Movie Nation

The opening image of “Bye Bye Germany” is of a three-legged dog, hopping out of a “Displaced Persons” repatriation camp in Frankfort months after the end of World War II.

That’s the perfect metaphor for the story to be told in this After the Holocaust tale. How could a three-legged dog survive the war? You don’t really want to know.

This mostly “true story” (“and what isn’t true is nevertheless correct.”) is about a group of survivors — from camps and elsewhere — who team up to hustle Germans in order to secure the cash to escape the Nazi-infested homeland that tried so hard to kill them.

Moritz Bleibtreu, most famous for “Run Lola Run,” plays David Bermann, a well-turned-out Jewish survivor who keeps his shoes shiny, his mustache trim and his cigarettes in a shiny, gold cigarette holder.

And he’s having trouble getting a U.S. occupying Army license to do business. The big question for most anybody on either side of the conflict is “What did you do in the war?” For a German Jew, it’s trickier. “How did YOU survive?”

He talks a shoemaker, Holzmann (Mark Ivanir), into partnering with him, just until they have the cash to flee to America. Holzmann will get the license to do business and pose as “the boss.” The “real” boss Bermann recruits “peddlers,” salesmen — with a cutthroat eye for closing a deal.

“What do Germans need most right now? Linens!”

Working in teams, scanning the obituaries to pick out their marks, scamming whole groups (railway workers, postal workers), they will prey on “German guilt” over the genocide carried out, directly or in their name, by Germans against Jews, Gypsies and gays.

“Germans feel guilty?” one potential salesman is puzzled to learn.

Everybody Bermann recruits has a story, one they’re barely willing to sketch in. This fellow served in the French Foreign Legion’s “Jewish Brigade,” that one “was saved by some German named Schindler.” An actor hid under the stage of a theater, another lost an eye spending the war in occupied Shanghai.

“Hitler is dead,” is Bermann’s pep talk to his hustlers. “But we’re still alive!”

This picaresque adventure, passing themselves off as a doctor (“Say what you want about Jews,” one not-quite-closeted-Nazi enthuses, “but they make the BEST doctors!”), as a combat veteran who served with a son who died in the Army, doesn’t always go according to scheme. But it’s a delightful form of payback that grabs an ugly stereotype of “Jews in business” and runs with it.

And nobody gets cheated, really. They’re just talked into buying French linen from people they don’t often realize are Jewish.

But this fairytale-like fable — the original title “Es war einmal in Deutschland” translates as “Once Upon a Time in Germany” — has a darker-than-dark subtext. The one thing the solitary (save for his three-legged dog, Motek) Bermann keeps from his comrades is that he’s being grilled, several times a week, by a prosecutor from the U.S. Army (Antje Traue). And under her questioning, Bermann spins (mostly in German, with English subtitles) a fantastic version of his “How did you survive the war?” story.

German-Jewish director Sam Garbarski, working from a script by the author of the books this story is based on, strikes a near perfect balance in this familiar “survivor’s guilt” version of a Holocaust tale. There’s a little of “Sophie’s Choice,” of “Enemies, a Love Story” here.

The lightness comes from Bermann & Co.’s hustles, and from the standout skill he supposedly had in the camps — telling jokes — and even from the racist Nazis’ idea of humor.

“Bermann, do you know why so many of you are in concentration camps? Because you heard it’s FREE!”

The film’s darkness come from the effrontery of anyone, especially an American, questioning any survivor about what they did to survive. Ponder that question for a second yourself and maybe you’ll see the wide range of answers that should be acceptable.

“Anything I had to.”

The film’s “getting even with the Germans” element has a dark side, too. But compare the sober and very human reaction of the men gathered for this enterprise to the violent vengeance cartoon “Hunters” on Amazon and repent for ever wasting your time on that.

It’s true, what Robert Palmer used to sing, that “Wise men know that revenge does not taste sweet.” And every Ricky Gervais Golden Globes crack about “Holocaust” movies, that there have been more than seem humanly necessary committed to film, is true enough, too.

But “Bye Bye Germany” makes for a sly, smart, funny and still touching peek into that horrid past, a dramedy with pathos and a reminder that “L’chaim, to life” is the best way to remember it — with a toast to life. In the end, that’s the best revenge of all.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, adult situations

Cast: Moritz Bleibtreu, Antje Traue, Tim Seyi, Mark Ivanir, Václav Jakoubek

Credits: Directed by Sam Garbarski, script by and Michel Bergmann and Sam Garbarski, based on the novel by Michel Bergmann. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time:

“Summer’s Night” plays like the bastard child of Richard “Slacker” Linklater and Cameron “Singles” Crowe, lashing out, rebelling against its parents by being charmless, humorless and clueless about its own blindness and inadequacies. I was amazed at how writer Jordan Jolliff and director Joseph Cross could get even the littlest things so wrong.

If you’ve never heard of “Summer Night” before Netflix, consider what they put on the poster advertising it — “Thirteen friends. One night to get it right.”

