Movie Nation

“The Bloody Hundredth” is a documentary commemoration of the real-life airmen whose exploits fighting the air war in Europe during World War II inspired Apple TV’s fine “Masters of the Air” series.

We meet some of the survivors of that conflict and the bomber group whose grievous losses earned it the nickname, “The Bloody Hundredth” — bombardiers, navigators such as Harry Crosby and pilots like “Rosie” Rosenthal and Tuskegee Airman fighter pilot Richard Macon are joined by academic historians, “Masters of the Air” author Donald L. Miller, as well as filmmaker/historian Steven Spielberg in retelling the story of their service and sacrifice.

Filmmakers Laurent Bouzerau and Mark Herzog use archival combat footage, generous helpings of newsreels of the day — including an Army Air Force recruiting film hosted by pilot and movie star Jimmy Stewart — and radio recordings of speeches and newscasts to set the scene and take us back to the darkest days of the war and the grim business of daylight bombing German targets in durable and heavily-armed but still ironically-named B-17 Flying Fortresses.

We get a taste of the training they went through and the awful things they endured in combat or in POW camps if they were shot down and captured.

“You look on your left and on your right,” one Eight Air Force airman remembers their commanding officers telling them at an assembly. “Only one of you is coming back.”

“We were going overseas to die.”

And many did, with no other bomber group sustaining the losses The 100th endured. Some of this, we’re made to realize, was attributable to the “hard luck” that dogged the unit — bad weather foiling elaborately-planned raids, the luck of the draw in assignments.

The closest the documentary gets to passing judgement on other reasons is the suggestion that the early leaders of the group, “Buck” Cleven and “Bucky” Egan, played by Austin Butler and Callum Turner in “Masters of the Air,” were “reckless” and “cocky.”

As the tide of the air war turned and more disciplined Col. Thomas Jeffrey (interviewed here) took over, their losses fell off dramatically.

“The Bloody Hundredth” doesn’t cover much that’s new in its remembrance of this unit and the nature of the Western Europe air war. But it makes a fine companion piece to the series and the “real” Rosie,” Crosby and Richard Macon underscore its accuracy with their memories of the fight and their experience of it.

Rating: unrated, PG worthy

Cast: Harry Crosby, Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, John “Lucky” Luckadoo, Richard Macon, Thomas Jeffrey, Donald L. Miller, Steven Spielberg and many others, narrated by Tom Hanks.

Credits: Directed by Laurent Bouzereau and Mark Herzog. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:03

Dark, darkly funny, surreal and nauseatingly violent, “Love Lies Bleeding” is a serious shock to the system. “Saint Maud” writer-director Rose Glass’s second feature delivers jolts, grim jokes and grisly killings in a queer noir thriller brimming over with “Bound” and “Blood Simple” touches.

The viewer is left slack-jawed, tumbling from “Wow” to “Wait, WHAT?” in a furious roller coast ride with a roid raging fury and the hard-nosed, “practical” woman who loves her.

It’s 1989 and the Berlin Wall is about to come down. But in this corner of BFE, New Mexico, life is boiled down to the honky tonk, the shooting range and the gym. That’s where Lou (Kristen Stewart) presides. She’s an unsentimental lesbian with a clean-the-toilets job and a fangirling, brown-toothed lover (Anna Baryshnikov) she’d rather keep at arm’s length. Maybe two arm’s lengths, if she’s being honest.

We don’t see Jackie, played by martial artist/stunt-woman turned actress Katy O’Brian, roll into town. We meet her sexing-up a creep (Dave Franco) in douche dude’s Camaro because he can put in a good word for her regarding a job.

Jackie is jacked. She is also homeless, sleeping under a bridge, working out hanging from parts of the highway overpass she’s sleeping under. The job is at the shooting range, a job she secures despite admitting to the owner she doesn’t like guns.

“Anyone can hide behind a piece of metal,” she notes. “I prefer to know my own strength.”

