Author Archives: Roger Moore

“The Stand-In” has the plot of what could have a Drew Barrymore of twenty years ago. She plays a comic actress, burned out and strung out, over the whole showbiz thing and ready to stop being a celebrity. And she … Continue reading →

A modern riff on Jane Austen? Alicia Witt, Shane McRae, Bebe Neuwirth, Li Jun Li, Daniella Pineda and Liza Lapira do a version of my favorite Austen novel, the less-filmed (Ciaran Hinds co-starred in the definitive version), playing up “Persuasion” … Continue reading →

Steve McQueen’s landmark “Small Axe” series, about the activist years of greater London’s West Indian diaspora, ends up an upbeat yet dramatically thinner and less satisfying than you’d hope note with “Education.” The finale, set in the early ’70s, when … Continue reading →

Truth be told, I could have done without the German holiday line-dancing in the finale. There are plenty of times co-writer/director Detlev Buck (“Hands off Mississippi”) tosses a few too many balls in the air — characters to follow, subtexts … Continue reading →

In these troubled times, which are looking more and more like End Times for Hollywood and movies in theaters, it’s heartening to realize that whatever dies, indie cinema will endure. Movies like “The Planters” pretty much guarantee that. An insistently … Continue reading →

The filmmakers who brought us “The Secret of Kells” and “Song of the Sea” bring another Irish myth to vibrant, animated life in “Wolfwalkers,” an environmental fable about spirits who protect the forests from the Ruin of Man. The vivid, … Continue reading →

One of the cleverest touches of “Coded Bias,” the new film from documentarian Shalini Kantayya (“Catching the Sun”) is the faces we see and the voices she chose to give a platform to. The film — about the destructive biases … Continue reading →

There’s a whiff of a half-interesting screen romance in the multi-character episodic rom-com “Love, Weddings & Other Disasters.” Oscar winner Jeremy Irons plays a stiff, snobby Boston caterer who is “set up” with a “blind date.” The date is played … Continue reading →

One thing Woody Allen didn’t cover in his new “the REAL me/my side of things” autobiography is the nearly 20 years he cultivated a mystique by avoiding talking to the press. It took the scandalous 1992 revelation of his affair … Continue reading →

Lily James, Johnny Flynn and Ben Chaplin also star in this Jan. 21 Netflix release.