Movie Nation

So what can we read into this trailer for the upcoming thriller “Siberia,” starring Keanu Reeves?

Reeves, like Nic Cage and Cusack and a few others of his generation, is still getting some sort of decent quote. That’s why a lot of his films — not the “John Wick” comebacks — feature one “name” in the cast and are filmed overseas.

That one name? Keanu. Of course, Molly Ringwald is in the cast. Did I miss her in the trailer? Not enough here to generate the interest in watching it again, frankly.

This looks like a smuggling job gone wrong thriller with plenty of “John Wick” styled violence. Writer-director Matthew Ross did the incendiary “Frank & Lola,” so there’s probably more here than the trailer gives away.

“Siberia” opens July 13. 

Bittersweet is such a tricky thing to master in a movie that you cherish it when you find it, even if the movie delivering it is a bit on-the-nose, corny even.

But all those traits have become a niche for Brett Haley, director of the last chance romance “I’ll See You in My Dreams” and the wistful old Western star romance “The Hero.”

“Hearts Beat Loud” is a charming, gently-unsurprising love story — several love stories — tucked into the sentimental end of a New York record store and never-say-die dreams of its lonely, failing owner.

Nick Offerman is Frank, who’s run out of gas and out of cash running Red Hook Records. He can’t compete with Amazon and he knows it, so no more effort at being the charming old coot with the encyclopedic knowledge of pop music. He tells his landlady (the warm side of Toni Collette) that “It’s time…seventeen years was a good run.”

He’s a single dad whose beautiful smart cookie of a daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons of “Dope,” “Flatliners” and TV’s “Transparent”) is pre-med, and heading to UCLA in the fall. His mom (Blythe Danner, co-writer/director Haley’s good luck charm) is getting forgetful and shoplifting. Clumsily. She always gets caught.

And his bar owner pal (Ted Danson, quite funny) is full of sage advice…for a pothead.

Frank’s one escape? The nightly “jam sesh” with the kid. Sam is focused on getting that  knowledge-edge for UCLA and doesn’t want to, but when she relents, they make beautiful, soulful twangy synth-pop together.

Dad records what they work out, on a whim uploads her song “Hearts Beat Loud” to Spotify, and the Rest is History –in an even more predictable movie.

Maybe things will turn around now. Maybe he gets one last shot at his dream (he recorded a record in his youth). Maybe this will give him the confidence to court that landlady. Maybe med school can wait?

“I don’t want to be in a band,” the kid — the GROWNUP in the relationship — scolds. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t be in one with my Dad!”

But as Sam envelopes herself in that tender, first love — with Rose (Sasha Lane) — it all gets much more complicated, bittersweet as promised.

Haley doesn’t do enough to service every character, but the teen romance is warm and fuzzy and everything you’d hope for in a movie. The father-daughter love plays out in the “jam sesh” and on-stage (Offerman can really play, Clemons can really sing).

A random moment I adored, showing the way an artist first hears his or her song “on the radio” has changed. It’s not as special as it was for generations (Spotify, in that one coffee shop that plays “Indie Mix”), but there’s a little “That Thing You Do” magic in Frank’s delight. Offerman kills it.

And the songs by Keegan DeWitt have enough going for them that you could totally buy into them catching on with the right corner of the insanely fragmented music audience of today.

“Hearts Beat Loud” is, as I said, on-the-nose, as in not particularly ambitious or challenging for those involved. Haley’s movies have an old-fashioned comfort food quality, and this sits happily on the menu with his earlier works.

But the unsurprising surprises have their own rewards and the movie and its music could touch you if you, like the film, are in a bittersweet mood.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some drug references and brief language

Cast: Kiersey Clemons, Nick Offerman, Toni Collette, Blythe Danner, Ted Danson

Credits:Directed by Brett Haley, script by Brett Haley, Marc Basch. A Gunpowder & Sky release.

Running time: 1:36

It’s clever, but we’re not talking “Memento” here, plot-wise.

It’s droll, even in its violence, but Leigh “Saw” Whannell is no Noel Coward.

And even if it’s not a prophetic equal to “2001” or “AI,” it’s vivid and horrific in its depiction of an an ever-so-near future when we’ve ceded just enough control over our freedom and our lives to be looking at our doom, even if we can’t quite see it yet.

