Movie Nation

It was the summer of Woodstock, and just up the Catskills from the revolutionary Bethel (Saugerties) festival of art and music, Jim LeBrecht was encountering people just like himself, in large numbers, for the first time.

He was born with Spina Bifida, and “the barriers” to his life were “all over the place,” even in New York. But at this long-established summer camp, Camp Jened, which had found its true purpose just a few summers before, barriers disappeared, young people like himself experienced freedom, fun and the camaraderie of a shared struggle — being disabled.

They met, talked and played in a camp “filled with disabled people, run by hippies.”

And in this “Utopian” atmosphere, they fell in love, found common purpose and changed their outlook on what the world be could like.

“This camp changed the world,” declares LeBrecht, a veteran sound designer for theater and sound mixer for movies, co-director of “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution.”

That’s a bold claim for a film you’re both in and co-directed. But damned if “Crip Camp” doesn’t prove that thesis in 100 upbeat, focused and outspoken minutes. It’s a feel-great movie arriving at just the time we could use one.

It was a project that spun out of “the social experimentation of the times,” then-director Larry Allison remembered (in an archival interview). Camp Jened was a place where polio survivors, “CP’s” (cerebral palsy) and assorted paraplegics, quadriplegic teens, deaf and otherwise “disabled” kids could be in a place where they weren’t “freaks.”

“At camp, everybody had something going on with their body. It was no big deal.”

And the realization that life didn’t have to be a losing struggle against unfriendly people and unfriendly buildings, streets without ramps and train stations without elevators, was Earth shattering for these young people.

Led by camp alumnus Judy Heumann, who sued first New York state and then led sit-ins across the country, they proceeded to “change the world.”

Doubt that phrase at your own peril, even if you’re too young to remember an America before The Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, and the other laws and fiercely resisted progress that preceded it.

Judy is our tour guide through many of those years, here, but other alumni speak up and talk of how their lives changed, camp counselors speak of what they experienced at Camp Jened and how they “brought that home with me” to the Deep South, or wherever, after that touchstone summer.

LeBrecht was involved with videotaping (in black and white) the events of that summer, and the film uses that footage, along with other camp movies, and decades of archival TV news coverage of Disabled in Action activism — wheelchair-bound protestors shutting down streets, closing government buildings, getting their voices heard.

“Crip Camp” underlines and identifies the alumni, a tiny, dedicated and networked (pre-Internet) band who drove this movement for 20 years until ADA became the law of the land, “equal access” because the default position of America and the pro forma discrimination, segregation and even institutionalization of the “Differently-abled” was beaten back.

In these, America’s darkest days since the Vietnam War, “Crip Camp” is an inspiring, upbeat shaft of light and a sobering reminder that whatever conservatives want to say about the ’60s, every now and then, hippies changed America, and helped America change the world.

MPAA Rating: R for some language including sexual references

Cast: Judy Heumann, Jim LeBrecht, Larry Allison, Lionel Woodyard, Denise Sherer Jacobson, many others

Credits: Directed by Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:46

“April Love” roars out of the gate in “Banana Split,” a romance that begins, progresses sexually and socially through two years of high school and comes to a crashing halt — all of that encapsulated in the opening credits.

Because it’s what comes AFTER April (Hannah Marks) breaks up with surfer pinup boy Nick (Dylan Sprouse) that’s a lot more interesting. Life is what comes after graduation.

She’s prepping for a cross-country trip to Boston University — college. The film gives us countdowns, “84 Days Until Orientation,” to remind us of that.

And as quickly as Nick moved on, blond bro’s HEAD would spin if he saw how quickly April and his new girl, Clara (Liana Liberato) click. They collide at a house party, bond over “shots” and Junglepussy “Bling Bling” sing-alongs, and “Nick” stories.

“Did he always put his NOSE in your mouth?”

“I know, right? I had to GOOGLE it!”

Just like that, numbers are exchanged and “rules” are established for their friendship.

“Rule number one, no talking about ‘Nick.’ Rule number two, no TELLING Nick!”

“I feel like we’re in FIGHT Club!”

The title may be a tease, sexual slang for a lesbian relationship. But Clara and April click on a whole different level, a bond that may outlast this boy and could outlive every boy to come.

The corporate ethos of the production company American High” lays this vow on you right on their website. They want to “update” the sophisticated teen comedies of John Hughes (“Breakfast Club,” “Sixteen Candles”) and “embrace the R-rated reality of high school” today with their films.

