Movie Nation

Yes, “Aladdin” knows parkour.

And no, Will Smith is not Middle Eastern in any way, shape or form.

Funny? Yes he is. Not Robin Williams funny, but flip and the timing is there.

The leads are as bland as ever, animated or live action. Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott are the co-stars, because really, this is all about the genie.

If I was Disney, I wouldn’t be flinging “A Whole New World” away in the the first trailer. Already sick of it, it’s over-exposed in that “Let It Go” way. Why not keep it out of earshot until the movie opens?

May 24, we’ll see how this lush, action-packed Guy Ritchie version works out.

A former colleague from his days as a Goldman Sachs investment banker is chatting with Stephen K. Bannon near the end of the new documentary about him, “The Brink.”

“People who don’t know you,” he says, will find Bannon “disarming.”

Bannon can be funny, flippant. He’s given to moments of self-deprecation about his weight, his politics and views. He doesn’t seem to lose his cool, unlike his former employer, Donald Trump. We don’t even hear him swear.

That’s the Bannon at the beginning and middle of “The Brink.” He cracks jokes during public appearances, calls his audience “deplorables,” even though most of the crowds he’s seen speaking to in Alison Klayman’s film — post 20016 election — are the very “elites” he railed against, well-heeled “country club Republicans.”

But stick with “The Brink,” our Goldman Sachs man seems to suggest. We’ll see something more.

As Klayman tracks Bannon through the whirlwind of 2017-2018, basically kicking off after Bannon was forced out of the White House when the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. blew up and Bannon’s “own it” attitude towards white nationalism became a perceived Trump weakness, to his whirlwind media tour afterwards, his triumphant holding of audiences in Europe, “organizing” or at least meeting with the far right “nationalist” parties of Britain, France, Italy, Sweden and Belgium, we get a peek at the man behind the self-described “gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk.”

How much attention was Bannon getting in 2017? Royal Family/Meghan Markle coverage. His every stop, supporting Judge Roy Moore’s Senate campaign in Alabama, his meetings with the chief cheerleader for Brexit and other far right party operators, covered by major media outlets in the U.S. and abroad.

Hell, there were even two documentaries being shot about him, almost at the same time. So hats off to Klayman for getting “The Brink” into theaters before “American Dharma,” by Oscar winning documentarian Errol Morris, reaches the viewing public.

Bannon was magnanimous, quoting Lincoln at a time when that first Republican president was at his lowest ebb and the Republic was “on the brink,” as a coping mechanism when things start to turn against him.

But by the time November of 2018 rolls around and Bannon sees the storm coming, estranged from Trump or not, frantically rallying the faithful for embattled candidates we’ve seen him meeting with to get his endorsement in the film’s first act, we get the cursing, defensive micro-manager.

Yes, there’s a documentary crew following him around, so when he’s bluntly cut to pieces on “Good Morning, Britain” — Bannon will only grin and say, “She’s tough. Tough.”

What “she” said? “If you’re a ‘fine person,’ you wouldn’t march alongside a neo-Nazi.”

He doesn’t show any temper when his own words are thrown back at him, a Guardian reporter who has done his homework contradicting his use of “dog whistle” phrases, setting up enemies as (Jewish) “globalists” and the like.

Trump taught him a lesson, Bannon says, which one can imagine the credit-stealing Trump passing off as his own, even thought P.T. Barnum coined the phrase a century ago. “There’s no such thing as bad media.”

We meet him in a cringe-worthy moment, expressing admiration for the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, which he’d visited in his previous life making a film. He’s in awe of “the German perfection” of this machine for “mass murder,” and what can only be described as frank admiration for the “people who totally detached themselves from any moral horror of it.”

“Humans can actually do this. Not devils. Humans that are just humans.”

You can see why Bannon spends so much of “The Brink” defending himself from charges of anti-Semitism, even as he works with Jewish Republicans running for Congress. The “racism” tag seems a harder sell as he cozies up to a Bannon Republican Senate candidate who happens to be black, or partners with the London chief of the Breitbart far right media site which was Bannon’s entry into Trump world.

Perhaps the film’s great moment of disconnect is when that Londoner, Brit-accented Raheem Kassam, sneers out the car window to Bannon in London — “Look around you. It is lit’rally ALL Arab stores.”

Bannon spends “lit’rally” the entire film denying that his “economic nationalism” is just old fashioned nationalism/fascism rebranded.

He makes sense when he talks about why 2016 happened, admitting that “hate” is a strong motivator when talking about the boogeymen he helped Trump identify to his “deplorables” — Clinton, and especially the Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

But Klayman, to her credit, doesn’t just observe and let him spout his worldview and “reality” of “alternate facts”. He ridicules Democrats for their black/brown/yellow/LGBT “identity politics,” and she suggests “the Deplorables” are his “identity politics” crutch.

“And your point is?”

