Movie Nation

“A madman can be redeemed.”

Who is Mel Gibson speaking of, here?

He and Sean Penn are the leads in this all-star cast account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, compiled by James Murray (Gibson) and Dr. William Chester Minor (Penn), confined to an asylum at the time.

Jennifer Ehle, Natalie Dormer, Steve Coogan and Ioan Gruffudd also don Dickensian attire for this mid to late 19th century story, “The Professor and the Madman” (John Boorman was the original credited screenwriter). It has no US release date, yet.

A dark comedy — a bleak worldview — a life lived in fear.

Of everything.

Why this guy doesn’t buy a gun (It’s “The American Way”) is anybody’s guess.

But this Jesse Eisenberg vehicle shows promise in its premise, and he’s perfectly cast.

“The Art of Self Defense” is a June 21 release, and being handled by Bleecker Street — nobody will see it.

“Gloria Bell” is the picture of supportive, understanding patience and resilience.

It lets the 50ish divorcée (Julianne Moore) thrive at work, as an insurance claims mediator/adjuster. Maybe it explains how she’s still on good terms with her remarried ex (Brad Garrett). It’s why she holds her tongue when her daughter (Caren Pistorious) falls — hard — for a Swedish surfer.

Who knew there were such things?

Even the paranoid screaming jags of her upstairs neighbor — her landlady’s son, it turns out — earn as much pity as complaint when she calls her.

And it stands Gloria in good stead when she’s out at her favorite 50something bar, traveling solo, meeting men — dancing and even bedding one on occasion.

One of those meet-up/hook-ups kind of flips for her, and we can understand why. She’s outgoing, beautiful, accomodating and yes — understanding. So even if Arnold (John Turturro) is still letting his now-ex wife and clinging, over-dependent adult daughters interrupt their every tender moment with cell phone cries for attention, Gloria practices forbearance. It must be how she was raised.

“Gloria Bell” is a remake of a 2013 Chilean film that practically shouted “Cast Julianne Moore and GET THIS WOMAN HER OSCAR when you remake it in English!” It’s a tailor-made tour-de-force for Moore’s unmatched ability to play empathy, vulnerability and inner resolve beneath a surface that suggests “put-upon pushover.”

She’s played a wide range of characters, but think back to her turns in “Far from Heaven,” “The Hours” or “The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio.” Few have captured that bright light consigned to a life in the shadows by circumstance, bad marriages or historical second class citizenship better than her.

Of course, she won an Oscar in the years since that first “Gloria” came out. But it’s worth bringing up the “O” word here because we were just subjected to an awards season of Best Actress contenders — including the winner — whom Moore would have easily overwhelmed with this nuanced, open-hearted, naked (sometimes literally) performance of rising self-awareness and slow-to-assert-itself self-esteem.

This is a crowning moment in a great actress’s run of crowning achievements.

The supporting cast is proficient and professional in roles that rarely have the showy moments Moore’s Gloria is given. Turturro’s Arnold seems a tad out of her league, and that’s how he plays Arnold — overwhelmed, smitten, but too weak to break decades of bad habits. Garrett gets a fun drunk scene, and Jeanne Tripplehorn and Rita Wilson make the most of concerned, loving but faintly patronizing friends.

If you remember the Chilean film also written and directed Sebastián Lelio, also an acting tour de force, you know the Laura Brannigan song from Gloria’s swinging, clubbing youth is the key to understand Gloria — its reference to the illusion of joy, the appearance of “fun” and the empty life lying behind the delusions.

Here, its arrival on Gloria Bell’s playlist is both poignant and a grand release, a brave acknowledgement of who she is and an acceptance of herself on her own terms. Moore makes this solo moment touching, bittersweet and triumphant.

That she manages variations of that in every scene of “Gloria Bell,” first to last, is all the more glorious.

MPAA Rating: R for sexuality, nudity, language and some drug use

Cast: Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Michael Cera, Caren Pistorious, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Brad Garrett, Rita Wilson, Sean Astin, Chris Mulkey and Holland Taylor

Credits:Directed by Sebastián Lelio, script by Alice Johnson Boher, adapted from the screenplay to Lelio’s “Gloria.” An A24 release.

