Classic Film Review: The First Person Diary Doc is born on “Sherman’s March” (1985)

Posted on August 16, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s hard to remember how “out there” Ross McElwee’s landmark “personal journey” documentary “Sherman’s March” was in 1985.

A confessional, cutesie, creepy and revealing snapshot of the South and one privileged movie maker’s revisiting of his romantic past and revelation of his romantic present, there was nothing like “Sherman’s March” when it came out.

Long before “the attention economy” of Youtube, “look at ME” video selfies and Facebook Reels, its two and a half hour blend of performative narcissim was an eye-opener, and an invitation to “become” your own documentary.

Before Michael Moore’s first person jeremiads and the scores of “personal essay” docs to come, McElwee laid it all out there in a musing and amusing drift through the question of “Is romantic love possible” in an age hanging under a nuclear cloud (the “brinksmanship” of the Reagan era).

“Sherman’s March” was so revolutionary that it was selected for the National Film Registry of essential American cinema preserved by the Library of Congress. The functional dysfunction on display and droll commentary on a region determined to drag America into the racist, superstitious, conservative Confederate stupor to come seems prophetic today.

With McElwee, who’d go on to make the similar and more pointed “Bright Leaves” some years later, now releasing an update on his life and movie making, “Remake,” it’s the perfect moment to re-release “Sherman’s March” in all its quirky, restored glory.

I first caught the film in an art cinema in the Northern Plains (Madison, Wisnconsin) when “Sherman’s March” was released, a movie trumpeted by magazine critics and “Siskel & Ebert” as essential viewing of that era. I don’t remember it being over two and a half hours long, but the word “indulgent” has been attached to most every review of it, then and now.

McElwee was a Charlotte, N.C. native doc filmmaker at the tail end of the shooting-on-celluloid era, living n Boston when he got the idea of revisiting General George Tecumseh Sherman’s “scorched Earth” march through the South in the backbreaking campaign that concluded the Civil War.

With legions of white Southern relatives, teachers and acquaintances who still referred to the Civil War as “the late unpleasantness,” in a region that still spat at the mention of Sherman’s name, his plantation, church and city burning march of 120 years before burned into the collective white Southern memory, McElwee was definitely onto something.

The first tone-deaf/slavery-denying 40something blonde who lets slip “I still don’t think we were wrong,” confirms it.

But those unreconstructed Confederates, the daffy, drawling first generation of “preppers” planning cultish survivalist compounds in the Appalachian Mountains, and the “elite” Confederate costume ball crowd (McElwee dresses appropriately for it) turn out to be a sidebar to the “real” movie he’d make.

He’d follow Sherman’s path, sure, from Atlanta to Savannah, Sumter to Columbia and on to Bentonville. But his Boston girlfriend had just ditched him. Self-absorbed McElwee’s movie would be an attempt to dip into his psyche to ask “Why?”

Is it all on him, an angsty, bearded over-thinker who “hides behind (his) camera?” Or is the existential angst of a feminist era, with the last sputterings of liberated “free love” hippydom smothered by a “Me Decade” (the ’70s) that never morphed into the “Us” decade (the ’80s) that the most naive had prophesied?

As family hurls him into the path of a newly-divorced high school flame and he and his sister paddle by a fetching swimmer who turns out to be a confident, assertive and earthy would-be actress hellbent on getting into the next Burt Reynolds movie, the mid-30s McElwee finds himself drawn to Atlanta and half-heartedly begining his Sherman project.

We hear McElwee telling Sherman’s own tragic story and connections with the South in narration and see him trying to convince assorted Steel Magnolias (the film is overwhelmingly female) that Sherman wasn’t the monster the reenactment-crazed region made him out to be.

And we see McElwee drawn to and smitten with women like no-deep-thinker actress Pat and out of his intellectual league linguist Wini, living on her own and often au naturel on deserted Ossabaw Island off of Savannah, Georgia. He visits “compoinds” in the mountains and gets a little theology from a preacher and a lot more from Mormon DeeDee.

She’s a woman “marriage broker” (Teacher? Friend?) Charleen is determined to fix McElwee up with.

Jackie the anti-nuclear, pro-women’s rights activist is just one of McElwee’s versions of “the one that got away.”

The movie’s downmarket lifestyle is something of a pose, even if the surgeon’s son from Charlotte grew up in the sort of privilege that produces lake houses and documentary filmmaker children, then and now. Making a movie on a shoestring, he bums his brother’s rattletrap 1950s MG TD (it could be a TC) to make his journey, a ride that leaves him stranded hither and yon, accepting late night accomodaations in a town jail in tiny Adrian, Georgia and Spartan sleeping quarters elsewhere.

Viewing “Sherman’s March” now, one is struck by the “male gaze” focus of it all. The camera embraces all the women and leers at more than a few. The point of view can seem voyeuristic, and McElwee’s “innocent in the land of women and ‘unresolved’ romances” act makes one wonder if this hapless romantic dweeb has a whiff of “stalker” about him.

