Movie Nation

A cop buddy comedy, where the scary hulk with a badge (Dave Bautista) basically takes an Uber driver (Kumail Nanjiani of “The Big Sick”) hostage.

A few one-liners, some gunplay and ultra-violence, and a couple of laughs — just in the trailer.

Wonder if they’ll find any laughs in stereotypes in “Stuber?”

July 12.

Full disclosure, stop-motion animation is my favorite form of animated entertainment.

Yes, “Isle of Dogs” was the best animated film of 2018, I don’t care who they gave the Oscar to (the blurry “Spider-Verse,” how soon we forget). The tactile, hand-made look of plasticine clay, molded and put into “motion” by human hands (with some digital assistance) never fails to delight. Such movies — think “Wallace & Gromit,” “Coraline,” “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” — come to life by way of a grand visual whimsy that no other animation can match.

“Missing Link,” from the studio that gave us the glorious “Kubo and the Two Strings” and writer-director Chris Butler’s “ParaNorman,” has the story,acclaimed and game voice cast and that “grand visual whimsy” going for it. All this comedy, an “Around the World in 80s with Sasquatch” variation, needs is about 25 or 30 more jokes to wholly come off.

It’s cute, but joke-starved.

“Link” is a story-driven kid’s film that holds the attention even as you wish they’d work-shopped more laughs into Butler’s script, spent the money on managing a few more sight gags.

Hugh Jackman voices the intrepid, very proper and very English Sir Lionel Frost,  “renowned seeker of mythical beasts.” We meet him as he’s endangering another assistant on the fool’s errand of seeking the Loch Ness Monster.

How does Sir Lionel lure Nessie to the surface? By playing bagpipes underwater, of course!

But Sir Lionel never seems to land conclusive proof for his exploits and discoveries, and is thus always on the outside looking in at London’s stuffy Optimates Club, where starchy Lord Piggot-Dunceb (Stephen Fry) presides.

They’re all about exploring, conquering and colonizing there, “spreading good British table manners to savages the world over.” No place for a tweedy crank like Sir Lionel.

But Frost has received a letter, a suggestion he visit Washington State and meet a Sasquatch, whom he declares is “the Missing Link between man and ape.” And he bets Lord Piggot-Dunceb that this time, he’ll bring proof to prove he “belongs.”

Frost makes the trip and finds the letter-writer, and it turns out to be a fellow nobody is yet calling “BigFoot.” He’s a chatty literalist who speaks and writes English in the voice of Zach Galifianakis. And he’s lonely. Humans are encroaching on his territory so that there are none of his kind left.

“Your world grows bigger and mine is eaten away.”

They reach a bargain, even if there’s a bit of a literal language barrier. Sir Lionel will take the Sasquatch, “Mr. Link” they’ll call him, to the Himalayas where the Yeti (Abominable Snowmen) will welcome him like a long lost cousin.

“I give you my word!”

“Great! What is it?”

First, Frost must smuggle our friend into a lumber town to arrange passage.

“I imagine everyone there has hairy knuckles and poor hygiene. You’ll fit right in!”

Then they must visit the widow of a dead colleague, Adelina (Zoe Saldana) to purloin one of the late explorer’s Yeti maps.

The fact that Lord Piggot-Dunceb has hired an assassin and “rare creature killer,” Stenk (Timothy Olyphant, sporting a perfectly vile drawl) to prevent them from completing their mission means that Adelina has her Marion Ravenswood in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” moment. She’s coming along because she’s too valuable to the quest not to.

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The camera lingers over each hand-made creation, from the lumber town saloon to the Himalayan world of the Yeti, soaking up detail but generally slowing down the movie. Comedy — and that’s what this is, story-driven or not — is quick, the more brisk the better. “Missing Link” is not.

We can set the time frame as 1886, as we see the Statue of Liberty being assembled in New York harbor. Shots of a ship at sea, snowy mountains and rustic forests impress. But aside from that opening bagpipe piped underwater bit, there’s not much in the line of sight-gags here.

The best joke among the snowmen and women is the putdown their leader (Emma Thompson) lays on the country cousin, the furry rube who’s just shown up at their snowy door. “Redneck,” is how she describes him.

The paucity of jokes and sight-gags aside, the story and whimsical animation here should keep the kids locked in. The message, about “finding where you fit in,” is not that far removed from Butler’s “ParaNorman,” which gave us the first gay character in animation as part of its “fit in” messaging.

But without the gags to enliven the travelogue, without more funny lines to lighten the load and impart that message, “Missing Link” feels like a missed opportunity. It’s the second animated stab at making comedy out of Big Foot and never much more than second best on the subject.

MPAA Rating: PG for action/peril and some mild rude humor

Cast: The voices of Hugh Jackman, Emma Thompson, Zoe Saldana, Timothy Olyphant, Stephen Fry and Zach Galifianakis

Credits: Written and directed by Chris Butler. An Annapurna release of a Studio Laika film.

