Movie Review: “The Sheep Detectives” hunt for Suspects when their Shepherd is Offed

Posted on May 8, 2026 by Roger Moore

I can’t say much for the plot of “The Sheep Detecives,” a children’s murder mystery about talking, crime-solving sheep from those sheep-and-murder mad Brits. The “murder mystery” isn’t particularly mysterious and its solution leaves a lot to be desired.

And for a kids’ film, the sheep jokes that land are few and far between.

But there’s a serious subtext or two tucked in this tale of a devoted shepherd (Hugh Jackman) who dies under mysterious circumstances, with his generally dim, in deep denial flock the only chance his killer might be brought to justice.

Screenwriter Craig Mazin wrote much of TV’s “Chernobyl” and plenty of “The Last of Us” episodes, and he gently leans on questions of life and death and how sheep might face the reality that they don’t just “become clouds” when they pass on.

And give credit to director Kyle Balda, who counts a “Minions” and “Despicable Me” as well as the Dr. Seuss enviro-parable “The Lorax” among his credits. He gets pathos out of a movie with CGI sheep and dogs, no easy task.

Jackman plays shepherd George, a bit of a curmudgeon in the tiny hamlet of Benbrook (Surrey, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinhamshire provided locaions). He shuns church but tolerates the vicar (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith). feuds with a fellow shepherd (Tosin Cole) and despises the local butcher (Conleth Hill).

But he dotes on his sheep — running his small farm from a parked caravan (camper trailer), reading murder mysteries to his flock by night.

“They’re all special,” he writes/narrates in a letter. But Lily? She’s the smartest. Lily, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is the one who can always guess “whodunit” from these formulaic stories they’re read.

But one dark and stormy night, George dies. He’s found in the pasture, and Mopple (voiced by Chris O’Dowd) has to explain to Lily that he’s not “playing a game” or sleeping. He’s dead. She may be the smartest, but Mopple is “the wisest.” He’s the one who remembers everything the sheep decide is too unpleasant to face and recall themselves.

As the old ram Sir Ritchfield (Patrick Stewart) notes, “Sheep are not meant to remember such things.”

The local human cop (Nicholas Braun) may be nobody’s idea of a Miss Marple or Inspector Morse. It’ll be up to Lily to convince dopey Constable Tim that this was a murder and who the best suspects might be.

That pastor and other shepherd and butcher are on the list. Hotelier Beth (Hong Chau) was sweet on the shepherd and resented the scented letters he was sending to some woman named Rachel.

And then Rachel shows up, with George’s biting and brittle big city attorney (Emma Thompson) in tow. It turns out Rachel was the man’s daughter and stands to inherit a lot.

Constable Tim and cub reporter Elliot (Nicholas Galtizine) will need some prodding by their wooly helpers if this killer is to be caught.

The narrative trots through the tired tropes of the genre — “The killer always returns to the scene of the crime!” — without enough wit to compensate for the tedium.

The sheep — voiced by everyone from Regina Hall to Brett Goldstein and Bryan Cranston — can be funny. But this is no “Sean the Sheep” animation. Thompson’s cutting remarks earn more grins than all the sheep jokes put together.

Cranston voices Sebastian, the reclusive dominant ram in this flock, a bitter survivor who knows more about their fate than the average sheep could bear.

“Go back to your hay and dandelions and your naps” is his advice. Sebastian drolly explains church to his flock as a place where humans believe God, who is both a “lamb” and a “shepherd,” dwells.

The film is sweetest when the characters touch on death, the impermanence of life and the role memory plays in keeping dead loved ones alive.

But anyone who comes expecting funny folks Louis-Dreyfus, O’Dowd,” Stewart, Cranston and “Ted Lasso” veteran Goldstein to serve up ovine wisecracks and wit will be sorely disappointed. And treating kids to this downbeat dramedy/”mystery” has a whiff of forcing them to watch “Matlock” or “Murder She Wrote” re-runs with grandma.

Rating: PG, death and the afterlife, or lack of it, are discussed

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Hong Chau, Nicholas Braun, Tosin Cole, Molly Gordon, Nicholas Galitzine and Emma Thompson, with the voices of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chris O’Dowd, Bryan Cranston, Regina Hall, Brett Goldstein and Patrick Stewart.

Credits: Directed by Kyle Balda, scripted by Craig Mazin, babed on a novel by Leonie Swan. An MGM/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:49

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Netflixable? The “Son-in-Law” — His Corrupt Rise and Fall

Posted on May 5, 2026 by Roger Moore

Movies like “Son-in-Law” force the viewer to ponder the difference between “confused” and “confusing” narratives.

Critics use “confusing” when we’re willing to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt about tangled and unconventional plotting. “Confused” puts the blame squarely on whoever cooked up this muddled, meandering mess.

“Son-in-Law” is the tale of the rise and fall of a Mexican American — born in San Diego, sent to Mexico to live with an aged uncle for the “discipline” the old man might pass on — who thinks big, marries money and entangles himself in the corruption often associated with Mexico’s narco-politics.

