Keep in mind that tens upon tens of new movies are released in theaters, on disc and on streaming services each week. It’s almost as if filmmaking itself has found a way to grow and not to melt.

Street Cat Named Bob may be the first animal-genre film to actually star the feline that it’s based on. Bob, and a couple-of-three lookalike gingers that sub for Bob doing complicated pet things like glancing at the camera in just the right way, running, riding a skateboard, complete the movie with Bob pretty much stealing the entire film.

James, a heroin addict in the UK on a methadone program, walks the streets of London as a homeless soul. James bumps into his father only to have his stepmother dis him. James’ councilor finds him supported housing, only the first day an intruder comes in through the kitchen window.

Turns out to be a stray cat that for the sake of identification will be forthwith called Bob. Bob insinuates himself into James’ life and a series of life journeys unfold, each more poignant than the last. James reaches sobriety and Bob achieves celebrity status when a reporter does a story on how James busks in Covenant Garden with Bob sitting on his guitar.

To date there have been multiple books written about Bob by James Bowden (with Garry Jenkins) and its inconceivable that sequels won’t follow. Roger Spottiswoode, whose credits include editing films for Sam Peckinpah, and directing many cult films over the years, directs Street Cat Named Bob. It would’ve been nice to have some great extra features that the disc lacks. Many such featurettes can be found on YouTube including the real James and Bob at the London premiere of the film.

Make no mistake, A Street Cat Named Bob is a film for all ages – game level eight-to-eighty. Max 2: White House Hero takes the conceits of the original Max (2015), which revolved around a Belgian Malinois dog who served in the Army in Afghanistan and returns to live in Middle America with a kind of doggie PTSD, and reduces the story to a tale for kids.

Max 2 centers on two 10-year-old kids who just happen to be son and daughter of the President of the United States and the Russian Premiere (aptly named Vladimir Bragov). And charming kids they are. The girl is a sassy redhead who speaks with a Russian accent that makes her sound like Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle. The boy has longish hair and a delicate manner and looks not unlike a pre-teen Phoebe Cates.

Max 2 may be one of the most innocent depictions of supreme power. C’mon, Lochlyn Munro plays the POTUS. The thin plot involves double agents who are trying to sabotage the American-Russian peace talks. Fortunately the kids figure out the subterfuge and Max saves the day. In one scene Max leaps into the passenger window of a speeding van and wrestles the driver to a halt. Adults will be bored but kids will want to watch Max 2 over and over.

Max 2 does feature some extras that reveal how different dogs were used for exacting stunts. For me the best part of the film was a photomontage during the credit roll that shows historical images of Presidents and their canines. There’s a painting of George Washington with his family and their dog; FDR; Clinton; Obama; LBJ; Nixon with Checkers; and George H.W. Bush with Barbara’s dog Millie being hugged by Vladimir Putin.

Also On

Independent films get released on disc the same as studio fare. Sometimes it’s the only way to see said films as many of these titles were only seen at film festivals or special engagements. Two companies that specialize in getting indie content across, both with streaming services and hard copy DVDs, are Candy Factory Films and IndiePix Films.

• The Babymooners – an expectant mother makes a video diary for her soon to be child in this comical New York story.
• The King of New Orleans – a NOLA cab driver runs the gamut of bizarre customers.
• Split – distaff filmmaker Deborah Kampmeier peels the veneer on a highly sexually charged relationship between a stripper/actress and a designer who makes masks for the play in which she performs. Some explicit scenes both in the bedroom and on stage.
• Midnight Swim – debut film from Buster’s Mal Heart director Sarah Adina Smith who finds poetry in three sisters traveling home to settle the estate of their recently deceased mother.
• Millie & the Lords – a Puerto Rican femme hooks up with a member of the Young Lords, a nationalist PR revolutionary group from the ‘60s.
• Apocalypse Child – Years after Apocalypse Now lensed in the Philippines, a family lives to surf and tells their son he’s the bastard son of Francis Ford Coppola. Of course he’s not, but there’s lots of surf action.
• On the Road, Somewhere – also titled Algun Lugar, a road trip movie from the Dominican tropics. Three young boys on a last trip before they advance to adulthood encounter Candide-esque characters at every turn.

