Movie Nation

Bullying, blood-spilling and a rising body count are the hallmarks of the Aussie “revenge comedy” “The Dressmaker.”

It’s a darker-than-dark farce where the talent on hand is impressive, but the laughs are sparse and grimly won. Maybe you have to be Australian to wholly appreciate it, but I found it hard going, with just a few flashes of wit to justify employing an Oscar winning star, Oscar nominated co-star and putting Hugo “The Matrix” Weaving into a dress.

Tilly Dunnage may be beautiful and talented, but the bitterness bubbles through the moment she steps off that bus in Dungatar, the berg in the Aussie boondocks she used to call home.

“I’m back, you bastards!” she hisses.

Kate Winslet brings her va va voom to Tilly, dressing to impress even in this dusty village. It’s 1951, she left under a cloud years before. Now, she’s back to tidy up “Mad Molly,” her mom, get some answers and maybe clear her name.

Tilly was once accused of killing an elementary school classmate, and the town hasn’t forgotten. But what haven’t they forgotten? Does anybody really know what happened, all those years before?

Mom, Mad Molly, doesn’t even remember her own daughter, much less the details of “the murder.” Judy Davis throws the last ounce of vanity out the window for this sickly, unbathed hermit. Before Tilly does anything else, she’s got to clean up Mom — dress her — get her to recognize her.

Tilly is convinced she’s “cursed,” and has been since that long-ago day when fate brought her into conflict with a school bully.

To get some answers, she vamps it up and stirs the pot — distracting the local football team, tempting the neighbor (Liam Hemsworth) who grew up next door to her, irritating every other woman and man in town.

“Trollop” is the nicest insult hurled her way. But considering those judging her, you wonder why Tilly bothered to come back.

There’s the hunchbacked chemist/pharmacist (Barry Otto) who regards the entire village as “sinners,” and resists prescribing any drugs to any0ne — “Addictive. All she needs is God’s forgiveness.”

The president./mayor (Shane Bourne) feeds tonic to his obsessive/compulsive wife, doping her every night before taking sexual advantage of her.

The local constable (Weaving) is a bit too fond of women’s fabrics. Weaving plays this Sgt. as sweet and reluctant to judge, a John Waters in drag.

Tilly finds herself interjecting in local romances, interfering in gossip and hunting for answers as she does — offering dazzling dresses of her own making as payment.

I have no idea how this novel read, but the film plays as nearly tone-deaf drudgery. The husband-wife team of Jocelyn Moorhouse (“How to Make an American Quilt”) and P.J. Hogan (“My Best Friend’s Wedding”) spare no unpleasantness, and fail to find laughs in much of it.

Winslet can still deliver the glamour, and gives fair value in scenes both bitter and biting. Davis is flinty and the character could have been a hoot, but the writing lets her down.  Weaving lands most of the laughs, swanning about, not really helping Tilly solve her personal riddle until a little haute couture is offered in trade.

Hemsworth is just non-judgmental eye-candy.

It’s no novel observation that venality endures through the generations in small towns, that people escape such villages to escape that the stigma their hometown hangs on them.

“The Dressmaker” doesn’t so much change the pattern of this “Peyton Place” style story as render it ugly and humorless.

MPAA Rating: R for brief language and a scene of violence

Cast: Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth, Hugo Weaving

Credits: Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, script by P.J. Hogan and Jocelyn Moorhouse, based on the Rosalie Ham novel. A Broadgreen release.

Running time:1:58

An unreliable narrator proves an unreliable eyewitness to a crime in “The Girl on the Train,” a tricky thriller whose tricks are less important than its riveting leading lady.

Emily Blunt has the title role in this film, based on the best selling Paula Hawkins novel, playing a wounded, perhaps wronged/perhaps guilt-ridden suburban divorcee who finds herself mixed up in a missing persons case.

Rachel sits by herself on the commuter train, watching, pondering, wondering and narrating, turning her “over-active imagination” onto the houses whose back porches she glimpses each day as she rides into the city. She builds imagined lives and passionate love affairs into one particular home — a blonde stranger with an exhibitionist streak — or at least a need for curtains that can be drawn lest strangers see in from passing trains.

Rachel admits “I’m not the girl I used to be,” but in this blonde (Haley Bennett) who has passionate, uninhibited sex with her lover/husband (Luke Evans), she sees herself — her former self.

“She’s what I lost.”

The film, a myriad of flashbacks within flashbacks, lays out that loss. Rachel was married. Her husband (Justin Theroux) has remarried. He and that new wife, another beautiful blonde (Rebecca Ferguson) are living in Rachel’s old house, just down the street from the mystery blonde. And Rachel won’t let it go — calling at all hours, stalking the new wife, alarming her and her new baby.

