Movie Review: “Raise Your Hand” if think Writing a Play will Get You Out of Hard Luck High

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Raise Your Hand” is an earnest, well-acted indie drama seriously undercut by coarseness, cliches and stereotypes.

Writer-director Jessica Rae’s debut feature is about coming of age and finding your voice. The stakes are pretty high for a high school story — escaping the trap of poverty, poor decisions made without smart adult advice and supervision and the role art and artistic expression can play in breaking a cycle that sees single moms raising single moms.

Jearnest Corchado plays Gia, our heroine/narrator, a teen who has written her life story in diaries since childhood, something that could prove a help when she takes a high school drama class where self-revealing monologues are required.

But showing up is also required in Ms. Ramsey’s (Jess Nurse) class. And Gia’s got a lot going on — some of which she trots out as excuses (working mom, part-time job, kid brother), and some of which we only hear her narrate as she’s scribbling fresh, unfiltered confessional entries into her journal.

Because Gia’s bestie Lila (Hanani Taylor) has it even rougher. Her dad’s been in prison since before she was born. Her single mom had issues that put her in the wrong alley at the wrong time.

If social services knew Lila was living at home alone, that she was cutting class and hooking up with any guy who smiles her way — even in the school toilets (with Gia standing guard) — Lila’s “freedom” to continue down the primrose path of bad choices would be yanked away.

Gia’s also distracted by the constant attention of boys. Latina Gia and Black Lila work this power with their wardrobe, their insolence with authority figures and their smoking. Yeah, those are stereotypes. Another and more unfortunate one in this ’90s period piece is how it leans into is its portrayal of Black teen boys and young Black men men as sexual predators.

There are no white kids at Jefferson High, and few white teachers, as well as a white campus cop and condescending white principal.

Teachers like Ms. Ramsey and vice principals like Amari Edmunds (Evan Allen-Gessesse) fight an uphill battle to “see” these kids, take an interest and try to steer them away from poor choices.

“Raise Your Hand” is about Gia’s talent for writing getting noticed and the struggle it takes for her to accept this and buy in to school before it’s too late. And it’s about the hyper-sexualized high school soap opera that engulfs Lila and Gia and threatens not just their relationship, but their safety.

High school gossip, hit-it-and-quit-it boys and young men, corrupt and bullying cops, tuned-out parents and racially patronizing administrators all have a place in this messy melodrama, a movie that pushes “school” and family into the background to make room for more cliched situations and stereotypical characters.

Gia is pretty much the only archetype (artsy but poor) allowed to have an “arc” to her story, which is myopic in the way it emphasizes sex and sexuality and sex crimes.

There’s little more to “school” life than sex and attempts to procure it, with one moment of respite as the kids in drama class find themselves inspired by or contemptuous of “Rent” — not that most public high schools wouldn’t avoid that edgy musical like the plague.

And you’d think a movie about a “great writer” in the making would have a pithy insight or two or at least one quotable line, even one laced with f-bombs.

You can do only so much in a 90 minute movie, and one gives the writer-director the benefit of the doubt about intentions. But “Raise Your Hand” is a perfunctory “journey” trapped in a genre picture vacuum, a “troubled teens in high school” melodrama built on a checklist of cliches.

It doesn’t move so much as manipulate. But all involved earn a “nice try,” and the reward of their 2020 movie finally being picked up for streaming. Better luck next time.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual assault, sexual situations, teen smoking, profanity

Cast: Jearnest Corchado, Hanani Taylor, Evan Allen-Gessesse and Jess Nurse

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jessica Rae. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:31

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Movie Review: “Bring Her Back” — Horror One Suffers Through rather than Relishes

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

It’s not a blanket condemnation to say I could not wait for “Bring Her Back,” the excruciating new film from the co-directors of “Talk to Me,” to come to an end.

One can recognize its unflinching, grisly details and unsparing cruelty and appreciate that it’s not played for grisly horror laughs or even intended to “entertain.” But this is as hard a movie to sit through as they come — flesh-rending, tooth-shattering violence filmed in sadistic, gory closeup, victims pitilessly victimized over and over again.

The victims are children. The victimizer is an adult and a “system” that carelessly lets children fall into the wrong hands.

“Bring Her Back” is a movie anchored in loss and grief, but only truly heartbreaking when we see the consequences of that visited upon those least prepared to handle it and fight back against their abuser.

Piper (Sara Wong) is an isolated Aussie tween, someone who can’t make friends easily. At least her older stepbrother Andy (Billy Barratt) is there to look out for her, make sure she gets home from the bus stop safe and sound.

