Classic Film Review: The Duke, Quakers and the Original “Angel and the Badman” (1947)

Posted on October 1, 2026 by Roger Moore

John Wayne was on the cusp of his career peak when he struck off on his own and produced and starred in “Angel and the Badman,” a project written and directed by James Edward Grant, who’d become Wayne’s confidante and go-to screenwriter in later decades.

They made this burly Western for B-movie specialists Republic Pictures in what might be said to be Wayne’s “last B Western,” and one of his best Bs.

He was breaking free from his overbearing mentor, John Ford, if only for a moment. He wasn’t yet tying his fate to the tastes of action auteur Howard Hawks. But he, Grant & Co. filmed in Ford’s favorite “Monument Valley” locations and included players who’d become famous as members of Ford’s stock company — Bruce Cabot and Hank Worden among them.

And Wayne saved a plum part for Harry Carey, a star character actor from early silent Westerns who gave Wayne a lot of his moves, poses, wardrobe choices and the like — many of the ingredients that came to define Wayne’s onscreen persona.

Sprawling, violent and serio-comic, with lots of Western lore, Western tropes and Western “types,” “Angel and the Badman” would kickstart a stretch in which Wayne would take on a string of roles that would redefine him for all time.

And as it’s been remade for stars Zachary Levi, Meg Fraser and Tommy Lee Jones (in the Harry Carey role), I thought I’d get around to it.

John Ford fans quickly evolve into Western snobs, with only a few other filmmakers (Hawks, most prominently) meriting our attention. But “Angel” would prefigure “Shane” and “Three Godfathers,” inspire Harrison Ford and Peter Weir’s “Witness” and pay homage to Ford in scenes, shot selection and composition.

If Grant was no John Ford, he and The Duke damned sure knew how to imitate him. At times, it seems all that’s missing is an accordion and a rendition of hymns like “Shall We Gather at the River?”

The sentimental story picks up our “Badman” (Wayne) after he’s escaped some bit of violence. Falling off his saddle at the Worth Ranch, he insists on going to the town telegraph office to get off a land claim message before he collapses, bloodied, into the care of young Penny (Gail Russell, a delighful foil for him).

The Worths (Irene Rich, John Halloran, with Stephen Grant, the writer/director’s son, as little Johnny) are Quakers, kind-and-helpful by faith. They bring the notorious Quirt Evans (Wayne) back to life.

Pretty soon the man named for something you whip horses and boys with is throwing his weight around to “help out,” and yet softening, just a little, in the presence of righteous pacifists.

“Each human being has an integrity that can be hurt only by the act of that same human being and not by the act of another human being.”

But trouble is on the way from the desperado Laredo (Cabot), He has history with Quirt, and a beef with the guy.

“Hey, why don’t we just bust in?”

“Because bustin’ through doors with Quirt Evans on the other side ain’t my idea of a healthy pastime.”

The script meanders a bit, with Quirt alternately courting and then matchmaking for darling Penny, laying low and then starting saloon brawls, fighting rustlers over a herd that he may want to rustle himself, mooning over Penny and sparking with “dance hall gals” and sometimes even listening to the aged marshal’s (Carey) sage advice.

“Only a man that carries a gun ever needs one.”

This isn’t a great Western, but it covers a lot of bases and a lot of ground. It’s sentimental and sweet, downright cute when it isn’t violent. And it’s gorgeously atmospheric thanks to the dusty locations and livestock — cattle, horses and actors — trotted through them.

If you’re going to remake a John Wayne “classic,” it’s probably a better idea to pick his last B-movie than to aim for “True Grit” — unless you’re the Cohen brothers, and Jeff Bridges is signed on.

Rating: “approved,” violence, sexual inuendo

Cast: John Wayne, Gail Russell, Irene Rich, Joan Barton, Bruce Cabot and Harry Carey.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James Edward Grant. A Republic Pictures release now in the public domain and free on Tubi, Roku, Pluto, other free streamers.

Running time: 1:40

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Classic Film Review: “El Cid” (1961 — Still a Stiff?

Posted on September 30, 2026 by Roger Moore

Yup.

That’s the answer to the rhetorical question posed by that bad-pun headline.

Honestly, I’ve never understood any of the adoring or merely “tolerant” reviews of “El Cid,” a corpse of a corpse-on-horseback “history.”

Charlton Heston, at his Big Man Standing Out from the Scenery early ’60s peak, wilts and was never worse in the title role.

Sophia Loren, whom Heston spent the ’90s praising as “a FORCE of NATURE,” is miscast and misused.

