Netflixable? Ethan Hawke’s Lorenz Hart Sings and Smokes, once in a “Blue Moon”

Posted on September 23, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Blue Moon,” conceived and released as an awards contender in late 2025, is a tuneful but talk-you-to-death take on a pivotal night late in the life of legendary song lyricist Lorenz Hart.

Richard Linklater’s film clings to its “Unhappy Lives of Great Artist” formula to a fault, capturing a diminutive, unhappy and alcoholic “star” in steep decline, but keeping up an empty, brave front for his vastly diminished “public.

It’s built on a colorful turn by Ethan Hawke in the title role — puffing cigars, trying to avoid “falling off the wagon” and bending the ears of anybody within earshot at New York’s famed Sardi’s restaurant and club on the opening night of a show Hart whose lyrics Hart didn’t write.

It’s March, 1943. The show was “Oklahoma!” with, Hart mocks, “an EXCLAMATION point!” And it would change Broadway and the American musical theatre.

“The corn is as HIGH as an ELEPHANT’s eye’ is the stupidest lyric in the American Songbook!”

The premise of this sturdy but sometimes sultifying long, dark night of the soul melodrama is that Hart’s demons and predilections got the better of him, and no string of Broadway (“Pal Joey,” “Babes in Arms” and Hit Parade hits (“Blue Moon,” “My Funny Valentine”) could fill the holes in his heart.

Very short, gay and closeted, a “voyeur” by reputation, something confirmed by screenwriter Robert Kaplow’s reading of the letters Hart exchanged with a late life vicarious crush, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), Hart wrote tunes that often ached in perfectly composed couplets with external and internal rhymes.

“Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone…”

“Worst goddamn lyric I ever wrote,” Hart blusters to the soldier-on-leave (Jonah Lees) playing piano in a nearly empty Sardi’s. The man had a lot of hits, and high standards.

That’s a little harsh. But Hart’s just walked out on opening night for the musical that had to mean the end of his long association with composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott). And he knows it.

There’s no La La Land escape hatch for Hart.

“Do they even speak ENGLISH out there in Hollywood?” But he quotes the new hit “Casablanca” adoringly. “

“Nobody ever loved me that much.”

And the bottle? Well, our friendly and indulgent barkeep (Bobby Cannavale) can leave it, having filled one glass for Hart to admire and comment on, next to his “shot” of seltzer water. He can’t drink, as that’s one reason he’s not sharing fresh glories of Rodgers.

As he awaits the Broadway crowd, including the creators of “Oklahoma!”, Hart will regale the piano player, the bartender and writer and grammar scold E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), a fellow “genius” (“Charlotte’s Web”) who will serve as foil for his increasingly lurid descriptions of his too, too-young “protege,” Elizabeth.

She’s a Yale gal with Broadway ambitions played by Margaret Qualley.

Hawke, his hair thinning, dyed and slicked and his height reduced by camera tricks, puffs and puffs away, letting his “vulnerabilities” out even as he insists he’ll bring back “the cloak” as his shoulder won’t let him don and doff overcoats, that he’s “throwing a huge party tonight” at his apartment and everyone’s invited and that he has a rodent intruder in his flat that he’s named “Stuart,” something White (author of “Stuart Little”) takes great care in jotting down in his notebook.

And he’ll bed that coed, by God, by dawn!

The film’s longeurs all take a back seat to Qualley’s big scene, trying to erase the on-the-make sexpots she’s played in the past as she not-quite-demurely relates Elizabeth’s sexual history to an almost drooling-at-the-hearing Hart.

Aside from her, not enough is done with the supporting players to make this movie fly by.

Scott’s interesting, indulgent but almost parental Rodgers is joined with a colorless take on Rodgers’ new book and lyrics partner Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney). White is properly depicted as a quiet, reporterly poet and wordsmith, but Kennedy makes no impression in the role.

And Cannavale is just a generic, tolerant and friendly bartender who knows this barfly well and who wants to do right by him, even if that means serving that drink order that the sanitorium-sobered Hart might use to fall off the wagon.

But Hawke, Linklater’s muse and alter ego in the “Before Sunrise” pictures, and “Boyhood,” is at his very best, here, crooning with a lyricist’s (passable, polished but not Broadway bound) singing voice, quipping and cutting and saying “I’m not jealous” and “I’m not bitter” when we know he’s both.

Look at the shows he co-wrote, and the ones Rodgers went on to do after Hart and count “revivals.”

Linklater’s direction has a staid reverence for the subject that robs the movie of any hope of joy. There’s wit, but a kind of standoffishness that drowned the Kevin Kline Cole Porter “De-Lovely” over twenty years ago. And Porter? He was even wittier.

Gay, voyeur, bisexual, what have you. You can make your character “discrete,” as all who knew Hart insist he was. But there’s no sense in treating this like a 1940s taboo in a 2025 film.

Linklater’s “Nouevelle Vague” and “Me and Orson Welles” pretty much danced off the screen. This sad subject may not allow for much of that. But more of what made Hart special — aside from the cutting remarks and observations — begs to come out, and doesn’t.

Rating: R, smoking, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Andrew Scott, Patrick Kennedy, Jonah Lees, Simon Delaney and Bobby Cannavale.

Credits: Directed by Richard Linklater, scripted by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the letters of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland. A Sony Pictures Classics release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:40

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Movie Review: In Muldoon’s Curtain Call he’s an Ex-Boxer with “Dirty Hands”

Posted on September 22, 2026 by Roger Moore

Patrick Muldoon was a “Starship Troopers” alumnus who never quite got over the B-movie hump as an actor. He passed away last April at 57.

“Dirty Hands” was his final film, a representative work for an actor who made a decent impression in small roles in lesser thrillers such as Oscar Isaac’s “Card Counter” and Liam Neeson’s turn as Philip “Marlowe.” It co-stars his “Starship Troopers” friend and former flame Denise Richards.

And before I recalled that he died, I appreciated the simple virtues of the genre grindhouse picture Muldoon went out with.

Writer-director and co-star Kevin Interdonato (“Bad Frank”) took the old film actor’s maxim “If Hollywood isn’t hiring, write a film for yourself” to heart. “Dirty Hands” is his second feature. “Bastard Son” was the first.

It’s a simple and simplistic thriller that rarely offers a surprise, where everybody in the cast wears their mileage and disappointments and makes them work for their roles.

But a movie this lean, whatever its failings, shows its production history in every scene, and why if you’re taking a risk as a struggling actor, betting on yourself and hedging that bet is money in the bank.

“Dirty Hands,” the tale of an ex-boxer turned mob collector (Muldoon) and his hothead, no-good kid brother (Interdonato), is a line producer’s dream, a location scout’s shortest day ever and a location manager’s least complex shoot.

It’s got five locations — the collector’s garage, where we meet him and his brother brawl-boxing, his kitchen, where we meet the wife (Richards) and kid; the office of the mobster (Michael Beach), who has to be convinced to let the “f—up” kid-brother go along, the club where the “pick-and-drop” exchange of cash for coke takes place and goes wrong, and the after hours auto repair shop where our “heroes” and “villains” settle up for the climax.

A few nights of driving, chasing, shooting and punching it out in and out of a handful of some ’70s and ’80s vintage cars, on the streets in parking lot and in a back alley, and you’ve got your movie.

The script is a parade of f-bombs thrown around in vouching for, questioning and berating the kid brother/brawler, whom the “boss,” Dally (Beach) is loath to entrust with this job. The older brother is soon inclined to agree.

“You’re about as sharp as a two by four!”

The wife’s history is all over her preserved, crushed soul of a face. Yeah, that “Visit Mexico” postcard seen in the foreground was a dream. Once. Might it be foreshadowing, too? How much you want to bet?

“The last time you lied to me we almost lost everything!”

The fights are epic if only semi-logical. These are mob folk. They have guns. Why mess around with all the punching, grabbing tools in the repair shop for weapons, stabbing, brass-knuckling and choking with a chain?

“You just killed us, Little Brother!”

Sad to say, Muldoon’s cinematic curtain call isn’t very good. But the framework is there, the archetypal characters and tropes of the genre.

You can see why Muldoon thought this was worth the effort, why Richards and Beach might have signed on. And Interdonato may be nobody’s idea of a Tarantino or faux film noir savant. The direction here is competent and pedestrian. Nothing more.

But for aspiring filmmakers frustrated by finances and an ever-deferred dream, he’s showing you how it’s done.

Write a three-act genre script. Keep the settings to a minimum and put your money in the actors. Give them a lot of one-on-one, two-on-one dialogues. Try to toss in flinty, pithy lines.

“He’s not like that.”

“Everybody’s like that.”

And roll the dice. What’ve you got to lose?

Rating:TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Patrick Muldoon, Kevin Interdonato, Michael Beach and Denise Richards.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kevin Interdonato. A Saban release streaming on Amazon.

Running time: 1:22

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Netflixable? “Stop! That! Train!” Take the “Airplane!” instead!

Posted on September 21, 2026 by Roger Moore

The longest 90 minute comedy of the mid 2020s might be the one with the most celebrity cameos, and fewest laughs per cameo.

That’s an apt description of the drag farce “Stop! That! Train!,” a quaint quip-a-thon in the “Airplane!” tradition, with vamped-up vulgarity as its only means up updating that 1980 parody.

A disaster movie about the nation’s first non-stop bullet train facing meteorological peril as it dashes from L.A. to Celebration, Florida, it’s a 700 one-liner, 100 sight gag and half a dozen lip-sync numbers make-work project for legions of the nation’s drag queens, led by their self-annointed queen, Rupaul Charles.

It feels half-amusing at the start but oh-so-old and dated before a half hour has passed.

The tale is set in an alternate reality where this “true story” can boast of a dying “Stank Rail” passenger line contrasted with lush, posh “Glamazonian Express,” replete with campy passengers, tacky gilded, over-decorated cars and service of in the “extreme” range of “wasteful excess.”

“We’re like if Amtrak was gay!”

The train dashes off only for a lone control center dispatcher (Rachel Bloom) to recognize the “Stormaganza” between it and its destination.

“Now boarding, couples that shouldn’t BE together.”

The president (Rupaul), watching her approval numbers slide and up down from “Love Her!” to “Lea Michelle, 2020,” will have to get involved.

“It’s time…to NUKE Russia! Kiddddd-ing!”

And those two cabin hostesses (played by Jujubee and Ginger Minj, ahem) laid off by “Stank” when it closed, now pretending to be Glamazonian staff, will have save the day. They must overcome the Mean Girls hostesses (Brock Hayhoe, Symone and Marcia Marcia Marcia) if this train and its colorlessly colorful passengers and crew (Chris Parnell, a lot less amusing than usual, is the conductor) are to survive.

The passengers include a “grieving” Nicole Ritchie, stuffing a full sized wooden coffin in the overhead luggage rack, Ms. newly-divorced and seriously on-the-make (Missi Pyle), a “Real Housewife” here, a “Modern Family” cast member or onetime “Vampire Slayer” there — Joel McHale in bondage gear and other SAG sight gags, that sort of thing.

The jokes consist of sexual “kink” zingers and run-on lists of pop culture references, “The Real Housewives of the Potomac,” et al, bad pun names (President Judy Gagwell) and “Tell it to me straight!” demands. “Now, tell it to me GAY!”

One running thread through the picture is a general dismissal or simple “dissing” of women by the drag queens, as in nobody in drag or merely mincing recognizes Sarah Michelle Gellar, and they all insult her as a nobody who is too poor to be riding the glam train. You’d think they were all named “Karen.” Or “J.K.”

Natasha Leggero annoys the queen corps of cabin stewardesses no end.

“Sir, please don’t TOUCH me.”

The rat-a-tat-tat nature of the zingers should have produced a lot more winners. But as Martin Short observed, par for the course in comedy is if “twenty percent” of what comics cook up earns a laugh.

And while it’s easy to fall in with the whole drag-not-trans vibe of the thing — from the most convincing to the least, every gender bending player is parodying and exaggerating femininity — there’s something very “Airplane!” dated about how all that is handled.

The viewer can appreciate the attempt to drag drag out of the culture war headlines and remind us of the overly-made-up, vulgar fun of it all, “Stop! That! Train!” just doesn’t play.

One keeps waiting for something John Waters edgy or shocking or hilarious. But Adam Shankman, who broke out by directing the delightful but tame musical remake of Waters’ “Hairspray,” his screenwriters/gag crafters and his gender bent cast don’t deliver.

Rating: R, sex jokes, drug jokes, profanity aplenty

Cast: Ginger Minj, Jujubee, Brock Hayhoe, Symone, Marcia Marcia Marcia, Rachel Bloom, Missi Pyle, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Latrice Royale, Joel McHale, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Nicole Ritchie, Lisa Rinna, Charo, Raven Symone, Chris Parnell and Rupaul Charles.

Credits: Directed by Adam Shankman, scripted by Christine Friel and Connor Wright. A Bleecker St. release streaming on Netflix.

Running time: 1:30

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Classic Film Review: ’60s Nippon Noir — “I, the Executioner”

Posted on September 21, 2026 by Roger Moore

Here’s a lean, mean serial killer thriller from 1960s Japan with sex, grim violence and style to burn.

“I, the Executioner,” more poetically subtitled “Requiem for a Massacre,” has a McQueen/Belmondo cool ladykiller– leather sportscoat, black turtleneck, shades and an omnipresent cigarette on his lips or lightly pinched between the fingers.

“Ladykiller” is literal. He (Makoto Satô) is a torturer and strangler of women, who beds them before unleashing his savage side.

Yakuza film stylist Tai Katō (“Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza,” the “Red Peony Gambler” series and “By a Man’s Face Shall You Know Him”) throws us into this black and white slaughter before daring to suggest that there’s meaning to this madness.

Five women (Kin Sugai, Yuki Kawamura, Junkô Tôda, Sanae Nakahara and Ranfan Ou) had a drunken Mahjong revel. Now, they’re being strangled and worse.

Why?

Katō, works from a script by Haruhijo Mimura with DP Keiji Maruyama (“Village of Doom”) framing shot after arresting shot — check out the “Citizen Kane” compositions — and editor Shizu Ôsawa (he cut  Katō’s samurai classic “Miyamoto Musashi”) ratcheting up suspense as we follow events from the killer’s, assorted victims’ and the cops’ point of view.

The film leans into the tropes of such tales even as it puts a distinctive Japanese stamp on film noir.

Fujio Suga plays the meaner, younger detective, inclined to dismiss connections and clues if they come from his police force inferiors. The chief (Tatsuo Matsumura)? He’s more sanguine. He’s unsympathetic to suspects — they have a “list” of fourteen — and uncomfortable all the way through this.

Blame his hemorrhoids.

“Once an alibi fails,” he muses (in Japanese with subtitles), “we can issue a warrant and arrest you.”

As they work their way down their list, our killer is striking here and there, picking off that Mahjong gathering, each murder as perverse as the one preceding it.

But wait! There’s a noodle shop waitress Haruko (Chieko Baishō) who is attracted to our kill’er’s brooding and seeming gallantry. Is she in danger, too?

This film comes from an era before much of the world’s urban culture had become homogenized, and the late ’60s the culture clash this picture preserves is a real eye opener.

Geishas join the ’60s J-pop whirl of a discoteques. Street scenes, transit stations and the construction boom that brought Japan back to life after the devastation of World War II feature in the background.

We ponder the absurdly laxity of the prison sentence it is suggested that this “pervert” “thrill killer” faces, something cops and others discuss. We fear for each new victim, lured to her doom by a cool hunk who never breaks a smile.

And we wrestle with the seriously twisted, monstrously sexist “motive” the cops start to wrestle with as they piece the connections together.

Katō saves much of the explanation of this plot for third act flashbacks, as stylishly cut into it as the dramatic framings of victims with their would-be killer in the background.

The violence — nudity, bondage and strangulation included — jolts. But the tone is musing, almost romantic, backed by sentimental Japanese ballads of the day.

Satô and Baishō are the stand-outs in the cast, but each victim is given a surface personality and a hidden agenda and the players play around with that to great effect.

Other supporting players have Kurosawa (“Seven Samurai,” etc.) credits and flesh out the film’s milieu with commitment to the older cop no one listens to, the aged noodle shop owner who rejects the era he finds himself trapped in.

The subject matter and its very Japanese and quite dated attitudes and treatment play as cringey on a different level today. But “I, the Executioner” remains a riveting Japanese entry in a genre where it can invite comparison to works by Huston, Wilder, Lang and Welles and hold its own quite well, thank you very much.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Makoto Satô, Chieko Baishō, Sanae Nakahara, Ranfan Ou, Kin Sugai, Kin Ishi, Fujio Saga,
Junkô Tôda and Tatsuo Matsumura

Credits: Directed by Tai Katō, scripted by Haruhiko Mimura , Tai Katō and Yōji Yamada. A Shochiku, Film Movement Classics release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:33

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Leave a comment

Movie Review: “Above the Line” and Far Below Par

Posted on September 19, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s a movie about Hollywood and the dirty dealing it often takes to “get to the top” or even “get a break.”

But it’s hard to muster up any enthusiasm for the stumblebums in the plot, or behind the camera for “Above the Line,” which takes its title for the way the most important creative folks in a film are billed — writers, actors, director, producers

This Jeffrey Scott Collins action comedy is about wannabes/never-will-bes secretly hired to steal Oscar statuettes from a particularly vile and successful producer (veteran character actor Gregg Henry). Things go right and things go wrong, some rise to the occasion by improvising and some flee.

And the plot and editing are so confused that it’s damned difficult to sort out who is screwing over whom and who knows what among that sextet of would-be starlet, directors, a writer, a “Hero” and a producer.

An empty Beverly Hills McManson is the meeting place for our handsome “Hero” (John Way), the pretty “Princess” screenwriter (Sophia Ali), the “Dame” (Jamie Lee), the duo of young directing brothers, “Cowboy” (Dylan Playfair) and “Spaceman” (Jackson Pace) and the producer who’s basically still a “Ghost” (Reno Wilson) as far as Hollywood is concerned.

They’re summoned by a “golden ticket” and ten $100 bills each. There’s a cool $million in it if they can swipe the five ill-gotten Oscars that Jack Woodrow (Henry) keeps in his hilltop mansion for some unseen puppetmaster. A plan is laid out for them. It sounds nuts, but there’s a lot of money and that tempts most, but not all.

What really seals the deal for the five who agree to take the van provided and don the Halloween masks within to carry out this heist is each person’s Jack Woodrow “story.”

Our writer was screwed out of an Oscar-winning, break-out credit. The fading “I’m barely thirty”
Dame got humiliated trying to sleep her way into a guest spot in one of Woodrow’s TV series. And so on.

They tell these stories on the way to the heist, during and after it, as we all figure out Jack’s at home, he’s got starlet-“company” and this robbery goes off the (cocaine) rails in a hurry and a lone cop (Adhir Kalyan) gets involved.

We figure out why everybody, including the two young director/brothers have a beef. But we can’t figure out why they’d know and party with a twice-their-age Hollywood veterinarian played by Cedric the Entertainer, whom they visit when one of them gets shot.

And we get Hollywood “lessons” that King of Hollywood Jack imparts to each as he’s shafting them in this way or that.

“Always read the contract.” “Speak up when you know you’re right.” Etc.

When a movie like “The Player” or “Swimming with Sharks” works, there’s credit enough to go all around. But when your movie isn’t remotely on a cleverness par with those acrid tales of Hollywood chicanery, the blame is rarely the players’ fault.

This or that character serves no real function, as scripted, or when they do (Suzy Nakamura plays Jack’s long-suffering assistant), what to actually do with them.

Old pro Henry knows the biz and the creeps who run it well enough to make Woodrow interesting, at least. The other cast are trapped playing “types” that barely register as the plot stumbles this way and that, trying to find surprises or credibility as a Tale from the Dark Side of Hollywood.

Something got lost by the “Above the Line” “creatives” in the writing, workshopping or editing that might have helped it make sense, or at least feel less confused and pointless.

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

Cast: Sophia Ali, Gregg Henry, Reno Wilson, Dylan Playfair, Jamie Lee, Jackson Pace, Suzy Nakamura, John Way, Adhir Kalyan and Cedric the Entertainer.

Credits: Directed by Jeffrey Scott Collins, scripted by Jeffrey Scott Collins and Jono Matt. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:33

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

BOX OFFICE: “Resident Evil” Reboots with… $60? “Magic” Practically claws out $11

Posted on September 19, 2026 by Roger Moore

There was this dude — hardcore gamer, I gather, and fan of the “Resident Evil” film and game franchise, who did this to the beater he drove to work at a Subway shop in Roxboro, N.C.

You just knew they’d never abandon the Racoon City movie series, even after Milla Jovovich priced-out and aged out of being the nubile action heroine who anchored this 24 years and running film franchise. The fans are that dedicated.

So a franchise-best blockbuster opening — $24 million Thursday night and Friday, per Deadline.com — should come as no shock. Especially when Trumpflation is considered.

It did $8.8 million Thursday night alone.

Actor turned director Zach Cregger’s take on the game-turned-movie franchise is winning the best reviews of the series as well. Go figure. I lost whatever interest I had in this game-to-big-screen enterprise long ago, but Cregger means I’ll need to see it.

And The Numbers reports Sunday that it hit $60 million on its opening weekend.

The five and a half million or so gamers and diehards and Cregger fans — he did the superior horror tales “Barbarians” and “Weapons” — and whatever you’d call somebody who paints his car in Umbrella Corp. livery are turning out for this one.

The Sandra Bullock/Nicole Kidman “Practical Magic 2” sequel is doing less than half the business it did opening weekend, 12.1 million, and that’ll easily be good enough for second place.

“The Odyssey” wins weekdays in this portion of its summer-long battle with “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” But “Spidey” took in $6.5 million this weekend, “The Odyssey” $4.9.

“Coyote vs. Acme” took fifth $4.512 million weekend. It’s earned $54 million in North America. All that money doesn’t go to Ketchup Entertainment, but they paid $50 for it so they’re going to make money with it, in addition to a splash.

Angel’s “Runner” is on its way to a sixth place $3.18, and the new release “Daniel and the Fiery Furnace” is doing middling business, but $3.14 million got it into seventh, just ahead of the “Transformers,” re-release ($3.1), which sits in eighth place.

New releases “Shaun of the Sheep: The Monster of Mossy Bottom” (11th, $1.9) and the outdoor action pic “The Weight” ($2.55 in tenth with Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe reached a few viewers. Both are good and deserve an audience. Pity Gkids and Vertical didn’t advertise either all that much.

“The Uprising” for sure, “By Any Means” and maybe one other title will fade out.

Look at the take for “Mutiny” (left all theaters Thursday) and “By Any Means” and tell me Jason Statham and Mark Wahlberg aren’t seeing the writing on the wall.

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Movie Review: Hawke & Co. carry “The Weight” of Life, Loss, and Gold for Russell Crowe

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Roger Moore

The hero is a widowed veteran, father of a tiny girl who is taken away from him when he is unjustly imprisoned.

The warden of the camp where he’s jailed seems like a reasonable sort. He recognizes a man who is good with his hands who can solve problems menial or mechanical on the fly.

You want to shorten your sentence? Help me out with this onerous task, just a bit of backpacking across the mountains.

That’s the plot of “The Weight,” a lean, crackling thriller in the “Wages of Fear” (“Sorceror” was a remake of that.), “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and “Deliverance” mold.

