Movie Review: Dumb and dumber? Nah. “Heads of State”

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Roger Moore

If puns are “the lowest and most groveling form of wit,” where does the jokey/dopey action comedy “Heads of State” sit on that scale?

It’s got puns. Groaners. Lots of them. And action film cliches and buddy comedy bickering and a ludicrous/obvious plot that calls attention to itself and mocks itself, as if that’ll stop us from doing the same.

A film starting out from “Let’s reunite those two supporting players from ‘Suicide Squad‘” as its big idea sets the bar pretty low. But Idris Elba and John Cena, as an “embattled” British Prime Minister (Yes, we know the PM’s not “Head of State.” Shaddup.) and movie-star/pop icon U.S. president thrown together to fight for their lives, NATO and the future handle the banter and the tough-guys-trash-talking-each-other business with ease.

“Drop warheads on foreheads?”

“Where’s your back-up?” “There IS no back-up!”

A kicker — “It’ll be great for our memoirs.”

Priyanka Chopra Jonas handles fight choreography with aplomb, and Paddy Considine tries to give us something — anything — interesting in his shade of villain.

“Hardcore Henry” and “Nobody” director Ilya Naishuller pulls out more of his Guy Ritchie editing tricks — boiling down entire harrowing escapes to short and silly “How’d you FIND us?” montages.

But damn, the been-there/needle-dropped that feeling is strong with this one. The “dumb” just won’t quit.

A trio of screenwriters, including a “Mission: Impossibl” duo do-over pile on the travel, the epic set pieces and the mayhem and try to find the fun in all of that.

When you’re putting Air Force One in a dogfight and staging a bloody ambush in Buñol, Spain’s over-the-top tomato-tossing food fight (La Tomatina), who cares about helicopter crashes, presidential limo chases and Jack Quaid as a gun-slinging not-really-amusing nerd of a CIA agent?

The story — a wildly popular president stops in London to meet an unpopular prime minister who all but endorsed his opponent in a recent election. One is great at working the press. The other? More statesmanlike.

“He still hasn’t figured out the difference between a press junket (promoting a movie) and a press conference!”

Maybe PM Sam Clarke is just jealous of Will M. Derringer’s cool name, and initials — “WMD” — and his box office take.

“The universe keeps telling me I look good with a gun in my hand!” the cinema’s once-and-future “Water Cobra” jokes.

But when the two try to mend fences on the way to a NATO summit on Air Force One, they’re shot down. They’ve got to get along, work together and fight and trick their way from Belarus to Warsaw and on to Trieste. Because somebody’s hijacked the CIA’s super surveillance ECHELON system and is plotting their demise, and NATO’s.

Jonas plays an ace MI-6 agent who used to have a thing with our PM. Quaid’s a Warsaw Station agent just tickled that his favorite action hero turned president is dropped into his care, if only briefly.

Agent Comer has just enough time to arm up in the cliched “Look at my ARSENAL” scene and load up The Beastie Boys (“Sabotage”) on the CD player.

A little Mötley Crüe here, some “Total Eclipse of the Heart” Bonnie Tyler there, and you’ve got your soundtrack to your formulaic action comedy.

Comedy mainstay Stephen Root is here to tip us about the tone they were going for, and plays maybe the least funny role in “Heads of State.” Wade Briggs, Katrina Durden and Alexander Kuznetsov are costumed, hair-dyed and shaved to look like everybody’s idea of a villain.

Look for Sharlto Copley in a single scene and “Mission: Impossible” vet Ingeborga Dapkunaite as a Belorusian sheep farmer.

But all those players are but pawns in the big, fat empty-headed action beats involving brawls, shoot-outs, chases and a hysterically high body count in a movie you don’t so much watch as “consume.”

It turns out that reuniting Bloodsport and Peacemaker from “Suicide Squad” wasn’t the can’t-miss that nobody predicted.

Rating: PG-13, lots and lots of violence, some of it bloody.

Cast: John Cena, Idris Elba, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jack Quaid, Carla Gugino, Stephen Root, Sharlto Copley and Paddy Considine.

Credits: Directed by Ilya Naishuller, scripted by Josh Appelbaum, André Nemec and Harrison Query. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:54

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Classic Film Review: “How to make a cute/kinky ’60s Euro-thriller”is laid out in “Trans-Europ-Express”

Posted on July 3, 2025 by Roger Moore

“How to brainstorm a genre screenplay” is trotted out and exposed for the amusing and mundane process it is in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s goof of a thriller, “Trans-Europ-Express.”

