Movie Review: “Shaun the Sheep — The Beast of Mossy Bottom”

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Roger Moore

Much of the charm and delight missing from children’s animated films this year makes a belated arrival in “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom.”

Yes, it’s an aimated franchise and yes, there’s even been a VERY long-running TV series. So you’d think the Great Brits at Aardman Animation would be slap out of ideas for their mischievous, clever and non-speaking sheep, his fellow lambs, rams and ewes and every other non-speaker at the farm — animal and human — where he carries on.

But the short answer to that is no, they haven’t.

The trick seems to be to always augment a Shaun veteran with a new Brit wit in the script department. “The Beast of Mossy Bottom” pairs up Mark Burton, who’s had an Oscar nomination from working on both the “Shaun” and Aardman’s later “Wallace & Gromit” films as well as “Madagascar” and the “Paddington” bear comedies. Bringing in “Horrible History” alumnus Giles Pilbrow (the perfeect name for anybody assigned to write for Stephen Fry) pays off with with I expect will wind up being the year’s most adorable kiddie comedy.

The plot has Shaun dabbling in “mad science” from this “Homemade Science” textbook he’s gotten his hooves on with an eye to rapidly replacing the farm’s crop of pumpkins, ruined by the clumsy farmer just before Halloween. The pumpkins sprout and ripen and swell and swell and swell overnight.

But the farmer accidentally confuses the pumpkin-growing fertilizer for hair growing tonic that will get him a date with the cute veterinarian for the Mossington “Halloween Hoedown.”

The balding redhead furs up to such an extent that he’s mistaken for Bigfoot. The locals are up in arms, the vet wants to figure out what the huge hairy beast is and Shaun is put in the spot of making all that he’s messed up right again.

There are sheep doing the “Thriller” dance and “Psycho” and “Halloween” horror movie references, of course. The “mad sheep scientist” bits are straight out of every “Frankenstein” picture, right down to the windmill powered tech.

The villagers break out the pitchforks, scythes and tridents — plastic ones from the Halloween store — to chase The Beast. Some are holding torches — in one case, that’s a selfie stick with a cellphone whose screen has a flame from a torch on it.

One chef’s kiss moment has our hapless balding farmer accidentally rub under his nose after applying hair balm. Two tiny halves of a ginger mustache promptly sprout.

These movies have always appealed to eight and unders the most. But adults taking them to the cinema will be tickled too, as there are a lot more laughs — all of them coming from sight gags — in this “Beast” than the recent “Minions,” “Toy Story” and “Super Mario Bros.” blockbusters.

I don’t know if GKid their new studio, is advertising this in the right places. But take this review as a warning. You don’t want your 4-8 year-ld to miss out on Shaun as he strikes again.

Rating: G

Credits: Directed by Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, scripted by Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow. An Aardman/GKids release.

Running time: 1:20

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Netflixable? French actors, directors and Venus the Wild Boar yell “Call My Agent! The Movie”

Posted on September 17, 2026 by Roger Moore

A movie spun-off of a TV series is inevitably going to be more rewarding to fans of that series who know all the back stories of the characters and get the jokes that come from being that character, or breaking character as that character.

And a common problem with such adaptations, or movies made by veteran TV writers, is not knowing what to cut, how many characters and incidents they can stuff in, since excess baggage can be a terrible drag on the pace of it all.

The first isn’t an issue in the Netflix film of “Call My Agent!” The second? Kind of an the elephant in the room, as this unfolding-disaster farce charms and tickles here and there, but only gets up to speed a couple of times over the course of its two plodding hours.

Because slow-burns and “anticipation” aside, film comedy is a medium that begs for speed.

“Call My Agent! The Movie” is based on a five-year-run TV series from France about talent agents and the talent they deal with. But the cutthroat agents and agencies and the thin-skinned “talent” they “handle” are more of a side concern, this time around.

The idea is to pick up the characters five years after the run of that show, when Ms. Ambitious, Organized Pushy-britches Andréa (Camille Cottin) has gotten a script together and is about to direct her first film. The far sunnier secretary turned agent turned producer Noémie (Laure Calamy) is already a succes, running one of the biggest hits on French TV.

The plot is basically everything that can go wrong with a movie ticking down towards its start-of-production date, and afterwards. And then there are child-rearing problems involving lesbian working mom Andréa. The fact that Noémie’s star is rising — she’s called on to produce the untiled “true story” thriller — and still sleeping with and living with her aged mentor, an agent (Thibault de Montalembert) who is losing clients for “somebody younger” — leads to more conflict, the melodramatic kind.

The inside-the-movies stuff is fun if over-familiar. One star would rather bail out of this to do a bit part in a new Wes Anderson film, and his replacement has “history” with his co-star.

A funny touch — French actors Laetitia Casta and Vincent Macaigne play daffy, highly-strung versions of themselves as reluctant co-stars in these roles.

