Movie Nation

One quick way to depress yourself about the state of ethics in medicine is to Google the phase “organ donation scandal.” Germany to China, Bulgaria to India, this life-and-death access to transplantable organs has proven as easy to corrupt as dramatists long warned us.

One of those plumbing the depths of this medical, moral and financial dilemma was the veteran TV writer and playwright Mark St. Germain. Putting his play “The God Dilemma” on the screen attracted a good, if not top box office cast who deliver brilliant flashes of outrage and moments of pathos in writer-director Austin Stark’s revealing, moving and quietly gripping film.

Kelsey Grammer has his best role since “Frasier” as a conflicted, brooding heart surgeon who sits on such a committee at New York’s St. Augustine Hospital. Sitting with Dr. Boxer, passing judgment on who might be the best candidate for such transplants are testy Dr. Wilkes (Patricia R. Floyd), a sarcastic psychologist (Peter Kim) and the chief of medicine (Janeane Garofalo).

And on the day we’re introduced to this sage and sometimes impassioned debate on who has “the best chance for success,” “a good support system,” “lifestyle” (exercise, diet, drug-free), and who is otherwise “worthy” of a new heart is the new addition to the committee, a young cardiac surgeon who just got out of Dr. Boxer’s bed — Dr. Jordan Taylor (Julia Stiles). Oh, and this priest (Colman Domingo) shows up “representing the board.

The situation set up here is soap operatic, and the ticking clock they face (“Organ Expiration: 50 minutes” graphics) adds to that TV medical drama feel of it all. On top of all that, the hospital has had transplant failures, has lost its A-rated standing and is gambling, yet again, by implanting a heart into an older woman whose worthiness is more empathy than science based.

And then there’s the day’s big “new” decision, reshuffling the list of candidates based on their medical progress or decline.

The playboy son of a wealthy hospital benefactor (Dan Hedaya) might “move up in status” — if he’s drug free, if the girlfriend (Elizabeth Masucci) admitted with him verifies that the party boy is clean. A doorman and a rich old widow are also under reconsideration.

Dr. Boxer doesn’t think Dr. Taylor is “cut out for this,” and she does seem a tad idealistic about what they’re doing, “playing God.”

“I’ll be the first to step aside when God walks in here and votes,” Boxer growls.

The deliberations are never easy, the notion that “We could add years” to this doorman or that cranky old widow’s life, drug tests to evaluate, and then “other” considerations that come in — a $25 million “grant” that is dangled.

Also soap operatic, as is the pairing with Grammer with the much-younger Stiles.

But the story ably shifts back and forth between two timelines, the 2014 committee meeting that is Taylor’s first day voting on those decisions, and “seven years later,” when Dr. Boxer is on the verge of an animal-based xenotransplantation solution to the “worldwide organ shortage.”

Events in one timeline prefigure the other, and the ethical choices bandied about “then” have repercussions “now.” Have characters altered their views or seen their ethics soften?

Melodramatic? Sure. But most of the story threads are quite engrossing and sometimes touching. The tale is framed in the accident that makes a young man’s heart available, young lovers looking at the stars and planning for a future that one of them will never live to see.

Writer-director Stark keeps the histrionics to a minimum, and still almost everyone has her or his “moment” and makes the most of it. Stiles, the standout in the cast is impressive as always, but Garofalo and Grammer are the most surprising, giving us beautiful, nuanced moments of pained moral compromise or quiet desperation.

“The God Committee” is the sort of solid drama you get when actors you think you know are gifted with a script they can sink their teeth into, and make the most of their moment to shine.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, graphic surgical scenes, smoking

Cast: Kelsey Grammer, Julia Stiles, Janeane Garofalo, Colman Domingo, Patricia R. Floyd, Peter Kim and Dan Hedaya

Credits: Scripted and directed by Austin Stark, based on the play by Mark St. Germain. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:39

“Skinwalker” is a too-talkative walking-corpse of a Western horror tale from the auteur who churned out “Eminence Hill” and “The Covenant.”

