Classic Film Review: Coming of Age, Female and Korean — “Take Care of My Cat” (2001)

Posted on July 10, 2026 by Roger Moore

A Korean classic of the pre K-pop explosion, flip-phone era returns to theaters as subtle, sweet and soulful as ever.

“Take Care of My Cat” is a young women’s coming-of-age tale, set in the 2001 present, a film that, synth-pop score or not — plays like a timeless period piece twenty-five years later.

Five devoted friends finish their vocational school graduation and celebrate on the docks in the port of Incheon. A couple of years later finds them still tight, but straining at the business of growing up and the shrinking dreams and frustrations of the working class young in an economy that doesn’t seem to offer them much.

At 20, Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won) seems to have it figured out and under control. She doesn’t exactly lord it over her mates, what with her office job, nicer clothes and whatnot. But we see her place within that brokerage firm before she does — dress nicely, serve at the boss’s beck and call, fetch a lot of coffee — before she does. Is she a “low wage earner” flunky for life?

Twins Bi-ryru and Ohn jo (Eung-ju Lee, Eung-sil Lee) have family to lean on and street jewelry to hustle on the side.

Ji-young (OK Ji-young) has quit a job and can’t find another, an orphan living with her grandparents in a hovel in abject poverty, something she hides from her former classmates. She stops borrowing money from them as she withdraws from them because she can’t keep up, or so she seems to figure.

And Tae-hee (Bae Doona) is the glue, the one who nags the others to get together, a smart young woman who volunteers as a typist for a disabled poet. Her trap is her family’s “Healing Stones” sauna, run by a boorish father who doesn’t pay her for her labors and who puts all his hope and attention on her student-brother.

Director and co-writer Jae-eun Jeong’s (“Butterly Sleep”) drama follows each 20 year-old through the trials of “just starting out” — the boyfriend who comes whenever you call (for now), the boss who makes you drop whatever you’re doing to run a personal errand, the sense that there’s a better life than handing out fliers for the family sauna, a newspaper-ceilinged dump of a shack to live in, a dead-end job or no job at all.

I love the way the narrative sets up shop in the interior lives of this quintet, the dynamic of clinging to friendships that are starting to bring you down, the battle over “We should get together at least once a month”(in Korean with subtitles) or “The past is the past.”

One character entertains the thought of trying to get in the merchant marine. Another figures working like crazy and meeting her boss’s demands will get her past the new college grads who come in the door, instantly higher status than she will ever be. One we worry about, because she’s given up.

There’s cat in the title and a cat in the movie. A stray that she stumbles over is all poor aspiring fabric designer Ji-young has to offer — in an elaborately hand-decorated box — to Ha- joo on her birthday. The social climber makes it through a day or three before giving it back.

Young-rock Choi’s score charmingly dates this picture the way New Wave/New Romantics pop dated such genre pieces in the ’80s.

The gifted cast lets us into those interior lives — well, most of them, anyway — with just an expression or a gesture capturing all they dream and all they dread about the moment and the future to come.

All involved serve up a sober-minded (not a laugh in it) “growing up/moving away” experience that is both timeless and universal, a classic of a Korean cinema about to emerge and then explode in the years to follow.

Rating: unrated, smoking

Cast:Bae Doona, Lee Yo-Won, Ok Ji-Young, Eung-ju Lee, Eung-sil Lee,

Credits: Directed by Jae-eun Jeong, scripted by Jae-eun Jeong, Kim-hyun Jeong and Lee Eon-hie. A Kani re-release.

Running time: 1:52

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Movie Review: New Year’s Babies Seek Love “This Time Next Year”

Posted on July 9, 2026 by Roger Moore

Somebody had the good sense to cut half an hour off the London romance “This Time Next Year” for its Amazon streaming release. They just didn’t finish the job.

It’s a sweet-and-scenic “Hallmark Channel” love story (chaste and slow and drawn out) that reaches for cute but never quite overcomes “inert.” Attractive leads, curious “obstacles” to overcome be damned, “Next Year” is where cinematic “Time” stands still.

Sophie Cookson is our lovelorn heroine, struggling in her 30s to make a go of it with her No Hard Fillings pie catering shop. She may make a mean pie, but selling to OAP (old age pensioner) rest homes isn’t going to make anybody solvent. not with inept or indifferent help and a partner (Mandip Gill) keeping the bad news in their books from her.

Our pie baker’s always been “unlucky,” she figures. Back in 1990, she was almost “the first baby born in the New Year” in London, with her embittered mother (Monica Dolan) narrowly missing out on a big cash prize.

The woman sharing her maternity ward (Golda Rosheuvel) somehow gave birth first. And she not only took mum Connie’s coaching and good advice and the prize money, she bloody well stole the name she had planned for her baby girl — Quinn.

