Movie Nation

As he approaches his 76th birthday in December, Steven Spielberg can safely be assumed to be in the “memoirs” stage of his life and celebrated career. But as a filmmaker always more comfortable with the language of cinema, it’d be a shame if he tried simply telling that story on the page.

And no mere chronology of “how I came to be” would do, either. With “The Fabelmans,” he goes for a lightly fictionalized “fable” version of the upbringing that shaped and made him, the influences, encouragements and life events that drove him to succeed.

It’s a magical movie memoir of the making of a movie-maker, with Spielbergian sparks of delight and inspiration, and heaping helpings of Spielberg sentiment. Through it, we come to understand the man who gave us so many broken or breaking families, so many plucky on-my-own kids, so many sad heart-tugging moments undercut with wit, warmth and humor.

It’s a movie-lovers night at the cinema, taking us from his “first ever movie,” his mercurial, musical Mother (Michelle Williams) passing on her enthusiasm, his pedantic engineer Dad (Paul Dano) patiently explaining the “giants” they’d see on the screen are just images captured on celluloid, projected with light and blown-up to enormous size.

From the moment six year-old Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord) sees that spectacular train crash effect in “The Greatest Show on Earth” (1952), he is hooked. But it’s not just the train that grabbed him and caused his father to give him one railcar or locomotive or set of tracks per day during the following Chanukah.

Little Sammy liked to see things crash and blow up.

And when Mom swipes Dad’s 8mm film camera, Spielberg lets us see what makes Sammy run…to the photo shop, home from school to enlist family and friends in his little movies, to the notebook whose drawings become storyboards by the time he’s old enough for the Boy Scouts.

That Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle, a bit player in movies and in TV since 2013) is the one who uses his Phoenix, Arizona BSA Troop 275 as cast and crew in movies he’s learned to storyboard, shots he’s learned to frame, effects he’s ingeniously figured-out how to fake for silent films that have a beginning, middle and end, and a helluva lot of entertainment value.

That Sammy would be shushing his fellow girl-crazy Scouts when they get too rowdy at a theater showing “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” and that Sammy will write letters and knock on Hollywood doors after high school, and in the film’s climax, meet one of his movie making idols, uncannily brought back to life by another legendary director.

“The Fabelmans'” odyssey, from New Jersey to Phoenix and California, following Dad’s career as an RCA then GE and eventually IBM electrical engineer, make up the movie’s more conventional and melodramatic middle acts.

It was a troubled marriage. The family was more observantly Jewish when the grandmothers were around, and when the holidays popped up. Grannies would show up for Mom’s elaborate dinners served on paper plates with plastic forks, all of it tossed with the paper tablecloth when the meal was over.

Mom’s musical side — she is a concert pianist who gave it all up to raise three daughters and a son — would come to the fore, singing Hebrew duets with Dad. “Uncle” Benny, Dad’s work pal (Seth Rogen) would come in and be the “fun uncle” only not a “real” uncle at these gatherings.

And Sammy’s adoring, spirited sisters would not have to be his extras and crew for once, and could lose themselves in the festivities.

Judd Hirsch comes off as a kvetching stereotype in the brief snippet he’s glimpsed in the movie’s trailer. In the film itself, he is an earthy, warm and no-nonsense “circus” (and silent film) veteran, the uncle who comes to mourn his sister, one of their grandmothers, and impresses on young Sammy the tug-of-war his life will be in the arts, yanked between family obligations and life-responsibilities, and “the heart.”

Williams turns this mother into a fragile, impulsive free spirit, piling the kids in the car to chase the first tornado any of them ever saw. Dano was born to play a prototype “computer nerd” who sees a lot of himself in his artsy but technocratic craftsman kid.

Comical young love, the first serious blasts of anti-Semitism Sammy faced in a new school, a smart-aleck who takes a bloody nose as a small price to pay for a withering comeback, this third of the film has been in a thousand other coming-of-age tales before, and often done better. Still, there’s an earnestness to these scenes that counts for something.

Tony winning playwriter (“Angels in America”) and “Munich” screenwriter Tony Kushner came on board to give this story shape, to make “The Family’s Dark Secret” pay off.

But it’s all the things that have become the director’s trademarks that lift “The Fabelmans” into Spielberg Fable status. The fractious, playful scenes with the siblings, the noisy but enthusiastic mob of Scouts needed to create a silent 8mm World War II drama “Escape to Nowhere,” the “Eureka” moments when young Sammy figures out this effect or has his first moment “directing” a performance are brimming with heart and that “gee-whiz” fun.

As for the rest, the Oscar winning icon may hint at the emotional turmoil of a home life with a somewhat manic, frustrated “artist” and the workaholic engineer who takes forever to stop calling what Sammy does with a camera, an editing table and celluloid “a hobby.”

