LOS ANGELES, May 23 (UPI) — Dogma, returning to theaters June 5, comes from a decade where indie writer/directors were celebrated for the words in their screenplays. Kevin Smith was one of the major voices that emerged in the era of Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater and Sofia Coppola.

In his first film, Clerks, Smith had his convenience store clerks express all of his thoughts about Star Wars, retail and relationships. Dogma, his fourth film, was the work of a writer who grew up Catholic and had thoughts about faith.

Exiled angels Bartleby (Ben Affleck) and Loki (Matt Damon) find a way to get back into heaven. As part of a Catholicism outreach campaign, New Jersey Cardinal Glick (George Carlin) promises forgiveness to anyone who passes through his church’s arch.

If the angels gain forgiveness, then take human form and die, God will have no choice but to allow them back into heaven. What they don’t realize is that invalidating God’s decree will cause the end of all existence.

So God’s Metatron (Alan Rickman) visits Planned Parenthood employee Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) and gives her the task of preventing Loki and Bartleby from entering the church. Smith regulars Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are sent as prophets to help Bethany in her quest.

This is a story that adapts Catholic scripture into a modern apocalyptic story, but it is really a vehicle for characters to talk about religion, the way characters in other Smith movies talk about movies and comic books.

That dialogue is performed emphatically, and more subtly it’s well edited by Smith and producer Scott Mosier. Smith’s biblical figures would use the F word while making their profound points, but maybe they learned it from millennia of humans, or at the Tower of Babel.

The film’s messages challenge some of the oldest doctrines of Catholicism. No one has to base their values on a movie, but as an artistic exploration of this thesis, all of Smith’s questions are backed up by a creative interpretation of the scripture.

The message is ultimately that God doesn’t care which religion you follow as long as you believe. That would offend organized religion, but the film unabashedly believes in God.

Jesus’ unsung 13th apostle Rufus (Chris Rock) tells Bethany that God wants people to think for themselves. As bold a take on religion as that might be, it is ultimately optimistic.

Bethany is a character seeking to regain her faith. She remembers the feelings that church gave her as a child.

Yet she no longer feels that as an adult, which is understandable with painful life experience. But she’s open to restoring her faith and this adventure gives her a reason.

Of course, Smith has a mischievous spark. Loki likes to talk nuns out of their faith when he’s literally an Angel with knowledge of God herself (Alanis Morissette).

Smith speculates on eras of Jesus’ life that were not in the Bible as characters speak of their time with him. Those extrapolations show empathy towards the burden of being the son of God for a teenager.

They’re also not meant to be canonical. Smith’s point is to get viewers thinking as they laugh, not launch a religion himself.

Exposure to biblical figures certainly does not make Jay any more wholesome, but his ability to keep making vulgar sexual innuendo amid crises of faith of apocalyptic proportions is impressive.

There is a little bit of gay panic when Bethany mistakes Bartleby and Loki for lovers, and Rufus exposes Jay’s secret desires for men. Characters also use the R-word, because 1999 was unfortunately before many people learned it was a slur, but Smith has addressed both of those issues in subsequent work.

The complicated release history of Dogma, passing between several studios, has made it difficult to see since its Blu-ray release. Now out of print and not streaming anywhere, the re-release is a welcome return of one of Smith’s seminal works.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

Some bio documentaries are carried mostly by the reflective, archival footage that send you back to the subject’s heyday.

But in Matt Wolf’s “Pee-wee as Himself” — as wonderful as much of the archival stuff is — nothing is more compelling than when Paul Reubens is simply himself.

Before his death from cancer in 2023, Reubens sat for 40 hours of interviews with Wolf. His cooperation is clearly uncertain and sometimes strained in the film — he stopped participating for a year before talking about his infamous 2001 arrest — and his doubts on the project linger throughout.

