Movie Nation

History barely remembers they were at Woodstock, as they were left out of the film due to contract issues. Their Grammy glory came the year before that awards show was recorded on videotape.

They played Vegas, the epitome of “selling out,” in their day. But there might have been a moment or two when Blood, Sweat & Tears was considered “cool.” They were founded by legendary musician, songwriter and session man Al Kooper, after all.

They were, at their peak (they’re still around) a nine-piece pop band with horns. Their sound was “ubiquitous” during a brief flash of time, between 1969-71. They’re remembered as part of a post-Janis Joplin/Joe Cocker Big Band rock era that included Chicago and The Electric Flag.

The Fifth Dimension and Three Dog Night were perhaps their closest analogs. BS&T was a singer-fronted “show band” whose original hits like “Spinning Wheel” were far outnumbered by jazzed-up covers of songs by the likes of Laura Nyro (“And When I Die”), Brenda Holloway and Berry Gordy (“You Make Me So Very Happy”) and The Beatles (“Got to Get You Into My Life”).

“What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears” is a documentary about a tipping point moment for the ensemble, when they took on a three nation State Dept.-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe at the height of the Vietnam War. They were the first pop band to play the role of “musical ambassadors” behind the Iron Curtain, something Louis Armstrong and jazz and classical music figures pioneered in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Selling out” to work for a government during a wildly unpopular war, they were condemned by the counter-culture, the underground press and eventually the mainstream press and their fanbase just as musical tastes moved on to glam, heavy metal, punk and disco.

But in their telling, they were “blackmailed” into committing career “suicide” by the Nixon Administration, which sought propaganda value — at home and abroad — from this “youth” group playing in Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland.

Writer-director John Scheinfeld, a veteran of historical music docs, is most famous for his “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” expose of government persecution of the most radical Beatle. He and his researchers have some receipts backing up that assertion in this film, memos from Henry Kissinger to Nixon, archived Romanian police state surveillance files and the like.

The story goes that singer David Clayton-Thomas, as distinct to their sound as their horns, had a police record in his native Canada and a fresh charge of threatening an ex-girlfriend with a gun (“Dropped,” he says). He faced deportation from the lucrative American market, or at the very least having his work visa yanked.

What makes that assertion credible is the Guess Who song “American Woman,” a tune whipped-up by that Canadian band when they were threatened with draft notices or deportation for overstaying their visas in the US during the Vietnam War.

But “blackmailed” into doing a three country State Dept. tour seems a stretch. What’s described here is a shady bit of “quid pro quo,” an ex-con manager “made a deal,” they got to continue touring and recording with their Canadian lead singer, IF they did this “favor” for the State Dept.

They’d come back, play Vegas and get labeled “uncool” and “sell-outs” and even picketed by Abbie Hoffman and others. That was the price of this “do us a favor we’ll do you a favor” “deal.”

BS&T brought a film crew along to capture their shows for a planned concert film, subject to State Dept. approval and dependent on whatever strictures the various governments in the countries where they were playing could think up. It never saw the light of day.

The film Scheinfeld got out of all of this political dealing, “James Bond” skullduggery and “Rocky and Bullwinkle/Peter Sellers” Cold War comedy is an account of a forgotten tour with moments of triumph, a near riot in Bucharest thanks to government goons and police dogs brought in to ensure that no one had too good of a time, and a night when BS&T bombed and were all but booed offstage in Zagreb.

So it’s a little bit “U.S. vs John Lennon,” and a hint of “Festival Express,” a doc about an infamous and ill-fated all-star Canadian rail tour on the heels of Woodstock.

Many band members remember the chilling moments mixed with thrills, being called-out for encore after encore, standing up to Romanian “decrees,” and seeing the consequences — kids arrested and beaten thanks to their concert.

A scholar from the Nixon presidential library provides Cold War context, actual concertgoers from Romania and Poland revel in the memories of this ground-breaking tour, and the band marvel at their reception — good and bad — in a part of the world where this sort of “rhythm” simply was not allowed.

Record label impresario Clive Davis provides musical judgement about what this interruption in their meteoric rise might have meant to their legacy and longevity.

And Rolling Stone writer David Felton shows up to read his snarky 1970 take on their return, a story headlined “BS&T Turns Backs on Commies,” and apologize for that and the blood-in-the-water rejection of a band which merely told people what they witnessed in the secretive Eastern Bloc — poverty and pitiless repression, not a popular stance with the West’s counter-culture of the day.