“El Yerno,” as it is titled in Spanish speaking countries, begins in the fictive present, when it all comes bloodily crashing down on Attorney General José Sánchez (Adrien Vazquez). Then it bounces back to 2019, when things started to go wrong, then back to 1985 when the eager-to-fit-in kid took his first chance at impressing a girl by bringing drugs to her birthday party, and then we jump to “20 Years Later.”

This all happens in the first seven or eight minutes. We barely have time to get used to an actor of one age before another leaps into the role, and making heads of tails out of any of it announces itself as the problem that smothers this picture in the cradle.

“Ten years later” and “three years after that” are to come as we see a young man with a passion for transportation — he drops out of law school to drive his uncle’s ancient VW taxi — who sleeps with the sister of his best friend, the senator’s son.

When José gets Lucia (Verónica Bravo) pregnant, Jose finds himself the voiceless “executive vice president” of the family’s bus transit company, the poor stepchild to their shipping empire. He spies the corruption, cozies up to a cartel kingpin, El Lobo (Jero Medina) and finds his way to power by flattering and bucking up his all-powerful in-laws’ political enemy (Rodrigo Virago), literally driving him to power.

The movie, in Spanish and English, struggles to juggle its dispirate elements, losing track of the central anti-“hero’s journey” from working class cabbie to Transporation Minister of the fictional state of Albacruz all the way to Attorney General and perhaps beyond.

He gets that last title because he’s the only one “stupid enough to take the job” in a state run by three warring cartels. José is cynical enough to play the game as corrupt “peace maker,” and the implication is that he’ll cheat, lie, steal and fake assassination attempts when it suits his purposes.

Maybe the best reason for the faked attempt is getting his wife and daughter out of the country by convincing them of “the danger.”

We see the story from José’s point of view, but we never know where we or the movie stand with him. He’s in prison, cooperating with (American) authorities, turning the tables on his in-laws, manipulating his wife, conning assorted cartels and getting things done due to native cunning.

But his daughter’s quinceanara? That’s another matter altogether.

The most famous credited screenwriter here is James Schamus, who has made a mint out of scripting “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman” and “The Wedding Banquet,” and then presiding over remakes of these Ang Lee classics for other cultures and other audiences. He also wrote Marvel’s first crack at “Hulk,” and even though the Mexican co-writers have credits like “This is Not a Comedy” and “Technoboys,” let’s assume this was largely a mess of Schamus’s making.

Not fair, probably. He’s not working with Ang Lee this time and even though director Gerardo Naranjo’s best credit, “Miss Bala,” was 15 years ago, Schamus took the money and kept his name on the credits.

Whoever is primarily to blame, “Son-in-Law” starts out confused and stays confusing almost to the can’t-come-soon-enough closing credits.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Adrien Vazquez, Jero Medina,
Verónica Bravo, David Gaitán and Rodrigo Virago

Credits: Directed by Gerardo Naranjo, scripted by James Schamus, Gabriel Nuncio and Aleandro Aljete. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:43

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Movie Review: A Period Piece as Dated as its Period — “The Choral”

Posted on May 4, 2026 by Roger Moore

The writing and directing duo who brought “The Madness of King George (The Madness of George III),” “The History Boys” and “The Lady in the Van” first to the London stage, and then to the screen skip the whole West End part of the equation for “The Choral,” a World War I homefront drama about art transcending politics and nationality and sexuality.

Playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett’s script grapples with a lot more than that in this quaint and overreaching but sometimes quite moving story.

It’s about a (fictional) working town’s chorus and the choirmaster that The Choral’s sponsor, an industrialist who fancies himself a better baritone than he is, hires to take over for their next oratorio.

That choirmaster is the exacting Dr. Guthrie, played with sympathy and almost self-destructive resolve by Ralph Fiennes. And what factory-owner/alderman Duxbury (veteran character actor Roger Allam) and his singing/politicking mate Fytton (funnyman Mark Addy) and the gossips of town fret about is the fact that Dr. Guthrie spent years of his career in Germany “by CHOICE!”

It’s 1916, and patriotism is still the dominant emotion in a populace not yet shocked and numbed by the horrendous human cost of World War I. Any man who celebrates German composers and culture and art is suspect.

The fact that he doesn’t prefer the company of women is another matter altogether.

But when the choirmaster who was to guide the troupe through Bach’s “The Passion of St. Matthew” enlists to “do my bit,” this chorus is in a fix. Guthrie, with a trusted pianist (Robert Emms) in tow, will have to do.

Bach was German, Guthrie points out in more than one argument with Duxbury & Co. Eventually, he turns their jingoism around on them to pursue permission to do a more modern and more British choral work, Sir Edward Elgar’s “The Dream of Gerontius.”

No, I’ve been to and recorded choral concerts and worked in classical music public radio for years and I’ve never heard or heard of it either.

