“Dolemite is My Name” may be an affectionate homage to Rudy Ray Moore, profane “party record” stand-up comic of legend, progenitor of hip hop and forgotten pathfinder of the indie cinema.

For the film’s star, Eddie Murphy, it’s a “mutha-f—–g” victory lap.

It’s another movie about the making of a bad movie, a blaxspoilation “Disaster Artist” who had the last laugh about his “amateurish” low-brow action comedy long before generations of hipsters rediscovered him.

And as Moore, an aging, less-than-fit Arkansas dreamer who believed in himself, invested in himself and found every budding entrepreneur’s Holy Grail — an audience that white Hollywood wasn’t serving, and served them — Murphy has his best role in ages, a “Bowfinger” that is his and his alone.

The script of this Craig Brewer (“Hustle & Flow,” TV’s “Empire”) film takes Moore, in his 40s, struggling and hustling to sell the dated-sounded soul and pop records he’d recorded and trying to get a belated stand-up comedy career going, from struggle to gamble, disaster to triumph.

And Murphy makes us care and turns the coarse, rhyming comic “character” Moore appropriated into a laugh-at-me-and-with-me anti-hero. Being hilarious didn’t hurt Rudy Ray Moore, and that’s still in Murphy’s wheelhouse, decades past the days when he was comedy’s cutting edge.

We see Moore as an assistant manager of a famous Central Ave. L.A. record store, hyping  the radio DJ (Snoop Dogg) whose studio is in the back of the store to play Moore’s 45s.

“I ain’t lyin’, people love me!”

Moore’s desperation to “be somebody,” to “get famous” has gotten him nowhere, just a tardy store underling (Titus Burgess of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”) to hear his complaints.

“I ain’t got nothin’ nobody wants.”

Until, that is, a smelly local wino with a glorious patter about assorted characters, a self-described “repository of Afro-American folklore,” gives Rudy an idea. He brings a bottle down to the winos’ encampment, tape records some of their lewd, hyperbolic and passed-down braggadocio, breaks out his pimpest outfit and turns himself into one of wino Rico’s favorite characters — Dolemite.

He trots out the character and his crude, boasting couplets at a local club where he emcees shows for his pal Ben’s (Craig Robinson) soul, blues and jazz ensemble. Dolemite is an instant hit.

All Rudy needs to do is rent some recording equipment, turn a living room into a “club” for the evening so he can record a “party record” of the type that made Redd Foxx famous. Maybe his aunt (Luenell) can pay for it with “all that money you made when you fell off that bus.”

Rudy’s doubting pals (Robinson, Mike Epps, Burgess) become believers and the world, or at least the purveyors of underground, off-color “party records” and then the famed Chitlin’ Curcuit, where black talent had its chance to shine in segregated American entertainment, becomes Rudy’s oyster.

Proving his friends, club owners and record company executives wrong was just Rudy’s first act. A Christmas Day trip to sit with elderly white folks roaring with laughter at the early ’70s remake of “The Front Page” — while he and his friends sit stone-faced, wondering what the hell these rubes find so funny, a movie with “No t—ies, no funny, no kung-fu?” — gives him one last big idea.

His next impossible leap is to the big screen where “I can be EVERYwhere at once!”

No, he’s “no Billy Dee Williams,” but he rooks a serious-minded social justice theater type (Keegan-Michael Key) to help cook up a story, and a pretentious veteran of bit parts in studio pictures and “sidekick” roles in “Black Caesar” and other blaxploitation pictures (Wesley Snipes) to come on board as a co-star and director.

Rudy gambles everything on a “Dolemite” movie back in the days before cheap cell-phone filmmaking, running up against “No thanks” every step of the way.

As foul-mouthed and politically-incorrect (era appropriate) as “Dolemite is My Name” is, it is a classic Hollywood feel-good movie, a sentimental tale of an underdog overcoming obstacle after obstacle to follow his bliss.

