Netflixable? “Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story”

Posted on September 22, 2025 by Roger Moore

The stakes could not be higher. The sneering gang of armed men burst into the house, punch and abuse the inhabitants and ransack the place looking for “the money.”

The husband is bloodied and the pregnant wife slapped around, all in front of their just-graduated-kindergarten little boy.

The thugs threaten to execute the Brazilian immigrant owners of a trucking company right there in their Winter Garden, Florida McMansion. And we’re pretty sure they mean it.

But in “Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story,” the goons over-react and paste on their sneers, and the Borges underreact. There’s no frantic urgency to the ransacking and little sense that the actors playing the victims — starting with the child and including the parents — are in mortal terror.

They’re so “off” that we naturally wonder what they’re hiding, what their connection to this crime might be, how “clean” that money the mobsters are looking for is. What are they not telling us about why they were targeted?

When you’re telling a “true story” about a real home invasion and the pregant wife’s response to it, that’s a staggering blunder, one worth hiring a lawyer over. The script, the performances and the direction are accidentally suggesting the victims kind of expected this and for good reason.

“Orange is the New Black” alumna Dascha Polenco has the title role and sets the tone for a film that shows its hand as “A Lifetime Original Movie” long before we read the credits. She doesn’t quite sleepwalk through the film, but her every under-reaction to being taken hostage, stuffed in a car trunk, threatened and taken to a bank to make a withdrawal with a clock allegedly ticking down towards her family’s “execution” lowers the stakes of the movie.

Most of the performances, even by the sneering gangsters (Marito Lopez, Ivan Lopez and Mitchell Jaramillo), feel like the walk-through of a scene, a rehearsal just before director Felipe Rodriguez says “Let’s film this. ACTION!”

Nisa Gundez (TV’s “Designated Survivor”) tries to vamp up the over-the-top ringleader of the gang.

“You. Have. The. Wrong. People.” Marcela calmly corrects her.

“I know everything about you,” bitchy Bianca hisses back, so unconvincingly that we’re pretty sure she doesn’t.

Rodriguez, who directed the TV series “Ruby and the Well” and “Blood and Water” manages to raise the stakes for the violent finale. But everything leading up to that is dully acted, filmed and edited, and even in the action climax, the weak fight choreography lets us see the tumbles slow-tumbled and the “stage punches” pulled.

This is a terrible film, and if you ever wondered by the mass production women-and-families-in-peril thrillers from Lifetime have their own disparaging label — “Lifetime Original Movie” — now you know.

Rating: TV-14, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Dascha Polenco, Johnathan Souza, Nisa Gunduz, Marito Lopez, Ivan Lopez and Mitchell Jaramillo

Credits: Directed by Felipe Rodriguez, scripted by Crystal Verge. A Lifetime Movie on Netflix.

Running time: 1:26

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Netflixable? “Terror Comes Knocking: The Marcela Borges Story”

Movie Review: Widower Timothy Spall crosses Britain on “The Last Bus”

Posted on September 21, 2025 by Roger Moore

The first impression Timothy Spall made on film fans was when he played a plump, delusional, somewhat daft chef in Mike Leigh’s quirky slice-of-working-class dream, “Life is Sweet.”

Restaurateur Aubrey thought putting boiled bacon consumme, prune quiche and pork cyst on the menu of a restaurant he chose to name after a favorite French song — “Regret Rien” (Edith Piaf’s signature tune, “Je ne regrette rien”) — a restaurant named “Regret Nothing” serving “pork cyst.”

Spall’s subsequent career has garnered acclaim — an OBE from the Queen and a BAFTA — and roles ranging from Churchill in “The King’s Speech” to the great English painter JMW Turner in “Mr. Turner,” Britain’s “Last Hangman,” and Ian Paisley in the Northern Irish peace talks drama “The Journey” (opposite Colm Meaney).

“The Last Bus” casts Spall as a doddering retiree in a cross Britain quest travelogue about a man with a mission, an old man with sad secrets.

It preceeded by a couple of years the entirely-too-similar but slightly better “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” starring Spall’s “Life is Sweet” co-star, Jim Broadbent.

