Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger — Another gleeful underdog saga

Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five); Unrated, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Amazon Prime and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

Back in 2023, director Chris Foggin’s delightful Bank of Dave depicted how England’s Dave Fishwick rose from a working-class bloke who parlayed his one-man car repair shop into Britain’s largest minibus supplier, and then — enraged by what the 2008 financial crisis did to ordinary folks — set up his own lending company.

 

After Dave Fishwick (Rory Kinnear, foreground) publicizes the predatory tactics of payday
lenders, they fight back in a way that drags him into court and threatens the existence of
his bank. His colleagues — from left, David (Pearce Quigley), Oliver (Amit Shah) and
Jessica (Chrissy Metz) — offer words of encouragement.

He vowed to do what bank CEOs had forgotten or ignored: to help people and do no harm.

Scripters Piers Ashworth and Clare Keogh shaded some events — it was a film, not a documentary — but the core jaw-dropping details were accurate. (Channel 4’s actual 2012 documentary is readily available via YouTube.)

 

But Fishwick wasn’t finished.

 

Foggin and Ashworth are back, with the just-released Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger, which delivers an equally entertaining and provocative account of what Fishwick did starting in 2013, after learning that some of his customers were being bled dry by the usurious interest charged by payday lending firms.

 

(We’re warned, as was the case with the first film, that this one’s narrative is “true-ish” at best.)

 

Rory Kinnear and Jo Hartley return as Dave and his wife, Nicky, who make the perfect team. Events kick off quickly, when — during a chat show — Dave hears from a caller who is being buried beneath crippling interest rates on a payday loan. 

 

He’s stunned to discover that the British government has done nothing about this predatory business model. Dave then allies himself with Oliver (Amit Shah), a Citizen’s Advice & Law Center counsellor who can lead him to numerous victims. 

 

But unlike Dave’s earlier battle, which was limited to British entities, he and Oliver learn that the two largest payday offenders — dubbed Quickdough and Snapcash Advance — are overseen by a dodgy wealthy American named Carlo Mancini (Rob Delaney). This prompts Dave to cajole Jessica (Chrissy Metz), a New York-based financial journalist, into joining them in his Lancashire home town of Burnley.

 

Their subsequent crusade runs into serious roadblocks. None of the victims is willing to testify in court, for fear of being slapped with even higher interest rates. And while interviewing such folks, Dave learns that both operations are run solely online ... meaning that there’s no physical place for borrowers to pay back in cash, even if they have the necessary amount.

 

That really annoys him ... but it also prompts the ingenious manner with which he decides to channel public outrage, social media being more of a force than it was, back in 2008.

H Is for Hawk: Deeply moving

H Is for Hawk (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five); rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and occasional profanity

Available via: Amazon Prime and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

In the spring of 2007, as a means of coping with her grief after the sudden death of her beloved father — with whom she shared many interests, most notably birding — 27-year-old Cambridge research fellow Helen Macdonald purchased a young Eurasian goshawk, intending to train it.

 

Having spent weeks (months?) training her goshawk to trust her, and respond to
commands, Helen (Claire Foy) prepares to let the bird loose for its first outdoor kill.

Although impulsive, this wasn’t an entirely foolish act; Macdonald had been flying falcons, alongside her father, since adolescence. But goshawks are notoriously vicious, volatile and savage: almost impossible to train.

Macdonald ultimately recounted her experience in an award-winning 2014 memoir which became a best-seller within a fortnight.

 

Her saga now has become a deeply poignant, emotionally shattering and unexpectedly exhilarating film — of the same title — under the careful direction of Philippa Lowthorpe, who shares scripting credit with Emma Donoghue. MacDonald is brought to life via a remarkably nuanced performance by Claire Foy, who runs a gamut of emotions during this saga.

