Movie Nation

Truth be told, the two Oscar winners in the cast are supporting players to this “Hand that Rocks the Cradle” riff given the “Princess Bride” punchline for a title — “Inconceivable.”

It’s a Gina Gershon vs. Nicky Whelan moms-throw-down thriller, a sedentary stroll through surrogacy gone terribly, graphically, insanely wrong.

Nicolas Cage plays Brian, the doctor/husband who doesn’t believe his doctor/wife (Gershon) when she starts freaking out over this new friend/play-date stranger whom they’ve let into their lives, moved into their house and persuaded to donate the egg that will be their second child, a pregnancy she also volunteers to carry to term.

Faye Dunaway is Brian’s suspicious mother, the one who wonders about this striking single-mom blonde (Whelan) named Katie who has turned a play-date between toddler daughters into an escalating relationship where “I feel like I’m part of the family.”

Gershon is Angela, the wife/mother whose life of miscarriages and a disapproving mother in law (Dunaway) is made so much better when Katie and her little girl enter their lives.

Katie is helpful in every way. But as we’ve seen her grabbing that child and escaping what she says was an abusive marriage, escaping by stabbing the man who grabs her by the neck in the opening scene, we have to wonder about Katie.

New hair color, demonic blue contact lenses? Either she skipped out on a murder-or-self-defense trial, or there’s more to the story than what screenwriter Chloe King tells us. And King and her director move things along so slowly that we’re way ahead of her Big Reveals anyway.

Katie and Angela meet via a friend/personal trainer (Natalie Eva Marie) and get along like a house afire.

Their little girls are the same age, and play-dates carry on into sleep overs and Moms and the personal trainer finish off a bottle of wine parties.

But Katie is awfully fast taking liberties with her new status. She skinny dips in the pool. She has sex in the poolside cabana where they let her and her little girl stay.

As she takes on nanny duties, paints their house, (bedroom murals for children’s rooms are her specialty), she’s rummaging through Angela’s closets, setting her sights on…something, avoiding being photographed and dodging the mother-in-law’s pointed queries.

Pacing a picture like this too slowly is fatal, because of that whole audience-gets-ahead-of-the-movie thing. That’s on director Jonathan Baker (who has a small, overly indulged with screen-time role).

Whelan has limited effectiveness in creating doubt that Katie is not what she seems. A little too on the DeMornay nose, if you follow.

Cage gives fair value, and if it took his name to get his “Face/Off” co-star Gershon a leading lady role — Angela is the one who works at unraveling the puzzle, confirming her suspicions — then good on him for that.

Gershon makes the most of this chance, but it’s not enough.

It’s just that “Inconceivable,” despite the odd moment of tension, mystery or violence, despite attempts at delivering a decent twist or two in the third act, is too obvious to come off, too melodramatic to surprise and too slow to hold our interest.

MPAA Rating: R for some violence, sexuality, nudity and language

Cast: Gina Gershon, Nicolas Cage, Faye Dunaway, Nicky Whelan

Credits:Directed by Jonathan Baker, script by Chloe King. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:46

I don’t know where Netflix got involved in the process, if their millions helped round up and finish (with shots still missing) a film notorious for being “lost” in this fire or that hasty/didn’t pay his rent and fled Orson Welles move.

It’s not just his final film “in the can,” it’s a last look at performers from John Huston and Mercedes McCambridge to Edmond O’Brien and that young whippersnapper Peter Bogdanovich.

Lilli Palmer and Paul Stewart and Cameron Mitchell and Susan Strasberg — all these people who worked on this fits-and-starts film over the years — here they are, preserved on celluloid, “lost” performances or snippets of performance, resurrected like The Great Man Himself with this final finished/finally finished movie about a movie maker in the winter of his career.

But as for Netflix? Bless them for getting “The Other Side of the Wind” into homes this Nov. 2.

What we remember is the smile.

The Emmy winning characters, the crazy hair, the skill at creating funny faces, funny voices? Gilda Radner‘s name summons up those memories, too. And then we smile.

