Movie Review: Even the most Righteous Revenge has a Cost — “Is God Is”

Posted on May 25, 2026 by Roger Moore

Writer-director Alaesha Harris makes a furious feature film debut with “Is God Is,” an ugly, unblinking slice of African American Gothic horror as relevant as a headline and as timeless as a parable.

It’s about two fire-scarred sisters “always on the outisde looking in” given the chance and the responsibility to avenge themselves and their family on the man who did this to them. One is hardened enough for the quest, and the other too compassionate or just too beaten down to be.

Blood will be shed on a north to south, coast-to-coast quest to track down the father who burned their house, with them and their mother in it, got away with it and thrived, guilt-free in a new life. Nothing will be simple and little’s going to be pretty in this Old Testament styled manhunt/man-punish odyssey.

Racine and Anaia are twins, bonded since birth in ways the movies often treat as supernatural.

“If one finds trouble, the other can feel it,” one of them narrates. They can communicate telephatically. And if you pick on one, and you’ve got to deal with the other.

Racine, played with a cold-blooded resolve by Kara Young (of TV’s “I’m a Virgo”). is the tough one — petite, with most of her scars on her arms and torso. But God help you if you call her more badly-scarred sister Anaia (Mallori Johnson of “Steal Away”) “ugly.”

They’ve grown up in the foster care system, abused and neglected and unloved. These days, they can’t even keep custodial jobs. ‘Cine takes any second glance as an insult, any repellent look as an outrage.

Then they get a summons they were never expecting. Their mother, whom they’d been told died in that long-ago fire, is alive down Virginia way and breathing her last.

But mother Ruby, played through scar tissue and gritted-teeth by Vivica A. Fox, doesn’t have a tearful reunion in mind. She knows who did this to them and has a notion of how to find him. There’ll be no “forgive and forget.” Ruby declares she’ll have “no peace until I know he’s gone.”

She is their mother, the one who “created” them, “God” to the two sisters. Her word is the law.

Racine’s violent temper tells us straight off that she’s down for this “mission.” Anaia isn’t, but is too weak to resist her sister’s furious focus and too loyal to let her take on this quest by herself.

They will encounter figures worthy of a Homerian odyssey in their travels — their father’s faith-healer/preacher second wife (Erika Alexander), his beautiful, kept-in-comfort third wife (Janelle Monáe), assorted step siblings and dad’s old and mute (tongue taken out) lawyer (Mykleti Williamson).

But little that they experience prepares them for The Man (Sterling K. Brown) himself.

The script’s narrative is somewhat static, even as it’s on the movie. And its messaging is direct to the point of simplistic.

But this cast plays the hell out of this violent parable about what one endures, who one believes caused it, the need for revenge and the cost of giving those who deserve it their comeuppance.

Fox has her best role in years and registers grief eaten up with outrage under layers of makeup and in pre-fire flashbacks. Young practically seethes off the screen, Johnson gives the movie its humanity, with Alexander, Monáe and Williamson adding different shades to the black and white, good and evil simplicity of the plot.

And Brown shows up to bring it all home, delivering a character study in “the villain’s point of view” — cold, calculating, unsentimental, the “monster” any horror film simply must have to come off.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Kara Young, Mallori Johnson, Vivica A. Fox, Janelle Monáe, Mylkelti Willaimson and Sterling K, Brown.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alaeshea Harris. An Amazon/MGM release.

Running time:

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Documentary Review: Celebrating the NBA Player, Coach and GM — “Jerry West: The Logo”

Posted on May 24, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Jerry West: The Logo” is a glossy updating of the timeworn NFL Films era formula of documentaries celebrating athletes.

It’s officially sanctioned, touching on only the uncomfortable corners that its subject — NBA legend Jerry West — approved of. West may have died late in production (in June of 2024), but we hear first-time doc director Kenya Barris on camera and off thank people who knew West for participating.

“Jerry thanks you” too, he hastens to add on a couple of occasations.

Barris does a fine job of hitting the high points and the red letter events of West’s life in what must have seemed, even to him (he created TV’s “Black-ish”), a pretty old fashioned and downright corny hero’s journey tale.

There’s a whiff of “Hoosiers” in the story of the small town hardscrabble childhood that shaped West — abusive father, idolized older brother killed in the Korean War, but a kid who taught himself the game with a hoop nailed to a tree in the backyard of his Chelyan, West Virginia home.