The conceit Guthrie and his ensemble come up with is to alter the oratorio’s poetic and symbolic intent to one that suits the moment — a horrific war and its grim cost to those young men fighting it.

But first they’ve got to get through auditions, round up undrafted male factory workers as basses and baritones. They also contend with the very real but also melodramatic lives of working class folk who sing on stage or for the Salvation Army (Amara Okereke), pine (Emily Fairn) for a lover missing in action (Jacob Dudman) while aware of the attentions a fellow chorus member (Taylor Uttley) and the like.

Socialist politics, homophobic rumor-mongering, the dread of the draft or eagerness to “serve” and a small city sex worker with a patriotic heart of gold all enter the fray.

Simon Russell Beale steals his scene as the grand and “uniformed” Elgar, “the greatest living English composer,” who drops in to see how his least successful choral work is faring in this outing. He charms the lovely young Black soprano (Okereke) whose voice stands out in the cast, but also betrays his own myopia about how he wants his work produced.

The film’s oh-so-delicate treatment of what used to be poetically labeled “the love that dare not speak its name” (homosexuality) is emblematic of “The Choral’s” main shortcoming.

Bennett & Co. grapple with several subtexts, subplots, politics and “issues” and never get a grip on any of them. The treatment of the gay subtext is so delicate as to make this play like a film dancing around that subject back in the less “out” 1980s.

The story arc of building up to “The Big Show” is so formulaic as to feel trite. The delicate treatment of the assorted subplots dooms almost all of them to an unsatisfying conclusion.

Fiennes is fine, but even his performance leaves us craving more than the script has him give.

Charming romantic threads collide with dissonant ones and in the end, little seems resolved even in subjects as black and white as “War is Bad” and “Prejudice is ignorance.”

It’s a grand looking production and a well-cast, well-acted and high-minded film. But Hytner and Bennett have conjured up a Big Show and an Important Statement, and so cluttered the narrative that they lose track of which statements they’re serious about making.

Rating: R, profanity, sexual content

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Roger Allam, Amara Okereke, Mark Addy, Roxanne Morgan, Emily Fairn, Alun Amrstrong, Jacob Dudman and Taylor Uttley.

Credits: Directed by Nicholas Hytner, scripted by Alan Bennett with contributions by Stephen Beresford. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:53

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Movie Review: A Stand-up Comic’s last “line” of defense — “Is This Thing On?”

Posted on May 4, 2026 by Roger Moore

The trailers to “Is This Thing On?” had me hyped to catch it during its awards season run.


Will Arnett, one of the funniest actors to hold a SAG card, playing a midlife crisis character who copes by trying his hand at stand up? A movie directed by and also-starring Bradley Cooper? Oscar winner Laura Dern as the wife our would-be stand-up is letting get away?

But you could guess why the film instantly vanished from “For your consideration” the moment its brief and limited theatrical run (which led to me missing it in theaters). The “tell” was in the stand-up scenes sampled in the trailers. And the dead give away is the title, that old stand-up’s line about a joke or comic bit that flopped, blaming the sound system.

“Is this thing on?”

Arnett was never a stand-up comic. Nor was Cooper. And these two co-wrote the script (With Mark Chappell coming in to, we guess, “joke it up?”).

Almost nothing in the many stand-up scenes that show our angsty hero, Alex Novack (Arnett) trotting out his and his wife’s (Dern) marital woes, failings and the like plays as funny. Cutting to eager and growing crowds’ laughter at this material is a lie. Watching Alex rise from “open mike” sessions to paid gigs with set after set staggering through awkward pauses, confessions and the like is not a viable or realistic rising career arc.

And that mutes the impact of everything else in the film — the couple struggling to break up or make up, the advice from comic veterans (Amy Sedaris, Chloe Radcliffe, James Tom, Reggie Conquest), the “straying,” the dopey actor bestie (Cooper) finally getting a big break on a Western series and the caring parents (Ciaran Hinds, Christine Ebersole) who blame their son for letting Ms. Right get away.

More’s the pity, as Cooper manages to wring a lot of sensitivity and “feels” out of this family dynamic — a drifting, “lost” husband and father struggling to find himself, his place in the marriage and his standing with wife and their kids, somebody who could use a little therapy and decides airing his failings on late late night comedy club stages.

That sweet streak helps but never prevents the narrative from becoming an unwieldy jumble as Alex talks on stage about sleeping with other women and his wife is meant to be tempted by a longtime client, inexplicably played by footballer/pitch-man Peyton Manning.

At some point, Alex’s wife and his dad finally get around to checking out his set. Which is revealing, but never ever “funny.”

Cooper’s not a bad director. But this material and this milieu evade him. All that research he did into Leonard Bernstein and he couldn’t glean more from his stand-up visits than this? Maybe watch Seinfeld’s brilliant documentary about the work and the fragile, brittle and defensive people who struggle to do it, “Comedian?”

Arnett’s funny. No doubt about it. But he needs material to work with, and “Is This Thing On?” doesn’t deliver it.

