Movie Review: Falling In and Out of Love, “In Spite of Ourselves”

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s become a romance/romantic comedy cliche, that eager, disrobing, slam-your-partner-against-the-wall sex after the first date.

And if “In Spite of Ourselves” accomplishes nothing else, at least it sticks a skewer in that “let’s get this out of the way” movie and sitcom trope. Because the reasons it’s not a great idea may be dated in the post Grindr era, but they still apply.

Sweet, cute and sentimental to a fault, “In Spite of Ourselves” is a romantic melodrama set in scenic, trendy Portlandia — Portland, Oregon — in fall.

Writer-director Josh Loeb is apparently a rich restaurateur dipping his toes in movie making. As one of the young lovers in it is a pastry baker aspiring to chef status, getting the details of that world and that character’s background right, the film turns out to be less dilettantish and vainglorious than you might expect.

Conor Leslie of “Chained” and TV’s “Titans” stars as Hannah, thirtysomething and running her own bakery and gritting her teeth about her need for the approval of trendy Chef Jake (Ethan Ingle) if she’s to become his dessert-provider.

Brett Dier (TV’s “Jane the Virgin,” “Schooled”) is angsty stand-up comic Archie, someone people recognize thanks to his latest stand-up special. but who always answers “Don’t I know you?” with a curt “Ya DON’T!”

“Archie doesn’t like people,” he fellow stand-ups confirm.

Hannah and Archie “meet cute” in her bakery. He tries too hard to buy her last cinnamon off the kid who just purchased it, and tries and fails to not look at all creepy in doing it.

Hannah’s fellow baker Becca (Britain Seibert) recognizes him and gives a “not that funny” dismissal. But Hannah and Archie make entirely too much eye contact, so something’s happening.

She catches his act during a Portland residency and sparks lightly fly.

But he’s got issues — a father suffering from dementia in an L.A. nursing home. Dad’s capable of being difficult, if not outright violent and his son insists that he not be “medicated into a zombie.” The memory care director reminds Archie and the viewer that “Dementia is a one-way street.”

Hannah? She’s lost her hearing in one ear and afraid of the risks of surgery that might correct that.

“I could die!”

Can these two find love in the middle of career, family and health complications?

Writer-director Loeb is more at home in the kitchen scenes than he is in the clubs. But there are laughs in this script. Archie tries inviting Hannah to “my show.” What manner of show might that be, she blurts, disingenuously?

“You’re a…clown? Oh we have a HUGE clowning community in Portland!”

That’s straight out of “Porlandia,” or should be.

One puts a lot of stock in “chemistry” in such films, and Leslie and Dier have it, with able support from the following actors playing character tropes.

Seibert is the “disapproving friend.” Alyssa Limperis and Mo Mandel play comic pals who’re rooting, rooting SO hard for Archie not to “f— this up.” Both of them are more convincing stand-ups than Dier, although he brings some old pro physicality to the stage act, which never quite overcomes the low energy of his onstage-with-the-mike presence.

And Ingle is a lot of arrogant chef cliches boiled down into just the suggestion of loves-hearing-himself talk and the right pretentious “young” wardrobe. He likes Capri pants for men — “man-pris,” they’re called.

They make Chef Jake look like he’s had “a random late growth spurt” to Archie.

What Loeb has concocted here sticks rigidly to a time-proven recipe. It’s cinematic comfort food, a movie that some streamer or even The Hallmark Channel might pick up, if there was less stand-up comic profanity in it.

So no, don’t expect any surprises. But the laughs and the stars’ chemistry put it over.

Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual situations, drug abuse reference

Cast: Conor Leslie, Brett Dier, Britain Seibert, Glen Morshower, Alyssa Limperis, Mo Mandel, Zora Casebere and Ethan Ingle.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Josh Loeb. An LMNL release.

Running time: 1:40

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

Netflixable? Shailene’s on the hunt for the “Unabomber”

Posted on September 29, 2026 by Roger Moore

The difference between “a true story” and “inspired by a true story/true events” is laid bare in “Unabomber,” an account of the tail end of the hunt for mad mail bomber Ted Kaczynski.

