Netflixable? Phylicia, Seraya and Tyler riff on The Book of Ruth — “Ruth & Boaz”

Posted on September 30, 2025 by Roger Moore

The Biblical “Book of Ruth” was the inspiration for “Ruth & Boaz,” a modern, semi-faith-based romantic melodrama from the fantasy factory that is Tyler Perry Studios.

Ruth isn’t a widow who bonds with her widowed mother in law, meeting the rich Boaz as she gleans his barley fields. Here she’s an Atlanta rapper on the lam with the woman who might have been her mother-in-law had Ruth’s fiance lived long enough to marry her. Ruth picks grapes for a wealthy vintner in Tennessee wine country and catches the eye of the bottler Boaz with her beauty.

Actress turned writer-director Alanna Brown’s (“Trees of Peace”) film of a Michael Elliot, Cory Tynan script takes us from a dangerous Atlanta music scene, where performers do what they’re told and honor their contracts or else, to the rural outskirts of Nashville, where a Black winemaker can make a mark with the family winery and the mostly-Black workforce can let off steam by going line dancing in the Country Music Capital, Nashville.

It’s got moments of eye-rolling fantasy, absurd plot twists and lots of faith-based voice-over and face-to-face advice from widow Naomi (Phylicia Rashad) to singer-turned-wine-picker Ruth (singer-actress Seraya of TV’s “Empire”).

“Sometimes God’s angels don’t wait for an invitation.”

At least this corny, formulaic “collision course with destiny” drama is short and sweet-natured, and the Book of Ruth connection shows some imagination.

Ruth Moabley and her singing partner Breana (Nijah Brenea) are on the cusp of stardom. Their hip hop act, The 404 (Atlanta’s area code) has the sex appeal and sonic pop to break out. Their manager Syrus (James Lee Thomas) has a lot invested in them. He’s counting on that So So Def Records “eight figure deal” in the offing.

But Ruth isn’t sure about this tiny-costume/suggestive lyrics/grinding dancing future. We see the crucifix she always wears. And she feels the disapproval of her fiance’s mother Naomi, who isn’t subtle in suggesting her son Marlon (Chaundre Hall-Broomfield) could do better.

Bailing out on Syrus is not allowed. When Marlon and his dad (Gregory Alan Williams) are murdered in a “car jacking,” Syrus flat out tells Ruth he did this.

Rather than run to the police, she runs off to Pegram, Tennessee with grieving Naomi, whom she keeps in the dark about her role in losing her husband and son. They’ll live in the half-ruined farmhouse Naomi left behind when she married well and moved to the Big City.

Beautiful Ruth will learn to cut and crush grapes, sing just enough as she works to raise an eyebrow from her fellow farmworkers and catch the eye of Boaz (Tyler Lepley of TV’s “The Haves and Have Nots” and “Harlem”), the owner who is sure he’s got a vintage coming to market that will make his winery famous and successful.

The film’s many Biblical allusions are in names — Ruth Moabley (Biblical Ruth was from Moab), Syrus (Cyrus) and Eli and Bo Azrah, nicknamed “Boaz” — in the way Boaz washes Ruth’s feet (it’s for wine-crushing, in this case) and in the lessons of love imparted in many, many snippets of voice-over narration or sage pronouncements from Naomi.

“Love is patient and kind, but love can also break your heart.”

It’s a shallow, corny story with absurd twists — the way Syrus keeps admitting to crimes, of course Naomi’s old church comes by to fix up her house, Ruth “going viral” by covering Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” in a country bar, Boaz just happening to be pals with producer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds.

The usual Tyler Perry Studios sheen of affluence coats the production and removes the story from reality and fails to sugar-coat half-hearted dialogue-writing.

“Like I said before, I TOLD you.”

Seraya sings and handles the spotlight well enough. The character may be thinly developed,. A smorgasbord of screenwriting cliches make up Ruth’s background. But our star never lets us doubt her musical destiny.

There really is a Tennessee Wine Country, so kudos for finding a story that fits that setting. But with “Ruth & Boaz,” it’s the dull, predictable and ever-so-chaste fantasy romance that’s the hard sell.

