Movie Nation

Imagine the nerds from “The Big Bang Theory” stumbling into the plot of “Taken,” or pretty much any Liam Neeson out-for-revenge thriller. Now imagine them Danish.

That’s “Riders of Justice,” the dark, bloody, sweet and sometimes hilarious comic thriller from Anders Thomas Jensen. He scripted the Oscar-winning “In a Better World,” which had similar messaging about cycles of violence.

That’s what this is about. A bike is stolen, a girl (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) can’t get to school. Her mother (Anne Birgitte Lind) has to drive her, only the car won’t start. And then her husband (Mads Mikkelsen) calls from Afghanistan, where he’s deployed. His tour has been extended.

That’s how they decide to play hooky for the day. That’s how they ended up on the train. That’s where the newly-fired statistician/mathematician Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) surrenders his seat. And when the train crashes, that seat is where Mom dies.

It’s a terrible tragedy, “not terrorism” officials assure a worried nation. But first Otto, and then his even odder partner Lennart (Lars Brygmann) start adding in variables, as is their wont. Another crash victim was a member of the ironically-named white supremacist biker gang, “Riders of Justice.” He was due to testify in court. His lawyer died, too.

“There are too many indications that this wasn’t an accident,” Otto pleads to the police, who blow him off.

So what do Otto and Lennart do? They go see the teenager who just lost her mother. They talk to her dad and tell him what they’ve theorized. Markus (Mikkelsen) hasn’t been much comfort to Mathilde. He won’t mourn, won’t let her believe she’ll see Mom in heaven.

But get him more proof about that one “suspicious passenger.” Get him a name. THIS is something Markus can do. “Get me close” and let vengeance rain down upon these “Riders.”

Nicolas Bro plays the third nerd, morbidly-obese, borderline-Tourettes Emmenthaler. He, like his two computer compatriots, is certain that certainty is just a data point or two away, that anything is predictable and anyone can be found and studied with enough (illicit) computing power.

Where this grim tale of vengeance turns hilarious is their insistence on riding along — shocked by the violence, or eager to join in. Where it finds its heart is when these very smart, socially-awkward and emotionally-damaged geniuses find themselves adopting this family, taking an interest in Mathilde’s adjustment even if Markus won’t hear of “counseling.”

That’s OK. Lennart’s been in enough therapy that he can fake his way through sessions (Mathilde must be kept in the dark about their true “mission.”) and make informed suggestions about giving her father space, reassurances about what shock has done to her empathy and totally inappropriate cracks about her appearance.

“You’re a chubby little salami,” sounds just as funny and just as unhelpful in a body-shaming sense, in Danish.

The geniuses help the kid with her homework, teach her chess and impart wisdom about her own concerns about the awful “coincidence” that cost Mathilde her mother.

The infinite variables that enter into any “butterfly effect/cause-and-effect” scenario undercut any notion of “there’s no such thing as ‘accidents'” or arguments for a “divine plan.”

Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence, like a Danish filmmaker naming one of his nerdy heroes “Lennart,” which is damned close to a certain “Big Bang Theory” leading man’s moniker. The tutoring/bonding with the girl bits are straight out of screwball comedies like “Ball of Fire.”

The daft and the absurd intercuts with the violence in Jensen’s film, which — coincidences or not — unfolds with all the usual “vengeance thriller” tropes more or less intact. For instance, no tormented hero can walk into a bathroom without smashing a mirror. It’s the law.

Mikkelsen gives a hulking, bluff interpretation of a character who is so shut-down he can’t organize his priorities or admit that not all PTSD manifests itself on the battlefield. It’s poignant when Markus turns down professional help, offered at the hospital. It’s hilarious when Mikkelsen keeps the same dead-eyed stare with uncredentialed Lennart and even Mathilde’s “My mom’s a psychotherapist” teen boyfriend (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt) offer theirs.

Kaas (of “Child 44”), Brygmann (“The Professor and the Madman”) and Bro (“Small Town Killers”) make a most engaging and flawed brainy trio to have tag-along with our “man with very particular skills.”

These characters, like our man-of-violence and his daughter, have personal journeys to make.

Hollywood treats the road to revenge as straight, narrow and bloody. With “Riders of Justice,” Jensen considers the myriad other places such a path can lead and finds regret, heart and humor along the way.

MPA Rating: unrated, very violent, profanity

Cast:  Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Andrea Heick Gadeberg, Lars Brygmann, Nicolas Bro and Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt

Credits: Scripted and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen. A Magnolia/Magnet release. (May 21).