“Banana Split,” like American High’s Hulu film, “Big Time Adolescence,” has teen drinking, teen smoking, modestly explicit teen sex and permissive parenting. The whole “drug” element of “Adolescence” is dispensed with. And the fresher, female-centric point of view makes the weary “coming of age” tropes play.

“Split” is also more charismatically-acted, wittier and funnier, closer to the Hughes films in laughs and the limited role parents play in this world. The only adult we meet is April’s “cool” Mom (Jessica Hecht) who ineptly referees fights between the graduating sister and her obnoxious, foul-mouthed 14 year-old sibling, Agnes (Addison Riecke).

“I am a three dimensional HUMAN BEING,” Mom complains, “who has had sex…and UTIs!” So, listen to your Momma. Right.

Marks co-wrote the script and packs Hannah with both deflated vulnerability about Nick moving on, and epic threats to their mutual friend Ben (Luke Spencer Roberts) so that she can get details about who her ex has taken up with.

“I am going to tell WEIRD stories about you at your funeral so that NO ONE accurately remembers you!”

We get how rare meeting someone compatible can be when you’re too-smart and 18.

“I’m an existentialist.”

“Cool! I love horses TOO!”

Cinematographer (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) turned director Benjamin Kasulke and the American High production team aren’t reinventing the genre so much as giving tried and true themes a fresh, frank edge.

There’s nothing deep in this “Banana Split,” nothing remotely moving or profound. But Marks (TV’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”) and Liberato (“If I Stay”) let us believe these two would connect, push each other’s buttons and bruise each other, and in just that way — just not in the way the title implies.

MPAA Rating: R for crude sexual content and language throughout, drug and alcohol use — all involving teens.

Cast: Hannah Marks, Liana Liberato, Dylan Sprouse, Luke Spencer Roberts, Addison Riecke and Jessica Hecht

Credits: Directed by Benjamin Kasulke, script by Hannah Marks and Joey Power. An American High/Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time:

There have been a lot of movies set in this “Fall of Rome/Beginning of the Dark Ages” era in recent years. They’re often about some lonely military outpost, some “lost legion” that is slow to get the word that order has broken down and their mission is pointless.

“The Lost Legion,” “The Last Legion,” “Centurion,” “The Eagle.”

I’ve seen’em all.

Here’s one coming out May 8.

The eternally boyish Jesse Eisenberg can almost get away with playing a 16 year-old Jewish Boy Scout helping to rescue orphans during World War II in “Resistance.” Sure, 35 is a tad long in the tooth (he’s 37 now) to pull off “idealistic teen.” But kids had to grow up fast during the war.

It’s the fact that he’s got to convince us that he’s the iconic French mime Marcel Marceau that proves to be the real overreach. Mastering “the silent art” this long past your “mime class” years (don’t think he ever had them), even when your mother performed as a clown, proves to be the big letdown in “Resistance,” a harrowing tale of Occupied France that has enough “true story” in it to make your jaw drop, enough suspense and derring do to do justice to its subject.

Marceau became famous the world over in the decades after the war, the most celebrated mime in history. But in France, he was a decorated war hero, one of that rare breed of heroes who desperately fought back — mostly by (according to the film) helping his fellow Jews survive.

The tale is framed — told by General George S. Patton (Ed Harris) — speaking to a huge Army gathered in Nuremberg just after the German surrender. “Courage,” he reminds his men, “is no more than ‘Fear holding on a minute longer.'” And this young man, whom he introduces, exemplifies that.

A child (Bella Ramsey) is orphaned when her parents (Edgar Ramirez plays her father), are grabbed and murdered by Nazis on Kristallnacht (1938). She is among a group of orphans bribed out of Germany to safety in the border city of Strasbourg, France, where young Marcel Mangel (Eisenberg) is learning to write, paint and perform despite the disapproval of his butcher-father and soldier-brother, who grouses “Marcel only thinks of himself.”

That view starts to change when the kid is enlisted by an activist Boy Scout friend, Georges (Géza Röhrig) to entertain the 123 orphans just freed by the Germans, to be cared for by Catholics in the town castle. Marcel takes to this work. And when the Germans overrun France in 1940, another of his artistic skills comes in handy.

Painters make the best document forgers. That’s when he changes his Jewish last name on his ID — inventing “Marceau.”