Every trope, all the cliches and archetypal characters, the “How do we get from Paris to Antwerp?” problem solving of the plot, where to introduce “the gun,” the obligatory nudity and sex — including 1960s bondage — it’s all laid bare in this spoof from the screenwriter of the obscurant “Last Year at Marienbad” and director of “Successive Slidings of Pleasure.”

Robbe-Grillet was a “cult” director, “cult” screenwriter and plainly a man with a sense of humor about the mental or erotic titillations that were his specialty. Because ’60s-dated or not, “Trans-Europ Express” still plays, still amuses and still “applies” when it comes to formula films like the one it sends up.

Three filmmakers — a director, producer and script supervisor — board a train in the Gare du Nord station in Paris. The moment they settle into a compartment, “We should set a film on a train like this” (in French with English subtitles) occurs to them.

The director (Robbe-Grillet) gets his script supervisor (Catherine Robbe-Grillet, his wife) to break out a tape recorder to take notes. It’s a suitcase-sized portable reel-to-reel, a ’60s tech joke “Austin Powers” missed. With the producer (Jérôme Lindon) pitching in, they conjure up a plot.

How does one get cocaine from Paris to Antwerp? Where can you buy a “false bottom suitcase?” Wouldn’t our “trafficker” be more likely to smuggle diamonds in and out of Antwerp?

An actor crosses their field of view. “Isn’t that (Jean-Louis) Trintignant? He’d be PERFECT” for this!

We see the trenchcoated Trintignant — of “And God Created Woman,” “Z,” “Under Fire” and in 2012’s “Amour” — side-eye everyone and everything, doing his best version of “sketchy.” He shops for a suitcase. “The trafficker model. Just kidding.”

He is eyed by the sexy stranger (Marie-France Pisier of “Cousin, Cousine” and Truffaut’s “Love on the Run”). Who is she? “An agent for a rival gang!” “An amateur detective?”

Over the course of the train ride, the trio dreams up an absurdly convoluted plot that involves multiple suitcases and multiple handoffs, legions of middle-men and women and an ever-evolving code-phrase about when one last saw “Father Pettijohn.”

Leaky bags of sugar are loaded into the suitcase for a dry run. A small semi-automatic pistol of the era is hidden in a hollowed out paperback novel (about trains). Cops and “fake police,” an inspector, a fake blind man (Ivo Pauwels) and others aid, pursue or work with Jean, our trafficker.

Eva (Pisier)? She’s a sex worker, or a spy who asks questions.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m an assassin.”

“Oh, a professional?”

“No, an amateur. Semi-professional, actually.

All these interruptions, arrests and interrogations?

“Tests.”

Our brainstormers send Jean from hotel to hotel, into a nightclub or two, one with a bondage show, train stations to drawbridges to dry docks.

Yes, he picks up a bondage magazine for the train ride. Yes, he buys rope. Will that play into “the whore subplot?”

What turns him on?

“Rape. Any rape.”

“All right. But it’s more expensive!”

It’s all weird and witty, and yes, one could totally imagine a film coming to life in just this way — plot, characters, complications, “Chekhov’s gun,” sex and violence, titillation and tension trotted out, debated and worked-out and shoved into the script on a train ride.

No, it never adds up to much or much that makes a lot of sense.

“Trans-Europ-Express” is like that ’60s train ride, mainly interested in simply getting from point A to point B, with requisite plot complications, a black and white tour of Antwerp and the Gare du Nord, hand-held tracking shots (camera work is glimpsed) on foot and in rail cars, vigorously obvious editing and kinky jokes that were daring for their time and can still push several politically incorrect buttons along the way.

If you want to take a 100 minute course in thriller cliches and how to apply them (right down to the obligatory “strip club” scene), Robbe-Grillet summons you aboard and announces “Class is in session” the moment he says “We should set a film on a train like this.”

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, bondage, sex work jokes

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Marie-France Pisier, Christian Barbier,
Ivo Pauwels, Jérôme Lindon,
Catherine Robbe-Grillet and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet. A Lux/Kino Lorber release on Tubi, Amazon, et al.

Running time: 1:45

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Movie Review: If the Priests Aren’t Up to it, “Dark Nuns” Will Handle this Exorcism

Posted on July 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

Back in the olden days, a local archdiosce might appeal to the Vatican for a little help when it came to demonic possession of good Catholic folk in their care.

Before you could say “La plume de ma tante!” Max Von Sydow would fly in, or Russell Crowe would Vespa over dressed in black to go to war with Satan.

