Movie Nation

The movies that matter in your life burn into the memory that first encounter with them.I saw “Chariots of Fire” at a preview in Charlotte, N.C., with local college and high school track teams in attendance, at a now long-closed cinema near now-renamed UNC-Charlotte. And I remember getting downright teary over just how beautiful this lovely period piece unfolding before me was.

It’s not just the stunning images of “Out of Africa,” “Moonstruck” and “Memphis Belle” director of photography David Watkin, or the crystalline synthesizer score of Vangelis Papathanassiou. There’s the immaculate period-perfect production design, the world of weathered stone and inherited, poshly-turned-out privilege it depicts.

The cast, a blend of the fresh-faced and the legendary, is remarkable. Lump them in the with stars of the PBS import “Brideshead Revisited” and you could feel a tidal wave, a whole generation of British actors about to wash over world cinema thanks to what the Brits would spend the ensuing decades proving that they do best — recreating their recent and distant past. And the synthesizer wasn’t the only music in it. There are lush sacred choral works, snippets of the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, bagpipes and bands laced throughout. The story is a flashback within a flashback. In the “present,” we sit in on a 1978 memorial service for the Elder Statesman of British sport. Through that, we drift into that iconic image of the film, young track athletes training by running down a Scottish beach (Fife) just before the 1924 Olympics.

One of their number, Aubrey Montague (Nicholas Farrell) writes a letter home, taking us back to 1919, when he met the great sprinter Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) as they enrolled in Trinity College in Cambridge. “Monty” and we see the intensity of the Jewish Abrahams, and his prickliness. It is just after World War I, and disabled veterans are all about, as is anti-Semitism. Abrahams is determined to stand out, win and shave their snobbery up their noses.

“I’m forever in pursuit and I don’t even know what I am chasing.”

John Gielgud and the great British director and sometime narrator and actor Lindsay Anderson (“If…,” “Oh Lucky Man,” “The Whales of August”) play the high-born “masters” of their respective colleges, anti-Semites from birth.

“Academically sound. Arrogant. Defensive to the point of pugnacity,” the Master if Caius (Anderson) intones.

“As ‘they’ invariably are,” Mr. Master of Trinity (the Oscar-winning Gielgud) sneers. Abrahamson means to win an Olympic medal a few years down the line, and his determined push for personal glory rankles the higher-ups.

Meanwhile, to the north in Scotland, the saintly Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) is a star rugby player, the son of missionaries who grew up in China, and a man whose own mission is preaching and returning to China to spread the word of God. He is a naturally gifted runner coaxed into changing his focus, if only for a while.

“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”

Abrahams figures out he’s going to need a “professional” coach to best Liddell and chase a gold medal and hires the even-more-outside outsider Sam Massabini (Ian Holm). He’s also distracted by the transcendent beauty Sybil Gordon, a singing stage actress played by South African Alice Krige

Nigel Havers plays the Oxbridge dandy, renamed Lord Lindsay in the film, a “natural” athlete of title and impeccable breeding who puts down his cigarette to sprint and dash through the low-hurdles, which he masters by parking glasses of champagne on each one, vowing to “not spill a drop” as he gallops through them.

He’s meant to be adorably insufferable, and he is, although most viewers might embrace him as the embodiment of noblesse oblige and the privilege “amateur” athletics set out to test and honor.

The “villains” of the Olympics are the always-to-be-feared American Olympians, with two famous sprinters, Charles Paddock and Jackson Scholz, played by peaking stars Dennis Christopher and coiled, compact walking muscle Brad Davis (he was in producer David Puttman’s “Midnight Express”).

Location after lovely location for this film captures the place and recreates the time in glorious detail.

Some of the loveliest scenes in “Chariots of Fire” are slow motion reveries on the track. But terrific tracking shots takes us through the pell-mell that first day at Cambridge, and an intimidating peek at the American team training in Paris, all business. Note Christopher’s choice of leg warm-ups, on his back, mock-pedaling a bicycle.

Whatever the film and filmmakers’ politics, “Chariots of Fire” is an inherently conservative enterprise, never wholly mocking the high born, never wholly embracing the outsiders and most fervently celebrating the pious and divinely-inspired Liddell.

