If aliens are out there watching our movies, they definitely think high school is some form of purgatory. They might be right. In this new Hulu comedy (releasing June 17), the 2008 class of a small-town high school finds out that they didn’t actually graduate. In their mid-thirties, this group of unhappy people has to return to North Meadows High to complete their last two weeks of school—and their regrets, failed romances, and other tortures are still waiting for them. 

Starring John Reynolds, Sofia Black-D’Elia, Carmen Christopher, Jo Firestone, and Gary Richardson, with Topher Grace, Never Change! is an absurdist comedy directed by Marty Schousboe and written by Reynolds that’s about being forced to change and facing demons. It’s also a movie that reminds me that humor is subjective. It’s apt in satirizing the intersections between who these characters hoped to be as teenagers and everything (absolutely everything) that went wrong afterward. Finding its truths in a combination of relatable moments and classic High School movie references, there’s something here that might’ve worked somewhere between Gross Pointe Blank and The Big Chill—maybe even The Four Seasons—all dialed up to the peaks of absurdity.

However, I was not amused. You know that meme where the choir sings, “What the hell!? What the hellie?” I am the meme. The gags keep gagging until they’re a choking hazard. But Richardson’s “Watch this” scene is incredible. And although the cast is up for whatever and the filmmakers go full stream-of-consciousness while telling a cohesive story, I wanted to spit this movie out. I admire what they’re going for but…Yeah, I think we’re done here.

Béla Guttmann may be the most consequential soccer coach you’ve never heard of. But if it weren’t for Guttmann, you may never have heard of Pelé.

And Brazil may never have become the greatest soccer-playing country on Earth.

That’s because Guttmann changed the shape of modern Brazilian soccer — and changed the sport forever — when he imported the revolutionary 4-2-4 system from Hungary to Sao Paulo in 1957. A year later, Brazil won the first of five World Cups and the joga bonito was born.

But what Guttmann brought to Brazil isn’t nearly as interesting as how he got it there. That’s just one of the fascinating stories in “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story,” the exhibit that will open the Holocaust Museum LA on Sunday at the Goldrich Cultural Center, a $70-million expansion that will double the size of the Pan Pacific Park museum’s campus to 70,000 square feet.

The exhibit was unveiled during a private reception on Saturday followed by a free preview day open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The grand public opening will take place in August.

The show’s launch coincides with eight local World Cup matches, which kicked off with the United States’ 4-1 win over Paraguay on Friday at SoFi Stadium, and it shines a light on the important but largely overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game, as well as how Jewish innovators like Guttmann shaped the modern rhythm, style and culture of the sport.

“It was in the same intellectual level as jazz, as art and everything modern and progressive,” journalist Allon Sander, who helped curate the exhibit, said of Jewish participation in European soccer in the years before World War II.

“The origin of the game and how it intersects with Jews and the Holocaust and the impact that these Jewish footballers and coaches had to shape the game and help popularize the sport is so fascinating,” added Beth Kean, the museum’s CEO. “And it’s an unknown history.”

Much of that story can be told through Guttmann, who was born in Budapest in the final year of the 19th century and developed into one of the sport’s first Jewish stars, representing Hungary in the 1924 Olympics and playing for nine teams in two countries before retiring to become a coach.

But none of that success mattered when the Hungarian government began introducing anti-Jewish laws in 1938, costing Guttmann his job and nearly his life when he was sent to a Nazi forced-labor camp, where he was tortured. Just days before he believed he would be shipped to Auschwitz, which meant certain death, he escaped alongside Erno Erbstein, another Jewish coach.

Erbstein revolutionized soccer in Italy before dying in 1949, along with the entire Torino team, when their plane crashed into a hilltop outside Turin. Four years ago, he was inducted into the Italian soccer hall of fame. Guttmann, meanwhile, who lost much of his family in the Nazi death camps, would go on to coach for 42 years in 14 countries, winning championships in six of them yet only staying in a single place for more than two years just once.

“He’s running away from his demons,” said Ronen Dorfan, a journalist and sports historian based in Budapest whose research was instrumental in putting the exhibit together. “His father was murdered, his sister was murdered. You never know how you survived in Budapest during the war so he had guilt feelings.”

A jersey worn by player Max Wozniak and a jersey from the 1930s are displayed in an exhibit called “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story.”

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

The exhibit was designed in three sections, the first devoted to the years before World War II, the second is about the Holocaust and the third is the postwar years. And while it details Jewish participation in, and influence on, global soccer, it also challenges the cliché that Jews were intellectuals, artists and laborers but not athletes.

