Movie Nation

“Black and Blue” is a lean, simple, pulse-pounding thriller built around an intensely relatable star, a perfectly alarming villain and a story that has the ring of “ripped from today’s headlines” about it.

It’s a genre picture, plain and simple — a clean cop chased by dirty cops through an arresting setting — foggy, rainy and wintry New Orleans. Director Deon Taylor, of “The Intruder” and “Traffik,” working from a Peter A. Dowling script (“Flightplan,” “Reasonable Doubt”), keeps us guessing which of the three or four obvious directions this can play out with will be one the characters choose.

And damned if they don’t manage a surprise or two, almost in spite of themselves.

Naomie Harris, a slip of a thing who is Moneypenny to Daniel Craig’s James Bond, plays Alicia West, a Big Easy native who returns from military service to take a job on one of the nation’s more notorious police forces.

Growing up in the 9th Ward, she is idealistic enough to think relating to the few folks she still knows there, making conversation in the best “community policing” fashion, will let her affect change.

A veteran of the force (James Moses Black) sets her straight.
“WE are your people,” he says. She’s no longer black. “You’re blue, now.”

That is put almost instantly to the test when she witnesses the execution of some young drug dealers.

Alicia, a rookie, but a veteran once stationed in Kandahar, has no problem with the new department-issued body cams. That’s what seals her fate. It’s on while Narc Malone (a ferocious Frank Grillo) pulls the trigger. He’s barely attempted to explain “This ISN’T what it looks like,” when a subordinate riddles Alicia with bullets. If not for the bullet proof vest, her wounds would be worse.

Now, she’s on the run, unarmed — she dropped her gun — with a dead cell phone and a vest-attached camera archiving explosive video that exposes a vast, corrupt conspiracy within her precinct. Who can she trust? How can she survive, on foot and bleeding?

How will justice be done?

Early scenes neatly establish her inability to reconnect with “her” people, among them Milo (Tyrese Gibson), the older brother of a friend, and a onetime teen pal (Nafessa Williams) who runs with the wrong crowd, and is all “I don’t KNOW her” now.

It’s no surprise when doors slam in Alicia’s face as she frantically runs from house to house.

“Oh HELL nawwwww”

Early scenes have also established the soul-crushing brutality of police relations with the African American community in the 9th. Routine thumpings under the guise of “stop and frisk,” a real cop as prosecutor/judge and jury complex amongst “Blue,” who are “armed, and with a bullet proof vest” have traumatized much of the populace.

And this woman, this “You one’a THEM” whom bystanders, drug dealers and frantic hunting cops call “Bitch” about 400 times, and in 400 different ways, wants help?

Gibson does some of his best screen acting by doing less, playing a man beaten down by a life of limited choices, a system and constant violent, humiliating encounters with those who claim “To protect and serve.”

Grillo is emerging as the finest heavy of his generation, a villain with native cunning and a ruthlessness built on a calculus that he lets you see in every raised eyebrow or steely glare.

But Harris is the key here, letting us see how troubled she is about the state of her city and of relations between the “black” and the “blue.” We believe her idealism, her good intentions and her naivete. And we appreciate her wide-eyed panic.

“They’re trying to KILL me, man!”

I don’t want to oversell “Black and Blue.” It doesn’t transcend its genre. But it doesn’t waste our time, modulates its chase with alternating brisk and slow pacing, hand-held camera sprints interrupted by bursts of violence and stops, every so often, at a moral crossroad.

“She’s ain’t one’a us. She picked her side!”

The cleverness of the picture is that we doubt she has, and we’re never confident either “side” will pick her.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Naomie Harris, Tyrese Gibson, Frank Grillo, Mike Colter, Nefessa Williams and Reid Scott

Credits: Directed by Deon Taylor, script by Peter A. Dowling. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:48

What do you think? Does it sell the picture? Promise improvements over the other formulaic and recycled installments in the saga?

The story that inspired the Iditarod dogsled race is one of the great pieces of Alaskan lore, a genuine tear jerker about heroic mushers and dogs dashing through a deathly cold winter to deliver diptheria serum to Nome, which was teetering on the edge of a pandemic.