The spectacular Spanish locations — unspoiled castles, beaches, hills and plains filmed during the Franco era’s long economic fascist nap — pop. But when paired with painted, over-lit and altogether drab soundstage interiors in Rome, don’t match up.

Action beats suffer from limp noodle barrages of arrows fired by extras who’d never seen a bow before and catapults only tested by “We bring you BREAD!” — loaved half-tossed over castle walls — look like cheap, nonfunctionl props.

The ahistorical bastardized history the screenwriters consulted leads to a muddle of a movie about a warrior, canny psychological warfare student and opportunist of his age passed off as noble, a mythic model of chivalry. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar switched sides between serving “Christian kings” of parts of Spain, and the dreaded Muslim Moor occupiers, whom those very same Moors dubbed “El Cid” to history.

Why wouldn’t they call Don Rodrigo “The Lord?” His impact on history has a “held the line — sort of” cast to it, seeing as how it took the Spaniards nearly 400 more years to unite and finally expel the Moors from Spain. Spaniards and Moors have reason to celebrate El Cid.

As the Moors, defined by history as North African Muslims of generally dark complexion, there’s something a tad racist in that the Moors that El Cid befriends in the movie are fairer skinned and played by the likes of Douglas Wilmer in light blackface. The “fresh from Africa Moors” are crazed zealots in their thousands, in black attire and blackface. The new threat to peace and religious freedom is led by future Inspector Clouseau foil Herbert Lom, furious and in far darker blackface.

The film, restored and briefly re-released in 1993-94, was an “event” picture of its era, a follow-up to Heston’s “Ben-hur” success and a precursor to the disaster that was “Cleopatra,” which at least was sexier and easier to follow.

They were long “road show” attractions,” with an overture and intermission with music making even “Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang” a widescreen “event,” at least in the eyes of the producers.

I remember it as a TV “event” some years later, and probably thought, for the first time in my then-young life, “This is what a 100 minute movie in a three hour package looks like.”

The “plot” has El Cid gain some measure of martial fame before being forced to kill The King’s Champion (Hurd Hatfield, older and unconvincingly a “match” for Rodrigo) in a duel over his father’s honor, a killing that all but ends Rodrigo’s wedding plans for that “champion’s” daughter, Jimena (Loren).

“The man you chose to love could do only what I did,” doesn’t lessen her hatred for him.

Years and kings pass, love waxes and wanes, battles are pitched but mostly a series of sieges, and El Cid doesn’t get any of the best lines.

“What a noble subject,” one admirer says of him. “If only he had a noble King.“

A gargantuan production like this one is a supreme test of an actor’s focus and a director’s (Anthony Mann, who made some Westerns, a few war movies and “God’s Little Acre”) ability to keep his and the film’s eye on the ball. “El Cid” fails at this.

Watching “El Cid” now, one’s mind drifts back to Heston’s autobiography, where he recalled his TV debut as a soldier in an adaptation of “Julius Caesar” on CBS. He blew his lone line “live.”

“Ahoy, Caesar!” he bellowed. There’s a lot of that here, dialogue delivered as if mistakenly chiseled in stone.

And more than once, characters bark out “We attack TONIGHT!” and we see processions of Medieval (11th century) soldiers, siege engines and the like, proceeding to battle, torches lit against the “night” when it’s plainly broad daylight or the worst “day for night” film processing in color cinema history.

The Middle Ages, the struggle between East and West for the future of Europe, castles and what not are kind of my thing. I’ve visited a few of the Spanish locations of this movie in the decades since its release. I’ve wanted to love “El Cid” as a “forgotten” classic, pretty much every time I’ve seen it.

And it just doesn’t measure up or hold up, no matter how cool that finale is.

Say this for Heston. Even as a corpse (you can kind of see him moving) nailed into the saddle, cut a helluva figure on horseback.

Rating: “approved,” violence

Cast: Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren, Raf Vallone, Geneviève Page, John Fraser, Gary Raymond, Douglas Wilmer, Michael Hordern and Herbert Lom.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Mann, scripted by Fredric M. Frank, Philip Yordan and Ben Barzman. An Allied Artists release on Amazon, other streamers.

Running time: 3:02

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Movie Review: Falling In and Out of Love, “In Spite of Ourselves”

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s become a romance/romantic comedy cliche, that eager, disrobing, slam-your-partner-against-the-wall sex after the first date.

And if “In Spite of Ourselves” accomplishes nothing else, at least it sticks a skewer in that “let’s get this out of the way” movie and sitcom trope. Because the reasons it’s not a great idea may be dated in the post Grindr era, but they still apply.

