Movie Review: House isn’t a home when it’s haunted by a ghostly “Presence”

Posted on January 24, 2025 by Roger Moore

It’s just a haunted house story, just a movie with objects that move and things that go bump in the night. Well, mostly in broad daylight.

“Presence” is a “A Ghost Story” filmed like a “Paranormal Activity” installment. And it’s by one of the American cinema’s true American Masters, Stephen Soderbergh.

The director of everything from “Contagion” to “Erin Brockovich” and one of the most accomplished and constantly-employed screenwrieers of our time, David Koepp (“Spider-Man,” later “Indiana Jones” movies, etc), an accomplished director himself, deconstruct “the ghost story” genre and reach back to their minimalist cinema pasts for this quiet, intimate drama with a supernatural edge.

“Presence” doles out its jolt and thrills sparingly, immersing us in its limited, claustrophobic milieu and connects us with its sharply drawn characters.

A family (Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, with Callina Liang and Eddy Maday) have moved into a new-to-them hundred year-old, two story wood frame house. Whatever the home’s history, it’s not truly “haunted” until they show up.

Call it the House of Bad Karma.

Rebekah (Liu) is mixed-up in something sketchy at work, and she’s plainly got a favorite child. Tall, handsome and athletic Tyler (newcomer Maday) is abrasive, indulged and mixing with a mean boys crowd. Husband Chris (Sullivan of “This is Us”) is tuned in to that, his wife’s coming crisis, and her lopsided parenting and looking for a way out.

And underclasswoman daughter Chloe (Liang, of TV’s “Tell Me Everything”) is the child who knew two female classmates who wound up dead in recent weeks, the consequences of drug abuse, so everyone says.

But when stuff starts moving around in her room, Chloe’s uneasiness about their new home takes on meaning.

“It’s Nadia,” one of the dead girls, she finally blurts. “I think she’s here. I feel her.”

Chloe has felt this “presence,” and whatever its unease or intent, it’s moved in. We’ve felt it with her, because this movie is filmed from the “presence’s” point of view.

The tone Koepp, the cast and director/cinematographer Soderbergh reach for and achieve here is the great triumph of this compact, moving genre picture. Soderbergh’s camera floats through the house, settling in on tight compositions as it reaches each room and follows each character in each “long take” scene.

We or rather the “presence” are eavesdropping, peeking through louvred closet doors, standing over a teen’s bed or a wife’s evasive tap-tap-tapping on her laptop, which she doesn’t want her husband to see.

We follow Chris onto the wrap-around porch/deck, getting phone advice from a lawyer for “a friend.”

Once the story settles in, we meet just a couple of outsiders, and one of them is the cliched amateur, concerned and sympathetic medium (Natalie Woolams-Torres). What can she tell them, warn them about? Who in that house will listen?

What the writer and director were going for here is a dissection of a family already in crisis before something supernatural shakes rooms, rattles things off shelves and focuses on Chloe.

Soulful, concerned Dad lectures his son about “the fine man” he might be, the one he’s waiting for his teen with a “mean streak” to finally reveal. Brittle, distracted wife Rebekah keeps her panicked phone chats furtive and her favoritism on her foul-mouthed and dismissive son, who sees mercurial, growing-up-too-fast Chloe as the queen of attention-grabbing acting-out.

And Chloe is the one who should listen when her father says “bad decisions are the kind that last forever.”

The performances are understated and considered.

The shooting strategy adds to our unease, as a lack of edits (all closeups are medium shots achieved by physically moving the wide-angle lens camera in tight) works on the mind as much as seeing school books or whatever move of their own volition.

One shouldn’t oversell “Presence.” At the end of the day, it’s just the simplest sort of ghost story, told from each character’s point of view in their scenes, always spied from the ghost’s-eye-view.

But if you love horror, this minimalist “Sex, Lies and the Supernatural” is on an astral plane all its own. Its blend of mystery, suspense, chills and pathos are perfectly pitched. “Presence” is simply sublime.

Rating: R, violence, sex, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Lucy Liu, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday and Chris Sullivan.

Credits: Directed by Stephen Soderbergh, scripted by David Koepp. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:25

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Movie Review: Dockery figures out Grace and Wahlberg are each a “Flight Risk”

Posted on January 24, 2025 by Roger Moore

There was never any doubt that, “canceled-“or-uncanceled, Mel Gibson has skills as a director.