Director Tate Taylor (“The Help”) skillfully hides that literary “unreliable narrator” quality, that of the storyteller we realize isn’t telling the truth or doesn’t really know it — for just a few minutes. Then, the narration stops and Rachel speaks to a stranger on the train.

Her words are slurred. Her eyes blurry. That water bottle she keeps with her at all times? She’s emptying glass bottles of vodka into it. She has blackouts. Rachel is a wreck, unstable. Nothing she says or believes can be taken at face value.

And when the pretty blonde, who looks a lot like the woman who replaced Rachel in her own house, turns out to be the nanny of Rachel’s ex-husband’s new wife, and that nanny goes missing, we wonder — as should the cop (Allison Janney) on the case — what Rachel had to do with it.

Hawkins’ novel, like the film, flips back and forth between points of view. No wonder our narrator is unreliable. She doesn’t know Megan (Bennett) was a nanny. She doesn’t know she has been seeing a psychotherapist (Edgar Ramirez), that the marriage Rachel sees as her ideal was nothing of the sort.

“We were the saddest people we knew,” Megan tells the doctor, whose sessions she fills with frank sex talk and thinly-veiled come-ons. Did the doctor ever take the bait?

Rachel doesn’t see the suspicious nature of Megan’s husband, Scott — doesn’t know he breaks into Megan’s various devices, looking for evidence of infidelity. As Evans plays Scott with a volatile scowl and a menacing stubble, there might be more that Rachel doesn’t know.

And despite her stalking, Rachel has no real idea what’s going on in her former home, the state of that marriage, what either of those people are capable of. And it’s their nanny who is missing.

Blunt staggers through this picture, a ruined life captured in near-tears close-ups and the occasional scene where the camera lurches, slips in and out of focus and lets us see the world as she experiences it. It’s a marvelous performance augmented by sympathetic direction, camera work and narrative tricks.

The supporting players’ main job is play variations on a cagey theme, and Ramirez is best at this. Bennett (“The Magnificent Seven,””The Equalizer”) goes a bit broad in vamping up the oversexed nanny cliche she must play. But Hawkins and the script give Megan a backstory, and that covers some of the movie’s tracks.

As mysteries go, this must have worked better on the page than it does on the screen, because many if not most viewers will figure this mystery out long before Rachel sobers up enough to connect the dots herself.

Dissecting what we see leaves questions — Why isn’t Rachel’s number blocked on her ex-husband’s phone? Why isn’t she blocked from his Facebook page? Where are the restraining orders? Why hasn’t the cop brought her in for a thorough grilling?

But despite that, in spite of the three unhappy, possibly ill-used women/Oprah Book Club feel of it all, “The Girl on the Train” works. Blunt, in her best screen performance to date, gives it a heartbroken center and the alcohol-scented breath  of life.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, sexual content, language and nudity

Cast: Emily Blunt, Haley Bennett, Edgar Ramirez, Rebecca Ferguson, Luke Evans, Justin Theroux

Credits:Directed by Tate Taylor, script by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on the Paula Hawkins novel.  A Universal/Dreamworks release.

Running time: 1:52

The late American journalist and fiction writer Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” has proven to have one of the most durable plots in all of fiction.

A 1924 short story also known as “The Hounds of Zaroff,” is about a man who makes sport of hunting other humans. There are almost too many filmed versions of it over the past century to count, starring everyone from Fay Wray to Ice-T (“Surviving the Game,”), Richard Widmark (“Run for the Sun”) to Andy Griffith (“Savages,” based on a Robb White novel inspired by “Most Dangerous Game”).

As Connell, who also wrote “Meet John Doe,” is long dead and wasn’t named Disney, his story is “fair game” — ahem — for director/co-writer Jonas Cuaron, Son of Oscar winning director Alfonso (they shared writing credit for “Gravity”).  Thus Cuaron’s “Desierto,” a lean desert thriller with immigration as its text and Connell’s story as its subtext.

It follows a truckload of illegal immigrants sneaking across the U.S. border in the desert Southwest. An embittered, hard-drinking, truck-driving, Confederate-flag-on-his-CB-radio-antenna “hunter” is hell bent on tracking them down.

As the unnamed killer, Jeffrey Dean Morgan doesn’t have a lot of lines. His dog, “Tracker,” is his only company. His one encounter with “government” is testy.

“I used to love this place,” he tells the dog. “It’s my HOME!”

Now, he mutters, “I hate it.”