That’s not how they roll in the ROK. Korean exorcisms, as depicted in “The Priests” and now “Dark Nuns,” cover all the polytheistic bases — Catholocism, Buddhism and shamanism.

For the ten-years-later sequel to “Priests,” all the guys in cassocks and crucifixes are busy. So it’s up to a couple of “Dark Nuns” — one older, unordained and uncensored enough to be over this “s–t” — take up the cause of saving a boy from whatever demon in whichever of the “twelve manifestations” has moved in and turned the kid suicidal.

Director Hyeok-jae Kwon tries to match the sass, spookiness and tone of “The Priests” in a slog of a thriller that manages to be even longer and slower than the 2015 original film.

Song Hye-kyo of John Woo’s “The Crossing” movies stars as Sister Junia, stomping in with a five liter can of holy water and ready to kick ass by getting a demon to say its name.

She’s unfiltered and big on backtalk, to demons — “Coward! Taking over a child’s body!” — and to Catholic higher-ups, who as in many an exorcism movie including “The Priests” disapprove of having to “approve” this fighting-the-Devil dirty work. So they keep it at arm’s length.

Unordained or not, we’ll find you a priest to pitch in and you go, girl!

But Father Paolo (Lee Jin-wook of “Squid Game”) runs the hospital where poor Hee-joon (Moon Woo-jin) is being unsuccessfully treated.

“Possessions are not real,” Paolo argues (in Korean with English subtitles). And God, he reminds Sister Junia, “exists solely in heaven.”

He won’t be much help unless he upends his disbelief. So his young protege Sister Michaela (Jeon Yeo-been) will have to join the cursing, smoking Junia on her quest.

They appeal to the Vatican for the priests from “The Priests” to come and help. No dice. St. Francis’s Bell from that first film? Maybe. “Saint Peter’s Keys?” You know, the ones on the tarot cards?

Yes, this script, like the first film’s, spends a staggering amount of screen time on arcane Catholic myth, tortured explanations of “why” Father Kim and Father Choi can’t be bothered to help this time (the actors got more famous) and Korean polytheistic work-arounds.

Tarot, shamanism, let’s throw the works at this demon and see if we can save this boy.

Both films have decent enough effects, but neither manages the existential dread that “The Exorcist” served up and few “exorcism” films since have come close to imitating in the 50 years since.

Both “The Priests” and “Dark Nuns” go for jokes, just not enough of them. Each story is driven by a maverick Catholic character who could have been a lot more fun to hang with and root for. But neither film gets enough out of that engaging central character.

All “Dark Nuns” manages to do is provide equal opportunity for disappointment.

Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Song Hye-kyo, Jeon Yeo-been, Lee Jin-wook, Huh Joon-ho and Moon Woo-jin.

Credits: Directed by Hyeok-jae Kwon, scripted by Hyo-jin Oh and Kim Woo-jin. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:54

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Movie Review: Tracking a Syrian War Criminal down a French “Ghost Trail”

Posted on July 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

An obsessive search for justice and closure consumes a Syrian on the hunt for an Assad regime war criminal in “Ghost Trail,” a quietly gripping thriller about Syrian expats in Europe pinning their hopes on “international justice” as they conspire to track down a torturer.

But is the trail cold? Is their quarry too careful and cunning? With “justice” imperiled all over the world, will they get what they’re looking for from others? Or will the tempation of simple revenge be too hard to resist?

Back home, our hunter was Hamid, a professor of literature in an Aleppo university imprisoned at Sednaya, released in the middle of desert by callous soldiers in the film’s grim opening. But in Strasbourg, France, he calls himself Amir. Or Saleh. Many names. He (Adam Bessa) does day labor in construction. But that’s just to get to know the crew so that’s he comfortable asking around.

“Have you seen” his cousin, he wants to know? He questions anybody who was ever in a refugee/resettlement camp, haunts the welcome conters and visits the Turkish quarter where some Syrian refugees settled. His photograph of the man he’s looking for is blurry. His vague questions earn mistrust. Escaping a murderous dictatorship leaves one and all paranoid.

When Yara (Hala Rajab) says that she knew someone who knew “Sami Hanna,” after she tests him by quoting Arabic literature. She goes so far as to flirt a little. He barely notices.

Hamid is on a mission, one that has him lying to his mother (Shafiqa El Till) in a Beirut refugee camp, lying to French authorities who insist he’s overstayed his welcome and should return to the country that accepted him — Germany. He will seek psychological counseling if that will prolong his stay.