“Upgrade” is an entertaining and at times troubling riff of man and machines from the creator of the “Saw” series, horror visionary Leigh Whannell. It’s an American tale set in Australia — because the Future is Australian in sci-fi (“Matrix,” etc.). The time? Just a few years down the road, when the tech we’re relying on to save us apparently has.

That’s the world Asha (Melanie Villalobos) and her husband Grey (Logan Marshall-Green) live in. Their gorgeous, austere and roomy high-tech house runs off its own batteries, the cars are self-driving electro-wagons and the streets strangely under-crowded, as perhaps we’ve finally gotten a handle on over-population.

(Australian sci-fi always looks that way.)

She’s an exec with a robotics firm, he’s an old school muscle car restorer.

One of his clients is Eren, a tech visionary (Harrison Gilbertson) with an effete Dane DeHaan haircut and a thing for a “Smokey and the Bandit” Firebird Trans Am. He shows off his latest superchip, “STEM,” which promises to revolutionize neural computing. And then he sends them off.

But self-driving computerized cars can be hacked, and the drive home diverts the couple into “The Underground,” where the unwashed, under-fed and under-policed masses dwell. An ambush, a murder and Grey is left a quadriplegic, “Someone who liked to get things done with (his) hands, and now you can’t.”

That’s how Eren sweet-talks Grey into submitting to off-the-books surgery. He could be a test-cast for STEM. As the guy has been suicidal and helpless to accomplish even that, why not?

The “miracle” of his motor skills recovery hasn’t even sunk in when Grey, who has been hounding the cops (just one cop, Betty Gabriel) to track down his wife’s killers means he can start to dig into that himself.

But he’s supposed to keep this “illegal” surgery secret. He’ll have to pretend he’s still in that wheelchair. STEM, which guides his movements (jerky, robotic), anticipates threats and gives him speed, agility and fighting skills he never had. And crime-investigating computing power, I might add.

Oh, and STEM talks to Grey. In his head. Grey has to speak out loud to STEM, but STEM doesn’t need the amplification. He’s soft-spoken. Yeah, he sounds just like the HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“Gimme a second.”

“One second has passed.”

You know what’s coming. Grey goes underground, and gets into it with the killers and is troubled by what he’s capable of. STEM?

“I can do it for you. You don’t even have to look.”

Marshall-Green, of “Sand Castle” and TV’s “Damnation,” has a touch of the young Mel Gibson in the playful way he plays this character, jerking up his physical movements, Robocop style, handling the tried and true war-for-control-of-my-body moments passably.

The script gives us a lip-smacking villain who smacks his lips over lines that require lip-smacking.

“Let my superiority over your kind be the last thought that crosses your mind, before a machine tears it apart.”

There’s little of the harrowing, agonizing tension of “Saw” here. And if you haven’t figured out where this is going (No, I didn’t give that away) by shortly after the shooting (earlier than that is you’re real sharp), you need to see more movies.

But “Upgrade” manages to entice and provoke, impress and terrify, if you let it. Whannell, to his credit, delivers that terror not so much in the movie as you watch it as on the ride home…in a car that you still “have” to drive, following directions that you entrust to a computer and bought through a bank whose computers you let control your money.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, grisly images, and language

Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Benedict Hardie, Melanie Vallejo

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

Running time: 1:40

Of all the blood-and-whisky-soaked dystopian thrillers peddled to all the Chinese financiers by all of Hollywood, why on Earth would Oscar winner Jodie Foster return to the big screen with “Hotel Artemis?” 

She plays “Nurse,” who runs an underworld hotel-hospital in the LA of very near future, where class war has turned ugly as the poor finally start to fight back, when water riots over the privatization of the elixir of life make the city a combat zone.

And everybody, wounded hoodlums in need of her robot-assisted surgery to mob bosses and their sons and her own orderly (Dave Bautista) refers to her as “Old Woman.”

So yeah, even if it had worked, it was never going to be slapped on her Hollywood Royalty resume.

Writer-director Drew Pearce has tarted-up a dullish action comedy that finds laughs hard to come by and its moral underpinnings shaky in a future where medicine is largely a one or two person operation, with the aforementioned surgical robots and nanotech injections that can patch up even the most badly shot up.