Piper’s blind. So Andy is the only one to see the awful, bloody death throes of their father in the shower when they get home.

The devastated duo is thus surrendered to “The System,” which in this small-town corner of Australia means they’re fostered out to a former counselor. Laura (the great Sally Hawkins, pushing the envelope again) seems kind and nurturing. For about a second.

In no time, we see how she manipulates both Andy and Piper — their memories, their relationship with their shared father and with each other — focusing on the ugliest possibilities, making each paranoid about the other and what they “know” about their past and their family.

Laura’s been through loss herself. Her daughter Cathy died not long ago. And she’s got another foster child already under the roof of her isolated house in the rainforest. Oliver, “Ollie” (Jonah Wren Phillips) is mute and seemingly locked away. But if he could talk, the stories he might tell…

Sibling filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou let us glimpse video tapes Laura is watching. They’re not just old home movies of Cathy (Misha Heywood). She’s watching creepy Eastern European rituals, “how-to” videos of the most disturbing nature. She’s prepped the house with a vast white circle in chalk that you can only see from above, and painted a DIY depth line on the side of her pool.

Whatever Laura is prepping, you can bet it won’t be to any living child’s benefit if the title “Bring Her Back” tells us anything.

Hawkins, of “The Shape of Water” and “Happy Go Lucky,” has a nurturing innocence and sweetness that the Philippous tap into and flip on it’s head for this role in this film. Laura couldn’t possibly be capable of this or that. Oh yes she is.

The Philippous put children in the most wrenching jeopardy one could imagine and tease us along to see if the kids — or any one of them — figure out the nature of the threat and who embodies it in time to save them all.

It’s the filmmakers’ unsparing depiction of violence against children that overwhelms this story of supernaturalism or desperate, misguided superstition. That seems excessive, a shock-value cheat that gives this “wrenching nature of loss and grief” story a sense of overkill.

They’ve made a smart, thought-provoking but ugly and incredibly hard to watch thriller in which the crimes against the flesh and teeth overwhelm a simple gothic tale of a mourning mother turned monster and the children The System lets have for her nefarious purposes.

Rating: R, gruesome violence, “bloody content,” nudity, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Billy Barratt, Sara Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, Misha Heywood and Sally-Anne Upton.

Credits: Directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, scripted by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:44

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Movie Review: What Guy Wouldn’t go Mental Craving Weatherman Paul Rudd’s “Friendship?”

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Cringe Comedy” is taken to the next level, and then some, in the intimately uncomfortable “Friendship,” a story of the broken state of bro bonding and on-the-spectrum oddness.

Writer-director Andrew DeYoung taps into a generation’s male isolation with a dark comedy that will make you squirm every time you laugh, especially if you see it with an audience. It is an open wound of insecurities hidden in a dark and darkly funny examination of “fitting in” and failing.

So God forbid you laugh when the rest of the audience watching it with you isn’t laughing.

“Saturday Night Live” veteran and “I Think You Should Leave” sketch comedy star and co-creator Tim Robinson plays an instantly off-putting tech nerd whose tactless, clueless inability to “read the room” is off the charts.

That’s established within moments in the opening scene as Craig (Robinson) and his wife Tami (Kate Mara) sit and listen and share in their support group.

Tami is fragile, wary and weary. She’s survived cancer, and everything about her screams “survived…for now.” She’s worried about how much of her life she’ll get back, and if she’ll “ever have another orgasm.”

Clueless Craig? He’s “Everything is AWESOME,” “We BEAT cancer” and “MY orgasms are just FINE, by the way.”

Good one, Craig. No, nobody in the group laughed.

They have a teen son (Jack Dylan Grazer) who is a lot closer to Mom than Craig will ever be. Is he her child from a previous relationship? Maybe this “Devon” she keeps talking about and meeting?

Craig is probably good at his job — working for a digital consulting firm that helps brands manipulate people into addiction to products, apps, people, etc. But it doesn’t take much for his subordinates and superiors to reveal their open contempt for the office weirdo.

“He’s odd man out for a reason!”

Mr. Insecurity enthuses about the wrong things, curses at the wrong times, overshares and dresses in the same khakis, sports coats and peculiar, hard-to-get, “only shoes that fit” deck shoes from a restaurant chain that “also sells food.”

He and the Out-of-His-League Mrs. are selling their ’70s style split-level, hoping to move somewhere bigger so that her Flowers by Tami florist business can flourish.