The film glosses over Bannon’s suggestion, in Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” that Trump’s arms-length-but-colluding involvement in the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russians was “treasonous.” We see Bannon meeting with old chum and Trump insider PRESENT at that meeting, mercenary firm Blackwater founder Erik Prince, as if nothing at all happened.

We hear him go out of his way to mention the “vibe” one gets from “a church, a mosque, a temple” and how that contrasts with the poisonous atmosphere of the White House he was just kicked out of.

We hear him pound his “not a racist, a populist” message time and again, even when he’s meeting with Big Money at the Republican Society Patriot Dinner crowd at that bastion of the Unreconstructed Confederate South, The Citadel. Then he poses for selfies with a couple of fans, bull-necked white South Carolina cops.

He never explains his assault on the European Union, and there’s no overt Russian connection made to Bannon in the film. Even the European reporters, who give him a harder time than the American ones (with the occasional exception) fail to highlight what’s really behind his efforts to “weaken Europe.”

Whatever else the Harvard man might be, he’s no idiot. His candidate reached his “people” because “the elites are content with ‘managing’ our decline,” with NAFTA, the EU, trade deals and Wall Street absorb and merge mania.

Perhaps its going to take two documentaries to plumb the depths of Bannon’s persona, what drives this frump who rails against elites even as he’s serving their purposes so well. Klayman’s has an incomplete yet polished feel to it. There’s too much we don’t find out.

But Morris is going to be hard pressed to come up with a better illustration of what a dangerous figure the subject he shares with Klayman is than Klayman’s eviscerating montage of Bannon making George Soros his favorite whipping boy, eager crowds asking “Why hasn’t George Soros been arrested?” and the mailing of bombs to Soros and others, and the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

It may be all just a game to him, some late life rationalization that his “dedicated” core of unswayable Breitbart Media “deplorables” has made him matter. Getting the angry, the resentful and the armed and unhinged worked up will be his real legacy. Whatever the future of his “nationalist” wave holds, he’s already getting people killed.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Stephen K. Bannon

Credits:Directed by  Alison Klayman. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:31

“Division 19” is science fiction more to be appreciated than enjoyed.

It’s a reasonably smart, somewhat timely riff on Current Conditions rendered in a dry, slow action satire, a picture lacking a charismatic lead or much in the line of entertainment value.

In 2039, the online faces of the Resistance are mocking us for eating and staring at our cell phones, “stuffing your faces while the world burns.” The hectoring hoodie-wearing spokesman declares that “We’re gonna bring down your house and watch it burn.”

Twenty years in the future, “Anonymity is a crime,” and being “off the grid” and “unregistered” means you could officially disappear — and not just in the digital sense.

Hovering drone gunships keep watch over the cities, CCTV cameras are pretty much every where and small drones can track and trace anybody Central Control chooses to watch.

The Nanny State has taken on Nazi State totalitarianism. A drone barks through  its speaker, “Smoking is not permitted in the street…you have ten seconds” to put out your smoke and move along.

But the power here isn’t so much in elected or anointed authority. It’s in corporations, especially Panopticon Interactive. They have created the most addictive streaming reality TV of the day, tracking a prison inmate 24/7, like an incarcerated “Truman Show.”

And their public face, Nielsen (Alison Doody of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”) is dreaming bigger. In a nation where the incarceration rate long exceeded the crime rate, corporations have control of the prisons and have found fresh ways to monetize them.

That’s why Nielsen has turned Hardin Jones (Jamie Draven) into a star. He’s the unwilling, unwitting, brawling spokesmodel for product placement in prison togs. He has no idea he’s being watched.

“He’s had more drugs pumped into him than Central America,” Nielsen crows. “Crime’s down. Consumerism’s up. What’s not to like?”

Her bigger idea? “New Town,” a planned community where convicts interact with one another and the general public, watched (on your streaming device) as they “earn their way back into society.” Or don’t. By committing crimes, acts of violence on their neighbors? Maybe.

“People died building the pyramids,” she sniffs. “The price of progress!”

The Resistance, calling itself “Division 19,” has figured out how to live “off grid.” They remove the chips that allow Central Control to track you down. They change their appearance, and holing up in Greater Detroit (still mostly ruins in 2039), they can hide until their next hack, on the Federal Reserve, on Panopticon’s live-streaming Hardin’s life.

That’s when they can blurt out their manifesto and make demands. Hardin’s brother Nash (Will Rothhaar) is in their ranks, Barca (Toby Hemingway) is their spokesman.

When Barca makes demands, it’s enough to make you nod your head and then head over to Wikipedia. He hides his face in a stocking cap, points his finger and says Division 19 wants a far-reaching anti-corruption trial, reaching back several administrations to pinpoint where America went wrong. And they want a re-introduction of the Glass Steagall Act that protected the economy and the public from the greed, carelessness and depradations of bankers and Wall Street investment firms, up until it was eroded and removed prior to the Great Recession of 2008.

