Documentary Review: “Chris and Martina: The Final Set” of a Love Match built on Sportsmanship

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Roger Moore

The recent news that former tennis champ Chris Evert’s cancer has returned for the third time adds more real-life poignance to a lovely new documentary about her and her longtime foe and friend, Martina Navratilova.

“Chris & Martina: The Final Set” is the story of perhaps the greatest rivalry in tennis, a decades-long duel that started in friendship, descended into winner-take-all bitterness and ended in a form of triumph — an even closer friendship only made possible by the role models of sportsmanship both of them embodied.

Sports fans of a certain age won’t have much trouble tearing-up at this fine recollection of a different era in sports — pre-social media and invasive 24 hour “news,” pre-“Fan Duel” and pre-PEDs.

Filmmaker Rebecca Gitlitz makes her feature-length documentary directing debut a moving and honorable outing for all involved. And she makes her presence felt as she gets close to her subjects and asks obvious but tough follow-up questions from behind the camera when the occasion demands it.

Because as both women and their fellow champions Billie Jean King and John McEnroe remind us here, it’s damned lonely at the top, “number one” in a winner take all business.

“You give up things if you want to be best at something,” Evert acknowledges.

And when you are the best, the number of people who know what you’re really going through, win or lose, is tiny.

We see them lose their hair and strength, but not their will, during cancer treatment. And we hear how the two who met as teens, with Chris already the “cute” Florida blonde “girl next door” star and Navratilova the insecure, out-of-her-depth player from behind The Iron Curtain.

Evert was sweet and welcomng, Navratilova remembers, “because she wasn’t a threat” others add.

The Netflix film tracks their friendship through Martina’s on-court meltdowns at losses, through the toughening up — emotionally and physically — that the Czech star’s basketball-star girlfriend Nancy Lieberman put her through.

Lieberman’s “You have to HATE her” ethos about the rivarly (she’s not interviewed here) is blamed for the rift that entered the Martina-Chris relationship as Navratilova muscled and served-and-volleyed her way to dominance on the court.

But first Martina had to endure the trauma of defecting from her Eastern Bloc homeland for America, disconnected from her most faithful support group, her family. The press was always trying to “out” her. She developed a lifelong aversion to lifelong commitment, robbing some of the joy of her glory years.

Evert had to change her accomplished, highly-polished and quite mature “baseliner” game just to stay on the court with Navratilova. That cost her relationships and marriages and an early bout with former teen-phenom burnout.

But as their playing days wound down, the friendship was renewed. Retirement turned them into role models all over again, this time for that old-fashioned notion of “sportsmanship.”

It’s adorable seeing the two of them re-watching their most famous matches — Evert’s early dominance, a turning point bout or two, Navratilova’s years of dominance, finishing with grand grace notes for each of them on the court.

Off court, the storms in their personal lives, the monomania it takes to excel at a sport and its psychological and romantic costs, are lightly covered.

They have a laugh suggesting that an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch about them (Chris hosted) which mocked Martina’s lifelong oneupsmanship, be revived. As this documentary was being filmed, Navratilova’s cancers are more widespread and her prognosis seemingly more dire, a grim “I win!” punchline to their rivalry.

No one wants to see either of them lose this “Final Set,” but almost certainly one of them will. And when it happens we’ll mourn not just the deceased, but the survivor. Because that’s how these two paragons of grace, dignity, loyalty and sportsmanship will be remembered — joined at the net, embracing after every battle won and lost.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Chris Evert, Martina Navraitilova, Billie Jean King, John McEnroe, Pam Shriver, Mary Carillo, Sally Jenkins, Bob Kain and Zina Garrison.

Credits: Directed by Rebecca Gitlitz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

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Documentary Review: Intentionally forgotten Lebanon — “Do You Love Me”

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Roger Moore

In Lebanon, an opening title tells us, “contemporary history is not taught in schools.”

Basically, a half century of intermittent bloody unrest has been erased. The endless Israeli incursions and invasions? The civil war Israel triggered with the refugee dislocations caused by its 1948 creation and its “preemptive” “Six Day War” against its Arab neighbors in 1967, a civil war Israel then took sides in, all of which repeatedly tore Lebanon apart and devastated and re-devastated its capital, Beiruit, aren’t spoken of.

But the people remember — via home movies and photographs and oral histories and news coverage and TV and cinema from Lebanon or set there — films starring Catherine Deneuve (“Je Vous Voir,” “I Want to See”) and others.

“Do You Love Me” is history and memory via montage, sn impressionistic cut and paste picture made from thousands of sources — songs, TV shows, home movies, archival news footage and films, a city seen then and barely glimpsed now.

Lebanese filmmaker Lana Daher accurately labels herself a “multidisciplinary” artist, and proves it with this work of memory and poetry, music and testimony.