A couple of horseless cowboys (Nathaniel Burns and director Robert Conway) stumble across a Native American grave. The one with the “Duck Dynasty” beard (Burns) takes a death totem from the grave. And all sorts of living dead revenge is unleashed.

Desperados and lawmen and Mormons pay the price for this desecration.

The sets suffice, in a bare bones of the day way, and nothing interesting is done with the Arizona locations of this sleepwalk of a movie.

The acting’s pretty stiff, the violence is ugly enough, and right on the edge of random. The totem and its first “victim” take separate paths and lead whoever each encounters into the grave, thanks to the shapeshifting (not really) “Skinwalker.”

But that talking, all the anachronisms mixed with pale-imitation-of-“True Grit” dialogue and portentous speechifying.

“She can feign a grace and composure of the prim and proper. But she’s the SERPENT.” And this was but a drop of her venom!”

Dang, Marshal. Where’d you learn to talk so purty?

There’s gunslinger moralizing at Mormon “plural marriage.”

“You got a problem with the way you live our lives, outlaw?”

Eva Hamilton (“Ruin Me”) plays the saucy consort of an outlaw. No sense trying to reason with “the Serpent.”

“Blow it out your backside, Marshal!”

Of course, all that fine talk is no substitute for pacing. This corpse is dead on its feet.

Cast: Eva Hamilton, Cameron Kotecki, Amelia Haberman, Nathaniel Burns

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Conway. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:34

“The Holy Game” sets out to give the Catholic Church a little image burnishing by showing how its stages a civil, sportsmanlike soccer matches among the various seminaries and schools of Rome, in and around Vatican City.

It’s called The Clericus Cup, a mini “World Cup” for pre-ordination seminarians and some of their teachers and mentors, playing on behalf of Pontifical Urban College, North American College’s Martyrs, Mater Ecclessiae, Redemptoris Mater, schools filled with players from five continents and 66 nations.

One young priest compares it to the Quidditch World Cup of the “Harry Potter” novels. Considering the names of the colleges and teams, it’s no wonder than analogy caught on.

But as we meet a sampling of the player/seminarians, see practices and watch soccer matches (not awful) play out, as we get a glimpse of the lives these men lead in their pursuit of a life of “self sacrifice” that is “not a job, a vocation,” taking vows of poverty and chastity as they talk about “putting all their trust in God,” the Elephant in the room is poking his nose over our shoulders, and theirs.

For most of the people he’s met after announcing his choice of vocations, Grayson Heenan says, “The only press they’ve heard about the Catholic Church is negative.” That’s ongoing and no, he doesn’t know what to say to that.

Some of the men speak of the lives they might have led and we get a hint of regrets. Their teachers, directors of colleges, talk about pursuing “happiness…that goes beyond fame and glory and money,” a student speaks of the “sacrifice for the greater good.”

Still others ponder why there are pedophiles in the priesthood, and TV news coverage shows TV anchors and Catholics around the world reacting to the shocking crimes the church has covered up.

And then, sure enough, one of the priests we’ve seen on camera, waxing lyrical about the calling and the work, is exposed as one of “those” priests. Not an usher-boy molester, but just a “celibate” who fathered children post-ordination.

Of course this hijacks the movie, a light treatment of the final years of a priest’s education, showing us how they’re trained to give the last rites in hospitals, for instance, and setting an example of how futbol should be played (they give out “blue cards” as penalties, in which the offending player goes to the sideline and “spiritually reflects” on what he’s done).

Which begs the question, “When the whole point of your movie is undercut, what should a filmmaker do?” Was there a way to re-cut it, re-direct the focus and make this somehow worthwhile, at least in a “slice of life about the priesthood today” sense?

