Movie Nation

“Cordelia” is about a London actress of that name rehearsing King Lear’s youngest daughter, his favorite, in Shakespeare’s play.

There’s something about Cordelia — the actress, not the Bard’s “banished” for most of “King Lear” character — that seems a bit off. And no, the “character” isn’t much of a clue as to what. Again, “banished” early in the play.

Our Cordelia (Antonia Campbell-Hughes of “Split” and “Paul, Apostle of Christ”) is skittish, paranoid, and gives us the impression she’s been this way for years. She has a recurring nightmare which takes her back to “The Tube.” Something happened on London’s subway. Anybody can see that.

She’s very dependent on her twin sister and roommate Caroline (Guess who? Again?), not so much trapped in their father’s old basement flat as not quite whole when she’s away from it.

“I just want to feel normal, no ‘reminders,'” Cordelia says after bumping into an old beau on the street.

You just need to “start living in the real world, with other people in it” is Caroline’s diagnosis.

Theater might be therapy for her, and when the film about her frazzled state begins, she’s still only an understudy. So maybe they’re humoring her.

But someone is calling her flat and hanging up. Something about that dream is freaking her out.

And all of a sudden, there’s this handsome cellist Frank (Johnny Flynn) who lives upstairs, and is so disarming and charming that she finds herself kind of swept along with him — taking The Tube again, learning he named his cello “Valerie” after his first “unrequited” love, meeting him in his regular pub, only to wonder what caused him to sneak out and call her, desperate for her to take Valerie and slip out the back door.

We’re left with two puzzles in director and co-writer Anthony Shergold’s paranoid thriller. What is Cordelia’s secret? And what is Frank’s deal, anyway?

Shergold (“Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman” and TV’s “Persuasion”) makes the puzzles rather obvious before turning them in on themselves and making us second guess our first guesses.

Frank’s a trifle too charming and forward. Cordelia’s a bit too obviously unstable. Or is he? Or she?

I found “Cordelia” an intriguing, immersive mystery that left me with more questions — not about what’s really going on, but about more mundane third act specifics — than it has answers to.

Campbell-Hughes channels Charlotte Gainsbourg in this performance, taking on a sort of resting-wounded-face that begs the question of what’s going on in her head and how real and straightforward this handsome cellist could be, because she’s depressing to be around.

And Shergold makes great use of that in a thriller that doesn’t really take on classic “thriller” elements until late in the game, even as it keeps asking more questions than it answers.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Johnny Flynn, Joel Fry and Michael Gambon

Credits: Directed by Adrian Shergold, scripted by Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Adrian Shergold. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:31

Oscar-winning effects and stop-motion animation master Phil Tippett helped get “Star Wars” off the ground and won an Oscar for bringing dinosaurs back to life in “Jurassic Park.”

But for 30 years, in between “Robocop” sequels and installments in the “Twilight Saga,” he’s been working on this dense, gooey Big Statement on his art and perhaps his philosophy of life. And now “Mad God” is done and coming to the general public via Shudder.

It’s a sunglasses-at-night dark-and darker-blend of stop motion animation with bits of actors in live action scenes, with nobody talking in anything other than gibberish.

Take the title as a face-value pun and it’s a commentary on religion and life in general, as we follow a WWI gas-masked figure into an industrial wasteland underworld only a “Mad God” could conceive, where everything and everyone is consumed, chewed-up or merely randomly snuffed-out, with no sound effect spared to heighten the ickiness.

Primitive faceless slaves service — and self-sacrifice into — all-consuming steam punk furnaces. Doll-girls in chains hang from cages and grotesque monsters cast-off from “Ghostbusters” menace one and all in this Hell of Forever War, where everything and everyone is just fodder — fuel — with little clear idea who’s at the top of this nauseating “food chain.”

Maybe the doctor/mad scientist “God” of it all? He’s played by director turned actor Alex Cox (“Sid & Nancy”), the bug-eyed embodiment of “madman” or “Mad God.”

Strip away the honored credentials of the filmmaker and the tortured back story of this passion-project — something virtually no critics seem willing to do — and what we’re left with is an artist’s descent into obsession, crawling so far up his arse that nobody but him can see the light.

I’m reminded of the similarly-obsessive “The Thief and the Cobbler,” a 28-years-in-the-making hand-animated mess that grew more confused and more baroque the longer it stayed in production. The obscurant rag-doll-after-the-apocalypse animated “9” is another ready comparison here, although it made sense and was easier to follow and didn’t gestate for a third of a century.