This loving tribute to them and everything that he and they went through and how it informed his art suggests they did something very right along the way.

Rating:PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use.

Cast: Michelle Williams, Gabriel LaBelle,Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord, Seth Rogen, Paul Dano and Judd Hirsch.

Credits: Directed by Steven Spielberg, scripted by Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:31

There’s no shouting and very little pleading in “Safe Place,” Croatian writer, director and star Juraj Lerotić’s debut feature.

That can be misleading, as the film is about a brother and his mother’s frantic efforts to keep a sibling and son, who has just tried to kill himself, from finishing the job. It’s a fraught 24 hours for all involved, with a depressed and perhaps schizophrenic patient who won’t stay in his hospital room and is compelled to make more sad-eyed confessions about hospital staff who “are going to kill me,” and the like, and family struggling to understand it and fighting indifference at every turn.

Lerotić casts a spell and serves up life lessons in a sort of parable about those who are ready to go and want to go, and the loved ones determined to stop them.

A long, static opening shot sees Bruno (Leroti) dash through a street scene of placid quiet, desperate to break the door open in a weathered high rise, more desperate to break down the door to brother Damir’s apartment after he does.

Damir (Goran Markovic) is bleeding from the wrist, and calm enough to be in a stupor. Bruno plunges into manic efforts to get an ambulance and impatient annoyance with the police who show up at the hospital, demanding that Bruno come back to the apartment — immediately — and explain why he busted doors and ask “Who cleaned up the blood?” as if they have any doubts that the glowering man on the gurney did this to himself. And then there’s the shockingly rude, unprofessional and disinterested psychotherapist who resents any questions about treatment or the medications he’s prescribing.

“You don’t trust us,” he smirks, in Croatian with English subtitles. And to Bruno and Damir’s mother (Snjezana Sinovcic Siskov) “You’re a strange woman.”

A couple of things we pick up almost in passing. Bruno is a screenwriter. And telling your brother, in a hospital bed with his wrist bandaged, that “You can only state lines I write for you to say,” is not something you’d expect to hear, not in the real world or the reality Lerotić presents here.

His film is partly autobiographical, and we can take it as an experiment in narrative or as an exercise in self-help, a way of letting himself and his mother off the hook for what they didn’t pick up on in Damir’s state of mind and a way of getting back at unconcerned, unhurried officials, healers and administrators who cannot see or make themselves care about what this event has done to everyone close to the person who attempted it.

Either way, “Safe Place” makes for a beautifully subtle portrayal of guilt, fear and grief, the stress a loved one’s actions bring to those who love them and the acknowledgement that whatever they could have done, odds are it probably wouldn’t have changed the course of history.

Rating: unrated, suicide as subject matter, smoking

Cast: Juraj Lerotić, Goran Markovic and Snjezana Sinovcic Siskov

Credits: Scripted and directed by Juraj Lerotić. A Pipser release.

Running time: 1:43

 The actor Rainn Wilson recently changed his name to Rainnfall Heat Wave Extreme Winter Wilson as a way of protesting America’s indifference to the growing climate crisis facing the planet.

Young activist Greta Thunberg has devoted her life to challenging world leaders to do something, inspiring millions to emulate her and earning the ire of climate change deniers and those who financially back them the world over.

So if Disney decides the hour is getting late and there’s no sense in sugar-coating an animated parable about our pigheadedness in the face of imminent peril, and serves up a generally humorless and heavy-handed cartoon about an environmental crisis like “Strange World,” they’re not going to get criticized by me for their intent.

The film’s stumbling unoriginality, cliched characters and joyless jokes that land like flops from a constipated greenhouse gassy cow, however earn every ounce of ire I can summon.

I didn’t realize the screenwriter and co-director wrote “Raya and the last Dragon,” which was also a bust in my book, and in a lot of the same ways. Like this, it was overloaded in representation, underwhelming in story and dialogue.

I couldn’t make out Dennis Quaid‘s cleverly-disguised voice in the trailer. There was a lot that hit me out of the blue about this one, because there’s been zero buzz for it. Disney knows what they have here. Talking it up won’t help. So they haven’t.

Quaid plays a legendary explorer from a fantasy civilization trapped in a valley, surrounded by high mountains that he and his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) attempt to conquer in the opening sequence.

But Jaeger Clade is hellbent on carrying on when things turn disastrous. And son Searcher decides to head back to backward Avalonia with the electrically-charged berries from the Pando plant (Hey, Disney owns Pandora now, too!) he’s just discovered, which can help Avalonia even more than finding out what’s “beyond the mountains.”

Dad Jaeger goes missing. Searcher comes home, marries (Gabrielle Union), has a son (Jaboukie Young-White) builds a thriving Pando plantation, which in the intervening years has revolutionized their world. Floating cars, airships, electric light, all thanks to energy berries from a plant they’ve become positively addicted to.