Rating: R, drug use, sexual references, lots and lots of profanity

Cast: Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Bradley Cooper, Andra Day, Amy Sedaris, Sean Hayes, Christine Ebersole, Peyton Manning and Ciaran Hinds.

Credits: Directed by Bradley Cooper, scripted by Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett and Mark Chappell.

Running time: 2:01

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BOX OFFICE: “Devil Wears Prada 2” opens huge, “Michael” Sticks Around, “Super Mario” and “Hail Mary” still Drawing

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Roger Moore

I was overseas this past week, and I couldn’t help but notice that on every flight, the personal entertainment screens were filled with passengers watching “The Devil Wears Prada.”

Twenty years, an Anne Hathaway Oscar and a Stanley Tucci cancer scare later, the sequel owns the first weekend in May at the box office, and long may they reign. At least until a “Star Wars” or comic book or video game adaptation comes along to push them aside.

“The Devil Wears Prada 2” will have cleared $77 million by midnight Sunday. Reviews have been kind, if not exactly generous. But a romance for adults with lots of beloved stars (It’s OK to love Anne Hathaway again, apparently) winning a “summer” weekend at the box office and clocking over $80 million? That’s reassuring.

The critically battered and morally less defensible “Michael” cleared $54 million on its second weekend. That’s a 44% drop, pretty good for a movie about a child star turned superstar, abused kid turned pedophile.

Both films are huge hits overseas.

“The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” added another $12 million as it clears the $400 million mark, domestically.

In fourth place, “Project Hail Mary” added $8.5 million to its running $300 million since opening count.

A Neon horror release starring Adam Scott, “Hokum,” did $6.4 million on its opening weekend, good enough for the Top Five and a reminder that in today’s cinema, it’s go blockbuster or go home.

The new critically derided “Animal Farm” is in sixth — $3.4 million.

Lee Cronin attaching his name to the title of “The Mummy” only added up to a $2.23 million seventh place on its third weekend. It will clear the $30 million mark by next week, and not much more than that all in.

A new distributor/new thriller release called “Deep Water” made only a $2.15 million splash, good enough for eighth.

Sony/Crunchyroll’s latest anime release, “That Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime: The Movie — Tears of the Azure Sea” may barely clear a $million. That ungainly title didn’t help.

And the romantic thriller “The Drama” is still in the top ten, almost adding another $million as it crawls towards the $50 million mark.

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Movie Review: A Romantic Melodrama in a Minor Key — “Two Pianos”

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Roger Moore

The great ones make it look effortless, with their mere presence in a role affirming the story’s unimpeachable reality.

Charlotte Rampling started her career in the ’60s, came into her own in the ’70s (“Farewell, My Lovely”) and by the early ’80s (“The Verdict”) any sense of artifice had vanished from her performances.

Her subtlety, unhurried timing and understated performances invite us in, getting across the verisimilitude of every classic character from Dickens or Chekhov, making us come to her and believe her as a Russian spy trainer in “Red Sparrow,” callous abbesse or inscrutable conjure woman of “Dune.”

We see her play with sensitivity and the assurance of a legendary Chopin concert pianist in “Two Pianos.” We don’t need to see her fingers soulfully manipulating the keys, but we do. Her eyes and expressions have already made the sale.

Rampling never strikes a false note, even if the multi-handed and frankly melodramatic script of Arnaud Desplechin’s (“My Golden Days,” “King and Queen”) latest, has its atonal and dischordant moments.

The screen legend plays the aged mentor of a once-promising pianist who returns from teaching in Japan to join her for what she’s decided will be her “farewell” concerts.

Mathias (François Civil, D’Artagnan in the recent French “Three Musketeers” movies) is the brooding sort, devoted to his demanding, self-described “monster” of a mentor Elena and to his long-suffering agent Max (Hippolyte Girardot) but someone who walked away from it all to teach.

He’s barely renewed both acquaintances when a chance encounter with a former lover (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) makes him faint and her flee the scene of the fainting.

As Lyon isn’t a gigantic city, he is later haunted by the sight of her little boy, a dead ringer for Mathias at age eight.

We start to get a sense of why he says (in French with English subtitles) “I broke my life in two.” The imperious Elena’s orders that he “focus” and Max’s pleas that this “full house, cloaked in contempt” that awaits him means he has to be good enough to “crucify them” will be ignored as fragile Mathias crawls into a guilty bottle or three.

The sensitivity of the performances adorn this coincidence-riddled romance with some magical moments in between the eye-rolling turns of the plot.

A sudden trauma, a Jewish funeral, misguided sex, a concert that may or may not come off and the bizarre suggestion there might be a happy ending in all this messiness are folded into a scenario that is far less convincing than the actors starring in it.

Civil, a composer and actor, looks comfortable at the keyboard even as Mathias struggles with guilt, the knowledge of unfulfilled potential and hangovers when he is supposed to perform.