His only satisfaction seems to be in doing what he figures the state or the Feds should be doing in his stead — stopping illegal migration with deadly force.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, pointing his long-range rifle at another target. “They just keep comin’!”

Gael Garcia Bernal is just one of the dozen or so men and women who stumble out of a broken down truck and follow their impatient coyote (smuggler) across barren salt flats.

“Los Estados Unidos es de esa manera,” he yells when the truck dies. “The United States is that way!” But he doesn’t tell them how far “that way.”

Bernal’s unnamed migrant carries a teddy bear and has a do-gooder streak. Some in their party are weak, some are unscrupulous. He struggles to keep the peace, to keep a teen girl (Alondra Hidalgo) from being exploited by her escort.

And then the shooting starts, and his quest becomes a matter of life or death.

Cuaron captures the desolate beauty of mesas, dry washes and the Seguro cactus that is the only green thing is this land. But the story he and co-writer Mateo Garcia tell is melodramatic and conventional.

How long will the fat and out of shape migrant in their group last? What has to happen to make the “game” a fairer one? When do the rattlesnakes make their appearance?

Morgan, covered in tattoos, is the leanest he’s ever been on the screen, here. The lack of dialogue is the only thing that removes racial slurs from his vocabulary. He’s not some mustache-twirling “sportsman” murdering for fun. He’s wrapped up in the hunt, but never too busy to let the hate bubble through.

Bernal and Cuaron let us see the hero’s wheels turning, a desperate man reasoning his way out of a deadly jam with cunning and daring.

But the performances don’t keep us from realizing we’ve seen this story before — WAY too many times. Freighting the tale with a bloody satire of America’s immigration debate doesn’t change the basics — Mass murderer man with gun hunts people without guns.

And “Desierto” never amounts to much more than a variation on a theme we know by heart, predictable at every single sandy step they take.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence and language

Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Jeffrey Dean Morgan,

Credits:Directed by Jonas Cuaron, script by Jonás Cuarón, Mateo Garcia. An STX release.

Running time: 1:27

How far into “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” did director Tim Burton get before he realized he’d split up with the only woman who could play the title role?

Because it’s pretty obvious Eva Green is just a younger, duller interpretation of a role Helena Bonham Carter would have blown up until it popped in a cloud of weirdly witty confetti.

Not to lay the somewhat lifeless film wholly at the feet of the one-time “Bond Girl,” Green. No, she just has too much in common with the actor playing the film’s young hero/narrator, Asa “Ender’s Game” Butterfield. They’re both pretty place-holders, not giving you the spark of life, they just “look right.”

“Peculiar,” based on the popular novel by Ransom Riggs, is a little Harry Potter, a little “X-Men,” and a little dark for its intended 12-and-under audience. Which is a good thing. Kids are molly-coddled enough these days. Have you tried to sit through the inoffensive swill that PBS, Disney and Nickelodeon are slopping onto kiddie palates?

Butterfield is Jake, a kid whose adored grandfather (Terence Stamp) used to tell him stories about this amazing school he’d attended on an island off the coast of Wales. Jake always believed the stories. His teachers, classmates and Dad (Chris O’Dowd)? Not at all.

When grandpa mysteriously dies, he leaves Jake a cryptic message. “Go to the island. The bird will explain everything!”

Since Jake’s shrink (Allison Janney) doesn’t believe Jake’s version of his grandfather’s tales of odd classmates and their battles with monsters, and since the island of Cairnholm is a birder’s paradise (Dad is an ornithologist), Jake and his father take that trip. For “closure,” you understand.

And that’s where the kid stumbles into the school, bombed to pieces during World War II but still extant in a bubble in time, “a loop” where the kids and Miss Peregrine (Green) relive versions of the same day in 1943 over and over again, in perpetuity, as a means of hiding from “hollows,” empty-eyed villains led by Barron (Samuel L. Jackson) who command fierce, invisible monsters in a quest for “loops,” “peculiar children” and eyeballs.

There’s blood and death in this fantasy world, and peril. And coolly keeping it all in check is Miss Peregrine, an “ymbryne” who changes into — you guessed it, a falcon — and who keeps a pocket watch that allows her to stay on schedule and maintain the time loop.

The kids are an odd lot — a boy who has bees living in his mouth, a superstrong tiny girl, a fire-fingered redhead (Lauren McCrostie) who wears gloves to keep from accidentally torching everyone and everything. And then there’s the fair Emma, played with a winsome warmth by This Season’s English Rose, Ella Purnell.