Jackie is a body builder, angling for a shot an upcoming Vegas contest. She is headed for the gym, and not just because she’s fated to meet Lou.

Lou’s the daughter of the man she describes as “a f—–g psycho,” Louville gun range owner, Lou Sr. (Ed Harris). The F.B.I. is sniffing around, asking Lou about Lou Sr. and her long-gone mother because Lou Sr. runs guns with local law enforcement paid to turn a blind eye. And young Lou’s the sister-in-law of the cheating, rat-tailed J.J. (Franco) Jackie had sex with to score a job. J.J. beats his wife (Jena Malone), which is why Lou wishes him dead.

Things are complicated, and about to get more so.

Glass serves up lesbian love affair tropes — instant attraction, sex and post “first-date” moving in and abrupt “big future plans” with a side order of muscular, energetic sex. Because Jackie is jacked. And as Lou just happens to have steroids around, Jackie may have a Vegas edge, one with impulse control after effects.

The violence, when it comes, is shocking enough to snap your head back, queasy to the point of nauseating.

The crime might be covered-up, but Jackie is losing her grip on reality and Lou can’t hide their tracks and lie her way around loose ends with her brand-new partner only focused on leaving for Las Vegas and glory.

Lou Sr. isn’t going to like any of this, not with the Feds having him in their sights.

Glass and co-writer Weronika Tolfiska don’t hide where this is going, but keep wrong-footing us on the way to getting there. The layer of details, such as Lou’s self-help “Stop Smoking” cassettes, to everybody’s hair — Stewart’s was cut with a weed whacker, Jackie is ’80s curls incarnate, Harris wears a bald-villain’s ponytail and Franco’s transition from mullet to rat tail is almost complete — help sell the reality here.

Until surreality kicks in, most of it seen through Jackie’s eyes coming out of Jackie’s increasingly unhinged head.

O’Brian a real find here, a dreamer toughened up by life who buries her family’s rejection under more body building, a woman whose “focus” is limited to one thing at a time. Stewart gives a rough, affectation-free performance as Lou, who has been through things, seen things and maybe done things that we can guess, just from her manner and her self-loathing.

The usually-grinning Franco is perfectly vile here. And the reliably scary Harris has only to scowl for us to recognize what Lou Sr. is capable of.

What they give us in the end, isn’t pat, righteous or “bluebird on a telegraph line” “happy,” to refer back to the Elton John/Bernie Taupin song that provided the film’s title. It’s just bracing and brutal, two people who find each other determined to punch through anybody who gets in their way, venal, violent and just-a-victim alike.

Rating: R for violence and grisly images, sexual content, nudity, language throughout and drug use.

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Anna Baryshnikov, Jena Malone, Dave Franco and Ed Harris.

Credits: Directed by Rose Glass, scripted by Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:44

“One Life” is an inspiring drama about efforts to save refugee children — mostly Jewish — from Czechoslovakia in the months leading into World War II.

It’s a meandering if sometimes moving story of asserting one’s humanity and appealing to Britain’s “commitment to decency and kindness and respect for others” that strains to assert its relevence in an anti-refugee era in Britain and much of the West.

And it’s a Holocaust drama overswept by events in Gaza which threaten the usage if not the very meaning of “Save one life and save the world entire.”

Anthony Hopkins plays Nicholas “Nicky” Winton, a British retiree nagged by his wife (Lena Olin) into getting rid of the lifetime of clutter, files and such he’d accumulated over the decades, cluttering several rooms of their house by the late ’80s.

A volunteer at non-profits, even in his dotage, Nicky flashes back to his pre-World War II actions as he’s rounding up files about work that had nothing to do with his lifelong labors as a London stock broker.

Back then, Nicky Winton — Johnny Flynn plays him as a young man — reads news accounts and rushes to Czechoslovakia, whose Sudentenland has been ceded to Hitler to save the peace, an action that dooms families that fled Germany and Austria, many of them Jewish.