“Quinn” Cooper never got over the second choice name that she ended up with — Minnie. Think about it, because that’s the only laugh out loud line in the film.

Minnie runs into birthday mate Quinn (Lucien Laviscount of “Emily in Paris” and “People We Meet on Vacation) on a particularly disastrous day. Quinn is a well-off management consultant who drives his Bentley to her rescue at work, after freeing her from a public restroom where she found herself locked on New Year’s Eve, the day before her birthday.

The two put the coincidences together, but whatever sparks might fly are dampened by her obligations to a “useless” lout of an influencer/”journalist” boyfriend (Will Hislip) and the grudge she and her mother still hold about their shared birthday.

“You stole my name!”

Cookson, of the “Kingsman” movies and “Stockholm Bloodbath,” has presence and a little spark about her. But the script and her too-pretty model/actor co-star give her and this romance nowhere to go.

“Four Weddings and a Funeral” alumnus John Hannah and Dolan make an interesting couple, and Charlie Oscar steals her scenes as Minnie Cooper’s lazy, multi-hued hair delivery driver.

Structurally, this leaden film is a TV movie with obvious points for commercial breaks and pacing designed to fill a two hour+ timeslot, not move us through obstacles — one mother has agoraphobia — on our way to True Love.

A few laughs and a lot more romantic heat might have made this endurable, but not at the one hour and fifty-five minutes the creators had in mind for its release length.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Sophie Cookson, Lucien Laviscount, Golda Rosheuvel, Mandip Gill, Will Hislip, Charlie Oscar, Monica Dolan and John Hannah.

Credits: Directed by Nick Moore, scripted by Sophie Cousens. A Radical release streaming on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:24

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Movie Review: A Jewish Summer Camp comedy with more “Oys” than Laughs — “The Floaters”

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Roger Moore

The summer camp comedy “The Floaters” makes its way to theaters after spending the past year making the rounds of the Jewish Film Festival circuit, where it probably should have remained.

Foul-mouthed, cliched and inane, it isn’t funny and adds nothing to the “summer camp” movie genre.

One under-developed plot thread is about the “camp experience” it can take decades for adults to shake off.

The film’s teen lead’s “journey,” from privileged, Yale-coveting “self-hating Jew” to one who embraces — if only at ironic arm’s length — the “Medieval crap” traditions and superstitions of “our people,” is barely brushed over.

It’s lost in the squishy side-stories and general vulgarity of an outdoor “safe space” for products of permissive Jewish parenting.

“Is it in the f—–g Bible, or not?”

Jonah (Judah Lewis) is leery of this whole idea of going to Camp Daveed,” the “JEWISH Jewish” camp his dad (Jonathan Silverman) went to, way back when. He’s got orders to kiss up to a kid whose mom runs Yale University’s admissions. Oh, and have fun.

Bullies will be confronted, “kosher” will be tested and mocked, loners like Judah and camp outcast Lindsay (Nina Bloomgarden) will bond and the “dweebs” of many ethnicities and pronouns of Camp Daveed will renew their rivalry with the “douche bros” of nearby Camp Barack.

That camp is run by Daniel (Seth Green who at least remembers what it was like to play something as “funny”). Steve Guttenberg‘s Manny is the figurehead director of Camp Daveed, a character played with an empty earnestness and a smattering of “Oy veys” who confesses to a lifelong obsession with “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Rabbi Rachel (Aya Cash) sets the tone for the teaching that goes on about “our people,” “our history” and “Israel.” She’s always looking for new ways to engage with the kids, “The Torah as fan fiction,” etc.

“Here at Camp Daveed, you leave a piece of you behind!”

Sarah Podemski plays Mara, the alumnus of the camp who has made it her mission — as the “real” director — to keep it afloat. She’s the one who recruits the 40ish former campmate Noni (Jackie Tohn) to join the ranks of her counselors.

Noni’s an over-the-hill “shock effect” rocker just canned from her latest band as they’re about to tour Europe. She’ll take on “The Floaters,” the kids who arrived at camp without signing up for any “activities.” Noni’ll give them a taste of freedom to create “art,” which turns out to be a kid’s juvenile idea of a Jewish identity skit for their big competition against Camp Barack.

One counselor’s suggestion that “We need to start talking about HARD stuff — guns, race, politics, ISRAEL” — is as close as this meandering misshapen mess gets to speaking to its moment, arriving in theaters two years into Israel’s Gaza genocide.

Well, that and the ice cream “historical maps of Israel” contest.

A subtext about the hurtful nicknames that stick and other downsides of camp chasing one into adulthood is promising.

“Camp” is either “the most important experience in your life,” or “It’s just camp.”