That’s on the money political commentary, writer-director S.A. Halewood. And you parked it right in in the middle of an exceptionally low-budget indie film.

Division 19 helps Hardin escape. The COO of Centrol Control, the would-be “president” of us all, is Premier Lyndon (Linus Roache, terrific). He’s as cynical as the latest polls allow, determined that Hardin be caught and order be restored. But Panopticon sees better ratings, more product-tie-ins and more viewer involvement (“Seen this man? Turn him in for CREDITS.”) in chasing him on his dash through the underground to the Underground.

The pursuits are reasonably well-handled, montages of aerial footage, black and white drone interior clips, fights and chases. There’s blood, and that action picture stand-by, self-surgery.

Lyndon has been sentenced to be served by a class of hipster tech nerds and trend “influencer” trackers, who appreciate the “sophisticated hive mind”  pitch of Division 19’s subversives — they include tax reforms in addition to their push against Big Banking and Wall Street.

When the youngsters start to lecture him on the predictable path this liberty and taxation insurrection is taking, he notes that what they’re talking about “The Laffer Curve.”

“How’d you KNOW that?” the childish hipsters want to know.

“Because when I was your age, YOU were being BORN.”

There are a lot of dystopian ideas crammed into this tiny movie — human organ sales, the ways privatized prisons are incentivized to both get everybody incarcerated and misuse the inmates.

“Convicts are for fighting!”

Poor neighborhoods reflect the globalization of poverty imposed by a winner-take-all economy. Detroit’s roughest corner? Favela Town.

Hardin learns the hard way that getting off the grid while you’re on the run in a cashless economy is a great way to starve. He applied for Food Stamps/

“Can you fight?” the social worker wants to know. Food Stamps are “not for you. That’s for real people. Ex-cons are for entertainment.”

The idea here is that zonked-out Hardin takes up the cause as the drugs wear off as he’s on the run. Might he become “The brain dead Messiah” he needs to be?

Well…

Casting and coherence are two serious shortcomings of “Division 19.” Other names were attached to this project at one time, and the importance of charismatic leads is sharply underlined here. Only Roache,  a veteran character actor with “Priest,” “The Wings of the Dove” and “Hart’s War” as resume highlights, brings anything like the spark this picture needs to come off. Another character player, Clarke Peters (of “The Wire” and “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”) so dazzles in a single scene or two that you wish they’d built the entire movie around these two.

But no. The leads, whatever their ability to handle fight choreography, are bland in the extreme, uninteresting to the point where the picture wilts at their mere appearance.

The Panopticon boast about their “adopt a convict” streaming show, “Drama’s never been so real,” was never going to be the tagline for “Division 19.” The plot is top heavy with ideas, and the only three witty lines in the thing I’ve quoted above.

But as great scripts attract great talent, you can see the conundrum the financial backers and the writer-director found themselves in — a script, cast and movie trapped in the second division.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast:Will Rothhaar, Jamie Draven, Alison Doody, Linus Roache, Lotte Verbeek, Clarke Peters

Credits: Written and directed by S.A. Halewood. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:33

It’s a sixth grade “Superbad” rolling out just as the little darlings are back in school. Which they’ll have to sneak out of to sneak INTO an R-rated — dirty, drug content etc — comedy.

Totally appropriate that Seth Rogen introduces this Aug. 16 release’s red band trailer for “Good Boys.”

Put your headphones on, as this is NSFW and not something you want to be listening to in a public library, for instance.

They disembarked their trains — some of them, the foreigners — well-heeled, serenaded by a string quartet, assured their luggage would arrive later — “Everything will be safe.”

German officers in their crisp, grey uniforms, smiled beneath the red swastika banners and only deigned to hide their contempt once the train and its better off passengers arrived.

Jewish clerks, luggage handlers and translators hustled everyone to and fro as a public address system crackled out “Welcome to Sobibor, your new home!” announcements, a place where they would “work diligently and live in dignity.

Of course, the kapos — the clerks doing the lying for the Germans — knew the truth. So did any local and most Poles sent to Sobibor. Nobody here gets out alive.

Just enough people knew the truth and lived long enough to do something about it to ensure Sobibor’s place in Holocaust history, the death camp that gave birth to the largest uprising by Jewish concentration camp detainees of World War II.

Actor and director Konstantin Khabenskiy of the “Night Watch” movies brings us a Russian-backed film of that uprising and mass escape, conventional in its telling but still delivering a visceral, heart-pounding finish.

Khabenskiy also headlines “Sobibor,” starring as Alexander “Sasha” Pechersky, a Soviet soldier transferred there after a failed escape attempt in Minsk. He arrives in Poland with little more than contempt for his fellow inmates, praying “cowards” awaiting death “like livestock led to slaughter.”

But don’t be so hasty, survivor Leo (Dainius Kazlauskas) cautions. “We’re trying to survive to get our revenge,” he says (in subtitled Russian. The Polish, Hebrew and German in the film is also subtitled). They have been organizing. They just lost their leader, a veteran of the Dutch Navy. They might follow a soldier like him. If he can prove he’s Jewish.

