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The attack was brazen, and because it was captured on video and involved North Korea, it dominated the news for months back in 2017.

The exiled brother of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s latest dictator for life from the Kim Dynasty, was approached by two pretty young women in Kuala Lumpur airport who suddenly smeared something in his face and skipped off. One even looked up at a CCTV camera and smiled on her way to a restroom to wash her hands.

The victim? He talked to police, was taken to the airport clinic, and was dead within an hour.

Who were these two murderously amoral black widows? And who put them up to it?

The answers seemed simple back then, as they do in the first act or Ryan White’s gripping investigative documentary, “Assassins.” Yes, this Indonesian woman in the LOL t-shirt and her Vietnamese colleague did it. But did they know what they were doing?

White talks to their families, and the lawyers for Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong. At first, they fret over daughters were “seduced” by the world outside a Vietnamese farm or Indonesian town. “Confess, if you did it,” Doan’s brother writes her.

The lawyers seem, at first, resigned to their clients’ murderous intent or at least complicity.

White interviews journalists, both inside press-restricted Malaysia and outsiders, to reveal an ever-widening web of conspiracy, complicity and the diplomatic entanglements that the case uncovered and trumped “justice” in the case at almost every turn.

But Malaysian police, snappish and defensive in press conferences, are exposed as “shallow” and not eager to stand up higher-ups who see relations with North Korea, Indonesia and (to a lesser degree) Vietnam as more important than a mere political murder in a public place, with video cameras that ensured the world could see their shame.

That footage, by the way? Leaked to the international media, but kept from the defense attorneys.

The film also gets into the Kim family history, the younger brother/dictator’s need to “keep them (others in government, in the country and in his family) terrified.” For a laugh or two, watch the “outraged” North Korean ambassador declare (in English), “The Malaysian police are desperate to shift the blame to us!” after we’ve seen the cluster of North Korean agents in video at the airport laying the groundwork the day of the murder.

The North Korean “mastermind” and “the godfather” and “the chemist” are identified by Malaysian journalist Hadi Azmi as, in scene after scene, he walks us through the crime’s set-up and the moment by moment events that the CCTV footage document.

We’re allowed to take the lawyers lightly — at first. With clients facing the death penalty, they chuckle inappropriately over the irregularities of the done-deal court and can seem disorganized. But they doggedly pursued the women’s back-stories, that this was a “prank” for a Japanese TV show, that they’d been groomed by doing these very sorts of stunts on strangers for a year by virtually every Korean agent the police ID’d and in some cases arrested and then let go.

White, who did “Ask Dr. Ruth” and a “Serena” documentary, is very good at getting the blood boiling over the injustices at every turn, the feigned outrage of North Koreans trying to bully their way out of blame and Malaysians who let the world know that they know who was involved and how, and just what they were willing to do about it.

The larger theme of “Assassination” is one of the unjust “justice” of press-restricting/oppressive states. When state actors are allowed to get away with murder, who else makes it to the regime’s “immune to prosecution” list? What chance does “the rule of law,” under strain even in democracies, have under such conditions?

It isn’t the Washington Post or New York Times that sticks its neck out in cases like this. It’s the reporter who knows the state’s blind spots and what they’re capable of willing to tell her or his people what’s going on who becomes the hero of a sordid story like “Assassins.”

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast:  Siti Aisyah, Hadi Azmi, Anna Fifield, Doan Thi Huong

Credits: Directed by Ryan White. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:44

“The Father” is as close to dementia as any of us would ever care to get. And yet, thanks to longevity that has turned recent generations into the longest-lived in history, it is touching more lives than ever.

French playwright Florian Zeller, adapting his play, and his peerless star Anthony Hopkins visualize the confusion, paranoia, panic and flashes of sentience that characterize Alzheimer’s and senility’s other variations, both from outside and within.

Oscar winner Olivia Colman is the daughter witnessing this collapse from outside, struggling to prepare her widowed, solitary father for the idea of a nursing home. At the very least, Anne wants him to go easier on the in-care help she keeps arranging and whom his tirades chase away.