“I have to do something,” he tells his almost-disapproving mother (Helena Bonham Carter).

And once there, he joins a British refugee rescue operation already organizing family evacuations. He takes note of the looming winter of ’38, the neediness of the hundreds of children he encounters and all of a sudden, London’s stock index doesn’t seem so important.

“I have seen this, and I cannot unsee it.”

“One Life” is a seriously conventional drama about the logistics of getting children out of a war zone with the only escape route a train ride through hostile Germany itself, and through Holland, “which has closed its borders to Jewish refugees.”

British bureaucracy must be confronted. That’s where Nicky’s Mum (Bonham Carter) makes her “commitment to decency and kindness” appeal. National attention must be obtained via the press, funds raised.

And wary Czechs and a Prague rabbi must be persuaded that Winton — whose family had just changed its Germanic name to avoid problems in the U.K.– means them no harm, that he’s not stealing their children and helping “end” Judaism in Central Europe by his actions.

The acting is good (Romola Garai is a fiery, no-nonsense aid worker), the suspense not quite as suspenseful as one would hope and the earnestness exactly what we’ve come to expect from the many movies about versions of Oskar Schindler-like figures saving the most prominent victim group of the Holocaust, Europe’s Jews.

“You’ve done enough!”

“It’s never enough, is it?”

The movie’s third act is wholly about how this forgotten story came back to light, and while it is moving, it’s ungainly, and as generic as much of what’s come before.

You’d like to think people the world over, from Islington to Illinois and even Israel, would have absorbed the lessons from history’s darkest hour, that we wouldn’t need reminding with periodic updating of a story that’s often been told in movies just like “One Life.”

And then you watch the news about refugees facing life-or-death barriers to safer lives almost everywhere, and “ethnic cleansing,” a genocide with a neater, Serbian-inspired name going on in the last large piece of Palestine left to its native inhabitants, and you realize that repeating “Never forget” and “Never again” is never going to be enough, especially if the people saying it are using it to deflect criticism from their own crimes.

Rating: PG

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Lena Olin, Romola Garai, Johnny Flynn, Jonathan Pryce and Helena Bonham Carter.

Credits: Directed by James Hawes, scripted by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, based on a book by Barbara Winton. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time:

“Arthur the King” is a sweetly sentimental story all but guaranteed to move any dog fancier to tears.

A Mark Wahlberg star vehicle in which he’s more or less second banana to a dog — at least when they’re on screen together — it balances some gripping action with canine melodrama, teaching us as it does about the extreme sport this “true story” is set against — team Adventure Racing.

Wahlberg plays a headstrong star in the three-men/one-woman team sport that sees competitors run, climb, bike and kayak across hundreds of miles of some of the world’s most impassible wild terrain. But as “all-in” as Mike Light is, he’s never brought home the top prize.

When we meet him, he’s bullheaded a team into paddling in defiance of the tide and losing one last time, ignoring the solid advice and protests of the more media savvy teammate, Leo (Simu Liu of “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and “Barbie”), who shames him with a viral video.

Three years later, Mike’s not-quite-resigned to helping run his Dad’s (Paul Guilfoyle) Colorado real estate business and raising his little girl with his retired-competitor wife Helena (Juliet Rylance). But Mike wants that “one last shot.”

“Racers race. This is not how it ends for me.”

We see him round up an under-tested (Nathalie Emmanuel) climber/competitor, a canny but older “bum knee” navigator/veteran like himself (Ali Suliman) and reluctant sponsors for a team leader who never comes out on top.

Social media star Leo is the only way they land the money, setting up an in-team rivalry as we wonder if Mike will screw it up again, or learn to be a “team” player.

That could very well be the case as they struggle during the early stages of a 400-mile+ dash over, through and around the Dominican Republic for a world championship.

But we’ve also been following the plight of a street dog of Santo Domingo, an injured mutt who’s been abused and tested by this life on his own.