Reubens would rather be directing it, himself, he says more than once. The man many know as Pee-wee Herman is used to controlling his own image, and he has good reason for being skeptical of others doing so. But beyond that tension over authorship of his story, Reubens is also delightfully resistant to playing the part of documentary cliche.

“I was born in 1938 in a little house on the edge of the Mississippi River,” he begins. “My father worked on a steamboat.”

Talking heads have gotten a bad rap in documentaries in recent years, but in “Pee-wee as Himself,” nothing is more compelling than Paul Reubens simply sitting before the camera, looking back at us.

Pee-wee may be iconic, but Paul Reubens is hysterical. And Wolf’s film, with that winking title, makes for a revealing portrait of a performer who so often put persona in front of personhood. In that way, “Pee-wee as Himself,” a two-part documentary premiering Friday on HBO and HBO Max, is moving as the posthumous unmasking of a man you can’t help but wish we had known better.

Reubens was a product of TV. He grew up transformed by shows like “Howdy Doody,” “The Mickey Mouse Club” and, later, “I Love Lucy.”

“I wanted to jump into my TV and live in that world,” he says.

Part of the delight of the first half of Wolf’s film is watching the wide range of inspirations — the circus culture of Sarasota, Florida, where his family moved to; Andy Warhol; performance art — coalesce into a singular creation like Pee-wee. That name, he says, came from a tiny harmonica that said “Pee-wee” on it, and a kid named Herman he knew growing up.

“It was a whole bunch of things that had never really connected connecting,” says Reubens.

Wolf carefully traces the birth of Reubens’ alter-ego through the Groundlings in Los Angeles, on stage at the Roxy and then out into the world, on “The Gong Show,” on Letterman, in the 1985 Tim Burton-directed “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and, ultimately, on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

“I felt in a way I was bringing the character out into the wild,” he recalls. “I just stayed in character all day.”

That came with obvious sacrifices, too. For the sake of his career, Reubens stayed closeted as a gay man. He grew intensely private and seldom appeared in public not in character. Reubens also jettisoned some of his close collaborators, like Phil Hartman, as his fame grew. There’s tragedy, both self-inflicted and not, in Reubens’ increasing isolation.

When Reubens was arrested in 1991 and charged with indecent exposure, Reubens’ carefully guarded persona came crashing down. The scandal was worse because people knew only Pee-wee and not Reubens. There was also injustice in the whole affair, particularly the 2002 arrest that followed on charges of child pornography that were later dropped. In both cases, homophobia played a role.

When Reubens does get around to talking about it, he’s most resistant to painting himself as a victim, or offering any, as he says, “tears of a clown.”

Wolf, the director of films like “Recorder,” about Marion Stokes, who recorded television all day long for 30 years, and “Spaceship Earth,” about the quirky 1991 Biosphere 2 experiment, is better known as a talented documentarian of visual archives than as an compelling interviewer of celebrities.

“Pee-wee as Himself” would have probably benefited from less one-sided interplay between subject and filmmaker. But Wolf’s time was also limited with Reubens and just getting this much from him is clearly an accomplishment.

Above all, Reubens says he’s doing the film to clear a few things up. In the end, the full portrait of Reubens — including all his playful, self-deprecating charm in front of the camera — add up to a much-needed retort to some of the misunderstandings about Reubens.

The day before he died, Reubens called Wolf to say one last thing: “I wanted to let people know who I really was and see how painful it was to be labeled as something I wasn’t.”

“Pee-wee as Himself,” a Warner Bros. release is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 205 minutes. Three stars out of four.

One of the constants in the intimate films of Joachim Trier is his ability to bring out the very best in his actors. With emotional acuity, he mines their inner lives for truths that seem subcutaneously to connect his cast to his characters. Actors don’t so much play roles in the Danish-Norwegian director’s work as live inside them. His transcendent 2022 feature, The Worst Person in the World, is both a romantic comedy and an anti-rom-com, a close study of a woman navigating a messy transitional period, alive with intergenerational insights and foibles most of us can recognize from some point in our lives.

