Author Archives: Roger Moore

I’ve taken to disparaging a lot of the streaming series I’m pitched and that I get around to sampling or even reviewing as “drip drip drip” storytelling. Even the cliffhanger serials of yore, the ones that Lucas and Spielberg were … Continue reading →

This international child trafficking thriller built around “The Passion of the Christ” star opens July 4. But what’s “really” going on here? What agenda is in play? Caviezel has made films like this his cause, and he adds a little … Continue reading →

I’m hard-pressed to think of another author in the English language whose work seemed destined for “mini series” treatment than Charles Dickens. The man wrote novels in serial form. He was literally incentivized to write long. When the serialized story … Continue reading →

Romantic comedies that work typically walk a fine line between expectations if familiarity, and surprise that delights. We have to root for the couple, even though we anticipate them rubbing each other the wrong way — at first. You can … Continue reading →

“The Blackening” is a horror farce in the tradition of the “Scary Movie” and “A Haunted House” franchises, a send-up of Black horror and Black horror movie fans. It’s fast, foul-mouthed and freaking hilarious, a spoof within a spoof filled … Continue reading →

“Midday Black Midnight Blue” is an impressionistic collage in shades of grief. Non-linear in its storytelling, stingy with its facts, details and “truth,” it’s a picture that violates a lot of the basic covenants between filmmaker and audience. It’s more … Continue reading →

“American Graffiti” was a culture-shifting blockbuster when it came out, a modestly-budgeted movie with a mostly-no-name cast that spawned a 1950s-early-’60s nostalgia boom that swam against the tide that gave birth to disco and punk. Its warmth, innocence and fun, … Continue reading →

A couple of things come to mind after watching writer-director Harold Trompetero’s “To Love is to Grow,” a Netflix comedy titled “Amar es Madurar” (Love is to Mature) when it premiered in South America. The cleverest conceit in this rom-com … Continue reading →

This can’t have cost a lot, but there’s an anarchic energy to this trailer that suggests it could suck, or find its way to a few outlandish laughs. Two high schools forced to merge, a “last weekend,” sex, drugs, brawls … Continue reading →

“Montréal Girls” is a sharply-observed, sympathetically-scripted coming-of-age story about a Middle Eastern med student who has his horizons broadened and his heart broken by the title characters, the gorgeous bilingual young women of the capital of French Canada. What director … Continue reading →