Movie Nation

Good intentions run smack into self-indulgence in “MVP,” a slack, sentimental, cliche-and-stereotype-stuffed drama from activist, charitable foundation founder, Green Beret vet and actor Nate Boyer.

Boyer directed, co-wrote and stars in this story of a homeless Marine who meets a star wide receiver (Mo McRae) just as the footballer’s career has ended. They collide, clash and eventually connect over the commonalities of their experiences.

Although the script takes pains to have a character dismiss any “ballfields and battlefields” analogy, the male bonding here stems from the two worlds having a shared “camaraderie, purpose and pride.”

The larger theme is sharing the rough time a lot of combat veterans are having, generating sympathy for their plight and looking for solutions via outreach and acceptance, making this a sort of filmed ad for the MVP Foundation that Boyer and Fox sportscaster Jay Glazer set up a few years back.

But you can see the higher purpose of a project and still have “notes” about the movie.

Boyer stars as Zephyr, “Z,” a troubled ex-Marine living in a shelter in Hollywood, jogging in camo and backpack to his job as a security guard at a gated community in the Hollywood Hills. That’s how he meets Will Phillips (McRae), on “Willy Phil” or “Will-the-Thrill’s” worst day.

The 11-year veteran wide receiver has just been cut, involuntarily retired. The shock of that news, the fact that he can’t even get to that day’s game at the stadium to get his face out there and start the hunt for TV work because he’s never had to find his own parking space for his baller’s Humvee, sends Will on a bender.

Zephyr fireman carries the so-drunk-he-peed-himself jock home, and the jock wants to say “Thanks” the next day. That’s how he finds the “barracks” run by Vietnam vet Jim (Dan Lauria of “The Wonder Years”) and that’s how he insults Z by offering him a “tip” for “your service.”

“MVP” tracks that uncertain introduction through each man’s trials — Z trying to keep it together, despite Marines all around him ending their lives by suicide, trying to pay back an addict comrade (Shawn Vance) who “took a bullet” for him, maybe opening up to a cute age-appropriate waitress of Middle Eastern descent (Dina Shihabi) and Will struggling to figure out “the next thing” after football and the new shape of his life with his wife (Christina Ochoa) and daughter.

It’s through the often-touchy meetings between the vet and the baller that their shared values come up, and through Will, we experience the outsider’s view of the crisis in veterans’ mental health care.

Hanging over everything are Will’s “Hail Mary” hopes of TV sports stardo and Z’s fraught and armed (with a pistol) mental state/

“Most of my ‘post traumatic stress’ is from a lack of traumatic stress.”

Boyer’s a perfectly passable actor, if not leading man material. He looks like a young Dylan Walsh.

But as a producer, he should have had the good sense to hire a director for “MVP,” someone who could say, “OK, bro, that’s enough close-ups of you.” As a director, he would have been well-served to give total autonomy to his editor. Every shot of Boyer is held too long, every scene runs past its climax, creating a movie with no pace or narrative drive. Pointless dead time, the odd bad scene that could have been discarded — there’s an 85 minute movie in this 113 minute long film.

The script has pithy observations — “Just because I went to war doesn’t make me a hero.” — lost in a sea of “gym bros,” “warriors/just a civilian,” “rip off that band-aid,” “stay in your lane” cliches.

The odd cringeworthy scene could have been tweaked, but the ones that ring false — a little live-fire gamesmanship that gets laughed-off — needed to go.

We get the tiniest peek into the “jockocracy” of sports TV, and Tom Arnold shows up — as himself — to demonstrate the showbiz shlock that “fantasy football” and pandering to gamblers-not-real-fans represents.

I hadn’t paid Boyer’s acting career much mind — mostly TV work, roles in “Den of Thieves” and “The Secret of Sinchanee.” And I had forgotten the way Boyer — who played in one Seahawks pre-season game as a long snapper — injected himself into the Colin Kaepernick controversy until the new documentary “Kaepernick & America” reminded me.

Then, and with this film, you get the sense of an earnest, well-intentioned man trying to help — and a self-promoter getting his name in the headlines for being the guy who advised Kaepernick to not sit down during the national anthem, but to “take a knee.”