No. Directors Brent Hodge and Chris Kelly were at a loss about what to do, and cannot “finesse” that grenade that went off in their footage. The picture is only 67 minutes long, making you wonder what had to be left out as they scrambled to “pivot” and take in the film’s new reality. The version I watched had “rights” clearance issues, people whom they talked to who might not agree to appear in the final cut.

They probably should have accepted that they’d wasted resources, time and effort on a movie that was never going to work, even at the truncated 67 minutes this one comes in at.

“The Holy Game” just leaves us wondering if maybe the sexually problematic Catholic Church should take off the cleats, stop moralizing about others and playing politics and take a red card. Sit down and shut up until they’ve fixed their catastrophic, faith-killing, life-shattering problems.

And Gravitas Ventures? When did you guys lose the judgement that should tell you when a lightweight “Vatican clerical students play soccer” doc is rendered unfit to release?

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Grayson Heenan, Mike Zimmerman, Eric Atta Gyasi, Father Oscar Turrion, Felice Alborghetti

Credits: Directed by Brent Hodge and Chris Kelly. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:07

Here’s a light Indonesian dramedy about a teen who comes to New York to find the Mom who left him back in Jakarta over a dozen years before.

Yes, it’s a “fish out of water” comedy, after a fashion. And yes, the deck in this Islamic Indonesia screenplay is stacked against poor Mom (Marissa Anita), whom we see in a flashback say goodbye to a little boy and a confused, deflated husband. She is “pursuing” her “dream,” to become a singer in the Big Apple. The kid overheard parental quarrels as the months passed and Mom refused to return with a self-absorbed “I can’t go back and be NOTHING.”

When we meet near-adult Ali (Iqbaal Dhiafakhri Ramadhan) he is reaching out, composing a hearfelt message online for her. Only he doesn’t know where she is. It’s only after his father’s death that Ali finds the postcards and letters, the plane tickets Mom sent for them to come see her.

And a pleasant family gathering comes a tad unglued when Ali finds out they were in on the deception, that they never forgave Mia for “abandoning” her family. There’s nothing for it but to rent out the house he inherited and fly to New York to track her down.

The trail isn’t totally cold, but the apartment in Queens she once rented is now home to a quartet of women her age, one a former roommate. These boisterous, hard-working women are determined to finish raising the money to open a restaurant. Sure, kid, you can stay here (in English and Indonesian with English subtitles). Sure, we’ll help you find Mom. Yes, you’ll need to help us out on the rent.

“Ali & the Queens” as it titled on The Internet Movie Database (“Ali & Ratu Ratu Queens” on Netflix) is lightly charming, in its own way. But to stick with the game of cards analogy, the filmmakers leave an awful lot of money on the table, underdeveloping many a comic or tragi-comic possibility, mainly to beat up the abandoned-her-kid Mom.

The four women — the house-cleaner Party (Nirina Zubir), sexy masseuse Chinta (Happy Salma), cook and single-mom Ance (Tika Panggabean) and hustler who got hustled the day she arrived, and now supports herself gambling at chess and mahjong and what have you Biyah (Asri Welas) — flirt with being greedy enough to sucker the kid out of all his cash to realize their “dream.” But that would have been edgy, and nothing here comes close to that.

The search for Mom is haphazard and short. Her reaction to being found is…pretty much what you’d expect.

And then there’s the teen daughter of Ance, pretty, arty and helpful Eva (Aurora Ribero) who becomes Ali’s crush.

Every New Yorker they meet is pleasant, supportive and helpful? Even in Queens, that’s a stretch. Ali’s hopes of going to art school, maybe becoming an animator (we see him animating his drawings) are met with “Sure, you’ll get a scholarship.” And money?

“This is New York, man. Money is EASY to find if you look!”

Not nearly enough is done with how “American” the Indonesian have all become — drinking alcohol, swearing.

In short, there’s not much in the way of struggle, too little conflict and almost every rough edge has been rubbed off, save for Mom the Abandoner.

“Coming to America” narratives are coming back as a genre, but you’re going to have to do better than this mushy movie selling an absurdly softhearted fantasy version of New York if you want Western audiences to buy in.