Aside from the honesty of that ad — because they DON’T “get it right” — what does that tell you the movie is about? Nothing.

In an unidentified college (apparently) town (Newnam, Georgia — and Atlanta), a bunch of college-age slackers date, recreate, drink shots, play in bands at a movie house turned bar called The Alamo, or drink shots and listen to their friends bands at The Alamo.

Mel (Analeigh Tipton) has her girls (Lana Condor, Melina Vidler) with her when the pregnancy test comes out positive. Her boyfriend Seth (Ian Nelson)? He’s down at the swimming hole, getting high with Jameson (Ellar Coltrane, star of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”).

Seth gets the news via text, but hey — his band’s playing at The Alamo tonight. Lot to process. Sober.

Taylor (Callan McAuliffe, who was already in Georgia filming a “Walking Dead” spinoff) is off trail-riding on a mountain bike when he’s jumped and robbed by rednecks. Luckily, Dana (Ella Hunt of “Anna and the Apocalypse”) is there to nurse his wounds. In the woods.

Jack “Rabbit” (Bill Milner) has a thing for Lexi (Ms. Condor), and Andy (Justin Chatwin) plays in the band with Seth and Caleb (Hayden Szeto).

They’ll work everything out over drinks and some jangling/sensitive alt-pop (a banjo makes an appearance) at The Alamo, where Corin (Elena Kampouris) takes the cover charge at the door, crushes on Jameson and is appalled when he shows up with the assertive, confident and seriously sexy Harmony (Victoria Justice, a long way from TV’s “Victorious”).

Is that “thirteen friends?” Lemme recount.

That two-gorgeous women contending for a pretty guy dynamic — “male wish fulfillment fantasy” in screenwriter speak — plays out twice in “Summer Night,” one of a myriad of crimes committed by screenwriter Jordan Jolliff. Seth takes Dana to the bar (she’s underage) and has to contend with the undesired come-ons of bombshell Vanessa (Vidler).

Fortunately, there’s a Magical Negro (Khris Davis), hanging by the door, smoking, to advise his young white friends.

“You can’t build a house using your head for a hammer!”

Well, at least he gets the character count to “thirteen.”

Damn, this is dumb. There are only a couple of truly quotable lines — Caleb’s withering put-down of Seth getting Mel pregnant — “This isn’t 1937!” — is one. Hot Hot Harmony’s aloof expectation of slavish devotion is another.

“I don’t date guys who’re SORTA into me.”

Otherwise, the long, musical evening (Hop Along tunes are played, apparently, another band steals the name of ’80s myth The Barking Spiders) adds up to a lot of nothing at all. Nothing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, smoking, drinking, profanity

Cast: Analeigh Tipton, Ellar Coltrane, Victoria Justice, Ian Nelson, Callum MacAuliffe, Lana Condor, Elena Kampouris  and Bill Milner

Credits: Directed by Joseph Cross, script by Jordan Jolliff. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:38

You kind of forget that Bill Forsyth’s charming “Gregory’s Girl” begins with a bunch of thick-accented Scots mop tops leering through the window at a nurse disrobing in the dressing room at the local hospital.

“She’s go’a BRA-zere!”

Maybe this one isn’t aging well at all, you fret, post #MeToo.

And then this 1980 jewel takes you right back to what made it an indie phenomenon and launched Forsyth’s distinctly quirky career (“Local Hero” and “Breaking In”). It may be ostensibly from the boy’s point of view, but Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) is harmless, gangly, and gawky. More to the point, he is hapless and helpless in the commanding presence of more together (more “sorted” as they say in the UK) girls his own age.

The “girl” (Dee Hepburn) is the fetching jogger/classmate who joins Gregory’s soccer team, in essence displacing him. Dorothy has game. She’s ahead of her time. The sports bra hadn’t been invented and she may not “bend it like Beckham,” but then, “Beckham” was five years old when this film came out.

And as for style, “Gregory’s Girl” was adorably “random” before “random” was a thing.

Forsyth set his tale in colorless “modern” Scottish suburbia, in a high school where Gregory’s best mates are Andy (Robert Buchanan), dead-serious about home ec class baking as if he’s found a trade, and Steve (Billy Greenlees), who is a shorter and slightly more outgoing than Gregory, if just as helpless with the girls.

“D’ye knoooow that 12 tonnes of Cornflakes pass under here every day?”

Everybody wears the same tie, more or less the same uniform and all the lads — at least — have matching Bay City Rollers shag cuts.

Whatever soccer skill Gregory had evaporated when he hit a growth spurt. The coach (Jake D’Arcy) may fret over eight straight losses. Gregory, formerly a star striker? No worries. A demotion to goalie, with a threat to cut the shambolic goof altogether?

“You won’t regret this,” he grins. God knows he won’t.

And then Dorothy shows up, and “shows up” the lads. Gregory’s life has purpose, “obsessed with a beautiful, unattainable girl” purpose.