Running time: 1:56

“Citizen Penn” is a documentary about Sean Penn‘s path from Oscar-winner, tabloid target and sometimes hectoring political activist to a humanitarian aid worker of the first order, a Hollywood star who has turned his celebrity into a magnet for drawing media attention to human and environmental disasters.

It’s one of those movies that folks who’ve made up their mind about Penn based on comedian mockery and Fox News “enemy of the state/useful idiot” labeling will never bother to watch.

Still, as it premieres on Discovery+ (May 6), maybe some enraged hater or three will stumble across it and maybe soften their views on his very serious, very public charity work, something most of the media and much of the country has already done.

“Citizen Penn” is built upon archival news coverage — an opening montage summarizes his Oscar win, his assorted tabloid moments with Madonna and others — on footage gathered by a trusted friend and fellow aid worker in Haiti, and a long sit-down interview. with the filmmaker.

Penn uses the film the way he promotes his major charity, which started life as J/P HRO (Jenkins/Penn Haiti Relief Organization). He accepts the spotlight, then takes it and points it at the work and the many others in league with him carrying it out — doctors, volunteers, Haitian officials and members of the U.S. military. He names names and filmmaker Don Hardy (Penn narrated Hardy’s 2008 doc “Witch Hunt”) shows the faces of those Penn celebrates and honors as heroes of the struggle to provide help in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake that flattened the country, and the hurricane that threatened to flatten it again.

“The best humanitarian aid organization ever built is the United States military,” Penn declares, showing how his team, thrown together in the days after that January of 2010 cataclysm, eventually embedded with the Army. When the Army was withdrawn, J/P HRO took over feeding, doctoring, organizing and relocating some 60,000 Haitians who moved onto an abandoned golf course in the days after the quake.

The film is dominated by on-the-scene/ground-eye-view footage of the disaster, with J/P HRO using Penn’s name and face and connections to get help, on the spot, to those who needed it.

We see an actor widely-condemned for buddying up to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez recall putting in a call to Chavez for the first thing he heard Haiti was in desperate need of — morphine for pain relief in the overwhelmed, triage-centered hospitals.

“An actor in Hollywood knows how to find drugs,” he jokes. But 350,000 vials of painkillers?

They fly into Haiti with thousands of Chinese water-purifiers, which they distribute to churches and train aid workers to operate in the early days of the disaster.

And they interrupt a U.S. Army Lt. Colonel’s morning shave to scope out their chopper friendly, logistics-mastered base of operations, and throw in their lot with him and his men. When the Army — some 22,000 U.S. troops were sent to help by then-President Obama — withdrew, that Lt. Col. and Penn “persuaded” the Army to leave the fully-equipped hospital tent they were running for Penn’s charity to operate.

Weeks and months went by and the media coverage moved on. But here was Anderson Cooper, “stunned” to see Penn & Co still there, still at it months later.

Those months — which moved from triage to civil engineering, getting a rubble-filled street in an abandoned district cleared — turned into years and then into something permanent, building a Haitian civilian conversation corps to plant trees and start dealing with the island’s deforestation and environmental degradation, which make every disaster there worse.

The film’s more personal touches range from a day and night sprint through Port au Prince, looking for diphtheria serum to save one newly-diagnosed child from disease, a broken social safety net and indifference — a vast stockpile of medicines and aid that no one had organized to distribute — to Penn’s amusingly blunt fund-raising appeals in an annual Hollywood charity gala.

“I get worse and worse at it,” he confesses with a laugh, owning up to his rep as a guy whose intensity about his causes rivals the intensity he shows on screen. He’s always breaking the cardinal rule of humanitarian charity fund-raising, something public speaking clips here amply demonstrate.

“Don’t bum out the crowd” if you want them to donate.

The most revealing material in “Citizen Penn” might be his own doubts about the limits of what one charity can do in the face of a catastrophe of this scale. He notes that keeping his eyes on the ground and faces in front of them, solving one problem, getting help to another day’s traumatized victims, let him believe “the ‘big picture’ is fixable.”

And then he gets into a helicopter and sees the destruction spread far and wide and realizes that he has no idea what they’re all up against.

“Citizen Penn” isn’t a wholly balanced portrait of the “do gooder” star and humanitarian. It flirts with turning towards hagiography, here and there.

