Movie Nation

This September release, about miners ordered to tunnel beneath German trenches to blow them up covers similar ground to “Tunnel Rats” and “Beneath Hill 60.”

Grim business, good ground for a war drama, with class etc. playing a role.

Richard Schiff made a good Jerry Wexler in “Ray,” playing the R&B fanatic record producer and Atlantic Records co-founder earlier in his career.

But Marc Maron’s take on him — the voice, the look (skinnier, yes), the “Do what the artist wants” deference, the flashes of temper — is something approaching definitive.

SOMEbody did his homework. Uncanny.

Granted, this is an arcane corner of music history, a pivotal figure R&B fans know of and few others do. But having interviewed Wexler a few times during his Siesta Key retirement, I felt I was watching the man in his prime in “Respect.”

So much “Respect” Marc Maron. Well done.

A piece of Aussie lore that evolved into slang becomes the title of “Buckley’s Chance,” a lad-lost-in-the-Outback drama that takes a bloody long time to get that lad lost in the Outback.

It’s about Ridley (Milan Burch), a New York city kid whose mother (Victoria Hill) drags him to Australia after his Oz-born firefighter dad dies in the line of duty. This son of a hero has become a discipline problem, so maybe a little visit with the grumpy grandad he’s never met will set him straight.

Bill Nighy plays Spencer, a grouse “trying to run a sheep station” who “doesn’t need a grieving widow” and her “pain in the arse son” around, complicating life.

But guilt over his estranged son forces old Spencer to make an effort, teach the kid a little Outback survival and outback lore — and explain why he pulls out his .30-06 and points it at dingoes every time he spies one, out mending fences and such.

“You’re gonna shoot a DOG?”

“They may look like a dog, Ridley, but they’re more wolf than dog.”

The kid isn’t convinced. So when the chance comes to rescue a fine specimen of the breed trapped in a fence, he makes a new friend. He names it after grandpa’s ranch, “Buckley’s Chance.” Buckley might come in handy when the going gets tough. Which it does, sort of, after a very long set-up.

Repeating the phrase “There’s no strength without struggle” has got to pay off eventually, right?

We sample some lovely and exotic Outback scenery — OK, dry, dusty and forbidding locations, including an abandoned open pit mine — a boy and his dog and Nighy to recommend “Buckley’s Chance.”

But the meandering story, abrupt shifts in tone and character, absurd incidents and plot twists, pauses for flashbacks and criminals who would only “play” here if they were funny let much of the air out of this.

Nighy doesn’t do much of an accent, so it’s up to Kelton Pell and other supporting players to provide the “local color.”

Still, it’s sentimental and kid-friendly, with a couple of decent grace notes. If your kids are at the undemanding age, have at it. Just try not to notice when the plot and incidents in it turn eye-rolling.

MPA Rating: unrated, animals in peril

Cast: Bill Nighy, Milan Burch, Victoria Hill, Kelton Pell

Credits: Directed by Tim Brown, script by Tim Brown and Willem Wennekers. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:36

“Raging Fire” is a Hong Kong cops go rogue thriller, par for the formula course for writer-director Benny Chan, whose resume is filled with its close kin — “New Police Story,” “Heroic Duo,” “Gen-X Cops” and “Gen-Y Cops.”

But it pairs up the great Donnie Yen (“Rogue One,” “Ip Man” and “Mulan”) and Nicholas Tse (“Undercover vs. Undercover”) which leads to just the sort of brawling, chasing, face-off fireworks one hopes for in a Hong Kong thriller.

Yen plays a veteran detective, married with a baby on the way, whose life and career and waylaid by the mass slaughter of several colleagues at a drug raid that went wrong.

Tse plays the leader of the masked quintet that shot up rival gangs and lots of cops in that debacle. Turns out, Inspector Cheung Shung-bong and curly-haired Ngo have history. Once upon a time in Hong Kong, they were partners. But one rainy night on the amber-lit docs, it all went wrong.

Can the ex-cop outfight, outwit, outrun and outshoot the “ethical” cop who let him go to prison, way back when?

The story is a bit of a dawdle, but here’s what we came for — a couple of grand chases, including an epic one involving a motorbike and a car, and a handful of serious, mythic shootouts and brawls.

And those deliver in a big way. Chan, who died tragically young (58) after “Raging Fire” was completed, was no John Woo. But he pays homage to the master in a few scenes (a climatic duel in a church, alas, without white doves) and otherwise lets Yen and Tse and their stunt doubles (Yen is a well-preserved 57, but we all have our limits) and occasional sped-up motion do the rest.

