Movie Nation

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

Whatever the cast was paid, however much the writer-director-producer got for getting “Wrong Place, Wrong Time” finished and in the hands of Uncork’d Entertainment, we can see where the real money was for this demons-and-dumdum bullets tale.

The lady or gent who had the squibs and stage-blood concession made out like a bandit. Bags and bags of the stuff gushes, spurts, vomits out and spills in this predictably dim dog of a thriller.

“Wrong Place” is the sort of C-movie where a drug kingpin growls at his “mole” inside a military-trained gang of robbers-for-hire — “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right where you stand?”

The only proper comeback is “Dude, I’m SITTING. Which you can PLAINLY see!”

It’s a thriller where the anti-heroic, big-body count “hero” (Alex Ryan Brown) finishes up the five minute opening scene shootout/massacre of cops and FBI agents during one robbery by kneeling before a kid, covered in blood spattered on him by the dead and dying, and says “Look at me. I want you to remember this, ALL of it! Don’t run from the pain!”

Why bill the state for counseling?

And its’ the sort of thriller in which the gang, punching into a supposed safe house where there’s this key code and drive they need to recover. Instead, they find women and children tied up. A guy named Luther shows up. He calmly says “Take whatever you want” and then “please LEAVE.”

Because Luther isn’t what he seems. Actually, he’s exactly what he seems. We can see it. Even the name sounds just enough like “Lucifer” to give the game away. The prolific creator of this, Justin Price (“The Elf,””Snare,””Forsaken” etc.) isn’t exactly subtle.

Blood, gore, the dead become the undead and demons check in and boy, Special Ops training never prepared anybody for this.

If you like your horror dripping in blood, with the occasional well-turned-out-actress bathed in it, by all means, go for it.

Me? I’d give this hardcore/stupidcore horror a hard pass.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence and lots of it, gore

Cast: Alex Ryan Brown, Franziska Schissler, Mike Markoff, Chase Garland, Olivia Rivera and Bianca Stein.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Justin Price. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:25

The story of how Stanley Kubrick selected his subject for the “horror movie” he wanted to make goes like this. He’d send his secretary out to book stores after work every night. And the next day she’d sit in the outside office, listening to the “thump thump thump” against his door as he’d start a book, get a page or three in, and hurl the paperback against that door.

When the thumping stopped, she poked her head in and saw him reading and making notes from Stephen King’s “The Shining.”

Actress and singer Eartha Kitt told of how she and Orson Welles would settle on a film to watch when they were dating in Paris in the ’50s. They’d buy a ticket, duck in, and bail to run off to another theater — all over town, keeping a taxi waiting — until they found something worth sitting all the way through.

Those anecdotes come to mind while trying to labor through “First Signal,” a no-budget sci-fi outing now up on assorted streaming PPV platforms. The thumping on the door never stops here, and Eartha and Orson have already taxied off into the Paris night.

It’s damned near unwatchable.

“Signal” is a top-down view of how the news that “We’re being watched” is handled, a bunch of actors playing the president, top military and civilian advisors and others, haggling over potential “ridiculous Freedom of Information Act” requests and not letting the public know that aliens have satellites and maybe observers on the planet’s surface.

Contrary to the photo above, the vast majority of the 102 minutes of run time is in a drab, generic and underpopulated “conference room” at a G7 meeting that the president (Wendy Hartman) has been yanked from to be given this momentous news.

As the film opens with a Carl Sagan quote, it’s worth pointing out how “First Signal” goes completely wrong at the moment of conception. The best films that capture that first hint that we’re “not alone” make such a scene tense and spine-tingling. Think of “Contact” or even the Charlie Sheen “alien threat” thriller “The Arrival.”

Quick show of hands — who wants to see a movie where allegedly Top Security Clearance characters have to explain away why they’re not using Power Point for this presentation? Who wants to see a meeting with a civilian advisor (Conor Timmis) dressed like a Bond villain who shops at T.J. Maxx?

And no, before you go there, “First Signal” is not so bad it’s “fun.” It just isn’t.

“Primer” and “Safety Not Guaranteed” and the Spanish “Time Crimes” are proof that you don’t need big money to make sci fi that plays.

A plot with all the potential for drama left out, deathly dull dialogue, flat performances, ugly locations, the works.

If only Eartha and Orson were here to drag me off to another movie in another cinema, another movie.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Paul Noonan, Conor Timmis, Wendy Hartman 

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mark Lund. A Zone 5 release on Amazon Prime, Google Play etc.

Running time: 1:42

“Duty Free” is a featherlight feel-good documentary about a broke son’s efforts to give something back to his equally-broke mother when she loses her job.

Here are the heart-tugging “hooks” to this Mother’s Day gift. Rebecca Danigelis is an English immigrant, a single mom. The job she lost, the one that supported them, was cleaning hotel rooms or supervising their cleaning, for 40 years. She sent one son, Sian-Pierre Regis, to college and he became a freelance journalist for CNN and other outlets, and she supports an older son who lives in a group home with other independent but mentally-ill adults.