Running time: 1:42

There’s a tipping point to how much editing a movie can sustain before it becomes visually incoherent. It’s a sweet spot in the modern, flood-of-rapid-fire cuts style that sits somewhere between say the Paul Greengrass (Christopher Rouse, editor) “Bourne” movies and the disorienting, dismaying mush of the action beats in the “Transformers” movies.

“Captive State,” a sci-fi thriller about Occupied Earth and starting a revolt against the alien invaders tends towards the “Let’s make a hash of it all” end of the spectrum.

When this sort of cutting is done right, it creates impressionistic action, a dizzying chiaroscuro of characters, plot and a movie in motion. In “Captive State,” it’s a substitute for character development, riveting plot, etc.

The editing ruins a serviceable — if nakedly foreshadowed — story and a properly gloomy post-invasion Chicago production design in a vain effort to make this seem trickier and more sophisticated than it plainly is.

Jumpy, hand-held camera pursuits of unnamed characters played by unfamiliar actors, chopped into tiny slivers of screen time, dark scenes chasing darker scenes, never quite settling on a hero or “hero’s journey,” it’s an intensely unsatisfying viewing experience. Even if the story’s easy enough to follow — again, the resolution is tipped with a BIG wink in the first act — the action isn’t.

Everybody calls the aliens “roaches,” but not to their um, faces. They’re insectoid, shape-shifting porcupine mantises who conquered the planet and persuaded world leaders to submit to an armistice. Humans are forced to work building alien habitats, which look like termite mounds, mining and shipping out the planet’s natural resources hustled skyward in alien spacecraft — which look like mud-dauber wasp nests.

The aliens prefer to be called “Legislators.” They rule every locality the world over, by proxy. Humans and “democracy” ostensibly are still in charge. It’s just that they take orders from below, where the aliens live.

A prologue shows a cop trying to get his family out of Chicago, and failing. His oldest son Rafael became a “resistance” legend, sacrificing himself in a slaughter in Wicker Park. The youngest, Gabriel (Ashton Sanders, of “Moonlight” and “The Equalizer 2”) has grown up to have a job in an electronics factory, a girlfriend (Madeline Brewer) and secret plans with his street-punk pal (Machine Gun Kelly) to flee “across the lake” to the north, and a chance to start afresh.

But the local Special Branch cop, Mulligan (John Goodman) keeps an eye on Gabriel, and on what he thinks is a still-active resistance “cell.” They’re passing messages, he realizes, via classified ads using the wings of a Phoenix as their symbolic signal.

We’re given proof of that cell, as unnamed characters played by James Ransone, Ben Daniels, Caitlin Ewald, Alan Ruck and others, are followed through byzantine plans to stage an “incident.”

There’s a hooker (Vera Farmiga) with a passion for Roy Cohn biographies, Trojan horse sketches and Nat King Cole records whom Mulligan leans on, and a boss (Kevin Dunn) who is the city’s actual go-between with the roaches.

We track Mulligan’s efforts, and Gabriel’s, and in a departure, we spend little time staring at the aliens and figuring out what they are, how they succeeded and how they can be defeated.

Those are details left to the Phoenix folks, and they’re not sharing.

Director Rupert Wyatt (Mark Wahlberg’s “The Gambler”) builds towards a false climax — “Soldier Field” — and stumbles as he drags us to the bigger climax, a frustrating slog through two more acts of “drama” and dull dialogue, arrests, etc., towards the big payoff.

Goodman is a perfectly cagey and competent villain, but young Sanders seems to have suffered in the editing — a “no confidence vote” in his ability to carry a narrative.

The characters are under-developed —  pure plot devices, given little to humanize them and even less to say.