Both are fictional tales tacked onto a cross-country travelogue, old men stories about regrets and “promises” to keep, the infirmities of old age be damned. In “Pilgrimage,” our Old Age Pensioner hero stumbles into his undertaking on foot and becomes an unlikely Forrest Gump social media star as he covers some 500 miles to see a dying friend.

In “The Last Bus,” our trekker plans an itinerary that will allow him to travel from one local bus stop to the next, all the way from John O’Groats at the northern tip of Scotland to Land’s End at the southernmost tip of England, in Cornwall. And yes, he finds himself photographed for more than one social media mention as he attempts the 874 mile long bus ride.

We meet a young couple (Natalie Mitson and Ben Ewing) in the early ’50s just as the distraught wife is begging her mate to “take from away from here, as far away as we can go.”

Tom dutifully gets them on a bus and they flee Land’s End to the furthest point away from it in Britain, John O’Groats.

Flashbacks will tell us whether it was scandal, trauma or tragedy that sent them packing. And bits of the life they enjoyed in the north — working class jobs that got them a cozy home with a garden — are sampled as Tom packs a tiny old leather briefcase that gives him a “Paddington Bear” air — to some — and boards that first local bus.

He is retracing that journey they took as a couple long ago, with an exacting schedule, beds and breakfasts in place of the inns they knew back then.

He will meet friendly drivers and generous strangers, and bus-riding bigots and prickly, unsympathetic men behind the wheel. There will be stumbles and accidents and little moments of delight with a cheer squad, a tipsy Glaswegian and a bachelorette party bantering with football fans. Tom will share his “war” experiences with a young man off to enlist because of a young woman.

“You were in the war?”

“Yes.”

“First World War?”

A pause leaves room for a chuckle that never quite comes –– “The Second.”

He’s doing this by local “bus,” many ask him, incredulously? “Better than walking.”

Spall is, of course, everything you’d want in this little old man — stoic, playing the part in the forlorn face of old age, lower lip stuck out like his and every other actor’s version of Churchill, taking it one tiny, uncertain step at a time, in a hurry but not making great time, charming children and confronting a bully like a geezer with nothing left to lose.

The production has a limited amount of local color accompanying Tom’s many encounters with strangers of all stripes. And it does an indifferent job of letting us know of Tom’s progress, identifying exactly where he is most of the time. Well traveled Britons will pick up on accents and street scenes. But we rarely glimpse Tom’s map or itinerary.

It’s a little weepy, not terribly surprising and only colorful in its lead performance. But Spall makes “The Last Bus” watchable, even if his old castmate Broadbent bettered this film thanks to a script with more to it, one that put a more comic twist on a very personal tragedy.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Timothy Spall, Phyllis Logan, Natalie Mitson, Ben Ewing, Patricia Panther and Steven Duffy

Credits: Directed by Gillies Mackinnon, scripted by Joe Ainsworth. A Samuel Goldwyn film on Tubi,

Running time: 1:26

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: Widower Timothy Spall crosses Britain on “The Last Bus”

ASC Blackfriars, “Two Gents”

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Roger Moore
With Bard as my witness, I have never seen a production of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” that the dog didn’t steal. Twas ever thus.

A famous stage director who ran the drama department of a theatre conservatory I used to cover and review once told me that in this show, the best test for a young actor is pairing them up with the dog, Crab, as Launce the sassy servant.  Because you never know what the dog will do and how big a laugh the damned dog will get for doing it.

The actor has to react, “be totally present” and ready for anything and have an idea of a funny reaction response.

Because the dog gets a treat every time she or he delivers. That’s an incentive for hamminess if ever there was, in Shakespeare’s productions, and at the ASC Blackfriars one.

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Comments Off on ASC Blackfriars, “Two Gents”

Camera Heritage Museum, Staunton, VA.

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Roger Moore

One of those quirky little museums that celebrate a collector and her or his passions. The Camera Heritage Museum in Staunton has some 7000 cameras and accessories, nearly two centuries’ worth — under one roof and on display.

