Movie Review: “Carolina Caroline” and Her Man Oliver Rob their Way through the 1990s South

Posted on June 4, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Carolina Caroline” is a rigidly formulaic romantic thriller about a couple who meet as grifter-and-trainee and abruptly graduate from picking pockets and quick change scams to bank robberies.

It’s dogmatic to the point where any potential surprise is smothered out of it, starting with an opening scene narrative framing device that gives away who’s still on the lam after it all hits the fan.

Screenwriter Tom Dean follows the outline of a hundred “Bonnie and Clydes” and “Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry’s” before him. Director Adam Carter Rehmeir (“Snack Shack”) can’t inject much novelty or suspense into that, and manages only one nervy getaway amid the mandatory waypoints of such sagas.

But it stars “Ready or Not” queen Samara Weaving and “Strange Darling” demon Kyle Gallner, so we hold out hope for sparks that rarely fly and fireworks that never go off.

Caroline is a convenience store worker who picks up on the handsome stranger’s bit of short-change trickery with her boss, and that leads to a honky tonk pick-up and a midnight swim down’tha quarry in this corner of BFE, Texas.

Oliver (Gallner) asks her the Big Question straight off.

“What are you still doing here?”

Potential beauty queen or not, Caroline’s dreams are as limited as her possibilities. She’d love to “travel,” maybe go as far as South Carolina.

When he asks her to “go out on like 500 dates with me,” she counters by requesting that her philospher grifter to “teach me how to con.”

Thus begins a criminal odyssey across the early 1990s/early-2000s South — stealing from high end department stores and businessmen on trains, living big in nice hotels, eating in good restaurants and filling out wardrobes well beyond the means of the petty thievery they’re carrying out.

But if they want to up their game, they’ll have to swipe getaway cars because even 25 years ago, Oliver’s 1970 Chevelle was too conspicuous for any thief — petty or GTA or armed robber — to manage a getaway.

As the story is saddled with a “three months earlier” timeframe in the opening, we’re meant to buy into Caroline’s impulse-driving escalations in crime. Weaving’s performance, washed out and reduced to Daisy Dukes and boots and bare midriff-wear, doesn’t make that sale.

Gallner’s playing a 30something grifter who reads people and memorizes IDs and has figured out to “exploit flaws in a given system” by recognizing and preying on human flaws.

“Everybody lies. Especially to themselves.”

He can guess that lie and use it to his advantage. Caroline? She’s just Margot Robbie-distracting by birth.

Weaving loses the Oz accent but doesn’t replace it with a Texas one.

Little insights like sharing the “fear that we’ll end up like the parent that left” each of them in childhood aren’t deep.

Caroline’s devotion to her daddy (Jon Gries) is taken as a given, even as he lets her take off with a goateed stranger — from California, no less. And the family joke about “Ecuador” is so dull and uninteresting that it must be foreshadowing.

Kyra Sedgwick breathes some fire into this road picture with careless, sloppy bank robberies as a defiant barfly.

But this narrative is so worn and this variation on it so watered-down from the decades of genre pictures that preceded it that the filmmakers and actors have to convince us that “60 second” robberies are casually planned, practiced and carried out.

“It’s easy, right?” No, it isn’t.

And setting your movie in the pre-CCTV surveillance state/phone booth/no cell phones seen/stealable-with-a-screwdriver cars era doesn’t make it more plausible. Not in the least.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Samara Weaving, Kyle Gallner, Jon Gries and Kyra Sedgwick.

Credits: Directed by Adam Rehmeir, scripted by Tom Dean. A Magnolia Films release.

Runnin time: 1:45

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Movie Review: Travolta’s “Propeller: One-Way Night Coach” is One for the Ages — All Ages

Posted on June 4, 2026 by Roger Moore

Back in the good ol’days — the ’90s — John Travolta would love to get off the topic of “Michael,” “Pulp Fiction” or “Get Shorty” in interviews with film journalists like me and regale us with how utterly besotted he had been with his first flying experience, how that drove his passion for piloting and buying planes and airfield-adjacent luxury houses.

He didn’t even seem to mind having to move house when this or that development balked at him flying his Boeing 707 out of there on the way to locations.

Travolta would tell any journalist who asked that he was writing a kid-friendly book, “Propeller: One Way Night Coach,” based on his first flights as a child in old propeller driven airliners — cheap red-eye overnight treks with too many connections for your average jet age traveller to tolerate.

I remember picking up the book when it came out later in the ’90s — at an airport gift shop — and thinking “Well, that’s as cute as I figured.”

And now, decades later and trapped in the B-movie hell of his post “Gotti” career, Travolta’s turned that cute book into the most delightful, fanciful and colorful bon bon of a movie.

“One Way Night Coach” is a child’s fantasy of flight and flying the way it used to be — with pristine, uncrowded, futuristic airports, an early ’60s era of jets and prop planes with over-uniformed stewardesses in white gloves, the days “Back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham,” as Sideshow Bob memorably sneered on “The Simpsons’.”

It’s a fictionalized account of Travolta’s childhood about an only child (at least two Travolta siblings have bit parts in this movie) of a never-made-it/never-will actress/single-mom (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) who indulges her aviation-obsessed eight-year-old with a cheap cross-country overnight flight.