Hamid is “sure” his quarry is here. He rebuffs doubts from the online first-person-shooter video where he and his co-conspirators chat. He takes the money from his French go-between (Julia Franz Richter) in silent spy-game exchanges.

And when he spies someone who fits his profile, Hamid will not let anyone distract him from his prey or dissuade him that he’s got the wrong guy. It’s him, he tells his compatriots (in Arabic, French and German with English subtitles).

“I can sense it.”

He will stalk, eavesdrop and spend days and weeks looking for this college chemistry student (Tawfeek Barhom) to give himself away.

Bessa, of “Mosul” and “Extraction,” internalizes everything about Hamid, an educated man driven by loss, grief and revenge to listen to the victims’ tapes and plumb the depths of his own trauma to see if he has a match.

Others speak of being covered with a hood, counting the steps their persecutor took and smelling the sweat, breath and cologne of this creep who beat, electric shocked and burned his victims with acid. What detail will be the one that confirms or denies that our obsessive, disturbed stalker has his man, or that he’s lost any ability to be objective and weigh facts?

Barhom’s performance has a caginess that leaves room for doubt. And Richter’s Nina lets down her guard long enough to show the wrenching emotions about her reasons for joining this search-and-expose-or-kill cell.

Director and co-writer Millet scrupulously avoids melodrama and he immerses us in Hamid’s isolation, in the life he’s lost and the future he abandons for this obsession, his desire to get that closure and perhaps give all that was taken away meaning.

We invest in this quest, put ourselves in this man’s shoes and wonder, like him, if “justice” is itself a ghost, if it’s even possible in a world where tyrants and their minions face no consequences for their crimes, even in alleged democracies.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Adam Bessa, Julia Franz Richter, Hala Rajab, Shafiqa El Till and Tawfeek Barhom

Credits: Directed by Jonathan Millet, scripted by Florence Rochat and Jonathan Millet. A Music Box Films release.

Running time: 1:48

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Movie Review: Korean Catholics have their own way of Exorcising Demons — “The Priests”

Posted on July 1, 2025 by Roger Moore

Well Go USA is about to unleash the sequel to the Korean exorcism thriller “The Priests,” titled “Dark Nuns,” in North America. So they figured they’d put the original 2015 hit out there for people who want to catch.

Not a bad idea, as that film may be easy enough to follow, but writer-director Jang Jae-Hyun (“Exhuma”) so cluttered his narrative with so many characters and bits of back story that it’s hard to keep track of who is whom. It takes some adjustment to get into the “style” of storytelling.

Naming more than one character “Park” in a Korean film is just plain mean.

A prologue shows us that Italian priests have taken their shot at this one Korean case and failed. They got the demon out, tucked it under one priest’s cassock for disposal (all becomes clear in the third act) and didn’t get it across the finish line.

One maverick Korean priest (Kim Yoon-seok of “Escape from Mogadishu”) has plunged into the case of the teen girl (Park So-dam of “Parasite”) and failed. Her allegations of “touching” were an added difficulty, with what the world knows about priests and this particular demon knowing what accusation to make.

Other priests and deacons have come and gone as this child’s possession keeps her in a coma between exorcisms. But they all took notes and recorded cassette tapes of their efforts.

Young, eager and perhaps troubled Deacon Choi (Gang Don-won of ““Peninsula”) is the latest recruit, summoned and cajoled by a church heirarchy trying to keep this entire enterprise off the books and out of the news.

Tactless, jaded Kim isn’t impressed by the new guy.

“You look like a Mormon,” he mutters (in Korean with English subtitles). “Idiot” becomes his nickname for the young guy, who starts to see things the moment he looks into the case and long before he meets the victim. That makes him qualified for the work.

The novelties of this 2015 film are its droll, sarcastic humor and the distinctly Eastern touches added to all the vomiting/bed-levitating tropes of the genre. A little Buddhism and a sprinkling of shamanism and the like suggest that the Civilized East has been dealing with these devils since before the Vatican, William Peter Blatty and William Friedkin got involved.

Demons are typically lions, snakes or scorpions and can’t be destroyed. The best you can hope for is to trap them in another animal’s body and toss them in a river “at least 15 meters wide.”

Yeah, they’re damned specific, or so Father Kim says as he has Deacon Choi ring a bell made by the founder of their order, St. Francis of Asisi as part of the ritual.