A lovely touch, a gaggle of UCLA film students (white) show up as “crew,” and do filmmaker-in-training magic to let the amateurs struggling with even the most rudimentary requirements to make a movie (acquiring “film,” remaking an abandoned hotel into the sets they need, stealing electricity) realize their dream.

If you’ve ever been on a film set when a problem arises, you’ve heard the problem-about-to-be-solved phrase. “I’m on it.” Murphy beams as if the trust fund kid film student “cavalry” has arrived. Little moments like this tickle throughout the “film” part of “Dolemite.”

Snipes is gloriously imperious as D’Urville Martin, Da’Vine Joy Randolph brings warmth and bawdy wit to Rudy’s comedy protege, Lady Reed, Chris Rock and Bob Odenkirk take on chewy cameos.

There are anachronisms, here and there. And truth be told, the picture slows down to a crawl during the sagging later acts.

But feeling good and finding laughs is what this is all about, and Murphy & Co. inject joy into the damnedest places — the pornographic album cover shoots for Rudy’s records, the anger that drove Rudy away from poverty in Arkansas and his first awful critic — his step-dad — anger channeled by his openly contemptuous director, Martin.

The fact that it’s a Hollywood story, replicated just a handful of times through movie history, a lone print of an “I spent everything on this” movie finding success — “A Fistful of Dollars,” “Night of the Living Dead” “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Deep Throat” followed similar paths — just makes this that much more mutha-f—–g adorable.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, crude sexual content, and graphic nudity

Cast: Eddie Murphy, Wesley Snipes, Craig Robinson, Keegan-Michael Key, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Snoop Dogg, T.I., Mike Epps, Titus Burgess and Chris Rock

Credits: Directed by Craig Brewer, script by Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58

I love that Netflix is giving this a limited theatrical release, and dangling the carrot of awards season consideration to an Eddie Murphy comedy, a movie about a 1970s comic who invented a character and became a phenomenon. 

The father of rap? Not for me to say. But others have made the case, and he certainly was a comic, fast-talking role model.

It’s the “true story” of entertainer Rudy Ray Moore, and this 1975 blaxploitation film. 

“Dolemite” was directed by this blaxploitation legend. 

Eddie and Wesley and Craig and Snoop and Keegan-Michael Key and Titus Burgess and Chris Rock and Mike Epps and T.I. and Da’Vine Joy Randolph — people were lined up around the block to get into this Craig Brewer (“Hustle & Flow,” “Empire”) film.

An Oct. 4 release.

Perhaps this song, used in a much-discussed film of the fall…

Inspired the editors of this trailer to include a different Cream song, and perhaps it, too, will end up in this January mov…

That means we should be keeping our movie-going ears perked for “Badge,” “Strange Brew” or perhaps this one. Because three uses in movies in a short period of time just means directors and music editors are listening to each other’s work.

Comic book heroes may possess an immutable timelessness, their virtues more or less the same through the decades.

But every generation has its own Joker — camp or callous, twisted or fey.

This is the “Joker” America deserves, here and now. He is a villain of the dispossessed, a bad guy — like X-Men’s Holocaust survivor Magneto — with a legitimate beef with the world.

Joaquin Phoenix and co-writer/director Todd “The Hangover” Phillips give us a equal parts raging id and on-the-spectrum ego, a broken, beaten-down man in an angry age and a mental health patient abandoned by a system bankrupted by tax-cuts-for-the-rich politicos, the sort of ticking bomb NRA apologists like to say “slipped through the cracks.”

Repellently violent, intimately epic and powered by a performance so absorbed, hurt, confused and just “out there” that it makes everything that’s come before it in the genre just a vamp in tights, “Joker” turns every previous film in this justly maligned genre into “just a cartoon.”

Damn. There’s an Oscar in this.