Rating: TV-14, threats of violence

Cast: Seraya, Phylicia Rashad, Tyler Lepley, James Lee Thomas, Nijah Brenea, Walnette Carrington and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds.

Credits: Directed by Alanna Brown, scripted by Michael Elliot and Cory Tynan. A Tyler Perry Studios release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:33

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Movie Review: McConaughey, Ferrara and Greengrass rally around “The Lost Bus”

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Roger Moore

Paul Greengrass, one of the last and greatest of the cinema’s action auteurs, stages, shoots and edits the hell out of “The Lost Bus,” turning a conventional enough “true story” of children trapped on a schoolbus in a raging wildfire into a minor epic.

It’s about something that happened in the horrific Camp Fire that devoured Paradise, California and environs and killed 85 people in 2018. A blaze lit in a stiff breeze swept down on thousands before many knew what was happening, and a bus sent to evacuate school kids to safety got lost in the smoke and flames.

Greengrass, the director of “United 93” and “Captain Phillips” and the best of the “Bourne” thrillers, takes us into the inferno and the race to fight or flee it in a tale told at a breathless sprint, almost from start to finish.

The story may be old fashioned “Disaster of the Week” TV movie generic. But Greengrass elevates it to pulse-pounding thriller art.

Matthew McConaughey plays Kevin McKay, a townie who left Paradise and came back — one busted marriage, one surly teen son and one aged mother later. He’s driving a school bus and barely hanging onto that job thanks to family distractions. His dad died not long back, his mother is getting up there in years, the kid is getting on his last nerve and the day before the worst happens, his aged dog has to be put down.

And then those poorly-maintained, slow-to-be-shut down Pacific Gas & Electric high-tension lines lose an insulator in a stiffening breeze. Sparks become flames and a brush fire turns into an inferno in the climate-change baked and wind-blasted mountains and canyons.

Not a good day for Kevin’s son to get sick and act-out by not answering his phone.

“I wanna go live with Mom!”

Ashlie Atkinson is Ruby, the school bus dispatcher who’s reached the “I don’t care” stage of Kevin’s excuses. But his “family emergency” stop offs and delays in getting bus 693 into the maintenance shed mean that he’s the only driver in a position to evac the last kids from a school about to be swept over.

America Ferrara is Mary Ludwig, the teacher determined to get the 22 kids “into two straight lines,” , remind them to “keep calm” and follow “procedure” just long enough to ensure that their window to escape all but closes. She’s armtwisted onto the bus to manage the children while Kevin tries to outsmart crushing traffic and the fire racing towards Paradise to get them to safety.

And Yul Vazquez of “Captain Phillips” and TV’s “Succession” is Chief Martinez, the professional but overwelmed Cal Fire commander whose hope to “Let’s knock this out before it becomes something” come to naught.

Greengrass moves us to the edge of our seats with technique — hand-held cameras swirling through the chaos, extreme jumpy close ups of his sweating and panting stars letting us see the fear and panic and fire’s-eye-view tracking shots of the blaze as it swoops its way from an inaccessible origin point down into the towns and villages of this corner of California.

You know what you’re seeing can’t be real and has to be CGI augmented with smoke and flashes of real flames blended in. But Greengrass and his effects team do a grand job of faking it. Somebody on this production must have seen the eerie and hellish dashcam drive through a Siberian forest fire scenes of “The Road Movie” documentary of a few years back. This is that realistic.

But that’s what you get when you hire the best action director out there for your formulaic disaster made-for-TV movie. “The Lost Bus” takes that weary formula, lets the player grab our empathy and then just plain dazzles us with the inferno the filmmakers light.

Greengrass sees to it that Apple gets a movie so well-crafted that they’ll regret not opening it in theaters.

Rating: R, people burning, scenes of children in peril, profanity

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrara, Ashlie Atkinson and Yul Vazquez

Credits: Directed by Paul Greengrass, scripted by Brad Ingelsby and Paul Greengrass, based on a book by Lizzie Johnson. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:10

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Movie Review: “Running on Empty” pretty much sums this Rom Com Up

Posted on September 29, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Running on Empty” is a dark comedy that tests the comic limits of the infamous “Gen Z stare.”