Running time: 1:35

A touchy, liberal-guilt-ridden riff on Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” this stars Ashton Sanders as the young man hired by an affluent family to serve as chauffeur.

Bill Camp is the “NAACP supporter” patriarch, and Margaret Qualley pegs the townhouse rich girl vocal fry meter to the wall as the faintly patronizing employer who acts like your friend, disapproving daughter to daddy’s do-gooderism.

Here’s a brittle early moment from Rashid Johnson’s film

“Native Son” premieres Wed. night at 8.

“Ash is the Purest White” is a sweeping Chinese crime saga that’s more interesting for what it shows than what it’s about.

The story is a routine mob moll melodrama, a devoted woman’s life of tests once she’s taken up with a boss in the jianghu, the Chinese underworld. The acting can feel static, the compositions formal and the camera pretty much planted in place.

But the China writer-director Zhangke Jia (“A Touch of Sin,” “Mountains May Part”) isn’t the China of legend, or even the China of travelogues. These are the cities Westerners never hear about on the news, with crumbling People’s Republic housing apartment blocs, labor strife, mining towns emptying out as the coal economy peters out, with mahjong parlors filled with chain-smoking gamblers whiling away their days with their “brothers.”

It’s the China of petty criminals, implied corruption, crooks going “legit” to land government contracts, where the complicit cops are more than happy to keep the peace when it means hunting down young gang bangers who are attacking the established gangs and their “order.”

Zhangke Jia is wrestling with his favorite subtext in this setting and this story covering the first decades of the New Millennium, the beginning of The Chinese Century.

Bin (Fan Liao) is the boss of his gang of “brothers,” the arbiter of petty disputes among the rank and file. But his longtime girlfriend, Qiao (Tao Zhao), always at his side, who is the real keeper of the flame. The daughter of a miner and labor agitator, she’s the one who proposes the toast to tradition and “brotherhood.”

Tao Zhao, the director’s wife, has a quiet ordinariness about her that is deceptive. She lets us sense Qiao’s understanding of her situation, the bargain she’s made with Bin. She can’t pick and choose which parts of this life she’ll engage with.

“For people like us,” Bin growls (in Mandarin, with English subtitles), it’s always kill or be killed.”

She’s all-in, even when he’s trying to teach her how to handle an illegal (in China) firearm.

That pistol will loom large in the film’s inciting act, a mid-city, mid-street motorcycle ambush that is about to end with Bin’s death by beating — fists, feet and shovels — when Qiao fatefully intervenes. Merely brandishing the pistol means she’s arrested. Merely adhering to the code she’s bought into — loyalty above all — means prison time.

She will be tested by fire, and as she and Bin have discussed in the shadow of a volcano, the hottest place on Earth produces the finest, whitest ash. Metaphor 101.

The performances have a TV close-up  quality, a lot of nothing to see with the viewer able to read much into what the players’ faces are not betraying. Rare is the emotion given away by the leads, with only supporting players blowing up or wising off.

Zhangke Jia is most at home depicting the ritual fealty of mob life — presents given to the boss, Cohiba cigars “which don’t cause cancer,” he’s assured — and depicting China’s formal, overburdened and crumbling prison system.

A lovely bit of garnish, one of Bin’s fellow gangsters has made sponsoring a ballroom dance team his passion. That’s how the mob mate’s funeral is celebrated, outdoors in a dusty backlot, competition-dressed dancers paying tribute over his ashes.

A river journey upon Qiao’s release takes her on a ferry cruise up river through the Three Gorges in the year or so before a great dam would flood much of the countryside and lower sections of sections  of cities — poorer, disenfranchised — without the locals having any say.

Jia packs a lot of travel shots amidst the melodrama of the two hour and 16 minutes of “Ash is the Purest White.” The idea isn’t to tie things up neatly or even give the viewer great satisfaction at the resolution.

As with China itself, reality is messier, satisfaction harder to come by and “justice” a purely Western concept that hasn’t caught on, the way Western autos and Western pop music and discos (Still dancing to “Y.M.C.A.”) have.

And perhaps they never will.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic gang violence

Cast: Tao Zhao, Fan Liao

Credits: Written and directed by Zhangke Jia. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 2:16

If there had been an Internet and fangirls and fanboys back in Stephen King’s film and TV adaptation heyday — the 80s to early 90s — he never would have had the chance to fall out of favor.

Over-exposed, with every month, it seemed, hosting a new King “Lawnmower Man,” Maximum Overdrive,” “The Stand” or “Christine,” Hollywood managed to wring every ounce of value out of his brand by the 90s.

The movies generally weren’t very good, and most were of the “Pet Sematary” (1989) variety — killer concept, cheap cast, indifferent script and direction.