Emma wears lead boots because she’s lighter than air, and her deep sea bubble blowing is one of the great movie effects of recent years. Her scenes sparkle, even though she shares most of them with the leaden Butterfield.

Burton fleshed out the cast with some wondrous talents — Oscar winner Judy Dench (as another ymbryune), Rupert Everett, Stamp (wonderfully de-aged for flashback scenes) and O’Dowd, whose whimsy and magic disappeared when he ditched his Irish accent for the Dad role. But only Jackson stands out in this lot, registering through the wild makeup, dental appliances and effects.

I was a little awestruck, here and there, at the world “Miss Peregrine” serves up. And I liked the dark and deadly sensibility Burton was reaching for.

But the cast is and the oh-so-conventional third act Battle Royale let a promising premise down. I dare say Burton realized that himself long before filming that finale — maybe back in 2014, when he and wild-haired Helena split up.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense sequences of fantasy action/violence and peril

Cast: Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Chris O’Dowd, Ella Purnell, Samuel L. Jackson, Terence Stamp, Rupert Everett

Credits:Directed by Tim Burton, script by Jane Goodman, based on the Ransom Riggs. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 2:07

All you need for screen romance is two characters, either in love, about to fall in love or remembering past love.

But as simple as that template is, Hollywood rarely gets it right or even attempts to get it right. Which is why there’s indie cinema and the extended cinematic family of The Duplass Brothers to remind them how it’s done.

“Blue Jay” pairs up Sarah Paulson (the recent O.J. Simpson TV series) with writer-actor Mark Duplass (“Safety Not Guaranteed,” TV’s “The Mindy Project”), two high school sweethearts meeting again after decades apart.

All they do, pretty much, is talk. This subgenre of cinema was labeled “mumblecore” some years back, and even though that faded from use as the films turned less talky, it still fits in this case.

Amanda moved away years before. She’s married, running an animal rescue shelter, back in town to visit her sister. That’s when she stumbles into Jim (Duplass).

They were, the weathered clerk (Clu Gallagher of “The Last Picture Show”) at their favorite convenience store confirms, “the famous lovebirds.”

But a chance meeting leads to coffee, emotions awkwardly held in check, two people playing with fire but also rediscovering why they parted.

Amanda finds herself “smiling until it hurts,” and Jim has to apologize for tears.

“My face leaks.”

Over the course of an afternoon and an evening, they talk, flirt and peel away layers revealing the wounds, the entanglements, the lives they’ve half-lived in the decades since.

They may have been in love but frankly, “We weren’t very cool.”

No. “UNcool.”

She has moved on. Maybe. He’s drifted through towns and different jobs, and now he’s back at the cluttered old house he grew up in. Everything he didn’t throw is away is a shrine to the Great Love of His Life.

The Duplass script takes the ex-couple through role-playing of the sort they used to do, reminiscing about their “40th anniversary” and the like. None of which can be healthy for either of them.

Paulson plays Amanda as awakened from a comfy slumber, a woman curious to see if the hold she had over Jim is still there, but remembering, from time to time, how to be kind and gentle with someone more fragile than her. Duplass makes Jim more of a cliche, the classic arrested development mess whose spirit was broken by a love affair that was his only hope for the future.

They dance to Annie Lennox, accuse each other and clash over what went wrong. The script has a few groaningly obvious devices and twists. The direction (by Alex Lehmann) is fairly pedestrian and the black and white is more “nice effect” and technical afterthought, even if it does suit the material perfectly.

But this somber monochromatic marvel, shot over seven days (Where? Big Bear Lake, California, maybe?) is an emotionally challenging and mature romance that is, like “Tallulah,” exactly the sort of movie the streaming service Netflix should be producing.

And Paulson and Duplass make all this talk (never once mumbling) fascinating, lived-in and real, taking us into the sad, lost lives of these two long lost lovers. “You can’t go home again,” the novelist taught us. But if you do, the most dangerous enterprise you can undertake is wallowing in “what might have been.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with alcohol consumption, adult situations and subject matter, profanity

Cast: Sarah Paulson, Mark Duplass,Clu Gallagher

Credits:Directed by Alexandre Lehmann, script by Mark Duplass. A Netflix/The Orchard Orchard release.

Running time: 1:20

It seems so ludicrous, now.

An American college student with a solid alibi and zero motive, almost no DNA evidence implicating her and no history of violence, arrested and convicted of taking part in a “sex party” ritualistic murder with her boyfriend of five days and another man she doesn’t even know.

“Italian Justice” never seemed like more of a punch line.

But Amanda Knox went through it, lost years of her life and wears the weight of that awful crime’s tsunami-sized ripple on her to this day.