“Anthony” is raging against “the dying of the light.” “I don’t need her. I don’t need anyone!” He’s at home in his large, comfy flat with his opera
CDs and his books. Why all the fuss?

“She’s stealing from me!” he hisses about the latest caregiver he’s run off.

But no matter how focused his fury, how articulate his defenses, he’s losing his memory. He’s mixing up conversations and people. He’s even confused, here and there, about what Anne looks like. Olivia Colman? Or is she another woman played by Olivia Williams? He tries to hide it, but we see his panic over this.

This “man” she’s met and planning on leaving London to live with in Paris — does he look like Rufus Sewell or this other fellow (Mark Gatiss)?

Is Anne leaving at all? Is she still with her husband? Did this conversation happen? Or that one? Is she gaslighting him, even if he can’t recall the term or the movie that it’s from?

From Anthony’s point of view, things he remembers that day or a day or two ago are being altered.

“She told me the other day. I’m not an idiot!”

Time is running in an ever-changing loop. Has he chased away his last in-home nurse, or are they just now interviewing another (Imogen Poots)?

“Can I ask you a question? Are you a nun? Then why are you speaking to me as if I’m retarded?”

Of course Hopkins can make us sense the panic, the long-retired engineer capable of mood swings of great charm, losing it, panic-stricken as he tries to hide that fact by covering up that he doesn’t know who this person he no longer recognizes is. And what about younger daughter Lucy, “the artist?”

“I hardly ever hear from the other one.”

Colman gives us glimpses of the heartache and guilt a child feels over being unable to do more for a parent that has become more than a mere relative can handle.

Other characters give us flashes of patience and compassion, and withering cruelty and callousness. Is Anthony imagining these, or are some of his grievances against the world legitimate?

Zeller uses the confines of a couple of sets well, revealing a few more square feet here and there as he goes along, letting the real estate reveal Anthony’s real state. It’s not a play that’s been “opened up.” “The Father” is all about a world closing in.

Demographics and the slow pace of medical improvements in gerantology make “The Father” a story with universal appeal. It’s universally chilling and sad, because no one would wish this on themselves or anybody else.

And Hopkins, Colman, Williams, Sewell and Poots give us an eyeful and and earful of a fate awaiting far too many of us in this quietly gripping and intimate drama.

MPA Rating:  PG-13 for some strong language, and thematic material 

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams, Imogen Poots, Ayesha Dharker and Mark Gatiss.

Credits: Directed by Florian Zeller, script by Christopher Hampton and Florian ZEller, based on Zeller’s play. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:37

A deep bow, from the waist, for any actor who takes a flier on a crazy idea of a movie, on a nutty dreamer with a screen-written dream, on a cracked visionary with the unlikely name Adam Egypt Mortimer.

That’s what Joe Manganiello did. He’s the “name” who signed on the dotted line and got the lunacy that is “Archenemy” made.

He plays a hulking, Letterman-bearded drunk, raving and weaving stories of his life back on “Chromium,” the world where he used to live, where his blood was blue and he was like “a god” who “used to punch holes through space and time,” and who once saved that world by stopping the evil Cleo and her “void machine.”

But…hiccup…”it was the last thing I ever did.”

Now he’s here, telling these tall tales, inventively visualized as lurid hot pink and Slurpee blue comic book animation in his mind or the minds of his listeners. Don’t underestimate this rummy, friends. He’s a superhero!

“I’m not a f—–g superhero!”

And he didn’t fly here from Chromium. Oh no.

“I didn’t fly through space. I came through the membranes of reality.”

OK. The one guy to take this flake he labels “Max Fist” seriously is Hamster (Skylan Brooks of “The Inevitable Defeat of Mister & Pete”). He’s a manic reporter-wannabe, weaseling his way into a job with an online news organization through his stories on Max Fist, his life on Chromium and his plight now.

Hamster’s sister is trying to support them by drug dealing. Indigo (Zolee Griggs of that recent Wu-Tang Clan TV series) wears her dreads long and blue and her nerve on her sleeve when running errands for the wisecracking villain who calls himself The Manager (Glenn Howerton).