But a chance meeting with their new neighbor rocks Craig’s less-comfortable-than-he-thinks world. Because Austin (Paul Rudd) is everything he’s not, effortlessly “cool,” for starters.

Austin’s a local TV weatherman rocking a ’70s TV “Anchorman” pornstache. Austin is married, but plays in a punk band. And when he invites Craig on “an adventure,” he means it. It could be roaming Clovis city’s old sewer system and sneaking into city hall in the wee hours or hunting wild mushrooms when Craig’s supposed to be at work.

Craig fanboys along, and that gets him invited to a party with “just the guys,” Austin’s acolytes from his band and elsewhere. But not reading signals or being comfortable in such a setting dooms Craig to missteps. No, he doesn’t join in the screwy, impromptu sing-along to “My Boo.” But playing around with boxing gloves was sure to come to tears.

Craig kills the party, and in an instant, he’s as good as out. Austin’s deciding to “end this friendship” comes later.

The guy who “got speed bumps installed” in the neighborhood he’s trying to move out of, the fellow who should be fretting over why his wife is spending so much time with an ex or paying more attention to his just-getting-into-girls teen son becomes obsessed with being like Austin, getting back together with Austin or even replicating Austin’s bro pack on his own.

The “cringe” includes “men’s movement” subtexts and the sociology and psychology of manhood that sentences so many to lives of isolation and loneliness. The jokes have a cringy, Gen X topicality, as hapless Craig struggles with his feelings, his Austin-reunion fantasies and his misguided efforts to talk his son and the son’s latest girlfriend to join him at his new favorite bar.

“It’s 7:30 in the morning! We’re SIXTEEN!”

Robinson makes Craig equal parts pitiful and hilarious in scene after scene — forever losing a shoe on Austin’s “adventures,” always losing his Zenith cell phone, replacing it, and relying on the young salesman for something “a little stronger” than booze to help Craig get out of his own head, or further into it.

Rudd serves up a mature if still insecure version of his arrested development “I Love You, Man” character, someone who embraced his inner bro long ago. Everything’s cool as long as his pack adores him and doesn’t see it’s mostly a front.

Veteran TV writer and director DeYoung lures the viewer in and leads us in amused, faintly contemptuous but always nervous laughter. There’s shared pain beneath the laughs. Why DID this or that friend “move on” from us?

And DeYoung maintains suspense as his hero and his movie stagger towards the inevitable Chekhovian meltdown. Because no bro this disturbed and this “wronged,” at least in his own mind, can hallucinate his way out of the dilemma that his empty life forces him to confront.

Not without licking a toad, anyway.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd, Jack Dylan Grazer and Kate Mara.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew DeYoung. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:40

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Movie Preview: Guillermo del Toro and Netflix make Oscar Isaac the Doctor Who Played God — “Frankenstein”

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

The Oscar winning del Toro gets a Netflix black check to write and direct his take on the monster and the man who made him.

Isaac, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, Jacob Elordi and Charles Dance also star.

November

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Movie Preview: Ethan Hawke and Ma Bell return, “Black Phone 2”

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

They’ll be hard-pressed to match the heartbreaking suspense of the 2022 blockbuster. This snowy October release has supernatural “Elm Street” et al vibes.

No wonder everybody ditched their land lines.

Check it out.

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Movie Review — “Karate Kid: Legends,” down for the Count

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

Let’s call the standing — or flat on its back — ten count on the “Karate Kid” movies after “Karate Kid: Legends.”

Sentimental father figure martial arts revenge dramas frosted with the honor and code of the Asian fighting arts — honors and codes violated by villains but upheld by our heroes — these pictures ran out of ideas decades ago, not that a TV “Cobra Kai” revival was hampered by that.


“Legends” unites later “Karate Kid” sensei/teacher Jackie Chan with the “original” kid, Ralph Macchio, which will touch those who still appreciate the simplicity and underdog-vs-bullies ethos of 1984’s “The Karate Kid.”

Chan and co-star Ben Wang did the fight choreography, and director Jonathan Entwistle, cinematographer Justin Brown and editors Dana E. Glauberman and Colby Parker Jr. ensure that the martial arts moves are a spectacular blur of fists,” “one inch punch” blows and flying, spinning “dragon kicks.”

But the story is The Same as it Ever Was. There are thuggish bullies who misuse martial arts. And the assorted “kids” and their teacher have to set them straight about what the “art” and discipline are really about.

