Movie Nation

Not the first Fred Rogers documentary, but as it is from the director of “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” it’s the first one with Oscar buzz.

An American TV saint gets his documentary due. Really looking forward to this one.

“Hereditary” is a horror film that features ghosts, a Satanic cult, grisly deaths, flies, possession and seances, children imperiled, nightmare sequences, a doubting adult or two and a dog who seems to be the only one to know pretty much what’s going down.

Nothing new to see here, right?

And the fact that first-time feature director and writer Ari Aster treats all this as if he’s just discovered it, and that these cliches merit a stately two hours and seven minutes of screen time, should be turn-offs. I mean, come on.

But Aster landed superb actors Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd, Alex Wolff and especially Toni Collette. Great actors make you believe because they believe. It gets under your skin by messing around with those conventions and cliches.

And damned if “Hereditary,” macabre, meditative and meandering as it is, doesn’t well up in your throat like a breathless scream that can’t get out.

Collette plays Annie, a visual artist in the alien, underpopulated wilderness and wealth of Park City, Utah, the home of the Sundance Film Festival. She, husband Steve (Byrne) and their two kids live in a mountainside chalet that looks like a designer dollhouse.

And that’s sort of what her art looks like. It’s a dollhouse filled with dollhouses, actually meticulously crafted diaoramas ranging in subject from the banal to the bizarre.

As Annie bases these on her world and events in her life, her latest is “Hospice,” part of a show she’s pulling together for a prestigious art dealer. “Hospice?” That’s where her hated mother was until she died. Yeah, the funeral will make a cool “subject,” too for “Small World Artworks.”

“Should I be sadder?” she wonders, and she’s not alone in that family. She should be worried. She’s got a teen son (Wolff) who tolerates her via a serious dedication to marijuana. Her daughter Charlie? That girl ain’t right.

Whatever’s going on or about to in that house, Charlie( Milly Shapiro) is the focus of our suspicions. “On the spectrum,” as we say — she’s 13, disheveled, miserable and morbid, playing with grim toys of her own design, obsessed with death and plainly indulged by a school when she should be in a class all her own.

She obsessively devours chocolate bars (without nuts), clucks her tongue, scribbles weird graffiti on her walls, seems far away even when she’s sitting right next to you and would give anybody not used to her appearance, her slow-wittedness and manner the creeps.

It’s a portrayal so unsettling that you worry for the young actress creating it, fret over how her young life might be scarred by association with a character so homely, socially crippled and mentally off.

Charlie doesn’t so much drive the action as incite it.

And Aster’s film isn’t so much a cerebral (This IS an A24 release) exercise in genre filmmaking as a picture that gets in your head through the performances. The grief support group lady (Ann Dowd) Annie meets who talks her into a seance is a laughably abrupt introduction and re-direction of the film.

But Collette plays that seance with the overwhelming shock that most of us would register upon seeing “proof” of the supernatural.

Peter’s reaction to tragedy is mute shock and denial in a searing scene that is the movie’s first-act jaw-dropper. Byrne’s Steve is stoic, keeping it all together, skeptical and haunted, in his own way, by what he sees in his wife and what he knows about her past.

Collette’s Annie? She comes completely, believably apart, dissolving in paroxysms of grief.

Ordinary horror films give us hope, but Aster’s vision doesn’t, an apt metaphor for the End Times the world and America seem to be heedlessly sprinting toward.

“Hereditary” isn’t original enough to merit “great film” praise. But by bending and extending the tropes of the genre and hiring top drawer talent to buy in, Aster makes us buy in, too, and gives us a pretty disturbing picture to chew on and mull over on the way home.

MPAA Rating: R for horror violence, disturbing images, language, drug use and brief graphic nudity

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd

Credits: Written and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:07

Shailene Woodley makes a salty wench on a halyard winch in “Adrift,” a solid if unsurprisingly conventional survival at sea tale that’s for fans only.

By “fans” I mean Shailene fans, those who forgave the “Divergent” sell-out or who just picked up on this extraordinarily open actress on “Big Little Lies” on TV.  The young star of “The Descendents” and “The Spectacular Now” is a polished veteran now, able to hold her own with Nicole, Laura, Zoe Kravitz and Reese Witherspoon on the melodramatic HBO soap-thriller.