As history, it’s a film that doesn’t break down the many eras of the seemingly endless conflict, which Israel and the Lebanese-born descendents of the Palestinian refugees Israel created over the past century renewed back in 2024. Taking its title and organizing principle from the mournful Lebanese pop hit “Do You Love Me,” Daher’s film washes over the viewer with snippets of fresh oral history, archival interviews, film dialogue and music giving us a taste of the place and a grim feel for all that it’s been through.

Montages capture the simmering violence of Beirut, the fixation on firearms that took hold of the culture and the Lebanese cinema when hostilities broke out in the former French colony in 1975.

But the locals dance. Families gather to decorate cars for weddings and celebrate such ceremonies, sit down for meals or venture to the beach in other home movie footage.

“In this life,” a title tells us, “our memories melt into the sea.”

Papering over that history, “Do You Love Me” implies, merely ensures its constant repetition. Newspapers publish stories with blank spaces where unpleasant truths, facts or opinions have been “censored” out.

There are no Truth and Reconciliation commissions here. Wrongdoers never admit and repent anything. There’s no dealing with the country’s dysfunctional neighbors. And the upshot?

“We don’t know who we are.”

Daher’s evocative documentary isn’t designed to change that, just to remind Lebanon, Beirut and the world of an erased past that cannot be recreated. No matter how many times they rebuild and welcome “war porn” tourists longing ruins of the post-colonial “Paris of the Middle East,” those tourists are lways disappointed. The past is bulldozed and bulldozed, buildings replaced, again and again, by people trying to forget what they need to remember.

Rating: unrated, some violent images

Credits: Directed by Lana Daher, scripted by Qutaiba Barhamji and Lana Daher. An Icarus Films release .

Running time: 1:16

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Classic Film Review: Jean-Pierre Melville is one of “Two Men in Manhattan” (1959)

Posted on June 29, 2026 by Roger Moore

Sometimes, the most accurate mirrors we face are held up to us by others.

Consider the flood of viral stories about America and those visiting it during the World Cup — the German who sang our praises and found himself coddled by locals who want to believe in a version of the country that has been lost, the Scottish fans who charmed and were charmed wherever they went, the Japanese fans who cleaned up stadiums after their team played, and the shameful tales of our treatment of Iranians and Africans and of many people Black or brown or from the Middle East.

Classic films can also preserve such snapshots of the past, and one of the most intriguing is Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Two Men in Manhattan,” a fairly conventional missing-person-hunted by reporters tale that captures 1959 New York at its Cafe/Cabaret Society-cool jazz peak.

The sunglasses-fetishizing Melville, “Godfather of the French New Wave,” shot on location, with its lurid advertising-lit Manhattan-at-night scenes, and on French soundstage interiors and an almost all-French cast.

It’s a movie of “vibe” and feel, very much in the “nostalgic existentialist” vein of Melville’s most famous films (“Bob le Flambeur,” “Le Samurai”). “Two Men” is also arch and sometimes messy, with imitative but illogical scenes in service of a generic plot, bits of looped sound and interiors and exteriors that don’t match up as neatly as Hollywood productions of the day.

And every so often, there’s a hint of what the man who took American novelist Herman Melville’s name as his alter ego during his days in the WWII French resistance, thinks of this land he visited, took in and pondered, mostly through his viewing of American cinema, especially Hollywood film noir.

A French diplomat goes missing, and no one — journalist, photojournalist or the man’s family — even considers going to the U.S. police. Journalistic “ethics” and morals seem to be something the French mull over before ignoring, reminding us of that “Sweet Smell of Success” age when Americans rarely took such scruples into consideration. “Foreigners” are both exotic and annoying, and a Black stripper is hated by her fellow white dancers.

Melville may take us to a high-end brothel, with geishas and sex workers of many races.

“You can judge a culture by its level of prostitution,” a cynical Frenchman notes.

But the dancer Bessie Reed (Michèle Bailly) is the only character writer-director-star Melville chose to film nude.

All of that is subtext. What Melville was going for here was a cool jazz collision of generations and values. An old school U.N. diplomat of “the classy type,” one with a war record, has gone missing.

The 40ish news agency reporter Moreau (Melville) has to be reminded “of that old French expression” that always pertains to “whenever a man is missing” bythe diplomat’s lesbian secretary (Colette Fleury).

“Cherchez la femmes.” Look for the women.

The posing, lying, bribing and finagling Moreau drags his even less ethical younger freelance photographer/hustler Delmas (Pierre Grasset) out of bed with his latest conquest, sobers him up and off they go into the night.

An actress (Ginger Hall), a singer (Glenda Leigh) and a dancer (Bailly) are the reporting duo’s married and missing quarry’s known paramours. Bars and brothels and a Broadway show backstage will be visited, a flask will be emptied and every time they get in Delmas’ Ford Mainline, a Ford Fairlane cranks up and follows them all through the night.