Tereszkiewicz struggles to master the script’s tricky demands of playing a flighty woman ill-prepared for reopening old emotional wounds or facing new ones.

But old pros Girardot (“The French Dispatch,” “Mama Weed”) and Rampling renew the tale’s connection to reality and our commitment to “Two Pianos” every time they join a scene.

It may be straight-up melodrama, from its lone, corny, over-explaining flashback to the cliched drunk tank our hero finds himself in to the grim hysteria of an ambulance ride. Desplechin’s film still strikes enough of the right notes to be entertaining.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: François Civil, Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Hippolyte Giradot, Jeremy Lewen, Alba Gaïa Bellugi, Anne Kessler, and Charlotte Rampling

Credits: Directed by Arnaud Desplechin, scripted by Arnaud Desplechin, Kamen Velkovsky, Ondine Lauriot dit Prévost and Anne Berest. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:55

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Movie Review: Make “Animal Farm” Great Again?

Posted on April 23, 2026 by Roger Moore

George Orwell’s parable of totalitarianism earns a Trump era updating in a new animated “Animal Farm,” this one backed by Angel Studios and not the CIA.

Actor turned “Venom” sequel director and the one-and-only “Gollum” in J.R.R. Tolkienland Andy Serkis and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller “(“Bros” and TV’s “Platonic”) take a big swing at Orwell’s tale, and a big risk.

Their film is about the unjust trap of consumer capitalism, cult of personality politics and the same human foibles that Orwell always warned us about in our “leaders.” And releasing it on May Day just underscores that “Animal Farm” was never a condemnation of socialism, despite 75 years of conservative spin.

It doesn’t all work, and some key elements are lost any time you mess with a classic plot. But if there’s an agenda in this “Farm,” it’s that good but misguided people (animals here) have to admit they’ve been had before their deeply-flawed, criminally cruel idols can be brought down. And calling out their stupidity is no way to lead, either.

The trouble on Manor Farm isn’t just animal cruelty and animal enslavement by drunken abusive Farmer Jones (one of a couple of charaacters voiced by Serkis). The bank is seizing the property over the mortgage he can’t pay.

That’s the last straw for the animals there, with Snowball (Laverne Cox) the pig figuring out that the livestock are being rounded up for slaughter and not “a vacation,” as simple workhorse Boxer (Woody Harrelson) and the simpleton sheep (Jim Parsons voices one) believe.

Snowball leads the revolt, with her promising pupil pig Lucky (Gaten Matarazzo) at her side. Porcine lout Napoleon (Seth Rogen) and his lacky Squealer (Kieran Culkin) sort of go along with the coup de critters, even if they didn’t figure any of this out on their own.

The animals rout the humans, embrace “freedom” and listen as idealist/agitator Snowball lays out new “rules” to live by.

“Four legs good, two legs bad” may not take into account the chickens and ducks, but it separates the livestock from those who prey on them — men.

“No animal shall sleep in a bed…wear clothes…or drink ‘naughty juice.”

Everything is to be shared — work, shelter and food. And above all else, “All animals are equal.”

If you remember the story arc, it doesn’t take some pigs long to cheat, steal, back-stab and sell-out on their way to “but some are more equal than others.”

Rogen’s Napoleon is an imposing dunce who mocks those smarter than him as he preys on the most gullible. He recruits and grooms the farm’s Dobermans to be his enforcers. Pigs are a separate class under the regime he establishes when he deposes Snowball for insisting that they save grain for the winter to come rather than heedlessly eating and doing whatever you want and calling that “freedom.”

“You animals are all too stupid to understand” your shortsightedness is never going to win any converts.

Lucky is left behind to see every “rule” twisted or broken, every historical fact about Napoleon’s shortcomings and the peril he puts first one group and then another under is gaslit out of mind.

Cynical donkey Benjamin (Kathleen Turner) sees the unfolding disaster and shrugs it off as the natural, flawed way creatures look out for themselves and not their neighbors. Boxer just relishes the work and their collective, brotherly labor, with him taking on the lion’s share.

Little shots at the hype of commercialism are slipped in. Calling the eggs they sell “The best in the county” isn’t wrong. “It’s not lies, it’s hope,” Squealer rationalizes. Napoleon’s gaslighting and lying, laughing and coercing plays as very Evening News familiar in Rogen’s voice-acting. There’s even a hint of a faked assassination attempt, for those slow to pick up the analogy.

Glenn Close plays a self-serving capitalist robber baron in a Cybertruck-knockoff limo. Steve Buscemi voices a weasely banker who gets into business with the dictator class pigs, who lord over the farm in landlord class luxury, leaving the other animals to starve.

One thing that’s sorely missing in this alteration of the story arc is much of the optimism that comes after the workers of the farm unite and throw off their chains.

The first animated “Animal Farm” made overt Soviet references in how the critters look, speak, scheme and betray their people and their own alleged Marxist ideals. But the filmmakers gave the Stalinesque Napoleon Winston Churchill’s jowl and voice for a reason.