“We need a Moses!”

Striking new arrival Selma (Mariya Kozhevnikova) is warned to “take whatever work you can get” by camp veteran Chaim (Fabian Kociecki), which she does.

Others — scores of them — we see herded nude into a “shower,” an officious guard totaling their number on a ledger, locking the door and turning on a valve that opens up the exhaust gas from a huge engine that Sobibor used to murder 250,000 people or more.

Young apprentice jeweler Shlomo (Ivan Zlobin) reassures his little sister and family that he’ll be all right, but that they’ll be safer together. He doesn’t know.

We also meet the jeweler Jakob (Joshua Rubin), assured “We are immortal” by a fellow jeweler on arrival, relieved that means he has “work” and can look after his wife, horrified when he comes across his dead wife’s wedding band among the loot the Nazis have taken from prisoners before directing them to “the showers.”

Perhaps Khabenskiy and his trio of screenwriters didn’t need to treat us to a “Holocaust 101” refresher course. We’ve seen nude women packed into a room, gassed to death. We know about the gruesome architecture of mass murder, the ghoulish practice of pulling gold fillings from the dead bodies, the officious and contagious efficiency and sadism of ordinary Germans (passed on to collaborators in many countries they occupied).

But as the world lurches towards new versions of fascist totalitarianism, with bigotry and anti-Semitism blinking into the cold light of day, a little reminder of what human beings are capable of doing to each other is always a good thing.

The Nazis are the usual cadre of psychopaths, drunks, bullies and martinets. Christopher Lambert plays the haunted, deranged camp commandant, Karl Frenzel. Wolfgang Cerny, Mindaugas Papinigis, Maximilian Dirr and Philippe Reinhardt, playing his subordinates, have the sicker and showier roles. Lambert’s German is dubbed, here.

Khabenskiy loses himself in characters like Sasha’s would-be love interest (Felice Jankell), the adorable kid (Kacper Olszewski) whose eager-to-please/desperate-to-survive obsequiousness will come in handy later, and traffics too readily in the tropes of Holocaust movies. The orgy of violence staged by the guards and officers (who knew the camp was slated to be closed ahead of the advancing Russians) is so excessive only Caligula could appreciate it.

But his “Night Watch/Day Watch” years with director Timur Bekmambetov taught him to make the most of the night scenes, giving the extermination camp a haunting beauty and menace — guard towers and the occasional fence post sitting in pools of light.

He expertly sets up the planning scenes, capturing the impromptu haste with which those plans had to be implemented and the leap each conspirator had to make, from resigned victim to cold-blooded killer, for this to come off.

And he stages the revolt, its chaos rendered more sensible by judicious use of slow-motion, with fury and brio.

There was a fine TV movie, “Escape from Sobibor,” on this subject in the ’80s, and all this “Sobibor” (opening March 29) has on that Alan Arkin and Rutger Hauer film is the graphic violence, heightened sense of horror and odd moment of poetry Khabenskiy brings to the story.

Still, it’s a sturdy enough story that it can withstand a little dilly-dallying, and the visceral finale is as heart-pounding as we need this story — when the lambs rose up against their slaughterers — to be.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Konstantin Khabenskiy, Christopher Lambert, Mariya Kozhevnikov, Michalina Olszanska, Maximillian Dirr

Credits:Directed by Konstantin Khabenskiy, script by Anna Chernakova, Michael Edelstein and Ilya Vasiliev. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:50

Here’s another gritty, pitiless Western carved out of archetypes and that favorite horse opera trope — the good man who eschews violence forced to take up a gun by armed thugs invading paradise.

Countless Westerns have been built on that framework, from “Firecreek” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to “The Outlaw Josey Wales.”

What sets “Never Grow Old” apart is its intimacy, canny casting and novel setting. It’s not every day that Ireland, with its lowering grey skies and wintry pallor, fill in for 1849 Oregon, which is where the remote “California Trail” town of Garlow is supposed to be.

That’s where Patrick Tate (Emile Hirsch) scrapes out a living. He’s an Irish immigrant, the local undertaker and town carpenter, struggling to feed his French wife (Déborah François, fierce) and two kids, with one more on the way.

Business hasn’t been good since the fire and brimstone Preacher Pike (Danny Webb) and his “temperance league” shut down the saloon and emptied out the whorehouse.

He may declare this “a holy town…a true Christian town” from the pulpit, but the money that was coming in through that saloon and brothel is missed. And without armed, drunken men getting into fights over women, cards or manners, Patrick’s hard-pressed to make ends meet.

“This isn’t the same town that we stopped in,” he gripes.

He’s a sensitive soul raising sweet children, all of them mourning the death of their plow horse, Patrick because it means “we go hungry.”

