Movie Nation

Let’s begin with first principles. We are never going to get a “definitive” documentary that takes in everything, talks to everyone and tells us all we need or could possibly want to know about the inscrutable genius, Stanley Kubrick.

Consider just what’s available for a fan or fanatic’s perusal on Youtube at this writing. There’s “Lost Kubrick,” a pretty good “unfinished films” doc made for TV. A fan has pieced together all the film footage — including childhood home movies, much of it with sound — “All Video Footage of Stanley Kubrick.” Somebody else uploaded a “rare” hour long taped interview with him. There are collections of actors and directors talking about him, “behind the scenes” footage from any number of his films also archived there.

And that’s on top of the many other fine documentaries on him, about him, or deep diving into this or that movie, the most famous of which is “Room 237,” which gets at the obsession this most obsessive filmmaker feeds among his most devoted fans. Everybody in his life, it seems, has been in a film about him — family, colleagues, even his driver.

But here’s a new brick in the video wall of Kubrick scholarship. Gregory Monro’s “Kubrick by Kubrick” made the rounds of film festivals during the pandemic, and earns its official release Mar. 23. It’s built around one of the “rare” interviews Kubrick gave, this one to the French critic and longtime Kubrick enthusiast and expert Michel Ciment.

Is it the last word? Can’t be.

Is it even complete? The documentary was 13 minutes longer when it played festivals. Now, it lacks any mention at all of “The Killing,” “Killer’s Kiss” or “Lolita,” and only Sterling Hayden’s apologetic explanation of why Kubrick beat him down with 38 takes of one shot and few seconds of “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” turn up here. So something happened — rights or otherwise — between 2020 and now.

But it’s still a must-see for Kubrick fans, because here he is, exploring his themes of “evil” and “the duality of man” and “intelligence” and control — talking about his photography background, making his favorite Napoleon as a movie director analogies.

Little seen footage of Kubrick frolicking with his kids has him griping/joking about what Napoleon would think of “Lew Wasserman and David Picker” (moguls who put the brakes on Kubrick’s eventually-canceled “Napoleon” epic) controlling his fate.

He addresses one thing this film and all the other audio and footage of him talking punctures, his reputation as a “recluse.” There was even a John Malkovich movie about a guy who got away (sort of) with posing as Kubrick, “Color Me Kubrick,” remember.

“I just don’t particularly enjoy interviews,” Kubrick tells Ciment, who is interviewing him. He did lots of those through the 1960s and a few again in the ’80s, when “Full Metal Jacket” came out. He famously eschewed “explaining” or talking about his 13 finished films, but he does a bit of that here. If you take into account one infamous 1960s profile, which Kubrick agreed to when “2001: A Space Odyssey” came out, but which he demanded final approval of, you get a feel for what he didn’t come out and say to Ciment or anybody else.

The poor 1960s interviewer could only publish a single “approved” line from Kubrick, “I really prefer to let the films speak for themselves.” The journalist had to fill the page with a Jack Torrance (a decade before “The Shining,” mind you) sentence endlessly repeated. “I just spent three hours interviewing Stanley Kubrick. I just spent three hours interviewing Stanley Kubrick.”

What Stanley insisted on ALWAYS was “control.”

Ciment gets in a few pearls about Kubrick’s love of “the detective work” of research, which he’d dive into for years. His mania for “realism” in “2001” and most of his other films is legendary, and he goes into some depth explaining how he bought every book on 18th century European art in existence and cut pages out to get the costumes, colors and light of “Barry Lyndon” perfect.

But he cast “Love Story” star Ryan O’Neal as the lead for that film because “I couldn’t think of anybody else.”

He made “military consultant” R. Lee Ermey a star when he realized the man he was letting berate actors auditioning for roles in the film as an exercise was exactly the Drill Instructor as Profane Poet that “Full Metal Jacket” needed.

His mania for research, years of it wasted on “Napoleon” and “The Aryan Papers,” may have reached its zenith with “Full Metal Jacket,” a Vietnam War epic that takes Marines from basic training into combat, with Kubrick perusing through “100 hours” of documentary footage (TV, films movies like “The Anderson Platoon,” filmed in-country in the ’60s) to end up faking Parris Island and The Tet Offensive Battle of Hue in the U.K. because the Brooklyn-born Kubrick refused to film far away from his English home once he gained the clout to demand that.

No, a few palm trees and ruined “buildings from the same era” don’t look like Vietnam and Hue, no matter what he said. But who would correct him?

The title here is something of a misnomer. There’s a lot of archival TV coverage of Kubrick’s death, as well as video of vintage TV reviews and even roundtable discussions of his films, his life and his work, footage from France, the UK and even the U.S. That reinforces the reasons he is important, a still-revered creator of motion picture “events,” and just how thin the material the in-the-know Ciment actually gathered from this long sit-down.