Trier’s exquisite new film, Sentimental Value (Affeksjonsverdi), shifts its gaze from romantic to familial love, at times harmonious and at others tainted by resentment and anger. The director’s observation of the mutable contracts between sisters, and even more so, fathers and daughters, is intensely affecting in a movie freighted with melancholy but also leavened by surprising notes of humor. As always with Trier’s films, its depth of feeling sneaks up on you without announcing itself.

There are faint traces of Bergman in Sentimental Value, but also Chekhov and Ibsen, pulled into a contemporary world where they deepen our understanding of history and memory in relation to the characters. With grace and empathy, it explores the volatile power of art and the cost of making highly personal work, to artists and to the people they have hurt.

That aspect is amplified by the living, breathing presence of an Oslo family home, a place that looks like a fairytale cottage, nestled among the soothing greens of the garden and looking onto expansive views of the city. But it’s also a fortress of sorrow, of pain remembered, embedded in its walls.

Renate Reinsve, the luminous star of The Worst Person in the World, plays Nora, an acclaimed stage actress who pours her anxieties into her taxing roles. As a child, she wrote an essay for class about her family’s house and the history it contains of people who lived there before her, precociously attributing it sentient properties.

A hilarious early scene taps Reinsve’s natural gift for physical chaos comedy as Nora is gripped, not for the first time, by crippling stage fright. She misses her music cue (the portentous opening notes of The Shining’s main title theme) while having a full-scale meltdown and refusing to be coaxed by her director to go on. Kasper Tuxen’s agile camera follows her as she dashes from her dressing room to the backstage area, throwing herself at her fellow company member and married lover Jakob (Anders Danielsen Lie, from Worst Person and earlier Trier films). Tearing at her costume and hair, she pleads with him to fuck her, or failing that, slap her. He opts for the latter.

At their mother’s wake, Nora is the calm one while her normally composed sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an academic historian, is a mess. Retreating upstairs, Nora listens at the heating grate, just as she did as a child eavesdropping on her parents’ arguments or her therapist mother’s conversations with patients; she is startled to recognize the voice of her father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), an unexpected arrival.

A once lauded film director who hit a 15-year fallow patch, Gustav abandoned the family when the girls were young, moving to Sweden and divorcing their mother. The reunion is more than a little awkward. Further complicating matters is the fact that their mother got the house after the divorce, but the papers were never signed, meaning Gustav now owns it.

Trier and his longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt draw us in quickly to the family dynamic, establishing the sly ripples of humor that run through even the darker scenes.

Gustav tells Nora he needs to speak with her while he’s in town, later showing her a script that he says might be the best thing he’s ever written and a great comeback for him as a director. He offers her the lead role of a young mother, transparently based on his own mother’s tragic story, though he denies it.

Nora wants no part of the movie or of him, calling him a drunk who has caused the family nothing but pain. She adds that he has never shown much interest in her work and barely even seen her on stage, which he justifies without apology by saying he doesn’t care for theater.

This is a marvelous role for Skarsgard, who gets to play up Gustav’s self-importance and lack of accountability along with his flirtatious charm as the movie progresses. The theater/film divide seems to confirm Nora’s view of him as the enemy. He doubles down on it later, confessing, “It’s not that I hate theater. I just hate watching it.” Sure enough, he then fails to show at her opening night.

Determined to go ahead with the film, he casts American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), whom he met while being honored at a film festival. She’s jaded with Hollywood and with the projects she has lined up, roles to which she feels no connection.

Rachel responds emotionally to a screening of the movie that put Gustav on the map many years back, a WWII drama about orphaned Jewish children trying to escape the Nazis that ends on a lingering closeup of a young girl’s haunted face.

