Movie Nation

It plays like a rowdy, raunchy 1970s Blaxploitation period piece. Because aside from cell phones, what’s changed in “tha’hood” in the past 50 years?

Gang-bangers, pimps and “ho’s” riding around in Yank tank Buicks, aimless souls pumping iron, hitting the convenience store for a scratch-off and a forty.

But that’s the whole satiric point of “They Cloned Tyrone,” a noisy, funny and ever-so-quotable comedy about the vast white wing conspiracy to keep the brothers and sisters down. Nothing’s changed in 50+ years because “There’s something in the water.” Or the fried chicken. Or grape drink. Or hair-straightener. Or the music.

Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier’s script was Black Listed, deemed “one of the best unproduced scripts making the rounds in Hollywood” about five years ago. Netflix finally produced it, with Taylor behind the camera directing, and it’s hilarious.

It’s about low-tier drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega) who clumsily injures a rival invading his turf, gets a bellyful of lead because he’s not smart enough to see a reprisal coming, and wakes up to the same life, the same routine — “Got Drank!” convenience store for a 40 and a scratch-off, a quick cruise in his ’77 Buick LeSabre to hit-up pimp Slick Charles (Oscar winner Jamie Foxx) for the drug cash he owes, same “ho’s” providing him information (Tamberla Perry) and sass, especially Slick’s favorite, Yo-Yo (Teyonnah Parris of “Dear White People” and “Chi-Raq”).

As Slick and Yo-Yo remember Fontaine getting ventillated, he starts to wonder just what’s going on in “The Glen” (Atlanta)?

With Yo-Yo doing some “Nancy Drew s—,” Fontaine stomping around like a grilled-teeth bull in an Atlanta china shop and Slick Charles casting out words of warning, they start to put it all together — the inane hip hop on every radio, the fried chicken that has folks lined up around the block.

“They say curiosity killed the cat. We some cats. COOL cats, but we still cats!”

The screenplay sings a song of silliness and conspiracy, start to finish. Like most “Black Listed” scripts, it’s movie-savvy — references to “Nancy Drew,” “Book of Eli,” “Training Day,” “Sophie’s Choice” and especially the Kevin Bacon thriller “Hollow Man” abound.

Screenwriters love referencing earlier screenplays via characters who speak movie shorthand.

“They ‘Clockwork ORANGING ni–as!”

The rolling tide of jokes and references includes a “Coma” inspired “Dexter’s Lab” filled with “Bill Nye-the-Science-Guy-looking-mother-f—ers.”

The world they create here is “Do the Right Thing” lived-in, complete with an aged, drunken sage, Frog (Leon Lamar) who cadges drinks in front of the Got Drank! and lets drop “There’s something in the water” and other pearls of wisdom about what’s really going on.

David Alan Grier, in a FULL Frederick Douglass wig, goes OFF as a singing, testifying and (spiked with mind-control drugs) grape drink communion preacher, a single scene that calls for a whole spin-off movie.

And if you need a conspiracy explained by one of the conspirators, you can’t cast better than Kiefer Sutherland. Maybe let the Canadian do a Southern drawl if he likes.

But Foxx, who had his “medical emergency” just before this production wrapped, is the life of the party, the pimp’s pimp and funnyman to Boyega’s stoic straight-up gangster straight-man. Foxx is on-fire, and you have to wonder how many of his one-liners he improvised, because as almost all of his lines land laughs, surely not not all of them can have been scripted.

“Just regale me the latest indignity suffered upon my ace boon coon.”

Our “Nancy Drew/Scooby-Doo” trio goes underground to the lab to find answers?

“We don’t spelunk! WHITE people spelunkers!”

Let’s hope Foxx gets his health, his voice and his wit back to full strength, because it’s impossible to imagine anybody else as funny in this role. And let’s hope the Writer’s Guild gets what it wants from Hollywood’s producers and studio execs. Writing this sharp deserves compensation and protection.

But once again Netflix giving a filmmaker final cut without sweetly-worded “notes” on pacing drags a movie down. Even the Oscar-nominated pictures from the streamer, from “Roma” and “Mank” on down to comedies, “Extraction” thrillers, the works, almost all play as long, as if “It’s on Netflix, nobody cares about ‘pacing'” when viewers are wandering into the kitchen, playing on their phones or taking toilet breaks.