Phoenix, gaunt to the point where his features are a grotesque skull on a skeletal body, is Arthur Fleck, a Gotham clown-for-hire, spinning “Everything Must Go” signs, until street punks steal the sign and pummel him for wanting it back, putting on a song and dance for a children’s hospital until the moment his innate weirdness — he laughs, uncontrollably, at stress and tragedy, and has a laminated card that explains this to strangers on the street and on the subway — gets him fired from that.

His invalid mother (Frances Conroy) always lectured him that “I was put here to spread joy and laughter.” But his stand-up act is the anchoring delusion of a life built on them.

What kind of comic can’t finish a joke or a thought without breaking into chillingly maniacal giggles? Aside from Jimmy Fallon?

He can fantasize about the gorgeous young mother (Zazie Beetz) who lives down the hall, about getting his big break from celebrated talk show host Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro, taking “King of Comedy” in full circle).

But Arthur is just a guy on seven medications, incapable of responding to any threat with anything more than gasping laughter in a 1980ish metropolis covered in grime, greed and graffiti.

Until that fateful day, that is — his Bernard Goetz moment. That the victims are Wall Street (or whatever its Gotham equivalent is) thugs is a tipping point moment in a city and society looted by the imperious rich, bursting at the seams with the struggling working poor, the disadvantaged, the mentally ill abandoned by “the system.”

Arthur’s act is “V for Vendetta” scary — to the one percent. The ruling class of millionaire Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) and his oligarchic ilk are rather like the folks fearing the “violence” this film could inspire. This is “The Dark Knight” origin as seen from the point of view of someone not a privileged vigilante.

If there’s violence inspired by “Joker,” it won’t be on theaters. It’ll be in brokerages, privacy-stealing tech firms and corners of corrupt crony capitalism.

Maybe put extra guards on anything named “Trump.”

“The worst part about having mental illness,” Arthur decides, “is people expecting you to behave as if you don’t.”

When the man the world has ignored lashes out, off his meds, armed and in his best clown makeup, the world has to notice.

Top flight character actors Bill Camp and Shea Whigham are cops hunting for the clown who killed three guys who had it coming on the subway.

Marc Maron plays the late night show producer who sees more menace in this failed-comic/object of fun than his host (DeNiro). Glenn Fleshler is a fellow clown of dubious “friendly” motives.

But this is Joaquin’s show, our most dangerous actor going to the most dangerous places in a DC Comics film that so transfuses the genre as to make the entire Marvel canon seem like piffle, or at the very least, fluff.

And if everybody who knows any bit of “Batman” lore knows where this is going, if the violence crosses the “repellent” line into gratuitous, if the Chaplin references (“Modern Times,” and his song “Smile”) and Sinatra notes do little to dress up an ugly age referencing an earlier ugly age, that’s all of a piece.

“Joker” is the anti-hero the movies want, crave and must have right now, the Joker this generation deserves.

MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert DeNiro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Bill Camp and Shea Whigham

Credits: Directed by Todd Phillips, script by Todd Phillips, Scott Silver. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:01

For a movie that won big at the Venice Film Festival, and allegedly has Oscar buzz, a film expected to snatch the October movie opening record at the box office, “Joker” has awfully mixed early reviews.

It looks bleak as all get out, the ultimate “dark/darker/darkest” take on a comic book character that the graphic novel fangirls and fanboys adore. But the violence has people — especially surviving family members of the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting — concerned that like the darker “Dark Night” pictures, the impressionable with easy access to firearms could start acting out.

I’m not the last critic to get around to it, and they’re showing it to critics in Florida a whole, gosh, DAY before the damned thing opens.

Let’s see what the fuss is about, shall we?

A good time travel movie doesn’t have to cost a lot. The Spanish “Time Crimes” the American indie jewel “Primer” prove that.

All it needs in order to succeed are engaging characters, a ticking-clock plot and a thought exercise that we can wrestle with as the picture unfolds, and in the days after seeing it.  Good films of the genre, from “Back to the Future” on down the line, invite us to work out the chronology, the “logic” — not so much of the time-travel device, the way it happens, but in how characters cope with the the timeline, and avoid (or succeed) running into versions of themselves.

