Movie Nation

“Seabiscuit” director Gary Ross takes on a clothes-horse caper comedy and finds the glass slipper doesn’t fit in “Ocean’s 8,” a distaff spin on the “Ocean’s 11” movies.

A make-work project for generations of Hollywood women and female fashion celebrities, it is pristine in its visuals  — mainly closeups of the Oscar winners and other great beauties of its cast — precise in its caper, and utterly bloodless in execution.

Who you gonna call? “Ghost Bustiers.”

The odd funny moment is like catching a hair out of place, makeup (and attendant cosmetic augmentation) that isn’t perfect or a character with any edge at all.

It’s simply not allowed, darling.

Sandra Bullock is Danny Ocean’s less careful con artist/thief sister, the one who’s been in prison for the better part of six years. Danny’s dead, one and all bemoan, especially Ruben (Elliott Gould) who meets Deborah Ocean at the grave of Danny (George Clooney) when she gets out.

As with many a caper comedy, Deborah has spent her years in stir plotting a heist — and getting the best hair, makeup and collagen America’s prison system can provide. Apparently.

She hustles her way through Berdorf Goodman’s, stealing perfume and makeup, cons a hotel room out of — The Plaza, was it? No? — and reconnects with her butch bombshell “partner” (Cate Blanchett), saving her from a life of watering down vodka for the clubs she services.

They need a team — a fence (Sarah Paulson) trapped in upper middle class suburban hell, a hacker (Rihanna, in huge hair and huger knit hair-covering), a pickpocket (the normally hilarious Awkwafina), a jeweler (Mindy Kaling) desperate to get out of working for her “Why aren’t you MARRIED?” Indian mother. They enlist a desperate, broke and fallen-from-favor Irish fashion designer (Helena Bonham Carter).

They have a mark, a vain, insecure style icon (Anne Hathaway) whom they can trick into using the designer. And they have a prize, a six pound diamond Cartier necklace, The Toussaint, never taken out except by the insistent and insanely Internet famous, and only with body guards all around.

These are the best scenes in the movie, brisk recruitment of the accomplished, the desperate and the female. NO MEN here, Deborah insists, “Not a HIM.” She has her reasons. Not interesting ones, but she has her reasons.

The caper itself, set at the “most exclusive party invitation in America,” the Met Gala, is a perfunctory affair, lots of necklace-passing, split-second timing and Vogue Porn, complete with stunning Oscar winners and a Grammy winner in gorgeous dresses and cameos from the likes of Anna Wintour and Kim Kardashian.

Cameos are big here. Look for Marlo Thomas and Elizabeth Ashley and Dakota Fanning and whoever. Unfortunately, things like mystery, edgy characters and a compelling villain were forgotten. Seriously, nobody wanted to play the “bad guy,” the hateful one we root against? Hathaway would make a great mean girl grown up. Not here.

Even the investigator on their trail is the feminized, edge-free talk show limey James Corden.

But the ladies are, to a one, stunning. Carter, slinging an Irish accent but switching to French and playing perplexed and desperate, stands out. Bullock has the Clooney role — cool and poker-faced. Unfortunately, that’s all she’s really up for these days — roles limited by the inexpressive but perfect profile she can serve up, thanks to modern cosmetic science.

At least she gets to show off her fluent German. The banter has no snap, no crackle, no Clooney, Pitt and Damon to make it work. Even the recruitment bits are retreads of “I might have something for you,” and “Can I have my watch back?” when the partners meet the pickpocket.

Paulson’s Tami explaining “what Mommy’s doing” with her “special friends” by phone point in a promising direction, Awkwafina’s slangy, streetwise contrast with the slick, smooth comfy-with-the-rich Queens of this Underworld was another.

But even Blanchett and the comically gifted Hathaway are just models for the costumes, the hair stylists who are the real anti-heroines here.

I was perfectly tolerant of “8,” cute and empty as it was, up until the shoehorned-in third act “twists,” which make little sense and suck the faint zephyr of wind out of the film’s sails.

All I could think of was, all this obvious facial filler — and yeah, it’s a brutal business for women, who cannot afford to age…at ALL — and they’ve made a movie that’s all cinematic filler.

“Oceans” is just like that “Ghost Busters” remake. An empowering, “Sure, we can do that” comedy.” Cute. Just not funny.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language, drug use, and some suggestive content

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Rihanna, Awkwafina, Helena Bonham Carter, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, James Corden

Credits:Directed by Gary Ross, script by Gary Ross and Olivia Milch. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:50

Bradley Cooper directs and co-stars, and Lady Gaga — Remember her? — is the New Judy Garland/Janet Gaynor/Babs Streisand in this latest “A Star is Born.”

This trailer has Bradley Cooper ego trip (and you thought GAGA was a diva) overwhelming it.