But her smile comes first,  her broad, toothy, omnipresent gift, perfectly summed up by her Second City/Toronto director Andrew Alexander in the new documentary, “Love, Gilda.” That smile was her secret weapon. Gilda, he says, could “always find a way to endear herself to the audience.”

Lisa Dapolito’s film has endless shots and clips of Radner smiling in her too-short 43 years of life. She beams as a slightly chubby child mugging for the Polaroid or home movies of her growing up in Detroit, grins on campus at the University of Michigan, backstage at Second City and National Lampoon’s “Lemmings,” guffaws in after parties for the famous Toronto production of “Godspell,” where she first met musician/comic/collaborator Paul Shaffer and dated Martin Short, and on cracks up rehearsing “Saturday Night Live.”

But the film digs deep into the packrat Radner’s archives, narrating her life on tape for her posthumous autobiography, “It’s Always Something,” sampling her diaries, journals, full of random poems and self-reflective thoughts, many of them read on camera by the generation of comics inspired by her — Amy Poehler, Melissa McCarthy, Cecily Strong and Bill Hader.

Hader gently opens her journal and his voice cracks, “This is a real honor. No. Seriously. This is a BIG deal.”

Dapolito gets at what Radner represented to those who followed her, and what Radner recognized in herself, that play-acting comedy let her “be prettier than I was, be people I could never be…Comedy allowed me to be in control of my situation.”

This documentary soars through laugh-out-loud-to-this-day characters and sketches, and dips into the darkness of eating disorders, traceable to a rich, over-concerned mother who put Gilda on diet pills at 10. It tracks Gilda through her “Saturday Night Live” glory years, peaking with a late 70s one-woman show on Broadway, and then records her decline.

A radio interview taped in the ’70s captures her confusion and inability to think of what “the next big thing” for her might be, even as the weight of “SNL” fell on her shoulders with the departures of so many castmates. Her ambition was to live, find love and be happy.

You have to laugh at the notion that this scrawny, gawky woman/child with the face-eating grin dated scores of people she worked with — almost every guy who later appeared in “Ghostbusters,” for instance — and  married first a Canadian sculptor who didn’t like it when she was funny, then G.E. Smith, guitarist for her one-woman-show “Live from New York” (and who became “SNL” music director/guitarist) and finally Gene Wilder.

The little news value that the film has isn’t that it puts to rest any rumors about the nature of that Wilder/Radner relationship, because we can see the loving, nurturing and caring for her after her cancer diagnosis, which we knew about. We also hear that  Wilder “got her to eat,” finally, his nephew insists — and her diary lets on how she really learned how to live with Wilder, even if she “made my career” out of getting him to marry her — taking tennis lessons, learning French, etc.

We can still see the movies they made together — “Hanky Panky,” “Woman in Red,” Haunted Honeymoon” — and how ill-used and overshadowed she was in them. That’s kind of on Gene, too.

But there’s a reason ancient reruns of “Saturday Night Live” still have laughs and still have value. Lorne Michaels made Radner the first official cast member for a reason, and seeing Emily Litella and Roseanne Roseannadanna again, we can see why. She was an original, and thanks to that smile — immensely relatable. Who else could have gotten “Bitch” past NBC censors, a network first? As little old Emily Litella, Gilda did.

Dapolito gets friends and former castmates to talk about Gilda dating Bill Murray while they were shooting the “Todd and Lisa” sketches which gave those turns an electric, nerdy, hormonal anarchy. ”

That’s one of the great joys of “Love, Gilda,” that Dapolito’s star and Amy Poehler’s inspiration, dead almost 30 years, can still deliver a laugh that takes your breath away. And in our memories, at least, she always come out smiling on the other side.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Gilda Radner, Amy Pohler, Bill Hader, Chevy Chase, Melissa McCarthy, Lorne Michaels, Laraine Newman, Martin Short

Credits:Directed by Lisa Dapolito. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:28

“Crazy Rich Asians” looks to finish the summer off with another stellar weekend. But will it really lose NO audience when compared to last weekend?