The new Netflix documentary “Amanda Knox” lets us see how it happened, a years-in-the-making investigative film that interviews almost all the principals — from suspects to prosecutors — and paints a portrait of doubt, or at least lets us see how conclusions might have been reached by people you’d hope would know better.

“Italian Justice” indeed.

Filmmakers Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn followed the case, in Italy, for years — got to know the players and gained access to evidence footage, home movies, social media pages, leaked “secret” prison cell recordings and taped phone calls, all the stuff that prosecutor and detective fiction fan Giuliano Mignini looked at to decide that DNA evidence shouldn’t take precedence over his own gut instincts.

“I like Sherlock Holmes”

We get a hint of Italian mores and prejudices. American college girls studying abroad? Easy. Oversexed. And heck, she nicknamed herself “Foxy Knoxy.”

She’s smooching on some Italian guy she met five days before the murder, at the CRIME SCENE as the cops are digging around a bloodied house with Meredith Kercher’s body still in it. A shallow, self-involved, foul-mouthed sexually active 20 year old, Knox didn’t grieve, didn’t seem to act the way Italians expect somebody to act under those circumstances.

She didn’t seem to take it in, didn’t act like somebody who SHOULD have thought, “Oh my God, I spent the night somewhere else, but that could have been ME,” or “If I’d been here, maybe I could have SAVED Meredith.” Knox, to do this, doesn’t articulate such thoughts.

Within a day or so of the crime, she was on the phone talking about “the best year of my life” to a friend, as if nothing awful had happened.

So, bad on her.

But again, her British roommate was a veritable stranger. They’d moved into the Perugia rental house together, sight-unseen, a couple of weeks before. Think of the self-absorbed 20 year old (Americans) you know and tell me the reaction is outside the norm.

Nick Pisa, the British freelance journalist out in front of the story, smirks about his “page one bylines” piling up as he unveiled “Foxy Knoxy” and painted the “girl on girl crime” picture that the British press, and then Italian and European press, picked up on.

And that, in turn, drove the harried prosecutors and demonized Knox in British and Italian public opinion. I love the reaction shot the filmmakers get of Pisa when the verdict is overturned.

“Who me? I knew she was innocent all along!” That’s the look.

Generous helpings of cable news coverage pepper the proceedings, raising the case’s profile. Who could get a fair trial anywhere under such circumstances?

The through-line interview that all this is built on is with a haggard, high-mileage Knox today, weeping at what went wrong, defiant at the conclusions the viewer must reach — that either she’s a diabolical murderess, cold-blooded, “a psychopath in sheep’s clothing.”

Or, “I am you.” This could have happened to anyone who doesn’t know local customs and mores, maybe a little shaky on the local language. It could happen to anyone.

A telling line, explaining her “reputation” in Italy — “In Seattle, I was cute. In Italy, I was the beautiful blonde American girl.” That was new to her. She’d never been in love, never been this far from home and family. She was 20.

The most chilling details — not necessarily new, but parked here all in one place — are the Italian police tactics revealed by the case. They told Knox she was HIV positive to break her. They leaned on her and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and he caved like the Italian Army in North Africa in 1941.

Video from the investigation shows Keystone Cops in Italian uniforms creating chaos at the crime scene. And there’s that ridiculous prosecutor, “a hero” to his people, admitting his “instints” and his love of melodramatic crime fiction.

See what I’m doing there? I’m playing on stereotypes, pre-conceived notions of how this culture could have produced this debacle. Because that’s exactly what the cocksure Giuliano Mignini did. And Italian appellate courts have done the same, reacting against “being lectured by the American media,” buttressed in their bigotry by the Brits and their rabid, race-to-wrong-conclusion press, hell bent on re-convicting her, mainly out of spite.

“Amanda Knox” may not change anybody’s mind. But it should. Sure, there’s doubt lingering around the fringes of the case, and Kercher’s family may be the last ones to give up the condemnation of the American they want to believe had a hand in Meredith’s death.

But in a part of the world where convicted murderers face far fewer consequences than punishment-crazy America would fling at them, maybe they should be a little less quick to indict those who look guilty simply through the lens of their culture.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence crime scene footage, frank sexual conservation

Cast:Amanda Knox, Nick Pisa, Raffaele Sollecito,  Giuliano Mignini

Credits:Directed by Rod Blackhurst, Brian McGinn, script by Matthew Hamachek and Brian McGinn. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Tim Burton’s Harry Potterish “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” is showing he still has a brand name at the box office, as late night Thursday and all-day Friday numbers put the film on track to hit $26 million or so on its opening weekend. Will that let it break even? Middling reviews suggest “Not so fast.”

