Movie Nation

I found an AMC “classic” (an old theater where they don’t fix that which is broken) near me and a matinee showing of comic Bert Kreischer’s “The Machine” that cost me a whopping $5.19.

No, I’m not asking for my $5.19 back, or my wasted time, or even an explanation as to why Sony thought a bloody, dumb and laugh-starved action comedy built around this stand-up’s sole claim to fame would be worth almost two hours of anyone’s life.

Well, it’s not like they could turn back time if I did.

I’m not begrudging Kreischer the cash, and I’m pleased his movie — smuggled into theaters on a holiday weekend (the trailers promised it was coming out May 31) — pulled in a respectable (ish) $6 million on its opening weekend. His fans knew where to find it.

They and many of the rest of us remember the Internet phenomenon that Kreischer ginned-up by recalling a drunken, Russian Mafia-befriending school trip when he was studying Russian at Florida State University.

A clumsy, bad-student mis-translation on his part (Florida…State) led to his billing himself as “The Machine” to his new Russian pals. And he found some shirtless stand-up comedy laughs — in his 40s — recalling the outrageous things he says went down when he was riding from St. Petersburg to Moscow with partying thugs, his fellow FSU students pretty much none-the-wiser–until he helped the Russians rob most everybody on that train.

“The Machine” is a comedy about Russian mobsters seeing this “viral” stand-up story and vowing revenge — actually the return of a pocket watch stolen on that long-ago misadventure.

Fair enough. That has comic possibilities.

But the married-with-two-kids-and-pushing-50 “Machine” is going through a binge-drinking-driven existential crisis. Bert may “make a living ‘creating a scene,’” a pretty good living from the looks of things. Yet he’s stopped doing his act and is in family-counseling because he’s made his teenaged daughter (Jess Gabor) ashamed.

His planned California sweet sixteen party for her is already going wrong in all the bad sitcom ways when Bert’s semi-estranged Florida carpet-kingpin father (Mark Hamill, miscast), the source of his “Daddy issues,” arrives.

And then this Russian mob daughter (Iva Babic) strolls in to threaten his daughter if “The Machine” doesn’t return the watch, which he has no blackout drunk memory of ever having.

Nothing for it but to go with them to try and retrace his tipsy late ’90s steps, with her and assorted oversized Russians, and with his Dad, who was “an Eagle Scout!”

“Vat eez ‘Iggle Scout?”

“It’s like if James Bond was a Mormon.”

In Mother Russia, Bert’s a “folk hero.” There he is, in all his roly-poly shirtless glory, on billboards and the label of a cheap brand of vodka. Gangsters all know the story of “The Machine,” the American who could hold his own in the most alcoholic culture on Earth, join in on slap fights and amuse one and all by imitating catch-phrases from Austin Powers movies.

“Do I make you horny, baby?”

Flashbacks decorate the quest of Bert, his Dad and his Russian minders’ quest for the watch, as we see Bert in his Florida Man attending a “football school” prime, played by Jimmy Tatro.

Those flashbacks recreate many of the scenes from “The Machine” story, which Bert re-narrates, in sections, throughout the movie.

Honestly, I love a good gonzo binge boozing comedy as much as the next guy, but I found almost nothing funny in this.

The recreation robs the story of its reliance on the listener’s imagination, and chopping this long comic anecdote into pieces strips the picture of momentum and makes the Blondie T-shirt wearing Bert’s tale not so far-fetched, unless you’re talking about the idea that anybody was ever amused by it.

Yes, Tatro can act. No, Kreischer can’t. Not really.

The picture’s turn towards the sentimental — after much mayhem and many shootings (this picture has more dead Russians than Kyiv) — is neither surprising nor affecting.

But there’s no begrudging the man the ticket price paid out for this dog. Because the cinema is littered with one-trick comics with one-picture careers, all of them longing for just enough of a bounce to match Larry the Cable Guy or Dane Cook (Remember them?) in terms of longevity.

There are scores of these guys who once got similar shots, and disappeared — guys I can’t remember by name or movie title to save my life. Tucker Max, anyone?

Still, I didn’t enjoy your movie, at all — no big deal. But relish this moment, “Machine.” Maybe you’ll get another. Just watch out for your liver if you do.