The buzz off the set wasn’t the best.

A lot of Gaga self-affirmation in the “I thank yer beautiful” drawl country crooner Bradley sports for this one. Is that him singing? Not bad if it is. And I think it is.

Can she act?

Oct. 5 we find out. 

Great filmmakers remember that cinema is a visual medium, that you never say something with dialogue when you can show it with an image.

That’s how Clio Barnard tells the story of “Dark River,” a quiet, tense and beautiful tale of brothers and sisters and abuse set in Yorkshire sheep country.

Maybe it was the thick, subtitles-worthy accents that she knew wouldn’t travel well, or maybe, just a couple of features into her writing/directing career she’s already approaching greatness, but Barnard lets the setting, the rhythms of a hard life on the farm and her actors’ faces do most of the talking here.

And the movie’s richer for it.

When you’ve cast the formidable Ruth Wilson as your lead, you’ve put your visual storytelling into the best possible hands. And eyes. Wilson, of “Saving Mr. Banks” and TV’s “The Affair,” has a scalded quality about her, eyes that carry pain, disappointment and scars. She is at her working class earthiest as Alice, a sheep shearer who learns her father has died.

She’s a ways from home, “traveling the circuit” as sheep shearers do. And while her colleagues and employer can see she’s upset, she’s not crying. This is deeper than that.

Wilson, with just a look in her eye, gives away Alice’s past. She was abused by the old man and is haunted by him still.

Packing her ancient Land Rover and rumbling home only makes the flashbacks (also wordless) more frequent and more damning. He (Sean Bean) kept after her, all during her teen years. She left the family farm 15 years before.

Now, she’s going back to take over. “He promised it’me,” she declares. The old man and her part-time truck-driver brother let the place go. She makes her intentions to the tenant land trust that controls it known, moves in and proceeds to “get the place sorted.” Wilson’s ease around sheep, shearing and gutting a rabbit for dinner underline the practical woman Alice is.

But there’s still brother Joe (Mark Stanley) to contend with. Their relationship is complex, brittle and bitter. He resented her leaving. He is stubborn. He drinks. He has let the ancient stone walls fall to ruin and let the sheep go to “skin and bone.” H still won’t let her have fields cut for silage. Beautiful, now-rare wildflowers, insects, “voles,” all sorts of wildlife would be lost, he says. He won’t kill the rats in the barn because a family of owls have moved in there.

Their war of wills — alternately testy and tender, riven by flashbacks of the relationship they once shared — underscores “Dark River.” And in every corner of the weather-worn farm and farmhouse, Alice sees the old man, what he did to her. She can’t even make herself go upstairs, where the real horrors lay.

Barnard intercuts scenes of Alice taking care of farm business — trying to train the sheep dog her brother once bought but never made useful, doing what she knows is right even though she knows she’s risking another tirade from Joe — with the missing bits of Alice’s past.

She had a beau there. He’s still around. The locals her dad’s age are quick to judge her for her absence, even at the funeral.

But when she asks, “Did he suffer?” she seems satisfied with the answer “Yes.”

Wilson lets us see the pain and injust shame with just her eyes, her history on this land that no number of cleansing dips in the waterfall can wash away.

Barnard’s spare script manages to give just a hint of Britain’s complex farmland ownership arrangements and the pressures on such land, pressures which play into the sister/brother struggle.

She lets the grey skies and rock-strewn landscape explain why Alice is so hellbent on keeping the farm and mending her relationship with Joe, even if she can only count on him to do the wrong thing as she strives to “get it back to ‘ow it’were when Mum and Dad were running it.”

Mostly, though, Barnard wisely just leaves this in the hands of the actors, letting Wilson ache for some sense of redemption and wince at every bad association that the farm conjures up, and having Stanley (“Game of Thrones”) masterfully conjure a difficult relationship and the damage it did Joe, too, something he manages with body language and a mercurial rage that is both frightening and real.

That drama and the unsentimental way she and Alice view this picturesque but hard land and the alternately callous and quaint sheep farming done there lift “Dark River.” It’s no mere indie summer sleeper, it’s worth tracking down. And Barnard is no mere novice feature director (She also made “The Selfish Giant”). Her canny grasp of psychology, story and telling that story with faces and images make her a British director to watch.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Ruth Wilson, Sean Bean, Mark Stanley

Credits: Written and directed by Clio Barnard. A FilmRise release.

Running time: 1:29

Deborah Haywood’s “Pin Cushion” is an easy film to laud, a hard one to warm up to.

It’s about the psychic toll of bullying, as both a fresh experience, new to the young, and what a lifetime of it can do to you.

You can tell by looking at her that Lyn has dealt with it forever. The hump on her back singled her out, pretty much from birth. She dresses oddly, isn’t quite immune to the stares she gets or the insults callous children have never been taught to hurl her way in her corner of Little Britain.