Monro also artfully recreates the modernist bedroom with 18th century furniture from “2001,” and shows us slate/clapper images as he cuts to a homely 1960s cassette deck to reflect that medium the interview was done on.

There’s a nice sampling of film people who were ill-used by Kubrick, and almost to a one they decline to judge him or even analyze why he’d demand “45 takes” of his Steadicam operator on “The Shining,” or 38 takes of the great Sterling Hayden. Composer Leonard Rosenman is the only one here to at least label this as “insane” to the man’s face. But when Kubrick demanded “105 takes, when the second was perfect” in a piece of Rosenman’s period-instruments “Barry Lyndon” score, Rosenman stormed into the engineering booth to ream him out. Then again, he had a whole orchestra ready to back him up.

The famous footage of Shelly Duvall abused and berated on the set of “The Shining” isn’t here, nor is a more obscure clip I’ve seen recently, in which Kubrick blamed his many takes on “lazy” and “unprofessional” actors “not staying at home” the night before a scene “and learning their lines.”

That’s nonsense, of course. Kubrick beat his players down in an effort to get exactly what he wanted. There’s got to be a middle ground between the “one take,” no matter how far short of perfect it is Clint Eastwood approach, the “Jaws” conditioned “get the perfectly-framed shot” and move on Spielberg, who also brushes off actors’ desired retakes, and Kubrick’s on-the-spectrum OCD approach.

If you love movies, you can’t help but get into Ford and Hitchcock, Welles and Kubrick, artists and manipulative control freaks that the great ones — not just the men — often are. But I’ve been making laps around the Kubrick star for ages, and my view of him changes almost annually.

The first film book I bought was Alexander Walker’s “Stanley Kubrick Directs.” I saw “The Shining” in 70mm several times when it came out while I was in college. But by the time “Full Metal Jacket” rolled around, in grad school, I was cooling on him.

His beautiful but often stiff and always arch later films led me to believe he’s a filmmaker you can outgrow, like a love of heavy metal or a mania for the fiction of Ayn Rand.

But here I am, reviewing another documentary about him. Yes, it was pitched just days ago, when I was fresh off watching more youtube collections of the Wit and Wisdom of Stanley Kubrick and other analyses of his work. Kubrick is a film buff’s ultimate rabbit hole. Watch “Room 237” if you don’t think so.

We may never get that “last word” book or film on him, his obsessions, his art, his finished films and the “Napoleon” mini-series that Spielberg just renewed his pledge to make (he first promised that, according to a post on this very blog, ten years ago. That’s a measure of Kubrick’s hold on any film fan’s imagination.

I’ve interviewed several actors who’ve worked for him over the decades, but the favorite anecdote I collected is one I won’t repeat here, as I used it in my review of “S is for Stanley” some years back. But I will repeat his “Spartacus” player John Ireland’s punchline for what he witnessed, the extent Kubrick went to in order to get that perfect look from actors, reacting exactly how wanted them to for a single shot in that film, something which Ireland laid out to me back in the ’80s.

“THAT’S genius!”

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: The voice of Stanley Kubrick, Michel Ciment, with archival interviews with Malcolm McDowell, Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Marissa Bernenson, Leonard Rosenman and Sterling Hayden.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gregory Monro. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:01

The role that changed Hugh Bonneville’s life didn’t arrive in a “Eureka!” moment, and he doesn’t treat it that way in his charming memoir, “Playing Under the Piano.”

“Downton Abbey” made itself known to him as a make-conversation chat with his director, Julian Fellowes, on the set of an earlier movie they made called “From Time to Time.”

“You writing anything else at the moment?”

As recounted in the forward to “Playing Under the Piano,” Fellowes mentioned a few projects, and this “Gosford Park” “great house,” its owners and its staff saga he was about ready to pitch. He’d had great success scripting his first “Upstairs/Downstairs” melodrama, “Gosford,” for Robert Altman. And even though the genre was stale and dead at the time, Fellowes had a hunch. He did think Bonneville, one of a legion of British character actors appreciated by fans but not all that famous, was “too young to play a dad.”

Bonneville’s reply would change his life.

“I am a dad. Of three girls, marriageable age.”

“Downton” drifts through “Playing Under the Piano,” summoned up here and there to make a point about why one avoids eating what’s served to you in a scene (many takes, from different many angles, they have to match in continuity, making a LOT of brownies disappear from “Notting Hill”) or how you never know if what you’re doing is going to click with the public, much less become a global phenomenon.

And Bonneville lets the dressing-for-dinner soap opera bookend his book with a lovely remembrance of Maggie Smith’s last scene, the last day of shooting the last film and even the New York press junket, savoring something that he never actually comes out and says “changed my life.”

It’s a brisk, florid biography in the standard actor’s life mold — “Hugh Boo Boo” childhood, memories of literally playing under a piano, first crushes, first roles, first time he figures out his character actor’s “stocky” niche, first time he is so “in the moment” that he makes something spontaneous and fun happen onstage during the run of a play.