The heroine, played by Shailene Woodley, is an FBI linguist brought in to analyze the writing style of the man who planted or mailed sixteen bombs, killed three and injured 23 others.

The unknown killer eluded capture for 18 years until the FBI caught a break. But there was no FBI “linguist” named Joanne Miller who parsed the perpetrator’s archaic and sometimes academic writing style, published in screeds culminating in “The Unabomber Manifesto.”

But damn, THAT would have made a fascinating movie and moviegoing thought exercise.

Kaczynyski, a onetime math prodigy and Harvard grad — he was enrolled at 16 — ranted about technology, “industrial society” and academia and sent bombs to airline and university faculty — “UN-A” bomber. He was only caught when his brother recognized the rants as in a style he knew all too well.

Knowing all this doesn’t mean you can’t get a surprising and riveting thriller out of the hunt for a cunning quarry who was every bit as brilliant as the most far-fetched “supervillain,” with a special talent for covering his tracks and living off the grid.

But what Danish director Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe,” “Armadillo”) and the two credited screenwriters of “Unabomber” serve up is a dull, under-detailed police procedural attached to a sort of “Beautiful Mind” mental breakdown of a madman who wanted to be an important thinker.

Jacob Tremblay of “The Life of Chuck” plays young, late 1950s Chicago-native Ted, son of a working class tyrant of a father who expected great things of him, but an impressionable kid too young to be subjected to CIA backed psychological experiments by a charismatic Harvard professor.

Oscar winner Russell Crowe was an Oscar nominee for his performance in “A Beautiful Mind.” Here, he ably plays a flawed manipulator.

He encourages the kid’s dreams of becoming a philosopher.

“It’s ideas that shape the world!”

But this series of wired-up and studied provocations with an argumentative foe only referred to as “Mr. C.” (Gus Halper) don’t so much sharpen young Ted’s arguments as gut him, psychologically. He learns to be as cruel, ruthless and personal in his vicious expressions of his views of society, “progress,” The Industrial Revolution and the like.

And from that, we infer, a callousness that crosses into mania festers.

Tremblay serves the externals of the character well enough, the meek “submissive” and rules-following Ted who devolves into a killer. But we sense no interior life, and the writings that came to define who this terrorist is aren’t sampled nearly enough to paint a more complete portrait. They’re barely touched on at all.

Crowe’s character is similarly sketched-in, an academic striver working for “The Agency” to see how brain washing works and how to identify those most susceptible to it. The personal conversations between the mentor/tormentor and his “subject” whom he convinces is a “protege” aren’t revealing because we don’t buy them as anything more than other forms of manipulation.

Woodley similarly has too little to play around with, just a fictional character who is always right while her colleagues doggedly go up more and more blind alleys at the direction of a flawed “profile” created by “Langley.”

“He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else,” is her insight. We don’t see or hear enough of the Unabomber’s writing to make that insight with her.

The movie’s revelations are few and far between, as the writings of Kaczynski aren’t used to flesh out what still play as troubling ideas — that a few powerful men are using technology and industrial “progress” to enslave everybody else.

That would be a daring approach for the film to take — that maybe Crazy Ted had a point before crossing this or that line. It’s dangerous point of view to let get around, considering what happened to the creep who ran United Healthcare.

Perhaps that’s why they avoided the rants and ramblings and philosophizing of their subject.

And lacking that dangerous edge, “Unabomber” just passes the time, another F.B.I. procedural with a couple of big names adorning the cast and classing the joint up, with neither their characters nor the screenplay illuminating it or its seriously sinister title character.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Shailene Woodley, Jacob Tremblay,Annabelle Wallis, Alexander Ludwig, Matthew Kevin Anderson, Steven Ogg and Russell Crowe.

Credits: Directed by Janus Metz, scripted by Sam Chalesen and Nelson Graves. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

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

Documentary Review: Cinema as Seen from the Projection Booth — “Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey”

Posted on September 28, 2026 by Roger Moore

You probably missed this sprawling, feel-good-about-cinema’s-future Australian documentary “Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey” when it made the rounds of film festivals and earned a limited release a couple of years back.