Ben Wang plays Li Fong, a Beijing boy with the most American accent in Mr. Han’s martial arts academy. His mother (Ming-Na Wen of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D”) disapproves of the martial arts thing. She’s already “lost one son” to it, she complains to Han (Jackie Chan).

Luckily for Dr. Mom she’s landed a gig in New York. The kid will have to “promise” to give up training and fighting as they move there and he tries to fit in. The accent will be no problem, and no screenplay invention can explain away the boy’s California-fluency.

Li ducks into a pizza joint, gets the “go to Jersey” insult from the owner (Joshua Jackson, formerly of “Dawson’s Creek,” recently in TV’s “Fatal Attraction” series) over his Philistine’s “stuffed crust” request and an aggressively perky vibe from the owner’s daughter (Sadie Stanley), and finds his first New York friends.

Naturally, pizza cook Victor is in hock with a local dojo owner (Tim Rozon). Naturally, Victor used to be a boxer, so he needs “one more fight, maybe two” to get out of debt. Even though he’s pretty damned close to getting that AARP card in the mail, that’s what we’re meant to buy into.

And of course perky daughter Mia used to have a thing with that dojo’s most savage, unscrupulous sucker-punching fighter Conor (Aramis Knight).

Li will “turn you from a stone into a stream,” teaching Victor to “flow” in his fighting, countering the other boxer’s efforts with deflection and popping him with the occasional deadly “one inch punch.” And the 125 pound Li will have to come up with some new tricks if he himself has to fight over Mia.

Li may more than hold his own with groups of thugs who try to muscle the pizza shop owner, punching through the flashbacks where he remembers how his martial artist older brother died in front of him. But if he’s going to train this boxer and get REAL revenge by beating the punk Conor in The Five Boroughs MMA tourney, he’s going to need teachers.

Mr. Han flies in. Then he flies off to find Mister Miyagi’s best pupil, Daniel-san (Macchio). They teach Li a new trick or two in just a couple of days.

Director Entwistle (Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World” was his) keeps the cliches coming and the narrative — such as it is — moving. But there aren’t enough fights in the early going to sustain interest. And the later ones are pretty much pre-determined.

This “Kid” is somewhat better than the one Chan made with Will Smith’s kid several years back, but “Cobra Kai” fans may find the generic plot weighs down the punches too much to add anything new to the saga.

Rating: PG-13, violence, some of it bloody

Cast: Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Ming-Na Wen, Sadie Stanley, Aramis Knight, Joshua Jackson, Tim Rozon and Ralph Macchio

Credits: Directed by Jonathan Entwistle, scripted by Rob Lieber, based on characeters created by Robert Mark Kamen.

Running time: 1:34

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Movie Review: “Aloha” means “Why Bother?” with this remake of “Lilo & Stitch”

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Roger Moore

The latest Disney remake of an animated classic makes “Lilo & Stitch” more Hawaiian and less cartoonish. The former might be a big deal, in terms of getting Hawaian culture right and advertising the island paradise-state to tourists. But the latter is an unforgivable omission in a comic romp about aliens, animal shelters, surfing and family.

“Ohana means ‘family,’ and family means nobody gets left behind” is the one thing all of us learned from the 2002 Disney comedy, a lightweight action romp designed to be a modern “Dumbo” variation — quick, cheap, cute, funny and sentimental.

Director Dean Fleischer Camp’s live-action remake is an almost note-for-note copy, with most of the notes not resonating the way they did 20something years ago.

Casting a live Hawaian girl as Lilo (Maia Kealoha) pays no real dividends. Making Billy Magnussen and whatever happened to Zach Galifianakis the aliens hunting their lost “experiment” weapon creature 626, who has escaped to Earth and been adopted out as a “service animal” by a no-kill animal shelter achieves a few “different” takes, lines and moments, but zero laughs.

Courtney B. Vance taking over for the far-more-menacing Ving Rhames as CIA Agent Cobra Bubbles doesn’t pay off. Bringing back Tia Carrere (as a social worker, she was Lilo’s sister Noni in the original) and (the voice of) Chris Sanders as Stitch is the least tribute Disney could pay to a hit movie that produced TV series and other intellectual property bonanzas back in the day.

It’s not totally soulless, even if it is mostly laugh-free. But hundreds of millions in tickets sold or not, the filmmakers never manage anything like a reason that this intellectual property should have been remade.

Brace yourself for, “Mommy, why isn’t this as fun as the cartoon?”