That role was played by Agnes, who says the film shoot was the only time she ever got to be at the center of her father’s universe. When he approaches her about putting her son Erik (Oyvind Hesjedal Loven) in the new movie, she instantly refuses, though that doesn’t stop him from going around her to try convincing the boy what fun it would be. The DVD selections that he turns up with as a gift on his grandson’s ninth birthday are priceless. Less kid-friendly films would be hard to find.

Playing an egotist with a roguish appeal to which only his daughters are immune, Skarsgard stirs in wry humor (and a funny Netflix dig) about being an aging arthouse director whose success is behind him. He visits his longtime cinematographer Peter (Lars Väringer) in the swanky house paid for by his work on Lasse Hallström films. But during the 15 years since they last worked together, Peter retired; he’s keen to do the movie, but his frail physical state makes Gustav drop the offer. Gustav later asks his producer Michael (Jesper Christensen), “Am I too old for this?”

Trier and Vogt delicately layer in allusions to grief and sadness being passed down to successive generations, both in scenes Gustav rehearses with Rachel and archival records Agnes finds of her grandmother, who was tried for treason, imprisoned and tortured during the German occupation.

Despite the frequent touches of humor, the movie’s swirling mix of past and present builds pathos, yielding one of Trier’s characteristic stylized flourishes in which the faces of multiple generations wash over each other, staring into the camera as one person morphs into the next.

Around this time, Rachel starts to feel uncomfortable about doing the film, realizing it’s not her story to tell. In one of the movie’s loveliest scenes, she approaches Gustav about pulling out; he shows her more paternal fondness than he’s probably ever shown his daughters. Skarsgard is unexpectedly moving as Gustav acknowledges to himself the ways he failed his family, his arrogant certainty abruptly falling away.

There are gorgeous moments late in the movie between the sisters that indicate how their roles have switched since childhood. Nora looked after Agnes when they were girls, but Agnes now serves as protector of her more fragile sister, just as she took on caregiver responsibilities with their dying mother. As wonderful as Reinsve is, Ibsdotter Lilleaas, who’s mostly unknown outside Norway, matches her every emotional beat. “How did it happen?” Nora asks Agnes. “You turned out fine and I’m fucked up.”

Unlike the Hollywood version of this story — the kind of script Rachel Kemp might have passed on — there’s no neat and tidy reconciliation. But Trier keeps tricks up his sleeve that provide surprises and leave open a window just enough to let in a sliver of hope.

For what might have been a standard family melodrama in less capable hands, Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards and contemplative in its reflections on the places where we live becoming a permanent repository for our memories, remaining there even after we move on. The movie’s poignancy accumulates gradually, every supple turn expertly modulated as the presence of generations past becomes more tangible.

Cinematographer Tuxon (who also shot Worst Person) takes great advantage of the crystalline Scandinavian light, giving the chamber piece a panoramic amplitude. As always, Trier makes beguiling music choices, deep cuts that gently help shape the mood — the way he did with the Harry Nilsson songs and Art Garfunkel’s “Waters of March” cover in Worst Person.

Here, he bookends the movie with two songs brimming with tenderness and warmth: Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl” and Labi Siffre’s “Cannock Chase.” Anyone whose soundtrack selections run from Roxy Music to Michael Nyman, New Order to Pastor T.L. Barrett & the Youth for Christ Choir, makes you want to score an invite to explore their album collection.

The whole cast is superb, but it’s especially gladdening to see Reinsve working again with a director who draws out every ounce of raw feeling in her, but also makes you think — even in this often dark and predominantly dramatic context — how good she might be in screwball comedy.

One scene comes to mind that’s just a delight, when Nora and Agnes are in the house sorting through things, deciding what they might want to take as keepsakes.

Nora chooses a vase that Agnes wanted and when they see Gustav arriving with Rachel through the window, Nora backs out of the room like a bad driver, almost smashing the vase but catching it in time, running out the back door, across the yard and through a gap in the fence still clutching it. As she walks briskly toward the camera it seems like perfect continuity with her character Julie running in The Worst Person in the World.