We can sense that the real “test” of this reporter/photographer collaboration won’t come amid the lies they tell to ambush these women, but when they get closer to “the truth” of what’s happened and how that will play back home in France.

When I refer to “Two Men in Manhattan” as “messy,” I’m talking about things like the seemingly pointless “interrogations” of the three women. Yes, the characters are “introduced.” But Moreau questions them (in English, with much of the dialogue between French men and women in subtitled French), gets less than nothing from them — no admissions or denials, barely a hint of “connection” between them and the diplomat — and are summarily dismissed.

Moreau and Delmas are pretty much frisked and made to “check your coats” at the strip club, when we see other patrons in trench coats.

Some of the performances seem phonetically sounded-out in English, and other bit players can come off as amateurish, something a director more comfortable with English would have caught.

The resolution to the evening’s mystery is conventional. It’s the wildly divergent responses to it from our man-hunting duo and the reporter’s Old School boss (Jean Darconte) that interests Melville and grips the viewer 65 years later.

Cinematographer Nicolas Hayer shoots Manhattan street scenes at night in ways no Hollywood movie of the era did — using the avaiable light from neon signs, marquees and street lamps and little else. It’s dark beyond the neon, not washed out with fill light. “Two Men in Manhattan” is even more striking to look at than the “journalism” noir classic “Sweet Smell of Success.”

And composers Christian Chevallier and Martial Solal give us jazz on the soundtrack, on record players, small combos in clubs and in a Capital Records recording studio, much of seemingly inspired by the brassy, brazen jazz standard “Blues in the Night.”

Whatever its shortcomings, “Two Men in Manhattan” maintains a vibe and a tone that its creator, a French “innocent” abroad in America, never allows to stray. It’s a bracing slice of “as others see us” cinema from an era many Americans look back on as “the good ol’days.”

Melville makes the case that in cinematic terms, at least, the ’50s were a gilded, if monochromatic era. He shows our cultural capital painted in shadowy shades of black and white and a time when our myths were defended and our music was jazz. He shows us the way the world saw us even if we were too distracted by rock’n roll, Technicolor and Cinemascope big screen spectacles and the new TV set in every living room to remember it right.

Rating: TV-14, alcohol abuse, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Jean-Pierre Melville, Pierre Grasset, Ginger Hall, Michèle Bailly, Glenda Leigh, Monique Hennessy, Jean Darconte and Christiane Eudes.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. A Gaumont release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:24

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Movie Review: “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War”

Posted on June 28, 2026 by Roger Moore

These are not the days for “Patriot Games.”

The world we live in’s realities long ago outstripped Tom Clancy’s post-Cold War fantasies of a righteous but compromised America and the West and the mythic “surgical strikes” it takes to keep us “free” seem a tad out of date with treason at the hightest levels exposed and shrugged off by those in power.

And even Clancy, who died in 2013 but is still credited as a producer on TV series and films built around his most famous character, Jack Ryan, knew the “rogue operation” within the West’s spy apparatus was a worn out trope — trotted out by “Three Days of the Condor” (“Six Days of the Condor” in book form) and Treadstoned to death “Bourne” franchise.

Into this “We’ll never be on a par with ‘Mission: Impossible” climate, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War” seems downright quaint. “Ghost War?” Like murdering human trafficking victims on the high seas? Kidnapping foreign leaders? Starting and losing illegal wars at the behest of Israel?

This “Ghost War” has a couple of destination travel settings — Dubai and London — a slick but unexceptional chase or two and a good 24 minutes of its run-time eaten up with convoys of black SUVs and “company” owned private jet flights.

It’s spy vs. spy nonsense with the trappings of a Minor Motion Picture.

But it’s got the long-serving TV version of Ryan, John Krasinski the title role and as co-writer. If he gave himself this line to intone, he at least was one guy who “read the room.”

“That ‘dream’ they sent me out to fight for may not even exist.”

And giving Wendell Pierce‘s spy boss Greer a solid comeback lets hope linger a little longer that “Ghost War” won’t be more of the same-old same-old Clancy-lite claptrap.

“Walking away from the darkness is not the same as walking into the light!”

It is not to be, of course. Production designing Dubai into a Mecca-tolerant Vegas, showing off every black SUV on the market (Volvo, Land Rover, Chevy, etc.) for product placement plugs and putting Sienna Miller in an “I’m deep undercover” stocking cap as an MI-6 agent who cracks “old guy” jokes about Napster-referencing Ryan (Krasinski is two years older than her), “Ghost War” doesn’t break down into vital, intriguing over even interesting component parts.

As a whole, it’s as lively as a comatose carp, one that’s starting to smell.