“Incoherence” wasn’t necessarily the goal. But if it’s worth reciting the decades it took to pack all this imagery into sets so dark that much of it doesn’t register, it’s also worth noting that effects folk are, by definition, masters of making the trees. Whether or not they grasp the “forest” and can tell a compelling, coherent story about it isn’t exactly a given.

Rating: unrated, gross.

Cast: Alex Cox, Niketa Roman, Satish Ratakonda, Harper Taylor, Brynn Taylor

Credits: Scripted and directed by Phil Tippett. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:23

Reza Akhlaghirad wears a sullen scowl — first scene to last — in Mohammad Rasoulof’s bitter, biting indictment of life in corrupt, theocratic Iran, “A Man of Integrity.”

His character, Reza, is tested again and again, a surly and stubborn Muslim Job whose privacy, livelihood, property and civil rights are trampled on by bullying local power brokers and an indifferent bureaucracy that won’t do anything about it without the proper bribes.

It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare set in a suburban town where justice is bought and paid for and fighting the status quo is quixotic, and dangerous.

Reza raises goldfish. He’s mortgaged to the max, but he won’t pay the suggested bribes to assorted bank officials to avoid late fees. He’d rather sell the family car to pay whart he ownes, and let wife Hadis (Soudabeh Beizaee) take the truck to the girl’s school, where she is head teacher. “Proud” and “stubborn” go hand in hand with “integrity” as far as Reza is concerned. He’s setting an example for his young son.

But to raise and sell goldfish, he needs access to water. “The Company” isn’t intent on letting him have it, and a parade of local officials have been bought off to ensure that his protests won’t get anywhere.

An off-camera tangle with Abbas, the local enforcer of Company edicts lands them both in jail. But Reza’s grossly unequal treatment should be his last, best warning.

“Sell your land and leave,” his brother-in-law (Misagh Zare) urges. Hadis makes a short trip from “Do what you think is right” to figuring out bribes and making threats to the child of Abbas at school to realizing the futility of it all, as human-engineered calamities befall them.

“We are ruined,” she laments, in Persian with English subtitles.

There’s very little shouting in this marriage. Most debates are settled in stare-downs. But whatever the couple decides to do, every avenue of escape seems cut off and every escalation leads to deadly overreactions.

Movies and other works of art should, ideally, be considered on the merits of what’s in front of you, not the back-story of the production or trials of the filmmaker. That’s never the case, and when it comes to writer-director Rasoulof, knowing that his movies (“Manuscripts Don’t Burn”) are generally banned in Iran and that he was imprisoned for filming without permission, informs what we see on the screen.

The first scene here has Reza furtively making watermelon liquor right up to the moment the Sharia Law enforcers show up on a motorbike. Two impertinent punks search his house, take his hunting shotgun and tell him to renew the license and retrieve it “at the mosque.”

Every legitimate avenue of protest is a futile quest for “justice” that has disappeared. It’s chilling to watch, even more so when you consider the open corruption that’s moved into the spotlight, unpunished in America thanks to a bought-and-paid-for court system and utterly compromised Supreme Court.

Rasoulof doesn’t take into account the viewer’s growing frustration as we wait for intervention, retribution or revenge. In keeping many of the steps Reza finds himself forced to take off-camera, the film’s third act struggles to coherently make its points or provide logical satisfaction in its resolution.

This is maddening, and the people who have resigned themselves to it — “oppressors” and “the oppressed” — just amplify the feeling of impotence we start to share with the characters.

Through it all, Akhlaghirad makes a fine, seething muse for Rasoulof, a character who never quite gave up his student protestor past now speaking for a filmmaker who plainly never outgrew his, either.

Rating: PG-13, implied violence, drug content

Cast: Reza Akhlaghirad, Soudabeh Beizaee, Nasim Adabi, Misagh Zare, Zeinab Shabani, Zhila Shahi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof. A Big World release.

Running time: 1:56

We all remember hearing Tiffany Haddish talk about her hard life on her way to the big time. The daughter of a broken home, with an absent Ethiopian Jewish dad and schizophrenic mother, Haddish was homeless for stretches as she pursued her dream of comedy, fame and riches in her teens and 20s.

“Livin’ in a 1995 GEO METRO,” was a part of her stand-up act, pretty much from the start, and even after getting famous, she was talking about it in “Saturday Night Live” monologues and that disastrous New Year’s Eve show she did that kind of told her that maybe she shouldn’t bother with stand-up any more.