That’s when his “luck” changes. Armed brutes show up, looking for a missing member of their gang. They are the quintessential “men with guns,” ruthless bullies who get their way over the weak. Dutch Albert (John Cusack) wants to know where Billy Crabtree lives. And mere directions won’t do. He demands Patrick’s use as a guide, in the middle of a rainy night.

“Son, don’t make me ask you again.”

Events quickly unfold that demonstrate how serious these men are, and how helpless the town is, useless sheriff (Tim Ahern) and all. A saloon not serving alcohol? A “hotel” with no cook or available prostitutes? Dutch Albert, the brutish mute Dum Dum (Sam Louwyck) and “Italian, I think” Sicily (Camille Pistone) set about remaking the town in their own image — violent, above the law, drunk and corrupt.

And as they do, Patrick’s business booms. Burials aren’t free, you know. Whatever his wife thinks of his blood money and guilt by association with Dutch Albert, Patrick reluctantly goes along with it, corrupted by the corruption and murder he tolerates and profits from.

Cusack’s Dutch Albert is his most charismatic role in years, yet another black hat perpetually pulled down over his dark puffy eyes.

He’s smooth, if not exactly subtle at sewing the separation the once-Catholic Patrick feels towards his preacher and fellow townsfolk — “They don’t like the Irish much, do they?” He coos over Patrick’s “honest man’s work” hands, nicknames him “Saint Patrick” even as he drags him into Hell, or at least underground (a cave) to help him cover up his not-quite-finished murders.

“He’s here to bury you, Bill. No need to thank me. I know you’d do the same for me.”

Hirsch does well by Patrick’s story arc, a man who realizes he’s trapped in a morality tale, a parable about greed and “every man for himself” libertarianism, who endures the insults and indignities for a few pieces of silver, until the hoodlums go too far — repeatedly — and finally settle on his family as their next prey.

A favorite gripe of “The Golden Age of the Western” was how most of what Hollywood churned out during this era of the iconic American film genre looked the same.

Settings often used the same studio-owned ranches near Los Angeles, or productions would decamp for wilderness and National Parks land which shared the same waterless dust and sagebrush terrain — striking, but leaving the viewer thinking “Who could farm/raise cattle or do anything with nothing but sand and tumbleweeds to rely on?”

“Never Grow Old” — a terrible title, by the way — resembles “The Claim” in how striking and unusual its setting is. It’s disorienting, if not unheard of, seeing Westerners mostly clad in black under grey skies, contending with mud instead of dust.

Irish writer-director Ivan Kavanagh uses that arresting setting and his stars well, staging some of the violence off camera but never letting us forget the consequences of it by having Patrick pluck the bodies from the scenes of crimes — which he is helping cover up — and then prepare the torn and bloodied corpses for their entombment in wooden boxes he hammers out.

Kavanagh’s second coup was in giving this too-familiar tale just the right star power, with the criminally under-used Hirsch shining as our anti-hero and Cusack, settling into the playing-the-heavy part of his career with as much wit as he can muster.

We’re long removed from the Western’s gilded age. But grimy, bloody lower-budget fare like “Hostiles,””The Kid” and “Never Grow Old” remind us that there’s value in remembering the genre and what it says about our country’s history of violence, even if we have to shoot the film in Ireland to make it look new and fresh.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language, some sexual content and brief drug use

Cast: Emile Hirsch, John Cusack, Déborah François, Danny Webb.

Credits:Written and directed by Ivan Kavanagh. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:40

The idea is to hit you with the scale, to impress us with the magnitude of what was attempted and what was accomplished.

So “Apollo 11” begins with a closeup of NASA’s gigantic crawler, the tracked vehicle — then new — that hauled a fully assembled 325-foot Saturn 5/Apollo rocket from the enormous Vehicular Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A.

Only a building “so big it has its own weather” could piece together what was then the most complex machine in human history. Only a tractor that could bear the weight of a city block could move that enormous space ship down the long, flat path to the launchpad that would send men to the moon.

Breathtaking and definitive, “Apollo 11” avoids voice-over narration or overly-explaining anything about America’s date with destiny in July of 1969. If we aren’t old enough to remember it, we’re supposed to know it. It’s in our DNA.

What this documentary does is give us huge images and stunning detail, digging deep into restored footage from NASA’s massive archive of color film stock and grainy videotape to show us just how big a deal this was and remains.

Control rooms jammed with row upon row of launch control, mission control technicians — scientists, men and women in white shirts and ties, white Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Rockwell or NASA lab coats, “computers” and “monitors” with matching headsets.

This was analog’s finest hour, human beings, “calculators” or as “Hidden Figures” reminded us, “computers,” staring at cathode ray tube monitors with headsets adorned by stick-on label maker name tags.

An army of mostly-men in more lab coats, wearing helmets or hairnets, taking a break from working in the Clean Rooms assembling future Apollo missions to see their handywork lift off into the heavens.

