Movie Review: Don Johnson REALLY wants what’s in storage “Unit 234”

Posted on December 29, 2025 by Roger Moore

It’s got a “name” or used to be “name” cast, a compact setting, a twisty plot and the director of “Sweet Home Alabama” behind the camera.

“Unit 234” has the makings of a gritty B-movie that makes the most of its underdog status.

But those twists turn in on themselves as the picture’s plot contorts into a pretzel dunked in one lapse in logic after another. The action passes by in what seems like slow motion.

The location and a pretty good cast giving decent performances are squandered in the process.

The setting is a lonely, potentially claustrophobic 24 hour self-storage facility on the outskirts of Jacksonville in the northeastern corner of the Self-Storage State. And if you don’t think “24 hour” denotes “We rent to sketchy people” you’ve never been to one of those joints after dark.

It isn’t exactly Girl Scout cookies ready for distribution or Aunt Frida’s mid-century modern furniture that has folks come poking around for in the wee hours.

“Orphan” alumna Isabelle Fuhrman plays Laurie, a 20something saddled with the family business after her parents died and ready to learn the hard way that she’s the only dependable Gen Z employee she knows. Her big vacation to see her beau (Anirudh Pisharody) is derailed by an underling who bails on taking her shifts from her.

And wouldn’t you know it, that’s the rainy night in Florida when somebody stashes a body in “Unit 234,” one that might wakeup from the hospital gurney it’s handcuffed to.

A prologue introduced us to blood-in-his-hanky sick rich guy (Don Johnson) who wants that body or person or what’s in that body or person. He rides around in a chauffeured G-Wagon and has minions who will shoot other minions for him if he doesn’t get what he wants.

Showing up at Schuyler’s Self-Storage after dark without a key runs him afoul of Laurie’s “procedures” and rules. So cold-blooded Jules’ henchmen will have to do this the hard way.

As she opens the unit herself and finds a guy still wired up to med fluids and such, who wakes up blabbering about “organ harvesting,” she has words for her foes when she and Jules cross paths again.

“You people are going straight to HELL!”

Jules? “Yeah, I think I’m OK with that.”

A harrowing night of using what’s in the other units to fight back or get away or at least get out the word about their peril ensues. Yes, “storage units are like a box of chocolates.”

Laurie learns the mistake of waking a sleeping-on-the-job Florida sheriff’s deputy and expecting help.

Director Andy Tennant — “Hitch” and “Fool’s Gold” were also his — isn’t known for thrillers. And that shows in the picture’s slack pacing. A bit of speed might have rushed the viewer past all the “Wait, in what alternate reality does this shooting/reaction/behavior make sense?” moments.

But the cast is game, with Huston properly frantic, Johnson oozing menace and Fuhrman dialing up the pluck and self-preservation savvy in her role.

It’s not their fault “Unit 234” turns out to be a blood-stained episode of “Storage Wars.”

Rating: 16+, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Isabelle Fuhrman, Don Johnson, Jack Huston, Christopher James Baker and Anirudh Pisharody

Credits: Directed by Andy Tennant, scripted by Derek Steiner. A Brainstorm Media release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:28

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Documentary Review: An Environmental/Farm Economy Parable from Macedonia — “The Tale of Silyan”

Posted on December 28, 2025 by Roger Moore

An ancient parable is remembered and acted-out in modern day Macedonia in “The Tale of Silyan,” the latest documentary from the director of the Oscar-nominated “Honeyland.”

Writer-director Tamara Kotesvka documents the collapse of her country’s small farm economy and sees its parallels to the folk tale of a son, Silyan, who wants to leave his father’s farm and see the world only to be “cursed” by the father and turned into a stork.

Silyan doesn’t really fit in with the migrating storks. And his father no longer recognizes him. So they face their future separated, lonely and mourning what they once had.

Farmer Nikola Conev has been on the family land all of his 60 years. He and wife Jana plant and cultivate melons, potatoes, corn and grapes, and their daughter, her husband and children pitch in to help with the harvest.

But prices collapse and the younger generation migrates to Germany where they can only find low-paying jobs that barely cover the cost of their childcare. So Jana moves there to help.