“Arthur the King” is the name he’s given when he shows up, mid-race, to aid and inspire the team.

The Michael Brandt script and director Simon Cellan Jones, who directed Wahlberg’s “The Family Plan” fictionalize the tale — a Swede named Mikael Lindnord was the one who met Arthur, and wrote a book about him — and ensure that the first two thirds of the movie are overwhelmingly devoted to assembling the team and the “embrace pain, buckets of it” nature of the race, where “suffering is a skill” one and all must master.

The scenery is spectacular. The players do a decent job of getting across the superhuman efforts required and the stunt crew delivers one doozy — involving mountain bikes, a “short cut” and a zipline.

But the picture doesn’t find its stakes until this bloodied dog joins them in their quest.

The script tries and fails to find a “villain” for the tale, something a few “true story” films struggle with. A trash talking Aussie (Rob Collins) is the best they could manage. The snarky, funny Liu would have better served that purpose, but what can you do?

The Hollywood focus on Wahlberg’s Americanized character distracts us from the actions of the dog, which seem pretty far-fetched on the surface.

But if we focus on the dog and his struggles, we have to try not to pretend there’s anything off-putting in these entitled fringe-sport athletes competing in some of the poorest places on Earth for their races, where emaciated dogs are but one sign of the poverty of their vacation destination.

I found myself focusing on how the athletic star Wahlberg related to the dog (played by a team of matched canines), how the instant empathy his character is scripted as having seems harder to play than the acceptance of their mascot in later scenes.

But as manipulative as this has to be, as far-fetched as some of the story plays, the film’s heartwarming virtues cannot be denied. The dog training — thank GOD they used real dogs and not digital ones — paid off, and Arthur shows a little bit of personality, mostly in the eyes.

And if you don’t get a little choked up by the finale, you may find yourself condemned to watching “My Dog Skip,” “Marley & Me” and “A Dog’s Purpose” in Purgatory until you get the message.

Rating: PG-13, profanity

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Nathalie Emmanuel, Simu Liu, Juliet Rylance, Paul Guilfoyle, Rob Collins and Ali Suliman.

Credits: Directed by Simon Cellan Jones, scripted by Michael Brandt, based on the book by Mikael Lindnord. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:30

If Oscar night and a scattering of “out there” movie and series turns hadn’t made it obvious, that darned John Cena is pretty Down for Anything.

Nude “Best Costume” presentation, or dressing up as Alice Cooper or Britney Spears in “Baby One More Time” schoolgirl gear, Cena lays it on the line — showing off the sight-gag bod and crackling timing of probably the funniest wrestler turned actor of them all.

All those rock star poses — complete with singing R-rated versions of “Whip It,” “White Wedding,” etc. — are the funniest bits of “Ricky Stanicky,” a bloated groaner of a comedy from Peter Farrelly.

Cena is far and away the best and almost the only funny thing in this farce, whose director must like working with Zac Efron (“The Greatest Beer Run Ever”) and the idea of putting the Oscar winning “Green Book” further behind him as he revisits the hit-or-REALLY miss farces of his “Dumb and Dumber” past.

Cena plays Rod Rimestead, aka “Rod Hard Rob,” a flailing Atlantic City showman whose act is masturbation-themed parodies of pop and rock hits of the past. His life changes when he meets three jerks who have lied their way into a weekend in Atlantic City away from their significant others.

Sadly, “Ricky Stanicky” is about the lives of Providence, Rhode Island’s own lie-on-the-fly king Dean (Efron), “organic” “natural” stick-up-his-bum J.T. (Andrew Santino) and never-found-his-calling Wes (Jermaine Fowler), three pranksters who invented an imaginary bestie to get out of trouble in childhood — they set a house on fire — and clung to that friend, complete with fake online identity, cell phone and legend into adulthood.