A deadpan rom-com about death, it has reliable comics in supporting roles and co-stars Lucy Hale. And it is stillborn thanks, in part, to the expressionless turn by Keir Gilchrist, our leading man, who plays a young mortician (“post-mortem artist”) who would like to find one last love before his impending death.

Gilchrist, also star of “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” (It wasn’t.) is Mortimer Mortensen, a 30ish bore trapped in the black suit he wears everywhere and every day, even when he’s not prepping corpses in “How they lived their life” poses — skiing, parasailing — for death photos.

“Adventure funerals” is how he and his uncle (Jim Gaffigan) pitch this concept to their Sherman Oaks and Greater LA patrons. And it’s a hit. What movielover or critic wouldn’t want to be captured, post mortem, in a mock up of a cinema, wearing 3D glasses as the way they’d like to be remembered?

Mortimer is engaged to Nicole (Francesca Eastwood, you-know-who’s kid) and house shopping. He’s the practical-minded one. But when she can’t talk him into a house just beyond their means, they’re persuaded to get their “LDCs” to ensure they’ll have decades and decades together to justify this expense.

Your “Life Day Count” is a service provided by a medical science startup that will tell you, with “97.9%” certainty, the day of your death.

No, they can’t anticipate accidents, murder or suicide.

So “How exactly do you figure that out?”

“We just do.”

Nicole has a death date over half a century into the future. Mortimer? He’ll be dead within the year.

Writer-director Daniel André takes a sort of “We just do” to this fanciful conceit, and that spills over into the rest of the movie. Neither we nor Mortimer are told of how he’ll die. No medical condition is mentioned, no treatment suggested. And as André has already scripted himself into a corner — no “accident, murder of suicide” is predictable — he just skips by that.

“Skips” is entirely too merry a word for anything that happens in this stiff of a comedy.

Awkward meals with Mortimer’s family (Monica Potter, Dustin Milligan and Clara McGregor) have no pulse.

There’s not much amusing about the dating service that’s set up to take advantage of this new “We know exactly when we’re going to die” world. Til Death Do Us Part’s interviewer/videographer Kate (Lucy Hale) allows herself to connect with the colorless Mortimer. But not before we endure a generally joyless bad-dates montage of women who either share Mortimer’s predicted-death situation, or who just aren’t interested in “commitment” or anything um, long term.

The film’s big “obstacle” to Mortimer’s dating-until-death plans is a misunderstanding with a sex worker that leads to endless, escalating threats from a pimp (Rhys Coiro). That story thread — which begins with the hooker reaching her “death date” — has promise that the script never realizes.

Comic Jay Pharoah, playing the hearse driver for Uncle Barry (Gaffigan) patters away for laughs that never come. Gaffigan is pretty good at deadpan, but there’s not much funny to work with here.

Mortimer’s profundities about reasons not to fear death aren’t even worth quoting, much less packaging in a fortune cookie.

And through all this humorless flailing in front of and behind the camera — you’ll notice shots literally repeated (the same sailboats pass by Mortimer and Kate as they chat on a Marina del Rey pier) — Gilchrist never delivers more than a shrug or that generational stare.

It’s not wholly his fault that “Running on Empty” is comically empty. But he does nothing to compensate for the inadequacies of script or direction, not that anyone else in the cast could.

Rating: R, slapstick violence, “sexual content,” profanity

Cast: Keir Gilchrist, Lucy Hale, Jim Gaffigan, Rhys Coiro, Jay Pharoah and Francesca Eastwood was

Credits: Scripted and directed by
Daniel André. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

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Series Review: “House of Guinness” is a Pint in a Gilded Gallon-sized Glass

Posted on September 28, 2025 by Roger Moore

How long does it take you to decide if a streaming series is worth bingeing all the way to the end? One episode? Three? Five?

That’s why such series frontload the action, the parade of characters, the colorful settings and in the case of period pieces, costumes. The series opener has to be a grabber. Think of “Ozark,” still Netflix’s streaming gold standard.

At the very least, a series-narrative needs to get down to the business of really entertaining by the second or third installment.

The late 19th century Dublin, rural Ireland and New York Bowery of Netflix’s period piece “House of Guiness” is striking and lavishly recreated for the series, set during a tumultuous changing of the ruling guard of Ireland’s most famous export — the dark porter of St. James Gate, Guinness Beer.

