Movie Nation

He’s the writer. Laura Linney’s who he ended up with. Elle Fanning is the result.

And Salma Hayek is, in some form, one of “The Roads Not Taken.”

Sally Potter directed this March 13 release.

This looks lovely and reaches an audience the major studios neglect.

Elisabeth Moss has the best “resting tormented face” in the business. So she’s perfectly cast as a abused, haunted wife certain her dead control-freak husband is manipulating her life and attacking her and those close to her in “The Invisible Man.”

Leigh Whannell, screenwriter/actor of the “Saw” and “Insidious” movies, has written and directed a brilliantly-acted, thematically-simple, technically-adept thriller of genuine suspense, a movie where the faintest noise in dead silence chills you to the marrow.

And Moss is the EveryWoman on screen, terrified and shocked, and in her most haunted moments resigned to this terror that only she believes is being visited on her.

Cecilia is introduced in bed, staring at the clock that reads 3:42 a.m. This is her chance. She slips her sleeping husband’s arm away from her, quietly calls his name, and washes out the glass she used to drug him.

Grab the “bug out” bag with her ID, cash and a few clothes, redirect a security camera so she can be sure he hasn’t leapt up to chase her, try to get the dog to understand she’s not coming back, and then flee the modernist, remote, cliffside Northern California mansion. When you’re desperate, climbing a wall and scrambling through woods for a narrow escape is the price you’re willing to pay.

We get a taste of the abuser Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is. A big taste.

It’s no wonder that Cecilia doesn’t stay with her sister (Harriet Dyer). She lays low with a friend of sis. James (Aldis Hodge) is a single-dad cop with a daughter (Storm Reid) ready for college. It’s all he can do to get her to open the door of this “safe” house.

His reassurances that “He’s not out there” are cold comfort. Even the news that Adrian killed himself days later isn’t reassuring. She knows him. And when she fled the house, we glimpsed its Tony Starke lab downstairs. Adrian’s source of wealth was optical technology.

If anybody could fake his death, it’d be him. And when weird stuff starts happening in the safe house — a stove turned up here, sheets pinned to the floor by an unseen foot there — she’s sure he’s back, stalking her in some Harry Potter cloak of invisibility.

Her sister all but rolls her eyes. James the cop can’t reason with her. “Don’t let him win by bringing him back to life.”

And the dead man’s lawyer-brother (Michael Dorman) can’t convince her that this tricky inheritance Adrian left her isn’t a trap, and that her late husband is in “that urn over there” in his office.

“The Invisible Man” is a true tour de force for Moss, who is starting to earn those (“Her Smell”) on the big screen as well as the small one. She lets us see Cecilia unravel, all but taking us through the stages of death and dying as Cecilia is assaulted, scared out of her wits and traumatized by the degree of “control” HE still exercises over her.

If there’s a big flaw in the film, it’s the common one of the genre. We aren’t given enough doubt about what she is experiencing — real “invisibility,” old-fashioned haunting or all in her medicated and increasingly-deranged head.

Whannell also slaps an anti-climactic coda on the tale that feels as unnecessary as as saying, “See, she looks SCARED!”

But with a lot of silence, some wonderful, minimalist effects doled out for maximum shock value, and a focused, fear-filled turn by Moss, Whannell has updated a timeless title with a genuinely horrific message. We’re never alone. We’re being watched and “controlled,” even if we were never said “Til death do us part” to the wrong spouse.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong bloody violence, and language.

Cast:Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer, Michael Dorman and Oliver-Jackson-Cohen

Credits:Written and directed by Leigh Whannell. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:04

She is not stylish.

Quiet, demure, “mousie” we used to say, she is anonymous, invisible — barely noticed and when she is, it’s to slough off some unpleasant bit of personal or busy work.

She’s just been on the job five weeks, but she’s already proficient at the requirements of being “first in, last to leave” at this motion picture production company. She makes coffee, loads the mini-fridge with Fiji Water, empties trash, juggles schedules, prints out and binds scripts, balances her boss’s personal expenses ledger.