Here, David Schwartz has put 58 years into adding to a vast collection of cameras, a history of photography from early 19th Century Dageurreotypes to the first Kodaks to large format and tiny “spy cameras,” with every camera maker and type and design you can think of represented. 

And yes, that’s one of the cameras Leni Riefenstahl used to do “Olympia.”

Come for a little Shakespeare at the Blackfriars, grab a little lunch and duck into The Camera Heritage Museum to remember every camera you ever had, and those that belonged to grandma, great grandpa and on back. 

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Comments Off on Camera Heritage Museum, Staunton, VA.

Movie Review: A Slight Flight of Fantasy Fancy billed as “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey”

Posted on September 19, 2025 by Roger Moore

Pairing up Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell for a big screen fantasy romance doesn’t pay off in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a film that has one or two big moments on its road-trip-romantic “journey,” a little digitally augmented “beauty” along the way, but little that measures up to anybody’s idea of “bold.”

Robbie, perhaps in an attempt to shrug off “just a beautiful face” pigeon-holing in Hollywood, doesn’t do romances. And Farrell, bless his heart, decided not to have a proper shave for this role. But they’re game and light when they need to be even if the heart’s-sad-baggage story lets them down.

David’s a 40ish single doing all right for himself in his solitary life in an unnamed Left Coast city. But a road trip to a weekend wedding might be foiled by that parking boot on his tire. Serendipity delivers a flier for A Rental Car agency, close enough to reach on foot, tucked in an alley in a cavernous warehouse.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the German-accented potty mouth who runs the place, which only rents 1994 Saturns. Kevin Kline is the wise old mechanic who keeps them running.

David will be “f—-d” if his “phone craps out,” so she gives the option GPS the hard sell.

They take his photo but she already has a head shot on file. She thinks he’s an actor. He’s not.

“Ve perform more than ve tink ve do,” she purrs in her best Beer Hall Putsch accent, which comes und goes.

“Sometimes we have to perform to get at the truth,” the Oscar-winning mechanic philosophizes.

Sure enough, David needs the GPS, which starts communicating with him directly on the trip. That’s how he’s paired up with another ’94 Saturn SM driver, Sarah. They’re thrown together when hers won’t start.

They’re both determined to stay single, so they can flirt at the wedding. But she’ll dance and he doesn’t dance. He can smile, make eye contact and ask questions, but she isn’t having it.

“Stop trying to be charming…I’m afraid of hurting you.”

Even though she hooks up with someone else at the wedding, they’re back in the car whose GPS has a mind of its own. It’s when it directs them to stop in a forest where a red door in a doorway to nowhere beckons that the magical realism kicks in.

Such doors will take them in a corner of each other’s past — sad, teen traumatic, wistful and the like.

When the second door hurls them into David as his 15 year-old self, a grown man determined to warn the co-star he crushed on in their high school musical of her “future” with the lout she prefers to be with, “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” peaks. Too early, it turns out.

“How to Succeed in Business” is derailed, mid-opening night, by a singing, dancing David who carries his pleas to his crush onstage for all the confused audience to see. Luckily, “musical nerd” Sarah is there to bail him out.

After that moment, “Big Bold” ebbs. And all the sadness interrupted by jokes that follow can’t equal it or top it. The Seth Reiss script devolves into a series of “We can’t date” arguments that can’t transcend cloying.

The journey, contrived by The Rental Car Agency and its all-knowing GPS, is to resolve their “issues” and offer closure about this unrequited love or that parent you never got to say “goodbye” to.

Sarah’s cynicism and David’s emotional detachment must be explained and reconciled in Psychology 101 terms.

And what could have been a wistful/hopeful light-hearted romp just slogs up and down a soggy West Coast Interstate with the odd stop for a CGI sunset as viewed from a lighthouse.

The “doors” are a trite device, and the high school, lighthouse, after hours at a museum, hospital etc. they lead to are rarely magical.

The casting coups suggest this might have seemed frothier and more fun on the page. But director Kogonada — the John Cho trapped in “Columbus” Ohio dramedy was his — wasn’t having that. He leans into the “learning” and smothers the life out of the fantasy.

Waller-Bridge may earn the picture its R-rating all by herself, but her f-bombs quickly lose their comical sting.