Celluloid purists certainly wouldn’t have.

Australian projectionist turned doc-maker Rob Murphy takes us through the history of movie projection, the digital revolution and efforts to preserve not just old films, but to keep the novelty of the visually overwhelming, sharply-detailed, richly-colored and textured Big Screen experience alive.

The emphasis here is on the penultimate moviegoing cinegasm, Cinerama, immersive movies shown on huge curved screens via three projectors playing at once, creating a vast, deep and panoramic image that only the rarest cinema palaces — most famously LA’s CineramaDome — could accomodate.

Murphy spends much of the film speaking with his fellow (mostly Aussie) projectionists of prior generations, some of whom became celluloid movie print collectors/”hoarders,” with a few going so far as to rebuild tiny versions of the vast and complex analog projection system it took to show Cinerama.

The role of film print collectors in preserving a vanishing movie heritage is explored via a few eccentric collectors, professional archivists and others with horror stories of all that can go wrong when vast collections of film cannisters are stored safely until the person who knew how to store and preserve them aged out of being able to care for them.

Thousands of films, from the earliest silents to even more recent eras, have been trashed, recycled (for the silver nitrate in the prints), decayed or fast faded into unwatchable due to whatever flawed film process or stock (Eastman Color, take a bow) they were originally shot and shown on.

Murphy tracked-down the now-late director (“Silent Running”) and effects pioneer (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) turned heightened-cinematic-experience experimenter Douglas Trumbull to talk about his efforts to put the “wow” back into moviegoing.

His high-speed projection Showscan system was an abortive effort doomed by the ill-fated but startling to look at sci-fi film “Brainstorm,” most remembered as the movie Natalie Wood drowned before finishing. When Murphy caught up with him, Trumbull’s last sizzle in making and projecting bigger, brighter, sharper and deeper “like looking through a window” images, MAGI, was struggling to get on its feet.

Trumbull is the expert witness to the fact that digital projection, for all its benefits, is lower resolution, dimmer and duller than any of the premium 70mm celluloid projection processes.

Quentin Tarantino backed this up when he presented his generic Western ensemble piece, “The Hateful Eight,” in select cinemas able to still screen it in 70mm. The third act of “Splice Here” is taken up with Murphy’s efforts to help the art deco Sun Theatre cinema in Yarraville, Victoria (Australia) piece together the projectors necessary to show one of Tarantino’s better-looking lesser efforts in the format the filmmaker desired.

QT even showed up for the premiere!

But the engrossing stuff here is all the history, the archaic technology and the fact that if films are to be preserved, it’s the eccentrics still devoted to that form of projection who will be responsible. Because the ever-consolidating/ever-“trashing” old prints studios that made them haven’t made it their business to guard their old investments or their patrimony.

Murphy drops in on the American Library of Congress’s vast underground audio/video archive in Culpeper, Va., for the “Mostly Lost” Film Festival, an event where fragments of old films are screened for experts and buffs who shout out suggestions as to who might be in them, when they were made (automobile’s often give away the year) and what they might have been about.

Murphy is entirely too fixated on Cinerama here, for my taste. It was, when it was introduced (by American journalist and “Lawrence of Arabia” popularizer Lowell Thomas) in 1952, just a gimmick to set movies apart from TV.

“This is Cinerama” didn’t lead to a mass conversion of American cinemas, and only a handful of films were shot and shown in this three-projector super-widescreen format. “How the West Was Won” and “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” were the most famous narrative features made in Cinerama. It was outgrowths of that, 70mm films like “Grand Prix” or “2001,” that became more widely accepted.

I’ve seen one or two super widescreen movies at the CineramaDome, and once caught a showing of “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm” in the basement cinema — furnished with abandoned projectors and screen and seating from closed movie theaters — of a collector in North Dakota.

As critic Leonard Maltin notes, it was a “novelty” way back when, and celluloid 70mm projection and its technical kindred are destined to be that now, as well. Until digital projection closes that visual experience gap.