And she puts on rubber gloves, goes in and tidies up his office, hours before he arrives, scrubbing stains we never see, saving dropped earrings we do.

She is “The Assistant,” a minutely detailed character study in the drones — go-getters fresh out of college or entitled offspring hired as a favor to relatives and someone you may need a favor from — the faceless, mostly silent “entry level” folks who make the world work for the people who make movies.

And if Harvey Weinstein’s trial is the perfect context for this timely “#MeToo” era drama, they are the cowed eyewitnesses to Hollywood’s casting couch culture and its binding code of silence.

Julia Garner of TV’s “Ozark” is plain Jane — never named in the movie, new to the job and impassively accepting the low-woman on the totem pole off-loading of work that her two senior fellow assistants (Noah Robbins, Jon Orsini) leave her to deal with.

An irate, scratchy phone connection — “It’s the wife.”

“Why me?”

Shrug. Why indeed?

“How was YOUR weekend?” one who bothers to return her early morning pleasantry asks.

“I was here.”

Documentary filmmaker turned first-time feature writer/director Kitty Green shows us a day in this young woman’s life — up well before dawn, availing herself of the studio’s car service, dozing with binders in her lap at the start of the day, picking at yet another pastry at the darkened end of it.

Garner plays Jane as poker-faced, first scene to last. Except for those moments when she gets a half-overheard tongue lashing from The Boss, whom we never see and she probably doesn’t either. He’s the sort that brings her to silent tears over the fact that she’s not doing a good enough job of placating his irate wife. Her every transgression requires an emailed apology.

Her two semi-smug colleagues edit each mea culpa for her, standing over her shoulder. “Thank you for this opportunity you’ve given me. I won’t let you down again.”

Anybody expecting high drama or even a little righteous outrage and “Hollywood” melodrama may feel sorely let down by Green’s portrait.

This is a film of quiet, florescent gloom, conversations overheard, whispers, Jane always glanced at and then ignored. A favorite moment — she gets on an elevator with a movie star. He says nothing, she says nothing. She probably isn’t allowed. It’s Patrick Wilson.

Of course there has to be an arc to this character, this milquetoast Hollywood version of assistants we’ve seen in “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Swimming With Sharks,” “The Big Picture” and “30 Rock.” An even younger and prettier young thing (Makenzie Leigh) shows up, flown in from her waitress job in Idaho. She’s to be the fourth “assistant.” And Jane has to take her to the swank hotel where they–HE– are putting her up.

Matthew McFadyen, co-star with Keira K. in the big screen “Pride & Prejudice,” plays the sympathetic HR guy who hears her timid complaints, and we get a dazzling, understated dose of his transition from “You can tell me. That’s what I’m here for,” to “Do you like working here?”

That’s about as dramatic as “The Assistant” gets. There are a dozen ways Green could have goosed the script, even slightly, to give us a little more and make this movie more of a meal.

But there’s value in seeing the hierarchy at such studios, the endless meetings and the egos, the “wheels’ up” coast-to-coast juggling act, and the cavalier treatment of underlings and other people’s time.

Only “The Chairman” gets an office. Everybody else has a cubicle. Everybody else has to take it, to wait — in the limo, on the tarmac, in the conference room. And any “It gets better” can be grimly laughed off. Here’s that one long-suffering cubicle VP (Alexander Chaplin) who endures the worst of it, like Jane, forced to deal with every appointment blown off for a casting session, irate Chinese investors left hanging because The Boss is on “personal time.”

Somewhere. Somewhere with room service.

MPAA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Julia Garner, Matthew McFadyen, Noah Robbins, Makenzie Leigh, Jon Orsini, Alexander Chaplin and Patrick Wilson.

Credits: Written and directed by Kitty Green. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:27

The jokes and impersonations tip the hand of “Addicted to You.”

Cracks about “a modern day John Cusack” and Kate Hudson, “Never Been Kissed” and hearing “Helen Hunt’s voice in your head” (“What Women Want.” A stoned Matthew McConaughy impersonation. A character a little too INTO you too quickly?

“Does Aimee own ’27 Dresses?'”

Break it down for us sidekick David — “You’ve got yourself a classic rom-com.”

