Movie Review: Keaton, Lulu and Hodge taste the benefits of “Arthur’s Whisky”

Posted on March 9, 2025 by Roger Moore

Of all the “Mad Money,” “Poms” and “Book Club” trifles that Oscar winner Diane Keaton has made since stardom faded, “Arthur’s Whisky” might be the most trifling.

But this British nothing of a “fountain of youth” comedy manages to go down easily, despite or even thanks to its triviality.

Patricia Hodge, a mainstay of British TV (“All Creatures Great and Small,” the latest version), the singing sprite Lulu (“To Sir with Love”) and Keaton play three longtime friends who benefit from an elixir invented by Joan’s (Hodge) husband, who was promptly struck by lightning in his “Eureka!” moment.

How convenient. The entire screenplay’s a set of such conveniences.

We never learn how the three mismatched personalities met, never “get” the connection, for instance. It’s just there.

And when they drink this “whisky” that makes them young (Emse Lonsdale, Hannah Howland and Genevieve Gaunt give their all to impersonating Hodge, Lulu and Keaton in the bloom of youth), their “bucket list” of things they’d like to manage before they die, things they can survive that they’re young again, is inane and banal when it isn’t bathetic.

Hodge’s Joan doesn’t seem to miss her newly-dead husband (Ossian Perret) that much when he goes. There’s a reason for that. The American Linda (Keaton) has an ex she’s determined to get even with. Susan (Lulu) never married. Perhaps that’s something she can pull off once she’s a younger version of her cute self.

They stumble across the whisky and immediately set out to avail themselves of all the perks of youth — slang, clubbing, coffee shop hangs where they quaintly order Earl Grey tea, flirting and um, waxing — “Brazilian, Hollywood, Bikini or ‘landing strip?'”

Joan resolves to revisit an affair of her youth. Suze meets a handsome Venezuelan food truck owner (Adil Ray, not the most convincing “Venezuelan”). Linda wreaks havoc on her cheating ex’s new romance.

They travel, check off items from their “bucket list,” and manage all this even though this “whisky” has effects that wear off quickly.

The extent of the “message” to all this is “You’re never too old to become young.”

Cute bits include a vicar who can’t be bothered to get details right at funerals and the various eternal pick-up lines the ladies hear when they decide to “club” with the kids.

“Here I am. What’re your other two wishes?”

A bucket list trek to Vegas is an excuse to visit a drag revue that hosts a Boy George concert.

Lulu steals the picture — petty theft, in this case — and Gaunt gives us a fun, younger take on Keaton.

And that’s kind of how all this goes — “surprises” that aren’t, “bad news” that is almost expected and a tinkerer’s de-aging “whisky” which they never bother to investigate or try to replicate because who’d be bothered with a little thing like finding the formula?

Despite all that, the cast is pleasant and the Walton-on-Thames locations pretty. Of all the bad movies Keaton’s kept active with over the past 20 years, this may be the least of the lot. It’s certainly the least grating.

Rating: 16+, adult themes

Cast: Patricia Hodge, Lulu, Emse Lonsdale, Hannah Howland, Genevieve Gaunt, Boy George, Adil Ray, and Diane Keaton

Credits: Directed by Stephen Cookson, scripted by Alexis Zegerman. A Sky Original/Vertical release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:34

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Netfixable? Beware of anything the Germans deem “Delicious”

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Roger Moore

Writer-director Nele Mueller-Stöfen’s “Delicious” hides its secrets well. But if you’re observant, the clues pile up long before the thriller’s too-patient build-up drops its big revelations on you.

She’s tapping into international inequality in this horrific tale of German “haves” who have gained the notice of pan-European have-nots. And as we see and hear a group of employees at a posh French hotel ponder if they’re “rich enough” to be worth their trouble, we develop expectations about what’s to come.

Is this a “Parasite” variation, with the working class/working poor simply pilfering from and squatting on the rich? Is it another “Funny Games,” where they’re punished for their greed-gotten affluence? A Baader Meinhof kidnapping? Or is it something worse?

You have no idea. But you will once you start looking at that occasionally glimpsed “gang” and the predelictions and manipulations of its cunning Spanish housekeeper/leader, the obvious becomes obvious.

Valerie Pachner stars as born-rich corporate IT guru who brings her husband (Fahri Vardim) and children (Naila Schuberth and Caspar Hoffman) on vacation to her family’s villa in the south of France.

But to get there, they have to be driven through the latest notorious round of French street protests, this time over income inequality and soaring food costs.

“Those people don’t care about us,” biologist-dad John tells the kids. If “care” broadly means “notice” in this case, John could not be more wrong.

Because when they arrive, unpack and go out to dinner at the restaurant of a swanky local hotel, some of the staff raises its eyebrows. Once enough conversations — including high-pressure business cell calls — have been overheard, the die is cast.

“A drink, for the road, on the house?”

That “innocent” offer sets a whole plot in motion that involves intentionally gashing ringleader Teodora’s (Carla Diaz) arm for the “accident” they let tipsy John think he’s driven into in the family’s Jaguar.

“No hospital” will be necessary, take-charge wife Esther says, when the panic subsides and she’s gotten her “This is why you shouldn’t drink and drive” (in German with subtitles, or dubbed) judgement snipe in.