The picture that emerges is of an affable chap who recognizes his privilege — son of a doctor who doted on him, whom he doted on in turn, prep schools, etc. — and the career he’s made out of that.

The anecdotes aren’t sizzlers, as he’s not retired and his former and possibly future colleagues aren’t dead and still in the position of possibly hiring him again. Well, he takes one good shot at director Mike Newell. And everybody knows Christoph Waltz is a “wanker.”

But there’s no “dishing” about Elizabeth McGovern or the Divas of “Downton” — just a note on Smith’s “reputation” — a warm note on Judi Dench‘s acting generosity and a lighthearted look at Julia Roberts, offhandedly throwing her Big Star weight around during “Notting Hill” to the betterment of the film and the benefit of her much lower-billed co-stars (ensuring Bonneville and others were flown to the NYC premiere), gratitude to Kenneth Branagh for hiring the Laertes in his stage “Hamlet” (Hugh) for a bit part in his “Frankenstein,” memories of films like “Iris” (he played the Jim Broadbent character as a young man, naturally) and “Burke and Hare.”

And the childhood recollections are occasionally amusing, but conventionally upper middle class, a long list of the semi-obscure corners of England where he grew up, schooled and summered.

The pursuit of an acting career, after entertaining thoughts of the law and the pulpit at Cambridge, makes for a fun account — meeting Olivier at a dinner party his parents dragged him to, failing to get his foot in any door, shortening his “Hugh Richard Bonniwell Williams” name to something even more posh. He tells cute, self effacing near disaster stories about auditions and recreates a National Youth Theatre/ National Theatre/RSC and Stratford world that he learned his craft and came of age in.

I tracked him down for a chat when the first “Paddington” bear picture came out, and found him much more “Notting” and less Lord Grantham, a fellow who recognizes the good fortune that moved him from lower billings to leads, the generosity of his “Downton” benefactor Fellowes when the chance came his way to join a George Clooney project (“Monuments Men”).

As for the career, movies like the recent thriller “I Came By,” which had him at his most villainous, suggest he has a few surprises in him.

On the whole, he comes off as you’d hope, disarming and not terribly self-serious, sentimental and enthusiastic about the work, if more laid back “British” about it than your average American “Actor’s Studio” alum or emulator.

“Playing Under the Piano: From Downton to Darkest Peru.” By Hugh Bonneville. Other Press. 372 pages, with index. $28.99.

A good rule of thumb for horror cinema is that your movie can get away with being obvious, or it is allowed to be slow to unfold. But it can’t be both and work.

That’s the curse of “The Womb,” an occasionally tense but generally tedious horrors-of-giving-birth tale from Indonesia.

“Obvious” comes from its opening tease, a wizened shaman (Pritt Timothy) is being interviewed about a particularly unlucky day — by tradition — to give birth. He describes the remedy in vague terms, a “ritual” designed to “cut off…the misfortunes the baby comes with” (in Indonesian, with English subtitles).

That’s what the movie is about, a pregnancy facing a dangerous “Wekasan Wednesday” birth, and just what that “cut off” ritual involves.

But before anything like that can enter the picture, we need over a half hour of the story of unhappy Wulan (Naysila Mirdad), pregnant with a fair weather beau who tells her to “get rid of it.”

She lives in a tenement, and is late on the rent because sonograms aren’t covered by national health insurance. The landlord, overly fond of the sex worker living across the alley from her, doesn’t want to hear about it. Asking her boss at the big box home improvement store for an advance just earns her an unwelcome advance of a sexual nature.

So that’s three “problem” men in her life, not even taking into account her flashbacks to her unhappy childhood, where Dad and Mom fought constantly.

After taking suggestions from a friend and co-worker, consulting a pushy male operator on an unwanted pregnancy hotline, she stumbles across an older couple. Eva and Agus (Lydia Kandau, Rukman Rosadi) are desperate to adopt.

Next thing we know, she’s on her way to their big, remote country house, offered all sorts of health tips, “special” food and body oils by Eva and a sympathetic ear by Agus. It’s all good until the vivid nightmares start, triggering her growing suspicions about the place and these two, the midwife they consult and the shaman (Timothy again) they bring in. It’s enough to completely freak her out in her heightened, hormonal state.

And Wulan isn’t seeing all the stuff that director Fajar Nugros is showing us — the rat trapped in a cage in the garden shed metaphorically cut into the scene where Eva shows Wulan her room, what happens to rats when Agus is around.

“The Womb” takes its sweet time to get going, and drags out the assorted incidents that raise Wulan’s suspicions to the point where, whatever alarmed look Mirdad occasionally shows us, there’s no momentum for building a sense of rising paranoia.

Nothing really gets going until the third act, which is as good a time as any for the viewer to remember the “obvious” tease in the opening.

Remember, this is a Muslim country, and considering that, the movie’s very subject matter and treatment of sex is pretty racy and risky.