What we didn’t know was that a documentary filmmaker was tracking her life, and that of a couple of other comics in the same boat back then. “Comedy Confessions” sat unfinished for a long stretch and largely unseen even now. Whatever else the film has going for it, there’s all this footage of Haddish as young, skinny and as she said on stage at the time, “WAY too beautiful to be doing comedy.”

Here she is, showing us the tight squeeze that her “home,” that battered red 1995 Geo provided, driving us to the corners of Beverly Hills she’d park in to give herself a lift when “super-depressed.” Because if she parked under those trees and the cops didn’t hassle her for being “a vagrant,” she could dream that someday, she’d be rich enough to buy one of those houses.

It’s a frank and frankly amazing thing to see. We’ve heard Jim Carrey talk about being homeless in his lean years, but here’s video proof, how Haddish and comics Steven Lolli and Doc Jones lived in a Metro, a Toyota Corolla and a GMC pickup on the streets.

They’d get cleaned up at the clubs — The Laugh Factory, The Hub — where they’d perform, hitting laundromats during the day, praying for callbacks from auditions and, at the end of the night, try to find a safe place to park and sleep.

Haddish drives down Hillcrest in Beverly Hills, Lolli rolls into and describes the benefits of living in a car in the quieter portions of Culver City

They show us the logistics of their “choice,” gambling everything on a showbiz longshot because they don’t need the distraction of a “real job” and can’t scrape together “first, last and damage deposit” on the crumbs the clubs paid, then and now.

As exhausting and time-consuming as homelessness is, we see no scenes of them writing material and rehearsing new bits for their acts. Lots of stand-up footage is folded in, and it’s easy to see Haddish as the “sure thing” star in this. It’s also amazing to think of the risks they all took, her in particular. She makes clear her concerns about her own mental state, catching up with her estranged father and the hazards of being a pretty young thing in this predatory world, when ither housing “options” might present themselves to her.

“If I thought men were decent creatures,” she might accept the offer of a couch, spare bedroom or what have you, she says. But in words she’d fully expect from TH, she’s not giving up the you-know-what to have a place to crash, she tells us.

Jones, a divorced seminary graduate from Louisiana with a son he left with his parents, is more poised than exuberant — Haddish’s trademark — and every bit as funny.

Lolli has confidence, good material and bad material, and is as tough on himself as you hear the great ones always are.

Two of the three talk about their homeless status onstage, as comics do. One is more concerned about the “image” and “success” he wants to project. All three of them, or any one of the three, could have blown up. They’re all funny enough.

“Comedy Confessions” was finished in 2018, the finishing money no doubt coming from the fact that “Girls’ Trip” had made Haddish an overnight sensation. The actual filming took place @ 2008-9 (apparently), although that’s hard to pin down because the one person to give his age does what showbiz people have done since the dawn of time — he shaves maybe four or five years off.

Haddish might have given up stand-up, now that her acting career has taken off. She’s even published a memoir that’s covered some of this part of her history — “The Last Black Unicorn.”

But if she made “I was homeless” part of her brand during those open mike years, it’s great to find out just how honest she was being, just how hard it was and just how much she and everybody else in the film needed that nightly set, “comedy as therapy,” or at least a break from the discomfort, danger and shame of living hand-to-mouth-to-gas-tank.

Rating: unrated, profanity, raw language

Cast: Tiffany Haddish, Steven Lolli and Doc Jones

Credits: Directed by Gabrielle Sebastian. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:21

Snooker’s the game, and an Indian lad takes it up to avenge his father’s honor in “Toolsidas Junior,” an engaging feel-good dramedy as seen from both ends of the pool cue.

Mridul Mahendra’s film may lack the whizz-bang showmanship of Martin Scorsese’s “The Color of Money.” But he shows us two Indias as he tells the “true story” of a child of privilege who watches his Dad waste his shots at glory — easily plied with drinks that ruin his chances every time the Calcutta Sports Club championships roll around — and hangs around in seedy pool halls to learn to snooker the snooker who snookered his old man.

That’s a confusing sentence, much like the film’s confusing relationship with the literal truth. A lengthy disclaimer opens the movie, and a refutation of that disclaimer ends it. All the director needed to do was say “Inspired by a true story” and leave it at that. But the fellow changed his name for the credits, so there’s more to it than that.