But the plants are dying, and the leader (Lucy Liu) is intent on going out beyond the edges of their world, beneath it even, to find out why. Events conspire to put everybody in Searcher’s life on that airship with him and her — stow-aways included — all of them wrapped-up in solving the mystery of why the plants they need to fuel their civilization are going away.

On the way, they find Searcher’s long lost dad, who hasn’t changed. Can son and father evolve, with the help of one’s wife and the other’s grandkid, and learn to accept each other and figure out the solution to the Big Problem they discover?

I mean, the kid’s got this world-building video game he’s great at, and that could help.

I’d quote some funny lines from “Strange World,” but honestly, I didn’t hear any. A cute and helpful underworld creature they nickname Splat is meant to provide sight gags. As is the family mutt. But nah. Nothing doing.

The animation isn’t bad, in a “shades of ‘Avatar'” sort of way. And the “message” comes through, loud and clear. Will little kids figure out the allegory? Not without Mom and Dad explaining it to them, I fear.

But as I stopped taking notes — not proud to admit that at some point I wrote in HUGE type a four-letter expletive that rhymes with “QUIT” all the way across my notebook page — I picked up on where the laughs really are in this animated environmental comedy.

It’s a movie that’s about our addiction to something that’s killing us, which the Koch Brothers and their minions have brainwashed a third of the country into pretending isn’t happening.

The folks triggered by anti-consumerist “Wall-E” are going to have coronaries over this.

It’s built around a family with A) an interracial couple that’s not shy about showing affection, two loving farmers raising a B) gay teenager whom they adore and wholly support and treat as normal because that’s what loving, intelligent people do.

Heck, they even have a three-legged dog.

And when they’re given information about something they’re doing that’s endangering civilization, they adapt and repent.

I dare say the belligerent runt who picked a fight with Disney in Florida this past year, and his mouth-breathing minions are going to lose their rhymes-with-quit over that. So there’s that.

The movie? Not one of Disney’s best. One of its weakest in many years, I’d say.

Rating: PG for action/peril and some thematic elements

Cast: The voices of Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Gabrielle Union, Lucy Liu and Jaboukie Young-White

Credits: Directed by Don Hal and Qui Nguyen, scripted by Qui Ngutyen. A Walt Disney Animation release.

Running time: 1:42

One of the bloodiest and most important struggles of World War II in the Pacific is given a loopy, ahistorical B-movie treatment with loopy, B-movie actors in “Battle for Saipan.“

It’s loosely based on the real-life “banzai charge” at the climax of the battle, when thousands of surviving Japanese troops charged vainly at Marine and Army positions, overrunning them at first but wiped-out, almost to the last man, eventually.

Writer-director Brandon Slagle (“Frost,””Crossbreed”) uses that fact for a fictional “last stand” story set in a military hospital, with doctors and nurses having to pick up weapons to fend off bayonets, machine guns and samurai swords.

Setting it in a hospital also allows Slagle to make his WWII movie coed, so that he could cast his muse — Devanny Pinn — something he does in every film of his I cared to look up. Isn’t that sweet?

The movie, filmed in Thailand, has Louis Mandylor as a major whose patrol is ambushed at the beginning of that July 7 Japanese counter-attack. Major Porter is from Staten Island, a fact that’s an endless bone of comical contention when he drags the one other survivor from his unit to the hospital, where Dr. Vic (Casper Van Dien) presides.

Vic is from Brooklyn. Staten Island might as well a Canadian province.

Porter is taken to “the general,” played by Jeff Fahey in full Col. Kurtz/”Apocalypse Now” mode. He’s sweaty, goateed, long-haired and drunk. And he’s supposedly in charge. Guess it’s up to the major to organize a defense.

“Do you hide beyond your scalpel and syringe of morphine all day?”

Everybody in the place, doctors, nurses to patients — including the guy we see lose his arm (graphically) in a surgery scene — has to fight for their lives as freshly-laundered Japanese infantry and officers infiltrate the place, generally in groups of two or three, making them easier to handle.

There’s no urgency to the situation. A Cold War era tank meant to be Japanese blows a hole in the building, and all the ward of patients and nurses can do is shrug and ask “What the hell was that?”

The fights are reasonably well-staged, with the odd ludicrous touch.

But this is weak directing of bad writing with a lot of actors — one of them apparently the director’s lady friend — getting a working vacation in Thailand for their trouble.

There are epic tales about this bloody battle waiting to be told. One, “Windtalkers,” was turned into a movie. Making this one up seems all the more pointless seeing as how poorly it turned out.