It’s a good looking film, with simple but effective effects and jolts of violence here and there. But it’s a bit obvious and entirely too slow in getting around to reminding us of that.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, smoking, profanity

Cast: Naysila Mirdad, Lydia Kandau, Rukman Rosadi, Dimas Anggara and Pritt Timothy

Credits: Directed by Fajar Nugros, scripted by Deo Mahameru. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

There were a couple of instances during his storied career as director, producer and “brand” that Roger Corman might have moved beyond B-movies and taken his shot at being an A-picture filmmaker. “The Secret Invasion,” a 1964 WWII combat picture, was always planned as a B-movie. But with a “name” cast and United Artists distribution, it settled in that grey area between major studio productions and Corman’s “action cinema on the cheap” ethos.

It’s a post-“Guns of Navarone” pre “Dirty Dozen” convicts-as-commandos thriller built around just-past-his-peak Stewart Granger, Mickey Rooney settling into supporting roles, Henry Silva on his way to iconic villainy, Italian star Raf Vallone just starting his long association with Hollywood and rapidly-fading TV “fad” Edd Byrnes.

Set in occupied Yugoslavia, inspired by a magazine article on Dubrovnik, Croatia that Corman read at the dentist’s office (Where else?), it is, hands down, the most scenic film Corman ever made.

Twenty years after the end of World War II and little had changed in Tito’s Yugoslavia. The Croatian War of Independence was decades in the future. Little had marred Dobrovnik’s old city and its citadel. Condos didn’t cover its rocky seaside hills and their tumbledown stone walls and stone houses.

The story was straight-up WWII pulp fiction. Convicts from Britain, the U.S. and the Mediterranean are assembled in 1943 Cairo for a mission to distract the Germans from the coming Allied assault on Italy. They’ll stir things up by convincing an Italian general who hates the Germans to lead his troops into an uprising with Yugoslav partisans.

Things get all Rogered up (i.e. “silly”) straight away, as this squad of experts called in by the Major (Granger) are a coldblooded assassin (Silva), an Italian thief and contraband smuggler (Vallone), an IRA demolitions man (Rooney, aye. Rooney.), a forger (Byrnes) and a master impersonator (William Campbell, probably best remembered for his TV spots on “Star Trek,” etc.).

Not a lot of commandoes, and overall a pretty goofy skill-set to fake-start a “new front” in the Balkans.

There are a couple of twists that still work and the combat sequences, which grow in scope as the Yugoslav Army is dressed up as scores of Germans and Italians, aren’t terrible.

The screenplay sets up the players as “types” and serves up a meaty line or two. One character doesn’t like the smell of digging from a tomb into the fortress where their Italian general/quarry has been imprisoned.

“Get used to it,” the morbid, pervy Durrell (Silva) hisses. “It’s the smell of eternity!“

But whatever tropes are trotted out for “the mission,” however it turns out, whoever earns the most beautiful death scene, the fun in many a Corman movie is in our grudging appreciation for how he managed all this on the (relative) cheap.

There’s no sense relying on “the vain one” (Campbell) to master impersonating Granger (for an escape attempt in the middle of their training) or their German captor. Just loop in the other actor’s voices when he “imitates” them.

Genius!

Similarly, Rooney’s character’s “big scene,” taking on a pillbox machine gun nest by himself, has him singing, in an Irish brogue that comes and goes, about the “big surprise” he’s got for Gerry.

Watch his lips. He added the wee tune in post production. Funny, that’s the only scene from this I remember from watching “The Secret Invasion” on TV as a kid. I didn’t remember his co-stars or the title, just the Mick singing and tossing potato smashers (German grenades).

The best “big moments” belong to Silva and Vallone, stirring and surprising, even today. Corman spent most of his money on actors, and it really paid off here.

As far as cutting corners, a fog machine is a great help when you’re trying to stage a trawler-vs-German gunboat fight at night, and you can’t go to sea and there is no water filming tank to rent. It’s masterfully minimal.

Sound effects cover up the ordnance budget. A few smoky blanks per firefight, a lot of machine gun noise, a well placed squid or two for some of the victims and pyrotechnics on the walls and rocks, skilled editing and it’s “close enough for government work,” as the boys used to say.

That said, the film took on an Adriatic vacation pacing, probably in mid-production, something that spills over onto the screen. The stakes never seem that high, the urgency of the mission is basically an afterthought, everybody’s relaxed and kind of enjoying their working vacation, and it shows.

No, it’s not the beefier, longer all-star cast A-picture “The Dirty Dozen,” or even “The Devil’s Brigade,” which came years later. But it is a great reminder at why Corman remains an inspiration to indie filmmakers, generations removed from his years of mentoring Ron Howard and Coppola, Scorsese, Dante and James Cameron into the business of directing movies, and doing it without wasting one thin dime along the way.