But as we see Confederate women financing and finishing up a monument to the Confederacy in South Carolina, visit Stone Mountain, Georgia’s biggest Confederate monumber of them all (dedicated in 1970), McElwee can seem as prophetic as any movie maker who picked up his own 16mm camera and belt-held Nagra tape recorder and simply recorded what was right in front of him.

While our self-absorbed culture fretted over love, getting ahead, mind-expanding travel and “following your bliss,” the look-backward unreconstructed were setting the stage for a MAGA coup in which the South DID “rise again.” And not in a good way.

Seeing this film anew, I had forgotten the ways my own path crossed McElwee’s during his years of filming. I worked in Charlotte in public radio at the beginning of my career, and like McElwee, spent too much time trying to score an interview with Burt Reynolds as he filmed “Stroker Ace” there.

I covered the same “End of the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment)” rally McElwee followed his activist ex to Raleigh to film.

And like McElwee, whom I interviewed when “Bright Leaves” came out, I’m a product of a family deeply invested in the South’s demon weed, tobacco, before anybody knew it kills people.

So there’s more to “Sherman’s March” than prophecy and a startlingly accurate snapshot of doggedly embittered white South (there are several of Black folks in it, old mechanic friends and new musicans).

The navel gazing boomer nostalgia of it all, looking for a mate in a post free-love culture, will appeal to some. How this undeniably important and influencial film has aged will vary by generation.

Because whether we’ve marched forward since this groundbreaking film came out, or off a cliff, is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Rating: unrated, brief nidity, mild profanity

Cast: Ross McElwee, DeDe McElwee, Patricia Rendleman, Wini Wood, Charleen Swansea, DeeDee Geraty, Joy Perrin and Burt Reynolds.

Credits: Written, directed, filmed and edited by Ross McElwee. A Music Box re-release.

Running time: 2:37

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BOX OFFICE: Spidey’s still The Man, “Odyssey” clears $500 million, “Paw Patrol” and “End of Oak Street” fight for Third

Posted on August 15, 2026 by Roger Moore

The summer’s biggest blockbusters opened huge, and “held” audience, week to week, weekend to weekend.

As front loaded as “Toy Story 5”(not far under $500 million), “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” (way over $700, closing on $800) and “The Odyssey” (just cleared $500 million, and counting) seemed when they opened, it’s that staying power that’s paid off.

“Spider Man: Brand New Day” to dropped about 50% , weekend to weekend, and cleared $70 million on this its third weekend of release. And Christopher Nolan’s biggest hit, “The Odyssey,” is dropping only 27-30% weekend to weekend, adding $23.2 million this fifth weekend of its release.

Whatever hits the early summer provided, 2026 is proving that opening a big film late enough in July can turn August into a bonanza for cinema owners.

Two new releases about dinosaurs dueled for third place. Thee “Twilight Zone”/Spielberg-inspired “The End of Oak Street” showed some muscle, on track to clear $21 million.“Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie” is a late summer animated break from the “Toy Story/Minions” parade just cleared $20 million for fourth place..

Other reviews I’ve glanced at for “Oak Street” seem to be awash in lowered expectations, with critics relishing the chance to bash “Jurassic” movies and Spielberg outings that they almost certainly raved about when they came out. Nonsense. At least we all agree that Anne Hathaway sells the reality of this wormhole in time tale, delivering a terrified face that even her “Devil Wears Prada” co-star Ms. Streep would have trouble matching.

The surprise in fifith place is a girlgroup celebration doc, “Katsye: Wild Hearts” did a middle $3.95 million, good enough for fifth place in the slack season for new releases.

“Six: The Musical Live” is a bit of filmed theater that managed sixth with a $3 million take.

The Reagan/Gorbachev nuclear-de-escalation drama “The Brink of War” from Angel Studios, starring Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris, is pulling in $2.68 million or so from aged Reagan fans. That’s good enough to seat it in a Dog Days of August top ten (seventh). I ducked into a showing of it to see if I wanted to sit through the entire thing and thought “Meh.” Reviews have been mixed to poor on that one.

“Toy Story 5” $2.3 million) spent most of the summer in the top five and is still doing eighth place business.

“One Night Only” earns another week in the top ten with a $2 million tally, good enough for ninth placeo back in session.

And “Vishwanath & Sons,” a dramedy import from the subcontinent, cracked the top ten with a $1.6 million opening weekend. As loyal as that audience is, if I was an urban theater owner, I’d want an Indian title every week, a new anime every month and maybe two horror titles a month for good measure.

“Moana” and “Super Troopers 3,” “The Invite,” “Hadestown” and “Obsession” are driftig out of the top ten and into the summer sunset.

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Movie Review: The Last Bon Bon of Summer — Dafoe Faces the Prospect of “Late Fame”

Posted on August 15, 2026 by Roger Moore

There are worse obssessions a film buff could indulge in than making a point of catching every film Willem Dafoe takes a role in. An Actor and Artist who merits a capital “A” when labeled such, he rarely disappoints, especially in star vehicles that tap into his soulful grasp of loneliness.