“GLOW” alumna Tohn sets the tone for all the performances here — competently unmoving and uninteresting. Rachel Israel’s direction is flat, unemotional and unamusing.

Campfire rap-alongs, “Ishtar” cracks kids won’t get, a little obvious grasping at inclusion (gay, Asian and Black Jews are in the mix of campers and counselors), punny T-shirts (“Ain’t no Challah Back Girl”) and a sentimental cinematic “skit” are all “The Floaters” serves up as “entertainment.”

Thus a “niche audience” movie further shrinks its niche as it becomes as dull as it is unrelateable outside of its specialty film fest run

Cast: Jackie Tohn, Sarah Podemski, Judah Lewis, Aya Cash, Nina Bloomgarden, Thani Brant, Steve Guttenberg, Jonathan Silverman and Seth Green.

Credits: Directed by Rachel Israel, scripted by Amelia Brain, Andra Gordon and Brent Hoff. A Brainstorm Media release.

Running time: 1:40

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Classic Film Review: Edwards and Sellers crash “The Party” in Hollywood (1968)

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Roger Moore

A wicked thought crossed my mind midway through re-watching the Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers farce “The Party,” one of three times the great British funnyman donned brownface to play Indian characters.

What would have happened had Sellers, a comic legend and a gifted mimic who loved accents more than anything, had taken a shine to the most musical of accents in English, the patois of Jamaica and “de islands, mon?”

The once-and-always Inspector Clouseau had donned French, German, various American, Welsh, Scots and Cockney voices on screen and radio over the years. How did he resist Jamaican? Could Hollywood have resisted letting him?

Hollywood had given up blackface — reluctantly — during the Civil Rights movement. But old timers like director David Lean and star Alec Guiness thought they could get away with passing an Englishman off as a sage and inscrutably cute Indian in “A Passage to India,” as late as 1984.

In 1960’s “The Millionairess” Sellers played a moral, principled and idealistic Indian doctor who resists the endless overtures of the world’s richest woman (Sophia Loren) as he treats London’s poorest patients. Perhaps he and his “Pink Panther” partner Edwards figured that gave him license to don the makeup and the accent again for “The Party.”

The character is an Indian actor, an innocent new to Hollywood and Hollywood ways, brought over to legitimize a California-shot “Gunga Din” styled tale of a heroic native servant who tries to save his regiment of bagpipers from slaughter at the hands of the Afghans, Sikhs or whoever.

Hrundi Bakshi is a fop, a careless klutz who hams it up, forgets to remove his wristwatch before takes and accidentally sets off a “We’ve got ONE shot at this” special effects explosion destroying an entire set before cameras are rolling. He’s fired, “finished” in this business, one and all declare.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t be accidentally invited to the studio chief’s (J. Edward McKinley) lavish, “Who’s Who” dinner party set at his ultra-modernist mansion high in the Hollywood Hills.

The character is — as the stereotype goes — unfailingly polite. He is also a humble innocent, desperate to fit in and out-of-his-depth. Hrundi is a teetotaler who avoids alcohol and has no clue what those folks rubbing their gums are doing in one bathroom he tries to duck into, or what those others are smoking in another.

Is Hrundi offensive on the page, made moreso by casting an English funnyman in brownface to play him? Possibly. The fact that this widely-acknowledged classic has never been remade, despite efforts to do that (with or without a subcontinental caricature) is telling.

But here’s what makes this peak-Edward/peak-Sellers farce funny. It’s not so much the obsequious, always clueless (confidently so) “foreigner” amongst the social swells of the cinema business. It’s not how “they” treat him — tolerantly indulgent to a fault.

It’s not even the mayhem that we expect and occasionally see erupt all around his naive presence in this alien world.

It’s the anticipation.

Hrundi soils a white shoe getting out of his Morgan three-wheeler as he parks for the party. What will he go through to surreptitiously clean it? Might the pool that flows through rooms and under the floors of the mansion play into that? Or the wait staff?

He walks in on duded-up cowboy star Wyoming Bill Kelso (Denny Miller, comically-costumed and funny) as he’s trying to impress his date at the billiards table. What might Sellers — who had run-ins with pool tables in other films — cook up here?

So much of the house is remote controlled — from gas fireplaces and peeing cherub fountains to the very floors that conceal so much of the pool. What temptations does that control panel offer our innocent?

And what will be the consquences of turning down every drink the dipsomaniacal waiter (Steve Franken) brings him?

Edwards teases and baits us into expecting this and anticipating that as the picture builds towards the merry mayhem almost everyone attending seems to shrug off as the long evening unfolds.

A starlet (Claudine Longet) must be rescued from a boorish producer (Gavin McLeod). The studio chief and home owner has to deadpan his way through every mishap he sees coming and cannot prevent.