The haste in rushing this out — supposedly, there were scenes Foxx didn’t finish before his health scare in April — may explain some of that. A little more editing time and maybe the filmmakers could have been convinced to tighten “Tyrone” and abandon a pointless anti-climax.

What we’ve got though, is a very funny movie with socially relevant bite, and the best “Get Well Soon” card Jamie Foxx could ever want.

Rating: R, violence, drug content, constant profanity

Cast: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonnah Parris, David Alan Grier and Kiefer Sutherland

Credits: Directed by Juel Taylor, scripted by Tony Rettenmaier and Juel Taylor. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

“Cobweb” is a horror genre piece as simple and to the point as its title.

A child hears noises in the walls of the old house where he lives, and in trying to raise the alarm with his parents, comes to wonder what their true nature is and just what they’re capable of.

First-time feature director Samuel Bodin proves sure-handed in dealing with the basics and produces a few truly hair-raising joles from Chris Thomas Devlin’s script.

But the odd dissonant note in a performance and stumbles in the plotting and especially the finale point to failures in execution and, when the chips are down, a loss of nerve.

Woody Norman, another moppet with the “child actor hair cut” (long, unruly) plays Peter, a lad bullied in elementary school and rattled by noises in the walls of his room at night.

His mother (Lizzy Caplan) teases his “over-active imagination,” and while his Dad (Anthony Starr) might give credence to the racket, he’s passing it off as “rats.”

But “rats” don’t whisper in a girl’s voice. Rat’s don’t pass on warnings about his parents, who won’t even let Peter go trick-or-treating, and aren’t shy about telling him of a girl down the street who disappeared on Halloween a few year’s back. Rats don’t coach Peter how to deal with the bullies at school.

With the bruises piling up at school and Peter doing chilling drawings in class in which he pleads “Help Me,” it’s no wonder his new teacher (Cleopatra Coleman) takes it on herself to check out his living situation and worry about his safety.

Virtually everything that happens in the third act summons up dusty, cobwebbed memories of the movies this one borrows from — a skittering, hairy monster of “The Ring,” masked intruders, a bloody showdown.

Caplan is the stand-out in the cast, hitting just the right shrill notes of the “a little…off” variety. But the kid’s not bad, Coleman’s properly plucky and Starr has his moments.

For a modestly-ambitious genre pic, “Cobweb’s” not all that original. But not that bad, either.

Rating: R, for horror violence and profanity

Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Anthony Starr, Cleopatra Coleman and Woody Norman

Credits: Directed by Samuel Bodin, scripted by Chris Thomas Devlin. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:29

Regal Waterford Lakes, Orlando, 833pm Thursday July 21.

“Barbie” fans represent. My review is here.

The movie, as of Friday AM, is on track to $100 million+ on its opening weekend, just in North America. Huge overseas, too.

Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” is a movie of its moment, a brilliant bauble of female empowerment, scathing satire and genuine wit.

That “war on women” that is eating up so much of America’s bandwidth right now takes it in the gonads in a comedy that delights as it sends up the patriarchy and the plastic pastel parallel universe that the physically “perfect,” independent have-it-all over-achiever doll always taunted girls and women to live up to.

How Mattel ever agreed to this is anybody’s guess. But Gerwig (“Last Bird”) did two corporate behemoths proud in sending up men making toys for girls and Warner Bros for giving this hilariously smart movie maker final cut, and then some.

Gerwig gives us a feminist “Barbie” who’s pretty witty, and still pretty in pink.

Margot Robbie, the only woman who could have portrayed “stereotypical Barbie,” plays a toy who falls into an “existential crisis.”

What life is beyond Barbieland? There every woman is a Barbie and Barbies do every job –President (Issa Rae) to Supreme Court, with Nobel Prize winners (Alexandra Shipp) thrown in for good measure.

All those Kens played by Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu and others? They’re just here to “beach,” mere adornments for their respective Barbies.