Boyer’s circuitous route to achieving his acting dream — Hollywood rejection, then a “brief” stint as a Darfur aid worker, Green Berets, University of Texas after the military, a walk-on for their football team, that Seahawks try-out stunt, then acting and veteran’s advocate activism — has a “whatever it takes” pluck that you have to admire. Figuring out a way into a business that runs on wealth, connections and nepotism, as well as beauty and talent, has a sort of “whatever hustle works” ethos.

But none of those resume-padding occupations gave him a director’s eye and feel for storytelling with a camera.

With a bit of editing and polish and in the right directing hands, this screenplay might have played, his performance might have been toned down. “MVP” could have made the cut. Good intentions or not, it doesn’t.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Nate Boyer, Mo McRae, Dina Shihabi, Dan Lauria, Christina Ochoa, Shawn Vance, Tony Gonzales, Jarrod Bunch, Randy Couture, Jay Glazer and Tom Arnold

Credits: Directed by Nate Boyer, scripted by Nate Boyer and Gee Jones. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:53

The film’s co-producer was found murdered, handcuffed to a chair two weeks before the film was released. He and a later-imprisoned co-producer made their money from marijuana importation, sales and distribution.

The movie was chopped up by studio editors and released in New York, and abruptly yanked. Four years later it came out “restored,” making a little more sense but barely any more box office cents.

Myth has it that the Kennedy clan tried to suppress “Winter Kills.” But its unique place in cinema history might be that it’s the only movie to ever go bankrupt in the middle of production. Many of its famous cast members supposedly never got paid, but Elizabeth Taylor, stepping out of retirement for a single scene and a single line, made damned sure to get her cash up front.

And its director only made two other features in the ensuing 43 years. William Richert, who also made the equally cultish film “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon,” starring River Phoenix, died just last month (July, 2022).

“Winter Kills” checks almost every box on the “this might be a cult film” checklist. It is beloved, studied, parsed by obsessive fans. Look at the “trivia” entry for it on the Internet Movie Dababase. The gossip around this movie is its own legend.

It’s the least-heralded of the conspiracy thrillers from the Golden Age of cinema conspiracy — “Chinatown,” “Executive Action,” “All the President’s Men,” “Cutter’s Way.” All of them seemed so far fetched at the time, even the historically-accurate one.

And yet here we are in 2022, with evidence pouring in of an ever-widening conspiracy to pull off a putsch on Jan. 6, 2021, with vast expanses of Trump-corrupted government covering it up, and compelling evidence emerging of espionage or attempted espionage committed by a treasonous, Russian-colluding puppet placed in the White House by America’s enemies.

Think this movie about an oligarchic conspiracy to elect and/or kill a sitting president still has something to say?

I first encountered “Winter Kills” in a “Film Satire” class in grad school, and that’s what it is. However serious Richard Condon’s Kennedy Assassination roman a clef novel was (he also wrote “Prizzi’s Honor”), Richert — who only had a dance documentary to his credit when he landed this gig — saw it as darkly hilarious. And so the finished film often is.

Jeff Bridges is our slack-jawed straight man, the last son of an all-powerful tycoon (John Huston) who got young Nick’s much older half-brother into the White House only to see him assassinated there twenty years before. A presidential commission laid the blame on a “lone gunman,” and paid little heed to the fact that the shooter was murdered in police custody by a mobster NOT named Jack Ruby.

So yes, the Kennedys were probably a bit put-out by the hit novel and the fact that a movie was being released just as the Chappaquiddick-disgraced youngest brother in the family was considering a run for the White House.

Nick Kegan is on an oil exploration ship in the Persian Gulf when one of his father’s fixers, played by Richard Boone in a Mexican poncho and California Angels baseball cap (and supposedly magnificently drunk in every scene) shows up with a dying man whom he says was the real shooter that day.

They hear the dying man’s confession, and the game’s afoot, with Mr. “My Name Opens Every Door” Kegan running around and slowly figuring out that most everybody who knows “what really happened” and that knows he’s stumbling into “proof,” gets killed. His first hint is when the ditzy old cop (Brad Dexter) and a couple of others with him when he finds the hidden murder weapon are shot — right in front of Nick in the very car that they plan to drive to the FBI.

Not-wholly-hapless Nick is instantly over-matched in every meeting, especially those with his meddling, all-powerful father.

“I gotta talk to you, Pa.” “You better BELIEVE it, boy.”