Think “Light Sleeper,” “At Eternity’s Gate,” The Lighthouse” or “The Florida Project.”

As a forgotten poet, more “never was” than “has been” famous in “Late Fame,” his perfect casting is summed up by a vamping actress (Greta Lee) who meets him and sizes him up in an instant.

“Of course, this is exactly how you would look.”

Based on a novella by early 20th century Viennese doctor and writer Arthur Schnitzler, casting director turned screenwriter Samy Burch and director Kent Jones (he made “Diane” and the doc “Hitchcock/Truffaut”) perfectly cast and reset the story in modern day New York.

A city of art and artists, publishing and legions of rich kids in and out of prestigious universities is the perfect place to park a decades dormant poet in the company of fawning poseurs.

Ed Saxberger came along too late for Kerouac and Ginsberg, a mournful, streetwise wordsmith who moved to the city and got published at the tail end of punk rock, an artist wholly out of his time when Reagan’s “Greed is Good” ’80s rolled around.

Ed stuck around by taking a job for life — “thirty seven years” with the U.S. Postal Service. He lives in a book (and poets on tape) stuffed apartment, a weathered, solitary man seemingly content to hang with work cronies at his favorite Greenwich Village bar, grill and poolhall.

But that overdressed young dandy (Edmund Donovan) who stares at his apartment building and hails him on the street knows who he is. Or was. Or almost was. He’s the guy who wrote “Way Past Go” in 1979.

Or course Ed works at the post office, “just like (poet/novelist Charles) Bukowski!”

Trust fund fanboy Meyers flatters, questions and implores Saxberger to drop in on Meyers’ “group.” “The Enthusiasm Society,” they call themselves — generally idle and notably entitled creative “types” who gather upstairs in the coffeehouse called “Any Old Place.” Flattered, Ed relents.

He is gushed-over by the eight or so members of this Moveable Feast, guys (Clay Singer, Luca Padovan, et al) who sneer at their fellow poseurs, the “sociopathic media” set — influencers wrapped up in the “monetizing of everything.” They make big plans for themselves and their new “re-discovery,” the lost genius Ed Saxberger, a writer they can hook up — via “family connections” — with an equally well-off trust fund baby agent (Jake Lacy).

Ed may say “I had my moment. It passed. It’s your turn, now.”

But Gloria (Lee), a swanning actress of the premature grande dame persuasion, is a bit older than the lads in their group. And the sexy singer/chancer with an eye towards self-promotion sizes Ed up to his face.

“There’s nothing more exciting than being a ‘re-discovered’ male genius.”

It isn’t long before Ed is shopping for “what the NYU kids” smoke at his local bodega, and not long after that the inevitable “You have no idea who you’re talking to” is trotted out for his “old” work friends (Clark Johnson, William Hill, et al).

We know where this is going, only we don’t.

Meeting that agent, responding to demands for “new work” and even a name-dropping “memoir,” Gloria’s desperate flirtations, put-up or shut-up time as The Enthusiam Society plans an “event” — the plot points may be anticipated, but how they play out isn’t.

Lee, of “Past Lives” and Netflix’s “The Last House,” takes her most extroverted role and acts and sings the hell out of it. We “know” Gloria, even if Ed needs to be warned about her.

But like him, we are dazzled by her Dietrich meets Liza by way of Piaf one-woman cabaret act. Ed may not notice that every man in the tiny club is just as aged, lusting and perhaps frustrated as him. We do.

Dafoe ably conveys a weary, myopic and ageing artist tempted out of his solitude by visions of what he once wanted to be.

Our filmmakers and players take Schnitzler’s cautionary tale of the empty allure of “Late Fame” and make us apply it to the present day. We’ve seen scores of Ed Saxbergers “re-discovered,” and every week has a new social media phenom that the culture must contend with, often someone who “re-discovers” this composer/singer/actor/painter/guitarist/writer/filmmaker.

Hell, director Jones made his bones as a documentarian remembering how French critic/filmmaker helped “re-discover” Alfred Hitchcock, for Pete’s sake.

No, there’s “nothing more exciting than re-discovering a male genius.”

But it’s worth remembering that sometimes they got lost for a reason, a hard truth even the “re-discovered” have to consider. Eventually.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, Edmund Donovan, Clark Johnson, Graham Campbell, Clay Singer, Luca Padovan, Tony Torn and Jake Lacy

Credits: Directed by Kent Jones, scripted by Samy Burch, based on a novella by Arthur Schnitzler. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:36

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Movie Review: “The End of Oak Street,” End of Summer Dregs

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Roger Moore

Say what you want about the Spielberg-lite creature feature “The End of Oak Street,” but Oscar winner Anne Hathaway makes us believe that she believes it’s “The End.”

A seriously silly movie that misses more laughs than it reaches for, “Oak Street” summons up Spielberg suburbia of the ’70s and ’80s but wastes the period piece settings on a flat, cliched genre pic about a bunch of feathery dinosaurs — something we learned about them in the decades since “Jurassic Park” — raising hell when time and tectonic plates slip and flip.