Nikola and many of his peers meet and console each other, as many are in exactly the same boat. Their entire families have left. All that remains for them is protesting their plight with tractor parades and public crop dumping. “Giving up” could mean selling their land and moving abroad, staying on it until the money runs out, or suicide.

Nikola video calls his wife and tries to maintain ties. He takes a job running bulldozers and tractors at the local dump. He takes in an injured stork there and tries to nurse it to health.

And he broods over a son we never see, one like the son in the parable, a child he hasn’t talked to in years. He could be that injured stork, for all he knows.

As she demonstrated with her quiet, contemplative and mournful story of an old lady beekeeper in the mountains, Kotesvska is the very embodiment of the “patient” documentary filmmaker.

You can use words like “acted-out” and “story” in describing her films as she follows and films and waits and blends into this world, figuring out the narrative as it reveals itself to her.

We stop wondering if this reality we’re seeing is “performed” as we follow the still-playful-together couple into the fields, flirting and teasing, and we join Nikola with an even older and lonelier friend who’s just bought a metal detector which they take to all the empty houses in their village.

Did somebody bury gold in the walls? They’re that desperate and that delusional.

But this family left their house long ago, that farmer hung himself right here, etc.

Kotevska weaves the human story into the extensive footage of Europe’s omnipresent storks. They swoop down on newly-plowed fields for worms and grubs. And when field after field goes fallow, they follow “the sound of the tractors” of Nikola and fellow farmers to the dump where they now work.

Many storks die in the plastic-littered garbage. But one Nikola makes it his business to save.

It’s a beautiful film, equal parts sentimental and bluntly realistic. Like “Honeyland,” what Kotevska is capturing is a vanishing way of it.

If there’s hope to either film, it might very well be futile. But if the parable of the stork son and his father farmer can work out, why can’t modern day Macedonians find a resolution that brings balance, purpose and a future for the farmers and the storks who watch, follow and depend on them?

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Nikola and Jana Conev

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tamara Kotevska. A National Geographic release premiering on Disney+ and Hulu.

Running time: 1:19

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Movie Review: What Makes “Marty Supreme?”

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

New York filmmaker Josh Safdie has his fans, and I’ve been one of them at times. At other times? Not so much.

He does underbelly-of-the-city stories well. “Good Time” was something of a reinvention of the possibilities of Robert Pattinson. But I found “Uncut Gems” an indulgent wallow and laughably wrongheaded in its attempt to make Adam Sandler show off his “range” playing a thoroughly repellent hustler, philanderer and loser juggling the balls of his life as he struggles to pass for a winner.

“Marty Supreme” is very much in the same vein as “Gems.” It’s calamitous and chaotic, and not just in its deliberately assaultive and often indecipherable sound mix. A cornucopia of ugly Jewish archetypes and stereotypes, it’s almost but not quite offensive because Safdie’s allowed to get away with pretty much anything at this stage, especially with “his” audience.

But the movie? It plays like an abortive Coen brothers project that somehow got filmed and released.

It’s built around an utterly repellent lead character, a pushy, bullying, con artist — a shvitzer and all around gonif, if you want to get Yiddish about it.

It struck me, as our self-mythologizing whirlwind of need, desires, appetites and ambition hurtles through 1950s New York — throwing a jaw-dropping Holocaust crack into into the mix and declaring “It’s OK, I can say that. I’m Jewish.” — that it takes guts to make a character this stereotypical and loathsome and this Jewish at this moment.

Anti-Semitism is spiking all over the world, and not just over Israel’s genocide in the Palestinian concentration camp that they made out of Gaza.

But this is probably the closest we’ll ever get to Hollywood filming someone as nakedly recognizable as a “Sammy Glick Type.” Budd Schulberg’s “What makes Sammy Run?” always hit too close to home in the La La Land of Goldwyn, Mayer, Ovitz, Spielberg and Weinstein for any studio to make a film of it.

Timothée Chalamet has the title role in “Marty,”playing an early ’50s dynamo overflowing with chutzpah. Marty Mauser is a smooth-talking shoe salesman who works for his uncle and carries on with a shopkeeper’s wife (Odessa A’zion) down the block.

