Author Archives: Roger Moore

Netflix owns teen comedies and has done well with romance. But Amazon takes its shot at gaining a foothold with that audience and those genres with the serious high school romance “Chemical Hearts.” Looks hopeful and poignant and very romantic.

Talked to him a few times over the years. A class act, sort of a British Norman Jewison. “The Commitments,” “Fame,” “Bugsy Malone,” musicals that often didn’t play like musicals. “Mississippi Burning” took deserved heat for its “white savior” tropes. … Continue reading →

  It’s not so much a rule, as an understanding — an agreement between filmmaker and audience. If your comedy or rom-com is only 80 or so minutes long, you’ve got to give us something to laugh or at least … Continue reading →

    The amorality that is obvious about Tomasz Giemza, from the first moment we meet him, had to have set in years before. He’s still young and in college — law school, no less. But the plagiarism which gets … Continue reading →

Was writer-director Miranda July at least “inspired” by the Oscar nominated Japanese drama “Shoplifters?” She’s not saying. But “Kajillionaire,” more a dramedy — colorfully comic con artists, until their “daughter” figures out she’s being used — than a drama, certainly … Continue reading →

When it hits Amy, it arrives in a rush. She jams Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief” into a single night, at most just hours. Amy (Katie Lyn Sheil) will blast through “denial” and “bargaining” and go straight to … Continue reading →

The new Epix series “Helter Skelter: An American Myth,” weaves its story out of the culture’s collective memory of LA’s infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, committed by drug-addled cultists in the thrall of Charles Manson. In half a dozen episodes, documentarian Lesley … Continue reading →

Gleeson? Uncanny Showtime is tossing this movie Molotov cocktail at the traitor and his self righteous and clumsy GOP FBI chief right before the election.

You’ve seen Tom Bower in scores of films over the years, brief appearances that leave a mark in “Die Hard 2,” “Light of My Life” or the “Breaking Bad” movie — “El Camino.” Parked front and center in an indie … Continue reading →