Rating: R for strong violence, pervasive language, drug use and some sexual references

Cast: Bert Kreischer, Mark Hamill, Iva Babic, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Jimmy Tatro, Martyn Ford, Aleksandar Sreckovic, Robert Maaser and Jess Gabor.

Credits: Directed by Peter Atencio, scripted by Kevin Biegel and Scotty Landes. Sony/Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:52

Funny how the trailers had this coming out May 31, and Sony decided to sneak it out Memorial Day weekend instead. It’s doing decent business.

Yeah, let’s go see this. No, I’m not proud.

It’s titled “The Year I Started Masturbating,” it stars “Sleepy Hollow” hottie Katia Winter and it’s SWEDISH.

What’s not to love in this made-for-Netflix sex comedy? A lot. There’s a lot not to love.

It’s a tepid tease of a farce built around a woman’s sexual self actualization, sort of a modern twist on “It’s My Turn” and the Jill Clayburgh films of the ’70s. A couple of giggles, a genuine laugh, maybe two, some half-hearted “growth” and…credits.

Sexy? For a comedy about a just-ditched woman about to turn 40 who is lectured to start listening to her vagina’s monologues, not so much.

I reviewed that German teen sex comedy “Hard Feelings” the other day. It used the same “listen” to your genitals hook and the same confetti gimmick to simulate the thrill of orgasms. Must be something going around Europe right now.

When you’re a Swedish production and a German comedy drifting into the same territory is A) funnier and B) sexier, you’re not doing “it” right. No. Seriously.

Winter plays Hanna, a distracted creative type who can meet a deadline and dance her way to her dinner date, jamming to “Sweet City Woman” in Swedish.

But her date Marten (Jesper Zuschlag) is getting into a taxi. She’s THAT late. Not to worry, they live together and have a little boy. It’s all good.

But it isn’t. We get a hint that she’s a control freak — partly from him. And as he shakes his head at her refusal to quit her better-paying-job than his and almost melts down when he learns she’s spent “Tesla money” on a designer sofa without consulting him, we can see the writing on the wall.

Yes, the sitter calls to interrupt the break-up we see coming. There’s probably a culture joke in there, as the sitter lectures Hanna about the child’s priorities. “He” wants her at home. NOW. But it, like much of what’s supposed to play as light and funny here just doesn’t.

We get a sense that Marten’s pal has been urging him to end it. We see her dorky boss (Henrick Dorsin) hand her Post-It notes with women’s shelter and AA recovery phone numbers on them, assuming “that bastard” back home abuses her or drove her to drink, and Hanna’s best friend also leaps to conclusions about her “finally” dumping Marten.

She’s the last to catch on — at the hospital, where he’s just over-dramatized a cycling accident and is openly flirting with the nurse.

For the rest of the movie, Hanna’s jam — which she hears on earbuds, mournfully sings to herself in a “singing” therapy session and hears from a street accordionist, is “Must Have Been Love, But it’s Over Now,” by the Swedish duo Roxette.

Hanna reluctantly quit her job to save the relationship just before the abrupt dumping. She’s blown a fortune on a sofa, and has no cash. And she quickly runs out of people she can call on for a place to crash.

Only the fiesty young barmaid Liv (Vera Carlbom) seems to see what ails her.

In the words of Olivia Newton John, she’s not listening to her “body talk, body talk.” What Hanna needs, Liv lectures, is to master is the art of self-pleasure.

I don’t know how you fail to make a beautiful actress neither titillating nor amusing as she mimes stimulating herself at the office, or at home with a gadget, but hats off to director and co-writer Erika Wasserman for managing that.

Couples counseling scenes have long been the fodder for rom-coms, as such “professionals” are notorious for taking sides. That’s what happens here, and it’s not the least bit funny.

Even a sexual stimulation tutorial that gets accidentally blasted over the smart speakers at the office doesn’t merit more than a grin, the way it’s handled here.

A hook-up getting the news, in flagrante delicto, that his mother just died in hospice must play funnier in Sweden.

And the little speeches about the psychological, physical and professional benefits of masturbation aren’t clevely written or comically played.

The script makes Hanna a victim, but one with legitimate focus and disinterested-in-him issues. And Marten comes off the way she describes him, a “whiner” (in Swedish, or dubbed into English) and a bit of a whiney bully.