Rating: violence

Cast: Stewart Granger, Mickey Rooney, Raf Vallone, William Campbell, Spela Rozin, Edd Byrnes and Henry Silva

Credits: Directed by Roger Corman, scripted by R. Wright Campbell. A United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:38

Was this what Netflix was thinking in serving up its overlong supernatural action comedy, “We Have a Ghost?”

They won’t need to keep the streaming rights to “Ghost,” “Ghostbusters” or “Monster House.” They don’t have to wish they had Disney’s “Haunted Mansion,” not if they mash up all of those films into one two-hour-plus PG-13 title.

A thriller that isn’t thrilling, a horror comedy that rarely produces more than a chuckle or three, a sentimental tale that can’t quite wring a tear out of death and loss, “We Have a Ghost” dishonors pretty much every hit film it steals from.

We have reason to expect better from the writer-director of “Freaky” and director of the “Happy Death Day” films. But given that Netflix blank check and lack of editorial supervision business model, a dud was almost pre-ordained.

An opening tease tells us there’s something weird about this 19th century Greater Chicagoland two-story fixer-upper. The previous family fled in the dark of night.

The new folks roll up in their ancient Jeep Cherokee, ask the real estate agent “Nothing like, bad happened here, right?”

The family’s sketchy years are barely sketched in, but father Frank (Anthony Mackie) and mom Mel (Erica Ash) are ready for another “fresh start.” Older son Fulton (Niles Fitch) rolls with it. But sensitive guitarist and classic-rock-loving Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) does not.

“How many ‘fresh starts’ are we at now, Dad?”

Naturally, he’s the one who first sees the ghost, a shrieking mute in a bowling shirt with “Ernest” stitched over the pocket.

Kevin is unafraid and unmoved in that modern teen way. All he sees is something cool he can video-record on his phone. As the ghost (David Harbour) manifests himself as Kevin’s singing, he can only assume they share a love of Credence Clearwater Revival.

Kevin barely has time to learn a few of this unspeaking ghost’s “rules” — “We can’t touch you, but you can touch us, kind of like a stripper!” — before big brother grabs his phone and finds out, followed by Dad, followed shortly thereafter by Mom. She’s the only one to act like she’s seen a ghost.

Dad? He’s always got an eye on the next get-rich-quick scheme. It’s time to monetize this calamity via social media dominance.

Kevin tries to solve the mystery of who the dead man is, helped by Joy, the mouthy, stereotype-riffing and ripping Japanese-American classmate (Isabella Russo) who happens to be his trombone-playing neighbor.

The funniest sequence in the film is the tried-and-true life-cycle of an online phenomenon montage, with the ghost video going viral, then self-promoting online leeches videoing their commentary on it, “I See Dead People” memes and fans videoing “The Ernest Challenge,” even though nobody but a real ghost could actually run through a wall.

Jennifer Coolidge plays the “West Bay Medium,” a “basic cable” paranormal show hostess who is sure this is fakery and is totally fine with that — until Kevin eggs Ernest into “attacking” her. Tig Notaro plays an academic researcher turned author, one with a “secret government project” past.

And all of this stands between Kevin and his new friend Joy getting to the bottom of “Ernest’s” trauma, the event that has him haunting this particular fixer-upper.

Car chases, military “ghost buster” activities, channel-surfing by “Ghost” on TV, Dad’s endless hustles to cash in on this gift from beyond the grave, “We Have a Ghost” at least references all the elements that could have been developed into something funnier.

Writer-director Christopher Landon, despite the generously provided screen time allotted, doesn’t serve up anything anyone over the age of ten might giggle over.

Coolidge leans on her oversexed and over 50 shtick for a laugh, but the reliably funny Notaro is just hung out to dry.

Mackie might have made something out of his barely-outlined con artist father figure, had he given the guy a manic edge. Harbour seems ill-used here as well.

That adds up to a mash-up action comedy that teases you with everything it might have been, every amusing possibility not followed through on, and then defiantly refuses to on those possibilities.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, some sexual/suggestive references and and profanity

Cast: Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Anthony Mackie, David Harbour, Isabella Russo, Erica Ash, Jennifer Coolidge and Tig Notaro.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Landon, based on a short story by Geoff Manaugh. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:07

Michael B. Jordan makes his directing debut in “Creed III,” his third acting outing in the never-ending “Rocky” saga, the first without founding father Sylvester Stallone on screen.

And the movie he gives us is quiet, almost stately, a real actor’s picture and something of a redemption for Jonathan Majors, so good in “Devotion,” so disengaged as the heavy in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”

Majors finds the vulnerable, resentful core of his character, an ex-con who did time thanks to young Adonis Creed’s Biggest Mistake. Damien “Dame” Anderson gets out of jail and eases his way into the orbit of the now-retired champ before hitting him with the “Try spending half your life in a cell…watching somebody else live your life” guilt trip turned threat.