Little Jeff (Clark Shotwell) will revel in almost every Idlewild to Pittsburgh to Dayton to Chicago to Kansas City to Denver and Los Angeles minute. He strolls into the cockpit to meet pilots, charms the stewardesses and checks out the sleeping bunks on the TWA Lockheed Super Constellation, loving even the delays if not the Chicken Cordon Bleu he’s offered on legs of the journey that offer a meal.

And as he’s an observant child, he comments (Travolta narrates) on his 50ish mother’s vamping and posing, her choice of cigarettes (Newports) and drinks, the solo traveling men whose attention she pursues and earns.

“I was her best audience,” adult Jeff remembers of the mother who’d read him plays as bedtime stories and delusionally hopes that this trip to Los Angeles might be her “big break” even though she’s pushing 50.

“Hollywood called,” she’d explain about their overnight cheap flight arrangements to ticket agents and crew. “They told me to take the next flight!”

At every turn, Jeff meets or sees kindness — stewardesses who indulge his many questions and bump them up to first class on the mostly-empty planes, a captain who fixes his toy model of a Constellation, a mentally ill flyer who flips out but is calmed by a flight attendant who isn’t overworked and frazzled in jet-powered tin-can jammed with Joe and Jane Sweatsocks who think nothing of traveling in their pajamas.

Normally, I cringe at pictures this reliant on voice-over narration. I recoil from stars who populate their picture with Sandler etc. offspring. But “Propeller” is unfailingly sweet and never cloying.

Sure, it’s fictionalized. But if you’ve followed Travolta’s life and career, a lot of him is in this — his raptoruous engagement with flying, an indulged child who developed a taste for fine food and creature comforts, a mother who was his guiding star as an actor.

I get why there are less adoring reviews than mine floating around “Propeller.” It’s unfailingly sweet. Mom’s man-hunting is seriously dated. This TWA tale is decorated with Gershwin’s majestic “Rhapsody in Blue” — United Airlines’ signature tune. And Travolta’s been around long enough for recent generations to come up and not feel a connection to the “Saturday Night Fever/Get Shorty” star whose career has fallen off and life has been visited by too much tragedy.

But I’d hate to be seated next to anybody who doesn’t appreciate this adorable, pristine and nearly perfect aviation fantasy on any flight, much less an overnight one.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Clark Shotwell, Kelly Eviston-Quinnett, Ellen Travolta, Ella Beau Travolta, Olga Hoffmann and John Travolta.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Travolta, based on his book. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:01

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Movie Review: Radha and Roth and Ioan — “Seven Snipers,” One B-movie from Oz

Posted on June 2, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s always encouraging to see good actors continuing to get work after any “hot” streak that their careers gave them winds down. What’s unfortunate is the poor quality of the only projects with half-decent paydays that are on offer.

“Seven Snipers” is a B-movie thriller whose title tells the tale. Seven professional snipers take shots at one another, using all their stealth, guile and scope-shooting skills to stay alive. The finale in this Sandra Sibarras film is straight out of a C-Western or lesser samurai thriller — a long distance “snipe-off” to settle things once and for all.

Australian actress Radha Mitchell (“Silent Hill,” “Man on Fire,” “Melinda and Melinda”) is the anchor actor here. Even twenty years past her in-demand peak, she’s the draw that got this Australian thriller made, the best explanation for why Tim Roth and Ioan Gruffudd flew to an Oz vacation to wear the camo, tote rifles and talk tough.

“First you survive,” in this long-range murdering environment,” one growls. “Then you’ve got to live with yourself.”

Mitchell gets most of the best lines, as she’s the star — a long-retired single mom on a farm in BFE, Queensland. Her biggest problem has been maintaining discipline on her hot-to-trot teen (Annabelle Wolfe) who’d rather sneak off in a tent with her boyfriend than practice her archery or show up for school.

Then a stranger with an interest in Kris’s 130 hectare farm shows up and she sees right through him. She starts shooting and his last words confirm her suspicion.

“Long live The Dragon!”

I won’t ask “Who SAYS that sort of thing?” Because “Who WRITES crap lines like that?” (Andrew O’Keefe) is more to the point.

There was this guy from our heroine, Kris Hendrix’s past. He has “a grudge.” Now the long-retired “Voodoo Chile” (figure it out) shooter has to get “the old team” together for her and her daughter’s protection.

Father-and-son shooters (Damien Ryan and Charles Collier), a European (Bianca Wallace), a reluctant-to-get-involved professional (Pachero Mzembe) and the hardcase named “Milk” (Gruffudd) show up.

Because if The Dragon is breathing fire again and not dead as they thought, he”ll be tough to fend off. Tim Roth plays this killer with his usual never-let-us-see-the-wheels-turning professionalism.

Roth is the only player in the cast who looks like he’s handled a rifle before, even though Gruffudd never lets on this is a total novelty to him.

Watch the way young Collier carries and comports himself with a sniper rifle, holding the barrel like he’s aiming a milk pail. Mitchell doesn’t look natural with it, either. There was, one guesses, no military consultant involved with this one, nobody to tell the star to put her damned eye closer to the scope if she wants to see through it.

The “Ten Little Indians” nature of the narrative means we’ll see one shooter after another hit, go down and probably be taken out. The one novel scene O’Keefe manages is an impromptu field-autopsy/surgery.