The story was never about socialism. It was about taking care who you allow to “rule” you, and understanding that race, class and heirarchy are all exploited to get you to give power often to the wrong people.

One thing the Serkis film makes clearest — “personalities” that flatter and pander to you while holding “them” in utter contempt aren’t rare. They’re human/animal nature. And the message here is that sooner or later, everybody — even their most ardent duped supporters — figures that out.

Rating: PG, animated violence, a fart joke

Cast: The voices of Gaten Matarazzo, Woody Harrelson, Laverne Cox, Seth Rogen, Kieran Culkin, Steve Buscemi, Andy Serkis, Jim Parsons, Kathleen Turner and Glenn Close.

Credits: Directed by Andy Serkis, scripted by Nicholas Stoller, based on George Orwell’s novel. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:34

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Netflixable? June Squibb is “Eleanor the Great”

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Roger Moore

Timing, especially in comedy, is everything. But Sony Pictures Classics had no way of knowing that its Oscar-campaigned Jewish Holocaust dramedy “Eleanor the Great” would come out in the middle of worldwide outrage at an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Woody Allen darling Scarlett Johansson’s directing debut and perhaps June Squibb’s best shot at major awards arrived at a moment when the public at large wasn’t in the mood for yet another “Never again” Holocaust story, this one about a woman who claimed to be a “survivor,” and wasn’t.

It’s well-acted all-around. And some would be more forgiving of its parade of third-act stumbles, blunders and “It’ll all work out in the end” contrivances. Because Holocaust stories in general and tales of grief and remembrances have historically earned the benefit of the doubt.

But any sober consideration of this movie about a survivor’s best friend keeping her memories if not her memory alive via lies has to grapple with the blunt truth that it doesn’t really work.

We meet Eleanor (Squibb) and Polish immigrant Bessie (Rita Zohar) as they wind down the last good years of their lives in Florida. They’ve been friends since the ’50s and in New York — widowed and in Florida for over a decade.

As roommates, the amusingly abrasive Eleanor knows Bessie’s story and the reasons for her nightmares. Their past together was happy, and there’s a shared Bronx-hardened sarcastic intolerance for any Florida store clerk who doesn’t keep the kosher pickles supply stocked in their market.

Where’s your sense of humor, ladies?

“Hitler took my smile,” Bessie spits. Eleanor seconds this, only to be reproved by a mutual friend who knows she was no closer to the Holocaust than Coney Island.

Bessie dies. Eleanor moves back to New York, in with her divorced daughter (Jessica Hecht of “Friends”) and the “one good Jew in the family,” her doting college student grandson Max (Will Price).

Stressed working daughter Lisa is anxious to find Mom a little assisted living. But in the meantime, she tries to keep Eleanor connected with their community by signing her up for a music ensemble at their Jewish Community Center. And that’s where it all goes wrong.

Eleanor ducks into the wrong group meeting, and when Holocaust survivors talk about their grief and their experiences in their support group, Eleanor chimes in by repeating Bessie’s experiences as her own. She’s “fitting in” by stealing a Holocaust survivor’s trauma.

The film brushes by any guilt she feels about this and stumbles somewhat as Eleanor’s lies take on more consequence when an NYU journalism student (Erin Kellyman, terrific) picks up the story and that student’s TV anchor dad (Chiwetel Ejiofor) raises the stakes even further when he sees “an angle.”

I kept waiting for Eleanor’s lack of a concentration camp tattoo or, you know, basic research by the “reporters” or old acquaintances (she’s 94, there aren’t any of those) trip her up.

Instead, Tory Kamen’s script takes us into Eleanor’s pursuit of a late life bat mitzvah, with a rabbi (Stephen Singer) assigning her the ethically problematic story of Jacob and Esau as her Torah passage to memorize and recite in Hebrew.

That’s a tad on the nose, as this Biblical tale of a brother’s deceit allowing him to steal a sibling’s birthright is an origin story that excuses, rationalizes and brushes over a lot — rather like “Eleanor the Great.”

Squibb is fine and makes the most of another late career showcase, no matter where the ungainly plot takes her. Hecht is called on to play the struggling daughter who acts most undaughterly — with cause — when the you-know-what hits the fan.

Kellyman, playing a student eager to please a journalist dad but mourning her own Jewish’s mother’s death, is subtle and moving. Ejiofor should have called a journalist friend or two about what could have been done with the nonsense Kamen scripted for the journalistic finale.

But Zohar is the heart of the piece, and anybody who’s ever met a Holocaust survivor will recognize the haunted life behind her performance. Others are good, she is wonderful.

I’ve interviewed Holocaust survivors over the years, and the worst thing about such live (public) radio chats is fighting tears because you know how unprofessional that might appear. At least in print, you have the distance provided by the keyboard.

But if the Holocaust was, as some have observed, a moment that was “The End of History,” then we may be hitting the end of the road of the Holocaust drama and documentary epoch. The scores of documentaries about survivors that I’ve reviewed have lately played as repetitivie, stale and downright hypocritical.