Another cute bit — getting a meeting with George Clooney to see if he’ll agree to star. Noémie, whom Andréa has hired to be her “stand-in” producer, a push-over who’ll let Andréa walk all over her, crashes that meeting and procedes to test Clooney’s yen for working with people who’ll “tell me the truth” by critiquing his writer/director/star vehicle flop “Monuments Men.”

“There’s no pace” stings just as much in French accented English (the film is available in subtitled French or dubbed into English) as it would in any Hollywoodese.

That “pace” problem applies to this movie, as well. Longtime fans of the series may get a kick out of onetime office boy turned agent in training and now “actor” Herve (Nicolas Maury) overthinking his bit part as a hunter in the film and serving as bitchy gay confessor for Noémie. But there are too many characters in this for all of them — their foibles, concerns and “issues” — to be serviced into something funny.

Eva Longoria plays herself as a producer setting up shop in Paris, bashing Andréa’s script in classic Hollywood fashion. But that scene, like many others, doesn’t land a laugh or really serve the plot.

That plot has a “diva”(not really) tame wild boar and her handler on set, secrets the actors are keeping from their director and producer and vice verssa, accidents and domestic melodrama that’s never more than a cliche.

Cottin — she was Matt Damon’s foil in the Marseilles thriller “Stillwater” — is the stand-out in the cast, giving her first-time/writer-director character some edge, if not the quite the comically despairing agony of seeing her dream come to pieces due to the weather, timing, an animal and “other people.” She hits manic notes at time, and a lot more of that might have given this “Noises Off” some momentum.

I dare say most of the edges have been worn off the series. The back-stabbing, manuevering, cajoling and flattering lies that are in an agent’s repertoire are pretty watered down in director Émilie Noblet’s second feature film, in which several screenwriters ensure that there’s a whole lot of “make nice” going on.

That’s not usually amusing as a guiding principle in comedy.

If there’s a “message” here, it’s that agents might be more suited to directing than we’ve ever given them credit for — sweet-talking talent, organized and on-task hustlers who can keep the insane hours getting a film made entails.

The fun stuff is seeing actors vamp up alternate versions of themselves, but even that’s a tad hug-it-out mild by comic standards.

And whatever get-everybody-in-here fan service the producers had in mind, this film wants to be a streamlined farce. Situations and characters give us that expectation. But it never gets up that head of speed necessary to turn giddy.

So I guess George Clooney isn’t the only one who has a hard time with “pace.”

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Camille Cottin, Laure Calamy,
Thibault de Montalembert, Grégory Montel, Laetitia Casta, Vincent Macaigne and Nicolas Maury, with Eva Longoria and George Clooney.

Credits: Directed by Émilie Noblet, scripted by Fanny Herrero, Lison Daniel, with Violane Bellet and Benjamin Charbit, based on the French TV series. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

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Movie Review: 120 minutes of Badly Written, Poorly Acted Poison — “Run, Hide Fight: Infidels”

Posted on September 17, 2026 by Roger Moore

Some are “canceled” but few truly remain that way in Hollywood.

Kevin Spacey and Armie Hammer aren’t around. But Roseanne Barr is, reduced to ranting into nearly empty convention halls and podcasts of fellow cranks.

But Woody Allen kept working after people finally started believing the child molestation charges against him. Granted, Wallace Shawn was the only “star” happy to be associated with the creep.

Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism didn’t keep him from carving out a solid B-movie career, which is the fate of most action stars in their dotage anyway.

And here’s former Marvel man Jonathan Majors, rendered nearly unemployable after beating his then-girlfriend, “starring” in a thriller so Islamophobic you’d think it was released on Sept. 12, 2001.

Aside from Majors, “Run, Hide Fight: Infidel” has a no-name cast and a whole lot of hate packed into its 120 or so minutes of clumsy, lurching running time.

The latest from those Weenie Riefenstahls at The Daily Wire is an idiotically plotted and scripted terrorism thriller and a “stand alone” sequel to “Run, Hide, Fight” — which had real (B-list) movie stars in it.

It’s about a college campus taken over by terrorists, with assorted “woke” caricatures pitilessly murdered in what are meant to be “You figured it out” epiphanies, but actually here played for laughs among the bigot audience of The Daily Wire.

Consider — a gay college kid is tossed off a roof, tracked screaming all the way to the ground. Another coed wearing a rainbow colored cape is hung from the top of a flag pole.

Journalists are feckless bystanders who also get what the fascist right figures they have coming to them.

The large cadre of Muslims who show up, bearded and unloading duffels and rifle cases, aren’t noticed. We aren’t shown them toting sacks of black hajibs for their hostage/coed “brides” to wear before they’re raped.

Here’s how assorted terrorists are ID’d in the credits — “Pockmark, Scar, Cleft.”

Black characters — students and faculty — are anti protest, anti free speech and anti student, save for the one “security” employee whose girth is a punch line and who follows the younger, dopier Army vet video gamer kid into battle.

And Majors? Why, he’s a Bush era Iraq War veteran plugging a book, “America Unafraid,” accompanied by armed bodyguards onto a college campus because, I guess he saw what happened to Charlie whatisname.