But with a remake of “It!” blowing up, “Mr. Mercedes” hitting TV and all things King back in vogue, The Modern Master of Horror is having another moment, long past “Misery” and “Dolores Claiborne.” And to judge by the  nerdgasmic raves coming out of the gathering of the tribes called South by Southwest last month, the remake of “Pet Sematary” was supposed to be just more kindling on the bonfire.

But it’s not. Neither good nor terrible, it’s an inert remake, just “different” enough to warrant online dissection in the labs where horror films are put under the microscope.

It’s not frightening, so the co-directors rely on cheap jolts — a quick cut, LOUD music or sound effect, all designed to pin us back in our seats. The cheap frights are necessary because real suspense is missing. The script gives away the game too early, has ZERO room for pathos and relies on the reliably dull Jason Clarke to carry it off.

He doesn’t.

All I remember about the original was the horror hook — the “sour ground” where pets and if need be humans are buried by eccentric Mainers who want them to return to life — and that Fred Gwynne was the only Big Name in the cast.

John Lithgow has that part in the remake, playing the elderly, sage and kindly neighbor who wises the new family, The Creeds (Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence and twin boys named Lavoie who combine to play the toddler, Gage) about that old graveyard behind their new home in rural Ludlow.

The local kids, and occasionally adults, make ritualistic trips there to bury their pets, wearing homemade masks as they do.

It has a sign, scrawled and misspelled, “Pet Sematary.”

Even eight year old Ellie (Laurence) knows, “They spelled it wrong.”

But when the family cat Churchill is run over by a mean Maine driver, neighbor Jud has a better place to bury it — BEHIND the pet cemetery. He doesn’t warn Louis Creed, a man of science (doctor) and thus a skeptic, about what happens next.

Louis has been having visions, warnings from a dead patient he lost on the gurney in the college clinic where he now works.

“The barrier is not MEANT to be broken!”

And the cat coming back to life (nice makeup) is just the beginning of his problems.

This “Sematary” is two minutes shorter and plays much longer than the 1989 version, with a stately pace that feels like “gravitas” but is nothing of the sort. It’s just slow.

The script touches on Louis and wife Rachel’s diverging views of what to tell their two kids about mortality, death and dying. She’s pushing “heaven,” he doesn’t want to lie. But David’s answer to little Ellie’s question about death is reason enough to NOT want to tell her the cat is dead.

Death “might seem scary, but it’s not” can’t be Stephen King’s own words, can it? Terrible line for a doctor dad who doesn’t want to “lie” to his children. Death is terrifying at that age, and the less said about it the better if you can’t manage anything better than that.

The production design looks backlot heavy, with every fog machine in the tri-state area engaged for night shots.

But “foreshadowing” to directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer means pounding home the menacing tractor trailers hurtling down the two lane road in front of the house. “Character arc” means the Dr. David gives up his core beliefs without fuss or fight.

And “climax” means “Let’s drag this thing out well beyond the point there is a point, and beyond any fright or fun we can wring out of it.

Fun? That’s the word this production’s team never learned. But again, getting the dead cat makeup (it rarely looks digital, if indeed it was) right seems like the top priority.

MPAA Rating: R for horror violence, bloody images, and some language

Cast: Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence , Obssa Ahmed and John Lithgow

Credits:Directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, script by Jeff Buhler based on the Stephen King novel. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:41

“Satan & Adam” chronicles a famous odd-couple blues duo who made their name on the streets of Harlem, earned fame by appearing on a U2 concert album and found a little success and a little heartache in the years that followed.

“Twenty years in the making,” as the hype goes, editor-turned director/editor V. Scott Balcerek caught guitar virtuoso “Mister Satan” and his harmonica-playing “apprentice” Adam Gussow in the ’80s, shortly after they teamed up.

And he didn’t lose touch over the decades, filming them in black and white back then, in color in later years and today. He’s assembled that footage, with interviews, eyewitness testimonials and the like into a charming and engaging history of a pop cultural phenomenon.

In 1986, Gussow was a Princeton grad and grad student at Columbia, fresh off a romantic breakup, “which put me in a space where I could be…struck by the blues.”

In Harlem, about a block north of the famed Apollo Theater, a “One Man Blues Band” ripping it up on a guitar, keeping time with tambourine and high hat via pedals, Mister Satan did the striking.

Passionate, accomplished, a beloved local landmark and just a little off — as anybody who bills himself “Mister Satan” is likely to be — the guitarist let the kid sit in with him for a couple of tunes, playing harmonica.

“I won’t embarrass you,” Gussow promised. He didn’t.

As word spread, “Satan’s gonna play with the WHITE boy,” a crowd gathered. And as the electric shock of that first collaboration settled in, an act was born — “Satan & Adam.”

The novelty of seeing them caught on with passersby, and then won the attention of the New York media. And as it did, Gussow learned of Mister Satan’s previous life.