No one “brings down” the system. Abrahams merely infiltrates it and comes to be accepted as both “a gentleman,” a patriot and “one of us.”

“Chariots” exists in a few versions, so be certain to choose the longest you can find, as sequences are omitted by this one, and a trickier opening can be seen in that one. Otherwise, you might miss Kenneth Branagh and Stephen Fry in crowd and ensemble scenes, with Fry one of the singers in the finale of a production of H.M.S. Pinafore the students mount. Michael Lonsdale, already a star thanks to “Day of the Jackal” and as a Bond villain in “Moonraker,” is allegedly in here somewhere, but I’ve never noticed him. Among the men of this male-dominated cast, I’d say Farrell, the embodiment of privilege and also-ran pluck who outlives most of his teammates in “Chariots,” had perhaps the most durable career, in supporting roles in the decades that followed. There he was in “The Iron Lady,” here he is in “Munich: The Edge of War.”

The Scot Charleson, who peaked with “Chariots” and a plum supporting part in “Gandhi,” died of AIDS less than ten years after “Chariots.”

Cross had a long if less stardusted than one might have hoped career. I just reviewed the last film he appeared in, a horror tale, “Prey for the Devil.”

Holm’s lovely twinkle in “Chariots” was a nice contrast to the heartless android he’d played in “Alien.” He’d eventually achieve fantasy film immortality with the “Lord of the Rings” films, returning to Tolkien as adorable Bilbo after first playing Frodo in the definitive BBC/NPR radio series back in 1979.

But Krige, who emerged from “Chariots” as a not-quite-name star, quickly established herself in horror (“Ghost Story”) and who became a fan favorite in the “Star Trek” universe, is the one player in the enterprise (ahem) who became an icon. She acted in period pieces, romances and thrillers. She was the Witch in the brilliant “Gretel & Hansel” and the title role and magnetic presence at the heart of “She Will,” she has the kind of fame that films confirm and fan conventions render immortal. Actor turned screenwriter Colin Welland went on to adapt the South African and the “Lord of the Flies” parable “War of the Buttons.” Director Hugh Hudson aslo peaked with “Chariots,” with “My Life So Far” and his last film, “Finding Altamira” far from atoning for the big budget disasters “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,” “Revolution,” in which he failed to wrestle America’s founding into a movie and “Lost Angels.”It was Oscar-winning producer David Puttman who went on to preside over years of prestige pictures such as “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission,” taking a shot at turning Columbia Pictures into a prestige studio in the ’80s. He failed. One common thread in stories from film magazines and trade publications from that era seemed to me, as a budding critic back then, and how resented and disliked the folks behind “Chariots” were by mainstream Hollywood. Like Harold Abrahams in “Chariots,” they were seen as “brash” and “arrogant” outsiders by the Old Guard. The notion of what “snobs” they were turned up in profiles of Puttnam and Hudson, pouring out of the pages of “Fast Fade,” a quickie “biography” of Puttnam that came after his brief run at Columbia. You can see it on the IMDb bio of Hudson, accurately labeled an “Etonian” as if that shorthand (entitled upper class Brit) could be missed by anyone. But there’s no escaping the impact of their landmark film, a game-changer for British cinema and a piece of Thatcher-era triumphalism that shifted Britain’s place in the world of film, a moment worth heralding as moment of returned glory in Sam Mendes’ semi-autobiographical “Empire of Light.”

Seen today, with all its striking, dated synthesizer music and stuffily-tolerated British classism, it’s still glorious, the sort of dreamy memory that provokes Pavlovian tears in a film fan who remembers what a stunning moment it recreates and what a wonder that the film itself was when first seen.

Rating: PG

Cast: Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Alice Krige, Nigel Havers, Nicholas Farrell, Ian Holm, Nigel Davenport, Brad Davis, Lindsay Anderson and John Gielgud.

Credits: Directed by Hugh Hudson, scripted by Colin Welland. A Warner Bros. release on Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, Youtube and PositivTV

Running time: 2:05

“Under Her Control” is a surrogacy-gone-wrong thriller wrapped in a “Devil Wears Prada” package.