Yes, and who got into the car with their KIDS after he’d been drinking, eh?

Esther’s band-aid first aid for an injury that A) needs stitches and B) which obsewrvant eleven year old Abby says “looks like a cut” by a knife, and a few hundred euros “bribe” sends Teodora on her way.

But she comes back. Of course she comes back. And as she’s noticed how sloppy the family is, with their villa housekeeper out of town, Teodora makes them a deal. She’ll be their housekeeper and cook, which gives her a place to stay as she was “let go” from her hotel job because of her “injury.”

“The long con” here has Teodora corrupting and winning the trust of the kids and working herself into a position where she can exploit rifts in this marriage of unequals. “Secrets” play to her advantage, as her seldom seen accomplices watch and wait.

The pacing here is somewhat ponderous as actress-turned-writer/director Mueller-Stöfen takes her sweet time setting her up “surprises.”

But the foreshadowing gives a lot away, and once you’ve gotten past “No, she wouldn’t” yes she will. And the only shock in that is elementary and generic.

Diaz makes a cryptic but not-exactly-compelling cunning planner/manipulator/seducer, and the rifts in the family are obvious to the point of melodramatic, with some so poorly set-up that they have to be explained away.

“Delicious” is creepy enough. The character flaws — obvious or occasionally subtle — intrigue.

But Mueller-Stöfen loses track of the “politics” of this variation on “The Menu,” and the picture has too little else going on that surprises or wins us over. The “battle of wits” is pretty one-sided. We end up investing in a slow-moving, low-heat thriller that never really comes to a boil.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Valerie Pachner, Carla Diaz, Fahri Vardim, Naila Schuberth and Caspar Hoffman.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nele Mueller-Stöfen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

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Movie Review: R. Patts is Labor at its Most Disposable — “Mickey 17”

Posted on March 7, 2025 by Roger Moore

Oscar winner Bong Joon Ho’s latest film is an arch sci-fi parable about the troubled world we live in.

An Earth-born colonist/laborer on the distant planet Nilfheim has been recruited by a charismatic but dimwitted poseur/ex-senator/cult-leader whose “propogate the species” enterprise features a bird mascot. Too on the nose?

The laborer was in a jam and needed to get off Earth in the worst way, and being pretty dumb himself, he didn’t read the fine print on his contract.

Mickey isn’t just to be exploited, dictated to and endangered on the four and a half year journey to Nilfheim. He’s an “expendable,” to be treated as a guinea pig, lab rat, worker drone and canary in a coal mine by his employers, who cavalierly let him die or kill him off on dangerous jobs only to 3D print/process a new version of him, a perfect copy in appearance and a wholly updated adult with all the memories, up to the week, of oafish Mickey Barnes.

Every time he’s killed on a spacewalk, purposely exposed to deadly radiation for study and slowly murdered by being forced to test the atmosphere of Nilfheim as a lab rat as Science finds a vaccine to save the other, more valuable colonists, Mickey’s “number” changes.

“Mickey 17,” who narrates his story from its narrative midpoint beginning, with flashbacks and a story that picks up and takes him to his epiphany and final fate, is the incarnation of this sad sack we become most familiar with.

Robert Pattinson, once the Timothee Chalamet of his day, plays the various Mickeys in a sort of Keanu Reeve stupor/Buster Keaton stoicism. Mickey is known to all of the other colonists, a hapless object of fun who faces just one question from these tactless cultists over and over again.

“What’s it feel like to DIE?”

Mickey found love on the long voyage out, a cop/detective/soldier “agent” named Nasha (Naomi Ackie of “Blink Twice”), who revels in experimenting with the digital Kama Sutra with pretty-but-dim Mickey.

Mickey regards Timo, the partner (Steven Yeun of “Minari” and “Nope”) who got him into that fix on Earth, and into a more terminal one in space, as his best friend. On a ship packed with the cruel and tactless, Timo is a particularly loathsome, callous creep who’s used his partner as a scapegoat and thinks no more of killing him or letting him die than he would an ant trapped in an unflushed toilet.

Their Dear Leader on this church-driven colonization is cheerleading cult leader Kenneth Marshall, an unseated senator who found a new hustle and is leading the faithful to their new homes on an ice-covered hellhole of a planet.

Mark Ruffalo makes this puffed up dunce half Trump, half Elon Musk, a “celebrity” whose cunning wife (Toni Collette) is in his ear, trying to steer him clear of this scandal or that ugly revelation about how he REALLY feels about his red baseball-capped clown car of colonists.

Another police agent (Anamaria Vartolomei) seems to have the sweets for Mickey, for reasons we can’t guess, and the only compassionate member of the careless, cretinous science team Dorothy (Patsy Ferran) also seems to care for his well-being.

Everybody else just uses and abuses this non-union loser as they see fit.

“Snowpiercer,” “The Host” and “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho summons up memories of his least likable “hit” “Okja” with this icky, overlong wallow in “life is cheap for working folks around the world” allegory.

But in adapting Edward Ashton’s 2022 sci-fi novel “Mickey 7,” he references Big Idea films from “Brazil” to Chaplin’s “Modern Times,” even as he fails to find anything funny in the repeated deaths of R. Patts in an “Edge of Tomorrow” sense, a goof on that film’s “Let’s kill off a famous actor for laughs” humor.