If only.

“Addicted to You” is a crude, laugh-starved and vulgar C-list copy-and-paste of “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” and proof of the thesis that if you’re going to steal, you might want to aim higher than a movie nobody EVER called a “classic.”

It’s built on that rom-com staple since Shakespeare’s day, two people lying about who they really are meeting and falling for the dishonest version of each other.

Luke — played by Florida wrestler-turned-actor Shane Hartline — is a 30something meme generator at Buzz Story, working with his bros Jackson (Choni Francis), David (Garrett Mendez) and Wendy (Tara Erickson), living by the credo old Uncle Doug (Alex Walters) taught him as a lovesick tween.

“Follow my one rule! ‘Thou shalt NOT fall in love!'”

Uncle Doug’s dead now, just like Michael Douglas’s Uncle Wayne in McConaughey’s “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” Also not a classic.

The new flirt at work, Aimee (Cat Alter) hurls herself Luke, beds him, drops the “L” word the morning after, and blurts “I decided we could be good together, like Lucy and Ricky, or Sid & Nancy! Want to meet my MOM?”

That’s Luke’s trigger. He needs an out. What he and his pals come up with is “I’m a sex addict. I’m in recovery.” Funny thing, their boss (Warren Burke) is in “a group.” He understandingly drags Luke into it.

And another funny thing, Kara (Melissa Paulo) is a star writer at SNS Magazine, and her “Sorry Not Sorry” boss (Patricia Viletto) wants a story on dating a sex addict. Kara ends up undercover at that same support group.

I’ve used the phrase “funny thing” here hopefully, but that’s not accurate. The “meetings” are as artificial as their setting — on a high school theater stage (Hey, the lights were already hung, etc.). And the courtship that follows is just as contrived.

There’s a lot of riffing and comical crudity over everybody’s various shades of kink. The performers sound like improv veterans.

“I’m dating an emo. We’re working on penetrating…our FEELINGS.”

Everybody’s got a few go-to impersonations — Jack Black, Obama, Seth Rogen, Larry the Cable Guy. Team Luke gets messed up with an evening of 40 ouncers, “magic drops” and a five-apple bong. That turns them all into animated versions of themselves, Beavis and a lot of Buttheads.

Some players try WAY too hard (Francis co-wrote the script and hits his punchlines so hard he leaves a mark.). Others give us a taste of R-rated sitcom whimsy. David’s new hook-up (Ashley Crystal Hairston) is seduced with the old fake-wedding ring routine. And she’s all in.

“Brittany’s offering BUTT stuff,” David sings — improvising his own autotune as he does. “Buuuuuuuttttt stuff! It’s my ROSEBUD!”

As limp as the laugh lines are, when “Addicted to You” (“Addicted to Love” anyone?) turns sensitive and serious, the eye-rolling only gets worse.

Some of the “let’s fake how hot we are for each other” vamps are laugh out loud funny in a sort of over-the-top acting exercise way. Alter stands out in those moments.

Mostly though, this addiction is too easy to shake, a rom-com that’s content to reference “classic” rom-coms, without making the references funny or for that matter improving on them.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with frank sexual situations, drugs, profanity — mild violence.

Cast: Shane Hartline, Melissa Paulo, Cat Alter, Choni Francis, Ashleigh Crystal Hairston ,Garrett Mendez, Tory Devon Smith, Patricia Villetto

Directed by Mike Cochnar, script by Mike Cochnar, Choni Francis, SteevJBrown. A Leomark release.

Running time: 1:35

The shaggy dog — Ok shaggy Dude — comedy “The Big Lebowski” produced more memorable characters than most any cult film you can think of.

And any of them, played by Jeff or Julianne, John or Jon, was indelibly hilarious enough to merit a spin-off film, at least to fans.

Of course, the catch here is that any attempt to catch that lightning in a bottle 20 years later would probably turn out like “The Jesus Rolls,” John Turturro’s return to the cocksure Puerto Rican bowler with aggression, sex appeal and an accent to die for.

