Netflixable? Polish Rocker Rebels and Resists as “Less of a Stranger”

Posted on October 11, 2026 by Roger Moore

All the cliches, tropes and tricks of the rock star biopic are trotted out for “Less of a Stranger,” a Polish prance down the primrose path of pop stardom.

“Less of a Stranger?” That phrase applies to this Polish production in almost every way as overfamiliarity dogs it for the better part of two hours.

But here’s the thing. This is about Lady Pank, a New Wave era Polish band who were Fight the Man role models for the likes of Pussy Riot and others resisting authoritarianism via punk poses and Hendrix-style guitar solos.

Our guitar hero/narrator is Jan Borysewicz, whose Wikipedia page doesn’t do him justice. The film follows him from his first act of childhood revolt — a tween turning the radio back up over his Dad’s objections and smashing dishes with his big brother when he hears Jimi Hendrix — to a climactic riot at a concert interrupted by Polish “militia” state police in 1983, and the state-enforced mental hospital committal that followed.

Borysewicz himself voice-over narrates the recent past and distant past episodes, and everything in between. And when adult actor Mikołaj Bukrewicz takes over for young Miroslaw Tomczuk, a lot of his lines are dubbed by Borysewicz as well.

That’s…a choice.

As we finally get around to the pre-ordained “rise-to-the-top” montage an hour into the film, with another quarter hour passing before the hedonistic, drug-fueled sex party that tells us Jan’s “too far gone,” the endless voice-over and voice looping business aren’t the picture’s biggest distractions.

The kid Jan gushes to his brother (Julian Gostymski), “I’m going to AMERICA (in Polish with English subtitles)! I’ll be FAMOUS!”

Both things will prove to be true, but not before his sibling buys him his first guitar, allowing boy-Jan to stop pretend-playing a cutting board, not before Jan’s first abortive music lessons, not before his bitter ex-musician father (Ireneusz Czop) has yanked the strings out of it forbidding him from joining his first band.

Complications? His mother’s (Kinga Preis) “tremors” turn out to be multiple sclerosis, a lifelong, life-shortening disaster that hangs over the family, even ever-on-the-road Jan.

An abortive “tour” of the Netherlands is what triggers Jan’s decision to drag his songwriting partner/manager (Patryk Pietrzak) off with him as he starts his own band. A one-night stand with fetching hairdresser Magda (Bernadetta Statkiezicz) leads to a baby.

“I don’t want a ROCK star,” she fumes. “One child in the house is enough!”

And The State? They’re taking notice of songs like “Less than Zero,” that become anthems on Poland, with that song making it on MTV in the U.S. Better not play it tonight, comrade. Can’t disturb the peace, you know.

Our rebel has already thrown LPs at American record company execs and tangled with uniformed militia on the streets. You think he won’t incite a riot? Think again, towarzysz.

If director Kristoffer Russ (“Into the Wind”) had approached the cliches of the story with a need to speed through them, this worthwhile tale might play. Then again, the performances are across-the-board superficial and the twangy ’80s tunes, even the edgy ones, have a “You had to be there. And be POLISH” to get much out of this.

“Less of a Stranger” never gets close enough to its subject to be intimate and that robs the film of its importance in Polish and European history. Without importance, this is just “Bohemian Rhapsody” with more colorless Bohemians.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Mikołaj Bukrewicz, Kinga Preis, Patryk Pietrzak, Ireneusz Czop, Mikołaj Matczak, Hubert Milkowski, Krzysztof Oleksyn, Bernadetta Statkiewicz and Marcel Barra.

Credits: Directed by Kristoffer Russ, scripted by Joanna Kozlowska and Wiktor Piatkowski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

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Documentary Review: The Canadian Who Cooked Up “SNL” — “Lorne”

Posted on October 11, 2026 by Roger Moore

Lorne Michaels, the inscrutable guru who changed Saturday nights in America by creating “Saturday Night Live” and then presiding over it for almost all of its 51 years, is the “star” and central figure of mystery of “Lorne.”

The documentary by Morgan Neville, the Alex Gibney of American pop culture documentarians, probably promises more than it delivers in getting at “the REAL Lorne Michaels,” and not the legend. Or the many “Doctor Evil” impersonations. Michaels still guards his family today and his upbringing way back when like treasured industrial secrets.

And scads of people he’s “discovered,” employed and “made famous” confirm as much in this still delightful dollop of Boomer — and Gen X etc. — “SNL” nostalgia.

Cast members from Tina Fey to Chris Rock on down to John Mulaney and Sarah Sherman, fellow Canadians Mike Myers and Martin Short and “close friends” Paul Simon and Steve Martin relay the “routines” that dominate the life and work of Michaels, who turns 82 in November.

We glimpse his lakeside Maine “blueberry farm” retreat, where he and his unseen third wife and family spend most of the weeks and months that “SNL” is on hiatus. And his ex-wife and onetime “SNL” writer Rosie Shuster talks about him and the show, but nothing comes out that Michaels wouldn’t approve.