His Dad isn’t driven to back Nick’s search for who had his oldest son murdered by any great desire for truth and justice, not even by patriotism.

“I’ve got INTERESTS in this country!”

Nick’s quest sends him to meet chicken farming mobsters and another crazed old crone of business (Sterling Hayden) who stages tank battles — with live rounds — on his vast Western ranch.

In retrospect, Dad sending Nick there in a Ford Pinto should have been a clue. And no, that’s not even the nuttiest scene in the movie

Nick has an elusive girlfriend (Belinda Bauer) who works for a magazine. His mother (Oscar winner Dorothy Malone) is a bit mad, his father’s valet (Toshiro Mifune!) isn’t any help, and Dad’s pre-Internet records, information and wire-tapping kingpin (Anthony Perkins) could have been the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s mad satire “Brazil.” This amoral, robotic nerd has all the answers.

“Your father spent eleven million dollars to raise your brother up from a skirt-chasing college-boy to President of the United States. For twenty years he told him what to do and how and why he was gonna do it and what would happen when it was done.”

Almost every scene has a whiff of madness about it. Perkins’ metallic line-readings, Mifune’s phonetic efforts at English, a sex scene that’s so over the top that silly Nick is the only one not to know “She’s faking it,” a mob meet in a cafe where a gangster brings 20 or so pals to ensure Nick doesn’t try anything.

The lore surrounding the movie tends to overshadow some of the fun. The Kennedys probably didn’t try to quash it — probably — and it doesn’t look like any special “slimming” lens was used on Liz Taylor in her single scene.

But Huston, all arrogant, imperious bluster, a saggy, pear-shaped old man not shy about showing us what he’s got in a bathrobe because he’s just that rich, as casual with racial slurs as he is about homophobic ones for the same reason, is a grandiloquent beast here.

Virtually every legend put on screen pops right off it in this film. Eli Wallach plays a Rubyesque mobster with Cuban ties in flashbacks, Ralph Meeker is in some of those flashbacks as a colorful, unfiltered mob-go-between named “Gameboy” and Hayden is just as blustery as Huston and sitting in a tank because that’s how the super-rich play. He’s not shy about speaking ill of the dead president to the guy’s half-brother, either.

“Hell, if your old man didn’t own him already, I might’ve bought him myself.”

The overarching subtext of “Winter Kills” — set over just a few days in a mid-70s winter — is that America is a “democracy” owned and ruled by the super-rich, who not only face no consequences for their misdeeds, who not only benefit by pillaging a “rigged system,” but whose very lives are prolonged by secret, experimental longevity therapies — “blood replacement” and the like.

“You sure that sugar’s good for you, Pa?”

“It’s MY hospital!”

The novelist Condon was sure this film was suppressed by such people, and wrote a magazine article titled “Who Killed ‘Winter Kills?'” That inspired a documentary 20 years ago.

I don’t buy it. I reviewed Richert’s “Jimmy Reardon” when it came out, and while it’s worth seeing and decidedly out of step with the teen coming-of-age dramedies of its era, its quirkiness wasn’t exactly commercial.

“Winter Kills” is flawed and screwy and “out there” and the cast is mostly very old, never a recipe for box office success. It’s found its select audience over the decades on home video and streaming, with critics coming along and reviving interest in its bracing set pieces, big laughs and dark, uncomfortable chuckles.

And with it having so much to say about America in 2022, a few more of you should dive in and spread the word. “Winter Kills” was onto something.

Rating: R, violence, explicit sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Anthony Perkins, Richard Boone, Toshiro Mifune, Sterling Hayden, Eli Wallach, Dorothy Malone, Tomas Milia, Ralph Meeker, Belinda Bauer and Elizabeth Taylor

Credits: Scripted and directed by William Richert, scripted by based on a novel by Richard Condon. An AVCO Embassy release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers

Running time: 1:37

You’re doing a documentary about quarterback turned social justice icon Colin Kaepernick. But Netflix has nailed him down (probably) with an “exclusive rights” deal of some sorts for their “Colin in Black and White” dramatic series, so an interview is hard to get.

That’s not a dealbreaker for the makers of “Kaepernick & America.” Ross Hockrow and Tommy Walker focused their film on a timeline of Kaepernick’s journey from Super Bowl quarterback to someone who “took a knee” during the National Anthem before games and became a lightning rod for controversy, a singular protester against racist, trigger-happy policing and eventually a “former NFL quarterback.”