The late Rajeev Kapoor plays the portly father who dominates the snooker table at his club, except for that one time each year they hold a tourney and he somehow finds a way to lose to the regal, imperious Jimmy Tandan (Dalip Tahil) in the finals.

Varun Buddhadev plays Midi, adoring son of Mr. Toolsidas, a kid in his tweens who cheers his father on at the tourney until that one year he sees exactly how Tandan does it. The winner gets his father drunk between rounds.

Midi is too little to call out his father’s behavior, or even warn him (apparently) when he sees this sabotage coming from a mile off.

But Midi isn’t too little to figure out a way to rescue his much larger and older brother Goti (Chinmay Chandraunshuh), who, like his father, has his vice and an addiction of choice. Goti is a teenaged gambler. Midi sees through the “fix” at a carnival shooting gallery, and Goti decides that since the kid is sharp, a quick study and a crack shot, he should be the family’s champion sportsman.

Forget snooker. Midi should stick to the “big money” sports like tennis and cricket. Goti will be his manager. The only problem with that is Midi is too little to be any good at either of those sports.

He’s too small to play pool in the club, either. His “feet don’t reach the floor” and he’ll “tear the (baize/felt) table.” That’s why he and the hustler-in-the-making Goti search high and low for a place for him to pick up the game, and settle on a pool hall in the homeless, poor, porn cinema/street-hustler side of town.

Not that they tell their parents. Not that Goti sticks with it after the kid learns which streetcars to take and when to show up to get practice time. Goti’s on to his next bet.

The brother to brother scenes are light and slapshticky enough to come off. But “Toolsidas Junior” doesn’t hit the sweet spot until the kid finds a mentor.

The sullen, silent Salaam Bhia (Sanjay Dutt) naps in the downmarket Wellington club where he holds forth. Nap for an hour, practice for an hour, that’s his ritual. He used to be the national champ at snooker. Now he just broods, enforces “his” rules and chews.

“Muhammad Salaam Bhjai doesn’t spit his betel leaf for ANYone,” one of his down-and-out fans insists. The kid studies him, mimics his every move, and eventually becomes his protege.

“If you want to see clearly, befriend the darkness” of pool halls, the guru preaches. Take naps to rest your eyes and stay acclimated to the place.

The instruction scenes, something no Hollywood pool hustling movie ever gets into, are marvels of simplicity and common sense. Dutt’s towering presence sells the reality of these scenes, and the snooker playing on display isn’t bad either.

It’s a simple feel-good movie, with an “I’ll show them” shot of family redemption tossed in between the trick shots and run-the-table sequences. In most cultures, a filmmaker could’ve gotten through this story in 90-100 minutes easily.

Still, the adults are sharp and the kids are all right. It plays, even if the pacing’s slow by Western standards. And while you might not know the rules of snooker any better by the end than you did at the outset, there’s enough here to make one want to look them up.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Varun Buddhadev, Rajeev Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt, Tasveer Kamil, Chinmay Chandraunshuh and Dalip Tahil

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mridul Mahendra. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:10

It’s fitting that Ray Liotta died on a film set. Just not at age 67.

Another of those actors who never stopped working, Liotta was on a set in the Dominican Republic, filming “Dangerous Waters,” when he took a nap and didn’t wake up.

“Goodfellas,” “Marriage Story,” “Bee Movie,” “Field of Dreams,” “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” sitcoms and cop series, the guy with the battered face worked pretty much constantly after Scorsese made him a star. He really classed-up “The Many Saints of Newark,” I thought.

I interviewed him a couple of times, when “Unlawful Entry” came out, and promoting some other film I can’t recall.

A good-humored guy with alarmingly bright eyes who might make fun of his appearance, but God forbid you do. I mean, come on. He played SCARY as well as anybody who ever did. Scorsese cast him with an eye for that.

“Ya work with what you’ve got,” Liotta used to say. And did. A lot.

Sixty-seven is too young to go. He had decades of mob bosses and patriarchs of all stripes ahead of him. A damned shame.

1954-2022

When the aliens visit, they might give us the standard “Take to me your leader” shtick. But if they’re young enough, they might be more interested in comparing farts.

That’s the lesson of “Maika: The Girl from Another Galaxy,” a laugh-out-loud kids’ fantasy from Vietnam, hands-down the best “E.T.” knockoff to come along in years.