There was a pretty good kids’ cartoon, “Balto,” named for the lead dog in the last leg of that “Race to Mercy.” If you ever visit Central Park, you can see a beloved statue to him commemorating that feat, a bronze sculpture rubbed shiny by the thousands of kids’ hands that touch it every year.

“The Great Alaskan Race” reaches for those tears, but may best be appreciated by being the most historically accurate — if fictionalized and not wholly complete — version of this story we’re likely to get.

Actor turned actor, writer and director Brian Presley (“U.S.S. Indianapolis: Men of Courage”) stars as the hero of that relay run, Leonhard Seppala, a Norwegian immigrant who covered the longest legs of that 674 milesprint — and the most dangerous — over the frozen surface of the Norton Sound.

Other mushers included the guy who handled the first leg, from Nenana — Wild Bill Shannon (James Russo) and the Norwegian Gunnar Kaasen (Will Wallace).

The pandemic, coming close on the heels of the global plague named the “Spanish Influenza” outbreak, gripped America’s newspapers, and was covered by the first radio station in Alaska.

The town doctor, Curtis Welch (Treat Williams) was the one who diagnosed the illness that was starting to pick off Native Inuit and other locals, some of them children. He sounded the alarm.

The territorial governor, Scott Bone (Bruce Davison) portrayed as a drinker who worried about “bad press,” gambled on the dogs even as the big local newspaper publisher (Henry Thomas) railed at him in print for not using open cockpit airplanes in the dead of winter to make the run, for using this “Stone Age solution” to a crisis.

The teams would hand off a cylinder of anti-toxin after runs to places like Whiskey Creek, along the Iditarod Trail, a sled dog mail route that passed through a mining town named for what the miners told the pay master about how much ore they’d cleared that day –– “I did a rod.”

Presley’s 85 minute film points out that there had already been a sled dog race, that Seppala and his now-aged lead-dog Togo were undisputed masters of the All Alaska Sweepstakes.

There’s grousing and panic amongst the iced-over townsfolk and mushers — “You know what we don’t need in Hell? A Devil’s Advocate!”

“You know the rule of 40? Never run a dog at 40 above or 40 below!”

The film’s fictional elements add some drama. It has Seppala losing his Native Inuit wife to the Spanish Flu years before. Yes, his daughter Sigrid (Emma Presley) was at risk. No, she wasn’t already sick when he made his desperate dash.

Pressley’s movie cuts between static and dramatically flat interiors — save for a bit of emotion from Williams, playing the doctor — and grim depictions of the deathly cold, ice fog and whiteout blizzard conditions of the trail. It undercuts the film’s tension when the “drama” consists of the governor having another drink, others arguing in mild-mannered debates, characters like Nurse Constance (Brea Bee) expressing worry and concern.

The radio narration of the “Serum Run” progress is a tried and true storytelling crutch, but a tired one. In a variety of ways, the storytelling, editing and music fail to deliver the harrowing suspense the story needs to move forward. Perhaps Pressley got TOO caught up in including so many way points on the trail, so much back story, so many characters.

And it’s not like he didn’t take liberties and shortcuts with the history presented here.

Neither of the Norwegian mushers are performed with an accent. There’s no hint that they’re recent immigrants.

But the movie’s great sin of omission is one ordained by history itself. Most of the mushers were Inuit, Athabaskans — natives — postal workers used to covering that trail. Their names didn’t feature in newspaper accounts, nor do they here. The PC Police call that “whitewashing,” and in this case, the label is warranted. Inuit figure in the film story only as victims. The only acknowledgement of this postal connection is the presence of Post Office Inspector Edward Wetzler (Petrie Willink), who had the governor’s ear during the crisis.

But as I noted at the outset, this is probably the most accurate version of this story we’re likely to see told on the big screen. Dramatically, though, it feels like a pulled punch. There’s pathos here, from Presley’s desperate, dog-and-daughter-loving Seppala, and from Williams. It’s just not enough.