The novel tortures, theatrical gunplay and desperate-intimate fights that are blurs of kicking, punching, shooting and writhing take you back to a time when Hong Kong action pics were all the rage because of their original, operatic take on archetypes and violence at its most personal.

MPA Rating: unrated, lots of bloody action violence

Cast: Donnie Yen, Nicholas Tse

Credits: Scripted and directed by Benny Chan. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:06

In this age of Charlottesvilles, here and abroad, of “Jo Jo Rabbit,” “The Hitler Channel” and Trumpism, the world is “beyond the point where people have lost the meaning of (Adolf) Hitler,” one of the chorus of experts in the new documentary “The Meaning of Hitler” laments.

He’s a mythic slur applied far and wide to racists, authoritarians and to pretty much any “leader” interviewed by Tucker Carlson.

So perhaps its time for experts, from historians and archeologists to psychologists and those versed in propaganda aesthetics and rhetorical, even microphone technique to weigh in. They can give us an accurate picture and point out the ways we’ve let Hitler be distorted into the Internet darling of anyone seeking to use imagery, words or political stance to “shock,” get attention, and tap into the “hidden under a rock” corners of Greater Deplorabilistan.

Oh no, “not another ‘archival’ (WWII/Nazi/Hitler) documentary,” narrator and co-director Petra Epperlein laments. But she and her “Gunner Palace,” “How to Fold a Flag” and “11/8/16” co-director Michael Tucker do their utmost to find “Meaning” and make this Hitler documentary stand out from the fascist fetishizing that covers whole cable and streaming channels dedicated to the subject.

We see the German Epperlein reading from all the cautionary books that describe “where we are now” on a cable car, including “1984” and finishing with Sebastian Haffner’s definitive study, which provides the film with its direction and its title, “The Meaning of Hitler.” Haffner was a German contemporary of Hitler who saw the rise of Nazism and dissected its techniques, appeal and “meaning” pretty much in real time, once he escaped to Great Britain.

We meet psychologists who tick off the wide range of “diagnoses” of Hitler, post-mortem, from “bipolar” and “Oedipus complex” to “hysteria” and “megalomania,” and then argue, with great credibility, that such “explanations” are excuses. “Millions” have these delusions, only one committed mass genocide. 

We are “rationalizing” this “normal” man, elevating him into a “monster,” letting him off the hook for his all-too-human failings, the film maintains.

And we see and hear novelist Martin Amis, one of the great men of letters of our time, cut straight to the chase, right in the film’s opening interview.

“You might as well get on with his similarities to Trump.”

That list is ticked off all the way through “Meaning of Hitler,” from “fanatical cleanliness” to delusions of “genius” to “ignorant” and only comfortable around lackeys scared to tell either Hitler or Trump how intellectually limited, cruel and stupid they are.

The most telling of these is an aside tossed out by one Hitler expert relatively late in the film. “Hitler had no friends,” and if that isn’t Trump in a sentence, no sentence can make that claim.

I was struck by the microphone historian consulted on how the “Hitler Bottle” microphone of the era became something the public speaker Hitler mastered like a great song stylist, by the discussion of “Triumph of the Will” as “pure (Nazi) kitsch” that became “the most imitated film of all time” (“Star Wars,” etc. are sampled) and yet, viewed as it is, “makes your flesh creep.”

As clips of the many screen interpretations of Hitler flicker by, we’re reminded that a big part of “the myth” is the way no filmmaker has shown us the ugly, gruesome way he and Eva Braun met their deaths, always cutting away, as if we have no right to gaze upon The Prophet at his feeblest.

The world’s most infamous Holocaust denier and anti-Semite David Irving agrees to meet with the filmmakers, but only at Mazury, Poland (home of Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair” bunker), only after he’s ascertained that Petra isn’t “Jewish.” He physically bristles as a tour guide jokingly sings a song about German leaders’ genitals that was popular in the British Army during WWII. And afterwards, Irving repeats his usual dismissals of what Hitler knew about the Holocaust, the totality of that genocide and his own virulent anti-Semitism.

Then, still miked-up, he walks ahead and chats with a young fan, and everything he just said on camera unravels. What a creep.

Anti-Semitism is described as the ultimate “conspiracy theory,” and debunked, point by painstaking point.