But thoughts of death send Barbie to “Weird Barbie,” a wise doll (Kate McKinnon) who was played with a bit roughly. She surmises that Barbie is absorbing angst from “the girl who plays with her” and sends her into “the real world” to find that girl and set her straight.

As the “2001” prologue we’ve seen in the trailers to this film points out, Barbie was the first doll to suggest to girls that they were smart and independent and could do anything and make their own way in the world, that there are careers other than motherhood, Barbie figures she’ll be welcomed as an icon.

No dice.

“Aren’t there any WOMEN in charge?”

Body image, white privilege issues with this doll abound in girls like tween Sasha (Arianna Greenblatt). Her mom (America Ferrera) is the true Barbie believer.

Ken (Gosling), who tagged along on the trip, finds himself drunk on the “man’s world” he’s stumbled into, embracing the patriarchy even if his himbo status means he’s not qualified to do anything but look good on the beach.

He will go back to Barbieland and organize the boys for an electoral coup. A “Kendom” is born. Or might be, if the bro’s can stay focused.

And Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell) from corporate HQ doesn’t have enough “Yes” men to set all this to right. Only Barbie and her feisty, feminist friend Gloria (Ferrera) are willing to take on the task.

They’re the ones who know “Ken is totally superfluous!”

There are layers of meaning and jokes by the dozens in this send-up of the sexual hierarchy in America. The “liberated” Kens start singing Matchbox 20’s “I Wanna Push You Around,” which spoils Barbie’s Indigo Girls sing alongs.

The soundstage-centric production design of Barbie Dreamhouses, Barbie 1950s Corvette convertibles and clothes clothes clothes is immaculate.

Robbie is, of course, the ultimate production design flourish, but she gives a great doll-out-of-water/doll awakening performance and is the heart of the movie.

Goslings sings and vamps and does it all with a straight face, adding to the camp value of the entire enterprise.

Ferrara is the film’s soul, preaching about the contradictions and “cognitive dissonance it takes to be a woman.”

And McKinnon has perhaps her best film role as the droll and sage wit who sees the problems and the injustice of “our” world invading Barbieland and points Barbie towards her quest.

“Hey, don’t blame me. Blame Mattel. They make the rules.”

Much of what’s here will go over the heads of any child tempted into begging a parent to take them to see “Barbie.” It’s a little edgy and “adult” without crossing into “ADULT.”

But it’s great fun for anybody who grew up with the doll, or who has a sister who did, and anyone wondering just how far women can be pushed by a misogynistic minority before they get their backs up, get into their best protest and go-to-the-polls pastels, pop into their Corvettes and make the society that this malleable, ever-evolving iconic doll hints that they might.

Rating: PG-13 for suggestive references and some profanity

Cast: Margot Robbie, America Ferrera, Ryan Gosling, Issa Rae, Alexandra Shipp, Simu Liu, Arianna Greenblatt, Dua Lipa, Rita Arya, John Cena, Michael Cera and Kate McKinnon

Credits: Directed by Greta Gerwig, scripted by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. A Mattel/Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:54

The “Beanie Baby Craze” of the 1990s silenced anybody who ever had a laugh when learning of the
“Tulip Fever” that gripped Dutch collectors, investors and ordinary folk in 17th century Holland. And no movie about the Clinton Era plush toy mania could fail to find the fun in remembering folks who made and lost fortunes hunting down and “investing” in cute, cleverly-marketed children’s toys.

“The Beanie Bubble” may be a tad conventional in its approach to this “origin story” and its “rise and fall” narrative arc. But it’s a fun, infuriating trip down memory lane thanks to the people traditionally left out of this “story,” the women who made it happen for the guy who got all the credit.

Zach Galifaniakis brings his disarming charm and a layer of “almost adorable creep” to his portrayal of Ty Warner, the “genius,” aka adult “child” who founded Ty Toys and spun his own myth out of it and the Beanie Mania it helped create.