The recent digital 3D film fad is presented as a possible stepping stone to vastly better digital theatrical projection, as its technology can be repurposed to something that won’t require wearing disposable glasses to view.

But I love the former projectionist’s affection for that skill and the people who ran projection booths, gigantic and tiny, over the decades. I have made it a point over the years to get to as many ancient movie houses as possible, as not all are in Hollywood and thus eagerly preserved by the locals.

I think the oldest cinema I went to is now gone, a 1914 vintage Madison, Wisconsin nickelodeon with wooden terraced floors and a screen canted to the left when you entered the venerable (smallish) auditorium, not directly in front of the rear exits.

Like Murphy and several of the folks he interviewed, movie projection was one of my first jobs, showing films in the absurdly-long-visual-throw-distance performance hall at my university via ancient Simplex carbon-arc (16mm) projectors. It was primitive, mechanical and all sorts of things could go wrong and did.

But I got to learn the job and hang around with the last colorful generation of projectionists in the first cities I lived in after school as I was starting my media career. It was a profession dying out in weeks, not years.

For my part, I spent too much time in the past avoiding movies at theaters that didn’t replace projection bulbs often enough, with scratchy prints and known for sloppy reel changes and crackling sound to ever want to go back to celluloid. But if they can make “premium experience” films with higher digital frame rates, brighter, deeper images and do it without seats that shake and blow wind or spray rain on you, I’m all for it.

Especially if the films that most merit “epic” treatment are the ones that deserve it;

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Rob Murphy, Douglas Trumbull, Quentin Tarantino and Leonard Maltin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rob Murphy. A Gravitas Ventures release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:57

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

Movie Preview: The “Musk” documentary “They” don’t want you to see

Posted on September 26, 2026 by Roger Moore

The oligarchs in charge of Tik Tok, Facebook/Meta, Twitter and Youtube don’t want you to see the movie “Musk.”

Hell, the Zuckerberglings don’t even want you to see the TRAILER to this documentary by Oscar winner Alex Gibney, the most feared, unassailable FACT focused filmmaker on the planet.

We owe it to ourselves and to Bleecker Street to get the word out about the Oct. 9 release of this damning indictment of the best candidate for taxation into poverty and then deportation in America.

Pass it on!

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

BOX OFFICE: “Avengers,” “Resident Evil,” “Heart of the Beast” and “Primetime” are neck-and-neck over $20 million

Posted on September 26, 2026 by Roger Moore

Marvel wants to whet the appetites of filmgoers, to not leave less avid Avengers fans in the dark about the convoluted “history” they may have forgotten when “Avengers: Doomsday” lumbers into theaters in December.

And they’d love to add a pile of found-money to the books of “Avengers: Endgame,” which they’ve re-released this weekend for a “get reacquainted” “Encore” release. It’s paying off as the 2019 film collected a fresh $26 million which will move itself closer to $900 million, still well short of the Trumpflation era “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”

That edged the second weekend take of the “Resident Evil” reboot, which faded to a $23.3 million weekend. That’s a whopping 70-Percent-Plus-“Tyler Perry” plunge from its heady $60 million opening weekend, which means its exhausted its franchise fan appeal and that few others give a hoot it.

A Brad Pitt-and-his-war-dog tale and Robert Pattinson’s best shot at awards season fanfare are dueling for third place, with both films set to collect $20 million+ on a weekend with a nor’easter rattling more populous movie-going corners of the country.

“Heart of the Beast” is a quite-conventional surviving the Alaskan wilderness thriller, and is earning decent enough reviews for Pitt and the German Shepherd named Uber. It ended up earning $20 million, according to Paramount.

That edged A24’s Pattinson in “Primetime,” co-starring Merritt Weaver, Anna Faris and Skyler Gisondo, with former NBC News chief Jeff Zucker shamelessly appearing as himself. It earned $19.2 million, and is also earning mixed-to-positive notices.

Fifth place will go to another new release, Dreamworks Animation’s non-franchise, girl-centered tale “Forgotten Island,” which is on course for a very humbling $12.8 million opening weekend, chicken feed by big animation house standards.