Some of the releases were viewed on DVD rather than Blu-ray.

“It’s the flip-side of a documentary. I’ve been on film sets all my life,” Coppola says to Free Press Houston during a recent visit in town. She’s credited as director with two other filmmakers on the documentary about her husband Francis’ Apocalypse Now titled Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

“On a documentary you’re an observer. You’re looking for something interesting to happen. There more problems there are the better your documentary is. With fiction film it’s the flip. You’re trying to create something that will have a life,” says Coppola. “Every decision you make is reflected in what you shoot.”

For Paris Can Wait, Diane Lane plays a fictionalized version of Eleanor who finds herself on vacation in the South of France with her workaholic producer husband (wonderfully played by Alec Baldwin). Baldwin has to fly to Italy on business so Lane takes one starts out as a one day drive to Paris with family friend Jacques (played eloquently by actor/director Arnaud Viard). Lane herself has been in four films directed by Francis Coppola starting with The Outsiders (1983) and followed by Rumble Fish (also 1983), The Cotton Club (1984) and Jack (1996).

There’s a string of visual motifs in Paris Can Wait that suggest previous films by Francis Coppola like the journey itself (Apocalypse Now). When Viard’s Peugeot breaks down Lane substitutes a pair of pantyhose for a fan belt. A pantyhose gag was used in Peggy Sue Got Married, as well as a locket from the same movie. Lane’s character occasionally fidgets with a locket she wears. “That’s interesting, but that was not part of my conscious intent,” replies Coppola.

“Diane was so right for the part. It took us six years to find the financing.” Originally Lane turned down the part, but a year later when asked again she accepted. “She was so professional. She’s been acting since she was seven.”

A six-hour drive turns into a couple of days when Jacques insists they try a top-rated restaurant or stop at noted tourist attractions, like the Vézelay Abbey or the scenic Roman aqueducts in Vers-Pont-du-Gard. Another stop occurs at the Institut Lumiére museum in Lyons.

The relationship between Lane and Viard is platonic but there’s a sense of romance with the food and the various locales. Paris Can Wait breezes by like a day trip down your favorite country road. In the end you’ve learned a little about food and film history and a lot about human nature.

Paris Can Wait opens exclusively this weekend at the River Oaks Theatre.

Long Strange Trip unwinds at just under four-hours. A fast paced and evocative look of the history of both The Dead and society in general over a period of four decades, LST engages the viewer regardless of their personal association of The Grateful Dead.

What do you really know about Jerry Garcia, or Bob Weir, or Robert Hunter, or Pigpen a.k.a. Ron McKernan, the first founding member of the GD to die? Perhaps not ironically, Pigpen was a victim of alcohol (March, 1973) and not psychedelic or opiate drugs.

The Grateful Dead actually broke up in 1975 but quickly got back together, says Bar-Lev to Free Press Houston during an interview at SXSW following the film’s regional premiere earlier this year.

“I’ve been working on the film for fourteen years,” says Bar-Lev. Not a documentarian to be second guessed, Bar-Lev has directed films as different as My Kid Could Paint That (2007) and The Tillman Story (2010).

“That’s when I first reached out to them about making the film. I’ve been working on it in earnest for four years,” he says. “There’s no way you could make a film like this without their support and participation. They opened up their vault to us. So we have all this footage that has been shot over the years, some of which is truly amazing. This is my seventh film, but there’s more remarkable archives than anything I’ve ever worked on.”

Amongst the clips that have never been seen before is footage of Jerry Garcia playing at Bridget [Barbara] Meier’s birthday party in 1961. Meier and Garcia stayed in touch and after Garcia’s marriage to Carolyn Adams ended in 1990, Garcia and Meier once again became an item. Another snippet shows the Great Pyramid of Giza as seen from an airplane flying the Dead and company to a concert in Egypt in the early 1970s.

Regarding the footage of Jerry and Meier when they reunited twenty-eight years later, Bar-Lev says: “They fell in love during the conversation and you can hear that on the tape. There’re tons of home movies, the band shot a lot of footage throughout their career.