But what it manages to get across is that dismissing Penn and his passion for philanthropy of this sort is a mistake, that he’s sincere, committed to the long game., and an impatient man-of-action pretty good at articulating why you should pitch in, too, in whatever way works.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Sean Penn, Cécile Accilien, Anderson Cooper, Ann Lee, many others

Credits: Scripted and directed by Don Hardy. A Discovery+ (May 6) release.

Running time: 1:32

It’s established fact that “time travel” is the best plot to lean on if you want to make sci-fi on an indie film budget.

“Cerebrum” is a twisty, confusing time bending tale of a son (Christian James) who walks into his estranged father’s (James Russo) memory-digitizing scheme for beating Alzheimer’s.

Dad is sure this DIY gear at his rural, desert-country lab will work. Will son Tom try it out?

“I don’t want to fry my brain,” Tom complains. But eventually he relents — for a price, a cash price.

But there’s also the way these memories can be retrieved, inside another person’s body. Tom is sometimes Tom, and sometimes he’s father Kirk (Russo).

It would take a helluva acting job to pull that off, and a better script to make that dilemma and those distinct points of view compelling.

As the story takes us back to the father’s past, and gives us glimpses of the future, Tom’s concerns grow as he sees Dad’s video diary and sees “video of me strangling you.” Crime enters the equation and memories become as mixed-up as our notion of who it is we’re seeing in this given scene.

Long review short, “Cerebrum” isn’t much fun to sit through and isn’t smart enough to compensate for that.

It’s sci-fi on a budget, but it’s not the budget that kills it. It’s the script.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Christian James, James Russo, Alexxis Lemire, Andy Pisharody and John Ruby

Credits: Directed by Arvi Ragu, script by Arvi Ragu and Gary D. Houk. An SP release.

Running time: 2:01

Could a Rainer Werner Fassbinder become a star filmmaker today?

That’s a question that comes to mind in the scruffy, seamy but accurate portrait of him that emerges from “Enfant Terrible,” director Oscar Roehler’s film biography of the wunderkind of the New German Cinema of the late 60s and ’70s.

Mercurial, narcissistic, impulsive and violent, he used and abused — sometimes physically –actors, colleagues and lovers alike. #MeToo would have nailed him to a tree, although one can picture him laughing maniacally as it happened.

He worked impressionist-painter fast, filming his symbolic, sometimes sloppy melodramas in mere days, writing and directing as many as seven films in a year, plowing through TV series the same way.

And he wasn’t overly fond of editing. His movies and especially his epic 14 episode/15 and a half hour TV adaptation of “Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)” are often as famous for their epic length as their sometimes overtly-theatrical explorations of bourgeois, fascist-at-its-core Germany, homosexuality, violence and loneliness.

The digital era might have given Fassbinder a more modest, “viral” version of the niche he enjoyed in his heyday — a festival and critical darling, subsidized, celebrated abroad and infamous at home.

The fact that his name rarely comes up these days speaks volumes, too. Werner Herzog is the most famous among that class of German filmmakers, living long enough to become beloved.

Oliver Masucci, who played Hitler in the dark farce “Look Who’s Back (Er ist wieder da),” makes a riveting Fassbinger, another raving, tirade-prone tyrant, bullying everything in his path.

We meet him — already paunchy and wearing the leather jacket, biker boots and walrus mustache that became his trademark — just as he stages the coup that allowed him to take over Munich’s Action-Theater troupe in 1967. He makes his fellow thespians into film actors and slaps the actress meant to be his muse, Hanna Schygulla (Frida-Lovisa Hamann) because he’s too arrogant to have ever learned how to stage-slap.

“This is FILM, not theatre,” he grouses (in German with English subtitles). Then he tells “Martha,” as she’s called here “One day, I’ll make you famous.” He kept that promise.

“Enfant Terrible” tracks, with indifferent thoroughness, the 15 years that followed; the politics that inspired the terrorism of the era, the communal living arrangements that kept Fassbinder surrounded by the actors, designers, producers and others whom he used and abused to crank out 50 or so films and plays during that time.

He began in the avante garde, imitating Brecht and his hero, French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. The “Enfant” cites Welles and 1950s melodramas-with-a-message icon Douglas Sirk as his influences, and eventually, that’s where his cinema turned.

Masucci’s Fassbinder only shows vulnerability with the male and female lovers he often seduces with film role offers — the Afro-German Gunther (Michael Klammer), the Tunisian-born El Hedi ben Salem (Erdal Yildiz), star of his breakout film, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” among them.

