Posted last January: Amanda Lipitz‘s STEP (Fox Searchlight, 8.4) is a spunky, engaging, “we’re black and proud and headed for college if we can earn good enough grades and somehow manage the financial aspect” thing. It’s about hard work, high hopes, heart, family, ups and downs, etc.

We’re all familiar with docs and narratives about high-school strivers. The best of them are rough and real but also comforting and inspiring. We can do this if we really believe in ourselves and work our asses off, and it couldn’t hurt if fate or God smile. STEP feels like one of the better ones. It ends, of course, with a competitive performance finale, the outcome of which gives you a nice “fuck yeah!” feeling.

Shot in late 2015 (or a few months after the Baltimore unrest sparked by the death of Freddie Gray), the doc focuses on three senior girls at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women who are members of the stepdance team, and are known as the “Lethal Ladies of BLSYW.”

The most magnetic of the three is Blessin Giraldo, a spirited looker who’s looking to attend college away from Baltimore, where she’s seen some tough times both at home (her mother suffers from depression) and elsewhere. Plus she’s having scholastic difficulties and is therefore putting her future in some jeopardy.

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Angelina Jolie is on the cover of this month’s Vanity Fair, which is either her ninth or tenth. A VF cover used to be a fairly big deal — now it’s like “uh-huh, okay.” I’ve mentioned twice before that as a director with the ability to choose her own projects, Jolie has demonstrated a preference for stories about innocents suffering horribly under the yoke of evil forces. In The Land of Blood and Honey (’11) focused on a Bosnian muslim woman (Zana Marjanovic) coping with the Serbian genocide. Unbroken (’14) was largely about an American soldier being sadistically brutalized in a Japanese prison camp. The following year Jolie was talking about directing a film about the poaching of elephants with Brad Pitt intending to play poacher-fighter Richard Leakey. Now she’s promoting her latest film, a Netflix production called First They Came For My Father, which deals with the Khymer Rouge’s genocide of Cambodia in the mid ’70s. Father will probably play Telluride.

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Yesterday’s Toronto 2017 announcements will ultimately represent…what, maybe half of what will finally play there? By the way: I’m presuming (praying) that Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Loveless, a Cannes hottie, will be among the Telluride selections. Put another way, it damn well ought to be.

England Is Mine is a ringing title, but name one Smiths song that you hum to yourself on occasion. I can name several. The Smiths are my life. When I shower I’ll often sing “Girlfriend in a Coma” or “Still Ill” or “Panic” or “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” A portion of my living room walls are covered in Smiths’ album jackets. The Queen is Dead, Meat Is Murder…come softly to me, Smiths! I’d obviously like to see Mark Gill’s film (who wouldn’t?) — a friend just sent me a link. Seriously: I always understood that I needed to respect The Smiths, but in the same way I never saw a Beth and Scott B. film, I never gave them a single listen on my own dime.

With all the Donald Trump animus it doesn’t seem right that Chicago artist Mitch O’Connell couldn’t make a deal with a domestic billboard company to display his They Live art. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that billboard companies pretty much nationwide don’t want to touch anything so political,” reports the Chicagoist‘s Steve Gossett. Later this month O’Connell’s creation will finally be displayed, albeit “along Norte 69, in Naucalpan, just northwest of Mexico City.” Has McConnell ever heard of Robbie Conal? The image should be duplicated by the tens of thousands and wild-posted everywhere, every city and town, sea to shining sea. Someone needs to fund this.

Goleta bluff — Sunday, 7.23, 4:35 pm.

Whenever you’re flirting with buying something on the rack, the price is almost always about $100 more than you want to pay.

Posse wine, ordered at Bacara Resort & Spa.

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Mike White‘s Brad’s Status is clearly a smart, bone-dry comedy about an insecure, middle-aged dad (Ben Stiller) who’s more than a bit  haunted by underachievement and, worse, the blooming success of his son. My first reaction was “this’ll be good, I get this, I wanna see it.” But right after that I thought, “Wait, Stiller’s playing the same kind of anxious 40ish guy he played in Noah Baumbach‘s While We’re Young (’14). Should he be doing another one of these so soon?” But I’d jump for joy if he’d make Greenberg 2.

Right after the reported encounter with alien craft, Indianapolis air-traffic control asks the pilot if he’d like to report a UFO. Silence. The air-traffic guy asks again if the pilot wants to report. Finally the scratchy reply: “Negative…we don’t want to report.” That’s much, much better than what this trailer passes along (“I wouldn’t know what to report.”) Trailer-cutters are dedicated to removing the intrigue and the shading. They’re always dumbing things down.

I’ve made it clear I’m no fan of Mervyn LeRoy‘s 1950s films, and that certainly includes The FBI Story (’59). James Stewart gives a reasonably engaging performance as FBI agent Chip Hardesty, whose 25-year history with the bureau serves as the basic throughline. If you can excuse or ignore the fact that The FBI Story is essentially a J. Edgar Hoover propaganda film (the closeted FBI director assisted the producers every which way), you could give it a pass. But it’s always struck me as a stodgy, Joe Friday-ish, overly righteous thing with a broomstick up its ass.

And yet I’ve always loved Elmer Bernstein‘s main-title theme. It summons your inner right-winger, and as such is almost as good as Jerry Goldsmith‘s Patton theme (including his entr’acte music). Every so often Bernstein’s scores would surpass the films they were meant to enhance; this was one such occasion.

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