Ryan is now in “the private sector,” a former intel officer turned international relations/conditions/intrigues specialist with a hedge fund who is “kidnapped” by his old boss (Pierce) for a reunion.

That pointless chase through New York — black SUVs make their bow — is so maddeningly unprofessional and unworthy of inclusion in any semi-serious spy game — much less its introductory sccene — that the ghost of executive producer Tom Clancy is spinning in his grave. And demanding more “points.”

The reunion sets the tone — flippant and yet supposedly serious — for the movie to follow.

Ryan isn’t having this recruitment to take a “meeting” with somebody in the field. He’s lost his last girlfriend and is seriously questioning the life “alone” he’s stuck with after his service.

Besides, “It’s never just about meeting a guy!”

Because the “guy” is sure to get killed. That oddly-attired (for Dubai) blonde (Miller) interfering with the “op” drop, the bizarre way the hit is set up and executed (steps in the process were left out of the editing) and the always-a-step-late comrade (Michael Kelly) who’s got Jack’s back play out like a song that’s worn out its welcome.

There’s dirty laundry from the past — an abandoned operation called “Starling” — that’s made it back into the washer, complete with the pitiless killer (Max Beasley) who masterminded it.

Old tech attacked by new hackers, cooperation and betrayal by Allies old and Middle East recent, an assasination and a lot of riding in SUVs and charter jets and you’ve got yourself 105 minutes of content. But not a movie.

Krasinski deserves a little credit but getting Pierce and Kelly more to do in supporting roles, and landing Miller wasn’t a bad impulse — just a wasted one.

But until the spy games of the cinema can find a way to top the open secrets of the Trumpstein Files/Russian Assett Spy Chief/Mossad blackmail/Putin and Netanyahu present, Jack Ryan would be best left on the same shelf where James Bond is quite plainly biding his time.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: John Krasinski, Sienna Miller, Wendell Pierce, Michael Kelly, Betty Gabriel and Max Beasley.

Credits: Directed by Andrew Bernstein, scripted by Aaron Rabin and John Krasinski, based on characters created by novelist Tom Clancy. An MGM/Paramount release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:46

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Netflixable? “Little Brother” makes Cena Look Small

Posted on June 27, 2026 by Roger Moore

Netflix has made inroads in horror and begun to make a mark in prestige pcitures. But they cornered the market on teen rom-coms a while back. And now, years after signing Adam Sandler, his family and hangers-on, they’re going all in on coarse comedies.

“Little Brother” vies with “Office Romance” for Crudest Comedy of the Summer “honors.”

Pee pee gags, threesome romps played for laughs, drug humor and profanity are the main selling points of this John Cena/Eric André farce.

A few crude moments pay off and the odd “Oh no they didnt” chuckle tinkles around the edges. But mostly this is an R-rated bust and kind of embarassing for all involved.

Cena, a reliable oversized laugh in most movies, is paired up with Eric André, an acquired taste one acquires by watching his TV series — which I haven’t — or movies like “Balls Up” and “Happy Gilmore 2,” which one tries to forget.

The gimmick here is that Cena, as Rudd, a rising star in New York real estate, was once “big brother” to André’s disadvantaged Marcus, who idolized him as a child.

Decades later, Marcus busts out of a mental hospital because he’s got the idea that Rudd “needs” him.

Sherry Cola plays Rudd’s ace assistant, inexplicably attracted to the new loon who’s shown up at Rudd’s door. Michelle Monaghan is Rudd’s wife, mother to his dysfunctional teen sons, a woman inexplicably touched by Marcus’ story and determined to take him in, even though Rudd’s big TV break has landed in his lap — a chance to co-star in a New York real estate “Hustlers” reality series.

And Christopher Meloni plays Rudd’s overbearing, super-successful big brother, a Bezos by way of Joe Rogan success story who may or may not be looking out for his kid bro’s best interests.

I’d quote some funny lines, but there aren’t any. The vulgar sight gags that stick with you involve urinating out of and all over a high-end Porsche, a threesome straining to deliver a laugh via raunchiness and an “I like to watch” third party and Cena doing a tad too much nose candy to safely navigate a very important party at his brother’s place.

The real estate TV show — with its archetypes and machinations — never delivers a titter, much less a giggle. And most of the rest falls into the “know what’s coming, wasn’t that funny the first time we saw it” basket.

Monaghan deserves better. Cola should offer to joke-up her own characters and not be content with a glam wardrobe and hours in the stylist’s chair.

And whatever André brings to the table, Cena would be well-advised to leave him to the ageing Sandler crew, as “Little Brother” is nothing more than a quick, crude and lowdown buck with barely a laugh in it.

Rating: R, nudity, sex, scatological humor, profanity, drug abuse played for laughs

Cast: John Cena, Eric André, Sherry Cola, Christopher Meloni and Michelle Monaghan.