Sure, he’s unforgettable. Like several others in the film, he has his own catch-phrase — “Nobody f—s with the Jesus.” But take him out of his element and maybe the twenty years matter more and the film will seem creaky and winded.

It’s not a terrible idea to package Jesus with a fellow ex-con pal, Petey (Bobby Cannavale) and a cranky French hairdresser, Marie (Audrey Tautou) and put them on the road in a remake of Bertrand Blier’s “Going Places.” But every minute that The Jesus isn’t in a bowling alley Turturro and his movie lose a lot of what made him stand out.

That doesn’t mean “The Jesus Rolls” doesn’t come damn close to just skating by on the glories of that character and our memories of that movie. We meet him as he’s released from prison, and if you ever wondered what the unflappable Christopher Walken (playing the warden) looks like breaking character, he comes close here.

“SERVED your TIME, boy!” he twinkles, and almost loses it. He seems as delighted as we are at seeing Turturro back in Jesus mode. “Keep on BOWLING boy!”

For a moment, as Jesus exits the prison, we think we’re going to get a “Something About Mary” musical narration. Jesus, remember, doesn’t just have a look, an accent, a catch-phrase and a go-to move — licking his bowling ball before rolling. Jesus has his own music. The Gipsy Kings play him out, and they are literally in the prison with him.

Maybe Turturro couldn’t land them for transition shots throughout the movie, but this is inspired. And it’s the one moment in “Jesus Roles” that truly takes us back to The Dude and his abiding.

The rest of “Jesus Rolls” is mostly Jesus rolling. Petey picks him up at prison, they steal the first of many MANY vintage cars that they boost, and we’re off.

It’s a road comedy of criminal enterprises, comic mishaps and quaintly kinky sex. Once they’ve stolen that Plymouth Road Runner from the gun-toting hair dresser (Jon Hamm) and stolen his star stylist (Tautou), who has “history” with Jesus, let the threesomes begin.

A parade of cameos pass by — Hamm, Tim Blake Nelson, Sonia Braga as the Mother of Jesus, a hooker — “Steel in the game, at your age?” JB Smoove gets a haircut. Susan Sarandon is a female ex-con they pick up, stealing another car to give her a lift.

Jesus has a thing for Chrysler products — Road Runner, K-Car, Fury. The vintage Bentley doesn’t suit The Jesus.

The surprise focus here reminds me of the way “Big Lebowksi” kind of went off the rails for me — the sex scenes. There’s amusing nudity and a lot of switching partners and sharing and a faintly frustrated Frenchwoman who says “I sleep with everybody. That way, no one is jealous!” Jesus frets that “Ain’t no pleasure for The Jesus not to give pleasure!” Not much pleasure in the scenes, either.

The picaresque crimes are dull, the road “comedy” never develops momentum.

But one more moment brings “The Jesus” back to his natural habitat — a bowling alley. The Gipsy Kings (unseen, alas) play and sing a Spanish “My Way,” and there’s time for a tango, in bowling shoes.

This is The Jesus we want. This is the Jesus John T. should have saved.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, language throughout and brief nudity

Cast: John Turturro, Bobby Cannavalle, Audrey Tautou, Susan Sarandon, Pete Davidson, Jon Hamm, Sonia Braga, Tim Blake Nelson, JB Smoove and Christopher Walken.

Credits: Directed by John Turturro, script by John Turturro, based on Betrand Blier’s film “Going Places” and the character created by Joel and Ethan Coen. A Screen Media release/a Sidney Kimmel production.

Running time: 1:25

AT’s what I’m talking about!

Opens Friday in select cities. Because not everybody’s found The Jesus.
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Elisabeth Moss is on quite the roll. “Handmaid’s,” “Her Smell,” “Light of My Life,” “Us.” Showing us more of her thriller chops this time around. The trailers have all pointed to her doing a great job of muddying up our notion of whether this haunted-by-my-abusive-ex thing is “real” or all in her head.

“Saint Frances” is a sentimental and sweet, coarse and edgy comedy about childcare, abortion and finding adulthood at 34.

Intrigued? You should be.