They limited their film’s focus to 2011 to roughly 2020, and interviewed sports figures and sports reporters, a TV anchor, an activist and a civil rights expert.

And they tapped into the vast archive of Kaepernick interviews, press conferences and public appearances, from his ever-smiling days during the glory years of his career, to his silent protest — unheralded until someone tipped reporter Steve Wyche that the San Francisco 49ers quarterback wasn’t standing during the “Star Spangled Banner” in pre-season games back in 2016.

Wyche, now an NFL Network reporter, recalls how he was nailing down that information in the middle of a game that summer, looking up the blowback that Muslim NBA star Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf faced for a just-similar-enough protest in the ’90s so that he could ask informed questions about “consequences” of Kaepernick. Which he did.

Kaepernick didn’t back down. Now that image of him taking a knee is cultural current. “There’s power in symbolism” one interviewee notes in the film, and that one professional athlete’s gesture resonated, for fans and haters.

As DeRay McKesson, who became an activist during the Ferguson, Missouri protests over the police shooting of Michael Brown and later befriended Kaepernick reminded him and us, “Once you’ve made someone’s life uncomfortable, expect your life to be uncomfortable.”

There’s a generous sampling of the uproar that broke down mostly on racial lines when all this happened, plainly not a banner moment in the history of American tolerance. And there’s a surprisingly touching interview with Green Beret and one-game long-snap NFLer Nate Boyer, who wrote an open letter questioning Kaepernick, one that led to a meeting and to CK taking Boyer’s advice that “taking a knee” was a more appropriate gesture “of respect” and protest.

That even got right wing sports talker Colin Cowherd’s grudging admiration.

But in our entrenched culture war positions, a single documentary that isn’t going to get in front of the most spittle-spewing red-faced raging eyeballs isn’t going to change a lot of minds.

Still, for a movie that doesn’t have an actual interview with the subject of the film, “Kaepernick & America” isn’t half bad, although the material they have to work with is so thin the co-directors had to pad out their movie with one of the strangest tricks I’ve ever seen in a documentary.

They give CNN anchor Don Lemon, Coaches Hue Jackson and Jim Harbaugh, this or that sports reporter — everybody they interviewed in their movie, this WWE-styled “hyped” “walk-on music” styled introduction — a montage of clips each subject being interviewed or appearing on TV that bolsters their “expertise,” or the fact that they’re media darlings.

It’s kind of ridiculous, but hey, you start doing that and damned if everybody you ask to interview doesn’t say “Yes.” Because if all the world’s a stage, everybody wants a hype man playing walk-music when they sit down.

Rating: unrated, some profanity — rednecks cussing about Colin Kaepernick.

Cast: Don Lemon, Pam Oliver, Steve Wyche, April , Hue Jackson, DeRay McKesson, Jim Harbaugh and Nate Boyer.

Credits: Directed by Ross Hockrow and Tommy Walker. A Dark Star/Amazon Prime Video release.

Running time: 1:22

So aliens have been imprisoning the worst of the worst among their criminals inside human bodies for centuries, solving a big warehousing problem for them and explaining a whole LOT of not-quite-humans scattered amongst humanity.

Hellooo, Mister Musk.

One of the places and times they’ve been stashing their villains is the present day, and another is 14th century Korea, the Goryeo Dynasty, as a title tells us. Because plainly this is a “true” story and historical accuracy matters.

The one-man prison guard keeping the peace is the Guard, and he’s helped by his all-knowing, shape-shifting late model SUV — going out on a limb here and saying it’s a Hyundai Galloper. That helpmate sometimes takes the form of Hello Kitty-cute droid, other times he’s just the truck, and occasionally he even impersonates the Guard himself.

Apparently, keeping the prisoners locked in their human bodies is far tricker in the sword and sorcery and flying martial artists past, as they’re busting out all over. And the magic of the dosa — Master Hyun, Mister Blue, Miss Black, Dog Turd ( I s–t you not.) and even the punk Mureuk, who carries two feline/human sidekicks (Left Paw and Right Paw) for help in his magic fan — is hardly a match for these tentacled monsters.

That prison break mayhem spills over into present day, where Earth could be poisoned for alien habitation, wiping out humanity.