Still photos, home movies and animated snippets barely touch on the childhood, the father who died when Lorne Michael Lipowitz (one of the legions of Lorne impersonators groans on Michaels’ behalf at this mention) was young, so there’s little hint of the formative years before he got on Canadian TV, then went to LA and kick-started his career in “Laugh-In,” following that by working with Lily Tomlin on her post-“Laugh-In” specials.

But Neville and his crew sit in on the weekly Tuesday “host meets the cast” dinners at Manhattan’s Lattanzi Cucina Italiana on a week when Timothée Chalamet hosts “Saturday Night Live.” And the film crew is there during the weekly writer, performer and producers meeting where story pitches are made.

This is where cast members and writers, from Bill Hader and Paula Pell on back into the Tina Fey pasts revel in the memory of that time they “made Lorne laugh” and got his approval.

And Neville and we get to glimpse the process of winnowing 80 sketch ideas down to the 8-12 that Michaels announces to one and all make the final cut, sending writers and performers back to polish the scripts and get them ready for that hard, unforgiving deadline that drives this entire process, “11:30 Saturday night.”

Nostalgic Boomers who have watched the show from the start and anybody who has binged decades of “SNL” online can pick up on some between the lines “answers” to questions like “Why WAS Paul Simon on SO MANY episodes during the early years?”

He was Lorne’s neighbor.

The trauma of Michaels and the entire cast leaving after the fifth season is remembered, as is an abortive non “live” version of the series that NBC talked Michaels into attempting, “The New Show.”

Viewers and cast members can be tickled by clips of Michaels’ early TV efforts in Canada, where he “was a terrible performer” Michael Che notes, and often broke-up in sketches. Chris Rock adds, “The best coaches were lousy players.

Michaels often broke up in sketches. “Corpseing” they call it in the UK. Jimmy Fallon, perhaps the show’s most constant corpser (watch “More Cowbell”), shakes his head and jokes about the “therapy” he could have saved himself if he’d known the thing Michaels berated him for constantly was something the Executive Producer never conquered.

Not “everybody” is here. Nor is every highlight and low point. How could they be? Fifty years, thousands of sketches that became classics, or epic misfires, scores of cast members, famous and infamous, there wasn’t time or room for everyone. And so few claim to actually “know” this film’s subject more voices might not have helped.

Michaels jokes that one reason the show has endured and even its earliest seasons dominate Youtube is that it “clips well,” as legendary bits only have to be briefly sampled on video for the viewer to guffaw over what made “Julia Child” or “Cowbell” or Ryan Gosling’s corpsed collapse in a “Beavis and Butthead” bit endure.

Michaels himself is reasonably forthcoming about process. “Fatigue is your friend” on those Thursday night marathon writing sessions where “edge” and “hard laughs” come when the writers are punchy and uninhibited. But Michaels maintains his “mystery” even bantering with frequent host Steve Martin and others who really “know” him.

Mulaney, Rock and Che have the best anecdotes. Fey may be the one who really “gets” him, as she shows us how she based Alec Baldwin’s character on her Lorne-produced sitcom “30 Rock” on Michaels.

One and all note how “he made so many of us (rich and) famous.”

But the most telling read on “the boss” and why, in his ’80s, he still has “the eye” and ear and savvy to pick up on “what the kids are laughing at these days,” might come from current cast member Sarah Sherman.

“He takes, like, 24 year olds really seriously.”

Every generation of players, many of them getting their start in their early ’20s, is heard and valued, even when the boss has a vast collection of put-downs about how soon they’ll be fired, the show will be canceled or the network will go bankrupt because this or that sketch, line or performance isn’t landing.

That has to be the key to Michaels’ success and longevity in a profession where “old guys can’t do comedy” is the law. And taking “24 year-olds really seriously” has made Michaels “the guy who stays…the ultimate show business survivor.”

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Lorne Michaels, Tina Fey, Chris Rock, Steve Martin, Mike Myers, Paul Simon, Michael Che, Colin Jost, Paula Pell, Maya Rudolph, Dana Carvey, John Mulaney, Candace Bergen, Martin Short, Howard Shore, Adam Sandler and Steve Higgins.

Credits: Directed by Morgan Neville. A Focus Features release now streaming on Netflix, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:41

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Netflixable? Can “Animals” Stick the Landing?

Posted on October 10, 2026 by Roger Moore

Isn’t it about time that America’s film schools added a “How to End Your Movie” course to their curricula? I know that they don’t have such “Finishing” or “Stick the Landing” stand-alone tutorials set up, and not just from covering such schools in a couple of states. I know it because I’m seeing more movies of late that fail to finish.

“Animals” has two film school alumni (UCLA, University of Colorado) among its screenwriting credits And it’s directed and co-written by star Ben Affleck, who did “The Town” and didn’t do film school.

And no matter whose fault it is, “Animals” has one of the most glaring examples of “botched ending” to come along in recent years. A well-cast, well-acted and perfectly respectable, kind of functional two, two-and-a-half star thriller drops to one and a half stars in the last ten minutes.

The plot is a straight-up rip-off of Spike Lee and Alan Fox’s “Highest 2 Lowest.” Kidnappers grab someone they think is a rich and famous person’s child only to have the kid — disguised in a Halloween costume this time — turn out to be the gardener’s son.