Credits:Directed by Matt Spicer, scripted by Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

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BOX OFFICE: Little “Supergirl” Lost — “Toy Story 5” rolls in the (play) dough

Posted on June 27, 2026 by Roger Moore

Another blockbuster weekend for “Toy Story 5” was a given. And to some of us the indifference that a fresh, punk-riotgrrrl take on “Supergirl” with no “names (Mathias Schoenaerts excepted) and Warner Bros./DC’s MF CGI “dog” sidekick was just as easy to anticipate.

I mean, come ON.

A decent but underwhelming Thursday “preview” turnout of $7.8 million folded into a Friday opening ($18 million) did no favors for “Supergirl”

Deadline.com called that a $40 million comic book origin story/franchise starter. Nope. The Numbers makes the final call — “just” $38 million. Eek.

Call it fanboy “Captain Marvel” sexism or the Curse of DC Comics (reviews haven’t been enthusiastic) or superhero fatigue or the dark times we’re living through, but true “blockbusters” don’t sell WELL under four million in tickets on their opening weekend.

Maybe it’ll have legs, but that’s unlikely.

Meanwhile, the laugh-starved, obvious and muddled message-heavy “Toy Story 5” is filling cinemas on its second weekend — $70 million or just above it, a-56 percent drop.

The no-name-stars, sad and smart horror phenom “Obsession” leaves its smart horror rival “Backrooms” in the dust with another $9.8 million weekend, good enough for third place on its march towards $250 million, which is where I figure it will end up.

The endless “Jackass” farewell tour wraps up with “Jackass: Best & Last,” which is straining towards an $8.4 million opening. Not terrible, until you remember ticket prices and figure maybe three quarters of a million people will see it. A lot of people are sentimental fools over these suicidal fools. Well, maybe a million. Hell, they reopened cinemas after COVID, so God Bless them, Every One.

“Disclosure Day” is down to $8.1 million and fading fast in fifth.

“Backrooms” drops to sixth ($4.315 million).

The creaky reboot of “Scary Movie” adds $3 mullion for seventh place.

A Fathom Events wide anime release (single weekend), “BLEACH — Thousand Year Blood War: The Calamity” will settle for eight place with a $1.95 million take.

“Mandalorian & Grogu” also is on borrowed (release) time, as it falls to tenth with $1.6 million, and will lose screens with about $180 million

“Masters of the Universe” vanishes from screens and falls short of reaching the $65 mark before it goes to streaming.

The two new titles also push “Michael” and “The Death of Robin Hood” out of the top ten.

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Movie Review: Too Much Talk, Too Little Action — “Ip Man: Kung Fu Legend”

Posted on June 26, 2026 by Roger Moore

The storied, mythic and constantly fictionalized life of the martial artist who taught Bruce Lee his moves earns perhaps his dullest film outing in “Ip Man: Kung Fu Legend.”

It’s not really the fault of star Yu-Hang (Dennis) To, who has appeared in Ip Man (Yip Man) adventures for nearly 20 years and has played Ip Kai-man off and on since 2010. His wirework-assisted, manic-edited fights serve up nothing new. But he’s got a serene, focused presence reminiscent of Donnie Yen, without Yen’s wit or charisma.

The thing that makes this “Ip Man” outing so laborious is the script, a weary collection of tropes, cliches, “foreign devil” villains and production values that set this in a politically murky netherworld — the Hong Kong of the early ’20s, ’30s, late ’40s? — designed to not offend Chinese authorities.

Our hero has moved to Hong Kong from Foshan with his wife (Zhou Xiaofei) and little boy with the hope of setting up a martial arts school. The local guild insists he fight three duels in order to win this right, which he achieves in the film’s opening scenes.

But there’s a big new player in British-ruled Hong Kong, and Pike (Steven Dasz) has his eye on real estate that the martial arts association and its friends own. His plans include setting up a boxing gym on some of that property.

Pike has the henchman and the money to turn locals (Zhao Jinshuyu) into “traitors” and the police into accomplices. One intrepid woman in uniform (Tingei Zhang) might stand in his way, if the frame-up Pike puts into motion doesn’t pan out.

Ip Man seeks “justice that the law can’t give.” His comrades know that it’s “better to fight than suffer in cowardice!”

The narrative bogs down in real estate details and the talkative waits between this duel or that prison brawl seem interminable.

Hoary plot devices abound. You can guess the who will be kidnapped pretty much the moment the character is introduced, for instance.

To wears the black fedora, black Changsan and kung-fu-fighting slip-ons with style. But there isn’t much to work with here. The constant talk is tedium itself, and the real estate intrigues feel low stakes, even when murder enters the picture.

And expecting wires, CGI and slo-mo to make the fights pop isn’t going to get it done in a world saturated in martial arts thrillers and Ip Man adventures.

Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Yu-Hang (Dennis) To, Tingei Zhang, Steven Dasz, Zhao Jingshuyu and Zhou Xiaofei

Credits: Scripted and directed by Li Liming. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:34

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Netflixable? Schnabel’s Mad Monomania paints “In the Hand of Dante”

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Roger Moore

There’s a “just go with it” madness that is demanded of anyone who dives into the glorious — some will say wretched — excesses of “In the Hand of Dante.”

A romantic thriller contrived out of history, great “lost” literature and the great creators who write it, it’s a “Da Vinci Code” mystery with “In the Name of the Rose” thrills tucked into an epic length mob movie.

Naturally, there are Italian mobsters. Unnaturally, Jason Momoa plays one and the great Martin Scorsese is cast as a 14th century Jewish intellectual who speaks of the meaning of love and life and who helps finance the art of  Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri;,known to history as Dante Alighieri, the greatest writer in Italian history and a beacon who lit the way for the literary age that became The Renaissance.

It’s based on a novel by journalist and biographer Nick Tosches, who fictionalized an egomaniacal version of himself as protagonist, a rough-and-tumble writer involved in mob efforts to murderously procure the copy text of Dante’s epic poem, “The Divine Comedy,” written in Dante’s own hand, and as Dante himself, struggling to create and survive Florentine politics and papal disapproval in 1300s Italy.


Any way you look at “In the Hand of Dante,” it’s a LOT.

Al Pacino has a lone scene as a made-man uncle who counsels Nick in his early teens after the boy confesses to killing a kid his age. Gerard Butler plays a inhuman hit man sent to “clean up” any loose ends in the procurement of this priceless manuscript, and a megalomanic 14th century pope (Boniface VIII?). Gal Gadot is both Dante’s wife, Gemma, the woman the poet never wrote about as “The Divine Comedy” was inspired by his longing for a long dead childhood crush, and Nick’s Italian secretary/assistant and new love. Franco Nero and John Malkovich play mobsters, Dennis Hopper’s daughter plays a daughter Nick never knew he had.

And Oscar Isaac is Nick, a man of reason but with a past that gives him the edge a writer needs to traffic in this deadly company, and he is Dante, a Medieval writer caught up in the turmoil of his times, neglectful of his faithful wife if not his genius.

The film is messy, sprawling, with many settings and timelines, and is paying the price for the overreach with poor reviews.

But what can I tell you? It spoke to me.

I’ve interviewed the painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel a few times over the years. And I could not imagine a more hilariously arrogant egomaniac outside of a comic book. He is supervillain larger than life and convinced of his greatness, and that I can’t begin to tell you how delightful it is to engage or attempt to engage a creative person like that in conversation. Just getting on his wavelenght is invigorating.

So Netflix giving the director of “Basquiat,” “Before Night Falls,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and the even more indulgent “Miral” and “At Eternity’s Gate” the money and latitude to make this isn’t their dumbest move.

Isaac’s Nick is a blunt, verbose writer with delusions of his own hardboiled grandeur, ready to chew out any editor with “My books can’t be edited any more than a leopard can be given a manicure!” He’s quick to suggest his greatness and wealth will only be achieved “posthumously,” after he’s dead and gone.

The real Tosches died at 69, and has come to be lionized by the hip set, including Schnabel and Johnny Depp. The fictional Tosches plays hardball with editors and publishers. That hardscrabble Italian-American upbringing — and his love of Dante — is why mobster Joe Black (Malkovich) summons him.

Black relates a long, colorfully-detailed anecdote about this long lost manuscript discovered by a mob-installed functionary at the Vatican. Nick is sent to Italy to meet the aged priest and the mobster (Nero) who now possess the first hand-written copy of “The Divine Comedy,” among other pages.

Mob enforcer Lou (Butler), who insults Black’s prized Rembrandt self-portrait in the same words that Nick does, will come along and kill anybody who keeps the manuscript from them and basically anybody who learns about it.

Nick is trapped in a quest to “authenticate” what he and Lou procure, with assorted Italian archivists and librarians paying the price for his “consulting” with them.

He’s got a new assistant, Giuletta (Gadot), on board to help him get flights, move money and the like. In their past lives, he is Dante and she is Gemma, the great love who made Dante’s life make sense.

The two main timelines are 2001 and the early 14th century, with Nick learning the science of carbon-14 dating and the properties of ancient velum paper stocks as the clock ticks down towards 9-11, and Dante threatened and evicted for his “republican” politics by a power-drunk pope (Butler).

“I place the mark of Cain upon thee!”

Momoa plays a towering, white-suited (and hatted) mobster connected with the gangsters Lou has killed. Benjamin Clémentine is a mysterious Italian underworld figure who goes by “Mephistopheles.” And Scorsese is a Jewish sage who ponders matters temporal, racial and metaphysical with our poet.