“We put out a call to Dead-heads for their own footage, using social media. Amazing stuff came in, Super-8 footage that’s been sitting in people’s attics.

“The most amazing piece of archive that’s in the film, that almost becomes a film within the film, is a documentary crew that came before us in 1970 that were making an observational Don’t Look Back style vérité film. It’s beautifully shot until they go on stage and then the beautiful cinematography turns to crappy cinematography. We didn’t understand what we were looking at. We did some research and then we realize the camera crew has been pulled into the story so to speak,” says Bar-Lev.

In other words, they were dosed with LSD.

Long Strange Trip offers a sequence where the Dead put LSD in the coffee during the filming of the syndicated television show Playboy After Dark. “That’s another moment that has a metaphorical figurative resonance, because as Jerry said, ‘We turned a fake party into an authentic party.’ To my mind that’s what they did to America on a larger scale. They set a bar for how you go about being a rock star in an honest way,” says Bar-Lev, adding, “They did eventually realize that was a terrible thing to do to people.”

Long Strange Trip paints a masterful portrait of the Dead as well as the entire culture that sprang up around them.

“They only got rich after A Touch of Grey,” says Bar-Lev about their hit 1987 song that includes the lyrics “I will get by/I will survive.”

There are key moments in the film that are about this question of permanence. “The way the film starts is Jerry saying, ‘One of the most seminal moments of my life was seeing Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein.’ His father had just died and seeing a dead being brought back to life terrified him,” says Bar-Lev. LST incorporates film footage of Frankenstein that fits in nicely with the evolution of the band. Another Frank, Senator Al Franken, talks about his time spent following the band.

At one point Garcia talks about being 20 years old and coming out of an acid test and going to see the Watts Towers in the morning.

“The Watts Towers were illegally put there by the artist and when the artist died the city came in with wreckers and tried to pull down the towers. But he had built them so well they couldn’t be torn down. So the city went the opposite way and put them in the tourist pamphlets.

“Jerry said, ‘I figure if I succeed as an individual artist I will have built something that can’t be torn down,’” says Bar-Lev.

“What you take away from the Frankenstein and Watts Towers footage is that Jerry was solely committed to the moment and didn’t care at all about the future.

“But it’s a different way of thinking about the future than the guys who built the pyramids. It’s a different way of thinking about cheating mortality,” says Bar-Lev.

Wanting to tell as compelling a story as possible, Bar-Lev showed his collaborators the recent OJ: Made in America and used the dexterity of that seven-hour-plus film to convince them that making the film longer was the route to take.

“The Grateful Dead is a virus that has been unleashed on the culture and it’s carefully calibrated giving its maximum lifespan. And I think that’s really neat,” says Bar-Lev.

Long Strange Trip plays in select theaters on the night of Thursday, May 25. After that, Long Strange Trip will be available starting June 2 on Amazon Prime Video.

Essentially the story of a married couple who’re serial cheaters, The Lovers posits that a successful marriage only occurs when said couple takes the final leap of faith — divorce.

Jacobs has written a script that at times evokes love while at the same time depicting lacerating emotions. Much of the coup of the film comes from Jacobs casting two exceptional actors to play the nuclear unit.

Debra Winger plays Mary and Tracy Letts plays her husband Michael. Winger needs no introduction. Letts has played supporting roles in various movies like Indignation and Elvis & Nixon and the television series Homeland. Letts also won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for plays he’s starred in and written. Both actors bring their A-Game to the film.

Mary and Michael spend their leisure time with their paramours. In Mary’s case it’s Aidan Gillen (King Arthur) and in Michael’s case it’s Melora Walters (Magnolia). While they spend time with each other, it’s mainly as a cover to act as solid parents for their college age son, himself a bit of a snob, as well as to preserve the status quo of their domestic situation.

The magic of The Lovers — and it is a magical film — comes from what Mary and Michael never say. They drink wine in silence with the television tuned to a random channel. They go to work and privately promise themselves to tell the truth to each other. But the truth never materializes until they finally leave each other.

