BUSH’S BRAIN

[] (Three stars)

Lands some solid blows. Running time: 80 minutes. Not rated (nothing offensive). At the Sutton, 57th Street and Third Avenue, and the Cinema Village, 12th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place.

‘BUSH’S Brain,” a highly critical profile of presidential adviser Karl Rove, is one of the better political documentaries flooding into theaters after “Fahrenheit 9/11” and before the election.

Though it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival before “Fahrenheit,” Joseph Mealey and Michael Paradies Shoob’s documentary begins a lot like Moore’s polemic: Sarcastically wondering how the goofy-seeming George W. Bush became president.

Similarly, it closes with a schmaltzy anecdote about a fallen soldier in the Iraq invasion.

But this otherwise sober documentary – drawn from a well-researched book by Dallas newsmen James C. Moore and Wayne Slater – doesn’t need these cheap flourishes to make a persuasive case against Rove, a protégé of the late and legendary Republican dirty-tricks specialist Lee Atwater.

Rove, a longtime confidant of both President Bushes, stands accused of secretly orchestrating smear campaigns against former Texas Gov. Ann Richards (who was defeated in a bid for re-election) and Sen. John McCain (whose 2000 presidential campaign was derailed) on Dubya’s behalf.

The filmmakers also lay out a case that Rove was responsible for outing the CIA-agent wife of a veteran diplomat who wrote an op-ed piece critical of the administration.

Rove denies these charges, and much more, in statements that are read in the documentary (he declined the filmmakers’ invitation to comment directly into the camera).

But recent reports in the New York Times and other newspapers linking Rove to TV ads attacking John Kerry’s war record – ads which began airing after this film was completed – reinforce the chilling portrait painted by “Bush’s Brain” of a presidential Svengali who will stop at nothing to advance his candidate.