He’s fond of wearing tennis gear, and down for pushing his target market for street drugs younger — “the sippy cup crowd. If they’re old enough to download porn on their iPad, they’re old enough to get high!”

He’s joking. He just makes the self-described “sugarplum fairy interstellar princess” more nervous every time they meet.

Threats are both real — from the heavily-armed drug dealer and his minions — and maybe imagined. There’s this Cleo (Amy Seimetz) that Max rants about, the SuperVillain on Chromium whom he defeated but did not vanquish. Might she be just a figment of his stories?

As “Archenemy” flips back and forth from the bloody, violent, lawless “reality” of “Edge City,” its fantasy-“present” and the animated Chromium of Max’s fever dreams, a fundamental flaw drags on any notion of reveling in its gruesome violence and deranged archetypes, in the “story” that isn’t much of a story at all.

There’s no “reality” to ground this in, no baseline that feels real. So there’s no doubt about Max’s true background. None.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for.

And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.

But take heart. More drugs are legal in a lot more places now. And nothing converts a loopy, trippy over-reach into a “cult” film better than hallucinogens, shared by the watch party.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Joe Manganiello, Zolee Griggs, Skylan Brooks, Glenn Howerton and Amy Seimetz

Credits: Directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer, script by Adam Egypt Mortimer and Luke Passmore. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:31

There’s a melancholy magic about “Farewell Amor,” a story of Africans come to America, cultures clashing and a family tested by the shock of reunion after a long separation.

Watching Ekwa Msangi’s debut feature, a remake of a short film she did a few years back, we can feel as dislocated as the Angolan trio portrayed here, lost in a strange culture and exotically beautiful Afro-Portuguese music, caught up in a family that’s been tested by civil war and years and years apart, a family that may not survive the jolt of finally reuniting in New York.

They reconnect at JFK where Esther (Zainab Jah) gushes “Amor!” at the husband she hasn’t seen in 17 years. Their daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson) is more wary, reserved.

And husband Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine)? It’s like he doesn’t know what to do. They’re all but strangers to each other, and he and Sylvia are the only ones who get that.

In three chapters named for those three characters, we see this “adjustment” from each person’s point of view. The first sign of trouble is Esther’s fervent prayer of thanksgiving at their first meal.

“The Devil is shamed and DEFEATED,” she declares. From just the look on Walter’s face, we know this is a new development in the woman he met in college and married shortly after.

Walter, a taxi driver, humors Esther’s passion, attending church with gritted teeth, hearing out her reciting her pastor’s advice in how to “rebuild our family.”

But his passion? There’s something wrong, something beyond “needing time to adjust.” And we can guess what that is more quickly than she can. Her “I haven’t been with another man” isn’t met by his matching declaration of devotion.

We’d wonder if Sylvia has her own suspicions, but she’s too caught up in a new school, homesick texts back home and wondering if she’s got what it takes to crack the step dance team at her Brooklyn high school.

Esther, ardent faith or not, isn’t that slow. She can see mail addressed to somebody else mixed in with theirs. Can she learn anything from their hip, sassy neighbor (Joie Lee)?

The conflicts set up are Walter’s attack of conscience and desire to maintain some connection to “the other woman” (Nana Mensah), Sylvia’s desire to fit in, get away from her pious and controlling mother, overcome the self-consciousness she feels in this new scene and impress the attentive classmate DJ (Marcus Scribner). Esther wants to “rebuild” the family, get them into church so that she will “NOT lose my daughter to this country.”

The script is a passing parade of grace notes, most delivered with a light touch. The father-daughter connection is particularly strained, and Walter is unsure how to remake a bond that was never there. Esther’s not quite blind to what may have been going on while Walter was abroad, but she’s totally deaf to how her religious fundamentalism is rubbing everybody else the wrong way.

Sylvia’s step-dance ambitions is a seriously played-out direction for the story to wander, and Walter’s options don’t seem like options at all.

The cutest scenes pair up Jah, playing fish-out-of-water to New York savvy Nzingha (Lee, Spike’s sister), who brings a little Brooklyn Black Girl magic to their bonding.

“Pleased to meet you, Queen!” sets up instant familiarity. And you just know a New York makeover is coming, because that church-bound African attire — “Is that really what White Jesus wants?”