Even they would be bullied and abused, in time. A couple ended up killing themselves.

He throws Hitlerian tantrums — a comparison born of the shared bug-eyed, spitting excesses and harshness of their language — threatens most everybody he works with, none more than his closest collaborators.

“I like to provoke,” he confesses. “Otherwise, nothing happens.”

And he tries to shrug off the fame, when it comes, recognizing that his very personal art is what matters even as he has the last laugh on those who dismissed him at first.

“You have to go where it hurts. I always go where it hurts. In life and in films.”

Director Roehler (“Punk Berlin 1982”) concocted the story with screenwriter Klaus Richter and makes no attempt at showing us a simple chronology of Fassbinder’s life and career. We see snippets of an early film created and shot, and glimpses of “Ali,” “Lola,” “Whity” and others as they’re being made.

We meet a few of the lovers, see his defiantly omnivorous sexuality and his notoriously “out” visit to New York in the late ’70s, cruising the gay bars as a famous and unapologetic international film figure.

And we’re treated to the sight of his self-destruction, the drug abuse that took center stage in the last years of a life lived with zero self-control.

Masucci’s intensely charismatic Fassbinder, bathed in cigarette smoke, working “26 hour days” even before the cocaine and barbiturate addictions that took over later, looks like walking death the moment we meet him. That lets “Enfant Terrible” reinforce the suspicion that Fassbinder is more famous for his excesses than his films, 40 years after his death.

Herzog may be the Grand Old Man of the New German Cinema. Outside of older film buffs, who still talks about Wim Wenders, Margarethe von Trotta, Wolfgang Petersen and Volker Schlöndorff today?

But only Fassbinder, leather-loving, Village People-inspiring “bad boy,” the ’70s cinema’s “Enfant Terrible,” has inspired a pretty good/true-in-spirit biopic, one that takes us back to an ugly era and one of the uglier artistic success stories of from it.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sex

Cast:  Oliver Masucci, ,Lucas Gregorowicz, Jochen Schropp, Katja Riemann Anton Rattinger, Michael Klammer and Erdal Yildiz

Credits: Directed by Oskar Roehler, script by Klaus Richter. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 2:15

“The Human Factor” aims to be a sort of “how we got here” depiction of the impasse in efforts to obtain peace between Israel, the Palestinians and Syrians in the Middle East.

Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh (“Sharon,” “The Gatekeepers”) limits its scope to the decade when seemingly meaningful treaties were signed, and even more meaningful ones seemed within reach — the 1990s.

There’s validity in at least some of that narrowed focus. His interviewees celebrate tantalizingly near-run-things with the Bush I administration and poker-player James Baker’s bluffs, explain the role the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin had in stopping everything cold as that led to the rise of the dogmatic and authoritarian Bibi Netanyahu, and discuss how the aging/dying of Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad and the Palestinian Authority’s Yasser Arafat stopped progress at other times.

The film begins with Baker’s 1991-92 push, and climaxes with the failed Camp David summit of the summer of 2000.

But as Moreh skips past 9/11, Bush II and Obama efforts to break the gridlock and gives us a clip of Trump promising more than Netanyahu was ever going to allow at a press conference that the various “peace team” Americans describe as “farce,” you grasp the myopia of it all.

At one point, Moreh notes that almost every interview subject, every member he talks to from that State Department “peace team” is, like himself, Jewish. For just a moment, he and the person on camera he is speaking to consider the optics of that. Forget the later suggestion that these negotiators have been or are at least have let themselves be perceived as “acting like Israel’s lawyers.” Actually, you can’t forget that.

“You are biased,” Moreh declares off-camera, to a little bit of hemming and hawing about “everybody’s biased” from this mediator and “Well, I’m not an OBSERVANT Jew” from that one.

We can only imagine how that plays to the other parties in Middle East peace talks. Because Moreh doesn’t talk to anybody from the Palestinian Authority or from Jordan, Egypt or from any of the surviving Secretaries of State or presidents who invested so much of themselves in this time-and-money-and-soul-sucking “process.”

That’s not to say the bleeding ulcer that has been the Arab-Israeli can be laid at the feet of those who provide the continuity between administrations, as Bush I failed to get re-elected and “get a deal,” as Clinton’s team botched early efforts to get Syria and Israel to sign on the dotted line and then staged a summit with no concrete goals as Clinton was a lame duck.