The elderly West, who revisits that town and that home for the film, recalled fantasizing “big game” scenarios as he practiced his soon-to-be-iconic jump shot, focusing on pull-up jumpers where his feet landed “in the cylinder” he jumped from.

He starred for the West Virginia Mountaineers in college, a high-scoring guard and small forward leading his team to the Final Four. But a pattern was established. They lost the championship game. And West was named tourney MVP, which, as it repeated itself in his NBA LA Lakers years of losses to the Boston Celtics, was like rubbing salt in the “We LOST” wound for the hyper-competitive West.

Barris sits down with West’s second wife and sons from his two marriages, with former teammates like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and future “Showtime” Lakers coach Pat Riley. We hear about West’s temperament and frustrations with a decade of finals losses, his self-admitted unsuitability for coaching — despite getting the Lakers into the playoffs in that role in the ’70s.

But West’s lasting fame came from his GM years, getting Riley into building the Lakers’ “Showtime” dynasty, then the Kobe-Shaq dynasty, and later still the Golden State Warriors dynasty, the one build around the greatest shooter since West, Stephen Curry.

Michael Jordan empathizes with the competitive drive, Magic Johnson shares and feels the love West didn’t openly express during their years as management/star player, and hears how West broke down at the news that Magic’s career was over due to contracting the AIDS virus.

It’s all good enough, up to a point. But we’re in a new golden age for surface gloss documentary biographies, and nobody is churning out more of those than Netflix.

West’s repeated “I don’t give a s–t” cracks about his “country” ways, temper, successes and failures don’t get us into his head. Barris questions West about the formative tragedies of his life, his moments of pride and depression over coming close but failing to achieve his ultimate goal many times. But we never feels we “get” what drove him.

Big controversies, like the team owner Jerry Buss public firing of Paul Westhead at Magic Johnson’s very public urging, and the incredibly messy way Riley became coach, are ignored.

And more simply, there’s not enough analyis of his on-court skills — how he sharpened them, who he learned from the most, how he adjusted from huge scorer to assists leader — to explain his on-the-court greatness.

Barris has an easier time underscoring West’s later-life glories. It was his own hard-won skills at sizing up opponenents on the court that made him a genius at evaluating talent and engineering draft picks (Kobe, Magic) to match with complementary trades (Shaq, et al).

West’s Kobe “discovery” in high school was one of the great coups in pro basketball history, and his devastation at Bryant’s post-career death in a helicopter accident can be felt. West’s ability to relate, player-to-player, with Black teammates and stars he later recruited and advised for the Lakers is mentioned but not explored.

There’s just not enough of that material, too little done with the personal life, far too few Kareem Abdul-Jabbar anecodtes — he and West are the smartest guys in the room, here — revealing how his former teammate and then boss played on the court and then manuevred in the LA Forum office suites to put legendary teams on the court.

It’s all too “officially sanctioned” to come off as unfiltered and definitive.

Barris has made a good film. But this gloss-over makes the case that wee don’t need a feature film about West, that the most complicated West we’ll ever see was in TV’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.” And cunning front office tactitian that he was, that Jerry West was merely part of an ensemble of once-in-a-lifetime talents, role players, ownership that had to be placated and a vibrant, culture-defining “scene” that he was never really a part of.

West will be “The Logo” until some future NBA commissioner figures some photo version of Jordan, Kobe, Curry or whoever merits that honor.

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Jerry West, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, Michael Jordan, Pat Riley, Karen West, Ryan West, David West, Stephen Curry, Rod Thorn, Jonnie West, Klay Thompson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Credits: Written and directed by Kenya Barris. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:01

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Movie Review: The Revolution will be Shoplifted– “I Love Boosters”

Posted on May 23, 2026 by Roger Moore

Capitalism’s end game is taunted and satirized in “I Love Boosters,” a loopy, anarchic comedy about shoplifting, fashion, media mass indoctrination and This Cultural Moment.

The latest from the rapper and songwriter turned filmmaker Boots Riley (“Sorry to Bother You”) has a touch of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” sci-fi and “One Battle After Another” energy. But just a touch. Sweeping up everything from teleportation to a succubus, generational angst (Gen Z and Alpha, mostly), pyramid schemes to con the poor, draconian Chinese labor practices and a parade of TV interviews with “fake” gig workers and apartment renters extolling the virtues of not making enough money to live on and the evils of rent control, it’s all a bit out of hand and yet furiously on the mark.