This Spanish melodrama starts slowly and lumbers towards a Big Finish that isn’t nearly big enough to atone for the tedium that precedes it.

First-time feature director Fran Torres gets a few hot sex scenes into his debut, and spills some blood in the finale. But the middle acts are one long siesta thanks to a low-stakes script (by Laura Sarmiento Pallarés) dependent upon not a whole lot happening.

Cumelen Sanz plays Sofia, an ambitious sales clerk at a Madrid bargain fashion store with dreams of interning and then working for the great Beatriz Gaya (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) a self-made Madrileña fashion tycoon.

Sofia is a devout, superstitious Catholic from Colombia not shy about dropping in on her Colombian beau, Nacho (Alex Pestrana) at the various rental properties he shows to prospective renters.

It’s not just siestas that Spaniards take over the noon hour.

Sofia’s fervent prayer comes true and she lands the internship as Beatriz’s assistant. But just as she’s learning the ropes and starting to get her ideas “out there,” all that unprotected sex comes home to roost.

She can’t tell Nacho. The priest she consults just shames and threatens her that “There is no worse crime than spilling the blood of the innocent!”

Meanwhile, single, 50ish Beatriz has figured out that her careerism and years of “swipe right” level relationships have run out her biological clock.

“By the time you know what you want, you’ve no time left,” she sighs (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) to her OB-GYN (Vanessa Rasero).

All it takes is her picking up on Sofia’s “condition” and the young woman’s desire to get out of it for Beatriz to spring into action, and enlist her gyno-pal and her lawyer (Pedro Casablanc) in the scheme.

They will manipulate and bribe Sofia, tricking her out of an abortion, plotting to separate her from Nacho during the pregnancy, keeping everything secret so that the baby can be passed off as belonging to Beatriz.

For all their machinations, they should take heed when Sofia brazenly asks for double their offer and a contract guaranteeing future employment. She’s not some naive waif, fresh off the boat from South America.

But she finds herself “Under HER Control” when Beatriz parks her in a country estate with no phone, where CCTV cameras will watch her every move and her health regimen will be strictly monitored.

And then the pregnancy progresses, hormones kick in and the real games begin.

The plot has dopey, obvious contrivances designed to make all of this plausible, which they don’t.

The performances are on low simmer as the characters turn towards sinister or allegedly desperate, and do nothing to engage us in the proceedings.

And the payoff is flat, with even the violence failing to up the heartrate as it supposedly ups the ante.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Cumelen Sanz, Vanesa Rasero, Pedro Casablanc and Alex Pestrana.

Credits: Directed by Fran Torres, scripted by Laura Sarmiento Pallarés. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

The sort of simple, indulgent reveries you could find on TV variety shows back in their Golden Age, turning over the camera and six minutes of your show to Orson Welles to improvise his way up to Sir John, Shakespeare’s lines long committed to memory. This is from about 1968, a few years after Welles’ Falstaff film, “Chimes at Midnight,” one of the many Welles TV appearances preserved on Youtube.

You didn’t have to grow up in the ’70s, travel to America’s major cities back then to know what the decade looked like. And that was largely due to films lit and photographed by Owen Roizman.

The director of photography of the overcast natural-light-fixated “French Connection,” the malaise and gloom of “Network,” the existential fear of the dark of “The Exorcist,” the gaudy showbiz “West” of “The Electric Horseman,” the seedy side of SoCal of “Straight Time,” — “Black Marble,” “The Taking of Pelham One, Two Three” — he practically defined the on-screen look of the decade.

And when the “national malaise” mood was shifted by the delusional optimism of the ’80s, he was right there lighting it — “Tootsie,” “True Confessions,” “Absence of Malice,” “Vision Quest.”

He worked with Lawrence Kasdan on comedies and “Grand Canyon,” shot Westerns (“Wyatt Earp”) and musicals (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”).

Roizman’s the guy the cinematographer-turned-director Barry Sonnenfeld trusted to know the right “funny lens” to use for “The Addams Family.”

Roizman was one of the great ones, and never won an Oscar. Nominated five times and never won. You don’t always know who is defining the light, look and tone of a decade on Eastmancolor (Kodak), Fuji, Afga when they’re doing it.