If you’re hanging your movie’s rep on its accuracy, maybe listen to a few Norwegians speaking English on Youtube, or watch a few John Qualen performances from the ’40s and ’50s. These characters almost certainly had accents.

Wiping Native and immigrant heroes out of your movie makes its own statement, and it’s not a flattering one.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material, brief bloody images, some language and smoking.

Cast: Brian Presley, Treat Williams, Bruce Davison, Henry Thomas and James Russo

Credits: Written and directed by Brian Presley. A P12 Films release.

Running time: 1:25

Scorsese said Marvel  movies weren’t “cinema,” and he wasn’t wrong.

Now Francis Ford Coppola has weighed in with what the tights-wearing “superhero” movies aren’t doing that great movies do.

The “Godfather” of “Godfather” movies calls Marvel movies “despicable.”

Naah. Doesn’t matter what two old, old men, who happen to be the greatest living American filmmakers, say about Marvel or DC or the genre. It’s all about brand, “cool digital fights,” swagger and wisecracks and pandering to the fans, right?

Who cares what the great storytellers have to say about aueteurs like the Russo Brothers?

“Spivak” is a hapless indie comedy about the last guy in the world you’d figure would “get the girl.”

Yes, Michael Cera’s in it. No, he’s not the “last guy” this time around.

It’s a “Swingers” that doesn’t swing.

The filmmakers behind “Pumpkin” and “Dead Man on Campus” turn to actor and Tarantino mascot Michael Bacall, whose writing credits (“Scott Pilgrm vs. The World,” “21 Jump Street”) as their anti-hero, the anti-social librarian and would-be writer who is as out of place in L.A. as any shorter, younger version of Steve Buscemi can be.

Wally Spivak lives with roommates, who can’t finish or publish this novel he’s been struggling with for three and a half years, and who crushes on the uninterested Sasha (Chloe Wepper), who has invited him to her “Unlovables” Valentine’s Day Party.

He’s rather go home and sulk. But that means walking past the successful fraud Robby Lebeau (Cera), whose just published memoir, “MacArthur Park’d” is about his days of addiction and sexual hustling at the famous nearby park.

“See the article about me in ‘The Paris Review?’ Just gotta get published, Wally.”

Pals Jesse and Kevin (Mark Webber, Elden Henson) drag him out on Valentine’s Day, figuring they’ll hook up with “desperate” women. That doesn’t exactly work out. Wally just snoozes, which is howw they drag him to Vegas in the wee hours to this place they’ve heard is a “sure thing.”

In the cavernous, empty and cover-charged Elysium, they nurse their drinks as Wally, against all odds, is approached and invited to her room by the first gorgeous woman (Maggie Lawson of TV’s “Psych”). No, she’s not a hooker, his first thought (and ours).

It turns Jeanine is a fellow Angelino about to get married. And she and her intended use Vegas as their “one last night of sex with somebody else” adventure.

Running into her and Chuck (Brit Robert Kazinsky of “True Blood”) repeatedly is too awkward. So the couple decides to make a project of Wally. They’ll fix him up. You know, with an L.A. Laker Girl (Ahna O’Reilly of TV’s “Kingdom”). They’ll golf together, weekend at Catalina.

Chuck, a golf pro, wants to read Wally’s book.

And all this changes Wally’s not, if not Wally.

The thesis here, passed on to Wally by his concerned pals, is that “great writers live interesting lives.” He’s got to get out and live to do that. Even Robby Lebeau managed that, after a fashion.

But you can take the lump out of the library and not the library out of the lump. Wally pouts, broods and cannot manage the socializing. Little moments here and there, but not enough to keep the interest of a Laker Girl.

And that’s true of the movie, too. Wally is too unlikable, and even pity for him feels misplaced.

The awkward moments outnumber the actually amusing ones, and neither is much evident in this script. I didn’t quote any funny lines, because truthfully, there aren’t any that stood out.