MPA Rating: TV-14, alcohol, mild profanity

Cast: Iqbaal Dhiafakhri Ramadhan, Marissa Anita, Aurora Ribero, Nirina Zubir, Tika Panggabean, Happy Salma and Asri Welas

Credits: Directed by Lucky Kaswandi, script by Ginatri S. Noer. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

One of the last moments of the documentary “Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide,” has the artist revisiting huge, fanciful and playful painting that gives the film its title. He goes with his daughter, Malia, who co-directed the film, to see it for the first time in years.

“When World’s Collide” is the quintessential Scharf painting, his “Jetsonism/Hanna-Barberism” graffiti/Warholian pop art style on a vast canvas. He takes a look at it, turns to his daughter and says “See ya later!” and leaps, as if to lose himself in the gaudy, goofy and insanely colorful world he envisioned in 1984.

As we’ve seen in the family-made/Kenny-sanctioned movie that precedes that giddy moment, “That’s so Kenny.” Playful at 62, just as playful as he was in the ’80s, when he was one of the three Andy Warhol fans/proteges who lit up the New York art scene with their “graffiti” style.

It’s somewhat safe to say that of the trio — Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny — Scharf is the least famous, at least outside of the art world. But as the sad old joke goes, most painters don’t get truly famous until after they’re dead.

Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988. Haring succumbed to AIDS in 1990. That goofball Californian, Kenny Scharf? He’s still raiding dumpsters in LA or “cleaning the beach” of his Brazilian home for his “precious plastic,” turning cast-off cup lids, straws, plastic fruit serving baskets and the like into whimsical “bathroom art.” He’s still losing himself in canvases that have homages to pop culture, advertising, junk and Hanna Barbera cartoons like “The Jetsons” and “The Flintstones.”

And yes, as fans, peers, curators, historians and collectors testify in this too-humorless (considering the subject) film, he’s still a pretty big deal.

His work is filled with “the noise of life,” and are just “too much” for mere mortals to take in, testimonials insist.

With him painting isn’t a trade, a craft or even a calling, “it’s an obsession” one fellow artist declares.

Here’s performance artist and actress Anne Magnuson recreating the “peak decay” New York of the Reagan years, where Scharf, Haring and Basquiat saw to it that “the Uptown World started paying attention to the Downtown World.”

“Experimenting” with paint, sculpture, video and performance art, putting on all manner of bizarre and Dadaist “happenings” at Club 57, these rising stars of pop art found their voices and advertised their aesthetic in a city craving “fun” in its visual art.

“They just seemed to bring the ’80s alive,” actor, artist and collector Dennis Hopper declared.

There’s all this old video of Scharf performing, playing around, being interviewed (often with his best-bud, Haring) to go along with new footage of Scharf traveling, working and dissecting his own influences — Warhol and Picasso, Escher and Lichtenstein and Dali, from the evidence we see on canvas.

He decorates–OVERdecorates his house. We see the ancient Cadillacs he’s transformed into rolling, over-the-top art-on-wheels exhibits. We get a glimpse of a TV cartoon he made for The Cartoon Network (“The Grooveians”).

When critics interviewed here talk about the “infantilism” of the ’80s New York creative scene, they’re paying Scharf the ultimate compliment. Not only did he outlive and outlast his peers, but he’s kept his sense of play intact, polishing his technique, maintaining his childish sense of wonder, making his “use everything” art to this very day.

The film is, truth be told, entirely too stodgy to “get at” the essence of the artist or mimic his psyche and aesthetic. Yoko Ono celebrates Scharf as “a goofy wind…in the art world,” and that should have been the filmmakers’ agenda.

Still, it’s great to see him still at it, fun to take in the works and fascinating to get a new take on Manhattan art scene history, with the home movies to show just how uninhibited, creative and offbeat it was.