But no teen dance/mom-makeover tropes break the sad, wistful spell Msangi casts in “Farewell Amor.” There’s dread built right into the title, and the hints of the family’s history make us root for them — and fear for them — first scene to last.

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations

Cast: Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah, Jayme Lawson, Joie Lee, Marcus Scribner and Nana Mensah

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ekwa Msangi. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:41

This month’s version of “Assassins who primp” is Jessica Chastain, pale and perfectly put-together murderess for hire as “Ava.”

She’s a woman of mystery whose job is “closing” targets for “management,” getting striking little splashes of blood on that immaculate makeup that’s been a trademark of the genre since Nikita the femme gave birth to it.

Only she’s not a woman of mystery, and that’s the first way this action pic goes wrong. Her resume, pretty much all of it, is splashed in montage form in the opening credits.

That’s after she’s play-acted as driver to a financier (Ioan Gruffudd) and broken every protocol in the book by questioning him instead of just simply “closing” him.

“What’d you do? Why would someone not want you to be alive any more?”

Her end of the bargain? “A good death.” She quotes Croesus, for Pete’s sake.

“Count no man happy until the end is known.”

How that jibes with the high school athlete/junkie/ex-military killing machine the background montage lay out is anybody’s guess. Maybe that’s where “Ava” teeters into self-parody.

John Malkovich, in a bit of on-the-nose casting, is Ava’s handler, the former agent now handing her assignments and arranging logistics. Yeah, he can still do fight choreography. Colin Farrell is “management,” the promoted-from-the-ranks higher up calling the shots.

And then there’s the messy “past” and home life that’s back in Boston, where Ava’s mom (Geena Davis, who played a female assassin in “The Long Kiss Goodnight”) has angina and her singer/songwriter sister (Jess Weixler, who played Chastain’s sister in “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby”) has taken up with Ava’s ex (Common).

Another complication? The mysterious Chinese entrepreneur/bookie (Joan Chen) running a hot night club that Ava finds the time to bust up.

Girlfriend’s got…issues. But she can take a punch and Chastain can take a fall, even if she’s not the best at disguising the throw-weight physics of a to-the-death brawl.

Tate Taylor, the director who made Chastain a star in “The Help” is behind the camera here, and while he’s dabbled in violence with “Ma” and intrigue with “The Girl on the Train,” he’s out of his depth. Not so much as actor turned screenwriter Matthew Newton (“Who are We Now,” “From Nowhere,””Three Blind Mice”). They’ve teamed up to clutter up what is, by genre necessity, meant to be mean and lean.

Setting some of the violence to dreamy synth pop? Not

After that first “closing,” things progress on such a predictable path that the only enticement to continuing is the notion that we’ll get to see many a “good death.”

But…but…those ISSUES.

Here’s a tip. Try not to bore us so much next time.

MPA Rating: R for violence and language throughout, and brief sexual material

Cast: Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Common, Jess Weixler, Joan Chen, Diana Silvers, Ioan Gruffudd and Colin Farrell.

Credits: Directed by Tate Taylor. A Voltage Film/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Say what you will about the somewhat hokey supernatural love story that they’re trying to put over in “Wander Darkly.” But Sienna Miller and Diego Luna put on a clinic in screen chemistry in this melancholy puzzle-picture romance.

Writer-director Tara Miele’s debut feature may be unduly concerned with the “puzzle” part. But her leads are stars who light it up and kind of break your heart, and if Luna and Miller aren’t on your short list of “my favorites,” here’s a movie to remind you of your poor choices.

They’re fighting when we meet them, or at least not getting along all that well. Adrienne and Matteo have a new baby and a new house and “We’re broke.”

And SOMEbody just forgot “date night.”

The evening, meeting friends for dinner, is tense and terse — something about the way Adrienne spits out “We’re not married” when people make that mistake. And right in the middle of the “Why are we even together any more?” fight on the way home, they crash.

She wakes up bloodied, confused, chasing a gurney down the hall in the hospital, watching a body slid into a freezer in the morgue.