 

We barely meet Helen’s father, longtime Daily Mirror photojournalist Alisdair Macdonald (Brendan Gleeson), before Claire — while at Cambridge — receives word that he died unexpectedly, while on assignment. Gathered alongside her mother (Lindsay Duncan) and brother James (Josh Dylan) in a funeral parlor, their mourning is briefly overcome by incredulous, shared laughter when the agent suggests a decorated “themed coffin.”

 

(This tacky, tone-deaf moment is Lowthorpe’s sole dose of macabre comic relief. I cringed at the notion that this actually may have occurred.)

 

Back at Cambridge, unable to focus on teaching, or finishing her fellowship — or even worrying about where she’ll live if she doesn’t finish — Claire decides that embracing an impossible challenge is the only way to endure getting through each day. Longtime friend and fellow falconer Stuart (Sam Spruell) thinks she’s crazy; goshawks are “the wildest and maddest of raptors ... the perfectly evolved psychopath.”

 

“Don’t even think about it,” he further cautions, “certainly not in your state.”

Song Sung Blue: Musical lightning!

Song Sung Blue (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, brief profanity and fleeting drug use

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.4.26

If writer/director Craig Brewer’s poignant drama weren’t based on actual events, it would be a shameless tear-jerker.

 

Be advised: The fact that it is based on actual events, makes it even more of a tear-jerker.

 

Mike (Hugh Jackman, left), Dave (Fisher Stevens, center left) and Mark (Michael
Imperioli, center right) listen intently, as Tom (Jim Belushi) outlines their upcoming
touring schedule.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve been a life-long Neil Diamond fan since early high school, which makes me inclined to be both forgiving and potentially hyper-critical. But the latter never came into play, because both Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson are fabulous singers and performers. 

Brewer’s film, based on Greg Kohs’ 2008 documentary of the same title, deftly profiles small-time musicians Mike Sardina (Jackman) and Claire Stengl (Hudson): how they met, and the magic that occurred once they got together.

 

Brewer begins unexpectedly, with a tight-tight-tight close-up of Jackman’s face, as Mike gravely recounts some seminal moments in his life: a confession of sorts, which concludes as the camera pulls back, to reveal that he’s at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It’s a special day — his 20-year “sobriety birthday” — and he celebrates it as he has each one before, by concluding with a solo guitar performance of “Song Sung Blue.”

 

Mike moonlights as a mechanic to support his true passion, as a veteran musician — nicknamed Lightning — on the Milwaukee gigging circuit, performing whatever is demanded at county fairs, small auditoriums and dive bars. After uncharacteristically refusing a gig — insisting that trying to impersonate Hawaiian pop singer Don Ho is too much of a stretch — he chances to catch Claire doing her Patsy Cline act at the Wisconsin State Fair.

 

They click (to put it mildly).

 

“I’m not a songwriter, I’m not a sex symbol,” he confesses. “I just want to entertain people.”

 

“I don’t want to be a hairdresser,” she replies, “I want to sing, I want to dance, I want a garden, I want a cat.”

 

The relationship happens quickly, both because they’re sympatico … and also because Jackman and Hudson radiate charm and charisma the way the rest of us breathe. Mike and Claire are totally cute together, with a goofy, giddy level of excitement like teenagers experiencing love for the first time.

 

Both have painful pasts. In addition to his hard-fought sobriety, Mike carries trauma from his service in Vietnam as a “tunnel rat,” and has a failed marriage behind him; Claire also is divorced. 

 

Mike gets occasional visits from his college-age daughter, Angelina (pop chanteuse King Princess); their relationship is prickly, at best. Claire has two kids — teenage Rachel (Ella Anderson) and adolescent Dana (Hudson Hensley) — who frequently drive her crazy. Both Mike and Claire also struggle financially.

 

Musically, though, they go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Blue Moon: Waning

Blue Moon (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity and vulgarity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.26.25

Director Richard Linklater obviously loves the flow and rhythm of meticulously crafted dialogue, along with the challenge of a “talking heads” premise that involves very few characters, most memorably achieved in 1995’s Before Sunrise and its two sequels.