And yet, that said, “Captive State” might have achieved some sort of screen satisfaction had the straight-forward-with-obvious-twist script not been hacked into tiny image bites, rendering huge passages of it a confused visual mush.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action, some sexual content, brief language and drug material

Cast: John Goodman, Ashton Sanders, Verea Farmiga, Jonathan Majors, Madeline Brewer, James Ransone, Alan Ruck, Kevin Dunn

Credits:Directed by Rupert Wyatt, script by Erica Beeney, Rupert Wyatt. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:49

Gimmicky? Sure. But cute, clownish? No.

Not even a joke about “We have PLENTY of Neanderthals ALREADY,” not in the trailer anyway.

“William” is about a scientist couple who decide to give birth (via DNA swap) to a Neanderthal (young) man and its consequences to him, his peers and science.

Tim Disney directed it. I knew his dad, Roy.

It opens in limited release April 12.

Paul Fahrenkopf is a character actor/bit player who has kicked around in movies, TV and theater forever.

Or since the ’70s, when his first credit, as a “spectator,” was earned in the Super Bowl terrorism thriller “Black Sunday.” Read his IMDb credits and you’ll see a lot of roles that weren’t speaking parts.

But he makes the most of a starring role in “Nothing to Do,” playing a gruff 60ish DJ who has to take time off to care for his dying father.

It’s a sweet, gently-funny comedy with a hint of romance, and death as its backdrop, and Fahrenkopf, sort of a mustashioed version of British car show star Jeremy Clarkson, shines in pretty much every scene.

Kenny Shapiro had to dash down from Philly to stay with Irv (Philip Lawton). A grizzled classic rock radio vet, he is missing his last big chance at “making a mark” — a promotion to “morning drive” — to do the right thing.

But he’s OK with being there, repeating a favorite childhood phrase when asked about taking time off from “life” to do this. “It’s all good, Dad. I got nothing to do.”

Dad has been putting off late-life decisions, so Kenny’s in for a steep learning curve. “Power of Attorney?” “Hospice?”

The doctor may be “freaking” him out, but that’s nothing to what his sister Rachel (Connie Bowman, wound-tight and funny) puts him through. She’s frantic that “We are having the RIGHT test done,” meaning she wants Dad back in the hospital.

Kenny heard the doctor say it was “Let nature take its course,” time. Rachel isn’t hearing it. It’s only when she says “My mother just died last year. I can’t go through this again” that we get it.

As the siblings engage in a tug of war punctuated by their childhood put-downs for each other — “Idiot” — Kenny resolves to follow “Dad’s wishes,” and avail himself of the old man’s supply of opioids.

“You want some morphine? They really loaded us up, here…Wanna get high?”

Meanwhile, Kenny’s noticing the extra attentions of the age-appropriate neighbor-lady Patti (Patricia Talmadge), who has a touch of hippy Earth Mother about her. Soup, “hearty” organic veggie soup with edamame, that’ll fix what ails Irv.

“I didn’t know this was HOSPICE. I don’t think my soup’s gonna help.”

Writer-director Mike Kravinsky, using many of the same cast members from his 2013 comedy “The Nextnik,” finds touching moments here and there, mixed in with a few laughs. Mostly, he scripts and directs his familiar cast in ways that play to their strengths.

Fahrenkopf’s booming, chain-smoker’s baritone is perfect for an on-the-edge-of-over-the-hill DJ, and as he gets to know Patti, he shares radio station promo patter from the many cities he’s plied his trade — Miami, Charlotte, up and down the dial.

Bowman hits just the right brittle notes as a sister who always considered her brother too irresponsible to handle any of this, especially Power of Attorney over their father.

And that’s without seeing Kenny crush up Dad’s opioids and snort them.

It’s not a dazzler, not even a knee-slapper. But “Nothing to Do” sets its goals and meets them, and reminds us and every indie filmmaker out there that America is overrun with skilled, talented actors desperate for work.

Not all of them can be movie stars, but many of them are wholly capable of making characters come to life and your indie screenplay become a reality.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, profanity, lots of smoking

Cast: Paul Fahrenkopf, Philip Lawton, Connie Bowman, Patricia Talmadge

Credits: Written and directed by Mike Kravinsky. A Nextnik release.