The random stuff begins almost right away. Gregory and his wiser 11 year-old sister (Allison Forster) live middle-class lives largely without the supervision of parents. His dad (Dave Anderson) is a driving instructor whose student almost runs his kid over on his (late) way to school. This is the only time we meet a parent.

“Your mother…you remember your mother? I told her we met briefly in the hallway last week…”

Teachers giggle through the window of the teacher’s lounge at Gregory’s oddball/dodgeball way of crossing fields and lawns to get to class. Somebody in a penguin costume shows up in the hallway, never says a word, and one random teacher glances at her and says “Room 6.” A scene or two later, same thing, another teacher — “Room 14” this time.

Gregory spends a few seconds on the drums before any given day’s departure for school, walks out the door and is surrounded by scores of unexplained pre-schoolers. Every day.

A little boy who is baby-sister Madeleine’s age has more poise, polish and manners when it comes to knocking on their door than Gregory ever will.

The photographer for the school magazine, Eric (Alan Love), has a mini-me younger fanboy who does everything — gestures, etc. — that Eric does.

It’s a movie peppered with cackle-out-loud goofy touches, quirky line-readings, mock outrage and “tolerance” even though “GerrULLLS wair’no MADE t’play foo-ball!”

“It’s MODairn. It’s the FUTURE!”

Indeed it was.

“Gregory’s Girl” is pretty much as funny as it ever was and is, if anything, even quainter than when it came out. Gregory’s obsession with “brown” means making him over is a particular challenge for baby sister.

Forsyth’s penchant for whimsy, aka those “random” touches, means that it hits several points where we’re sure it’s over, and sure enough, it isn’t. The third act could be tighter. The “kids” are unaffected, quite natural. But none of them went on to major careers. Nor for that matter did Forsyth — just a handful of films, one of them a sequel I couldn’t get through a few years back.

But any doubt that there are teen comedy “classics” of the 80s that don’t have Chicagoan John Hughes’ name in the credits is erased in a flash.

Need an excuse to try Film Movement Plus for a month? It’s streaming there through May Day.

MPAA Rating: PG (nudity)

Cast: John Gordon Sinclair, Dee Hepburn, Jake D’Arcy. Clare Grogan, Robert Buchanan and Billy Greenlees

Credits: Written and directed by Bill Forsyth. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:31

“Indian Horse” is a hockey story serving as an expose of Canada’s infamous Catholic “Residential School” system and the horrors it inflicted on generations of indigenous people there.

Based on a popular novel by acclaimed Ojibway fiction writer Richard Wagamese, it covers familiar ground in the long litany of stories about abusive Catholic priests that burst into the light with “The Boys of St. Vincent,” and the monstrous crimes of such schools (“Older Than America,” “We Were Children”).

So don’t look at the picture of the hockey player on the Netflix menu and figure this is just a feel-good “against all odds” story on skates. It’s conventional in that regard, but its subtext leads to powerful moments that sometimes let it transcend its genre.

We see the cruel and near-genocidal “system” through the eyes of one Ojibway child’s experience, recalled through flashbacks decades later at a support group for those who survived the experience, and were traumatized by it. Opening titles note that this idea — removing Native children from their families for trade schools aimed at assimilating (and indoctrinating in Catholic teachings) Indigenous people into white, mainstream Canadian culture began in 1876, and didn’t truly end until — get this, 1996.

Thousands died, physical and sexual abuse was rampant. As the adult Saul Indian Horse narrates, “They called it a school, but it was never that. The only test was whether you could endure it.”

It’s no wonder his family goes to extremes to spare him and his brother the experience. In 1959 they are spirited away by their parents and their grandmother (Edna Manitowabi) from Manitouwadge to “our ancestral lands to the North.”

It’s a perilous journey by canoe, and Saul’s brother sickens and dies on the trip. His parents leave him with his grandmother, but the long arm of the Canadian government finds him and throws him into an environment where whippings are administered for not speaking English, for clinging to a younger sibling scared to death at being away from her family, for just about anything.

“The Lord God is your Father now,” the abusive nuns (Emily Klassen plays a particularly vile one) and priest headmaster (Michael Murphy).

But the new priest (Michiel Huisman of “Game of Thrones” and “The Other Lamb”) in charge of the school hockey team gives little Saul something to look forward to. He is too young to play, but teaching him to skate on the sly shows Saul (Sladen Peltier) to be a natural. Before long he’s rejecting escape attempts by his equally oppressed classmates just for the chance to show his stuff.

The story takes us through those formative years, jumps ahead to the late ’60s when Saul stars for an Indigenous semi-pro team, and endures the awful racism white Canadians hurled at Natives in virtually every public setting.

And then a coach (Martin Donovan) for a minor league team connected with the Toronto Maple Leaf sees Saul (Ajuawak Kapashesit) and convinces him that his innate feel for “THEIR game” — meaning white Canada’s national sport and obsession — lets him “conjure” magic on the ice, and the kid is put on track to the NHL.