Critic David Wild might be closest to the mark in answering the “What the Hell Happened” question in describing their sound as making them a band “of their moment,” with less shelf life than the contemporaries who hewed to a guitar-quartet formula that evolved and endures as “classic rock.”

The film’s political focus seems a tad narrow, but the evidence that this tour — however it came to be — did them no favors and didn’t do Nixon any more service than his association with “Up With People” is convincing.

And hearing all the efforts filmmaker Donn Cambern and his traveling film crew went to in order to prevent Romanian destruction of their startling and historically-valuable footage makes one wish it could be recovered. What the State Dept. did to it stripped out that value and so muted the result that it’s just as well their edit never saw the light of day.

But if those 65 hours of concert, backstage and in-audience footage is around — just judging from the audio tape recordings of upset and irate band members backstage, outraged at Romanian police treatment of their audience — a fascinating and colorful piece of history has been lost and a generation far-removed from that era has been cheated of an eye-opening musical depiction of the Cold War at its ugly peak.

Rating: unrated

Cast: David Clayton-Thomas, Steve Katz, Fred Lipsius, Bobby Colomby, Tina Cunningham, Donn Cambern, David Wild, Jim Fielder, Tom Naftali, David Felton and Clive Davis

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Scheinfeld. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:52

A “Zodiac” true story serial killer thriller earns a “She Said” styled treatment in “Boston Strangler,” a newspaper procedural about the dogged reporting that turned up clues and held an inept police department’s feet to the fire in an infamous case in the 1960s.

Well-cast, properly gloomy, with a serious bone to pick about Beantown’s “good ol’boys at the bar” sexism and chummy mediocrity, it’s a step-up for writer-director Matt Ruskin, whose “Crown Heights” had similar “attack the system” ambitions but fell short of the mark.

In the early ’60s, somebody is talking their way into homes, townhouses and apartments and strangling women with their panty hose. He’s leaving the hose tied “in a bow” as “a gift” for the cops.

“Did it look decorative?” asks Boston Record-American reporter Loretta McLaughlin, given a poker-faced flintiness by Keira Knightley. She’s a features reporter condemned to “women’s” society profiles and reviewing new toasters, but wants a job on the police beat.

Chris Cooper plays the crusty editor who won’t consider it, even when she shows up at his desk with clippings from her paper and a nearby town’s suggesting there’s a “phantom” strangler out there preying on women.

“Let me profile the victims,” she offers, “on my own time.”

She’s the one who hears about the panty hose bows, who makes the connection and confirms, to the outrage of reporters, editors and the police commissioner (Bill Camp), that there’s a serial killer preying on older women.

When the story blows up, brassy, seasoned pro Jean Cole (Carrie Coon of “Widows,” “The Post” and TV’s “Sin”) is partnered with her to report and write the stories that would define that now-closed newspaper in history as the one that owned the biggest local story of the day, the one that labeled the murderer “The Boston Strangler.”

Cole and McLaughlin run into sexism in the office and from the cops, resentful that two “skirts” are making them look bad.

Alessandro Nivola plays one detective who will swap info with McLaughlin as the story evolves from a manhunt to an expose about a police department and a city “that can’t protect its women.”

This “Strangler” isn’t “Zodiac.” It’s chilling and unsettling, but never terrifying in the relentless manner of David Fincher’s gripping masterpiece. And it’s considerably less cut-and-dried than the lurid 1968 thriller “The Boston Strangler” starring Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis’s dad as the killer. As newspaper sagas go, “Strangler” feels closer to the quixotic “We may never get the full story” tale told by “Kill the Messenger.”

Ruskin takes care to let us hear a first murder through apartment walls, another taking place in another room after the killer has talked his way in the door as a plumber/painter or whatever. We only see one of the gruesome crimes committed, in the flesh, one third of the way in.

The dimly-lit bars capture the city’s drinking scene. Ask if a cop’s on duty, and if he isn’t, ask “Where’s he drink?” The police commissioner comes into the editor’s office and is promptly handed a libation to lubricate his tirade at these “skirts” casting doubt on his uniforms and detectives.

The story is simplified in ways that rob another newspaper of the “scoop” that first alerted the city to the serial killer risk of a “mad strangler” loose in their streets. The Boston Sunday Herald broke that story. But as with “She Said,” the shoe leather reporting, threatening phone calls and genuine peril at the idea that one of these women will be alone with someone who might be a dangerous criminal feels authentic.

