s McKinnon’s hilarious riff on her persona is worth the price of admission. Sober RBG cackles the way the rest of us did the first time we caught “a Third Degree GinsBURN.”

“RBG” has the sort of decorum largely vanished from American politics and American life these days. Even the few foes who show up on camera are polite, gracious (in defeat, in Olson’s case) and right on the edge of admiration. Even her polar opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia, vacationed with her and made jovial joint public appearances that never got heated, despite the paper cuts of deathly-serious repartee.

It’s that tone that makes “RBG” worth seeing in theaters, the shock value of seeing people agreeably disagree . No, there are NOT enough dissenting voices in the film, she’s that popular.

But it’s jarring to see the turn the film, and the country take, away from civility, a steady march toward equal rights and the profane, law-flouting death-to-mine-enemies, progress-torching culture we’re moved into.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements and language

Cast: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Gloria Steinem, Nina Totenberg, Orrin Hatch

Credits:Directed by Betty West and Julie Cohen. A Magnolia/CNN Films release.

Running time: 1:38

This is one of the great unfilmed “true” stories of World War II, that of the multi-lingual, quiz-show dazzling baseball catcher and coach  Moe Berg’s work as an OSS spy.

An all-star cast, headed by Paul Rudd but including Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Jeff Daniels and Paul Giamatti, tells the story of Berg’s recruitment, training and espionage work to keep the Germans from developing the A-bomb.

“The Catcher Was a Spy” pens June 22.