Roizman made it to the ripe old age of 96. Well done all around, sir.

Egyptian action auteur Peter Mimi is no stranger to Hollywood blockbusters. You don’t have read or watch interviews with him to have that confirmed. It’s right there on the screen.

The latest from the director of “No Surrender” is a robot-as-revenge thriller that takes from “The Terminator” and imitates, in ways both obvious and subtle, the story beats, action tropes and trendy vehicles popular in La La Land action cinema of the moment.

“Mousa” is about a meek, bullied engineering student named Yehia (Kareem Mahmoud Abdel Aziz) who can’t even summon the courage to stand up to the thugs who break in, beat and rob his engineer-turned-clockmaker father (screen veteran Salah Abdullah) and set fire to their house, killing his father.

But Yehia is clever enough to design and build a nearly-unstoppable metal man to carry out his dead father’s post-mortem wish, via a vision.

“One of us had to get burned so he could light the way for the other,” father counsels, in Arabic with English subtitles. “Avenge me!”

It doesn’t matter that Yehia was kicked out of engineering school by an intemperate, classist professor (Eyad Nassar) who didn’t like the kid showing him up. It’s not important that Yehia can’t make much in the way of eye contact, especially with the opposite sex. And fighting? He’s the Cairo version of the proverbial “98 pound weakling.”

But let him slip on the telepathic VR helmet he uses to control the robot he named after the stillborn older brother his parents lost, and thugs, child-trafficking organ thieves and terrorists had better watch out.

This story, framed within an interrogation that comes after an opening image stripped from the film’s action climax, loses track of logic, characters and the plot in the third act. It goes completely off the rails, train-crash pun intended.

No, we never really connect the hero to his crush (Sara El Shamy) or even his more badass soulmate (Asma Abul-Yazid) for reasons that seem more due to sloppy screenwriting than Muslim cultural mores. I rewatched the last third of the film repeatedly, trying to figure out how this character turned-up in that location, that robot got on a train or who the heck this or that figure is and how they become part of what is largely a loner’s revenge-on-the-world story.

The plotting may be clumsy, the pace too slow at the start and too disorganized at the end, and the morality simplistic in the extreme. But the acting isn’t bad.

The effects are spectacular and would pass muster in any Hollywood release. If “RRR” showed the world that Indian CGI was on a par with America’s best, “Mousa” is an impressive ad for farming out some of that work to Egypt.

And then there’s what a North American might get out of watching Egyptian sci-fi action via “Around the World with Netflix.”

Mimi pays homage to “The Terminator” in several ways, including cribbing the skeletal robot walking through fire. But it’s the silly Hollywood trends and tropes that tickled me.

What do I fixate on regularly in this space, movie fans? “Cars with character.” And what does rich girl Rieka (Abul-Yazid) show up with to transport this Mousa robot to places where he’s needed — fires, so that he can rescue kids, human trafficking warehouses, etc? It’s not a Chevy Nova. No. It’s a Pontiac Ventura. That’s the Pontiac version of the Nova.

What does the college professor, whose story sidetracks the film for a bit as he has an even darker side, drive? The same thing college professors have driven in generations of Hollywood films — a Volvo.

And what do the cops and villains tangle in and chase each other with? Jeeps, with the bad guys in the evergreen Jeep Cherokee (XJ), Hollywood’s hottest “vintage” on screen car of the moment. Even in Egypt, “there is only one Jeep.”

The contortions of “Mousa’s” third act make one fret that Mimi has visions of a “franchise” on his hands, ands maybe let that distract him from a half-decent movie that loses its way at the end.

Either way, I’m looking forward to what he comes up with next. It’s obvious where he’s getting his inspirations from, and hit or miss, I for one am totally down for seeing how genre pictures and action tropes look through an Egyptian lens.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Kareem Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, Eyad Nassar, Asma Abul-Yazid, Sara El Shamy and Salah Abdullah

Credits: Scripted and directed by Peter Mimi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

You’re going to have to trust me on this. Espionage thrillers are my jam, for obvious reasons. And “escape” narratives — in books or in films — have been a passion since I was old enough to read “Who Goes Next?” or root for James Garner in “The Great Escape” on TV.