But perhaps there’s somebody in Palestine or Jordan or Lebanon or Egypt who might say, if asked, “Maybe they needed to change up the ‘peace team,’ diversify it or at least bring in new blood.”

Because the current gridlock, with Israel altering the geography with West Bank Settlements and Israeli voters backing the extremists who demonized and then murdered Rabin, isn’t going away.

The ’90s timeline that Moreh presents is memory jogging and sad. But despite his investment in the outcome of these efforts and his earnest attempts to show what went wrong and how, his film’s monotonous one-sidedness can leave the viewer frustrated, with fewer answers than 100+ minutes of questions should have provided.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Dennis Ross, Gamal Helal, Aaron Miller, Martin Indyk

Credits: Written and directed by Dror Moreh. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:48

“Ondine” is one of those Irish dramedies that you see as you’re scrolling down this or that streaming menu (Roku, Tubi, etc. have it) and you wonder, “Haven’t I seen that?”

It’s a sea sprite romance — “Selkies,” they’re called. A little of bit “The Secret of Roan Inish,” the animated “Song of the Sea” and the like.

And it’s the sort of movie you see mentioned on blogs of a “Whatever happened to Colin Farrell?” nature, although Farrell’s still around, still doing good work even in bad movies (“Voyagers”).

A better query might be “Whatever happened to Neil Jordan?” Ireland’s quixotic if somewhat mainstream director is best known for “The Crying Game,” “The Brave One” and “Michael Collins,” but too-often associated with obscure pictures like this one, “Byzantium” and “Greta,” movies with quality casts and something to offer. It’s just that they didn’t offer much to very many people.

But back to this bit of dark whimsy. Farrell plays Syracuse, master and owner of the trawler Lucy B in tiny Castletown, Eire, a fisherman known by the locals as “Circus.” He’s a onetime circus clown, unlucky at love, a recovering alcoholic, father of a little girl with kidney failure and not exactly a thriving fisherman.

Until the day this stunning young woman (Alicja Bachleda) turns up in his net.

We used to know two great truths about most Colin Farrell movies going in — that if he could manage it, he’d do the Johnny Depp thing and avoid a haircut or a serious scrubbing down. And a Colin Farrell character has but one response to something of a jaw-dropping nature, like finding some soaking wet siren with a strange accent in his trawl net.

“JAY-zus!”

Circus is shocked, dismayed, panicked as he tries to revive this 20something in a soggy, short cut dress. And when she refuses a hospital and hides from other boats, he can only wonder.

“Are ye one of those ASYLUM seekers?” Maybe she swam from the Med in the Middle East. “Ondine” she calls herself. A touch poetic. And she sings.

It’s only when he’s telling his daughter Annie (Alison Barry, in one of the more adorable-precocious performances in recent screen history) that this “Once upon a time” tale as the little girl takes dialysis that he hears a more “logical” solution to the mystery.

“Is she a selkie then?”

Annie’s a minor authority with the wherewithal to become a library-trained expert on the subject. And when she finally meets Da’s “water baby,” holed up at his mother’s old cottage, she proceeds to tell the rescued woman about the mermaid-like selkies and their “seal coat” and the “seven tears” that can tie them to “a landsman” for “seven years” should she fall in love.

As Ma (Dervla Kerwan) is a surly unrepentant alcoholic, Annie would like Da to have somebody new in his life. Ondine is “good luck.” When she sings, lobsters crowd his traps and all sorts of fish fill his net — even salmon, “which you never catch trawling.”

“Circus” has but one person to seek counsel from, the whimsical priest (Stephen Rea) who suffers Circus treating confession as “an AA meeting,” but does what he can.

As Circus and his no-longer-hidden new “water baby” friend turn heads, threats to their world come from both supernatural and all-too-natural means.

Jordan immerses us in this tiny world of overcast skies, lush greens and a salty damp you can almost taste. The characters are fully-formed, even the not-that-bad new man in Annie’s mom’s life.

Annie’s a smart kid, quoting “Alice in Wonderland” (“Curiouser and curiouser!”) and using words like “quotidian” in the proper context. But as someone with “special needs,” she’s not above letting the rough kids mess around with her new electric wheelchair just to impress them and curry favor.

Farrell and Rea’s scenes have an easy, bemused rapport.

And Farrell plays his moments around this young woman who may or may not be of supernatural origin in properly gobsmacked shades.