We’re given suspects, and if you’ve lost track of the state of the case in the decades that have passed since it was “solved,” with DNA evidence altering its conclusions, you will be as surprised as I was by the third act, which isn’t so much an epilogue as a “wait just a minute, here.”

The main achievements of this “Strangler” are to show improvement in Ruskin’s screen storytelling skills and to open the door to further dives — in documentary or re-enacted series form — into a case that transfixed the nation, became a movie and introduced the name of F. Lee Bailey into legal infamy, decades before the O.J. case tossed the last shovelfuls of dirt on his reputation.

Rating: R for some violent content and language.

Cast: Keira Knightley, Carrie Coon, Alessandro Nivola, David Dastmalchian, Bill Camp and Chris Cooper

Credits: Scripted and directed by Matt Ruskin. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:52

“The Tutor” is an engaging, well-acted and suspenseful thriller that stumbles through a string of plot holes on its way to a predictably unsatisfying ending.

It toys with class, privilege and the injustices of crime and punishment and only seems remotely plausible thanks to the big twist in the finale. It never makes as much sense as it might, but it does get us going as the outrages pile up and debts demand to be paid by the finale.

Garrett Hedlund has the title role. Ethan is a scruffy, bespectacled tutor working through a New York service that caters to the scions of the well-to-do. An opening montage shows him at work, flashing flash cards, asking questions and trying to hold the attention of his distracted, bratty entitled pupils.

The sketchy, strip-club-loving boss of this operation (Joseph Castillo-Midyett) rings him up with a dream gig. Someone has requested his services. He’ll have to stay at their Long Island mansion (actually in Birmingham, Alabama) for a week “trying out” for the family. But the rate is $2500 a day.

As he and girlfriend Annie (Victoria Justice) have a baby on the way, let’s get to work.

Teenaged Jackson, played by Noah Schnapp of “Stranger Things,” seems smart enough. He has no problem with the evaluation tests. But pale, with slicked-back hair and an off-putting intensity, Jackson gives off serious “American Psycho” vibes.

When he lets slip that he knows Annie is pregnant, alarm bells tinkle. When he throws money around to see if Ethan can be “bought” into blowing off a day’s lessons, those bells should ring louder. The creepy “cousin” and other entitled and 20ish teen hangers-on on the property — with only a butler and a chauffeur as “adults” — all but seal Ethan’s fate.

But what kind of game is this pasty-faced creep planning?

Hedlund serves up mis-directed educational achievement with a hint of corruption as Ethan, a guy who been around and should see red flags in the attempts to hook him up with some compliant young woman, even if he isn’t hearing those alarm bells.

Justice’s character is entirely too credulous, a woman in a five-year relationship with the father of her baby more than willing to judge him, believe the worst that this stranger Jackson says about him, and all based on the red flags she should have seen in him all along, if what Jackson is saying is true.

Lines are crossed and intrigues added, and then things spiral towards an inevitable denouement.

Director Jordan Ross (“Thumper”) upsets expectations somewhat with the casting. But not enough to make this make sense or play as smoothly as you’d hope.

By the closing credits, we’re all tutored-up with no place to vent.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Victoria Justice and Noah Schnapp.

Credits: Directed by Jordan Ross, scripted by Ryan King. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:32

One of the advantages to streaming services is that they afford you the chance to repeatedly rewind, to help you catch a plot twist you may have missed or unravel a conclusion that seems muddled.

Which is exactly what I did rather than simply scratch my head and mutter, “Say what now?” at the end of the quiet, slow-burn Belgian thriller “Noise.” Not that rewatching portions of it helped.

It begins with a woman walking into a lake to commit suicide, cuts to decades later, when her son tries to reveal a cover-up in an industrial accident that involved his father, all while living his “influencer” life with his beautiful girlfriend and their new baby on the family estate he stands to inherit.

We’re no clearer what it’s been about at the end than we are at the beginning.

Matthias (Ward Kerremans) becomes increasingly obsessed with “noise.” Only not really. He’s got control issues with girlfriend Liv’s efforts to run a catering business in the small town where he grew up and self-esteem/self-worth problems stemming from his contributes-nothing-to-society job, guilt over that long-ago chemical accident at the family factory and a father (Johan Leysen) who has checked into a rest home with dementia.

Throw in his mother’s problems — known and unknown — and you can start to understand why he’s wound up tight, anxious to check out his father’s rambling “kept it out of the papers” cover-up of a deadly accident, hallucinating the bricks of their basement floor rising and falling, and if some presence is breathing under there, buried alive.