Writer-and-star Kelly O’Sullivan has concocted a Greta Gerwiggish star vehicle that’s laugh-out-loud funny, blushingly crude and beautifully touching.

She stars as Bridget, a careless, distracted and somewhat adrift ditz whom we think is about to have an epiphany about all those things in the middle of a party. Then a random guy (Max Lipchitz) interrupts her and they wind up in bed.

It’s not until the next AM that she realized it was her “time of the month.” That’s so Bridget. And I’m being a lot more delicate than anybody in this movie is about bodily functions and having one’s period.

Jace — that’s the pick-up’s name — just rolls with it. Bridget figures this is the time for discourse on “bloodhounds” and making a very messy situation amusing.

She’s got a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Her job interview the next day is filled with such faux pas. A “fallen” Catholic, she’s been recommended by a friend to take her old job as nanny for six-year-old Frances, the daughter of two women (Charin Alvarez, Lily Mojekwu) who just had a little boy.

They may exchange looks that give away “desperate,” but Bridget’s tactless stumbles may be too much. Frances (Ramona Edith Williams) and Bridget don’t click, either.

“We’re done” the child blurts out. She does that a lot. And yet for all of that, cell-phone-distracted, “not much good with kids” Bridget ends up with the job. She has no idea what she’s in for.

The couple are strained, with Mommy (Alvarez) suffering postpartum and Mama (Mojekwu) a humorless workaholic.

Frances? She’s Mommy and Mama’s little unHoly terror. She badgers Bridget to bump her around in the stroller for thrills, then runs to her parents when she takes a tumble.

“She threw me out of the stroller!”

She’s not hearing Bridget’s “no sugar” repeat of her parents’ edict when the ice cream truck rolls by in the park. Her tantrum summons a cop, which was her six-year-old intention.

“HELP! She’s not my Mom! I don’t KNOW her!”

Bridget gets a bellyful of childcare hell and the downside of Mommyhood. She is dismayed at Mommy Maya’s decline from “funny, confident woman” to “bare-boobed unshowered perpetually-crying milk machine.”

Perfect time for Bridget to find out she’s pregnant, right? This is how she earned my “careless, distracted and somewhat adrift ditz” label. Her birth control isn’t even worthy of being called a “method.” She asserts herself as a feminist, with her “I’m for sure getting rid of it” to Jace. But like everything else, there’s a lot of “lazy” in her “I am woman”hood.

Poor Jace is younger, all empathy and “I know” at her every complaint. He’s doing his part “in our relationship.”

But “We’re not IN a relationship!”

And as if to prove it, Bridget goes all goo-goo eyes over Frances’ new toddler-guitar teacher/poet (Jim True-Frost).

All these complications, all this “feeling,” all this (literal) “messiness” is sprinkled with dialogue that will make you laugh or at least chuckle out loud when delivered by O’Sullivan. Guitar teacher says Frances is “a future Joan Jett.” Who’s that, the kid wants to know?

Rock star, “really angry — lots of ‘STATEMENT’ eye liner.” Pause. “Wonder if she’s dead now?”

O’Sullivan sells this woman’s embrace of not “having it together” with a performance on a par with Jenny Slate’s bracing and funny turn in the similarly themed and pitched “Obvious Child.”

Yes, abortion can be funny, even in a movie with lots of Catholics and Catholicism.

And then our heroine turns on a dime, letting this problem child get to her, developing empathy for Frances’ parents even as she’s clumsily making every mistake short of a fatal one with their kid.

Comedy is the most subjective film genre, and all this menstruation, abortion, Catholicism and Meeting Mr. Wrong won’t be to every taste. I found “Saint Frances” a real indie comedy shot in the arm (first-timer Alex Thompson directed). And I cannot wait to see what O’Sullivan comes up with next. Nothing that involves kids, I trust. For obvious reasons.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, adult subject matter and situations.

Cast: Kelly O’Sullivan, Ramona Edith Williams, Charin Alvarez, Max Lipchitz and Lily Mojekwu.

Credits: Directed by Alex Thompson, script by Kelly O’Sullivan. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:41

It looked like a “Star Wars” sandcrawler, armor-plated and on massive tracks.