It’s entirely likely, says Box Office Mojo. That means another $25 million, $30 million when you add in the Labor Day holiday on Monday.

It’s not little in the line of real competition.

The midweek opening of “Operation Finale” didn’t set the world on fire, doing $1 million. It could collect as much as $10 million this weekend, over 4 days. But Oscar Isaac and Melanie Laurent will have to grow a lot more box office appeal for that to happen.

All you folks who don’t show up simply on hearing the news that Sir Ben Kingsley’s in a film are missing out. He’s fascinating almost every time out, and he gives us a vivid, studied take on Nazi fugitive Adolph Eichmann, kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli security forces. He plays Eichmann as smarter than your average Nazi (largely rednecks, racists, buffoons and oafs), but no Evil Genius — just an amoral thug with an education.

“Searching” goes into wider release this weekend, but that may prove to be a marketing blunder on Screen Gems’ part. It’s the best reviewed film that Sony studio has released…maybe ever. It’s not a horror film in the conventional sense, but a mystery thriller. It has little sense of ticking-clock urgency, but a father’s online search for his missing daughter, probing her online footprint, is fascinating. It may only earn $5 million, according to Mr. Mojo. 

As it got ALL its attention last weekend, perhaps that’s when they should have opened it. It did piddling per screen numbers in its few markets then, and the buzz has died down a bit. Hype the hell out of it the last week of the month, release it on the wave of that hype and it does double what they’ll end up with this Labor Day. Screen Gems Fail.

As for “Kin,” nobody’s bothering with this violent, tone-deaf and ill-conceived “kid finds a futuristic gun and uses it” thriller, not even the NRA. Because the kid is black. The NRA makes its bread and butter off scaring people about “black folks with guns.” That’s kind of why the Russians are such big NRA donors, too. 

Focus Features’ “The Little Stranger” won’t crack the top ten, and wouldn’t have even if the reviews hadn’t been indifferent. 

“Mission: Impossible” should clear the $200 million mark by tonight (Friday), “BlackKklansman” will hit $40 by Sunday, Monday at the latest, the sleeper “Alpha” will near $30 million by Monday.

But the biggest news will be “Crazy Rich Asians” clearing $100 million by midnight Saturday.

The “What happened to my daughter?” mystery “Searching” is like a poker game. Everything goes well until that last hand where you lose it all.

And leaving the table, you have the sneaking suspicion that the other guy cheated you.

John Cho may not be the most compelling lead, not giving us that rising sense of panic that is the normal human reaction to the shocking realization that your kid is missing, that you don’t know enough about her, her friends or her online profile to help the cops find her.

“I KNOW my daughter!” is played more “I uh, know my daughter.”

And Debra Messing may be the most helpful cop in the Western Hemisphere, a real Janey on the spot, always available, too patient when talking Dad through the sorts of scenarios and the sorts of places he can do that will help her to help him.

The “ticking clock” urgency of this search, its desperation, is missing. Filling the screen with hyped “missing teen” coverage is no substitute for fear and dread that the cop should impart or the fear and panic somewhat muted in Cho’s performance.

But the plot, the actual nuts and bolts of how you dissect a loved one’s digital life — phone to laptop to social media sites, search histories, etc. — is damned fascinating, a blend of “Lion,” the movie about an Indian orphan who finds his mother via Google Earth, and “Unfriended,” the Facebook murders movies.

The computer forensics that this digital “infrastructure management” consultant carries out is within the capabilities of any parent. And kids? We’re taking notes.

Margot (Michelle La) is a cute kid, 16, a gifted pianist and her daddy’s pride and joy. But in the opening montage we’ve seen, via their online posts, calendar, videos and photos, that he’s raising her alone. Mom (Sara Sohn) died just a couple of years ago.

Margot is carrying on, Dad seems utterly deflated by their loss.