He’d been on Ray Charles’ record label, had a minor hit (“Oh She was Pretty”).

As Sterling Magee, the singer-guitarist played with Etta James, Little Anthony and the Imperials and Marvin Gaye. He’d backed up James Brown at the Apollo just down the street from their regular spot. Now, he was playing on the street. That moniker he was now going by explained a lot.

He billed himself as Mister Satan, “the Prince of Darkness,” because “I can go into the darkness of my mind and come out with beautiful things.”

Yeah, he’s a bit of a free thinker. He is “from the same planet as George Clinton, Sun Ra” record producer Rachel Faro opines. And as they played together, were suddenly “discovered” by U2 as they and director Phil Joanou made “Rattle & Hum” (Joanou and The Edge are among those interviewed), landed first a regular club gig, then an agent, then a record deal and tours here and abroad, Gussow figured out what’s pretty obvious the moment we see Satan on the screen.

He’s a flake, a great musician who could accept this “success” only up to a point, function normally only within his own parameters based on hard life experience and a touch of mental illness.

“Satan & Adam” has Gussow do most of the narrating, and what we pick up from him is how this educated New Yorker, obsessed with the blue and Southern Black culture, made his peace with that.

The payoff? They became almost famous, opening for Buddy Guy in Central Park, touring Europe as the opening act for Bo Diddley,

Magee relates his Mississippi childhood, raised on Gospel, falling into “serving the Devil, playing the blues.”

“I don’t do it for money,” he is heard saying. “I don’t do it for fame.”

Gussow got a taste of both of those with Magee, marveling at how when they were busking on the street, they’d split the bills, but Mister Satan would “blow up” if he didn’t get all the change. He always gave the coins away to the local homeless.

And “fame” was never going to sit well with the guitar man.

The college grad never quite got over his awe. “I was his boy, not his equal. His apprentice. I knew this was the best gig I was ever going to have.”

All he had to do was keep Satan’s equally “off” wife from wrecking the act while they were on the road, keep Satan on task when they had steady gigs (The Magees moved to Virginia after a dispute with a New York landlord) and talk him into the recording studio.

Rev. Al Sharpton and journalist Peter Noel provide cultural context, what else was happening as these two became celebrated. The New York of the “Do the Right Thing” era, when the gap between the haves-and-have-nots was widening and racial tensions were spiking was a tricky place to launch a salt-and-pepper act.

“Suddenly, I was the problem,” Gussow remembers, “just one more white man come to rip off the black man’s music.”

“Cultural appropriation” is addressed more than once, here. But Gussow’s picking up the harmonica and mastering it? Mostly skipped over.

Balcerek’s film makes for a brisk journey through their rise and eventual breakup, generously sampling the duo’s live performances and rendering an interesting if superficial portrait of each man, especially during their rise.

It can feel superficial and less revealing than we might want. Much is left out, but for that we can probably turn to the book got out of the experience. “Mister Satan’s Apprentice.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Sterling Magee, Adam Gussow, The Edge, Harry Shearer, Rachel Faro

Credits:Directed by V. Scott Balcerek, script by V. Scott Balcerek, Ryan Suffern. A Cargo release.

Running time: 1:23

The cinema’s great, mad visionary Terry Gilliam has longed to film a tale called “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” since the 1980s.

Talk about maddening. The man has had stars and money lined up (sort of) more than once on this ill-fated project, most famously getting underway with the French actor Jean Rochefort and co-star Johnny Depp in Spain, only to have every thing that can go wrong stand in his way. That made for a fine documentary about a film fiasco, a real-time catastrophe caught on camera — “Lost in La Mancha.”

One doesn’t need to recall that “Don Quixote” bested an earlier film genius, Orson Welles, to feel the production, the very title, is cursed. As this has happened to other Gilliam projects over the years, I even asked him if he himself was the one with the curse hanging over his career in an interview.

He laughed. But he didn’t deny it.

Now “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is finished, and lawsuits over who owns the rights have further entangled it so that it will first reach movie screens via Fathom Events for it at a “one night only” showing at a theater near you April 10.

And if the finished film feels a tad labored, the editing a trifle tentative, it’s no wonder. Grapple with any idea for 30 years, drag any stone up a mountain as many times as Sisyphus, and it’s going to feel over-cooked.

But “Quixote” is lifted by its performances, startling in its originality and striking in its setting. And there’s just enough of Gilliam’s magical madness to make one relieved, at times delighted, that the “12 Monkeys” maestro finally got this one monkey off his back.

It’s an absurdist fever dream brought to life, a filmmaker’s nightmare of the line of work he’s chosen, the reality he’s bent and the collaborators he’s used and tossed aside.