It was welder and mechanic Marv Heemeyer’s masterpiece, 85 tons of unstoppable motorized mayhem. Because that’s what he built it for.

“Tread” is a tale of a small town feud taken driven to its diesel-powered coup de grace. It has an operatic, unbelievable, large-than-life/”only in America” quality. And if you don’t remember this moment in time from 2004, it’s because Ronald Reagan died the day after Heemeyer’s drive of revenge through Granby, Colorado, utterly obscuring this Great Moment in White Male Working Class Rage.

Using interviews, actual news coverage, reenactments and a rambling, cassette-tape manifesto by the welder run amok, filmmaker Paul Solet paints a portrait of working class grievance, “good ol’boy” cronyism and venality, persecution complexes and petty grudges that become epic. Its portrait of small town provincialism suggests that it should go straight from theaters and streaming to just the right TV network — RFD-TV — where some rural soul searching is in order.

Yes, the “hero” of the piece is plainly paranoid, messianic and wrong. But as Solet’s film cannot help but reveal, that old joke has a hint of truth about it.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everybody ISN’T out to get you.”

Heemeyer was an Air Force vet who stayed in Colorado after his service, using the welding and mechanical skills he picked up in the military to make a business — a muffler shop — and a life for himself in Granby, population 1800 or so — just over the mountain from Boulder.

He had plenty of friends, a sometime girlfriend and a passion — snowmobiling. His work was respected by all and he ran a successful welding business.

But to hear him tell it, in this long, multi-tape suicide note he left behind, he crossed the wrong “legacy” businesses and families when he won a place to open his shop at auction. It took a decade of perceived insults, zoning and sewage distract hassles and lawsuits that he saw as persecution for him to have his hot tub epiphany.

Buy a huge Kubota bulldozer at auction, turn it into a tank and make himself an avenging angel on treads. God told him to do it. In his hot tub.

“You people needed to be taught a lesson,” he explains, on tape. “When you visit evil on someone, believe me, it will be visited on you.”

The overarching theme of Solet’s film is that there’s no feud like a small town feud. Get on the wrong side of the wrong person, and you can’t help but make associations that every other problem in your life will connect to them. Because they have friends, and relatives. And those friends and relatives are on this board, run that town office, or are even the mayor.

People like the local newspaper editor became — in Heemeyer’s growing rage — sworn enemies. We hear Heemeyer’s accusations first, and then denials, which colors our perceptions about who might be right, who might not be right in the head.

Those he accused come off as genuinely puzzled, or leave the viewer with the suspicion, “Yeah, Heemeyer’s a hotheaded assh–e, but so’s this liar.”

“No one realized how distorted it was becoming to him,” Ski Hi News editor Patrick Brower admits, his business targeted despite his professed best efforts to be fair and keep on the good side of a disgruntled local business owner.

The last third of the documentary is devoted to news footage or painstaking recreations of the “killdozer” rampage, and let me blunt about that. It’s 85 tons of pure catharsis, served up as entertainment. Which it is.

Make this story about a gun-nut slaughtering innocents — which it could have been, given the setting, the culture and Heemeyer’s on-tank cannon (a .50 caliber rifle) — and there’s no way anyone in good conscience could take it this way.

Instead, we watch a methodical, mechanical nut, with grievances (possibly) real and imagined, destroy the property of those he figures have wronged him. A friend recalls a Vin Diesel movie the 51 year-old Heemeyer kept in his shop, “A Man Apart.” I left “Tread” certain he must have seen that James Garner Army comedy “Tank.”

We see footage of townspeople gathered on the hill overlooking the tank-tantrum, and we get it. They gawked as we gawked, as news viewers around the world gawked. Everybody likes to see machines run amok. You’re already headed to Youtube to check out the news clips or the movie trailer there.

Businesses destroyed, lives shaken to their core, the cars of bystanders crushed, cops helpless to stop it — it’s awful and tragic, sure.

But it’s something to see, man.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marv Heemeyer, his friends and “enemies” in Granby, Colorado

Credits: Directed by Paul Solet. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:28