“Everything ‘they’ told us we could rely on seems so temporary these days.”

Not all of it works and pacing and flow call attention to themselves when the picture lurches into lower gears. The targets are recognizable in daily life in 2026, even if the means of “resisting” the villains stumble into the sci-fi fantastical

But Riley rounded up a winning cast, giving Keke Palmer her most glamorous and dressed-to-kill leading role and landing Don Cheadle, Eiza González, Will Poulter, Taylour Paige, Naomie Ackie, Popi Liu and LaKeith Stanfield in support.

And as the entitled, smart, rich and predatory designer Christie Smith, Riley serves up Demi Moore at her most villainous and most grandiose.

“I drape bodies that become a human landscape,” she bellows, a line that the “Devil Wears Prada 2” crew would have killed for.

Palmer plays “Corvette,” a Bay Area fashionista who dresses in her own fashion-forward creations and dazzles as she does. She may be using a silly fake name and squatting with her running mate Mariah (Taylour Paige of “Zola” and “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F”) in a derelict fried chicken joint. But there’s always time for hair, makeup and dressing well.

Because these ladies — with fellow “crew” member Sade (Naomi Ackie) and other decoy “shoppers” — are professional “boosters.” You want to shoplift in high end couture shops like icon Christie Smith’s Metro Design, you have to “pass” for a customer with money. Especially if you want to stuff so much clothing down your track suit that you look like the Michelin Man’s pretty-in-pink sister as you waddle out.

The media has just enough shop-provided CCTV footage of the thieves in action to give them a name — “The Velvet Gang.” Christie takes their pillaging personally. She’s a former science prodigy who made her killing in designer clothing, and these boosters “are reducing our margins.”

Riley writes a clever scene that puts the predator and the prey in the same room, with Christie giving a disguised Corvette career advice that plays like a moment of “sisterhood.” The “first rule” of managing people?

“You never let them see you’re f—ing managing!“

Corvette is convinced that one of Christie’s new outfits was swiped from her Instagram post of her own version of that design. It’s game on, time to bring down the titan of the fashion industry.

But there’s competition in the rob-Chrstie-out-of-business game. This brassy Chinese woman (Popi Liu of TV’s “Hacks,” “No Good Deed” and “The Afterparty”) seems to be ducking into stores and literally vacuuming dresses off the racks. Turns out, she’s got stolen Chinese tech that she’s using to rob Christie and highlight the awful pay and working conditions in the clothing factory where she and others slave away to make Christie’s creations.

The “teleportation device” prop kind of hijacks the picture as writer-director Riley would rather embrace the gimmick than struggle to find something hopeful to say about mistreated store employees (Eiza González, Najah Bradley) finding common ground with exploited Chinese garment laborers.

Considering the many targets Riley passingly singles out as part of “The Problem.” Moore’s Christie quite righltly complains about being singled out . “Why (only) my s—” is being pilfered?

Palmer anchors the narrative with her vengeance-seeking fashionista who might discover feminism if she learns to listen instead of just lashing out and taking charge.

LaKeith Stanfield finds laughs as the misty-eyed model who always gives the ladies what they want — with a catch. Cassandra, aka Corvette, isn’t falling for it.

Will Poulter does his best “Are You Being Served?” gay clothing store manager. And an almost unrecognizable (heavy makeup, fat suit) Don Cheadle plays a pyramid scheme guru without the polish or digital distraction of “crypto” in his spiel.

It’s all more cluttered than you’d like, but that’s implicit when the filmmaker is reaching for “anarchic.”

The more solid than silly performances and a whimsical production design belp. There’s a Leaning Tower of San Francisco apartment high rise for the richie riches, chases down streets even steeper than the ones you find in real life San Francisco and Cassandra’s nightmarish vision of the Indian Jones boulder that her life has given her, a crushing ball of bills, eviction notices, old cell phones and the like that follows and pursues her as she scrambles to make that Big Score.

“I Love Boosters” makes a fine down-market, down-and-dirty and more pointed take on the Fashion Industrial and Media Complex than any “Devil Wears Prada” outing. I won’t say it’s funnier, because it isn’t. But Riley’s film gives you a few things to chew on between succubus sex scenes, teleportations gone awry and the Big Debate of any given fashion season.

Is it turquoise, or just plain “aqua marine?”