Well, “understand” may be stretching things a bit. Hitchcock was famous for attempting psychological explanations for character behavior in films such as “Spellbound,” “Psycho,” “Rope,” “Marnie” and “Frenzy.” Given the limitations of the field at the time he was making these films, that has made these age poorly, at least in those regards.

Director and co-writer Steffen Geypens (“Logger”) struggles to do that in the third act of “Noise.” But those efforts are diffuse and a tad incoherent. The cause and effect is sloppy and the “Noise” of the title is painfully undeveloped as a subtext.

Matthias is going mad because of “noise” we don’t hear or notice? Is that related to what he didn’t hear when his mother killed herself?

And how does that fold into his increasing resentment of Liv, her work and that noisy baby they have together? Is he unplugging the big freezer where she stores her ingredients for catering to sabotage her business, or because it is making “noise?” I’d say the former, but Geypens doesn’t make that clear.

A lot of the issues stem from the film’s short running time and flat storytelling and pacing. He doesn’t have the screen time to develop these ideas, and doesn’t move things along quickly enough to give the film any urgency.

And when he reaches his seriously clumsy conclusion, re-watching the third act doesn’t help.

Rating: TV-MA, suicide, violence

Cast: Ward Kerremans, Sallie Harmsen, Johan Leysen and Jesse Mensah

Credits: Directed by Steffen Geypens, scripted by Steffen Geypens, Robin Kerremans and Hasse Steenssens A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

“Still Time,” or “Era ora,” is a light Italian rom-com about life and a marriage passing you by so abruptly you finally notice it.

The gimmick here — a workaholic newlywed (Edoardo Leo) wakes up the day after his birthday and finds that another whole year has passed, jumping forward a year at a time through a pregnancy, a birth and a marriage that slips away — is so derivative as to give the viewer a sharp case of deja vu.

“Where’ve I seen THIS before?”

But once you get past the glib premise and the fact that it kicks in before we really have time to invest in these characters, Dante and his bride Alice (Barbara Ronchi), it starts to hit you in ways you never expect as Dante tries to intervene, interrupt the inevitability of time and save this marriage he’s checking out of without even realizing it.

The “meet cute” is simple but telling. Dante is so distracted at a New Year’s Eve party that he has to rush in, grab his girlfriend and kiss her as the clock strikes midnight.

Only it’s not “my fiance,” who is wearing the same dress, whom he kisses. It’s Alice, a bit startled and a little wise as she advises him to “drop it” and find Ms. Same Dress in a hurry. He ignores that suggestion just long enough to get his first slap of the new year — by his brand new “ex.”

Cut to his 40th birthday, with Alice dressing up like a ’60s pixie and singing along to “It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want To” as he scrambles to get up, eat a not-hastily-enough made pancake and get to work.

She makes a big deal out of the day, throwing a surprise party that he is absurdly late for because his insurance job is that demanding, ending the evening with a little “Lord of the Rings” sexual cosplay by the elvish Alice.

Somebody treats you this special, it’s got to be true love, right?

But he awakens the next day to find Alice very pregnant, and as days pass, he awakens to a crying baby and a more and more remote Alice. Sometimes “the change” hits mid-day. He tosses a ball to a puppy he never wanted to get little Galadriel, and a grown dog romps back into the scene.

“Sorry, since when do I smoke?” (in dubbed English or Italian with subtitles).

His bestie Valerio (Mario Sgueglia) hears what he tells him is happening, but blows it off. To Alice, his complaint about time passing is his new “birthday thing,” something he brings up every year, after neglecting her and their home life (she’s an illustrator) another 365 days. A doctor tells him it’s “just stress.”

The early scenes rarely rise to the level of “cute,” with barely a laugh in the first hour of “Still Time.” But as Dante finds himself promoted at work, sleeping with a colleague because his marriage is “on a break,” he finally accepts what’s happening as real and wrong and scrambles to take steps to stop the slow-motion trainwreck that is destroying his marriage.

The problem-solving in the script isn’t particularly impressive, considering what Dante is trying to accomplish and the number of people he’s neglecting and the behavior he is powerless to change in the 365 days he’s not able to follow through on his changes in behavior.

But the performances are affecting even if the message seems a tad trite, and not exactly on-brand, considering Italy’s cultural reputation for family, “la dolce vita” and all that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and can a marriage really be saved in one?

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, smoking

Cast: Edoardo Leo, Barbara Ronchi and Mario Sgueglia

Credits: Directed by Alessandro Aronadio, scripted by Renata Sanio. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

“Full River Red” is the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s “hold my beer” movie moment.