And there’s only so much twinkle in Robbie’s Sarah warnings to David she’ll “hurt” him, his plea that “Maybe I’ll hurt you” and Robbie’s side eye, with the implied “Look at me and tell me who’ll hurt whom, near-beard boy.”

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Colin Farrell, Margot Robbie, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Hamish Linklater, Jennifer Grant, Lily Rabe and Kevin Kline.

Credits: Directed by Kogonada, scripted by Seth Reiss. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:49

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: A Slight Flight of Fantasy Fancy billed as “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey”

Movie Review: The Deal with the Devils it takes for “Him” to Make it in Pro Football

Posted on September 19, 2025 by Roger Moore

Pro football, the movie doctor about to take on the institution over the issue of “Concussion” was famously warned, “owns a day of the week. The same day the Church used to own!”

“Him” is a horror movie that takes on that same institution, the “God, family and football” and not necessarily in that order ethos that the football crazed (and gambling-on-football addicts) preach. It’s a mad, ambitious allegory that dives into the Deal with the Devil one makes for a career in the game.

What director and co-writer Justin Tipping’s film asserts is nothing less than football is, in much of America, not just cultish but The New Religion. Those with the skill and physique necessary to compete must sacrifice everything — their bodies and futures included — if they want to glimpse the glory and partake in the pageant of it all.

“You think this is a GAME?”

You want to quarterback in the pros, you’ve got to bleed, suffer, master the pressure and see yourself as a god whose destiny is to be the GOAT — the Greatest of All Time.

Tipping’s film, produced by horror impressario Jordan Peele, takes a focused and talented top prospect (Tyriq Withers, quite good), recovering from severe head trauma, into a one week tryout that is a version of Dante’s descent into Hell. Team mascots become demons and satyrs, “free agents” trying out become sacrificial fodder and the team — the San Antonio Saviors — trains in a combination temple, shrine, gymnasium and brothel of football, an underground pigskin Mecca in the high desert.

Greek imagery abounds. A Leni Riefenstahl appreciation of semi-nude male fitness informs the visuals. And the subtext of young Black men contracting their health and their lives away to cadaverous white crones who own the teams and a racist culture fanbase is pretty hard to miss.

Those devoted to the game and their gambling “leagues” might not embrace the madness of this movie. But anybody who has followed The Game that Ate America will appreciate this allegory about the corrosive effects of a culture that “grooms” young men to play it and to obsess about the faux martial spectable of this meatgrinder long after they’ve left the playing to “professionals.

Cam Cade’s injury makes him an iffy prospect for the draft. So the god-like GOAT (Marlon Wayans, dauntingly over the top) quarterback of the Saviors wants to prep, nurture, test and intimidate the would-be-draftee who might be his replacement at a week-long pre-draft tryout.

There’s a Bateman-esque agent (Tim Heidecker, pretty much doing an impersonation of Jason Bateman) who wants this to happen, a single parent family relying on the prospect of Cam’s big payday, and a sports medicine Dr. Feelgood/Performance Juicer (Aussie comic Jim Jefferies).

“Never kill yourself for a job,” he counsels, fully aware that’s falling on deaf ears.

Eight-time champion quarterback Isaiah White (Wayans) may be in Cam’s face about the daddy issues that drive him and “How far would you go?”dedication. But he’s been hurt enough to hint at the younger man’s future.

And the Saviors’ quarterback’s brand-ambassador/infuencer wife (Julia Fox) is another peek at the future, what Cam’s high school sweetheart could devolve into — a profane “muse” with access to as many surgeons as her man.

Cam gets his bell run again and thinks he’s “seeing things.” But the deranged, painted-up fanatics at The Combine and their more fanatical kin who crowd the entrance to the training complex are real even if the demons dogging his every movie and serving up doubts aren’t.

I liked what Tipping is saying and was on board with this movie’s messaging the moment it was announced. “Concussiongate” was a real tipping point for me. Football fans? They probably won’t like this. But they get off easy here.

The body horror is rough, but not the grimmest we’ve seen of late. Tipping shows full-contact drills in X-ray vision, putting the head trauma of helmet-to-helmet contact on a screen so wide we can’t pretend not to see it or to minimize it.