Kim is sanguine about what it will take to defeat this “5,000 year old bastard,” and Choi’s stomach, spine and will shall be tested in the battle. Is he up to it?

The film begins in gloom and mystery, drifts around interminably in the middle acts as earlier priests and deacons are discussed and even revisited, men terminally changed by their battle with The Beast.

Church politics further muddy up the narrative, not adding anything to it, just slowing the movie to a crawl.

But if you’re going to see one Korean exorcism thriller this year, you can’t make it “Dark Nuns.” Not without catching “The Priests” first, and not without wading through a lot of distractions that keep us from focusing on our leads and their quest to save a teenager from a demon who has to be convinced to “say his name.”

Rating: unrated, Satanic violence

Cast: Kim Yoon-seok, Gang Don-won, Park So-dam and
Lee Ho-jae

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jang Jae-Hyun. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:47

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Movie Review: Offerman’s a “Sovereign” who thinks God and Guns and misreading the Constitution can beat Banks, Courts, Cops and The System

Posted on July 1, 2025 by Roger Moore

Smart, tense and thought provoking, “Sovereign” is a movie of its moment — thirty years of American moments.

An “inspired by true events” thriller built around a stunning performance by Nick Offerman, it offers insights into Red State America and the cult appeal of of fringe conservatism to rural white America that most every other movie on these subjects misses.

Offerman plays a one-time roofer, beaten down by loss and hardened by struggle against powerful institutions aligned against him, who figures he can resist, stonewall and outsmart banks, the courts and the police through twisted populist faith and a myopic misreading of the law.

Jerry Kane is an Arkansas widower who is home-schooling his teen son Joe (Jacob Tremblay of “Room” and “Wonder”) when he’s at home, blithely ignoring the eviction notices and bills piled on their cluttered kitchen table every time he returns from one of his “seminars” road trips.

Jerry acts the part of a white-suited folk hero, popping up on podcasts, fighting banks and “The System” with a quixotic mix of stubbornness, parsing and twisting the law into his idea of “literal” and when all else fails, flinging “faith” into the argument to end it, at least in the eyes of the gullible.

“You say I owe you something? PROVE it,” he preaches.

Jerry’s a classic “stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”

The people who listen to him on podcasts and who show up at American Legion halls for his lectures/pep-talks and coaching through foreclosure fights and the like are desperate. Underinformed folks whom life has turned into losers will do anything to flip that script — and that includes rage-blinded trips to the polls and to gun shops.

Jerry has thoroughly indoctrinated his son, from re-interpreting his Red State’s home school workbooks to arranging the boy’s nightly prayers to God, his dead mother and cribdeath baby sister and “J.C. (Jesus). Never forget J.C.”

A big payday means it’s time for the boy’s first semi-automatic weapon and a trip to the range where the targets have a uniformed cop shape.

“Aim more for the head. You know they wear bullet proof vests.”

On the other side of that thin blue line is Dennis Quaid, the aged “chief” of the local law enforcement, grooming his own son (former child actor Thomas Mann) to join the force, watching and reinforcing the rough-handling “overwhelming force” training of much of American policing today. No, you’re not interested in listening to someone’s “point of view.” Your job is ensuring “compliance” with violence and that “overwhelming force.”

The chief’s son is trying to absorb all this, and applying the old man’s tough love to his newborn baby. Comforting crying infants is how you start down the road to “spoiling” a child, Chief insists to Chief Jr.

But young Joe starts to push back at the home schooling so that he can enroll in high school and maybe have a conversation with the cute neighbor (Kezia DaCosta) he crushes on. And officer-to-be-Adam might be inclined to listen to his wife (Ruby Wolf) rather than the old man’s old school parenting when it comes a screaming infant.

Maybe the next generation can change the fate their fathers seem ordained to play out.

First-time feature writer-director Christian Swegal — he wrote Taraji P. Henson’s “Proud Mary” — takes us into “Blue Caprice” country with this tale of a dangerous father, a groomed son and the rising dread about what’s coming. A guy who so enrages a judge that the man summarily rules against him and storms out of court and who infuriates a succession of police who pull him over and don’t accept his “travel” documents, his definition of “conveyance” as it’s used for commercial or non commercial purposes, isn’t a ticking time bomb. He’s a fuse waiting to be lit.