Seven years earlier, Capt. Clay Saunders lost his best buddie in an insurgent hunt in the Middle East. That dead man’s son, Devlin (JC Kilcoyne) is now a student at Virginia’s Laughton University (actually defunct Limestone U. in Gaffney, S.C.), running cross country and crushing on classmate Lizzy (Tyler Aser).

The day Saunders is due to make his speech about “the three ways Islam replaces (Great Replacement Theory without Jews) us,” the college is to hold its student carnival, which is being disrupted by a corps of protesters led by Farrah (Charlotte Delaney Riggs), a shrill anti-Zionist who peppers every sentence with slogans and acronyms despised by the intolerant right.

“ICE out, Gaza IN!”

Devlin’s swaggering, combat vet game-addict roomie PJ (James Bingham) slings slurs at this Egyptian or that Korean on their dorm floor in that wingnutty “He don’t mean nothin'” way.

And then that Syrian refugee who took a custodial job on campus, Ibrahim (Stephen Hailo) and his team unleash explosions, flames and AK-47 fire on the campus, the lecture hall and the student union.

With protests going on and protesters throwing their own smoke grenades, you can see how everybody caught up in this is confused. I mean, that hail of bullets gunning down students all across the quad, should we run, or not?

The vague “demands” of the terrorists, who take hostages after killing scores, and then kill scores more, the involvement of a German-born employee of the bookstore, the non-response by “police” (mocked here) all swirl around a thriller designed to have the track star kid inherit his late daddy’s firearm skills, the vet and a security guard (David Lucas) free students — especially the girl crush — and take back the campus.

Take The Daily Wire release off the opening credits and you still find yourself facing a film where every scene is sloppily scripted and pointlessly progresses past any perceived dramatic or plot-function “payoff.”

The ’90s pop layered onto the soundtrack — Third Eye Blind, “Breakfast at Tiffanies” — is just…off, and there’s no explaining it away.

Writer-director Kyle Rankin’s so worried about “agenda” that his movie is laughably obvious and clumsy in expressing that agenda, and utterly lacking anything recognizably human in the caricatured characters or performances.

And through it all, in his few scenes, Majors looks something between glad-to-have-a-job and embarassed.

Because there are worse things than being “canceled.” Taking the wrong gig to make your “comeback” is one.

Rating: violence, racism, homophobia and profanity

Cast: Jonathan Majors, JC Kilcoyne, Tyler Aser, Stephen Hailo, James Bingham, Charlotte Delaney Riggs, Savannah Leigh James, Chase Ramsey and David Lucas.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kyle Rankin. A Daily Wire release.

Running time:

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Movie Review: Son learns Extremist Politics from his Daddy via “The Militia”

Posted on September 15, 2026 by Roger Moore

I can’t speak for all critics, but “character arc” is not somthing I spend a lot of time musing over when evaluating a movie.

The heroine’s or hero’s journey is a given, usually predictable but a necessary component of compelling drama. The accepted wisdom that taking the viewer from where the character starts to how they’ve “changed” by the closing credits is cinematically essential.

But one pretty much has to address the absence of what one would call an “arc” to the hero of “The Militia.”

It’s a sturdy character study in radicalization and a sober portrayal of the disaffected, gun-fetishizing white men of rural America who don camo, tac’up and play soldier on weekends in the American tradition of “resisting tyranny.”

Except the “radicalization” has already happened when we meet the son (Sam Williamson) who is a Missouri home-schooled chip off the old militia-member dad (Michael Broderick) block. Son
Daniel’s “journey” is a short one, and father Lee’s is non-existent, allowing no room for regrets or remorse.

Daniel, who turns 17 the day after we meet him, has a regular hang with his buds from church. They don camo and helmets and gear-up for realistic laser tag combat. Daniel is the leader of this quintet (Elliott Daggett, Scott Callenberger, Noah Aronstein and Solomon Puckett) by training and by birth.

His Army vet father Lee doesn’t just train with the local militia, where he’s one of the higher ups. He trained Daniel as well.

Lee is a non-nonsense control freak, a less overly bullying version of “The Great Santini.” Farmer Lee has raised his son to be just like him, and mom’s (Laura Feierbach) home schooling — with special emphasis on Civil War battles and “what they teach” him — backs that up.

Dad’s “control” vanishes when the new sheriff (Luke Stratte-McClure) pulls them over and busts Lee for having a truckload of off-the-books assault weapons. Lee’s hostile non-compliance is by-the-book “Constitutionalist.” And obstinate.

“You wanna tell me where you’re coming from today?

“No, we do not.”

That starts up this low-heat thriller’s steady escalation — jailing, armed interference in a court trial, etc. — that slow-walks us toward us toward that moment of truth confrontation.

Writer-director Dylan King Welter’s arm’s length approach to his second feature means that the movie doesn’t take a stand on the issues it brings up.

The father’s unreasonable, unbending and determined to not comply with rules and treatment he has decided that he doesn’t deserve due to his “God given rights,” and the viewer can infer, his white privilege in rural Red State America.