An overheard “NASA reports” strange “ripples” in the solar system on the radio, a neighbor marveling at a peculiar pre-palmetto plant that’s burst through her lawn, a high school kid who dreams of Cornell and studying with Carl Sagan, and a few flashes, booms and growls in the night and next thing we and the Platt family knows “wormholes” might be real.

Their 1982, polyester eart0 tone fashions, cathode ray tube world with its dead car brands — vintage Plymouths and AMCs abound — is uprooted and surrounded by beasts straight out of museums hunting them and their neighbors and their pets into an extinction level event.

And they didn’t even have to pull out their Jumanji board to bring all this down on themselves.

Writer-director David Robert Mitchell leaves most of his “It Follows” skillset behind for a pricey and dull horror lark testing you or your kids flashcard skills in identifying Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Gargania and Pterosaurs et al, and yes I had to look them up.

The Platt parents (Hathaway and Ewan McGregor) have annoying neighbors (P.J. Byrne), Spielbergian smart-ass kids, and secrets. Wife and aspiring novelist Denise has the most benign one. Husband Greg is awfully anxious to skip family time for his side hustle delivering pizzas. Maisy Stella plays the Cornell hopeful daughter (the most under-written character) whose Sagan dreams are gone with the wormhole or whatever caused this. Christian Convery is whiny son Brian, who has school issues and a low fraidy-cat threshhold, unless his unruly cattle dog Starbuck is concerned.

One by one, those suburban concerns fall away as they take on prehistoric beasts with the occasional gun, a baseball bat, knives and the tween son’s bow and arrow.

Mitchell tries to keep the violence close at hand and his cast on the run. Hathaway “sells” this terrified fleeing better than anybody else. But for all the deaths, immediate and impending, the stakes never feel all that high.

The “science” is a sloppy afterthought and you can pretty much predict the story beats and deaths two or three scenes in advance, in some cases.

A few tight compositions in XCUs stand out, visually. Hathaway gives us a dose of disappointed wife and fiercely protective mom.

“Is this the end of the world, mom?”

She’s more convincing in answering that than Dad is in his “not going to let anything happen to you” cliche speech.

So while one can appreciate reminding the old master of his glory days tropes in the summer Spielberg tossed off “Disclosure Day” and tried to pass it off as epic. But there have been better Spielberg impersonations, better When Dinosaurs Attack movies,

And at some point, in between raptor and super snake and mega-gator assaults, we can’t help but recall “It Follows” was a one off, Mitchell’s follow-up “Under the Silver Lake” wasn’t Andrew Garfield’s finest hour and we’re allowed to ask of “The End of Oak Street,” “Is that it?”

Rating: PG-13, grisly violence, profanity

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis and P.J. Byrne.

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Robert Mitchell. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:38

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Netflixable? Self-Centered Actress/Mom’s Come Home to “This, That and Everything in Between”

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Roger Moore

“This, That and Everything in Between” is a perfect covers-all-the-bases title for a soap opera. In this case, the soap in question is a feature length film from the Philippines.

But “soap” is what this meandering mess stumbles into after an opening act that struggles to be a laugh-free farce about a delusional diva actress coming “home” to get to know the screenwriter-daughter she abandoned 27 years before.

When the laughs don’t come, let’s reach for melodrama?

That mirrors the plot of this Cholo Laurel (“Afterlife,” “Wherever You Are”) potboiler. A rising star screenwriter (Jodi Sta. Maria), famous for rethinking her plots on set, juggles her way towards an American screenwriting fellowship by toying with abrupt changes in direction of the script she’s already pitched to Hollywood.

But Jo has a hard time focusing on the writing and her Big Chance when her self-absorbed, short-tempered actress/birth-mother shows up after 27 years.

Paz (Agot Isidro) had her own shot at stardom at home in the Philippines. But she dashed off to New York to try and create an American film breakthrough while she was still young and beautiful enough to be labeled a “starlet.”

Now she’s “home,” “allowed” back in the country some say. Nobody recognizes her as a well-preserved but grey-haired diva, which has her biting the head off of cab drivers and profanely tearing her 20 year-old son Mattias (Gabriel Lazaro) a new one over pretty much any slight.

Jo isn’t all that into re-connecting with “Our Lady of Eternal Absence.” She’s got an award-winning series to keep afloat and final prep for that Brooklyn writing fellowship to take care of.

But Dad (Gardo Versoza) insists she come home to San Rafael, to the people who raised her and the insecure narcissist who didn’t. He needs Jo’s help with all this.

Paz insults siblings who’ve made careers on the Filipino stage and Filipino Netflix series. Her screaming bouts with her son don’t lessen her “issues,” or his. He’s twitchy, and has taken to getting stoned to tune her out.

“You don’t GET me (in Filipino and English),” Paz shrieks to her ex, her extended family and anybody else within earshot. But Jo, “JoANNE,” as her mother insists on calling her, isn’t hearing it and isn’t having it.

And then, dang it all, the movie abandons any sense of exaggerated “fun” it was reaching for and turns melodramatically serious.