It is drugs? Is she dead? Or is she merely “concussed,” Matteo’s answer? Because Adrienne is convinced “I died.”

Sounds are muffled and Miele’s camera is canted, flipped, as woozy as Adrienne’s state of mind as she steps out of a corridor and into another location, then another, fades out and wakes up on her own sofa, overhears her mother (Beth Grant, terrific as usual) talking about “taking the baby home with us.”

Adrienne sees Matteo eulogizing her at her funeral, jumps ahead and sees her daughter growing up with her parents.

“I’m dead…What is this, Purgatory?” Only Matteo is there to comfort her, correct her — “You’re confused.”

He resolves to “help you remember…I’m gonna tell you our story, OK?”

“Wander Darkly” sees them doing exactly that, stepping into and out of scenes from their not-a-marriage — first date, first kiss, first jealousy. The conceit here is that they’re not just observing their history in the manner of a hundred similar romances. They’re in the situation, as they were then, but commenting on it from within to reinforce his reassurances, or her doubts.

“Hey, I love you.” “No, I was the one who said it first.”

Adrienne gets over her anger at a possible “other woman” — “Even me dying isn’t enough to make you step up.” The “I’m a good ghost” cracks fade away. And as they do, you might feel the picture slipping away, the filmmaker losing the thread or at least getting away from what works — the give and take between her stars.

There are tips and too-obvious clues about what’s really going on here. And Miele drags out the finale, too, trying to bring on the tears.

But Miller and Luna give this romance a history, weariness and testy spark that keeps “Wander Darkly” going even after we’ve guessed what its destination is.

MPA Rating: R (Language|Some Sexual Content/Nudity)

Cast: Sienna Miller, Diego Luna, Beth Grant

Credits: Written and directed by Tara Miele. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:37

If “satire,” as the playwright/wag George S. Kaufman famously observed, “is what closes Saturday night,” then what are the possibilities of “The Twentieth Century?”

It’s a surreal, expressionistic satire, a camp vulgarization of history. And Hell’s bells, it’s CANADIAN history. “Closes Saturday afternoon?”

Writer-director Matthew Rankin works the Guy Maddin (“The Saddest Music in the World”) side of the cinematic street in this furiously strange riff on the rise of Canada’s dominant political figure of the last century, William Lyon Mackenzie King, or as the syrup-slurping classes to the North sometimes call him, WLMK.

No, I’m not making that up. But Rankin, looking at the gaps in King’s half-century-spanning public career, noticed what is known (white supremacist, a bit late figuring out Hitler, into the occult, never married) and plunged over a cliff in this fanciful, fantastical, stylized and almost totally fictional spoof of a figure who towers over modern Canadian history.

Queen Victoria is quoted, summing up Rankin’s maple-leafed native land — “In happy days as in sad, disappointed you shall be.” And if she never said it, and there’s no such place as “Disappointment Square” in Toronto or Ottawa, more’s the pity.

“May the disappointment keep us safe!”

This is Canadian comedy at its loopiest, Second City on Acid — bawdy, transgressive and transgender, and filmed on digitally-augmented sets of serene, expressionistic beauty — all angles and colors, triangular stage monoliths in front of painted (digitally rendered) backdrops.

The story compresses King’s formative years into a blur of failed romance, a kinky shoe fetish, bullying by his political rivals and a reputation for do-gooderism that Rankin ridicules to death.

The “spineless milksop” is played Dan Beirne, his domineering, sickly husband-dismissing mother by Louis Negin (Dame Edna’s…brother?), his political and moral role-model and ideal, the angelic and self-sacrificing politico Bert Harper by Mikhaïl Ahooja and the string-pulling Royal Governor General Lord Muto (His real title was Earl of Minto) by Seán Cullen.

Rankin has characters compete for power via a reality-TV worthy series of “competitions” — ribbon cutting (look “statesmanlike”), IDing logs by tree scent and a whack-a-mole game in which the moles are “baby seals,” to show how you identify with “the demented inbreds” who go for that sort of thing.

King visits a tubercular child in the Hospital for Defective Children for inspiration and motivation.

“I happen to believe that politics is about building a better world,” he says. “Help those that cannot help themselves” was the real King’s motto.