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige, Naomi Ackie, LaKeith Stanfield, Popi Liu, Eiza González, Alan Z, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle and Demi Moore

Credits: Scripted and directed by Boots Riley. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:40

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BOX OFFICE: “Mandalorian and Grogu” sell tickets and toys, “Obsession” builds, “I Love Boosters” underwhelms

Posted on May 23, 2026 by Roger Moore

From 1977 to 2026, “Star Wars” movie have been money in the May box office bank.

So mediocre reviews aside, comparisons to “Solo” and other lesser “Long time ago in a galaxy far away” tales be damned, here’s the big screen version of the bounty hunter and the baby Yoda puppet making big bucks on another holiday weekend.

Deadline.com is saying that “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” will clear $90 million over the four day Memorial Day weekend. Jon Favreau directed the film based on the spin-off TV series, and a big Thursday night and very good Friday ($34 all-in) set up that projected take. Not a world beater, but a very healthy opening to finish off a most robust spring in the Trumpflation era.

Speaking of pedophiles, the Michael Jackson bio-pic “Michael” is adding maybe as much as $20 million and has cleared the $300 million mark at the domestic box office. It’ll be over $320 million by the start of next weekend.

“Obsession” is turning into a break-out horror title, holding all its audience from last weekend and possibly even slipping past “Michael” if the Saturday, Sunday and Monday audience show up. It’ll clear $18, possibly even hit $20-21 in third place. With a little-known cast and a catchy horror hook, “Obsession” was pulling them in all during the week, and the weekend suggests those ticket buyers are giving it a word of mouth bounce.

Next week — maybe by Thursday — “The Devil Wears Prada 2” will clear the $200 million mark. It is on track to earn another $14 million by midnight Monday and that’ll leave it just shy of $198.

Those darned “Sheep Detectives” are holding onto the family movie audience, collecting another $11 million this four day weekend and clinging to a spot in the top five. They’re closing in on $50 million.

Two other new titles will vie for spots just outside of the top five.

A horror offering from Paramount, “Passenger,” will flirt with $9 million but probably fall short of that.

And the weekend’s most critically-acclaimed new release, the Keke Palmer/Taylor Paige/Naomie Ackie/Demi Moore fashion pilfering picture, “I Love Boosters,” may manage $5 million in more limited release. Love that Keke.

Those three new titles should push “In the Grey” and “Is God Is” and one other title out of the top ten, but we’ll know more about that later Saturday and early Sunday.

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Netflixable? Sally Field and an Octopus each Ponder “Remarkably Bright Creatures” peering through the Glass

Posted on May 21, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Remarkably Bright Creatures” is a sweet, sentimental and gratingly-cloying tale of a grieving widow who forms a relationship with the ageing Giant Pacific Octopus at the small town aquarium where she’s the cleaning lady.

It introduces but never really addresses issues of grief and fear of impending death as the narrative contorts itself into one contrived coincidence after another meant to add weight to the plot.

Sally Field weeps about her character’s loss and her fears of the life that shrinks for the last time once the phrase “assisted living” enters the conversation. “Answers” replace aching questions about a mysterious death and Alfred Molina — Sally’s villainous husband in “Not Without my Daughter” — voice-over narrates the running monologue of Marcellus, the octopus in question.

Marcellus takes an interest in Tova Sullivan’s (Field) life, reluctantly. As she lets bits of it out as she chats to his tank, he can guess or even intuit what is going on with a life not unlike his own — winding down.

Hers might still have the veneer of being “full,” but she was shattered by tragedy and is just now facing late life if not end-of-life decisions.

Tova has her gossip-and-knitting circle, The Knit-Wits (Kathy Baker, Joan Chen and Beth Grant), but they’re just going through the motions (and movie tropes) these days. She’s friends with the local deli/quick stop shop owner (Colm Meaney), who might be sweet on her. She has a lovely home with a view.

But the husband who shared that waterside cabin and who made assisted living reservations for them is gone, and that room in the house she keeps shut-up and preserved was for a son who died.

It takes the arrival of musician Cameron (Lewis Pullman of “Salem’s Lot” and TV’s “Outer Range”), on the last teetering legs of a rock stardom dream that dies hard — 30something and living in a van — to give Tova purpose and Marcellus a mystery to ponder and solve. Well, if he can work it out when not fuming about “the hell of a class field trip” at his aquarium home, his efforts to escape from his tank maybe Tova and then Cameron’s confessional chats with the captive critter behind the glass will give him something to work with.