But a jolt from the first episode seems all creator Steven Knight budgeted for, so his director Tom Shankland — who shot half of the eight episodes — fills the screen with lush sepia (gas lit) interiors, dark repetitive shots of the sweaty, fiery, steelworks-like brewery.

The second installment feels like a placeholder, with melodrama of the dullest, most predictable variety wrung out of this saga of “fiction inspired by true stories.” So…it’s based on Guinness lore and gossip?

The third episode didn’t hook me, either.

The professional reviewing standard for most series is one should watch at least two or three episodes to form an opinion you can back up with a review. Most reviewers, judging from the notices I glanced over just as I started this review of “House of Guinness,” seem to have only watched an episode before passing judgement. It’s lovely to look at, but were they just guessing it would get better?

I sat through a third installment, and then a fourth, which is half-consumed by Jane Austen-esque scheming at a marriage ball. But midway through that fourth piece of the puzzle, the series crackles to life as a chancer (Jack Gleeson of “Game of Thrones”) finagles his way into representing the company as it tries to make a mark in the Irish-hating New York and Eastern American seaboard market of that era.

Finally, all these introductions and all that table-setting for the intrigues to come is sort of set in motion –halfway into the series. It starts to play as if our attentions to it will be rewarded, if only partially. Eventually. We hope.

The characters are a grab bag of melodramatic tropes. There are personal secrets and intrigues among the four heirs to the brewing empire — Arthur, played by Anthony Boyle, is mustachioed and closeted, Benjamin (Fionn O’Shea) is a dissolute drunk, Anne is the daughter (Emily Fairn) struggling to negotiate or procreate herself into a place at the table and Edward (Louis Patridge) is the dashing, resentful middle brother who works seven days a week making sure the beer and the business come to a perfect head every time.

“Your name is Guinness. That is not WHO you are! That is WHAT you are!”

So we have a gay blade whose “secret” could be exposed and ruin them, a scheming drinker/gambler, sexual adventures outside of marriage and even the poshest of the posh drop F-bombs like they’re auditioning for “Trainspotting.”

The sountrack is packed with anachronistic Irish rock, pop and hip hop by the likes of The Mary Wallopers, Thin Lizzy, Kneecap and Fontaines D.C. to give the enterprise an angry sonic edge that the narrative rarely provides.

Players earn their keep with frequent costume changes — Gilded Age tuxes and dresses for the swells, 18th century uniforms for the servants and green coats and sashes and skirts and bowler hats for the Catholic majority, especially the Fenians, agitating for Irish independence.

In 1868, when the Guinness patriarch dies, Ireland is still under the thumb of the British and the Fenian Brotherhood, precursor to the IRA, is protesting and angling to make the Brits consider giving them their freedom. The brewery may be a huge employer, but it is a Protestant enterprise in a Catholic country, which the Fenians — just a generation removed from the British-overseen potato famine — see as an angle to exploit.

But at least one Guinness sees that angle first and vows to play it for electoral advantage. The family has historically run for a seat in Parliament, and the Irish working class (males) are newly enfranchised. And Fenian connections will do wonders with the Irish diaspora in America, if they’re to sell their beer there.

Series creator Knight scripted and directed the very fine “Locke” and wrote terrific thriller “Eastern Promises” and the abomination “Serenity.” One gives somebody with those bonafides the benefit of the doubt.

But while I have no problem with the fictionalizing and the era-inappropriate music, I couldn’t get into Knight’s over-reliance on “types” — the power-and-position-hungry wife (Danielle Galligan), the fiery redheaded Fenian agitator (Niamh McCormack) and the Guinness family’s two-fisted “fixer,” Mr. Rafferty (James Norton) whose ties go deeper than most of the siblings realize.

Knight uses types rather than casting famous Irish acting names and faces to invite us into the story. Norton is the most famous player in the cast. He and Gleeson make the strongest impressions.

Future billion dollar business aside (graphics do the exchange rate math between then and now), the stakes in this story never feel all that high. The characters never give us the impression they’ll be paupers if they don’t make the others bend to their will.