The Guard must take on Terminator 3000 guise and drive his Hyundai through a “gate” in time to tidy up the past. And that kid he ended up having to raise when one of his inmates killed her host/mother is done acting-out at school and complaining to her teachers and the cops about being “kidnapped” by an alien who is up to no good. She ages out of middle school and finds herself taken back to 1391 as well.

But she’s not stupid. Lee Ahn brought a semi-automatic pistol with her.

For you kids who’ve at long last outgrown the ever-evolving clutter of “Dragon Ball,” have I got an over-populated, crazy-ass Korean eye-candy, action martial arts comedy for you. That’s the set-up of “Alienoid,” a martial arts and magic spectacle like few others.

Writer-director Choi Dong Hoon (“Assassination”) serves up a sort of homage to the wide range of Asian martial arts fantasies, psychotronic supernatural nonsense with A-level effects and a Hyundai, galloping through time.

Do Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi know about this?

“Alienoid” is so stuffed with characters and chock-full of superpower-heightened wire-flying martial arts brawls, magic talismans (“Divine Dagger”), aliens and alien spacecraft, it’s nigh on unfathomable.

Every sequence delivers something, even if the scenes within that sequence can seem superfluous, even if coherence is sacrificed to make way for the next “cool part.”

But a light touch prevails throughout. The helper-bot is a softy who is the one who talks The Guard into taking the orphaned baby girl from the 14th century back to the present day. The robot knows reverse psychology.

“Should we kill her?” the bot wonders, in Korean with English subtitles. “Let’s EXPERIMENT on her!”

Kim Woo-bin simmers in cool and stylish futurewear as The Guard and Ryu Jun-yeol brings a nice befuddlement to the monk/magician/swordsman Mureuk, a bit of a jerk always getting in over his head, despite the help of Right Paw and Left Paw.

Yum Jung-ah and Joo Woo-jin, as the monks Miss Black and Mister Blue, are pretty funny every time they show up, mystified not just at the alien stuff, space ships included, but at that damned Hyundai and the girl “who shoots thunder” when she has the ammo to do it.

And every time Kim Tae-ri‘s Lee Ahn is thwarted by magic, alien powers, alien tech or villains who don’t know when to quit, she hilariously whips out a pistol and ventilates them or whatever force field or imprisoning spell they throw at her.

There’s an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality to this, and I can’t say that’s necessarily a good thing. The sequences are easy enough to follow, but the connection between them, jumping back and forth in time and geography, aren’t. The film’s epic length doesn’t mean that screen time is used to make everything clearer.

And hell’s bells, this is the first half of a two-part epic.

If I sound on the fence about it, I am. It’s all eye candy and spectacle, all a bit much and pointlessly hard to follow. But make no mistake, this is something to see, even if making sense of it can feel more trouble than it’s worth.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence

Cast: Kim Woo-bin, Kim Tae-ri, Ryu Jun-Yeol, Yum Jung-ah, Joo Woo-jin and
So Ji-seob

Credits: Scripted and directed by Choi Dong-hoon. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:22

The “Dragon Ball” franchise has become a great boon for North America’s multiplexes, delivering steady results when there’s no non-anime comic book movie blockbuster around to sell the popcorn.

“Dragon Ball Super: Superhero” had a good Thursday night ($4 million) and a decent-enough Friday to point to an opening weekend in the $17-20 million range. (updated — $20 it is). Whatever the reviews, these films usually do very good business for a week or two, and that should tide cinemas over until the Films of Fall start rolling out in early Sept.

Its distributor, Crunchyroll, can pop a few champagne corks for brunch.

That is, provided “3000 Years of Longing” doesn’t finish the summer with a bang when it opens next weekend. That seems like a hard sell.

Idris Elba’s big picture THIS weekend is “Beast,” the family fights off animated lions action pic/horror movie. Middling reviews aren’t helping, and Elba’s still not big box office so $11.5 million is all we can expect from “Beast.”

“Bullet Train” is falling off another 40% this weekend, taking in $8 million.

“Top Gun: Maverick” should be surrendering the screens it reclaimed last weekend and slims down to $5.8, putting it just ahead of the still-hanging-on “DC’s League of Super Pets” animated outing ($5.7). It’s now the sixth highest grossing US release ever, according to Exhibitor Relations.

