Category Archives: Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news

Classic Film Review: Bronson Brawls and an action auteur is born — Walter Hill’s “Hard Times” (1975)

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Roger Moore

There’s a gentility about “Hard Times,” a bare-knuckle brawling drama set during the Great Depression. It’s a genre piece populated with veteran character actors playing archetypes bound by their own code, playing their parts in a story so pre-ordained that … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: Struggling Siblings reconnect, or try to — “Scrap”

Posted on December 2, 2024 by Roger Moore

Thirtyish Beth smiles and gives her five-year-old daughter a squeeze. “Gremlin, you know I will always take care of you.” As we’ve heard Beth lie like she breathes, we doubt that, even if the little girl she named Barbara but … Continue reading →

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Netflixable? Parole violators don’t stand a chance against “Officer Black Belt”

Posted on December 2, 2024 by Roger Moore

Absurd on its surface and dark hearted to say the least, “Officer Black Belt” is a violent thriller that flirts with being a Korean action comedy. If you can get by the murderers, rapists and many child molesters brought to … Continue reading →

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Movie Preview: K-horror about a transplant that goes supernaturally, horrifically wrong — “Devils Stay”

Posted on December 1, 2024 by Roger Moore

Dad knows something’s wrong. He’s “hearing” from his dead daughter. And is she “dead,” after all? I mean, he did the heart transplant and all. Where did her heart end up? Dec. 6.

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Movie Review: Colombian Road Warriors smuggle gas, and more — “Pimpinero: Blood and Oil”

Posted on December 1, 2024 by Roger Moore

It begins in a “Road Warrior” hellscape, a desert borderland where gasoline is smuggled in a high stakes game of chicken with the authorities of two countries added to the danger of carelessly transporting an explosively flammable substance. We meet … Continue reading →

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Movie Preview: Jackie Chan gets mixed up in sword and scorcery and…archaelogy — “A Legend”

Posted on December 1, 2024 by Roger Moore

A period piece with a modern scientist mixed up in the lessons the past has to teach the present. Stanley Tong directed this one.

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Movie Review: Spain’s Oscar hopes ride on “Saturn Return (Segundo Premio)” a bio pic of the indie band Los Planetas

Posted on November 30, 2024 by Roger Moore

You don’t have to know the history and love the music of Spanish indie rock icons Los Planetas (“The Planets”) to connect with the new bio-pic about these ’90s fixtures of Spanish “alternative rock.” But it helps. “Saturn Return” is … Continue reading →

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Movie Preview: Obsessed with hunting “sexual predators” — But who are the “Filthy Animals” here?

Posted on November 30, 2024 by Roger Moore

A favorite obsession of the wingnut right gets its own dark comedy about “punishing” predators, and makes us wonder what sort of person carries around such an obsession. Two “outlaws/predators” set out to hunt accused “predators” on Christmas Eve. Raymond … Continue reading →

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BOX OFFICE: “Moana 2” breaks records, “Black Friday” is one for the books

Posted on November 30, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Moana 2” opened Wednesday, and a fall that has been STARVED for animated family film fare (save for the limping-along “Wild Robot”) was finally sated over the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. It earned over $221 million over the five day … Continue reading →

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Classic Film Review: Carney, Tomlin, Killings and a Missing Cat — “The Late Show” (1977)

Posted on November 29, 2024 by Roger Moore

The golden age of film noir — cynical, sinister and shadowy thrillers about crime and the unchanging nature of human criminality — was the 1940s and ’50s, when black and white cinema still ruled. The genre never really went away, … Continue reading →

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