Got a “ventilated liver?” She’ll 3D print one, have it installed and park you in one of the suites of the aged but upgraded Hotel Artemis, suites named “Honolulu, Waikiki, Nice, Niagara” and the like.

A bank robbery gone wrong puts Sherman (Sterling K. Brown) in need of the hotel, a members-only establishment where if you’re not prepaid, you’re not saved. Sherman’s brother (Brian Tyree Henry) is the guy in need of a liver.

But before brother Lev screwed-up the robbery get away and aired out his liver, he stole this outsized pen from the Alfred Hitchcock “Macguffin” collection. That’s either their ticket to easy street, or their doom.

And it’s not like the other patients at the Artemis, the mouthy arms dealer (Charlie Day) or French assassin (Sofia Boutella) will be any help or comfort.

Foster plays Nurse as a harried professional at this “dark house” (gangster slang for no-questions-asked hospitals), and a stickler for “the Hotel rules” — no weapons, “no killing the other patients.”

That’s going to be tested as the bank robber and the assassin have history, and there’s an A-list patient, “the guy who runs LA” being rushed in through a city night torn by the worst riot in LA’s history. That would be “The Wolf King of LA.”

“Such a dumb nickname,” Nurse chortles, critiquing the silly script for the audience.

It’s the sort of film where “You work with what you’ve got, not what you hoped for” is a good line, though more often we hear “How long has it been?” “You know EXACTLY how long it’s been!” is more common, a script trafficking in trite hardboiled dialogue and a plot that seems to spin out of that mythic hotel run by Ian McShane in the “John Wick” movies.  Pearce wrote the lesser “Iron Man” and “Mission: Impossible” sequels.

What “Artemis” has going for it are Foster, Bautista, and especially Jeff Goldblum as that Wolf King fellow, with an over-the-top Zachary Quinto, insufferable Charlie Day and Jenny Slate in a “Let’s find somebody for Jenny Slate to play” afterthought.

Boutella, the titular “Mummy” of Tom Cruise’s nightmares, has the best fight scene. But “Hotel Artemis” isn’t really about that. As it’s not funny, and the Nurse has a past that is barely worth pondering as the source of her haunted, hard-drinking demeanor and many, many MANY flashbacks, the picture all boils down to politics and futurism.

So there’s a crack about escaping “South of the Wall,” and some grim socio-economics on the streets outside, where the peons have finally gotten Stinger missiles and started shooting down police helicopters.

Is that enough? Hell no. Foster isn’t funny old or sweet old or curmudgeonly old. She’s just a 50something made up to look like a 60something. Yawn.

Bautista gets the few good lines, Boutella the best outfit and Goldblum the best scenes.

None of which make “Hotel Artemis” a destination hostel for film lovers of any genre or of any actor in this cast.  Foster has never let us know she’s taken a role solely for the payday. Not until now.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language throughout, some sexual references, and brief drug use

Cast: Jodie Foster, Dave Bautista, Sterling K. Brown, Zachary Quinto, Sofia Boutella, Jeff Goldblum, Jenny Slate, Charlie Day

Credits: Written and directed by Drew Pearce. A Global Road release.

Running time: 1:33

Hugo Weaving is the heavy?

Sure? You can’t do sci-fi, or rather you shouldn’t, without Hugo W.

Very steampunk “Howl’s Moving Castle” YA adaptation with a mostly no-name cast, “Peter Jackson Presents” but does not direct. His Tolkien adapting screenwriters are on board.

“Mortal Engines,” based on the Philip Reeve novel, opens Dec. 14.

No, it’s not the “Serenity” the fanboys and girls want to see.

But you’ve got two Oscar winners and two Oscar nominees in this cast, a sultry tropical setting for violence, sex and shark infested waters. So chances are, when this gets distributed this fall it won’t be “Aviron Pictures” that gets the job done.

Matthew McConaughey kind of ruined voice-over narration for himself with those damned Lincoln commercials. But he’s well-cast as yet another beach gypsy, man on the lam from…something.

Anne Hathaway goes blonde to play the femme fatale. Djimon Hounsou reunites with his “Amistad” co-star to play MM’s conscience. Diane Lane serves a similar function.

And Jason Clarke is the abusive husband who is, as we say in the nautical trades, “excess ballast.”

Intriguing. Oct. 18.

“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