Movie Nation

Lena Olin earns a fine showcase as the partner, organizer, caregiver and maybe muse of a famous artist in “The Artist’s Wife.”

This domestic melodrama from producer (“Call Me by Your Name”) and sometime director (“Last Weekend”) Tom Dolby touches on the artistic temperament, thwarted ambition, family estrangement and dementia in covering just a hint of the same ground that Glenn Close took an Oscar nomination for in “The Wife” a few years back.

Married to ancient painter Richard Smythson, played by that colorful curmudgeon Bruce Dern, Claire (Olin) may have accepted her lot, to have to hear her famous husband say “I create the art” in interviews, and “She creates the rest of our life.”

For Claire, that means running their designer home and keeping his art dealer (Tonya Pinkins) placated, but at bay while Richard struggles for inspiration.

“It’s very hard to look inside and paint what’s all gone,” he confesses, at one point — not to Claire. Richard is still teaching classes, but his “erratic” behavior — vulgar around the students, insulting, unfiltered and forgetful — is causing problems.

Claire knows he’s “lived his life on his own terms.” But he was rash and temperamental to start with. Now, he’s losing it. Her new duty is keeping the peace with the college and his impatient dealer, and not telling him about the dementia his doctor sees settling in.

She is overwhelmed. In his sentient moments, he’s a joker. Their marriage is “Twenty-five years of ‘Stop, please,” he cracks in public. But she’s at the point of asking their housekeeper what it took for her to end her marriage.

Claire could use some support. Sure, the reason she starts hassling Richard’s estranged daughter (Juliet Rylance) is “I want him to remember you.” But taking on these end-of-life decisions for a famous and famously-irascible husband is hardly a burden you want to bear alone.

Angela is a mother, going through a break-up of her own, and not interested. But Claire is nothing if not persistent. Some of the best scenes of “The Artist’s Wife” are ones where we find how seriously estranged those two have been, and Claire’s cluelessness, caught in between them.

She doesn’t even know Angela’s sexual preference, has never met her little boy.

The three-writer screenplay is on its sturdiest ground letting a fine cast get across love, devotion, schisms and pain. Olin has always been an open book as an actress. And Dern’s later years have given him plenty of showcases for his mercurial twinkle-to-tirade range. Stephanie Powers has a chewy bit part as an old artist friend of the couple, and Avan Jogia has a little to play with as Angela’s calm-troubled-waters nanny.

The script lacks much of the couple’s back-story. Was she his student? And it develops a hitch in its step all throughout the third act, where abrupt character reversals give away every contrivance.

This is more worth seeing for Olin and Dern’s tetchy and touching interactions, portraying a marriage of devotion and decay. Every filmmaker who preaches that “Casting is everything,” or 90 percent of everything, isn’t exaggerating. “The Artist’s Wife” proves it.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some graphic nudity and brief sexuality

Cast: Lena Olin, Bruce Dern, Juliet Rylance, Avan Jogia and Stephanie Powers.

Credits: Directed by Tom Dolby, script by Tom Dolby, Nicole Brending and Abdi Nazemian. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:34

If filmmaker Alex Gibney was an oncologist, he’d be the one you could rely on if you asked, “Give it to me straight, doc. Is it the Big Casino?”

He makes films that have a dogged devotion to the unvarnished truth. Scientology to Steve Jobs, the “real” story of Enron or Lance Armstrong, Gibney’s reputation as a documentary truthteller is unimpeachable.

So if you want the hard answers about Russian manipulation of elections and whether Donald Trump was “cultivated” as a “Russian asset” who might win the White House and pander to Russia’s interests, Gibney’s the guy to go through the Russian nesting dolls to give us something like the unvarnished truth.

“Agents of Chaos,” the two-part film he directed for HBO (premiering Sept. 23), uses that nesting doll image and allegory, scores of interviews and reiterations of the reporting of what we knew in 2016, and what we now know, to lay out — in clear but somewhat exhaustive detail — how it all went down.

“Agents” traces Russia’s 2013-2014 Ukrainian practice-run “lab” of public opinion manipulation, sewing division and seeding “fake news” to the St. Petersburg troll farm IRA, names the known names of the hackers who fed Wikileaks and willing American media companies stolen documents and gossipy emails, digs into “collusion” and draws conclusions.

Several of the principals involved in all this — Russian “connections” such as Felix Sater and Carter Page, ex-CIA chief John Brennan, Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson and email hack victim John Podesta are here.