Adam Driver is Toby Grisoni, a vain, arrogant director of lavishly-produced TV commercials. He’s dismissive of subordinates, clients, pretty much everyone. And he’s in Spain (the Canary Islands, mostly) doing a commercial riff on Spain’s greatest literary hero, Don Quijote de la Mancha. It isn’t going well and he’s burning through the producers’ (Jason Watkins, Will Keen) cash and nerves.

“GENUFLECT everyone!”

He may bark “Me Organ Grinder, you monkey” into the phone, dumping calls with “Gotta go. Hands to hold.” But Toby is cracking under the pressure.

“He’s a genius! He’s a visionary!”

“Doesn’t help.”

A Gypsy (Óscar Jaenada) selling DVDs at one night’s lavish restaurant dinner distracts Toby from his worries, his boss (Stellan Skarsgård) and “the boss’s wife” (Olga Kurylenko). The video is of Toby’s student film, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.” That black and white movie’s daring style, non-professional cast and memories take over his life.

Before he knows it, he’s revisiting the village of Los Suenos (“The Dreams”), reveling in the sleepy hillside town he and his then-tiny production once took over, reminiscing over the cobbler (Jonathan Pryce, in full twinkle) he cast as the hero, recalling the waitress (Joana Ribeiro) he lured into show business as his “Dulcinea,” and dodging responsibility for what happened to her and to his career.

Fleeing town, he still takes a moment to follow a weathered, hand-lettered sign, “Quijote Vive!” (Quixote lives!) to a shed where an old woman is showing his student film, projected onto a sheet. Damned if Javier (Pryce), his “Don” way back when, doesn’t come to life.

And The Man of La Mancha, slow to get into character back then, is in so deep now that he insists that Toby is his Pancho Sanza, and that he rejoin his master for his quest, to live outside this “Age of Iron” and “restore the lost Age of Chivalry!”

The real world present flips back and forth with the Old World “adventures” as Toby is recognized by actors and hassled by cops at some times, dragging his “Don” into his modern reality with him, and at other times it’s the other way around.

Don Quixote, the “knight errant,” totally immerses the jaded young filmmaker in the simpler time and his delusions of glory, honor and bravery.

“There you are, Sancho. You crazy peasant, always playing games!”

There’s jousting, rousting, courtly wooing and singing. They contend with characters confused for Muslim terrorists today, and Muslims fleeing Spanish persecution “then.”

The famous delusions of the Don are shared with Sancho with Toby, each man seeing a different reality; windmills as raging giants, wine skins come to life, with grinning human mouths, sheep confused for “Muslims, their heads bowed in prayer to Allah!”

Driver is more interesting, nasty and befuddled than he often has been on the big screen even if he is perhaps not the best of all the leads Gilliam attempted to film this with (Ewan McGregor, Depp, etc.). But Pryce’s plummy, over-enunciated hamminess perfectly captures the “knight errant, and his loyal “squire-rel!”

I love the warmth of his malapropism-littered lines, the silly way he pronounces silent letters in even familiar words (“Give me my s-WORD!”), turning “chivalry” into “CHEE-valry,” and waxing poetic at the sight of any woman, no matter how homely.

“I shall forever preserve your kindness in the treasure of my memory.”

Toby may have a hard time shaking the sense that he’s “in” a movie, and still directing it.

“Aaaaaannnnd…cut right there.”

But Pryce’s Javier/Don Quijote is florid perfection, making one grateful that this poetic hero didn’t suffer injury or death before filming could finish, like John Hurt and Rochefort  — who might have played him.

“Tonight, we will sing songs to your bravery!”

But after so many years of struggle getting it made, it’s as if Gilliam couldn’t bear to finish it, or let “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” end.

I counted five edits in a few seconds of film that capture Toby/Driver parking and dismounting a motorcycle.

And the film reaches a bittersweet climax at the 90-95 minute mark, and feels for all the world as the credits are coming. Nope. Another 40 minutes bear down on us, with Russian mobsters, a real damsel in distress, “real” giants, the bonfires of “Holy Week” purging the world’s materialistic excesses.

Gilliam and his longtime collaborator (Tony Grisoni, who also wrote “How I Live Now”) may not have “lost the thread” in their heads. But they lost me for some of that, anyway.

Still, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is an absolute must-see for Gilliam fans and “film that never was” buffs. It’s a picture that crossed into legend long before it was actually, fully and completely in the can.

And it’s something to see, man.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Jonathan Pryce, Adam Driver, Olga Kurylenko, Stellan Skarsgård, Joana Ribeiro, Hovik Keuchkerian, Jordi Molla

Credits: Directed by Terry Gilliam, script by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 2:08

You’re going to learn a new word today, because I learned that new word last night at a screening of “The Best of Enemies.”

It is “charrette,” a French word applied to crunch-time, deadline-conscious group problem solving. And that’s what was tried in 1971 in Durham, N.C., an exercise in tough, sometimes unpleasant grass roots democracy that brought two polar opposites to the negotiating table in search of ways to bridge a vast cultural divide — back then, it was the fight over school integration.