Jordan takes a solid swing at showing us something fresh in the fight sequences, boxers whose focus and intensity literally leaves them as the only two men in the rink and the darkened stadium where they’re fighting, a sell-out crowd blocked utterly out of their minds and erased from the visuals.

He also takes pains to show us something we’ve seen after real life prize-fights — even if rarely — two pugilists recognizing that they’re the only two people in the world who know what they just went through, and the bond that creates.

But that story. Ugh. “Recycled” does the word a disservice. This is a humorless, dry retread of the lesser, later “Rocky” movies, a molehill of a tale for our boxing titans to climb.

It’s a movie about being at the top, rich, fat and happy. But whatever laughs or eyerolls Rocky Balboa was able to generate about sudden affluence, whatever guts he could summon up to battle a Clubber Lang (Mister T, a loose parallel to Majors’ Damien Anderson) — pride or principal or revenge now that he no longer has the desperation of a nobody getting a title shot — it’s just not here.

The script, like Adonis Creed in the story, has good intentions but no fire and no heart.

Adonis a Ralph Lauren billboard model and a guy who drives to work in his Rolls Royce, running his own stable of fighters from his marquee gym when we meet him. Dame comes back into his life, a figure from flashbacks of their big brother/kid brother relationship past. Creed takes him on and makes him a sparring partner for his current champ.

But a humble, grateful Dame starts acting out, his punches too pointed, his swings too dirty for mere sparring. “My clock is ticking” he says. “Too old” or not, the former Golden Glove winner wants his shot 18 years after he went to prison.

Adonis tells his Mama (Phylicia Rashad), singer-turned-producer wife (Tessa Thompson) and his trainer Little Duke (Wood Harris) that “I can make it right.” But he’s not seeing what they see.

“He’s telling you who he is,” Duke counsels. “BELIEVE him!”

You know how these pictures work. Events align and people conspire to put these two men who used to be “like brothers” into the ring together for a grudge match, where broken noses, broken ribs, broken hands and concussions are the possible payoff.

Jordan sets up the over-the-top spectacle of a championship and delivers an impressive fight or two.

But rarely have the stakes felt so low in one of these movies, seldom have the plot contrivances felt so contrived, with our first-time director rubbing the edge off the picture in an effort to step away from the “two Black men beating each other’s brains out” symbolism here.

He softens the movie without stripping the violence, and it goes adrift, characters groping about in a story that doesn’t have a real purpose or reason to exist. .

And if the Creeds insist on Rolls Roycing their deaf pre-tween daughter (Mila Davis-Kent) to ringside to watch this brutal beating her dad takes, you have to wonder if the better fight might be the one with Child Protective Services.

Rating: PG-13 (Violence|Some Strong Language|Intense Sports Action).

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson, Jonathan Majors, Wood Harris and Florian Munteanu.

Credits: Directed by Michael B. Jordan, scripted by Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin. An MGM/UA release.

Running time: 1:56

Vietnam War literature is where we first heard the combat infantry expression “thousand yard stare.” It’s entered the war lit/war film lexicon as shorthand for the soldier whose eyes reflect the exhausted wariness of anybody too long “in country.”

But it wasn’t until I saw Jesse Gavin wear it as a Afghan combat vet who will never get over what he lost in “Northern Shade” that I got a sense of what it must look like.

Gavin, a career bit-player turned leading man, gives a breakout performance as an infantryman who saw a close friend die overseas, and comes home to his old man’s boat — a weathered sport fishing trawler which he lives on — a strained relationship with his mother, a long-estranged younger brother, and a bottle.

If you saw, smoked with and chatted up the ghost of your fallen comrade Noel (Alejandro Bravo) on a regular basis, you’d drink, too.

When a private eye (Titania Galliher) visits The Gasshole — perfect name for a boat with no sails, BTW — and asks questions about a now-burned-out vehicle Justin gave his little brother Charlie, Noel chides Justin about his responsibilities.

“Go up there and find him.”

“Up there” is Connecticut’s rural border country with New York. Charlie’s joined some guys holed up in the woods. Yeah, it’s what you think. Yes, another guy “in the woods” is someone the private detective is looking for. And no, the cops — even the ones not sympathetic to camo-wearing secessionist militia goons — are not interested.

Writer-director Christopher Rucinski doesn’t stretch the genres he’s mashing up for this classic “find my missing partner/relative/lover/old-comrade” quest. His background is visual effects, but he’s made his writing and directing debut a film that doesn’t call for any, just really good actors.

What he gets absolutely right, in every role, is casting. Bravo makes a “careless” and somewhat naive Noel in the field, a weary best friend/nagging conscience as a ghost. Galliher is believable as an ex-military/ex-cop with a conscience. And Rose Marie Guess gives Noel’s war widow and single mom a pandemic-strained loneliness that’s easy to buy into.

The militia members we meet are belligerent, secretive and intellectually weak enough to fall under the spell of Billy (Romano Orzari), a strutting, conspiracy-minded blowhard and Wit and Wisdom of Joe Rogan philosopher.

