Producers: Jason Blum, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gregory Goodman and Brad Inglesby  Director: Paul Greengrass   Screenplay: Paul Greengrass and Brad Inglesby   Cast: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vázquez, Ashlie Atkinson, Spencer Watson, Levi McConaughey, Kay McCabe McConaughey, Kimberli Flores, Danny McCarthy, Nathan Gariety and Peter Diseth   Distributor: Apple+

Grade: B

Paul Greengrass is a past master at making riveting drama of real-life tragedies, and “The Lost Bus,” about a single act of heroism and triumph during the Camp Fire that struck Butte County, California, in November 2018, pretty much wiping the town of Paradise off the map, is the latest proof of his skill in this “ripped from the headlines” genre.  If it doesn’t equal his best work, it’s still an intense, emotionally affecting film.

The focus of the script fashioned by Greengrass and Brad Inglesby from Lizzie Johnson’s 2022 book “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire” is Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a school bus driver living with his mother Sherry (Kay McCabe McConaughey).  He’d left home years earlier after a rift with his father, and returned only when Sherry informed him that his dad was dying.  He’d not managed to get there in time to see the older man before the end, but remained to care for his mother. 

Kevin’s living a ragged, day-to-day existence, doing a decent job with the kids who ride his bus but behind in his reports to his supervisor Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson), who’s also demanding that he bring his bus in for overdue maintenance.  To add to his woes, he’s just had to have his beloved dog put down, and is being visited by his surly teen son Shaun (Levi McConaughey) as a result of a custody arrangement with his divorced wife.  Shaun does not want to be there, and is skipping school claiming to be ill.  That causes a row between them just before Kevin leaves for work on November 8.

By then a truck driver has spotted a brush fire along his route, and local firefighters are dispatched to handle the blaze, caused when an electrical transmission tower had been damaged by strong winds.  When the crew is unable to get to the site, others are called in from a broader area, including Cal Fire, the response arm of the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.  They arrive under the leadership of battalion chiefs Ray Martinez (Yul Vázquez) and Jen Kissoon (Kate Wharton), but as their efforts prove unavailing due to the high winds and the spread of the flames, they begin ordering evacuations, among them of a portion of Paradise where Ponderosa Elementary is located. 

Though parents have picked up most of the students, twenty-two remain, along with teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera).  Ruby asks whether any driver with an empty bus can transport them to a pickup site further into the town, and though Kevin’s completed his run and trying to get back home with medicine for Shaun, he agrees.  When he arrives at the school, he’s irritated at Ludwig’s insistence on calmly following protocol to get the kids onto the bus, aware as he is of the urgency.

From this point the film, edited by William Goldenberg, Paul Rubell and Peter M. Dudgeon, juxtaposes the increasingly desperate efforts of the firefighters, who must eventually order a full evacuation of the town and admit that their mission has shifted from confronting the blaze to rescuing endangered people, with the increasingly fraught situation on the bus, which becomes the major emphasis.  With radio contact lost, McKay heads to the original destination only to find it abandoned, and he must make split-second decisions about what routes to take to reach a fairground that serves as an emergency location as the roads become glutted with cars and pedestrians trying to escape.  In the process, of course, Kevin and Mary overcome any differences between them to help the terrified children to cope with the physical and emotional terrors confronting them and get the bus to safety while the kids’ relatives wait anxiously for word and both McKay and Ludwig worry about the welfare of their own families.

Greengrass and his editors, with stunning work from a visual effects team headed by Charlie Noble and ace cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth, have created a genuinely harrowing environment, the scenes of the blaze bearing down on its frantic victims, especially those trapped in the bus, wrenchingly real; production designer David Crank and costumer Mark Bridges contribute artfully to the sense of visual authenticity.  Of equal importance to the tone is the aural component: Lisa Piñero’s sound design and James Newton Howard’s score ramp up the excitement level as the threat to the bus accelerates.

Among the cast one can single out Vázquez and Atkinson, both of whom etch strong characterizations in limited screen time, but McConaughey and Ferrera bear the brunt of the drama, and both acquit themselves well. The former ably conveys McKay’s fear of personal inadequacy coupled with a drive to do his job as best he can, and the latter persuasively depicts Ludwig’s transformation from a rather prissy, rule-bound woman to a person willing to put her own safety on the line for her charges.  The children on the bus are, it must be said, a rather amorphous group; only scared little Toby (Nathan Gariety), with whom Kevin develops a special bond, emerges with much individuality (and then only a little).  But as a group they succeed in engendering audience concern, which is what matters.              