You think this engaging, inspiring and important movie about a little known piece of Civil Rights history has something to say to Divided America in 2019? Me, too.

They called her “Roughhouse Annie.” Ann Atwater was a divorced mother of two who didn’t just gripe about the plight of black folks in general and single mothers like herself in segregated, bullhead Durham. She got involved, and nagged the dickens out of others to join her haranguing the racist city council. The lady was not one to mince words.

“Get your ass down to City Hall tonight! I’d BETTER see your face lookin’ Black and ANGRY!”

Casting the formidable Taraji P. Henson as Atwater takes no stretch of the imagination.

In a city where the Klan and the White Citizen’s Council were used by politicians to protect slumlords, unequal schools and white supremacy, Atwater was their tireless foe, a fury given to shouting down dismissive council members, and spinning the most racist member around in his chair when he made it a point of not looking at her when she spoke.

“We’re humans,” she bellows, exhausted from stating the obvious. “Humans shouldn’t have to LIVE like this.”

C.P. Ellis wasn’t just a good ol’boy who ran a local Pure filling station and garage. He was the Exalted Cyclops, an activist leader in charge of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter, recruiting Young Klan and leading them in “the good fight,” as and his co-believers saw it, fighting “the communists, N—-rs and Jews” as “part of something bigger than yourself.”

Sam Rockwell has done well with drawling racists in the past (an Oscar for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) and he’s spot-on as Ellis, a swaggering diehard/blowhard who keeps a shotgun in his Ford trunk and a big folding knife on the belt of the pants he hitches up high, for extra security.

Speaking from childhood experience, one couldn’t drive through Jesse Helms’ North Carolina in that era without passing scores of tobacco barns with “KKKK” (“Knights of the Ku Klux Klan”) painted on the side facing the road, advertising for a terrorist group that was a big part of Southern life and Southern politics.

A local woman is dating a black man? Grab your guns, Floyd (Wes Bentley), let’s go shoot up her house — with her IN IT — and train a couple of Klan Youth we bring along for the ride.

But the tide of history was turning, even if the large and active Durham Klan couldn’t see it. That’s when an electrical fire at the battered local “black school” brought Durham’s racial divide to the fore and the mendacious, mediocre status quo protected by the council president (Bruce McGill, also on-the-nose) into the spotlight.

The choices are to integrate the already under-funded, underwhelming schools, or let black kids fall further behind. The city was never going to make the right choice, and the judge the NAACP files suit with is desperate for a buck-passing solution.

That’s how they bring in the skeptical Shaw University professor Bill Riddick, given a patient-when-he-should-be-exasperated turn by Babou Ceesay of TV’s “Into the Badlands.” He will do this “charrette” thing he’s been demonstrating in cities, mostly in the North. He will sign up two co-chairs, leaders of their respective communities.

He will listen to the spit-spattering outrage, and find one “good” thing to focus on, as positive reinforcement in turning the most dogmatic. He will get the Civil Rights agitator and the KKK kingpin on board to legitimize this deadline-driven form of problem solving, bridging a racial divide that goes back centuries in just 10 days.

Mr. won’t-serve-black-customers, refuses-to-shake-hands “Not gonna have’em kids’n OUR school” and Miss “I am NOT gon’work with that CRACKER!” get the same sales pitch.

“If you truly represent your people, represent them!”

Producer (“Seabiscuit,” “Free State of Jones”) turned writer-director Robin Bissell packs in a lot of detail in this narrative; chilling scenes of Klan intimidation, Klan target practice and backdoor communications between the militant racists and politicians depressing examples of the state of Black life in the South in the 1970s — unsafe schools, lack of opportunity hemming people in on all sides.

The overarching message, voiced by Riddick, echoed by others and hammered home in the film is “Once you listen to the other side,” make an effort to get to know your “enemy,” you’re changed. As are they.

That’s what makes “The Best of Enemies” timely. But the history, of the last open era when white supremacy was a viable political stance, of the informal “rules” that kept “them in their place,” is just as valuable.

Bissell has made a film where the casting isn’t the only thing that’s “on-the-nose.” The message, where the film’s sympathies lie and its emphasis on the character with the bigger journey to make could earn it some “Green Book” styled blowback.

But if you don’t think we need to hear this sermon, you’re not paying attention. If you don’t think “reasonable” voices (Anne Heche, sporting a comically anachronistic haircut, is Mrs. Ellis, who supports her husband’s Klan activities but has the common sense to see they’ll go broke if he doesn’t “start sellin’ to the OTHER half of Durham”) are too easily drowned-out in divided, trying times, you’ve abandoned hope.