This King might marry one of two women, the harp-playing Teutonic goddess and Boer War fanatic Ruby (Catherine St-Laurent) or French Canadian Nurse LaPointe (Sarianne Cormier). The “Wedding Rituals of Toronto” with their “matrimonial sapling” and walk across a (moving, painted floor) ice-filled river is quite the test for true love.

Sexual frustration and implied perversion is treated by Dr. Milton Wakefield (Kee Chan). Milton Wakefield is a modern day politician who is still living, here imagined as a turn of the 20th century sanitarium doctor — and Asian.

The look of this “Century” is dazzling, and the off-the-wall inventiveness impresses — for a while.

But man, does this farce hit the wall or what? The frenetic early scenes in this biography in “ten chapters” lapse into the doldrums before the halfway mark. The zingy lines become fewer and farther between. And the performances, uneven in their comedic effect, run out of gas as well.

Full disclosure, I was never a huge Guy Maddin fan, and he did more wholly-realized versions of this sort of spoof back before digital effects made it all a tad easier.

I’m inclined to cut “The Twentieth Century” slack for sending me on a deep Wiki dive into Canadian history, and the visual inventiveness and perverse camp of it all. But the politics are murky, the satire muddier.

Maddin got there first, and his movies didn’t feel this gassed for the last half hour or more.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual imagery

Cast: Dan Beirne, Sarianne Cormier, Catherine St-Laurent, Louis Negin, Brent Skagford, Mikhaïl Ahooja, Seán Cullen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Matthew Rankin. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:30

It’s a little “Predator,” a bit of “Robocop” and a LOT “Terminator” — metal mercenaries of the not-too-distant future hit a Third World trouble spot.

Mayhem ensues.

“Living well,” they say, “is the best revenge.” But what would you call living on — outlasting your enemies and loved ones, all your peers, outliving everything except for your memories?

“Frau Stern” is about to turn 90. She has the love and attentions of her daughter, and the adoration and affection of not only her granddaughter, but her granddaughter’s peers — the local bartender, a young hairdresser who comes by for a trim and to check on her, most of them one third her age.

She’s socially active, a tireless smoker and in extraordinary health, her doctor assures her. But Ms. Stern, played by the late Israeli actress Ahuva Sommerfeld in her only screen appearance, has had enough. A Berliner and a Holocaust survivor, she’s ready to go.

“I want to die,” she tells her doctor (in German, sometimes Hebrew, with English subtitles).

“You should stop smoking,” he chortles.

“If you’re not going to help me, I’ll do it myself.“

He won’t. Whatever the ethics, he knows the optics, what the headlines will look like — “German Doctor Kills Holocaust Survivor.”

So Frau Stern starts on her single-minded quest, finding a way to stop living on her own terms, to stop remembering because “I remember everything.“

As she starts in on the daughter (Nirit Sommerfeld, her real life daughter) and then the granddaughter (Kara Schröder), widening her search for a means to an end to other means and other sources of “help,” “Frau Stern” slyly shifts from being about suicide to about what makes life worth living.

She is inspired and somewhat encouraged by a chat show she checks into, pretentious conversations moderated by the host (Robert Frupp) of “Glory Moment,” a show about ordinary Germans telling the more extraordinary stories of their lives.

Frau Stern has stayed in Berlin despite what “The Germans” did to her and her family. Her granddaughter is dating “The German,” and from all her talk along this line we start to figure she stuck around out of spite, to have the last word.

And now, those who persecuted or stood idly by while crimes against humanity were carried out, have died.

Writer-director Anatol Schuster fills in what looks like a full life. The widow has her “usual” at the bar, her usual bartender to remember it and deliver it, her regular smokes she picks up at the smoke shop, even a favorite convenience market she shoplifts from — just for excitement. Pushy new, young neighbors seem to have sketchy intentions. That’s a fresh challenge.

As she’s asking around about a gun, she has lots of people to consult, modifying her request after answering “What do you need a gun for?” a tad too bluntly. Now, she says “It’s getting dangerous around here.”

That’s the humor in this very dry and somewhat limited character study, the lady’s unflappable resolve and hard-won native cunning.