With its relatively limited focus on McKay and Ludwig, “The Lost Bus” doesn’t carry the broader emotional heft of Greengrass’ finest films—“Bloody Sunday,” “United 93,” “22 July”—and one might wish it exhibited a bit more steeliness in pointing out culpability than just including as a secondary figure a representative of the PG&E (Peter Diseth) whose evasiveness represents corporate concern for its legal safety rather than people’s lives.  But on its smaller scale the film still carries considerable punch.  It also serves as a worthy complement to Zachary Canepari and Drea Cooper’s Netflix documentary “Fire in Paradise” (2019) and Ron Howard’s 2020 documentary “Rebuilding Paradise.”      

Producer: Sandra Maischberger   Archival Producers: Monika Preischl and Mona El-Bira   Director: Andres Veiel   Screenplay: Andres Veiel   Distributor: Kino Lorber

Grade: B

Andres Veiel’s documentary about German actress-director Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) is biographical, in the sense that it covers her life from childhood to death (the home movies showing her stern father’s method of teaching her to swim stand out, for his girth if nothing else).  But though it doesn’t stint on showing her early career as dancer and actress—it even includes excerpts from a late-in-life reunion with some childhood girlfriends, their giggly conversation almost surreal—its emphasis is on her work as a director/editor, particularly on “Triumph des Willen” and “Olympiad” in the 1930s, films that are still regarded as masterpieces of propaganda, unfortunately in the service of an infamous regime.

Even more specifically, Veiel focuses on Riefenstahl’s insistent, often positively desperate, claim in the years following World War II that those brilliant but notorious films were works of art, not Nazi propaganda, and that she’d never been an apologist for Hitler’s regime, of whose crimes, she said, she was unaware at the time.  Veiel systematically challenges that self-serving explanation, coupling her statements immediately with evidence that invalidates them. 

He does so through a skillful combination of clips from interviews Riefenstahl did in the postwar years, often on TV talk shows, and a great mass of material—home movies, audio recordings, letters, photos, drafts of her memoirs, and much else—from Riefenstahl’s estate, which became available after the death of her much younger husband, Horst Kettner, in 2016.  (He was forty years her junior.)  Some of the most disturbing material is in the form not of her outrageous protestations of naïveté about the Final Solution but the supportive telephone messages she received from people who sound like unregenerate Nazis.  Yet even more horrifying are the revelations about her employment of Roma extras from transit camps in her version of “Tiefland” in 1940, and her subsequent claims of ignorance about their afterward being sent to death camps, and her insistence that a group of Jewish workers be removed from locale she was using in that film, which, whether she intended it or not, led to their execution.

The accumulation of such damning material puts the lie to Riefenstahl’s portrait of herself as an artist rather than a collaborator, and points up her attempt to rewrite the history of her relationship with Hitler and Goebbels, as well as with Peter Jacob, the committed Nazi officer to whom she was married briefly in 1944-1946.  Yet was there an element of self-delusion at work as well as an effort to fool others?  That’s a question the film cannot answer.

Nor can it entirely explain Riefenstahl’s fascination with the Nuba people of southern Sudan, whom she photographed for glossy books in the seventies.  Was this another part of her attempt at rehabilitation, or a continuation of the idolization of physical beauty she’d shown in “Olympiad”? 

The argument that Veiel makes in “Riefenstahl” is certainly not new, but his presentation has a comprehensiveness that’s impressive, especially in terms of the inclusion of materials that have become available only recently.  And the form in which he casts it—eschewing talking-head commentators, he’s content to limit himself to somber if obviously critical narration linking together the clips and stills—is certainly stylish, even if some of the technique is rather arty, like the motif of having Riefenstahl repeatedly “age” through a procession of photographs.  (Of course, Riefenstahl’s work was itself ostentatiously arty, so that’s entirely defensible.)  Presumably the work of cinematographer Toby Cornish was given over to the creation of these transitional elements; more important, certainly, is the editing of Stephan Krumbiegel, Olaf Voigtländer and Alfredo Castro, who, together with Veiel, were responsible for giving shape to the cinematic text.  The score by Freya Arde contributes to the mood without becoming a distraction.

Veiel won’t have the last word about Leni Riefenstahl; she pretty much saw to it that no one would, given the mounds of material she left behind on film and the page, and the claims about her and the supposed innovations she made to the medium that she made herself and that scholars have debated endlessly over the past century.  But his work represents a major contribution to the biography of a filmmaker at least as notable for the context in which she worked as for the result.