“Is driving a right or a privilege?“

The genuis in casting Offerman is his acting baggage. His no-nonsense “man’s man” Ron Swanson on TV’s “Parks and Rec” and humorous self-reliance memoir “Paddle Your Own Canoe” has a lot of right wing folks making a meme out of him, assuming “he’s one of us.” Yet there he was, best man at a gay wedding on “Parks,” playing a Trumpish tyrant who causes a “Civil War” rather than giving up office, and here he is skewering the whole Sovereign Citizen Movement/Militia Movement and assorted other favorites of the fascist fringe in a single movie.

Offerman makes Jerry Kane seem, at first, somewhat reasonable. When your enemies are the banks and the “fascists” many folks see in the badge-wearing classes, you’re going to get sympathy from several demographics.

Jerry joking about violence against judges, local bureaucrats and the like at his seminars has people shouting “turn off” the video “camera,” lest their shared belief that violence is the best way to get what they want get around. “He’s only joking,” Jerry’s fan and paramour (Martha Plimpton) insists.

We and everybody else know better. Many gun fetishists cling to an Old West “pull the trigger, problem solved” ethos that explains why all the “political” and racial violence in America comes from that end of the spectrum.

Writer-director Swegal doesn’t quite pull off the parallel fathers story structure he was going for, and Quaid’s “chief” seems to be a sheriff, and in either guise would not be the person to interrogate a kid about his not-yet-violent crackpot father to determine if the boy’s in need of social services aid.

But Offerman’s Jerry Kane is a villain for the ages, a man with a point of view that more people share than we’d like to believe. He makes “Sovereign” must-see cinema for understanding not just a “type,” but a movement and a moment, and just where they’re taking us if we let them.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Nick Offerman, Jacob Tremblay, Dennis Quaid, Nancy Travis, Thomas Mann and Martha Plimpton.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christian Swegal. A Briarcliff release.

Running time 1:41

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Movie Review: Broadbent “walks 500 miles” in “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry”

Posted on June 29, 2025 by Roger Moore

Oscar winner Jim Broadbent earns a fine showcase in “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,” a sweet story of grief, regret, obligations and the kindness of strangers.

It’s based on a novel by Rachel Joyce that seems inspired by any number of similar “pilgrimage” narratives — “The Straight Story” to “The Way,” with a cloying detour into “Forrest Gump.” The sentiment plays. The quixotic quest at its heart — an elderly man’s impulsive walk from South Devonshire to Berwick-upon-Tweed to visit a dying woman — is dogged, scenic, patient and engaging.

That predictable turn towards “Harold goes viral” doesn’t quite spoil it. But it comes close.

Broadbent’s the title character, a set-in-his-ways OAP with a comfortable but joyless life with his brittle wife Maureen (Penelope Wilton of “Downton Abbey”) in a tidy, underdecorated semi-detached in a tidy town (South Brent, Devon).

Something broke between these two, and the ties that bind survived that. But a letter from a woman he used to work with, Queenie, has Harold taking stock. She’s dying in a hospice in the northernmost town in England, Berwick-upon-Tweed. Harold struggles with a reply letter, even enlists Maureen’s help.

“Say something you mean,” she testily advises, put on edge by the entire idea of her husband reconnecting with this woman, Queenie. As an aside, she adds that some things can’t be put in a mere letter. She comes to regret that.

But he writes that letter and walks to a mailbox, then the post office, and finally a convenience store. The blue-haired young woman (Nina Singh) there gives him more advice — another sign — on hearing of this letter to a woman dying of cancer.

“Believe you are making a difference.”

Harold resolves to go see Queenie, and on an impulse he calls Saint Benedict Hospice.

“Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. I’ll keep walking as long as she keeps living.“

He mutters the suggestion that he “let her down.” And that she’s not the only one. Flashbacks give a glimpse of a son (Earl Cave) who needed something else from Harold.

There’s nothing for it but for this elderly man in street clothes, rain jacket and not-suitable-for-a-long-hike deck shoes to walk the 500 miles, “the length of England,” to fulfill his promise.

He’s left his phone at home, which his wife figures is a sign he’s got dementia. He has no map. But south to north he goes, trekking on footpaths and B-roads and along major highways, stopping in tiny inns, flopping in barns, searching his soul for the guilt he hopes to resolve and depending on the kindness of strangers all along the way.

“You will not die, you will not die” is his walking cadence as he marches days and then weeks, pausing in Exeter Cathedral, stopping at farms, pubs and the like, “keeping to a budget” but helped by others, who take pity and rediscover their own empathy.

Maureen is instantly beside herself, then furious and whatever comes after that.