Running time: 1:20

Here you go. See if your favorites are “dead” (Mark Ruffalo, “I’m not fired?”) or back for this general wrap up of a superhero storyline, sure to own the late spring and much of this summer at the box office.

Sentimental, “Sometimes the best we can do, is start over.” Pandering. “I like this one.”

A metaphor for America in the MAGA era?

Hollywood has such a hard time cooking up a decent romantic comedy that any indie filmmaker testing those waters earns my sympathy as a matter of course.

But sympathy is wasted if the picture lacks charm, wit or pacing, as Eden Marryshow‘s “Bruce!!!” demonstrates.

A sex-farce or character study in “heel,” it fits under the broadest interpretation of a rom-com — an aimless jerk seeks focus and purpose in his life while pursuing and bedding a cavalcade of women, each dumped just as another comes into the picture.

Only Bruce, played by director and co-writer Marryshow, isn’t “seeking” purpose or anything else. He’s like a “Seinfeld” character, where the ethos was “No GROWING.”

Still, there’s a sliver of promise in here, a 75 minute comedy suffocating in the 103 minute sack it’s stuffed in.

Take the words Bruce uses to break up with Theresa (Jean Goto) in the film’s opening scene.

“I’m not doing this TO you. In some ways I’m doing this FOR you.”

But, she protests, “You said I LOVE you!”

“I said ‘Me, too.'”

Bruce is King of the Clueless, a self-absorbed jerk or, in the words of more than one character in “Bruce!!!”, an “ass—le,” as in — someone whose head is so far up his rear end he can’t see past his rectum.

He launches into an MLK impersonation when breaking the news of his breakup to the NEXT woman he will break up with.

“Free at last, free at last…”

He’s constantly lying to his too-understanding, Tony Robbins-quoting law school roomie (Jason Tottenham) about the rent, exaggerating his job — “You don’t have a JOB…You walk one f—–g dog!” and talking up his years and years in gestation Big Idea screenplay, “Tales of a Dirty Badge.”

“It’s taking a little bit longer, because it’s me writing it.”

“Have you ever worked with a deadline?”

“That’s kind of a personal question.”

He cadges cash from his parents, only when dad (Gene Pope) is not in the room.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak ‘Old Man Hating on My Youth.'”

His “dream” woman is of the “Kelly LeBrock in ‘Weird Science’…Halle Berry in ‘Boomerang'” variety — unattainable, delusional fantasies.

“I can’t force myself to get into somebody if I’m not ELATED.”

He’s got the lines, even if the delivery isn’t all that snappy — “Now I know…why JESUS wept!” Not the best reaction to roomie Greg revealing his girlfriend Kerri (Jade Eshete) is pregnant.

Dragging pal Trevor (Christopher Gabriel Nuñez) into a bar requires coaching, delivered in jerk-speak.

“There are two B-/C+ chicks in there…to see me. I will give you the opportunity to speak to one of them. Are you listening to me? DON’T be weird.”

Even the women he charms, tricks and seduces get the occasional good line — post brush-off.

“I may NOT stalk you!”

Banter is EVERYthing in a comedy like this, and Marryshow and co-writer Jesse Wakeman (he plays Belafonte in the movie) turn out enough clever lines to make a shorter, sharper film with a more charismatic lead pay off.

Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned, the running time has plenty of room for slack stretches — LOTS of them. Some of the supporting actresses register, and Marryshow himself isn’t the worst comic lead I’ve seen in a movie.

But comedy is quick and close-up, and “Bruce!!!” is slow, with too many establishing shots. Even gimme sight gags like losing control of a pack of dogs you’re walking have a stumbling quality.

And while banter may be “EVERYthing,” pacing is PARAMOUNT in comedy. “Bruce!!!” and its star never get out of his own way.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Eden Marryshow, Mlé Chester, Jade Eshete, Jason Tottenham, Jean Goto, Christopher Gabriel Nuñez.

Credits:Directed by Eden Marryshow, script by Eden Marryshow and Jesse Wakeman. A Global Digital release.

Running time: 1:43

“Wonder Park” is easily the most beautifully animated film ever to come out under the Paramount Animation/Nickelodeon nameplate.