“Aren’t you breaking the law,” the son wants to know?

“My law is complicated,” is Dad’s evasive reply.

Our lawman assures his suspect that “We’re on the same side,” which plays right into the image of policing in general, the rural American variety especially so. But militia tracking and logging sheriff’s department communications and travel routines is enough to get the new sheriff’s back up.

The viewer, depending on her or his politics, is left to filter what we see through our own prism. These are “rightous, God-fearing people” who take Constitutional liberties in the “literal” way they interpret or miinterpret the document. Or they’re belligerant racists who claim they’ve armed themselves to resist “tyranny” but do nothing when a tyrant takes over, starts wars, murders civilians at home, at sea and in foreign lands, steals and self-deals and is left unchecked by a feckless Congress and fascist sympathizing courts.

The acting is more competent than compelling — low heat, all across the board. And Big Dramatic Moments are so lacking that when one or two show up, they’re so underplayed as to land flat.

But it’s the not “taking sides” that robs “The Militia” of its dramatic potential. And without character arcs — “learning” or “growing” — or real consequences, the dramatic stakes are lowered in a movie that seems to lack nerve or a defensible point of view.

“The Militia” thus feels like an exhibition bout where both fighters pull their punches. These delusional yahoos want to re-fight the Civil War. Not coming out and saying it makes your movie gutless.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Sam Williamson, Michael Broderick, Luke Stratte-McClure, Laura Feierbach, Chris Bylsma and Elliott Daggett.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dylan King Welter. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:55

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Documentary Review: Mr. Navel Gazing “How To” Kvetches through “The History of Concrete”

Posted on September 14, 2026 by Roger Moore

“The History of Concrete” is an amusing amble through that construction material’s lineage, especially as it pertains to New York. And New Yorkers.

It’s by doc filmmaker/essayist John Wilson, which should tell you its light tone and short-attention-span aimlessness, if you recall his quirky and quixotic HBO series “‘How To’ with John Wilson.”

The new doc is basically an extension of that three-years-canceled series, a film about a documentary filmmaker groping about for a subject that interests him and lends itself to his voice-over-narrated drollery after losing that series.

He wants to “make art.” Wilson needs that “art” to be something other people will want to see and thus a film third parties will want to invest in. Tricky.

“You never felt so helpless,” he says, in that NPR “storytelling” style he’s adopted. Every pause in every second person point-of-view sentence is packed with performantive pauses.

“You live in a…historical designated neighborhood.” “You’re…constantly surrounded on all sides….by concrete trucks.”

That’s his experience of New York. That’ll be his subject, “the second most used material on the planet.”

Concrete. Not just “cement.” Wilson has others explain the difference as he learns it for the first time. He relates to the crumbling foundation of the old inner-city house with upstairs and downstairs apartments that he bought when his checks from HBO weren’t residuals for .49 cents. He sees the “poor craftsmanship” of the shoddy repairs of the boroughs’ gutters, kerbs and sidewalks. He has an expert point to the cracking and rusting (exposed rebar) state of bridges, overpasses and buildings all around him.

“You,” John Wilson, have your next film’s subject. It’s only after shooting lots of footage, chats and encounters and watching concrete as it is being made, worked, repaired and still crumbling, followed by Zoom meetings with possible financiers. that he begins to question it.

“The material…you had so far wasn’t really…exciting anybody.”

What’s fun here is Wilson’s roundabout way of getting to that point. He starts the film lamenting the loss of cachet and fame and salary that his series gave him, stumbles across a “How to Write Hallmark Movies” Reddit, and attends a Writing a Hallmark Movie workshop where he learns their magic formula and why The Hallmark Channel will be the last cable service standing.

A Hallmark employee, working at the mundane concrete warehouse/soundstages complex just across the border in Canada where a lot of these “Second Chance Love in the Boondocks” “Meeting Mr. Right at Christmas” tales are shot lets slip the brand’s best unkept secret.

“We’re telling the same story over and over…Wash, rinse and repeat.”

No, Wilson won’t make a Hallmark movie or shoot an Arby’s commercial. He’ll get financing, fly to Rome where he asks construction workers and Roman cops standing in front of the ancient concrete-domed Pantheon “the secret” to Roman “self-healing” concrete.

Like they’ll know.

He travels to Bellefontane, Ohio, home of the “first concrete street in America,” which was built in 1891 and is patched to death and still crumbling under the weight of modern traffic. He’ll ride along with a driving school instructor as she has students use that street, and where she also points out “The Highest Point in Ohio” and “The Shortest Street in the U.S.”

“The History of Concrete” is random by intention, quirky by discovery. The film coincidentally arrives the same summer as a “comeback” film by the documentary essayist who invented the genre, Ross McElwee. He’s the fellow who made “Sherman’s March” back in the ’80s, a doc that started out as a “lingering legacy of the Civil War” in the South and morphed into a navel gazing account of other our filmmaker’s quest — with the assistance of others — to find love that lasts in the Reagan ’80s.

