Author Archives: Roger Moore

How do you screw up Shakespeare’s hilariously malleable feuding couple farce “Taming of the Shrew?” If you’re the Polish team behind their cleverly-retitled modern setting of the tale, you put all your efforts into a stupidly complicated story and a … Continue reading →

A couple of things you might guess about a redeemed-by-faith story co-starring Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson. It’s going to have edge, because Wahlberg’s voice is best-suited for swearing. And it’ll be Catholic, because Gibson’s love-hate affair with what was … Continue reading →

Return with us now, to the Wizarding World and the latest wagonload in the content caravan of “Fantastic Beasts,” another prequel that serves as a place-holder film more at home on Warner Brothers’ accounting books than in J.K. Rowling’s. “Fantastic … Continue reading →

Today’s “Around the World with Netflix” entre is a violent, leering farce about sex, sexual dysfunction, sexual abuse and revenge for such abuse in 1980s Indonesia. The title — “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” — may hint at … Continue reading →

“We All Went to the World’s Fair” is a self-consciously moody horror film that’s more interesting as an essay on loneliness than as a source of frights. And even the “interesting” label has its limits. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun created a … Continue reading →

Brawny and bloody, mythic and mystic, “The Northman” is a revenge quest as Viking saga, an epic that wears that label lightly. Robert Eggers’ grim, gory and gorgeous tale lets us sentimentalize “the hero’s journey,” and then disembowels that sentiment … Continue reading →

It’s about people trapped…in a cornfield. It’s like they’re maze runners who can’t figure out a way out, “Six characters in Search of a Twilight Zone Exit,” or Steven King has another even less original son than the one that … Continue reading →

Writer-director Riley Stearns picked up on something that he was able to cash in on in casting Karen Gillan in “Dual,” his dark sci-fi thriller about a future when cloned “replacements” take over for the dying. Although he had to … Continue reading →

Newcomer Anna Cobb stars in his Jane Schoenbrun tale, a vlogged experience, a shared terror opening April 22.

Any road trip with a small child might turn out to be a trial. But if the kid is as manic as the little Iranian boy in “Hit the Road,” there’s no doubt about it. He is wound-up, loud, blurting … Continue reading →