Never seen that before — Radha Mitchell squishily poking around a dead comrade’s skull to “use the head wound to figure out Dragon’s position.” Caliber of the kill-shot, sure. But angle, distance, etc? Come on.

Mitchell and Wolfe have decent mother-daughter chemistry, as those are the best-written characters. Nothing says “teen hellion” like putting the runway-ready starlet on a motorbike.

But this is trash, and one can only hope Gruffudd and Roth got to see the sights on their off-days of this working vacay to Oz. Mitchell at least got to use her own accent and sleep at home after work.

They deserve better.

Rating: R, violence

Cast: Radha Mitchell, Annabelle Wolfe, Ioan Gruffud, Pachero Mzembe, Bianca Wallace, Damien Ryan, Charles Collier and Tim Roth

Credits: Directed by Sandra Sibarras, scripted by Andrew O’Keefe. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:28

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Movie Review: The “Pressure” of D-Day Weighs on Ike and his Weathermen

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Pressure” is the sort of , stoic World War II drama that Hollywood and Britain used to turn out in the days when the World War II generation was still going to the movies.

It’s built on a formula and never deviates from it, with “the war will be lost” stakes and egos and rivalries and histrionics suiting the situation. And this Andrew Maras film of David Haig’s stage play hits all the right notes thanks to a cast headed by Andrew Scott and Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, with Kerry Condon, Chris Messina and Damian Lewis in support.

All these intrigues, all this office politics and all this drama revolves around the weather — storms that may or may not be headed for the English Channel and which could, if Eisenhower’s dueling weather men guess wrong, derail D-Day.

While “the war will be lost” seems like an overstatement coming from one or two characters in the drama, “victory will be delayed” doesn’t sound as stark. But history would be even bloodier and messier has D-Day feels like a solid guess.

The invasion was to open the long-planned “third front” with the U.S., British, Canadian and other troops pushing towards Berlin from the West through France, with the Soviet Union pushing from the East and the Italian campaign grinding north from the South.

Scott plays Group Captain James Stagg, Churchill’s ace meteorologist, summoned by Ike the weekend before D-Day to cover all his bases and confirm the attack, set for June 5, 1944. Eisenhower had his own Cal Tech meteorologist, Irving Krick (Messina, terrific), a name-dropping Hollywood consultant who has called forecasts correctly for Eisenhower all over North Africa and the Mediterranean.

But Krick’s flippancy and “Gone with the Wind” “Burning of Atlanta” weather forecast anecdotes grate on the all-business Flagg. Krick spends his time looking at historical trends, “analogs” from the past to find a matching set of patterns to base a new forecast upon.

In this script, it sounds like Krick should be publisher of The Farmer’s Almanac, which similarly bases “forecasts” on historical patterns.

Flagg? “Get me the DATA,” he snips. As Eisenhower wants “certainty” out of the “one imponderable” about the greatest sea borne invasion in history, only “data” from weather balloons and reporting stations from Nova Scotia to Iceland, Ireland to ships at sea, will tell the story.

Krick has the inside track and an excellent track record. And he has the ear of Eisenhower’s trusted aide and perhaps lover, Kay Sommersby (Condon). The Irishwoman Sommersby is Ike’s gatekeeper. And all the prickly Flagg, who has left his very pregnant wife behind for this long-weekend of weather forecasting, can do is dismiss Sommersby and anybody who doesn’t take his opinion seriously.

Because as he reminds us and Ike time and again, there is no “certainty” about the weather. As Flagg sees looming Atlantic storm systems destined to produce high winds, rain and deep swells at sea, dooming the landings, Krick sees similar storms blocked by a similar Azores high, back in 1904 and 1925.

“In my experience,” Flagg almost sneers, “the weather never replicates its history!”

As anyone who hasn’t forgotten their history knows how this turns out, and remembers the actual date of D-Day, the drama has a preordained predictability about it. But Maras, who gave us the “Hotel Mumbai” terrorist attack historical thriller, teases out the inevitable well and his production team weaves fresh footage, digitally cleaned-up historical footage and CGI to give us a taste of the D-Day that Spielberg mastered in “Saving Private Ryan.”

Fraser, an actor just now hitting his prime, looks enough like Eisenhower in profile for the resemblence to work, and suggests a little of the “public” Eisenhower — steady, steadfast — but a lot more of the private one. This is Ike haunted by the possibility of failure and the losses that came from a D-Day rehearsal exercise just a month before. This Ike has a temper. He bawls out subordinates in front of others, absorbs insults from the arrogant poppinjay Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery (Damian Lewis, a tad too tall to play Britain’s favorite bantam rooster general) and relies on Sommersby to be his HQ team eyes and ears as well as access-granting gatekeeper.

Condon’s cagey, controlled performance makes us guess about the veracity of Sommersby’s alleged affair with her boss. This Sommersby is depicted as someone prone to trust gut instincts and personal interactions over methodology and science.

Messina is perfectly cast if you want to make the hustling Krick into your film’s cocky, glib villain. He gives a little color to a character sketched out as an archetype.

But Scott, TV’s “Ripley” and the sensitive heart of “All of Us Strangers,” does the heavy lifting here, a mortal man/weather man who must sublimate his fears at the fate of his pregnant wife and get on with the job of making the most important forecast of his life.