Pattinson and the picture turn truly interesting when Mickey survives one expected death only to find he’s been regenerated as Mickey 18, a tougher, wise-to-his-exploitation and hellbent on avenging it “version” of the usually passive dullard Mickey is. There’s to be a struggle for Mickey’s place in reality between these mismatched two.

I loved all the threads Bong Joon Ho weaves into this narrative even as I lamented all the ones he leaves hanging. The narrative takes a “Close Encounters/Starship Troopers” turn that seems shoehorned in, reaches a half decent “Pandorum” climax and promptly wanders off into a stunning dull anti-climax.

Our writer-director leans on that lazy screen adapters crutch, voice-over narration, to carry too of the novel’s account of Mickey’s dreads and dreams and jokes about his plight.

“You read through the contract?” one and all ask Mickey as he signs on for a life of endless suicide missions destined to end badly. There’s a hint of generational angst as a guy who lost a lot of loan shark’s money on a macaron delivery business.

“I don’t have any skills,” Mickey admits. Might as well join a space colonization mission he’s sure to not survive — to repeatedly not survive.

But Pattinson is a sad but silly stitch in the title role. Ruffalo and Collette dial up their villainy and Ackie sexes things up even if Yeun seems a tad lost and miscast, too subtle and straight-laced for a farce this broad.

Sure, “Mickey 17” waters down its messaging by broadening that message to Netflix mini-series extremes (a better place for this movie, I fear). But if the movies are going to talk about labor, human rights, cruel “leaders” and love in the world Gen Z is growing up in, the raw deal facing Mickeys 1-17 is a good place to do it.

Rating: R, violence, sexual content, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Patsy Ferran, Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on a novel by Edward Ashton. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:17

Bond

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Movie Review: When Ireland isn’t Enough, “The Problem with People”

Posted on March 6, 2025 by Roger Moore

A couple of top flight character actors — Irish mainstay Colm Meaney and American kvetcher Paul Reiser — pair up for an Irish comedy about family history, inheritance, grudges and cultures clashing in “The Problem with People.”

It’s got the sunny, soaked summery greens of Ireland, a friendly pub and colorful locals going for it. And you can’t make a credible comedy about Ireland without Meaney.

But the problem with “The Problem with People” is a script by people who don’t seem to “get” Ireland, who then cook up clunky reasons to pair these two “cousins” up and contrive clunkier concerns that drive them apart. Their research appears to have consisted of watching other movies about Americans in Ireland. Or um, Scotland.

There are grace notes — a lovely memory recited by the old man (Des Keogh) responsible for throwing these two distant relations together illustrated by charcoal sketched animation and black and white photos of a long ago rift in the family.

The American (Reiser) is convinced to go by his daughter, who reminds him his favorite film is “Local Hero.”

“That’s Scotland. Whole other country.”

“What’s the difference?”

But the charms of quaint Tinahely, County Wicklow wear thin and after an hour of charming or at least flirting with charming, the picture collapses into a contrived conflict that neither works logically nor plays comically.

Meaney is Ciáran, whose ancient “Da” (Keogh) uses his deathbed to demand “the last request of a dying man,” that his son track down an American relation and put an end to “the whole sorry story” of how their extended family became separated 100 or more years ago.

Ciáran neglects the Gorman family funeral home business, leaving Padraig (Patrick Martins) in charge as he plows through all the Gormans in the New York directory until he hits on the developer Da told him was profiled in a magazine article a while back.

Barry (Reiser) is taken aback by the call. No, it’s not a “scam.” No, they don’t “want” anything. OK, actually, they do. Barry’s about to close a big deal on a 57th St. redevelopment, but sure, he’ll fly off to rural Ireland to fulfill “a dyin’ man’s last wish.” His daughter’s (Jane Levy) “Local Hero” argument seals the deal.

Barry and Ciáran get along grand, and there’s just enough local color to charm him and us — two local lads who imitate American accents and Americanisms based on what they’ve heard from the movies, the attentive barmaid (Lucianne McEvoy) Barry takes a shine to.

And then the old man, who summoned up the strength for one last night down’tha pub, dies, but not until after sentimentally rewriting his will. He leaves half his property to the rich New Yorker.

It’s a silly conceit that might have worked had they played up how ridiculous and against-the-grain of such stories this rash act is. Instead, we’re with Ciáran, who’s in a fury over the way Americans grieve and the way Americans greed.

The picture has inane tit for tat escalations, a town dividing up to take sides and none of it making much screenwriterly sense as the whole enterprise goes plumb off the rails.

The moral of the story, that “it’s mighty easy to fall out, but the weight of carrying” a grudge “forward can be too great,” is trite and the forms the illogical feud takes — in the past and in the present — spoil the potential fun.

As we watch Reiser and the redheaded Levy (of “Evil Dead” “and TV’s “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist”) gnosh on Manhattan Chinese food and debate Irish motivations and a family murky past, with Reiser dipping into his “This is what I’m saying” shtick, the movie hints at something wittier that might have been.

Would it have been funnier to have the American Gormans as Jewish, via marriage, conversions and what not? THAT’s a culture clash with real friction — hopefully funny — in it.

