Movie Review: Post WWI Germans learn there’s no recreating “Eden”

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Roger Moore

The setting is forbidding, the political parable heavy-handed and human nature “inevitable” in “Eden,” Ron Howard’s dip into real history for a sociology lesson that can apply to today.

It’s an all-star rendering of a true story of Germans who tried to experience a new way to live on a tropical island — Floreana in the  Galápagos Archipelago — during the Great Depression.

Despite having “It” girls Ana de Armas, Sydney Sweeney and Vanessa Kirby in the cast with Jude Law and Daniel Brühl, the Oscar-winning Howard found himself with a difficult-to-market survival tale, a movie possibly tainted by its reception at a Toronto Film Festival premiere, one that virtually no one wanted to distribute.

But the picture reaching theaters is a solid yarn, a well-acted and suspenseful thriller that covers well-worn “Lord of the Flies” ground about ugly features of human psychology that show up when “society” doesn’t smooth out the rough spots.

After the horrors of World War I, a Spanish Flu pandemic and with the Great Depression finishing off the Roaring Twenties, the philosphy-obsessed German physician Friedrich Ritter (Law) and his life partner, Dore Strauch (Kirby) set off to uninhabited Floreana Island to live simply and escape from society to a place where the Nietzsche-adoring Ritter could formulate a “new” philosophy that could save humanity from the doom he saw awaiting it.

He’s German. He’s seen what happened there and what’s brewing in the poisonous politics of the present. And given the second World War we all know is coming, he wasn’t wrong.

He sends letters talking up his philosophy and their contemplative vegetarian lives there which get published in newspapers and create an allure in “a world that’s gone crazy.” Maybe one can “get away from it all.” But whatever the purpose of his letters, he draws fans. “Eden” is about what happens when a family of them move to join them on the semi-arid volcanic rock they’re living on.

Heinz Wittmer (Brühl) is, Ritter decides, “a man broken by the war.” Scarred, widowed and recently remarried, Wittmer quit a civil service job, sold most of their possessions and brought young bride Margret (Sweeney), his tubercular teen son Harry (Jonathan Tittel) and their dog, along with supplies and tools, to live on the island near their idol.

Grumpy Ritter, resenting the distraction, directs them to one of the two tiny springs on Floreana, encourages them to set up housekeeping there and waits for them to fail.

“Life here is gruesome,” he warns them as he smirks to Dore, whom he’s claimed to “cure” of her multiple sclerosis in his letters. “Failure is inevitable!” As inevitable as the coming cataclysm back home, he figures.

But while the Wittmers may not be intellectuals, conjuring up a philosophy that will “save” the human race, they are prototypical pragmatists. With Harry getting some of his strength back in the hot, dry climate, Heinz’s muscle and Margret’s stoic practicality, they set up house and home and garden, tame a wild cow (left behind, like the wild pigs, wild dogs and Dore’s “pet” donkey, by passing sailors over the years) and do all this in a fraction of the time that the distracted intelligentsia managed it.

Ritter is barely adjusting to the fact that their failiure isn’t “inevitable” and that they may not take his “I’m no longer a DOCTOR” barks seriously when Margret gets pregnant when a boatload of other fans show up.

Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (de Armas) is a flamboyant bon vivant with grandiose dreams of a “Hacienda Paradiso,” “the world’s most exclusive resort hotel,” which she will build on this “Eden” that the exaggerating doctor described in his published letters.

She’s got a South American “engineer” (Ignacio Gasparin) to help her start construction, and two lovers/helpmates (Felix Kammerer and Toby Wallace) to provide the well-digging, foundation-laying muscle.

Fat chance of that. They’ve been dropped off with a vast array of her luggage, lots of alcohol and canned goods, tents and a Victrola. But the good doctor pitched this place as a perfect setting for the “grandiose.” Maybe they’ll fit right in.

The baroness is arrogant, privileged, rude and manipulative. And those aides and “bodyguards?” We and the locals notice they’re wearing sidearms.

Let the “Lords” start lording over the “flies” and let’s see where this takes us.

This true story, complete with scandal, violence and political and social allegories built in, has been a part of popular culture — books, articles — in the decades since it happened. It could have inspired such film narratives as “Swept Away,” and it was the subject of a broadly-distributed 2013 documentary, “The Galapagos Affair.”

Howard and screenwriter Noah Pink (“Tetris”) set up a simplistic dynamic made for conflict, and let it play out accordingly. Stealing food and trying to set rivals against each other in a forbidding place with little survivable margin for error ensures that there will be blood. But whose?

The script and Howard, pursuing one last “dream project,” attracted a stellar cast and they do not disappoint. Law gives a fanatical edge to his dreamer. Kirby’s flintiness is channeled into an embittered, brilliant beauty, de Armas vamps and schemes and has never been more hateful and Brühl perfectly captures a pacifistic Everyman faced with neighbors who could cripple his family’s odds for survival.

And while this isn’t the movie that “made” Sweeney’s big screen career, it is her most impressive performance outside of TV’s “Euphoria.” She embodies the shrinking violet “hausfrau” who is no competition for the more vivacious, sexy and cunning other women on the island. Sweeney lets us see Margret’s pragmatism in her realization that everyone needs to get along. But while she may be steely enough to face childbirth amidst a wild dog attack (Whoa) alone, she is slow to figure out her trust in the doctor, Dore or the baroness is misguided.

Margret and to a lesser degree Heinz embody one message in all of this, that defaulting to kindness and mediating conflict is the way society should function. But the other lesson for life today here is the harder one to swallow.

There is no escaping fascism and the cruel creeps who embrace it. The utopian doctor may dream of “true democracy” inspired by a new philosophy. But the way of human civilization is “Democracy, fascism and then war,” he preaches. “It is INEVITABLE!”

That World War they all lived through wasn’t “humanity at its worst.” It was “humanity at its truest.”

“Eden” isn’t the subtlest allegory about life in troubled times, but Howard rarely makes a bad film and he hasn’t here. From its eyes-averting grimness to its eye-rolling obviousness and “inevitability, “Eden” is a parable that plays.

And whatever the box office prospects, nobody in this cast should run away from this resume credit. There isn’t a false note among them.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sex, nudity and profanity

Cast: Jude Law, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas,
Daniel Brühl, Felix Kammerer, Ignacio Gasparin, Toby Wallace, Jonathan Tittel and Vanessa Kirby.

Credits: Directed by Ron Howard, scripted by Noah Pink. A Vertical release.

Running time: 2″09

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Movie Review: Corporate Villains Kept at Bay via “Relay”

Posted on August 22, 2025 by Roger Moore

Every thriller needs a good hook, and “Relay” has a doozy.

How can you protect your anonymity and preserve your identity in the modern surveillance state, when data harvesting, phone bugging and tracing has moved from the state into the private sector? How do you keep thugs of a corporate, criminal or governmental nature in the dark when there’s money and dangerous secrets you’re dealing with?

Our hero here has figured out the rules, tricks and arcane blind spots in the procedures of dying U.S. Postal service.

And he doesn’t just stop at a succession of burner phones when talking with people who would love to do him professional, personal or physical harm. He’s gained access to “relay” services for the hearing impaired. He can call in, have them complete the call — and then he types his side of the conversation with a corporate whistleblowers or the folks who want those whistles unblown. Nobody involved ever hears him, much less knows who he is and where he might be. That’s privileged communication.

So kudos for screenwriter Justin Piasecki, who gets his first produced script on the screen for coming up with this grand gimmick. And further congratulations for landing Riz Ahmed as his star, a sort of fixer, a non-violent “Equalizer” who stops intimidation and threats by people who hire heavies to keep their deadly secrets for them.

For much of the film, Ahmed’s unnamed (until the third act) fixer doesn’t speak. He communicates to those seeking his service via his Ameriphone dialogue phone, and for a long while we wonder if he’s playing another man with hearing loss after his powerhouse turn in “Sound of Metal.”

But no, this unnamed functionary is just very, very cautious. We see him communicate to a client (Matthew Maher), giving him precise instructions about how to hand off documents and a payoff from a corporate wrongdoer (Vincent Garber) in the opening scene.

A cute touch. They have to take a selfie together to seal the deal and ensure the threats will stop.

Our intermediary goes to great extremes ensuring his client safely makes his getaway. It’s implied that he probably provides his services to genuine do-gooders who expose those who endanger the public health by speaking out. But our “hero” isn’t a crusader. He’s a specialist getting paid by those whistleblowers needing protection, and money extorted from the wrongdoers they’re agreeing to not expose.

He’s anonymous to all involved, just a phone number with voice mail some lawyers have in case a client needs that kind of help.

Lily James is Sarah, a corporate scientist who saw an email pointing to cancer concerns in a new “fertile crescent” wheat varietal she worked on. She just wants the “harassment” to stop. She’ll hand over whatever documents she has if her former employer will “just leave me alone.”

Her car was set on fire. A quartet of corporate goons (Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Pun Bandhu and Jared Abrahamson) are brazenly stalking her and staking out her apartment.

Sarah’s worries start to ease as she’s sent new phones, carefully detailed instructions and places to ship her documents and cash via these relay calls.

“Do not contact them yourself,” she’s told. “Do not respond if they contact you.”

He will do the talking, via text. He will threaten them with exposure, a bit of leverage that has lost much of its sting in our lawless, paranoid age.

The early acts in this David Mackenzie film — he did the terrific “Hell or High Water” — crackle with intensity and the quiet competence of a character who knows his tradecraft. Our “Equalizer” is always a step or two ahead of the bad guys, wearing disguises, sending Sarah traipsing through airports to sniff out who’s pursuing her and throwing them off the scent.

Even the more melodramatic turns in the story have a logic to them that works its way into the latter acts as we learn the guy’s name is “Ash,” that he’s in AA, that he’s smitten by the good-looking scientist who sees him as her savior and who wonders if he’s “lonely.”

And Ahmed, poker-faced start to finish, puts us in this guy’s shoes and in his head when his best laid plans are derailed, his “control” is shattered and his identity endangered. It’s another great character turn by a star who’s gained his leading man status the old fashioned way — by giving one raw, layered and compelling performance at a time.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Riz Ahmed, Lily James, Sam Worthington, Will Fitzgerald, Jared Abrahamson, Eisa Davis, Matthew Maher and Victor Garber

Credits: Directed by David Mackenzie, scripted by Justin Piasecki. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:52

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Movie Review: New Yorkers Connect, but Avoid Attraction, Love “Or Something” Like It.

Posted on August 21, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Or Something” is a not-half-bad indie romance in the “Before Sunrise,” “In Search of a Midnight Kiss” tradition.

Two strangers are thrown together for a long day of trying to collect a debt. They talk and talk and try to make or avoid anything like a “connection” as they do.

Insights about their characters, pieces of their histories tell each other and us how they met at this Brooklyn apartment and why they have to take on this Quixotic quest from Broolyn to Harlem, home to “Uptown Mike” and their money.

Defense mechanisms go up and come down, kneejerk prejudices are offered up and swatted down, all folded into a day of generally engaging subway ride chats, diner discourse and walks through a nearly empty park mere days before Christmas.

Olivia (Mary Neely) meets Amir (Kareem Rahma) as they’re both heading for the same Brooklyn apartment. We’ve just seen her selling clothes to raise cash. He’s fighting some sort of family fire via cell phone.

As he’s walking in the same direction, just a few steps behind her, he earns a New York “Hello.”

“I will f—–g TASE you!”

Relax. He’s going to see Teddy. So is she. He lets her possibly racist hostility slide. Her “Sorry” is almost sincere enough to warrant it.

She needs cash that Teddy “owes” her. So does he. They both want the exact same amount — $1200. “Synchronicity?” Maybe. But Teddy (Brandon Wardell), in a wheelchair, his foot in a boot-cast, is all about deflection and distraction.

Couldya REFILL my Big Gulp? I could “write you an IOU on the IOU.”

Teddy’s manipulative. Teddy’s privileged. What New Yorker would trust Teddy to give them the time of day, much less money?

Surely they know that “your money is with Uptown Mike” is a dodge. No, Teddy can’t give you Mike’s exact address. No, he won’t give out the man’s phone number. There’s an excuse for why Mike has no social media presence/photo for them to look at.

Mike’s a “private dude?” Sure.

But off the two of them go, as beggars can’t be choosers and each appears to have some sort of cash-starved deadline. She wouldn’t talk at all, but she burns out her phone’s battery playing Sudoku on the subway. And when Olivia does converse, her attitudes, gender dogma and generation blurt out in a single sentence.

“Guys are only nice to the girls they want to have sex with.”

Amir’s reassurances to the contrary fall on deaf ears. Citing all the social media blasts from women who don’t “want to be approached” at work, in the gym, in the park or in the pubs and clubs is why “I just don’t talk to girls in real life.”

They have a day to work past this impasse, an afternoon fraught with confrontation (David Zayas plays the anti-gentrification crusader with a baseball bat, Uptown Mike), confession and confirmation bias.

A second tradition built into this project is the “Write a script you can star in” make-your-own-break ethos that sees Neely (“Happiness for Beginners”) and Rahma, who was in a couple of episodes of “Poker Face” cook up this story built around all this conversation, New York locations and two story arcs to follow, all of it divided into time-check chapters with cutesie titles riffing on the film’s title.

“Like 2…or something.”

The characters are interesting and the conversation, ranging from one’s “everything is connected” reason for being respectful, acting with kindness and morality to anecdotes about different cultures’ reactions to death and Istanbul as “the hair transplant capital of the world.”

But Neely and Rahma and director Jeffrey Scotti Schroeder find a light tone, a “vibe,” and then betray it in an effort to “explain” this or that behavior and worldview. The ending feels plausible but not “true” to the spirit of the film.

A lot of this feels screenwriterly, which makes Brandon Wardell‘s repellent, self-absorbed and unaccountable douche-bro poster child Teddy entertaining, but the sort of character who only exists in screenplays.

Our leads, however, make these New York “types” wholly believable.

And you have to credit “Or Something” for doing what it sets out to do — introduce two characters who neither they nor we would pay any heed, and make us interested in their lives and invested in their quest, hoping for the best from Teddy, Uptown Mike or an ending we can live with.

Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Mary Neely, Kareem Rahma, David Zayas and Brandon Wardell

Credits: Directed by Jeffrey Scotti Schroeder, scripted by Mary Neely and Kareem Rahma. A Factory 25 release.

Running time: 1:21

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Series Review: Returning to the Gold Standard — “The Story of Film: An Odyssey”

Posted on August 19, 2025 by Roger Moore

I reviewed “The Story of Film” back when it first made its way to the US via Netflix over a dozen years ago, and like everyone else who weighed in on it, called it “a film school” course in streaming form.

But it was a cursory review, based on the early episodes, and deadline pressures kept me from getting back to all of Mark Cousins’ fifteen (initial) episodes about film history, the innovators and revolutions and “golden ages” of the cinemas of America, Germany, China, Italy, Japan, Africa and so on.

In the years since, no series has come along — detailing the invention or discovery of continuity editing, the close-up, split screens and parallel structure narratives, the rise of this or that movie trend or national cinema or iconic, rule-inventing filmmaker — to challenge its place as The Best Film History Series of Them All.

So with the summer cinema of 2025 winding down, and that godawful “Titans” drama with a hint of “docu” series on Netflix now, I’ thought I’d track down Cousins’ series and finish it off. It’s available as part of Amazon Prime, now.

The Northern Irish Cousins is an idiosyncratic tour guide, gushing over this little seen corner of the world or that little-appreciated film or filmmaker. His quiet, flat, lightly-accented narration is somewhat sleep inducing.

And he wears out phrases like “golden age” and how this or that trend “would change the story of film.”

But this series is a film buff’s dream, a thorough, global appreciation of where the Big Ideas and storytelling novelties of cinema were first introduced. If your “understanding” of film history is warped by Hollywood mythology and an America-centric view of the movies, as mine was, you mind can’t help but have your eyes opened by learning Indian cinema beyond and before Satyajit Ray, the “revolution” that Egypt’s “Cairo Station” was and the ways Robert Bresson, Fellini, Ozu, Passolini and Kurosawa, as well as Welles, Ford and Hitchock, influenced decades of movies that followed their heydays.

Every episode roughly encompasses an era — usually about a decade long — from the earliest silents of the Lumiere brothers, Edwin S. Porter and Georges Melies to the vast leaps that German cinema and Scandinavian films made during the silent era, the earliest epics through the movies of China’s first cinematic “golden age” (the 1930s) and onward.

The French New Wave, New American Cinema of the ’60s and ’70s, Africa and South America’s earliest smashes, Japan’s pre-war films compensating for a cruel,imperialist culture and post-war embrace of the need to evolve, “An Odyssey” truly covers as many of the waypoints the movies have passed through as would seem humanly possible in one lifetime.

Here’s Cousins on the godfather of Hong Kong kung fu cinema, King Hu.

“If John Ford had been into Buddhism, ballet and zero gravity gravity (wirework flying martial artists), he might have made films like King Hu.”

“Muhammad: Messenger of God” earns a closer look for “innovations,” as do kung fu films, Bollywood action musicals and “The Horse Thief,” the “Fifth Generation” Chinese film that Cousins agrees with Scorsese was “the best film of the ’80s,” a “rebellious” decade when communism lashed out in dying gasps and conservative “lies” were challenged by an emerging indie cinema in the West.

The filmmaking team of John Sayles and Maggie Renzi are celebrated as “standard bearers” of
American indie cinema. “Intolerance” turns up as inspiration for scores of epic imitations ,”The Blair Witch Project” embraced as the ultimate “digital age” smash and Gus Van Sant appreciated for his consistently “out there” hits (“Elephant,” its inspiration and title are explained) and misses (“Gerry“).

Spielberg’s “signature shot,” that moment of “awe” in so many of his movies, is sampled. Mercedes McCambridge reveals the ways she inhabited the “entity” voice of Lucifer in “The Exorcist,” and Luke Skywalker trusting “the force,” his feelings, rather than reason and his targeting computer becomes the metaphor for American cinema in the ’70s and beyond, “feeling” no longer “thinking.”

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Documentary Review: The Psychology of “Ordinary Men” who carried out “The Forgotten Holocaust”

Posted on August 19, 2025 by Roger Moore

It can’t be a coincidence that Netflix chose this moment in time to stream the 2022 German TV doc “Ganz normale Männer – Der ‘vergessene Holocaust,'” “Ordinary Men: The Forgotten Holocaust.”

The Internet is overrun with videos of masked goons attacking, roughing up and “arresting” people who may or may not be immigrants — almost entirely “brown people” — and may or may not be documented.

They’re doing this on the payroll of a totalitarian regime put in power by hate and run on hate. American mainstream news organizations are cowed and under-covering or even normalizing the crimes and the assault on due process and the ways this violence is being used to change the subject from the corrupt regime and its leader’s deep ties to pedophilia.

The film airs at a time when the word “Holocaust” has been reduced to a “brand” that’s being tarnished daily by a “final solution” underway in the Middle East, following decades of land-grabbing and apartheidist disenfranchisement backed up by Jewish/Zionist state violence. The phrase “Never Again” is losing all its meaning thanks to an Israeli regime bent on ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

So yes, maybe the Germans still have something to teach us.

“Ordinary Men” takes its title from University of North Carolina academic Christopher Browning’s book about a Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 101 and how mature, often academically accomplished “ordinary men” were recruited and thrust, with little training, into carrying out the early days of the mass genocide of Jews, Gypsies, Poles and Slavs to create “living space” for the Third Reich.

Browning, psychologists and sociologists discuss specific “ordinary men,” and the general process of peer-pressuring these untrained recruits, many of whom weren’t Nazi fanatics who joined up just to “police” occupied territories and avoid being conscripted into the army, into unspeakable acts.

Millions of victims were killed in death camps during the “Final Solution.” But those doing the rounding up and transporting of the doomed had already been carrying out mass killings — from shooting men, women and children to “bashing” babies heads in — in Poland and anywhere else they were posted.

The film, narrated by Brian Cox, focuses on that Hamburg battalion, whose commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, showed shock as he told his charges of the “terrible” orders they were given that day they were told to slaughter 1500 Polish Jews, some of them Germans who’d fled to Poland after Hitler’s rise to power.

German “efficiency” and cost-cutting didn’t yet figure into the machinery of the Holocaust. They escorted victims one by one into a forest, chatting with them (one recognized the owner of a cinema he’d attended in Hamburg) before murdering them.

Black and white photographs and rare archival footage of such “operations” blends with reenactments to recreate the horror. Audio and filmed archives of the trials of some of these war criminals — most were never brought to justice — lets us hear surviving victims’ accounts, and the killers’ unemotional descriptions of their work, carrying out the grand scheme of their state and the fanatics running it.

None expressed remorse, something one of their surviving prosecutors (Benjamin Ferencz) says.

But as Browning asserts and German academics confirm, these weren’t do-this-or-die orders. These “ordinary men” had a choice. Some chose to endure a bit of “coward” taunting from their comrades and refused, with no official punishment or recriminations.

The “We were just following orders” defense never works, from SS, Gestapo and “Reserve Police Battalions” to ICE or IDF.

Yet Browning reminds us that it’s never been about “orders.”

“Regimes that want to commit genocide or mass murder will never fail to do so for a lack of people who will pull the trigger.”

There’ve been so many Holocaust documentaries over the decades that it’s easy to become numb to the subject and anything those who endured it have to teach us. “Ordinary Men” breaks through that with a warning to those ignoring history repeating itself, and to those who think they’re safe, hiding behind masks as they commit crimes against humanity on behalf of leaders relying on hate to avoid their own reckoning.

Rating: TV-MA, discussions of mass murder, nudity

Cast:Christopher Browning, Harald Welzer, Hilary Earl, Stefan Klemp, Benjamin Ferencz and Sefan Kühl narrated by Brian Cox.

Credits: Directed by Manfred Oldenberg and Oliver Halmburger, scripted by Manfred Oldenberg. A Netflix release.

Running time: 58 minutes

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Classic Film Review: “The Limey” brings Terence Stamp and Cockney Revenge to ’90s L.A.

Posted on August 18, 2025 by Roger Moore

A chewy comeback role is the ultimate gift to an accomplished actor who never quite caught fire or who got older while producers and studio execs kept getting younger.

Think of what Tarantino did for Travolta, Pam Grier or Robert Forster, what “Stranger Things” meant for Winona Ryder or “The Whale” managed for Brendan Fraser.

Steven Soderbergh had just transitioned from “indie” cinema icon (“sex, lies and videotape”) to mainstream hit-maker (“Out of Sight”) as a director when he brought “The Limey” (1999) to life at boutique distributor Artisan.

A simple, bluff and brutal thriller without a lot of mystery to it became the star vehicle Terence Stamp never really had in his ’60s debut years, when “The Collector” and “Modesty Blaise” might have made him, but didn’t.

Stamp, who passed away this week at 87, passed on “Alfie,” which made his former roommate Michael Caine a superstar. He was supposedly considered a replacement for Sean Connery as James Bond.

But what never happened back then came to him with the career-extending showcase that was “The Limey,” making him a Cockney ex-con bashing and shooting his way through Los Angeles in search of answers about his daughter’s death.

Soderbergh, working from a Lem Dobbs (“Dark City,” “The Score”) script, had a tale about a “villain” as the Brits like to call him who got his start in the ’60s. Who better to renew our acquaintance with London in the ’60s than Stamp?

Stamp was one of the famous faces of ‘Swinging London.” He dated Julie Christie and other starlets of the day. His younger brother, Chris Stamp, managed mod-era rockers The Who, who earn a needle-drop (“The Seeker”) in “The Limey.”

Stamp, with that fixed, blue-eyed stare that could suggest menace or masked despair, would be our fish-out-of-water proxy, a man of violence out for revenge in a city where money and power insulated the powerful from accountability.

And he’d be our introduction to the already-faded world and rhyming, coded slang of Cockney.

“I’m gonna ‘ave a butcher around,” Wilson, his character says, puzzling any Angelino who hears him. “Butcher’s hook,” he explains. “‘Look’ around.”

Luiz Guzman, getting one of his biggest breaks, plays Eduardo, the ex-con who befriended Jennifer, the daughter who died, supposedly in a car crash, and who wrote to Wilson back in Britain about her death.

“He’s my new china,” Wilson says by way of introducing “Ed” to others. Another puzzled look. “China plate. Mate.”

Wilson and his “new china” will use any name Ed can come up with to get Wilson closer to Terry Valentine, Jennifer’s much older record-producer boyfriend. The slick, oily and 60something Valentine is played by Peter Fonda, fresh off “Ulee’s Gold” and leaning into his own “comeback.”

Wilson gets in over his head, busted up by the first thugs he meets. But they let him live, which turns out to be a mistake.

He chats up LA voice coach Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren) who knew Jennifer and who provides us a peek at show biz back in the day. And before we know it, our Limey has shown up at Valentine’s designer hilltop mansion for a party and given some thought to how he’s going to kill this guy whom he’s sure had everything to do with Jennifer’s death.

But prison taught our Cockney to “make a choice” about what actions to take, to realize “when it matters, and when it doesn’t.”

There’ll be no public execution of the tanned, imperious Valentine in public. Oh no. That’d be too easy, “china.”

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One of the Great Ones, Terence Stamp — 1938-2025

Posted on August 17, 2025 by Roger Moore

Dashing, urbane, underestated and soulful, British character actor Terence Stamp might have had a run as a matinee idol. That wasn’t the hand the movies dealt him.

So he crafted one of the most colorful careers of any of his peers, that post-Burton — O’Toole, Reed and Caine generation of British actors.

Yes, he was menacing as General Zod in the ’70s-80s “Superman” franchise. But check Stamp out as a British father hunting for answers about his daughter in Los Angeles as “The Limey.” Watch him upend the dynamic of a hostage awaiting his doom as “The Hit.”

Bathe in the glories of his dignified camp “Not f—–g ABBA” turn in “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert.”

Remember his place in “Swinging London” in “The Collector,” “Modesty Blaise” and his other ’60s roles in “Far from the Madding Crowd” and “Poor Cow.”

Stamp passed away in the UK today. He was 87.

He dated Julie Christie, turned down “Alfie,” never got but so close to James Bond, but the career he carved out and left behind is distinguished, iconoclastic and fun.

Stamp’s “comeback” years, kicked off by “The Limey,” kept my attention and when “Valkyrie” came out back in 2008, I jumped at the chance to interview him. He came off charming, thoughtful and exacting — an actor who knew characters and how to make them work within his own understated but outsized persona.

He helped make the under-rated “Last Night in Soho” a dazzling experience, play-acting in an era (The ’60s) he helped define. It the last film he made,our last chance seeing him in — just four years ago.

I have my orders this evening. So do you. Let’s find “The Limey” on Tubi or Amazon Prime or Plex and revisit one of the great one’s finest hours.

RIP.

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Movie Review: “Groundhog Day” goes Gallic, “Palm Springs” swings Moroccan — “An Endless Wedding”

Posted on August 17, 2025 by Roger Moore

The French take on “Palm Springs” is something of a departure from the Hulu original film starring Andy Samberg, Cristin Miliotti and J.K. Simmons.

Director and co-writer Patrick Cassir’s “An Endless Marriage” is just as funny, but more brisk and with a panache that the cute but often crude Max Barbakow film never managed, right down to its title in French — “Un mariage sans fin,” A Wedding/Marriage Without End.”

This destination wedding is at a Morrocan resort. And the outsider swaggering through it, all tropical shirt, jaded grin and je nais se quois is Paul, played by Tarek Boudali of the French “Babysitting” comedies.

He knows the wait staff by name, even if that always prompts a “Do I know you?” (in French with English subtitles) from them. He’s over his tone-deaf fiance, Justine (Claire Chust). We can see it in his eyes, in the cringe he barely suppresses as she stumbles through a song she’s performing for her best friend, the bridge, Gala.

He’s heard that mess before.

Gala (Marie Papillon)? She’s a bit bowled over by this runaway wedding — French, with Morrocan dancing, decor and ululating. The groom (Bertrand Usclat) moved here and has gone whole hog in the cultural appropriation department.

It’s all too much for Paul. He hates weddings, with their “idiotic table plans” and “chocolate fountains,” he mutters in voice-over narration. But he knows the drill. Even if the father of the bride is always wondering “Who IS that guy?” And the mother mutters “Why isn’t he DRESSED?”

When the dancing starts, he navigates the dance floor like he knows this Pac-Man maze by heart, grabbing that next drink that he’s certain will show up in just that hand at just this moment.

And when the maid of honor, the bride’s big sister Louna (Camille Rowe) stumbles through a toast she hasn’t prepared, he gallantly steps up to the mike and to the rescue.

He may hate weddings, but “Who are you?” Paul is the grease hat makes this wheel turn.

And when it turns out Louna hates weddings too, she and her toast-rescuer might just connect. Especially when she learns he’s engaged.

“I drink like a fish” and “I only sleep with unavailable men.”

But an attack by a crossbow-wielding avenger (Youssef Hadji) interrupts that. A dash to a cave emitting a supernatural light further confuses her. And when he is snatched away, not to worry. “We’ll meet again…and again…”

Louna awakens to the same man-in-her-shower shame that she did on this long wedding day. And tracking down Paul, who’s also up with the first discordant notes of Justine’s attempted “song,” just confirms what she fears.

“We’re in a time loop…a vortex.” Don’t bother with the RFK idiotic “science” of the situation. Don’t fight it. You can’t run away from it. Don’t kill yourself. This is your lot, to relive this “Endless Wedding,” day after day into eternity.

The louche Paul has endured this day “thousands of times” already. He reads the same newspaper every morning, reassured that “nothing’s changed.” He visits a cafe in town where he knows the regulars by name (they have no idea who he is) and he plays the lottery, and wins, because he knows the right numbers.

Can Louna give herself over to this? Can Hakim, the vengeful crossbowman, be placated or reasoned with?

Will anyone learn to “Live in the present, nothing else matters,” as Paul claims he has?

Now that Amazon has joined Netflix in that “Let’s remake our intellectual property (scripts) for all the many cultures that we serve” ethos, streaming consumers who don’t mind subtitles are going to run into the same plot more than once.

You can either “I’ve seen ‘Palm Springs'” and move on, or you drop in and see how another filmmaker might tailor the tale for another part of the world, vive la difference and all that. I found the Franco-Moroccan touches amusing and charming, the laughs less crass.

The “oh no they didn’t” turns in the tale, the “history” of our “hero” and the like are more amusing than explosively funny. I remember the oft-stolen-from classic “Groundhog Day” a lot better and more fondly than the much more recent “Palm Springs.” But thescattered big laughs in the latter film are genuine spit-takes. There’s little here in Morocco that manages that.

However, this remake just breezes by, a comedy more in touch with its tone, more whimsy than wham-bam-thanky-ma’am and the like. It’s less carnal and more romantic.

Boudali never lets us see him straining for laughs, and Rowe, Chust and Papillon have their moments.

And while neither film is on a plane with “Groundhog Day,” they’re certainly on a par with each other. Vive le difference and all that.

Rating: 16+, suicide, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Tarek Boudali, Camille Rowe, Claire Chust, Youssef Hadji, Bertrand Usclat and Marie Papillon.

Credits: Directed by Patrick Cassir, scripted by Jim Birmant and Patrick Cassir, based on the “Palm Springs” script by Max Barbakow and Andy Siara. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:21

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Netflixable? Vanessa Kirby goes Desperate and Dressed Down for “Night Always Comes”

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Roger Moore

When it works, there’s a heedless, reckless energy to the desperation Vanessa Kirby brings to “Night Always Comes.”

As a sex worker whose unhappy home life led to a string of impulsive, life-threatening decisions, Lynette is racing against a deadline to raise the down payment for a house that won’t so much lift her prospects for the vanishing “American Dream” as allow her to cling to what little she has.

And when Lynette lurches into crimes, ill-considered “deals” and rash, in-the-moment miscalculations, director Benjamin Caron (“Sharper,” TV’s “The Crown”) finally achieves the pace this day-and-night ticking clock melodrama demands.

But the rest of the time, this dressed-down version of the “Mission: Impossible,” “Pieces of a Woman” and “The Crown” star is a case study in why “melodrama” is not something you want out of a film.

Contrived situations abound as Lynette reels from her mother’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) spiteful decision to impulsively buy a car with the down payment money Lynette now needs to raise.

Lynette stumbles into a series of “stock” characters . A married “regular” (Randall Park), an old friend “in the life” (Julia Fox), a pawn broker who once “used” her (Michael Kelly), an ex-con co-worker (Stephan James) at one of her two jobs to an ex-con safecracker (Sean Martini) down to a sleazeball drug buyer (Eli Roth) all must be met, charmed or cheated in her mad pursuit of $25,000 in roughly 18 hours time.

Every encounter could get her closer to the cash or deeper in trouble. And lying, angling, finagling Lynette can’t help but insult or otherwise cross every single person she needs to do her bidding or supply the down payment.

Her mania to “save” her older special-needs brother (Zack Gottsagen) from “the system” (supervised care) is meant to explain everything. But this journey through one hellish night in Portland, Oregon is just one set-piece encounter/negotiation/confrontation after another, each one feeling more “scripted” than organic.

James, as Cody the guy she’s heard is an “ex-con,” is the most fully-rounded character among Lynette’s parade of “The Used.” But their repetitive, mistrustful and interogatory conversations between action beats stop the picture dead.

In Sarah Conradt’s script based on a Willy Vlautin novel, Cody went to jail for robbery.

“That’s not the whole story.” “”What’s the whole story?”

“I was set up.” “You were set up?”

“Yeah, that’s the WHOLE story.”

Kirby’s down-and-dirty look here doesn’t wholly obscure the famous eyebrows and cheekbones, and the picture rarely comes close to wallowing in what “the bottom” looks like, and that goes for her performance, too.

Lynette’s late-for-meetings/work excuses fibs and bigger lies, thefts and confrontational moments with those she “blames” for her plight occasionally feel lived-in or credible. She strikes one as somebody who has leaned on her looks for a lot in life, even a life this downmarket.

That’s why for all these shortcomings in the name of scripted expedience, this picture had possibilities. Breathless, ticking-clock pacing would have stripped the narrative of the many pauses where we’re allowed to think “Oh come ON” before the next stock character makes a bow, the next blow lands or next crooked angle presents itself.

Rating: R, violence, drugs, sexual situations and profanity

Cast: Vanessa Kirby, Stephan James, Zack Gottsagen, Randall Park, Julia Fox, Sean Martini, Eli Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

Credits: Directed by Benjamin Caron, scripted by Sarah Conradt, based on a novel by Willy Vlautin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

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Movie Review: Everyman Odenkirk faces Sharon Stone — “Nobody 2”

Posted on August 15, 2025 by Roger Moore

Sixtysomething Bob Odenkirk returns as a middle-aged-man wish fulfillment fantasy antihero in “Nobody 2,” a sequel to the violent action comedy about a family man/good provider who happens to be a professional fury in a fight.

More people underestimate snowflake-whiskered, balding and wrinkled Hutch Mansell. And more people pay the price in this picture that peaks early and tumbles towards cutesy and manages to outstay its welcome despite breezing by in 89 minutes.

Workaholic hitman/collector Hutch still has too many jobs to do and too little time for his not-wholly-unsuspecting family (Connie Nielsen, with Paisley Cadorath and Gage Munroe). His “debt” with The Barber (Colin Salmon) won’t pay itself, after all.

But with out-of-his-league wife Becca almost sending that “We need to talk” text over that “other side of you,” his late nights at “the office,” getting more nicks and bruises in his savage fights-to-the-death seems like a test this marriage won’t pass.

“I’m gonna take a break.”

Stumbling into a bumper sticker for Plummerville’s vintage “Tiki Rush” theme park, that’s where he’ll drag the wife and teens to.

“You need to have happy memories to carry you through” life’s other tests, he tells them. So they roadtrip from Ohio to northern Wisconsin, “just like we did when I was a kid.” Grandpa (Christopher Lloyd) checks out of “the home” to come along.

But wouldn’t you know it, the water slide is closed and there’s bullying of hotheaded teen Brady at the arcade. When the bouncers join in the bullying, Hutch needs to get the family out and use his favorite excuse.

“I forgot my phone.”

Let the mayhem of righteous wrath begin.

But that runs him afoul of the corrupt sheriff. In a world where dad-bod Bob Odenkirk is a badass to be reckoned with, Colin Hanks can be a tough, murderous sheriff. Even if John Ortiz is the park operator who “RUNS this town.”

Because the real power is the scariest archetype of all, the murderous dragon lady (Sharon Stone) running a casino and a smuggling network from Canada through Not the Wisconsin Dells.

Hutch finds out who she is. She’s about to find out who Hutch is.

The over-the-top violence is funny in the early scenes. But it turns more and more abrupt, more over-the-top and more sadistic the longer the story unfolds. Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto (“Headshot”) gets the tone right much of the time. But the lurching pace suggest cuts that interrupt the flow and the “family” stuff doesn’t land gracefully.

The picture still delivers some of the fun of the original. But the “Nobody National Lampoon’s Vacation” in suburban Winnepeg (Lilac Resort becomes a down-market “South of the Border meets Old Town”) means repetitive brawls on a tour boat ride and “escalation” when Hutch is advised to “de-escalate” and — you know — not slaughter minions and torch smuggling operations and the like.

And that lurch into “cute” was coming the moment you saw this picture’s trailers and knew Christopher Lloyd was returning.

Rating: R, graphic, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Bob Odenkirk, Connie Nielsen, Colin Hanks, Colin Salmon, John Ortiz, RZA, Christopher Lloyd and Sharon Stone.

Credits: Directed by Timo Tjahjanto, scripted by Derek Kolstad and Aaron Rabin, based on characters created by Kolstad. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:29

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