Clint Eastwood’s longtime camera operator Stephen S. Campanelli directed “Indian Horse,” and does a solid job of recreating hockey in the pre-helmet era. Good editing can make half-speed games look realistic, and that’s important as the film is hockey-centric for its middle acts.

But Wagamese’s story doesn’t let us off the hook with just hockey. His novel came out before Canada’s long-overdue “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” reckoning with what generations were put through. The story’s ugly underbelly keeps it downbeat, even when we expect it to turn uplifting.

And the unfortunate fact that the big revelations here are depressingly over-familiar works against the movie, allowing us the time to notice the flat and amateurish nature of some performances and the polished, over-familiar archetypes even the screen veterans are playing.

In Canada, “Indian Horse” was labeled “much more than a movie,” which is almost certainly true thanks to its message and what it depicts. But the film lacks shock and catharsis, just a depressing recreation of awful things.

As cinema, it’s somewhat less than it could have been, lacking the emotional highs and lows that compelling characters compellingly played could have given it. Saul is stoic, first scene to last. And the villains never rise to the level of unforgettable the way “The Boys of St. Vincent” made Martin Czerny a movie star.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual abuse, alcohol abuse

Cast: Sladen Peltier, Forrest Goodluck, Edna Manitowabi, Ajuawak Kapashesit, Michiel Huisman, Martin Donovan, Emily Klassen and Michael Murphy

Credits: Directed by Stephen S. Campanelli, script by Dennis Foon, based on the novel by Richard Wagamese.

Running time: 1:42

Here’s the way the brain wanders.

You’ve just finished reading “The Story of Spanish,” are just now starting on the equally breezy, informal and informative “The Story of French,” books that combine travel with history, geography, etymology and phonetics.

You review two Midlands moviesfrom the UK, whose characters have accents you couldn’t cut through with a chainsaw. You reference the “My Fair Lady” song “Why Can’t the English?” (speak bloody comprehensible English) in one of the reviews.

And then “Pygmalion” pops up, George Bernard Shaw’s delightfully dated and sexist play about “Posh Accents Make the Lady…or Gentlemen” which he helped adapt for the screen in 1938. And as I hadn’t seen it in this millennium, well why not? Aside from loathing most of “My Fair Lady” (which adapted “Pygmalion” into a musical) and having had to review it on the stage maybe half a dozen times over the years, I mean.

Leslie Howard, most famous for “Gone With the Wind,” was at the top of his profession and the top of his game for this classic-to-be, even taking a co-directing credit to make sure his close-ups were all they could be.

He’s Professor Henry Higgins, phonetics, speech and accent expert, “confirmed bachelor” and misogynist.

Wendy Hiller is a perfectly believable braying Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle.

And Scott Sunderland is the phonetics academic Col. Pickering, freshly back from The Raj (India) who returned to London just to meet “My dear Higgins.”

They meet at Piccadilly, as Higgins puts on a show of guessing every street urchin (Liza), pickpocket and society swell’s home and birthplace simply by their accent.

He teaches, too, and that’s how the callous bet is made — that the braggart can turn the grubby flower seller, whom he labels “you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language,” into a young lady who could pass for a member of polite society — nobility, even.

“My Fair Lady,” remember, was an Edwardian pre-WWI period piece. Howard and Shaw’s “Pygmalian” was contemporaneous, a pre-WWII comedy with state-of-the-art speech therapy technology (a phonograph recorder, etc.). That makes for cute (not that funny) teaching montages.

The class consciousness of the piece is much sharper when all those songs and regal non-singer Audrey Hepburn aren’t around.

The banter crackles, the insults fly and this Higgins is close enough to Eliza’s age to not be a creeper, even if Eliza’s extortion-minded pop (Wilfrid Lawson) suggests as much.

Musicals work their magic by folding in songs when the emotion of the moment is too great for mere words or longing, lusty looks to do. And knowing both plays and films, you can’t help but miss a couple of the emotional/musical highs.

The finale drags in “Pygmalion” in a way “My Fair Lady” — a front-loaded musical (most of the best songs are before intermission) — rarely has.

But everything before that finale just sings, without music. It’s a deliciously smart and wordy comedy from the age when Hollywood — on this side of the pond — was thinking “screwball” in its approach to the great class divide.

Howard was a fey leading man, something underscored by “Gone with the Wind” and carried to the level of joke in “49th Parallel.” But he’s perfect here, prissy and able to treat females and everybody else with a dismissive harrumph that plays as asexual.

And Hiller, personally chosen by Shaw for the film, was just coarse and common enough to take to the makeover like a butterfly.

“I washed me face and hands before I come, I did!”

Whatever the virtues of “My Fair Lady,” it is “Pygmalion” that’s aging well, a black and white jewel properly enshrined as a classic.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, dated allusions

Cast: Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Wilfrid Lawson, Scott Sunderland, David Tree and Marie Lohr.