“Thor: Love & Thunder” cleared another $4, over $332 in North America now. Not bad for a Marvel “bomb.”

“Where the Crawdads Sing” is living up to that older, whiter, rural book-reading audience MO by sticking around as folks “get around” to it. It earned another $3.1 million and will be over $80 million before next weekend.

“Bodies Bodies Bodies” added theaters theaters theaters, and still fell off, only pulling in $2.4.

“Orphan: First Kill” is in a few theaters and streaming at the same time, so it only earned $1.6 million this weekend. Might’ve done better in wider release with streaming delayed until Sept. 1. Probably not.

“Fall” managed another $1 million. Not a bad movie, but a bust.

You can look at Stanley Kubrick‘s second film as a director, “Killer’s Kiss,” as his sizzle reel, an introduction/audition for all the great films to follow.

His low-budget feature filmmaking debut, the opaque and amateurish “symbolic” war picture “Fear and Desire,” was nothing to show to producers, financiers or studios he might want to work for. But this lean, dark and stunningly-photographed follow-up, a 1950s New York film noir, has scene after scene that showcase his director’s eye, his ability to tell a story with pictures and skill in handling action sequences.

The touchstones of his career and biography are all here — the self-taught photographer tuned documentarian and filmmaker, the control freak who obsessed over tiny details.

He’d already made a boxing documentary, and he takes what he learned there to give us a fight unlike any we’d seen before.

The violence of the film’s signature set piece is both visceral and allegorical, two men going at it with sharp weapons in a mannikin warehouse, with pieces of fake bodies flying into the frame.

The mise en scene and production design on a budget are startling — simple, carefully decorated sets, oddball pieces of foreshadowing. Why our boxer-hero has a machete hanging on the kitchen wall of his studio flat has hints of “The Shining” to come.

The street scenes, grabbed on the sly with handheld cameras often hidden in cars, are immaculately composed. There’s a nightmare sequence developed as a negative image race down an empty New York street.

The idea that “an artist is someone who pounds the same nail, over and over again” is never far from your mind watching “Killer’s Kiss” and Kubrick’s next film, “The Killing.” Images, framing, sequences, faces, lots of things he repeated over the decades first appeared in these two black and white crime pictures.

The music — much of the action is set to a taxi dancer ballroom’s Latin band beat — and sound effects are used in the same way, to give the picture its pace. The sound is looped because the premature auteur couldn’t compose his shots without getting his experienced sound man’s boom mike shadow in the frame. That’s how anachronistic steam engine noises made it into electric subway and elevated train-era Pennsylvania Station’s soundscape.

And his “photographed, edited and directed by” credit is as telling as his not listing Howard Sackler as the screenwriter. Stanley K. was a credit thief who cared more about images than words, but he needed the words. Although voice-over narration is something he’d decry, he used it here, in “A Clockwork Orange” and “Barry Lyndon,” and allegedly wanted this crutch included in “Eyes Wide Shut.”

The story — a welterweight (Jamie Smith) smokes and waits at Penn Station, opaquely narrating what happened the last three days to put him there. A ring veteran with a “glass jaw/weak chin,” his last “big fight” is set up in a clever, efficient and cheap montage of fight posters fluttering on light poles, taped into windows and the like, and Danny getting oiled up to go into the ring.

There’s a pretty blonde (Irene Kane, whose voice was dubbed by a radio actress because she was no longer available) in the apartment across the alley that Danny notices, who barely notices him. Gloria’s a taxi dancer at a ballroom on Times Square. Her boss Vinnie (Frank Silvera) is the one who recognizes Danny when he drives up to take her to work. He makes her watch the fight on TV.

Notice the surprised look on Danny’s face every time he gets knocked down. Perfect.

Vinnie has designs on the much-younger Gloria, and that night, he gets rough with her and Danny wakes up to respond to her shrieks. That sets in motion their love affair and the ill-fated events to follow.

Danny considers going to visit an uncle on his ranch in Washington. Gloria tells a sad story of her ballerina sister, complete with ballet sequence.

Coincidence, unhappy accidents and mob violence set Danny up for a murder he didn’t commit and trap Gloria with a monster whom she just might have to learn to live with.