A movie that stands up for science in an age of science-denying charlatans is a blessing.

And this “true story” hews closely enough to the facts to play as history. The one jarring blunder I caught in the dialogue has someone (Monty, I think) refer to the long-awaited “fourth front” he wants to command. How “Band of Brothers” star Lewis let that pass his lips is a mystery. Third front, Monty. THIRD.

World War II seemed exhausted as subject matter some years back. But with much of the world flirting with the fake “strong man” appeal of fascism to solve personal and national problems, “Pressure” renews the importance and timeliness of this as subject matter.

Informed decisions made by rational people calling on the best and the brightest to give them fact-backed opinions and directions seems downright refreshing in an age of jack-booted charlatans, drug addicts and career criminals carrying out their crimes with a gullible public’s blessings.

And letting this mob control “history,” “facts” and the National Weather Service seems like a blunder we’ll be paying for soon enough, perhaps starkly enough to warrant its own movie when this latest cadre of Nazis is vanquished.

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon, Chris Messina and Damian Lewis.

Credits: Dorected by Anthony Maras, scripted by David Haig and Anthony Maras, based on Haig’s play. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:40

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Movie Review: Beware the “Backrooms” of Your Worst Nightmares

Posted on June 1, 2026 by Roger Moore

Here’s a thriller that Maurice Escher could have production designed, with Salvador Dalí decorating the sets and Stanley Kubrick behind the camera directing.

Not that Youtube phenom turned horror filmmaker Kane Parsons is the new Kubrick. But in turning his “Backrooms” found footage horror video series into a feature film, he and his production designer Danny Vermette (“Longlegs”) and art director Alan Derksen summon up not just cinematic horror imagery of the past, but of the most disturbing painters in the canon.

A visual essay in the sinister possibilities of a minimalist unknown becomes something deeper with nightmarish echoes of Heironymous Bosch and Dalí pasted on a yellow on yellow settings that could have been inspired by Mondrian.

This summer’s “Blair Witch Project” horror phenomenon is about a stressed, divorced furniture store owner who stumbles into an alternate reality by stepping through the walls of the basement of his bland ’90s surburban warehouse store.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, bringing the “real”) never seems to have any customers, which only adds to the bitter edge his drinking has taken on.

“Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire” is a badly-named “cheap particle board” furniture warehouse store which Clark tries to advertise with DIY commercials of himself dressed as a furniture pirate. The whole “pirate” or “sultan” branding doesn’t work and even his young dead-end employees (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) get that they don’t “get it.”

It’s only with his therapist (Renate Reinsve of “Sentimental Value” and “The Worst Person in the World”) that Clark gets into the reasons for his anger. He lost his house in a divorce to his perpetual law-student wife.

“I hurt people,” he confesses. “It’s just the way I”m wired.”

Role-playing the “big fight” that ended his marriage doesn’t help, and we wonder if published author Dr. Mary has a clue about how to get Clark “forging a new path” to better mental health.

The dude’s sleeping in his furniture store, after all. He’s got almost nowhere to go but up. But will he?

Something about this yellow wallppaper and yellowish carpet milieu of vast rooms, empty sections, cubicles with no one in them, wonky wiring and PA and CCTV systems gives him and us as viewers the creeps.

Poking around in the basement has him poking a wall because he hears something, and then freaking out when his arm and indeed his entire body go right through it.

Horror films that cast really good actors are the ones that manage the proper level of “This can’t be happening” shock and awe at what transpires. Clark absorbs the shock. Then he “explores” this beyond-the-basement-wall realm — mysterious piles of what looks like furniture, but “make no sense” as chairs or desks or what have you.

Half-buried manikin parts protrude, Dalí style, out of the floor. An advertising standee with a pirate on it chirps away greetings in a parade of languages. Walls recede into some pointed forced perspective and shafts and tunnels present themselves to Clark, who knows there’s someone or something in there with him. It’s just that he can’t help but come back.

Trying to explain to his therapist this “New York Subway System…massive” maze of rooms and corridors gets him nowhere. And rounding up his two employees to join him for this “expedition” to video what they find seems a mistake. It always is.

“Backrooms” is primarily a triumph of horrific tone, with a handful of grim and gruesome shocks to sate viewers who like their horror violent and bloody.

The look and the psychological mystery at the heart of it feed into the chill that sets in early and rarely leaves your mind. Horror conventions such as a character being snatched out of the frame and “Slenderman” like figures — and a dwarf — are tucked into this “Everything Everywhere All at Once” universe of an underworld.

The finale is entirely too conventional and pat to fit the general weirdness of all that’s preceded it. And as we ponder the puzzle what connects these people to that place — literal or mental — we have to consider what indie cinema icon Mark Duplass might be playing and what Reinsve is getting at as we see and hear her struggle to emote or even hit the right word emphasis in sentences in English.

But Ejiofor is the casting coup here, an actor who buys in and makes us join him as he utters even the most exhausted lines in horror — “Look, I know this sounds crazy.” Because it is. Until it starts to make sense, almost in spite of all the over-explaining that dominates the closing scenes.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve and Mark Duplass.