Credits : Directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, script by George Bernard Shaw, based on his play.  A Criterion release, also on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:29

The older boy has a cassette record to play with, like many children of the late ’70s. His toddler brother has no shortage of plastic tools and toys, Legos and the like.

There’s a dog and a parakeet, too. Rich, the oldest, needs a pair of shoes. Let’s go off the shops.

But neglect has many faces, and two parents who seem disinterested at best, wrapped up in their smokes, their drinks and a kitchen sink melodrama they’re too dim to see themselves starring in it have those faces. “Ray & Liz,” their son Richard, “Rich” back then remembers them.

Birmingham “Black Country” photographer Richard Billingham came to fame documenting his parents and their tiny, dysfunctional and circumscribed lives. “Ray & Liz,” his feature film directing debut, shows him still mining their myopia, an adult now with a score to settle.

In 108 spare, harrowing minutes, we see the walls closing in on a family that’s given up, never equipped to deal with the despair of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Ray (Justin Salinger) and Liz (a fierce Ella Smith) are self-absorbed and self-medicating. And their kids, tracked over the course of half a dozen years, are “free range,” raising themselves, trapped in lives with a very low ceiling and inclined to mimic the callous cruelty their parents teach them with every puff of a cigarette.

There’s no back-story here, and no subtitles for these porridge-thick accents. It’s cheating to tell you that Ray lost his last good job, as a machinist, before events in the movie play out. They weren’t always “Council Flats” (subsidized housing) poor, on the dole, living from handout check to handout. But we can tell something took this couple out of the work force and made them all but check out of life as well.

Billingham doesn’t tell us who this “Lol” (Tony Way) is, an oaf of an uncle (perhaps) who does his best Charles Laughton as the Hunchback impression for little Rich’s cassette recorder. As she and Ray and Rich prep to go shoe shopping, Liz makes a naked threat to Lol that suggests a lifetime of conflict. He’d better keep an eye on little Jason. He’d BETTER not get into their liquor.

That’s not remotely as cruel as what Will (Sam Gittins) pulls when he gets home. He’s their lodger, has a touch of just-out-of-jail about him.

And what’s he do when Lol asks about the liquor? He produces a crate of it, gets Lol passed-out drunk and empties his wallet. And oh yeah, Will paints baby Jason’s face with boot polish and puts a carving knife in the child’s hand. Will then beats a retreat, only returning to see Liz’s beat-the-stupefied-Lol to a pulp meltdown over the scene she finds when the family gets home.

A few years later, the family’s fortunes have moved them from a modest duplex to those Council Flats. Rich is a self-sufficient teen, but younger Jason (Joshua Millard-Lloyd) is taking the brunt of this “raise yourself” ethos.

One thing they’ve both absorbed is the cruelty. Joking around, Jason sticks things in passed-out-dad’s mouth, the last of which is powdered punch. Ray almost chokes.

When the power’s cut off, Jason goes on a wander into the cold, dark night. And that gets “the authorities” involved.

Billingham’s film is built on the “kitchen sink” realism born in British cinema in the early ’60s, perfected by the likes of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. It is grim, grey and overcast world and a hard watch, and not just because of those “cold-blooded murder of the English tongue” accents.

Framing the story within the 1990s final years of Ray (Patrick Romer) and Liz (Deirdre Kelly) doesn’t ease that burden. They’re apart, but connected — still drinking (he is, anyway), still selfishly self-absorbed, still badgering cash off each other to purchase some fresh impulse.

The movie memoir “Ray & Liz” most reminds me of is “Running With Scissors,” with “Ray” being a more bleak and humorless look back at a less-than-rosy childhood, less obviously a story told by a son with scores to settle.

But whatever Billingham took from this struggle to make his art, make no mistake –he’s settling a score, here.

The cinematography darkens the tone, the performances — especially Smith, Way and young Millard-Lloyd, revel in reality. And if at the end we feel no more for “Ray & Liz” than they apparently did for their own kids, that’s a final, cruel endorsement of the truth acted-out by all involved.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcoholism, profanity

Cast: Ella Smith, Justin Salinger, Deirdre Kelly, Patrick Romer, Joshua Millard-Lloyd, Tony Way and Sam Gittins

Credits: Written and directed by Richard Billingham. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:48

“Northern Soul”was a fad, a movement, that came just after the Mods and Psychedelia, concurrent with Glam Rock and just before Disco and Punk conquered those music-mad Brits.

It got people in the north and Midlands of England back on the dance floor, listening to obscure African American soul music in the ugly fashions of the early ’70s. And as they did, many of them got deeper into the pills that replaced most of the popular drugs of the ’60s.

Photographer turned writer-director Elaine Constantine tries to give this milieu a sort of “Commitments” meets “24 Hour Party People” treatment in her film of the same title, a movie that vividly recaptures a time and place — with the odd stand-out anachronism.