Mix in politics — Affleck plays an Angelino lawyer running for mayor — sexual intrigues and a collection of sketchy characters we might suspect of being involved in the kidnapping based on what they have to gain or lose and you’re off to a very promising start.

Might an idealistic independent candidate, trailing in the polls, or his campaign manager (Steven Yeun of “Minari” and “Nope”) have set this up as a stunt to grab the Latino vote?

Has the candidate made one too many enemies along life’s way?

Could the candidate’s cheating marriage psychotherapist wife (Kerry Washington) have hooked up with the wrong paramour?

We’re even allowed to wonder if the political opposition is mixed up in this, or even the LAPD, who back the sitting mayor.

Could the housekeeper (Adriana Paz) or her “illegal” beau (Luis Gerardo Méndez), whose son was taken by accident, be implicated?

And how about about that quiet, officious, greedy and inscrutable “fixer” (Gillian Anderson) the campaign manager calls out of desperation? Could she be pulling the strings even as she’s asserting with certitude that this or that probability is the one that’s playing out, and this or that move is the “only” play in the situation at this time?

Affleck does a good job of playing and setting up his character — an opening act campaign ad for the confident, Spanish-speaking activist, combat vet and lifelong do-gooder played by the guy many in Hollywood (his pal Matt Damon chief among them) assumed would plunge into politics.

But Mark Kimball has spent himself into the hole and is still trailing in the polls.

Washington does her best “distant and getting more so spouse” as Abigail, who has found a younger, less well-off and less complicated lover. The campaign has taken over their lives, ended their privacy and she’s over it.

Neither can find a way to help housekeeper Ceci (Paz) get her overqualified gardener/boyfriend (Méndez) a decent job when he hasn’t got citizenship.

As a prospective mayor, Mark “can’t enforce laws that he does not abide.”

We’ve seen the white van, the repair shop far too close to the railroad tracks, the one where an unseen stranger is online stalking our candidate and his family.

When the Kimball kid and gardener Ramon’s boy go trick-or-treating over Santa Monica way, without “security,” we know what’s coming. Noticing that the biracial boy and Latino kid look alike, that their matching costumes have head covering masks tips us that this could go wrong.

“Picture what your son would look like in a dumpster,” the fuming, voice-disguised kidnapper growls when the snatching’s done.

Before the “wrong boy” business is figured out, the troubled, stressed couple has to melt down, the meddling manager has to interfere and a high-priced “invisible” fixer has to be summoned for her advice, counsel and high HIGH interest ransom loan.

“Our adversary has made a mistake,” she muses when the mix-up is uncovered. “This is when they stumble. This is when they’re most vulnerable.”

They need to put the kidnappers off their game, trip them up. And even if that isn’t the Kimball kid, they have to get young Hector back — $7 million+ price tag be damned. If Mark’s going to win election, he can’t have every Latino voter knowing that he values the lives of “the help” less than his own kin.

And this “fixer” isn’t one to take “My kid’s safe, never mind” as an “out” for their contract.

A lot of very good actors are thrown at all the promising elements set up here, with only a few plot threads are woven into something that improves the whole. A lot of intrigues are presented as complex, when the script unravels them with bizarre stumbles and missed chances.

The notion that their best “option” will involve “something that we take to the grave” should raise the stakes, but instead just falls flat.

Anderson’s character is wholly constructed out of the actress’s ability to suggest a sort of serene menace. Her every pronouncement is psychobabble that the “real” psychotherapist among the characters should cut to pieces.

“Animals” is a movie that almost but never quite gets us there in every scene in the three acts. And then this film schooled script all goes to pieces in a finale that doesn’t so much “stick the landing” and poke a finger in the viewer’s eye and hope we don’t notice.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, sexual situation

Cast: Ben Affleck, Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun, Gillian Anderson, Adriana Paz and Luis Gerardo Méndez

Credits: Directed by Ben Affleck, scripted by Connor O. McIntyre, Billy Ray and Ben Affleck. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

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BOX OFFICE: Pre-Halloween “Other Mommy” opens Big, “The Social Reckoning” is Unfriended

Posted on October 10, 2026 by Roger Moore

Jessica Chastain has a horror hit on her hands.

Replacing Jesse Eisenberg with the more naturally menacing, taller and less ZuckerberglyJeremy Strong blows up in Aaron Sorkin’s face with his Facebook Takes a Hit sequel to “The Social Network,” “The Social Reckoning.”

And “Verity” proves to be a fall dramatic thriller with legs.

That’s the quick take-away from this second weekend in October at the movies.

The Numbers reports that a robust Thursday night ($3.6) and healthy Friday “opening day” (adding another $8+) put “Other Mommy” over $12 and on its way to a $27.5 million opening weekend.

Horror movies are kind of critic proof, even in an era when highbrow horror and “smart” supernatural thrillers are thriving. “Other Mommy” isn’t all that with the critics. “Saw” producer James Wan just keeps those Blumhouse/Universal horror hits coming because that audience is getting back in the habit of going to the movies.