These three use some crisis or need to meet-up with Ricky Stanicky as their way of getting out of all sorts of things, including the baby shower Dean and TV reporter girlfriend Erin (Lex Scott Davis) are throwing for J.T. and his wife (Anja Savcic).

The aimless, indulged and supported-by-his-partner Wes, who is gay, uses Ricky excuses to escape “living in a gay ‘Handmaid’s Tale,'” which is how he describes his life. Yeah, they’re brats, nobody’s idea of adults.

Sporting events, concerts, guys’ nights out, “weekends,” Ricky has always come through, although wives, partners and relatives scratch their heads over a guy they’ve never met.

But the baby shower transitioned into premature labor and J.T. missed the birth of his son. His furious mother-in-law (Heather Mitchell) demands to meet him and others chime in. Either come clean, or double down on the lie with a “Ricky.” That out of work actor nicknamed Rock Hard Rod? He’s “available.”

The most amusing elements of the movie — AFTER Cena’s on-stage singing shtick — are how deep “sloppy drunk” failed-actor Rod gets into character. The lads kept a “Bible” of their Ricky lies, details of his life to keep others from tripping them up with questions about details. Rod memorizes it.

Ricky’s a few years sober? Vomiting, withdrawal Rod jumps on the wagon. Ricky’s a non-profit do-gooder in Africa? Rod enters the Bris in a safari hat, filled with Bono stories and facts at his disposal about the perils facing the planet and the good works he’s involved in. He charms most — “Churn my butter with a slippery stick!” — convinces (sort of) the mother-in-law, and even insults Dean and J.T.’s financial firm boss (William H. Macy) in true self-righteous eco-warrior fashion.

“Whatever helps you sleep at night, Ebeneezer.”

Things get out of hand. Rod’s past is pursuing him in the form of a couple of mugs. The lies are so convincing there’s sure to be repercussions for the Providence Prevaricators. Is having a real Ricky Stanicky in everybody’s lives really what the three con-stooges have in mind?

The energy in the picture falls off a cliff after the introductory scenes, which climax with the bris. Jeffrey Ross has a cameo as a shticky rabbi who gets amusingly “k-holed,” and it’s pretty much all downhill after that.

The former Farrelly brand, beaten into us when Peter and Bobby Farrelly were The Farrelly Brothers, is revived here — off-color one-liners and “Oh no they didn’t” go theres leaving no subject sacred, vomiting and bodily function humor, alcoholism as a punch line, etc. — and wears out its welcome in record time.

And yet the movie persists, pointing us toward some sort of long-delayed squishy finale that doesn’t tickle, touch or leave a pleasant taste in the mouth.

Like too many of his movies of late, the idea here is to “See it for Cena,” as the film around him isn’t up to the big funny man’s big, scenery-devouring turn.

Rating: R, substance abuse, drug jokes, profanity, vulgar content

Cast: Zaf Efron, John Cena, Lex Scott Davis, Andrew Santino, Jermaine Fowler, Heather Mitchell and William H. Macy.

Credits: Directed by Peter Farrelly, scripted by Jeff Bushell, Brian Jarvis, James Lee Freeman, Peter Farrelly, Pete Jones and Mike Cerrone. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:53

This Netflix thriller further ensures that the days when “AI” stood for Allen Iverson are gone baby gone.

Judging from the trailer, this is one good looking space mission in crisis thriller.

But we’ll have to see.Lopez has so much makeup and…hair…in space.

A deaf child whose family is murdered is trained and interior-monologued into seeking his revenge on those who did it.

And the world in general.

This April 26 thriller-comedy is based on a short film and not a comic book (we all lose that bet) has some big names in the cast — Bill Skarsgard, Famke Jansen, Michelle “Downton” Dockery and Jessica Rothe, but is notable for the voice of that deaf guy’s interior monologue, the dry comical stylings of H. Jon Benjamin, voice-actor of many an animated TV series, from the current “Bob’s Burgers” going all the way back to Comedy Central’s droll masterwork, “Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist.”