It’s either that or “I can go back and watch algae grow.”

As Shelby Van Pelt’s source-novel came out about two years after Netflix collected an Oscar for the touching and revealing life-intelligence-and-death of an octopus documentary “My Octopus Teacher,” one might leap to the conclusion that inspired “Remarkably Bright Creatures.” That certainly inspired Netflix to want it filmed.

There’s also whiff of “Free Willy” and “Turtle Diary” in the feel-good but unsurprising, anticlimactic twists in the plot. And every potentially emotional turn of events is undone by the unlikeliness of this or the cutesey nature of that.

The octopus has all the punch lines, and in the hands of director and co-writer Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing”), none of them merit more than a muted grin.

“I am subservient to a species beneath me in every observable measure.”

At least “day 1401 of my captivity” has a little more to it than watching “algae grow.” But not much.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, deaths

Cast: Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, Colm Meaney and the voice of Alfred Molina.

Credits: Directed by Olvia Newman, scripted by Olivia Newman and John Whittington, based on a novel by Shelby Van Pelt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

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Movie Review: Faith & Family meet in a Vegas Brew Pub — “God & Beer”

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Roger Moore

A dash of Irish twinkle provided by Jared Dalley isn’t enough to recommend “God & Beer,” a drab little faith-based dramedy set in a Las Vegas brew pub, of all places.

Flatly-acted, with indifferent direction, amateurish writing, staging , makeup and editing, it’s as lifeless as any 74 minutes you’re likely to spend in front of a screen.

“God & Beer” is about an Irish brewmaster (Dalley, the pride of Boise State) who travels to Sin City to track down the daughter he hasn’t seen since she was eight. Showing a photo of her at that age isn’t much help in a city where a visitor can only ask a street preacher for directions, and “nobody” actually lives in and around The Strip.

But there’s this couple in marriage counseling, Nora (Nicole Butler, ID’d as “Emma” on the Internet Movie Database) and Jamie (Mark Justice) who figure in that search. She’s Irish, a real estate broker married to an “entrepreneur,” which is what professional dilettantes call themselves.

Jamie’s latest passing fancy is a brew pub/restaurant he’s just bought. It’s a business he knows nothing about, but it allows him to show up to work with a perma-stubble, and sleep one off any time he has a tad too many. They’re in couple’s counseling because he’s a drunk who owns a bar and is basically living there, in other words.

Oisin Quinn (Dalley) wanders into coffee shops, appalled at being served espressos in paper cups and into the HUDL brew house where he has to instruct a barmaid in how to “proper” pour a Guinness draft.

He’s just what Jamie needs. Oisin’ll even get the “brewing” started so that the brew pub can live up to its name. The employment deal he strikes is awfully similar to pieces of Guiness family lore he passes on to one and all — “10 percent of every pint” he brews that sells.

Meanwhile, he keeps missing Nora as she ducks into the coffeeshop as he leaves or steps out of the pub as he steps in. Sure, we know she’s his daughter.

Oisin’s here to fix a broken family, get Dad involved in his aspiring hoops player/actor-wannabe son’s life and ensure that Jamie’s little girl starts speaking to him again.

Most everything about “God & Beer” is half-hearted, undercooked and stiff. The acting is almost uniformly amateurish. The clumsy framing device of couple’s counseling slows an already leaden pace to a crawl.

But Dalley breathes a bit of sober (faith-based film, after all) life into his scenes, serving up Irish wit — “The well-fed do not understand the lean.” — and Irish biblical justifications for drinking.

What was Christ’s first “miracle?” Turning water into wine. There are also cornball bits of Guinness the beer-making empire’s family lore.

The presence of Dean Cain as a school principal and a few shots at “Bud Light” are about as close to an agenda as this picture gets.

It can’t be cheap to film a movie in Las Vegas, even one as generic in settings as this one. Which is enough to make one wonder why anybody involved bothered? With drama this flat, stakes this low and entertainment value this paltry, the safer investment might have been at the roulette table.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Jared Dalley, Nicole Butler, Mark Justice, Jessica Adams, and Dean Cain.

Credits: Scripted and directed Jessica Adams and Natali Nichols. A JC Films movie on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:14

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Series Review: “How to Get to Heaven from Belfast” takes Derry “Girls” to Dublin and Donegal along the Way

Posted on May 17, 2026 by Roger Moore

Here’s a delighftul weekend’s binge, a daft and darkly comic trip to the Emerald Isle that’s a lot cheaper than flying, with a lot more laughs than you’ll get from wrangling with DHS.