A creator of epic-length period pieces, romantic or action sagas in the tradition of David Lean — “Raise the Red Lantern,” “Hero,” and “House of Flying Daggers” — and a big slice of Hollywood period piece cheese (“The Great Wall”), he’s taken to heart the “epic” label slapped on latter Tarantino tales and Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” comic mystery thrillers.

His “answer” to those films is a two hour and forty minute 12th century double and triple cross tale, bloody-minded political intrigues lampooned in a sort of “Daggers Out” thriller giving a back story to a famous jingoistic poem of the day, well-known in the People’s Republic to this very day — “Full River Red.”

Zhang’s film is patience-testing and dense — a series of schemes, assassinations, summary executions and intrigues surrounding a letter lost when a Jin Dynasty emissary is murdered the night before a big negotiation with the Song. It is excessive, stunningly-detailed from the first, with period-appropriate score and instrumentation decorating the opening scenes.

It is also — pretty much from the opening moments — laugh-out-loud funny. Characters wince and grimace and chuckle at the difficulties, dangers and deadly threats they suffer at each other’s hands. Bodies pile up as throats are slit and we’re reminded of just who invented “water boarding” torture as an interrogation method, and how long it’s been practiced.

But with “vinegar?” That’s seriously messed up.

The stakes rise and the deception — there may be traitors exposed by the contents of that missing letter — deepens. And the score shifts to amusingly anachronistic Chinese rockabilly, pop etc. used as “traveling music” as functionaries and soldiers quick-march or sprint from one end of a large, borderlands Song Dynasty complex to the other.

In the hours before dawn, that emissary’s body is found. A lot of guards had to be slacking off, or in on it, for that to happen. Deputy Commander Sun Jun (Jackson Yee) rounds them up, makes them draw straws and commences with the throat slashing.

A lowly corporal, Zhang Da (Shen Teng) scrambles to fake, cheat and talk his way out of the summary executions. Lucky for him he can lie-on-the-fly. Dragged in front of the tubercular prime minister (Lei Jiayin), he correctly guesses that this might have been over a missing message. He, of all people, is given “two hours” to investigate the treachery and find that letter.

Commander Sun is to keep an eye on his progress. Sadistic Lord He (Zhang Yi) and officious Lord Wu (Yue Yenpeng) are to keep an eye on Sun.

Everyone either knows more than they’re letting on, or less, including the dancer (Wang Jiayi) who entertained that ambassador and might have been the last to see him alive.

All Zhang Da needs to know is that he’s got two hours to figure this out, and figure out a way to survive uncovering what he finds out. Because everybody he deals with has a murderous agenda, even if a lot of them — Sun is his “uncle” — are related, have known him and are likewise known to him.

He keeps asking Lord Wu if “I can use your background.” The son of an imperial concubine, Wu’s connections to the emperor are less noble. He’s basically a titled “nepo baby.” And he’s touchy about that.

Slice-happy Sun keeps killing suspects and witnesses, something everybody openly suspects is merely a murderous means of covering his tracks.

“A wolf or a dog,” he philosophizes at one point (in Mandarin with English subtitles), “depends on what you feed it.”

But whodunnit? And where is that accursed letter?

It used to be common practice to try and read subtexts and non-communist-approved messaging into Zhang’s early films — “Red Sorghum,” “Ju Dou” and “Raise the Red Lantern.” But you don’t have the prolific career he’s had by not toeing the party line, or never crossing it.

Like such WWII films as “The Flowers of War” and “Cliff Walkers,” “Full River Red” plays as straight-up Chinese nationalism, building a tale around a patriotic poem about “revenge” against one’s enemies and re-taking “our land.”

But there are sly digs at heartless, faithless bureaucracy, arbitrary punishments and government by connections and personal decree.

My favorite scene here is basically a game of “rock paper scissors” involving Imperial warrants, seals, decrees and licenses, with everyone sure he is untouchable by the others because he possesses one of those, and all are comically-confused about what edict trumps which decree.

For all the complications, it’s pretty obvious that the sheer scale of the film is what accounts for its repetitive, talky and occasionally tedious running time. Hundreds of armor-plated extras, a large complex with assorted courtyards and barracks, messages being marched or run hither and yon, every double-cross uncovering a new alliance or allegiance, another twist in the plot.

But longtime fans of one of China’s greatest living filmmakers won’t want to miss this one. It isn’t every day that Zhang Yimou jokes around. You’ll want to be there for every bloody punchline.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Shen Teng, Jackson Yee, Zhang Yi, Lei Jiayin and Wang Jiayi

Credits: Directed by Zhang Yimou, scripted by Chen Yu and Zhang Yimou. An Edko release.