Gibney and others pick at the “Steele Dossier” and “Guccifer 2.0,” the manufactured “hero worship” of Julian Assange and “insidious” Wikileaks (Gibney did an earlier film on them), “Trump Tower Moscow” and other blind alleys a salacious press corps chased while the more blunt truth was practically right out in the open.

Years of Trump singing Putin’s praises on Fox News are sampled, Trump’s parroting of Russian positions on everything from the EU and NATO to the myth of “American exceptionalism” are revisited.

Trump “does things for (Russia) in public that they can’t do for themselves,” one insider explains.

We’re tipped that, in movie terms, the Russians were acting as if “they were in some John LeCarre (“Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy/The Russia House”) spy movie” while Trump’s team were playing roles in a New York “mob movie.”

We see how the troll farm in St. Petersburg learned on the fly, made research trips to Red State America and figured out how easily it would be to create fake social media profiles and fake Texas “secessionist” groups like Hearts of Texas on Facebook, not just to create and disseminated divisive memes, but more importantly — to amplify the hate, mistrust and bigotry that was already out there.

From Alex Jones’ InfoWars to CNN, everybody seemed to fall for it.

Gibney takes pains to show both “what Russia did to us,” and “what we did to ourselves” in this process.

Journalists, academics (historians) provide big picture perspective and analysis of Putin’s motives, Trump’s eager compliance, “authoritarian” playbook moves (assaults on protestors, blizzards of bald-faced lies, a daily outrage) and the “profound form of failure” of the media to avoid chasing mirage and not the real story.

In a year when such films and books (Andrew Weissmann, part of the Mueller team who has a new book out, is here) are legion, “Agents of Chaos” stands out for synthesizing so much of what we’ve heard, what we’ve come to believe about Russia and Trump (some of it mistakenly) and what exactly is on the line in November. It’s wearing and exhausting to go over all this again. But that’s nothing, the film suggests, to how alarming we should be that millions of our fellow citizens don’t look at Russia today with revulsion and fear — that they and we and Trump are remaking our democracy in Russia’s corrupt, autocratic image.

Cast: Margarita Simonyan, Felix Sater, Glenn Simpson, Victoria Nuland, John Podesta, John Brennan, Camille Francois, Andrew McCabe, David Hinkton, Andrew Weissmann, Carter Page, Michael Isikoff

Credits: Directed by Alex Gibney and Javier Alberto Botero, created by Gibney and Lowell Bergman. An HBO release.

Running time: Two episodes @2:00 each

He was a good Bond villain in a daft Bond film, “Moonraker.”

“Look after Mister Bond. See that some harm comes to him.”

But the Paris-born French actor Michael Lonsdale, who died today at 89, was in two thrillers I have never been able to channel-surf past — “Day of the Jackal,” about the 1960s hunt for a hit man sent to kill DeGaulle, and “Ronin,” the last great John Frankenheimer action picture, an all-star espionage/heist thriller.

By that stage in his life, Lonsdale was all but retired, forgotten, by English language filmmakers anyway. Not by Frankenheimer. Great film, and Lonsdale — quiet, meticulous professionals were his forte — was terrific in a small role, explaining the story’s title to the audience, and to De Niro and Jean Reno.

Nicely done.

It might not be the best time to release a movie built around attacks of conscience. That’s a concept that’s taken a beating in the United States in recent years. We’re not living in Frank Capra’s America any more.

But here is “Foster Boy,” a kind of John Grisham Lite “feel good” legal drama with healthy helpings of melodrama, courtroom shenanigans and thriller touches. It’s “just a movie.” Still, with some very good performances, a couple of nice twists and a righteous cause — questioning the privatization of states’ foster care systems — it at least will make you nostalgic for the days when we could at least hope the corporately-coddled and sold-out might do the right thing.

Matthew Modine is the sell-out at the center of all this. He sips his fine wine in his Architectural Digest home, dons a custom-tailored suit and takes limos and corporate jets wherever his corporate clients need him, wherever he’s licensed to practice.

But Michael Trainer rues the day he pops into a Chicago courtroom, fresh off the jet from LA, to argue a case in front of Judge Taylor (Louis Gossett Jr.). Sure, he wins. But Taylor’s in…a mood.

“Have you ever done anything for anybody but yourself?” he grouses. That’s when he orders the high powered/perfectly-put-together corporate attorney to take on, pro bono, a civil suit involving a young man (Shane Paul McGhie) brought up in the hearing after Trainer’s.