Schuster doesn’t take us on a long journey, or even the one we think he’s guiding us into when it begins. A brief film like this can endure only so many interludes, and he tries a couple that don’t push the story forward or illuminate characters in any important way.

But Schuster wrote “Frau Stern” specifically for Sommerfeld, and we can see what he saw in her in just a scene or two. She’s a spitfire, a fighter, not a complainer. And as we identify with her, we can either root for her quest, or hope she finds a reason to abandon it. But Sommerfeld ensures that we respect it, even if Frau Stern’s doctor, friends and descendants do not.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, profanity, drinking and smoking

Cast: Ahuva Sommerfeld, Kara Schröder, Nirit Sommerfeld, Murat Seven and Robert Schupp 

Credits: Scripted and directed by Anatol Schuster. A Film Movement release on Film Movement+.

Running time: 1:22

The signs are all there — a lurid underworld filled with over-the-top violent “villains,” thick London accents, bits of rhyming and pithy one-liners flung about by characters named Rawbone, Hard Eight, Tick Tock and “Not Now, Nigel.”

That punchdrunk title? “Knuckledust?” Some writer-director bloke’s lost himself in Guy Ritchieland for a few weeks punching this one out.

That bloke would be actor turned director James Kermack, and he’s conjured up a bloody, gruesomely violent and ultimately nonsensical story of a bareknuckle “club” where the super-rich wager on assorted brawlers who fight to the death, and which the cops are about to bust up.

It’s got pacing problems and (serious) coherence issues to go along with the Ritchie touches and yet another visual homage to the epic corridor kill-off in the Korean classic “Oldboy.”

Kermack goes for “Sin City” visual cues — neon-lit titles ID the many assorted characters in an opening, where stunning skinny biker and boss Serena (Camille Rowe, whose line readings remind one that directors go deaf in casting sessions) marches into the Church of Herod, her pricey underground fight club just as Tombstone (Guillaume Delaunay) is finishing off the last foe in a mass murderous gladiatorial punchout.

The next bout? It’s got to go a certain way. Hard Eight (Moe Dunford) needs to lose. Serena’s hiring requirements are “hard fighting men, men nobody will miss.” Hard Eight, aka Brody, has somebody who will miss him. Serena will have her killed by hitmen Happy (veteran character actor Phil Davis) and Hot Lips (Matthew Stathers) if Hard Eight doesn’t take the fall.

“You die, or she dies.”

Hint — it’d be a mighty short thriller if a character you went to all the trouble to name “Hard Eight” buys it in the opening act.

“Knuckledust” is about Hard Eight’s revenge, and the cops — bossed around by Kate Dickie and Jaime Winstone (Yeah, she’s Ray’s daughter.) — who’re raiding this operation in an effort to bring down the richies luring veterans off the street and making them fight to the death.

There are some furious fights, and a few funny moments — such as SWAT showing up with the wrong equipment to break down the door.

“We didn’t bring the ram, ma’am.”

Dave Bibby, as a manic sweater-vested tech nerd Hooper, stands out among the many villains and villains hunting the villains. And Parisian Sebastien Foucan has the tastiest trash-talk, delivered in a French-accented purr.

“I have an ear for guns. They whisper to me…This one is saying, ‘SHOOT me, I’m full.”

Irish actor Dunford acquits himself well here. He’s got the right growl and build for this. He was in “Black ’47,” “The Dig” and TV’s “Vikings,” and heck, you can even hear his voice in Netflix’s animated holiday “Angela’s Christmas Wish.” But you shouldn’t. It’s lame.

“Knuckledust” seriously lost the plot — or made me lose it — late in the second act and for pretty much all of the third. But there’s enough here that maybe you figure Kermack will come closer to the mark next time.

More punchy punch-lines, more tight shots (comedy and violence are best delivered in close-up), quicker cutting.

Guy Ritchie’s got to pass the mantle to somebody, after all.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Moe Dunford, Camille Rowe, Kate Dickie, Philip Davis, Jaime Winstone, Gethin Anthony, Sébastien Foucan and Dave Bibby

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Kermack. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:45