“Concrete” comes out in the Youtube/Instagram era when we’re all “stars” of our own videos. There are laughs in it. Wilson’s mania for videoing any business or street sign with “Butt” or “Tit” in it ironically lowbrow. His cute interviews, ducking onto indie film shoots (uninvited), sampling the “apartment as music venue” mania among his peers, joining the city’s lone “Gum Buster” for a cleaning session of gun removal from sidewalks, are both revealing and cute.

But Wilson’s wandering efforts to connect with a musician or music group worthy of a “rockumentary” before lurching back to New York’s “too much/too little” concrete problem (affordable housing vs. organized “NIMBYs”) and his constant dry, semi-detached/semi-ironic second-person narration compensating for the lack of focus by declaring the metaphor in all this is “everything’s impermanent” makes this an acquired taste.

So in Wilson-speak terms, “You” might like it more than I did.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: John Wilson, Michael Rispoli, many others

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Wilson. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:01

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Movie Review: “Practical Magic 2” Stops the Clock

Posted on September 13, 2026 by Roger Moore

No major motion picture as mediocre as “Practical Magic 2” deserves the emotional response this film sometimes generates.

It’s released 28 years after the original film, with its two stars — Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman –– having collected Academy Awards in the interim. They’re rejoined by their grandes dames supporting “aunties,” Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing, with the formidable Danish director Susanne Bier (“In a Better World,” “After the Wedding,” “Birdbox”) taking over behind the camera.

That earned them an impressive near-blockbuster opening weekend, so “Magic 2” feels like a celebration of sorts, especially for women who — like its stars — have survived a fraught couple of decades in a man’s business in a man’s world seemingly at war with them since the original film came out.

But if you have trouble remembering the “Practical” original, that’s because it’s forgettable. And the sequel doubles down on forgettability, an empty husk of an all-star extravaganza, a “Harry Potter” or “Hocus Pocus” for grownups.

The romance, source of a witch family “curse” in the first film, is downplayed to the point of nearly omitted altogether. The moment the stakes and plot turn towards “perilous” is laughably abrupt, one of the few real “laughs” in the damned thing.

And then the climax is slowly steamrolled by a parade of anti-climaxes, with any sense of a “graceful exit” beaten to death, even if there are plans for “Practical Magic 3.”

But don’t Kidman and Bullock look fabulous, returning to roles they first played in their ’30s? That seems to be the emphasis here, two 60somethings reprising versions of two sisters at war with their witchy heritage decades after they should have settled the matter, once and for all.

Sally (Bullock) found her “happily ever after” in “Magic 1” with Gary (Aidan Quinn), seemingly breaking “The Curse” that hung over the supernatural women of the Massachusetts branch of the Owens family. But Gary died between films, leaving the fussbudget librarian who finds “comfort in order” with two daughters, who’ve grown up to be a boy-magnet coed (Joey King) and a med student (Maisie Williams) about to be a full fledged doctor.

Sally’s dizzy, partying, don’t-love’em-and-still-leave’em sister Gillian, Gilly (Kidman) kept her vow not to do witchy things or tell Sally’s daughters about their bloodline. Gillian took the curse, that any Owens woman who falls in love is doomed to see that lover die, seriously. She never fell in love.

But the ageing spinster wiccans who raised them, Aunt Jet (Wiest) and Aunt Frances (Channing) are still around, still expressing concern. And Jet is having a birthday. It doesn’t matter that the town shuns them, save for the lovelorn or lovesick young women who seek the “weird sisters”‘ magical assistance. The three generations of Owens women can still have a party.

But that’s where we figure out what why they’re seeing ravens in town,. That’s what that “Raven” book Aunt Jet has been re-reading is for. That’s when we first see and hear the scarab, “The Deathwatch Beetle.” Someone in their ranks is doomed.

That death leads to blurted revelations to Sally’s daughters. And as daughter Kylie (King, of “The Kissing Booth” Netflix movies, “Bullet Train” and “Radium Girls”) is in the process of falling in love, she finds herself making a guilt trip to the Olde Country (Britain) to the family’s ancestral home to break the curse and save the life of her beloved.

Naturally Sally and by extension Gilly set off in pursuit. Slowly.

They’ll deal with hexes and curses and bad blood going back centuries and a naked professor (Lee Pace) who needs…reviving. And consulting.

That near-nude hex scene is as naughty or edgy as this romance novel piffle gets. Big questions hang around the periphery but are never addressed head-on in the story. Sally’s determined to never “like” again, much less “love.” Gilly’s issues are mainly with her sister’s denial of their “powers” and heritage.

The pacing is leaden, and then there’s the abrupt turn towards imminent peril, which is every bit as juvenile as the most inispid Harry Potter showdowns.

But King sells the pathos of young love, Kidman makes the most she can of the most fun character (the script is…lacking) and Bullock trots out her perfectly-preserved “While You Were Sleeping” sad and loveless face in most every scene.