“I’m not a fighter,” he complains at efforts to recruit him for The Resistance. “I think, therefor I am.”

But the situation, and the entreaties of the pretty Emma (Clémence Poésy) draw him in. And that puts him in the line of fire of “The Butcher of Lyon,” Klaus Barbie, one of the most infamous German war criminals of World War II.

I’ve never read that Marceau confronted this “monster” directly. But writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz gives his film an epic villain by pitting them against one another. Matthias Schweighöfer makes Barbie a cultured, ideologically pure sociopath — beating homosexuals to death to break up a gay underground gathering of queer Nazis, torturing and gunning down suspects in the empty pool of the belle epoch Hotel Terminus in Lyon, Gestapo headquarters for the region.

The subtext of “Resistance,” in light of the politics of Western Civilization today, is how people of the distant past whom we regard at “not human” in their treatment of others can seem awfully familiar in a climate of hate speech, rhetoric used to justify mistreatment of immigrants of other races.

And it’s a reminder that creative people — artists — play a role in resisting evil, preserving life, humanity and civilization itself.

“Resistance” is, in many ways, an old fashioned World War II movie. Most of those who fought as soldiers or resistors were very young, but Old Hollywood was forever casting Bogart, Savalas, Richard Burton, Gregory Peck and David Niven as its heroes — 40-50somethings.

Nobody in this is “Boy Scout” (it’s a coed organization in the film) age, and losing the impulse, fears and preoccupations of youth costs the film some of its pathos.

The action — daring rescues using street entertainment, fleeing Barbie through the Alps — is beautifully shot and edited. And this is an epic tale well worth telling (pity the French didn’t take a shot at it).

But when we’re meant to be moved, there’s a disconnect. And when we should be transfixed, something Marceau managed in mastering his art, we’re let down. Every time.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Clémence Poésy, Bella Ramsey, Matthias Schweighöfer, Edgar Ramirez and Ed Harris

Credits: Written and directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:01

Hulu takes a stab at stealing some of Netflix’s thunder in the teen “coming of age” genre with “Big Time Adolescence.”

It’s a raunchy, drug-and-profanity fueled “Superbad” meets “Meatballs” of a kid who clings to his older sister’s ex-boyfriend long past the point of reason, the guy who gives the boy his first beer, his first trip to a bar, his first (kind of) girlfriend, first sex and first “hot box.”

And as a sidebar, it’s also about the clued-in-but-still-permissive parents that let all this go on. Remember Jon Cryer in “Two and a Half Men?” This is his character there ceding all control over his kid’s life to a Charlie Sheen-ish stoner/slacker/loser who cheated on his daughter when they were dating.

Pete Davidson of “Saturday Night Live” has the Bill Murray/”Meatballs” role here, an occasionally sweet, often wrong and far-less-benign “big brother” figure to young Monroe (Griffin Gluck).

Zeke used to date Kate (Emily Arlook). The older boy always included the younger one in their boardwalk arcade visits, movie dates. He took an interest. Here it is, seven years later, Kate has gone to college and moved on. But “Mo” still sticks to Zeke like a fanboy and bad-influence Zeke eats it up.

As the opening scene is the hammer being dropped on young Monroe, and his voice-over narration skirts the blame for the consequences of his Big Mistake with “not entirely my fault,” “Big Time Adolescence” is going to be about the slippery slope of hanging with “a man” who “made ME feel like a man,” only in the most adolescent sense.

Zeke is scattered, unrealistic, filled with “I could be an actor” talk or “I’m gonna be a TALK show host,” never doing a damned thing to make those delusions happen.

He picks up Mo in the same battered Volvo wagon he used to pick up sister Kate in, and out they go — to the bars, hanging out with Zeke’s fellow “Joe Rogan Show” bros.

Mo barely bothers to befriend anybody his own age, and the one kid who takes an interest (Thomas Barbusca) is the “Superbad” peer — the one who uses Mo to use Zeke to score liquor for a “Pimps & Ho’s rager” at a high school senior’s house.

The kids there won’t realize Zeke watered down the booze he bought with their money. And oh, by the way kid, take some of my weed with you to sell.

The kid’s dad is Mr. “All it takes is 10 seconds of stupid to ruin your whole life,” but Mo barely puts up a fight. “I feel like it’s going to become this whole thing.” He can see the future even if he is seemingly helpless at avoiding it.