One and all — even Hrundi — mutter about finding “good help these days.” The cowboy allows himself many an “Injun” joke around his new “little buddy” from India.

And that “little buddy?” “Pay no attention to me, sir. I am merely spectating!”

Just don’t bother him with your Yiddish, Hollywood “types.”

“You’re MESHUGAH!”

“I am not your sugar!”

No elephants were harmed in the making of this movie, but a baby one is a tad manhandled by hippie kids who crowd around her and lead her all over the soundstage mansion set.

Through it all, a jazz combo plays on, even with a tide of soap suds closing in on them like an iceberg in the path of the Titanic.

The most memorable screening of “The Party” of my experience was a film society showing I caught in grad school, where it played like the comic blockbuster it was back in its day.

Viewed again, it’s laboriously slow in getting up to speed. The opening movie-shoot-goes-wrong sequence is under-edited and the third act feels barely edited at all.

It makes a great snapshot of the ’60s — the fashion, the dancing, the changes in “tolerance” (almost everybody is nice to “the foreigner”) and Henry Mancini’s riff on swing band rock and roll are a hoot.

Watch the Black maid (Frances Taylor) among Hollywood “liberals” take over the dance floor, shocking one and all. And keep an eye peeled for the cowboy actor sight gag/product placement –what he sneaks out of the catered dinner party with — a bucket from “The Colonel.”

Sellers is funny enough in the lead role, but if you ask yourself if the character would have been amusing as merely an Englishman out of his element, you have your answer as to whether or not the performance is a racial caricature.

“The Simpsons” settled that argument some years back.

Think about Inspector Clouseau’s martial artist valet if you want further evidence that Edwards was nothing if not a filmmaker “of his time.” And remember all those “Seinfeld” episodes featuring broad Asian stereotypes for a taste of how long these attitudes and portrayals persisted.

The naive bull in the Hollywood china shop hook of “The Party” still plays and there are enough laughs here to recommend this classic — perhaps worthy of a remake, even a Bollywood one.

The original? It’s not Edwards’ best, nor Sellers’ best or best film work with Edwards. But it makes a decent comic time capsule of a simpler era, when Hollywood could lead the civil rights way, or play catchup once it realized that putting even a gifted mimic in brownface might not be as funny as it once seemed, even to the white folks who decided to do it.

Rating: TV-14, drug abuse, alcohol abuse

Cast: Peter Sellers, Claudine Longet, Gavin McLeod, Denny Miller, Kathe Green, Frances Taylor, Herbert Ellis, J. Edward McKinley and Steve Franken.

Credits: Directed by Blake Edwards, scripted by Blake Edwards, Tom Waldman and Frank Waldman. An MGM release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:39

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BOX OFFICE: “Minions” Wear Out their Welcome, “Washington” isn’t Celebrating, “Supergirl” sinks like a Stone

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Roger Moore

There’s a LOT to unpack with this holiday weekend’s box office take, stretched to five days thanks to the early opening of “Minions & Monsters.” So let’s dig in.

The umpteenth iteration of Universal’s venerable “Despicable Me/Minions” franchise was expected to blow up, or at least do very well over the five days between Wed. and Monday — $115 million-and-up were the most recent projections.

It’s managing only a bit more than HALF that. Blame the heatwave, the general malaise of the moment (Anybody “celebrating” this July 4?) or the “Toy Story 5” spillover, but Deadline.com is projecting a $64 million opening five day weekend.

Getting real critics to even show up to review it’s been a problem — been there, chuckled and eyerolled at that.

Deadline’s been steadily lowering their best guess — $80 million is the latest they’ll own up to — but that’s not fooling anybody. The “Minions” opened Wed. ($15 million), barely edged “Toy Story 5” on Thursday and found all the wind out of their Friday ($16 million on a holiday from a popular kids’ cartoon is AWFUL).

They’ll win the weekend, as “Toy Story 5” is now looking at adding another $31 million (for second place) and “Minions & Monsters” will manage under $40 ($36+) Fri-Sunday. But boy, talk about the bottom falling out of an overfamiliar franchise. This is the lowest opening weekend in the entire “Despicable” history.

Stick a fork in’em. They’re done.

Angel Studios’ Father of Our Country in his early years drama, “Young Washington,” is doing a decent over $21 million or so over its three day opening weekend. Reviews have been mixed to indifferent, so mine is perfectly representative.

That’s good enough for third place, and a slightly better opening than expected. Angel Studios is an established player in faith-based, rural-America-appealing pictures. Maybe now they’ll discontinue their cynical practice of slapping one of a movie’s stars up over the closing credits begging audiences to buy extra tickets to game the box office take and make their movies look like bigger hits than they are.