What she’s done with “Adrift” is take a stab at Reese’s “Wild,” playing a young woman tested by the sea. Instead of a long hiking trail, a journal and flashbacks of her dead mother to buck her up in her hour of trial, she’s got an injured beau to complain “We’re gonna DIE out here” to, and the open Pacific to test her.

We meet Tami (Woodley) after the “knock-down.” That’s the sailing term for a wave and/or wind that broaches the boat, rolls it and tears off the mast. Yes, the other “fans” in this “fans only” affair might be old salts like myself.

The Hazana is a 40-44 foot ketch with both masts torn off, their sharp ends pounding against the hull with poor inexperienced Tami bloodied in the cabin, which is trashed and half full of water.

Richard (Sam Claflin), the experienced world-cruiser who is the love of her life and her skipper on this Tahiti to San Diego run, is nowhere to be found. Once Tami fights her way out of the cabin and takes a quick inventory of the damage, getting to Richard, who has floated away on the dinghy, is priority one. Getting them both to Hawaii with no radio, a makeship short-canvas mast, jammed rudder and no electronic navigation help is priority two.

Flashbacks show us the sweet, instant-attraction affair between the drifting traveler Tami, who odd-jobs her way from port to port, and the dashing Richard, a few years older and cruising the world in a boat he built himself.

Friends of his ask that he deliver their ketch, Hazana, to San Diego. And even though that’s where she’s from and she has no interest in returning, that’s their quest.

Where the movie by Iceland’s greatest director, Baltasar Kormakur (“Contraband,” “Everest”) lets Shailene and us down is in the personal journey she must make, the estranged mother who abandoned her, details of the life that sent her to sea, running from who knows what. Three screenwriters took a shot at giving her psychological depth and romantic heft, and Woodley is left playing that strained indulgent laugh women trot out to let you know they’re interested.

But as there’s a real Tami Oldham who tells this tale, there wasn’t much room for sexing the script up. Woodley takes care of that with endless swimsuit shots and a little nude sunbathing.

Mainly though, she dresses down and blisters up for this epic, scenes and shots of just her struggling with the boat, the sun, the sea, her personal demons and her injured boyfriend — diving to fix this, enterprising her way past drinking water and food shortages.

If you’re a yachtswoman or man, or just an armchair sailor, you know that there are scores of such narratives on bookshelves, and plenty of TV and film versions as well, including the more spiritual and more harrowing “All is Lost.”

You also know the tropes of the genre — waiting for the rain to cure a dying thirst, that first container ship that does not see your flares, spear-fishing your food supply.

It’ll be new to Woodley’s young audience, but to nobody over 30,  especially no one who has a passing acquaintance with stricken sailboat stories.

Woodley’s barefoot ease on the not-quite-pitching deck is impressive, and her diving and swimming are real resume-assets. She displays a physical confidence on the water, and on the docks as Tami effortlessly comes off as shy and guileless when it suits her purposes.

But the dialogue has few moments of poetry and the call of the sea, “just you, the wind and the sound of the boat cutting through the ocean.”

Claflin, of “The Hunger Games” and “Me Before You” has an easy charm, and Woodley works the girlish giggle and body contact towards “chemistry,” but never quite sets off sparks.

Still, it’s great seeing Woodley out of YA sci-fi and into a role that makes use of her approachable reality. And truth be told, no movie with sailboats in it can be all bad. John Candy and Kurt Russell tested this maxim to the max, and they’re no Shailene Woodley.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for injury images, peril, language, brief drug use, partial nudity and thematic elements

Cast: Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin

Credits:Directed by Baltasar Kormákur , script by Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell |and David Branson Smith. An STX release

Running time: 1:47 

“What’s wrong with you?”

Jersey islander Moll hears this often, and her reactions — wincing, wounded, resigned — make us realize she’s been hearing it for years, if not all her life.

Moll (Jessie Buckley of the recent A & E “War & Peace”) may sing in the art chorale, but the choir director (Geraldine James) seems to have it on the tip of her tongue…always. She’s her mother.