Stripping sport of its reliance on The Big Game/Big Fight./Big Race formula is a fascinating “trend” in horror, as the Orlando Bloom body horror boxing picture “The Cut” (now showing in the UK, coming to North America in Oct.) covers similar ground about extreme physical sacrifice, long term damage and the hallucinatory “zone” one falls into when remaking your body.

“Him” — as in “You want to be ‘HIM,’ the guy” in the locker room, on the field and in public perception, The Man, Mr. “No Guts, No Glory” in the eyes of fans — is trippy and self destructive even as it pulls some punches.

The movie’s too short to get into deeper suggestions about the cultural cost of slavish devotion to a sport that churns through human fodder all in the name of providing the faithful a reason to tailgate and bet and argue about on online forums and sports talk radio costs the culture.

Limiting the cast to mainly these two Black quarterbacks allows race to be introduced in a series of glancing blows. But if you want to see Jerry Jones in the crone owner of this Texas team, it’s there.

But it’s totally on-brand for producer Peele, a horror film with smart social commentary on race, athletes and their “owners” who tempt players with promises of “generational wealth” and a “lifestyle” of the rich and entitled.

“I’ll take your youth” and by extension your body’s future health as part of the bargain. Too few ponder that Devil’s deal with the game that “owns a day of the week” until it’s too late.

Rating: R, bloody violence, drug abuse, nudity and profanity

Cast: Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Tim Heidecker, Julia Fox and Jim Jefferies.

Credits: Directed by Justin Tipping, scripted by Zack Akers, Skip Bronkie and Justin Tipping. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:36

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: The Deal with the Devils it takes for “Him” to Make it in Pro Football

Documentary Review: Entrancing “Trains” is a History of Europe through its Rails and Rolling Stock

Posted on September 18, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Trains,” the new dialogue-free “found footage” documentary by the Polish filmmaker Maciej Drygas, is one of the most original pieces of movie-making you’re likely to run across.

Drygas tells a history of Europe through the first half of the 20th century using nothing but archival footage of trains, train travel, train construction, train repair, how trains were used in the two World Wars and the changing lives and fates of those who rode them.

The director of “Abu Haraz,” a years-in-the-making doc about the building of a Sudanese dam and a village scheduled to be buried under the reservoir it creates uses no intertitles, no narration or words at all to tell his “story.”

We’re greeted with the jaunty novelty of traveling by train in the early years of the century, a generation finally mobile enough to see something of their corner of the world. Trains had been around for over half a century, so if you traveled, you’d do it by rail.

Fashion shows could be staged on long trips, and silent movies could be shown in a car set up as a cinema. The classes might not mingle, but a broad segment of humanity could travel for the first time, so they did.

World War I was the apotheosis of a huge conflict dictated by “mobilization” dependent on rail schedules, the ability to move the militarized masses to the Western Front and the Eastern one, seen through British, French and German scenes of boarding at stations, soldiers and civilians alike.

As you might guess, the world wars become an organizing framework for “Trains” as we see recruits departing, and then returning mangled and broken (field surgery scenes included) during WWI, and the film’s final act captures the most infamous moment in Polish rail history — cars crowded with smiling Nazis and victims of the Holocaust, living and dead.

Giant rail-mounted artillery is transported and set up in WWI France, with much of the crew African, another reminder of the “erased” history of the past hundred years. And women dive into changing gender roles as they take over rail jobs during the conflicts.

For hardcore rail buffs, there are fascinating how-they-built-steam-locomotives and rail car construction works scenes. We see a prefabricated switch intersection lowered, spiked and welded into place.

“Mesmirizing” is the only word for it all, the dashing shot of an engineer peering through the smoke out of the side window of the locomotive, the how-to of rail mail pickup and delivery, the chefs and meals and amenities, the Tommies and Doughboys and Poilus and Huns heading off to battle, limping home — haunted — afterwards.

There’s nostalgia built in to these images from the distant past. Most everyone’s heard war stories and rail travel stories handed down through generations. I had a WWI veteran grandfather who came home to a career as a station agent for rail lines along the Va./NC border.