But in trying to get the music to “sound” the way it did then, pre-hi fi 45rpm records heard through Stone Age speakers and gear, she wastes every single pence the picture spent on music rights. No, we weren’t listening to amplified mud, dear.

And robbing the story of the hook, the actual sounds that young fans grabbed and turned into a lifestyle and movement, gives us a movie that’s basically without music or the romance of it, and without a whiff of the last gasp of pre-punk/pre-Thatcher joy.

Elliot James Langridge plays an anti-social schoolboy whose parents (Lisa Stansfield and Christian McKay) nag him into attending an after school youth club. He doesn’t necessarily fit in there, either. But the music by local DJ Ray (James Lance) puts him in a trance. He dances by himself.

And when he later meets fellow enthusiast Matt (Josh Whitehouse), John finds his entre to “cool” (Matt gives him a fashion makeover) and deep fandom. It’s all about haunting record stores and street bazaars, hunting for soul that nobody else has heard.

That’s their ticket for doing their own DJing. The goal? To fly to America together to REALLY dig into obscure soul music at its source.

John fancies the cute slightly older nurse (Antonia Thomas) he sees on the bus each day. What he doesn’t fancy is the oppressive school and his tuned-out teacher (Steve Coogan, of “24 Hour Party People”).

And what Matt fancies are the drugs that he listens to the music to.

The rest of the movie is about their unequal partnership and its shifting dynamics, their rise to DJing paid dances, their growing circle of drug-abusing pals, and their fall.

The performances are energetic but downcast. The dialect is as unfathomable as the music, although I did catch Frankie Valli’s name in the introduction of a song. Edwin Starr to Leo Sayer, Shirley Ellis to The Velvets, the soundtrack (what you can make out of it) ties the film to this generation’s obsession, not unlike the earlier Beatles/Stones generation Brits brought to its deep dive into The Blues.

Whatever its virtues (Tattoos were NOT on every torso back then, especially in the Midlands), one can’t take much more from “Northern Soul” than a moving snapshot, a color scheme. Because “Soul” is the big thing lacking in Elaine Constantine’s one and only shot at making a feature film.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, language throughout and brief sexuality

Cast:Elliot James Langridge, Josh Whitehouse, Antonia Thomas, James Lance, Christian McKay and Steve Coogan.

Credits Written and directed by Elaine Constantine: A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:42

MRS. AMERICA — Pictured: Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug. CR: Pari Dukovic/FX

MRS. AMERICA — Pictured: Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem. CR: Pari Dukovic/FX

MRS. AMERICA — Pictured: Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly. CR: Pari Dukovic/FX

You look at the episode list and you think to yourself, “Do I really want to spend nine hours digging into ten years of the political life of anti-Equal Rights Amendment crusader Phyllis Schlafly?”

It’s a valid question. In this, the golden age of bingeable short-term series TV, every narrative idea is stretched to the point of breaking to lure the viewer in, hook you and drag the damned thing out into eternity as it slowly ambles from point A to point B.

But “Mrs. America” (April 15, on Hulu) is, for the most part, worth the short-made-long journey of Schlafly’s life and her key role in the rise of Reagan and the end of the FDR/Kennedy age of progressivism, social progress and long march toward gender, race and income equality.

The first episode, introducing us to “Phyllis,” her allies and foes, sets the series up beautifully. And the finale, “Reagan,” is strong enough to be a stand-alone film all its own.

Credit the casting, sharp dialogue and an insightful script that picks up on both Schlafly’s methods and the fundamental hypocrisy (and blunt dishonesty) of her stance, as well as the back-biting bitchiness that doomed “libber” enemies.

Cate Blanchett gives us the shrewd, smiling, June Cleaver-with-a-switchblade persona that made Schlafly famous — “talking points” (often exaggerations, sometimes flat-out lies) hammered home on every “Phil Donahue Show” appearance. And we see her struggle to hide the disappointment or bitter fury whenever powerful men (Barry Goldwater among them) she is lobbying take her self-owning use of “we homemakers” literally, and ask her to take notes for their meeting.

Just like the second-class citizen status that she made her cause.

We see the idea of fighting the ERA handed to her by a friend (Sarah Paulson), watch her run with this into the spotlight, writing a newsletter and holding her coveted “mailing list” of committed conservatives close to her as everybody from womanizing Congressman Phil Crane (James Marsden) to Ronald Reagan himself leans on her to share it.

In a pre-Fox News/Rush Limbaugh era, TV news was expected to be impartial, but conservatives used the “Fairness Doctrine” to demand equal time to contest the facts of any debate via opinion. Of course, when they took control of Washington, they killed the Fairness Doctrine so that Limbaugh and Hannity et al and the stations that carried their programming wouldn’t face the same “give the other side equal time” requirements that they’d gamed.

Then there’s the infighting between the various factions of “feminism” as it was known in the 1970s — with pioneer Betty Friedan (Tracy Ullman) bitterly sniping at Ms. Magazine “cover-girl” Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), and Congresswomen Bella Abzug (Margot Martindale, dialing down the drawl to play New York Jewish) and Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Abuba, who has no trace of Chisholm’s distinctive lisp) unable to keep the peace.