Rating: R for strong violence, bloody images and some language

Cast: Casper Van Dien, Louis Mandylor, Devanny Pinn, Jennifer Wenger, Natalia Nikolaeva, Randall J. Bacon and Jeff Fahey.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandon Slagle. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:33

The actor’s first duty in a movie that is plainly nobody’s idea of a “good choice” is to not let us know it’s her or his “only choice” or offer at the moment. Don’t embarrass yourself by looking bored or annoyed at being here.

And “Burn Notice” veteran Jeffrey Donovan, as the only real “name” in the cast of “R.I.P.D. 2,” manages that, more or less.

It’s a sequel nobody wanted, another outing with heavenly law enforcement officers commissioned to deal with the undead as their lot in the afterlife.

The mind-bogglingly dumb original 2013 film threw Oscar winner Jeff Bridges, Canadian national treasure Ryan Reynolds, Mary Louise Parker and Kevin Bacon at this concept, pairing up an Old West lawman (Bridges) with a modern dead cop (Reynolds) in modern day Boston.

It was a low point on the resumes of all involved.

But the accountants at Universal saw “intellectual property” where others only noticed the red ink, and decided to revisit the comic book they own the rights to for a straight-up Western from Hell sequel. Or prequel.

Sheriff Roy (Donovan) is murdered in the line of duty, just as his daughter’s about to marry. But after heavenly processing, he’s sent back as a member of the Rest in Peace Police Dept.

His partner? She’s a Medieval Frenchwoman named Jean (Penelope Mitchell) who is handy with a sword and knows her Bible. Wonder what her last name is?

Some hapless gold miner (Richard Brake) has dug a tad too deep in Utah, where Hell is uncomfortably close to the surface (we guessed as much). He’s rounding up legions of “deados” as minions and talking “New World Order.”

A cute touch. Our team cannot appear as themselves to mortal man or woman. Their avatars are a pair of nicely turned out African-American women (Rachel Adedeji and Evlyne Oyedokun). That makes for some amusingly awkward encounters, and a testy take down of a “No Colored Allowed” sign in one establishment.

The one-liners are of the “You got looser lip’s than a jawless mule” and that knot is “tighter’n a bull’s ass in fly season.”

Pardner.

Perhaps the best gag in the piece is dressing Sheriff Roy (The same character that Bridges plays in the other film? Making this a prequel?) in a brown leather jacket from the Studio 54 collection, complete with cape.

Worst gag? The idea that heaven has an armory, filled with gold plated pistols and multi-barrel “deado” shootin’ irons. That’s a firearm fetishist’s wet dream.

Jake Choi finds a grin here and there as a deado prisoner the duo take with them on their quest. Brake growls in that Old West heavy manner but is no one’s idea of a top drawer bad guy.

This is no credit to anybody involved, dull and dumb, badly directed from a really bad script the director took a co-writing credit on.

Leave this corpse buried.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Jeffrey Donovan, Rachel Adedeji, Penelope Mitchell, Jake Choi, Evlyne Oyedokun and Richard Brake.

Credits: Directed by Paul Leydon, scripted by Andrew Klein and Paul Leyden. based on the comic book. A Universal film release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:42

We’ve seen decades of boot camp movies over the decades, most taking their cue from 1957’s “The D.I.,” with Jack Webb playing the titular Marine Corps drill instructor. More recently, the bar was set by R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket,” another D.I. charged with changing recruits into soldiers, no matter what their background, disposition or fitness for the job.

But we’ve never seen a version of this coming-of-age/making-of-a-soldier tale as seen through the eyes of a not-wholly-closeted gay man. Writer-director Elegance Bratton makes his semi-autobiographical drama “The Inspection” both a classic underdog-in-boot-camp story, and a blunt and unblinking look at a gay man’s experience in the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era, which ended in 2011.

Bratton and his alter ego, Newark recruit Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) lean into ugly tropes that opponents of gay enlistment trot out every time their bigotry gets the better of them. A just-effeminate-enough gay man putting himself in an all-male environment, living with and showering with his comrades in arms?

Let’s just say Bratton dares to put the “phobia” back in homophobia by some of what his protagonist experiences, does and dreams of doing in this world of testosterone and muscles.

Ellis is homeless when we meet him. He may have his gay “fam” as a support system, but they aren’t feeding, housing and caring for him or giving him options for taking care of himself.

At 25, he has to beg his estranged, disapproving prison guard mom (Gabrielle Union, wearing her mileage and her ferocity) for the paperwork that’ll let him join the military.

It’s 2005, near the post-9/11 peak of military activity, and lipstick-wearing Ellis wants to be a Marine.

Mom’s an embittered mess and cruelly-skeptical of how his “life style” will fit in the Corps.

“Come back” as “the son I gave BIRTH to,” she snaps, and that’s that.

Sure enough, the bullying starts on the bus ride to basic training. But Ellis shows his first hint of mettle when he sits next to a targeted recruit.