I don’t think the “story” here is as coherent, universal and all-encompassing as Drygas would have us believe. It’s a European epoch, not really a universal one. But it’s still fascinating history fast becoming ancient history for generations who’ve grown up in the coal-free bullet train Eurail era.

Rating: Unrated, war imagery

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maciej Drygas. An EPF Media release.

Running time: 1:21

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Documentary Review: Entrancing “Trains” is a History of Europe through its Rails and Rolling Stock

Movie Review: A Dark Night of “La Dolce Vita” — “Finally Dawn”

Posted on September 18, 2025 by Roger Moore

Federico Fellini cast a jaded, bemused eye on the postwar Italian decadence and indulgence with “La Dolce Vita,” a cinema classic about a generation just removed from decades of fascism and war partying, reveling in paparazzo-pursued celebrity and an internationally celebrated film industry.

Marcello Mastroianni played our tour guide, a seen-it-all journalist reduced to chasing and documenting the whims of shallow celebrities for a culture that couldn’t get enough of that piffle.

Modern Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo looks back on that era and casts events and attitudes in a more sinister light with “Finally Dawn,” about a starstruck young woman who samples early ’60s “la dolce vita” (the good life) when she’s cast as an extra in an American film production at the famed Cinecittà film studios.

Mimosa may be the “plain” sister, just tagging along to see that nothing untoward happens to her prettier, talent-scouted sibling Iris. But she’s the one plucked from auditions to play a “featured extra” hand maiden to an Egyptian queen, portrayed by American screen siren Josephine Esperanto.

As a day on the set spins into a night on the town with the star-who’s-taken-an-interest-in-her and her entourage, wide-eyed Mimosa (Rebecca Antonaci), trapped in a whirl of rich and perhaps depraved sophisticates, starts to fear for her safety and wonder if her fate is tied to another extra on that same film, an aspiring actress who turned up dead in the surf of a seaside Roman beach.

Where Fellini found bubbly cynicism, Costanzo hints at rape, drugs and murder. And in trying to turn suggestions of a thriller into “art,” he makes aesthetic choices that drown his melodrama in dullness.

A dour, sentimental black and white prologue sets the tone. It’s a downbeat war movie Mimosa, sister Iris (Sofia Panizzi) and their mother (Carmen Pommella) are catching on a Sunday afternoon at the cinema. “The Sacrifice” builds tension by showing us a mother and child hiding from a murderous German on the day of Rome’s liberation, a scene that unfolds ever-so-slowly and suspensefully. Shots are held well past their payoff.

And that “slow,” almost agonizing wait for a “cut” and moving on to the next scene becomes the editing strategy of not just the overlong sample of a film-within-a-film. It tediously takes over “Finally Dawn,” and rarely pays off as it does.

Brit star Lily James (“Yesterday”) plays Josephine, the regal star of this “swords and sandals” epic. But as we watch her on the one excruciating long take in which the champion from a foreign empire (Joe Keery) bests her hulking proto-gladiator and wins the right to her young stepdaughter (Rachel Sennott), we pick up something from Josephine’s stillness and her extravagantly coiffed and made-up scowl.

Josephine’s an entitled movie star, but a bad actress. Her performance brings to mind Elisabeth Shue’s orders in “Palmetto.” Being told to play someone bad at acting in a movie that’s not a comedy almost never comes off.

Mimosa makes eye contact with the star during that long take fight and negotiation. And as she tries to find her “just another extra” sister and locate their mother, supposedly waiting for them, as she shyly tries to avoid changing out of her costume in front of other women, a fancy dress and shoes are delivered to her. From Josephine.

When she finally exits the nearly empty hundred acre studio lot, who picks her up to take her home but Josephine, co-star Sean (Keery) and Josephine’s “one friend in all of Rome,” the art dealer Rufus (Willem Dafoe). But they’ve got a stop or two to make on the way.

Dinner devolves into “Let’s go dancing” which takes them to a hedonistic party where rare “snow from Bolivia” (cocaine) is sampled. Even though she doesn’t speak English, Mimosa picks up on Josephine’s reputation — insecure, on her third divorce and “completely crazy,” the crew assures her. The star’s conversation gives away pretension covering for vapidity.