The film seems structurally bound to serve the older leading ladies, leaving the younger ones (“Game of Thrones” alumna Williams has nothing to play) shortchanged and the elder stateswomen only a few moments to sparkle.

And yet for all that, it touches us here and there — even, for the briefest of moments, in that excruciating drawn-out finale.

As with her Netflixt film with Bullock, Bier is better than this material. The film has a fine sheen to it, and there’s gloss in the effects and in the makeup, which touches up what filler does its best to hide. But there’s almost nothing of substance here.

One would like to think our younger “older” stars would look to the example of Wiest, ageing with grace and beauty, instead of competing to see who can out-skinny or under-wrinkle their 20something supporting starlets.

But Nic and Sandy negotiated and bonded and worked out a deal and made a sequel to a film whose big screen success was magnified to the n’th degree on TV reruns and streaming into a fan favorite.

And if it’s no better than the first film — and in some ways worse — this feminine cast and crew still deserve this victory lap with their female fans. Let’s just hope the towering talents here all parlay this hit into better roles, ones they can sink their teeth into and not their magic wands.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, adult situations,

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Joey King, Maisie Williams, Dianne Wiest, Stockard Channing and Lee Pace.

Directed by Susanne Bier, scripted by Akiva Goldsman, Georgia Pritchett and Kelly Marcel, based on the novel by Alice Hoffman. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:10

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Movie Review: Djimon’s the Shuttle Bus Driver, Kodi’s “The Passenger” with a Bomb

Posted on September 12, 2026 by Roger Moore

“The Passenger” is a classic “two-hander,” a thriller that parks two characters center stage and piles on suspense in a battle of wits, agendas and brawn over the course of a long shuttle bus ride.

It stars Djimon Hounsou as a Somali immigrant driver trapped in his vehicle on a long haul with a lone rider (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who, it turns out, planted a bomb at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and is now apparently making his getaway.

Now throw away all of the promise of that premise, all the bickering over who will get blamed for the bombing if they get stopped — the young white guy or the Muslim — all the fraught potential over being a hostage of a killer who might kill again.

Because this Vadim Perelman adaptation of a Bennett Fisher play is pretty much dead on arrival. I’d call it a non-starter, but it sets up well, showing us a bit of the background of our put-upon driver and suggesting some mystery to the mad-eyed bomber.

It’s well cast, and the setting has built-in claustrophobia. The stakes couldn’t be higher, a terrorist who could strike again and a hapless working man who sees that, and the personal cost that picking up the wrong passenger has for him, his wife (Leigh-Ann Rose) and child.

“If I get pulled over I lose it all!”

But director Perelman, famous for “The House of Sand and Fog,” fails at almost every turn when it comes to building suspense.

The film practically pauses as our manic, rambling, drug-snorting 20something launches into his manifesto — his scatterbrained reasons for carrying out this heinous act against innocents. And it’s not like “The Passenger” was hurtling towards a nerve-wracking climax before that, or after it.

“I tried to do something good!” may be the silliest line in the history of unintentionally silly villain lines. The questioning of Hassan, “Ever think about going back?” (to Somalia) and “The whole ‘Blackhawk Down’ thing,” provokes eye-rolls as well.

There’s an awkward stop at a convenience store, a racist tirade by a customer and young Lloyd’s profane, over-the-top response, which is just the thing a hoodie-wearing bomber needs to be doing, seeing as how the authorities are already looking for the Somali driver with a backpack seen looking sketchy on CCTV cameras at the airport.

But whatever forward progress the narrative makes on this “I’ll pay cash” off-the-books ride to Chicago, the lack of urgency takes away.

Former child actor Smit-McPhee (TV’s “Disclaimer”) doesn’t dial up the mania to make his character feared, fanatical or even understandable as a fictional creation. Disenchanted “Lloyd” is just a collection of tics and self-aborbed, murky grievances.

Hounsou never phones it in, but we can feel his loss of faith in the screenplay in the middle acts, before the melodrama of the Big (not really) Finish.

Everybody involved has been better in other films and series. Which is why we acknowledge the failed screenplay and blame it for the dull movie that came from it and the less-interesting-than-they-need to be characters portrayed in it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Djimon Hounsou, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Carolina Campos and Leigh-Ann Rose

Credits: Directed by Vadim Perelman, scripted by Bennett Fisher, based on his play. A Vertical release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:33

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BOX OFFICE: “Practical Magic 2” stops “Spider-Man 9,” not much “Hope” for “The Uprising,” more for “Runner”

Posted on September 12, 2026 by Roger Moore

That Sandra Bullock can still pull’em in. Having fellow Oscar winner Nicole Kidman as co-star, with Oscar winner Dianne Weist in support and newbies Maisie Williams and Joey King isn’t hurting the seriously belated sequel to 1998’s “Practical Magic” either.

Nor are reviews, which are lukewarm, at best. I cared for it less than some.