The second weekend of the new Colleen Hoover adaptation “Verity” is racking up another $11.5 million in second place, as the fall is shaping up to be one where established Oscar-winning actresses are getting work with box office potential, as Anne Hathaway (“Verity”) and Jessica Chastain (“Other Mommy”) are making movies that make bank.

The “Resident Evil” reboot is fading but still earned $8.35 million this weekend, a $140 million or so hit that may top out at $160 or so when it finishes its run.

In fourth is the Brad Pitt and his Dog (with CGI wolves and moose) adventure “Heart of the Beast” are still selling, clearing $7 million, good enough for fourth place. It’ll clear the $50 million mark by Monday.

Aaron Sorkin’s “Social Network” sequel, “The Social Reckoning,” which replaced its intense leading man with an even more intense one that looks less like Mark Zuckerberg, is underwhelming one and all for a $5.5 million fifth place .

As “Reckoning” is about the evils of Facebook being exposed and subject to massive lawsuits, it’s also a harder sell. Hundreds of millions still use Big Brother Meta’s data-mining/viewer-manipulating addiction.

So maybe people aren’t in the mood for a movie that isn’t even getting good reviews or anything like Oscar buzz. That’s what happened with “Digger,” which opened weak and is fast fading to black.

Has everybody uninstalled the headspace-invading/voter-manipulating app from your phone? That’s the easiest way to cut back on usage without giving up the few actual “connections” we get out of it, I find. Just load the website whenever you want to check in, and resist the urge to compulsively reopen the app 60 times a day.

The fall disappointments “Forgotten Island ($4.5, sixth),Primetime ($4, 7th),” “Digger ($3.2 8th),”and the stumbling Angel Studios remake of “Angel and the Badman ($2.06, 9th)” cling to the top ten, with “The Odyssey ($2, 10th) finally besting “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” on a weekend that sees Spidey exit.

“Practical Magic 2,” also exits the top ten.

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Movie Review: Remembering “Tenzing” and Hillary and their Ascent of Everest

Posted on October 9, 2026 by Roger Moore

The viewer keeps waiting for “Tenzing,” the new bio-drama of the life of “the other man” to be the first to summit Mount Everest, to take a false step.

But director Jennifer Peedom comes from documentaries and she’s made films about the world’s highest peaks, the Sherpa porters and guides who help climbers ascend them and one particular “Miracle on Everest.”

She knows this world and the cost of “false steps” in it. And that becomes a great virtue of her feature film debut, a beautifully-shot, solid and sentimental life of Tenzing Norgay, the plucky guide, problem solver and Everest veteran who was with Edmund Hillary every step of the way in their 1953 “conquest” of the world’s highest mountain.

“Tenzing” is a lightly-fictionalized, rigidly-unconventional drama painted in time-honored strokes, often letting its beautiful settings lift it above its formula. It’s modest, like its hero, showing us the Everest climb accented by flashbacks telling us of its intrepid climber’s impoverished childhood and dogged lifelong obsession with “getting to know” the mountain that Tibetans and Sherpas call Chomolangma, “Goddess Mother of the World.”

Screen newcomer Samdrup Dorje Lama affectingly plays Tenzing as a boy, a yak herder who stumbled into some “foreigners” once, one of whom happened to be the famed Alpinist and doomed Everest climber George Mallory (Johnny Flynn). Tenzing’s fixation on Chomolangma is traced to that day.

Fresh-off a failed Swiss effort to climb Everest, the adult Tenzing (Genden Phuntsok) negotiates his position with the new British-led attempt led by Col. Hunt (Willem Dafoe, perfect). No, the 1950s Brits haven’t given up their “white man’s burden” view of brown, black, red and yellow folk. But there’ll be none of this “just a porter” business for an Everest veteran like Tenzing. He holds out until the condescending white guys accept him as part of the climbing team, and “Head Sherpa,” the one who ensures the Sherpa support team gets tents, oxygen bottles, food and everything else to the various base camps higher and higher up Mount Everest.

We get a glimpse of Norgay’s people skills as he keeps the peace between sometimes resentful Sherpas and imperious Brits doing their damnedest not to come off as straight-up racists.

Flashbacks show us the trials Norgay endured — orphaned, raised outside of his tribe, “He’s not even Sherpa!” — in another country, scorned when “our servant boy” tries to court and marry his childhood crush, Dawa (Phurba Tashi Sherpa plays her as an adult), rebuffed when he first attempts to win a job on an earlier Everest expedition.

In the best “boy that made the man” tradition, it’s easy to connect the kid’s persistence, pluck and creative problem-solving with the adult who will be the keystone to the first successful climb to The Top of the World.

His fellow porters and Sherpas can warn him about “getting any big ideas” (in Sherpa, and in English) about who the Brits regard as equals. But one climber, Ed Hillary (Tom Hiddleston), is more color blind than the other team members. He recognizes “merit” and the “meritocracy” of this attempt. He’s also treated with scorn by the Limeys.

“Lovely to imagine a ‘kiwi’ (New Zealander) at the summit,” one less-than-Great Brit cracks.

Naturally, Hillary figures out who is best qualified to summit and teams up with Tenzing.

The script, inspired by a Ed Douglas biography of Tenzing Norgay, may be lightly fictionalized, giving the viewer some pause at the more “kumbaya” moments of fraternity, sportsmanship, heroism and seeing past racism. But as almost all of this checks out — Hillary became Norgay’s lifelong friend and insisted on the shared credit of their “summit together” climb — the “feel good” parts of the story are honest.

The Brits stand on a crevasse that turned them back the day before and wonder why they’ve marched back to this “impassible” obstacle.

“What’s happening?” they ask the Kiwi.

“Tenzing,” Hillary drolly replies as Norgay rigs a rope to cross the chasm. “Tenzing’s happening.”

That’s wholesome, gee whiz quality of the historical account is one of the reasons this hasn’t been the “Everest” story Hollywood has fallen over itself to tell. There’s less drama — conflict within the “underpaid” Sherpa ranks (Tenzin Jigmey plays Norgay’s most contemptuous Sherpa rival), unrealistic expectations by the team leader, fears of an “early monsoon” — and less tragedy than in the many efforts to reach the peak before and since.

Peedom’s most artful touches are the flashbacks, the last of which cross the screen as we’re seeing what Norgay saw — the climbing boots that he stares down at as he moves one exhausted step at a time up the last harrowing stretch to the top.

Our director’s been to Everest before. She knows where the “epic” is in this epic tale, and keeps Chomolangma in the frame, up close or as the most striking backdrop on Earth.

There have been more harrowing “Everest” quests and films of or about those quests. “Tenzing” is simply and straightforwardly the first about the unassuming but heroic local man who made this extreme climbing destination possible by doing the impossible — paving the way with his “Kiwi” friend.

Rating: PG, mild peril

Cast: Genden Phuntsok, Tom Hiddleston,
Caitríona Balfe, Johnny Flynn,
Samdrup Dorje Lama, Tenzin Jigmey and Willem Dafoe

Credits: Directed by Jennifer Peedom, scripted by Luke Davies, inspired by the Ed Douglas biography of Tenzing Norgay. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:06

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Movie Review: “Don’t Move” or the Creature in the Creature Feature will Get You

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Don’t Move” begins with a tragedy so vivid and horrific it sets us up for a much better thriller than the movie that follows.

A competent, can-do mother braves the flames of a seedy amusement park haunted house horror ride that’s caught fire. She barks panicked questions and takes matters into her own hands from the hapless ride-operator. But the only people she can’t save are her husband and young son.

It’s a scene that resonates and even aches. But in cinematic terms, the real tragedy is the dull, slow-footed creature feature that “Don’t Move” devolves into. It’s a “Quiet Place” without much in the way of suspense, pace, pathos or quiet.

“Kick-Ass” and “Hot Tub Time Machine” alumna Lindsy Fonseca is the newly-widowed, newly-childless Megan, who still “sees” her husband in the bathroom vanity, brushing his teeth as she preps for another mournful day at the office.

She’s not the best candidate for Pastor Rizzo’s (Tom Cavanagh of the original “Scrubs”) church camping trip. She’s jolted by a hallucination of her burned-to-death son the minute she gets on the church bus.

But that’s not what this movie is about. It’s what happens on this trek to Missouri’s vast Mark Twain National Forest that has Megan in fresh peril.

This B-movie goes wrong pretty much the moment everybody assembles to hop on the “Godmobile,” as the most unsavory character on board labels it.

Hip hop singer Russ, who sings along to Tiffany’s version of “I Think You’re Alone Now” when he meet him, is a drug mule in this corner of the Show-Me State. He figures a church bus is less likely to be stopped by the cops, and since he’s the ex beau of the pastor’s daughter (Hunter King), assumes he’s invited.

The fact that her new lover (Ryan Stark) is camping with her is one of a long checklist of plot points (lots of profanity, too) that screams “This isn’t any Missouri ‘church bus’ in the real world.”

Grandparents (Dee Freeman and Mark Eugene Vaughn) are dragging their fraidy-cat grandkid (Patrick Bippus) into the woods. It’s Pastor Rizzo’s “wilderness guide” pal (actually a Walmart stocker) Rob Riggle leads the nine of them into 900,000 acre forest for some “good, old-fashioned fellowship” where you don’t want to be left alone.

Because the first time two characters trek off on their own, only one returns — covered in blood, and blurting “He got TAKEN!” about his hiking companion.

The script is so generic you’d think one could buy the plot and nine characters online from Walmart, maybe even save money casting it there as well. I’m pretty sure Walmart stocks “rotting cabins in the woods” as horror film settings, too.

Fonseca makes a plucky lead, and Riggle trots out another variation of irritating blowhard with his usual half-hearted gusto. Russ isn’t the worst rapper turned actor in memory.

But the death-by-death-by-death story makes little effort to give us time to identify with characters, fear for them or mourn their passing. That’s on the screenwriters, one of whom is the director, Maclain Nelson.

He’s more wholly responsible for the pace, which is slack in the extreme.

A good creature feature has momentum that picks up speed as we hurtle towards a climax. Here, the story beats just drip by towards that finale in a way that’s all but certain to serve up an even less satisfying anti-climax to follow.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Lindsy Fonseca, Tom Cavanagh, Rob Riggle, Hunter King, Ryan Stark, Patrick Bippus, Mark Eugene Vaughn, Dee Freeman and Russ.

Credits:Directed by Maclain Nelson, scripted by James Murray, Maclain Nelson and Darren Wearmouth. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:34

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Classic Film Review: Friedkin tries Funny — “The Brinks Job”(1978)

Posted on October 5, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s not shocking to realize that William Friedkin, one of the star directors of ’70s filmmaking, took a breather and attempted a caper comedy after the ordeals of “The French Connection” and “Sorcerer,” seeing as how the latter film damn near broke him.

He could have made a straightforward version of “The Brinks Job.”  But no, the facts of that story — the 1950 Brinks Armored Car Co. vaulted business office heist in Boston — seemed to lend themselves to laughs.  So he cast a corps of guys who had proved or would prove in this film and later ones that they could be funny.

Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, Warren Oates, Paul Sorvino, Allen Garfield and Sheldon Leonard — playing the tallest and least likely to ever be seen in a dress F.B.I. chief J. Edgar Hoover?  There’s got to be a chuckle or two, three or ten in that crew.

“Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia” star Oates plays a bespectacled blowhard vet whose story of his “service” during WWII changes to much nobody could possibly take this “Specs” guy seriously when he suggests blowing a safe with a bazooka. But he is. Serious.

“Young Frankenstein” star Boyle has nothing funny to play as the fence/financier of the caper. Garfield may be somewhat amusing as the short-attention-span brother-in-law Falk’s “mastermind,” Tony Pino, keeps in the crew, against his better judgement.

And Falk plays it pretty straight, bringing a deadpan incredulity to Pino, a l0w-rent cool customer, fresh out of “the joint” and ready to make a score that will end his greasy spoon diner days with wife Mary (Gena Rowlands).

For long stretches as the “job” is plotted and planned, we have to hunt for clues as to why this was ever considered a “comedy.”

One “tell” — Friedkin’s late ’40s to early ’50s’ period piece is the tidiest version of Boston you’ll ever see, unless Disney makes a “Newsies II: Beantown Bop” sequel. A filmmaker known for grit and grime and cityscapes painted in grey and rust — “The French Connection,” “To Love and Die in LA” — swept and scrubbed the streets, alleys, warehouses and tenements of Boston because comedy is…tidy?

The occasional funny line gives away the intent, too.

“Yer honor, I can’t DO no twenty years!”

“Well, do as much as ye can, son.”

The big joke here is that this unlikely crew of ex-cons and unimaginative mugs pulled off the heist of the century when they figured out that the armored car company Brinks was basically intimidating and formidable by self-hyped reputation. As was the Hoover era F.B.I.

Brinks was uniformed but sloppy, guarding millions in cash and securities and the like with cut-rate methods and minimal expense and effort. The vaunted F.B.I. couldn’t get anywhere in the investigation without torturing would-be suspects. And even then, a guy with a high pain tolerance and teeth-gritting patience could wait them out.

Falk, who’d first proven his comic mugging chops with The Rat Pack’s “Robin and the Seven Hoods” over a decade before, manages a cocky twinkle here and there, and the odd bit of sputtering outrage.

But “The Brinks Job” is entirely too straightforward to play as funny as we’re walked through the haphazard planning, the not-that-tense near blunders of the job itself and the aftermath.

“Slow-walked” is closer to the mark. Comedy is quick, and this film isn’t. And it’s not as if Friedkin does anything ambitious or arresting with the heist, either.

“The Hot Rock” was more suspenseful and far funnier. “Brinks Job” is closer to George C. Scott’s abortive “The Bank Shot” in failed caper comedy terms, and even that film scored more laughs than this.

There’s a little “local color” with the odd Boston Italian (Sorvino) or Irish mug (Malachy McCourt plays one) popping up. Falk’s ex-con is an expert “peteman,” or “pete.” That’s an archaic term for safecracker.

Aside from that, this movie could have been shot and set most anywhere urban, with only the cars identifying the era and only the label “comedy” telling us we’re supposed to be laughing.

Falk would hit his comic peak with “The In-Laws” and in decades of playing Lt. Columbo on TV. Boyle would have a grand third act comeback with “Everybody Loves Raymond.” And Oates would turn up in “Stripes,” the wildly popular Bill Murray farce, before dying too young.

Friedkin would also bounce back — not with the notorious “Cruising” (1980), but with “To Live and Die in LA” a few years later. And he’d never make a classic comedy, or even a very good one.  But with “The Exorcist,” “The French Connection,” “To Live and Die in LA” and “Killer Joe” on his credits, who needs comedies?

 

Rating: PG, violence, profanity
Cast: Peter Falk, Peter Boyle, Warren Oates, Gena Rowlands, Allen Garfield, Gerard Murphy, Kevin O’Connor, Malachy McCourt and Sheldon Leonard.
Credits: Directed by William Friedkin, scripted by Walon Green and Noel Behn. A Univeral release on Youtube, Amazon, Apple TV, other streamers
Running time: 1:44

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Movie Review: A Hole Even “Digger” Cruise Can’t Shovel His Way Out Of

Posted on October 2, 2026 by Roger Moore

One has to appreciate the huge swing four-time Oscar winner Alejandro G. Iñárritu and his Oscarless star Tom Cruise took with their climate crisis and culture satire “Digger.” But it’s still a swing and an epic miss.