Films like the lavish spectacle she’s starring in can be classics. And “If it’s classic, it’s not old. It’s eternal.”

But what’s her interest in Mimosa, whom she takes to calling “Sandy” and passing off as “a Swedish poetess” to her fellow revelers?

“You’re her passtime tonight.”

Warning Mimosa to “keep your guard up” seems unnecessary. We’ve watched her wander the vast backlot, with sets and soundstages and other productions and film folk gathered in a screening room to watch a newsreel about the murdered actress-wannabe Wilma, who died while working on this very film.

No film buff could mind Costanzo (“Hungry Friend” was his) taking his time leading Mimosa past the hustlers and callous casting combo that they procure would-be-starlets for, through the teeming backlot at Cinecittà. What we can dismiss is his confusion of slow long takes for art.

This isn’t “I Am Love” and he isn’t Luca Guadagnino. Sometimes “slow” is just your movie telling you that whacking twenty minutes culled from the end of every take that goes on too long wouldn’t be a bad idea.

The picture is pretty, but hardly lavish or lovely.

Antonaci is properly wide-eyed and guileless, Sennott her usual intimidating self and Dafoe deftly manages the charm that might be a mask for something uglier for his character.

James? She’s moved on, no doubt wisened to be wary of any filmmaker who sees her as a femme fatale, and asks her to be a bad actress in playing her.

Rating: TV 18+. drug abuse, sexual situations

Cast: Lily James, Rebecca Antonaci, Joe Keery, Willem Dafoe,
Sofia Panizzi, Alba Rohrwacher and Rachel Sennott

Credits: Scripted and directed by Saverio Costanzo. A Samuel Goldwyn release on Amazon.

Running time: 2:00

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: A Dark Night of “La Dolce Vita” — “Finally Dawn”

Movie Review: Cryptic Creepiness in Cymru (Wales) — “Rabbit Trap”

Posted on September 17, 2025 by Roger Moore

Existential musings about the nature of sound, past trauma and childlessness occupy the lovely headspace of “Rabbit Trap,” a quiet and obscurant folk horror tale set in 1970s Wales.

Dev Patel and Rosy McEwen (“The Alienist”) co-star as a couple who’ve retreated to a remote, bog, forest and stone corner of the Welsh countryside. They’ve filled their house with sound gear, from reel to reel recorders to oscillators, oscilloscopes and even a theremin.

Daphne is a musical fringe figure, an electronic music experimenter who has stopped touring to find new soundscapes to decorate her next album. Darcy is a sound designer, wandering the woods with a portable reel-to-reel deck, directional shotgun microphone and bulky Koss headphones to record everything from wind and birds to sheep.

He’s having nightmares, which she sometimes records. She’s having a touch of writer’s block.

And then Darcy chases down this odd local who seems to be spying on them. He apologizes repeatedly to a boy (played by actress Jade Croot) who asks a lot of pointed questions and never answers theirs. Like, what’s your name?

The kid is deep into Welsh folklore, talking about “the widows of the woods” (ancient moss-covered tree stumps), enchanted springs and holloww, assorted spirits and sprites and the “veil between this world and faeirie.”

The boy wants to know “what happens when a sound dies?” And nightmares or not, Darcy has an answer.

“When you hear a sound, you become its home.”

The kid, a self-described “hunter,” can be quippably cryptic, too.

“If you catch a rabbit, you catch the message it’s carrying.”

There are references to faeries as “a forgotten child,” as the kid’s attentions turn troubling and even scary.

Is this a demon in gender dysphoric form, a woodland sprite guarding the land or the child they might have had or might have? Are these interlopers in the Welsh hinterlands unwelcome or in danger?

Let’s just leave those many questions hanging there, because that’s what writer-director Bryn Chainey does with his debut feature. “Obscurant” as a descriptor is rarely a compliment.

But the stars and a startling number of producers (Elijah Wood among them) signed on to “Rabbit Trap,” with its daddy issues Slenderman nightmare images and vaguely menacing mystery “kid.” They saw something in the material on the scripted page.