Mo likes being “the Legend” who shows up with the goodies for his classmates. He gets the courage to flirt with the sassy “real” Sophie (Oona Lawrence of “The Beguiled”).

But we know how this is going to play out — the illusion of infallibility, the delusions of popularity, the blunders.

The female roles here are, to a one, barely sketched in. Gluck, from TV’s “Lock & Key,” registers — but only just. He’s playing a character that seems underdeveloped, like most of the others. Some of Mo’s actions seem abrupt and out of character, until we remember how little his “character” is fleshed out.

The actor-turned-writer-director Jason Orley cast Gluck, makes him a baseball player/baseball fanatic (he’s about 85 pounds, soaking wet). But the kid is so in Zeke’s thrall that he lets the never-amounted-to-anything Zeke give him baseball advice, in addition to love life pointers. And yeah, he talks him into selling drugs to teenagers.

It’s Davidson’s show, and he gives Zeke the attention span of a salmon, the morals of a jackrabbit and the sex appeal of the “cool guy” who most certainly wasn’t that cool in school. He needs younger acolytes to sell that myth. Meeting Zeke’s onetime guru, the Zeke back when Zeke was Mo’s age, could be sad or “Van Wilder” funny. It’s neither here.

Cryer’s years of practice playing the well-meaning but “What can you do?” ineffectual dad on TV mean more to his seemingly wise-to-Zeke’s-ways character than the screenplay. Why does Reuben allow this to go on? Cryer has the film’s one touching scene,  an adult chat with Zeke that has pathos, at attempt at getting across what “parenting” is and…not enough parenting.

Orley’s screenplay borrows from several sources and is never quite wrestled into the same shape as the legions of better movies on this boy-comes-of-age theme that preceded it.

But Davidson, in a bid to escape “SNL” just as Bill Murray did shortly after “Meatballs,” gives this guy every bit of charisma and kid-luring bravado that he can summon up. Davidson may know “Big Time” is strictly small time. But he never lets on that he does, never lets up and never lets us notice how thin the entertainment surrounding him is.

MPAA Rating: R for drug content, alcohol use, pervasive language, and sexual references – all involving teens

Cast: Griffin Gluck, Emily Arlook, Julia Murney, Jon Cryer and Pete Davidson

Credits: Written and directed by Jason Orley. A Hulu Original.

Running time: 1:31

Maybe what the world needs now is a romance that surprises and delights, stings and hurts and hangs on that sense of longing the great ones get across.

Maybe it’ll be Canadian. But it won’t be “Space & Time,” a wan, waffling 90 minutes of cute (ish) romantic predictability.

The leads are almost likeable, the situations almost believable, the breakup totally pre-ordained and everything post-break-up pretty much what you’d expect.

Siobhan (Victoria Kucher) is a PhD candidate in experimental particle physics. Sean (Steven Yaffee) is a Toronto photographer. They’ve been together for years, and we meet them on their anniversary, taking the ferry over to Wards Island for a little fireside camp-out.

She broaches the idea of “multiverses,” and how there might be “badass” or hip or more-in-love versions of them in another universe. He’s fretting over “pushing 30.”

And he takes her picture, and our first real hint of trouble emerges.

“You think it’s been years since you’ve photographed me.”

She’s thinking of applying to a fellowship to CERN, the research super-collider in Switzerland. He’s leery. “What would I do there?”

The fact that her sister (Alex Paxton-Beesley) is getting married presses in as well. Where do we go from here?

“I want you to be with me while I figure this thing out!” That’s as romantic a proposal as a fella’s likely to get at 30. Right?

In a flash we go from that to the Big Fight and Big Bluff — which is, or course, called.

“Maybe we should just break up!”

One conceit of writer-director Shawn Gerrard’s film is how grim the other couples are that Siobhan do dinner dates with. Sister Frances (Paxton-Beesley) and her fiance (Ish Morris) bicker over his cell phone addiction and her pushiness. And Sean’s pushy, flirtatious new protege, D.D. (Risa Stone) is a highhanded bully to her live-in lover, Hannah (Robby Hoffman).

Another conceit? Well, there isn’t one. Gerrard is content to show us the stereotypical “male” way of moving on from a breakup and the equally stereotypical female path.

And those play out in not-quite-surprising ways as we wander the primrose/thorny rose path to that inevitable finale.

