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From the confines of the Witness Protection Program, “Icarus” co-star Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov filed an April 30 lawsuit against Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets. Both men hail from Russia, where Rodchenkov — tasked with overseeing the Olympic Anti-Doping Laboratory in 2014 — says the government ordered him to help dozens of their nation’s cheating athletes bypass testing for performance-enhancing drugs. Rodchenkov’s mea culpa came via The New York Times and the aforementioned Bryan Fogel film, which won Netflix this year’s Best Documentary Oscar.

Three Russian athletes accused of doping in Sochi — Olga Zaytseva, Yana Romanova, and Olga Vilukhina, who were stripped of their silver biathalon medals and banned from future Olympic competition — sued Rodchenkov for libel in February. Prokhorov is paying the biathletes’ legal fees for the New York State Supreme Court case.

In a Monday-morning call with journalists, Rodchenkov’s lawyer, Jim Walden of Walden, Macht & Haran,...

Break out the vodka (pronounced wad-ka) and start boiling the potatoes, because Russian director Oleg Stepchenko has a dark Russian fairytale he’d like to tell you. Loaded with witches, Slavic folklore, and mystical enchantments, Forbidden Empire provides a cultural spin on what would otherwise be a Brothers Grimm tale. Stepchenko keeps his influences in-country, using Nikolai Gogol’s story Viy as a backstory for larger, more sinister(ish) adventures, but there’s an (ish) added because Forbidden Empire feels like two separate films the entire time. It’s like Stepchenko can’t decide which audience he’d rather please more, as the film erratically jumps from childish bouts of jubilant frolicking to sudden bursts of ghoulish debauchery. Ugh, what a haunting tease.

Jason Flemyng stars in Stepchenko’s fable as an ambitious cartographer (Jonathan Green) who sets out to create detailed maps that show the true borders of countries.