But this fanciful childs-eye-view of her “dream” theme park and all the rides and activities that might entail is so oddly devoid of magic, so starved for laughs or delights, as to make you question if those were even what the filmmakers were going for. Because unless it’s anime, as everybody but animation fangirls and fanboys know, pretty pictures aren’t enough.

It fails, in the current parlance, to “spark joy.”

The screenwriters of the recent “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” reboots wrote it, and big names from Mila Kunis and Jennifer Garner to Ken Jeong, Matthew Broderick and Kenan Thompson voiced the characters. As it’s built around a tweenage girl dealing with her mother’s life-threatening illness and interacting with the imaginary mascot critters of her imaginary theme park, you’d think laughs and sentiment and warm grins were the object here.

Still, as few to none are forthcoming…

June (Brianna Denski) always had a favorite story at bedtime. It was about the fun, mishaps and imaginative rides and attractions at a theme park the two of them dreamed up. “Wonderland” features “Clockwork Swings” and “Fireworks Falls, “Zero G-Land” and the like.

June has “Future Imagineer” written all over her, as she spends her days making mock-ups of the rides and theme park areas out of cardboard, drinking straws and the like.

As she gets older, she organizes the area kids into neighborhood-wrecking soap-box loop-the-loop courses out of whatever they can scavenge or break-off and “borrow.”

Then Mom (Garner) gets sick. Wonderland goes into the fireplace. Indulgent Dad (Broderick) isn’t listening to the advice the authorities are handing down — “Military school!” But he’s got to keep June occupied while her mother is in the hospital. “Math Camp” is the answer.

Her Milhouse-nerdy Indian-American pal (Oev Michael Urbas) is thrilled, because he has a crush on her, loves math and this means he won’t be her crash-test dummy any more.

“I’m ALIVE! Thank Krishna!”

But before they even get to Camp Awe+Sum, almost before the campers get through the delightful “Pi Song” (the never ending ratio) and June can blurt “Holy Hypotenuse!” she’s made a break for home.

This is a mistake, as Camp Awe+Sum is the cleverest conceit in the movie, worth a kids’ film all by itself.

In the woods, she stumbles across the magical remains of “the REAL Wonderland,” where the mascots she and mom made up — a wart hog (Mila Kunis), a “delayed hibernation disorder” big blue bear (Ken Hudson Campbell), beaver twins (Kenan Thompson and Ken Jeong) and a porcupine — are running for their lives from licensed merchandise dolls gone wrong.

Peanut (Norbert Leo Butz) is the chimp who charms guests at the gate, whose literal “magic” marker invents the park’s crazy rides, but who now has gone missing as dolls made from his character, “chimpan-zombies,” are dismantling the park and chasing the mascots toward a swirling fireplace-smoke vortex — “The Darkness.”

June, whom they come to learn is their creator and perhaps the source of their doom, must sort this out and save Wonderland.

The sentimentality attached to a little girl, lashing out about having a sick mom and having to make right what her tossing Wonderland into the fireplace hath wrought, is lukewarm at best.

The action beats are colorful and dazzling theme-park rides run amok. Frenetic action substitutes for wit, here.

The laughs? They all come from that porcupine, voiced by HBO’s John Oliver (“Last Week Tonight”) in a performance shockingly free of F-bombs and koala chlamydia gags. Every line to burble out of his Limey mouth is a stitch, from his order to “Stand DOWN, I say” to his poetically expressed love for Greta the wart hog and her “come-hither tusks.”

Must be the voice. He was born to do cartoons.

As “Wonder Park” has gone through release dates and title changes, with plans for a spinoff TV series already in the works, the film’s general mirthlessness can be traced to a boardroom, not merely hack screenwriting.

It’s a commodity, intended to become a branded property, a “Jimmy Neutron” (which also became a TV series) without a proper, fun, buzzed-about cartoon film to launch it with.