Credits: Directed by Kane Parsons, scripted by Will Soodik, based on the Kane Parsons video series. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:50

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Movie Review: Car Salesman “Breadwinner” turns Mister Mom Wannabe

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Roger Moore

Comic Nate Bargatze’s Hollywood studio comedy debut, “The Breadwinner,” is another “Mister Mom/Daddy Daycare” knockoff, a “Dad’s no good at kiddie caregiving” conceit that’s so moldy and out of date that the less said about this stiff the better.

But given the beatdown that Bargatze deserves (he co-wrote it) for creating this corpse, it’s worth recalling something the great comic actor David Alan Grier said about auditioning for “Seinfeld.” The pilot script “sucked.” True enough. But “This man can’t act” was the real reason Grier figured that “show about nothing” was never going to become a reality.

Bargazte can’t act. Not a lick. You stare at his flat expressions and look for signs of life behind those empty eyes and wonder how this ever got a green light. He’s Jim Gaffigan without the uh, “personality.”

Yes, but that didn’t keep Jerry Seinfeld from fame and fortune. So no sense putting one’s head in the oven about a bad review or two or seventy.

The movie Bargatze builds around his shtick has him playing “the top Toyota salesman in Greater Nashville,” Nate Wilcox, a married father of three girls “living the American dream.”

He’s married to creative and hyper-organized Katie (Mandy Moore) who keeps home and hearth together and three daughters (Stella Grace Fitzgerald, Birdie Borria and Charlotte Anne Tucker) healthy and happy.

Then one of Katie’s organizer ideas — the Starminder — gets her on “Shark Tank,” where her Big Idea might be worth the backing of the performative capitalist “stars.” If, that is, they can get past the “full time mom” problem of their potential CEO, and the “bozo” her husband comes off as when they drag him on camera — mouth full of donut — to see if he’ll pick up the slack.

One “How hard can it be?” followed by a “It isn’t surgery” and Katie’s in business — in South Korea, where they’ll manufacture the plastic do-dads.

Dad? He’s instantly over his head. He doesn’t know which schools his kids go to, has no clue about cooking, cleaning, laundry or how to open a parent-teacher “portal” to get progress reports from the girls’ schools.

“Katie, portals aren’t real.”

Ruined meals, “shortcuts,” insecurity about his place at work and a rigid schedule set up by his wife are Dad’s undoing. His kids freely admit “We’re kind of a lot.”

The sexism of the plot isn’t as grating as it might have been, and a big’ol Walmart plug mid-movie is as backhanded a slap at disposable consumerism as a lifestyle as America’s Biggest Big Box is likely to have ever signed off on.

It’s just that there’s nothing funny in any of this — cloyingly smart-aleck kids, “Shark Tankers” doubling down on mean without managing amuzing, buy-the-kid-a-pony gags, the works.

Even the incompetent roofer (Will Forte) dad hires is worth barely a chuckle.

Actors cast as random delivery guys and teachers show up and demonstrate the poor judgement of all involved when it comes to “But can he/she/THEY be funny?” Must have been some producer’s relatives.

Bargatze is just plain bad. But here’s Colin Jost of “Saturday Night Live” and Kumail Nanjiani (“The Big Sick” just as bad, showing off just how much time they’re spending in the gym these days and how little input either had on making a terrible script more tolerable.

Family friendly comedies are rare, but not so rare that there isn’t more than one idea about ways to make “Dad” funny.

“The Breadwinner” is downright embarassing, and not in a funny way. Not that it should end Bargatze’s career. Well, maybe the movie career.

Rating: PG

Cast: Nate Bargatze, Mandy Moore, Lori Greiner, Zach Cherry, Will Forte, Stella Grace Fitzgerald, Brett Cullen, Colin Jost and Kumail Nanjiani

Credits: Direted by Eric Appel, scripted by Nate Bargatze and Dan Lagana. A Sony Tristar release.

Running time:

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BOX OFFICE: The Youtube Business Model takes over — “Backrooms” Blows Up, “Obsession” Booms

Posted on May 30, 2026 by Roger Moore

Legendary screenwriter William Goldman, the guy who scripted “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Princess Bride” and “Misery” and who literally wrote the book on how Hollywood works and what to expect when trying to get a movie made, famously said this about the decision makers and the movies that they’d decide get made.

“Nobody knows anything.”

But what would Goldman make of a moviegoing weekend like the last one of May, 2026?

Two Youtube creators, with one taking a youtube series onto the big screen with actual movie stars, are dominating the box office and the movie conversation.

Skip by a lot of the conventional Hollywood paths to the green light. Create your thing and get it in front of the public. Then make your deal with A24 or Focus features from a position of strength and the confidence that you’ve already built audience and awareness — THEIR jobs, usually — and that you’ve got something people will want to see.

The alternate, horrific universe of the “Backrooms” of Chiwitel Ejiojor’s furniture store are the stuff of nightmares in Kane Parson’s intellectual property (4chan to Youtube to a Theatre Near You). And it is blowing up the box office model in a “Mandalorian and Grogu” summer.

This film, which A24 is disrupting the box office with, will clear $81 million on a non-holiday weekend. A lot of good reviews are helping it along.

The guy dreamed this up and started telling this story online as a teen. So? Film school, shmilm school.

“Obsession” has no name stars and good reviews and a young, “show me something new” audience and BOOM goes the box office.