His on-base greeting (Parris Island is never named) is the cliched litany of yelling, spittle and intimidation from the two assistant drill instructors. Chief Gunnery Sgt. Laws (Bokeem Woodbine) is sparing in his shouting, but not in his threats.

“I will break you,” he promises one and all. “I HATE recruits. But I LOVE Marines.” He’s duty-bound and old school enough to do whatever it takes, above or below board, to weed out the weak from his Beloved Corps.

Woodbine gives Laws a temper that he controls, a cunning that he rarely gives away and a gaydar that is a little slow on the uptake. He praises the faintly fey “French” and his commitment, before finding his ready-made excuse for cutting him.

“The Inspection” thus sets up as the standard war-of-wills story, but with a generic boot camp “system” vs a culture willing to bend and modernize that system twist on that.

It’s fascinating, if perhaps a tad triggering for some old soldiers who can’t see how “this sort of thing” could happen, when of course it’s been happening all along.

Pope, of Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” mini series, pays dividends as an actor who is both believably gay and convincingly fit, flinty and tough enough to stand up to grueling training and savage bullying.

Raúl Castillo plays a D.I. who makes an intriguing argument for finding the Marine inside the man, picking up on French’s determination, focus, loyalty to his comrades and intelligence. If Laws is willing to do what it takes to make the “sissy” wash out, French and Sgt. Rosales are willing to call him out about crossed-lines and “psychopath” behavior.

Speaking of bullying out of control, McCaul Lombardi is just as realistic as the anointed squad leader in the class, willing to mete out peer-punishment at the D.I.’s instigation to force French out.

But “The Inspection” is best appreciated as a showcase for Woodbine and Union, each taking her or his best big screen dramatic role in years and bringing it home in scene after scene. She almost quivers with contempt for her own child. Woodbine gives Laws the cocksureness of his own prejudices, certain that this less butch recruit won’t pass his every test.

They make Bratton’s film a metaphor for American ignorance faced-down with first-hand experience. He sets up the character to fail, even taunts us with the obvious traps society long-expected recruits like Ellis French or Elegance Bratton to fall into. He then transforms them into further tests for a homeless, desperate gay man who wants to change his future and serve his country as he does.

Bratton makes it not just believable but acceptable for Ellis to be seen as among “The Few, the Proud.” Because gay men, as this Marine Corps vet realizes, know a little something about “pride,” too.

Rating:  R for language throughout, sexual content, some nudity and violence.
Eman Esfand

Cast: Jeremy Pope, Bokeem Woodbine, Raúl Castillo, McCaul Lombardi.
Eman Esfandi and Gabrielle Union.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Elegance Bratton. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:35

One of the best films ever made about the Armenian Genocide tells the story of one of the first survivors to make it to America. It’s titled “Aurora’s Sunrise,” and it uses different media, bending film genres to relate one of the great tragedies of the 20th century through one woman’s plight.

Arshaluys Mardiginian, renamed “Aurora” when she came to America in 1918, met an American newspaperman who helped publicize her ordeal and the mass murder being carried out by the Ottoman Turks under the cover of World War I. Reporter Henry Gates ghost-wrote a serialized memoir from her accounts, got the interest of Hollywood, and put Mardiginian in a William Selig-produced film epic, “Auction of Souls, (Ravished Armenia)” that traveled America, raising money for Armenian orphans and a hoped-for independent Armenian state.

Here’s what Armenian director Inna Sahakyan and her crew of filmmakers and animators drew from to tell Mardiginian’s tale. Sahakyan includes snippets of the 20 surviving minutes of the 80 minute 1919 biographical thriller sometimes called “Ravished Armenia.” As little of that film survives, a crew went out and recreated silent black and white scenes from it with an actress (Anzehelika Hakobyan) portraying Aurora, who played herself in the movie of her odyssey back in 1919.

There’s also documentary footage of the late Arshaluys Mardiginian, from a long oral history interview she sat for in 1984.

And there’s gorgeous animation — what appears to be rotoscoped actors under-animated in front of lush, water-colorish backgrounds of 1910s Armenia, present day Syria, and America. It is narrated by actress Arpi Petrossian, who speaks in Aurora’s voice in monologues from her memoir about her ordeal.

Take the animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir,” throw in some of the multi-media technique of “Nuts!” and add a few more degrees of difficulty and you have an idea of what Sahakyan and her team have attempted and pulled off.

“Aurora’s Sunrise” is an often gorgeous and always extraordinary film relating one woman’s extraordinary ordeal.

In 1915, from the very start of the Ottoman Empire’s WWI alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary, 13 year-old Arshaluys notes her family being warned by a Kurdish shepherd that the Turks were rounding up Armenians all over the empire.

Her family — she had seven siblings — lived in a small town (Chmshkadzag), provided for by a father who kept silkworms and made, dyed and sold silk. The kids put on plays and had happy lives, right up to the moment the round-up of conscripts began.