Kucher makes a pretty but colorless lead, with her glasses the only signifier that she’s “the smartest ‘girl’ in my cohort” (of PhD candidates). Yaffee would need to spend two weeks in Florida to rise to the level of “colorless.”

Not that they have a lot of play with here. The only flashes of life are the more broadly drawn supporting characters D.D. — a narcissistic, psychic-consulting impulsive control freak and Alvin (Andy McQueen), Siobahn’s flaky flirt of a classmate who is discovering hip hop — late, and getting into it “chronologically.”

Very “Big Bang Theory.”

In life, even an ill-fated romance can leave traces, treasured traits and moments and scars, big or small, that you carry with you in memory. “Space & Time” takes up none of the former and too much of the latter to feel of any consequence.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Victoria Kucher, Steven Yaffee, Risa Stone, Alex Paxton-Beesley, Andy McQueen

Credits:Written and directed by Shawn Gerrard. A Head On Pictures release on Apple TV and streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:29

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“Streetlight Harmonies” is a short, brisk documentary that takes us from Gospel close harmony singing as it morphed into pop music, covering The Inkspots through doo wop, Motown and The Beach Boys to En Vogue and *NSYNC.

Built on fresh interviews, some archival performance footage, stills and survivor anecdotes, director Brent Wilson — a veteran of *NSYNC music videos and creator of the most recent Brian Wilson (The Beach Boys) documentary — makes a case for a less heralded assortment of the founding mothers and fathers of rock’n roll, R & B and hip hop.

Singers such as “Little” Anthony Gourdine (Little Anthony and the Imperials), La La Brooks (The Crystals), Al Jardine (The Beach Boys) and Lance Bass (*NSYNC) walk us through the history — ancient and recent, when Gospel drifted over into the 1930s and ’40s pop of The Mills Brothers, The Ink Spots and many others and set the stage for “inner city” music to pop up from kids who couldn’t play an instrument, but who could harmonize and “get the attention of the girls” standing under street lights all over New York and Philly.

Charlie Thomas of The Drifters remembers nights when his budding group would be on one corner of Eighth Ave. in Brooklyn, and “there’d be a different group on every other corner,” all of them singing — some of them canny enough to know where singers, songwriters and producers lived, singing under their windows.

The Coasters, The Orioles, The Clovers and others got their starts just like that.

A film chapter titled “The Big Bang” recalls the genre’s breakout moment. Frankie Lymon, all of 14, and an integrated backing quartet of friends, The Teenagers, blew up with “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” in the spring of 1956.

A legion of imitators followed — African American groups, then Italian American ones like Dion & the Belmonts, girl groups (The Crystals) by the dozen.

Dick Clark “Bandstand” barn-storming bus tours, Motown, Phil Specter’s “Wall of Sound, all smothered by The British Invasion, then brought back by Sha Na Na (Jon “Bowzer” Bauman appears), who were at Woodstock years before “American Graffiti” tapped into the late ’50s nostalgia.

The role such acts and their tours had in integrating segregated America is touched on, along with the ebb and flow of such music within the mainstream, fading away only to come back with a vengeance every dozen years or so.

En Vogue and *NSYNC members chat about the primal appeal of voices in close harmony, with Lance Bass noting “that there’ll always be a place for boys singing harmony as long as there are teenage girls.”

K-Pop stars BTS, and their forebears, Britain’s One Direction, bear that out.

Sure, it’s a surface gloss treatment of the subject, mentioning the racism groups encountered, the financial exploitation rampant back then (and on through *NSYNC).

But “Streetlight Harmonies” is valuable in rounding up a lot of the first and second generation stars and getting their memories on film before they die off. A few have passed since the making of the film.

Stories about how the music migrated from the street corners to the hallways of apartment buildings, and then “into the subways, where we sounded even better” and how the groups allied with Brill Building songwriters to conquer the world would have been lost had Wilson and his crew not gotten their testimonials about making those harmonies by streetlight on film.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast:  La La Brooks, Charlie Thomas, Lamont Dozier, Barbara Jean English, Ron Dante, Jon Bauman, Wally Roker, Brian Wilson, Al Jardine and

Credits: Directed by Brent Wilson, screenplay by George Bellias, Brent Wilson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:24

No, not Lily’s “real” Dad, Phil Collins. But wouldn’t THAT be something?

“Inheritance” goes live/becomes available April 23.