Running time: 2:39

He was the Alpha, the Founder, “the originator, the ARCHITECT” of ‘rock’n roll.” Just ask him.

“I’m an NOT conceited,” the flamboyant, brash and hilarious Little Richard Penniman said to almost every interviewer who ever basked in his presence. “I am CONVINCED.”

Animated, outspoken, wild-eyed and bawdy, a maniac onstage and a scandal waiting to happen off, Penniman bridged the gap between racy “race music” and the raucous, embryonic sound that invented the idea of “teenagers.”

Ripped-off by record labels, too often downplayed in many a “History of Rock” account in book or film, does he finally get his due in Lisa Cortes’ new documentary, “Little Richard: I Am Everything?” Yes he does.

A tidal wave of all-star testimonials endorse the many ways he impacted the culture. The film samples the many times Richard himself made his case as that “originator and ARCHITECT” of the music form that lasted long enough to earn its own lavish Hall of Fame.

But historians, social scholars, gay icons and others also paint a picture of a seriously-conflicted figure whose Christian fundamentalism reared up repeatedly over the years.

The mercurial Richard left music, not far from his peak fame, to enroll in college to pursue his original vocation, preaching.

“I’m going to the Lord,” he said.

He came out of the closet, but would repudiate his sexuality and his music off and on in his later decades. The gay community side-eyed him every time he did, but people like Billy Porter appear here to express an understanding of the conflict that raged within a gay Black man of his era.

The veteran producer (“Precious”) and documentary director (“The Remix: Hip Hop X Fashion” and “All In: The Fight for Democracy”) Cortes tracks a life that began in working poverty, one of twelve children of a washerwoman and preacher/juke joint owner and sometime bootlegger. Pretty much from birth, the boy was different.

“MY daddy said ‘I wanted SEVEN sons and you’re MESSING that up!'”

We see who influenced him as a performer, from Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Lloyd Price and Billy Wright, the chitlin’ circuit drag act performer whom Richard borrowed from most freely. And then we hear, from the horses’ mouths, the rockers who borrowed from Richard — David Bowie and those lads from Liverpool whom Richard dragged to Hamburg, Germany with him.

Paul McCartney watched his act, night after night, and emulated his “WOOOoooo” shrieks, and freely admits getting lessons on that. On tape, John Lennon remembers being “almost paralyzed with adoration” in his presence.

Richard launched a British tour with a show so over-the-top it started a riot. Even as fickle teen tastes changed, he did not and attracted adoring crowds to shows all through the ’60s.

Scores of TV interviews are sampled, capturing his smiling outrageousness in all its glory — self-adoring, comically snapping “Shut UP” at interviewers and studio audiences that might not be as quick to accept his “beauty” and his ego at face value.

We learn about his unlikely culture-shifting rise to fame from childhood neighbors and relatives, and his lasting influence from Nona Hendryx, Tom Jones, Nile Rodgers and even John Waters.

 “Little Richard’s mustache,” Baltimore enthusiast and gay filmmaker Waters gushes, “I wear TO THIS DAY in twisted tribute to him!”

In covering all the bases, the film’s energy can’t help but flag in the later acts. But Cortes has made an impressive music history that restores a “king” to his rightful place in rock royalty, one that acknowledges that everything outrageous about the music and the people who perform it, the stuff “your parents hated” about it, as Waters puts it, started with Little Richard Penniman.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Little Richard Penniman, Bo Didley, Nona Hendryx, Paul McCartney, Billy Porter, Tom Jones, Nile Rodgers and John Waters.

Credits: Directed by Lisa Cortes. A Magnolia/CNN Films release.

Running time: 1:38

Speaking directly to the camera, and perhaps to a support group, a counselor or a family member, Chama poetically muses are her situation and her need to “keep my s— together.”

She describes her dreams, her life, her family, and her struggles and ponders when “everything will fall apart” again. As together as she seems. As thoughtfully as she expresses her dreams, as beautiful as she is Chama can’t help but “wonder if you all hear me.”

“All the World is Sleeping” is a dreamy stroll around addiction, a film that makes much of the “seven women” whose stories inspired it, but which doesn’t actually get a handle on its subject and immerse us in this trap.