So we’re not rooting for him, we have a hard time rooting for her and we sure as shooting aren’t rooting for “them.”

How you start off with these movie “hooks” and end up with nothing makes “The Year I Started Masturbating” seem almost that long, and a comedy that comes nowhere near to measuring up to its tease of a title.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Katia Winter, Jesper Zuschlag, Henrik Dorsin, Nour El-Refai, Hannes Fohlin and Vera Carlbom

Credits: Directed by Erika Wasserman, scripted by Christin Magdu, Bahar Pars and Erika Wasserman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

Lithuanian filmmaker Sharunas Bartas achieves a “Defiance” level of grim, wintry detail in his post-war Soviet occupation drama “In the Dusk.”

The director of “The Corridor,” “Freedom” and “Frost” tells a story of his native land’s countryside in 1948, with World War II finally ended, the fascists defeated and the communists moving in to take over.

Summary arrests, credulous denunciations and abitrary land seizures and “loans” to the “Soviet people” (government) were the new occupiers’ preoccupation. Those fighting back, hiding in the forests, clung to the hope that the Russians would withdraw, that the West — after “Churchill’s speech” at “Fulton” — would come to their aid.

If you remember your Eastern European Baltic States history, that help was a tad tardy.

We see the plight of the people through the teenaged Unte (Marius Povilas Elijas Martynenko) who has come home to the farm to find his father (Arvydas Dapsys) and stepmother (Alina Zaliukaite-Ramanauskiene) estranged and living under separate roofs, his father carrying on with the family cook (Vita Siauciunaite) and fretting over seeing everything he’s worked, suffered and married to attain ripped away from him by the machine-gun-wielding socialists who have come to town.

Will the lad find a way to keep his parents together, maybe hold on to some of the dirt-poor, struggling farm? Or will he join or return to (I couldn’t tell) the partisans who have taken to the woods and don’t seem to be carrying the fight to the Bolsheviks, no matter what they would have everyone believe.

As his father goes into hiding and the partisan-alligned Ignas (Valdas Virgailis) starts parroting socialist talking points (in Lithuanian with subtitles) — “They’re saying people will be given land…taken from those who have too much” and given “to those who have nothing.” — Unte has some considering to do.

The final third of “In the Dusk,” also titled “At Dusk” at certain points of its release, is where all the action is — interrogations, betrayals, shootouts and such.

The first 100 minutes of this midwinter’s tale is like watching snow melt. Bartas holds shots too long, lets scenes go on forever, and takes his sweet time getting to anything resembling a point.

Family intrigues, local rivalries, Russians disgusted by the poverty of the place and yet still determined to ruthlessly shake the locals down, the history here is fascinating, and rendered in what feels like slow motion.

Bartas must not have read Hemingway’s advice about murdering “your little darlings,” as huge chunks of the first two acts add little to the narrative and merely flesh out what we can see simply in situations and performances.

This is, no doubt, a vital piece of Lithuania’s history and well worth recalling with Putin’s fumbling efforts to reconstitute the Russo/Soviet Empire. But wasting this much time getting to the point is a lot like the infighting and recriminations amongst the opposition partisans in the film — hurling your efforts and your ammo in the wrong direction.

And recreating important history doesn’t give you the right to bore the viewer to death before getting around to your point.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marius Povilas Elijas Martynenko, Arvydas Dapsys, Alina Zaliukaite-Ramanauskiene, Salvijus Trepulis, Valdas Virgailis and Rytis Saladzius

Credits: Directed by Sharunas Bartas, scripted by Sharunas Bartas and Ausra Giedraityte. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 2:08

“Joy Ride” is loud, vulgar and crude, exactly what you’d expect from an Asian-American romp across “Girls’ Trip/Bridesmaids” terrain.

But “Crazy Rich Asians” screenwriter turned director Adele Lim gives this raunchy road trip comedy a “Joy Luck Club” detour into sentiment that sets her directing debut apart from all the other “women gone wild” outings of recent vintage.

It’s an unfiltered farce about growing up as “the Asian kid” in America, and about the adoptions end of the Chinese-American diaspora, a comedy of life paths and high expectations, finding your roots and having a lot of noisy, stereotype-smashing mishaps along the way.