Louisiana, as has been its wont, gave away the bank in incentives to get “Deepwater Horizon” made. So the break even bar is lower, and the film is opening to very good reviews and a possible $20 million opening weekend.

“Masterminds,” a caper comedy that was sort of dumped out this weekend by Relativity, is doing poorly. Zach Galifianakis still isn’t box office, nor is Kristen Wiig. Owen Wilson is no longer that big a draw. Figure $6 million will be a “win” for this “true” NC rubes rob an armored car company.

“Storks” and “Sully” are holding onto a much higher percentage of their audience than “Magnificent Seven,” which is falling off 50-55% on its second weekend (about average for an action film).

“Queen of Katwe” is doing pretty good in limited release, cracking the top ten with 1200 theaters. 

“Bridget Jones” is officially over and done with, barely over $20 million by the end of its third weekend.

“Suicide Squad” is in the top ten, which tells you how weak the fall films have performed.

The statistics are damning, the dots connect and the admissions — secretly recorded or otherwise admitted, are conclusive.

There’s been a concerted effort to criminalize, incarcerate and stereotype black men as “super predators”, junkies and the like by opportunistic politicians, lobbyists and the corporations that profit from the decades of misery that “The War on Drugs” produced and the new “War on Illegal Immigration” promises.

“Selma” director Ava DuVernay’s documentary “The 13th” is peppered with experts who document the effects and lay out the causes of America’s skyrocketing, world-leading prison incarceration rate.

Talking heads — activists, academics, lawyers and legislators — sum up the sorry history of race relations in America. And they  zero in on the year — 1970 — when “Law & Order” President Richard M. Nixon launched the policies that filled prisons, got new prisons built and eventually allowed private companies to run prisons as the number of inmates, nationally, soared from 357,000 in 1970 to some 2.3 million today.

The culpable are held accountable — the nefarious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) lobbying group whose members include corporations that benefit from the policies that they write and that their bought-and-paid-for legislators then introduce into law. For profit prisons push for laws that allow them to operate, and other laws that will keep those prisons full and profitable. Firearm companies and their mouthpiece groups all the way to retailers that sell guns (Walmart) back, through ALEC, anything that could boost gun sales (Florida’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” law).

DuVernay includes a few dissenting (GOP, white) voices, but the stats shout them down, backed by John Ehrlichman’s admission that Nixon went after drugs to disrupt black lives and disenfranchise black voters, by GOP strategist Lee Atwater admitting on tape that “Law & Order” was just what others call “dog whistle politics,” what polite Conservatives say because they can’t say the N-word in campaign speeches preying on White Fear of The Other.

It’s a solid film, but the mission creep of its many messages, its format — interviews broken up by vintage news footage, old movies (“The Birth of a Nation”) — and a stylistic choice by DuVernay dull its impact.

We’re subjected to a sea of faces and an ocean of voices. And for the first ten minutes, DuVernay doesn’t identify anyone giving her testimony. The titling and credentialing of these interviewees is more thorough afterward, but still spotty. That undercuts the authority of one and all.

Some of the experts are more expert than others — credentialed academics (Henry Louis Gates), politicians (Charles Rangel), published researcher/authors (Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow”) — mixed in with folks you can’t vouch for because DuVernay is hiding their identity from you.

What’s the point of going to the trouble of becoming an expert if the filmmaker is going to treat the weight you bring to the subject so cavalierly? Not naming names here, but some of these folks have more opinions than authority.

That waters down “The 13th” — the title comes from the Constitutional Amendment that abolished slavery — rendering a good film on an important subject a somewhat less compelling argument than it might have been. A simpler narrative with fewer voices, properly identified, would have made a stronger argument.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violent images, profanity, racial slurs

Cast: Angela Davis, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Grover Norquist, Charles Rangel, Cory Booker, Newt Gingrich, many others.

Credits:Directed by Ava DuVernay. A Netflix  release.

Running time:1:40

I had an editor early in my career who repeated her grandmother’s favorite oath any time the culture served up fresh evidence of the dire and depraved straits America was plunging into.

“Fall of Rome. Fall of Rome.”

It’s a phrase that came to mind often in the two hour and 43 minute “American Honey,” an odyssey about poverty, predators and prey in Meth Mouth America.

Open bottles in every car ride, joints passed back and forth from driver to passengers, people at the bottom preying on anybody empathetic or gullible enough to fall for their spiel. This is what American desperation looks like, a “Winter’s Bone” that’s gotten a grip far beyond the Ozarks.