The cop (Trystan Gravelle) who fancies her doesn’t dare say it. But you know he thinks it.

Her oaf of a brother  (Oliver Maltman) might trot it out just to hurt her. And her prettier, happily married sister (Shannon Tarbet) works the hardest at avoiding using those words. But even she looks over, looks down on and pities Moll, and has for years.

It’s no wonder shy, brittle Moll falls for the first guy who sticks up for her, the one everybody says is “bad news,” the young man who might give her story its title, “Beast.”

The feature film debut of Michael Pearce, “Beast” is about the monsters we think we recognize and the ones we’re creating, unknowingly, by neglect, oppression and simple failure to act. It’s about a torrid, liberating love affair consummated in the middle of a horrid serial killer investigation.

And right from the start, we and everybody else suspect Pascal (Johnny Flynn, who was young Albert Einstein in TV’s “Genius). As the old song says, “He’s a rebel and he’ll never be any good.”

She meets him as she’s fleeing a birthday party that sister Polly has just upstaged, and after a night of drinking and dancing and letting a lout get overfamiliar. Pascal interrupts what might become a sexual assault with the unthinking bravado of a brute. He’s toting a rifle at the time.

He’s crude, coarse and fearless, careless about his grooming and his attire, careful not to give away his name right away, conspiratorial in letting her know what he was doing with a rifle by the beach. He’s a poacher.

Moll, downtrodden at home, her family the very model of repressed English emotions which holds manners uber alles, is smitten.

“I love the way he smells.”

He’s gauche, tactless and profane, everything Moll (a bus tour guide when she’s not singing) and her family are not.

As the affair kicks off, two lost souls tearing into each other like starving cast-aways, Mom’s disapproval grows, sister tries to be encouraging and the cops start asking questions. Another girl has been abducted and murdered. The entire island seems to be picking out suspects and coming after them hammer and tong.

Pascal, a solitary misfit and “craftsman” (good with his hands), has a record. He is Suspect One.

Moll is questioned, confronted left and right. She is his alibi. We know she’s not telling the truth. What does she see that we don’t? What’s in her past that could explain her deeper understanding?

Pearce cast this well, with Buckley glorying in bullied Moll’s growing defiance. Moll quietly, resolutely and unfeelingly revels in wearing the evidence of her roll in the grass all over Mom’s white carpeting and furniture. Give the stubbly, unkempt Flynn a motorcycle and not the ancient diesel Land Rover he rambles about in and he could be a Johnny playing another Johnny — Brando’s anti-hero of “The Wild One.”

The mystery is less interesting than the revealing set-pieces — Moll’s first trip out poaching with Pascal, the escalating confrontations with her family, cops and neighbors.

“Beast” is hard to watch at times, from its graphic crime-scene photos to the pitiless way a rabbit is dispatched. But as cryptic as it aims to be, it’s not hard to follow. And yeah, that rabbit is a clue. Good thrillers don’t explain the psychoses involved. They show them.

This one lets you keep up, encourages you to guess ahead, and then surprises you with what comes AFTER what comes next.

MPAA Rating: R, gory violence, somewhat explicit sex, gore, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Jessie Buckley, Johnny Flynn, Geraldine James, Trystan Gravelle

Credits:Written and directed by Michael Pearce. A Roadside Attraction/Film 4 release.

Running time: 1:47

Actually, the first film of the day is a belated viewing of “Beast.” Then there’s “Hereditary,” the new Toni Collette horror piece from A24.

But STX is releasing this Shailene lost-at-sea adventure without previewing it for critics, and as I am on my fifth sailboat, third cruising sailboat, and I’m a Shailene booster from WAY back, “Adrift” is the one I’m most looking forward to.

Sure, Shailene damaged her brand with the damned “Divergent” movies, cut-and-paste YA sci-fi based on books that were more commodities than works of fiction. But “Big Little Lies” gave her back her mojo, holding her own with Nicole, Laura and Reese.

Now the first weekend in June isn’t prime movie release date real-estate, which is why Blumhouse cheery-picked South by Southwest fanboy praise reviews for “Upgrade.”