Acting is a profession that feeds insecurities and invites harsh body image judgements on one and all. Vanity enters into it, too. If Bachleda is ever unsure of her gifts in that regard, all she needs to do is screen “Ondine.” Back in 2008-9 she made an unutterably gorgeous sea sprite, whatever the accent.

The movie is something of a mixed bag, twee and sweet when it’s dabbling in fantasy, hard and jarring when it turns “quotidian.”

But director Jordan and Farrell, Rea, Barry and Bachleda keep it interesting and charming, even if its grand mystery is one we can write off as “all wet.”

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some violence, sensuality and brief strong language 

Cast: Colin Farrell, Alicja Bachleda, Alison Barry, Dervla Kirwan and Stephen Rea.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Neil Jordan, a Magnolia release on many streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:50

I submit that even at this late date, with director Stanley Kubrick long parked near the top of the cinematic pantheon, that we’re allowed to watch at least the first 20 minutes of the first jewel in his crown, “The Killing,” thinking “this isn’t all that.”

Voice-over narration, the crutch of many a hack and the bane of “let the pictures tell the story” guys like Kubrick, over-explains and dumbs down the movie to an almost irredeemable degree. It was added over Kubrick’s objections.

The tropes of many a gangster movie and heist picture — “assembling the team” (a collection of heavies), machine gun in a violin case and later tucked into a delivery box of long-stemmed roses — are trotted out. It’s only on reflection that we wonder if Kubrick wasn’t the first to think of the flower box bit, and other touches, way back in 1955.

The folding-in of second unit racetrack and stock footage isn’t seamlessly handled and the multiple points-of-view versions of the heist — a $2 million robbery at a California horse track — has a clumsiness about it that others (Tarantino in “Reservoir Dogs”) managed to improve on.

But about 20 minutes in, when race track cashier George, played by the iconic “little man” of many a crime drama Elisha Cook Jr., gets slapped around because his greedy, unfaithful wife (Marie Windsor) has been caught eavesdropping on the gang’s plans, “The Killing” takes off, pulls us in and earns its reputation as an inspiration to generations and the landmark thriller it is seen as today.

Classic films are always overwhelmed by their legend and the details-cluttered back-story of how they got made. Skipping over all that, ignoring the whole Rodney Dangerfield “cameo” in the brawl scene and the first of Kubrick’s uses of actor Joe Turkel, the simple evidence of what’s on the screen still holds the eye and fires the imagination.

Casting a genuine he-man among Hollywood’s “movie stars,” Sterling Hayden, pays the flintiest of dividends. As Johnny, fresh out of Alcatraz, he’s believably pitiless about abusing men in the gang, and women, and plotting a heist that depends on a strongman chess player he knows (Kola Kwariani) busting up a bar and getting arrested and an ex-military sniper (Timothy Carey, superb) killing a prized racehorse to throw a race’s results into turmoil and buy the time necessary to empty the safe in the cash counting room.

Kubrick populated his picture with mugs straight out of Hollywood’s “hard boiled” character actor collection — “faces” like Jay C. Flippen, Cooke and Ted de Corsia (playing a crooked cop).

The women (Windsor and Colleen Gray as Johnny’s “girl”) are merely stock “types,” but leave impressions.

And the heist itself, with a couple of track insiders in on the deal, a lot of moving parts dependent on precise timing, is still a clockwork marvel, even if it doesn’t hold up to intense scrutiny.

You don’t have to be a “Room 237” level Kubrick fanatic to pick up on the filmmaker’s attention to detail, his growing obsession with mise en scene, often masquerading as carelessness.

I mean, even in 1955 a hulking tough (Hayden) seen toting a violin case would raise a “made man” eyebrow. Your Turturro-vulpine sharpshooter is the most conspicuous guy at the track, driving a two-tone MG-TD roadster with a showy Jaguar hood-ornament, and doing the shooting from the seat of the roadster. Let’s not fret too much over that “omnipotent” shotgun wielded by rival robber Vince Edwards.

And $2 million in mostly $10 and $20 bills? That would weigh over 500 pounds. Your strong-man starting the bar fight would have been the only one with a prayer of toting it, with or without the battered suitcase Johnny deems appropriate to hold the loot.

But the harsh, ugly exteriors and low-light interiors and brooding shadows in screen veteran Lucien Ballard’s cinematography (“True Grit,” “The Wild Bunch,” “The Getaway”) set the tone.