No serious person’s taking Kelsey Grammer’s pleas seriously. Seriously.

Say it ain’t so, “Supergirl?” After a dramatically underwhelming opening weekend ($37), the label “tarnished goods” has attached itself to Milly Alcock’s big break/title role. Sexism and the Curse of DC Comics almost certainly suppressed the opening weekend. Crap comic book movies become blockbusters as a matter of course, much of the time.

But there aren’t even enough fangirls out there to push it past $9.6 million (I keep having to adjust this number DOWN) on its second weekend. That’s just one million people buying tickets, “Jackass” numbers.

That’s poisonous word-of-mouth at work right there, and a fourth place finish. I may go this weekend, as I do like myself an empty theater.

“Disclosure Day” (cleared $100 million mark on Friday) adds another $5.3 million to remain in the Top Five.

“Obsession” ($5.1) may well stick in the top five one last weekend (closing in on $250 million), but right now is looking at sixth place.

“Backrooms” ($3.3) clings to the top ten on seventh.

The  two new titles, followed by the “Jackass” farewell ($3.3 in eighth), “Scary Movie” at $1.23 in ninth and and Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” ($800k in tenth) will push “Masters of the Universe” into a distant memory, with “Mandalorian & Grogu” joining it

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Movie Review: Cumming and Kin “Drive Back Home” in The Bad Ol’Days for Canada’s Gays

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Roger Moore

“Drive Back Home” is a road comedy with a queer history subtext and a hard, melodramatic flourish saved for its finale.

It’s about a prodigal son and an estranged family that he fled the moment he was old enough to get away from the provincial New Brunswick town of his unhappy childhood. But in “Stonewall” era Canada, “tolerance” was hard to come by, even in the Big City.

A period piece “inspired by a true story,” it’s a reckoning-with-a-gay relative tale set in the very differernt Canada of 1969-70 (Phillip Forsyth is heard hosting “As It Happens” on the CBC, a job he left in 1969).

The whole village of Stanley turns out for the death of Perley Hinson Sr. But his no-nonsense widow (Clare Colter) unsentnmentally assures the priest that the whole village shows up for “every funeral.” Her sour expression and a cruel anecdote son Moses (Gray Powell) included in his eulogy tell us the old bastard won’t be missed.

Son Weldon (Charlie Creed Miles) is also also in attendance. But Perley Hinson, Jr. is nowhere to be found.

A sneering, abusive phone call from the Toronto police tells Weldon where Junior is. He’s in lock-up for having “sex with a man” in a public park men’s room. Perley Jr.’s looking at “five years” in those days of criminalized homosexuality, unless his brother comes to fetch him. Ontario’s not interested in prosecuting this crime any more, even if its cops don’t agree.

Weldon can’t go. “I’ve got work tomorrow.” He won’t. But his mother won’t hear of that. And after asking if “they speak English in Quebec” and stockpiling gas cans in the worn out F-100 that is his assigned company truck — because he’s told “No, they speak French” and he’s frightened by that — Weldon takes his first-ever long journey away from home to free a brother he doesn’t have much to do with.

Perley (Alan Cumming) is embarrassed that his brother has had to come and furious that the cops lost his nice loafers. He’s a hair-dyed dandy in colorful coat and jacket, ascot around his neck and Russian fur hat. And he’s dealing with a lot.

Not only was he beaten in custody, but his answering machine reveals that he’s lost his advertising job in his absencce. And then he has to explain the cost of a nice Toronto apartment and this newfangled answering machine to his “dumb hick” brother, who thinks he’s an “idiot” for living like this.

But they both do what Ma wants, so off down the road they go — a long haul that turns into a multi-day ordeal thanks to winter weather, a balky truck and misadventures along the way.

Back home, their mother and Weldon’s wife are putting up with less tolerant members of the family and hoping for the best. Because dealing with Perley, who likes drinking and hooking up, in that cultural climate has always been fraught.

And every so often, Weldon’s dreams give us a glimpse of the biggest trauma of their childhood, a violent night fleshed-out, bit by bit, in writer-director Michael Clowalter’s (“Tenant” was his) sentimental, sad with sharp edges screenplay.

“Drive Back Home” dawdles a bit for a road picture. The slow pace is a product of leaving room for DIY car repairs, Canadian roadhouse meals and grace notes like an impromptu “confession” to a non-English-speaking Quebecois (Guy Sprung).

That deliberate pacing makes the melodramatic, violent and yet touching finale more jarring.

But Cumming is always in-the-pocket “real,” first scene to last. Every moment of Perley’s live-for-the-moment behavior is plausible in Cumming’s hands, every hint of “had ENOUGH of this” abuse is an easy sale.