Lim delivers a film littered with “Oh no they DIDN’Ts,” one that leans into the culture and swats the image in a lot of profane and unexpected ways.

Audrey was adopted by a white American family as a child. Luckily for her, the tiny bit of white suburbia where she moved already had a Chinese girl, Lolo, who’d moved there with her family.

When an elementary schooler trots out that favorite Asian slur of the underage and ignorant, Lolo’s response is profane and appropriately pugilistic.

A lifelong bond is born.

Years later, Audrey (Ashley Park of “Mr. Malcolm’s List”) is a rising star corporate attorney ready to close the Big China Deal. Lolo (comic and actress Sherry Cola of TV’s “Good Trouble” and “I Love Dick”) rents her garage apartment and makes genitalia-inspired art, bless her heart.

But if Audrey is going to China, she’ll need somebody with a slightly better handle on the language, as Audrey grew up with white parents. Lolo it is!

They’ll fly over, indulge in the Chinese rituals that accompany business deals (binge drinking, karaoke, slap-fight games). Audrey will catch up with her college roommate Kat (Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu, who’s in everything, and was in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”) who is now a famous Americanized actress in Chinese cinema and TV.

And danged if that cousin-we-all-avoid doesn’t tag along on the trip. “Deadeye” (Sabrina Wu, making a deadpan screen debut) came by her nickname honestly, and it has nothing to do with marksmanship.

Business with the Chinese would-be client, a little sight-seeing, a little catching up with Deadeye’s family. Maybe they’ll even, you know, try and track down Audrey’s birth mother.

Their odyssey will bring a “best friends” rivalry (Lolo vs. Kat) to a boil, Asian “identity” into the spotlight and business to a halt as this motley quartet makes its way across China. The complications include family matters and love interest(s), drug smuggling and basketball, some of which land harder than others.

Lim finds her biggest laughs on the heels of every “Aww, isn’t that...” moment, starting from shy Audrey and brash Lolo meeting as tiny tykes.

Audrey finds a nice, safe “American” blonde (Meredith Hagner of “Search Party”) for them to share a train car with, and then the cops show up looking for a drug smuggler. The blonde panics and implicates one and all by blowing cocaine on everyone.

“You’re drug dealers NOW, bitches!”

The B-word is generously deployed throughout as mishap piles on top of mishap, Kat keeps getting recognized as the star that she is and Lolo uses every opportunity to try out her Mandarin vulgarisms and international gestures deploying her tongue and fingers to shock and awe the People’s Republicans.

Seth Rogen is one of the producers here, and the “best joke on the set” ethos infests this movie — shock-value profanities, throw away lines about racist “Mulan-themed office parties” and the Americans marveling how “We look like everyone else, for once” land laugh after laugh.

Hsu shows a sharp edge here, with Park letting us see a more outrageous side and Wu doing well with that always underestimated “nerdy, quiet one” type. But Cola fizzes and sizzles and swaggers through every scene, a bawdy force of nature, the Asian Danny McBride in this Rogenesque Lim China shop.

But the picture peaks, and nobody involved could think of a graceful way to finish during a turn toward the serious. Whatever one gets out of the third act, we can all hear what the director and screenwriters were muttering off camera in these scenes.

“How do we get out of this?”

Because once you’ve delivered your big “cocaine” joke, and played your “pose as K-pop stars” cards, what else is there?

But “Joy Ride” still fulfills the R-rated promise of “Crazy Rich Asians,” an outrageous comedy that isn’t just about representation. It’s a reminder that rude, raunchy laughs travel, translate and tickle, no matter who you are and where you’re watching.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu, and Desmond Chiam

Credits: Directed by Adele Lim, scripted by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, Teresa Hsiao and Adele Lim. A Lionsgate release (July 7).

Running time: 1:35

Walt Disney Co. has taken a lot of abuse for converting its animated classics into still-largely-animated live action films. But The Mouse knows a dollar when it sees one sitting on the shelf as Disney-owned intellectual property.

The new less-animated “The Little Mermaid” had a decent Wednesday “early
access turnout of $850k and an $8 million Thursday night preview take, folded into a big $38 million dollar Friday, according to Box Office Pro.