“When elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers. Somebody’s got stand up for the grass.”

And Gavin gives a John Hawke in “Winter’s Bone” eye-opener of a performance — haunted, twitchy, weary and guilt-ridden, a man who must lose that “thousand yard stare” before he can be of any use to anybody.

The plot points aren’t the most surprising or even rationally defensible. But Gavin & Co. make this an intimate thriller with personal agendas, limited people making rash, limiting decisions with life or death consequences, with no one there to talk them out of any of it.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Jesse Gavin, Titania Galliher, Rose Marie Guess, Alejandro Bravo, Joseph Poliquin and Romano Orzari

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Rucinski. A Bayview release.

Running time: 1:36

My stars and garters, I lost COUNT of the number of times I muttered “They did NOT just go THERE” while watching “Cocaine Bear.”

I haven’t seen this many cocaine jokes since “Saturday Night Live” in the ’80s. And the gore. The GORE. Entrance and exit wounds, a disemboweling, maulings and clawings — early Eli Roth bloody.

It’s “Snakes on a Plane” with a bear. No Samuel L. Jackson, alas. And lots and lots of cocaine.

A hyper, just-addicted short-attention-span mama bear, bear cubs caked in “booger sugar,” children taking big, fat heaping spoonfuls? Heavens!

Comic actress turned comic director (“Pitch Perfect 2,” “Charlie’s Angels”) Elizabeth Banks and the screenwriter serve up a wildly fictionalized splatter comedy based on a real-life Tennessee tale from the mid-80s. And say what you want about the piddling dialogue and middling script, if the horror and coke joke audience was bigger, this bear would mop the bloodstained floor with that Ant-Man. Whatever its actual merits, this beast fills the cheap seats

A jaunty, jokey, life-is-cheap tone is set up in the opening, a montage of TV news coverage of the day (Tom Brokaw‘s finest hour) and the sight of a lummox drug trafficker (Matthew Rhys) dancing and snorting and tossing duffel after duffel stuffed with coke-cakes out of an auto-pilot prop plane, then clumsily killing himself when he bails out over The Smokeys in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Ray Liotta, in what won’t turn out to have been his final film (pity), plays a Missouri drug dealer who wants to get his ditched cargo back. O’Shea Jackson, Jr. and “Solo” exiled Alden Ehrenreich are the subordinates he sends into the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area to retrieve it.

Isiah Whitlock Jr. is a Tennessee cop out to catch the elusive Syd (Liotta) and his minions.

But others, from local snatch-and-grab hoodlums, to kids playing hooky from school (Brooklynn Prince of “The Florida Project,” and Christian Convery) stumble across the duffels, the wrapped coke cakes or the bear that got to at least some of the cocaine first.

“It’s demented…or something!” Or something it is!

Hapless hikers, embittered park ranger (Margo Martindale), wildlife and biodiversity expert (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) or single mom (Keri Russell) hunting for her kid all find themselves chased by, contending with and/or ripped-up by this Ursa Americanus with a newfound taste for Erythoxylon coca.

“Cocaine Bear” summons up memories of the “cocaine” comedies of the ’80s — not films about the drug or drug dealing per se, but instantly-forgettable high concept comedies made under the influence kind of aimed at those under the influence.

The digital bear is…animated. For the most part.

The biggest running gag here is the title, especially the first word in it. Coke is a joke. F-bombs tart up other lines meant to be funnier. And then there’s the comic gore — stabbings, fingers shot off, teeth and claws tearing at flesh and intestines.

Attention is paid to the syrupy synth-pop music of the era, and the goofy, period-specific (often synthetic) clothing. That’s worth a grin or two.

But the Jimmy Warden screenplay needed script doctoring, a heaping helping of joke-juicing. Sight gags and gore may sell tickets. The wacky news story, covered-to-death by TV in its day, may ensure that the picture jumps right out of the gate in the opening act. There’s just not enough funny business here to keep this from flatlining pretty much from the halfway point onward.

Banks is one of the great screen comediennes of her era. As a director? Did you see “Pitch Perfect 2” or the last and least “Charlies Angels” ever? She gets the easiest laughs, manages a fright or two as we fear for children and other innocent victims of the bear. And that’s it.

The movie loses its buzz too early and drifts into a hangover of a third act thanks to blown opportunities, trite situations, weak set-ups and tame punch-lines.

It isn’t quite “Snakes on a Plane,” a high concept comedy in which ALL of the fun is in the title and the billing. But it’s too close.

Rating: R for bloody violence and gore, drug content and language throughout

Cast: Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Alden Ehrenreich, Christian Convery, Margo Martindale and Ray Liotta

Credits: Directed by Elizabeth Banks, scripted by Jimmy Warden. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:35

It’s worth applying the Hippocratic Oath when considering the quality, veracity and messaging of any “faith based film.”

“First, do no harm,” Hippocrates preached.