Then one night, Margot tells him she’s pulling an all-nighter with her study group, and she doesn’t come home. She tried to call, Facetime, the works. But Dad slept through it.

And once he gets past the fifth “Young lady, you are in SO much trouble” text, he panics.  That’s when he calls the cops.

Det. Vick (Messing) is the one who sends David searching his kid’s laptop, looking at “Shedding light on who your daughter is, and who she talks to…I need to know a lot more about her.”

Thus begins David’s journey, getting around Facebook and Instagram passwords, discovering her “Youcast” (vlogging) presence, calling everybody on her “friends” list to try and track her movements.

“Friends” on Facebook, as if he didn’t know it, isn’t like “real” friends. One of the most biting messages of this film from director/co-writer (with Sev Ohanian) Aneesh Chaganty is the isolation of the digital age. Margot “knows” people, but connects with no one.

And David, aside from his younger brother (Joseph Lee), is just as bad.

People that lonely are ripe for catfishing, vulnerable to anybody who might pay attention to them, even online. When a story like this breaks, it can become a regional if not national phenomenon. And online comments on your tragedy aren’t always kind.

The script throws several plausible possibilities at us for a solution, and yanks us about in the best manipulative mystery-thriller tradition.

And then the payoff comes, and it’s the least plausible, the “How’d you draw to an inside straight?” last hand of poker you lose it all over.

It’s cool to see Cho (“Star Trek/Harold and Kumar”) get this sort of break, even if he’s not the most compelling parent — his meltdowns seem like pulled punches. There are a couple of great “Who I really am” jokes commenting on the difference between our online identity and how uncool we actually are.

There’s one sizzling “Could THIS be what happened” red herring. And the “Unfriended” way of making the screen — filled with Skype, Facebook, Google Search, and Google Maps searches — a character as well as a plot device is riveting.

Who hasn’t freaked out when “buffering” came up on their phone, notebook or PC screen at the worst possible moment?

But the end is too much like a “You may have already won” come-on, a poker game where the other player is using a 56 card deck, when you’re still counting on 52.

A cheat, in other words.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, some drug and sexual references, and for language

Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, Sara Sohn

Credits:Directed by Aneesh Chaganty, script by Aneesh Chaganty, Sev Ohanian. A Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:42

Jason Reitman directed this take on the heir apparent to the Democratic nomination for presidents, boots-wearing, boots-knocking Senator Gary Hart of Colorado.

Hugh Jackman, Vera Farmiga and Oscar winner J.K. Simmons star in this political drama about a politician brought low by his sexual appetite and indiscretion, back when we cared about such things as a measure of “Character.”

Sara Paxton is Donna Rice. Remember her?

Met Hart once, a before the fall meeting when he was working the rounds of civic groups, Chamber of Commerce lunches etc. in Charlotte, N.C.  All I remember was the hair, the boots and the confidence.

Reitman and Jackman, too, get one more shot at Awards Season, as “The Front Runner” opens Nov. 21.

“The Little Stranger” is a quiet, stately Gothic ghost story, an exquisitely observed British period piece built upon understated, reserved and stoic performances by Domhnall Gleeson and the formidable Ruth Wilson.

What is isn’t, despite a mood as chilling as an overdue English spring, is particularly frightening. Lenny Abrahamson, the director of “Room” and “Frank,” has conjured up everything but the tingles with this cerebral and slow story of a Great House, its Great Tragedy and the psychic repercussions that reverberate there decades later.

Gleeson is Dr. Faraday, our narrator, a self-described “ageing bachelor” who has returned to the Warwickshire community where he grew up, to a small town/small-time practice after the horrors and hustle of “The War.”

It’s the late 1940s, and a house call summons him to Hundreds Hall, a fabled estate that sat heavy upon his youth. Decades before, he was but “a common village boy.” His mother was a servant there, and it was her efforts that got him through medical school (Birmingham, not “Ox-bridge”). Now he has the posh accent and reserved manner of the class which he waits upon, the trusted healer and man-of-science dealing with the Ayres family, which has at long last lost its privilege due to death, progressive taxation and entropy.