“Time Trap” (“Timetrap” it appears in the film’s actual credits) makes a go at the first prerequisite, ignores the second and manages to make a complete hash out of the third.

No “mulling it over” when it’s done. It’s too damned dumb for that.

The Mark Dennis/Ben Foster film (“Strings”) weaves in a little “Fountain of Youth” here, some of H.G. Welles’ “The Time Machine” there, stuffing its protagonists in a cave where things go wrong, people get hurt and die and it takes them a very long time to figure out that outside of the cave, time is skipping by in a blur.

A Texas academic archaelogist (Andrew Wilson) has been hunting for people who disappeared in the high desert decades and decades ago. We meet him as he’s gotten his best clue, and hustles back to his house for gear to duck into a cave he needs to check out.

He orders his grad assistants (Brianne Howey, Reiley McClendon) to stay behind. He and his dog will look into this cave. They have a notion it’s the mythic Fountain of Youth he’s looking for. Hitching their academic wagons to a flake? Maybe.

Naturally, Jackie (McClendon) and Taylor (Howey) resolve to go after him. And just for efficiency’s sake, they hit up another student, Cara (Cassidy Gifford, yeah she has famous parents) with access to her dad’s SUV.

She brings along camcorder-crazed little sister Veeves (Olivia Draguicevich) who in turn,insists they drag along an even younger friend of hers, a kid named Wallace but who prefers “Furby” (Max Wright).

They track down the professor’s van, can’t raise him on the radio, and decide to follow him underground. Things start to go wrong the moment they do.

The clues the movie gives us about this cave and what’s in there are a creepy noises, suggestions that others came through here long along, a glimpsed cowboy here, primitive not-quite-Morlocks (from Welles’ “The Time Machine”) there.

The story’s great leap forward in exposition is one of the lamest I’ve ever seen — “Timetrap” is reliant on “found footage” of how this character read that “journal” someone left behind, or footage of how a character came to a grisly end.

A faint attempt is made at telling the story with parallel structure, letting us see Dr. Hooper’s poking around cutting back to the students’ search for him. That proved too complicated and was abandoned.

Whole threads of the story go out the window, too.

And while the third act has a couple of modestly exciting cliffhangers (hanging from a cliff, or a ladder) and some very good effects, the whole affair is more of a head-scratcher than anything you’d recommend.

The moments of pathos are kept short and never referred back to, in spite of the presence of a body from one of their number still within reach. Short mourning period when you’re trapped far below, I guess.

The cast is young and attractive, but the characters are poorly developed. Some semblance of giving every searcher a special skill — the best rock climber, the one person who knows how to drive a stickshift Land Rover, the photographer — is instantly dropped.

And the dialogue is duller than most any conversation you’d overhear at Starbucks.

“Wait, it could be a BOOBY trap!”

“Relax, this isn’t ‘The Goonies.'”

“What’s a ‘Goonie?'”

Nobody wants to speculate, nobody “explains,” nothing important, anyway. Not unless it’s on video.

It’s not the worst time travel tale ever, but it does earn the most dismissive assessement you can give a movie in this genre.

It’s not worth your time.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Olivia Draguicevich, Andrew Wilson, Cassidy Gifford, Brianne Howey, Reiley McClendon and Max Wright

Credits: Directed by Mark Dennis, Ben Foster, script by Mark Dennis.  A Paladin/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

Sometime between “Leprechaun” and “Leprechaun 2” it became fashionable, or a smart career move, even, to concoct a horror film that people would label “so bad it’s good.”

It never made much sense, and there’s always been junk cinema that some fans embraced beyond the world of “cult film” and “guilty pleasure.”

“Plan Nine from Outer Space” has become legend.