Rating: PG

Cast: Maia Kealoha, Sydney Adugong, Tia Carrere, Courtney B. Vance
Billy Magnussen, and Zach Galifianakis, with Chris Sanders as the voice of Stitch.

Credits: Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, scripted by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes, based on the 2002 animated film scripted by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:48

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Movie Review: Lovelorn Writer and Bookseller realizes “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life”

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Roger Moore

Perhaps only the French could get away with a Jane Austen rom-com riff like “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.” It’s slight and predictable, with featherweight jokes and a whiff of “Why’d she choose HIM?”

But title it “Jane Austen a gâché ma vie,” film it in French (with subtitles) and English, build it around a clerk in perhaps the most famous bookstore in Paris (Shakespeare and Company) if not the world, and it takes on a certain je nais se quios, just enough of it to make up the fact that they’ve rubbed all the edges off “Austenesque” in the process.

No, tossing in a touch of Euro nudity doesn’twholly atone for that.

Camille Rutherford of “Blue is the Warmest Color” is Agathe, a bookseller in the most poetic setting such people can thrive in, a frustrated writer with personal phobias and an ongoing flirtation with co-worker Felix (Pablo Pauly of “The French Dispatch”), complicated but comfy suburban living arrangements with her single-mom sister and one frustrated ambition.

She’d like to be a published writer herself, a romance novelist more on the Austen end of the spectrum than the Nicholas Sparks one.

Helpful Felix has pooh-pooh’d her writer’s block and submitted the promising beginning to her latest work to the Brits who should know talent. She’s awarded a Jane Austen Writer’s Residency at the Austen house.

Not much is made of the house, the location or the fact that this is a real thing and there are often groups of promising or even accomplished writers briefly residing there looking for “inspiration.” All we know is it’s in the UK, that Agathe has a phobia about cars (she bike-commutes to work) and that her grudgingly undertaken trip includes a ferry ride, which ends with her picked up in the least safe car imaginable — an unreliable 1960s MGB.

Charlie Anson plays the “great great great nephew” of Empire waistline Austen, Oliver, a snobby Oxford “contemporary literature” prof who drives and runs errands for his aged parents (Liz Crowther and Alan Fairbairn) who are the “real” Austen authorities and keepers of the flame.

Pity about Dear Old Dad’s forgetting to wear pants. Or underpants. Cute, though.

As Oliver is set up as a haughty Mr. Darcy and Felix takes on the role of the less suitable suitor, the one who wants to get her over her “imposter syndrome” (“I’m not a REAL writer!”), we hunt about for events, clashes — the assorted writers-in-residence include thriller novelists and a feminist/Marxist critic — that will enliven them en route to the “autumn ball” that the residency throws for the writers and locals, in “Pride & Prejudice/Sense and Sensibility” wear.

Agathe, whose father was a Brit, may be “looking for a Mark Darcy,” Felix teases. But she sees herself as Anne Elliott, the mousy “spinster” heroine of Austen’s “Persuasion.” The shallow Felix is her idea of “Henry Crawford of ‘Mansfield Park,'” opportunistic and perhaps out of the running for life partner.

Or perhaps not.

The limited locations sparkle, and the gags set up Agathe as out-of-her-depth hapless in some predictable (opening the wrong door while nude) and offbeat (spat on by llamas) ways.

Writer-director Laura Piani has made a frustrating film in that it mocks the idea of adding life experiences in order to become a writer, when plainly Agathe is doing just that. She makes a murk of the mimicked Austen romance formula. The stakes in all of this are low, and the resolution abrupt in ways that suck some of the romance right out of it.

But Rutherford is engaging, Pauly and Anson likeable “types” and the settings lush and Austenesque.

And it’s just French enough to feel novel, after decades of Austen adaptations, biographies and the like, a “fresh take” that isn’t all that but does no shame to its titular novelist and the iconic bookseller who figures she “wrecked my life.”

Rating: R, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Camille Rutherford, Pablo Pauly, Charlie Anson, Liz Crowther,
Annabelle Lengronne and Alan Fairbairn.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laura Piani. A Sony Pictures Classic release.

Running time: 1:38

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Sundays are for Cinebingeing

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Roger Moore

Let’s catch all the trailers and features — we’ve missed…

“Friendship,” “Karate/Legends,” “Jane Austen Wrecked,”: etc. .

It’ll do until the Durham Bulls are in town.

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Movie Preview: Pete Davidson has a new job at “The Home”

Posted on May 30, 2025 by Roger Moore

And it’s not going well.

This looks good and creepy and “Clockwork” ish.

July 25.

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