Eventually all the players meet on an even playing field, but spurned love makes them hiss at each other like angry cats or make idle threats that have no basis in reality. In other words The Lovers is a reflection of real life.

The Lovers opens exclusively at the River Oaks Theatre this weekend.

Lynch recounts his life from early childhood up to Eraserhead. David Lynch – The Art Life illustrates how he became the person who is now adulated worldwide for his uncanny and uncompromising films.

Most of the film shows Lynch working on a painting, adding layer after layer of paint, and then buffing it with a sander even after he’s added a glob of gelatinous antimatter that looks like a squishy embryo.

Lynch’s narration rides over the images. There are also several shots of Lynch sitting in a chair in his workshop smoking a lot of cigarettes. This ties into a specific incident in his life where he sat in a chair for a couple of weeks only getting up to pee or eat.

Lynch appears to be an artist first and a filmmaker second.

Lynch reflects on his parents and sitting in a mud hole under a tree as a young lad with a friend. His mother was religious but never preachy, his grade school friends were of questionable ethics.

Eventually Lynch grows up and moves to Boston and then Philadelphia. In Boston, Lynch rooms with Peter Wolf who would go on to become the lead singer of The J. Geils Band only to find their friendship comes to a crashing halt one night after a Bob Dylan concert.

In Philadelphia, Lynch and his first wife Peggy Lentz make a meager living and raise his firstborn Jennifer, who herself would go on to make bizarre films like Boxing Helena.

Eventually Lynch discovers motion and his short films The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970) get him a scholarship to the American Film Institute. The rest is history and my cursory description pales in comparison to hearing the same story as told by Lynch.

David Lynch – The Art Life unwinds this weekend at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on Saturday, May 20 at 7 pm. and Sunday, May 21 at 5 pm.

The unlikely story of an underdog who gained his fifteen-minutes of fame is told in Chuck.

Heavyweight boxer Chuck Wepner went one-on-one with Muhammad Ali. Wepner was known as the Bayonne (New Jersey) Bleeder, yet you can’t knock success even at the street level that Wepner excelled at. Liev Schreiber stars in the titular role with more than superlative support from Elisabeth Moss as his first wife and an unrecognizable Naomi Watts as the object of his affection. Ron Pearlman, Pooch Hall, Jim Gaffigan, Morgan Spector and Michael Rappaport also co-star.

Wepner was the basis for Sylvester Stallone’s screenplay for Rocky although he never saw a dime from that massive Hollywood hit. The bit in the movie where Wepner finally meets Stallone is tinged with bitterness.

Wepner hits rock bottom before his life finds a purpose. The evocation of the 1970s and ‘80s rocks with great color schemes, props, cars and occasional real footage of the actual events.

Chuck opens exclusively this weekend at the River Oaks Three.

Alien was Ridley Scott’s sophomore film after the 1977 adventure flick The Duellists. Alien had such a unique look and in fact the only time you can tell it was made when it was is the shot of a computer screen. It’s that green letter font that, while a few years ahead of its time, distinguished the look of late-1980s-era computer screens. Now that shot seems positively archaic.

Alien: Covenant takes great strides to make machinery and computer projections look as they might be in the future when the story takes place in the year 2104. There are xenomorphs and neomorphs and face huggers galore for those who have followed all the previous movies in the Alien cannon.

Alien: Covenant, along with the previous Alien film also directed by Scott, Prometheus, acts as a prequel to the events that transpire in Alien. A strong ensemble cast includes Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, James Franco, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, as well as cameos from Noomi Rapace and Guy Pearce who figured prominently in Prometheus.

Themes of immortality, the role of artificial intelligence and colonization are rife throughout the screenplay, often merging together like a spiral strain of DNA. Most of the fifteen or so members of the crew of the Covenant, a spaceship loaded with thousands of sleeping humans meant to populate a distant planet, are in relationships and thus certain bonds are established that depend more on loyalty than procedure.

Walter (Fassbender) is a robotic humanoid that runs Covenant while the crew hibernates. A sun flare damages the spaceship’s solar sails and Walter wakes the crew. While making repairs the ship intercepts a transmission that is obviously human in nature and turns out to be from the survivors of Prometheus, thus bridging the two sequels.