The nightmare of a shy guy getting his “wish” and winning the attentions of his crush is on track to clear the $100 million mark for Focus, with a big piece of that going to online comic (“that’s a bad idea”) turned horror filmmaker Curry Barker. It’ll earn $26+ million this latest weekend, and skipped past the Disney “Star Wars” film spin off from the streaming series “Mandalorian and Grogu” mid-week as the better daily earner.

“The Mandalorian and Grogu,” merchandising be damned, will drop to THIRD place this weekend with a $25 million take. Critic-proof “content” or not, the writing may not be on the wall for worn out IP sequels and spinoffs like “Star Wars,” anything Marvel or “Scream” or “Final Destination” related. But the rewards of trying something new(ish) are back in the backroom Hollywood conversation.

Hollywood’s “content” obsession and milking IP “brand” entertainment like the streaming-driven “Mandalorian” is running up against “original ideas” and gettings its ass kicked. This is a real up is down moment for the mandarins of movieland.

“Michael” is still making bank out of whitewashing Michael Jackson’s career as King of Pop and will take in another $11.7 million for fourth. Bad reviews, the inconvient truths about Jackson’s freak show private life and later public stunts be damned, the faithful are honoring his sugar-coated and formulaic bio-pic.

Nate Bargatze’s journey to big screen comic icon has been rattled as the comedy “The Breadwinner” from Sony is on track to do a mere $7.5 million on its opening weekend, enough to crack the top five, but barely. Bad reviews aren’t helping.

And there’s a Brendan Fraser as Ike Eisenhower at D-Day drama “Pressure” that’s doing middling business and yet still may earn $5.7 million on its opening weekend for seventh place. Good reviews aren’t making much of a difference.

“Devil Wears Prada 2” falls out of the top five but adds another $5.9 in sixth.

I’ll be ducking into theaters for a marathon catch-up day, and I suggest you do the same. This is a turning point moment for an industry that has been stumbling around looking for novelty and any new sure thing that’ll get ticketbuyers up and out of the house. None of us want to miss that.

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Series Review: Nic Cage’s a Private Eye Ensnared in “Spider-Noir”

Posted on May 28, 2026 by Roger Moore

Nicolas Cage dons the hat, mask, leather and goggles and plunges straight into the Spider-Verse in “Spider-Noir,” the latest Marvel spin-off to earn a series treatment.

An appearance previewed way back in the animated “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” predicated on a 1930 or so version of the web slinger fighting crime and monsters in Prohibition Era New York, would hardly seem a natural fit for the 60something but well-preserved Oscar winner.

But who doesn’t love Nic Cage? Especially in the Comic Con classes?

Oren Uziel’s made a superhero series with “supers” — villains with powers — and many of the trappings of film noir — an exotic femme fatale, fedoras, trench coats and tommy guns, a mob boss who “runs this town” and corrupt officials who let him. Standing against them is the last man with principles, a former “hero” reluctant to get involved.

Naturally, he’s a private investigator, a “dick,” a “gumshoe,” a shamus or whichever nickname you prefer.

But “trappings” alone do not a film noir make. “Mortal Kombat” and “Lost City” screenwriter Uziel and his co-writers have no ear for “hard-boiled” dialogue or monologues — the kind gumshoes like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Ben Reilly, formerly “The Spider,” are preordained to deliver.

The dialogue here has anachronisms — “I ain’t tryin’ t’die in no PHONE booth!”

And the gimmick of being able to watch this series in bright, vibrant color or “film noir” black and white doesn’t play. Ask any cinephile who saw “Mank,” “Roma” or “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and they’ll recite chapter-and-verse why black and white celluloid and the lighting techniques of the 1940s don’t look like the simple “erase the color” flatness of digital cinema.

I watched most of the series in color, and that just makes the overly tidy soundstages and CGI recreations of “lost” 1930 Manhattan (Penn Station) look even more fake.

Throw in a few performances as colorless as the noir “Noir,” and you too will be comparing this to “WandaVision” and “The Penguin.” Because no way in hell is this in the same league with even B-picture noirs of the past.

Five years ago, The Spider ceased being New York’s savior. As Ben Reilly (Cage) narrates, he lost the woman he was going to marry and with her most of his interest in “getting involved” in Gotham’s problems.

That’s given the Irish mobster Finn Byrne, aka “Silvermane” (Brendan Gleeson) free rein.

But an attempt on the mob boss’s life sets events in motion ensnare Reilly, his sassy secretary (Karen Rodriguez), favorite kiddie pickpocket (Cary Christopher) and the lounge singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li) and tears at the very fabric of the city.

The arsonist who torched Silvermane’s mansion can turn himself into a flame, until he’s shot and killed.

And he’s not the only new “super” in town. A select few WWI vets seem to have these powers.

Reilly keeps The Spider under wraps as he takes assignments from this character and then that one, all trying to figure out the nature of the threat and who is backstabbing whom.

LaMorne Morris plays Robbie Robertson, the veteran reporter trying to get back on with the big newspaper where he used to deliver his scoops. He’s also pals with Ben, which gives him an inside track to the “monsters” among them.

Jack Huston plays the great love of Cat Hardy and a “super” whose name gives away his ties to this and every other Spider-Verse — Flint Marko.

And former child star Lukas Haas has the Elisha Cook, Jr. role, that of a mob functionary who may be as tough as he talks. Maybe not.

The narrative plods along from episode to episode, with one or two bits of action per every 40-50 minutes and maybe one laugh per installment.