And in tiny Titusville, Florida, a sea of humanity — tens of thousands of spectators in Panama hats and cats-eye sunglasses, Johnny Carson in one of those plaid sports coats — all waiting to see history be made.

“Apollo 11” blows this over-familiar story — a narrative without narration — back up to the larger-than-life size it deserves. We may hear space buff TV anchor Walter Cronkite pontificate about “the hopes and burdens” carried by the the three astronauts at the finish line of the army many thousands of technicians, engineers, scientists and bolt-tighteners got them to — “for all mankind.”

But it’s as superfluous as command module pilot Michael Collins’ observation via radio of “the enormity of this event.”

Filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller (“Dinosaur 13”) makes speech unnecessary. We can see it. And when the Saturn V’s engines fire, we can feel it.

It’s a thrilling film, using only the shortest montage to skip through the backgrounds of the men who undertook the mission, limiting Matt Morton’s swooping, pulse-pounding score to several scenes, not all of them.

There’s so much implied in this footage — the American sense of purpose and pluck channeled into Ridley Scott’s “The Martian,” the rarest breed of men, the ones Tom Wolfe immortalized with the phrase “The Right Stuff,” a more homogeneous America (at least as far the “history” we were taught and on TV, shown back then), and a country that grasped the importance, purpose and urgency of science.

Sputnik did that to us, Kennedy trumpeted it from the mountaintops, Johnson and Nixon and TV news reinforced it.

NASA staffers catch glimpses of Vietnam on the cafeteria TV, mutter about having to compete with Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick debacle with Mary Jo Kopechne for the top spot on the evening news.

But in that capsule, buttoned down pros go about their business, always professional.

That’s where the rare moments of humor spin out of this 93 minute odyssey. NASA’s mission communicators did everything out in the open, back in an era when we knew the difference between ourselves and the Russians. Every glitch was mentioned and dealt with.

And when we’re told of the heart rates of the three Apollo astronauts as they experienced liftoff, you have to chuckle. The coolest customer of them all, the one least excited by all this excitement — was Buzz Aldrin, Steve McQueen in a space suit.

Fussing with Michael Collins about the monitors not delivering data from the bottom of his rib cage only invited a little deadpan.

“I promise to let you know if I stop breathing.”

As familiar as this story is, I was amazed at the simple graphics (countdowns, mission maps), the skilled interplay of images “up there” with chatter and images of those doing the chattering, conferring and celebrating in Florida and Houston, all of which allowed Miller to give this real edge-of-your-seat excitement and tension.

People old enough to remember Apollo will recollect the famous NASA acronyms, “TLI, trans lunar injection,” and the like.

And generations raised on special effects space odysseys will marvel at the tactile, intestines-ratting blast of engines, bolt-separation explosions and the like, stuff that real people with the Right Stuff actually did with little more than a legion of women and men with slide rules as their mathematical guides.

As I write this, I am in view of the VAB — the Vehicular Assembly Building — and the launch pads where Boeing, Space-X and Blue Origin and others deliver exciting but pale imitation launches into space to this day.

There are monuments, museums and parks to the space program in general and Apollo in particular, all over this corner of Florida. It’s woven into the fabric and the lore of Florida’s “Space Coast.”

When I first moved my sailboat here in the early 2000s, the diesel mechanic everyone trusted their engines to was a bespectacled, bookish eccentric named Kapus. Why did we use him? In a previous life, he kept the diesels on the crawler running.

I was thinking of him and the thousands like him as “Apollo 11” unfolded. And as Miller’s film rolls out scores upon scores of NASA names in its closing credits, one last exclamation point on the enormity of the enterprise, I realized Miller would have had it no other way.

MPAA Rating: G

Cast: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, Gene Krantz, Clifford Charlesworth, thousands of others

Credits:Directed by Todd Douglas Miller. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:33

The pundits — not the conservative ones, mind you — often joke about the war that the wealthy are waging on the rest of us. And there’s plenty of evidence of that.

In America, they might confine their predations to tax “reform” and a revolution-inciting inequity in the justice system. But what about the Third World? Would they kill and eat us?

That’s the premise of “The Cannibal Club,” a bloody and bloody slow Brazilian satire about that nation’s sequestered, insulated very rich, fair-skinned folk who have all the money and all the power already. Why wouldn’t they start eating  “squeegee punk” poor, the “delinquents” and “scum?”

Classic film fans can think of this slasher pic as “Swept Away” meets “Eating Raoul,” heavy-handed, wallowing in sex and slayings by the bored and depraved ruling classes. The wallowing is substituted for pacing in Guto Parente’s film.

Otavio and Gilda (Tavinho Teixeira, Ana Luiza Rios) love their beachside villa, their seaside pool. They want to keep it, which is why they have a bodyguard as well as a maid and caretaker/pool-boy.

When boss Otavio entrusts the latest caretaker with the run of the place while he runs to town, that means its playtime for Gilda. It’s just that she likes her sexual dalliances to climax with Otavio taking an ax to her paramour in mid-coitus.