Bacall? He’s still better as a bit player, even in a movie built around him.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast:  Michael Bacall, Maggie Lawson, Robert Kazinsky, Elden Henson, Mark Webber, Ahna O’Reilly and Michael Cera

Credits: Written and directed by Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Héctor, who is “Seventeen,” is the troubled loner everybody in his Spanish reform school picks on. The kids — all reprobates, like him — ridicule the way he took the judge’s edict that he use his two years confined there studying the Spanish criminal code, “to learn the difference between right and wrong,” she says (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

The kids call him “Abogado” (lawyer) and steal his criminal code book from him.

But the fuming, on-the-spectrum Héctor will fix them, we assume. We see him scheming and working in wood shop. He’s machined and carved a stake! When he finishes it, he scrawls a number on it.

He cadges some masking tape and lashes the reformatory-issued slippers he wears to his feet.

First chance he gets, he bolts across the soccer field, scrambles up over the high fencing, just outrunning the guards, and sprints down a path…past other stakes.

When he’s caught, even though he’s very, very fast, he sticks that stake in the ground to mark how far he got on attempt number 20.

“Seventeen” lives on such moments, a little “Cool Hand Luke” there, a hint of every feuding siblings on a quest comedy here, with just enough of Héctor’s (Biel Montoro) ingenuity in all things petty criminal (we’ve seen him steal a motorcycle and break into a mall as it closes in the opening) for his brother Ismael (Nacho Sánchez of Netflix’s “The Ministry of Time” series) to ask him the question we all are by the film’s midway mark.

“Now what, MacGuyver?”

Daniel Sánchez Arévalo — he did “Gordos, (Fat People)” — tells us a story of brothers, a dying grandmother, a missing dog and a cownapped cow in this smart and amusing, if slow-moving, dramedy.

The dog in question is the first sign the audience, and Héctor’s in-school counselor (Itsaso Arana) have that there’s humanity in him. He seems to take no pleasure in his shoplifting, mall-crashing and motor-scooter theft. He wears one expression all the time –sullen. He blames brother Ismael for his incarceration.

An abused therapy-mutt he is assigned lets us see him care about someone or something else. He names the fuzzball “Sheep,” trains him and gives him love, which we were beginning to wonder if he was even capable of.

Then the dog is adopted out. And this time, Héctor’s stake stays in his pocket. He makes his get-away.

He finds his brother living in an RV. “Marta” kicked him out. Ismael knows the kid only has two months left in his sentence. Héctor’s two days shy of his 18th birthday. Any crimes he commits while they look for the people who adopted this dog will get him put in prison, after two days.

Oh, and there’s their abuela (grandma). She (Lola Cordón) is dying, and before they can find the mutt, they must check granny out of the home so they can grant her dying wish — to be buried next to her late husband in the village of their youth.

So we’ve got a kid on the lam, a heart-broken older brother who raised him and wants to give up on him the way Marta gave up on him and a very old woman whose oxygen intake is falling by the hour.

“Dark comedy” is “comedia oscura” in Spanish, fyi.

But “Seventeen” reaches for more than that. It lets us see how this dog is just outside proof of the feelings he’s capable of, an extension of how he’s doted on his grandmother. The hunt of the adopted dog underlines that. He won’t leave a dog they find in a junkyard, refusing to leave the loyal but now sickly animal in the minivan he was in when his master died in a car crash.

I can’t say “Seventeen” sprints by, but its many grace notes make up for the slack pace.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA (criminal behavior, alcohol)

Cast: Biel Montoro, Nacho Sánchez, Itsaso Arana, Chani Martín and Lola Cordón.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, script by Araceli Sánchez and Daniel Sánchez Arévalo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

The faithful are going to want to see it, no matter what, as there is no tour for the album. The songs are perfectly serviceable, painting pictures of a stuntman (“Drive Fast”) with “I got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone, A steel rod in my leg, but it walks me home.”

He’s paying tribute to the great songwriter Jimmy Webb, he says, the fellow who wrote “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” and “Galveston.” But the “concert” portion of “Western Stars” underlines its essential shortcoming with its encore, a spirited take on Larry Weiss’s “Rhinestone Cowboy,” a huge hit for Glen Campbell.