Roderick (Will Poulton of “The Revenant”) is a badly burned RAF pilot and heir, charged with saving the estate. Caroline (the always earthy Wilson) is his hard-working, common- sensible sister. Charlotte Rampling is the regal matriarch, presiding over a slow descent into ruin and oblivion.

Because there’s something not quite right with this Hall, and the doctor — showing up to treat this or that, showing up to smile at Caroline and showing up just to revel in the glories that he remembers from long ago — is a necessary sounding board to them all.

“That house HATES me” Rod insists. The noises, the accidents, the queer occurences, they’re getting to him.

Dr. Faraday’s there to say, patiently but firmly,  “It can all be explained!”

And even though, as Caroline admits, “We’ve lost the trick of ‘company,'” Faraday finds himself almost welcome in their world. They can gripe about Labor tax policies, selling off land to “the rabble” and let their leaky, creaky house shame them in front of Faraday. Because he’s one of them…almost. Until push comes to shove.

A child died there decades before, and that might explain what’s happening, not that Faraday swallows that. The family and their last servant (Liv Hill) may accept the haunting as a fact of life, but not Faraday. He’s too busy sharing his memories of the place with them, batting his eyes at Plain Jane Caroline.

Abrahamson, working from a Lucinda Coxon script based on the Sarah Waters novel, loses himself in the whole Merchant-Ivory/Jane Austen features that might have better been observed on the fringes. Vast, empty, echoing rooms, drooping drapes and peeling plaster, land that is uncleared, held as a “park” which might have to be sold to make way for Britain’s post-war Baby Boom, the routine of a small-town medical practice at mid-century, a formal dance that goes on pointlessly, all decorate the story but distract us from the needed suspense, growing horror and genuine human reactions to facing the supernatural.

When a dinner party goes terribly wrong, even the blood-spattered shock of that is underplayed to the point of “Wake up, you lot.”

Wilson, as always, brings an unacknowledged soulful pain to her characterization — sensual as always (TV’s “The Affair” is her best-known role), but here with a bittersweet sting — sensuality withering away in solitude.

Gleeson, even in close-ups, rarely lets us see past the Good Doctor’s reserve, a not-quite-chilly bedside manner, just an MD keeping calm and carrying on.

There are two or three scenes that lift this above the still-life Abrahamson almost gives in to creating include a moment of romantic surrender and a tender, last-look-at-life through-living-eyes unblinkingly filmed as the family dog is put down.

It’s as if the whole enterprise — with moments, scenery and merit enough to be worth one’s while, but just barely — is, like Faraday himself, recalling that first time as a child he visited Hundreds Hall, “overwhelmed with admiration.”

MPAA Rating:R for some disturbing bloody images

Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Wilson. Charlotte Rampling, Will Poulter

Credits:Directed by Lenny Abrahamson, script by Lucinda Coxon, based on the Sarah Waters novel. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:50

This second peek at Ryan Gosling’s Oscar bait historical thriller raises the stakes, ups the ante and pounds home the charisma of the cast.

Gosling as Neil Armstrong, Claire Foy FIERCE as his wife Janet, and Corey Stoll as the life of that lunar party, Buzz Aldrin. “First Man” opens Oct. 12, with Ciaran Hinds, Shea Whigham, Jason Clarke, Ron Livingston and Ethan Embry in other chewy supporting roles.

A horror film directed by a fellow named Kevorkian, with English xenophobia as its subtext?

We are…intrigued. “Await Further Instructions” played all the right (horror) festivals, and opens Oct. 6 in the US.

An ever-so-English ghost story starring the omnipresent Domnhall Gleeson and the always scary Ruth Wilson, opening Friday, only previewing last night in some cities and this AM in mine.

Horror films that hit tend to not be period pieces, brand name franchises of the slasher/torture porn variety.

But this could be good. Fingers crossed.