Pretty faces or not, there’s no “romance” to any of this and scene after scene plays as decoration rather than forcefully advancing the plot.

As someone who loves the beverage and visited Dublin’s most popular tourist attraction — the St. James Gate Brewery — I was inclined to love this, and I enjoyed a moment here and there.

The stout? “I taste the bitterness of Ireland” in it, an Irish-American opines.

Where’d they get the symbol that decorates every bottle, keg and can of their beer? It’s Brian Boru’s Harp, but you’d have to go to Wikipedia to understand its symbolism and know where Edward Guinness first saw it.

Granted, the real history’s not exactly sizzling. But giving it a half-arsed “Bridgerton” sexing up doesn’t really pay off. Not early on, not even a bit after than and not really to so great a degree as to recommend this very pretty Irish travelogue bathed in beer and fire.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, nudity, profanity

Cast: Anthony Boyle, Louis Partridge, Emily Fairn, Fionn O’Shea, Danielle Galligan, Jack Gleeson, Niamh McCormack and James Norton

Credits: Created by Steven Knight. A Netflix release.

Running time: Eight episodes @:53-:55 minutes each

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Documentary Review: “Thank You Very Much” is the Deepest and Most Thorough Andy Kaufman Remembrance of All

Posted on September 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

There have been scads of TV specials, documentaries and books about comic performance artist, singer and hoaxer Andy Kaufman in the 41 years since his death.

I swear I’ve tried to take in one and all, from that sentimental, cute and childish pre-Pee Wee ABC special he did — belatedly aired around the time of his death — through his first biographer, who figured he had Kaufman nailed down as someone who perfected his shtick as a tween and basically repeated himself in more and more bizarre and maddening ways right up to his untimely death at 35.

His “alienating comedy,” intentionally bombing, posing as a virulent sexist, taking on weird disguised and untalented personas that could never have gotten on TV, was part and parcel of an entire career devoted to making his audience uncomfortable.

Our response? A lot of people, to this day, think he faked his death, the ultimate “commitment to a bit.” His “Taxi” co-star Carol Kane says she poked the corpse at his funeral “just to be sure” it wasn’t a hoax.

“Thank You Very Much” is the most thorough examination of Kaufman’s childhood, his psyche, his influences and the things that drove his art. For those who still care — and really, there has been no one who has done what he did and how he did it since — Alex Braverman’s documentary fills in more of the blanks than all the ones that preceded it.

There’s an image of tiny tyke Andy glimpsed in “The Peanut Gallery,” the kiddie audience present for broadcasts of “The Howdy Doody Show” in the mid-50s. We see and hear 20ish, bearded Andy challenge his Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi on “What is the value of entertainment?”

Their exchange, with the yogi chuckling at the audacity of the increasingly pointed queries, all but predict Kaufman’s future in entertainment back in 1970 and is one of the highlights of “Thank You Very Much.”

“Oddness is just a means of creating contrast,” Andy’s guru intoned. The yogi couldn’t have been more on the money if he’d added a verse of “That’s Entertainment!” as a kicker.

The late Robin Williams weighed in on his sometime collaborator. Michael Richards and Melanie Chartoff recall his intentionally disastrous “performance,” live on TV’s “Fridays.”

The wrestling, reading aloud from “The Great Gatsby” way past the point where the point it was funny on “Saturday Night Live,” “banned” from the show by popular vote, staging fake feuds and altercations with hecklers with his pal Bob Zmuda and fellow hoaxers, it was a career striking in its impact on the culture, and in its brevity.

Danny DeVito and Marilu Henner remember Kaufman posing as a panhandler down the street from where they were filming the sitcom Andy had just been cast in, “Taxi.”

Childhood friends, his parents and Andy himself talk about the childhood he reached back for and the trauma that might have triggered that.

The Tony Clifton alter-ego gets his due.

And the late Garry Shandling, seen in a pained and brief archival interview, adds “I would still like to know who the real Andy Kaufman was.”

Zmuda and Kaufman’s girlfriend Lynne Margulies are among the most authoritative witnesses and analysts of his mind and what shaped him.