The script is structured to have an awkward “reunion” dinner with family eat up a lot of the second act, and as Matti turns out to be the truth-teller in mom’s many tall tales about her “success” and real life, that promises laughs. Not many arrive, but at least they’re promised.

Then the picture lurches into a kind of unemotional, tasteless bittersweet reverie that threatens to put viewers to sleep.

In a youth-oriented business like film and TV, Jo seems entirely too old (she’s 37, since mom left her when she was ten) to be pursuing or seriously considered for a “fellowship” in a profession she’s already been a success in.

But not a whole lot of this makes sense. A favorite moment for me was when our diva yanks off her wig…to show us even shorter but less grey “real” hair underneath. What’s all that about? A compromised bit of half-committing to the part?

Isidro is over-the-top and amusingly awful in the lead role, but even she struggles to land an “out loud” laugh.

The other family issues stuff isn’t particularly well-handled, either. The dialogue isn’t that quotable even if the leads are decent, having just enough edge in their performances to give them credibility as estranged mother and daughter.

Notice, Mom, how I have no old family photos of you and me before you left. “You were never there.” But who, Mom spits back, does Jo think was TAKING those photographs?

Little dollops of heart and moments that ring true make you wish this movie played. But it doesn’t. It drifts away from Jo’s on-set TV writer problem solving and becomes a script that even Jo couldn’t fix, cliches and tropes and “soap opera” plot tricks or not.

Rating: TV-MA, smoking, drug abuse, sex and profanity

Cast: Jodi Sta. Maria, Agot Isidro, Gardo Versoza and Gabriel Lazaro.

Credits: Directed by Cholo Laurel, scripted by Cody Abad, Cholo Laurel and Shania Sumergido. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

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Movie Review: A “Burning” “Rashomon” from Kyrgyzstan

Posted on August 13, 2026 by Roger Moore

It may be ethnocentric to think this way, but one can’t help but hope that universally recognized civil rights, liberty and justice make their way into every corner of the world. Because you never know what sort of values you’ll see in the cinema of Egypt, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or any other corner of the Islamic world.

“Burning” is a mystery thriller from Kyrgystan, a former satellite state of the Soviet Empire, now a land-locked country where Islam is the dominant religion, superstition still has its place in the culture and women’s status is traditionally subservient, with head coverings required. And whatever you do, ladies, don’t let the men catch you smoking.

“Burning” is a tale told in three chapters , titled “Guilted, “Excuse” and “The Reason.” Radik Eshimov’s film unravels the story of a house fire, who and what caused it as “witnessed” or at least understood by three different neighbors.

Like “Rashomon” and its inspiration in this sort of disparate views screen storytelling, “Citizen Kane,” we’re led along and led astray by some of what we’re shown and told by the drunken Jyrdal (Rusalam Orozakunov), the more sober and gruff Durus (Askar Kachkynbaev) and lastly, his pharmacist-wife (Zhanilai Isakova). But some sort of opinion of “truth” and “justice” may turn up in their testimonials.

The home of Asel (Aisanat Edigeeva) and husband Marat (Omurbek Izrailov) has burned. It happened shortly after the arrival of mother-in-law Farida (Kalicha Seydalieva).

This fire happens not long after the couple lost their little boy. But Asel is pregnant and hopeful and Marat has summoned his mother to “help” and look after her as he’s to be away.

Farida is either a scowling witch with nefarious connections to the henchmen of local mullahs that will ensure her control over this pregancy, or a victim or simply a bystander. Asel may be a hapless victim herself, judged “guilty” in losing their son, “possessed by a jinn (genie, demonic spirit) or an abused wife who has few rights and has lost her sanity at her plight.

Marat might be naive, trying to stay helpful and hopeful, concerned and sober minded, or an abuser.

Director Eshimov and screenwriters Aizada Amangeldy and Dastan Madalbekov may give weight to every version of the story, but they cheat in lots of obvious ways. Our “eyewitnesses,” relating their versions of the story to one another and other neighbors after the fire, show us things they could not have witnessed and relate conversations and incidents they did not see or hear.

And of course, the filmmakers’ fingers are on the scales of which “version” is the cold, hard truth.

But the ending is quite moving and underscores what a sophisticated — if slow and uncertain at times — piece of screen storytelling this is.

There’s horror, suspense and violence, and the performances give every one of the three leads the chance to play pleading victims or hissable villains.

It’d be a candidate for “Lifetime Original Movie” in North America, fascinating for the alien culture it captures but clumsy in its melodramatics. But “Burning” gives one hope in its messaging, in the polish of its performances and in the fact that it was made at all.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Aisanat Edigeeva, Omurbek Izrailov, Kalicha Seydalieva, Askar Kachkynbaev, Ruslan Orozakunov and Zhanilai Isakova

Credits: Directed by Radik Eshimov, scripted by Aizada Amangeldy and Dastan Madalbekov. An Indiepix release.

Running time: 1:41

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Movie Review: A “Last Ride” with Spike Lee’s Less Talented Kid Brother

Posted on August 12, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Last Ride” is a bit of a head-slapper, a creaky, crawling thriller with intensely unlikable characters doing one stupid thing after another and a screwy semi-supernatural plot that staggers from the unlikely to the insanely inane.