This looks nasty and funny.

Production designer Meghan C. Rogers cooks up a fine M.C. Escher nightmare world of doors, dead ends and perils folding in on themselves for the drawn-out finale of “Imaginary,” another variation on the sinister side of having a childhood “imaginary friend.”

Unfortunately, most everything that precedes that overlong, climax-to-anti-climax and onward ending is just as “drawn out.” This Jeff Wadlow (“Truth or Dare,””Fantasy Island”) thriller grabs a simple concept and overthinks it into a dumb and rather dull 90 minutes surrounding maybe a dozen minutes of delivering chills.

But mixed in with all the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo of “explaining” what might be going on — much of it coming out of the mouth of Broadway legend Betty Buckley — at least we learn a new word. “Parocosm,” that’s what the broader idea of imaginary worlds, often created in childhood, is called.

DeWanda Wise of “The Harder They Fall” and “Jurassic World Dominion” stars as Jessica, a children’s book author and illustrator happy to escape the nightmares of a city apartment and move, with her new musician husband (Tom Payne) and his teen (Taegen Burns) and pre-school (Pyper Braun) daughters back to the house she grew up in somewhere in Louisiana.

Her books are about Molly the Millepede and her struggles with Simon the Spider, mild-mannered scary material aimed at the very young. Might they somehow tie into her past and that prologue that saw a Black family struggling with something demonic hidden behind a crawl-space door?

When little Alice, “Ally” (Braun) finds Chauncey, an old Teddy bear tucked away in Jessica’s old house, we start to get our answers.

Chauncey talks to her, or rather we hear her voice his side of conversations that involve games, tea parties and a scavenger hunt.

Jess overhears this chatter and is charmed and amused by it. Some of it even inspires her next story about that millipede, a real help to an illustrator with a deadline. And it’s a welcome break from the drama of the rebellious teen whose criticism of her various “step-mom” moves is not a help.

Ally, we’ve noticed, has a scar. Her birth mommy is “sick,” which must have ended the marriage. Jess has a scar, too.

And the violence of both their pasts informs what is to come as whatever Chauncey is, childhood “friend” doesn’t seem the best description.

The performances are mostly competently indifferent, although young Miss Braun packs a punch as a mouthy child who isn’t shy about asserting herself to an imaginary friend who seems bent on causing her harm.

The narrative steps on familiar touchstones of the genre — “irresponsible” fifteen year-old not taking care of her sister because there’s a cute teen boy next door, Chauncey “testing” Ally and making Jess anxious, the tuned-out husband who has to go “back on the road,” and the “chatterbox” neighbor (Buckley) who seems to know all about Jess’s past and what might be going on with Ally.

“People don’t believe in otherworldly things, until they have to.”

None of it’s handled with much pace, humor, suspense or style until our third act journey into the NeverEver. And even that, derivative as it is, misses the mark in terms of real frights.

“Explaining” is almost always over-explaining in horror, because the best jolts come from the shock of the unknown and unknowable. The “Imaginary” is always lot spookier than the “explained.”

Rating: PG-13, violence, suggestions of teen drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: DeWanda Wise, Pyper Braun, Taegen Burns, Tom Payne and Betty Buckley.

Credits: Directed by Jeff Wadlow, scripted by Greg Erb, Jason Oremland and Jeff Wadlow, A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:44

No Mark Wahlberg doesn’t have the title role. He’s all but doomed to be upstaged. By a dog.

But he’s being a good sport about it. So here goes.

(Updated, here’s my review.)

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, the work of creative people is often overwhelmed by the pathos or drama of their personal stories. That’s long seemed the case with the great Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

Notorious for her iconic, attention-grabbing “look,” her marriage to muralist Diego Rivera, her outspokenness, her communist politics and the tragedy of her personal story — grievous back injuries due to a bus and trolley collision in her teens, a miscarriage and unfaithful husband — her death at 47 seemed to freeze her artistic reputation in the shadow of her personal one.