He and his fellow Brit Creed-Miles (“Harry Brown,” the gangster film “Wild Bill”) have great, abrasive chemistry and we believe them as ill-tempered, mismatched siblings who just might recover the tug of “family” when the chips are down.

They make this odyssey a tense and testy ride that turns touching, just as we hoped it would, just when we least expect it.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sex, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Alan Cumming, Charlie Creed-Miles, Clare Colter, Gray Powell, Guy Sprung and Gord Rand.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Clowalter. A Good Deeds Entertainment release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:40

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Neflixable? “Enola Homes 3” Beats a Dead Horse

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Roger Moore

The bare minimum you expect from a sleuthing action comedy of the “Anybody Named Holmes” variety is that it hold your interest. Netflix’s “Enola Holmes 3” falls short of even that low bar.

It’s got a wedding and a few kidnappings, suspects chased and caught just in time to be shot, the ugly consequences of British colonialism and the sunwashed sights of scenic, cinematic Malta to recommend it.

And none of it amounts to much of anything more than Millie Bobby Brown narrating narrating narrating her latest “Enola” tale, and turning to the camera when she hears the words “Ernest Augustus” and quipping, “He has a first name,” about the man she is set to marry. “I was surprised, too!”

It begins messy, with a cryptic prologue that leaps into a wedding to the too-pretty-to-marry rich and idealistic swell Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge) that just isn’t. And as it bounces back and forth between kidnappings — brother Sherlock (Henry Cavill) among them — codes and clues and treasure, “Enola 3” never adds up to anything more than worn out genre tropes, cliches and lazy dialogue anachronisms like “stuck on ‘repeat,” a phrase that best describes this film series at this point.

Even the most interesting Moriarty in ages can’t save it, and even “she” is scripted in flat, superficial strokes.

Young social justice crusader Lord Tewkesbury asks our sleathing younger sister to Sherlock to marry him, and as his parents wed in Malta, they’re off. But once there, Sherlock’s sniffing around gets him snatched and Enola and Dr. Watson (Himesh Patel) dash off to find him.

Advice about looking beyond the surface of things is added to Enola’s grab back of :”advice” and detecting skills.

“Dr. Watson, what would my BROTHER do?”

A comical anti-imperialist Maltese revolutionary (Joe Azzopardi) plays a vaguely Pythonesque/Patinkin in “Princess Bride” role in their exploits, arriving and always introducing himself, his revoliutionary group and their “goals” in ending the rule of the Britsh crown.

But laughs are few and excitement impossible to conjure up in this Philip Barantini film.

When Ms. Brown signed her long-term deal with Netflix, surely she was hoping for more than just a short-term franchise gig to replace “Stranger Things.” She and Netflix have run out the string on this, and all she has to show for it is a shot at working with the director of “Villain” and “Boiling Point.”

Despite her early promise, her window to stardom was always narrow, and now it’s closing.

We’d love to think Helena Bonham Carter, still classing up the joint and bringing a dab of sparkle to the attempts at wit as Enola’s feminist revolutionary mum, would give us the best one-line review of this latest and probably last “Enola” outing.

“This is all a ridiculous merry mess!”

But no. “Merry” never enters into it.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Millie Bobbie Brown, Louis Partridge, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Himesh Patel, Joe Azzopardi, Henry Cavill and Helena Bonham Carter.

Credits: Directed by Philip Barantini, scripted by Jack Thorne, basedon the books by Nancy Springer. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

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Movie Review: Striving and Social Climbing, “Young Washington” takes the Shape of the Man He Became

Posted on July 2, 2026 by Roger Moore

Stately, staid and yet somehow still satisfying, “Young Washington” is a (mostly) by-the-book biography of the early life that shaped The Father of Our Country.

It’s well-cast and handsomely mounted, and only falls into hagiography — rather obviously and clumsily — late in the third act.

This is no “Last of the Mohicans” and director and co-writer Jon Erwin (“The Jesus Revolution”) is no Michael Mann, But this action biography about Washington’s steep and stumbling learning curve into his formative years in the French and Indian War paints a revealing if not vivid flesh-and-blood portrait of a class-conscious kid who sought to better himself in the heirarchy of British Colonial America.

And it reminds us that his “big break” was bungling Britain into history’s first “World War,” The Seven Years War between Britain and the France, a globe-spanning conflict triggered by an overreaching young man’s mishandling of a frontier encroachment in the Ohio River Valley.

William Franklyn-Miller takes on the daunting task of plaaying Washington, long and lean and barely out of his teens when he talked himself into the orbit of one of the richest men in the Virginia colony, Lord Fairfax (Kelsey Grammer, perfectly cast) which put him in a position to win the ear of Governor Dinwiddie (Ben Kingsley, formidable as ever).