And when she was forced out of that job, Mom was 75.

As Rebecca lives in Boston, one of America’s most expensive cities, and her son works (mostly) for CNN, it’s not like he can just float her, write her a check to prop her up (if you know what CNN pays). He watched the way her employer found an excuse to push her out the door and sees her difficulty in lining up a new job at 75 to supplement her Social Security and wonders how he can help her “attack this next stage in life.”

His brainstorm? Crowd-fund her bucket list, all the things she never got to do or couldn’t afford to do, and then film it for a cute Mother’s Day card of a documentary.

“To be a mother, you always put your kids first,” Rebecca says. Maybe Sian-Pierre can put her first, for once.

With him wired into the media world, the fund-raising was media-assisted, as was the promoting of this film.

And as the son hears her decide what she’s always wanted to do — from the mundane and cheap (“Take a hip hop dance class.”) to the cutesy and semi-exotic (“Sky diving in Hawaii.”) — he gives the impression that he’s just learning about her first marriage, a cancer diagnosis that caused her to give up her daughter for adoption in Britain.

So we hear her explain the decision to give up that daugher, and see her tearful reunion with her daughter and the other survivors of her British family.

Every so often, our director-fundraiser-narrator lets on that what happened to his mother is not unique as she fields donations and fan letters from across America and the world (again, media-connections pay off). It’s called “ageism,” but I don’t hear the word cross his lips.

While the very existence of “Duty Free” points to the fact that hard-working American seniors are facing a retirement they can’t afford, that our “social safety net” has fallen woefully behind the rest of the world, there’s no “journalism” here about that elephant in the room either.

And how does a journalist know so little about his mother’s past? How does he mention those cold facts and leave them hanging there?

To get mean about it, our ever-smiling, self-promoting “lifestyle-and-culture” haircut-changing on-air TV host isn’t really illuminating a problem. He’s papering over it and getting a lot of free travel for himself and Mom as he does.

Ageism is a very big deal and a serious American civil rights shortcoming. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid aren’t enough to ensure a comfortable retirement. Talking about it in all the TV interviews ABOUT the film while your somewhat vapid movie all-but-ignores it doesn’t cut it.

The “happy ending” of his movie is more sobering than uplifting, and might be the only pointed-messaging in all of “Duty Free.” Mom finds another job — at 78.

That’s not to say “Duty Free” isn’t worth a look, maybe with your mother, this Mother’s Day. But maybe the broader subject needed a more journalistic second set of eyes, someone willing to ask hard questions and get answers.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Rebecca Danigelis, Sian-Pierre Regis

Credits: Directed and narrated by Sian-Pierre Regis.

Running time: 1:13

They’re pitching this doc as a Mother Day’s winner.

Making a doc about Mom’s loss of a job? A real Hollywood move. Looks adorbs.

The rise of exercise “stars” in the ’80s appears to be the backdrop of this Rose Byrne “plucky and leotarded” dramedy. It’s coming out June 18 on Apple TV+.

As no-budget horror comedies about witchcraft go, “Bad Witch” isn’t half-bad.

The implication that it’s half-good is a hill worth dying on, so let’s see if I can make this case.

It’s about an aimless, slacker witch. Think of Xander, wryly played by Chris Kozlowski, as a Black Arts Bro. Just be sure you call him “witch.”

Oh, like a warlock! “No. A witch.”

So you’re like a wizard or something? “No. A WITCH.”

He’s bedded one willing but spoken-for woman too many and gotten punished by the torch, pitchfork and carve “WITCH” on your chest crowd. So he’s ready to give up dark magic. Time to crash on pal Henry’s (screenwriter James Hennigan) sofa, watch some TV. Maybe get a job.

“Got any experience?” “No.”

“Like working with people?” “Nope.”

Dishwasher it is, then. That’s how he meets bullied nerd Roland (Jackson Trent), gets mixed up in his love life and gets him interested in spells that will turn jocks (Jonathan Helwig) into walking zits and teen angels (Clare Lefebure) into nerd-fans.

The makeup effects include gross results of spells, and Xander’s own deterioration — fingernails falling out, etc. — which is what happens when witches “stop using.” Well done.

Xander’s flippant treatment of his special powers amuses, as does his refusal to realize his risky lifestyle “choice.”

“It’s not like I ever made the news,” he complains to Henry, his idea of “low profile.”

“This isn’t Salem,” he reminds one and all, before blowing the joke by over-explaining it. “Nobody’s gonna put us on trial for witchcraft.”

The acting in indie-film just-cute-enough, with Kozlowski bringing a fun swagger to Xander.

The one-liners could use some work, the plot and assorted scenes a bit of workshopping. “Slacker” here also refers to the story, which drifts along when it should bounce.

“Not half bad” sounds better than “half bad” But either way, it’s still better than most low-budget horror comedies.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast:  Chris Kozlowski, Jackson Trent, Clare Lefebure, Jonathan Helwig and James Hennigan

Credits: Directed by Victor Fink and Joshua Land, script by James Hennigan. A Mind in Motion release.

Running time: