Movie Review: A San Fran Romance with Wrenching — “Maintenance Required”

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Maintenance Required” is a gear-grinding rom-com that tries to blend car repair and romance between two good looking mechanics who meet on an online vintage Ford Bronco restoration forum.

That’s not a terrible idea, nor is the notion that Charlotte “Charlie” O’Malley has turned her dad’s Oakland garage into an all-young-female operation.

“All Girls Garage” anyone?

But co-writer/director Lacey Uhlemeyer, making her writing and directing debut, and her two similarly inexperiened co-writers (Erin Falconer and Roo Berry) have no idea what to do with their premise.

They take a stab at avoiding the leering, male-gaze-centric appeal of any “All Girls Garage” variation, but then dress their rarely-dirty starlet (“Riverdale” alumna Madelaine Petsch) in tight belly shirts and overalls that she rarely keeps buttoned up. Her receptionist (Madison Bailey of TV’s “Outer Banks”) is a manicurist attired like somebody who just left the beauty shop on the way to the club.

The creative team pays lip service to the notion that an all-women’s repair shop will be less patronizing and predatory than your average upcharge everybody/especially women, Firestone/Tire Kingdom franchise. But they do little with it.

They end up making a depressingly bland comedy with few romantic sparks and no real point of view beyond its curb appeal.

Charlie’s dad’s shop is an Oakland institution. She took it over after his death, and took on finishing up restoring the 1960s family Bronco, which has such a spectacular repaint that Marge — the SUV’s name –can’t help but look like a wholly restored car show competitor with a few new parts yanked out for movie purposes.

That’s what has her on the Bay Broncos online forum, looking for advice and encouragement after hours. Her “Greasemonkey” avatar bonds and commiserates with “Bullnose,” an across-the-bay restorer doing an electric engine swapout on his vintage Bronco.

Unbeknownst to the fair Charlie, Bullnose is Beau, aka “The Closer” for the ever-expanding Miller Boys chain of car repair franchisees. Run by the unscrupulous and somewhat dim Mr. Miller (Jim Gaffigan, the least funny he’s ever been) they’re like a Pep Boys with even fewer scruples.

You can guess the entire rest of the movie from that description. Beau is to open a franchise right across from Charlie’s, and even manicures-while-you-wait and fair-pricing can’t protect her from the kind of creepy lonely Charlie flirts with online, who figures out who she “really” is before she does, and keeps it a secret.

Beau’s got a gay BFF (Matteo Lane), a florist and advisor on his unhappy love-life with the hot but uncommitted Lola (Ianna Sarkis). Charlie has sexual smorgasbord sampler co-worker (Katy O’Brian) who wears all the bi-curious movie identifiers.

Charlie drives a “Bullitt” ’67 Mustang, Beau tools around in a ’58 Mercedes convertible. They pine over the concourse classics at a car show. Beau swoons and quotes “Notting Hill.”

“I’m just a man sitting in his car, asking her to love him.”

Charlie’s accused of “hiding in your Dad’s garage for the rest of your life.”

And Gaffigan’s Mr. Miller leads the corporate staff — whose names he barely bothers to learn before firing anybody who doesn’t toe-the-line — in capitalistic prayer.

“Please give this family wisdom so that we may underprice and bury our competition,” after which they’ll raise prices as a monopoly.

That’s almost funny, and a few double entendres nearly amuse. But from the moment the movie makers blow the “meet cute,” this “The Shop Around the Corner/You’ve Got Mail” ripoff doesn’t tickle, tantalize or titilate, even when the ladies of the shop engage in competitive tire-changing.

Rating: PG-13, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Madelaine Petsch, Jacob Scipio, Madison Bailey, Katy O’Brian, Matteo Lane, Ianna Sarkis and Jim Gaffigan.

Credits: Directed by Lacey Uhlemeyer, scripted by Erin Falconer, Lacey Uhlemeyer and Roo Berry. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:42

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Movie Preview: “What on God’s Flat Earth” is “Fackham Hall?”

Posted on October 29, 2025 by Roger Moore

Whatever you do, don’t say the title of this Britfarce of the Murder in the Drawing Room variety — they “watched the first two seasons of Downton Abbey” before filming it — quickly, and with a British accent?

Thomasin McKenzie, Tom Felton, Katherine Waterston and comic and chat show host (and co-screenwriter) Jimmy Carr are in the cast.

Bleecker St. has this Damien Lewis star vehicle about inbreeding, teaching the children to drink before puberty and classism in depressed 1931 Jolly Olde slated for theaters Dec. 5.

Looks a pip, wot wot?

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Movie Review: A Soap Opera’s Season of Intrigues Precede the Famous Painting “Auction”

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Roger Moore

What an immersive byzantine delight the French dramedy “Auction” turns out to be.

The latest from writer-director Pascal Bonitzer (“The Young Karl Marx,” and he scripted “Gemma Bovery”) is a playfully malicious peek behind the scenes of big money art auctions and the schemers who run such businesses.

“Le tableau volé” it was titled in France, “The Stolen Painting.” And the story of how that painting was stolen was nothing compared to the veritable soap opera melodrama that engulfs owners, the heirs who claim it as theirs and the conniving auction house that will “do anything” to ensure they’re the ones who bring it to auction and everybody around them.

Every motive is suspect, every fresh character has an angle, no one is quite who they seem and not every loose end will be tied up when all is said and done and lawyered and gaveled home in this dry but featherweight and fun comic mystery.

André Masson is a top dog auctioneer at Scottie’s of Paris, an Aston Martin-driving big shot with a watch collection that would feed the poor in some small countries, and a smooth talker who will weather an aged prospective client’s bigotry and familial vindictiveness to land a sale.

This job, André (Alex Lutz) explains to young intern Aurore (Louise Chevillotte), has its “Indiana Jones” moments of discovery. But most of the time, “You’re soliciting like a whore,” (in French with English subtitles).

Aurore is a little too quick to declare she’ll be “happy to whore” for him. We wonder about their history, the sexual tension and the baggage each brings to the table.

What André means is that lying, withholding, fluffing and bluffing are all a part of the job, on or off the clock. We get a glimpse of his standing among the swells who run Scottie’s, fellows who figure the gift of a collectible book on “The Art of Crawling,” how to be a “courtesan,” is insulting enough, until André’s rejoinder pops their entitled bubble.

“I admire you doesn’t mean I respect you,” doesn’t put him in his place either.

But when a “lost” painting that he’s certain is a “fake” turns up, André’s own classism gets the better of him. He practically spits out words like “moonlighting factory worker” (Arcadi Redeff) from the unfashionable city of “Mulhouse“ who has the painting when describing the “lost” Egon Schiele version of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” turns out to be real.

Nobody uses the word “provenance” to describe the story that André and his “specialist, not expert” ex-wife Bertina (Léa Drucker) tell of this “Sunflowers” painting’s history, when it was painted, who bought it and when it was lost.

But as the lost work’s history becomes clear, so does that of the experienced liar Aurore, the putting-on-airs André, the too accomodating Bertina and the too-blase-for-this-case lawyer (Nora Hamzawi) that the young factory worker Martin retained.

Bonizter could have titled the film “Provenance,” with all of the faux snobbery and skullduggery and side-eye scheming that goes on among the alleged “to the manner born.”

We cringe at the way “Sunflowers” left its owner’s hands, and fear for the painting’s safety, as Martin has young working class friends who take an awfully keen interest in his possible newfound wealth. We try to guess what twist involving this or that character’s motives and backstory will come into play. And we wonder if the spokesman for the “rightful heirs” (Doug Rand, beautifully unreadable) isn’t leaning into his “righteous Jew” pose a tad too hard to be believed.

Lutz and Drucker give perfectly modulated turns as people with a shared personal history and a still relevant professional one. Bertina and André’s reaction to seeing their prize in person for the first time, hung in a well-kept working class house, right next to a dart board, is perfect. They laugh in shock, delight, horror and awe.

And Chevillotte is adept at all the tricks pathological liars use, lying to get in jams and to get out of them. Her story may be a sidebar, but it’s every bit as fascinating as the main plot thread — damaged and devious and learning on the job how to throw a spanner into the works, or how others might accomplish that.

“Auction” is good, underhanded fun, and even the loose ends that Bonitzer leaves hanging — perhaps this had a longer cut at some point — leave one uncertain about how this high-stakes poker game will play out or who might upend the table with not-quite-all-their-cards on it for that final hand.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Alex Lutz, Léa Drucker,
Louise Chevillotte, Arcadi Radeff, Doug Rand and Nora Hamzawi.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pascal Bonitzer. A Menemsha Films release.

Running time: 1:31

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Netflixable? “A Woman with No Filter” has some Grievances to Air

Posted on October 28, 2025 by Roger Moore

In the tradition of “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “It’s My Turn,” and generations of women coming into their own in films comes “A Woman with No Filter,” a Brazilian comedy that covers familiar ground at an unamusing crawl.

Our put-uoon title character, Bia, runs an online magazine where she’s gone a decade without a raise from her BMW-buying boss. She has the burden of bucking up her “work husband,” a close colleague engaged to a rich beauty who pushes him around.

Bia has an artist/husband who won’t get a real job during his creative block and can’t be bothered to answer the door to get the wifi or whatever breaks fixed in their apartment. His son is a school-skipping slacker/stoner punk.

Their neighbor is a 40ish aspiring DJ who throws house parties every night — basically running a noisy nightclub in their building, something the cops and her building super let her get away with.

Her cat-lady sister leans on her to cat-sit because she’s apparently got no friends. There’s this one giant SUV-driving society type who never lets Bia merge into traffic every morning while driving to work.

And her bestie is too busy cyber-stalking her ex to hear Bia out when all she wants to do is vent about all the “other” difficult” people in her life.

What sets Bia (Fabiula Nascimento) off isn’t the half-her-age “influencer” Paloma (Camila Queiroz) her dead-weight-publisher (Caito Mainier) hires to “supervise” her. It’s not Paloma’s “my team” airs and dismissal of journalistic essays in favor of “a single quote” from celebrities, accompanied by a “reel” video to distract the readers.

It’s Paloma’s cooing insistence that what Bia really needs is a visit to “Goddess Vagina” (Molly Marinho), a combination masseuse, seer and shaman whose diagnosis and “treatment” causes Bia to “turn into the Hulk” (in Portuguese with subtitles, or dubbed into English).

About 70 minutes of this 92 minute comedy is a pretty good actress (Nascimento starred in “A Wolf at the Door”) cussing out the influencer, her “misogynistic idiot” boss, her best friend (Patricia Ramos) and on down the line.

The most entertaining of these meltdowns involves Bia sabotaging her arrogant, inconsiderate neighbor’s unlicensed night club DJ ambitions. The rest is a string of static, less-than-amusing shout-downs, broadly played, that show how Goddess Vagina “liberated” Bia from being the nice, compliant and put-upon woman that she’s always been.

Yes, she has her reasons and yes, they all have it coming and of course things will resolve themselves in the most mild-mannered, wish-fulfillment-fantasy ways.

Which isn’t exactly a formula for a winning comedy, even a “predictable” one.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Fabiula Nascimento, Camila Queiroz, Louise D’Tuani, Emilio Dantas,
Luana Martau, Júlia Rabello, Patricia Ramos, Caito Mainier, Samuel de Assis and Polly Marinho

Credits: Directed by Arthur Fontes, scripted by Tati Bernardi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

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Movie Review: Wahlberg, Key, Lakeith and Shalhoub “Play Dirty” in Shane Black-land

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

Shane Black?

Glib one-liners and glib gunplay? Bigger and bigger action, with a bigger and bigger bodycounts?

The actor turned writer and writer-director who peaked with “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” made his way to a “comeback” with “The Nice Guys” Shane Black? Shane Black who then made “The Predator” reboot to spoil it?

Oh, and “Last Action Hero,” “Last Boy Scout,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight” and “Lethal Weapon” “high concept” action “comedy” Shane Black?

Yeah, that guy, Mr. Hit or Miss, is the one behind the over-the-top, CGI-assisted, slaughterhouse of a heist “comedy” “Play Dirty.” With that introduction, you can probably guess which Shane Black I think showed up for this one.

A direct-to-streaming MGM thriller based on the Donald Westlake “Parker” underworld figure, it’s a Mark Wahlberg star vehicle that reaches for laughs and finds a few, puts a LOT of actors to work and kills off many and buries us under plots, counter-plots, mayhem and one-liners hoping we’ll ignore the fact that it makes little sense and the fact that it gets the few “facts” it dares to plug in wrong.

“I’m good at surviving,” our murderous anti-hero Parker declares. “So are cockroaches” one of his many foils spits back.

It’s a “trigger-happy” robber (Wahlberg) vs. “The Outfit” “rob the robber” thriller about a heist gone wrong, a “rob a country” bigger heist stumbled into in which you don’t get too attached to whoever the one-time “Punisher” in the cast in playing. Because somebody — a LOT of somebodies — will die.

Parker & Crew hit a racetrack in the opening scene, in which no digital horses are injured in the chaos that sends a getaway chase onto the track. Accomplices are killed when the safecracker who is anything but Zen — like her name (Rosa Salazar) — betrays them.

But she’s just gathering cash for an even bigger caper, an attack on the U.N. to steal treasure stolen from “my (Central American) country” by its evil presidente. That’s what Parker and his theater major pal Grofield (LaKeith Stanfield), “lady’s man”/wheelman Stan (Chai Henson) and the disguise-happy couple (Keegan Michael-Key and Claire Lovering) join Zen in attempting.

The unnamed Latin country’s security agents stand in their way. The Outfit, led by Lozini (Tony Shalhoub), has a bone to pick with Parker and an inept Top Lieutenant (Nat Wolff) on their tail

And in touches straight out of the low-rent pulp fiction of Clive Cussler (“Sahara”), the prize is the treasure of “a fifteenth century Spanish galleon,” including the ship’s figurehead, “Our Lady of Arintero,” sort of the Spanish “Mulan.”

Black and his co-writers are hip enough to make “wardrobe malfunction” (2004 Super Bowl) and “transgender kinda thing” cracks. Ahem.

“Are we being ‘Punk’d’ here?”

And they attach a legitimate piece of Spanish history to the plot, but confusingly name the warrior in the manner of the saints — “The Lady” becomes “Our Lady.”

Pointing out that the Central Americans repeatedly refer to a shipwrecked “15th century Spanish (treasure) galleon” when A) Columbus sailed in the 15th century, aka “1492; B) “treasure fleets” didn’t set out from the New World to the old until 1520 (the 16th Century) and Spanish “galleons” did not exist until 1530, also in the 16th century, would be petty.

Maybe that poor, backward and unnamed country needs the treasure to finance better history education.

Stanfield is more entertaining to watch than Wahlberg, and too much of what’s meant to be exciting or fun outside of their actions is just dull filler.

It’s all part and parcel of a big, blundering, Bugs Bunny Physics thriller that parks all these actors in an increasingly grating and nonsensical story which kind of climaxes when rich oligarchs get involved.

Spoiler alert — one of those fat cats gets shot, the “funniest” shooting in a movie that makes Parker an upflinching, unrepentent mass murderer. Well, I laughed.

All in good fun, right? Except it isn’t all that much fun. The odd chuckle doesn’t atone for the scads of laughs that just don’t land in a story that spins its wheels on the snowy streets of NYC. Except when the crooks drive a Rivian.

Rating: R, endless violence, profanity

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Nat Wolff, Keegan Michael-Key, Gretchen Mol, Claire Lovering, Thomas Jane, Chukwudi Iwuji and Tony Shalhoub

Credits: Directed by Shane Black, scripted by Shane Black, Chuck Mondry and Anthony Bagarozzi, based on Donald Westlake’s “Parker” novels. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 2:08

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Movie Preview: Need an Assassin? Call “The Old Woman with the Knife”

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

Lee Hye-Young stars in this Korean slicer-for-hire thriller from the director of “Memento Mori,” Min Kyu-dong.

The plot is as old as “The Mechanic” — the Charles Bronson original — and reflects another variation on “Killers of a Certain Age.” But this looks brutal and could be brilliant.

Nov. 25.

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Movie Review: A Filipino Gay Hustlers’ Odyssey — “Some Nights I Feel Like Walking”

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

Hooking up in bus station restrooms, hustling clients for sex in a cinema, police harassment, bullying, drugs, death and an impromptu funeral are on the menu of “Some Nights I Feel Like Walking,” a melodramatic saunter through one unnaturally long night in the Philippines.

Writer-director Petersen Vargas (“2 Cool 2 Be Forgotten”) treats us to sexiously sexual, sometimes emotional evening’s odyssey in modern day Manila.

Uno (Jomari Angeles) cruises along skywalks and through street markets of the city after dark. If his boy band looks and hair highlights don’t give away his game, his wary way of side-eyeing the world does. That hook-up at the bus station? That’s just the appetizer for the evening.

But the kid with the bruises named Zion (Miguel Odron) needs a favor. There’s a guy waiting in the station. Please give him this note.

Tagging along on Uno’s cruise is how Zion signs on for a seriously steamy 3-way in a hook-up friendly cinema’s projection booth, and how he meets Uno’s roommates.

Bayani (Argel Saycon) is tall, muscular and handsome enough to command higher prices from “clients,” and tough enough to stick up for his friends or bully anybody he choses. Miguelito (Gold Aceron) — “Ge” — is slim and slight, shorter than Zion. Rush (Tommy Alejandrino) is their hotheaded fourth.

They’re streetwise kids who know a police roundup just means a freebie for the “chief” will cut them all loose. Their world is awash in drugs, and some of them use. But it’s a client who will provide the dose that sends one into seizures, and before they can figure out how to get him to a hospital, he’s dead.

In a sentimental touch that pre-dates “Midnight Cowboy,” the kid wanted to “go home.” They’ve got to figure out a way to fool taxi or jeepney and overnight bus drivers to get their dead friend back to Pangasinan.

Vargas blends in grim, surreal dream sequences with mourning, telling us of childhood traumas that shaped these young men and bonded some of them for life. And if there’s a corpse involved, you can bet there are unintentional “Weekend at Bernies” touches.

The narrative is patient and somewhat predictable, which makes this unfold too slowly for its own good. The flashbacks meant to distract us from “We know where this is going” don’t all pay off.

But “Some Nights I Feel Like Walking” immerses us in a world and gives us characters worth investing in, even if we wish they had more original backgrounds and a less predictable destination.

Rating: unrated, violence, explicit sex

Cast: Miguel Odron, Jomari Angeles, Argel Saycon, Tommy Alejandrino and Gold Aceron

Credits: Scripted and directed by Petersen Vargas. An Omnibus release.

Running time: 1:43

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Classic Film Review: Renewing “The Commitments” to Irish Soul and Irish Joy (1991)

Posted on October 26, 2025 by Roger Moore

Twas the writer Roddy Doyle who re-introduced the literary world to the concept of “Irish joy.” Sure’twas.

His “Barrytown Trilogy” of comic novels in the late ’80s and early ’90s — the self-published sensation “The Commitments,” “The Snapper” and “The Van” — later expanded into a pentalogy, captured the humor, the vitality and the hustle of an island that had been “poor, impoverished,” U2 lamenting “the Troubles” of Third World Ireland for far too long.

But it took the director of “Fame” to bring that noisesome frolic, a Dublin bubbling over with youthful dreams, energy and delusions, to the wider world. Alan Parker captured the old, battered city — where Doyle had set his fictional working class Barrytown neighborhood — and crowded his screen with exhuberant kids of all ages, amusingly gobsmacked adults, indulgent priests and more indulgent parents.

“The Commitments” hit viewers with a wet slap of delight in 1991, a blast of “proletarian” soul performed by Europe’s most famously downtrodden minority. The film was hardly a smash in theaters, but its video and TV afterlife were boundless. Doyle’s reputation and legend were made. A mini soul music revival — a smaller scale version of Britain’s “Northern Soul” fad or what America’s The Blue Brothers had brought forth a decade before — an explosion in Irish tourism and a 2013 stage musical spun out of it.

And here it is, a near-riotous time capsule of its day, a “real” band that of actors who could sing and play or musicians (Glen Hansard) who’d learn to act immortalized on Panavision and Dolby Stereo for all of us to marvel over decades hence.

Parker made the scruffiest “let’s get a band together” comedy of them all, a shambolic but amusing mess that loses track of its leading man after he organizes a fractious ensemble that is sure to come apart, come to ruin or come to its senses. And we get to watch it all go right or go wrong.

Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) is a chain-smoking 20ish hustler, pitching pirated cassettes and second-hand vhs tapes (including Parker’s “Mississippi Burning”) at street markets all over Barrytown. But when he’s alone, he fancies himself being interviewed years hence.

 “Tell us about the early days, Jimmy. How did it’all begin?”

His brainstorm is the sort of “Hail Mary” many a downtrodden schemer pulls out of his hat. He’ll form a band, one dedicated to preserving and celebrating his passion for American soul music. Jimmy then proceeds to build it around a few musical mates (Hansard, Ken McCluskey, Félim Gormley and Dick Massey), preaching his passion to any who figure “we’re too white” to pull that off that bit of cultural appropriation.

“Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the Blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the Blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the Blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I’m Black and I’m proud!“

One of the more hilarious audition montages in all of cinema follows, pretty much to no avail which is pretty much the point. Everybody’s into music, nobody’s that good at what Jimmy wants to hear.

But Jimmy overhears a drunk (Andrew Strong) singing along with the old LPs at a wedding. His mates lust after fair Imelda (Angeline Ball), so he recruits Bernie (Bronagh Gallagher) to sing back up, and get her friend Natalie (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and by all means, reach out to Imelda to make sure she signs on.

And then the 50ish horn player Joey “The Lips” (Johnny Murphy) motorscooters up, with big tales of his years touring with Otis and Sam and Wilson Pickett and Martha Reeves, and the band has a name — “The Commitments” — a “leader” and a cheerleader.

“Black suits,” for the men, Joey insists. Black dresses for the ladies. This is “serious” music and should be treated with respect. For the assorted unemployed pipefitters, waitresses and the like, there’s nothing for it but to dive in and and pray that this will pay off and change their lives.

“‘Destination Anywhere,'” they sing. “East or west, I don’t care.”

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June Lockhart — 1925-2025, “Lassie’s” Mom, “Lost in Space”

Posted on October 25, 2025 by Roger Moore

I can’t for the life of me remember why some PR firm was trotting “Lassie,” “Lost in Space” and “Petticoat Junction” TV star June Lockhart around in the ’80s.

But I was a kid working in public radio in Charlotte, N.C. when the pitch came in. And I thought, “I can find audio of her TV and film appearances and that’ll make a fun radio piece.”

It kind of did, but the stage, screen (“Sergeant York,” “Meet me in St. Louis,” “The Yearling”) and TV star was kind of old school flaky to chat with. In those pre-Internet days — I don’t think I’d bought my first copy of “Haliwell’s Filmgoers Companion” yet — I didn’t know her impressive youthful credits. All I could think to ask her about was “Lassie,” “Lost in Space” and “TV moms.” That was on me.

But when I heard, some while after, that she’d been a regular in the White House Press Corps briefing room — not as a reporter — that seemed to fit. Curious about the world, sure. Outspoken in her politics at times. “Eccentric” fit her to a “T.”

She didn’t seem to remember why she was being toured (she was in her 60s) and it was hard getting her on topic, whatever the topic was. But throw in a few “Lassie” clips, some “Lost in Space” comedy and voila, RADIO. Podcasting for news professionals.

A couple of years later Barbara Billingsley (“Leave it to Beaver”) was similarly touted and toured by PR folks in support of some Mother’s Day related business (Maybe Hallmark?), and she was hysterically funny and warm and not the least bit flaky, for an ex TV mom. And I’d learned to do too much prep in case the interview threatened to become a non starter. 

But Lockhart was a sci-fi convention icon and was hip enough to make it into the occasional cool indie film (Christopher Guest’s “The Big Picture”) and motherly enough to score the occasional “Afterschool Special.”

She made it to 100, which probably surprises no one. Quite a character. Rest in peace.

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Netflixable? The Consequences of Renewing the Nuclear Option — “A House of Dynamite”

Posted on October 25, 2025 by Roger Moore

You expect a movie about the renewed Cold War and its radioactive endgame to be dispiriting, just in that “Here we go again/Been there, barely survived that” sense.

But the timing of Kathryn Bigelow’s grim, cautionary and “Don’t come here looking for hope” thriller “A House of Dynamite” underscores the helplessness of it all.

The film, scripted by NBC News chief Noah Oppenheim (!?), arrives in the middle of the Trump/Epstein government shutdown that has no end in sight, with democracy seemingly voted out of our history and the incompetence that dictatorship patronage spawns in evidence all around us.

The last crisis, it was a pandemic epically mismanaged by morons. The next time it’ll be a nuclear standoff with an aged, drug-addled pedophile’s finger on the button.

But that isn’t the administration depicted in this multi-act — each showing the same spiraling events from a different point of view — doomsday countdown tale. Even smart people, many of them with good intentions, may not be able to overcome decades of planning and technology and complacency that haven’t been updated to reckon with modern threats and the calculus of human survival.

A missile — probably fired from a submarine — has been launched somewhere in the vicinity of North Korea. Satellites didn’t capture the exact spot and “intel” can’t pinpoint who fired it. It’s headed for the American midwest.

As the film opens, the machinery built for doomsday prep is springing into action — command centers, “Star Wars” defense sites, FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) are manned and defense and other government officials are yanked off of golf courses or grabbed by the Secret Service for evacuation to shelters.

We see an overseeing general (Tracy Letts) talking about last night’s baseball All Star Game as a vague threat becomes real and response scenarios to recommend to POTUS (President of the U.S.) are bandied about.

The Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) is in a fury over what is not known and what “$50 billion” worth of “Star Wars” anti-missile defense actually buys you.

Acronyms and locations — “Stratcom,COG, JEEP,” etc. — fly by as Captain, wife and mother-of-a-sick-child Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) tries to calm her situation center staff by playing down the likelihood this is what they think it is.

It will turn out to be “the second most exciting thing to happen to you today,” she tells a subordinate (Malachi Beasley) who plans to propose this very day.

Hotlines that can’t be transferred to cell phones and other unanticipated SNAFUs slow down communication with the Russians, the Chinese and other corners of the world that are responding to America’s response.

An expert/aide (Gabriel Basso) is literally sprinting to get where he’s supposed to be, juggling calls and urging caution as “sometimes the warheads don’t even go off.). The North Korean expert (Greta Lee) has taken her kid to a Gettysburg reenactment.

A newly-promoted FEMA manager (Moses Ingram) is fretting over the “prenup” her soon-to-be-ex had her sign when she’s snatched and taken to a bunker to manage the incoming disaster’s aftermath.

The Secretary of Defense (Harris) has an estranged actress-daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) in the strike zone.

And the guy commanding the Alaskan anti-missile defense base (Anthony Ramos) has just gone through a breakup of some sort. He’s in a mood as they try to “hit a bullet with a bullet.”

The president (Idris Elba)? He’s in the middle of a kids’ basketball-and-academics camp event when he’s confronted with the worst crisis of all, that military aide (Jonah Hauer-King) hastily briefing him on the contents of The Nuclear Football with the FLOTUS, the president’s wife (Renée Elise Goldsberry) on a tour of Africa.

Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) brings a seriousness to the subject matter even as she leans back on her “Zero Dark 30” fragmented, multi-location, multi-character, story told and retold out of order tricks. A hard truth of this version of “Fail Safe,” “War Games” or “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is that the third act is the weakest.

“House of Dynamite” never strays far from the up-close-and-personal parade of characters of your standard issue disaster movie. There’s unspeakable horror in the offing and everybody’s got this relative or that relationship or personal “issue” distracting them from the ghastly matter at hand.

When someone says “I can HANDLE this,” you wonder. And all those “Have a nice day” cracks in the opening scenes are grimly dated and not funny. The melodrama is where the pathos is supposed to come from, and it just doesn’t

There’s another disconnect with so many Brits — Ferguson, Elba, Harris and Jason Clarke (as Australian actor) as the admiral in charge of whatever war room Ferguson leads — in the lead roles.

Bits and pieces of it work, but the endless succession of acronyms and character after character with “issues” rob the story of its stakes and the picture of its heart.

And all we’re left with is pondering how easily this could happen with the way world and national events have shaken out this past ten years, and that the bunglers in charge now just make it all the more likely.

Yay.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Moses Ingram, Jason Clarke, Greta Lee, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Malachi Beasley, Gabriel Basso and Idris Elba.

Credits: Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, scripted by Noah Oppenheim. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

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