Whatever “Americana” short stories Springtsteen was reaching for, nothing he serves up here is remotely as memorable or as interesting. A musical quotation from Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin'” here, a Jimmy Webb’s Arizona there. The generic images of these short stories can’t help but remind one of all the storytelling singer-songwriters who cover the same ground, Willie Nelson among them.

As a film, I am stuck comparing it to Neil Young’s recent, rushed and self-directed recording-process documentary “Mountaintop,” a singer-songwriter not attempting the ambitious re-invention Springsteen is here, but playing and writing with passion and political purpose. Springsteen seems exhausted by comparison, although neither film has all that much to recommend it, cinematically.

A not-terribly-satisfying recent Asbury Park music history doc gave us more Springsteen biography without his laconic narration.

Then there was Steven Tyler’s vanity project trip to Nashville, “Out on a Limb,” which was, at least, amusing in addition to misguided.

“Western Stars,” earning limited release Oct. 25, isn’t misguided. It’s just dull and self-serious. But if you’re Bruce Springsteen, nobody around you’s going to point that out.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements, alcohol and smoking images, and brief language

Cast: Bruce Springsteen, Patty Scialfa

Credits: Directed by Bruce Springsteen, Thom Zimny, narration by Bruce Springsteen. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:24

It helps if you’ve seen Alex Winter’s eye-opening/crime-explaining documentary, ” The Panama Papers.”

And even that isn’t enough, by itself, to dive into the horrors of this scandal.

The corruption runs so deep, the conspiracy is so widespread, that settling in to any understanding of this democracy-crushing, billionaire-enabling global criminal enterprise — with real murderers, drug lords and organ harvesters wrapped up in it — is enough to make one despair about whole nations and an entire planet that’s been “rigged.”

Director Steven Soderbergh doesn’t hand out pitch forks, or lay out long lists of names that’ll be, as the old joke goes, “the first against the wall when the revolution comes.” He delivers a sermon about this overwhelming scandal tucked into a cutesy, all-star/globe-trotting tragi-comedy “hosted” by movie stars — Oscar winner Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas — playing the two bankers who ran “The Laundromat,” Panamianian shell-company impressarios and money-laundering lawyers Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca.

It’s Soderbergh’s shot at “The Big Short,” and it falls somewhat short. It’s convoluted, basically because it has to be. The story is necessarily episodic as the cast of characters is international and hard to pin down and connect. If you’re lost, you’re not alone. The evidence suggests Soderbergh and his screenwriter were, too.

When you’re telling a tale that begins with a widow (Meryl Streep) trying to figure out why the insurance company that covered the tour boat that sank and killed her husband (James Cromwell) wasn’t being forced to pay out, how Russian oligarchs are able to steal a Vegas condo out from under her via her realtor (Sharon Stone), with African looter/robber barons (Nonso Anozie) and murderous Chinese oligarchs (Rosalind Chao) and powerful people of every stripe (the Trump and David Cameron families are implicated, of course) are mixed up in it, finding your way is a lot harder than navigating this long, run-on sentence.

And through it all, the clipped German accent of Mossack and the sultry purr of Fonseca give us the list of “Secrets” that enable this world to exist. “Secret 2: It’s just shells” let’s them pontificate on the tax havens and money-laundering qualities of banks, etc. set up in Cyprus or Panama, Nevis and Nevada, The Seychelles and Delaware.

“Credit is just the future tense of the language of money” sounds sexy and sinister, coming out of Banderas.

The scale of the scumbaggery Soderbergh tries to weave in is daunting to describe, much less to pull off. Jeffrey Wright plays a shell-company middleman, running thousands of them out of a post office box on Nevis in the Leeward Islands. That moral shortcoming spills over into his personal life. You get away with one crime, why not add a second, secret marriage and family?

Matthias Schoenaerts is a bribe-arranger, money-mover and would-be blackmailer who figures there’s an illicit fortune to be made off the slaveholder class in China.