At this point Alien: Covenant reveals surprises in each reel, and to reveal the spoilers would destroy your conception of the film. However there’s a great bit of conversation to be had for those who see the film and want to debate the surprise twist that ends the film.

Alien: Covenant opens wide Thursday night.

A majority of Wall Street executives went unchecked after the 2024 meltdown but one person took a big fall for his extravagant extortion – Bernie Madoff. Madoff took millions from rich investors and funneled the money into his own accounts while constantly switching funds from one account to another to avoid suspicion.

HBO Films presents The Wizard of Lies starring Robert De Niro as Madoff and Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff. Strong supporting performances from Kristen Connolly (Stephanie Madoff), Alessandro Nivola (Mark Madoff) and Hank Azaria provide compulsive viewing. Nivola in particular has an amazing arc that accurately depicts the depth of family tragedy that the crime entailed. Diana Henriques, a reporter who was the first person to interview Madoff in prison, plays herself.

Madoff was cooking the books unbeknownst to his sons who held positions at his firm. Azaria plays Madoff’s accomplice who was running the Ponzi scheme on a separate floor in the building. Basically they were supposedly investing the money and showing profits but in reality they were using new investors to keep the cash flowing.

In the end Madoff goes to jail for life, his sons experience their own tragedies and Ruth changes her phone number. Previously De Niro and Pfeiffer appeared together in the mob comedy The Family (2013). Barry Levinson directs with an eye to the utter ridiculousness of the situation.

The Wizard of Lies premieres on HBO on May 20.

Graduation (Bacalaureat) unwinds like an onion in the sense that layer after layer of complications are revealed with each successive act. Moral choices have to be made and people just talk about same. Mungiu previously directed the acclaimed film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in 2024.

As Graduation opens, a rock is thrown through a living room window. Dr. Aldea (Adrian Titeni) has a daughter about to graduate high school. Aldea also has a mistress and a wife as well as business associates who are under investigation by the police.

Aldea’s daughter is attacked one day after high school. We learn that the assailant was going to rape her but couldn’t get it up, so to speak, so the incident is treated as an assault. The girl sprains her wrist during the confrontation and now wears a cast. An exceptionally bright student, the family wants her to matriculate with the requisite grades to get a scholarship to attend Cambridge. Because of her arm, the school authorities don’t want her to take the finals because she could hide answers in her cast. This all happens in the first reel.

Mungiu lets the dialogue establish character development while never getting extravagant with camera moves or action. All throughout the film there are phones ringing in the background – phones that never get answered. Aldea’s mistress has a preteen son who wears a mask the way children do. In one scene the kid is wandering behind the adults wearing his mask. It’s a surreal moment in a key scene weighed down by the reality of the situation.

Not only must Aldea choose between his wife and his mistress, he must appease the officials investigating his friends and he has to convince his daughter to possibly cheat on the test to insure her future wellbeing.

Meanwhile the phones keep ringing and Mungui ratchets up the tension through words and character motivation.

Graduation opens exclusively this weekend at the River Oaks Theatre.

Guy Richie has formulated this elliptical method of taking two or three different scenes and intercutting between them with overlapping dialogue and breaking the space-time continuum to make it flow like one complete passage.

This style of filmmaking is nothing new and in fact Gus Van Sant used the same technique in Elephant and Gerry and a few other films, and was himself influenced by Hungarian director Béla Tarr. Only Tarr and Van Sant were making art films and Richie directs mainstream cinema.

One thing remains obvious, Richie’s newest film King Arthur: Legend of the Sword takes an oft-repeated story and infuses it with sorcery, magic and action galore. Truth is, nobody really knows if King Arthur ever really existed, it’s legend rather than historical fact. Giant elephants and snakes, and swords in stone are worthy narrative components under Richie’s steady direction. Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) might not ever become a Brad Pitt leading man but he puts forth a mighty convincing argument that he should be with his physical portrayal of Arthur. Astrid Bergés-Frisbey, Jude Law, Eric Bana, Djimon Hounsou and Aidan Gillen co-star.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword opens wide this weekend.