All of which sets “The Meaning of Hitler” apart from any other “Hitler” or “Nazism” documentary you’ve ever seen. This film doesn’t just ask “How it happened” and show the regimented rallies, the rabid fans, the pageantry, discipline and fascist fashion sense. It breaks down how Hitler manipulated the way the audience was organized so that they’d have to stand or how he appealed to “imagined victimhood,” and how the Koch Brothers, McConnells, Zuckerbergs (who appears here at his most disingenuous) and “elites” of the day embraced him for all that they personally stood to gain from his actions.

If you see just one “Hitler” film this year, make it this one.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Martin Amis, Yehuda Baeur, Richard Evans, Francine Pose, David Irving, Matilda Tucker, Saul Friedländer, Deborah Lipstadt, many others

Credits: Directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, narrated by Epperlein, scripted by Tucker, based on the book by Sebastian Haffner. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:32

We all knew Aretha Franklin’s story would make an entertaining bio-musical, and “Respect” doesn’t disappoint. It’s as uplifting and ready-made for sing-alongs as any recent bio-pic, mostly because it’s just like them.

Tracey Scott Wilson (“Fosse/Verdon” ) is the credited screenwriter, but Oscar winner Callie Khouri (“Thelma & Louise”) came up with the story arc, and one of those two should confess to cribbing the structure and style of “Bohemian Rhapsody” before the ridicule steps in.

It’s a film that peaks with the recording of the title number and climaxes with a defining, emotional concert performance. And it scrubs its subject if not squeaky clean, at least sanitized enough for us to notice. Very “Bohemian.”

But “not surprising” also goes for the lead performances. You knew Oscar winning belter Jennifer Hudson was going to render the Queen of Soul as regally as the story demands. Oscar winner Forest Whitaker was never going to disappoint as her domineering, womanizing and abusive father, Pastor C.L. Franklin.

Broadway songbird Audra McDonald as Aretha’s singing, gospel pianist mom, Barbara? Another no-brainer in that she’s effortlessly imposing in the part.

It’s the players orbiting around this impressive leading trio who deliver unexpected delights in a film that leans on “Bohemian,” but has just enough “Ray,” “Get on Up” and “Walk the Line” sizzle to deliver.

Titus Burgess, flamboyant in “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” is sympathetically soulful (and musical) as the church choir director who impresses on tiny, abused Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner, dazzling) “Don’t let nothing come between you and your music…Music can save your life.”

And comic, podcaster and sometime actor Marc Maron gives a dead-on impersonation of Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic Records producer who rescued Franklin’s career by pointing her to the songs and the sound that would make her famous, who learned to be deferential to the “Queen” and entered American pop legend with her as the “producer behind Aretha.” Maron is so uncanny in the part that he plainly based his performance on Wexler’s memoirs and TV decades of interviews discussing his “handling” of the “difficult” star.

That’s a running thread through “Respect,” Franklin’s frequent succumbing to “the Demon” that made her temperamental, mercurial and unreliable for much of her career. The script lays this at the feet of the rape that made her a mother in her tweens, and on alcohol, and suggests she found a way through it.

But she was blowing off concerts and personal appearances up to the day she died, one of the ways this script scrubs her image out of “Respect.”

The hair-raising, electrical musical moments in “Respect” come from the friction-filled trip to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where Wexler was sure he could spring Franklin from the mundane “jazz singer” trap her former record company, Columbia, spent five years and nine (flop) LPs building.

A Black gospel singer managed by an insecure, abusive husband (Marlon Wayans, quite good) shoved into a studio with a bunch of 1960s Alabama white boys, engineered by drawling Rick Hall (Myk Hall)? Yes, it came to blows. And yes, the session that preceded that abrupt exit produced  “I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You),” which announced her stardom.

And scatting with her backup singing sisters (Saycon Sengbloh, Hailey Kilgore) in the wee hours, at home to produce the “Just a little bit” and “Re Re Re” (Franklin’s family nickname) that turned Otis Redding’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” into the feminist soul anthem for the ages is a jewel of a scene.

If you aren’t moved by that, you should check your pulse.

Director Liesl Tommy graduates from her “Jessica Jones” and “Dolly Parton” TV movie background to features with a film that hits the waypoints of a legendary career just hard enough to remind us that they’re Aretha Lore, confirmed by myth and sometimes by fact.

And Hudson knocks the songs and the rising sense of empowerment that the Queen of Soul rode into a life as a diva’s diva out of the park. Her Aretha is sexual and soft, even at her most difficult. The intensely relatable Hudson makes Franklin likable, something the “Queen” spent decades defying.