Screenwriter Sackler, who also wrote Kubrick’s “Fear and Desire,” would go on to write the play “The Great White Hope,” and the script for Martin Ritt’s film of it. “Killer’s Kiss” is mainly a series of sketches, snatches of dialogue or voice-over used to decorate Kubrick’s documentarian view of New York life and grit in the 1950s.

What’s most startling all these years later is how even the shortcomings of the screenplay and the film’s production — the disembodied voices and canned sound — seem like artistic choices, and triumphant ones.

Few filmmakers other than Welles or Hitchcock invite the kind of obsessive, close-reading of details that Kubrick does. The documentary “Room 237” just scratches the surface of the OCD Reddit rabbit-holes of Kubrick arcana you can fall into.

Young men especially are lured into the Kubrick illusion of dominance, mastery and complete control, the obsessive filmmaker who’d torment actors with take after take after take, who’d immerse himself in every technical detail of a film but often downplay the scriptural contributions of others and even the acting, the control freak who’d later spend years and years prepping projects that never came to pass.

Does one outgrow Kubrick, the way one ages out of Ayn Rand, heavy metal, Hemingway or libertarianism? I think so.

Still, a film buff can’t resist revisiting the endless easter eggs that close-readings of his films offer. I dare say Tarantino’s heading towards that same sort of long-term cinephile obsession. And he’s doing it on purpose.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jamie Smith, Irene Kane, Frank Silvera, Felice Orlandi

Credits: Directed by Stanley Kubrick, scripted by Howard Sackler. An MGM/UA release on Tubi, Amazon, other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:07

A period piece with kids sent away from the cities during “The Blitz,” this adventure features a soldier hiding from the authorities and a couple of familiar faces — Jenny Agutter and Tom Courtenay.

Agutter’s presence in this speaks to its origins. Long before she was in “An American Werewolf in London,” she starred in the family film that “inspired” this one, 1970’s “Railway Children.” The working title of this one was “The Railway Children Return.”

Sept. 23.

“From the Hood to the Holler” is about “west Side” Louisville state representative Charles Booker’s long shot campaign to unseat Kentucky’s all-powerful Mitch McConnell, “the man who broke the Senate,” back in 2020.

Booker ran as an under-funded outsider, against the D.C./Democratic National Committee’s choice to battle McConnell, Marine pilot Amy McGrath, who raised tens of millions to fight against McConnell’s stranglehold on politics in the Basket Case of Appalachia. Booker lost.

But his campaign, upbeat and positive and truly statewide, an effort to find common ground between struggling rural white Kentuckians and struggling urban Black Kentuckians, makes for a textbook case of “grass roots” activism vs. party power plays. It was launched during a pandemic and parked on one of the Ground Zero flashpoints of Black Lives Matter, the police murder and cover-up of Louisville’s Breonna Taylor. And he almost won the primary, although who knows how he’d have fared in the general election.

Pat McGee’s film captures some “war room” moments of strategizing, but is more about him speaking to crowds in counties all over the state, to radio hosts, following him from his quixotic attempts to sway his conservative colleagues with the power of his rhetoric in the state legislature to his on-the-streets mediating between protestors and Louisville cops during the most fraught protests over the no-knock-warrant murder of Taylor, somebody Booker knew through a family member.

We hear from legislative backers of his candidacy, who puzzle over why a national establishment was tone deaf to figure someone who looked good on paper was a better candidate than someone who synthesized Kentucky’s general dislike of McConnell into a single sentence.

“Mitch McConnell is the barrier to our progress.”

Filmmaker Pat McGee has great access to the candidate and the assorted events, rounds up plenty of campaign coverage from the “fool’s errand” dismissive national media, but includes little input from those who might never vote for a Black man in a state where race and education and outside exploitation have been a way of life since the late 19th century.

It Booker goes on to unseat the hilariously hated, Russia loving Rand Paul for a Senate seat this fall, “From the Hood to the Holler” will make a fascinating footnote for a sea change in American politics and a reminders of when Kentucky gave up its status as a backward, self-loathing American basket case and finally woke up.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Charles Booker, Mitch McConnell, Tanesha Booker, Jason Perkey, Erin Bridges and Taylor Coots.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pat McGee. A Pat McGee Pictures release.

Running time: 1:42

Who knows where a role playing fetish begins?