Built on a fine, empathetic performance by Melissa Barrera of “In the Heights” and the “Scream” franchise, it’s a movie of musings and close-ups, voice-over narrated memories of a troubled childhood, a family history of addiction, the loss of Chama’s ride-or-die friend, Toaster (Jackie Cruz, also superb) and her struggles to get her daughter back when “CPS” (Child Protective Services) intervenes, in New Mexico as it does every where else addicts are trying to raise children in between binges or fixes.

Chama is struggling, a single Latina mom whose man charmed her, impregnated her and left her, trying to find a job — she’s good with cars — and doting on her little girl (Adilynn Marie Menendez).

“I remember being her age,” Chama narrates of her daughter who is about nine. “It’s when I learned how to lie.”

We see just enough of her childhood to reckon with her quick-tempered alcoholic mother, and to wonder how sister Mari (Alexis B. Santiago) came out the other side a real adult, without addictions or an ill-planned pregnancy. Mari is in her life for the judgement.

Jorge Garcia plays the affable counselor at the halfway house where Chama winds up after her child’s birthday party pushes her over the edge.

We meet the usual collection of “types” who decorate such stories. Inspired by real people or not, these support group characters have become tropes in films like this — the regional Chili’s manager, who may be delusional, the fury with mother issues, the woman seven suicide attempts into “getting clean.”

The cast is quite good, and the locations — including a trip to the White Sands National Monument — ground the picture in a particular place and a corner of the culture.

Of course, as dreamlike as it is, “All the World is Sleeping” runs up against the same problems as Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar-nominated alcoholism drama, “To Leslie.” The ground is over-familiar. And as much as one wants to praise a performance and acknowledge the real life struggles with addiction that inspire such movies, finding something new, novel and powerful to say on the subject at this stage is damned near impossible.

This film is good, just not on a par with “Requiem for a Dream,” “Ben is Back,” “Smashed,” “Half Nelson,” and not even those jewels in the crown can touch “Leaving Las Vegas” for pathology and pathos.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Melissa Barrera, Jackie Cruz, Alexis B. Santiago, and Jorge Garcia

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ryan Lacen. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:50

“In His Shadow” is a simplistic gangland parable about two half-brothers — one blind, the other a “monster” — who grew up and live in the Murets high rise projects on the outskirts of Paris.

Short and relatively brisk, it’s built on the unhappy upbringing that enveloped two sons thanks to their bullying and selfish Dad’s determination to bring home a second wife from the Old Country, whichever French African/Islamic colony (not specified) they trace their roots to.

The Ivory Coast singer Kaaris gives a ferocious performance as Ibrahim, the kid whose mother (Tatiana Rojo) was wronged by his father (Issaka Sawadogo) and grew up angry and criminal, at least partly due to that.

Adama (Alasasane Diong) grew up the son of the younger wife (Mareme N’Diaye), trapped in a stable but unhappy home with his sister Aïssata (Assa Sylla) and two feuding mothers.

Ibrahim turned to crime. Adama, caught up in the older half-sibling’s drama, was blinded in an accident related to the unhappy upbringing.

“In His Shadow” drops in on these lives just as things come to a head between these two, now adults. Ibrahim’s got control to the Murets projects, and parks his blind brother in his own apartment, which he turns into his “stash.”

And what happens to gangsters’ stashes? Rivals take it.

Adama becomes another member of the family at odds with and trapped with this “monster” in their lives. Aïssata cannot have a boyfriend (Carl Malapa), the mothers neighbors and businessmen can get no peace. The police are outnumbered.

And then their father dies, something also linked to Ibrahim’s activities. Adama must take his father’s lifelong advice to heart if he’s going to free them from this situation.

“Embrace your weakness,” Dad counseled (in French, or dubbed into English). “Don’t fight it. Look to make it your strength.”

Everything but that “look” instruction seems practical for the blind son with heightened hearing and other senses compensating for his “weakness.”

“Simplistic” comes in via the movie’s contrivances and plot conveniences, with the weapons of revenge dropped into our hero’s lap, along with a remedy for his “weakness.”

The action beats are pro forma, as are the way stations of this plot.

But Kaaris makes for a hulking fearsome heavy, a brute who will beat his own kin down or even to death if he sees the need. He alone is not worth checking this film.

There are many superior recent French thrillers available, some of them on Netflix, and most of them set in this or that housing project, just like the one glanced-over here. Those are worth watching. “In His Shadow” isn’t worth your time.