“The Unlikely Pilgrimage” is about Harold’s physical feat and a spiritual journey he and his increasingly distant wife unintentionally undertake together. And it’s about how others respond to Harold, from the helpful folks who offer him lifts which he refuses, to the immigrant doctor (Monika Gossman) who isn’t allowed to practice medicine in Brexittania, to people inspired by his quest and wanting a piece of it for their own inner peace.

Veteran Brit TV director Hettie MacDonald, with Joyce adapting her own novel into a screenplay, leans into the cute and never lets a tug at the heartstrings pass unnoticed on this journey of not just miles, but months. It works more often than not, even if its Gump-like “movement” interlude doesn’t.

But Broadbent and Wilton are the ones who do the heavy lifting here, and never for a second do they let us doubt we’re in good hands. He gives us the simple faith of acting on an impulse that Harold must do “something,” and she conveys all the hurt, confusion and panic that implies.

They’re simply great as a couple in the winter of life, struggling with the past and one last test of their relationship, people who are as likely to get the “meaning” of all this pilgrimage wrong as they are unlikely to get it right.

Cast: Jim Broadbent, Penelope Wilton, Earl Cave, Nina Singh,
Daniel Frogson and Naomi Wirthner.

Credits: Directed by Hettie MacDonald, scripted by Rachel Joyce, based on her novel. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:48

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Documentary Preview: Hey Vern! Jim Varney gets his own bio doc — “The Importance of Being Ernest”

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Roger Moore

I was working in Tennessee near the end of the Ernest P. Worrell fad and got to interview this serious actor turned famous bumkin goofball.

He’d come into town to help talk actors into joining acting unions, make appearances plugging his movies, surfing the wave that made him rock star famous. Or infamous.

If he wasn’t wearing the hat or vest or know-it-all knucklehead smirk, nobody’d recognize him

I once interviewed him in the lobby of Atlanta high rise hotel and saw that to be fact.

Died too young, but a whole generation grew up on his foolishness. Good to see him being remembered in a documentary.

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Movie Review: Improv Comics Howard, Mohammed and Bloom go “Deep Cover” looking for laughs in London

Posted on June 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Deep Cover” is an exceptionally silly Brit comedy about improv actors lying on the fly as undercover bait for London police. Logic goes out the window early on, with no means of re-entry.

And it’s built around Bryce Dallas Howard, Nepo Baby Number One on filmdom’s bad casting news rap sheet.

But here’s what it has going for it. It has Sean Bean as a well-past-it-and-knows-it cop who recruits failing improv actors as undercover buyers to bust drug dealers. “Ted Lasso” mensch Nick Mohammed plays the mousiest of the improvisers. Paddy Considine is the “somp’un’s not right with you lot” drug dealer. Here’s Ian McShane, going full Scots for his cranky, Jenga-obsessed kingpin.

“Pull th’wrong piece and it all comes dooooooooon!”

And then there’s the scene stealer, the co-star who lands a laugh in every scene, almost every single time he opens his mouth. Orlando Bloom plays a “Methody” nutcase actor, 40something and still booking single-line commercials, obsessive about getting “deep” into every character, even the street corner elf (LOL) he has to play to plug a department store’s holiday offerings.

Of course the guy’s name is “Marlon.” Of course he’s from Manchester. But if you’re trying to bluff murderous mobsters into not suspecting you’re “fake,” and thus offing you, the wild-eyed gone-to-seed loon is handy to have around.

“Mess with the bull,” Marlon hisses, leaning into Manchester-accented David Caruso, “you get th’ORNS!”

Marlon, Kat (Howard) and on-the-spectrum tech-nerd Hugh (Mohammed) are the losers hardbitten Sgt. Billings (Bean) recruits for his “two hundred quid a pop” “Donnie Brasco” gig — play-act “buyers” who bait sellers into selling them drugs so he can make the busts.

Considine is “Fly,” the mid-level dealer they stumble into when all they were looking for was a quick score. He tests them, and who wouldn’t? Tough talk or not, these “city slickers” don’t pass the smell test.

The gag here is that undercover work has the same “rules” as onstage improv. Number one, “Never break character.” Number two? “Say YES.” Improvisers use “Yes AND” as transitions for their on-the-spot invented dialogue. And number three, “Always trust your partner.”

But will that, the toy guns and squeaky toy grenade Marlon insists his “character,” “Roach” would carry, see them through? Kat becomes tough-talking “Bonnie” (missing her Clyde), the “brains” of the outfit. Painfully shy mystery man Hugh is “The Squire.” God knows what he’s capable of. Especially after he’s designated drug-deal “taster,” sucking up his first-ever lines of cocaine in the bargain.