Otavio gets his rocks off overhearing her frolics, and on the ax-whacking he gets to administer.

Those rare cuts of meat served every meal have don’t grow on trees, you know.

They’re a part of a whole “club” of super-rich killers in and around Forteleza, donning evening wear for midnight rites which involve watching and videotaping chained sex slaves going at it, butchered by an executioner hiding in the shadows awaiting their finish.

They gather for parties, brag about their travels — “I like First World countries so much better than Third World ones. Clean.”

“Tell me about it. It’s so depressing to come back.”

They self-righteously bloviate about “family, faith and work,” and hiss at the less fortunate.

“They should all die.”

But then a secret that this crowd regards as even darker than “We lure and kill working class Brazilians for sport” gets out, one involving Borges, Otavio’s powerful boss (Pedro Domingues). Somebody from their ranks is going to be killed.

“We’re not MURDERERS!” Otavio declares, in Portuguese with English subtitles and utterly without irony. The poor pawns they kill and consume? They don’t count.

Parente lets his sex scenes — including masturbation — go on and on. He has the camera linger over the newly ax-chopped or throat-slashed, has his “club” members stand around, nude, covered in blood as if this rite is their right.

A close-up of a rotting dog corpse is thrown in for metaphoric shock effect.

And Gilda goes to the toilet in front of us, and DOESN’T WASH HER HANDS. Savages.

There’s a funnier, more biting movie in this premise, this cast and their treatment of it. But Parente never lets his picture get up a head of steam, never lets it take off.

Suspense? Surprise? He doesn’t handle those elements with a deft hand, either.

Gore alone is not enough to recommend any movie, much less one with a bit of gruesome promise to it. Perhaps Rob Zombie will attempt a Hollywood remake and find pace that will make the dark humor play and give this politically potent premise its proper payoff.

MPAA Rating: graphic violence, explicit sex

Cast: Tavinho Teixeira, Ana Luiza Rios, Pedro Domingues, Ze María

Credits: Written and directed by Guto Parente. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:20

The bicycle is one of the most liberating inventions in the history of humanity. Its not just the exhilarating thrill of the ride, the exercise and sensation of speed that makes it addicting. Lives are changed and worldviews expanded simply by virtue of the freedom it affords, especially the young, who use this simplest form of personal transportation to experience places beyond their immediate experience, out of the reach of family control.

That has to be what freaks the mullahs of Afghanistan out about girls riding bikes. “We don’t like it,” men will say. Even in the most modest clothing, wrapped in scarves and long pants, the conservatives of this embattled, backwards country still call the act “shameful” and the girls daring to ride “infidels.”

“Afghan Cycle” is about ongoing efforts by the mostly-city girls in their country to drag it into the modern day, striking a tiny blow for gender equality as they ride in packs through city streets and on suburban highways, part of a national girl’s cycling team.

The girls in the film — Frozan and Zahra, Nahid and Mosama and others — enthuse about the “feeling of joy…I don’t want to get off” that cycling gives them.

They have been featured in TV news reports in the West, “training in secret,” “athletes who “risk our lives” when they train.

As Afghanistan struggles to put its Medieval “Taliban” years behind it, with city dwellers noting that women have “regained the right to work, travel and take part in sports,” you’d think Sarah Menzies’ documentary would be an upbeat celebration of teens striking a blow for freedom in a part of the world that leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to women’s rights.

But as they ride in uniforms of headscarves, matching long-sleeve jerseys and gym pants, they talk of “death threats” and “fighting the stubborn taboo” that so many men outside of Afghanistan’s few cities cling to. The movie isn’t the “feel good” story you’d hope it might be.

Frozan, the daughter of a dedicated cyclist who grew up before Afghanistan’s communist takeover and Soviet occupation and thus learned to ride, tries to balance the rituals and mores of her culture with her yearning to do the simplest things, forbidden by mullahs and their hold over the fundamentalists there.

“I don’t have the freedom to go outside and ride any time I like, or to go outside at all,” she complains (in Pashtun, with English subtitles).  “I want that for the future.”

“Security” is the team’s biggest concern. “The Jihadists put a stop to women’s rights…Girls who want to ride have a lot of enemies.”

The fundamentalist dogma there decrees that “Girls should not do sports, not have educations.” The riders are lectured (we’re told, not shown), hassled by passing drivers, jeered for ruining their “future” (reproductively) by riding and risking injury.

“This is not (your) right,” an Imam says on camera.

And yet, they persist. Masoma was the first in her family to ride a bicycle, and she and her sister Zahra are supported in their pioneering efforts by their father.

“We are role models for other girls, showing them they can live free.”