Armenian men, including her father and brother, were forced into the army, en masse. In her telling, that set the stage for the mass evictions, “death march” and mass murders carried out shortly afterward by the Ottoman army. The men were dead or gone. Women and children were easily evicted by the Ottoman Army, which was challenged all over the Middle East by Arabs and the British, crushed by the Russians to the north, an army in which discipline and the chain of command had broken down.

At night, Arshaluys recalled (in Armenian with English subtitles), the soldiers marched these women and children to their deaths and “got drunk and laid hands of the girls” — scenes recreated here with black and white silent footage more graphic than what might have been filmed in 1919.

Arshaluys and her siblings were hounded, robbed and raped by bandits and repeatedly assaulted by Turkish troops, who tossed children overboard as they barge-shipped refugees down the corpse-littered Euphrates River.

Turks kidnapped and sold Arshaluys, and she was exploited even by Kurds who took her in after she escaped a harem. But eventually, she found sanctuary and passage (via revolutionary St. Petersburg) to America to “tell our story.”

She had a brother who had immigrated here earlier. But once in America, in addition to telling her story, she found herself exploited in different ways by that unscrupulous reporter.

It all makes for a moving and utterly fascinating narrative that folds in a war, grim accounts of what one refugee endures to survive it, and American media and early motion picture history into a narrative of a horrific genocide, which the Turks refuse to acknowledge committing to this very day.

It’s a bit difficult to tell what’s archival footage from the recreations here. The mix of media makes “Aurora’s Sunrise” more challenging than your typical Best International Feature Oscar entry. But let’s hope the Academy embraces that challenge and recognizes this brilliant achievement with a nomination.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Arshaluys Mardiganian, Anzhelika Hakobyan, with the voices of Arpi Petrossian, Ervin Amiryan, Sara Anjargolian and others.

Credits: Directed by Inna Sahakyan, scripted by Peter Liakhov, Kerstin Meyer-Beetz and Inna Sahakyan. A Cineuropa release.

Running time: 1:36

Apologies to anyone at the roll-your-eyes “Here he goes again” stage of reading my familiar gripe, lament and rant about where too many thrillers come up short — pacing.

But here I go again.

“The Pay Day” is a a caper comedy of little action, low acting energy and almost non-existent wit. And every single one of those cringe-worthy shortcoming is connected to the snail’s pace which this indie outing commits to.

It’s disastrously slow — slow to start, slow to get down to business, with slow scenes, slow transitions to new scenes, slow line readings and indifferent editing that does nothing to correct the director’s timidity on the set.

Sam Bradford, mate, if you’ve never heard the phrase “Once again, but FASTER,” you should have. Pace is everything in a caper comedy. EVERYthing. And every single moment of this failure is like watching a fresco dry.

Kyla Frye and Sam Benjamin co-star and co-wrote this story of high stakes/zero-drama data theft. They plays characters who’re both after the same accounts from some firm that’s allegedly keeping the secret illegal stashes of Members of Parliament. She shoots him to prevent him from stealing the flash drive she’s just downloaded.

Could love be far behind?

It’s just that stupid, and never for one agonizing-as-it-plays-out minute lets you forget it.

We’ve seen Jennifer sacked from her office data management job because the boss can’t be asked for a raise. An anonymous phone call proposes a meeting with a cryptic “Anne Boleyn’s ruby slippers” recognition phrase.

Mr. Gates, played by the actor’s actor and Welles biographer Simon Callow, has a new gig for her. Her take?

“One percent of $500 million.” Yes, she can do the math. Can you?

She has to don a wig and fake her way past the lax and annoyingly chatty staff of the London office building where this takes place. And then she’s interrupted by a talky, chummy, over-familiar employee who won’t stop flirting and won’t take a hint that she needs “PRIV-acy,” as the Brits say it, to finish her “clean the server” work.

She’s doing this in a purloined office-maid’s vest, which he notes but doesn’t question. That’s because he wants that data, too. That’s how he gets shot.

Scene after lead-footed scene, with cops coming into the building after the shot is fired, an evacuation, etc., lacks any sense of urgency at all. Then there’s the woman who has never fired a gun barely registering shock at what she’s done, and a guy who acts as if a bleeding (barely) shoulder wound is no big deal continuing their struggles over a flash drive, flirting and passing out for “sex dreams” of the other.

It’s stunningly dumb. The acting is weak, another failing that the hapless editor fails to hide. And every sequence, every scene and every line is so flat and plays out so slowly that the stupid just stands out more.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kyla Frye, Sam Benjamin and Simon Callow.

Credits: Directed by Sam Bradford, scripted by Sam Benjamin and Kyla Frye. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:33

Here are three things that aren’t explained in the movie that might help you get more out of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “oneiric,” Fellini-esqe, quasi-autobiographical magnum opus “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths.”