But “Beanie Bubble” is about “Robbie,” the woman (played by Elizabeth Banks) who co-founded the company and became Warner’s partner, in and out of the office, only to have Warner cheat her out of credit and ownership. It’s about Maya (Geraldine Viswanathan), the smart young college student who joined the company as receptionist and who masterminded internet marketing and helped Ty Toys surf the ever-shifting shape of a business that turned from toys for kids to collectibles for “investors,” only to have her value discounted by the dopey, infantile and sexist CEO.

And then there’s Sheila (Sarah Snook) a single mom and business woman whose daughters became the original test-market for Beanie Babies and even helped design them with Sheila seduced into agreeing to marry this charming, kid-friendly billionaire. No, that didn’t work out either.

Each of the three narrates a portion of the story — Banks/Robbie remembering her struggles through a failing marriage to a paraplegic husband whom she supported with shop clerk jobs, only to meet Ty Warner and have him change her life, Maya recalling her Indian-American family’s disapproval of her abandoning medical school to learn on-the-job and invent internet marketing and Sheila recalling the way she, too, was swept off her feet by this sometimes clever, sometimes screwy toy company tyro.

The film is based on a book by Zac Bissonnette but fictionalized here, with probable composite characters exaggerated to fill a larger function in teh story, as one can’t quite nail down who this “Robbie,” “Maya” and “Sheila” might be, although the Internet provides some clues.

In the first act, each woman gives great reasons for the company’s success and their attraction to Warner as a partner/lover, boss or just suitor.

“We didn’t set out to make America lose it’s mind, but that’s what happened,” Robbie remembers.

“If he liked the way you think, he’d listen to you,” Maya enthuses.

“Oh Sheila, I would DIE before I let you down,” Sheila was told.

Giddy business breaks and happy accidents and courtship are covered in giddy musical montages set to The Cranberries (“Dreams”) and INXS (“New Sensation,” of course) and others.

Ty and Robbie take over toy conventions with their flash and their increasingly hot plush toy products. Ty has little epiphanies, and in spite of his sometimes shortsighted moves, he latches onto big ideas when he hears them.

One of Sheila’s little girls complains that she can’t get his “understuffed” (his real breakthrough) toys into her backpack to take to school. Let’s make something SMALLER, he decies. The chocolate-milk-addict Ty then grills the kids on naming critters that become best-sellers.

They’re his co-conspiractors, learning to dance and lip-sync with him to “Oh Sheila” for his bowling alley proposal to their mom.

Maya takes it on herself to knock out tiny poems to put inside the tag on every Beanie Baby sold.

Let the good times roll, with the warning signs popping up even in the best moments.

By the second act, every woman is seeing the flaws in Warner’s mercurial personality, and in the role “luck” played in his “empire,” which blew up almost in spite of his often poor understanding of business and the karmet, his bad hunches and general backward thinking.

And by the third act they’re all paying the price for his shortcomings, especially in the way he treats women.

Origin stories and their “Eureka” moments are endlessly fascinating to some of us. I never owned a Beanie Baby, or bought one for a child (Furbys, on the other hand…) or played “Tetris,” but the history of a product, a fad or a movement is great fodder for a film.

Producer-turned-writer/director Kristin Gore and music video-maker and actor-turned-director Damian Kulash set us up for a lot of those “when it happened” moments — that first suburban Chicago outbreak of “collecting,” the name of that first Beanie frog.

Their script bounces through two periods in time — the ’80s and the ’90s — taking shots at the Reagan recession and Reaganomics and the heady, unfettered new ideas (the Internet, instant-collectible toys) of free-for-all of the Clinton years, setting us up for “the fall.”

But the players are the chief assets here, with Banks giving us a magnificent meltdown, Viswanathan (of “Blockers” and TV’s “Miracle Workers”) embodying the tech, marketing and fad-savvy young person who isn’t so good at reading The Boss and Snook (“Run Rabbit Run,” “Steve Jobs”) impressing as the Only Adult in the Room.

It’s almost unfair to point out how this women’s story hangs on the quirky charisma of that damned Zach Galifianakis, but he’s just great here — charming, inspiring, motivating and in the end infuriating every woman he comes into contact with, real victim or a composite of all the women Ty Warner used and gave little credit or cash to in his heady years inflating “The Beanie Bubble.”