“Mad About You” alum Reiser does New York Jewish well, Irish American distantly removed, not so much. The reasons for avoiding that subject area include steering clear of stereotypes, not that Reiser and co-writer Wally Marzano-Lesnevich do a bang up job with that, either.

More local color and more colorful locals might have helped, with a better root conflict than a blase battle over real estate and a will. Otherwise, this sweet nothing loses the “sweet” and never overcomes the “nothing.”

Rating: 16+, profanity, alcohol

Cast: Colm Meaney, Paul Reiser, Jane Levy, Des Keogh and
Lucianne McEvoy

Credits: Directed by Chris Cottam, scripted by Wally Marzano-Lesnevich and Paul Reiser. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.

Running time:

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Classic Film Review: Still a hoot — Mssr. Belmondo’s Holiday — “That Man from Rio (L’homme de Rio)” (1964)

Posted on March 5, 2025 by Roger Moore

Adrien, dashing from 1960s Rio de Janiero to Brasilia, the then new capital of Brazil, in a pink 1929 Chrysler 75 adored with green stars, pulls over at the first modernist police station he spies.

He steps out of the ragtopped jalopy in nothing but boxer shorts, and proceeds to dress and babble in French — cigarillo dangling from his lips the whole time — to the befulled Portuguese-only speaking cop.

“Sir, could you please arrest me?”

“I’m a deserter. I lost my uniform. I flew without a ticket, conned an invalid. I fought with men of all colors and nations, and I drive around in a stolen pink car with little green stars.

“I’m also guilty of public indecency. The handcuffs, please!”

Adrien, played by international film icon Jean-Paul Belmondo, leaves out stealing a French cop’s Triumph motorcycle, sprinting miles on foot to an airport in pursuit of his kidnapped girlfriend, dodging dart gun bolts and fists, and when his own fists fail, kicking any villain he figures has it coming in the crotch.

And that’s before stealing an airplane he’s not quite sure how to fly, swimming miles to an oligarch’s yacht, dodging crocodiles in the Amazon and swinging like Tarzan from jungle tree to tree to free his dizzy beloved (Françoise Dorléac) in “That Man from Rio,” one of the great comic romps of the 1960s.

Filmmakers from the then-new James Bond franchise to Steven Spielberg would borrow from this spectacular action farce, which featured a future Bond villain (Adolfo Celi), locations cribbed for decades of other films and a finale that became a version of of the opening sequence of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” over 25 years later.

“Short Round” from “Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom?” His prototype is a pint-sized Afro-Brazilian shoeshine of many talents and connections named Sir Winston (Ubiracy De Oliveira), who saves Adrien’s French fried bacon more than once in this Oscar-nominated classic.

Director and co-writer Philippe de Broca’s Franco-Italian co-production serves up “The New Brazil” of the early ’60s — striking architecture, breathtaking scenery and poverty mostly glossed-over by the fresh-scrubbed faces of the “simple happy natives.”

The color film stock gives the picture a travelogue sparkle, and the stunts — with Belmondo plainly doing his own hair-raising motorcycle chasing, building dangling, diving, tumbles and crawls through brawls — can be pre-CGI jaw-dropping.

The plot? A couple of sketchy dart-gun wielding characters in trench coats swipe a statue of supposedly little value from a French museum. Professor Catalan (Jean Servais) has just enough time to tell the cops there were three such statuettes, and that they’re “cursed” before he’s kidnapped.


Agnes (Dorléac, of “Cul de Sac” and “Billion Dollar Brain”), the carefree daughter of a dead researcher who was with Catalan when they unearthed the statues, is also nabbed.

But Agnes was kidnapped right in front of her home-on-leave soldier, Private Adrien Dufourquet. He springs into action, a man of no “particular skills,” but a headstrong, impulsive rescuer on the fly.

He has no idea who took her or where they’re taking her. But he wings it westward with her kidnappers, unable to convince the flight crew of the jetliner he conned his aboard that she’s been “taken,” and at every turn, he’s there — trying to free her, hopefully before his leave runs out the following Monday.

“The bad guys always win!” Agnes gripes, once the drugs that made her even dizzier wear off. And so it seems. But Our Man Adrien will see about that.

Cinematographer Edmond Séchan shot one of the greatest short films of all time, “The Red Balloon,” and gives us sumpuous scenery, an “Architectural Digest” visual appreciation of the New Brazil’s architecture, and the occasional stunning shot — Adrien and Sir Winston climbing a mountainside favela in silhouette at sunset to Sir Winston’s cute and cool stilt house.

The editing leans into the travelogue nature of this international production a tad more than is necessary to maintain the picture’s pace, but the movie doesn’t suffer much for it.

And Belmondo, in one of his most entertaining action roles, just hurtles across the screen — dashing and diving and pilfering and conning and driving and dodging punches and crashing through construction sites and swinging from vines and construction dolly cables and falling out of a plane.

Damn.

Most of the time, we can see that’s really him, and marvel at how perilous they made the stunts look around him. Belmondo’s charisma is well-matched to the out-of-his-element and had-about-enough Adrien, a simple and sarcastic man out of his depth long before he’s a fish out of water, or in it.

Director de Broca hit his 1960s peak with this film, and went on to make “King of Hearts” and decades of more lightly-regarded films after that.

The oft-dubbed Italian character actor Celi plays the oligarch behind this New Brazil modern architecture spending spree. He moved into the James Bond universe as Bond’s skin-diving foe Largo in “Thunderball.”

And Dorléac, one of the great screen beauties of her day, had her finest comic role in this film before her life and career were tragically cut short in a car accident that killed her before “Billion Dollar Brain” finished shooting.

Laugh out loud moments and “How’d they do that?” stunts aside, one of the great pleasures in viewing “That Man from Rio” today is to see how this film influenced the action films and action comedies that followed. By the time Roger Moore took over as James Bond, the series’ producers weren’t even hiding their debts to “Rio.”

Spielberg allegedly wrote the director to praise the film and claim he’d seen “That Man from Rio” nine times.

Whatever the influences it spread far and wide, the film today is a grand snapshot of Paris, Rio and Brasilia in the early ’60s, and a reminder that Tom Cruise wasn’t the first to figure out that doing your own stunts, when reasonable and even occasionally unreasonable, stamps an action film with bonafides that show up in the finished film, and in the actor’s confidence or even genuine skittishness while doing them.

The effort shows in ways we don’t just see on the screen. We feel it.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, mostly comical, smoking, drinking

Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Françoise Dorléac, Jean Servais, Ubiracy De Oliveira and Adolfo Celi.

Credits: Directed by Philippe de Broca, scripted by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Ariane Mnouchkine, Danie Boulanger and Philippe de Broca. A United Artists (Les Artistes Associés) release from Cohen Media Group on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:54

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Movie Review: Pop Starlet Samara just keeps pushing Nutty Fan’s “love” over the “Borderline”

Posted on March 5, 2025 by Roger Moore

Samara Weaving is a Madonna-esque pop superstar stalked by Ray Nicholson in his father Jack’s full “Here’s JOHNNY!” nutjob mode in “Borderline,” a violent and crazed comedy about celebrity and the delusions it feeds to those who have it and those who psychotically crave to be near it.

It’s a dark subject. Ask Taylor Swift or any performer who has to keep bodyguards on duty and lawyers on retainer for restraining orders. Obsession with pretty pop starlets can be as pathetic and comical as those Tiffany fans depicted in the documentary “I Think We’re Alone Now,” or deadly dangerous. Remember the murdered singer Christina Grimmie?

Writer-director Jimmy Warden, who wrote “Cocaine Bear,” reaches for both in a darker-than-dark comedy about a brash star, the bodyguard who tries to show compassion for how she affects one fan in particular, and that one fanatic in 50 who turns out to be dangerous.

It’s more “Cocaine Bear” gonzo than subtle. But the laughs are big and bleak and sometimes bloody as one man’s deranged obsession comes to a head when he finally thinks he’s achieving his goal.

Set in the ’90s, “Borderline” follows Bell, a bodyguard who is both intimidating and certain of his threat assessment abilities. Eric Dane (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Burlesque”) plays up the guy’s patience and compassion when he has to deal with the latest door-knock from wild-eyed Paul (Nicholson), a “problem” fan who is certain singer Sofia (Weaving) is his girlfriend.

Wearing his dad’s old suit and bringing a single rose to the door of her gated mansion (How’d he get that far?), Paul sets off a few warning bells, which Bell is sure he can unring. That gets him stabbed enough to die, but he doesn’t. And that gets Paul inside Sofia’s mansion, bubble-bathing and Tom Cruise “Risky Business” dancing until he decides to turn himself in.

It’s a good thing Sofia was on the road with her “Deranged” tour.

For some reason, she brings Bell back on the job six months later. You’d think nearly getting yourself killed and potentially exposing your client to a nut with a knife would be a firing offense. But no.

Bell clocks back in just as Sofia is finishing up her fun with her latest plaything, a star NBA point guard (Jimmy Fails) who lets her crossdress him up and take him out to her favorite clubs. But he’s just figured out that, like her passion for jigsaw puzzles, he’s useful only until she’s “figured” him out down to the last piece. He’s about to go “back in the box.”

That’s the very moment that Paul, working with a fellow mental patient (Alba Baptista) and a too-loyal lump of a friend on the outside (Patrick Cox) breaks out of the mental institution and sets in motion his murderously cunning plans to live his dream.

Weaving gives Sofia the arrogance of the rich and famous, shrugging off suggestions she’s treating this point guard as a plaything, refusing to let herself be shocked or even that afraid when intruders get into her house. Ms. “Rich is a state of mind” has the brazen bravery of someone too insolated from real world problems to believe that anything bad can happen to her.

Point guard Devonte names songs by Cyndi Lauper and Madonna as his favorites, which does more to push Sofia over the “Borderline” than any violent threat staring her in the face.

Nicholson leers and mugs and oh yeah, we see the family resemblence in Paul’s more deranged moments.

Dane plays the straight man in all this, cast to set up tough guy/hero expectations which Bell may or may not live up to.

Random bits score the biggest laughs. A cop is summoned at one point, but he (Matthew Del Bel Belluz) is so distracted and unprofessional as to make us wonder if he’s another accomplice. No, he’s just got an audition in a few hours. He runs through Fred Astaire’s “Top Hat” song and dance when he’s supposed to be watching for creeps behaving creepily.

And that petite “fellow inmate” who escapes with Paul? She’s French. And you know how they are about Celine Dion.