Marty’s dream is a lot bigger than this. This chutzpenik is a table tennis champ (inspired by a real person) and motor-mouthed hustler. He’s forever brushing off his clingy hypochondriac mother (Fran Drescher) and uncle (Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman) with “I’m NOT a SHOE SALESMAN.”

He is certain that his destiny, his fate, is to become world champion and take the title away from a Polish Holocaust survivor (“I’m going to do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t! Finish him!”).

Everything — money — and every one standing in his way had better cough it up, bend to his will and step back, because Marty is not to be denied.

“This game, it fills stadiums overseas,” he preaches. It’s blowing up in Asia. Imagine what having an American champion will do for it. He can see it all — the cover of Wheaties boxes, magazine profiles, riches, fame.

He pushes his orange (more easily seen, and more striking to look at) ping pong ball idea at a lower tier sporting goods manufacturer, who is skeptical. The sporting goods maker’s son (Luke Manley) falls under Marty’s spell.

Marty bowls over table tennis officials, rants about “cheating” and “unfair” losses and fast-talks his way into everything, even an affair with a married-rich faded film star (Gwyneth Paltrow).

But Marty’s mono-maniacal focus has him stealing money (he says he’s owed) from his uncle to make a tournament, triumphing on his way to a title and losing The Big Match — and taking it badly.

And that’s nothing compared to the messiness that awaits him back home — kicked out, on the lam with his hustling cabbie pal Wally (Tyler the Creator, aka Tyler Okonma), in trouble with a mobster who loves his dog, carrying on with the married actress while dodging his pregnant paramour Rachel (A’zion).

Safdie strains to keep “Marty Supreme” moving at an exhausting sprint for its excessive, indulgent two and a half hours. He can’t. Even Chalamet needs a breather.

Marty’s juggling is doomed to bring a lot of balls crashing to the ground. But the longer the movie goes on, the more far-fetched the way those balls ever got in the air in the first place seems.

Paltrow does a fine job of imperiously dismissing this pesky, horny non-fan come-on artist. But the script has her character succumb to this nicked and pimpled punk’s relentlessness. As if.

Trying to keep this picture at a sprint means the long running time doesn’t allow characters moments to breathe and feel humanly fleshed out. You’re proud of Drescher’s work for the Screen Actor’s Guild. Great. Give her a plum role. But give her something to play.

Sandra Bernhard and others pass by on the picture’s periphery, a parade of little known and well known caricatures with exaggerated features, in Safdie’s eyes.

Kevin O’Leary makes a strong impression as the rich businessman/husband Marty almost impresses, but then doesn’t, leading to consequences which neither he nor the impulsive, mercurial Marty see coming.

And Chalamet, shorn of the makeup that made him a beatific matinee idol to many ages and every gender, fiercely commits to keeping this guy as detestable as they get — tactless, feckless, ruthless, so narcissistic you pray that he fails — until the script tries to soften him.

No deal.

Marty talks nonstop out of fear he’ll hear a “NO” and runs nonstop because life and the illusion of his fame and success will fall apart the moment reality sets in and shuts down his delusions. He is the athletic incarnation of Sammy Glick.

But in Safdie’s film, all this expended on-screen energy and effort isn’t edifying or rewarding. It’s just exhausting.

And nothing says “F-you” to an audience louder than a sound mix that buries dialogue under music and music — much of it stylishly anachronistic — so loud it induces tinnitus.

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Odessa A’zion, Tyler the Creator, Luke Manley, Fran Drescher, Sarah Bernhard, Emory Cohen, Kevin O’Leary and Gwyneth Paltrow

Credits: Directed by Josh Safdie, scripted by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein. An A24 release.

Running time: 2:30

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Movie Review: “Song Sung Blue” Weepin’ in My Popcorn

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

Sing-along songs are musical comfort food, and any songsmith, singer or singer-songwriter can count him or herself lucky if they stumble into one in the course of a career.

Musical biographies are the cinema’s equivalent of such comfort food, and just as inviting of the impulse to sing along. “Rocket Man” to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” they’re as close to a can’t-entirely-miss genre as there is.