It’ll be interesting to see if “Avengers: Endgame” will hasten the falloff of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” ($4.1, in seventh place) which dominated the summer and has steadily closed-in on the $1 billion mark at the domestic box office (over $950 million+ by weekend’s end)

“Practical Magic 2” ($5.4, sixth) steers clear of “Brand New Day” and “The Odyssey” ($3.7, eighth place).

“Coyote vs Acme” clings to ninth by selling another $1.9 million in tickets. A $50 million dollar negative pickup for Ketchup Entertainment from Warner Bros. that will clear the $60 million mark this coming week.

The Biblical semi-sleeper “Daniel and the Fiery Furnace” ($1.514) outlasted “Insidious” and “Runner” the top ten in tenth.

A pretty good Japanese ghost story tale in limited release, “Never After Dark,” won’t crack the top ten.

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

Movie Review: A Haunted Japanese Inn’s Worth Visiting, just “Never After Dark”

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s rare that even a casual horror fan doesn’t greet a new Japanese ghost story with the words, “I LIKE IT already!”

Even if the film is made by Tuscon-born one-time Mormon missionary (how he got into Asian culture and cinema) Dave Boyle.

The first time our heroine, ghost whisperer/ghost buster Airi sees her older sister in the rear view mirror of her ancient Volvo wagon hooked me on this one. The sister (Kurimi Inagaki) is only seen in mirrors or reflected in windows. She’s a ghost.

They can chat all they like — about “Mom,” the woman who passed this ghost-seeing business down, about Airi’s (Moeka Hoshi) new client, the owners of an old inn in the forest. But the only time they see each other there’s glass involved. Even when an insult’s called for.

“You suck (in Japanese with English subtitles)!”

New inn owner Teiko (Tae Kimura) insisted on hiring some supernatural help with a problem she thinks the place has. Her son Gunji?

“I don’t believe in this stuff.”

As soon as Airi banishes them from the property over their “But we paid good MONEY” to watch protests, she figures out what the mother was seeing and hearing.

A bloody-faced man, tall and thin, comes and goes. Staticky phone calls give her and us the chills. And as Airi starts poking around for clues as to who or what is causing this, her dead sister starts with the warnings, which grow more dire the deeper our investigator/ghost-banisher goes.

Every filmmaker has her or his own take of the “rules” and “realities” of their cinematic afterlife. Here, Boyle’s heroine speaks of a “veil” between the living and the dead. She uses a magic mirror with a zoetrope wheel that spins around its frame, and an enchanted candle to dip into the netherworld and dig up what this troubled ghost is after.

The devil is in the details in genre films of this sort, and Boyle comes up aces in his world-building and sense of cultural traditions dropped in on and sampled.

Our villain (Mutsuo Yoshioka) is creepy as all get out. But the other performances are more somber than riveting, empathetic or fear-inspiring.

I found the third act’s requisite sake-hits-the-fan mayhem more conventional and the “resolution” less interesting, frightening and moving than I was expecting.

But there’s entertainment value and no dishonor in this worthy homage to J-horror and the uneasy dead or about to die.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Moeka Hoshi, Kento Kaku, Kurumi Inagaki, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Bokuzō Masana and Tae Kimura.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dave Boyle. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:45

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

Movie Review: Pattinson & Weaver are ready for “Primetime”

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Primetime” is a “heavily fictionalized” account of “Dateline NBC’s” notorious, pedophile-entrapping “To Catch a Predator” series of hidden camera “gotchas” passed off as “reports” in the early 2000s.

It’s a film that struggles to condemn and illuminate why TV news and police “stings” that in essence create a crime are immoral and wrong without coming off as defending pedophiles.

After all, we’ve got the accused pedophile president, GOP Congress and Supreme Court for that.

But it is built on some terrific performances, including a career-best by “Twilight” alumnus Robert Pattinson.

As troubled, ethically-challenged “Catch a Predator” anchor/reporter Chris Hansen, Pattinson gives us his first swaggering Movie Star turn ever as a cocky but stumbling striver haunted with some sort of “Catcher in the Rye” syndrome.