Schlafly mobilized after the ERA passed in Congress with the idea that “It’s not too late to stop it.” She and her team fought the battle, one state legislature ratification vote at a time.

The feminists are slow to pick up on how “the men finally found the perfect smokescreen for their chauvinism — women.” Declining to debate Schlafly, they let her spread her fear — often via deliberate misreadings of the amendment — and hers became the only version widely disseminated.

It’s a fascinating political history that creator Davhi Waller and her team take us into, built on the idea that just enough women could be radicalized and mobilized to fight against women’s rights to amplify the voices of extremism. And once in power, the Reagan/Jesse Helms/Jerry Falwell and Co. (a very young Paul Manafort is glimpsed, at one point) carve the “culture wars” lines out in stone, leading to smearing of liberal ideals, destruction of unions, rapid income inequality and the manufactured “fears” of a vast, unrestrained and over-financed right wing hype machine.

And Blanchett makes the heroic villainness of the piece something you least expect her to be — a self-martyred victim, an ambitious and cunning Lady Macbeth without the self-reflection to see her advocacy as hypocrisy at its most naked, but smart enough to see how small she really is after a decade of gnawing her own and her gender’s legs off.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Margot Martindale, John Slattery, James Marsden, Tracy Ullman

Credits: Created by Davhi Waller. An FX/Hulu series

Running time: 9 episodes @ 1 hour each.

Even Ed Helms might cringe if the coarse, predictably dumb and absurdly violent Netflix action comedy “Coffee & Kareem” gives him some sort of comeback.

Then again, forcing him, Taraji P. Henson and the rest of the cast to repeat themselves, making fresh versions of this repellent farce, might be the perfect punishment that fits the crime.

Because that’s what this ugly, irritating, blood-spattered wallow is. It’s not supposed to be for kids, but pairing up Ed with an over-the-top foul-mouthed tween (Terrence Little Gardenhigh) suggests it is.

Backhanded slaps at Detroit, dirty cops, idiotically-indulgent single-mom parenting, a statement on “the death of childhood, as we know it?” That’s all pretty much out in the open.

There are a couple of laughs, generally not from the leads. And the gory mayhem, from “accidental” executions at the end of a torture session to what a grenade does to a human body, is played for giggles, too.

I had to double-check the credits. Screenwriting newcomer Shane Mack did it, not ultra-violent action comedy specialist Shane Black (“Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang”). The guy who directed “Stuber” was behind the camera. Yeah, that’s obvious.

But Problem One is young Mr. Gardenhigh (of TV’s “Henry Danger” and “Danger Force”), more specifically his character. If there has ever been a more charmless, grating, obnoxious “hero” at the center of an action comedy, I can’t think of him.

I can’t quote Kareem, because every word out of his mouth is raw-dog ugly, every thought is fifth grade sexual (he raps an R-rated come-on to his teacher for his class poetry assignment). He blackmails hall monitors and throws threats around like a streetwise gang banger, when in truth he’s just a spoiled mama’s boy.

His mom (Henson) shows no sign of ever so much as trying to curb his behavior. She’s a nurse, dating a cop named Coffee (Helms), and tries to throw the two of them together to bond.

The plump, dreadlocked punk uses that as an excuse to hire a murderous drug dealer (RonReaco Lee) who just escaped from the cops to kill his mom’s cop boyfriend.

He’ll pay for the his eith his pocket change.

I guess it’s funny that, you know, the cop who let Orlando (Lee) escape was Officer Coffee, who has been demoted and bullied by the TV-friendly detective (Betty Gilpin) who caught the guy. Of at least it’s SUPPOSED to be funny.

That near-hiring of a hitman goes wrong, a dirty cop is murdered and Coffee & Kareem are on the run, trying to prevent the bad guys from silencing them or getting to Kareem’s mom, trying to dodge the law (David Alan Grier has the thankless/laughless job of playing Coffee’s boss) which assumes Coffee is the cop killer, and a child kidnapper.

Yes, pedophilia accusations from the kid are a running gag here.

Helms plays another variation on his grinning nebbish, here, a loser who describes himself to Kareem as “like a bruised fruit — a little blemished, but still delicious.”

If Krass Kareem could stop screaming profanities to hear that, he’d have certainly made much of the word “fruit.”

Because it’s that kind of comedy, “Bad Lieutenant” jokes, killers-in-training cracking up about “practicing my lines for when I’m fixin’ to kill somebody,” “child soldier– brainwashing” gags.

Political correctness is gone before the opening credits are over. And it’s not as though some of this might have worked, but everybody in it is just maddening to spend time with.

Henson can blow a fuse with the best of them, and having her kid call her “six Halle Berry movies mad” at them is kind of amusing. Her telling the trying-to-be-hip-to-the-Black-experience Coffee to “Stop watching BET” is almost funny. But there’s no getting around that she’s playing a shrill, parenthood-challenged stereotype.