And everywhere, in every motel parking lot or backwater backstreet, we spy a sea of unsupervised children raising themselves because their self-involved lowlife parents (almost all white, BTW) can’t be bothered to stop drinking, line-dancing and lighting up a pipe to do it themselves.

If this is how the heartland’s hardest up are living and raising their kids, “fall of Rome. Fall of Rome.”

“Honey” is about a dead-end teen trapped raising her worthless trailer-trash mother’s children in the company of Mom’s groping/handsy ex-boyfriend. Star (Sasha Lane) leaps at the chance when she’s recruited to join a traveling band of hustling, drinking, partying kids who invade town after town, “selling magazines” and stealing and doing anything else they can to make a buck.

Star is lured by the flirtatious “Jack” (Shia LaBeouf) and the free-spirits of the “Tornado Publishers LLC” sales squad — kids “nobody will come looking for,” kids covered in tattoos and piercings, kids who to a one must have a sadder-than-sad family history that made them this desperate and vulnerable.

But the only sad stories they tell are fiction — about losing Dad “in Iraq,” or Mom “to cancer,” or “trying to win a prize so I can go to college and make something of myself.” Their real stories they keep to themselves.

It’s all a lie, and the prickly Star isn’t exactly a natural at it. Training with Jake, she bristles at his ad lib fibbing and is rude to his “marks.” She’ll never make a salesgirl who keeps Krystal, the sexy boss lording over this brood (Elvis granddaughter Riley Keough of :Mad Max: Fury Road”) content and flush.

But love might transform her. Jake is certainly willing to play that card, if it’ll make her a success. And as the kids and their handlers trek from Texas to Kansas, North Dakota to South Dakota, singing along to filthy rap and catchy pop (including the Lady Antebellum song that gives the movie its title), trotting out their rituals (beating up the kid with the worst sales, streaking, setting off fireworks for every occasion), we see Star evolve into someone with that potential.

And we see a love story that plays like two kids in heat, but finds a tender center thanks to Star’s sweet and nurturing nature.

Writer-director Andrea Arnold doesn’t make short movies. But even her breakout film “Fishtank” and her Kaya Scodelario “Wuthering Heights” are but warm-ups for this langorous, sensual film. It’s basically a 100 minute film padded out to 2:43.

But surprisingly, it never loses our interest as we wait for Jake’s inevitable moment of showing his hand, wait for the violence that surely awaits the reckless Star as she gets into semis at truck stops and roughneck pickups in North Dakota’s Bakken shale oil fracking fields, or hitches a ride with a trio of rich good ol’boys in cowboy hats (look for Will Patton) who introduce her to mescal.

There’s a fantastical unreality to a lot of this– the lack of conflict within the group, the threatened “punishment” of non-performers, the general lack of cell phones in a generation grafted to them, the utter absence of police, who would almost surely stumble across people this loud, this unruly in stores, at motels, this committed to under-age drinking and drug using.

The dreadlocked newcomer Lane is more sexual than sweet or conventionally beautiful. But she makes the character’s innate goodness peek through the hard shell Star has grown to cope with the misery of her life. We meet her dumpster-diving to feed her siblings. The adults in her life are that worthless.

We grimace when she ditches the kids with her lout of a mother. But with every honeybee she saves from a pool or trapped inside a window, with every kind stranger she does her damnedest not to cheat, with every moment she recognizes “These people are just like me — just as bad off” Lane lets us see Star learning and makes us hope that she will complete her education before something in this “life” she’s entered into puts her in harm’s way.

If Johnny Depp spent too many years taking roles that didn’t force him to cut his hair, LaBeouf has made it a point, post-“Transformers” — to tackle more interesting indie fare, especially if it has intense sex scenes in it. He’s more interesting as Jake — all ill-fitting suit and hustler patter, and under the thumb of the mature and in-control Krystal — than he’s been in years.

Arnold has made a bleak romance that shimmers with hope, an overlong odyssey that we smell just as surely as we feel. The lengthy scenes in the van, traveling from city to city, make us taste the close quarters that prevent rather than promote conflict and imagine just what this crowded circus’s scent must be, even as we wonder who, in this day and age, would buy magazine subscriptions, especially from these ‘hood rats.

But if this is how they live in the moment, and this is the limit of their shrinking horizons, when not one of them has ever been asked “How do you see your future?”

“Fall of Rome. Fall of Rome.”

MPAA Rating:R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout, drug/alcohol abuse-all involving teens

Cast: Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, Tom Paxton

Credits:Written and directed by Andrea Arnold. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:43

The real “hillbilly heist” was funny enough, without a lot of Hollywood embellishment. A gang of rubes from rural N.C. robbed a Loomis Fargo armored truck storage facility safe of $17 million, and almost got away with it.