“How to Get to Heaven from Belfast” has a hint of Hitchcock, a dab of “Ab Fab” and a big fat dash of “Derry Girls.” It’s an “Only Murders in the Building” where the building or buildings have burned down and only “three Belfast eejits,” gal-pals since Catholic School, can get to the bottom of things.

Creator, principal writer and “Derry Girls” writer-creator Lisa McGee has turned out a cleverly cast, playfully-plotted Ireland-tweaking, Brit-bashing, Catholic Church-torching hoot.

And you’ll want to catch it with the subtitles on, as you won’t want to miss a single bit of the slangy craic or wisecracks, the Derry-accented digs and down and dirty witticisms.

“I was RIGHT! You doubted me like that lad…that fella from the BIBLE!”

“Peter?”

“PETER! You’re all DOUBTING Peters!”

Our four “separate but inseperable” friends met at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School. But only three — TV crime show creator Saoirse (Roism Gallagher), whose name her British co-workers never pronounce correctly, the eternally testy well-heeled mother of three Robyn (Sinéad Keenan) and gawky lesbian Dara (Caoilfhionn Dunne) — stuck together into their late ’30s.

Cryptic messages and the mysterious death of their classmate Greta (Natasha O’Keeffe) summon them all South, to tiny, coastal Knockdara, where Greta’s widowed Garda (police) inspector husband (Emmett J. Scanlan) has a creepy way of mourning her passing and Saoirse’s clumsy effort to put a photo of all of them together in the dead woman’s coffin reveals the truth — to her any way.

That’s not Greta’s corpse. The body has no rune/tattoo that Greta made all the girls share, way back when.

There was a “Big Bad” back in their school days. And over the eight episodes of the series, from Northern Ireland to Ireland, London to Portugal via a passing parade of character points of view, the surviving trio track and parse anagrams and their collective past (flashbacks) and other cryptic clues to find their still-living classmate.

“DNA doesn’t just wash off — like Catholicism!”

That’s with the Knockdara constable and part-time tow-truck driver Liam (Darragh Hand) who is sweet on Saoirse always three steps behind them. But the son of a man (Josh Finan has both roles) who disappeared in their youth is also sniffing around, trying to figure out the “Big Bad.”

Continue reading →
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Movie Review: A Fantasia on European History “The Year Before the War”

Posted on May 17, 2026 by Roger Moore

Young Hitler inveighs to any who will listen the evils of meat and the virtues of vegetarianism. The already-famous Freud answers every question with a question with all answers leading to “sex.”

Lenin and Trotsky snigger and giggle at the “unwashed simpletons” of the peasant class with Stalin and Tito waiting in the wings. An aged Everyman Aristocrat rails and whips anybody who questions “the system must live on,” the one that keeps rotting, greedy oligarchs and monarchs like him in charge and the masses in chains.

And Franz Kafka watches and listens and takes in the Kafkaesque nightmare that was Europe “The Year Before the War” to end all wars.

In this Latvian fantasia by director and co-writer Davis Simanis Jr., the continent was aboil in turmoil with revolutionary change in the air. If only one humble lad could travel, listen and learn from everyone and every movement and figure out what to do on the tinderbox of history.

The young Latvian doorman Hans (Petr Buchta), whom everyone confuses for “Pyotr” or “Peter,” is a radicalized Forrest Gump, a witness to that final year before World War I in Riga (Latvia), Bern (Switzerland), Vienna, Paris, Prague and London — a traveling leftist-in-the-making haunted by the helmeted Hamlet’s ghost of his demented father, who cursed him with his final breaths.

“If a man hasn’t been to war, he’s lived an idiot’s life!”

Simanis, who co-wrote this brisk, dark and picaresque “history” with Tabita Rudzate and Uldis Tirons, gives us a modern take on the hoary Ticking Time Bomb theory of a Europe that was ready to blow. But this 2021 satire, in German, Latvian, French and Russian, isn’t a “Downton Abbey” end of the “gilded” Edwardian Era of Kings and Kaisers, Czars, Emperors and Sultans. This is from the point of view of the oppressed “masses,” young women and men in every country and every corner of the continent yearning for more than what generations before them had settled for.