MPA rating: unrated

Cast: Kenny Scharf, Ann Magnuson, Dennis Hopper, Samantha McEwen, Richard Marshall, Jane Panetta and Yoko Ono.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Basch, Malia Scharf. A Maliable Films release.

Running time: 1:17

The dying old mobster wants to set the record “straight,” give us “the real story,” one more time in “Lansky,” the latest version of the “mob accountant” who allegedly died with hundreds of millions of dollars that nobody ever found.

It’s a lot like many a mob memoir, especially a 1999 HBO film of the same title. That “Lansky” was scripted by David Mamet, starred Richard Dreyfuss, Eric Roberts, Ileana Douglas and Anthony LaPaglia, and is remembered for the same tired “interview” framing device, its brutality and image-burnishing.

Director John McNaughton (“Wild Things,” “Mad Dog and Glory”) at least gave it a gritty gloss.

This new, more down-market biopic has no Mamet, no McNaughton, and more exaggerated versions of the same flaws as the last “Lansky.”

It’s reasonably well cast, with Harvey Keitel as Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Seigel’s “partner,” the casino mogul with an “accountant’s” mind, telling “the real story” to a (fictional) journalist/biographer (Sam Worthington).

“When they don’t know you,” Lansky intones, “they put labels on you.”

The image Lansky paints of himself, in person as he’s interviewed, and in flashbacks (Joe Magaro isn’t bad, or the least bit charismatic, as younger Meyer) shows him still polishing his image, playing up his WWII “patriotism,” pitching in by hiring goons to beat up Nazi rallies in New York, cooperating with the Navy in using the mob to track down German spies (mob torture included). He was a big postwar backer of Israel, shuttling casino cash to help Golda Meir establish the Jewish state.

He’s still how we remember him, a top Jewish mobster in a mostly Italian mob era, a “survivor,” still careful to never pull the trigger or wield a knife himself. But it’s always implied in these stories that he was rougher and tougher “coming up.” Implied, but never shown.

This Lansky’s partner Ben “Bugsy” Siegel (David Cade) is a murderous monster who is the real tough guy. Lansky only gets physical when he’s fighting with his first wife (Anna Sophia Robb), perhaps the least flattering addition to his screen image.

Writer-director Eytan Rockaway (“The Abandoned”) serves up a cluttered, clumsy and dull portrait that blunders most obviously by not having Keitel do the voice-over narration for the flashbacks. Some are in Magaro’s voice, some in Worthington’s.

There are Feds (David James Elliott et al) racing to find Lansky’s alleged hidden millions, strong-arming the hapless, broke and desperate “biographer” to get him to help them track it down.

Thus is the wizened, tanned mobster, whose conditions for agreeing to the interviews are that they not be published until after his death, engaged in one last set of intrigues, keeping one last big secret even as he’s giving his spin on others he passes on to writer David Stone (Worthington).

People still die when they talk too much about Meyer Lansky, even as he nears death, in this story. But Rockaway never lets anything interesting get on screen that he doesn’t undercut with sadly sentimental slop in the very next moment.

Keitel is relaxed and magnanimous as the elderly mob capo, saddled with exposition, aphorism and rationalization-heavy dialogue, given one flashback of his own (his attempts to escape U.S. justice in Israel) in which to show us the fire the actor is famous for.

The mob movie tropes and cliches end up being the only memorable moments in “Lansky,” material so overfamiliar we can finish the lines before the actors do.

“I’m an angel…with a dirty face.” “You do what you can to feel alive.” “I’m a businessman. We don’t choose sides. We choose opportunities.”

The trouble with every screen treatment of Lansky (the saintly Ben Kinglsey played him in “Bugsy”) is this idiotic deference writers, directors and actors treat him with. Like everybody else, Rockway separates and insulates the man from the world he was immersed in, as if he’s “above” all that extortion, stealing, murder and mayhem.