That puts it on track to clear $95 million by Sunday night, $125 by the time the Monday holiday is one for the books, according to Deadline.com.

Will it be “the fourth highest Memorial Day opening ever?” It’s very long, a patience-testing musical for kids, a slug that’s a bit of a slog. But Disney will make bank on it.

“Fast X” opened at an inflated $112 million last weekend. The second weekend was always going to be the “tell” for this Vin Diesel dog. It’s falling off a cliff, plummeting on its Friday-to-Friday, close to a 70% plunge from its opening if it clears $21 million and just nudges out the more popular “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3.”

On its third full weekend, the middling “Guardians” may notch another $20 million take, as high as $26-27 million by Monday night.

“Super Mario Brothers Movie” is barely winding down its run, set to clear about $6 over three days, $8 over four. A rare video-game adaptation/blockbuster, not much of a plot or “characters” or anything, but the kids or the parents taking their kids have made it a $560 million hit. So what can you say?

Sony spent NO money promoting “The Machine,” an action comedy starring Bert Kreischer and Mark Hamill. It’s set to clear $6 million this weekend and crack the top five.

That allows it to edge the DeNiro/Sebastan Maniscalo comedy “About My Father,” which will also be in the $6 million range.

UPDATED via Box Office Pro.

Memorial Day weekend always means WWII movie marathons on all your favorite classic movie channels. But I thought I’d get a jump on that by tracking down a favorite of mine from the ’80s and watching it for the first time in forever.

Samuel Fuller was a genre director who fit neatly into the French auteur theory of directors as “authors” of their movies, with not just a style and repeated themes in their films, but a psychological through-line tying them all together.

He specialized in Westerns (“40 Guns”), noirish crime dramas (“The Naked Kiss,” “Underworld, Inc.”) and filmed, for what it’s worth, the very first “Vietnam War” movie — “China Gate” (1957).

But World War II movies were his bread and butter. He was already a screenwriter when he went into the Army. And when he got out, he dove into making gritty, often cynical grunts-eye-view pictures such as “The Steel Helmet,” “Fixed Bayonets” and “Merrill’s Marauders.”

It wasn’t until “The Big Red One (1980)” that we got a clear picture of what Fuller’s combat experience was like. He served with the Army’s First Infantry Division, came ashore in Algeria with the first waves when no one knew if they French they were facing would fight them or join them, survived the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, fought in Sicily and was on the beach on D-Day.

Fuller fought across Europe, and was present (and even filmed) the liberation of the Falkenau Contentration Camp. Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, the man had a helluva war.

All of which lend credence to the film many call his “masterpiece,” “The Big Red One,” named for the division’s shoulder insignia, a saga that skips through all that combat, from shipboard waiting to board the boats all the way through V-E Day.

With a budget that dwarfed most of his genre pictures and coming out in 1980, Fuller finally got his moment in the cinema spotlight with a movie that starred long-in-the-tooth Lee Marvin, “Star Wars” hot Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine of the acting Carradine clan and Bobby Di Cicco, fresh off the epic Spielberg flop “1941.”

It has gripping and believable small-unit combat set-pieces, a cynical “inner circle” of survivors who look on replacements as men they refuse to get to know, seeing as how they’re likely to get killed, and a serious foot-soldier’s eye-view of the war — limited, myopic, concerned first with survival, second with food and-or creature comforts.

The script includes almost magical “fog of war” interludes with a Sicilian boy who will only direct the squad to a German gun emplacement if they help him bury his killed-in-the-combat mother, an assault on a German-held insane asyllum, a baby that simply must be delivered inside of an abandoned German tank and a framing device that sees the WWI vet Sgt. played by Marvin involved in the killing of Germans after the end of hostilities in both “The Great War” and “The Big One,” as veterans referred to WWII.

The dialogue is classic hard-boiled Fuller.

“You’re going to live, even if I have to blow your brains out.”

But 40+ years on, the thing that stands out about the film now is how corny it all is — a combat Pilgrim’s Progress that travels through tropes and cliches that were a lot more familiar to audiences when it came out than maybe they play today.