Bissell makes hope the currency of “The Best of Enemies.” It’s a clarion call to action, to getting involved, to “represent,” to listen and to talk. And for a lecture on the utility of a charrette, a civics lesson in grassroots everybody-engaged democracy, it’s damned entertaining.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, racial epithets, some violence and a suggestive reference

Cast: Taraji P. Hensen, Sam Rockwell, Babou Ceesay, Wes Bentley, Bruce McGill and Anne Heche

Credits: Written and directed by Robin Bissell, based on an Osha Gray Davidson book. An STX release.

Running time: 2:15

Overheated, overwrought, over-furnished and over-dressed, “The Aftermath” is a WWII period piece that squanders another perfectly good Keira Knightley performance in a good looking movie that doesn’t measure up to the costume changes required of its leading lady.

Yes, nobody wears period clothes as well as the runway-ready Keira K. And romances, ill-advised and/or ill-fated, are kind of her thing. The camera adores her in closeup. But in this film, even she can’t act her way past the implausible leaps in plot, the dissonant lapses in character motivation.

She stars as Rachael Morgan, a woman we meet on her way to a winter rendezvous with her Army captain husband (Jason Clarke).

It’s mere months after Germany’s surrender, and Capt. Morgan (Hah!) is stationed in Hamburg, one of the earliest and most telling tests of the Allied strategy of creating air raid firestorms, flattening cities, killing tens of thousands and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Some historians point to Hamburg’s destruction (“Operation Gomorrah”) as very nearly breaking Germany’s back, with the strain it placed on a failing state. But never mind that.

In the movie version of “The Aftermath,” luxury train travel has already returned to Europe, the train station is none the worse for wear and Rachael’s husband, Lewis, has requisitioned a beautifully appointed mansion on the outskirts of the city.

It belongs to Stefan Lubert (Alexander Skarsgård), an architect who married well, somehow managed to avoid serving in the military or losing even his expensive furniture to the firestorm, looters or Allied spoils-of-war collectors. He has a teen daughter (Flora Thiemann) who is still fond of her Hitler Youth uniform and is tempted by the wrong sorts of German boys who survived with her — the ones with “88” branded on their arms.

What is the eighth letter in the alphabet, WWII buffs?

Captain Morgan is trying to keep these terrorists in check. He’s out to win over “hearts and minds,” by showing courtesy and kindness to the starving, sullen, vanquished foe.

That includes Herr Lubert.

Rachael doesn’t share his magnanimity. She is terse, rude and chilly to Lubert, because she has resisted her husband’s entreaties to let the Luberts remain. She practically hisses at him, refuses to shake his hand and rebuffs him at every turn.

And she wonders why the household staff makes snotty cracks about her in German right to her face.

The one Army wife (Kate Phillips) she can confide in puts her mind at ease. Susan is married to a brutish, mistrusting intelligence officer (Martin Compston), who shows no mercy to the Huns and has taught Susan not to trust them a bit.

Beware the “hate just beneath the surface” she warns Rachael.

Well, that’s catnip to the lonely wife of a properly repressed British officer, years of war under his belt with untold horrors that have passed before his eyes.

Rachael’s bitterness has an explanation. Stefan’s does as well, but he’s not allowed to show it, until that big come-to-terms-with-each-other hissing match between the two.

You can’t say this isn’t well-cast, with Clarke perfectly-suited for this sort of stiff upper lip but broken and hiding it Brit of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” generation.

Skarsgård gives us less to grab hold of, a quiet, humbled man who says that he’s a metal presser, now that his chosen field has been put in limbo until Germany recovers. But all we see him do is chop wood, skulk around the huge, lavishly-furnished estate house and — at the drop of a hat — tumble for the English woman who plainly despises him.

Knightley makes the best of a character whose mood shifts in spurts and starts, from hate to lust to love.

James Kent made “Testament of Youth” earlier in his career, another wartime romance that doesn’t quick stick to your ribs. But he shows us the violence of a handshake-refused and takes a shot at making the occupiers look exactly like American and British films have always made the Occupying Germans come off–boorish, oppressive, capable of callous violence.

There’s even a riff on that “Casablanca/Inglorious Basterds” moment of the arrogant winners singing and drunkenly playing the last Steinway in Hamburg — not Nazis, this time, but Brits belting out Gilbert & Sullivan.

A nice detail — that big blank space with discolored paint over every mantle. It’s where the Fuhrer’s portrait used to hang in the homes of Party members.

But one should never punctuate a hot and heavy animal attraction scene with a comically embarrassing moment of coitus interruptus. There’s no “right” way for these two to play this, as there’s no humor in the movie and no real room for it in all the melodrama.

The screenplay finds no mysteries here, no questions about Lubert’s “cowardice” or his means of avoiding combat, no doubts about his loyalties and humanity, or lack thereof.

The shifts in attitude Knightley and Skarsgård have to act out are abrupt and jarring enough to feel like perfunctory requirements of a melodramatic script.