“Kompromat” is the best thriller about breaking out of Russia to come along in years. It’s a tight, tense and just-melodramatic-enough tale that will have you racing along with our flawed hero, reasoning as he does as he tries to escape a culture whose police state traditions go back centuries.

French director and co-writer Jérôme Salle has conjured up a superb entertainment, and a sobering reminder that nobody’s ever been caught breaking “into” Russia. It’s the sort of film any Westerner considering traveling there for work, “business” or whatever, should see before confirming that reservation.

People like basketballer Britney Griner and multi-national “operator” Paul Whelan and others seem to have forgotten what this riveting film’s Cold War-familiar title means. It’s a KGB coinage for manufactured “evidence” to use in whatever kangaroo court show trial they cook up if they decide The West needs to be taught a lesson through whatever tourist, athlete or business person they have at hand.

And as too many true stories that “inspired” this fictional one remind us, once they’ve got their hands on you, who knows who can get you out? Who knows who you can even trust enough to try?

Gilles Lellouche, best-known for “Tell No One” on this side of the Atlantic, plays Mathieu, a local director of the Alliance Francaise, the cultural affairs arm of the French Embassy, in remote Irkutsk, Siberia.

That outreach program has helped finance the renovation of a theater there, and his efforts have landed a local oligarch’s backing as well.

But one day, the FSB, which is just the dreaded KGB rebranded, storms in and arrests Mathieu, right in front of his little girl. He’s hooded and hauled away, hearing her screams as he does.

This begins the process of digging through his memories, trying to figure out who he crossed and what brought this on? When they tell you they’ve caught you with child pornography, that your wife has denounced you for child molestation, you know they aren’t messing around.

Was it the homoerotic dance performance he booked to reopen that theater and cultural center? Did he dance with the wrong Russian blonde that night? Was she (Joanna Kulig) a classic “honey trap?” Did his unhappy and unfaithful wife (Elisa Lasowski) pull the trigger?

Perhaps that Russian liaison in his office, Vladimir, is behind it? What about the gregarious, hard-drinking, loud-singing consulate handyman, Boris?

Can he even trust the “best lawyer in town” provided by the embassy, when the town is Irkutsk in the middle of snowy Siberia?

Mathieu is from the world of the arts, “soft” even by French standards. He’s also not the most careful guy. Fluent in Russian, he might have listened when somebody warned him that the local FSB chief was watching him. And he can’t have wholly understood that “Russian mentality is very different from the French” suggestion in the way it was intended, joining that rich benefactor for a stag hunt in wolf-infested forests, refusing to participate or even carry a gun.

This “artistic type” is shackled, tossed into a crowded prison cell where the tattooed skinheads are full of questions and threats. There are “three types of men” in there, one of them advises in his most menacing Russian (with English subtitles). “Men we respect. Men we beat. And men we f—.” Which will Mathieu be?

Even removal from that environment, after the pre-ordained beating by the inmates, is no picnic. He is under house arrest, with “no outside contact” allowed — no phone, no Internet.

At least he’s now got the solitude, limited freedom of movement, and wherewithal in this bugged-and-watched house to consider his lawyer’s whispered advice.

“If you have the guts, escape.”

“Kompromat” is another thriller that makes my oft-repeated point that what is most exciting and engaging in such movies is seeing an EveryWoman or EveryMan try to use what little they know about such dilemmas to try and reason, scheme and fight their way out of this type of fix.

The phrase “ex-special forces” has become the lazy screenwriters’ best friend. The explanation “very particular skills” should have been retired once Liam Neeson used it in “Taken.” It’s become a cliche.

Mathieu is” Jason Bateman in “Ozark,” Redford in “Three Days of the Condor,” the grieving snowplow operator played by Stellan Skarsgaard from “In Order of Disappearance” or stricken husband Russell Crowe, desperate to free his imprisoned wife over “The Next Three Days.” He has no “particular skills.” But Mathieu does have the wherewithal to know how much he can accomplish if he can score a phone, if he can secretly access the Internet.

