Author Archives: Roger Moore

In sports, they call it a “make good” call. You blow your evaluation of one play, and bend over backwards to find a way to benefit the player/team your previous mistake hurt. It happens in film reviewing, too. When the … Continue reading →

It’s science fiction about a near future where compatibility can be ascertained well in advance, in which synthetic people are showing up on shelves and being taught to act more human.’ Ewan and Lea are the couple whose prototype (James) … Continue reading →

It helps to remember these people were Vikings, once. Get past the whole polite and smiling, tourist-friendly, global-financial-crisis exacerbating blondes taking daily dips in the volcanic hot springs, the almost unpronounceable names, the grey-black landscape of lava usually covered by … Continue reading →

Since achieving leading man status, Chadwick Boseman’s made a couple of decent and dignified if stolid biopics, and a musical one that ventures from pathos to cruelty and all the way to hilarity. He’s collected the big paydays for donning … Continue reading →

They still rot right in front of our eyes. But can anybody remember the last time zombies lurched and lumbered after their victims? Because, you know, they’re supposed to be “The WALKING Dead.” No, they started sprinting years ago, fell … Continue reading →

Yet another YA sci-fi dystopia about kids hunted and imprisoned and feared for who they are. Hey, it’s as topical as today’s headlines, right? Even though it’s based on an Alexandra Bracken novel. These kids have special powers, and no … Continue reading →

Chatty, self-absorbed, streetwise and sex obsessed, even if he wasn’t drawing his quintessential “New York types,” we’d call Jules Feiffer’s characters “cartoons.” They’re intellectuals on the pseudo-intellectual end of the scale, funny in biting, verbose flashes of self-realization. As in … Continue reading →

The sleeper boxing hit “Creed” was basically a “Rocky” movie extending Sly Stallone’s franchise into a new, temporally impossible timeline via the son of a fighter who died in 1985. It’s a boxing picture operating on comic book “universe” rules … Continue reading →

Mark Hogancamp is a sometime cook, dishwasher and busboy at a bar in Kingston, New York, a man who lives a strange and rich interior life with dolls. It’s not what you think. Back in 2000, Hogancamp survived a savage … Continue reading →

You might have seen the documentary “Marwencol,” when it made the rounds at film festivals almost a decade ago. Or on the “Independent Lens” PBS series.  It’s not a great film, but the story sticks with you. A man, Mark Hogancamp, … Continue reading →