A South African survivor’s family tries to trauma-coat the prosperous life she lived after marrying a South African and Ms. “Never Again” profited from decades and decades of apartheid, which she did not protest. And so on.

I think of her every time I see fresh accounts of what’s happening in Gaza and now Lebanon.

“Stolen valor” stories crossed my path in my Florida journalism years, where a documentary about The Tuskegee Airmen, filming gatherings of those survivors, revealed that their ranks were contaminated by poseurs who pretended to have served with those heroic World War II pilots and did not.

People exaggerate their connection to epic moments in history all the time, not just those running for office. There’s little that’s cute or “revealing the depth of grief” in a movie that tries its damnedest to brush by big lies, especially one that uses the story of Jacob and Esau to excuse it.

Whatever reactions Johansson, Squibb and Sony Pictures Classics were going for, pissed-off must have hit them by surprise. And it shouldn’t have.

Rating: PG-13, for “thematic material” (Holocaust descriptions), sexual references, profanity

Cast: June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, Rita Zohar, Will Price and Chiwetel Ejiofor

Credits: Directed by Scarlett Johansson, scripted by Tory Kamen. A Sony Pictures Classics release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:38

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Movie Review: “Deported” should have been Stopped at the Border

Posted on April 22, 2026 by Roger Moore

There’s something almost criminal about Amazon acquiring the 2020 immigration “comedy” “Deported,” and passing it off as a “new” “2026” release on their streaming service.

There hasn’t been a good time to unleash a raunchy, tone deaf and whitewashed farce about immigration in the past decade. But putting this Trump I era disaster in front of eyeballs in the middle of the murderously inhumane Trump II regime is damned near criminal.

It’s a familiar-faces/little-known-names romp buried under f-bombs, coarse sex jokes and a cascade of cameos. It’s tooth-grindingly bad, so much so that even Sandler hanger-on Nick Swardson seems embarassed in his scenes in it.

Robert Davi as a customs agent? He seems disappointed the guy isn’t more sadistic.

Director and co-writer Tyler Spindel (“The Wrong Missy”) chickened-out straight away by making this about a Canadian blonde (Megan Park) our “illegal” — “Deported” and banned for messing up some paperwork.

So rather than something edgy, like Cheech and Chong’s decades old “Born in East L.A.,” he makes an unromantic and almost wholly unfunny “Green Card,” about blonde Harper’s dizzy-but-not-nearly-dizzy-enough beau Ross (Whitmer Thomas) refusing to commit to marrying her so that she can finish chef school and, you know, take a chef’s job from an “American” so that she can realize her dreams.

Threatened by his girlfriend’s hunkier and more eager to help friend (Greg Sulkin), Ross’s plan involves marrying her off to this slovenly lout (Mickey Gooch, Jr.) who crashed the Halloween party where Ross and Harper first met.

The odd early tasteless joke has promise — one costumed partygoer shows up nude and years past her last sit-up.

“I’m LENA DUNHAM! I’m COMFORTABLE with my body?”

The “GET it?” is implied in this and most every other “joke” rolled out from here on out.

Ross’s big tech idea is a “Dick Face” app he’s pushing, which adds a penis cap to any photo you post in it.

His sort-of-separated-under-the-same-roof parents (Brenda Strong, Kurt Fuller) trot out testiness about “getting married too young” and intolerance of this would-be-chef who was caught re-entering the country from an Indian cooking school’s seminar.

“She got a dot?”

That much of the movie’s messaging seems on the mark, the idea that America is a nation of descendents of immigrants but roiling with casual, off-the-cuff bigots.

As “there is no such thing as a fake marriage in a REAL relationship,” as on-the-make lesbian and Ross pal Tammy (Fortune Feimster) declares, this is where Doug Lipinski (Gooch) fits in.

He may be a walking, belching, unbathed butt-crack. He may not know how to pronounce his own name (first or last). He may be “definitely on the spectrum.” But he’s willing to sneak into Canada for a quickie fake wedding just to get Harper back across the border.

Conchata Ferrell (“Two and a Half Men”) is his brassy, bare-knuckled, not-quite-disapproving mom. Swardson plays his jealous, over-bearing brother.

Jokes about women as “fire breathing whore dragons,” life onboard Doug’s barely-floating converted-tug houseboat’s resident lava-lamp-humping rat, “butt chugging” and the like don’t move any thinking or sentient person’s needle.

Clint Howard, Missi Pyle, Steven Bauer and others trot by in unfunny cameos.

And the attempted story “arc,” where we glimpse Doug’s unhappy humanity and Ross grows a pair while Harper considers her options but not really, are all clumsily handled

“Cringe comedy” is one thing, and raunchy fare like this still plays to sensory-deprived stoners.

But this is just bad, and Bezos & Co. know it. Which is why they tried to pass it off as “new.”