“The Big Red One” came out after “Patton,” after “A Bridge too Far” and nearly 20 years after “The Longest Day,” its closest WWII combat analog, a movie a lot creakier and cornier than this one thanks to the showy star cameo-cluttered cast.

Fuller’s alter-ego on the screen was Carradine, a few years short of “Revenge of the Nerds.” Private Zab is a cigar-chomping cynic who mouths off at the replacements and voice-over narrates the poor picture to death, first scene to last.

“You know how you smoke out a sniper? You send a guy out in the open and you see if he gets shot. They thought that one up at West Point.”

That’s a detective fiction device that Fuller knew all too well. The character, an already published novelist whose novel sells to Hollywood while he’s serving, is all-knowing and on-the-nose, chomping on a cigar like the WWII comic book version of Nick Fury.

What’s the first rule of cinema? “SHOW us, don’t TELL us.” It’s a visual medium. Zab is forever narrating plot points we’ve already picked up on.

“By now we’d come to look at all replacements as dead men who temporarily had the use of their arms and legs. They came and went so fast and so regularly that sometimes we didn’t even learn their names. Truth is, after a while, we sort of avoided gettin’ to know them.”

But the film gives Marvin — 56 when it came out — one last chance for an actual WWII combat vet (Marines, in the Pacific) to shine in a combat role, and he growls through his patient but unsentimental treatment of the combat-timid Private Griff (Hamill, quite good).

Marvin’s flintiest moments come in this film’s version of the “bangalore torpedoes” on the beach on Omaha Beach on D-Day, basically a more personal reprise of a scene Robert Mitchum starred in back in “The Longest Day.” And his most sentimental scene is in that concentration camp, taking a dying child under his care for a day.

The episodic nature of the movie afforded Fuller the chance to find light moments in the darkness, grim humor in the murder-or-be-murdered world of German submachine guns, castrating mines (graphically illustrated) and close-quarters knife work.

It’s not Fuller’s fault that Spielberg would come along under twenty years later and deliver the last word in WWII infantry combat movies, “Saving Private Ryan.” Or that “Band of Brothers” would almost surprass that. But that’s one reason, no matter what “director’s cut” you see of “The Big Red One,” that it seems so old fashioned.

It’s as formulaic and 1940s fusty as Fuller itself, in structure, storytelling style, unfussy shot-framing and jokes.

That’s not to say that it won’t be one of your better options whenever these “World War II” movie marathons roll around. It’s better than much of what came before it — “The Longest Day,” any John Wayne movie that isn’t “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” “A Bridge Too Far,” but not “Patton.”

And even if it isn’t a masterpiece, it’s certainly Sam Fuller’s biggest and best, a fine big screen curtain call for a reliable genre workhorse from the peak years of Hollywood’s old studio system.

Rating: R for war violence and some language

Cast: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Eddie Di Cicco, Stéphane Audran, Kelly Ward, Perry Lang and Siegfried Rauch.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Samuel Fuller. A United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:53

“Where the Tracks End” is an affectionate appreciation for the broke, small town schools that were the rule in much of Mexico much longer than they should have been, and the inspiring, intrepid women and men who made it their mission to teach the rural poor.

Based on a novel by Ángeles Doñate, this sentimental film — titled “El Último Vagón” in Spanish — follows four children as they form friendships and have adventures during one year at Malinalli Tepehpatl, a one-room escuela in a train car where the aged, devoted and compassionate Miss Georgina presides.

The great Mexican actress Adriana Barraza, of “Babel” and the Sam Raimi horror gem “Drag Me to Hell,” plays Miss Georgina, who meets little Ikal (Kaarlo Isaac) after he’s befriended some of her students. He’s 10, and hasn’t really been to school since his railroad laborer-dad (Jero Medina) moves the family to wherever tracks need to be replaced.

That’s kept the kid illiterate, if self-possessed enough to not take any guff from the older, taller and bullying Chico (Diego Montessoro) in their “gang.” Ikal is sweet on Valeria (Frida Sofía Cruz Salinas), and as his illeterate father doesn’t object and the kid has nothing better to do, so he agrees to join Miss Georgina’s class.

“Discipline!” she preaches. “Focus! Use that brain God gave you!” (in Spanish, with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

With a little help from her collection of comic books, the kid starts to learn to read.