The screenplay by Caryl Ferey and director Salle (“Anthony Zimmer” was his, and he scripted the Hollywood espionage flop “The Tourist) has creative problem solving, surprise twists and plenty of melodramatic touches as our clumsy but not stupid hero takes his shot at escape.

Igor Jijikine is the very face and bald pate of Russian villainy as the Spetsnaz tracker brought in to find our fleeing political pawn.

There are interpersonal intrigues with the Russian Svetlana and political ones with the French ambassador, as this story is set between Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea and its current attempt at “territorial expansion.”

The West always frets over “Russian relations.” The boozy once-and-future Bolsheviks have no such qualms.

Lellouche deftly navigates all this as a man just careless enough to make us shout “What are you DOING?” at times, even as we marvel at just how much “freedom” one can achieve, just through ride shares, social media, online AirBnB bookings and that modern mode of liberation, the cell phone.”

No wonder totalitarians and their pet South African oligarchs fear our “all access” tech. In this day and age, the most useful gadgets aren’t from “special branch” and whoever supplies the Impossible Mission Force. They’re from the Genius Store, or greet us with a helpful “Hello, Moto!”

“Kompromat” settles for a few easy ways out of this or that situation, and takes a few “compromised” steps. But it’s a first rate thriller, more cerebral than Tom-Cruise-does-his-own-stunts, and all the more engaging for it.

Lellouche and Salle allow us to sprint in Mathieu’s sodden shoes, identify with his plight and imagine we have the wits to attempt the impossible as he does, or even have the guts to.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast: Gilles Lellouche, Joanna Kulig, Elisa Lasowski, Aleksey Gorbunov, Michael Gor and Igor Jijikine

Credits: Directed by Jérôme Salle, scripted by Caryl Ferey and Jérôme Salle A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:06

For a while, at least, I was thinking somebody dropped the ball with this domestic horror “comedy” “Who Invited Them.”

“This is good enough to have played in theaters,” I said to myself, noting how a good cast does well playing two couples who act out manipulations, show widening strains in a marriage and play into a night that just won’t end because one couple won’t go home after the cocktail party’s over.

I mean, sure, the foreshadowing’s so obvious that you’d have to be deaf to not pick up on where writer-director Duncan Birmingham’s debut feature is headed — eventually. But there’s still some mystery about what distractions pop up along the way, how the evening might just “get interesting” after a lot of booze, a little “booger sugar” and pressure to stay up late, do more coke and maybe…swing?

But this short-but-not-particularly-brisk thriller delivers smirks, not laughs and intrigues, not frights. There are structural problems and badly worked-in red herrings that make the final act quite the little letdown.

Still, let’s accentuate the positive first. Ryan Hansen of TV’s “Veronica Mars” and Melissa Tang “The Kominsky Method”) click as a Adam and Margo, a couple with a little boy, a new-to-them house “in The Hills” overlooking LA, and a few issues they’re not really dealing with.

He’s trying to entertain a generally reluctant klatch of colleagues at a not-quite-house-warming, and she’s avoiding all of them by hanging out with her cook-friend in the kitchen.

But as Adam toasts and welcomes one and all “our friends,” he can’t help but notice these two good-looking strangers. Who are they? Friends of Margo? Nope.

As the house empties out, they compare notes on “that super slick couple” who look like they’re “dressed for a sexy funeral” and wonder who they might be.

Why not ask them yourselves? They haven’t left. They were in a bathroom...together.

All the awkwardness that entails is struggled through as we meet Tom (Timothy Granaderos of “13 Reasons Why”) and Sasha (Perry Mattfeld of “Shameless” and “In the Dark”). They’re very cool. They’re very pretty. They’re “the neighbors.”

Of course we don’t buy that, even if Margo and Adam do. Kind of.

They manage to finagle a last drink and talk Adam into putting some vinyl on the turntable. And then, either as a foursome — all in the same room — or breaking up into “Let me help you with that” guy-guy/woman-woman pairings, the strangers start tugging at fissures in this marriage, poking at the sore spots. The party hosts fall right into that trap.

That’s the most interesting part of “Who Invited Them,” the relationship dynamics and the ways Margo and Adam are manipulated into going for each other’s throats.