I’d never seen Kaufman’s community college roommate, the Iranian-born Bijan Kimiachi, who relates how he became Kaufman’s “foreign man” model, Kimiachi’s “gift” to his friend.

Another great “get” for Braverman’s film? The avante garde singer and artist Laurie Anderson remembers her years as Andy’s favorite designated heckler/slap-fighter. She was “attracted to the violence in Andy,” a button-pushing comic for a “very violent country.”

There is a stunning amount of extant footage of Kaufman doing bits, playing clubs all the way to Carnegie Hall, on TV from a ’74 Dean Martin summer replacement series, doing “the foreign man,” through a Dick Van Dyke series two years later to “Saturday Night Live” and culture devouring stardom.

Steve Martin had him on when he guest-hosted “The Tonight Show,” and in an interview for this documentary, breaks down the comic tension that Kaufman made his own, playing variations of the guy “who has no business being here (on stage, on TV, etc).”

As Kaufman would stumble and seemingly struggle to tell a joke or find a laugh, the first giggles would be nervous. The guy wasn’t just bombing, he was deer-in-the-headlights freezing up.

“He’s also funny when he’s waiting,” Martin observes. The TM-trained comic was making comic magic out of awkward pauses and silences.

Generations have grown up since Kaufman’s death, and decades have passed since that Jim Carrey biopic, “Man on the Moon” came out. But if fans want to remember his work, art, genre-bending performances and signature bits, as well as his sad and precipitous decline, “Thank You Very Much” covers all the bases.

It’ll more than do until Andy comes back from the dead and has the last laugh in the greatest hoax of them all.

Rating: TV-MA, drug content, sexual subject matter, profanity

Cast: Andy Kaufman, Bob Zmuda, Marilu Henner, Robin Williams, Lynne Marguiles, Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Melanie Chartoff, Bijan Kimiachi, Michael Richards, James L. Brooks, Jim Burrows, Laurie Anderson and Danny DeVito.

Credits: Directed by Alex Braverman. A Drafthouse Films release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:39

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Movie Review: A Friendship. An Affair. What’s Missing? “All of You”

Posted on September 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

Brett Goldstein burns through a little of his “Ted Lasso” capital with “All of You,” a “When Harry Met Sally” platonic-friends-can’t-stay platonic romance co-starring Imogen Poots.

The friends “since uni” story, co-written by Goldstein, is at its best when our not-a-couple are just bantering — drug jokes, a wake for her dad joke that nobody who hears it will ever forget — supporting one another in times of crisis, with one of them plainly longing for something that will never be.

It’s after Simon’s paid for Laura’s “Soul Mates” AI-perfect matchmaking, after he’s been to her wedding and after he was the one to rush her to the hospital so that she could give birth that the affair begins. That’s when the film settles into a struggle to transcend cliches.

Affairs go in and out of fashion in the culture, but “All of You” highlights the fact that it’s not just movies about them that are formulaic. Affairs themselves have become cliches.

She has a baby and a “vulnerable moment” — a late night visit, impulsive sex on the floor. She sets him up with a friend (Zawe Ashton) who clicks with him well enough for them to move in together, only for Simon’s new love to figure out who his true love.

Simon and Laura engage in cheaters’ magical thinking — a fantasy about running off to America for “non-stop sex and drugs.”

Even the epiphanies they’re sure to come to — she “won’t leave Lukas” (Steven Cree), her Scots husband — have the air of trite tropes.

“We hurt people and they don’t even know we’re doing it to them.”

Goldstein leans into soulful suffering as a journalist who doesn’t believe in this new foolproof “find the one person we’re meant to love” digital “test.” Poots makes Laura a beaming believer, pretty enough to take advantage of “just a friend” Simon and impose on him, even as she ignores how they connect.

He’s there with just the right laugh at her speech at her dad’s wake, or with a little Molly at the club where she’s hoping he’ll take a fancy to her “Andrea the Giant” (Ashton) buddy.

The movie moves on from the witty, callow quips of youth as they both take a stab at “being grownups…It’s AWFUL.”

Couplehood and its “farmer’s market” visits are not for Simon. “What goes on there? Are they selling farmers or something? Putting them up on plinths for display?”

What replaces that is sober and sad and so very over-familiar — a rendezvous by the sea, furtive phone calls, her protests that he’s “stalking” her when she’s the instigator — as to be almost laughable itself.

Honestly, who takes a checklist of all the things one does when having an affair, as seen in the movies, into an affair? That’s how this plays.

The acting is good, as Poots is an old hand at this sort of lovesick romance and Goldstein shows off character traits that most of us haven’t seen him attempt. But few of the heartfelt moments land and none grab the pathos that Goldstein and co-writer/director Walter Bridges are attempting.

It isn’t just morality that keeps us from “rooting for them” as a couple. We can’t decide if they’re rooting for them.

Rating: R, drug abuse, sex, profanity

Cast: Brett Goldstein, Imogen Poots, Zawe Ashton and Steven Cree

Credits: Directed by William Bridges, scripted by William Bridges and Brett Goldstein. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:38

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BOX OFFICE: “One Battle” battles to the top, “Gabby’s Dollhouse” moves in next door

Posted on September 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is bursting onto screens with a flourish, taking in over $22.4 million on its opening weekend.

Early projections were for a $25 million opening, and a $3 million Thursday night pushing the Friday “opening day” take in the $9-10 million range. Saturday’s take boosted that closer to the $25 originally expected.

A serio-comic thriller/satire about old revolutionaries and new fascist threats to liberty inspired by a Thomas Pynchon novel, it’s riding an all-star cast, the most hyped trailers of the fall and critical acclaim to the best opening ever for the celebrated filmmaker who gave us “There Will be Blood,” “Boogie Nights,” “Punch Drunk Love” and “Magnolia.”

I’d call it the first PTA movie in ages that I want to see twice, less brooding than “There Will be Blood,” a far more engaging and entertaining film than his “Licorice Pizza” or “Phantom Thread” outings. This should be his biggest hit yet, and reviews should keep it in theaters for a solid month as awards season begins.

DiCaprio, del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Penn, Regina Hall, newcomer Chase Infiniti, with Tony Goldwyn and legendary “Matewan” villain Kevin Tighe as the oligarchs murderously undermining democracy? That’s an “all star cast” in anybody’s book.

The kiddie film “Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie” the live action film based on a live action/animated TV series, is doing just fine as well, on track to come in second at the box office on its opening weekend with a $13.7 (per The Numbers) million take. Kristin Wiig is the biggest name in that cast, with series star Laila Lockhart Kraner taking the show onto the big screen with a splash.

The anime “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” has owned the past two weekends but is finally falling off to $7.1 million (it’ll be close to $120 million overall by Sunday night).

Fourth place this weekend falls to “The Conjuring: Last Rites” which will fall just short of $7 ($6.86). It’s over $160 million and counting, a big fat fall hit.

And in fifth place, the horror sequel “The Strangers 2” is riding bad reviews and overall disinterest to a $5.9 million weekend. Studio market research isn’t infallible.

“Him” will pull in $3.65 to head the second five.

“The Long Walk” (closing in on $30) will pick up another $3.4 million for seventh.

“Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” has been doing solid business on weekdays and will cling to the Top Ten with a $3.3 million weekend. It’ll clear the $40 million mark but end its run short of $50.

“They Call Him OG” is an Indian action pic on just 800 screens, and it still cracked the top ten ($1.7)

“A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” plummets to $1.25 and swift trip to tenth, and oblivion.

“Freakier Friday” (closing in on $95) and the “Toy Story” re-release and maybe even “Weapons” ($150 million and counting) finally drop out of the top ten.

“The Senior” (won’t ever reach the $10 million mark) as it loses all its screens and vanishes.

“Journey” (still well under $10) and “Him” (about to clear $20) are turning out to be the two biggest flops of the early fall.

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Movie Preview: James Badge Dale is Fresh Out of Prison, Billy Magnussen is family, both of them facing “Violent Ends”

Posted on September 26, 2025 by Roger Moore

Solid looking Southern fried thriller about Ozark crime families and an ex-con causing a shift in the balance of power.

Revenge?

Editor turned writer-director John-Michael Powell (“The Send Off”) cooked up this one.

Oct. 31.

