Tag Archives: Reviews

Movie Review: Whatever you do, Don’t Give “Jade” a Blade

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Cool” is the lifeblood of an indie thriller. Park your tale in a novel “cool” setting. Serve up a “cool” heist/scheme/plot, preferably with epic brawls, chases or shootouts. Cast a cool heavy. But even if you ignore or narrowly miss … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: Meet your compliant and cuddly new AI robotic “Companion”

Posted on January 31, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Companion” is a horrific and caustically cautionary sci-fi thriller about how the digitized alternatives to dating might go wrong. Very wrong. Signing on an impressive cast, writer-director Drew Hancock takes a big, roundhouse swing at “coupling” in a distracted, instant … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: “The Damned” Fishermen face Consequences for their Cruelest Mistake

Posted on January 24, 2025 by Roger Moore

“The Damned” is a thriller built on one of the oldest formulas in fiction. First, there are many, as Dame Agatha taught us, “And Then There were None.” Ah, but what a setting this 19th century fable has — the … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: Bisset still has her shimmer in “Loren & Rose”

Posted on January 23, 2025 by Roger Moore

A screen legend gives better than a lackluster indie script deserves in “Loren & Rose,” a movie about a movie-maker befriending a once-famous actress he needs to get his new movie made. Maybe there’s a bit of art-imitates-film-life in this … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: A 1970 “radical” family working through their issues — “Three Birthdays”

Posted on January 21, 2025 by Roger Moore

“Radical” politics — sexual, racial and otherwise — Vietnam, the first Earth Day, the sexual revolution, “female solidarity” and Kent State are the backdrop of “Three Birthdays,” a downbeat family melodrama about the day “The Sixties Died.” Writer-director Jane Weinstock … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: Tragic, Scandalous and Recent History Remembered — “Nickel Boys”

Posted on January 18, 2025 by Roger Moore

In “Nickel Boys,” first-time feature director RaMell Ross almost overwhelms performance with technique. Characters are obscured, faces hidden, glimpsed from the legs down to their shoes, passing by in the blur of memory. By the time we set our eyes … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: Almodóvar Ponders Death and the Lives Preceding it from “The Room Next Door”

Posted on January 17, 2025 by Roger Moore

In his mid ’70s, it’s only natural that the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar should turn his attentions to reflecting on lives lived, and questions of how one wants life to end with his latest film. But in boiling down … Continue reading →

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Classic Film Review: Brit Noir, Warner Bros. style — “They Made Me a Fugitive (I Became a Criminal)” (1948)

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Roger Moore

Here’s a flashy, violent British film noir in the classic Warner Bros. fashion, an on-the-lam thriller set in the postwar U.K. underworld where a war hero pays the price for going wrong. “They Made Me A Fugitive,” the film that … Continue reading →

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Movie Review: Zombie Apocalypse is the least of This Cali Hamlet’s problems — “Hemet, or the Landlady Don’t Drink Tea”

Posted on January 15, 2025 by Roger Moore

The line between a “Z-movie,” a “zero stars” on the one-to-four-star scale, and a very bad one-star C or B movie usually comes down to intent. Did they set out to make a film this awful? Was their motivation or … Continue reading →

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Series Review: Tom Wolfe’s “A Man in Full” becomes an Oversexed Cracker Cartoon for Netflix

Posted on January 7, 2025 by Roger Moore

Tom Wolfe’s darkly comic 1998 novel “A Man in Full” comes to the screen, courtesy of another king of ’80s and ’90s entertainment, TV writer/producer David E. Kelley. The book, uneven but page-turning trash encompassing Wolfe’s favorite themes — class, … Continue reading →

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