Lapdogs as foreshadowing, a femme fatale, “nobody knows what anybody else” has to do with their scheme, a little moment of cross-racial understanding in the track parking lot (James Edwards plays the attendant) that will be Nikki the shooter’s undoing — for an 85 minute genre picture that United Artists basically abandoned, there’s a lot to chew on here.

That’s what’s always been the great appeal of burrowing into The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick (the first book of film criticism and scholarship I ever bought, followed by Alexander Walker’s Kubrick tome). There’s minutia here, details that have long attracted chess obsessives, literary deconstructionists, coin, stamp or comic book collection “completists” and the like.

The movies may have their miscalculations and flaws, like the cinema of Welles, Ford, Bigelow and Lee. But taken as a whole, they’re an insight into an artist’s thought processes and obsessions, even the misfires.

I used to think Kubrick was a filmmaker film fans matured out of, like heavy metal, Marvel comics or a devotion to the works of Ayn Rand. OK, I still think that to some degree.

But his classic films are aging better than most, even the weakest links are worth knowing, inside-and-out, because of all the filmmakers who followed who imitate him, worship him and, as artists, pound the same nail, over and over again.

MPA Rating: Approved

Cast: Sterling Hayden, Maureen Windsor, Colleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Timothy Carey, Jay C. Flippen, Kola Kwariani, Ted de Corsia, Joe Turkel and Elisha Cook Jr.

Credits: Directed by Stanley Kubrick, script by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson, based on a novel by Lionel White.

Running time: 1:25

Olympia Dukakis passed away today in her New York home, her family has announced.

The Oscar winning star of *Moonstruck,” theater legend and acting “force of nature” was 89.

I got to talk with her a few times over the years, brassy and holding her own with her fractious “Steel Magnolias” co-stars, following her around as she gave pep talks to acting classes at the U.N.C. School of the Arts, and for one of her later films.

Sweet lady, regal when the mood strick her, a grande dame of stage and screen.

A fun documentary on her life came out just a couple of months back.

The thing about the past, America’s historian David McCullough once told me, is “those folks never knew, at the time, how things would turn out.”

That’s worth keeping in mind in recreating any nation’s “storied” history, especially when it comes to World War II. As “Into the Darkness,” the first film in a planned trilogy about Denmark during the war, reminds us, there’s a lot more to it than the famous rescue of Denmark’s Jews, celebrated the world over as an example of the Scandinavian country’s innate decency and humanity. There was heroism, as well as opportunism and outright collaboration, because as McCullough says, nobody there “knew how things would turn out.”

Anders Refn, the veteran Danish editor and occasional director, frequent collaborator with Lars von Trier, brother of director Peter Refn and father to filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, gives us a stately, posh and polished bourgeois account of those years with this epic.

It’s a Danish “Downton Abbey,” with just as much money (only some of it inherited), with no noble titles and fewer servants but with genuine class warfare. There’s shooting and sabotage because there are actual life and death stakes to be dealt with every day with the enemy right at the door, and sometimes invited in for dinner and cocktails.

The story centers around the Stov family, whose fortune is tied up in their Copenhagen electronics company. We meet them on the day patriarch Karl (Jesper Christensen, a regular in the Daniel Craig Bond films) and matriarch Eva (Bodil Jørgensen of “In a Better World”) are feted at their 25th wedding anniversary.

The singing’s just finished when Dornier bombers thunder over, dropping leaflets. It’s 1940, and Germany is occupying Denmark without having to fire a shot.

The family, which includes military son Michael (Gustav Dyekjær Giese) from Karl’s first marriage, are shocked and infuriated. Over the course of this film, some members will harden that attitude, some will soften, some will wear a swastika and one will end up sleeping with the enemy.

They have questions — “Can democracy work in an occupied country?” “Will Denmark have a Nazi government?” They have lives to live, a company to run, parties to throw and swank cars to keep up. With Germany triumphant all over Europe in 1940, a fat cat friend of Karl’s might be right when he declares (in Danish with English subtitles) “The German market is the future.” Others insist “the war will be over in a year,” and plan accordingly.

As the Klov’s kids stay in school or the Army, keep playing their jazz, or dancing to it, as the parents naively assume they can help Jewish friends of Eva make their “legal” way to Sweden (arrested instead), as Karl rationalizes that he can make a go of it with Elektronika, even after losing “the English market” and without doing business with “those people,” the years-long test becomes one of principles — of morality vs. expediency, survival and comfort.

And that’s both accurate and worth chewing on, because — back to that McCullough fellow one more time — nobody knows “how things (will) turn out.”