A magically-empowered alien child (Chu Diep Anh) crash lands her jellyfish-shaped space shuttle and befriends a lonely little boy, Hung (Lai Truòng Phù) who finds her. But their friendship is threatened by greedy, power-mad adults and their hired thugs. Hung must team up with his wealthy, spoiled rival (Tin Tin) to foil the bad guys, save the girl and let go back where she came from.

But first she has to “phone home,” of course.

Whatever the plot and story beats of the Slovak TV series that this is inspired by (glimpsed in the movie), writer-director Ham Tram (“Bitcoin Heist”) knows that the gold here is in tried and true characters, alien fish-out-of-water jokes and grownups as “obstacles” who can only be overcome with kiddie hijinks.

We’re introduced to Hung and his still-grieving widowed dad (Ngòc Tuòng), a tinkerer who can’t make ends meet repairing people’s cell phones. Hung is an avid model airplane flyer who finds himself in battle with Beo (Tin Tin), the rich kid who lives in a nearby high-rise and likes nothing better than wrecking Hung’s “Comet” camera-plane with his fancy camera-drone.

Goons hired by a samurai-obsessed gangster are trying to evict everybody in Hung’s building.

“Hey, why are you picking on these people Black Pecker?” “I go by BULL, now.”

Yeah, that’s just as funny in subtitles as it is in Vietnamese.

And there’s a Vietnamese billionaire who plans to build a spaceport and enter Vietnam into the space race.

Everybody’s plans get upended by the girl who crashes into the harbor, takes purple-haired human form after sipping a human juice box (Hah!), and tells Hung she has no name, but that she’s from the planet Maika.

Well, that’ll do for a name, then.

Maika’s powers are borrowed from many another big or small screen alien — mind melds and the like. But her species has tentacles they can summon up to use as Wonder Woman whips, which is novel.

Tram finds the heart, humanity and humor in all this in the kids, their simpler understanding of the world and simple, goofy solutions to confrontations.

“Kimchi Bombs!” are a weapon of choice. “Mooning” the bad guys is a great distraction.

Hung must contend with the cute nurse who is sweet on his dad, his best friend moving away and a wrecked airplane long before Maika arrives. The alien is looking for “my comrade,” and has to learn Vietnamese. She figures the default language on Earth is Russian, for some reason.

Otherwise, the story arc is almost note-for-note “E.T.,” but the laughs come from the oddest places. Hung has to explain tears to Maika, noting that they taste “salty, like boogers.”

Beo’s ongoing prank war with his skateboarding older brother (Phu Truong) has him dressing in an elaborate jumpsuit disguise, painted to match the yellow, blue and red rust on a beached buoy where Bin and his “club” hang out.

The Japanese gangster’s phone ring-tone screeches “Konnichiwaaaaaaaaaaaa” every time it rings.

No, it’s not the most original kiddie fantasy to come along. The plot sets up situations it doesn’t follow through on and there are wildly inconsistent “rules” within that set-up.

But the kids are — to a one — adorable. The slice of Vietnamese working class life — outdoor brick oven cake-baking, a trek to a mountaintop amusement park, scenery that hasn’t been over-exposed in movies — is interesting and the villains are the same over there as anywhere else — gangsters who hire others to be their “muscle,” and spoiled billionaires used to getting their own way, no matter the cost.

They’ll get theirs. And before “Maika” is through, you’ll get yours, or at least be rooting for that “phone home” call to get through.

Rating: unrated, violence, fart jokes, mild profanity

Cast: Lai Truòng Phù, Chu Diep Anh, Tin Tin, Ngòc Tuòng, Diep Anh Tru, Phu Truong and Kim Nha

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ham Tram, inspired by the Slovak TV book and TV series “The Girl Who Fell from the Sky.” A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:47

“Bob’s Burgers” makes the journey to the big screen, a dozen years into its TV run, its rat-a-tat banter, goofy production numbers and screwball dilemmas faced with doom and ditzy optimism by its chinless-to-a-one animated cast intact.

It plays like bubbly fan service bon bon to its loyal devotees, the folks who don’t forget what time it’s on every week and don’t have any meaningful boycott of Fox they’d care to adhere to. Then again, maybe they’re bingeing it on Cartoon Network.

As somebody who’s never gotten into it — at least past any given episode’s first commercial break — I found “The Bob’s Burger Movie” a pleasant surprise. They step up the quality of the animation, although that TV cost-saving crutch of having a couple of actors with too-distinctive voices do too many characters gets magnified on a big screen, surround sound and 100 minutes of story.