“Is it a sin to seek advancement,” he asks? It might be to people hellbent in ensuring their own place at the top.

Young George has made self-improvement, reading the classics and rehearsing genteel manners in the way he carries himself, his path to self-betterment. The British Army might be his one shot at such advancement.

And that’s how the young fellow whom Fairfax hired to survey his vast holdings in the Ohio wilderness found his way from messenger to militia commander “set-up,” the film implies, to take the fall when his warnings to the French to stop building forts and encroaching on British-claimed land go wrong and the first blood is shed.

“Failure is a great teacher,” he comes to learn in that first year of the French and Indian/Seven Years War.

Washington endures a steady stream of insults from assorted British officers and transplanted aristocrats, making him keenly aware of the class he was born into which his older brother Lawrence (John Foss) married his way out of, but which his widowed mother (Mary-Louise Parker) seems to accept. George remembers every slight.

He cannot hope to win the hand of the fair but self-aware rich girl Sally Clary (Mia Rodgers) unless his makes his fortune or makes his mark in the military. Or so he believes.

“Ambition waits for no man” becomes his guiding credo.

The script by Erwin, Diederick Hoogstraten and Tom Provost seeks to color in the spaces around the Red Letter dates in Washington’s early life, showing him recruiting the more woodlands-wise Christopher Gist (Leo Hanna) to join him on his surveying trip, where they meet Seneca natives and are shown — by the testy and wary Half King (Ryan Begay, quite good) where the French are settling in.

The Native Americans depicted here may take sides, but they’re mainly eager for a “Let’s you and him fight” scenario, setting these two intruder imperialist states against each other.

Slaves are mentioned but kept in the background.

Erwin handles the skirmishes and ambushes with skill, and the climactic battle, with the too-European for his own and his army’s good General Braddock (Andy Serkis at his best) comes off as chaotic and character-forming heroic.

The production design and CGI backdrops of the Virginian and Irish locations are first rate.

But the film’s dutiful “How Washington was shaped into the man he became” narrative plays as bloodless and generally humorless. Few big screen depictions of the man dare to allow him lighter moments.

“Young Washington” informs and illuminates as it passes the time between blasts of action. It’s the life, love and struggle beyond the edges of the screen, events outside of the adventures, social slights and Red Letter Dates that seems lacking.

That can’t help but hamstring this high-minded effort to capture the stumbles, failures and insults that shaped the leader whose learning curve was only completed when his endurance, pluck, experience and luck won the battle for American independence.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: William Franklyn-Miller, Ben Kingsley, Mary-Louise Parker, Mia Rodgers, John Foss, Ryan Begay, Kelsey Grammer and Andy Serkis.

Credits: Directed by Jon Erwin, scripted by Jon Erwin, Diederick Hoogstraten and Tom Provost. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 2:04

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Documentary Review: “Chris and Martina: The Final Set” of a Love Match built on Sportsmanship

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Roger Moore

The recent news that former tennis champ Chris Evert’s cancer has returned for the third time adds more real-life poignance to a lovely new documentary about her and her longtime foe and friend, Martina Navratilova.

“Chris & Martina: The Final Set” is the story of perhaps the greatest rivalry in tennis, a decades-long duel that started in friendship, descended into winner-take-all bitterness and ended in a form of triumph — an even closer friendship only made possible by the role models of sportsmanship both of them embodied.

Sports fans of a certain age won’t have much trouble tearing-up at this fine recollection of a different era in sports — pre-social media and invasive 24 hour “news,” pre-“Fan Duel” and pre-PEDs.

Filmmaker Rebecca Gitlitz makes her feature-length documentary directing debut a moving and honorable outing for all involved. And she makes her presence felt as she gets close to her subjects and asks obvious but tough follow-up questions from behind the camera when the occasion demands it.

Because as both women and their fellow champions Billie Jean King and John McEnroe remind us here, it’s damned lonely at the top, “number one” in a winner take all business.

“You give up things if you want to be best at something,” Evert acknowledges.

And when you are the best, the number of people who know what you’re really going through, win or lose, is tiny.

We see them lose their hair and strength, but not their will, during cancer treatment. And we hear how the two who met as teens, with Chris already the “cute” Florida blonde “girl next door” star and Navratilova the insecure, out-of-her-depth player from behind The Iron Curtain.

Evert was sweet and welcomng, Navratilova remembers, “because she wasn’t a threat” others add.

The Netflix film tracks their friendship through Martina’s on-court meltdowns at losses, through the toughening up — emotionally and physically — that the Czech star’s basketball-star girlfriend Nancy Lieberman put her through.