So as the “Gypsy Songman” Jerry Jeff Walker once put it, “When the chorus comes around, everybody jump on.”

“Song Sung Blue” is a veritable “Sing-along-‘Sound of Music'” musical, not the story of master craftsman and crooner Neil Diamond, but of a couple of Wisconsin fans and “interpreters” who made his music their life and livelihood and the inspiration of their love story.

It stars Hugh Jackman and bet-you-didn’t-know-she-could-sing Kate Hudson and was directed by “Hustle & Flow” filmmaker Craig Brewer.

So, a “can’t miss” holiday hit? Pretty damned much. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. And if you’re not too uptight to admit you know the words, you’ll sing along,

“Who doesn’t like Neil Diamond?” is a running gag in the picture. In that part of the world, and for millions of a certain age, you’d have to be a redneck biker to not fit in that broad fanbase.

It’s a true story based on a celebrated 2008 documentary of the same title about a mechanic and waana-be famous singer-impersonator named Mike Sardina who finds his muse and duet partner in a hairdresser/Patsy Cline impersonator named Claire and who finds his purpose in the vast songbook of Neil Diamond.

Mike is a recovering alcoholic who sings a Neil tune to his AA group every “sobriety birthday.” And like Claire, he hustles up gigs as an impersonator for “the blue hair crowd” at fairs and conventions and the like, where everybody from Buddy Holly (Michael Imperioli, quite good) to James Brown (Mustafa Shakir) comes back to life in between Elvis, Patsy and Tina acts.

That’s where Mike meets Claire, on a night in the late late ’80s when he’s too principled to sing “Tiny Bubbles” (a drinking song) in the guise of Hawaiian singer Don Ho. Or maybe he’s just mad about his thwarted ambition. He’s in multiple bands, is well known around Milwaukee.

When it comes to being a “name” entertainer, “I should be enough!”

He and Claire flirt and give some thought to coming up with an act. He likes Elvis’ TCB lightning bolt logo, so he’ll be “Lightning.” She’ll be “Thunder.”

He gets “I’m an alcoholic” out of the way in short order. She mentions her kids straight off. They bond with their shared desire to sing, be entertainers and “pay my bills” doing it.

They’ll gather a decent-sized band, with horns. And they’ll “interpret” Neil and create an “immersive” Neil Diamond show-spectacle. They’ll eventually open for Pearl Jam, whose lead singer, like a whole generation of rock and pop acts, appreciates musicianship, cherishes songwriting and knows a fun bit of pop kitsch when they hear about it.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Foo Fighters welcome RICK ASTLEY!

But after the “Cherry, Cherry” montage in which they see if their voices blend, the “Holly Holy” montage charting their romance and “Sweet Caroline” montage of their sudden rise to fame, tragedy is sure to strike these middle-aged dream lovers.

There’ll be complications which his daughter (King Princess) and hers (Ella Anderson) will talk out and explain to the movie audience. There will be severe tests, bad breaks and the like.

But the music, with a huge repertory of Diamond tunes used to sort out feelings, difficulties and the tests and depth of their love, carries us over the formulaic story framework and past the cliches.

Jackman, a genuine “triple threat” who could probably out-Neil Neil, dials down his Tony, Grammy, Golden Globe and Emmy award winning singing talent to suit the role. He’s just a good Neil Diamond “interpreter,” not Neil-reincarnated — long hair and sideburns be damned.

And he does this to blend his voice more easily with Hudson, who rises to the challenge with her best screen performance since “Almost Famous.”

Brewer puts his leads in extreme, revealing and emotional close-ups and they do the rest. Don’t get extra salt in your popcorn. Your tears will provide that.

Brewer’s script never misses a chance to turn “cute,” from Claire’s cranky mother (Cecelia Reddett) to the dentist who doubles as Mike’s agent (Fisher Stevens), colorful fellow impersonators Shakir and Imperioli, to the in-state booking agent (Jim Belushi, a hoot) whose main livelihood is driving the Badger (trolley) Bus that takes senior citizens groups to casinos, concerts and tourist attractions like the fair.