The great novelty here is the depiction of Franklin’s middle class connected-to-the-arts0-and civil rights childhood. It’s easy to forget that Martin Luther King Jr. was “Uncle Martin” to her, that she sang and spoke out on civil rights issues, and that even as a child she was rubbing shoulders with Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald and “Uncle Duke” Ellington, thanks to her father’s prominence in Detroit.

Stately as it is, “Respect” never quite becomes a “great film,” but Hudson, Whitaker, McDonald, Burgess and Maron ensure it’s never less than an entertaining one, a musical biography that gives the Queen of Soul her royal due.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content, strong language including racial epithets, violence, suggestive material, and smoking

Cast: Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, Marlon Wayons, Marc Maron, Audra McDonald, Titus Burgess, Kimberly Scott, Hailey Kilgore and Saycon Sengbloh

Credits: Directed by Liesl Tommy, script by Tracey Scott Wilson. An MGM release.

Running time: 2:22

I am at my favorite non arthouse cinema, the Regal Winter Park 20, Florida flagship of the chain, a lone white boy in a sea of Aretha fans of color.

Because some of us have taste.

MGM is having a nationwide Preview at 4 this afternoon, so if you’re close to a Cineplex, get busy.

I hope the long COVID winter that kept this onetime awards contender from release was worth. Killer cast, Jennifer Hudson was born to play this woman, and the songs still give me chills.

I’m most curious to see Marc Maron’s take on producer, believer, keeper of the Atlantic Records faith Jerry Wexler. He retired to the coast of Florida just before I moved here and a friend helped me track him down once I started work here.

A genuine fan, even after he and Aretha fallout, he had lots of stories about the diva’s diva and great talent that music was slow to discover and America was slow to embrace.

“The Swarm” is “Jean de Florette” meets “Little Shop of Horrors.”

It’s about an idealistic, “try something new” farmer who breeds bugs, only to discover that blood is what makes them thrive.

Only the French could think up this high concept variation on a buggy creature feature starring locusts.

It’s creepy and cautionary and culinary, because locusts have “more protein” per gram than any meat on the market. And “pretty soon, the entire planet will be starving, but you’re all too dumb to notice.

Suliane Brahim is Virginie, a struggling 40ish farm widow hellbent on keeping the land she and her late husband dreamed on. He thought goats were the way to go. He’s gone and she’s crunched the numbers and decided roasted locusts are the smarter bet.

But the strain has infuriated her young teen daughter Laura (Marie Narbonne) and upset her tween son Gaston (Raphael Romand). She’s annoyed her retail buyer and asked for one too many loans from vintner friend Karin (Sofian Khammes).

It doesn’t matter that they can be prepared in delectable “smoked paprika” or ginger-flavored ways. Her online support may keep the geodesic dome greenhouse hives alive, but they won’t thrive. She’s desperate, wearing fear and fury on her face.

And then our “Jean de Florette” makes her “Audrey” in “Little Shop” discovery.

Just Philippot’s film is a leisurely, somewhat tense amble down We Know What’s Coming Lane.

The twist to the classic “when bugs attack” thriller is that “Little Shop” touch, what the locusts and the desire to succeed do to Virginie.

The script finds clever ways to point us towards the “eureka” moment we know is coming — a little boy marveling at what a “pet” locust does to wart.

Icky locust closeups — eating, molting, cannibalizing, carnivore-ing — add to the fun.

The formula is the same in Hollywood or Caubeyres (Lot-et-Garonne), in English (dubbed) or the original French.

We see the first hint of “success,” and fret about its cost. We meet characters named Jacki and Huegette, and we get a sick feeling about their fate.

Brahim gives a fine fraught edge to Virginie, and Narbonne is reassuringly bratty, a teen with legitimate grief and beefs, but lashing out in ways that can only make things worse.

I thought the story had a few missteps, which may just be a reaction to lax French parenting practices. And the pace, when everybody knows the title (“La nuée” in French), seems entirely too deliberate and delicate. There’s a lean 85 minute thriller in this.

But as creature features go, this one plays and finds its pulse-pounding payoff in grand style.

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity

Cast: Suliane Brahim, Marie Narbonne, Sofian Khammes and Raphael Romand

Credits: Directed by Just Philippot, script by Franck Victor. A Canal+ film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:42

As it’s also available on HBO Max, this is a pandemic-depressed opening weekend that shouldn’t leave Warner Brothers in the red for James Gunn’s comic book reboot.

A $4.1 million Thursday night, the best Thursday night of the pandemic, Warners crowed, led into a $12 million Friday. That just won’t be enough to get “The Suicide Squad” over $30 million by midnight Sunday. Saturday is expected to see a steep fall-off from Friday.