This Hansen sees himself as dedicated to hunting an “ancient evil,” child molestation. And he’s determined to make his name, his fame and his fortune via his “To Catch a Predator” “performances.”

At just the right moment, with a suspect identified by catfishing members of a pedophile-hunting Perverted Justice vigilante group and lured to a rented house to meet their under-age “hook-up,” Hansen would stride into the shot and confront the perp with a “What are you doing here?”

Matthew Maher (“Air”) brings a creepy verve to Perverted Justice crusader Xavier Von Erk. Von Erk and others, like idealistic “bait” Del (Phoebe Bridgers of “I Saw the TV Glow”), a twentysomething gamine who can role-play tween boys and tween girls, worm their way into pedophile online spaces and bait traps for adults who groom, molest and prey on children.

And once they’re lured into this or that corner of America’s rental kitchen, his catch-a-pred catch-phrase can’t help but play as funny.


“You see how this looks, right?”

The film is seen basically through three sets of eyes — those of Hansen, struggling for stardom, stop cheating to save his marriage (Anna Faris plays his had-enough wife) — his show’s take-no-prisoners producer (Merritt Weaver of “Nurse Jackie,” knocking it out of the park) — and aspiring actor “bait” Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo (the latest Jimmy Olsen “Superman” sidekick).

Everybody involved has a queasiness about what they’re doing and how — at first. But the lure of fame and success is great, and even the guileless and under-coached “Bait Boy Dan” finds himself relishing the chance to “improvise” his way to a Screen Actor’s Guild card with his smiling, pushy performances.

Pattinson’s Hansen saves his self-righteous sneers for when he declares what they’re doing as “a form of activism,” and his smirks for the perps (Alex Winter, Tony Revolori, Bob Ari and Jonathan Lipnicki among them) when he strides into the trap with them, printouts of their criminally overt online come-ons to read from in his hand.

A crew member notes Hansen’s Emmy, his trench coat and his self-serious pose and mutters how Hansen “thinks he’s Mike ‘F—–g’ Wallace,” referencing TV’s original “crusading” poseur.

Director Lance Oppenheim (the Florida doc “Some Kind of Heaven” was his), working with an Ajon Singh script loosely based on an Esquire Magazine “To Catch a Predator” take-down article from 2007, immerses us in his characters’ agendas, which in Hansen’s case, borders on a mania.

We’re through the looking glass when we, like the “team,” sense they’re about to land “a whale” only to have a disabled and sexually twisted creep stagger out of car — a perp on crutches.

The film itself staggers as all involved try to decide whether it’s a horror tale of the hellish figures who prey on children all over the world, or a particularly American sort of Gothic comedy — a nation obsessed with pedophiles that elects a credibly accused one (fluffed to fame by NBC) president.

Having former NBC News chief Jeff Zucker play himself as one of the villains of the piece is rich.

But with name changes (Hansen’s producer was not female, with no hint of a “crush” on the “star”), inventions and flights of fictional fancy, “Primetime” struggles for credibility the same way the unsavory show with good (?) intentions did.

The last thing this culture needs is a cinematic watering-down and fact-bending spin on pedophiles that, like the political debate over a political party’s pedophile-protecting ethos, leaves the victims out of the equation. The perpetrators don’t really deserve our sympathy, outside of any idealistic “criminal’s rights” sense. And they and the cranks “catching” them aren’t the most viable objects of fun.

The crusty Texas police chief (Bokeem Woodbine) the show embeds itself with may be a fictional character, but it allows the movie to score points about people who should be watchdogging law enforcement, not getting in bed with them. The fact that this association, and the whole third act overreach “descent into a hell of our creation” doesn’t come off also hobbles the film.

The messaging and fictionalizing don’t ruin the powerhouse performances by Pattinson and Weaver. But “Primetime” does tend to seriously lower the temperature of a tale intended as awards bait in this fall of 2026, and a long hard look in the mirror for the American masses.

Rating: R, violence, pedophilia subject matter, full frontal nudity, profanity

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Weaver, Phoebe Bridgers, Skyler Gisondo, Matthew Maher, Anna Faris, Alex Winter, Bokeem Woodbine and Jeff Zucker as himself.