“Action Point,” a Johnny Knoxville non-Safety Inspected theme park comedy, wasn’t previewed for critics.

And “Adrift” is also lumped in there, its pre-release rep damaged by not letting critics see it. The trailers have been impressive, even if the story is fairly conventional (in sailing quarters, anyway, the “sailor” on board is hurt in a boat-crippling accident, the inexperienced mariner must get them to safety).

STX should spend a little money and preview these pictures, unless “Hurricane Heist” and “Bad Moms” and “The Circle” and “The Foreigner” and “Gringo” and “Den of Thieves” and “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” are sole ambitions. They did release “Edge of Seventeen,” “I Feel Pretty” and “Molly’s Game.” It’s not like EVERYthing they make is crap. Why let people think that if the movie’s good?

Well, this just looks daft.

In the Old West, R. Patts pines away for his long lost beloved. He’s brought a preacher with him to Tie the Knot when he catches up with the fair Penelope. And she’s not having it. Tough as nails, that Penelope.

Glad this screwball Western is getting released, by Magnolia, no less. June 22, limited release.

In the netherscape of Sword and Sorcery Land, a lad takes his training and his lessons from his father.

“You must draw from your surroundings,” the would-be warrior’s dad (Adam Gregory) counsels, dropping the tweenage kid again. Find strength on the ground you fight upon, in other words.

And so the boy knocks down his dad and grows up to wear the furs, leather and the facepaint, to wield a samurai sword and all manner of machete and battleaxe, to vanquish his enemies and spill blood.

He will save the princess and protect “The Veil.”

Well, first he slaps a princess (Alexandra Harris). The Warrior (William Levy) has his motives. And he has her dad’s “sacred” sword because he killed the old man rather than let him “save” his daughter from capture (by stabbing her to death).

“The Veil” is a mud and blood quest fantasy of the “Conan” school, and calling it a B-movie insults a rich tradition of cheap but entertaining Bs.

Left for dead by an opportunistic comrade (Nick E. Tarabay), The Warrior must survive his wounds, recover his health, recover the Desert Princess and have his revenge. On somebody. The Emperor, maybe? That’s how these things usually go.

I know. I’ve watched them all. Something about that pre-history “never history” of Conan the Barbarian and his ilk, tales set in a Dark Age of steel and sinew, lures me in. European or Chinese, Japanese or Indian, I dive into the leather, the big-haired maidens and witches, the stentorian comic book trash talk and prophesy.

“The world of war has given birth to a great warrior. His enemies shall fall by a sword not of man.”

Hallucinations, magic herbs and a second princess — “Zera didn’t mean to harm you. She only wants to know your soul.” — in a peaceful, “we do not kill here” land. Except “You are not welcome here.” Well, was his capture by Zera (Serinda Swan, straight out of the “Steel Magnolias” hair salon) foretold, or not?

A hero needs a sidekick, and Aysel (William Moseley) fills that bill. He’s a bit of a hippy with a “Teach me how to FIGHT them” Jones. Aysel has bigger-than-sidekick ambitions.

“Now KILL me” is his first lesson. “Or I will kill YOU.”

Yes, it’s an insanely silly, dippy installment in a generally dippy genre. Lots of romantic pauses by scenic streams and remote lakes. And this.

“All you’ve ever known is war. One self pitting against the self of another. It is the world of man. And to you, it’s real.”

That Zera could talk the stubble right off a dark-eyed warrior, I tell you what.

Love the gauntlets — sharp elbows for stabbing — love the tents, clever to include a herd of buffalo (filmed in strikingly barbaric Oklahoma), like the costumes, underwhelmed by the swords.

The Cuban Levy has that Christopher Lambert “Highlander” accent requisite to many a sword and sorcery C-movie. Of course, it’s not the accent, it’s the shirtless chest it murmurs out of that counts.

The acting in general isn’t anything to pack onto an audition reel.

They didn’t have a lot of money to make this thing, but the production values are solid, not quite up to the Dark Ages Vikings vs. Brits series, “The Last Kingdom,” but aside from the anachronistic haircuts and middling hardware, not bad.