Sweet, cute and sentimental to a fault, “In Spite of Ourselves” is a romantic melodrama set in scenic, trendy Portlandia — Portland, Oregon — in fall.

Writer-director Josh Loeb is apparently a rich restaurateur dipping his toes in movie making. As one of the young lovers in it is a pastry baker aspiring to chef status, getting the details of that world and that character’s background right, the film turns out to be less dilettantish and vainglorious than you might expect.

Conor Leslie of “Chained” and TV’s “Titans” stars as Hannah, thirtysomething and running her own bakery and gritting her teeth about her need for the approval of trendy Chef Jake (Ethan Ingle) if she’s to become his dessert-provider.

Brett Dier (TV’s “Jane the Virgin,” “Schooled”) is angsty stand-up comic Archie, someone people recognize thanks to his latest stand-up special. but who always answers “Don’t I know you?” with a curt “Ya DON’T!”

“Archie doesn’t like people,” he fellow stand-ups confirm.

Hannah and Archie “meet cute” in her bakery. He tries too hard to buy her last cinnamon off the kid who just purchased it, and tries and fails to not look at all creepy in doing it.

Hannah’s fellow baker Becca (Britain Seibert) recognizes him and gives a “not that funny” dismissal. But Hannah and Archie make entirely too much eye contact, so something’s happening.

She catches his act during a Portland residency and sparks lightly fly.

But he’s got issues — a father suffering from dementia in an L.A. nursing home. Dad’s capable of being difficult, if not outright violent and his son insists that he not be “medicated into a zombie.” The memory care director reminds Archie and the viewer that “Dementia is a one-way street.”

Hannah? She’s lost her hearing in one ear and afraid of the risks of surgery that might correct that.

“I could die!”

Can these two find love in the middle of career, family and health complications?

Writer-director Loeb is more at home in the kitchen scenes than he is in the clubs. But there are laughs in this script. Archie tries inviting Hannah to “my show.” What manner of show might that be, she blurts, disingenuously?

“You’re a…clown? Oh we have a HUGE clowning community in Portland!”

That’s straight out of “Porlandia,” or should be.

One puts a lot of stock in “chemistry” in such films, and Leslie and Dier have it, with able support from the following actors playing character tropes.

Seibert is the “disapproving friend.” Alyssa Limperis and Mo Mandel play comic pals who’re rooting, rooting SO hard for Archie not to “f— this up.” Both of them are more convincing stand-ups than Dier, although he brings some old pro physicality to the stage act, which never quite overcomes the low energy of his onstage-with-the-mike presence.

And Ingle is a lot of arrogant chef cliches boiled down into just the suggestion of loves-hearing-himself talk and the right pretentious “young” wardrobe. He likes Capri pants for men — “man-pris,” they’re called.

They make Chef Jake look like he’s had “a random late growth spurt” to Archie.

What Loeb has concocted here sticks rigidly to a time-proven recipe. It’s cinematic comfort food, a movie that some streamer or even The Hallmark Channel might pick up, if there was less stand-up comic profanity in it.

So no, don’t expect any surprises. But the laughs and the stars’ chemistry put it over.

Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual situations, drug abuse reference

Cast: Conor Leslie, Brett Dier, Britain Seibert, Glen Morshower, Alyssa Limperis, Mo Mandel, Zora Casebere and Ethan Ingle.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Josh Loeb. An LMNL release.

Running time: 1:40

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Netflixable? Shailene’s on the hunt for the “Unabomber”

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Roger Moore

The difference between “a true story” and “inspired by a true story/true events” is laid bare in “Unabomber,” an account of the tail end of the hunt for mad mail bomber Ted Kaczynski.

The heroine, played by Shailene Woodley, is an FBI linguist brought in to analyze the writing style of the man who planted or mailed sixteen bombs, killed three and injured 23 others.

The unknown killer eluded capture for 18 years until the FBI caught a break. But there was no FBI “linguist” named Joanne Miller who parsed the perpetrator’s archaic and sometimes academic writing style, published in screeds culminating in “The Unabomber Manifesto.”

But damn, THAT would have made a fascinating movie and moviegoing thought exercise.

Kaczynyski, a onetime math prodigy and Harvard grad — he was enrolled at 16 — ranted about technology, “industrial society” and academia and sent bombs to airline and university faculty — “UN-A” bomber. He was only caught when his brother recognized the rants as in a style he knew all too well.

Knowing all this doesn’t mean you can’t get a surprising and riveting thriller out of the hunt for a cunning quarry who was every bit as brilliant as the most far-fetched “supervillain,” with a special talent for covering his tracks and living off the grid.