Like “Cocaine Bear,” “Borderline” was built with “midnight movie” appeal in mind. And even if it never quite adds up to more than that, it doesn’t disapoint.

Rating: R for graphic violence and profanity

Cast: Samara Weaving, Eric Dane, Ray Nicholson, Alba Baptista, Patrick Cox and Jimmy Fails

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jimmy Warden. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:34

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Netflixable? A Norwegian remake follows a drunken, aimless skier on “The Wrong Track”

Posted on March 4, 2025 by Roger Moore

One of the more disillusioning aspects of the Golden Age of Content is the way Netflix repurposes intellectual property and remakes films for different markets.

Spanish films get almost pointless Mexican or Argentine remakes, and vice versa. And it all comes home to roost when they share these Around the World with Netflix variations on the same platform — North American Netflix, for instance — at the same time.

Right now, you can choose between the new Norwegian (dubbed or subtitled) rom-com “På villspor” (“The Wrong Track”) or the original Swedish film, “Ur spår (“Off the Rails”).

Not sure why the Norwegians would remake a Swedish skiing comedy that came out just a couple of years back, but that’s Netflix for you. They’re different, with a lot of charm of the first version of this story about finding purpose via the Scandinavian version of a winter marathon — a long cross-country ski race — wrung out of the Norwegian version.

But with its rural scenery and Nordic Olympic (Lillehammer and environs) locations, “Wrong Track” can claim the edge in that regard.

The set-up — a screwup, “never finishes anything” single mom who quits jobs and bungles mothering enough that she’s about to lose custody — is coerced into taking up cross country skiing by her seemingly-has-it-all-together older brother.

As Emilie (Ada Eide) struggles with the training and the reckoning this take-stock quest of skiing The Birken imposes on her life, will she finally get purpose and maybe find love along the way? As we learn that focused, motivated, Volvo driving yuppie brother Gjermond (Trond Fausa) has his own struggles — with a marriage (Marie Blokhus plays Silje) suffering from their inability to procreate, what will this “test” teach him?

One of the cutest elements of the original film, how odd it is for a Scandivanian to not know even the basics of skiing, is missed here.

The sex and romance elements are more abrupt, perfunctory and charmless in this take. But they go for the same upbeat, heartwarming feel in the finale, which plays about the same.

I’d suggest you skip “Wrong Track” and watch the Swedish original, since you sure as shooting don’t want to sit through two and the Norwegian “Tracks” feels more clumsily manipulative.

But both flirt with that “watchable” threshold thanks to scenery, engaging actors and people who have learned to do more than just put up with having too much snow for their own good.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, public urination gags, profanity

Cast: Ada Eide, Trond Fausa, Christian Rubeck, Idun Daae Alstad, Deniz Kaya and Marie Blokhus.

Credits: Directed by Hallvar Witzø, scripted by Lars Gudmestad and Vilde Klohs, based on the script for the Swedish film, “Ur spår” by Maria Karlsson A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

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Movie Review: Dito Montiel rounds up Murray, Coolidge, Davidson, Union and Ed Harris as “Riff Raff”

Posted on March 4, 2025 by Roger Moore

The trailers hint that there might be laughs, that the tone of “Riff Raff” — a dark and bloody comedy about hit men, family, and how those two only exist together in the movies — could very well come off.

Jennifer Coolidge and Bill Murray rarely do us wrong. Ed Harris brings gravitas and reality to every role he plays. And Gabrielle Union is here to class up the joint.

Pete Davidson? Well, it’s a hit man comedy, so there’s a chance he’ll get popped. Remember how we all laughed and laughed when that happened in “Bodies Bodies Bodies?”

But then there’s the moment in the opening credits, when you’re walking in on a small distributor’s comedy and you see the “Directed by Dito Montiel” on the screen. And there’s nothing for it but to mutter Gordon Ramsay’s favorite expletive.

“F— me.”

Directors aren’t wholly responsible for whether a film comes off. Casting a movie well does wonders. But if a script has a scrap of promise to its premise, the director of “Man Down,” “Boulevard,” “”A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” and “The Clapper” is your best bet to turn it into a Golden Raspberry Awards contender.

“Riff Raff” lives down to its title, a trashy movie with a gilded cast — a cast a tad tarnished thanks to the addition of this to their resumes.

Actor-turned-screenwriter John Polono (“Stronger”) cooked up a story of a mobster who’s buried his past, remarried and made a better life, two mobsters hunting him down via his unfortunate son and alcoholic ex, and a trio of varying-degrees-of-“innocent” bystanders, starting with the mobster’s adopted, Dartmouth-bound teenaged son.

Murray is the old trigger man they call “Lefty,” bluff and blunt and bullying around his amoral protege, Lonnie (Davidson). Something puts Lefty and Lonnie on the trail of an old acquaintance.

That would be Vincent (Harris), doting stepdad to smarty-pants D.J. (Miles J. Harvey), worshipful husband of too-classy-for-him Sandy (Union).

The intrusion of Vincent’s son from an earlier marriage, Rocco (Lewis Pullman), Roccos’s very pregnant Italian girlfriend Marina (Emanuela Postacchini) and Vincent’s blackout drunk ex-wife (Coolidge) is Vincent’s first clue that something awful is up.