The assorted screenwriters and the show runner struggle to supply “fan service” sequences — bits of fan-friendly casting and action and the like — and somehow give all this the grit and grim gravitas that putting “noir” in the title suggests. They fail.

Cage, entirely too old to be playing a WWI vet 12 years after the war ended, delivers fair value and seems to improvise a few “cool” takes to go with the digitally-assisted stuntwork of his stunt double.

“I guess I underestimated you.”

“‘Happens.”

Li Jun Li does her own torch song singing, which passes muster even if it’s as bloodless as pretty much every performance in this.

Listening to Gleeson’s 1930 mob boss explaining “entropy” to our private dick is one of a parade of eye-rolls that park this firmly in the realm of over-exposed comic book franchise “content” and not something that even measures up to the best of its contemporaneous super hero TV series.

In black and white or in color, “Spider-Noir” is basically a collection of gimmicks in search of a better story and writers who’ve seen “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep” and “Double Indemnity,” or more importantly HEARD them.

Rating: TV-14, violence, smoking, profanity

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Li Jun Li, LaMorne Morris, Karen Rodriguez, Lukas Haas, Abraham Popoola, Cary Christopher, Jack Huston and Brendan Gleeson.

Credits: Created by Oren Uziel, based on the Marvel comics. A Sony/Marvel release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: Eight episodes @ :42-:50 minutes each

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Classic Film Review: The Tragedy of Thatcherism as it Happened — “Looks and Smiles” (1981)

Posted on May 27, 2026 by Roger Moore

Finding love and then discovering there’s nowhere for it to go thanks to a contracting economy and government hellbent on “breaking” the working class is what Ken Loach’s very fine “Looks and Smiles,” a 1981 classic that offered the first signs of nostalgia for pre-Margaret Thatcher Britain, serves up.

It was Loach’s sixth film, full of the stunning naturalism of acting that doesn’t look like acting (amatuer cast) and a real world of unvarnished harshness and thick, untranslated “dee dars” working class accents. Scripted by Barry Hines, its story provides an apt vehicle — a “lost generation” in the making — for the political awareness that became a Loach trademark.

Not widely seen upon its release, viewed today “Looks and Smiles” provides a stark contrast to the glossy period pieces and Bond-inspired escape of the British cinema of the “Chariots of Fire” era. Today we can stream it at our pleasure and watch it with subtitles on to cut through the “nowt,” thee, thou” Sheffield accents of the cast.

We meet best mates Mick and Alan, played by screen newcomers Graham Green and Tony Pitts, as they’re facing the end of their academic lives and the beginning of adulthood.

They’re not above pranking each other or their friends with a “nicked” (stolen) motobike, as they’re young enought o outrun any copper. But Mick is starting the search for a job in the mechanical repair/engineering field and finding nothing available. Alan spares himself the trouble by enlisting in the army. Mick would, too, but his parents (Pam Darrell and Phil Ashkam) won’t hear his “Army’s the answer” complaints.

It’s the early ’80s, and the British Army is expending much of its energy, moral certitude and blood occupying Northern Ireland. Alan, at least, will find that out. The rest of the country saw industry after industry — manufacturig to mining — gutted by Margaret Thatcher policies without a lot of forethought or compassion.

Mick? He calls on businesses looking for work, applies for “the dole” (unemployment relief) and tries to stay focused, stay positive and not get discouraged.

“Why aren’t there any jobs,” he fumes at the employment counselor? What happens to “workers” when there’s “nowt work to do?”

A generation raised on disco but educated by punk was figuring out that even the limited horizons of their class-conscious underclass parents was going to be beyond their reach.

What can Mick say he does when they meet a cute “bird” (girl) at a club? “On the dole” and “livin’ with me parents.”

Karen (Carolyn Nicholson) has a job in a shoe store and appreciates Mick’s attention enough to treat when they go out to the movies. But she’s bristling at clueless parenting as well. Her single mum (Cilla Mason) has a new fella, and Karen doesn’t approve. If Mick has no prospects he’s not going to be much help getting her out of this situation.

Perhaps the father that fled shortly after his “declared redundant” layoff will take her in.

Loach shows us a stumbling courtship that doesn’t need BIG concerns to trouble its waters. Mick is clueless enough about women to not know how his thoughts of staying at the football match while she makes her own way home with a stomach virus will play.

But we root for the two of them, are charmed by her efforts to help him manage the math of a job aptitude test and wonder if his skill with motorcycles might be his ticket to ride and earn an honest living.

Alan, meanwhile, comes home on leave, picks fights in the club and leads Mick astray in all the old ways that they used to act out — breaking and entering, “nicking” a car. He’s been hardened by his first tour in Northern Ireland.

Most of the cast were amateurs making their screen debut, with “Looks and Smiles” Green’s only screen credit. He is damned near perfect in the part — with the “attempted mustache” of youth and die-hard reasoning that his youth, his muscle and knowledge of engines will take care of him for life.

The story’s arc sets us up for predictable let-downs, but Loach and Hines keep gently upending expectations. I love the way Loach leaves stumbled-over lines in the final cut, adding to the reality of it all.

The parents come off as a tad naive, but well-meaning. Dad’s about to be “made redundant” himself. But he’ll not have his boy enlisted and sent to Ireland.