But what Danish director Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe,” “Armadillo”) and the two credited screenwriters of “Unabomber” serve up is a dull, under-detailed police procedural attached to a sort of “Beautiful Mind” mental breakdown of a madman who wanted to be an important thinker.

Jacob Tremblay of “The Life of Chuck” plays young, late 1950s Chicago-native Ted, son of a working class tyrant of a father who expected great things of him, but an impressionable kid too young to be subjected to CIA backed psychological experiments by a charismatic Harvard professor.

Oscar winner Russell Crowe was an Oscar nominee for his performance in “A Beautiful Mind.” Here, he ably plays a flawed manipulator.

He encourages the kid’s dreams of becoming a philosopher.

“It’s ideas that shape the world!”

But this series of wired-up and studied provocations with an argumentative foe only referred to as “Mr. C.” (Gus Halper) don’t so much sharpen young Ted’s arguments as gut him, psychologically. He learns to be as cruel, ruthless and personal in his vicious expressions of his views of society, “progress,” The Industrial Revolution and the like.

And from that, we infer, a callousness that crosses into mania festers.

Tremblay serves the externals of the character well enough, the meek “submissive” and rules-following Ted who devolves into a killer. But we sense no interior life, and the writings that came to define who this terrorist is aren’t sampled nearly enough to paint a more complete portrait. They’re barely touched on at all.

Crowe’s character is similarly sketched-in, an academic striver working for “The Agency” to see how brain washing works and how to identify those most susceptible to it. The personal conversations between the mentor/tormentor and his “subject” whom he convinces is a “protege” aren’t revealing because we don’t buy them as anything more than other forms of manipulation.

Woodley similarly has too little to play around with, just a fictional character who is always right while her colleagues doggedly go up more and more blind alleys at the direction of a flawed “profile” created by “Langley.”

“He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else,” is her insight. We don’t see or hear enough of the Unabomber’s writing to make that insight with her.

The movie’s revelations are few and far between, as the writings of Kaczynski aren’t used to flesh out what still play as troubling ideas — that a few powerful men are using technology and industrial “progress” to enslave everybody else.

That would be a daring approach for the film to take — that maybe Crazy Ted had a point before crossing this or that line. It’s dangerous point of view to let get around, considering what happened to the creep who ran United Healthcare.

Perhaps that’s why they avoided the rants and ramblings and philosophizing of their subject.

And lacking that dangerous edge, “Unabomber” just passes the time, another F.B.I. procedural with a couple of big names adorning the cast and classing the joint up, with neither their characters nor the screenplay illuminating it or its seriously sinister title character.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Shailene Woodley, Jacob Tremblay,Annabelle Wallis, Alexander Ludwig, Matthew Kevin Anderson, Steven Ogg and Russell Crowe.

Credits: Directed by Janus Metz, scripted by Sam Chalesen and Nelson Graves. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

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Documentary Review: Cinema as Seen from the Projection Booth — “Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey”

Posted on September 28, 2026 by Roger Moore

You probably missed this sprawling, feel-good-about-cinema’s-future Australian documentary “Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey” when it made the rounds of film festivals and earned a limited release a couple of years back.

Celluloid purists certainly wouldn’t have.

Australian projectionist turned doc-maker Rob Murphy takes us through the history of movie projection, the digital revolution and efforts to preserve not just old films, but to keep the novelty of the visually overwhelming, sharply-detailed, richly-colored and textured Big Screen experience alive.

The emphasis here is on the penultimate moviegoing cinegasm, Cinerama, immersive movies shown on huge curved screens via three projectors playing at once, creating a vast, deep and panoramic image that only the rarest cinema palaces — most famously LA’s CineramaDome — could accomodate.

Murphy spends much of the film speaking with his fellow (mostly Aussie) projectionists of prior generations, some of whom became celluloid movie print collectors/”hoarders,” with a few going so far as to rebuild tiny versions of the vast and complex analog projection system it took to show Cinerama.

The role of film print collectors in preserving a vanishing movie heritage is explored via a few eccentric collectors, professional archivists and others with horror stories of all that can go wrong when vast collections of film cannisters are stored safely until the person who knew how to store and preserve them aged out of being able to care for them.

Thousands of films, from the earliest silents to even more recent eras, have been trashed, recycled (for the silver nitrate in the prints), decayed or fast faded into unwatchable due to whatever flawed film process or stock (Eastman Color, take a bow) they were originally shot and shown on.