“The Room” was celebrated to the point it led to “The Disaster Artist,” although any horror fan knows that “Leprechaun 2” is much more worthy of “The worst film ever made” than either that, or Ed Wood’s loony “Plan Nine.”

“Devil’s Junction” went through many contortions between concept and screen, title changes from “Handy Dandy” to “Devil’s Junction: Handy Dandy’s Revenge,” a director who wanted to change his name on the credits to the colors in the light spectrum acronym — “Roy G. Biv.”

Seeing “Devil’s Junction” — I think that’s the title they’re hanging onto — one gets it. Alan Smithee’s too good to take the credit. 

It’s about a group of friends trapped in an abandoned Detroit TV station — WOMB (Woot!) — by the ventriloquist dummies left behind from a show that was performed, in studio, in an earlier era.

It was plainly, one of the would-be victims notes, “some f—-d up ‘Howdy Doody’ ripoff.”

The “200 year old” ventriloquist is also out to get them. And some nameless hulk in a welding helmet (shades of “Plan Nine”). And an obese “surgeon” in clown makeup.

None of it makes any sense, but when you’re a screenwriter trying to brush off the unexplainable, “Masons” and “Masonic relics” will do.

Steffan (Jake Red) has dreams that his developer dad will let him turn this property into an exclusive club, and he lures five of his 20something friends — a fiesty lesbian (KateLynn E. Newberry), the jock with NFL dreams (Kyle Anderson), the automation lab scientist Doc (Danni Spring), the wealthy-enough womanizer (Arthur Marroquin) and his latest blonde conquest (Cody Renee Cameron) into WOMB after hours.

Jostling the stored dummies, making fun of them, triggers the wooden puppets to life. let the torture porn begin!

I laughed at the first time a dummy sticks its head around a corner, snooping on these young folks joking, smoking a joint, on Rick (Marroquin) and Abby (Cameron) getting naked and getting busy. There are two laughs in this thing, by my count.

An alcoholic businessman (horror veteran Bill Moseley, a mascot in horror films since “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2”) isn’t so drunk that he doesn’t remember what used to happen to kids in the neighborhood while “Mr. Jolly & The Handy Dandy Show” was on air.

He’s set to confront the spectral Mr. Jolly (Bill Oberst, Jr of TV’s “Age of the Living Dead”), only to wind up in the villain’s clutches for a session of tied-up trash talking.

“Who’s gonna win? The man, or the monster?”

“Smart money’s always on THE MONSTER!”

The businessman’s threats — “This ends tonight! You will not succeed. You will not survive!” — don’t hold a lot of water.

“I’m a 200 year old magician with a band of killer puppets.” “You don’t scare me,” in other words.

The puppets stalk and talk and crack wise when “the smart one” takes a shot at stopping them — with mace.

There’s no logic to the “story,” no reason for the hulk in the welding helmet, no performance that matches the freak-the-f-out events befalling them all (well, the women get it), no real budget for effects — save for the ones that involve dismemberment and blood.

“Roy G. Biv” & Co. succeeded in making a bad horror picture. They just didn’t make one bad enough to be so bad that it’s good.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, torture, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Bill Moseley, Bill Oberst, Jr., KateLynn E. Newberry, Jake Red, Kyle Anderson, Danni Spring, Cody Renee Cameron and Arthur Marroquin

Credits: Jeff Broadstreet, aka Roy G. Biv, script by J.S. Brinkley (story by Donald Borza II).   An Acort International release.

Running time: 1:22

A January release from newish distributor STX, a film that takes Ritchie back to what he does best. “Rocknrolla,” “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” “Snatch.”

The horrors of “Aladdin” are forgiven?

Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, Hugh Grant, Colin Farell, Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding and blimey, Jeremy Strong.

Check out that damned Hugh Grant in a bad guy beard in the opening!

Henry Golding? Watch to butch up after “Crazy Rich Asians,” mate.

Looks like fun. Jan. 24.