 

Lyricist Lorenz "Larry" Hart (Ethan Hawke) is foolishly besotted with the much younger
Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), who is kinder to him than he deserves.

He attempts the same with this biographical snapshot of a single evening in the ultimately tragic life of famed American lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart, who teamed with composer Richard Rodgers for 26 musicals during a collaborative relationship that lasted more than two decades in the early 20th century.

The result isn’t entirely successful, in part because it’s hard to endure the first half hour spent with this unpleasant, potty-mouthed narcissist, and also because it’s impossible to get beyond Ethan Hawke’s fake hair, and the trick shots employed to depict Hart’s shorter stature. Both are distracting.

 

That said, the film gets more interesting during its final hour, when the story expands to include several more characters equally adept at trenchant commentary and occasional bon mots.

 

Events take place during the late evening of March 31, 1943, following the debut of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (their first collaboration, and the first show the former created without Hart). The setting is the bar at the famed theater district restaurant Sardi’s, where the cast soon will gather, to await the reviews.

 

Production designer Susie Cullen and costume designer Consolata Boyle establish a persuasive sense of time and place.

 

Hart arrives first, having just watched the show. He pontificates to the mostly empty room, and also to Eddie (Bobby Cannavale, excellent as always), the tolerant, good-natured barman who will spend the next several hours trying not to serve drinks to Hart, who struggles with alcoholism. 

 

Hart’s stream-of-consciousness commentary is alternately witty, conceited, outrageously vulgar and self-deprecating. He waxes eloquent about the overall perfection of the 20-year-old Yale student with whom he’s currently smitten.

 

He also rails about the new play’s “corniness” and its clichéd presentation of old-fashioned American values, but — to paraphrase Shakespeare — the gentleman doth protest too much. It quickly becomes clear that Hart is both jealous and frightened: fully aware that he’s in danger of being replaced permanently.

 

(As we eventually learn, Rodgers was forced to write some of the final lyrics for their most recent collaboration, By Jupiter, because Hart’s alcoholism and terrible work ethic had become completely unmanageable.)

 

Frankly, these early scenes are quite tedious, because Hart is so unsympathetic and self-absorbed, and because he’s talking at Eddie, rather than chatting with him.

The Lost Bus: A harrowing journey

The Lost Bus (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and dramatic intensity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.19.25

Back in 2006, director Paul Greengrass unveiled the docudrama United 93, about the harrowing events of 9/11, and many of us wondered ... too soon?

 

With traffic backed up for 15 miles (!) on the primary escape road to Chico, school bus
driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) and grade school teacher Mary Ludwig
(American Ferrera) seek an alternate route to get themselves and 22 children to safety.

Apparently not. Viewers flocked to theaters, absorbed and horrified by the as-accurate-as-possible depiction of that heinous terrorist attack, and the selfless sacrifice of the passengers aboard United Flight 93.

Now, not quite seven years after the calamitous firestorm that leveled Paradise, Ca., Greengrass has responded with this docudrama ... and, again, is it too soon?

 

Absolutely not, thanks in part to a timely “message line” delivered by Fire Chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez), toward the end of the film: “Every year, the fires gets bigger. And there’s more of them. We’re being damn fools. That’s the truth.”

 

(Probably more of a 2025 sentiment than one from 2018, but still persuasive.)

 

That’s merely an incidental moment in a mesmerizing drama that begins at 4 p.m. on November 7, 2018, as recently hired Pine Ridge School Unified Transportation District bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey) drops his busload of children at their various stops, following a day at school.

 

Kevin’s life has gone completely to hell. He has returned to Paradise, following his father’s death from cancer, and taken the bus-driving job in order to deal with the lingering medical debt. He has moved his mother, suffering from stage 4 melanoma, into his home; his teenage son Shaun (Levi McConaughey, the star’s actual son) also lives with them. And — icing on the cake — Kevin’s beloved dog just had to be put down, also due to cancer.

 

(That may seem like Greengrass and co-scripter Brad Ingelsby are exaggerating this poor guy’s misery, but in fact those details are accurate.)