“Look mate,” Mick’s dad lectures. “Until you’re 18, you’re under our control.”

Karen’s dad has his own dose of reality to dole out, and surprises us with his sympathy for Karen and Mick’s lot.

The film’s politics are subtle, until Mick’s “what do workers do when there’s nowt work” for them to do speech.

And the romance — tentative, chaste and charming — gives away the origins of the movie’s title. How do young women win the fancy of young men, in good times and bad?

With “Looks and smiles,” Chekhov wrote nearly a century before Loach’s film. And so they did and still do, no matter how rough the world they grow up in handles them, no matter how callous “their (elected) betters” treat them.

Rating: unrated, adult situations, fisticuffs, smoking, profanity

Cast: Graham Green, Carolyn Nicholson, Tony Pitts, Cilla Mason, Arthur Davies, Pam Darrell and Phil Askham.

Credits:Directed by Ken Loach, scripted by Barry Hines. An ITC Entertainment release on Tubi, Apple TV, Amazon, other streamers.

Running time: 1:44

Rating: unrated, adult situations, fisticuffs, smoking, profanity

Cast: Graham Green, Carolyn Nicholson, Tony Pitts, Cilla Mason, Arthur Davies, Pam Darrell and Phil Askham.

Credits:Directed by Ken Loach, scripted by Barry Hines. An ITC Entertainment release on Tubi, Apple TV, Amazon, other streamers.

Running time: 1:44

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Documentary Review: Sate your Bond Appetite with Music — “The Sound of 007”

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Roger Moore

With the overdue annointing of a new James Bond coming any day/week/month or year now, those hunting for a 007 fix can be excused for tapping their watches and glowering at MGM/Amazon, which will be producing and releasing it. Eventually.

But that’s reason enough to watch and listen to the vicarious thrills provided by the iconic music of the 60+ year-old series.

For years, I’d keep the James Bonds’ Greatest Hits CD in my car for road trips. And over the decades, I’ve chatted up everybody from Shirley Bassey, Rita Coolidge, Simon LeBon, Sheena Easton to composer Marvin Hamlisch (“Nobody Does it Better”), and Bonds Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and and producer Barbara Broccoli about the music that became, early on, a signature of the British spy thrillers.

“The Sound of 007” is the one documentary that rounds most of them and many others up to talk about the happy accidents and inspired choices that created and recreated assorted Bond themes and the ways rock stars and pop singers craved the chance to make a musical statement in the movies.

Here’s Michael Caine recalling a ’60s stretch where he roomed with the most important Bond composer, John Barry, and got to hear the signature musical themes of the series before anybody else.

U-2 punched-out a rough draft of “Goldeneye,” insisted Tina Turner was the only one who could sing it, and it became one of many picks for “the most underrated” title tunes. George Martin produced Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die,” brought the tape to the tin-eared co-producer Harry Saltzman, not a “rock” fan, who kept asking “Who should we get to SING it? What do you think of Thelma Houston?”

Simon LeBon and John Taylor of Duran Duran relish getting the call to do “A View to a Kill,” the best New Wave Bond theme. Because if they’d been asked to do “Quatum of Solace” “nothing RHYMES with ‘Solace’…except for BOLLOCKS,” LeBon cracks.

Radiohead wanted to do one in the worst way, and Daniel Craig — a fan — was down with that. They did two tunes, one recorded before the request that they pitch a song for the then-upcoming film, another downbeat one that didn’t come in soon enough.

Amy Winehouse took a meeting with Barbara Broccoli and others and was interested, but too broken and broken hearted to come to terms with the assignment.

Hamlisch and McCartney revel in how quickly they whipped up their instant classics.

And Bond villain Rami Malek complains that Queen never got to do a Bond tune. Of course.

We see and hear legendary film and TV composer Hans Zimmer in the recording studio, working out ways to incorporate the Bond themes and the hummed and sung melody of the title tune of “No Time to Die” by Billie Eilish into the score.

Not every song or every film is covered. But the singular Shirley Bassey is here to remind us of the theatricality of her singing (and live performances) of “Goldfinger,” the song that set the Bond title tune standard, and others sing the praises of her under-rated and slinky “Diamonds are Forever” turn.

Sheena Easton, Jack White, Nancy Sinatra and Tom Jones talk about the prestige of being offered such a chance, and Jones remembers hitting and holding “THUNDER-Baaaaaaaaaaaal” so long he almost passed out at the mike.

It’s all good and informative fun — breaking down the Indian, Caribbean and Middle Eastern rhythms, the origins of Monty Norman and Barry’s contributions and the importance of horns in the best, “Rule Brittannia” “Swinging ’60s” tunes, which made those films time capsules and yet timeless.

And as we’re not getting a new Bond or Bond film any time soon, clips of great scenes and the great tunes of “The Sounds of 007” will have to do, for now.


Rating: TV-14, nudity, some profanity

Cast: Shirley Bassey, Sheena Easton, Jack White, Barbara Broccoli, Billie Eilish, John Barry, Naomie Harris, Nancy Sinatra, Sam Mendes, Hans Zimmer, Thomas Newman, Michael Caine, Rami Malek, Marc Forster, Cary Joji Fukanaga Lulu, Paul McCartney and Daniel Craig.

Credits: Directed by Mat Whitecross. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:28

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