But the Big Clue has been delivered and the story slides, and then stumbles a bit as it makes that turn towards the denouement, where all our suspicions bear fruit and yet nothing all that scary happens.

The violence is unpleasant, with a little added dash of sad and disturbing. It feels both inevitable and shoehorned-in. We believe in the menaced couple, but the ease with which they’re baited keeps us from rooting for them.

And the finale seems like an incomplete cheat.

Still, it’s good enough to at least make one wish all involved the best, “better luck next time” and all that. It’s just that the first hour had one hoping for a lot more than a consolation prize.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity and innuendo

Cast: Ryan Hansen, Melissa Tang, Perry Mattfeld and Timothy Granaderos.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Duncan Birmingham. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21

Every movie set during the Holocaust has some merit, especially those based on historical accounts of survivors. Anyone who lived through that needs to be celebrated, and those who didn’t must be remembered.

But not all concentration camp dramas are created equal.

“The Champion,” originally titled “The Champion of Auschwitz,” is about Polish boxer and “Inmate #77” at the death camp, Tadeusz “Teddy” Pietrzykowski, a Warsaw bantamweight imprisoned for fleeing the occupied country to re-join the Polish Army in exile. He survived the camps by fighting for the entertainment of the German Nazis. He was lionized in Poland and has been the subject of books and films there.

But one suspects the reason the Poles have venerated his story is at least in part because he wasn’t Jewish. And this facile, cliched and grievously limited-in-scope film biography doesn’t do him, his real story, the real tragedy or this genre of film any justice.

Pietrzykowski’s story is worth retelling because the real life details of it are fascinating and often inspiring, and because it’s worth remembering that the mass incarceration and slaughter widely known as The Holocaust wasn’t just about Jewish genocide.

Writer-director Maciej Barczewski’s debut feature looks right but never feels anything but contrived. He traffics in tropes, and trips himself up on details, glibly skipping through this story with seemingly the thinnest understanding of the real history and the facts of the event he’s working with.

A working “death camp” with “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (“Work Makes You Free”) over its front gate doesn’t have its officers and functionaries bellowing “There is no exit other than through the chimney of the crematorium” to its new inmates.

Yes, they were sadists, evil on an almost inhuman level. But blurting that out, how would they keep order? Arrivals would freak out and probably even riot at times. Even the illusion of “showers” would be shattered and every single operation of the camp would be compromised and rendered much more difficult to manage.

We see the myth of the “urbane, cultured Nazi” officer trotted out for the umpteenth time, and watch SS officers and their families — overdressed swells — sitting in the snowy cold of a Polish winter watching an inmate — who should be shivering — give an OUTdoor winter piano recital.

Scene after scene here rings false, or at least hard to defend with facts.

Our boxer (Piotr Glowacki) tries to keep his head down, and being “the dodge king of Warsaw,” an expert at avoiding blows, has to help. But his background and skill are discovered in the most trite way, and he befriends the beefy, bullying but also imprisoned German capo (Piotr Witkowski) who used to be a boxer as well, and who becomes t”he champion’s” champion.

“We’ll fatten him up and he’ll fight the best boxers!”

Why do the Nazis listen to this Walter? Why is this German imprisoned at Auschwitz, as we’re never told? Why have a dwarf as ringmaster/bout announcer? Why stray so far from the simple, more colorful facts of Pietrzykowski’s story in grasping for an “entertaining” and “uplifting” concentration camp film?

The cruelty, summary executions, starvation and presence of death all around those imprisoned there are established facts about such places and recreated here. A Nazi officer who makes inmates who have “stolen” apples put them on their heads before he shoots them, but who spares those who, unprompted, quote Schiller’s “William Tell” to him? Give me a break.

One accepts death camp movies on their level when possible. Even “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” had merits and pathos and made you feel something.

For all its vivid recreation of the era and the grim physical realities of the camps, its mostly solid and credible performances, “The Champion” fails at almost everything else important to any movie that tackles this subject.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Piotr Glowacki, Jan Szydlowski, Marianna Pawlisz, Grzegorz Malecki, Marcin Czarnik and Piotr Witkowski

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maciej Barczewski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

P.T. Barnum was 60 when he first took his “emporium,” oddities exhibition and giant circus on the road in 1870. William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his “Wild West Show,” with its cast of several hundred people, hundreds of horses and a small herd of buffalo, debuted and hit the road in 1883.