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Banks, Geraldine Viswanathan, Sarah Snook, and Zach Galifianakis

Credits: Directed by Kristin Gore and Damian Kulash, scripted by Kristin Gore, based on the book by Zac Bissonnette. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:50

For some reason, a Childersburg Alabama rescue squad member told a local TV affiliate in BFE, Alabama that a “TikTok Challenge” involving teens leaping off the back of speeding motorboats has killed four kids this year and that this was another example of social media and the Chinese-owned TikTok being bad for kids.

The story blew up and became national news. It was a lie, just another yahoo named Dennis making something up to fit an agenda.

But we believed it because it seems like every week, there’s a new viral example of something reckless young people are doing just to get “likes” on a video they post online. All a consequence of a performative generation trying to get noticed via online “attention culture.”

So the idea that teenagers might find this ceramic hand that serves as a portal for connecting with the gruesome, ghostly dead, use it as a party game, peer-pressure each other to try it and post videos of each other getting possessed and lashing out embarassingly or violently? Aside from the supernatural element, that’s an easy sell.

“Talk to Me” is an Australian horror film that taps into teen groupthink, gullibility and peer pressure with a jolting tale of this demon “hand” and how it keeps getting passed around for kicks and page-views despite its obvious dangers.

The drug-like rush of the experience and the social pressure to laugh off the dangers outweighs the eyes-averting gore of some of the consequences — captured on cell videos.

Maybe your teenagers wouldn’t fall for that. But by and large, most of us see that as just the sort of thing — like summoning Bloody Mary or The Slender Man — that no-consequences-considered kids would do.

The Danny Philippou/Michael Philippou film opens with a huge party that ends with a stabbing and a suicide, all of it captured on cell video because that’s what people do rather than “REACT” to something horrific happening in front of them.

The hand doesn’t show up until another party. That’s where Mia (Sophie Wilde), her bestie Jade (Alexandra Jensen), Jade’s “Christian” beau Danuel (Otis Dhanji) and Jade’s impressionable tween brother Riley (Joe Bird) show up for a little teen drinking, a lot of peer pressure and this experience that irresponsible Joss (Chris Olosio) and cruelly unpleasant Haley (Zoe Terakes) have to offer.

The hand has a few back-stories — legends — surrounding it, lore than nobody tries to confirm. It is covered in graffiti — names, cryptic words and the like. You light a candle, sit down with it and give the hand a shake while saying “Talk to me” and you see ghosts — decaying, angry, traumatized monsters that must have been people at some point or other.

Say “I let you in” and the demonic ghost takes possession of your body. The “rules?” Better not let it linger there for more than 90 seconds. Yank the hand away and blow out the candle to “close the door.”

Mia has a hint of the risk-taker about her. She doesn’t need the crowd’s “Do IT DO IT DO IT” egging on to shake hands with the afterlife.

But Mia’s recently lost her mother to tragedy. Mia is vulnerable. A glimpse of her dead mom is all it takes to make her eager to repeat the experience, heedless to the danger to her and it turns out, others.

As our parents always told us, it’s all in good fun until somebody gets hurt.

“Talk to Me” grimly marches through the consequences of taking a handshake from the dark side. Mia soon sees her mother and other ghosts without the helping hand. Someone gets hurt and Mia’s history of risks — “Are you on something?” Jade’s mother (“Lord of the Rings” veteran Miranda Otto) wants to know. — and reluctance to finish off an injured and dying kangaroo, to “put it out of its misery” — foreshadow what’s to come.

Otto lends the picture gravitas as the literal Adult in the Room — a single mom who embraces Mia, hinting at her history, until she recognizes her as a threat to her children.

Oz TV vet Terakes makes her cruel, callous mean girl a hateful figure, egging on others, eagerly documenting their horror and embarrassment.

Wilde (“The Portable Door”) gives us a relatable, (somewhat) innocent beauty right up to Mia’s first possession. It isn’t just makeup, editing, sound effects and huge, inky-black contact lenses that sell her “possession.” This is good horror film acting, taking us from the nervous laughter of the peer-presseured to the manic, willful violence of “another” taking over your body.