The tone and atmosphere are immersive and decidedly analog, and the whole nature of “sound” thing makes an interesting metaphysical text or subtext.

But “Rabbit Trap” is like that rabbit the stranger caught for the couple. Darcy, like most of us, doesn’t know how to skin it. Neither, apparently, did Chainey.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen and Jade Croot.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bryn Chainey. A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:28

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: Cryptic Creepiness in Cymru (Wales) — “Rabbit Trap”

Netflixable? Looking for Love via a Rich Bachelor in “The Wrong Paris”

Posted on September 17, 2025 by Roger Moore

As obvious as its title and as sexy as an all-gals bull-riding contest, “The Wrong Paris” is a Netflix romance novel of a movie whose creators don’t dishonor The Hallmark Channel Oath.

Keep it cute, keep it clean and make it watchable.

It’s a bon bon, a Hallmawkish wish fulfillment fantasy that riffs on the “reality” of reality TV. And it makes a fine star vehicle for “School of Rock” alumna Miranda Cosgrove, years removed from her child star days (“iCarly”) but still a pixie, still making media about making media.

She stars here as a plucky Texas metal sculptress who is accepted at a Paris art school, but who has to go on “Bachelor” style reality TV dating show (“The Honey Pot?”) to “earn” the cash for tuition, living expenses, berets and baguettes and what not.

Dawn’s younger sisters (Emilijia Baranac and Ava Bianchi) tip her off about the Dallas auditions. The show is promising to take contestants to Paris this season! You don’t have to win, place or “show.” All you have to do is get picked for the cast of 20 young women, collect that consolation check and you’ll already be in France!

At the video interview/audition, it’s obvious that show runner Rachel (Yvonne Orji of “Insecure”) is rooting for the plucky waitress with dreams of an art “career.” That gets in her over the bored objections of ratings-panicked producer Carl (Torrance Coombs).

Next thing Dawn knows, she’s on a plane with a brand-ambassador/influencer, an Orlando princess looking for her prince, a baby-mama in waiting, scientist, Tomgirl and assorted other “types,” sipping champagne and cooing “Ooo la la” on a chartered jet for Paris.

Kids these days. They don’t know their classic cinema. The German filmmaker Wim Wenders made a famous America film about “Paris, Texas.” Hell, Dawn grew up just down the road from it. She didn’t smell this switcheroo thanks to the Dallas auditions?

Dawn’s Montmartre dream becomes her nightmare of getting “stuck where I grew up.”

She’s furious, and who wouldn’t be? A LOT of Texas is like Paris, Texas — flat, dry and dull, aside from the local “characters.” I mean, the Wenders film was made ironically, after all.

Dawn meeting the rich ranch heir Trey McAllen III (Pierson Fode of “Swiped”) they’re “competing” for and seeing it’s the same handsome hunk that hit on her at the honky tonk the other night doesn’t lessen her fury. But she’s got a contract. She can’t get paid until she’s not selected for a “silver spur” as Trey thins the cast.

There’s nothing for it but to do the axe throwing, the haystack maze, the bull-riding and what not, trying to get the oft-shirtless Trey’s attention.

Orji, a fiesty Madison Pettis as the mean-girl “brand ambassador” with a huge social media following and a couple of other contestants make impressions.

There are chuckles but no hearty laughs in the assorted girlfight shenanigans and forced cornpone in Nicole Henrich’s low-hanging-fruit rom-com script.

“I like to two-step with a woman before I waltz with her.”

And Cosgrove and Fode kind of click in that pre-ordained rom-com way. She’s good at plucky and he’s been hitting the gym…a lot.

It’s all harmless enough even if it’s about as Paris, Texas as it is Paris, France. Yeah, they filmed it in Vancouver.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Miranda Cosgrove, Pierson Fode, Yvonne Orji, Madison Pettis, Christin Park, Madeleine Arthur, Naika Toussaint, Veronica Long and Frances Fisher.

Credits: Directed by Janeen Damian, scripted by Nicole Henrich. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Netflixable? Looking for Love via a Rich Bachelor in “The Wrong Paris”