“The Arab is the new Jew.”

And most everybody quotes poetry off the cuff, reaching for “a wisp of a memory that can’t be caught.”

“Tempus fugit,” “time flies” according to more than one character, then and in the fictive “now.” But does it?

Schnabel indulges in color cinematography in depicting the distant past, black and white footage to capture the ’70s and 2000s. A lot of lush, baroque villas, public and academic Italian and European spaces are thus drained of the distracting shades of generations of painters. Extreme closeups and swirling pans abound as we bounce through time and chase Nick on his quest and on the lam through Italy, Paris and Tunisia.

The violence is jolting, even when it’s expected. The novel-turned-screenplay’s indulgences stand out — an unnecessary bit of 1920s Sicilian mob history, Dante’s sea journey/test to grasp the infinite and Schnabel finding an excuse to throw Scorsese’s favorite band, The Rolling Stones, onto the soundtrack.

Netflix has indulged filmmakers like Scorsese, Cuaron and Fincher. Why not Schnabel?

Through all this messiness, Isaac is our grounding anchor, mastering the self-absorption of the artists, then and “now,” showing off his mastery of Italian, convincing as a guy just acquainted enough with this world to realize the stakes and attempt to scheme his way out of this fix.

Gadot doesn’t give us much to grab hold of, but it’s fun seeing Butler, Scorese (his later scenes are better than his early ones) and even Malkovich used in this way in these roles.

Even harder to follow scenes wash over you if you’re able to get yourself into that historic/poetic frame of mind. And it’s easy to see what all these talented people grasped in this story to make them want to help Schnabel tell it.

“You look at anything long enough, you see what’s wrong with it,” Nick muses about his love-then-“like” of Dante’s masterpiece. That won’t be the case with “In the Hand of Dante.” Its “issues” are often obvious.

But the result is unlike any movie you’ll see and listen to this summer, a grand overeach with indulgences that will make you grimace even as they give you access to the fertile creative mind of poets, painters, actors and a filmmaker who gets it even if he sometimes struggles to help us get it with him.

Rating: R, graphicviolence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Jason Momoa, Sabrina Impacciatore, Martin Scorsese, Franco Nero, Benjamin Clémentine, John Malkovich and Al Pacino.

Credits: Directed by Julian Schnabel, scripted by Louise Kugelberg and Julian Schnabel, based on a novel by Nick Tosches. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:30

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Movie Review: Bulimia’s a Drag in “Maddie’s Secret”

Posted on June 24, 2026 by Roger Moore

The first thing to know about “Maddie’s Secret” is that you have permission to laugh. Releasing it during Pride Month would tend to give one some doubt about that.

Writer-director-star John Early’s melodrama may “play it straight.” But this satiric farce is a direct parody of a “Disease of the Week” TV melodrama starring Meredith Baxter (“Kate’s Secret”) way back in 1986. The leading lady may be a gay man this time, but the illness has seldom been a laughing matter.

Comic actor and writer Early (of TV’s “Search Party” and “The Comeback”) dons drag and stars as a married chef and aspiring food influencer washing dishes and doing prep at a foodie streaming channel — GourMaybe — hoping for a break, hoping her “secret” doesn’t derail it.

Maddie endures the insults and fat-shaming of the channel’s British star, Emily (Claudia O’Dougherty) and their sexist producer-boss Zach (Conner O’Malley) because someday, she hopes to get her recipes and culinary stylings out there for the world to see.

“I’m tired of being such a good girl” and selfless employee, she breathlessly whines.

But meeting her as she’s jogging to work gives us our first clue of what “Maddie’s Secret” is. Her husband (Eric Rahill) and lesbian bestie at work Deena (Kate Berlant) may ogle and flatter her looks. But this foodie has “issues” with food.

The stress of being “discovered” when adoring hubbie Jake videos and edits her creating a dish at home — she goes viral — amps up anxiety over her secret “shame.” And the hot restaurant-set TV drama “The Boar” (“The Bear,” anyone?) needs a culintary consultant. This could be Maddie’s moment.

But lying to Jake and Deena, dealing with her bitter, fat-shaming mother (Kristen Johnson of “Mom” and “Third Rock from the Sun”) sends Maddie over the edge and into the hospital.

“She just couldn’t be happy for me!”

Early utterly commits to this role, mastering every exaggerated affectation of femininity that drag is famous for. Hair-tosses to winces of hurt at every slight and insult, most captured in overly-emotive TV movie close-ups, just heightens the melodrama and underscores the TV movie behavior this movie is mocking.

Early’s script digs for laughs in the fact that the phrase “healthy body” when “complimented” to a weight-sensitive woman is the most cutting insult of all. He trots through “group therapy” tropes — bitchiness and evasion rendered in daft and deft question-and-answer cuts as a baton is passed from patient to therapist to patient denoting who is allowed to “speak.”