The movie itself a bit of a slog, leaning into the dread and falling on the unpleasant end of the horror film spectrum. The tone is somber, the laughs are darker than dark, the violence sudden and shocking and the cruelty self-centered, narcissistic and oh-so-high-school.

“Talk to Me” feels much longer than the 96 minute run-time, and that’s not just because of pacing problems that permeate the middle acts. It can be a bit of a drag. But when your movie sets out to dare viewers to not avert their eyes, that’s part of the hard-to-sit-through bargain.

But kudos to all involved for making a horror movie with a simple gimmick, a lot of gore and a few things to say about teen culture in a social media age, none of them having anything to do with TikTok.

Rating: R for strong/bloody violent content, some sexual material and profanity

Cast: Sophie Wilde, Joe Bird, Alexandra Jensen, Zoe Terakes, Chris Olosio, Marcus Johnson and Miranda Otto

Credits: Directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, scripted by Bill Hinzman, Daley Pearson and Danny Philippou. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:34

Winter Park, Florida ready for a (preview) fright because they know if it’s an A24 horror release, it’ll be smart.

(Updated: A link to my review of “Talk to Me” is here.)

A good punch in the gut to end July, right?

A24 knows horror. This one opens July 28.

John Sweet’s not a name you think of when you remember the great actors, or even the lesser ones of Hollywood’s Golden Age. He was a Minneapolis schoolteacher turned sergeant in the Army, training in Great Britain to liberate Europe from fascism when he was “discovered” by the producing/directing duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger,

Something about Sweet’s drawl and lanky, folksy demeanor suggested an idealized GI to the British filmmakers — a blend of “foreignness,” common sense and common decency — so they drafted him into duty on their World War II allegory, “A Canterbury Tale.”

Sweet gives a grand, unaffected “real person” performance in this film, one of several “morale boosting” keep-calm-and-carry-on movies Powell and Pressburger made during the war, a lighthearted, sentimental follow-up to their anti-isolationist classic, “The 49th Parallel.”

It’s a vaguely Chaucer-esque yarn about “pilgrims” — an American GI, a British Tommy (Dennis Price), and a London shop girl (Sheila Sim) enlisted to do farm work in the country — who meet on the train to Canterbury, get off one stop short and tumble into a local crime and mystery.

Veteran heavy Eric Portman is Colpeper, the mysterious local landed gentry now magistrate of tiny fictioncal Chillingbourne, not far down “The Pilgrim’s Way” from the cathedral city immortalized by Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century story collection, “The Canterbury Tales.”

When the lost American Sgt. Johnson, ag worker Alison and received pronunciation posh Sgt. Gibbs stop there, Alison is doused by the locally-infamous scoundrel “The Glue Man.” As the magistrate seems to have all the power in town and a few peculiar habits with regards to the visiting soldiers, and no more eagerness to solve the crime than the constable or any other locals, Alison enlists the other “pilgrims” to crack the case, with all eyes pointing to Mr. Colpeper being the culprit.

I mean, he’s played by Eric Portman. Of course he’s the prime suspect.

The sleuthing entails Alison’s taking a farm job and quizzing the locals, Sgt. Gibbs working out the MO of the criminal and Sgt Johnson’s winning ways with the nosy, gossipy local boys, all of whom are busy playing war and providing clues.

The historic road has had a bit of archeological excavation recently, and coupled with this idealized view of the WWII English (Kentish) countryside, we hear a little about English patrimony, the long history of freedom, and cracks about the “tea drinking, left-side driving” and of all things The Domesday Book from cornball Bob, the Sgt. from Oregon.

“Tea? I don’t like that stuff.”

“Sure, it’s a habit, like marijiuana!”

“I’ll take marijuana!”

The “snooping about” and clue-collecting “story” isn’t what’s interesting now, almost 80 years later. It’s this sense of “This is the Britain, the traditions, people and freedoms that we’re fighting for” messaging.

The jokes that still work (one of them Cheech & Chong approved) include cracks about “isolationist” Americans, the Anglo-American language barrier and the wonderful black and white depiction of Kent — thatched barns, rolling fields (traversed by speeding Bren-gun armored personnel carriers) and ancient horse-and-wagon folkways still in use there.