Meanwhile, he and his mates (Ikal Paredes plays train-obsessed Tuerto) are pondering their futures, stumbling across corpses, raiding a local ranch for food and drink, adopting a dog — Quetzal, and dreaming of going to the a tiny traveling circus which has a lady magician, a clown, a tightrope walker and an exotic transgender knife-thrower.

But outside forces are staring at Mexico’s many under-funded rural schools, and deciding it’s time to “combine resources” by closing them. School inspector Hugo Valenzuela (Memo Villegas) is the guy with that thankless job, visiting schools small and packed, well-kept or worn out, and delivering the same news.

Director Ernesto Contreras (“Cosas Imposibles”) never quite lets this picture cross over into picaresque. The sweet tone is rarely due to laughs. It’s a tale with tragedies, big and small, and the sword of government funding cuts hangs over this piece of the recent past.

His movie may be entirely too sentimental, but it simply and beautifully summons up memories of other Mexican, Spanish and Italian tales of impoverished but plucky childhoods.

And Barraza makes a fine representative of that universal icon, the teacher who makes a difference. The kids are adorably real, facing lives whose horizons broaden every day they spend in this old railcar with the old woman with failing eyesight who lives in the back of that “vagón.”

Rating: TV-14, implied violence, teen smoking and drinking

Cast: Kaarlo Isaac, Adriana Barraza, Memo Villegas, Frida Sofía Cruz Salinas, Ikal Paredes, Diego Montessoro, Fátima Molina and Jero Medina.

Credits: Directed by Ernesto Contreras, scripted by Javier Peñalosa, based on a novel by Ángeles Doñate. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

“Blood & Gold” is a sadistically funny German Spaghetti Western set in the last days of World War II.

Suspenseful and violent, with brawls, booby traps, impalings and machine gunnings, it’s damned entertaining in the ways it finds to kill people, and in the ironic tunes that often accompany the violence — German pop of the war years by Marlene Dietrich and others, and melodies from real Westerns.

Stefan Barth’s script and director Peter Thorwarth (“Blood Red Sky”) fold in gold, greed, grief and guilt, the savagery of Naziism and the “blood rage” of combat as it mashes up “Kelly’s Heroes,” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Inglourious Basterds” for what boils down to a simple story of revenge.

What’s not so simple is how many people want it — the gold and the revenge — in tiny Sonnenberg, Germany in May of 1945.

“Blood & Gold” begins with a chase, capture and hanging. Combat veteran Heinrich (Robert Maaser, “1917”) has deserted. “The war is lost,” Allied planes buzz overheard and the lines are collapsing all around them. Widowed, Heinrich just wants to go find his little girl.

But the SS Lt. Col. von Starnfeld (Alexander Scheer) , a facially-deformed monster straight out of comic books, isn’t having it. And his dogged second in command, Dorfler (Florian Schmidke) hunts down the “coward” and has his minions hang him.

As in the Old West, not every hanging “takes.” The intervention of the intrepid farmwoman Elsa (Marie Hacke of “Outlander”) saves Heinrich and takes him home. But when that same unit comes to her farm looking for edible livestock, she and her special needs brother (Simon Rupp) are dragged into a shameful, genocidal war’s ugly ending.

Because what the SS wants is Jewish gold allegedly buried in a house in tiny Sonnenberg. When they get it, the Col. and his crew can slip through the lines and into new lives, right?

Surely the mayor (Stephan Grossmann) knows where the gold is. But the go-along-to-get-along innkeeper, donning his Nazi burgermeister uniform, “knows nothing about that (in German with subtitles, or dubbed),” or so he says.

Bet you he’s lying. Bet you the whole town was in on their mini “pogrom.” But maybe not.

The narrative serves up several points of view and competing agendas — murderous SS goons, Heinrich, Elsa, and townsfolk factions.

But everybody’s greed, temper and rash rage gets the better of them as the murderous uniformed men who murder in Germany’s name, after all, think nothing of torturing their countrymen, taking them hostage and even killing their fellow Germans over this cache of ingots.

There are just enough soldiers left to provide fodder for many a shootout, stabbing, grenading and pitch-forking as lines are crossed and blood is spilled that must be avenged.