David Schwimmer is a hapless Lake George, New York resort manager (with Robert Patrick as his tour boat captain) dismayed that “trying to save money” through a dubious Texas insurer has mixed them all up — including Streep’s widow, Ellen Martin — with the bogus business empire of The Laundromat, via its Nevis outpost.

And on and on it goes.

The guilty, most of them from the 2000 or so billionaires the world has allowed to gestate, are only looking for “white gloves” to keep their own hands from getting dirty, a shell company within a shell company with a shell corporation of shell companies — to give them deniability.

“You think we know everyone we create a company for?”

The film’s flippant style — all these shots of Oldman and Banderas in tuxes, in white linen suits, walking through caveman “barter” business transactions, drinking Blue Curacao on a beach in Curacao as they’re “explaining” all this — would go down easier if they really were EXPLAINING it.

In other words, take a bow for making the effort, but better luck next time.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexual content and disturbing images

Cast: Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Jeffrey Wright, Antonio Banderas, James Cromwell, David Schwimmer, Robert Patrick, Will Forte, Chris Parnell and Sharon Stone,

Credits: Directed by Steven Soderbergh, script by Scott Z. Burns, based on the Jake Bernstein book. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

“The Current War” is a flawed period piece that was caught up in the meltdown of The Weinstein Co. and the grotesqueries of its founder, Harvey Weinstein, who often did to movies what he allegedly did to many women within his reach.

An all-star cast, a splendid story and top drawer production values were doomed to disappear after a disappointing debut at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival.

But Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s (“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) orphaned film has been rescued (by Martin Scorsese) with a sparkling, at times dazzling re-edit, and its Gilded Age glories can be wholly appreciated in “The Current War: Director’s Cut.”

Benedict Cumberbatch is the mercurial pop culture icon-as-inventor Thomas Alva Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” the latest genius on his “Sherlock/Imitation Game” resume. Michael Shannon is the pragmatic but (in this version) principled industrialist George Westinghouse and Nicholas Hoult is the arrogant but brilliant immigrant-dreamer Nikola Tesla in this lively recounting of how the world became electrified.

It’s about the late 19th century struggle to illuminate America. Which current would light up Mr. Edison’s (or Mr. Westinghouse’s imitation) light bulbs, DC — championed by Edison — or AC, the horse Westinghouse backed?

Which company and its genius backer, once this rivalry had been wholly joined, would illuminate the Columbian Exposition, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair? And whose system would power the electric motors that would soon run the world, the appliances that would make “convenience” available to the masses?

A dazzling opening act of shadows, candlelit glows, sumptuous robber baron interiors and crackling dialogue sets all this up. Edison here is a flamboyant showman, stunning investors with his greatest invention, demonstrated on an open field on a snowy night near Menlo Park, New Jersey.

“I hope you brought your checkbooks.”

He boldly strong-arms mega-banker J.P. Morgan (Matthew McFadyen) after first warning his children about the infamous capitalist’s appearance. That…nose.

“It’s like someone took a hammer and smashed it into his face!”

Westinghouse is the one who sees things in terms of cost, practicality. The man whose fortune was made on the steam brakes that made rail travel safe claims to be guided by “legacy — leave the world a better place than you found it.”

He sees the ruinous infrastructure costs of Edisons Direct Current (DC) as limiting it to only cities, to only the wealthy. Alternating Current, which he presses his engineer, Frank Pope (Stanley Townsend), to perfect, will allow electricity to be transmitted over vast distances, slashing the number of power stations and cutting “copper” costs.

The man knew his nickels and dimes. Pope? He wasn’t so sure.

“I really don’t think it can be done,” Pope grouses.

“Why?”

“Because ‘He’ would have already done it.”

“Current War” perfectly captures Edison’s public persona. His credit-hogging and showmanship made him infallible in the public eye, and he expected that to scare off those who would copy him, rip off his ideas, steal the credit for his bulbs, motors, phonograph and later kinetograph (motion pictures).