Once again, the beach town burger joint is in jeopardy. Once again, the dogged Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) is overwhelmed, upbeat wife Linda (John Roberts, the good one, not the democracy-gutting one) is…upbeat if not all that helpful. It’s up to the kids — hormonal eighth grader Tina (Dan Mintz), delusionally dorky Eugene (Eugene Mirman) and their bunny-eared younger ring-leader, nine-year-old Louise (Kristen Schaal) to save the day.

This time, the predicament involves a sink hole in front of the shop, a bank loan due, their dismissive eye-patched landlord (Oscar winner Kevin Kline) and a skeleton found at the bottom of said sinkhole.

The plot’s cartoon cute and sitcom silly, and it’s perfectly serviceable. But it’s the characters and their rapid RAPID fire exchanges, comebacks and zingers that are the special sauce on this “Burger.”

Louise is mocked at school for her bunny ears, called a “baby,” and thus must act extra tough, and publicize the hell out of her own toughening up efforts. She will go INTO the sink hole, because “you know what they say.”

“‘Babies’ come OUT of holes, they don’t go IN them!”

The landlord might be placated by the right amount of begging.

“I’m of TWO minds…and by that I mean I’m DRUNK.”

The corpse Louise encounters buried in that sinkhole was plainly “Murdered to death and buried to death by a murderer and a buryer!”

And she freaks out when she accidentally swallows one of the skeleton’s teeth. Brother Gene takes pity on her.

“You can’t HANDLE the tooth!”

To find out whodunit, the kids will have to cut school and visit “CarnyOpolis” — the neighborhood where the local tourist trap hustlers congregate.

There’ll be chases, cliffhangers, songs and dances among the carnies, but also duets of longing and hope by Bob and Linda, and intrepid efforts by their most loyal, loving customer — blue collar Teddy (Larry Murphy).

“I can’t LIVE…if living is without you!”

No, it’s not particularly cinematic. It’s not a must that you catch this on the big screen. But if you’re a fan of the show, or have the faintest inkling that you could be one, you should. It’s not deep or all that sophisticated. Yet it’s always quick, and often damned funny.

“What’s THIS thing?”

“Ah yes, my old organ.”

“Your WEINER?”

Rating:  PG-13 for rude/suggestive material and language

Cast: The voices of H. Jon Benjamin, Kristen Schaal, Kevin Kline, John Roberts, Dan Mintz, Eugene Mirman, Zach Galifianakis, David Wain, Gary Cole, Nick Kroll, Keegan Michael Key, many others

Credits: Directed by Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman, scripted by Nora Smith, Jim Dauterive and Loren Bouchard. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 1:42

For everyone who chose not to chance COVID and show up in theaters to make “Jackass Forever” a box-office-boosting hit back in February, I get it.

One could get downright sentimental over the idea that these lovable louts literally saved the cinema, that the “old men” among them had done their doofus duty, pummeled, blown-up, bitten and battered for our entertainment, probably for the last time. But not everybody felt safe going.

And it’s just as understandable that Johnny Knoxville, Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuña, “Danger” Ehren McGhehey, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Preston Lacy and the newcomers wouldn’t want all their trials, tests and injuries to have been for naught. Thus, “Jackass 4.5,” a film of reminiscences surrounded by stunts not good enough to make the theatrical release, was assembled for Netflix. I get that, too.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Most of these gags didn’t make the “movie” for a reason. And those that did and are recycled here don’t add up to the same sort of experience “Forever” delivered.

Guys, you already dropped the mike. There’s no coming back on stage and stumbling, kicking it around as you try to pick it up again.

We see 2019 “test footage” where producer Spike Jonze, directed Jeff Tremaine and white-haired, gaunt, bespectacled and 50 year-old Knoxville started shooting to see “if this was still funny” and “if we had a movie” in all of their tomfoolery.

And we’re treated to entire bits that didn’t make the theatrical feature — a jokey electric eel shock stunt with Wee Man dressed as Ben Franklin, subjecting a castmate to jolts via a brass key inserted up the lad’s anus. I think that was “Danger” Ehren on the receiving end of that “prod.” He’s the stand-out in much of what’s seen here, a man they love to abuse and who takes it (mostly) like a good sport.

“Ehren was amazing in ‘Jackass Forever,'” Knoxville notes. “He didn’t MEAN to be.”