“Black Widow” just cleared the $170 million mark for Marvel/Disney. But one wonders if the over-saturation of streaming comic book content hasn’t hastened the fall-off of this long-running blockbuster fad. The cost-benefit of such movies makes more sense for HBO Max, Disney+ or Netflix than it does as a theatrical money maker.

Are audiences finally tiring of Men in Tights?

Disney’s “Jungle Cruise,” more family friendly, hit the $50 million mark its first week and should hit the $teens in second place this weekend. It earned almost $3 million Friday alone.

“Old” is fading fast, but already in the black thanks to its low production/cast cost.

“The Green Knight” did a robust (for an indie film) $9.5 million its first week, and should sit comfortably in the top five, even in the low single digits, for one more weekend.

Not so for “Stillwater,” which has earned over $7 and will fade enough this weekend that it should join “Snake Eyes” in losing a lot of screens next weekend.

The year of the Sparks Brothers reaches its climax with “Annette,” a long-gestating musical created by droll rockers Ron Mael and Russell Mael.

So what was their fondest wish, after 50 years of flirting with pop stardom as “critical darlings” and pop look pranksters? Apparently, they wanted to attempt a new musical spin on “A Star is Born” in which two stars have a baby who turns out to be a prodigy, a baby played by an animated/animatronic redheaded toddler in director Leos Carax’s (“The Lovers on the Bridge/Les Amants du Pont-Neuf” was his) vision.

So, offbeat? A little bit. Fun? For a bit.

It’s a tragic satire, a commentary on the arc of celebrity, the craving for and eventual weight of fame and what one man will do to maintain it. It practically leaps off the screen in its opening act and steadily sours and slows as it makes its way through a somewhat predictable fall-from-grace saga.

Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard star as a singing performance artist/comic and a famous opera singer whose very public, seemingly-mismatched romance leads to marriage and the oddest offspring this side of “The Dancing Baby.”

Henry McHenry takes the stage in a boxer’s robe and trunks, backed by a quartet in nightgowns for his “mildly offensive evening” as “The Ape of God,” a George Carlin meets Steven Wright deadpanner who stalks the stage, stares “into the abyss,” and jokes-confesses in rhyme and song.

Yes, our stars do their own singing, with Driver a serviceable low tenor, crooning and teasing about “Why did I become a comedian? To make you ‘notice’ what you’ve always surely noticed until I ask ‘Have you ever noticed?'”

His French fiance Ann Defrasnoux (Cotillard) sings opera, “where everything is sacred” Henry complains. And she’s always “dying dying dying” every night as she sings opera’s oft tragic repertoire.

They greet each other backstage after their performances. Him — “I killed them, destroyed them, murdered them.” Her? “I saved them.”

This’ll never work. But they marry, have baby Annette, and tragedy strikes and strikes again.

The Maels, who appear here and there in the narrative, have their musical sprint out the gate with the cast — including comic actor/pianist Simon Helberg of “The Big Bang Theory” — parading out of a recording studio, singing their way down a Hollywood street the fun on-the-nose opening number, “Shall We Start?”

Helberg, playing another accompanist (also his role in “Florence Foster Jenkins”) has a nice solo bemoaning his “accompanist” lot in life, and his ambition to be a conductor.

Our lovers sing duets, nude and mid-coitus or on Henry’s motorcycle, and solo complaints and laments — backstage or on the toilet.

“Annette” is at its most operatic in its call-and-response songs between Henry and his devoted audience, paparazzi singing “Give us a SMILE, please” to the couple and in a childbirth scene scored as a musical round — nurses singing “breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out” while the doctors and Henry chant “Push push push!”

As the story takes its turn toward grim, one can feel the bubbles fizzle out of “Annette.” What is darkly comical at first turns just dark, with that damned digitized baby (played by a real child, eventually) hogging center screen.

Cotillard shocks, once of twice, hitting soprano trills that, considering they didn’t let her sing Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose,” impress. And Driver’s stage presence makes up for whatever he lacks vocally in songs that don’t demand range, but simple emotional honesty.

Sparks fans may be more attuned to the music and tone of the humor served up in “Annette.” Then again, considering the playful tunes and stage vamping they’re famous for, maybe not. I found it a movie musical that loses its way when it loses its sense of play.

MPA Rating: R, sexual content, including nudity, language (profanity) and smoking

Cast: Adam Driver, Marion Cotillard, Simon Helberg, Ron and Russell Mael, aka Sparks

Credits: Directed by Leos Carax, script by Ron Mael and Russell Mael. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:20