“Oneiric,” a label applied by the filmmaker and/or the studio to the film, means “dream poem.”

“Bardo” is a Buddhist term for a “transitional” state between death and life, “purgatory” without the Catholic guilt. So our hero is either dreaming, or near death.

And the giant salamanders that show show up in a handful of scenes of this film about a Mexican journalist who gained fame after he relocated to the United States and turned to “docufiction” documentaries, are axolotls, named by the Aztecs — unique to Mexico City and thus a symbol of the city and the Mexican Republic.

In the film, they can be interpreted as the fragile pull of the hero’s heritage when deep down, he knows moving north expanded his possibilities and gave his children the chance to excel in ways that hierarchical, hidebound and constrained Mexico would not.

It’s a movie — pardon, film, as in “A film is a movie we don’t quite understand.” — of dreams and narrative shifts in time and the order of events, a tapestry of modern and ancient Mexico. Its money-scene is a debate between Silvario Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, an Iñárritu look-alike) and infamous conquistador Hernán Cortés (Ivan Massagué) at the top of a mountain of Native corpses in a Mexico City littered with the “disappeared” dead of the country’s recent history.

Not to worry, the “dead,” whom our protagonist, returned to the city from the U.S. to be feted before flying “home” to LA to receive a prestigious journalism honor, are but “extras” on a film shoot — his own.

Silvario as a character has seen them drop dead symbolically everywhere he turns his eyes to show the carnage of the drug wars, murderous corruption and the sea of humanity that has been fleeing north to the Rio Grande for 100 years, many of them dying along the way.

But before I go any further into this challenging satiric parable in an “8 1/2/All That Jazz” vein, what do we say about movies that don’t give us everything we need to interpret them between the opening and closing credits? That force us to look up obscure esoterica? We call such films cheats, the product of a pretentious, indulgent filmmaker who might actually be making this for a Mexican audience, not that you’d get a lot of traction with obscure Buddhist titling and 40 peso words for “dream narrative” in Ciudad Mexico either.

At some point, watching “Bardo,” I had to close up my notebook, give up on writing down the sometimes profound “handful of truths” in the hero’s conversations with his wife (Griselda Siciliani), kids (Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sancho), long-dead father (Luis Couturier), mother (Luz Jiménez) and Cortez.

At some point, there’s nothing for it but to lean forward, rest your head on your heads and try to figure out what this Oscar-winning (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”) pendejo is trying to say in two and a half hours of out time thanks to a big blank indulgent check from Netflix.

Silvario is determined to get an interview with a race-baiting/Mexican-hating US president. The news is filled with Amazon.com’s plans to buy “the Mexican state of Baja, California.”

Our documentarian is defensive about his homeland to anyone who bad-mouths the “Third World” basket-case state overrun with migrants fleeing north from Central and South America, narco-lords, corrupt cops and the corrupt politicians who enable them. But Silvario sees the classism that is so shocking to his kids, the affluence he has lived in and raised them in contrasted with the poverty that sends hundreds of thousands north when the crops fails and the struggle overwhelms them. He feels the resentment for leaving.

He drifts into encounters with ghosts, and truthfully, we aren’t sure in any given scene just what the reality of the moment is, if he’s really making love to his wife or sitting — mute — while an old comrade, now an embittered click-bait ambush chat show host (Francisco Rubio) who attacks him, smiling, on a live TV.

“Exposure at any price,” Silvario complains when the friend Luis complains about his silent evasions.
That’s what attention culture demands. Here he is, like every over-achiever who ever had to mix with the entitled, “seeking approval from people who despite me.”

Reality in “Bardo” is subjective, and capricious. Which is why we mutter Mexican profanities at the great Iñárritu. The pendejo isn’t playing fair.

There are magical moments, and brilliant sequences tossed into this ensalada of a movie — long tracking shots through a big rental hall concert/dance party, through his spacious Mexico City house, over the desert as we see Silvario’s acclaimed and controversial migrant profile film recreated.

He lectures the American ambassador (Jay O. Sanders) about a mythic moment in the disastrous (for Mexico) Mexican-American war, and it is recreated right in front of them, with Mexican actors in cheap blond wigs portraying the American troops.

Funny.

Silvario sees stigmata on his feet, more than once and watches them nailed to the floor at one point, and muses on the state of things and his state of mind in voice over-narration, which more than one character complains about. “Move your LIPS” when you talk (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Some of the profundities I jotted down before giving up and simply trying to decode what I was seeing — “A documentarian should not believe, or not believe. He only must know where to point the camera.” Old age isn’t summoned or expected, but when it arrives “It becomes a full time job.”

There’s a lot of that in the third act, which goes on forever and drags and drags, despite having the odd pithy observation about life and living it, guilt over “home” and the like.