Murphy tracked-down the now-late director (“Silent Running”) and effects pioneer (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) turned heightened-cinematic-experience experimenter Douglas Trumbull to talk about his efforts to put the “wow” back into moviegoing.

His high-speed projection Showscan system was an abortive effort doomed by the ill-fated but startling to look at sci-fi film “Brainstorm,” most remembered as the movie Natalie Wood drowned before finishing. When Murphy caught up with him, Trumbull’s last sizzle in making and projecting bigger, brighter, sharper and deeper “like looking through a window” images, MAGI, was struggling to get on its feet.

Trumbull is the expert witness to the fact that digital projection, for all its benefits, is lower resolution, dimmer and duller than any of the premium 70mm celluloid projection processes.

Quentin Tarantino backed this up when he presented his generic Western ensemble piece, “The Hateful Eight,” in select cinemas able to still screen it in 70mm. The third act of “Splice Here” is taken up with Murphy’s efforts to help the art deco Sun Theatre cinema in Yarraville, Victoria (Australia) piece together the projectors necessary to show one of Tarantino’s better-looking lesser efforts in the format the filmmaker desired.

QT even showed up for the premiere!

But the engrossing stuff here is all the history, the archaic technology and the fact that if films are to be preserved, it’s the eccentrics still devoted to that form of projection who will be responsible. Because the ever-consolidating/ever-“trashing” old prints studios that made them haven’t made it their business to guard their old investments or their patrimony.

Murphy drops in on the American Library of Congress’s vast underground audio/video archive in Culpeper, Va., for the “Mostly Lost” Film Festival, an event where fragments of old films are screened for experts and buffs who shout out suggestions as to who might be in them, when they were made (automobile’s often give away the year) and what they might have been about.

Murphy is entirely too fixated on Cinerama here, for my taste. It was, when it was introduced (by American journalist and “Lawrence of Arabia” popularizer Lowell Thomas) in 1952, just a gimmick to set movies apart from TV.

“This is Cinerama” didn’t lead to a mass conversion of American cinemas, and only a handful of films were shot and shown in this three-projector super-widescreen format. “How the West Was Won” and “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” were the most famous narrative features made in Cinerama. It was outgrowths of that, 70mm films like “Grand Prix” or “2001,” that became more widely accepted.

I’ve seen one or two super widescreen movies at the CineramaDome, and once caught a showing of “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” in the basement cinema — furnished with abandoned projectors and screen and seating from closed movie theaters — of a collector in North Dakota.

As critic Leonard Maltin notes, it was a “novelty” way back when, and celluloid 70mm projection and its technical kindred are destined to be that now, as well. Until digital projection closes that visual experience gap.

The recent digital 3D film fad is presented as a possible stepping stone to vastly better digital theatrical projection, as its technology can be repurposed to something that won’t require wearing disposable glasses to view.

But I love the former projectionist’s affection for that skill and the people who ran projection booths, gigantic and tiny, over the decades. I have made it a point over the years to get to as many ancient movie houses as possible, as not all are in Hollywood and thus eagerly preserved by the locals.

I think the oldest cinema I went to is now gone, a 1914 vintage Madison, Wisconsin nickelodeon with wooden terraced floors and a screen canted to the left when you entered the venerable (smallish) auditorium, not directly in front of the rear exits.

Like Murphy and several of the folks he interviewed, movie projection was one of my first jobs, showing films in the absurdly-long-visual-throw-distance performance hall at my university via ancient Simplex carbon-arc (16mm) projectors. It was primitive, mechanical and all sorts of things could go wrong and did.

But I got to learn the job and hang around with the last colorful generation of projectionists in the first cities I lived in after school as I was starting my media career. It was a profession dying out in weeks, not years.

For my part, I spent too much time in the past avoiding movies at theaters that didn’t replace projection bulbs often enough, with scratchy prints and known for sloppy reel changes and crackling sound to ever want to go back to celluloid. But if they can make “premium experience” films with higher digital frame rates, brighter, deeper images and do it without seats that shake and blow wind or spray rain on you, I’m all for it.

Especially if the films that most merit “epic” treatment are the ones that deserve it;

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Rob Murphy, Douglas Trumbull, Quentin Tarantino and Leonard Maltin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rob Murphy. A Gravitas Ventures release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:57

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Movie Preview: The “Musk” documentary “They” don’t want you to see

Posted on September 26, 2026 by Roger Moore

The oligarchs in charge of Tik Tok, Facebook/Meta, Twitter and Youtube don’t want you to see the movie “Musk.”

Hell, the Zuckerberglings don’t even want you to see the TRAILER to this documentary by Oscar winner Alex Gibney, the most feared, unassailable FACT focused filmmaker on the planet.