It stumbles out of the gate and staggers along for 89 minutes. And then it gets worse.

But because it was produced by Spike Lee’s filmworks and directed by his younger brother, Cinqué Lee, it got into lots and lots of festivals before vanishing without a trace. And now Amazon has it.

See how nepotism in the movies works, kids?

A prologue has an alcoholic father (Gustaf Skarsgård, brother of Bill and Alexander, son of Stellan) arm twist his 20ish son’s (Samuel Pau Small) pot dealer in Norway into leading them up via cable car/gondola to the top of a Norwegian peak. The kid is contemptuous of his old man, but there they are.

Dad, between sips from his oversized flask, allows that he has unfinished business on this mountain.

We’re promptly dropped into a flashback, Three obnoxious tweens (Roman Griffin Davis, Charlie Price, Felix Jamieson) are trying to talk a Norwegian cable car worker (Kristofer Hivju) into taking them up that same mountain in iffy winter weather.

The kids reek of privilege. It’s early March, 1982, and they’re not in school, they’re on vacation. Two of them have divorced parents who have…taken an interest in one another.

And they all have a secret that isn’t really a secret.

Devin, Syd and Jamie takes Polaroids of one another, patter maniacally about girls, school, family and each other. And they won’t take no for an answer from redbearded “Viking” Øyvind.

He finds himself “just a babysitter” for twerps “like you.”

But a shared love of The Clash abruptly changes “No. Go home…Come back tomorrow” or whenever to “Yes.” And so they sing-along to “London Calling” as the gondola takes one more wintry trip up the mountain in the gathering gloom.

Our first tip that not all is well is having the “London Calling” sing-along cover the entire tune. No canny director wastes screen time on a gag once we’ve gotten the gist.

And the cassette has barely finished when an ominous noise brings their gondola to a halt. Everything electrical and electronic is zapped. Poor Øyvind has barely put out a fire when he, too, is shocked. And there they are.

We see lights flickering out in a wave across the valley below. The jabbering kids are beside themselves. Who will save them? How? And what the hell just happened?

“If it was a blackout, there should be car lights,” one of them reasons.

There’s not a lot of “reasoning” in this lot, who take a while to adjust to the fact that there’s a dead body in their midst, someone who did them a favor and paid for it with his life. That last part they never reconcile.

Three varying-degrees-of-stupid boys must cling to life in a freezing cable car twelve storeys off the snowy ground, confronting every new clue about their situation with the dumbest possible response.

They’re children, so there is no “work the problem” here. There are light sticks in the first aid kit? Let’s light’em all up. It’s cold and getting colder? Let’s steal the dead guy’s…cigarettes. And clothes.

“I can smell his breath” on his sweater, one remarks. “Yeah, one of his last” another retorts.

What writer-director Lee was going for here is a Nordic peril “Stand by Me.” Alas, “Hang by Me” was not a considered title. “The Grand Allignment” was. Yes, Lee went to the trouble of attaching this traumatic tragedy to an astronomical event.

The old fiction writing 101 maxim “Write what you know” seems to have evaded Lee — he also directed the gimmicky “Window on Your Present” — who may have called on memories of all the indulged, idiotic white kids he knew growing up, or just imagined how awful such children can be.

The claustrophobic setting is comically misused.

The kids just scream “child actor” in their performances and the script does the adults no favors, either.

Anf then an epilogue as inane as the prologue ensures that whatever the outcome of what happened in that gondola was, the movie about it accomplishes nothing but leave a bad taste in the viewer’s mouth.

Rating: TV-16+, violence, profanity, tween smoking

Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Charlie Price, Felix Jamieson, Kristofer Hivju, Samuel Paul Small and Gustaf Skarsgård

Credits: Scripted and directed by Cinqué Lee. A Quiver release on Amazon.

Running time: 1:38

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Movie Review: You Can’t Spell Heartache without “H is for Hawk”

Posted on August 10, 2026 by Roger Moore

Almost all of us missed “H is for Hawk” when it was shown in “select cinemas” last winter. And we’re all the poorer for it.

This sublime, understated film — based on a memoir by Helen MacDonald — is another showcase for one of acting’s most natural, unaffected performers, Claire Foy. Foy gives another career-defining dressed-down performance as a woman haunted by loss, refocused on a fresh risk as she seeks any distraction to lessen her grief.

Broadly put, “Hawk” is about grief and Ox-bridge academia and falconry, as practiced by a Cambridge “fellow” who adopts a goshawk.

Helen (Foy) is a not-wholly-focused Phd candidate teaching disinterested students “erased” science history, debunking “The Great Man Theory” of breakthrough discoveries by pointing out a woman, for instance, who made Watson and Crick’s the shape of DNA “discovery” happen.

And then her beloved, ever-curious career newspaper photographer dad (Brendan Gleeson) dies and all the procrastination, perpetual tardiness, impulse control and easy distraction comes home to roost.