“What’d you do this time?” is how he greets his adult son. “You sure cuss a lot when Rocco’s around” is the Dartmouth-bound smart kid’s astute observation. Seeing as how his dad is compulsive model boat carver forever giving him “Don’t ever settle” lectures on a girl who just used and rejected D.J., that should be a tell for D.J. and his mom.

Ruth, the boozy, unfiltered ex who gets “horny when I’m scared,” cuts to the chase.

“You don’t know him (Vincent) at all!”

The disparate characters are destined to collide in a country house high on a woody hillside in Maine. The tale of how they all got there and what the bad blood here is about is told out of order via flashback “revelations,” rendering it a style we’d call Tarantinoesque. We’d call the callous, amoral and seriously unfunny violence Tarantinoesque, too. But why drag a good if perhaps overpraised filmmaker into this?

From the first spilling of blood, “Riff Raff” grates and goes grimly wrong. Blundering hit men use each other’s names in front of a farm produce store owner, a scene that ends with “A History of Violence” slaughter. It’s repeated later with victims we could describe as “annoying” and overly-helpful.

Neither Davidson nor Murray can make these scenes, or later jokes about “torture” and reasons for wanting to do it pay off. The violence is random, awful and way out of proportion to what sets it off.

There are interesting twists to the plot, but the finale’s a fiasco followed by the clumsiest anti-climax of the new year. And too much of what precedes it is packed with simplistic attempts to let Murray/Coolidge/Davidson and Union do what they’ve done in other movies and TV series.

Davidson’s Lonnie is “a twitchy weasel?” Hardly a stretch.

Union is very good at playing prim, proper and PO’d with just her flashing eyes and a testy line.

“Can I get a word?”

Coolidge is the only one of the lot who manages a laugh, running her “MILF” based career second act through another wringer, struggling to score a giggle here and there at how vulgar, coarse and lowdown one oversexed drunk can be.

“White Lotus” reminds us she can be better than this, as indeed most everybody else here has demonstrated via their earlier credits.

Their director? Not so much.

Rating: R, violence, sexual content, drug use, nudity, profanity

Cast: Bill Murray, Jennifer Coolidge, Gabrielle Union, Pete Davidson, Miles J. Harvey,
Lewis Pullman, Emanuela Postacchini, Michael Angelo Covino and Ed Harris.

Credits: Directed by Dito Montiel, scripted by John Polono. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:43

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Classic Film Review: Hackman’s a Working Class CIA Joe taking care of “Company Business”

Posted on March 3, 2025 by Roger Moore

Not every actor’s all that picky about her or his wardrobe. But the great ones are.

Glenn Ford didn’t find a character until he picked out just the right hat. Piper Laurie would fuss over what purse somebody she was playing would carry.

The late Gene Hackman? Hats and ties would tell the story.

So a movie about a CIA agent dodging “the Russians” and “The Company” in post-Berlin Wall Berlin might demand a trench coat. But Hackman always gave his characters with working class origins a tie tied entirely too short. And the hats were something you might see on your average New York cabbie of the day.

When he played high priced lawyers, presidents and such, the tie was normal length. But for a Popeye Doyle (“The French Connection” movies) or ex-CIA agent Sam Boyd in “Company Business,” the tie was short and the cap was baldspot-hiding working class.

The film, a serio-comic cat-and-mouse chase through Berlin and Paris, probably seemed a safe bet in 1990-91. Nicholas Meyer, who scripted “Time after Time” and whose light writing and directing touch saved the early “Star Trek” movies, cooked up a sort of “Hopscotch” comic thriller/working vacation in Europe for the Oscar-winning Hackman, paired up with Russian dancer/sex symbol turned actor Mikhail Baryshnikov.

But even if the film gave Hollywood the sense that veteran villain Kurtwood Smith (“Robocop”) could pull off perpetually PO’d in comic strokes, setting him up for “Hearts and Souls,” “To Die For,” TV’s “Big Wave Dave’s” and eventually “That ’70s Show,” “Company Business” barely manages a chuckle.

The set pieces are cleverly handled, the action beats play and the picture moves along at a nice clip. And Hackman — 61 when this caem out — is in fine form, giving better than the whole enterprise probably deserved. But if this is one of the forgotten titles of Hackman’s last decade on screen, there’s a reason.

We meet “old guy” Sam as he’s pulling a documents heist the Old School way — busting into headquarters in black mask and jumpsuit, dodging the guards, rappelling down a wall from an upper story of the glass-encased promontory to make his getaway.

The next day’s visit to his handlers gives away the game. He was stealing industrial secrets — cosmetics formulas. And a nerd in the lobby, also waiting to see the corporate types coveting this cache, got the same info simply by “hacking,” with the old guy tricking the kid to save face and his payment for the job.

When his former employers summon him to Langley with their old “Who do you like in the Fifth?” (a horse racing cliche) phone call, Sam’s first question is the only one that matters.


“Why take the battleship Missouri out of mothballs?”

Sam’s a Cold Warrior, and the Cold War is over. The Berlin Wall’s down. And we’ve already heard the CIA brain trust (Kurtwood Smith, Terry O’Quinn and others) gripe that they “HATE old guys” like Sam.