“She looks like the village idiot!”

She collects tchotkes and we can’t tell if she’s ever had a job or a beau.

One thing we do know about Lyn, played with a dazed, almost punch-drunk empathy by Joanna Scanlan of “Notes on a Scandal,” is that she had sex — at least once. She dotes on her wide-eyed daughter, Iona (Lily Newmark). But Iona is entering her middle teens, and if asked, will say her Mum’s “an air hostess” if she can get away with it. She’s ashamed.

And when the mean girls at school seem to take an interest in naive, plain Iona, that’s only going to get worse.

“The girls at school wear makeup. I think I might like some.”

“Makeup gives boys the wrong idea,” Mum counsels.

Daz (Loris Scarpa) may be just that sort of boy. But he seems nice enough, and Iona is smitten.

Mean girls in the movies always travel in packs of three, and we know by conditioning what cruel Stacie, Keeley and might-be-reachable Chelsea could be up to with Iona. As desperate as the new girl is to connect, make friends, as desperate as her mother is for her to have that, neither of them absorbs the warning signs or keeps her guard up.

Hayward piles on the indignities, the graffiti-shaming, insults and rank hostility Lyn and eventually Iona must deal with. It can be heartbreaking, even as you hope for some “Carrie” moment of comeuppance.

Young Newmark, of TV’s “Emerald City,” captures the neediness a kid that age carries around with her. But Scanlan shows how the bullied never outgrow that, and she lets us see Lyn stagger under the blows delivered by rude neighbors, one a mean girl who never outgrew that meanness.

Because most of us know they don’t.

The relentless cruelty here grows harder and harder to endure because Hayward never lets Lyn, or us, off the hook. Lyn crumbles, and we crumble with her, hoping against hope she will stand up for herself and make that a teachable moment for a daughter who otherwise faces a future almost as bleak as her own.

But the movie’s object lesson, though I hesitate to call it that, connects more with the current zeitgeist where bullying and its origins are treated as something society can identify and by mere appeal to a bully’s conscience, eliminate.

Since time immemorial, there has been but one proven, moral and righteous way to deal with bullies. “A punch in the nose” is all they understand, the famed columnist Mike Royko put it in a less namby-pamby era. Bullies don’t “learn” feelings and respect.

The empathy-impaired and cruel have to be confronted, faced down. Failing that, they go right on being bullies until they’re stopped. If they aren’t, they end up owning you or, in one extreme case, the White House.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexuality

Cast: Joanna Scanlan, Lily Newmark, Loris Scarpa

Credits:Written and directed by Deborah Haywood. A Cleopatra  release.

Running time: 1:22

There are no reviews of either of these films on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes or MRQE.com.

Which suggests to me that they’re getting “premieres” Tuesday night in wherever, and the mass press showings for both are Wed.

Don’t hole me to this, as it may be my corner of The Happiest Place on Earth that is seeing them late.

What we’ve been told in the Big O is the studios have so much confidence in BOTH projects that they’re “previewing” them in name only — literally hours before their Thursday night openings. Both previewing Wed. PM.

So. Which to see? I have been leaning towards “Hotel Artemis” because it gives me this “John Wick” vibe. Remember the hotel Ian McShane owns and the debonair Lance Reddick runs? No, there’s no “John Wick” connection as this is sci-fi and dystopic but Jodie Foster doesn’t work much and she’s usually interesting to watch.

“Artemis” also stars Sterling K. Brown, Jeff Goldblum….OOooooooo…and Zachary Quinto and Jenny Slate.

And uh-oh, Charlie Day.

Previewing at exactly the same time is the Gary Ross distaff riff on Stephen Soderbergh’s “Oceans” caper comedies, “Ocean’s 8.”

Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway — THREE Oscar winners — and Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Awkwafina and Helena Bonham Carter.

And Elliott Gould and — uh oh — James Corden.

Yes, Gary Ross did “Seabiscuit.” Make your own joke there, as I’m above it. I don’t know. Neither one looks like a sure thing. Which one will YOU see, or see first? Yeah, I’m polling the readership. My date for the screening will break the tie. Not sure which one she’s jonesing for.

Either way, my BEST guess for your best bet this weekend at the movies is the doc “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” sweet and uplifting, or the upscale horror pic “Hereditary.”

Robert Redford’s a legendary AARP-qualified robber of banks, Sissy Spacek the lady of an appropriate age he takes a shine to and Casey Affleck the lawman chasing him in this wistful, whimsical tale of Forrest Tucker — not the Western actor, but the bank robber and escaped con — who slipped out of San Quentin and resumed a life of gentlemanly charm and crime.