“We are always trying to challenge stereotypes. Stereotypes that we might have about ourselves and even stereotypes that we believe about others,” said Jordanna Gessler, the museum’s vice president of education and exhibits who helped curate the show. “It’s crucial to help people find their place and their voice and really see the unity, the similarities between people.

“This is a story that was lost in time and we’re really bringing it out,” Gessler added. “To really have this conversation and encourage people to explore stories that they might not know.”

One thing people might not know is that in the 1920s and ‘30s, Europe’s best teams weren’t in England, Germany or France, but in Austria and Hungary, where they were led by Jewish players and coaches such as Hugo Meisl, Jozsef Braun, Arpad Weisz, Marton Bukovi, Gusztav Sebes and Gyula Mandi. Weisz and Braun were both killed by the Nazis.

A soccer ball from the 1974 World Cup is displayed at an exhibit called “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story.”

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

The surge of antisemitism and fascism in Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe helped spread the influence of those revolutionary players and coaches around the world.

“With the rise of the Reich and the Holocaust, the coaches ran away,” Dorfan said. “And they ran to every corner of the world, to Brazil, to Argentina, to Portugal [and] provided coaches to Real Madrid, to Barcelona, to Benfica, to Flamengo.

“There isn’t one of these clubs that doesn’t owe its tactical development in the ‘40s and ‘50s to the Jewish coaches, which came primarily from Hungary.”

The primary tactical development was the shift from the popular but rigid 2-3-5 formation, which required immense physical endurance and tactical discipline, to the fluid 4-2-4, which spread the wingers to the touch line and allowed for improvisation and creativity on the attacking end, a formation pioneered in Budapest in the 1920s.

“They developed a more refined game of passing the ball, keeping it on the carpet rather than the English kick and run, and really put thought into tactical thinking,” Dorfan said.

Guttmann, who played or coached for more than two dozen teams in his career — including one, in Romania, that paid him in vegetables during the postwar period — brought the Hungarian approach to Brazil in 1957 when he coached Sao Paulo to a championship. After Vicente Feola, the manager Guttmann replaced at Sao Paulo, took over the national team a year later, he brought the formation with him, popularizing many of the tactics still used in modern soccer, such as fluid defensive wingers, overlapping full backs, the use of a withdrawn striker and an attacking midfield.

The soccer team at the Theresienstadt concentration camp’s flag is displayed in a Holocaust Museum LA exhibit called “The Beautiful Game … The Untold Story.”

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

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“He is the whole exhibition in one man,” Dorfan said of Guttmann.

“Obviously if we wouldn’t have had the Holocaust, those [coaches] wouldn’t be kept out of Europe, Europe would be much stronger, much more developed. [And] then the development of Brazil or the success of Brazil would be coming much later,” Sander said.

Dorfan spent the better part of two years tracking down many of the more than 100 trophies, uniforms, photos and trinkets that make up “The Beautiful Game” exhibit, a search that required determination, perseverance and more than a little luck. Many of the items, because of their ties to Jewish athletes and teams, were hidden during the war and presumed lost. Others resurfaced only through detective work that sent Dorfan following leads that spanned decades and crossed more than a dozen borders.

That also cost money. So Alan Rothenberg, the man who, as president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, first brought the World Cup to Los Angeles 32 years ago, stepped up to lead an effort that raised more than $1 million to fund the exhibit.

“The story really needs to be told, particularly with what’s going on right now with respect to antisemitism,” Rothenberg said. “It’s really important for people to realize what can happen. And soccer is a great vehicle to draw them in. The one main thing in the museum is bringing schoolkids in.”

The Nazis and their collaborators failed in their attempt to erase the history of Jewish soccer pioneers; in fact, they inadvertently popularized both the men — and women — and their ideas. But the sport also helped other Jews survive a dark period and Kean said that may be the most beautiful and uplifting part of “The Beautiful Game.”

“The main reason we decided to do this exhibition in the first place is because for years so many survivors, when they talk about their life before the war, so many of them talk about soccer. So many of them were passionate and fond of the sport,” she said.

“We knew the exhibit opening was going to coincide with the World Cup. L.A. is going to be on the world stage. This is a great opportunity for the museum to get these stories out.”

It’s tempting to describe English novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh’s fine-grained gay love story On the Sea as another version of God’s Own Country, switching out Yorkshire farmland for coastal waters in North Wales. But that would be unfairly reductive. Like Francis Lee’s smoldering 2017 debut feature, this is a rugged, elemental drama whose slow-burn potency plays out against a landscape as bleak as it is beautiful, where taciturn men are locked into restrictive codes of masculinity set in stone generations ago. 