But the script is a mish-mash of tedious prophetic nonsense, the fights humdrum and the scenes between the fights are unalloyed, uninterrupted tedium.

Where’s the villain? Tardy, or just AWOL? AWOL it is. For most of the movie.

And about this titular “Veil.” It’s a hallucinogenic mask that hides reality from the wearer, blinds him or her and incites visions of prophesies. Nobody calls it a “Veil.” Not that I heard.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: William Levy, William Moseley, Serinda Swan, Nadia Comaneci, Adam Gregory

Credits:Directed by Brent Ryan Green, script by Jeff Goldberg. A Toy Gun release.

Running time: 1:25

“You Get Me” is a spurned-lover thriller for teenagers, “Swimfan” with less swimming, “Fatal Attraction” without the bunny.

It offers model, bombshell and tabloid princess Bella Thorne the chance to play the bad girl  — REALLY bad — in a world of unearned affluence, casual beauty and consequence-free sex that yes, has consequences. But it’s tepid, generic thriller, and Temptress Thorne isn’t really up to the menace she’s supposed to generate here.

Tyler (Taylor John Smith) is a teen, spending the summer between his junior and senior years “living my California dream,” a poor lad close to the water in a coast California dreamscape of posh parties and sea views with no viable economic reality (Dude can afford Malibu environs on a part time job bussing tables? They’re broke? He drives a restored vintage Jeep Wagoneer?) attached.

He’s all about the gorgeous and rich Ally (Halston Sage).

“Ally? She ‘got me,” he narrates. “Love changes you. Makes you do things you’d never want to do.” Like tai chi.

But being a rich girl,  Ally has a past, and a rich Summer’s Eve named Chase ( Of course he’s played by a guy named Rhys Wakefield.) shows up to remind her of it, and slut-shames her to Tyler.

The party is a humiliating bust for Tyler. Ally doesn’t take his “You slept with THAT guy?” blast well. He’s dumped, and here’s Holly.

She tilts her head and flips her hair, fetchingly, alluringly. She bites her lip. She’s been working on that “come and get me, big boy/girl” for years. Wait, that’s Bella Thorne, the actress, who’s been “working” that. Holly, her character? She’s mysterious. She just knows how to work it without us knowing how she knows.

Holly drives a Jag convertible. “It’s not mine.”

She’s got the pills, and she passes them like a pro — with a kiss.

“I don’t know….”

“You swallow, I’ll swallow.”

Subtle. He is putty in her hands, etc. When they wake up in the hilltop mansion she’s “house sitting,” he is further bowled over. Wait until he finds out she’s “not really a house-sitter at all. I just…broke in!”

Sure, it’s all frolics and picnics by the pool and sex in the pool until…you know. He has to leave. And Ally wants to explain and patch things up.

“No more secrets. Ok?”

Um. Sure. You got it.

That’s when Holly shows up at their school, and is enrolled. And is all “Did you tell her about us? I can be VERY discrete.” Right.

Game on, kids. Ingratiate yourself with the girlfriend, show off your “art” photography, “date” Tyler’s pal Gil (Nash Grier) to be around them, make Tyler jealous and play Gil like a tuna on the hook.

The “stranger danger” signs are there — evasive about where she lives, her “parents,” no social media presence. But Tyler is slow to speak out. “Discrete.” Will anybody take him seriously when he does?

First time feature director Brent Bonacorso paints the “You Get Me” canvas in broad, generic strokes — teen wish fulfillment fantasy about the lifestyle, the locale, the fashions and “perfect” love and sexual encounters. It’s a soap operatic spin on a genre of thriller, light on suspense, heavy on the supposed foreboding.

Smith makes Tyler blandly stricken, upset but not wound-up enough at the growing evidence of Holly’s villainy. Tyler’s got to come clean and Smith has got to make that more of a struggle we see in his face. Like most of the players her, he was cast for his looks.

Sage has a leading role here, but she’s blander than she was in “Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” or “Before I Fall,” where her supporting parts had more meat to them. Her moments in peril are like a bad audition.