And then there’s the cathedral city of Canterbury itself, and a glimpse of what inspired this “tale” — a war brought home to all of Britain, at one point or another.

Powell was a star director by war’s end, and would go on to make some of the most gorgeous movies ever filmed in color — “The Red Shoes” and “Black Narcissis” among them.

Price enjoyed a long career after this film, Sims only worked for another decade. And Sweet, the soldier drafted into film acting for just a short period of 1944, playing a poster boy American GI of the day, made it through the war and back to teaching school — with a little stage acting on the side — in America.

He’d played the earnest, honest and upright uniformed American come to save democracy and not hit on every English rose he spied in the lcoal pubs and dance halls, a bit of home-front propaganda for pre-D-Day Brits perhaps wearying of the noisy, boisterous and catnip-to-the-ladies Yanks who had “invaded” their “scepter’d isle.”

Who could live up to that “ideal Yank” image? Maybe John Sweet could. He took the $2000 he was paid for his one and only major film role and donated it to the NAACP. He retired to the English-style retirement village “Fearrington” in North Carolina, and died at age 95 in 2011, a model example of “The Greatest Generation.”

“A Canterbury Tale” may not be top rank of films from Powell’s canon. It’s dated in some unflattering ways (a stammerer is ridiculed as “the village idiot”). But it makes an adorably quaint snapshot — complete with marijuana joke — of the war in Britain and an English countryside perhaps properly spoiled by progress and by too many years of TV’s “Escape to the Country.”

Rating: “approved”

Cast: Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, John Sweet and Dennis Price.

Credits: Scripted, directed and produced by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. An Eagle-Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, Tubi, etc.

Running time: 2:04

Christopher Nolan turns his considerable talents back to World War II era history for “Oppenheimer,” a biography that plumbs the genius, foibles and moral and ethical dilemmas faced by “The Father of the Atomic Bomb.”

It’s an all-star revisiting of an epic undertaking, the race to build a bomb “before the Germans get one,” envisioned as a cinematic whirlwind of science, history, intrigues and tragedy. Riding on the shoulders of a haunted performance by Cillian Murphy in the title role, a subtly-shaded turn by Robert Downey Jr., the bluff, blunt and funny presence of Matt Damon and a brilliantly brittle interpretation of Oppenheimer’s wife by Emily Blunt, it’s a magnificent film, head-and-shoulders above every other movie of the summer, and not just in its ambition.

Nolan’s script, based on the book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” sweeps us through the genius physicist’s academic achievements as the “man who brought quantum mechanics to America,” his mastery of any subject that entered his field of vision, his masterly management of The Manhattan Project, a very smart man’s dalliance in liberal-to-left-wing politics, his humanism and his womanizing.

Murphy’s Oppenheimer has the faraway eyes of a dreamer, with Nolan slipping vivid imaginings of what that mind was “seeing” when he pondered black holes and the physics that runs the universe. And this “Oppie” has the cocksure quick wit and swagger of a someone who knew he was the Smartest Man in the Room, and acted — sometimes recklessly, sometimes humorously — on that confidence.

“Why don’t you have a Nobel Prize?” Army officer/West Point-and-MIT-educated engineer Leslie Groves (Damon) bluntly asks the man he wants to manage the “Manhattan” project when they meet.

“Why aren’t you a general?”

The story is framed within Oppenheimer’s closed-hearing “trial” which revoked his security clearance in 1954, with his critics and defenders facing judgement from the likes of Gordon Gray (Tony Goldwyn) and grilling from judge/prosecutor, Roger Robb (Jason Clark).

And that frame is tucked within another, the Senate hearings of a former Oppenheimer champion and 1950s Eisenhower administration cabinet nominee, Lewis Strauss (Downey).

The thread that runs through those scenes and spreads into the flashbacks that recreate Oppenhimer’s much-documented life story is “Who’d want to justify their whole life?” He can dismiss ill-informed questions about why he didn’t attend the finest physics program in America, at Berkeley, with “Because I hadn’t built” that program yet. But studying in Britain and especially the world’s enemy, Germany, was seen as a red flag in his life story.