He knows how to cast, block, shoot and edit a thriller, be it historic or generically modern.

But what we’ve allowed ourselves to question during his years in the cinematic wilderness is his judgement. The off-camera questions became public knowledge and turned him into a punchline. On-camera, we can accept the string of C-pictures he’s starred or co-starred in during his exile at face value. And now the director of “Hacksaw Ridge” is letting us know all the ways he can mess up a conventional action picture.

With “Flight Risk,” he “Air Americas” up a perfectly straightforward single set actioner. There’s paranoia and airborne suspense, tension and personal, in-your-face violence.

But it’s glib as all get out, dumb when it isn’t being glib and not nearly as much fun as Gibson seems to think he’s made it out to be.

Michelle Dockery doesn’t embarrass herself, playing a Federal marshal escorting a “flight risk” witness from BFE, Alaska back to New York for a mob trial. Mark Wahlberg shaves his head and dons an intentionally fake drawl as the fake bush pilot who is to get them from the middle of nowhere to Anchorage airport.

But Topher Grace? Grace plays Winston, the comical “reluctant” witness/mob accountant in this bloody-minded “Midnight Run” dawdle into danger. And any time we fret over what the stakes might be, what perils come next and how tense this can get, he’s here to deliver his share of the one-liners that derail Jason Rosenberg’s script.

This isn’t a single-engine cargo/passenger plane they’re boarding, it’s “a kite with seat belts.”

Dockery’s agent cracks about finding Winston in a “Motel Sux.” And then there’s Wahlberg’s psychotic hitman/pilot, the one “outed” and who revels in his criminal intent just over a half-hour into the film.

“You know the last thing to go through your mind in a crash landing? Your ASS!”

One character’s a “by-the-book” Fed with a troubled past. The other’s a stereotypical mob accountant, right down to hiding out in a snowbound “Motel Sux.” But Wahlberg’s playing a campy thrill-killer who’s about as believable as that accent he trots out for his bug-eyed zingers.

“I don’t know about you, but I made a Jackson Pollock in my pants!”

Whatever entertainment value there is in this icomes from the serious early acts, which encourage the viewer to buy into this timeworn “Who will fly the plane?” predicament. Gibson throws up his hands at the job of constructing a compact thriller tucked into a tiny airplane, and just goes for ridiculous, physics-defying Alaskan flying exploits, cliched mob corruption reaching into law enforcement, bloody-to-the-edge-of-killing violence, and laughs.

And there aren’t enough of those to constitute an “action comedy.”

Maybe Mel Gibson deserved his decades in the cinematic wilderness as an actor. Maybe he’s done his penance. But he’s not moving back to the A-list by botching a simple, potentially enjoyable B-picture from behind the camera.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace and Mark Wahlberg.

Credits: Directed by Mel Gibson, scripted byJared Rosenberg. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

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Movie Review: Bisset still has her shimmer in “Loren & Rose”

Posted on January 23, 2025 by Roger Moore

A screen legend gives better than a lackluster indie script deserves in “Loren & Rose,” a movie about a movie-maker befriending a once-famous actress he needs to get his new movie made.

Maybe there’s a bit of art-imitates-film-life in this Russell Brown film. His best known feature was “Search Engines” some years back. Casting Jacqueline Bisset as “Rose” made this middling-at-best drama worthy of financing. It became a darling of second tier film festivals (Ojai, Sarasota, Sedona, Hot Springs, etc.), more than one of which feted her with well-deserved “Lifetime Achievement” awards a coupld of years back.

Bisset is Rose Martin, something of a screen legend thanks to a few cult films that made her an icon to assorted subsets (the horror crowd, “the gays”) of the larger cinematic audience. But director Loren (actor and sometime director Kelly Blatz of “Prom Night”) needs this mercurial presence, infamous for “a series of disappearances” from the public eye and the screen, because she’s the “name” in his cast that will get his indie feature debut in production.

They meet at an equally “legendary” and out of the way Topanga Canyon Cafe Sun & Earth to talk about her starring role in a drama loosely based on the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

“Loren & Rose” is a series of conversations that take place over the years as they collaborate, consider collaborating some more and become friends under the watchful care of ancient waiter Phil (Paul Sand of “The Hot Rock,” “Sweet Land” and TV’s “Palme Royale”).

Rose regales Loren and us with tales of flying into Bhutan to make a film, of “the heyday of hallucinogens,” or her one great love and of the highlights and pay-the-rent lowlights of her career.

“I felt like a port hooker on fleet week!”

She flatters the filmmaker who might engineer her comeback, even flirts a little as he goes on about breaking up with this same sex lover or that one and gushes about how “the gays” loved her career-defining role as a transgressive nun named “Lisa.”

Every so often, Loren drably voice-over narrates to catch the viewer up with what else has gone on in their lives, before and after they’ve met, and what’s happened between films.

As the story is framed within an estate sale of movie memorabilia and belongings, we gather that Rose has passed away and this narrative is a reminiscence.

The problem with this “My Dinner with Rose” is that the anecdotes are boilerplate dull. The drama inherent in “friction” between the two of them is flatly scripted and played. The stakes are low. So what if The Kid orders basically everything that provides the flavor left off of his “Restaurant Russian Roulette” meal orders?

Bisset, who worked with McQueen (“Bullitt”) and Truffaut (“Day for Night”), Huston (“Under the Volcano”) and Lumet (the 1970s “Murder on the Orient Express”), is still a radiant screen presence, a famous beauty who has aged with grace and whose talent for “lighting it up” on screen has never dimmed.

Blatz isn’t remotely on her level as acharismatic performer, but as Loren, he seems unintimidated. Perhaps if he had played the lad as a tad overawed, that would have given the conversations more edge.

But as Rose gently chides her director/suitor in the film, “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.” Brown’s script simply lacks the sizzle, pathos, friction or witty warmth to make “Loren & Rose” play.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Jacqueline Bisset, Kelly Blatz and Paul Sand.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Russell Brown. A Wise Lars production on Amazon.

Running time: 1:23

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Oscar Nominations — “Emilia Perez,” “Wicked” and “Brutalist,” “A Complete Unknown,” “Dune 2” and Five Other Films compete for Best Picture

Posted on January 23, 2025 by Roger Moore

Netflix’s much-hyped “Emilia Perez” musical led the way with 13 nominations when the much-delayed contenders for the 97th Academy Awards were announced this morning.

“The Brutalist” and “Wicked” scored ten nominations each. A total of 10 films are up for Best Picture this past year, with Demi Moore’s daring turn in sci-fi’s satire of Hollywood’s treatment of older actresses “The Substance” earning recognition, the impressive Dylan bio pic “A Complete Uknown,” the dark and even comical Papal thriller “Conclave,” “Dune: Part 2,” “I’m Still Here,” “Anora” and “Nickel Boys” rounding out the field.

Karla Sofía Gascón made history as the first openly transgender performer to receive a nomination, with her turn in “Emilia Perez” recognized. She is competing for Best Actress against Demi Moore (“The Substance”), Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked”), Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) and Mikey Madison of “Anora.”

If one takes this Oscars as sending a political message to the new/old administration in Washington, Gascón‘s nomination is one slap at the virulently anti-trans Trump crowd. Honoring Sebastian Stan with a Best Actor nom for portraying Trump’s training in crime, fraud and avoiding accountability in “The Apprentice” is another sign of that. Stan is up against Oscar winner Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”), Colman Domingo (“Sing Sing”), Timothée Chalamet (“A Complete Unknown”) and Oscar winner Ralph Fiennes for his Papal operator/archbishop in “Conclave.”

Best Supporting actor is an embarassment of riches with Jeremy Strong (a deadeyed dead ringer for Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice”), Guy Pearce (“The Brutalist”), Edward Norton’s uncanny Pete Seeger impersonation in “A Complete Unknown”), Kieran Culkin’s life-of-the-trip cousin in “A Real Pain” and Yura Borasov’s lovesick heavy in “Anora.”

Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in “A Complete Uknown”), Ariana Grande (the best reason to see “Wicked”), Felicity Jones (“The Brutalist”), Isabella Rossellini (“Conclave”) and longtime fan favorite Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez) fill out a frankly dazzling field for best supporting actress.

“Nosferatu” the Robert Eggers remake of a silent film classic, earned expected nominations for cinematography (Jarin Blashke), costumes (Linda Muir), makeup (David White, Traci Loader and Suzanne Stokes-Munton) and production design (Craig Lathrop; Set Decoration: Beatrice Brentnerová.

The best news about those nominations is that it could push “Nosferatu” over $100 million at the box office by the end of next weekend.

The Munich Olympics incident as seen from the broadcast booth of ABC Sports “September 5” earned a lone Best Original Screenplay nomination for Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum and co-writer Alex David. Jesse Eisenberg was nominated in that category for “A Real Pain,” along with Sean Baker (“Anora”), Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”), and Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote “The Brutalist.”

The adapted screenplay nominations went to “A Complete Unknown,” “Conclave,” “Nickel Boys,” “Sing Sing” and “Emilia Pérez.” “Wicked” was left out of that category for good reason.

Best Animated feature nominees include a new “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” from Netflix, “Inside Out 2” and “The Wild Robot” from the biggest animation houses, Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks, “Memoir of a Snail” and Latvian director
Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow.”

“Best directors direct best pictures,” the old adage goes. So “Anora” (Sean Baker), “A Complete Unknown” (James Mangold), “The Brutalist” (Brady Corbet ), and “The Substance” (Coralie Fargeat) might be the Best Picture favorites.


The complete Best Picture field is “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “A Complete Unknown,”“Conclave,” “Dune: Part Two,” “I’m Still Here,” ““Emilia Pérez,” “Nickel Boys,” “The Substance” and “Wicked.”

Some figure Denzel Washington (“Gladiator II”), Daniel Craig (“Queer”), Kate Winslet (“Lee”), Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”), Pamela Anderson (“The Last Showgirl”) and director Jon M. Chu (“Wicked”) were “snubbed. I’d add “Queer” as Best Picture, maybe Denis Villeneuve (“Dune: Part 2”) as Best Director, definitely Willem Dafoe (“Nosferatu,” Best Supporting actor) and Anjelina Jolie’s Best Actress nomination-worthy turn as “Maria” Callas as a geniune ommissions.

“Moana 2” and “Mufasa” didn’t make the Best Animated Feature field for obvious reasons. Last summer’s lavishly over-praised “Kinds of Kindness” crapped out with cause.

I think I’ll pull for “Nosferatu” in every category it’s up in, “The Wild Robot,” Demi Moore, Colman Domingo, Zoe Saldaña and Guy Pearce, Brady Corbet for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and “Brutalist” for Best Picture. What we’re looking for this year is memorable, from the heart and of-the-moment acceptance speeches of the sort that Adrien Brody delivered when he won for “The Pianist.”

Will we get them?

The 97th Academy Awards will be handed out on March 2 at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood, and telecast on ABC.

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Documentary Preview: A UFO/UAP “Aliens” doc that promises the Moon — “The Age of Disclosure”

Posted on January 23, 2025 by Roger Moore

A collection of (somewhat) more credible experts and officials than is usual for such docs — and Marco Rubio — tell us these “something is out there” phenomena are about to be proclaimed The Real Deal. Officially?

March 25, this one premieres at SxSW.

Will it deliver?

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Movie Preview: Single Mom experiences the First Day from Digital Hell — “Drop”

Posted on January 23, 2025 by Roger Moore

Saw this trailer in a theater last Thursday. Finally Universal/Blumhouse deigned to drop it onto YouTube.

Threatening “Let’s play a game” messages via a short distance “drop” into our heroine’s phone on a blind date.

Hell is cellular.

Meghann Fahy is the single mom.  Brandon Sklenar is the date. Who is sending those messages?

April 11.

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Movie Preview: Sean Astin’s an Old West Preacher, Casper Van Dien wears the “Guns of Redemption”

Posted on January 22, 2025 by Roger Moore

Jeff Fahey plays the heavy, Kaitlyn Kemp a damsel in distress in this Old West/Morality is a Firearm tale. That’s a pretty good cast for an indie outing, even if it comes a cropper.

“Guns of Redemption” streams March 7.

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Movie Review: Teacher helps a Troubled Student “Brave the Dark” of his Past

Posted on January 22, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Brave the Dark” is a earnest do-good/feel-good story of the “One Great Teacher Makes a Difference” genre. Released by Angel Studios, which brought us “Bonhoeffer,” “Sound of Freedom” and “Homestead,” where “earnest” is their brand, it’s a low-stakes, dramatically flat affair, a picture that never plucks the heartstrings it’s meant to.

“Dark” still makes a decent showcase for British actor Jared Harris (“Chernobyl,” “Mad Men,” and his acting brother Jamie Harris, if not for another brother — Damian Harris — who directed, had a hand in the script and never quite brings it to life.

They’re all sons of the late, great Hollywood hellion Richard Harris, if you didn’t know.

Nicholas Hamilton of “Captain Fantastic” and “It” is Nathan Williams, a high school hunk and track star at Pennsylvania’s Garden Spot High. He’s got a cute girlfriend (Sasha Bhasin), a ready running mate (Will Price), a leather jacket and a ’76 Camaro.

What more could a lad want in 1986 rural Pennsylvania?

It turns out that Nate’s keeping up appearances as the cleanest, best-laundered, best-groomed homeless kid in Lancaster County. He’s living in that Camaro. He runs track — in a fury — “just to use the showers.” He’s got no parents and no visible means of support. That’s a recipe for trouble, burglaries, just to get by.

The other teachers at Garden Spot might dismiss Nate as rude, impulsive, an indifferent student with a bad temper. But Mr. D, aka Stan Deen (Jared Harris), the English teacher, director of school plays and an adored figure on and off campus, notices Nate’s disappointment at not scoring anything from the vending machine. A Hershey bar is offered, and a slow-building mentorship and friendship begins.

In a school full of peers who shrug and say “Let the system take care of him,” after Nate is arrested for burglary, Mr. Deen decides to take matters into his own hands. He takes the kid in, questions and observes his actions and interests, and puts Nate’s photographic passion to work doing sets/backdrops for the school’s production of “Flowers for Algernon.”

Nate learns a few things about Mr. Deen — that he had dreams, that he came back to care for an infirm mother who recently died and that he’s not much of a housekeeper. And Mr. Deen slowly works his way towards understanding the kid his fellow teachers refer to as a “piece of trash,” the trauma of Nathan’s past.

“This too shall past,” he tells the boy, over and over, as Mr. Deen calls in favors in “the system” and takes his best shot at giving a child a chance, and maybe his own rewarding but disappointed life some purpose.

That phrase, “This too shall pass,” like the film’s generic cliche of a title, is banal in the extreme, another empty platitude in a movie full of them and a plot with little at stake and no edge.

And slapping another trademark Angel Studios, “Here’s the real guy this ‘true story’ is about to urge you to endorse this movie and ‘pay it forward’ by buying tickets for others” epilogue on “Brave the Dark” doesn’t change that.

The film glosses over how a teenager keeps a ’70s gas hog of a car going, much less feeds, grooms and clothes himself with no money as it avoids showing us how Nate navigates the difficult, energy and soul-sucking logistics of being homeless. There’s drama in that, and in keeping up the illusion that you’re not homeless to others.

The script never answers a question Nate asks on behalf of the viewer, “What’s your angle? Everybody’s got an angle, Stan.“

Harris plays Mr. Deen as an exhuberant “type,” that teacher who throws her or himself into their work and their students with such enthusiasm that he touches scores of lives each school year. Is it all a performance? Is he maintaining an illusion, just like Nate? What’s HIS story? Harris didn’t lobby for or reach for deeper insights into the character, and Deen’s big emotional moments just sort of arrive, they don’t build.

Jamie Harris plays the kid’s probation officer. The traditional Hollywood way of portraying such characters is to give a craggy, crusty-looking actor a leather jacket, which is all what we see here.

And young Hamilton has a hard time wringing any pathos out of this character the way he’s scripted. Nate is bland, even in his hot-tempered moments, which are rare, and his emotional epiphany, which is inexcusable.

While one appreciates any Angel Studios release that doesn’t lean on any particular agenda — it’s not overtly a “faith-based” film — “Brave the Dark” has too little else going on to ever make it much more than a way of passing the time.

Rating: PG-13, violence, teen drinking and drug abuse, some profanity

Cast: Jared Harris, Nicholas Hamilton, Sasha Bhasin, Will Price and Kimberly S. Fairbanks

Credits: Directed by Damian Harris, scripted by Lynn Robertson Hay and Dale G. Bradley, based on an original script by Nathaniel Deen and John P. Spencer. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:52

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Movie Preview: A twist on the remote house full of people who can’t make it “Until Dawn”

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Roger Moore

Peter Stormare is in this “Fresh Faces of 2025” sinister swing into the supernatural.

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Movie Preview: Ayo Edebiri, Juliette Lewis and Malkovich and his magnum cult “Opus”

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Roger Moore

Aged and reclusive pop icon comes out of seclusion for an”event” for the “select few.”

Have Kanye or Madonna thought of this?

The debut feature of Mark Anthony Green is built around a comedy central star, and John Malkovich.

March 14 from A24.

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