But there’s one more “exchange,” a long-imprisoned U2 pilot they can get for a chunk of cash and a Russian spy they’ve held for seven years. Post Iran-Contra, this bit of spookwork has to be off-the-books, as they’re using a Colombian drug lord’s cash and they don’t want Congress coming after them and Sam, who’d be an “Oliver North without all the medals” if caught.

Sam dutifully accepts the cash, fetches the Russian Pyotr Grushenko (Baryshnikov) and gets him to Berlin.

The banter is mostly dull and ill-considered, as the eagle-eyed and memory like a steel-trap Sam can’t recall the name of the vodka that the Russian keeps recommending.

Berlin’s sex district would make a great hide-out when things go haywire, and Meyer tries to find some fun in that. A transgender bar with a version of Marlene Dietrich singing “See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have” (from “Destry Rides Again”) is about as funny as all the gay references get.

Baryshnikov wouldn’t show a lot of comic flair until his last significant role, a story arc on “Sex and the City,” later in the decade. Lines muttered about his reluctance to “go home” — “Who do you think I am, E.T.?” — fall flat.

Smith and O’Quinn take sturns sputtering “It’s no longer fashionable to ransom hostages with Colombian drug money!” and “What’re you trying to do, restart the COLD WAR?”

The American Sam may crack that “We still have Fidel,” when it comes to international boogeymen for the country to obsess over. Petulent Pyotr could still crack back “So do WE.”

Not a knee-slapper in the lot.

Screen icon Hackman’s workmanlike turn holds the picture together, as far as that goes. But in a movie that tries to work up a fine comic fury over Reagan/Bush crimes and criminality, and that proves to be an exercise in futility. Nobody was hearing that.

The next year, Bill Clinton would win the White House because the clueless patrician Republican Bush didn’t know the price of a gallon of milk.

And lines about how “The Japanese own your whole f—–g country” may be reminders of how long “The Japanese Century” lasted about ten years. But for a viewer today it just underscores that “The American Century” is certainly over and with half the country voting to emulate Russiam Cold War action comedies have lost any cachet they once had.

Rating: PG-13, bloody gunplay, nudity,

Cast: Gene Hackman, Mikhail Baryshnikov,
Géraldine Danon, Terry O’quinn, Oleg Rudnik, Daniel van Bargen and Kurtwood Smith

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Meyer. An MGM release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:38

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Netflixable? Mexican Commandos fend of the “Dogs” of a Cartel — “Counterattack (Counterstrike, Contraataque)”

Posted on March 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

An elite Mexican commando unit battling cartels and corruption must shoot and fight its way north — to safety in Brownsville — in the chest-thumping shoot-em-up “Counterattack.”

Nothing is made of that irony, and that’s just one of many loose threads in this loose cannon B-movie from South of the Border.

Luis Alberti is Captain Guerrero, who finishes up an afternoon of drinking and gambling with a pal by intervening when two women (Mayra Batalla and Frida Jiser) trying to report a mass grave they’ve found are hassled by cartel goons and corrupt cops.

The captain is so celebrated and intimidating that he wins the stand-off with a legion of armed mob minions and local police, and gets to just walk away after having shot a couple of bad guys — including one with a badge.

That’s the logic here. Don’t judge “how they do things in Mexico” and don’t pay too much attention to how things transpire. Try not to get too far ahead of the utterly formulaic plot and don’t sweat the layers and layers of plot lapses and genre tropes and cliches.

When’s that next shootout, compadres?

Captain Guerrero is part of a unit called Murcielagos — “bats.” The cartel leader they’re hunting (Noé Hernández) and his brother (Israel Islas) have it in for these soldiers, blaming them for killing their father. That’s why they filled a ditch with dead soldiers, which the two women — one of them on her way for an abortion — find.

The villains ambush Guerrero and his closest subordinates — nicknamed Tanque, Pollo, Toro and Combo (Leonardo Alonso, Luis Curiel, Guillermo Nava, David Calderón León) — when they’re off duty, heading north for a U.S. shopping trip.

When the army men turn the tide and wipe out their ambushers, it’s game on as they’re on foot, the bad guys’ “dogs” are in pursuit (Ishbel Baustista plays their ace tracker) and the only hope for our heroes is a “safe” extraction either near the border, or across it in Texas.

The movie sets up several promising subtexts, and all but forgets almost every one of them as we lurch from shoot-out to shoot-out, with the Murcielagos battling long odds and never missing what they aim at — unless it’s a senior bad guy, whom they wound. So he can make a speech.

After every firefight that the five survive, they “report,” aka “sound off” — “Combo STANDING,” “Tanque STANDING…”

The shootouts are first-rate, in that “bad guys mostly miss, good guys never do” way.

Alberti is a most charismatic lead, and Hernández does what he can with the doting dad/ranting, raving and murderous drug lord at work stereotype. The willowy Bautista was an interesting choice to play the tough broad killer/tracker “Cobra.”

But nothing here is written or directed in a way to make it memorable beyond that moment when the credits start and Netflix is trying to convince you to begin watching something else without giving you the chance to say “Not so fast.”

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Luis Alberti, Leonardo Alonso, Luis Curiel, Guillermo Nava, David Calderón León, Mayra Batalla, Frida Jiser, Ishbel Bautista, Israel Islas and Noé Hernández

Credits: Directed by Chava Cartas, scripted by Jose Ruben Escalante Mendez . A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24

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