A onetime falconer, she decides this would be the perfect moment — with her future teetering, eviction and career suicide pending — to focus on training a goshawk, “the maddest and wildest of the raptors.”

Falcons are “like fighter jets,” she explains to any layman or laywoman misinformed enough to ask if that’s a Peregrin or Merlin she’s got on her gloved arm. “Hawks are Apache attack helicopters,” relentless low altitude bringers of death and destruction to any meal they get in their sights.

The hawk she names “Mabel” becomes her sole focus, neglecting her lone friend at work (Denise Gough), her grieving mother (Lindsay Duncan) and all else as deadlines pass and life goes on outside the bubble of her ever-more-cluttered and filthy university flat.

Whst profundity there is in this simple narrative lives in the details. Foy dresses the part, studiously avoids eye contact with the bird on first meeting as her character begs the breeder selling goshawks to give her the one who is the most skittish, dangerous and “wild.”

What a “well-behaved goshawk” needs, he (Sean Kearns) asks? “Murder. Calms her right down. Let her kill a lot.”

Foy gingerly keeps the hawk at arm’s length even as we see Helen becoming more and more obsessed about keeping this “hunting partner,” not “pet,” alive and training her to embrace their “partnership.”

Sam Spruell underplays the falconer (and perhaps ex-lover) she consults to renew her skill, a man not given to panic and the very model of patience that antic Helen must mimic. Josh Dylan is the brother who isn’t close enough to intervene in Helen’s quietly monomaniacal declne.

BAFTA-winning director and co-screenwriter Philippa Lowthorpe (“Three Girls,” “Call the Midwife”) includes glorious footage of goshawks in action and on the hunt even as she zeroes in on Foy’s brave-front hiding a broken heart and spirit performance. We see her work reflected with care in the supporting players, with Duncan and Gough in particular playing up the “kid gloves” loved ones often take when trying to buck up someone mid-breakdown.

Gleeson leans back in his turn, under-selling “larger than life” and letting us see her father as Helen does. Naturally, they shared a love of the natural world, and raptors were a big part of that.

The whole effect is life affirming as “H is for Hawk” takes us on a journey deep into a daughter’s crippling grief and glimpse, via sentimental and even playful flashbacks, the larger-than-life hole in her life that opened when the spirited, always-curious, always-engaging dad who made her died.

Rating: PG-13, smoking, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Claire Foy, Lindsay Duncan, Denise Gough, Sam Spruell, Josh Dylan and Brendan Gleeson

Credits: Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, scripted by Emma Donahue and Philippa Lowthorpe, based on the memoir by Helen MacDonald. A Roadside Attractions release streaming on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:58.

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Classic Film Review: Dietrich and Douglas, Posh Infidelity with “The Lubitsch Touch” — “Angel”

Posted on August 9, 2026 by Roger Moore

It’s 1937, and Marlene Dietrich would let the world know she could shed almost every hint of her German accent when it suited her purposes.

Melvyn Douglas proved that all a bland leading man needed to do was grow a pencil thin mustache and change his name from Melvyn Eduoard Hesselberg so that he’d be fit to court Marlene on the screen and “make Garbo laugh.”

And Berlin expat Ernst Lubitsch sat at the pinnacle of the Hollywood heirarchy, the go-to producer/director for sophisticated romantic melodramas and comedies, typically posh films that demonstrated “The Lubitsch Touch” — upscale and witty, cutting and romantically (sexually) daring for their Production Code day.

“Angel” is peak-period Lubitsch, even if it isn’t the first, second or third title a film buff summons up to sing his praises. This patient (slow) but meticulously crafted 1937 melodrama is about infidelity in the offing, if not in practice.

There’s even a hint of the unease Western Civilization was roiling under as attempts to head off another world war unfold in the background, off camera.

And then there’s the star power. Dietrich plays a sexy, upper class European woman of mystery who drops in on an old friend — a former Russian grand dutchess (Laura Hope Crews) — for reasons never quite explained.

As the grand duchess runs what appears to be a high end brothel, or at least escort service, this “old friend” busness doesn’t need much explanation. Maria is married and bored, and she has a past.

A rakish Brit fresh from India (Douglas, not even feigning an accent) drops in, mistakes the unnamed “lady” for the grand duchess and is instantly smitten.

It’s the eyes, the impossibly long eyelashes and that way Dietrich used them in this, the flirtatious “side-eye” corner of her career. She teases, tempts, lets him lead himself on and declines to give her name.

“I don’t want to know your name,” she purrs, maintaining decorum even as he talks her into a dinner rendezvous.

“Angel! That’s what I shall call you,” he enthuses.

And then, in the dark of a Parisian park, she watches him go to buy a flower from a poor street vendor, and vanishes.

We only see this and his reaction to it through via the face of the lady flower seller (Louise Carter) — sad, resigned, but hey, he dropped the flower I just sold him. Dust it off and I can sell it again!

Returning to Britain, Lady Maria settles back into her wealthy life with an important diplomat, Sir Frederick Barker (Herbert Marshall of “Foreign Correspondant” and “The Letter”). They prattle on about their effortlessly “happy” marriage, planning this outing or that dinner out.