Perhaps the whole “Dress up like a French maid” thing began with the swells who took the grand tour of Europe and brought back a taste for servants in short black uniforms. It could have been inspired by the 1946 Renoir/Paulette Goddard version of a play based on the Octave Mirbeau novel, “The Diary of a Chambermaid.”

But a betting man would trace the Halloween costumes and Valentine’s Day, “Honey, put this on” obsession to the 1964 Luis Buñuel version of the tale, whose raciest scene featured the cunning and stunning Jeanne Moreau showing off the black lingerie and gartered stockings her character wore underneath that prim black and white uniform.

“Diary of a French Chambermaid” was remade a few years back with Léa Seydoux as its star. But Buñuel and Moreau gave us the most memorable version of the scandalous-for-its-day novel, about a maid from Paris who schemes to rise in the world via the many men who turn their attentions to her when she takes a job in the country.

This version makes its heroine’s machinations a political act, her cunning ruthless and righteous.

Set this time in France between the World Wars, Celestine is 32 when she comes to work for eccentric fussbudget “Old Man Rabour” (Jean Ozenne), his martinet daughter (Françoise Lugagne) and her always-hunting, sexually-frustrated husband Monsieur Monteil (Michel Piccoli).

The brutish valet/handyman Joseph (Georges Géret) who picks Celestine up at the station sets the standard for the menfolk here. He notices her high heels and stockings and leaps to a contemptuous conclusion. Pretty much every man in the movie will do the same.

And when Celestine notes how “dreary the countryside always looks,” (in French with English subtitles), her analysis is spot on. “People probably don’t have much fun around here.”

Gossip is the cultural currency, badgering and imposing on the servants a privilege of wealth and back-biting and back-stabbing among the staff almost their only entertainment.

Gruff, prickly Mauger (Daniel Ivernel) is an old soldier/neighbor who picks fights with Monteil constantly, knowing that being a veteran the law will always favor him. Grumpy Joseph is an anti-Semite into all the right wing propaganda of the day, a goon given to rough handling of livestock and women, and he too figures the fact that he wore a uniform gives him a pass.

Monteil is the one Celestine is warned about. If Celestine’s “She counts the sugar cubes” mistress doesn’t fire the latest of her chambermaids, her husband “will knock you up.” Either way, she’s not long for “this dump,” she figures.

While here, she fields all manner of proposals — indecent and otherwise. Yet she fends off advances in a way that makes the men feel they have a shot. And she blithely yawns through the polite requests of her elderly employer, who insists on calling her “Marie,” as he has all his chambermaids.

“Marie, would you mind if I touched your calf?”

But everything changes when a couple of deaths alter the dynamic of the house and Celestine’s suspicions about those in it.

Buñuel was never nicknamed “The Spanish Master of Suspense,” but he already had some experience in crime stories. He took his transgressive sexual explorations much further with the masterful “Belle du Jour,” which came later in the ’60s, so he was finding his footing in this sort of material with “Chambermaid.”

Here he keeps his camera close to Moreau so that we can see the wheels turning even if we can’t guess what this worldly Parisian is thinking or might get up to. There’s a murder, and we can’t tell if she’s ready to rat her favorite suspect out, or playing the angles to personal advantage.

Buñuel filmed in a time of reactionary French xenophobia — the early ’60s — and resets this story in an era when the French right wing thumped its chest over its ties to the military and hatred of “foreigners” and “Jews,” and openly envied the Germans, whose Nazi leadership shared their ideology.

That twist in the film resonates even today.

But the co-writer/director mishandles the plotting in ways that don’t build suspense and don’t explain
Celestine’s scheming and plotting. The chronology is clear, but some steps taking us from A-to-Z are missing.

“Diary of a Chambermaid” is still worth hunting down because it’s by one of the masters of cinema and still manages to intrigue, entertain and titillate thanks to Moreau’s poker-faced turn as a woman with a few years of serious sex appeal left, and determined to use it to better her station in life, come what may.

Rating: unrated, an off-camera rape and murder, sexuality, some profanity

Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Georges Géret, Françoise Lugagne, Michel Piccoli, Jean Ozenne and Daniel Ivernel

Credits: Directed by Luis Buñuel, scripted by Luis Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, based on the novel by Octave Mirbeau. A Rialto release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:36

A Vietnam drama with a head on it.

Really happened? Looks “out there,” sobering and maybe funny. With great music.

A September 30 release on Apple TV+.