Sarah Adina Smith wowed film festival audiences with her 2024 metaphysical journey of three women and a mysterious lake in The Midnight Swim. Smith is back in full force with the equally reality bending Buster’s Mal Heart.

Rami Malek plays Buster with a vengeance. Malek will be most familiar to audiences from his lead role in the Amazon series Mr. Robot. Buster once had a family although the nuclear unit happiness was dampened by having to live with in-laws and working a nowhere job as a midnight shift clerk at a hotel.

Tragic events have led to Buster now living homeless in the forest and breaking into people vacation homes for his sustenance. Local talk radio stations occasionally get Buster’s weird rants about the coming of the “inversion.” I was halfway into the film until I realized that it was set on the eve of Y2K. Seems that Buster has been influenced by a weird character (DJ Qualls) that showed up at the hotel one night wanting a room, with cash but no credit card or I.D.

The police who’re chasing Buster are complex characters in their own right, often spouting funny observations about Buster’s penchant for leaving feces as his calling card.

Don’t expect a traditional ending but do expect to be entertained by Buster’s Mal Heart.

A high school girl is kidnapped by a young couple. At first they give her a lift, but end up talking her into coming to their house to party. They turn her into their personal sex slave with plans to eventually kill her.

The events of Hounds of Love are not as graphic as the subject implies, yet the tension is wound so tight that it might burst at any minute. The victim eventually starts playing the husband against the wife in an attempt to gain her freedom. The cool thing about Hounds of Love is that the action is set in Australia and we don’t know the actors. That allows the audience to really sink into the story without preconceived notions. The direction by Ben Young in his feature film debut keeps you on the edge of your seat until the unseemly conclusion.

Both Hounds of Love and Buster’s Mal Heart open exclusively this weekend at the Alamo Drafthouse Mason Road.

Everyone wants to see GOTGV2. If I said that for every ticket sold a puppy would die, that would deter nobody. And nobody is a bigger fan of the first film than your humble scribe who owns a copy in 3D Blu-ray.

Everything I liked about the first edition – namely the most likeable group of characters in a raccoon’s age – has been watered down. GOTGV2 tastes like a Diet Coke version of the original and not even the addition of Sylvester Stone and Kurt Russell makes it go down smooth.

That being said, let’s go for some positive comments. The original Guardians had a unique look from cinematographer Ben Davis whose credits include numerous comic book movies. Director and co-writer James Gunn is now working with cinematographer Henry Braham who gives this new Guardians an added sense of depth.

Specifically there’s a technique called “tilt shift photography,” which makes wide shots of outdoor locales look like miniature sets. Tilt shift works especially well with 3D. Nuff said.

Just a note of caution, if you plan to see GOTGV2, see it in a real IMAX theater such as Edwards Marq*e. The press screening was at the AMC Studio 30 IMAX screen (which isn’t even a real IMAX theater) and while there was nothing wrong with the projection or sound, that is one filthy theater. There were gross stains on nearly every seat and while I found a chair in the press row that wasn’t stained there was gum on the back of the chair in front of me that looked ancient. The blotch on the seat to my left, which nobody sat in, looked like a combination of ketchup and raccoon spluge. Before the show a KRBE radio person told the crowd that they had taped a prize under one of seats. You do not want to put your hands under the seats in that theater.

This weekend also rolls out two films starring Richard Gere. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, about a small time political consultant, opens exclusively at the River Oaks Theatre. The Dinner opens in several area theaters.

The latter film is based on an international best seller of the same name by Dutch author Herman Koch. Previously there have been Dutch (2013) and Italian (2014) film versions of The Dinner. Writer/director Oren Moverman gives audiences a unique twist on the story of two brothers (a very dependable Gere and a superb turn from Steve Coogan) who are faced with a moral dilemma when their children commit a horrific crime. Laura Linney, Rebecca Hall and Chloë Sevigny co-star.

Naturally the two families meet at a super exclusive restaurant and debate whether to intervene with the police or use their political influence to sweep the incident under the rug. Moverman keeps the tension simmering right up to the final fade out.