Oppenheimer’s attraction to the mercurial, unromantic communist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) is shown, and when this “questionable association” is revisited in his security clearance hearing, their sexual encounters migrate from hotel rooms to his chair in the hearing chambers, both of them naked before his accusers.

The story of Oppenheimer’s life is reflected in the great figures who were his peers — Kenneth Branagh is somberly playful as the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, Tom Conti is the weary, elderly Einstein, Josh Hartnett is Nobel prize-winner Ernest Lawrence, Benny Safdie is an always-sweaty H-bomb champion Edward Teller.

Through it all, the politics of the era pass by outside the halls of academia and later the hastily-built city of Los Alamos. Oppenheimer knows Marxism and its limitations because he read “Das Kapital” in “the original German.” He supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, because only fascists didn’t, and his brother and sister-in-law became “card carrying communists” and he wouldn’t distance himself from them because they were his brother and sister-in-law.

He loved women, and impregnated and married Kitty (Blunt), whom he met at a cocktail party with her significant other.

“You’re married to Dr. Harrison?”

“Not very.”

And he learned Sanskrit to read the “Bhagavad Gita,” and when the “Trinity” nuclear test blast succeeded in July of 1945, he quoted it.

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Nolan shot Congressional hearings and media scrums surrounding the Oppenheimer of the 1950s in the black and white of TV memory, and the epic story of Los Alamos and the life that led up to it in vivid color, folded into flashbacks within these frames.

Nolan’s films are famous for their sound design, and here that’s most impressive in the Trinity sequence, stunning silence underscoring the (non digital) pillar of boiling fire created by the world’s first atomic bomb, shattering noise erupting not just when the shock-wave of the blast passes over the scientists and soldiers, but when the shock of what they’ve achieved and what he’s wrought rattles Oppenheimer.

This brisk but long film’s third act delivers a clever echo of that shock, when Oppenheimer plays to the crowd at a celebratory gathering of those who worked on the project, stunned by their noisy enthusiasm even as he is almost as conflicted about this achievement as colleagues like Isidor Rabi (David Krumholtz, terrific) about the carnage their bombs wrought.

The film balances the much-debated moral quandary of the fateful decision to drop bombs on a fanatical enemy whose war-criminal leadership would have never surrendered via characters and character studies. Oppenheimer is parked on the fence while Groves and others march on in a panicked rush and sensitive colleagues question how much “blood” they will have on their hands.

Nolan leaves no doubt in where the “plain-speaking” American president at that moment sits on that scale.

When the movie makes points about what Hitler disdained as “Jewish science,” it hints at what might have played a role in Oppenheimer’s fall, an outspoken man in an era when America proved itself willing to remember anti-Semitism and forget the many Jewish scientists involved in bringing World War II to an abrupt end.

The filmmaker sees Oppenheimer as a war hero torn by his place in history, martyred by McCarthy Era politics, which isn’t necessarily a new or fresh take. There was a memorable BBC/PBS TV series — 1980’s “Oppenheimer” starred Sam Waterston — a good TV movie (1989’s “Day One” film David Strathairn as Oppenheimer, with Brian Dennehy as General Groves) and the ambitious but not-quite-epic 1989 feature “Fat Man & Little Boy,” which starred Paul Newman as Groves and Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer.

But Nolan gives us something like a definitive take on the man, his work and the times he lived in, a film with the science and scientists of “The Theory of Everything,” the tortured/martyred genius of “The Imitation Game” and the mad scramble headiness of America in a race against history’s villains of “The Right Stuff.”

The only time this latest film on this controversial figure feels too long is the third act, which makes its “decline and fall” points, and then labors on to the point of belaboring.

In “Oppenheimer,” Nolan tells an epic story tacked onto an introspective, multi-faceted life, a hero in the Greek tragedy mold — brilliant and focused, but a man who knew his flaws and conflicted enough about his work that he all but accepted his fate as just deserts for all the “blood on my hands.”

Rating: R, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Mattew Modine, Kenneth Branagh, Josh Hartnett, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Rami Malek, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Tom Conti and Gary Oldman.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the book by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. A Universal release.

Running time: 3:00