I had wondered who all the middle aged folk were, gathered in the lobby of the cinema where I caught “The Uprising” Thursday. It was the Sandy/Nicole uprising, producing a healthy $4.7 million Thursday afternoon and evening take in North America for “Practical Magic 2.”

Deadline.com says that boosted Friday, with the Thursday/Friday take adding up to a $12.5 million opening day. That added up to a $30 million opening weekend. .

So the “opening weekend” of the Beast that Ate American Sport and feeds Gambling Addicts, far and wide — the NFL — didn’t ding it. :arg;ey fe,ale audience..

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is bowling along, adding another $8.3 million. Opening week of NFL season doesn’t hit the comic book film crowd. These are likely second or third time viewerss. .

“The Odyssey,” as I’ve noted before, is winning weekdays from “Brand New Day,” came in third this weekend with $7.4 million. The NFL opener lowered expectations from $8 million+. The film still surpassed “Jurassic World” as the biggest hot Universal has ever had $1.6 billion, worldwide, and counting.

Angel Studios’ “Runner,” a very violent “comic” thriller co-starring Owen Wilson and Alan Ritchson, aka TV’s Jack “Reacher,” exceeded expectations by clearing $6.4 million. Lot of “Reacher” fans out there.

“Coyote vs. Acme” landed in fifth place with a $6.2 million weekend.

“Buddy” earned $3.5 in its third weekend to manage a sixth place finish.

“Indisidious: Out of the Further” took seventh with #3.35 million.

The wider release of the Korean alien invasion thriller “Hope” didn’t do much, but $3.31 million landed it in eighth.. I ducked into it for a few minutes before deciding I might set aside the two and a half hours it takes to sit through it on some future date. Looks gonzo in the trailers, the chunk I saw looked slow and (perhaps intentionally) cheesy. The theater was empty, aside from me. Reviews haven’t been over the moon. But I’ll get to it eventually.

“The Uprising,” the latest from Paul Greengrass, a Robin Hood-ish period piece starring Andrew Garfield and Thomasin McKenzie, didn’t make much noise, $3.25 million — ninth place this weekend. I was alone in the matinee “preview” screening I attended.

“By Any Means” earned another $2.5 million, good enough for tenth place.

That kept an Oasis documentary, playing in the states on the off chance that they were bigger than they seemed on this side of the Atlantic, from cracking the top ten. Disney has “Oasis: Don’t Look Back in Anger,” for the Gen X crowd that cares. A big ’90s band whose leader married Gwyneth Paltrow, for a bit? It sold maybe 140,000 tickets. Nationwide. $1.4 million

Check back here as the weekend progresses as I will be updating these figures with fresh data Sat. afternoon and Sunday.

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Documentary Review: Cleaning up the Ocean, One Butt at a Time — “The Cigarette Surfboard”

Posted on September 11, 2026 by Roger Moore

“The Cigarette Surfboard” is an upbeat travelogue documentary and surf picture about surfers turning into activists for cleaner oceans, and the power of ADHD creatives.

Surfer and industrial designer Taylor Lane is the subject of the film, a Santa Cruz surfer who got sick of seeing cigarette butts in the water while he was paddling out and carpeting the beaches back on dry land. He pitched in on beach cleanups.

When the non-profit Surfrider Foundation sponsored an “upcycling” contest, challenging creative people to turn surf area trash into art, Lane set out to build a surfboard out of those very same cigarette butts.

Building a board that soaked up seawater and almost sank led to later “Ciggy Board” models, and then efforts to improve their “surfability” — not just floating and not soaking up water, but “turning” — good enough boards that pro surfers like Mikey February and Rob Machado and Caity Simmers might ride them and raise awareness wherever they do.

And that “hold a mirror up to the ways we’re harming the ocean” sent Lane on a deep dive into surfing activism in the UK, Hawaii, South Africa, Fiji and Ireland.

Santa Cruz filmmaker friend Ben Judkins came along for the ride, filming some spectacular surfing footage and interviewing scores of surfers, “shapers” (board builders), academics and activists all over the seaside world.

The novelty of it all is the film’s hook — with a whiff of celebrity (surfer/singer-songwriter Jack Johnson), dashes of the hard science about the toxic nature of everything “cigarette,” including the plastic butts, and pro surfers reacting to the beauty of the boards and the message inherent in them, the “storytelling” they do.

The film includes some “we all share one ocean” idealism in its brief history of surf culture and of British surfing activism that got the UK to finally treat all that raw sewage it had been dumping into the ocean for centuries.

We see the trash pit that the “paradise” island of Fiji has become, and follow efforts to get seaside towns to ban the sale of single-use filter cigarettes.

It can play as a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, and as self-serving — a creative with a gimmick surfing his flash of fame into a trip around the world, watching and sometimes surfing exotic coasts, from Fiji to western Ireland.

But optimism triumphs over cynicism as we sample Next Gen surfer argot and pick up on surfer idealism . The viewer can’t help but start to take Lane’s ethos to heart — that doing nothing isn’t optional, and that “don’t be afraid to be weird” is always in the origin story of innovation and culture-shifting change.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Taylor Lane, Jack Johnson, Hannah Bennett, Cliff Kapono, Mikey February, Steve England, Easkey Britton,

Credits: Directed by Ben Judkins A Kanopy release on Eventive.