Helms is mostly a walking sight gag, a punching bag here. And as for the kid, I’m in agreement with the cop who, on meeting Kareem, suggests a “six hundred week abortion” is in order.

But Gilpin, star of “The Hunt,” playing a short-tempered tyrant, gets every truly funny line and makes every line-reading sing. She’s not just fighting the cocaine trade, she tells a TV reporter, she’s “protecting the tiny nostrils of Detroit.”

Her instructions to her cops before a raid are “Let’s keep this quiet. Don’t SHOOT anybody. We don’t want this s— on Youtube!”

She empties out a strip club (where Coffee has taken Kareem) with a shout, “Go HOME. WORK on your MARRIAGES!”

I could see a “funny mean cop” series built out of her and this character.

She’s the redeeming quality of “Coffee & Kareem,” the sugar that masks (a teensy bit) how distasteful the whole affair is.

But an old rule of movie reviewing holds truer than ever with this one. Never expect anything out of a film with an awful pun as its title.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex, profanity and drugs

Cast: Ed Helms, Terrence Little Gardenhigh, Taraji P. Henson, Betty Gilpin, RonReaco Lee and David Alan Grier.

Credits: Directed by Michael Douse, script by Shane Mack. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:28

Just outside of Milledgeville, Georgia there’s an organic produce and livestock “eat local” farm run by a collective of combat veterans as a form of self-help therapy, a way of easing them back into civilian life by re-purposing their war zone mind-set.

The product of their labor is farm-to-table “good food,” and the byproduct is healing trauma through a community of people just like them.

“Comfort Farms” is the name of the non-profit, taking its name from a fallen comrade. It’s also the title of a documentary about its work. Filmmaker Carlisle Kellam talks to founder Jon Jackson and other veterans there about their work, their former lives in combat zones and their efforts to “give something” to their community, while taking charge of their own drug-free, therapy-free (or post-therapy) mental health treatment.

Kellam uses interviews, archival combat footage, TV news features and segments from a talk Jackson gives to veterans’ groups, community organizations and schools, papering the film with quotations from veterans, writers like G.K. Chesterton and others about war, the nature of being a survivor of such trauma and the like.

But the big juxtaposition of the film is pairing up all this material about the soldiers with livestock slaughter, which they go to great pains to describe in ritualistic terms.

They butcher the pigs, chickens, cattle, ducks and bunnies “in a spiritual, respectful manner.” They speak about what that process — grim, even to somebody who’s had to pull the trigger for a living — and what it costs them. But there’s little evidence of that, or none shown on camera.

To a one, they’re very in-your-face about this to the film’s viewers, and to the patrons of the farm, who gather for parties, cook-outs and butchering rituals — laying hands on the animals, “make them trust you,” trying to ease the end of their lives, their “sacrifice” for our “good eating.”

You don’t like to see this? That’s “cowardly.” So “eat more vegetables.”

There’s more going on here, with men who have lived through bloody injuries and watching friends die, coping via what they acknowledge is “never an easy thing,” taking an animal’s life with a gun, knife or hatchet.

Kellam, by limiting his film to “in their own words,” reinforces the self-help ethos that Jackson and his fellow vets preach. Having veterans talk about “misconceptions about veterans,” about the flawed tendency of the public and the media to lump them all into a group, lauded and fund-raised for as “an object of pity” or “an object of worship” (Hellooooo Toby Keith.) is unusual and enlightening.

But its narrow “in veterans’ own words” focus allows the film to avoid the big psychological questions about the personailty types that join the “all volunteer military” and what people who have been in combat really get out of spilling all this blood once they come home.

They’re not wrong in that “locally grown” and “if you can’t kill it, maybe you shouldn’t eat it” thinking. But “Comfort Farms” leaves a lot skirted, unspoken and seriously-under-analyzed.

Not everybody in this post-VFW era club served in combat. And while every person and situation is unique, there are psychological profiles that would be helpful to consider, explanations that those too close to the situation have a hard time articulating.

They’re doing good, both for themselves and for their community. And anything that breaks the patterns of “troubled” combat survivors — suicides, domestic violence, joining motorcycle gangs and the like — is to be celebrated.

But personally, I could use a little of that analysis and a lot fewer too-quick-to-register quotations, and maybe fewer of the somewhat random insertions of graphic animal slaughter in all this talk of healing.

Thank you for your service. Now let’s hear what it “typically” does to someone who makes that sacrifice, or who “enjoys” the “good action” and adrenaline rush of combat (several say so) and signs up for repeated tours.

And what’s really going on that makes them want to come home to kill cows, bleed-out pigs and chop the heads off ducks?

MPAA Rating: Unrated, combat violence, graphic scenes of livestock slaughter and butchery

Credits: Written and directed by Carlisle Kellam.

Running time: 1:16