“Maddie’s Secret” reminded me of assorted John Waters pre-and-post “Hairspray” parodies. But Camp King Waters rarely pulled his punches. The last comic to take a roundhouse swing at bulimia as a joke was George Carlin. And died 18 years ago this week.

Touchy subject matter aside, Early’s focus here is more on playing it “straight” and on accurate mimicry than cutting edge satire.

A man in drag vomiting as a woman suffering from bulimia may be funny in exaggerated form as a running, revolting gag. Once or twice? That plays as insensitive. And Lifetime, where “Disease of the Week” female filmed fiction migrated, is beyond parody at this point.

The pacing is “Disease of the Week” deliberate, for the most part. The third act hospital treatment/group therapy “types” send up is a grind and the finale is as perfunctory as any Lifetime Original Movie, only less amusing.

Johnson, Early, Berlant and “SNL” alumna Vanessa Bayer (as a too-perky “issues with food” patient) turn this into a thumb-wrestling match for this lady chef’s soul, worth the occasional grin and a guffaw or two, but not really delivering on the camp and cringy possibilities.

And as for subjects the out-actor Early has permission to mock, I’m not sure bulimia sufferers signed off on his drag farce on foodies and eating disorders. One person’s puking punchline is another’s “punching down,” and that isn’t as funny as he seems to think.

Rating: Unrated, sex, profanity, eating disorders

Cast: John Early, Kate Berlant, Claudia O’Dougherty, Eric Rahill, Conner O’Malley, Gordon Landenberger, Vanessa Bayer and Kristen Johnson

Credits:Scripted and directed by John Early. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Running time: 1:38

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Netflixable? Jo Lo & Co go Loooooow for Laughs — “Office Romance”

Posted on June 22, 2026 by Roger Moore

Brett Goldstein finally found something that audiences want to see him in beyond the World of Ted Lasso in a movie he co-wrote himself.

“Office Romance” may a strained, coarse and lowbrow rom-com that grasps for laughs via endless vulgarity. But a lot of people on Netflix are watching it, and as Jennifer Lopez long ago taught us, there’s no such thing as bad exposure.

Lopez co-stars in this flagrant violation of human resources policy, a kind of grinding/Grindr romp where she’s the boss of the airline her dad started and Goldstein is her new Brit lawyer who always needs a shave.

Jackie Cruz scares most of her Air Cruz subordinates, save for her right arm Sydney, played with vicious and vulgar bravado by Betty Gilpin. Jackie’s too busy for men and too glam to manage a sex life. She dresses to overkill in the classic J. Lo style.

But a competitor airline (run by Roger Bart) is suing her for poaching gates at a new terminal in Dallas. And that creep is paying private detectives to spy on Jackie’s private life to blackmail her into backing down.

When her over-the-top attack dog head of legal affairs (Bradley Whitford, going for the gusto) has a comical medical emergency, it’s up to new counsel Daniel Blanchflower (Goldstein) to take over.

The first AWFUL scene in this clumsy Ol Parker (“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) comedy has our buttoned down Brit getting a comical erection when client and counsel first meet. Jackie’s scripted reaction to this special effects boner is just as “off” as the gag itself.

It’s kind of all downhill after that, as the attorney seems out of his depth but isn’t and the boss shares his attraction and contrives to find a way to see if they can act on it.

There’s nothing particularly realistic about anything here, and the whole power dynamics of sexual harassment — the entire reason for HR “no office romances” rules — is utterly ignored.

Instead, we get lame fish-out-of-limey-water gags like attorney Blanchwater explaining to HR (Tony Hale, of course) the many “British” meanings of the C-word, a bit Goldstein borrowed from George Carlin and adapted for Britain’s favorite expletive.

It’s nice seeing Lopez re-teamed with her “father” from her breakout film, “Selena,” Edward James Olmos. But aside from that…

Even a bit about Blanchwater’s “secret” sister (Jodie Whittaker), stuck in an American prison, crosses the line from “funny” to “let’s shock our way to laughs.”

Yes, some of the shock-jokes land. But “Office Romance” only finds its comfort zone in Lopez’s costume changes and constant reminders of how beautiful she still is. That’s in her contract.

Naturally there’s a beachside bikini scene, post coital (she’s putting her swimsuit back on), in which Jackie complains about all the places sand just got shoved into.

Yeah. It’s like that.

Rating: R, sex, some nudity and endless coarse profanity and innuendo

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Brett Goldstein, Betty Gilpin, Bradley Whitford, Jodie Whittaker, Tony Hale and Edward James Olmos.

Credits: Directed by Ol Parker, scripted by Brett Goldstein and . A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

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