Lieberman’s “You have to HATE her” ethos about the rivarly (she’s not interviewed here) is blamed for the rift that entered the Martina-Chris relationship as Navratilova muscled and served-and-volleyed her way to dominance on the court.

But first Martina had to endure the trauma of defecting from her Eastern Bloc homeland for America, disconnected from her most faithful support group, her family. The press was always trying to “out” her. She developed a lifelong aversion to lifelong commitment, robbing some of the joy of her glory years.

Evert had to change her accomplished, highly-polished and quite mature “baseliner” game just to stay on the court with Navratilova. That cost her relationships and marriages and an early bout with former teen-phenom burnout.

But as their playing days wound down, the friendship was renewed. Retirement turned them into role models all over again, this time for that old-fashioned notion of “sportsmanship.”

It’s adorable seeing the two of them re-watching their most famous matches — Evert’s early dominance, a turning point bout or two, Navratilova’s years of dominance, finishing with grand grace notes for each of them on the court.

Off court, the storms in their personal lives, the monomania it takes to excel at a sport and its psychological and romantic costs, are lightly covered.

They have a laugh suggesting that an old “Saturday Night Live” sketch about them (Chris hosted) which mocked Martina’s lifelong oneupsmanship, be revived. As this documentary was being filmed, Navratilova’s cancers are more widespread and her prognosis seemingly more dire, a grim “I win!” punchline to their rivalry.

No one wants to see either of them lose this “Final Set,” but almost certainly one of them will. And when it happens we’ll mourn not just the deceased, but the survivor. Because that’s how these two paragons of grace, dignity, loyalty and sportsmanship will be remembered — joined at the net, embracing after every battle won and lost.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Chris Evert, Martina Navraitilova, Billie Jean King, John McEnroe, Pam Shriver, Mary Carillo, Sally Jenkins, Bob Kain and Zina Garrison.

Credits: Directed by Rebecca Gitlitz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

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Documentary Review: Intentionally forgotten Lebanon — “Do You Love Me”

Posted on June 30, 2026 by Roger Moore

In Lebanon, an opening title tells us, “contemporary history is not taught in schools.”

Basically, a half century of intermittent bloody unrest has been erased. The endless Israeli incursions and invasions? The civil war Israel triggered with the refugee dislocations caused by its 1948 creation and its “preemptive” “Six Day War” against its Arab neighbors in 1967, a civil war Israel then took sides in, all of which repeatedly tore Lebanon apart and devastated and re-devastated its capital, Beiruit, aren’t spoken of.

But the people remember — via home movies and photographs and oral histories and news coverage and TV and cinema from Lebanon or set there — films starring Catherine Deneuve (“Je Vous Voir,” “I Want to See”) and others.

“Do You Love Me” is history and memory via montage, sn impressionistic cut and paste picture made from thousands of sources — songs, TV shows, home movies, archival news footage and films, a city seen then and barely glimpsed now.

Lebanese filmmaker Lana Daher accurately labels herself a “multidisciplinary” artist, and proves it with this work of memory and poetry, music and testimony.

As history, it’s a film that doesn’t break down the many eras of the seemingly endless conflict, which Israel and the Lebanese-born descendents of the Palestinian refugees Israel created over the past century renewed back in 2024. Taking its title and organizing principle from the mournful Lebanese pop hit “Do You Love Me,” Daher’s film washes over the viewer with snippets of fresh oral history, archival interviews, film dialogue and music giving us a taste of the place and a grim feel for all that it’s been through.

Montages capture the simmering violence of Beirut, the fixation on firearms that took hold of the culture and the Lebanese cinema when hostilities broke out in the former French colony in 1975.

But the locals dance. Families gather to decorate cars for weddings and celebrate such ceremonies, sit down for meals or venture to the beach in other home movie footage.

“In this life,” a title tells us, “our memories melt into the sea.”

Papering over that history, “Do You Love Me” implies, merely ensures its constant repetition. Newspapers publish stories with blank spaces where unpleasant truths, facts or opinions have been “censored” out.

There are no Truth and Reconciliation commissions here. Wrongdoers never admit and repent anything. There’s no dealing with the country’s dysfunctional neighbors. And the upshot?

“We don’t know who we are.”

Daher’s evocative documentary isn’t designed to change that, just to remind Lebanon, Beirut and the world of an erased past that cannot be recreated. No matter how many times they rebuild and welcome “war porn” tourists longing ruins of the post-colonial “Paris of the Middle East,” those tourists are lways disappointed. The past is bulldozed and bulldozed, buildings replaced, again and again, by people trying to forget what they need to remember.

Rating: unrated, some violent images

Credits: Directed by Lana Daher, scripted by Qutaiba Barhamji and Lana Daher. An Icarus Films release .

Running time: 1:16

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