I didn’t hate “Bardo,” something I can’t say about Iñárritu’s pal Alfonso Cuaron’s even more indulgent and hilariously over-rated “Roma.” But he’s made a film that challenges and infuriates and in equal measure.

And if the worst thing that comes from it is a few critic-fans calling him a “pendejo” for it, he’ll have gotten off lightly.

Rating: R for language throughout, strong sexual content and graphic nudity.

Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Griselda Siciliani, Ximena Lamadrid, Iker Sancho, Francisco Rubio and Jay O. Sanders.

Credits: Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, scripted by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:39

There’s something about Alaska that welcomes the quirky and celebrates the extreme.

It’s where The Iditarod was born, after all. But I used to live on remote Kodiak Island, where the locals would invent drunken DIY river raft races, bizarre footraces and no-holds-barred golfing challenges — there is no golf course — up the mountain overlooking the town of Kodiak. Every corner of Alaska is overrun with such oddities. Screwballs congregate there.

And sometimes, they invent a new race to lure more of them north.

“The Race to Alaska” is a goofy, lighthearted documentary about the R2AK, The Race to Alaska — scores and scores of boats without engines — racing sloops, catamarans and trimarans to dinghies, beach cats and the occasional paddle board — dash and endure the 750 miles from Port Townsend, Washington to Ketchikan, Alaska via “The Inside Strait,” a quest that can take from 3-13 days.

“Sounds like a good way to die!” one participant laughs. And he’s not wrong.

When you’re pedaling, paddling, or sailing through some of the most stunning seaside scenery on Earth, the Johnstone Straight, Seymour Narrows and “Cape Caution, which was NOT named by somebody who hadn’t been there,” are trying to kill you.

Giant waves, sudden changes in weather, vast tidal rapids, huge whirlpools, rocks, loose logs and shipping traffic — the occasional giant cruise ship looms up behind you — break gear, swamp boats and test experienced sailors and novices alike, every year since 2015.

“How do I avoid icy death?” becomes everyone’s motto.

But it’s also treated as something of a joke, even by the participants. They begin with a “LeMans start” (racers racing on foot onto their boats) accompanied by the Red Army Chorus’s booming rendition of the old Soviet National Anthem. Yes, in formerly Russian Alaska and environs, that’s still funny.

Filmmaker Zach Carver uses interviews and on-board video diaries from solo sailors and crews ranging from privileged bros to “blue collar” sailors, feminists, sourdoughs, eccentrics and adventure athletes to paint a fun picture of a character-building boat race peopled by genuine characters.

They are “someone who has the ability to push themselves beyond” their abilities, and beyond the expectations of others,” organizer Jack Beattie waxes lyrically.

“We have about 70 miles to smoke all the weed,” one crew decides as they hit the home stretch.

The boats can be customized to suit the conditions, or disposable yard sale purchases, with names like Sail Like a Girl, Freeburd, Fashionably Late, Grace B, Ptarmigan, Soggy Beavers and Jungle Kitty.

Crews rough it with DIY toilets, catching sleep where they can –on board in the rain and spraw, or in tents or homemade shelters along the undeveloped shore, where the Alaskan brown bears roam.

All are tested, some have to quit and some find themselves beaten down by the grind and exhilarated by the awe-inspiring views, joyous porpoise encounters and the thrill of the chase.

“We intentionally made a really frustrating race” with that in mind, Beattie admits with a cackle.

It’s a playful movie, very much in the spirit of the engine-free race it documents, with the various boat crews producing the memorable moments — knockdowns (when wind or wave slaps a boat onto its side, or worse — brilliant bits of ingenuity, sight-seeing ashore, meeting locals and Native Americans, and um, bonding as a crew.

“We’re brothers, working on being enemies. It’s a small boat.”

Sure, bragging rights enter the picture, but just getting to the finish line is achievement enough for most. Of course, somebody turned her race into a TED Talk. That’s how the attention economy works.

But what’s striking about these folks is the ingenuity mixed with idealistic naivete that so many bring to this bucket list adventure. As an experienced sailor who lives aboard a sailboat in Florida, I was amazed at some of the gadgets people invented to move even big boats when the wind or the tide are against them. Take away the easy “engine” answer to everything and people get creative.

“Gas is what we use now in place of intelligence,” one old salt opines. And he’s not wrong, at least in this case.

Beattie gets the last word on all this, a chamber of commerce/town promoter type who knew “the best bad idea” he and race coordinator Daniel Evans had ever heard, and ran with it. He should put this on a T-shirt as the motto of this good time/hard time once a year regatta.

“Be safe, be bold, do something incredible. And get over yourself.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, drug references

Cast: Jack Beattie, Daniel Evans, many others

Credits: Directed by Zach Carver, scripted by Zach Carver and Greg King. A Freestyle Release.

Running time: 1:37