Jamal Randolph was before the judge on a state matter. He’s in jail, nearing the end of another short sentence. But he has a civil case before the same court. His adoptive mother (Michael Hyatt) says they haven’t been able to find an attorney. Judge Taylor, putting his finger on the scales of justice, solves that problem with a thump of his gavel.

Trainer’s co-counsel mutters “How you think this kid is going to present?”

“Like a thug,” the rich attorney at law fumes.

There are things in this Jay Paul Deratany script that you don’t see in your typical courtroom drama. While shout-offs with a heavy-handed judge, questioning witnesses who’ve left the stand and are just sitting in the courtroom, with the judge allowing all this, may occasionally happen, it feels far-fetched. Get used to it.

Jamal was abused, repeatedly, while in foster care. He says the worst of it came when the private company running child placement for Illinois parked a known abuser client in a foster home Jamal was already in, and ignored his warnings and pleas for help.

Now he’s suing Bellcore and the woman who placed him in harm’s way — now a higher up there (Julie Benz) — for damages.

The Grisham touches are showing Jamal tased in court, in front of the jury, the illegal and downright violent measures that company (“Allie McBeal’s” Greg Germann is their CEO) undertakes to intimidate Jamal and Trainer, the over-the-transom “evidence” slipped to the Good Guys.

The Deratany touches are all the times Gossett’s judge allows the countless courtroom irregularities to slide, letting the pretty co-counsel (Lex Scott Davis) braid Jamal’s hair, and having Jamal read from his notebooks “of rhymes” — rapping testimony from his journals that relate his abuse.

But McGhie (TV’s “Unbelievable”) and Modine buy in — hard.

McGhie bites off every bitter, resentful line this kid spits at “Three Piece,” his nasty nickname for the reluctant “suit” defending him.

And Modine makes his character’s arc or journey in the story not some fairytale of compassion, but a proud, callous and rich jerk who gets his back up — first at the judge, then at his client, then at the creeps who are rolling over that client.

“One thing I don’t do is LOSE.”

The “white savior” trope may be passe, but Jamal’s race isn’t what the story’s about. Foster care systems being privatized deal with all races of children, and aren’t as accountable as a state entity would be with any of them.

They’ve made an uneven melodrama that’s easier to get behind than to endorse for its cinematic realism. But I will. Maybe for old time’s sake.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, violence

Cast: Matthew Modine, Shane Paul McGhie, Louis Gossett Jr., Michael Hyatt, Julie Benz, Lex Scott Davis, Michael Beach, Greg Germann and Amy Brenneman

Credits: Directed by Youssef Delara, script by Jay Paul Deratany. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:49

And Cloris Leachman and Peter Dinklage and Kelly Marie Tran and Leslie Mann and Catherine Keeper and Clark Duke…

Thanksgiving, the Cave Family experiences the culture clash of dropping into the modern world.

Tom Wolfe’s book about the early days of the space program had swagger, suspense and humor. It was inspiring but fun.

Philip Kaufman’s glorious 1983 film was mythic, with the sweep of a Greek epic. It was sexy, sentimental and often hilarious.

The trailer to this October series Disney+ has no bravado, no seat-of-the-pants whimsy, none of that blustery “right stuff” that Wolfe brought into the culture. This feels like a dry post-patriotism take on TRS.

Maybe not the right approach. But we’ll see.

Here’s a German comedy stuffed with cutesy touches but little else, a madcap scamper from start to finish that still feels static and kind of staid, and a gorgeous character who’s meant to be funny, but who makes you wish our heroine would break a damn bottle over her head.

That’s “Berlin, Berlin: Lolle on the Run” in a nutshell — emphasis on the “shell.” It’s a madly misshapen farce that never amounts to much more than pleasant nonsense, and damned little of that.

Consider: We meet Lolle (Felicitas Woll) in court in her battered wedding dress. She just fled the altar where she was about to marry Hart (Matthias Klimsa), her lifelong friend and business partner in the animation studio they run, which they’re about to sell to Hollywood.

She fled because her ex, beach bum bartender Sven (Jan Sosniok) motorcycled up, confessed his love, and gave away the game by confessing that they’d had sex shortly before this wedding. Lolle flees, causes many traffic mishaps, and thus she’s in front of a judge in handcuffs.

Lolle narrates big chunks of her youth, with flashbacks unnecessarily bringing us up to date on how she got to the altar. She’s put career first, jumped from comic books to animation, has “babies” on the brain, and here we are.