Rating:

Cast: Whitmer Thomas, Megan Park, Mickey Gooch, Jr.,Fortune Feimster, Kurt Fuller, Brenda Strong, Steven Bauer, Missi Pyle, Clint Howard, Nick Swardson, Conchata Ferrell and Robert Davi.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Spindel, scripted by Tyler Spindel and Dean Ward. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:31

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Movie Review: Tipsy Italians talk a lad into “The Last One for the Road”

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Roger Moore

“The Last One for the Road” is a seemingly aimless drunken drive through northern Italy, a picaresque misadventure in a minor key about a Neopolitan kid, fresh out of college, being taught “the meaning of life.”

Francesco Sossai’s curious gambole of a comedy makes a joke out of that. A couple of people who may have the answer start to reveal “the secret” — but a helicopter takes off, drowning out one, and a train door closes, silently sealing off another.

But this wistful, wandering wonder of a movie — drifting into and out of narrative focus, veering towards and then away from any sense of purpose — has a sensuality and immediacy that is vaguely universal while distinctly and indolently Italian.

It’s ethos? Don’t let anyone you care about get away with telling you “some other time.”

“There is no ‘some other time.'”

Live for the moment. Go for the gusto. But first, “one last drink,” one last round “for the road.” Just don’t look for “Le città di pianura” to win any endorsement from Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

A prologue takes us to an old man’s last day on the job. Two corporate toughs take him in arm and bring him to a spot where, by pre-arranged plan, a helicopter lands. The big boss steps out, calls Primo Sossai (Gianni Da Re) by name, and congratulates him for his lifetime of service.

“Everything,” he says (in Italian with English subtitles). You have done everything for us.”

What’s that worth? A Rolex and a thank-you from a guy pretending to know you and your wife’s name.

For the first time, we hear word of an “urban legend” about this town. For the first time, a character promises to reveal “the secret of life” and is drowned out by a helicopter. And for the first time, our focus shifts to two tipsy louts sleeping it off in a Jaguar that’s seen better days.

Dori (Simone Bergamasco) and Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) have an appointment to pick somebody — an old friend — up at the airport. “Which” Venice airport is the question. And they’re not finding answers to that in the parade of bars, live-music pubs and roadside eateries where they pursue “one last drink.”

“I forgot what it was I wanted to tell you.”

But stumbling into college kids singing and drinking through a graduation all-night bender, they spy young architect-to-be Giulio (Filippi Scotti) pining for fair Giulia Antonia (Giulia Bertasi), longing to tear her free from their class revels for just a moment. After all, he’s got to go home and be ready for his design presentation/job interview in the A.M.

“Some other time,” she says. They know what that means, even if Giulio doesn’t.

They take him under their wing, and the film becomes his long night and a couple of days of taking stock. There are endless waylays, detours and stops in assorted bars and pubs, a faux American country music roadhouse among them.

“And I thought Germany was ‘Americanized,'” a tipsy German tourist jokes. He’s come here to “see Italy before the Italians ruin it.”

“I think you’re too late,” Carlobianchi — “Charli” to his mates — grouses.

Dori and Charli drag Giulio through past haunts in search of drinks, “snails, cooked perfectly,” and meaning. Cops are evaded, a “ghost highway” in the making isn’t on any map, “Google” included, Italian designer sunglasses and “the theory of marginal utility” are discussed. An architecturally striking tomb is visited.

And these two sixty-ish geezers model their misspent lives for Giulio to see and sample through the bars, the booze, the music and all the life lessons one can absorb in a short time, once you’ve missed any chance of an appointment that would have set your future in stone.

I kept grasping for movie analogies for this film from the director of “Other Cannibals.” There’s a hint of Jim Jarmusch’s night crawl “Night on Earth,” a taste of such “binge” pictures as “California Split,” “Mississippi Grind” and “The Days of Wine and Roses,” and whiff of the Mark Rydell/Steve McQueen Faulkner adaptation “The Reivers” and other more overt “coming of age” tales.

For some reason I can’t articulate, Neil Young’s song “Harvest Moon” kept drifting into my mind — not during the police pursuit or the bachelorette party they crash, but whenever all involved are sleeping it off. That’s kind of the sentimental, melancholy vibe here.

Sossai hasn’t made a movie that sentimentalizes alcoholism, but he has managed to suggest the mistakes, busted dreams, dashed hopes and futility of getting ahead or getting by in a barely-functioning democracy and permanently-rigged “market economy” that makes the bottle such an appealing escape.

There is no “some other time.” And there are no “appointments” or obligations when you can’t remember them the morning after days and nights of living and God-forbid driving in the alcohol-soaked moment.

Rating: unrated, alcohol abuse, smoking, sexual sitautions, nudity, profanity

Cast: Filippi Scotti, Pierpaolo Capovilla,
Giulia Bertasi,
Roberto Citran and Andrea Pennacchi

Credits: Directed by Francesco Sossai, scripted by Adriano Candiago and Francesco Sossai. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:40

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