If you’re allergic to “cute,” stay home. Otherwise, pack your hanky and try to keep your singing along at a level that it won’t drown out what’s coming off the screen. Because what Brewer, Jackman and Hudson cook up here is comfort food at its most comforting.

Rating: PG-13, drug abuse, sexual content and profanity

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Ella Anderson, King Princess, Mustafa Shakir, Michael Imperioli, Fisher Stevens and Jim Belushi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Craig Brewer, based on a 2008 documentary of the same title by Greg Kohs. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:13

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Movie Review: Black and Rudd & Co. Learn You Can’t Go “Anaconda” Again

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

Three movie stars who have been funny in their pre-dad-bod past and Thandiwe Newton — who’s rarely been called to land laughs — shipped off to Australia to make an action comedy about a supersized snake in the Amazon, a “reboot” or “more of a spiritual sequel” to the 1997 hit “Anaconda.”

The results are even worse than you feared. The bloated, over-budgeted 1997 B-movie “Anaconda’s” semi-intentional laughs turn out to be pretty hard to mimic in this latest remake/sequel/whatever you want to call it.

The gimmick here is that four lifelong friends from Buffalo hit walls in their personal and professional lives and try to take a shot at making “that ‘Anaconda’ reboot” they dreamed of filming as kids before that AARP membership card arrives in the mail.

Doug (Jack Black) never left town. Married (former teen star Ione Skye plays his wife) witha son, he’s working for a local company that shoots and edits wedding videos, shoveling another load of dirt onto his dreams with every themed wedding “film” he makes.

His boss’s reassurances that he’s managed “a B, maybe even a B+ life” in the process is cold comfort.

Doug had to fire his cameraman of choice Kenny (Steve Zahn) for getting blitzed on the job one too many times. At least Kenny’s on the wagon, or you know, “Buffalo sober” these days.

Actor pal Griff (Paul Rudd) made it to LA, but he can’t even keep a role with a single-line of dialogue these days.

And Claire (Newton), who acted in their childhood movies, moved away and married and is newly divorced.

Everybody flying in or just showing up at Doug’s surprise birthday party gets them thinking about “Anaconda” again. When Griff says he’s got the rights to the “Japanese novel” the first film was based on, Doug scripts and budgets a movie they can make in the actual Amazon with a real live “stunt” snake.

There’s a Brazilian woman (Daniela Melchior) on the lam from armed goons in the illegal-gold-fields of Amazonia who might provide the team with a “theme” for their action script. There’s a riverboat to rent and a wrangler (Selton Mello) with a “tame” anaconda ready for its closeup.

Let’s head up river and shoot this thing! What could go wrong?

Nothing funny, it turns out.

Sony spent stupid money on a movie whose only hopes of working would have been to make it look cheap and DIY, shot-on-the-fly with cellphone cameras and the like.

The gigantic digital snake looks like a CGI serpent, the only gags that might have landed a laugh turned up in the trailers months ago and nobody on set — on-camera or behind it (Tom Gormican directed “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” and the utterly gassed “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F”) — could wring anything amusing out of all this money.

Whatever braintrust brainstormed this debacle into being, any audience this picture pulls in arrives under false pretenses and any money it makes should be spent on “Let’s never make another one of these” posters papering the Sony lot.

Rating: PG-13, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Daniela Melchior, Ione Skye and Steve Zahn

Credits: Directed by Tom Gormican, scripted by Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten, based on the 1997 movie “Anaconda.” A Sony Columbia release.

Running time: 1:39

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STILL not “a Christmas Movie”

Posted on December 26, 2025 by Roger Moore
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Classic Film Review: Carol Reed’s Mining Country Melodrama — “The Stars Look Down” (1940)

Posted on December 25, 2025 by Roger Moore

A young man’s future is derailed by a callous chancer and a faithless woman and a disaster he foretold and might have prevented is sure to doom many in his small Northumberland mining town in “The Stars Look Down,” the breakthrough melodrama from future Oscar winner Carol Reed.

The director who’d go on to film “The Third Man,” “Odd Man Out,” “Fallen Idol” and the Dickensian musical “Oliver!” would show flashes of the eye and ear that became his signature style in this Michael Redgrave star vehicle, a black and white picture populated with colorful character actors.

Based on an A.J. Cronin novel, it’s got a high-minded, ambitious, rise-above-his-working-class hero, a talented orator who sees the evils of unfettered capitalism trapping generation after generation in fictional Sleescale in “the pits,” mining “coking coal” in dirty, dangerous jobs that the entire town has come to identify as its heritage and its lot.

Davey Fenwick (Redgrave) may have started there himself as a teen, alongside his union leader dad (Edward Rigby) and aspiring soccer star kid brother (Desmond Tester). But growing up with a labor leader has him seeing through the patronizing, self-serving mine owner (Allan Jeayes) for who he is.

Boss Barras minimizes the risks of a mine section doomed to flood and slips a coin in Davey’s hand as he condescends how he’ll put in a good word when the student doesn’t finish college so that he can come back and teach at the local school.

Davey gives the coins to children.

His dad (Edward Rigby, archetypally on the money) is optimistic, in between coal coughs.

“Some day you’re going to do something about this industry of ours.”

His mother (Nancy Price, terrific) treats him with a mixture of sentiment and scorn.

“None of my family needed no college education,” she grouses, “stuffin’ you ‘ed with that highfalutin nonsense!”

But go he will. The strike his dad calls over the objections of the mine owner and the compliant union leaders sets the whole town against the Fenwicks. Davey leaves just as his dad gets caught up in a riot in which the hateful local butcher’s shop is looted.

The instigator of that riot is Davey’s amibitious but no good thief contemporary, Joe (Emlyn Williams), who skips town with the cash from the butcher’s even as his father and Davey’s are tossed in jail.

Crossing paths with Joe in Tynecastle, Scotland, one goes to college and the other becomes “a turf accountant” ( bookie) catting around with a rich man’s wife and leading on the landlady’s theater usher daughter, Laura (Margaret Lockwood).

Joe sees “smart” Davey as the perfect chump to dump Laura on as he eyes higher prizes. That’s how Joe ends up thrown together with the heartbroken Laura, who talks him into leaving school, taking up school teaching and never keeping her extravagant-beyond-her-upbringing tastes satisfied.

The film’s mid-WWII socialist subtext is refreshing to hear in the age of government by oligarchs. Davey preaches that “natural resources are NATIONAL resources,” and that the mines ought to be owned and run by the state.

No, that didn’t save the doomed coal industry. But Davey’s thinking, about doing something for people and not to them, is bracing.

What’s most dated in the script is the gender stereotyping. Women are subservient partners to their men, and when they’re not, they’re gold diggers and opportunists easily swayed by a smooth-talker like Joe.

Slapping a woman earns an “I deserved it” and then further feminine manipulations that don’t do our hero any good.

The film’s classic status is earned in the mine and mining disaster scenes, which have suspense and pathos built into them, with Davey’s cautionary pleas ignored and the media bending over backwards to portray the gambling-with-men’s-lives mine-owner as a hero.

The details are better than most movies set in mining country at the time — blindfolded horses brought down for labor, unquestioning fatalism by the miners and stolid grief from those who stay at home.

Other touches include the hint of illicit sex when a cheater visits a married woman. Reed suggests this by showing rain against a window pane and two rivulets slowly streak down to join and become one.

I don’t know if there’s a newer restoration of this 85 year old jewel, but if there isn’t there should be. The darkest scenes are murky with age and show signs of too many generations transferred from the original negative. Reed would make inky black darkness his home and cinematic calling card, and that is prefigured here.

The famed filmmaker was not an overnight success. His 1930s films have glimpses of talent amidst the budget-driven competence that is about the best we can say for his early genre pictures.

But in 1940, he delivered “The Stars Look Down” and then the delightful “Night Train to Munich.”

Northern Ireland (“Odd Man Out”) and Vienna and Orson Welles (“The Third Man”) came not long after that and a master filmmaker came into his own.

“Stars” may be just a melodrama with a mining disaster payoff, but it’s worth watching for the depiction of that disaster, for Redgrave’s earnest turn, for the tasty villainy of Williams and Lockwood and for the clues to the thematically challenging and visually stunning storyteller Reed shows himself as destined to become.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG

Cast: Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Edward Rigby, Emlyn Williams, Milton Rosmer, Cecil Parker, Desmond Tester, George Carney, Allan Jeayes and Nancy Price.

Credits: Directed by Carol Reed, scripted by J.B. Williams and A.J. Cronin, based on Cronins’ novel. A Grand National/MGM/Corinth Films release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:41

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Yeah, Merry Friggin’ Christmas…

Posted on December 24, 2025 by Roger Moore

Love to get out and see “Song Sung Blue,” “The Secret Agent” and maybe “Marty Supreme.” Events mahy conspire to delay this binge, but you’ve gotta have goals.

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Netflixable? A Cop and his Shrink learn there’s “A Time for Bravery”

Posted on December 24, 2025 by Roger Moore

A distraught, unstable, rules-breaking “maverick” cop is assigned a new partner to keep his demons at bay?

” I feel like I’m in ‘Lethal Weapon,’” the new partner cracks.

“I know, right?”

As action comedies go, the Mexican riff on the “Lethal” movies “A Time for Bravery” takes forever to truly land a laugh. An hour goes by with maybe a grin or a smirk at most.

But the last 40 minutes of “La hora de los Valientes” (in Spanish, subtitled, or in English) makes this high-stakes but inconsequential buddy picture tolerable.

Thank “Narcos: Mexico” star Luis Gerardo Méndez for that. As Dr. Silverstein, a psychotherapist forced — via “community service” — to babysit and ride-along with wife-just-left-him loose cannon Detective Diaz (Memo Villegas of the dramas “Sin Numbre” and “Prayers for the Stolen”), Méndez finds a few laughs in the fish-out-of-water absurdity of this situation.

And Damián Szifron’s script eventually makes its way to what might be funny about having a shrink on a ride-along — counseling the cop, facing danger himself, understanding how human nature can save your skin in a world of thieves, lowlifes and highly-placed corruption, all of whom are big on murderous threats.

“One more question and you’ll catch a stray bullet!”

Dr. Silverstein — even in Mexico, the stereotypical movie psychotherapist is Jewish — is forever trying to calm thugs down and make his not-quite-out-of-control partner/”patient” a little less prone to running every red light and pulling out a gun to get the “truth” out of this informant, that suspect or Dr. Silverstein’s might-be-cheating girlfriend (Verónica Bravo).

Detective Diaz is a little touchy about faithless lovers. And he’s got the arrogance of an armed, law-unto-himself and almost immune to prosecution cop.

There’s a ruthless, highly-placed villain (Christian Tappan) who makes people disappear. He has two soldiers he’s bribed killed in the film’s opening scene.

As the grizzled police commissioner (Noé Hernández) has no idea why two soldiers have gone missing how high up their disappearance reaches and how deadly the scheme that involved them is, he gives Diaz — with a shrink/partner — the case as “occupational therapy.”

The stumbling shrink asks a lot of questions as Diaz veers from despairing to reckless (red light runner), poking at the “confronation” the angry cop has avoided and the closure he won’t get until he has that.

But Silverstein is leery of the “Wild West out there,” in a country with criminals on the loose and police and officials at every level corrupted, all of them using the “but my salary” excuse.

Silverstein amusingly makes “in a well run country” cracks and lectures to bad guys. And of course he learns on the job how to fire a gun and talk tough. That business of sneaking into a secure facility with nothing but a street cop’s stolen uniform to get him to “the restricted area?” That’s improvised, and it plays an amusing set-up to start the final showdown.

I’m not seeing many comedies on the Villegas resume, so he’s far from a natural in this role. Even as a straight man he’s humorlessly humorless. Most everybody else plays things so straight that nothing much amusing comes out of their characters or their scenes, as written.

That only pays off in the case of the deadpan villain in charge.

But Méndez kind of makes this silly, coincidence-packed nonsense play. Sort of.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Luis Gerardo Méndez, Memo Villegas,
Verónica Bravo, Noé Hernández and Christian Tappan.

Credits: Directed by Ariel Winograd, scripted by Damián Szifron. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

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Movie Review: Kirby Howell-Baptiste is our Tour Guide among “We Strangers”

Posted on December 23, 2025 by Roger Moore

A hint of the inscrutable can do service to any film in any genre, and it pays off some surprising ways in “We Strangers,” an oddball domestic dramedy about a “domestic” and the dizzy white folks who hire her.

Veteran TV producer (“Dropouts,” “Hardly Working”) and director (“A Man on the Inside”) Anu Valia’s feature film debut is about a Gary, Indiana housecleaner whose “business” takes off when the wealthy white women she works for learn that she “sees things,” that she’s a psychic.

But the more “jobs” she books. the more entangled in the messy lives of her clients she becomes. And her personal life — juggling single motherhood like her single-mom sister and transporting her single mom mother — kind of unravels in the process.

Kirby Howell-Baptiste of TV’s “Barry,””Sugar,” “The Good Place” and “Killing Eve” is Rayelle, “Ray” Martin, a housekeeper who stumbles into several well-paying jobs when her maid agency books her into cleaning a doctor’s office as he moves into new digs.

We meet her after she’s already started cleaning the doctor’s (Hari Dhillon) sububan home, having accepted the gig in a brief flashback. The weirdness begins almost immediately when a confused, almost distraught neighbor (Maria Dizzia) wonders what she’s doing there.

Neighbor Jean’s begging “Don’t SAY anything” to the doctor suggests messiness of the kind that Clorox can’t clean.

Cleaning for the doctor forces Ray into the confidences of the wife (Sarah Goldberg), who can’t believe the pretty 30something Black woman can’t help an upper middle class soccer mom pick out something to wear, and won’t accept the expensive, “cute” but bland and conservative fashions Tracy wants to give to her as Ray has given the thumbs down on that choice of what to wear to Tracy’s next event.

Their teen daughter Sunny (Mischa Reddy) is her own set of “issues,” childishly leaning on Ray for favors that Ray does — until she figures out she needs to be charging the kid for this nonsense.

The way Ray is hired-out to the weird neighbor is sketchy, “a gift,” the good doctor insists. Jean (Dizzia) is an unhappy housewife not getting what she wants out of marriage to dull U.S. Steel manager Ed (Paul Adelstein), whose racial politics are “those people” simplistic, and whose idea of a hobby is photographing U.S. flags flying over all 50 states — each flag indistinguishable from the next.

Yes, their doorbell chimes to the tune of “Dixie.” And yes, Jean’s fixation on a TV “psychic” opens her up to the idea of Ray saying “I see things,” as in dead people, fates, things to come. We get the impression that it’s just a hustle.

As word of this “gift” spreads, Ray’s reliability in her “real” life starts to bend and break as she starts oversleeping and failing in her family obligations.

And her efforts to monetize her work, her “gift” and her “favors” leave her vulnerable to what you’d call “bad karma.” Not that she isn’t owed the money or her share of good fortune.

Howell-Baptiste makes Ray hard to read, even as she’s a sort of Puck in this “Midsummer Night’s Dream” amongst white surbanites, facing proof after proof of “what fools these mortals be.”

The recurring and ever-changing image of a Caribbean volcano and various interpretations, misinterpretations and off-the-cuff BS attached to the jailed “lone survivor” of an eruption of Mount Peléeis the metaphor Valia tries to wrestle into this tale to give it “meaning.”

Characters confuse the “The Prisoner Dilemma” as they suggest the imprisoned man’s fated survival was blind luck, but also a double-edged sword. So it is with Ray’s “gift.” As rich and clueless as her clients are, is this self-interested world one that she should aspire to and mimic?

Howell-Baptiste makes a mesmerizing yet earthy and “real” tour guide through the meandering narrative of “We Strangers.” She’s the best reason to watch this inscrutable film that’s easy to take-in but tricky to decode, based on what’s included and what’s left underdeveloped or simply undeciphered.

Rating: 16+, alcohol abuse profanity

Cast: Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Hari Dhillon, Kara Young, Paul Adelstein, Sarah Goldberg, Maria Dizzia and Tina Lifford.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Anu Valia. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:28

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