Whatever public image Thorne has cultivated, and you get the impression she’s capable of “whatever it takes” to get attention, headlines and job offers, she’s more at home suggesting a lying, hormonal schemer than she is at generating fear at what a predator like Holly might be capable of.

Whatever the script has her connive, her femme fatale could use a little work. Watch Erika Christensen in “Swimfan.”  She knew how to dial up the obsessive stalker with eyes that kill.

It’s not just about ensuring you get a lot of sex and swimsuit scenes, dear.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, adult situations, sexuality, profanity

Cast: Bella Thorne, Halston Sage, Taylor John Smith

Credits:Directed by Brent Bonacorso, script by Ben Epstein. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

Think of “Sara’s Notebook” as a “Heart of Darkness” for Africa in the age of Conflict Minerals and NGOs.

Stick with me, because I’m going to run with this conceit a while.

This Spanish film, acquired by Netflix, is a companion piece to “Beasts of No Nation,” an inferior sequel in some ways, but a harrowing if slooooooow moving odyssey about a Spaniard (Belén Rueda of “The Orphanage”) who comes to Africa to find out what happened to her sister, an aid worker lost in the war-torn Congo.

That’s a classic “Heart of Darkness” quest narrative.

Laura learns a bit about younger sister Sara (Marian Álvarez) through those who knew her, and from a notebook she left behind. Something in her sister changed as she witnessed and tried to help save Africans from each other in the brutal guerilla war that’s cropped up, not over diamonds or uranium, but to control coltan, a rare mineral that the warlords hang onto but which the government and the rest of the world covets. 

Yes, it’s a real  thing. 

The movie wastes a lot of time in the opening as Laura calls her broker to sell her stock so she can hire and then fire a shifty mercenary (Manolo Cardona) who promises to get her to the region where Sara disappeared, meets Sara’s onetime boyfriend Sven (Nick Devlin) and finally Father Salvio (Enrico Lo Verso), who might be of actual help.

She boards a bush plane and gets shot at, then a boat and finally Third World buses and pickup trucks in her heedless snake-bitten pursuit of a sister she is sure, thanks to instincts, tips and her own flashbacks with Sara, is still alive.

Sara had “gone native,” so identifying with the people she was trying to help that even passing a mirror shocked her. “How white I am,” she wrote. Again, very Conrad, straight out of “Heart of Darkness.”

Laura hasn’t evolved that way. When Father Salvia persuades a sullen African teen (Iván Mendes) to escort her on this dangerous journey, she thinks nothing of making him ride in the back of a truck while she sits in the cab, of cracking “They behaved like animals” in describing Jamir’s fellow Africans, fleeing soldiers or paramilitaries, were brutalized from both sides. 

Jamir is haunted, and as we hear and see accounts of child soldiers rounded up and “initiated” into this murderous world of minerals, slavery and genocide, we can guess where he’s been.

Director Norberto López Amado did the fine Spanish Civil War drama “The Time in Between,” and is most at home in the scenes of violence — raids, rampages, mass executions. But for a movie that is moving from point A deeper and deeper into the wilderness of points B, C and D, the damned picture is downright static.

There’s little urgency to the quest, and the payoff is a bit of a fizzle, too. Until, that is, you view this thing through the filter of Joseph Conrad and all the filmmakers who have made a pass through “Heart of Darkness.”

This isn’t a neat Conrad analog, but you can sense the “Darkness” bones here. Conrad and Coppola (“Apocalypse Now”) heightened the horror, waypoint by waypoint, and grasped the surreal loss of humanity that Europeans (and later the U.S. military) experience the further removed they get from civilization. Laura witnesses some of that, experiences a little of it too, but doesn’t make that same sort of personal journey.

She, unlike the Kurtz of Conrad, starts to see beyond the “this place will never change” primitive brutality of her locale. She can cling to the hope for redemption somewhere down the road.

In “Sara’s Notebook,” it’s everybody else (almost) who embraces the darkness and despairs at ever finding the light, even the aid workers and hands-off U.N. peace keepers who aren’t really helping.