Credits: Directed by Lance Oppenheim, scripted by Ajon Singh, based on an Esquire article by Luke Dittrich. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:50

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

Movie Review: A Brad and his Dog — “Heart of the Beast”

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Heart of the Beast” is a solid, formulaic adventure tale given a lift by leading man Brad Pitt and his connection to the German shepherd his character’s brought to the Alaskan wilderness with him.

Uber, who plays Odin the combat veteran getting by on three legs and his utter devotion to his Army handler, who took him into retirement with him, is a New Zealand mountain rescue specialist with big soulful eyes that make him perfect for conveying the love that transcends obedience for James Belmot (Pitt), Special Forces, retired.

“End of Watch” and “Fury” director David Ayer and his players strain to over overcome CGI critters and an utterly conventional, Jack London “stranded in Alaska” adventure tale’s tropes in serving up an exciting, perilous and moving movie about a soldier and his dog.

James and Odin or “Odie” served in the Middle East and survived multiple near-death experiences there. They have the scars to prove it. Odie has one artificial leg, “titanium” teeth and cuts across his muzzle. We have to wait for James to take off his shirt to see the damage his body took.

Now, the retired commando and his dog are flying a small float plane through the Alaskan bush. They’re getting away from it all. And them all.

You can tell by James’ hostile, rifle-cradled-in-his-arms posture that he’s not thrilled to have a Sourdough canoe traveller (J.K.Simmons) drop by their remote campsite. The gregarious stranger cuts in on their bonding and roughhousing time.

As both human and his partner dog have nightmares about their service overseas (seen in flashbacks), they’d just as soon keep to themselves.

But outrunning a storm in a small plane is enough to stress anybody, especially someone with a bum ticker. They crash. The plane is lost, the dog is hurt and they’re 58 miles from the nearest road.

If you’ve ever any version of a “lost in Alaska” tale you know what’s coming, starting with the small plane crash. It has to happen in a lake. They have to swim and tote what gear they can and hoof it out.

There’ll be digital wolves hunting digital moose, a CGI bear to confront, rapids to be survived, a gorge to be crossed on a rotten tree that’s fallen across it and the like.

Kudos to screenwriter Cameron Alexander for not serving up quicksand, or its Alaskan equivalent — falling through the ice on a frozen lake. Lived there, done that, BTW.

But Pitt’s stoic soldier and his adoring, smart and capable dog problem solve, save each other and help each other recover from wounds and other setbacks. And we buy it. Boy do we ever.

It’s a tear jerker, one of the few on Pitt’s Hollywood resume, and just saying that is sending more sensitive souls to http://www.doesthedogdie.com to see if this is a movie they can endure.

It’s a dog lovers’ movie, and I love dogs. But it is also, whatever the violence of its predictable parade of action beats, a terrible bore.

Harrison Ford taught all of Hollywood that using digital animals in a film like “Call of the Wild” or this variation of it is a bad idea. Mark Wahlberg & Co. heeded that warning with the sweet and superior “Arthur the King.” The producers of “Supergirl” did not.

“Heart of the Beast” tries to have it both ways in a thriller so dogmatically straightforward that it may send you, as it did me, to the Internet Movie Database to see if Cameron Alexander is one of Chat GPT’s pseudonyms.

Rating: PG-13, violence, bloody wounds and profanity

Cast: Brad Pitt, Anna Lambe and J.K. Simmons

Credits: Directed by David Ayer, scripted by Cameron Alexander. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:41

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

Documentary Review: The Long Struggle to “Free Leonard Peltier”

Posted on September 24, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Free Leonard Peltier” is about the half-century-long struggle to get Native American activist Leonard Peltier out of prison.

Peltier, accused of murdering two F.B.I. agents during the Federal government’s intervention in a Native “civil war” at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in June of 1975, was convicted in a trial littered with F.B.I. and prosecutorial “irregularities,” with an avowed racist on the jury and an accused racist — Paul Benson –– as judge.