Hans/Peter flees Czarist Latvia, struggles with which side to take (He tries to enlist in the Swiss Army, at one point), which will be the one to free the populace from class and its limiting horizons. He falls in love, gets treated by Freud and eventually picks up a pistol as one of a legion of possible assassins who stalked that era, looking for a shot that might change the world overnight.

He falls in with this beer hall crowd or that cafe agitator, listens to the assorted speakers who rail at this or that injustice, “beggars” who’re labeled “communist idiots,” and sees whole classes of people embrace or reject anti-Semitism, patriotism or existentialism. Some, like Pyotr, are ready to become the “blunt instrument” who trigger cataclysmic change.

Our anti-hero sees not only his deluded father, but a one-eyed version of his future self, a man who helps trigger the revolution and sits at a desk under a bust of Lenin and carries out its end game years later.

The film’s politics are as confused as they were in that roiled age, or in the current age of oligarchs, dictators, endless wars and last gasps of Soviet-styled empire building. Hitler (Edgars Kaufields) isn’t on screen enough to get across his emerging murderous dogma. But Lenin (Lauris Dzelzitis) and the Leninists speak in a hall with a Satanic pentangle painted on the floor.

Nobody comes off well, not even the leftist lover (Inga Silina) who helps “Peter” make up his mind which side he’ll take.

If the absurdity of it all is what we take away from this distant mirror held up to our own roiled times, so much the better. Even the passage of over a century hasn’t really answered what stance anyone held, what actions any labor agitator, suffragette or anarchist took or might have taken that could have been a help or a hindrance to “true democracy” unleashed.

The killing — assassinations to mass slaughter — didn’t in the end change as much as it was supposed to, fallen monarchies excepted. And “going to war” didn’t make a man out of anybody. It just got tens of millions killed.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Petr Buchta, Lauris Dzelzitis, Inga Silina, Girts Getseris, Edgars Kaufelds, Gints Gravelis, Daniel Sidon and Eduards Johansons.

Credits: Directed by Davis Simanis Jr., scripted by Tabita Rudzate, Davis Simanis Jr. and Uldis Tirons. An IndiePix release.

Running time: 1:35

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Movie Review: This Romantic Corner of Tuscany is “No Place to be Single”

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Roger Moore

“No Place to be Single” is a scenic but featherweight Italian romance set in the most popular region of Italy for film romances — Tuscany.

Based on a novel by the prolific Italian romance novelist Felicia Kingsley, it’s got sex and sun and soap operatic plot twists and a premise that nobody bothered to Google, making the entire scenario ludicrous.

A fairytale set up promises that this Tuscan town, Belverde, is where “people fall in love with one another as if by magic” (in Italian or dubbed into English). Nothing that follows comes close to “magic.”

And when you blow the “meet cute” in such romances, it’s all downhill from there.

Elisa (Matilde Gioli (“Runner,” “Cativa conscienza”) is the one woman in Belverde who rejects love. She lives and farms on the land of an aged count, where her family has long worked the land raising apples, grapes for wine and olives for olive oil.

Her mother (Cecilia Dazzi) and younger sister Giada (Amanda Campana) don’t seem to “get” why Elisa isn’t falling for a local dullard who pines for her. But maybe the story of how she’s raising a teen daughter, Linda (Margherita Rebeggiani), by herself explains that.

The count dies, and his distant nephews Michele (Cristiano Caccamo of “Under the Riccione Sun”) and Carlo (Sebastiano Pigazzi) stand to inherit that land. As Michele is a struggling deal-maker with a Milan development firm, this could be “our once-in-a-lifetime chance” at breaking through. Carlo? He’s a layabout, just along for the ride.

They come to Belverde where Elisa gives Michele her sales pitch for “plans” for improving the farm, turning on the charm as she does. As this is based on a romance novel, of course they knew each other as children. Or course they meet when he bonks her on the head at the church funeral of his uncle.

Carlo, meanwhile, is chased and charmed by Giada — who is already in love with a married creep in this gossipy little town. Giada is Elisa’s plan B. The younger sister will convince, by hook or seductive crook, Carlo to stand against selling the place.

Perhaps, as the locals say, “It’ll all be handled by karma.” Or maybe somebody will do the math on pitching “10 prime hectares” of beautiful Italian countryside to a boorish, cowboy-hatted American golf course developer.

Ten hectares, for the slow romance novelists, screenwriters and Italian directors in the back of the class, amounts to just under 25 acres. As golf courses are typically 150-200 acres, perhaps this pseudo-Texan American owns a chain of… putt putts?