Menzies probably set out to show just that, and ran up against the same headwinds facing female cyclists in Afghanistan. Her film has little dramatic arc to it, and little uplift. It plays as flatly as the desert valleys the girls pedal through. A filmmaking tip — when your settling is as sunwashed and sand colored as this, white subtitling is a terrible choice. White words over white backgrounds, people wearing white shawls and jackets, is like putting no subtitles at all in the film.

The girls don’t come off as future Olympians, riding their mix of road bikes, city bikes, mountain bikes and hybrids over flat desert highways and down dusty trails. That’s not the goal of most, though some harbor dreams of professional careers.

Younger rider Nahid lost a brother to a suicide bomb attack, and as the team rides past the home of what used to be two ancient, gigantic statues of Buddha — which the redneck culture-fearing Taliban blew up in 2001, we’re reminded of just how monumental the change they want to effect change.

Coach Abdul Sadiq Sadiqi remembers first trying to get this team going in the 1980s — pre-Taliban. It’s proven nearly impossible.

One young present day Jihadist wonders why they don’t “machine gun them all” and a seemingly reasonable mullah explains to the filmmaker that “girls are “precious gems,” that “Eyes are absorbent of all badness” and that he will not tolerate uncovering the girlish parts of their bodies of riding in groups.

His fear, their fear, is palpable. Let girls ride in groups and you can’t harass them as easily. Let them ride bikes, and next thing you know, “Islam will be weakened.”

But as we see them mount up on their Giants and other global brand bikes, check out the smiles from younger girls they pedal by, the viewer can take comfort that the tide of history is against the oppressors, that girls craving freedom might flee their homeland to find it now, gone with their Schwins.

Someday, though, given time and TV and exposure to a world much wider than the daily calls to prayer, change will come.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Credits: Sarah Menzies. A Let Media release.

Running time: 1:28

If nothing else, animator/writer-director Milorad Krstic has done the world’s “Art Appreciation” teachers and professors a great service. Why bother writing up a final exam when “Ruben Brandt, Collector” becomes available on video?

Here it is, a history of art primer packed into a light, brisk animated caper thriller. Hundreds of paintings and painters are referenced. So teachers, grade on the curve. First five students to list fifty references get the A, second five the B and so on.

The Serbo-Hungarian artist and filmmaker designed “Ruben” to have an Art Moderne/Klimt look, as interpreted by anime and manga artists obsessed with Picasso, Chagall and Dali and rendered in CGI animation.

It’s a gorgeous film about an art therapist who discovers art can also be maddening.

Dr. Ruben Brandt uses art to cure textbook cases of mania, obsession. In take-up-an-art-form solo sessions and group therapy, he convinces his patients to channel their dysfunction into work.

But Dr. Brant (voiced by Iván Kamarás) has nightmares. It might be Andy Warhol’s pistol-packing “Double Elvis” silk screen image from Presley’s “Flaming Star” Western, challenging him to a public gunfight, or Velazquez’s “Infanta Margarita Teresa” chewing his arm off as she drags him through a rail car window while Frank Duveneck’s “Whistling Boy” whistles at him tauntingly.

And all of them — including many characters within the movie — have multiple eyes on one side of their face, multiple breasts, “people” that might have been dreamed up by Picasso and Dali.

The art is out to get him, and that’s got him seeing a shrink himself.

His new patient might offer him some peace. Mimi (Gabriella Hámori) is a svelte, backflipping, parkour-practicing cat burglar who hits museums on the orders of a mob boss. She’s a “kleptomaniac” she confesses — not to the DC detective (Csaba Márton) chasing her through Europe, but to Dr. Ruben.

She does it “because beauty shouldn’t be locked away.”

As Brandt’s nightmares take on a pattern — the strands of hair of Boticelli’s “Birth of Venus” become tentacles to yank him into the painting, at one point — perhaps this unrepentant thief, with help from a few other patients, can “help” the good doctor — provide him some peace, if not a cure.

Flashbacks suggest his “Men don’t cry” father might be the key.

Off we go, dashing into museums across the globe, hunting down Hopper’s “Nighthawks” and Van Gogh’s “Postman Joseph Roulin” and escaping, always in the most aesthetically gorgeous vintage cars — Tatra, Mercedes 300SL a Citroen DS.

The dream psychology matches the film’s muted color palette and flat visual aesthetic. And even as interest in the story waxes and wanes — “What do we need to steal next?” or the mob and cop pursuers guessing “Where will they STRIKE next?” — the visual puns and witty homages to famous art and artists keep “Ruben Brandt, Collector” interesting.

It’s more clever than smart,  but here’s an animated film for adults (violence, nudity) that challenges and rewards the viewer who — yes — paid attention in class, and whose bucket list includes MoMa, the Louvre, the Musée D’Orsay, the Reina Sofia and Prado, Met and Musée Rodin.

MPAA Rating: R for nude images and some violence

Cast: The voices of Gabriella Hámori, Iván Kamarás, Csaba Márton

Credits: Directed by Milorad Krstic, script by Milorad Krstic and Radmila Roczkov   A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:36