If Rockaway had been as loose and cynical with Meyer Lansky as he was with Siegel or the Italians in his movie, it might have had some edge. Then again, when you underscore a meeting between Lansky and Lucky Luciano (Shane McRae) with the cornball Neopolitan musical cliche “Funiculì, Funiculà,” maybe “edgy” is beyond you.

MPA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language and some sexual references.

Cast: Harvey Keitel, Sam Worthington, Joe Magaro, Anna Sophia Robb, Minka Kelly, David Cade and David James Elliott.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Eytan Rockaway. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:58

Comic, writer and actress Iliza Shlesinger once was sued for turning away men at a show she’d labeled and limited to “for women only.”

So we know where she’s coming from, playing a stand-up who finally gets that TV deal but finds herself dating a fellow who lies about every important personal detail of his life. I mean, he looked “Good on Paper,” right?

The film, which she wrote and stars in, wrings a few laughs out of that idea (You’ll remember a “Seinfeld” episode along a similar line.) and a few more out of teaming her with fellow-comic Margaret Cho, who plays her smart-mouthed best friend.

And as the story of “how we met” and all the “signs” that Dennis (Ryan Hansen) isn’t all he’s passing himself off to be, we get snarky/smirky voice-over commentary, and bits of a stand-up act in which her character tells the story of this debacle, and comments on it.

If that sounds like “Seinfeld,” too, well…

Andrea (Shlesinger) is a comic who can’t get out of her own way, commenting on and comically “correcting” scripts she’s auditioning for, 34 and hitting multiple comedy clubs a night because she’s not yet scored every stand-up/would-be-actress’s dream, an LA sitcom deal.

Then dorky “not physically-attracted to him at all” Dennis stumbles into her at the airport and sits next to her on the plane. And here’s what she notices. The “not physically-attracted” thing. He drinks. A lot. But he’s “smart,” attentive and “charming.”

Here’s what he expects her to notice. He’s a hedge fund manager. He went to Yale. He’s just bought a house in Beverly Hills. He’s dating a “model” named Cassandra. The fact that he squeezes these factoids into their first-ever conversation should tell her something, but no.

She talks about her new “friend” constantly, introduces him to her BFF Margot (Cho), they all hang. And something else…develops.

She’s taken Margot’s advice, “Stop being so salty about all the things coming your way,” she figures. She’s still got her nemesis, the successful actress Serrena (Rebecca Rittenhouse) who started at exactly the same time as her, and has “made it” and is on billboards for her new movie all over town. She’s getting closer to her own “break.” And without really knowing how it happened (alcohol), she’s got a “boyfriend,” too.

It’s just that he’s secretive, glib and vague, with all these life details missing from her knowledge of who he “really” is.

“Good on Paper,” like the just-released horror comedy “Too Late,” does a good job immersing us in a comic’s life. We don’t see Andrea writing down funny lines, but we hear her saying them and thinking that she should write them down. We get a good taste of her act, and unlike in “Too Late,” the lead here has the confidence that creates stage presence, thus she’s perfectly credible at something Shlesinger actually does — stand-up comedy.

Hansen is amusing, in that obvious poseur way, selling lines like “Let’s just say I won’t be shopping at Cartier’s again,” or trying to.

The “story” here is what’s lacking, and it goes from bad to courtroom “worse.” And then there’s that amorphous and unamusingly unrelatable over-riding “complaint” — “having it all and wishing there was more” — that doesn’t invite anybody in.

Not enough laugh-lines land, and those that do are mostly exchanges between Shlesinger’s Andrea and Cho’s Margot, a lesbian bar owner who’s always on the make.

“Why can’t you stalk her on Instagram like a NORMAL person?”

It plays like a long TV sitcom pilot, an only modestly promising one. And yes, that’s also “just like ‘Seinfeld.'”