Mohammed is amusingly hapless and bounces off Bloom’s over-the-top loon nicely. Sonoya Mizuno plays Fly’s scary/sexy bi-curious gunslinger, and co-screenwriters Colin Treverrow and Ben Ashendon play unfunny cops who really should stick to writing.

Enough people (myself included) have beaten the bliss out of Bryce Dallas Howard’s limitations over the years, so I’ll just say she’s dead weight here, the least convincing “improviser” in the cast.

But McShane shimmers and Bloom reminds us that he’s been funny, he’s good at being self-serious and he’s still a lot more than Legolas, his arrows and his “Lord of the Rings” ears.

I found myself uttering the same words Keira Knightley said to me in an interview once, over and over again, when I mentioned I’d be talking to her onetime “Pirates of the Caribbean” co-star later that day.

“Orlando F—–g Bloom,” she said, not once or twice or thrice, shaking her head and laughing as she did. There’s a story there, and no, she didn’t tell it to me. That’s for her memoirs.

In “Deep Cover,” Orlando F—-g Bloom gets the dirty, funny job done, and how.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Orlando Bloom, Nick Mohammed, Paddy Considine, Sonoya Mizuno, Sean Bean and Ian McShane.

Credits: Directed by Tom Kingsley, scripted by Derek Connolly, Colin Treverrow, Ben Ashendon and Alexander Owen. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:39

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Movie Review: “M3GAN 2.0,” an Update Nobody Needed

Posted on June 27, 2025 by Roger Moore

A tip of the hat to Ivana Sakhno, who gives one of the more convincingly metallic turns as a woman-playing a robot in “M3GAN 2.0,” a killer robot sequel that leans even harder into well-founded AI phobia.

She is Maria in Fritz Lang’s classic “Metropolis” rendered in brutish Robert Patrick strokes in this “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” inspired thriller.

The follow-up to the surprise smash of the winter of 2022 goes for grim laughs this time out, with star Allison Williams reduced to straight man woman. Producer credit or not, she lets us know how she feels about that in every inexpressive, under-reacting moment she’s on screen. Literally everybody and everything here upstages her.

A military grade upgrade of the child-protective-robot of the first film goes rogue. Amelia, your steely, supermodelish Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics and Infiltration Android has run amok and is on the hunt for a master cloud server that will allow her control of Life on Earth.

Naturally, there’s a smirking, chip-implanting tech oligarch (Jemaine Clement) who has wired the world for his version of an AI future that Amelia is ready-made to exploint.

Only a rebooted M3GAN, still snarkily-voiced by Jenna Davis, can stop Amelia. Inventor Gemma (Williams), now a crusading, best-selling anti-AI/anti cell-phones-for-kids foster parent to Cady (Violet McGraw), kept M3GAN’s electronic brain around, but this time she’ll keep her in check by sticking her in an AI digital assistant-bot form.

But you can’t keep our avenging AI angel in “this plastic Teletubby” if you want her to stop Amelia. They’ll have to “rebuild a deranged robot in order to catch another deranged robot” if humanity is to have a chance.

M3GAN’s “You know I could never hurt you” reassurances to Cady, her insincere apologies to Gemma’s team (Jen Van Epps, Brian Jordan Alvarez) for trying to kill them in the first movie will have to do.

Gemma’s “virtue signalling snowflake” fellow anti-AI crusader beau (“Saturday Night Live’s” Aristotle Athari) better not get in M3GAN’s way, either.

Clement and Athari make the strongest comic impressions here, with FBI home invasion “jokes” and a cocky, stumbling, rights-violating military man (Timm Sharp) giving the film a tech fascism topicality.

Sakhno is steely-eyed menace personified. Those “Be Robert Patrick” stage directions paid off.

But with M3GAN cracking jokes, striking sassy teen poses and the like, the frights are never anything to take seriously.

Some of the jokes land. Some do not. And through it all, not a moment of rising threat level or terror registers credibly on anybody’s face. It’s as if they’re all in on the joke, with Williams merely the worst at spoiling the punchline.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Allison Williams, Jemaine Clement, Ivana Sakhno, Jen Van Epps, Violet McGraw, Aristotle Athari, Brian Jordan Alvarez, Timm Sharp and Amie Donald with the voice of Jenna Davis.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gerald Johnstone, based on characters created by Akela Cooper and James Wan. Universal Pictures release.

Running time: 2:00

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