The “Downton Abbey” comparison suits thanks to the stately pacing, populous cast and posh tones. Arguments break out over who is befriending whom, who clicks his heels for whom, who dares to bring a U-Boat first officer home to dinner and which factory employee or servant’s son is a Bolshevik. It’s all frightfully soap-operatic (“Downton,” cough cough) until people start shooting other people and bombs are planted.

The acting is sharp enough, although with so many players few get to make much of an impression.

I’m tempted to say Refn could certainly have gotten this entire five year or so history into one film. Certainly this could have been slimmed-down and sped-up.

But without the broad canvas and deliberate storytelling style, we might lose the sense of years passing, with equivocation, moral compromises and genuine doubt about where Denmark’s values and loyalties lie brought into question.

“Darkness” provides context and nuance worth mulling as we reconsider the slow path the country took towards “Denmark’s finest hour,” probably depicted in the next film. Because unlike the folks who lived through the occupying of Europe by Nazis, we know how it turned out, and how easily things could turn that dark again.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast: Jesper Christensen, Bodil Jørgensen, Mads Reuther, Gustav Dyekjær Giese, Sara Viktoria Bjerregaard, Cyron Melville and Kathrine Thorborg Johansen.

Credits: Directed by Anders Refn, script by Flemming Quist Møller, Anders Refn. A Samuel Goldwyn release (May 21)

Running time: 2:32

“The County” is a tense and intimate Icelandic drama about a tragedy that brings a tempest in a teapot to a boil.

Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir plays Inga, a dairy farmer whose life is upended when her husband dies behind the wheel of the truck he drives as a side-hustle, just to keep the family farm going.

Dalysminni has been in Reynir’s (Hinrik Ólafsson) family for generations. But in recent years, it’s become more automated. When we meet the couple, she’s complaining about the lack of vacations, the dent they’re not able to make in their sizable “robotic barn” debt, and the prices of their local farmers’ co-op.

But we’ve seen Reynir make deliveries, and take note of where the paint he’s dropping off came from — NOT the co-op.

Oh well, he jokes-threatens (in Icelandic, with English subtitles). “You won’t be painting any more houses around here!” Not after Reynir rats them out.

This co-op has become more than a local institution, a means for its farmers to sell their milk collectively and supposedly get discounts on the things they buy at “the company store.” In 120-plus years of existence, it’s become a hydra-headed monster, over-charging, underpaying and making versions of the “Nice little farm here. Be a shame is something HAPPENED to it” remarks to its indebted members.

Reynir bears the weight of that debt, and of his “informant” work. But as soon has he makes noise about “getting out,” he runs off the road and winds up dead in a ditch.

Inga is suspicious. The cops give her no solid answers, but their theories could point in several directions, not that they consider the co-op one of those.

Inga? She’s gutted and furious. Whatever happened, sleep/stress-deprived accident, “suicide” or something else, the “co-op” is implicated in her mind. The high-handedness of the fellow who runs it (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and the verbal bullying of his enforcer (Hannes Óli Ágústsson) drive her to distraction.

So she writes a “Mafia Co-Op” manifesto, parks it on Facebook, and lets the cow chips fall where they may.

“The County” is about a slowly-escalating feud in a Scandinavian culture where cooperation, getting along and collective thinking and action (aka “socialism”) has long been the rule.

Egilsdóttir portrays a complex swirl of emotions in Inga. She was frustrated before Reynir’s death. Inga’s grief mixes with dismay as she faces the new life. And every time she turns around, there’s the co-op, “helping” with the farm. Then cutting off her credit because it was in her husband’s name. Having to speak to director Eyjólfur (Sigurjónsson) about that is another petty infuriation.

Her manifesto, as is the way of these things — especially in movies — divides the community.

With each escalation we wonder how far this will go, right up to the closing credits. What are these people, on both sides, capable of?

Grímur Hákonarson’s film plays up this small-scale conflict, and hints around the edges at larger themes. How can a remote community and its institutions and business model survive in the age of Amazon?

Hákonarson doesn’t make the mistake Hollywood would have made in such a story. “Democracy” at its most basic is messy, the world is evolving and even the “winners” here are sure to lose, whether they continue to run “The County,” or choose to flee it.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir, Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson, Hannes Óli Ágústsson, Sigurður Sigurjónsson.

Credits: Scripted by Grímur Hákonarson. A Dekanalog release.

Running time: 1:32