A few laughs, plenty of (intentional) cringes, and one can’t help but notice that “Good on Paper” is about all the endorsement this one deserves.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout, sexual references, and brief drug use and nudity 

Cast: Iliza Shlesinger, Ryan Hansen, Rebecca Rittenhouse and Margaret Cho

Credits: Directed by Kimmy Gatewood, script by Iliza Shlesinger. A Universal film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:34

You watch enough reality TV, you know this. Ice road trucking is damned dangerous without throwing in much melodrama.

So all this villainy, these snowmobile chases, ice truck bumper cars and what not that “The Ice Road” serves up? A bit of gilding the Liam Neeson lily, right?

It’s another action picture for Mr. Neeson, another set of “particular skills” are trotted out. And as TV has covered most of the “work the problem” of doing this dangerous driving, coping with mishaps, breakdowns, tragedy and deadlines, I guess we can forgive the farthest fetched stuff that piles on in the third act.

But truth be told, “Ice Road” goes a bit wrong, right from the get-go. An action film fan sees a digital explosion knock over a digital dump truck closing the Katka diamond mine in Northern Manitoba, and the heart sinks. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the movie.

But as a rag tag trio of truck drivers on a “suicide mission” trying to transport gear miles and kilometers over a not-quite-wholly frozen lake, a not-weight-rated bridge, etc., real trucks and real stunts take over and in that regard, at least, it’s not half-bad.

Laurence Fishburne is the guy who assembles the team, which includes First Nation rebel Tantoo (Amber Midthunder), fresh out of jail, and newly-fired North Dakota siblings Mike and Gurty (Neeson and Marcus Thomas).

Everybody’s got a story, but the only one really explained is Mike and Gurty’s. Mike’s brother is a vet with mind-numbing PTSD, but hangs onto his diesel repair skills like the last piece of the old “him” he has left.

They need to get these wellheads — at least one of them, on three separate trucks (“triple redundancy”) — to the mine to drain out the methane gas that blew the place up and will asphyxiate the survivors trapped down below. The drivers need to manage this within “the oxygen window” those men (Holt McCallany is their leader) have left.

There’s an insurance guy from the mine company (Benjamin Walker) along for the ride, here to act as a surrogate for the audience, to have frozen lake “pressure waves” and the like explained to him (and us). And he’s there to state the obvious.

“You’re out of your minds, all of you!”

Things go wrong in a hurry, drivers try to “work the problem” using their skills and knowhow, and still people die. Will this all be in vain?

You know the answer. You can figure out the villains (one was George’s nemesis on “Seinfeld”) and even predict who gets punched in the mouth, if not exactly when.

Neeson is in solid form, villains do their villainy and the sassy lady driver copes with anti-Native racism with her smart mouth and her fists, to fun effect.

This genre of road adventure has a rich history, from “They Drive by Night” to “Wages of Fear” to “Sorcerer,” desperate people driven to do a deadly job of driving” and paying for that with their lives.”

“Ice Road” summons up memories of its antecedents, here and there.

But that ridiculous over-the-top third act, topping even the odd operating-on-ice physics of “The Ice Road,” tends to take the air right out of the Jonathan Hensleigh film’s tires.

MPA Rating: PG-13 (Sequences of Action & Violence|Strong Language)

Cast: Liam Neeson, Laurence Fishburne, Amber Midthunder, Holt McCallany, Marcus Thomas and Matt McCoy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Some films achieve “classic” status and even become pop culture shorthand, but eventually find themselves dismissed as overly-earnest, “of its time,” or even “self-parody.”

More than one Stanley Kramer production of the ’50s on into the ’70s has suffered that fate. A self-conscious/socially-conscious filmmaker, it’s hard to think of anybody in the modern cinema that who would own that label — maybe Spike Lee, and perhaps one day Jordan Peele.

Kramer took on “Inherit the Wind” and “On the Beach” and “Judgement at Nuremburg,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Ship of Fools” as a director. He produced the disaffected generation on wheels B-movie classic “The Wild One,” the Hollywood Blacklist-bashing Western “High Noon” and “The Caine Mutiny,” a myth-busting stage drama that took a sober look at the officer classes of the WWII US Navy.