There’s “Hot Sauce Enemas,” which is exactly as titled, with the added bonus of popsicles on offer to cool off the nether regions scorched by having sauce piped up four Jackass’s poop-shoots.

It’s easy to see why Knoxville’s disguised stunts — dressed as Old Man Irving Zissman for assorted pranks on hapless recruits who don’t recognize him — were ditched for “Forever.” They aren’t funny enough.

The big finish this time out is mainly all about the build-up of subjecting streetwise Dark Star, father of newbie Jasper and a man who has survived multiple gunshot wounds, to his first ever taste of skydiving. The build-up is OK, the payoff anticlimactic.

That seems all too appropriate for “Jackass 4.5,” a movie with some funny new bits, some new gross bits and a lot of guys (and newcomer Rachel Wolfson) standing around cackling, mostly at stunts we already saw in “Jackass Forever.”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, nude-violence and ensuing profanity

Cast: Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Rachel Wolfson, Chris Pontius, and Eric Andre.

Credits: Directed by Jeff Tremaine. A Paramount picture released on Netflix.

Running time: 1:30

The Cold War Soviet military provides a high-stakes backdrop for “Firebird,” the true story of a gay romance in a place where homosexuality wasn’t merely shunned and shamed, it was forbidden and persecuted.

It’s a policy that returned under the dictator Putin, which makes this period piece timely as well a reminder of a bitter past.

British stage actor and occasional big screen supporting player (“Kingsman,” “Blood on the Crown”) Tom Prior has co-written and produced himself a breakout star vehicle in which he plays a closeted conscript who finds love with a superior officer on an (occupied) Estonian airbase in the late ’70s.

A fighter squadron stationed there is on high alert during a time of rising tensions with NATO. The Soviet Empire is teetering towards the Afghan debacle that brought it down, and the Sukoi jets stationed here are scrambled at the merest hint of a Western provocation or probe of their defenses.

That’s what brings Lt. Roman Matvejev (Ukrainian actor Oleg Zagorodnii) there. He’s a crack pilot.

But what the clerical workers Sergey (Prior) and Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya) notice is his dashing good looks. They may flirt and talk about the future — Sergey’s enlistment is up in weeks, Luisa is studying for admission to medical school — but artistic-minded Sergey has a secret, something the handsome lieutenant picks up on.

Yes, gaydar was one area where the Soviets had absolute parity with the West.

A shared interest — photography — leads to an invitation to a Roman’s dark room. And where there’s darkness and intimate, hands-on instruction, and needless to say — “chemistry” — signals are sent and received.

Sorry, but the early flirtation scenes have a same-sex-romance corniness that invites a little teasing.

Still, this is going on at an airbase, a perilous place to start an affair.

The lieutenant takes the younger private to his first ballet — Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” Even that turns fraught, as there are checkpoints and base patrols to be evaded. We’ve already seen a “Stop or I’ll shoot” encounter with men on guard duty that Sergey, his friend Volodya (Jake Henderson) and Luisa faced, just for taking a late night dip in an on-base lake. Imagine what will happen if two men in uniform are caught in an intimate same-sex moment.

And naturally, there’s a Major (Margus Prangel) who starts to suspect what one, if not the other, is up to.

There’s something a soap operatic about all this — the “sensitive” young man who longs to go to acting school, the cultured, privileged older man, classical music LPs, the “love triangle” that develops and the threats of betrayal.

But there’s a reason romantic cliches became cliches. This is one way love develops, and as the script is taken from the memoirs of actor Sergey Fetisov, there’s only so much criticism that’s warranted about the waypoints of this romance.

It’s just that film adaptations are reductive processes, and in selecting what to include and what to leave out they make “Firebird” predictable, leaning toward the melodramatic.

Prior wrote himself a splendid part, and engagingly underplays young Sergey. Zagorodnii has great presence and a command of English that could stand him in good stead with casting directors, if he survives Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Even if the story here is as preordained as the ballet that gives it its title, they’ve made a nicely-detailed reminder of another critical difference between the totalitarian East and the more tolerant West, one that shows us how bad things were and how bad they still are there, and how bad they could be if Russia-loving/emulating politicians in the Free World are allowed to take power.

Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Tom Prior, Oleg Zagorodnii, Diana Pozharskaya and Margus Prangel

Credits: Directed by Peeter Rebane. scripted by Peeter Rebane and Tom Prior. A Roadside Attractions release on Lionsgate Home Video (June 3).

Running time: 1:47