But the artist and the woman are grandly illuminated in the new documentary, “Frida.” Using her reams of letters and frank, colorfully-illustrated and colorfully-profane personal diaries, filmmaker
Carla Gutierrez (she edited the Ginsberg doc “RBG”) lets us see the woman behind the icon.

And animators Sofia Ines Cazares and Renata Galinda breathe life into the decades of self-portraits, sketches and increasingly surreal doodles that comprised Kahlo’s artistic legacy, showcasing the genius often lost in the bushy eyebrows, traditional Mexicans fashions and the near mustache Kahlo defiantly wore and depicted in her art.

“I paint myself because I’m what I know best,” she wrote, her words read aloud (in Spanish with English subtitles) by actress Fernanda Echevarria del Rivero. She could “express my emotions” as she depicted her current physical and mental state on canvas.

The child of a devout Catholic mother and Mexico city photographer father, young Frida relates how she saw colors and the distinct shapes of her world from an early age.

Green was “good warm light.” Magenta represented “Axtec” images. “Mexican red” is “the color of old blood of the prickly pear” cactus, brown “the color of mole’…earth,” and yellow of “sun and happiness.”

How she saw her world is reinforced with snippets of newsreel footage from the Mexico of her childhood, the early teens of the 20th century, with selectively-colorized shawls, scarves and sombreros.

We hear from school classmates and her first boyfriend that she was “a little strange,” wearing men’s clothes, fond of profanity and blunt in her sexual appetite.

She and that first boyfriend graphically describe the accident that injured her and circumscribed her future life.

“I now inhabit a world of pain” she wrote, still in her teens. But that’s when she took up painting, something her father had dabbled in, more seriously. Laid up, with a contraption of her mother’s design over her bed, she painted herself and her mental state almost from the start.

At 18, recovering, the petite, aspiring artist Kahlo brazenly marched up to revolutionary muralist Diego Rivera, high on a scaffolding at work, and barked “Diego! Get down!” The towering, rotund Rivera — voiced by Jorge Richards — was struck by this fiery little woman with the brass to call him a “womanizer” as she made plain she wasn’t there “to flirt.”

He sized up her art, told her to keep painting, and as she did, a love affair started. They married and Kahlo was swept up into the whirlwind of the most celebrated Mexican artist in the world, traveling to New York and Detroit as he earned fat commissions from rich “idiots” (her words) and she painted, assisted with his murals and absorbed some of his style.

Her look won her attention rich society matrons “who get excited over the dumbest things.” But that fashion sense drew newspaper attention for her art.

She started to come into her own as an artist only after their divorce and her turn towards surrealism.

But in and out of marriage, her affairs are documented — a dalliance with the Soviet expat Trotsky, the French surrealist poet Breton, and others — as are Rivera’s. And the lifelong struggle with pain, so vividly depicted in her art, she relates from her letters and diaries.

One aesthetic blunder in “Frida” is worth noting. The war over movie subtitle colors was fought decades ago, but here the filmmakers avoid yellow subtitles — much more visible against white and all other light colors — for basic white subtitles, which washes out against many backdrops of Kahlo’s life and work. Brush up on your Spanish as the titles are almost lost in many scenes.

But “Frida” is still a beautiful film, both an appreciation of and an eye-opening humanization of its subject. Seeing the art animated with movement can seem redundant, but it is applied to delightful effect here.

The documentary does the best job of any film of rescuing the painter from the iconic, tragic artist who created the work by getting beyond the hair, the fashion sense and the eyebrow-lidded stare that one can’t help of think of when one hears the name Frida Kahlo.

Rating: R, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: The voices of Fernanda Echevarria del Rivero, Jorge Richards and others

Credits: Directed by Carla Gutierrez, with animations by Sofia Ines Cazares and Renata Galinda. An MGM film on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:27