Author Archives: Roger Moore

It’s hard to think of a movie, short or feature-length, a TV show or a play that, setting out to ridicule the critic profession, hasn’t landed a few sucker punches and body blows. Jon Lovitz, paunchy and animated for TV, … Continue reading →

Let’s coin a new phrase, one any movie lover will instantly “get” thanks to the state of cinema in the Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/Disney+ era. What’s a movie we’d describe as “streaming length?” It’s one that could stand editing, but run on and … Continue reading →

Nothing in all your or my years of watching movies prepared me for the utter glee Malcolm McDowell expresses the moment of his “big reveal” in the 1979 WWII action pic, “The Passage.” As an SS sadist chasing a runaway … Continue reading →

A reminder to parents who might consider checking out the suspenseful Canadian drama “Les Notres” in a cinema. It’s rude to throw things at the screen, and not great manners to shout at it. But variations of “Oh COME on!” … Continue reading →

“Gaia” is a South African trapped-in-the-forest thriller that trips up expectations more than enough to keep us interested. It’s an eco-horror tale where who and what we root for and against are flipped and flipped again as the story tales … Continue reading →

Kevin Hart waters down his ill-tempered, bug-eyed “little man with a foul mouth” shtick for “Fatherhood,” a perfectly-pleasant if predictable and right-on-the-cusp-of-maudlin single parent dramedy. Hey, that’s what happens when you team any edgy (OK, “edge-adjacent”) leading man with Paul … Continue reading →

Say what you like about “Lord of the Flies” and its many, many screen (and literary) imitations over the decades. That story, about the savagery barely civilized out of our young, even and especially the “well born” among them, still … Continue reading →

The stately, intimate and pictorially perfect “Center Stage” was Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Kwan’s “Citizen Kane” styled experiment in screen biography. He set out to tell the tragic story of a legend of early Chinese cinema, a starlet whose beauty … Continue reading →

The Hollywood shorthand we remember as “high concept,” a “pitch” you could squeeze into a single sentence, reached its zenith in the 1980s. As SOME of us never gave it up, let’s trot it out to describe Apple’s new ’80s … Continue reading →

A decent gimmick and half an idea for a movie surrounding it bedevil “Songs for a Sloth,” a coping-with-loss comedy that — pardon me — just hangs there. There are entirely too many “slowly” jokes to squander on a single … Continue reading →