Elisabeth Moss, Keith Carradine, Danny Glover, the riches know no end in this David Lowery film, based on an article about the real-life Tucker.

“The Old Man & the Gun” goes into limited release this coming Awards Season — Oct. 5.

This trailer to the Alex Lawther Brit comedy “Old Boys” had me at, “SMILE, Amberson. These are the best days of your life!”

The hazing, the military training, the period (Cassette tapes, the ’80s?), the hapless/awkward way he carries himself, delightful.

Lawther was the young Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game.” Having him play the romantic intermediary for a French teen with a crush on his boorish, handsome and popular classmate just…works.

Hope this Film 4 production gets picked up by a US distributor (IFC, Orchard, Magnolia, are you listening?).

Andy wakes up in his basement, washes his face and when his little girl Sally sees him, enlists her in his conspiracy of silence.

Because Uncle Zeke is in the house, with Andy’s wife (Angela Vint). Andy’s “missing.” Uncle Zeke (Benjamin Walker) is a cop, the sheriff, and he’s on the case. And suspicious.

Something, we don’t know what, went down at “Shimmer Lake.” But as we know Andy’s played by Rainn Wilson, and we see a fellow sheriff’s deputy have a hissy fit, we know this is funny, or supposed to be — a dark comedy.

There’s a dark and sultry femme fatale (Stephanie Sigman). She’s married to a real tough guy (Wyatt Russell).

Rob Corddry and Ron Livingston are FBI agents who join the case and puzzle out what’s going on. “So, they robbed the bank, came back and stole the banker?”

Judge Dawkins “owns First Mackey Bank.” Judge Dawkins (John Michael Higgins) is lying in a pool of it on his kitchen floor.

The Feds think Banker Andy was in on the bank job, Zeke is sure his brother wasn’t in on it. Bad blood between them is…unavoidable.

“No no no, the CAMARO was black and the SUSPECTS are white.”

This grey, atmospheric black comedy, in which “Surprise is for the ill-prepared,” is a rarely funny tale told out of order. It’s a fall film broken into chapters denoting days of the week, beginning with “Friday: Andy Heads for the Lake.” Wednesday comes later. Tuesday, after that. Characters are “introduced” after we’ve seen them die. We think.

That’s a little confusing, as we see people shot and/or dead and then pop up two scenes down the road and wonder where we are on the timeline. Hey, I’ve done this for a living forever. If I’m confused, it’s needlessly confusing. Take that to the First Mackey Bank.

Day-episodes come and go, the femme fatale does what femme fatales do, bodies drop here and there and Heaven Only Knows where all this is heading as layers add upon layers and the incestuous nature of small town business, government and law enforcement congeal around the crime. Nobody smells like roses in this corner of rural America.

“We got a dead body in a county that doesn’t get dead bodies…”

The jokes include a violent toilet accident, the sheriff cussing in front of his cute niece (Isabel Dove) who repeats what she hears for a cheap laugh. A running gag? The deputy sheriff (Adam Pally), the one who throws a tantrum, is constantly having to sit in the caged back seat of the towns lone cruiser. Daffiness intrudes when the Feds show up, and the heist itself has that potential.

But writer-director Oren Uziel does a better job of keeping it (somewhat) interesting than he does at building suspense (deflated by telling the tale out of order), creating urgency or developing a single character we can identify with and/or root for.

Ill-tempered, cursing their kids, prone to violence. Well, not all of them.

The performances range from unconvincing to not-quite-compelling, with Wilson the sole standout.

Uzeil makes the fatal mistake of trying so hard to out-smart the viewer than he forgets to get the basics — tone, an engaging villain (villains), motivations.

All of which adds up to a heist thriller that isn’t thrilling or particularly witty, but on that “Well, we’ve seen everything else” scale, right on the cusp of “Netflixable.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Rainn Wilson, Benjamin Walker, Stephanie Sigman, John Michael Higgins, Rob Corddry and Ron Livingston

Credits: Written and directed by Oren Uziel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

Oscar Isaac, Melanie Laurent, Peter Straus, Lior Raz, Greta Scacchi and Nick Kroll — Wait, NICK KROLL? — are involved in the hunt or the hiding of infamous Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann.

We know how it turned out, we’ve seen other filmed accounts. But Chris Weitz (“About a Boy,” “The Golden Compass,” one of the “Twilight” movies) is betting he has something new to say about it. Sept. 18 we’ll find out. 

Kind of over the whole “Lego Movie” thing after the last couple.

But Elizabeth Banks reciting “A lifetime has passed since the horrific events of ‘Taco Tuesday'” got a giggle out of me.

Chris Pratt, Alison Brie, Will Arnett (of course), Jonah Hill, Tiffany Haddish (who is EVERYwhere) and Channing Tatum do the voices.

Next February, might everything be “awesome” again?