I had hoped that the cringe-worthy comedy that took its place as a TV genre would confine itself to the short doses-long format of the sitcom.

But no. There’s a bit of cringing involved in most every film that alumni of “The Office” or “Veep” bring with them to big screen projects.

On rare occasions — a Steve Carell movie here and there, Paul Lieberstein (“The Office”) in “Song of Back and Neck,” for instance, “Cedar Rapids,” the only worthy star vehicle on Ed Helms’ resume — the squirm-inducing persona that hangs around a performer’s neck makes for something amusing and rewarding spread over 90 minutes.

Every other time? Ugh.

Case in point? “Under the Eiffel Tower,” a star vehicle for Matt Walsh of “Veep” that has many a cringe and barely a laugh. It starts with a huuuuuge cringe, and no comic payoff, and spirals down the drain like wine in the spit-sink of a tasting gone terribly wrong.

Utterly without charm? Close enough.

Walsh plays Stuart, a Louisville bourbon salesman who drinks his way out of a job and is inexplicably rescued by a “join the family on our trip to France” lifeline tossed by friends.

Even less explicably, he betrays the friendship of Tillie (Michaela Watkins) and Frank (David Wain) by turning a lifelong “Uncle” Stuart connection to their new PhD daughter (Dylan Gelula of “The Unsinkable Kimmy Schmidt”) into something icky beyond measure.

He proposes to this woman he’s known since childhood, someone half his age, “Under the Eiffel Tower” and in front of her dismayed dad and comically furious mother.

Watkinsm, of “Good Boys” and TV’s “Transparent,” is the best thing in “Under the Eiffel Tower,” and after that abortive, friendship-killing debacle, she is rarely seen again as the movie leaves that tower and proceeds, in the most trite and contrived ways, to pair up Stuart with a roguesh Scottish footballer stereotype (Reid Scott) as traveling companion, and lovely and sophisticated vintner Louise (Judith Godrèche), whom they meet on a train and proceed to compete over for the rest of the film.

Romance is in the air, or in the wine, in “the land that gave us Piaf, the guillotine and Andre the Giant.”

The “meet cute” debate over the relative merits of wine and bourbon is almost clever (Godrèche had a hand in the script), if an inaccurate oversimplification.

“Wine makes you feel warm and sensual. Whisky dills and agitates.”

Stuart is a tactless schlub, Liam is an arrogant, hustling douche, and we run into a Frenchman or two who fits that feminine hygeine description as well.

Everything happens inorganically, with little regard for amusing twists, fated “connection” and the like. No, this French beauty must be drawn to the boorish alcoholic Lousivlle doormat because…he can cook and she can’t? He’s a born salesman and she isn’t, improvising a plummy wine-tasting spiel for moronic American and British tourists?

One day, after she’s let them stay at the winery owned by the infirm American Gerard (Gary Cole), she asks, “You’re still here?”

That’s the perfect question to ask the movie, and the best spot to dump out of it lest you waste another 45 minutes on this directionless “road comedy,” this unamusing and unromantic “romantic comedy.”

Love the scenery (not enough of it), hated most everything else about “Under the Eiffel Tower.”

MPAA Rating: Unrated, adult situations, alcohol is used and abused

Cast: Matt Walsh, Judith Godrèche, Michaela Watkins, Reid Scott, Dylan Gelula, david Wain and Gary Cole

Credits: Directed by Archie Borders, script by Archie Borders, David Henry and Judith Godrèche

An Orchard/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

“The Joker and I? Broke up.”

And so Warners launches the breakout character from “Suicide Squad,” the one bit of casting that paid off, into a spinoff Margot Robbie star vehicle.

“Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn” is being released in the film release year’s sleeperland, Feb. 20.

Dazzling trailer, in an eye candy sense. Very “Sin City” — lush, saturated colors, etc.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and her sometime co-star and paramour Ewan McGregor are also in the cast of “Birds of Prey.”