And what do we know about commodities? They’re “produced,” just like “Wonder Park.” No wonder it has no credited director.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Brianna Denski, Jennifer Garner, Kenan Thompson, Mila Kunis, Matthew Broderick, Ken Jeong and yes, John Oliver

Credits:Directed by no one, apparently. Script by John Appelbaum and Andre Nemec. A Paramount/Nickelodeon release.

Running time: 1:25

Fiercely feral, dis-orientingly trippy and (for some folks at least) sure to inspire flashbacks, Gaspar Noé’s “Climax” is horror that hits you where you live.

It’s a waking nightmare, an erotic fantasy that twists into the sum of all paranoias. And even if I can’t say I’d care to ever see it again, there’s no denying its riveting/eyes-averting bloody-minded brilliance.

This is “Suspiria” without the cryptic supernatural nonsense, “Black Swan” without ballet, a tale of “the dance” that takes the stereotype that dancers — uninhibited hedonists and born sensualists — “live for the dance” and adds drugs to take away whatever inhibitions they might have left.

Noé, in the best Poe, Agatha Christie or “Friday the 13th” tradition, fills a remote school full of young, lithe and talented danseurs, showcases them as they celebrate the end of rehearsals with flexibility and skills most of us cannot imagine and then introduces LSD to their popping and locking, twisting and contorting bacchanal.

Sure, that’ll be fun. Until somebody gets hurt — everal somebodies. Until somebody grows paranoid — pretty much everybody.

Noé introduces us to the players “A Chorus Line” style — video “interviews” before casting, glimpsed on a TV set parked conspicuously between books on schizophrenia and a VHS copy of “Suspiria.” This happened in 1996 we’re told, and we meet Shirley and Cyborg, Rocco and Omar, revealing “my darkest fear,” and their utterly fanatical devotion to dance.

“It’s all I have,” says Lou (Souheila Yacoub). “I can’t be anywhere else,” adds Riley (Lakdhar Dridi).

Black and white, Gallic and Middle Eastern, gay, straight and all points in between, they’re primed for their “chance in a million” with choreographer/dancer/”boss lady” Selva, played by Sofia Boutellava for  of “Kingsman,” “Hotel Artemis” and the titular monster of “The Mummy.”

The party they throw to celebrate the end of three snowy days of rehearsal is a fluid, supercharged dance-off with dancers strutting their moves, showing off all manner of sexy dance wear — pausing only long enough to flatter the hell out of each other’s skills (in English, and French with English subtitles), flirt as they arrange their latest hook-up and partake in the evening’s libation.

“I made some sangria.”

It takes a while for what’s in the sangria to peak, a bit longer for Selva to hiss “What have you DONE?”

Chatterbox Emmanuelle (Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull) made the sangria. But she drank it, too. And she’s got her little boy with her for the weekend. Would she do that?

Omar (Adrien Sissoko) may have grown up in Muslim household, and still doesn’t drink. But joining a dance company isn’t exactly a Fundamentalist move and LSD seems way out of character.

Somebody else is pregnant, others are bitter over failed relationships, David (Romain Guillermic) may be “a ticket to an STD” after cutting a wide swath through the company, sexually. Might he have done it?

Doesn’t matter. Logic doesn’t apply when everybody shrieking accusations, screaming at this or that person accused, pounding and kicking them or tossing them out into the snow.

Noé (“Enter the Void”) parks his camera overhead, flips the image upside down, hurls light and darkness, dancers’ bodies and dancers’ blood at us as we watch a lot of healthy, perhaps not that well-adjusted young people dance until they go off their rockers.

But not before the longest music credits in screen history. He positioned those credits, and the film’s finale, in a final disorienting flip designed to look like a video editing “glitch.” They come at the beginning of “Climax.”

It’s unnerving at times, assaulting at others. “Disorienting” is the idea, and even if many of the tricks are simple and the plot unfolds along a generally predictable track, “Climax” achieves that goal. And how.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing content involving a combination of drug use, violent behavior and strong sexuality, and for language and some graphic nudity

Cast: Sofia Boutella, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub, Taylor Kastle, Giselle Palmer, Thea Carla Schott and Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull

Credits: Written and directed by Gaspar Noé. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33