The angry, divisive tone of “God’s Not Dead,” “Left Behind” and too many films that ride on the backs of Kevin Sorbo and/or Kirk Cameron are just for the fanatics, folks who politicize faith and bend Christianity into what is widely considered “Christian Nationalism” and recognized as dangerous to a pluralistic, secular democracy.

Films like “Miracles from Heaven,” “Noble,” “Same Kind of Different as Me” and “Soul Surfer” succeed by personalizing faith, playing up the real world problems and real world relief people take from faith, downplaying supernaturalism and avoiding angry, absolutist Falwellian politics.

There is no “harm” in “corny.” Sentimental and idealized? Why not? And if the story is real-world based, a little “edge” is a welcome ingredient.

“Jesus Revolution” keeps that oath and passes muster in a lot of regards. It’s a generally uplifting account of the hippies and spiritual searchers who turned away from LSD and drug experimenting and turned towards faith, without giving up their tie-dye or VW Microbuses.

It was a brief moment in time — and a Time Magazine cover (in 1971) — as this film, based on Pastor Greg Laurie’s memoir, makes clear in the closing minutes. But Laurie, a big deal in California Protestantism and (documentary) film producing, feels it’s worth remembering and celebrating, and not just for self-promotional reasons.

In the movie’s 1967-68 opening, we meet Pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer), presiding over a dying California congregation at Calvary Chapel, tuned out of debates with his college age daughter (Ally Ioannides) at home.

The TV news is filled with Vietnam War coverage, Vietnam War protests and middle-aged reporters talking about kids who live by “turn on, tune in and drop out.”

Pastor Chuck preaches that “this generation is lost, aimless…a generation without restraint.”

But daughter Janette figures what Dad needs is to meet a real hippie. Lonnie Frisbee, played by Jonathan Roumie of the popular series “The Chosen” (He plays Jesus) is just a Jesus look-alike she picks up hitchhiking. But Pastor Chuck hears him out and takes his suggestion that “kids are searching for the real thing,” “sheep without a shepherd.”

That transforms Pastor Chuck and Calvary Chapel. Overnight, Lonnie’s friends and future followers flock to this Woodstock-by-the-Sea, barefoot and unwashed, looking for meaning and wanting to be baptized in nearby Pirate’s Cove.

Meanwhile, military school teen Greg (Joel Courtney of Netflix’s “The Kissing Booth”) is so drawn to hippie chick Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow of TV’s “The Big Leap”) that he finds himself at “happenings,” where Janis sings and LSD guru Timothy Leary speaks, praising the young people for their “relentless search for the truth.”

By the way, MAJOR “edge” and style points for including Leary and taking him seriously here.

Greg follows Cathe and her crowd into a Microbus, into mind-expanding drugs, into flashbacks to his troubled life and childhood with his single mom (Kimberly Williams-Paisley). It takes an overdose and a car crash to wake SOME of them up.

When Greg meets Lonnie, he is ripe for recruitment and definitely in need of something new. But he sees what others were saying then and still say about this movement and its moment, a generation swapping one “addiction” for another.

“What if it’s just another high, another drug?”

Co-directors Jon Erwin (“I Can Only Imagine”) and Brent McCorkle (“Unconditional”) add a reporter with the Biblical name Josiah (DeVon Franklin) to give their story a framing device, the questioning and writing of that Time Magazine cover story, and add a little diversity to the cast.

They capture the birth of the first big faith-based “Jesus Music” group, Love Song, serve up contemporary pop by America, Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers and Edwin Starr and try to weave the threads of the story into an era-appropriate hippy poncho.

But their movie experiences its 40 minutes in the wilderness as it loses track of Pastor Chuck’s story arc and epiphany, and leans on future Pastor Greg’s journey, which isn’t remotely as interesting. But he wrote the book and produced the movie, so…

The money moment here might be when the 60something preacher listens to the complaints of the church’s elders about bare feet and dirty carpets, and they show up Sunday to see him washing his new flock’s feet as they walk in.

Out of context, that’s a little weird and could be played for comedy. Grammer, bless him, plays it straight and it is simple and moving and Biblical.

Lulls aside, “Jesus Revolution” works in that classic upbeat California vibe way. It’s not any sort of breakthrough as a movie or a “movement” moment. But it makes a nice contrast to the religious rhetoric of today, the pricey Super-Bowl-on-Fox ads funded by shadowy figures who preach tolerance while funding hate groups.

Laurie and the filmmakers have the good sense to step away from that. They know that the Hippocratic Oath isn’t just for doctors, and their movie is richer for that.

Rating: PG-13 for strong drug content involving teens and some thematic elements

Cast: Jonathan Roumie, Joel Courtney, Anna Grace Bellow, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, DeVon Franklin, Julia Campbell and Kelsey Grammer.

Credits: Directed by Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle, scripted by Jon Erwin and Jon Gunn, based on the memoir by Greg Laurie. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:59