The director of “Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance” and four other credited writers try to make sense of their send-up of a larger-than-life eco-villain, the poisonous yet comical guilt religion bears in conservative politics and the role of “art” in telling and selling “the story” that we need to believe in for nothing to get done, or for great things to be achieved.

Every story has to have a villain, and art’s role — even in catastrophes — is to make us look in the mirror when we see him or her.

Cruise shows his age and a notable paunch as “Digger” Rockwell, a third generation Texas oilman and thus the grandson of the patriarch who found oil with “a ten cent shovel,” which hangs over a mantle in Digger’s production-designed-to-death mansion.

We piece together bits about his life through the course of the film — his instincts, his bullying, control-freak style, the bluster that comes with trying to pose as the Smartest Guy in the Room even when dealing with one’s problematic “experts.”

Those are the folks telling him his drilling “in a national park” in Greenland was ill-advised and remains so even after he’s struck oil. Because the planet’s oceans are warming and methane gas is bubbling to the surface all over, especially in the Arctic.

Backroom deals with his pal, the ailing President (John Goodman) and stirring up doubt about half a century of climate science keep Digger going — a “drill, baby, drill” fanatic with a wife as an afterthought and a daughter doing Third World non-profit work of some sort.

His increasingly corpse-like cat is his boon companion, and he’s not shy about flying in “the world’s foremost feline health expert” to keep Maggie alive for even a day or two longer. Not if the doc gives him bad news, though.

“Between two weeks…and five minutes” is his prognosis.

Digger’s got his virtues of the oil business patter down pat. Buzzwords like “jobs” that he’s creating, “freedom” from cold, freedom of movement, with value for stockholders a part of that bargain. As to the downside? Well, “God” put this oil on Earth for us is a good enough comeback for doubting rubes.

When the worst case happens and a massive chunk of ice shelf cracks off, Mr. Snakeskin Boots and Bolo tie ,”I know what I’m doin'” changes his tune.

“Mister President, there was just no WAY t’see it comin’….out of the BLUE,” etc.

The vulgarian in the White House, surrounded by a company of old white men (and one young white Christian nationalist preacher), knows that Digger knew and has known for years that the oil barron was racing against time to destroy the climate before the money to pay him for destroying it ran out.

All that’s left is “involuntary manslaughter charges on a massive scale” as Europe cannot be “panicked” by warning of the iceberg-driven tsunami to come.

There are clever touches to the production and design of all this, and the first arresting bit of direction is showing the “Situation Room” comically, graphically reacting to the mass carnage that Big Oil wreaks on coastal Europe.

We don’t see the havoc ourselves. Not until later, anyway.

The plot dives headfirst into the Big Speech about what hypocrites we all are for bitching about oil, then lurches into a play about this calamity and the one man most responsible for it.

Cruise and Riz Ahmed — playing a government scientist Digger recruited to work for him and whose warnings were met with deaf ears and then silenced when he changed jobs — give marvelously over the top and afraid to go over-the-top performances.

Digger Rockwell is a 60something variation on Cruise’s cocksure men’s movement hustler in “Magnolia” with a big helping of his volcanically overbearing studio chief in “Tropic Thunder.” But potbelly and butt-crack shots aside, the guy is never charming enough to be magnetic, never funny enough to be a caricature.

Jesse Plemons, Sophie Wilde and Emma D’Arcy are all part of the “Fossil Fools” stage production put on as the planet drowns.

Sandra Hüller plays Digger’s sister, a family rival with a Germanic accent. Michael Stuhlbarg is the ineffectual vice president made a fall guy looking to pass that title on to someone else And you might recognize character actor Burn Gorman as one of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Sit-Room scenes, reprising that role for their staged restaging.

If you think this review has coherence problems, wait until you see the movie. Which no one will, because “Digger” isn’t as funny or as obvious as “Don’t Look Up,” and manages to be a bummer on several levels.

So one can appreciate the attempt, even if at some point we wonder if we’re seeing a version of our director and co-writer every time this cynical, self-destructive superrich fool blurts out “I know what I’m doing,” when it’s obvious he doesn’t. Not here, anyway.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Sophie Wilde, Jesse Plemons, Emma D’Arcy, Michael Stuhlbarg and Burn Gorman.

Credits: Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, scripted by Sabrina Berman, Jez Butterworth, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Alejandro G. Iñárritu. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 2:09

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

Posted on October 1, 2026 by Roger Moore

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

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

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

And Wayne saved a plum part for Harry Carey, a star character actor from early silent Westerns who gave Wayne a lot of his moves, poses, wardrobe choices and the like — many of the ingredients that came to define Wayne’s onscreen persona. Check out the pose Carey strikes in the shot above that uses Wayne and Gail Russell to frame the silent screen legend in the background. We’d see versions of that in Ford Westerns, most famously “The Searchers.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hey, why don’t we just bust in?”