In other words, the first five minutes of the movie is cluttered with a bunch of junk we don’t need to know. But in any event, we’re off.

Lolle’s “community service” is at a school, where this beautiful bullying custodian (Janina Uhse) proceeds to make her life hell — making her clean toilets, stealing her notebook P, with her animation studio’s pitch for being sold on it. Tracked to a bar, Dana then drugs Lolle, steals a car and gets them both arrested in the middle of nowhere.

They have to escape, stumble into a meth lab, have their clothes swiped by a cult of forest hippies, get back to Berlin, get Lolle’s notebook and maybe settle some of mean girl Dana’s “issues” as they do.

Dana’s like a dark, angry German version of that “too-much-fun/free-spirit” that comedies like this throw at us. Think “Something Wild” without the charm.

Lolle spends her time begging, questioning and trying to understand this hellish creature whom most of us would have cold-cocked the moment she literally spat in our face. But maybe that’s me.

The “cute touches” here are whimsical uses of split-screen action, as the meth lab mugs, the cult, the cops and Lolle’s two exes chase her and track her with the help of her blackmailing IT guy in India.

There’s a bear who eats a phone, and every so often Lolle imagines a person she encounters in animated form.

The animation is clever, if not hilarious. The running gag — that everywhere they go, they run into some OTHER ex of Lolle’s — also needed work.

The one scene that made me laugh involved the ladies’ pursuers colliding and collectively pounding on a gate, trying to get at them.

“Tear down this WALL! Tear down this WALL,” they chant, in German with English subtitles. Reaganesque.

And I grinned at the part of the Harz forest Lolle and Dana find themselves in — “Schnitznitz.” It may not be the best language for comedy, but German place names? Real beer-through-the-nose geography.

Funny. Unlike pretty much anything else in “Lolle on the Run.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, drinking, drug content

Cast: Felicitas Woll, Janina Uhse, Matthias Klimsa, Jan Sosniok

Credits: Directed by Franziska Meyer Price, script by David Safier. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:21

A dangerous journey of self discovery? Oct. 2 this one hits Film Movement.

There’s something amusingly disorienting about the creature feature “Shortcut.”

It’s an Italian production set in modern-day rural Italy, with a 1960s vintage Italian bus filled with English schoolkids, and an English-speaking bus driver.

Read the fine print on the sign in the bus window above. “S. Peter International School.” That doesn’t answer all the questions. Why does the Italian escaped convict who hijacks the bus (David Keyes) have an English accent?

Anyway, what we have here is an Italian quicky for the international market, a horror tale with a location — an unused tunnel complex — a somewhat clumsy English-ain’t-my-first-language screenplay, kids, a nicely-restored bus and a monster.

Could be fun, right?

Five kids are on this bus — lumpy goof Karl (Zander Emlano), smart-girl-with-glasses Queenie (Molly Dew) whom they nickname “IQ,” quiet Chris (Jack Kane) in the hoodie and earbuds, budding artist Bess (Sophie Jane Oliver) and proto-punk leather-jacketed Reg (Zak Sutcliffe).

They banter with the driver (Terence Anderson) on their scenic mountain drive — Home? Field trip? Back to Britain?

Then they hit a road block. No worries, driver Joe knows a shortcut. None of them see the just-buried hand sticking out of the dirt at that road block. None notice the bones scattered along the back road that throws them into the clutches of the Bad Guy with a Gun (Keyes).

They quickly ID him as an escaped con on the run, a killer known to “love teenagers” and nicknamed “The Tongue Eater.”

“I know what DEATH tastes like,” he hisses. And it isn’t “chicken.”

Karl has just enough time to blurt “He’s gonna kill us ALL” when, as things turn out, escaped convict Pedro Minghella is the least of their problems. There’s something OUT there.

“We’re trapped in a tunnel and we’re all gonna DIE!” is Karl’s update.

Horror movie tropes are strictly-observed — splitting up, medieval torches always handy, the girl who says “I really have to PEE,” etc.

A friend gets taken, and other kids keep calmly calling his name, over and over, as if they can’t hear his BLOODcurdling screams and cries, mid-devouring, mere yards away.

The kids are a pleasant-enough collection of “types.” There are a couple of decent “gotchas” here, and director Alessio Liguiri (“In the Trap”) uses the darkness of his subterranean settings well.