Rating: TV-MA, animal harm, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Alassane Diong, Kaaris, Assa Sylla, Carl Malapa, Tatiana Rojo, Mareme N’Diaye and Issaka Sawadogo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marc Fouchard. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

Tying a video Russian-born video game’s sale to the West to the fall of the U.S.S.R. may be a bit of a reach. But “Tetris,” the thoroughly engrossing new film about that, lacks nothing for ambition.

But “Tetris” becomes an equal parts playful and suspenseful yarn in the hands of the director of “Filth” and “Stan & Ollie,” Jon S. Baird.

Computer programmers and commissars, Japanese hardware icons and a British media baron all take the stage in the story about the unlikely path the Gameboy-popular building-blocks game took from Russian inventor to Nintendo blockbuster.

Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, the Dutch-born, New York-raised, Tokyo-based game builder whose Bullet Proof Software gamble on a digital version of the Asian game “Go” is all but forgotten the moment he sees Tetris demonstrated at the booth next to his at the ’88 Vegas Consumer Electronics Show.

He wants rights, but most are already sold. Not in Japan, though, and that’s where he’s based. His pursuit of PC and arcade rights to Tetris and to get Nintendo to commit to “partnering” for it are how this journey down the rabbit hole begins.

There’s this Hungarian/British tech businessman Robert Stein (Toby Jones, in rare form) who hunts for games in the U.S.S.R., and who discovers one that has been shared by everybody who has a computer there. He’s got the rights to it, and with the backing of Soviet leader Gorbachev’s multi-media billionaire “friend,” Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam, vocally, temperamentally and prosthetically perfect), he figures the world is his oyster.

Japanese rights? Sure. Go ahead.

But Rogers’ mesmerizing sales pitch to Nintendo’s founder, Hiroshi Yamauchi (Togo Igawa), all about how “partners are what make us great,” because that’s “why Mario (Super Mario Brothers) has Luigi,” may all be for naught.

The Russians have little idea of what’s become of this game, what contracts have been signed, what’s valid and how to cope with these damned eager beaver Western and Far Eastern capitalists. The inventor of the game, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov)? He’s been cut out of the conversation altogether.

As it’s the very late ’80s, the U.S.S.R. is just entering its death spiral, with some officials dogmatically toeing the Communist Party all-for-the-state line and ready to drive a bargain, and others looking for bribes because the End if Nigh, why not fly there — illegally — and try to negotiate in-person with people who have spent decades making Westerners they don’t like disappear?

Egerton manages a fine American accent and even tosses Japanese in as we see what this all-or-nothing gamble is doing to his wife (Ayane), family and Tokyo home life. He’s perfectly cast as a born salesman with the pluck to risk hearing direct threats from assorted Russians and yet persist. Rogers is that desperate.

“I am not going home without a deal.”

The Soviet/Russian skullduggery sequences, with game-inventor Pajitnov straining to keep his head down lest he lose it, are menacing and maddening. Each concerned party is being played off against the rest by mistrustful Russians who are the least trustworthy of all.

Baird inserts digital block-ish Gameboy-styled graphics into random scenes — a building about to be visited, a car chase — to playful effect. The score has “bleeps” and “beeps” tucked into it in between Russian-language versions of the pop radio hits of the day — “Heart of Glass” among them.

The portrayal of the Maxwells — by Allan and Anthony Boyle as the prickly and insecure heir taking charge of this negotiation, Kevin Maxwell — are just delicious. We may know what’s coming, remembering the downfall of the Hungarian-born British media baron and just-as-right-wing rival to Rupert Murdoch. But we can savor it as his company’s digital game division scrambles to score a big win even as the cash has run out.

“Tetris” suffers somewhat from a complicated plot rendered in broad strokes and a story told kind of piecemeal. The opening act is Rogers explaining how Tetris is about to be the next big thing and how negotiations are going so far to a skeptical banker (Nicky Yune). That framing device falls by the wayside as trips are taken, deals are struck and then reneged on, seemingly by everyone but Rogers.

Screenwriter Noah Pink, who wrote the docu-drama series “Genius” for National Geographic, wrestles with a complex and convoluted story and manages to make the murk as clear as it probably can be made. It was always going to be hard to follow all this, and how it ties in to the Fall of Berlin Wall.

But the players, the stakes and the milieu make “Tetris” well worth your time, especially for anyone nostalgic for all the time we wasted on this simple yet elementally addicting game.

Rating: R, beatings, profanity

Cast: Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Ayane, Nicky Yune, Toby Jones, Olag Stefan, Toyo Nagawa, Anthony Boyle and Roger Allam

Credits: Directed by Jon S. Baird, scripted by Noah Pink. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:58