And while Barnum was practically the inventor of “ballyhoo” and hype, and was the first to proclaim he was putting on “The Greatest Show on Earth,” anyone alive in the late 19th and early 20th century who saw both spectacles might beg to differ. “The Greatest Showman” is a matter of some debate.

There were few spectacles outside of the Roman Colosseum to rival the “Wild West Show,” a grand, chaotic pageant of “the taming of the frontier,” with famous cowboys, famous Indians, sharp shooters, lawmen and trick riders by the score.

And if there’s one thing filmmaker Robert Altman was known for in those heady days of his “M*A*S*H” to “Popeye” peak, it was pageants — sweeping, overpopulated tableaux of Americana that said something about the American psyche.

America’s politically-dubious modern wars to America’s “HealtH” fads, country music conservativism to the American way of “Wedding,” if it had a big theme and a lot of actors willing to play all the moving parts, Altman was in. It wasn’t the only sort of film he’d make over the course of his career, but it why we remember him, and how he bowed-out, with one last all-star spectacle, “A Prairie Home Companion,” in 2006.

“Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” was an ambitious attempt to recreate the man, the myth-making and one of the defining spectacles of what people back then, and in the film, called “The Show Business.”

It’s got Paul Newman in the title role, with Joel Grey playing Bill’s partner, producer and “MC” of course. The big themes are the myth that was already settling in about the country’s noble struggle to “tame” the frontier, about the Natives slaughtered and displaced by that, the wildlife and ecosystems nearly wiped out, historic American racism and how all of that could be encapsulated in a single Big Show.

The film, which I must’ve seen in part or as a whole a dozen times on TV as it was a cable staple in the ’80s, never quite comes off. Nobody describes it as their favorite Newman film or the best of Altman. But channel surfing by a Buffalo Bill documentary sent me down the rabbit hole of wondering which towns I’ve lived in hosted “Wild West Show” visits while it was touring, and curious enough to make me want to see this 1976 epic again.

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Homeless teens leave the mean streets of Medellin for the promise of a far-off plot of land in “The Kings of the World,” director and co-writer Laura Mora Ortega’s dark, picaresque odyssey through Colombia’s half-abandoned interior.

It’s a dreamlike journey into the hopes of reckless, under-educated kids who have nothing but each other, that piece of land and their “freedom.” And their concept of that seems borrowed from Kris Kristofferson, “just another word for ‘nothing left to lose.'” That’s what sends this broke, oft-injured and sometimes-quarrelsome quintet on their quixotic quest.

Ortega, who directed the gritty crime drama “Killing Jesus,” introduces these lads in their element in a opening act of nervous energy filmed with a jarring hand-held camera.

Bryan Andre, “Ra” (Carlos Andrés Castañeda) is 19, living on the streets, pilfering and begging and hustling, the magnet for several friends who ride busted, chainless and DIY modified “coasting” bikes, three-to-a-seat, as they look out for each other and keep each other company.

There’s safety in numbers, they must think. Because the lives of homeless kids like them are the cheapest of the cheap. Any bravado they think they’re showing by their mock machete fights won’t do them much good when they’re out of their element.

But that’s where these “Kings of the World” (“Los reyes del mundo”) are headed when Ra gets a letter from the national Land Restitution Agency. His late grandmother’s claim that she was involuntarily and illegally “displaced” from her home in rural Nechi has been heard and granted.

Ra’s dream of “a place” for them to live and make something of themselves and “be free” is coming true. Sere (Davison Florez), Nano (Brahian Acevedo) and Winny (Cristian Campaña) are up for this trek in an instant.

They don’t really know where Nechi is or how long it’ll take to get there. They’re not exactly rolling in cash. But hey, they have their bikes.

Before they can go, a first sign of trouble. Their in-again/out-again “friend” and supposed relative Culebra (Cristian David Duque) storms up full or threats and accusations. No, they’re not trying to “ditch” him. Sure, he can come.

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