A palpable sense of place, of milieu and of working-class lives in which pleasure, passion and desire have been dulled courses through this atmospherically charged film like the icy seawater and rough currents of the straits. The unerring restraint of its leads never obscures the raw feelings of their sensitively drawn characters.

The middle-aged protagonist, Jack (Barry Ward), and his younger brother Dyfan (Celyn Jones) co-own a mussel farm, a hardscrabble enterprise being squeezed by larger commercial fisheries. Jack and Dyfan are the third generation of men in their family to endure the backbreaking work of hand-raking the mussel beds and crating their haul each day in bitterly cold winds. The attention to quotidian labor in harsh conditions at times calls to mind Luchino Visconti’s classic 1948 neorealist docudrama about dirt-poor Sicilian fishermen, La Terra Trema.

Friction between the brothers sits just under the surface from the start. Dyfan’s three boys pitch in with the work, unlike Jack’s surly teenage son Tom (Henry Lawfull), a repeated no-show. When Jack sends his brother’s youngest home because his hands are too frozen to be of use, Dyfan takes understated jabs at his manhood by saying he’s too soft on the lads, none more so than Tom. Dyfan later shows resentment about having kept the business afloat solo while Jack was undergoing treatment for cancer, now in remission. Theirs is not an easy fraternity.

When an incident for which Tom is indirectly responsible leads to old-timer Bernie (Danny Webb), who makes a living from his scallop dredger, having his leg amputated, Jack takes charge of the veteran fisherman’s care. He gets help — at first through his firm insistence, later voluntarily — from itinerant deckhand Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen); they chop firewood to heat Bernie’s home and take his boat out to make money to pay his bills.

The attraction between the two men at first is so veiled it’s almost undetectable, though Daniel is more obvious with his glances and the hints he drops into their terse conversations. Irish actor Ward (who played the title character in Jimmy’s Hall for Ken Loach) expertly conveys the unease of a man reading and responding to the stranger’s signals even as he feigns indifference, fearful of disrupting his life in a community suspicious of any digression from old-fashioned norms.

Paradoxically, it takes Daniel smacking Jack in the mouth after he allows the younger man to be humiliated in the pub to spur Jack into acting on his desires. The sex between them is fumbling, nervous and almost feral at first, then increasingly tender and uninhibited as they start stealing time together in Daniel’s trailer. When the connection between them intensifies, Daniel becomes unsatisfied with clandestine hookups, wanting more, while Jack’s self-denial and wariness of potential exposure are tough habits to kick. 

“This is my town,” Jack tells Daniel by way of explanation. “I live here.” But no less affecting is Daniel’s frustration when he asks of their relationship, “What is this?” The emotional inarticulacy of both men is quietly bruising.

A million conflicts play across Ward’s face, notably Jack’s longing for a more fulfilling life and the sudden reminder that, had he made more courageous choices, that might have been an option. In a scene of crushing sadness, he sees Daniel playing pool at the pub with another man, the intimacy of their body language unmistakable.

Jack’s biggest regret, however, is the hurt he stands to cause Maggie (Liz White), the wife he has genuinely loved since they were high school sweethearts. That hurt becomes an increasing inevitability once Dyfan starts making pointed comments about Jack’s younger friend helping him take care of Bernie despite hardly knowing the old man, or Jack and Daniel taking Bernie’s boat out for the day, with no evidence of any fishing being done. 

That homophobic Dyfan chooses to drop these insinuations over a dinner with his brother and their wives makes his behavior especially toxic, not to mention that his spite is driven in part by his maneuverings to buy out Jack’s share of the business.

Walsh is an assured storyteller, aided considerably by the gritty textures and searching close-ups of DP Sam Goldie’s camera, which shapes an alternate landscape from Jack’s lined, stubbly face, his calloused hands, bulky wool sweaters and water-slicked rubber waders. The cloudy skies cast much of the film in shadow, the chief exception being a rare patch of sunlight seen from underwater during a swim off Bernie’s boat. Or is it a memory of a much earlier time on holiday with Maggie, when she first had an inkling of her husband’s secret?

Unfolding to the regionally inflected sounds of Felix Rösch’s delicate score, On the Sea takes some unsurprising turns, sketched out in foreshadowing, but also less expected developments, particularly once Maggie gets past her anger and her rock-solid strength of character kicks in. Tom, too, after keeping a hostile distance from his father, makes a late display of loyalty that silences his uncle. And a scene in which Tom’s girlfriend (Leisa Gwenllian) exchanges friendly words with Jack at his most isolated is lovely.

Walsh is too subtle in her writing to concoct a happy ending in which everything falls into place. But there’s comfort and even a kind of peaceful deliverance in the stirring closing images of a film that stays with you.