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Netflixable? Cross Liam in the Himalayas and he will Truck You Up — “Ice Road: Vengeance”

Posted on September 26, 2025 by Roger Moore

OMG there are some real LOLs packed into the Liam Neeson action sequel, “Ice Road: Vengeance.” Sadly enough, there aren’t many of them that are intentional.

It’s implausible but far from impossible to believe the sight of gaunt, weathered 70something Neeson free-climbing The Needles in South Dakota. He bellows at the gods — or Tom Cruise — when he summits.

How’d he master that skill and stay in shape for it doing all that driving?

Mike, our “Ice Road” hero, is hellbent on remaking the long-haul truck driver image, one movie at a time. They’re not all pill-popping, sleep-deprived road hogs and most-likely-suspects in most serial killer cases.

In “Vengeance,” Mike’s kidnapped on his way to spread his climber/Air Force sergeant brother’s ashes on Mount Everest. That brother recites in voice-over his final wishes in a letter he Mike left before deployment from Minot, N.D. to Iraq.

Hilariously, the dope mispronounces the name of his base town. It’s “MY-not,” ya silly micks. Not “ME-not.”

Actually, that’s on writer (“Armageddon,” “Die Hard with a Vengeance”) turned “Ice Road” writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh. Who’d expect a Belgian actor (Marcus Thomas) to know Northern Plains pronunciations?

Hensleigh probably didn’t set out to make an outlandish, plot-holes-you-could-drive-a-semi-through sequel. Then again, the original film wasn’t exactly “Wages of Fear.”

Mike’s trek to Everest is interrupted when he and his “half-Sherpa” guide Dhani (Fan Bingbing of “Iron Man 3” and “The 355”) are waylaid by a black-clothed hit team who hijack their Kiwi Express bus to the base camp.

The grizzled New Zealand bus driver Spike (Geoff Morrell) has just enough time to bond with his fellow “asphalt jockey” when the bus is taken — in broad daylight, in the middle of Kathmandu– and Mike and ex-military Buddhist Dhani have to figure out a way out of their jam.

“In Nepal, kidnappers leave no witnesses.”

There are Americans — a professor/NGO aid worker (Bernard Curry) and his inattentive daughter Starr (Grace O’Sullivan). And there’s a local. Vijay (Saksham Sharma) is the son of a landowner who has refused to sell out and allow a predatory developer (Mahesh Jadu) to dam their village’s river and bury all their property under water.

Yeah, this all about getting to Vijay.

Foiling the hijackers (Amelia Bishop plays the petite, bob-cut French killing machine) only puts Vijay into the hands of murderously corrupt cops led by Capt. Shankar (Monish Anand). Crossing them and the “Kathmandu Mafia” is “poking the dragon,” high-mileage Mike is warned.

“I’ve poked one or two before, trust me,” he purrs.

Chase after impossible chase, crashes that don’t end their quest, shootouts where everybody does a lot of missing — unless Mike picks up a pistol — insanely difficult on-the-road repairs and at least one trap we have no idea how the passengers and bus driver escape from unfold along this stunningly scenic, more-harrowing than it plays here “Road to the Sky” highway through the Annapurna Highlands.

A few of the action beats play — brawls and the like. Many don’t.

The repairs are pie-in-the-Himalayan sky absurd, a couple of get-aways are too implausible to even be entertainingly silly and the victims die off in the most utterly predictable order.

But that chiseled-out-of-Irish-stone Neeson always gives his all and delivers fair value, even if the movie that surrounds him isn’t all that.

Rating: TV-14, violence and lots of it

Cast: Liam Neeson, Fan Binging, Grace O’Sullivan, Saksham Sharma, Geoff Morrell, Amelia Bishop and Mahesh Jadu.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:52

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Movie Preview: Idris and Rebecca Ferguson sit on “A House of Dynamite” for Kathryn Bigelow

Posted on September 26, 2025 by Roger Moore

Somebody launched a missile without authorization. Who?

A tale from the New Cold War, this missile was launched from the U.S. Malevolence? Or just the stunning incompetence we’ve come to expect from the current regime?

This Idris Elba/Rebecca Ferguson thriller from the director of “The Hurt Locker” hits theaters Oct. 10, and comes to Netflix Oct. 24. For awards consideration, no doubt.

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