As for the filmmakers, if they’d paid more attention to “Heart of Darkness” and less to “Blood Diamond,” they might have found their way out, not of the stunningly scenic jungle they were filming in, but out of the corner they painted this not-dark-enough/not-emotional-enough riff on a classic fictional quest tale into.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, implied rape

Cast: Belén Rueda, Iván Mendes, Manolo Cardona, Marian Álvarez, Nick Devlin

Credits:Directed by Norberto López Amado, script by Jorge Guerricaechevarría. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

It’s a credit to the makers of the soccer documentary “Nossa Chape” that they’d still have a decent film, even without the tragedy that underscores the one they made.

Chapecó is a relatively small, poor city in fútbol-mad Brazil, perpetual over-achieving underdogs whom the 200,000 residents — coincidentally, not much bigger than the Odessa, Texas of “Friday Night Lights” — rally around with a devotion that knows no bounds.

Chapecoense, to use the sports metaphor, is famous for punching above its weight.

But the team and the town, indeed the entire soccer world, took one to the gut when their plane went down en route to their date with destiny, the finals of the 2016 Copa Sudamericana, to be played in Medellin, Colombia, in November of 2016. Gone in a flash was the feel-good story of South American football, most of its players, coaches, administrators and even the journalists who covered them most closely.

And what followed, as the Fox Sports documentary “Nosse Chape” (“Our Chapecó Team”) recounts, is grief interrupted by outrage, mourning curtailed because “the beautiful game” must go on.

Filmmakers Michael and Jeffrey Zimbalist have a Pele film, “Favela Rising” and “The Two Escobars” are among their collective credits, so they know the turf. Their access is broad as they take us through the the tragedy, the emotional recovery and lingering grievances of those who lost loved ones to absurd, tightwad incompetence.

We see archival footage of the happy-go-lucky squad of tightly-connected players, joshing and joking on their last hours on Earth, kidding about the cut-rate airline (LaMia) that the team hired to fly them to their deaths. We see the worldwide mourning, including a prayer from Pope Francis, about this “fairy tale with a tragic ending.” And we meet the widows and wives of those who died and the four players who survived.

It’s a little jarring to see the speed with which the administration of the team is reconstituted, the fierce announcement that “We will rise from the ashes and start again from scratch! (in Portuguese with English subtitles).” It’s what the players would have wanted, we’re assured. As if they know, as if “We Are Marshall” is the only way to come to terms with such a tragedy.

Vagner Mancini comes in as coach, new players are rounded up, and his orders are to move on, don’t dwell on the past or carry it as a burden. But good advice like that isn’t freely accepted by all, and the ups and downs of a hastily-convened recovery season add to the strain.

Players like Alan Ruschel want to get back on the field, grim prognoses from doctors be damned. But when the reconstituted team doesn’t have that old magic, the grief moves back to the fore.

I like the way the Zimbalists keep the events here at enough distance so that we can see ourselves in this obsessive sports-uber-alles mindset that the city’s leaders buy into. It matters because of how we see ourselves, how our self-worth becomes tied up in that favorite team. “Underdog” towns and teams have this the worst. Rushing to get a squad together mere weeks after the crash, on the pitch less than six months later, when the city and team can’t even figure out how to memorialize the fallen or pay for a statue to them, is a head-slapper.

And I love the way the film doesn’t dodge the scandal of the crash, an airline cutting corners on safety (the damned plane ran out of gas, and the crew let it happen), a sports team that has to use them because of its own expenses. The most chilling moments in the movie might be when the team administration is grousing about flight options for a return to Medellin, and how much they must spend on the least unsettling option.

The most moving moments are when those survivors revisit the crash site, meet the first responders, doctors and others who saved them.

Sports documentaries, even ones built around tragedy, have a “highlight reel” element to them, and “Nossa Chape” doesn’t escape that. But it’s an eye-opening tribute to a story that, like the sport itself, the rest of the world was a lot more riveted by, as it happened, than we were in the U.S.

MPAA Rating: unrated, accident imagery, profanity

Cast: Neto, Jakson Fullman, Alan Ruschel, Leticia Padilha, Barbara Monteiro

Credits:Written and directed by Jeffrey Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist. A Fox Sports Films release.

Running time: 1:41