All those social ills exposés, Holocaust remembrances, cautionary anti-nuclear war parables and pointed looks at American racism became Kramer’s reputation.

Dropping in on “The Defiant Ones,” recently screened on The Grio TV, I was struck by filmmaking qualities one forgets when a film ages into a classic so archetypal as to be beyond criticism out its time.

This is the movie that made Sidney Poitier an icon, but Tony Curtis was never taken that seriously as an actor, which explains some of the reason “Defiant” slipped into “dismissable” in some quarters.

It’s a lean racial allegory that preaches without ever seeming preachy, a beautifully shot (one of its Oscars was for Sam Leavitt’s B&W cinematography), well-cut time capsule of America at the birth of the Civil Rights Era.

Whatever star power and “message” appeal it had then, what makes it timeless is its “men on the run” story — two convicts, chained-together, on the lam from Southern justice.

No, it almost never looks like The South. They filmed it in the treeless mountains of Southern California, on backlots and sound stages, faking “swamps” and the like when needed.

The set-pieces — crossing a “raging” (not really) river, crawling out of a deep mud pit, fending off and then captured by the enraged white men of a local town, the single farm mother (Cara Williams) and her son that they stumble upon — can play as predictably corny.

But that on-the-run-in-chains narrative still zips by, and the script, with its get-past-racism-to-find-each-other’s humanity subtext, still pops.

“How come they chained a white man to a black?”

“The warden’s got a sense of humor...They’ll probably kill each other before they go five miles.”

Theodore Bikel’s sheriff character, “up for reelection,” has a hint of a drawl and a pre-Atticus Finch lawyer-turned-lawman notion of justice. He’s not a caricature when he might easily have been one. The script and the humanity Bikel brought to many characters over a very long career, make this guy out of step with his “posse.” He wants these men taken alive, and won’t let others even think about “mob justice.”

Here was a movie that took on the N-word head-on, with Curtis’s racist armed robber using the slur, and the standard defense — the assorted words thrown at white people in response in that day. Poitier’s hard-bitten “Ever heard those used with ‘in the woodpile'” might have opened a few eyes, if not minds, in 1958.

“I ain’t gettin’ mad, Joker. I been mad all my natural life.”

Poitier crackles with gimlet-eyed fury in what became a defining role for him. He didn’t play “angry” very often. Grace, dignity and intelligence were his brand.

Curtis managed to hold his own in a similar temper, first scene to last.

On-the-run stories put us in the dilemma with the characters, second-guessing their choices, using everything we’ve ever seen in such stories (“Cool Hand Luke” stands out) to guess what our criminal anti-heroes will do to get to “freedom.” One is desperate to go north, the other hellbent on heading “south.” Guess who wants to go where?

The film has a not-cynical-enough reporter (Lawrence Dobkin), a racist goon (Claude Akins) in conflict with an older, tougher local (Lon Chaney, Jr.) who won’t let a lynching stain his town’s conscience, the inhumanity of a search-dog trainer (King Donovan) and state trooper (Charles McGraw) in conflict with the sheriff, too many places for America’s moral quandary over the issue of race to be debated.

This could have been “All the King’s Men” or “Twelve Angry Men” and it never manages to be that tough.

But Kramer gets a message he felt America needed to hear and probably still needs to hear on the screen in an artful, just-edgy-enough and still-entertaining film that retains its claim as a “classic,” at least in part thanks to how deeply it’s burrowed itself into the culture.

MPA Rating: “approved,” violence, racial slurs

Cast: Sidney Poitier, Tony Curtis, Theodore Bikel, Lon Chaney Jr,. Charles McGraw, Cara Williams, Lawrence Dobkin and Claude Akins
Credits: Directed by Stanley Kramer, script by Nedrick Young, Harold Jacob Smith. A United Artists release.

Running time: 1:36

A July 7 doc about “cat fanciers?” Ok.