It’s a genre picture that follows formula and still keeps you guessing, another acting feather in Ethan Hawke’s hat and a reminder that Russell Crowe still does good very work — nuanced, shaded and dangerous.

Hawke reteams with his “The Good Lord Bird” TV series producer Padraic McKinley, who directs this murky, foggy saga in simple, mythic strokes, hitting each action beat hard, steadily raising the stakes every step of the way.

The Great Depression is on and police everywhere are making matters worse, hunting “vagrants” in the interest of the propertied people who always call the shots.

That’s how our downtrodden Everyman, Murphy (Hawke) is grabbed. He may be good with engines, construction and everything menial in between. But when you can’t find work in 1933, you get evicted. When the a crowd of out-of-uniform cops hassle him and get handsy with his little girl Penny (Avy Berry), he fights back and that’s how he ends up in jail.

Months later, facing the permanent loss of wee Penny, he’s transferred to a road work camp run by Clancy (Crowe). The Boss comes off as tough but fair minded. None of your Southern fried sadism in this forested corner of Oregon. When he picks up on Murphy’s plight, and his special skills, he makes his offer.

There’s this gold mine where they do their own smelting into ingots (apparently). With Franklin Roosevelt in the White House trying to turn the economy around, that isn’t going to be worth much to your average fat cat unless they rush it out and hide it or “speculate” their way to riches.

Murphy can hand-pick three feloow inmates — mouthy Rankin (Austin Amelio), leftist intellectual Singh (Avi Nash) and the stoic Olsen (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen) — and if they can retrieve that gold, under guard (Sam Hazeldine and George Burgess) and haul it over the mountains, they’ll earn early release.

The first thing that doesn’t go according to plan is the Native American cook (Julia Jones) who flees the mining camp with them. It won’t be the last.

The narrative, scripted by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, takes these seven characters to the inevitable rotting rope bridge spanning a canyon, a structure that won’t support their weight and the weight of the gold.

They’ll be hunted by greedy prospectors, dogged by each man and woman’s human failings and bedeviled by the fear that this is all a set-up by mine company hustler Taggert (Alec Newman) and/or Clancy.

I love the world the film immerses us in right from the start — Murphy driving an ancient Ford like a banshee down back roads just to entertain his pre-child-seat daughter giggling in the back, a kind neighbor trying to find things she can pay Murphy for to help them survive, a “justice” system that’s nothing of the sort.

Politics come to the fore on the march, as the anti-capitalist Singh is badgered by chatterbox orphan turned criminal Rankin, only to have the mouthy dope schooled by “the wrong kind’a Indian.”

Every character may be a stock “type,” but every characterization is spot-on, especially in the ways those “types” surprise us.

The score tosses in a few bits of modern (“classic” rock) music that jars. I guess banjos are out of the question in this Depression Era “Deliverence.”

Some of the problem solving, woodlore and martial skills Murphy displays is convincing. Some of it invites us to second-guess him and common sense.

And the movie does that, too.

How will this play out when the whip comes down? We’re guessing right up to the end about how satisfying (crowd pleasing) or frustrating the finale will be. Lay some of that at the feet of Hawke, who isn’t shy about signing on to movies where right or good triumphs doesn’t triumph over evil or The System.

As the screen faded to black, several of us got up to leave the showing I attended. But to a one, we all turned and stared back at the screen from the hallway, just to make damned sure Hawke, Crowe, director McKinley & Co. weren’t serviing up one last surprise to send us home with.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julia Jones, Austin Amelio, Avi Nash,
Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen, Sam Hazeldine, Avy Berry, Alec Newman, George Burgess and Russell Crowe.

Credits: Directed by Padraic McKinley, scripted by Matthew Booi, Shelby Gaines, Leo Scherman. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:55

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

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

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Roger Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: G

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

Running time: 1:20

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

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

Posted on September 17, 2026 by Roger Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

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

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

Running time: 1:57

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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

Posted on September 17, 2026 by Roger Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ICE out, Gaza IN!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: violence, racism, homophobia and profanity

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

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

Running time:

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment