Movie Review: A Torch and a Card Trick are passed to a new Generation — “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t”

Posted on November 14, 2025 by Roger Moore

It helps to think of the “Now You See Me” film franchise as a manga that dodged the whole anime series then anime movie “product” assembly line. “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” brought on that epiphany.

Revived a dozen years after it launched and six years after a sequel that included Daniel Radcliffe, these tepid thrillers are pure pop fantasy, with a manga style universe in which magic is not just cool, it’s “hip.” Gen Y and Z are all about pop-up shows where four Gen X-ers — OK, three plus one Boomer — show them card tricks, rob the robber barons and serve up justice by sharing all that ill-gotten, hoarded wealth with the underemployed “Gen Z staring” masses.

If you think of it all as manga in origin, you can brush off every absurd assumption, assertion (“This is cool!”) and laughable “reality” with a “Well, that’s what’s big in Japan right now.”

Hey, we all have our coping mechanisms.

Confronted with this joyless, by-the-numbers “getting the band back together” reunion, with ancient overseer Michael Caine retired out of the series and the agent chasing these “outlaw” magicians around the globe (Mark Ruffalo) reduced to a Zoom call with three new “horsemen” recruited to the four FIVE horsemen of the first two films, you can’t just wait to hang on every word the normally wonderful Rosamund Pike utters for a laugh.

Pike plays the villain, a South African diamond mining empress. And that accent... Oh. My. God.

Ordinarily, actors not named Sharlto Copley, Alice Krige or Embeth Davidtz speak a version of English that’s mostly Aussie without the “crikeys.” But Pike (“Gone Girl”) goes at it like a Jamaican on a rum-bender in County Kildare.

“She makes all the world’s worst people possible,” is how Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg) describes Veronica Vanderberg’s blood diamond/money-laundering empire. Yes, and she makes South African Oscar winner Charlize Theron spit up her prosecco every time she opens her mouth.

The four credited screenwriters open the film with a pop-up show in Bushwick, with the long-split-up “Four Horsemen” of magic (Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson and even Isla Fischer from the first film) pulling out all the stops as they appear, disappear and make a crypto bro’s millions vanish into the hands of the Gen Z audience.

But it turns out the “Horsemen” weren’t really there. It was an illusion/hustle cooked up by Ms. Parkour practicing Pickpocket June (Ariana Greenblatt), tech nerd illusionist Charlie (Justice Smith) and “Horsemen” hating master of disguise Bosco (Domonic Sessa).

J. Daniel Atlas is not amused. He was summoned there by a tarot card clue, and after he’s instantly sussed who the real practical jokers are, he enlists the new kids on the block for a heist.

Can the world’s largest diamond, the wellspring of the wealth of the Vanderberg diamond empire, be swiped? Let the old blood meet the new blood and we’ll see if that can be sorted out.

Jack (Franco), reduced to cruise ship magic bookings, mom Henley (Fisher) and hard-drinking hypnotist.”mentalist” Merritt (Harrelson) show up with their own Tarot card summons to pitch in, mid-theft.

“This liver is not going to destroy itself,” Merritt reasons between rounds.

They don tuxes and evening wear and disguises, crash galas, zipline, jet off to “the Orlando of the Middle East” (Abu Dhabi), steal a Formula One race car and face death because, as our South African princess reminds us “The Vanderberg family day nowt lowse!”

The humor is meant to come from the clash of generations, mocking shots of “You kids make a REAL difference” and the like.

The illusions are well-handled, “unbelievable” but easy enough to pull off — in a movie. Bringing back Henley’s “replacement” Horseman from “Now You See Me 2” (Lizzy Caplan) is worth a chuckle or three, mainly in her disguises.

But there are now FAR too many characters to track. And there’s no pop to the story or the new recruits. An F-1 car chase, a harrowing escape or two and more magic words of wisdom from the sage Thaddeus (Morgan Freeman) don’t put the picture over.

That four-handed screenplay gives us 85 minutes of movie, and “Zombieland/Venom” director Ruben Fleischer drags that out to nearly two hours. That underscores just how much this disposable piffle outstays its welcome.

As for the formidable Ms. Pike, let’s hope this over-budget card trick and her accent vanish before any real career damage is done.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Rosamund Pike, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Justice Smith, Dave Franco, Ariana Greenblatt, Lizzy Caplan, Dominic Sessa and Morgan Freeman

Credits: Directed by Ruben Fleischer, scripted by Seth Grahame-Smith, Michael Leslie, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, based on characters created by Boaz Yakin. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:52

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Movie Review: “The Running Man” Stumbles into a Dead End

Posted on November 14, 2025 by Roger Moore

About thirty minutes into the Glen Powell/Edgar Wright remake of “The Running Man” I thought “This is kind of working.” I invested in this updating of Stephen King’s dytopian sci-fi horror for the age of ICE, fascism and murderously amoral media and new star Glen Powell navigating it.

There are jokes connecting the film to the 1987 original. This fascist mediacracy America uses “New Dollars,” and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last “Running Man,” has his picture on the currency. Wright brings in his “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” star Michael Cera, and there’s a further sop to the fangirls and fanboys in a character who researches, writes and performs a vlog dissecting the infamous race-to-the-death TV show called “The Running Man.”

But the film’s grim tone suggests serious intent, and Wright wrestles with how to manage that messaging throughout. About an hour in, we get the first hints that Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall are scripting themselves into a corner. And upon arriving at that dead end, they focus group themselves right out of topical, allegorical sci-fi thriller and into a finish that’s the least satisfying or logical of the “Sean of the Dead/Hot Fuzz” director’s career.

Powell plays a short-tempered blue collar laborer in this future winner-take-all economy. Ben Richards can’t keep a job, at least partly because of his compassion and sense of responsibility to his fellow workers. His wife (Jayme Lawson) can only take so many extra shifts at The Libertine, a strip club where she insists she just “waits tables.”

And in an America where the working masses are at each other’s throats, the health care system has entered its end game. They’re on their own with a sick toddler and no money to get her “good pharm,” the medicine and medical care that will let her survive the latest iteration of the flu.

The Network isn’t just serving up all manner of “reality” FreeVee TV shows with terminal stakes for the participants. They’re the outsourced supplier of masked “goons” who serve as private police. Some of those goons are the hunters and killers on their most popular show, “The Running Man.”

Ben Richards insists “I’m not stupid enough” to audition for that 30-days-on-the-lam program, whose participants are always hunted down and killed before surviving the full thirty days and collecting the big paycheck. But when Ben shows up, desperate and ill-tempered, for the clearinghouse audition for any of a number of Network game shows, “Running Man” creator/show-runner Dan Killian (Josh Brolin at his toothiest) identifies him as the best prospect for his series, pitched to auditioners as “We’ve got the cash if you’ve got the balls.”

Maybe it was his responses to word association and the holographic Rorschach Tests. “The angriest man to ever audition” is a star in the making, Killian figures.

Ben signs on the dotted line, sends cash home to the wife — who is taken into hiding. And he braces himself for the challenge of running, hiding, disguising and fighting his way past paid thugs and freelance yahoos angling for the rewards the show promises to those who help track Ben, dopey Tim (Martin Herlihy) or their running woman Jenni (Katy O’Brian) down and kill them.

Colman Domingo tries to bring a little Tucci/Elizabeth Banks “Hunger Games” showmanship to the role of MC, the person who whips up the studio audience and viewers at home about how “evil” these “criminals” are that they’re turning loose to be hunted down on TV.

Ben quickly figures out this isn’t on the up-and-up. The Network deep fakes videos, backgrounds and the speeches the hunted “criminals” make and uses any means at its disposal to hunt and stage bloody executions in prime time — once the runners have driven the ratings up — collateral damage be damned.

King came back to this sort of Darwinian contest idea for “The Long Walk,” which was recently filmed. And “The Hunger Games” was just one YA novel series that stole that plot.

Dystopia seems a lot closer to real life than it did when King wrote the book and when Schwarzenegger & Co. first committed it to film. Not sure if that’s a selling point any more than the futuristic slums and legions of neon-lined futurecars mixed in with retrofitted DeLoreans, Citroens and the like we see in the crowded streets. But yes, the production values are first rate.

And there’s something primal about the chase, and “The Running Man” gets us pondering how we’d get out of this or that jam, get away from the D.C./Philly region to New York, Boston and — of course — Derry, Maine, the Capital of Stephen King Country.

Powell may be adept at taking us along for the run, but Brolin at his most sinister is the one who makes the sale. Yes, “entertainment” really could come to this.

Alas, the film’s pacing is stumbling and the longer it goes on, the less urgency we feel in that chase.

There’s little character development, with supporting roles barely sketched in. William H. Macy plays the black market explosives, disguises and weapons dealer/pal that everybody on the lam needs. Daniel Ezra plays the vlogger, with Angelo Gray as the kid brother who talks him into helping this stranger escape the mob and the goons.

And then, as we check our phones or watches for the umpteeth time, we figure that the fellows writing this have no neat, original, satisfying or “true” way of wrapping it all up. The sad part of that is they knew this before we did.

Everything they throw at the screen in the last 12 minutes plays like rewrites, reshoots and a studio badly fumbling what they’d thought was a sure thing way back when they set it up.

Rating: R, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin, Jayme Lawson, Daniel Ezra, William H. Macy, Angelo Gray, Michael Cera, Lee Pace and Colman Domingo.

Credits: Directed by Edgar Wright, scripted by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright, based on a Stephen King novel. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:13

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Classic Film Review: Lesser Lubitsch, a “Heaven Can Wait” (1943) that Bores

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

When we think of the Hollywood comedies by the great German expat Ernst Lubitsch, we remember Garbo at her drollest, a Bolshevik who falls in love in “Ninotchka,” the doors-slamming-on-Nazis backstage farce “To Be or Not to Be” and the oft-remade wit of “The Shop Around the Corner.”

We recollect the sophistication, the famed “Lubitsch touch” that made his films stand apart, even those less timeless titles (“That Uncertain Feeling”).

The monied, high-society setting and comedy of manners and mores “touch” is in evidence in his adaptation of the play “Birthday,” which the studio retitled “Heaven Can Wait” for its 1943 release.

Some critics at the time park this one in the pantheon of Lubitsch pictures, and a few today still do. But blame it on the limitations of the Technicolor production process, the time the film premiered — right at the height of World War II — the screwball-averse cast or the source material itself if you want to. Any way you slice it, this picture’s a sentimental stiff.

Glancing at reviews of it at the time on the film’s Wikipedia page, the greatest critic of the era might have been the only one to see the light. “Not up to his best,” James Agee opined. I’d go so far as labeling it a “Magnificent Ambersons” with fewer laughs.

The game is given away straight off as Alfred Newman’s score quotes freely from that 1909 tune “By the Light of the Silv’ry Moon.” Whatever else is going on here, a fat coating of sentiment will be lathered over it.

A “great cavalier of the gay ’90s” has died and gotten an appointment with “His Excellency,” Satan. The womanizing old man (Don Ameche) taking a seat before a towering Lucifer (Laird Cregar) is sure he’s hellbound and that he’s earned it. But the tall, tuxedo’d Old Scratch will decide if he meets “our requirements.”

So Henry Van Cleve of the Manhattan Van Cleves tells us and His Excellency the story of his privileged life and his lifelong infatuation with “girls,” from the child in pigtails he crushed on as a tween, through his marriage and into his dotage.

Impressing one of a couple of schoomates he was sweet on as a child required the gift of a captured beetle. Life lesson learned?

“If you want to win a girl, you have to have lots of beetles.”

We meet the oft-fired housemaid/French teacher (Signe Hasso) who gave teen Henry his first drink and it’s implied, first taste of sexual experience. Henry’s mother is quite put out at his “ill” her son must be, mumbling and half-passed-out as he is.

“Oh Randolph! Our boy, DELIRIOUS in a foreign language!

We see the young 20something Henry fall hard for a vision of 1890s femininity — Martha. Gene Tierney, who’d film the movie’s she’s most remembered for, “Laura,” the next year, makes Martha Strabel beguiling and guileless, just a girl from new money in Kansas who has no intention of letting her parents (Marjorie Main and the blustery character comic Eugene Pallette) keep her in Kansas. She’s just gotten engaged to Henry’s square young lawyer cousin Albert (Allyn Joslyn) to ensure she gets out.

Not for long.

When Henry poses as a store sales clerk (she’s interested in a “How to Please Your Husband” self-help book), poor Martha doesn’t even know she’s being courted and set up for an elopement at Henry’s birthday party later that evening. Albert barely has a chance to make their big announcement and introduce his prospective in-laws before the happy not-quite-a-couple-yet are off.

These scenes, stuffed with a smorgasbord of the best character actors of the day, charm and merit a grin, maybe two. Louis Calherne is Henry’s indulgent “keep a stiff upper lip” father. Spring Byington is a my-boy-can-do-no-wrong mom. But the venerable Charles Coburn has the most chances for laughs as the all-knowing grandad who sees through the lad and his son and daughter-in-law’s failed parenting. Grandpa sees enough of himself in the 26 year-old to give it all away.

He gruffly questions his butler, whom he sends after the elopers in mock outrage, shoving cash into that butler’s hands to get the young couple out of town.

“She was packed by E.F. Strabel / To be served at Albert’s table / But that Henry changed the label. Now that’s poetry!”

Wisecracks about Kansas “yokels” and the like keep the tone light in the early scenes. But the stodgy “My life story as told to the Devil” framework slows the pace and drains the light out of laughs that should trot by at a sprint.

Henry can’t think of any one capital offense that’s earned him the right to Eternity in Hell.

“But I can safely say my whole life was one continuous misdemeanor!”

For me, “Heaven Can Wait” doesn’t light up until the setting shifts to Kansas, an HOUR into the narrative. There’s where Martha is fleeing after years of Henry’s constant philandering around the fringes of their “happy” marriage.

The bickering Strabel matriarch and patriarch, who disowned Martha, can’t bear to sit closer than 25 feet apart at breakfast. An early 1900s disagreement over “the funny papers” has to be adjudicated by a long-suffering servant (Clarence Muse, who almost steals these scenes).

Pallette, who was Little John to Flynn’s “Robin Hood” and the blustering, flustered employer of “My Man Godfrey” is in his usual dudgeon, and Main (the future “Ma Kettle”) is more than his match.

The film’s screwball possibilities are evident early on, but mildly dithered away. That broken promise is only kept (almost) in this Kansas sequence, with Henry dashing in to lie and finesse his wife back home.

The stately pacing seems to reflect the somber mood of the country, the world and time the film was conceived and released in. I’ll bet this pattered by at a sprint on the stage.

Ameche had a sort of Ralph Bellamy handsome guy who doesn’t always get the girl career in his younger years. Whatever possibilities this scoundrel Henry Van Cleve afforded him weren’t really realized until his grand ’80s comeback — “Trading Places” (co-starring with Bellamy), two “Cocoon” movies and “Things Change.”

Tierney was a star hitting just hitting her peak, but she was never known for comedy.

Cregar’s turn as Satan is more of a sight gag than anything the screenwriter or the actor tried to have any fun with.

One can wonder if re-casting with a Stanwyck/Jean Arthur type would have goosed the pacing and the picture’s punch, with Ameche amping up his performance just to hold his own.

Shooting it in black and white might have stripped the “stately” out of this “escape” and allowed Lubitsch to pick up the tempo. Technicolor slowed many a feature film production to a crawl.

But what’s here is never more than a wry template for a sendup of dated mores and manners with a sentimental Satan there to hold our anti-hero’s hand and assure him that he’s not really suited for “down here,” even if “up there” seems like a bigger stretch.

And through it all, Alfred Newman keeps coming back to his idea of the right “Sentimental Journey” tone that the score needed, the maudlin but not-quite-sappy-enough to be funny (here) “Silv’ry Moon.”

Seen today, “Heaven Can Wait” — which was the title of the play that became the film “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” which Warren Beatty remade as “Heaven Can Wait” in 1978 — feels like a polished production of a darkly funny film on the page rendered into something too sober by half on the screen.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG

Cast: Gene Tierney, Don Ameche, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main, Eugene Pallette, Louis Calherne, Spring Byington, Allyn Joslyn, Signe Hasso, Clarence Muse and Laird Cregar

Credits: Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, scripted by Samuel Raphaelson, based on a play by Leslie Bush-Fekete. A 20th Century Fox release.

Running time: 1:52

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Movie Preview: An outbreak, a “Thing is spreading,” and Liam Neeson’s here to help put it in “Cold Storage”

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

Getting strong “The Stand” and “Andromeda Strain” with a splattery comic edge from this trailer.

Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery co-star in this star screenwriter David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Ghost Town,” “Indiana Jones/Dial of Destiny”) project.

Feb. 13.

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Movie Preview: Timing? “The Devil Wears Prada 2”

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

A sequel to the 2006 film based on a novel even further from a different era, with everybody involved 20 years older, seems kind of…made for streaming.

But when you’ve got Streep, Hathaway, Blunt and Tucci on board, there’s nothing for it but to zip up and doll-up and make your plans for May 1.

Fashion comes back into fashion?

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Movie Preview: Sam Rockwell is “FROM THE FUTURE!” — “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die”

Posted on November 13, 2025 by Roger Moore

A week doesn’t go by when I don’t dial hop past some “Pirates of the Caribbean” telecast and wonder “Whatever happened to Gore Verbinski?

The dude directed “Mouse Hunt,” “The Mexican,” “The Ring” and “The Weather Man” before selling his soul to Disney.

Well, here he is, behind the camera for an all-star action-farce about how a slob from the future starts the revolution today.

Zazie Beetz, Michael Pena, Juno Temple, Haley Lu Richardson and Asim Chandry are also in the cast.

Feb. 13, we see how it all goes down.

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Movie Review: Exiled Man and Woman wrestle with their Pasts on “The Silent Planet”

Posted on November 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

“The Silent Planet” is a sci-fi allegory that attempts to take the pulse of the human condition in our current, fear-immigrants moment and doesn’t quite come off.

One can appreciate the cleverness of seeing The Tablelands in Canada’s Gros Morne National Park as an alien world and some (but not all) of the sci-fi world-building-on-a-budget. But the script looks for universalities, loss, crimes and redemption or at least “tests” of humanity that it almost finds but never quite grasps.

Elias Koteas, a veteran of “The Last Days on Mars,” “The Baker” and “Chicago P.D.” is Theodore, an aged miner sentenced to this out-world where he digs up valuable ore which he’s able to electrically launch into a vehicle in low atmosphere orbit. He lives in the living-pod quarters stage of an atmospheric entry vehicle.

It’s implied that Theodore is the lone miner on this low-oxygen planet or planetoid (Europa?). For all the expense and tech it took to get him and those who proceded him –one at a time — there, his tools are a hammer, a chisel and a wheel barrow. The entry vehicle he plunged to the surface on had him strapped into a transparent bubble that forces him to face the searing flames and heat of hurtling downward. All part of his punishment?

Let’s take a moment to be thankful the writer-director didn’t call the mineral “unobtainium.”

Theodore mutters to himself through his days, writes and watches the sitcom “Roomies” at night during the 14 hour days. For some reason, he removes the life monitor planted in his chest. His overseers assume he’s dead. For some other reason, Theodore keeps mining and making his deposits into orbit.

Niyya (Briana Middleton of “Sharper” and “The Tender Bar”) is sent to replace him before anybody figures out the other guy is still there, just crazy.

Earth has been visited by aliens called the Oieans, designed and attired like creatures straight out of 1960s era “Doctor Who.” The planet has been less than welcoming of these interplanetary refugees. That’s how Niyya, raised by Oieans, got into trouble and was sentenced to work on thise mines.

“F— Humanity!” she’s scribbled in her journal, which Theodore promptly swipes rather than welcoming his new “company.” He’s paranoid, and he has his reasons. She’s paranoid and she has hers. At least she got Oiean advice as a child that might help her cope with her future.

“You can climb to the top of the world, but you can’t climb above yourself.”

Not sure if that’s as helpful as they make out. On a world with low oxygen, with a crazed fellow criminal your only company and rolling, sentient purple fog that reads your thoughts and turns them against you, “the silence will crush you.” Can these two just get along?

The clumsy arbitrariness of the plot, the “rules” of this world and the limits the story imposes which characters sometimes ignore undercut any “reality” we’re meant to buy into. Flashbacks, even those with nudity and murky evidence of past crimes, don’t illuminate much.

The actors are pretty much stranded in the The Tablelands with a static plot, spacesuit costumes, the flimsiest fake survival without O2 gear ever budgeted and most everything — wheel barrows included — sourced at nearby Deer Lake’s Home Hardware.

You don’t need a lot of Canadian money to pull off science fiction. But you do need to at least let us see what the actors must have seen in the script in the finished product.

Rating: TV-16+, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Elias Koteas, Briana Middleton and Courtney Lancaster.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeffrey St. Jules. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:35

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Movie Preview: Zooey and Charlie Cox break up, but “Merv” the dog isn’t having it

Posted on November 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

Zooey Deschanel and “Daredevil” Charlie Cox star in an old-fashioned/new fashioned romance of the sort that Deschanel used to excel in.

They play a couple splitting up, with a dog who isn’t taking it well. He needs a trip to “a dog beach in Florida.”

Kudos to the filmmakers for casting a real dog. That doesn’t look like any dog beach I visited during my years in Florida. But I’d totally go back and bring our pack if somebody threw together a beachside amusement park for puppies.

It’s an MGM release Dec. 10 on Amazon Prime.

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Book Review — “The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki: The Influences and Inspirations Behind the Iconic Films”

Posted on November 12, 2025 by Roger Moore

This fall’s North American box office success of such anime franchises as “Chainsaw Man” and “Demon Slayer” and the vast collection of such titles on offer from Netflix underscore the soaring popularity and international appeal of the Japanese animated art form.

But when it comes to anime, there is but one godfather and undisputed master of that world. The Oscar-winning writer and director Hayao Miyazaki, now 84 years old, is the artist who still towers over any serious discussion of anime. And his films, from “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Ponyo” to “Spirited Away” and “The Wind Rises” are still the exemplars of the best anime, a corner of film dominated by artistically inferior and far less demanding franchises with mass production TV production values.

“The Worlds of Hayao Miyazki” is a lovely new appreciation of Miyazaki’s art and touchstone films in book form, a breakdown of the myriad influences that this artist absorbed before making “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “The Boy and the Heron.”

Nicolas Rapold, a former editor in chief of “Film Comment” magazine, has written an “unofficial” and “unauthorized” biography that isn’t a conventional “biography” at all. “Worlds” touches on some of Miyazaki’s life story and folds bits of biography in with the scores of literary and animation origins and origin stories he tapped into to create his work. The new book is an illustrated biographical monograph compiled without much in the way of fresh access to Miyazaki or his animation house, Studio Ghibli.

We learn of the filmmaker’s youthful love of early sci-fi writer Jules Verne and how that helped shape the “steampunk” settings and production design of works like “Future Boy Conan,” Castle in the Sky” and “Howl’s Moving Castle.” Rapold may try to correct that “steampunk” label, but Miyazaki was most fans’ introduction to that world.

Miyazaki’s World War II childhhood and his father’s work for a fighter plane parts manufacturer informed the aviation-centric “Porco Rosso” and his fanciful “Jiro dreams of Zeroes” biography of a Japanese fighter plane designer — “The Wind Rises.” There are academic theses and New York Times “think pieces” on Miyazki’s obsession with flight, some of which Rapold traces back to an oft-mentioned favorite book from his youth, “The Little Prince.”

Miyazaki wasn’t just reading, digesting and adaptation variations of characters, fantasy themes and settings from “The Little Prince,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Pippi Longstocking” or “The Secret Garden.” Like Disney corporate practice to this day, he’d take colleagues on scouting trips to quaint, historical European cities and towns to inform the backgrounds of his often Euro-centric stories.

Rapold labels Miyazaki’s ability to absorb and re-think themes, ideas and characters into new stories “magpie tendencies,” and these manifest themselves in forms that render seemingly “foreign” fantasies like “Ponyo” somehow familiar.

That’s just a Japanese “The Little Mermaid” with younger characters and more modern and more Japanese concerns and considerations.

I’m not much of a fan of fantasy fiction or films. And using Miyazaki as your benchmark is a great way to dismiss the vast majority of anime as boilerplate mass production piffle, from under-developed derivative stories to under-animated execution.

But if you’re going to have standards, “The Japanese Walt Disney” is a great place to set the bar. His creative process, style, influences and the ongoing impact he has have been covered elsewhere, in a very fine TV documentary “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki,” for instance.

“The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki” adds to that appreciation. It’s a beautiful book, filled with images from those inspirations and how Miyazaki re-imagined them, and a grand overview of the touchstone TV and film works of Miyazaki’s career. Even a casual Miyazki fan will be transported back to those films, gain insight into their themes and the creative process. That makes this new publication a great gift idea for the anime or animation fan on your holiday shopping list.

“The Worlds of Hayao Miyazaki: The Influences and Inspiration Behind the Iconic Films.” By Nicolas Rapold. Frances Lincoln Publishers. 224 pages. $35.

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Movie Preview: A Dog Eat Dog/Winner Take All Job Market leaves Him with “No Other Choice”

Posted on November 11, 2025 by Roger Moore

This festival darling, the latest from Park Chan Wook (“Old Boy”) has echoes of the Michael Caine dark comedy about (literal) cutthroat corporate life, “A Shock to the System.”

Long term unemployment means you’ve got to do something to better your odds of landing that next job. “Anything.”

Christmas Day in select cities, everywhere when the Oscar nominations honor it in January.

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