And then the rakish Anthony Halton (Douglas) stumbles into their corner of this small world of British wealth, power and title. Who will realize what, and when? And how will each react?

The settings include the grand duchess’s salon, a seriously venerable British mansion, a dress-to-impress day at the Ascot racecourse and an evening at the opera. Of course.

The temptations and intrigues of the plot, borrowed from a Melchior Legyel play, are somewhat starchy and dry — dated even. But Lubitsch and one of his favorite screenwriters, Samuel Raphaelson, populate this gilded corner of “Lubitschland” with a house full of servants who are both comic foils for the leads, and judgemental commentators (without all the facts) on what is going on.

The dialogue is a veritable glossary of old world attitudes and pithy “truths” about class. love and the sexes.

“It’s the privilege of a woman not to make sense,” Maria declares. “Men that expect women to be logical are likely to be failures in love.”

“Angel” has plenty to make it feel a tad musty and old-fashioned, but there’s naughtiness seeping in around the edges. The jokes land and the cliches and stereotypes still play as they provoke eyerolls today.

Dietrich was already a legend, and showed off range and subtlety here as her film career took a turn towards iconic, later to the point of self-parody.

Douglas would age into a grand character actor (“Hud,” “Being There”) and only truly come into his own after his leading-man-paired-with-much-more-famous-leading-ladies ended.

Marshall is the anchor in reality here, delivering that British “Keep calm and carry on” stoicism (pre-war) that must be dropped if he’s to have a prayer of hanging onto his wife with a past.

“Ninotchka” was in the future for Lubitsch and Douglas, with “Destry Rides Again” soon to become Dietrich’s comical high water mark.

But “Angel” doesn’t let down the side or the cinema, a classic that’s too much of its time to sting, a lesser script perfectly shot and edited into the lovely, delicate bauble it remains to this day.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Melvyn Douglas, Herbert Marshall and Edward Everett Horton

Credits: Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, scripted by Samuel Raphaelson, based on the play by Melchior Legyel and its English adaptation by Guy Bolton and Russell G. Medcraft. A Paramount release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers..

Running time: 1:31

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Netflixable? It’s “The Last House” and Nobody Should Buy It

Posted on August 8, 2026 by Roger Moore

“The Last House” is “A Quiet Place” with rain — “A Rainy Place.” With survivalism. And monsters.

It’s a dull and exceptionally stupid environmental thriller, sort of “The Revenge of the Sea” for dummies.

Screenwriter Matthew Robinson wrote “Love and Monsters” a few years back, and the unfunny parts of Ricky Gervais’s rom-com “The Invention of Lying.” Here, he feels obligated to have our patriarch-hero utter the lines that every overmatched horror movie dad has said before him when the rains come, their house traps them inside and “something” is “out there” controlling all this.

“I’m not going to let anything BAD happen to us!”

Like that’s within dad Jason’s (Wagner Maura) control.

The set-up is stupid — the rains come, everybody’s house locks them inside to eventually starve or other die. But wait, there are monsters doing this? What’s their angle? People as food? Why let them rot, then?

Dad Jason and plucky mother Ann (Greta Lee) devote themselves to protecting their kids in their tumbledown Seattle home that’s about two mortgage payments shy of reposession. This mysterious “We’re locked in!” has an upside.

“At least we don’t have to worry about the mortgage this month.”

The script dives deep into the DIY nature of being trapped, on your own, in a world that has shut down. Communication with neighbors comes through chalk boards, passing gossip on about how far this calamity extends. Food must be rationed, but if you get sick, you’re all but doomed.

Nobody can “help” anybody else.

The loopsholes our family (Riley Chong and Noah Alexander Sosnowski play the kids, with Gabriel Barbosa and Emma Ho taking over “five years later”) benefits from come from the crumbling nature of the house. They create gaps in the “total lockdown.”

Mom DIYs vegetable garden is manageable with only the seeds of what they’ve been eating (and no, um, polinators). Unemployed engineer Dad makes DIY traps for “chimney fishing” for critters out in the wild, which reclaims their subdivision when the humans are stuck inside.

Yeah, a lot of animals meet their untimely end in this, before you run off to visit DoesTheDogDie.com.

Meaningful subtexts about what constitutes “living” — hiding in a house, or figuring out a way to face the perils of the world outside — are stumbled over. A whole lot of the logistics (walk-around sewers in a subdivision) make little sense and the science makes none at all.

Director Louis Letterrier once gave us an “Incredible Hulk,” but he’s hard pressed to serve up any suspense here, even in the action-packed third act.

The players do what they can, which isn’t much, considering the screenplay’s limitations.

But hey, Robinson got to write a version “Edge of Tomorrow 2.” So at least we’ll know what happened if that never goes before the cameras.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Greta Lee, Wagner Maura, Riley Chong, Noah Alexander Sosnowski, Garbiel Barbosa and Emma Ho.

Credits: Directed by Louis Letterrier, scripted by Matthew Robinson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

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