 

McConaughey, always at his best playing the sort of blue-collar, working-class bloke who makes this country run, delivers a shattering performance in these early scenes. His features are grim, resigned, frustrated and even frightened, his eyes haunted. Trying to juggle all these responsibilities has made him unreliable at work, to the dismay of his boss, Ruby (Ashlie Atkinson, in an excellent supporting role). 

 

These scenes are intercut with frequent news announcements — 210 days with no rain, rapidly accelerating wind gusts — and unsettling images of PG&E cell towers and cables swaying back and forth.

Roofman: True crime writ lite

Roofman (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, nudity and sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.12.25

Truth genuinely is stranger than fiction.

 

When these events went down, back in 2005, one of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department sergeants told a reporter, “This would make a great movie.” (Check out this detailed recent article in The Charlotte Observer ... after you watch the movie.)

 

Having clandestinely invaded a Toys "R" Us store late one night, and ravenously hungry,
Jeff (Channing Tatum) tries to snatch some candy from an aisle display, mindful of
avoiding detection by the overhead roving security cameras.

He didn’t lie ... and now, two decades later, director Derek Cianfrance has made that film.

He and co-scripter Kirt Gunn boldly assert that “This is a true story.” Credit where due, their film follows the saga’s unbelievably outrageous details with a level of authenticity that’s rare in cinema today (allowing for a few speculative enhancements concerning details never revealed).

 

The wild ’n’ wooly result is anchored by an endearing, awkwardly charming and mildly foolish performance by Channing Tatum, note-perfect as a resourcefully clever guy who’s also a complete idiot.

 

Our first glimpse of Jeffrey Manchester (Tatum) shows him running hell-for-leather through a field, trying to evade we-don’t-yet-know-what, as Tatum’s voice-over explains that — in order to understand what’s happening — we need to back up a few years. Tatum continues to offer narrative commentary as events proceed (and the reason for this confessional also is a brilliant touch, when the film concludes).

 

As introduced properly, in 1998, Jeff is a despondent family man, separated from his wife (Melonie Diaz, as Talena), their 8-year-old daughter (Alissa Marie Pearson, adorable as Becky) and infant twin sons. He doesn’t earn enough to give Becky the bicycle she wants for her birthday, and his “instead of” gift is totally clueless.

 

He later laments the uncomfortable result with longtime best friend and former war buddy Steve (LaKeith Stanfield), who scoffs at Jeff’s inane get-rich-quick schemes, insisting that he play to his strength.

 

“You’re an observer,” Steve points out. “You don’t miss details.”

 

So Jeff observes that all McDonald’s franchises are built to identical specifications, down to where everything is located behind and in front of the order counter. He therefore hammers his way through the roof of one outlet, waits patiently in the restroom for the workers to arrive, and then — masked — orders them into the walk-in refrigerator at gunpoint, before emptying the vault. His manner is polite and cordial.

 

(The actual Manchester estimates that he pulled off between 40 and 60 such robberies throughout the United States.)

Swiped: Bad behavior in the tech industry

Swiped (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated TV-MA, for profanity, nude images and deplorable behavior

Available via: Hulu

By Derrick Bang

The recent wave of tech-oriented origin sagas — 2023’s Blackberry and Tetris, and their ancestors, 2015’s Steve Jobs and 2010’s The Social Network — share an obvious characteristic: They’re all about young white guys, often working in a gender-hostile environment far closer to a frat house than a business office.

 

Having arrived as Texas' Southern Methodist University with the goal of getting sorority
and franternity gals and guys to sign up for their new dating app, Whitney (Lily James,
right) and Tisha (Myha'la) wonder where to start.

On top of which, the innovators often are arrogant, socially inept sociopaths: particularly true of Jesse Eisenberg’s handling of Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network ... a characterization that obviously was dead-on, given the actual Zuckerberg’s subsequent loathsome behavior.