The scenery is the highlight of the movie whose title is as clunkily unromantic in Italian — “Non è un paese per single” — as it is in English. Gioli is properly fiesty in her dressed-down farmgal scenes and dolled up to runway ready status for Elisa’s big “Night out with womanizer Michele” scene. Caccamo is underwhelming.

Subplots include Giada’s much-gossipped-about fling with an olive oil-making creep and Elisa’s daughter Linda’s rash efforts to lose her virginity to anyone but her unsure-of-his-sexuality-bestie.

They don’t hold one’s interest any better than the primary plot. With three credited screenwriters and a director not “improving” Kingsley’s tediuously formulaic tale, it’s no wonder they didn’t bother to look up how BIG golf courses are and how they’re falling out of vogue as developments in most of the world.

Even boorish American developers in cowboy hats know how many acres there are to a hectare. Well, some do.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, profanity, pot use

Cast: Matilde Gioli, Cristiano Caccamo, Amanda Campana, Sebastiano Pigazzi, Margherita Rebeggiani and Cecilia Dazzi.

Credits: Directed by Laura Chiossone, scripted by Alessandra Martellini, Giulia Magda Martinez and Matteo Visconti, based on a Felicia Kingsley novel. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:42

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Movie Review: Twenty Feet Tall and Still Hiding in the Dark — “The Yeti”

Posted on May 13, 2026 by Roger Moore

“The Yeti” is a low-budget creature-feature that’s terrible on pretty much every level.

Badly scripted, wootacting, dreadful effects that have that cast brushing fake snowflakes out of their hair and lit like a teenager’s in-mom’s-closet podcast, it’s an abominable waste of 93 minutes for anyone not related to the cast and crew watching it.

I mean, OY.

Writer-directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta try to pull a period piece splatter pic out of their Yeti in Alaska tale and fail on pretty much every level.

Characters skulk about in the perpetual murk of a not-so-special effects blizzard, never for a minute acting A) scared, B) cold or C) determined to get through whatever it is they’ve signed on for.

It’s 1947, and the crappiest imitation of a 1940s newsreel tells us that a famous oilman (Corbin Bernson) and famous explorer (William Sadler) have disappeared after their “ship” sends out a last, futile “MAYDAY.”

Merrill Sunday, Jr. (Eric Nelsen), the son of oilman Merrill Sunday Sr., announces he’s rounded up a team to go to their rescue. He’s got a hunter/man of violence with half a face (Linc Hand), “Dynamite” Hewitt (played by co-writer/director Gellerano), a famed radio combat journalist (Jim Cummings) and the great cartographer/daughter of explorer Hollis Bannister, Ellie (Brittany Allen).

They get themselves lost, cut-off and attacked by some beast in the dark. Because it’s always dark.

“Dynamite,” who claims to have “blowed up jus’ about ever-thin’ that can be blowed up,” sets off some dynamite, the Great White Hunter gets hunted and our cartographer and oil heir fret over their collective daddy issues. And that’s me making the narrative make more sense and play as more interesting than this blundering fiasco can manage on its own.

Those growls in the windy dark?

“Grizzly, maybe. Big one.” Ya think?

I was at a loss to figure out what has gone wrong, what is going wrong and how what they’re doing — setting off dynamite, for instance — is supposed to get them out of this fix and back on task. I remained at a loss throughout this tale of hunters being (dully) hunted, climbing a radio tower and contacting a “ship” as if this was on Kodiak Island or some such and a nautical rescue is possible.

There’s a prologue featuring a collection of very modern looking and sounding folks listening to early ’30s jazz on the 1920s Victrola and playing cards in a snowbound hut in “1047,” only to be interrupted by a beast that snatches one of them through a flimsy Alaska roof. No, it doesn’t tie into the main story. It just tips us off as to what we’re in for.

We know the would-be rescuers are going to figure out what the adventurer and the oil man were up to, either through flashbacks or reconnecting with the biggest names in the cast as the missing persons are eventually no longer missing. And somebody’s got to survive for that reconnection.

But I’ll leave all that as a possible source of suspense for anyone foolish enough to VOD this DOG.

Rating: R, graphic, bloody dismemberments

Cast: Brittany Allen, Elizabeth Cappucino, Gene Gallerano, Christina Bennett Lind, Eric Nelsen, Linc Hand, Jim Cummings, William Sadler and Corbin Bernson.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:33

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