We owe it to ourselves and to Bleecker Street to get the word out about the Oct. 9 release of this damning indictment of the best candidate for taxation into poverty and then deportation in America.

Pass it on!

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BOX OFFICE: “Avengers,” “Resident Evil,” “Heart of the Beast” and “Primetime” are neck-and-neck over $20 million

Posted on September 26, 2026 by Roger Moore

Marvel wants to whet the appetites of filmgoers, to not leave less avid Avengers fans in the dark about the convoluted “history” they may have forgotten when “Avengers: Doomsday” lumbers into theaters in December.

And they’d love to add a pile of found-money to the books of “Avengers: Endgame,” which they’ve re-released this weekend for a “get reacquainted” “Encore” release. It’s paying off as the 2019 film collected a fresh $26 million which will move itself closer to $900 million, still well short of the Trumpflation era “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”

That edged the second weekend take of the “Resident Evil” reboot, which faded to a $23.3 million weekend. That’s a whopping 70-Percent-Plus-“Tyler Perry” plunge from its heady $60 million opening weekend, which means its exhausted its franchise fan appeal and that few others give a hoot it.

A Brad Pitt-and-his-war-dog tale and Robert Pattinson’s best shot at awards season fanfare are dueling for third place, with both films set to collect $20 million+ on a weekend with a nor’easter rattling more populous movie-going corners of the country.

“Heart of the Beast” is a quite-conventional surviving the Alaskan wilderness thriller, and is earning decent enough reviews for Pitt and the German Shepherd named Uber. It ended up earning $20 million, according to Paramount.

That edged A24’s Pattinson in “Primetime,” co-starring Merritt Weaver, Anna Faris and Skyler Gisondo, with former NBC News chief Jeff Zucker shamelessly appearing as himself. It earned $19.2 million, and is also earning mixed-to-positive notices.

Fifth place will go to another new release, Dreamworks Animation’s non-franchise, girl-centered tale “Forgotten Island,” which is on course for a very humbling $12.8 million opening weekend, chicken feed by big animation house standards.

It’ll be interesting to see if “Avengers: Endgame” will hasten the falloff of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” ($4.1, in seventh place) which dominated the summer and has steadily closed-in on the $1 billion mark at the domestic box office (over $950 million+ by weekend’s end)

“Practical Magic 2” ($5.4, sixth) steers clear of “Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey” ($3.7, eighth place).

“Coyote vs Acme” clings to ninth by selling another $1.9 million in tickets. A $50 million dollar negative pickup for Ketchup Entertainment from Warner Bros. that will clear the $60 million mark this coming week.

The Biblical semi-sleeper “Daniel and the Fiery Furnace” ($1.514) outlasted “Insidious” and “Runner” the top ten in tenth.

A pretty good Japanese ghost story tale in limited release, “Never After Dark,” won’t crack the top ten.

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Movie Review: A Haunted Japanese Inn’s Worth Visiting, just “Never After Dark”

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s rare that even a casual horror fan doesn’t greet a new Japanese ghost story with the words, “I LIKE IT already!”

Even if the film is made by Tuscon-born one-time Mormon missionary (how he got into Asian culture and cinema) Dave Boyle.

The first time our heroine, ghost whisperer/ghost buster Airi sees her older sister in the rear view mirror of her ancient Volvo wagon hooked me on this one. The sister (Kurimi Inagaki) is only seen in mirrors or reflected in windows. She’s a ghost.

They can chat all they like — about “Mom,” the woman who passed this ghost-seeing business down, about Airi’s (Moeka Hoshi) new client, the owners of an old inn in the forest. But the only time they see each other there’s glass involved. Even when an insult’s called for.

“You suck (in Japanese with English subtitles)!”

New inn owner Teiko (Tae Kimura) insisted on hiring some supernatural help with a problem she thinks the place has. Her son Gunji?

“I don’t believe in this stuff.”

As soon as Airi banishes them from the property over their “But we paid good MONEY” to watch protests, she figures out what the mother was seeing and hearing.

A bloody-faced man, tall and thin, comes and goes. Staticky phone calls give her and us the chills. And as Airi starts poking around for clues as to who or what is causing this, her dead sister starts with the warnings, which grow more dire the deeper our investigator/ghost-banisher goes.

Every filmmaker has her or his own take of the “rules” and “realities” of their cinematic afterlife. Here, Boyle’s heroine speaks of a “veil” between the living and the dead. She uses a magic mirror with a zoetrope wheel that spins around its frame, and an enchanted candle to dip into the netherworld and dig up what this troubled ghost is after.

The devil is in the details in genre films of this sort, and Boyle comes up aces in his world-building and sense of cultural traditions dropped in on and sampled.

Our villain (Mutsuo Yoshioka) is creepy as all get out. But the other performances are more somber than riveting, empathetic or fear-inspiring.

I found the third act’s requisite sake-hits-the-fan mayhem more conventional and the “resolution” less interesting, frightening and moving than I was expecting.

But there’s entertainment value and no dishonor in this worthy homage to J-horror and the uneasy dead or about to die.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Moeka Hoshi, Kento Kaku, Kurumi Inagaki, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Bokuzō Masana and Tae Kimura.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dave Boyle. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

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Movie Review: Pattinson & Weaver are ready for “Primetime”

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Primetime” is a “heavily fictionalized” account of “Dateline NBC’s” notorious, pedophile-entrapping “To Catch a Predator” series of hidden camera “gotchas” passed off as “reports” in the early 2000s.

It’s a film that struggles to condemn and illuminate why TV news and police “stings” that in essence create a crime are immoral and wrong without coming off as defending pedophiles.

After all, we’ve got the accused pedophile president, GOP Congress and Supreme Court for that.

But it is built on some terrific performances, including a career-best by “Twilight” alumnus Robert Pattinson.

As troubled, ethically-challenged “Catch a Predator” anchor/reporter Chris Hansen, Pattinson gives us his first swaggering Movie Star turn ever as a cocky but stumbling striver haunted with some sort of “Catcher in the Rye” syndrome.

This Hansen sees himself as dedicated to hunting an “ancient evil,” child molestation. And he’s determined to make his name, his fame and his fortune via his “To Catch a Predator” “performances.”

At just the right moment, with a suspect identified by catfishing members of a pedophile-hunting Perverted Justice vigilante group and lured to a rented house to meet their under-age “hook-up,” Hansen would stride into the shot and confront the perp with a “What are you doing here?”

Matthew Maher (“Air”) brings a creepy verve to Perverted Justice crusader Xavier Von Erk. Von Erk and others, like idealistic “bait” Del (Phoebe Bridgers of “I Saw the TV Glow”), a twentysomething gamine who can role-play tween boys and tween girls, worm their way into pedophile online spaces and bait traps for adults who groom, molest and prey on children.

And once they’re lured into this or that corner of America’s rental kitchen, his catch-a-pred catch-phrase can’t help but play as funny.


“You see how this looks, right?”

The film is seen basically through three sets of eyes — those of Hansen, struggling for stardom, stop cheating to save his marriage (Anna Faris plays his had-enough wife) — his show’s take-no-prisoners producer (Merritt Weaver of “Nurse Jackie,” knocking it out of the park) — and aspiring actor “bait” Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo (the latest Jimmy Olsen “Superman” sidekick).

Everybody involved has a queasiness about what they’re doing and how — at first. But the lure of fame and success is great, and even the guileless and under-coached “Bait Boy Dan” finds himself relishing the chance to “improvise” his way to a Screen Actor’s Guild card with his smiling, pushy performances.

Pattinson’s Hansen saves his self-righteous sneers for when he declares what they’re doing as “a form of activism,” and his smirks for the perps (Alex Winter, Tony Revolori, Bob Ari and Jonathan Lipnicki among them) when he strides into the trap with them, printouts of their criminally overt online come-ons to read from in his hand.

A crew member notes Hansen’s Emmy, his trench coat and his self-serious pose and mutters how Hansen “thinks he’s Mike ‘F—–g’ Wallace,” referencing TV’s original “crusading” poseur.

Director Lance Oppenheim (the Florida doc “Some Kind of Heaven” was his), working with an Ajon Singh script loosely based on an Esquire Magazine “To Catch a Predator” take-down article from 2007, immerses us in his characters’ agendas, which in Hansen’s case, borders on a mania.

We’re through the looking glass when we, like the “team,” sense they’re about to land “a whale” only to have a disabled and sexually twisted creep stagger out of car — a perp on crutches.

The film itself staggers as all involved try to decide whether it’s a horror tale of the hellish figures who prey on children all over the world, or a particularly American sort of Gothic comedy — a nation obsessed with pedophiles that elects a credibly accused one (fluffed to fame by NBC) president.

Having former NBC News chief Jeff Zucker play himself as one of the villains of the piece is rich.

But with name changes (Hansen’s producer was not female, with no hint of a “crush” on the “star”), inventions and flights of fictional fancy, “Primetime” struggles for credibility the same way the unsavory show with good (?) intentions did.

The last thing this culture needs is a cinematic watering-down and fact-bending spin on pedophiles that, like the political debate over a political party’s pedophile-protecting ethos, leaves the victims out of the equation. The perpetrators don’t really deserve our sympathy, outside of any idealistic “criminal’s rights” sense. And they and the cranks “catching” them aren’t the most viable objects of fun.

The crusty Texas police chief (Bokeem Woodbine) the show embeds itself with may be a fictional character, but it allows the movie to score points about people who should be watchdogging law enforcement, not getting in bed with them. The fact that this association, and the whole third act overreach “descent into a hell of our creation” doesn’t come off also hobbles the film.

The messaging and fictionalizing don’t ruin the powerhouse performances by Pattinson and Weaver. But “Primetime” does tend to seriously lower the temperature of a tale intended as awards bait in this fall of 2026, and a long hard look in the mirror for the American masses.

Rating: R, violence, pedophilia subject matter, full frontal nudity, profanity

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Weaver, Phoebe Bridgers, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher, Anna Faris, Alex Winter, Bokeem Woodbine and Jeff Zucker as himself.

Credits: Directed by Lance Oppenheim, scripted by Ajon Singh, based on an Esquire article by Luke Dittrich. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:50

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Movie Review: A Brad and his Dog — “Heart of the Beast”

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Heart of the Beast” is a solid, formulaic adventure tale given a lift by leading man Brad Pitt and his connection to the German shepherd his character’s brought to the Alaskan wilderness with him.

Uber, who plays Odin the combat veteran getting by on three legs and his utter devotion to his Army handler, who took him into retirement with him, is a New Zealand mountain rescue specialist with big soulful eyes that make him perfect for conveying the love that transcends obedience for James Belmot (Pitt), Special Forces, retired.

“End of Watch” and “Fury” director David Ayer and his players strain to over overcome CGI critters and an utterly conventional, Jack London “stranded in Alaska” adventure tale’s tropes in serving up an exciting, perilous and moving movie about a soldier and his dog.

James and Odin or “Odie” served in the Middle East and survived multiple near-death experiences there. They have the scars to prove it. Odie has one artificial leg, “titanium” teeth and cuts across his muzzle. We have to wait for James to take off his shirt to see the damage his body took.

Now, the retired commando and his dog are flying a small float plane through the Alaskan bush. They’re getting away from it all. And them all.

You can tell by James’ hostile, rifle-cradled-in-his-arms posture that he’s not thrilled to have a Sourdough canoe traveller (J.K.Simmons) drop by their remote campsite. The gregarious stranger cuts in on their bonding and roughhousing time.

As both human and his partner dog have nightmares about their service overseas (seen in flashbacks), they’d just as soon keep to themselves.

But outrunning a storm in a small plane is enough to stress anybody, especially someone with a bum ticker. They crash. The plane is lost, the dog is hurt and they’re 58 miles from the nearest road.

If you’ve ever any version of a “lost in Alaska” tale you know what’s coming, starting with the small plane crash. It has to happen in a lake. They have to swim and tote what gear they can and hoof it out.

There’ll be digital wolves hunting digital moose, a CGI bear to confront, rapids to be survived, a gorge to be crossed on a rotten tree that’s fallen across it and the like.

Kudos to screenwriter Cameron Alexander for not serving up quicksand, or its Alaskan equivalent — falling through the ice on a frozen lake. Lived there, done that, BTW.

But Pitt’s stoic soldier and his adoring, smart and capable dog problem solve, save each other and help each other recover from wounds and other setbacks. And we buy it. Boy do we ever.

It’s a tear jerker, one of the few on Pitt’s Hollywood resume, and just saying that is sending more sensitive souls to http://www.doesthedogdie.com to see if this is a movie they can endure.

It’s a dog lovers’ movie, and I love dogs. But it is also, whatever the violence of its predictable parade of action beats, a terrible bore.

Harrison Ford taught all of Hollywood that using digital animals in a film like “Call of the Wild” or this variation of it is a bad idea. Mark Wahlberg & Co. heeded that warning with the sweet and superior “Arthur the King.” The producers of “Supergirl” did not.

“Heart of the Beast” tries to have it both ways in a thriller so dogmatically straightforward that it may send you, as it did me, to the Internet Movie Database to see if Cameron Alexander is one of Chat GPT’s pseudonyms.

Rating: PG-13, violence, bloody wounds and profanity

Cast: Brad Pitt, Anna Lambe and J.K. Simmons

Credits: Directed by David Ayer, scripted by Cameron Alexander. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:41

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