His secretary (Tom Holland) is closest to him, and still dazzled. Tesla came from Europe to work for him, and is somewhat more sanguine and just as brilliant and opinionated. He knows AC is the way to go, and as Edison dogmatically doubles-down on the DC bet and refuses to even consider the Serb’s big ideas, Tesla walks out.

However close the film hews to the facts (close enough, although we called them “robber barons” for a reason), the period details here are spot-on, from the rail coaches to the first electric tram, yellowy oil-lit lamps to the white-light bulbs that replace them.

Edison, a former telegraph operator, swaps Morse Code insults and jokes with his sons, nicknamed “Dot” and “Dash,” tapping them out with spoons on bowls, etc.

Tuppence Middleton and Katherine Waterston bring spark to the roles of the ever-supportive wives, Mary Edison and Marguerite Westinghouse. In them, we sense how the feud that erupted between their husbands began with a personal affront. The Edisons were to have a formal introductory dinner, with a little shop talk, at the Westinghouse mansion. Edison brusquely stood them up.

The “War” escalated, with capital punishment becoming a furious bone of contention as Edison, whose vow was to “never make anything that hurts people,” pushes the idea that Westinghouse’s AC system “is lethal,” and only perfectly-used when it powers the world’s first electric chair.

The Current War (2019) Benedict Cumberbatch CR: 101 Studios

Humor and swagger, ego and pathos are tied up in “The Current War.” It’s a tight picture, never more than in that sprint of an opening act (the first 35 minutes). But the pictorial grace notes are glorious — Niagara Falls frames the story.

Yes, it feels old-fashioned, playing up the virtues of the contestants. Civil War veteran Westinghouse never wants to lay off workers, turns cutthroat only AFTER Edison, and the film skips over how he was able to mimic but not copy Edison’s patents. Edison? Righteous to the point of self-righteous.

The movie gives Tesla just enough of the story to remind us why he is remembered along with the fellows who brought General Electric and Westinghouse into homes the world over.

One bit of casting doesn’t quite work. McFadyen is rarely cast as oligarchs and villains for a reason. Think of what John Goodman or someone with genuine menace could have brought to Morgan, an ogre with Harvey Weinstein’s looks and greed that knew no bounds. Cumberbatch’s Edison walks all over McFadyen’s Morgan. That didn’t happen.

It may not be the Oscar bait it was once pitched as. But “The Current War” is still a fine picture, sharper in focus, quick to identify all the many players in this epochal struggle, all improvements made since it left the hands of The Weinstein Co.

With this “Director’s Cut,” Gomez-Rejon and his editors have saved a witty, well-acted and gorgeous-looking movie and given it the heart, history and intellectual heft it needed to come off.

(The REAL Edison vs. the one in the film? Read more here.)

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some disturbing/violent images, and thematic elements

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Shannon, Tom Holland, Tuppence Middleton, Nicholas Hoult, Katherine Waterston, Matthew McFadyen, Stanley Townsend

Credits: Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, script by Michael Mitnik. A 101 Studio release.

Running time: 1:42

That’s being given as the reason why the summer blockbuster was pulled from China’s release slate for next weekend.

Can’t understand why the Maoist Kingdom would be bothered by depicting an early Hollywood Chinese hero as a poseur of the Summer’s Eve variety.

Apparently, the undemocratic, high-handed totalitarian state wanted Quentin Tarrantino to cut the Bruce Lee abuse from his movie.

He said no. Lebron James probably has an opinion on that. 

Like any longtime Hollywood film fan, I’ve noticed the American film industry’s eagerness to pander to the Chinese market in everything from “Great Wall” projects starring Matt Damon, “Meg” shark films with a big Chinese presence, to Obligatory Chinese Casting add-ons in virtually every franchise or action film (“Gemini Man” to “Rogue One”) coming out.

Sometimes, it pays off. Other times, it’s like “Who is Hollywood kidding with this tokenism?”

But this? This is just funny all the way around. I wrote last summer that I thought QT was out of line, or at least out of left field, in making the Real Bruce a short douche.