I mean, they’re both beautiful and all, and she’s got her full wardrobe with her and his wine cellar survived, along with the showpiece house and designer furniture. But come on.

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content/nudity, and violence including some disturbing images

Cast: Keira Knightley, Alexander Skarsgård, Jason Clarke

Credits:Directed by James Kent, script by Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse and Rhidian Brook, based on a novel by Rhidian Brook. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:48

Our short-attention-span culture can be forgiven for forgetting — with any new round of celeb photos, red carpet shots with wife Jennifer Lopez, what a shady scumbag ex-ballplayer Alex Rodriguez was and probably remains.

So lest we forget, here’s “Screwball,” a pretty good recollection, dissection and postmortem of A-Rod and baseball’s epic Biogenesis scandal of less than ten years ago.

Birector Billy Corben, most famous for the “Cocaine Cowboys” movies, and the pot-smuggling documentary “Square Grouper,” has also done films for ESPN on the University of Miami and on pro-athletes who went broke after playing, and another doc called “The Tanning of America.”

So he’s the perfect guy to tie together the corrupt, anything-goes culture of South Florida, the unregulated “anti-aging” clinics that sprang up there and thrived under then-governor and well-known medical fraud tycoon Rick Scott and the (mostly Latin) baseball players who cheated to get ahead.

Corben’s film shows how they found their hook-up with Tony Bosch, a Cuban American compadre who speaks their language and got his entre into their world by making Manny Ramirez into the feared late-career home-run hitter nicknamed “Man-Ram” by some.

Corben interviewed investigators, Bosch and most of the other principles involved in this 2013 scandal — not A-Rod, and not Major League Baseball — and concocted a  comic riff on this scandal that devolved into a comedy of errors, in which virtually none of the guilty were truly punished.

He uses Tim Elfrink, the reporter for Miami New Times who broke this story via a disgruntled business associate of Bosch, as tour guide through a stink that implicated Rodriguez in all manner of wrongdoing, right down to hiring “protesters” after he was sanctioned by baseball — people paid to show up at ball parks holding up pro-A-Rod/anti-Bosch signs to sway public opinion.

It didn’t work, although truthfully, most of us have forgotten and moved on.

It’s a solidly–reported documentary, with plenty of context and lots of Tony Bosch at the heart of it, a fast-talking hustler who parlayed a medical degree from Belize into an anti-aging and then athlete-juicing practice that gained him riches, reflected glory and finally infamy.

Most of his credentials, the film points out, are “self-proclaimed.” And one of the funnier bits in it is Bosch griping about the difference between a “fake doctor” and “an unlicensed physician” — as if that matters.

Corben IDs the cast of characters with baseball card shaped freeze frames, and on occasion (not consistently at all) he stages reenactments of events the various figures took part in. These reenactments star children, little boys mouthing the words of testimony from those implicated and those allegedly doing the investigating.

For instance, disgruntled marketing man and fitness, tanning and “anti-aging” fan Porter Fischer, who took the books that gave away the high school, college and professional athletes “Dr. T” (Bosch) “helped,” is portrayed by a kid wearing a fake-muscle suit.

Cute. Unnecessary, but cute.

But as the story unfolds, you kind of get why Corben saw the whole thing as childish and comical.

The State of Florida, “where fraud is the state industry” Elfrink says, hired a onetime Baltimore police officer to be their South Florida investigator of medical fraud. Jerome Hill had been fired in Baltimore for causes that should have ensured he’d never work in law enforcement again.

Florida is where guys like this get their second chance. Hill notes that Fischer, mixed up with some tough guys who ran tanning salons and were involved in the whole affair to an extent that they knew who they could blackmail and how they could cover it up, “is lucky he’s not in a canal somewhere.”

Major League Baseball, following up on the widening scandal Miami New Times had broken (a black eye for ALL of TV and print sports journalism, by the way), sent “investigators” to Florida to pay for information, offer bribes and sleep with employees of people they were supposed to be investigating.

“Every sleazy thing” MLB did to get to the facts, “A-Rod and his crew were doing the same thing” to ensure those facts never saw the light of day.

It was a mess, and the ineptitude of the state and the sport to police these practices and those wrongdoers can only be laughed at, now.

Which is why Corben gives the subject its comical treatment. It’s just that he loses his nerve, only recreating a few anecdotes instead of the bulk of the story with kid-reenactors.

I can’t say the scenes where he did that worked for me — kids looking like a young A-Rod, Bosch (complete with wig and “Dr. Tony Bosch” lab coat), Fischer and others, mouthing the words of whoever is telling this part of the story. Probably why Corben didn’t stick with this gimmick, start to finish.

He’s a terrific documentary storyteller, as his drug trade documentaries made clear. He just got too cute for his own good and got in his own way a bit, here.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:Bryan Blanco, Frankie Diaz, Jonathan Blanco

Credits:Directed by Billy Corben. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:43