Running time: 1:33

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Movie Review: Medieval Resistance that may have Inspired Robin Hood — “The Uprising”

Posted on September 11, 2026 by Roger Moore

I can’t say that one of my favorite filmmakers, Paul Greengrass, made the wisest decision in trying to make a famous “Off with their heads!” peasants’ rebellion the basis for the legend of Robin Hood.

The legend seems to date from assorted outlaws and knights who went rogue in the 13th century, and “The Uprising” is a fictionalized retelling of the events of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

But the director of “United 93,” “Captain Phillips,” “Bloody Sunday” and the best of the Bournes takes a shot at rendering this cherished piece of English history relevent to his (British born) times, and ours. And if your ears perk up when his script has someone use the word “deplorables” to describe those the elites tax and work to death, and another charactor growl “No kings,” that’s your clue.

Every so often, the Little People reach their breaking point and rise up. Such stories hearten the downtrodden in our darkest hours. And even doomed revolts have their idealistic origins, good reasons to “take arms against a sea of troubles.” The same goes for movies that overreach.

Andrew Garfield is a poor ploughman in the lowlands of Essex, a lost soul mourning those in the three graves of his hardscrabble farm. His wife and children died in the Black Death. Half the population of England perished with them.

That’s reduced the ranks of taxpayers and serfs, hitting the Church, the Crown and the Royal Council of advisors to teen King Richard II (Woody Norman) where they live. How can they finance wars in Scotland and France and live, dress and eat in the style they’ve grown accustomed to?

Tax businessfolk? No, they’ll “want a place at the table” of power for that, Treasurer Hales (Tom Hollander) warns. So, it’s the peasants again who’ve got to foot the bill. An archbishop (Stephen Dillane) can only cluck in mock sympathy.

When the Essex taxman — backed by chainmailed sergeants at arms — enforces rents and taxes demanded by the havesof the have-nots since all the land was divvied up by the Normans and “writ” in The Domesday Book, when he insists the Ploughman pay not only what he owes but also the “Death Tax” on his lost family, when his goons start molesting girls to see if they’re old enough to be taxed as adults, the protests of the local priest fall on deaf ears.

The Ploughman is the one who bellows “ENOUGH!” And when the goons come for him, they face his rage and eventually, his sharpened scythe.

The Peasants’ Revolt has begun. It spreads, with the Ploughman leading villagers who stuck up for him to the tax records holdings, torching the paperwork and killing anyone who stands in their way. “Heretic” priest John Ball’s release (Jamie Bell) from prison gives them a rabble-rousing motivational speaker. And soldier Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) gives the rebels just enough leadership to point them at London.

With the king’s army tied up in Scotland and France, “commons” will march on the city, “petition the king” and “save him” from his evil councillors.

“Up the commons,” they shout. The common men and women (Thomasin McKenzie plays a furious agitator who used to be a nun) will be heard and they will have their grievances addressed.

The queen mum (Katherine Waterston) may be concerned and seem sympathetic. But she’s most concerned for her callow kid with the crown, who is having nightmares, listening to tyrannical advice and plainly not in charge here.

Garfield is credible enough as this farmer who turns out to be awfully hard to kill, even when he’s facing professional fighting men. That’s the magic of movies, and the often-scripted power of “rage” to help one overcome any foe.

Jarvis is even more believable, and Bell works up a fine lather as a raging priest revolting against a heartlessly corrupt church, among other evils. McKenzie makes a nice zealot and Waterston gives us shades of “inscrutable” as the mother of a bratty mop top better suited to a boy band than a crown.

Greengrass utterly immerses us in this world of wood, thatch, oppression and mud. He taps into the working class appeal of this story, whose “politics” are as obvious and simplistic as they were in “Spartacus,” “Les Miserables” and in “Peterloo.”

As it would take the Brits almost another 300 years to break their monarchical addiction — with extreme prejudice and yet only temporarily — we know this story will take a turn towards a doomed poignancy. Ideals remain out of reach, snatched by ugly human nature and the determination of those with “the addiction of wealth” to maintain it.

But I’ll say this for Greengrass. He always serves up a thought-provoking ride. Even when the tale eyerollingly turns towards Sherwood Forest, I was thinking about the ancestral estate right across the road from ours, deeded to a Virginia family by “Mad” King George III well over 250 years ago, and still in their hands to this day, even though they haven’t lived on it or worked it in forever.

Chew on that and tell me “progressive” taxation is “fair” and that most people, “deplorable” or not, would think “ENOUGH” loud enough for the next spark of “Uprising” to break out.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Jamie Bell, Thomasin McKenzie, Woody Norman, Katherine Waterston, Stephen Dillaine, Tom Hollander, Sky Yang and Cosmo Jarvis

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paul Greengrass. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:06

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