But the wheels come off “Shortcut” pretty much the moment the kids have to flee that bus.

The problem solving involved in escaping a ruthless, armed serial killer nicknamed “The Tongue Eater” whom you’re trapped on a bus with would have been a lot more interesting than anything screenwriter Daniele Cosci cooks up for the thing “that isn’t human.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, gory supernatural violence, profanity

Cast: Jack Kane, Molly Dew, Zak Sutcliffe, Sophie Jane Oliver, Zander Emlano, David Keyes and Terence Anderson

Credits: Directed by Alessio Liguiri, script by Daniele Cosci. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21

If there’s such a thing as “universal humor,” it’s got to be toilet-based.

Planet to planet, galaxy by galaxy — excrement, poop, caca, dung — no matter how you polish it, a turd’s a turd. And talking about it, showing it, finding new ways to goof on the most basic of bodily functions is always going to be funny, no matter the means of communication.

“Alien Addition” is a stoner comedy from New Zealand about Kiwi potheads visited by aliens who seem to be searching the tractless void of space for their next high.

And what these hemorrhoid-headed saucer-steering voyagers are REALLY into is “beautiful, chunky texture” and “spicey,” and shouldn’t be wasted in septic tanks. Oh no.

Music video veteran Shae Sterling tells this story through the eyes, subtitle-worthy accents, slang and values of rural North Islanders, Maori mostly.

They like their pot, sure. But they’re hooked on the board game “Galaxy Gods,” each one quick to play the “alien” card. The only excitement in their lives is racing, by SUV, dirt bike and tuner car, to the local pool hall and pub where there’s always the chance that some cute backpacking tourist from South America will fall for a pickup line.

“If you were a banana, I’d SPLIT you…or um, if you were a banana, I’d find you APPEALING!”

But when Riko’s daft auntie (Veronica Edwards) claims “I seen an eyeball in the toilet,” nobody takes her seriously. She mixes up salt for sugar in her biscuits and can’t remember how to make a decent pot of tea. She’s lost it.

Riko (Jimi Jackson) soon finds out he and his mates were wrong. And after the shock of stumbling into the beeping, bleeping, burping swaybacked space travelers, whom he calls Gurgus and Jeff (Mel Price and Steven Samuel Johnston), he’s even more shocked by their priorities — getting a buzz on.

And what suits their atomizing alien bong best? Poop.

Sterling sets up a more interesting comedy than he delivers. The gang of aimless 20somethings Riko hangs with (Tane Huata, Tukairangi Maxwell and Harry Summerfield) are hilarious, their profane banter the basis of many a goofy boy-bonding tale in a place and in a culture (Maori, mostly) we never see on the screen.

This is just his jumping off point, though, as Riko — after an in-the-shower freak-out of discovery — proceeds to bond with his “visitors,” who even have a voice decoder so that they can speak the same language.

“Could you change your voice? Cuz you sound Australian.”

Can’t have that.

A rugby lesson, a thrift-store makeover, stumbling on stage at a strip club, gambling, clubbing, all this stuff is crammed into a ditzy and dizzying first 40 minutes or so.

That “Precious”-sized “Flaming Red River Burger” joint waitress (JoJo Waaka) with the outrageously libidinous come-ons? She’ll play a big part in how things play out. So will the rest of the lads. Eventually.

The villain here is a hoax-pushing “science blogger” (Thomas Sainsbury) who, with his more ethical assistant (Ayham Ghalayini), predicted these aliens’ arrival and is convinced his reputation will be made if he can capture and autopsy them.

In its earliest, giddiest scenes, you really have no idea where any of this is going. The colorful cast reminds you of a dozen classic films about aimless youth set in the world’s out-of-the-way places.

And then the blue hemorrhoids show up, and the generic blogger-villain, and Sterling scrambles to find something novel and funny to do with them.

Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn’t.

Still, Jackson makes a great tour guide for local life — in BFE, NZ — with a trip to the big city of Auckland in a stolen hearse as a bonus. The stoner humor works, the “bum hole” stuff runs out of gas (ahem) quicker than all involved seem to realize.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, drug use, scatological humor

Cast: Jimi Jackson, Thomas Sainsbury, JoJo Waaka, Harry Summerfield, Ayham Ghalayini, Tane Huata, Tukairangi Maxwell and Veronica Edwards.

Credits: Written and directed by Shae Sterling. A Sept.29 Zonic TV release (available on various streaming platforms, Amazon, etc).

Running time: 1:36