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: “approved,” violence, sexual inuendo

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

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

Running time: 1:40

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Movie Review: An “Angel and the Badman” in which Tommy Lee Jones plays Neither

Posted on October 1, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Angel and the Badman” is a remake of a classic John Wayne Western of the 1940s, with Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones in the role of the cagey marshal in this corner of the mythic West and EveryVillain Neal McDonough as the dogged gang leader out to recover stolen loot.

In the title roles? Meg Fraser, a relative newcomer (she had a supporting role in the TV romance “The Perfect Match”) is the pious, kindly and smitten “Angel.” And Zachary Levi is “The Badman,” a role Wayne himself played in the first film he ever self-produced.

Take a minute to get your head around that last credit. The once and forevermore Shazam, co-star of “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” plays a hardened criminal named Quirt, wounded and staggering onto a ranch where Christian charity prevails.

Levi seems miscast as a two-fisted, self-preserving/self-serving outlaw even if he’s far from awful — “just shy of adequate,” I’d say — in trying to fill the Duke’s boots.

The film around him? Director Julio Quintana did “The Long Game” and “Blue Miracle,” and probably didn’t have the Angel Studios budget to make an “authentic” looking, sounding, smelling and feeling Western.

Getting the dust and grime and horse and human sweat and blood and leather and sunbaked, wind-worn starkness of the era on film costs time and money. Making the pistol fire hard, metallic and loud is extra effort. Everything about this “Angel and the Badman” looks tidy, freshly-Maytag’d and pressed.

We see our heroine, Penny, trying to hitch a horse to a plow, and I’d swear I saw the Restoration Hardware price tag still on it.

The story, for those who’ve never seen the James Edward Grant original film, is about an outlaw who shoots it out and gets away from his original gang. He stumbles onto a ranch where the Worths (Jean Louise Kelly plays the widowed mother, Melissa Chambers the cussedly-cute matriarch and Barrett Ellis Luca is Penny’s kid-brother Johnny) take him in.

The ol’doc (Manny Greenfield) advises the good Christian folks to steer clear of this outlaw named for something he was beaten with as a child.

The marshal (Jones) and his deputy (Sean Bridgers) have tracked this outlaw, recovered his stolen “Confederate gold” and hope to round up Laredo (McDonough) and his whole gang. He enlists Penny to spy on Quirt and take notes as he recovers.

As she is smitten with the tall, scarred and gu-tshot stranger, she doesn’t.

Quirt recovers just in time to do a boon for the Worth women and little Johnny. He stares down the bully rancher up the valley into releasing the water he’s dammed up in an effort to dry out his neighbors.

The byword in both films is “treat everyone with kindness,” and darned if that sorry excuse for an oligarch (John Pyper-Ferguson) doesn’t soften. Just like Quirt.

But what about the outlaws? Can they be converted, fended-off or arrested to save Quirt and the Worths from the fate we’ve seen other innocents face?

The original “Angel and the Badman” came out and named the Worths and their kind “Quakers,” pacifists with a little boy a little too interested in guns for his own good. The film prefigured “Shane” and was one inspiration for the Harrison Ford/Peter Weir blockbuster “Witness.”

The “mining claim” at issue among the outlaws is replaced with “Confederate gold,” and the “Society of Friends” connection is erased here, along with much of the 1947 film’s edge (not all of it) and most of its grit.

I can’t decide if watering down the dogmatically decent “Quakers” to just pious, righteous Christians serves the story or does the remake any favors. In the Old West of the 1947 film, the Society of Friends are regarded as extreme and the ultimate test of living a life of nonviolence and kindness in a place the movies rendered bloody and vengeful.

Were the filmmakers hoping more viewers would identify as “Christian enough” to consider the point of view of the nonviolent worth emulating? Christian conservatives have long identified with John Wayne, gun culture and a might makes right, via a quicker on the draw hero, ethos.

McDonough is practically dapper in the saddle — spotless, crisp duds and hat. But he brings his usual blood-in-the-eye simmer to the role of a man determined to tidy up unfinished business. The fact that Laredo has a cough and needs mercury speaks volumes.

And Jones, who just turned 80 and is probably taking his last turn in the saddle, is adorably ornery as an old man whose face has weathered a lot more years, whose height has shrunk and whose voice has gone up an octave or so — Walter Brennanish.

But Levi single-handedly lowers the stakes here as he’s naturally more jokey than menacing.

The picture around him — freshly-painted house, “new” looking barn and what not — doesn’t take us back to The Old West so much as drop us in on a role-playing game — “Westworld” with Shazam as a Shootist.

Love the fact that Angel Studios found one more ride for Tommy Lee, and making McDonough part of their studio rep company is just smart business. But this one doesn’t compare to the 1947 film, and even without the comparison, doesn’t measure up to the message it never-quite-decides to send.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Zachary Levi, Meg Fraser, Neal McDonough, Sean Bridgers, Jesús Carús, Maurice Green, Jean Louise Kelly, Melissa Chambers and Tommy Lee Jones.

Credits: Directed by Julio Quintana, scripted by Jaime Hernandez, Kevin M. Townsend and Christopher Tuffin, based on the 1947 film written and directed by James Edward Grant. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:37

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