They just couldn’t resist the siren’s call, “Attention Wal-Mart shoppers!”

But Hollywood overcast, over-complicated and overthought this folktale of rednecks who soared, and got too close to the sun. There are laughs, but the uneven cast and the odd wonderful bit of physical shtick don’t add up to the sustained silliness that “Masterminds” cries out for.

Only a native of Andy Griffith’s North Carolina could pull off a line like this.

“Ah never been to the arr-port but twiced.”

Zach Galifianakis, no longer hung over but always and forever “Between Two Ferns,” is that Tarheel. And I dare say nobody else could have played the drawling rube David Ghantt, bag-man and patsy in the infamous 1997 caper.

Ghantt is a fey mop-topped doofus engaged to the dull Born Again Christian Jandice (deadpan Kate McKinnon), but smitten by the new gal sitting beside him in his Loomis Fargo armored truck. That would be the sassy Kelly (Kristen Wiig).

Kelly might suggest they swipe some of that mountain of cash, but can’t-shoot-straight David is worried about consequences.

“We could get FIRED!” To say nothing of prison and what not.

But when Kelly is fired for cause after an epic meltdown with the boss, her disreputable pals in the “high rise double-wide” they call home grab hold of the idea. She becomes the bait as the mysterious “Geppetto” (Owen Wilson) — a puppet master “pulling the strings behind the scenes — plots the robbery.

Ghantt’s best throw away line in the movie might be his correcting the “mastermind’s” mistake — “Actually, Stromboli pulled the strings. Geppetto was just a poor woodcarver.”

Kelly leads David on, the plan is set up and rehearsed, and then the big night — complete with bungles — plays out, and they’re all $17 million richer.

It’s funny, but Relativity, the releasing studio, was shy about letting this one into theaters, and didn’t show it to critics in advance. You’d think Loomis Fargo would have tried to stop it on their own. Blithering idiots like this hit them for that much money, and in the film, at least, it looks as if the vaunted armored car company was so lax that “inside jobs” were bound to happen. And they almost got away clean.

Steve, the mastermind’s real name, has Kelly convince David to flee to Mexico and lay low with just a little cash and a disguise that includes very unusual contact lenses.

“I thought ‘Anaconda’ was the BRAND name.”

The lovesick David falls for it hook, line and sinker. But as the FBI (Leslie Jones) strains to unravel the robbery, David stumbles into the truth. And that’s when Steve sends a redneck hitman (Jason Sudeikis) to Mexico to do the extravagant boob in.

Because Steve and his family (he and his wife think nothing of discussing the robbery in front of their young sons) are busy spending all the money on themselves — braces, Beemers and tacky matching Members Only jackets and the like.

The dream? To not work at the take-out window at Hardee’s, but “to be on the OTHER side of that window, driving up in a Rolls Royce, getting a year’s supply of CURLY fries!”

One of the delights of “Masterminds” is how easy it is to take Wiig’s natural cheap tartness to the next level. A half-midriff tattoo (Of her Mama, maybe?), a hint of a drawl, a funny shooting range (accident) scene and a “sexual harassment” tirade were almost enough to make this work.

But Wiig puts such effort into making Kelly “conflicted” that all the fun flees the character. Her fellow SNL alumni and “Ghostbusters” castmates McKinnon (too few scenes) and Jones (virtually nothing funny to play) are wasted in thankless roles.

Wilson is the one member of the cast who doesn’t even attempt an accent, which leaves his character colorless.

Only Sudeikis is able to hilariously justify fictionalizing much of this story, giving us a drawling, mustachio’d parody of a hit man this clown must have seen in a movie at the drive-in.

And Galifianakis gamely gives his all, trying to carry this not-quite-hilarious/not-remotely-droll “romp” by the director of “Napoleon Dynamite.” He does the exaggerated drawl, wears the ridiculous wig and vamps it up in Mexico in too many scenes on the phone with Kelly, or bonding with the guy who’s supposed to kill him.

If you remember this heist at all, you’d have to have thought it would make a good movie someday. But in your mind, as in my mind, it was a quicker, broader and almost certainly funnier farce than “Masterminds.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, some language and violence
Cast: Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig, Owen Wilson, Kate McKinnon, Jason Sudeikis, Leslie Jones

Credits:Directed by Jared Hess, script by Chris Bowman, Emily Spivey, Hubbel Palme. A Relativity release.

Running time:1:34