The story has clever fight-scene choreography and problem-solving, and all the rational logic and mathematical competence — far more minions are killed than we count in their first group scene — of a B-movie, married to the murderous glee of your typical Tarantino film.

Maaser and Hacke are terrific, letting us see their characters pushed to violence, and damned good at it when they are. Schmidke is relentlessly vile, and Scheer a classic black-leather-trenchcoated Nazi monster.

Thorwarth doesn’t know when to drop the mike. That’s why they call it an “anti-climax,” kamerad. But if you like war movies where Nazis get what’s coming to them, “Blood & Gold” fills the bill and then some.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence including sexual assault, profanity

Cast: Robert Maaser, Marie Hacke, Florian Schmidke, Alexander Scheer, Stephan Grossman

Credits: Directed by Peter Thorwarth, scripted by Stefan Barth. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

“Simulant,” the latest slice of cautionary sci-fi about “sexy replicants/androids/’simulants'” developing minds of their own points to one solution worth tossing into the current debate over the many forms and faces of AI — artificial intelligence.

Make a rule that the robots can’t be good looking. Sure, that’ll irk the sex toy industry. But with humanity’s fate in the balance, can we really afford increasingly “sentient” AI that looks like Sean Young, Rutger Hauer or Darryl Hannah in “Blade Runner,” Olivia Wilde in “Tron” or Alicia Sanz in “Simulant?”

This Canadian production may resemble a snowy, sunnier “Blade Runner” in almost every important regard. But they call their ever-improving, each model more “human” than the last androids “Simulants,” not “Replicants.” So there’s that.

This under-regulated corporation is rolling out its humanoid robot “servants” and assuring the world that its four “precepts” will save humanity from the great android uprising that we know is coming.

Nexxera’s simulants can’t “inflict harm on any human,” cannot “modify themselves,” must never “break the law” and simply have to “obey all commands from their masters.”

I feel safer already. The residents of unnamed FutureCity (Hamilton, Ontario) aren’t convinced.

Sam Worthington plays Kessler, an AI Code Enforement officer who tracks down “unregulated” simulants, wherever they may be. He’s got a pistol-shaped scanner to determine proof-of-life or “robot.” And when this one attractive quarry (Sanz, of “The Devil Below” and TV’s “El Cid” and “Now and Then”) knocks him around with superhuman ease, and then sprints off, he whips out his electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) rifle to disable every simulant within range so he can catch and detain her.

Something’s going on with these gadgets, which are showing “empathy” and as with the one that attacked Kessler, the ability to “assault a civilian with intent.”

Might it relate to that ex-Nexxara engineer who just happened to live across the hall from the sim that Kessler just collared? He’s played by Simu Liu of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings,” whose name could have inspired the new label for androids in this movie, but probably didn’t.

Meanwhile, there’s this very attractive couple (Jordana Brewster, Robbie Arnell) that’s gone through an accident, and now one partner is having nightmares of that crash and wondering if they’re real. We’re meant to wonder “Which one of them comes with a warranty?”

The plot is so “Blade Runner” reliant that it’s perfunctory. And that puts a damper on the performances. At least Liu plays around with charm-masking-self-serving-motives in his turn, but nobody else makes us feel or fear for their fate.

The production design is “futuristic minimalist,” as in there’s little here that doesn’t seem present day. No, this can’t have cost much, even in Canadian dollars.

That’s always a hook in thrillers like this, making us wonder who will turn out to be real and who will be a robot, and which robots won’t realize they’re not human.

Another plot element is the ways the fake humans “learn” to become human — reading Dostoyevsky and Kafka, music, painting, keeping a diary, becoming more self-aware and empathetic until that moment when — often as not — one of them SNAPS.

So the movies are getting at the problem. It’s easy to tell robot from human when we can see seams in the construction material and their “hair” looks like some plastic 3D printed version of Max Headroom’s coiffure.

But when the design team is cranking out new generations of androids and algorythmically selecting the sexiest physical traits, well…there’s your solution. Save us from our AI apocalypse. Stop making androids so doable.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual content

Cast: Sam Worthington, Jordana Brewster, Simu Liu, Mayko Nguyen, Robbie Arnell and Alicia Sanz

Credits: Directed by April Mullen, scripted by Ryan Christopher Churchill. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:35