Peltier’s incarceration became and international cause celebre, with everyone from Marlon Brando to the Dalai Lama, Soviet state media and Amnesty International weighing in. Decades passed, and the torch was passed from one generation of activists trying to get “justice for Leonard” to another.

Leonard Peltier’s name became synonymous with America’s unequal and broken system of justice and a black eye from which the F.B.I. never recovered.

He was imprisoned so long that the first major documentary about the sketchy case the government built against him — “Incident at Oglala: The Leonard Peltier Story,” by the famed British director Michael Apted — came out in 1992, some 34 years ago and came 15 years after his trial.

In “Free Leonard Peltier,” co-directors David France (“Welcome to Chechnya”) and Jesse Short Bull (“Lakota Nation vs. The United States”) use close access to Peltier and lobbying and organizing team and interview his many American Indian Movement contemporaries, including others accused of murder by the F.B.I. and exonerated. The filmmakers also lean on over half a century of archival footage of the conditions of the times and events leading up to the Incident at Oglala.

The result is a film that doesn’t leave much room for counter-arguments — Peltier’s version of where he was when the raid and shootout on the fateful day have changed over the decades — but that lets history catch up to its subject and its point of view.

The viewer can take or leave allegations about the reasons for the “civil war” on Pine Ridge, that it was inspired by “colonized” tribal Chief Dick Wilson and his workings with the government and mining interests that wanted the Oglala Sioux land and its buried uranium deposits.

But before the Nixon administration, when all this went down, few would have believed what one right wing megalomaniac might be capable of while running our government.

And the uneasy feeling that the F.B.I.’s vaunted reputation was built on managed, massaged and blackmailed propoganda existed long before its bestiality-friendly present, or Director “Fingers on the Scale of an Election” James Comey or leaking Director Christopher Wray’s insistence there was “no conspiracy” involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt.

A parade of presidents had the chance to pardon Peltier, but the only ones who’d consider it were Democrats, raising the urgency surrounding the end of Bill Clinton’s and then Joe Biden’s presidencies and the hopes for clemency.

Racist Republicans from Reagan to both Bushes and Trump notably pardoned cronies and well off white people, not Native American activists.

Any hope Clinton would release Peltier was dashed when some 500, almost all white, middle-aged and older F.B.I. agents marched to the White House. They wanted this conviction, evidence, cover-ups and injustices be damned.

Peltier’s cause appealed to many, but not all. But much of the U.S. and the world came to see his case as emblematic of America’s mistreatment of Native peoples and stealing of Native land since long before its founding.

I lived in North Dakota, covered Native events in Peltier’s hometown of Belcourt and saw occasional examples of the overt racism there, which looked an awful lot of what you saw in the way white people regarded Black and brown people in my native South.

I interviewed AIM’s Russell Means and Dennis Banks when Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” came out, and they’d had roles in the film and had led Native extras on a strike for better living and working conditons. Righteous dudes.

Reading “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” is a great way to lose your taste for many a “classic” Western.

And every time after my first interview with filmmaker Apted — when 1992’s “Thunderheart” and “Incident at Oglala” came out — that I reconnected with the director, we’d catch up on what the status of Leonard Peltier’s latest appeals were.

France and Short Bull cover as much of the story as possible in two hours — Native history, Bureau of Indian Affairs mistreatment and land theft giving rise to protests and militancy in a militant era.

And when the prosecutor in charge of the district that tried and convicted Peltier (James Reynolds) removed his name from the case and signed a petition for Peltier’s release based on F.B.I., judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, it’s not like we need to hear fresh fury from the people who railroaded the man.

Short Bull and France didn’t make the first documentary about Peltier, or the first great one. But they may have made the one that matters.

Rating: unrated, depictions of violence

Cast: Leonard Peltier, Russell Means, Charmaine White Face, Dennis Banks, Dino Butler, Madonna Thunder Hawk, Rob Robideau, Kevin McKiernan, and James Reynolds.

Credits: Directed by David France and Jesse Short Bull, scripted by Jamie Deradorian-Delia, Adam Evans and David France. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:48

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

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