All of which makes director Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s Swiped a breath of fresh air, since it giddily traces the rise, fall and rebirth of Whitney Wolfe Herd, who at the age of 31 became the youngest woman to take a company public, and also the youngest self-made billionaire.

 

(Clever title, just in passing.)

 

While fresh-out-of-college Whitney Wolfe obviously had some character shortcomings — chiefly naïvete and an overly trusting nature — she was then, and remains now, a rigorously honorable individual who has made a career of Doing The Right Thing, particularly on behalf of women.

 

Lily James’ performance gives Wolfe just the right blend of intelligence, breathless enthusiasm, sharp entrepreneurial impulses and an impressive ability to think outside the box.

 

Along with an unfortunate level of vulnerability, and a lamentable willingness to think the best of somebody, long past the point where self-preservation instincts should have kicked in.

 

But that comes a bit later. Goldenberg’s script, —co-written with Bill Parker and Kim Caramele — begins in 2012, as 22-year-old Wolfe tries to hustle her way into a sponsorship during a gathering of tech entrepreneurs and investors. She catches the attention of Sean Rad (Ben Schnetzer), one of several innovators brainstorming concepts in the Hatch Labs “incubator.”

 

Impressed by Wolfe’s enthusiasm and innovative suggestions, Rad puts her on his Cardify start-up. That’s just one of many potential projects in the Hatch Labs sandbox, and her attention soon turns to an embryonic dating app thus far known as MatchBox: a name that Rad dislikes. Given that existing dating apps are made for — and mostly used by — fortysomethings or older, Rad wants a catchy name for an alternative aimed at twentysomethings.

 

During a tempestuous meeting that typifies the mosh pit, dog-eat-dog behavior of her primarily male colleagues, Wolfe suggests Tinder. Delighted by this, Rad makes her the app’s vice president of marketing.

 

The additional all-important innovation comes from JB (Ian Colletti), who cleverly demonstrates what will become “the swipe.”

Eden: Paradise Lost

Eden (2024) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong violence, sexual content, graphic nudity and frequent profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Director Ron Howard — whose résumé leans toward uplifting, can-do dramas such as Apollo 13, Cinderella Man and Rush — seems a very odd choice for this fact-based saga of deplorable, depraved and misanthropic human behavior.

 

Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and longtime companion Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) are
less than thrilled, when they suddenly must share their island with a family of
know-nothing newcomers.

What has been dubbed “The Galapagos Mystery” has fueled numerous documentaries and books, the most recent being author Abbott Kahler’s Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II. The saga has long been well-known across the pond, although this new film likely will arouse interest here in the States.

German physician Friedrich Ritter and his patient-turned-companion, Dore Strauch, were the first “settlers” to arrive on the Galapagos’ Floreana Island in 1929: so chosen since it is one of the few with a (minimal) potable water supply. They spent three contented — if arduous — years as the island’s sole inhabitants. Ritter sent accounts of their lives back to Germany — picked up by occasional passing ships, and then published in newspapers and magazines — and pounded away at an increasingly Nietzschesque manifesto detailing his contempt for mankind.

 

They were joined in 1932 by WWI veteran Heinz Wittmer, his pregnant new wife Margret, and his teenage son Harry, having been inspired by the articles. Although the isolationist Ritter and Strauch likely were annoyed by these “intruders,” they and the Wittmers respected each other’s space.

 

This wary dynamic was completely torpedoed by the next arrivals: Austrian-born Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet, a shameless hedonist accompanied by her two German lovers, Robert Philippson and Rudolf Lorenz, along with an Ecuadorian “worker” named Manuel Borja. Claiming to be a baroness — a title open to historical debate — she systematically bullied and intimidated the others via an insufferably arrogant blend of entitlement, seduction, treachery and a hustler’s talent for exploiting psychological weaknesses.

 

What eventually occurred ... well, that would spoil the story.

 

Howard and co-scripter Noah Pink dumped an intriguing ensemble cast into this combustible brew of jealousy, resentment and worse, although some play their roles better than others. Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby aren’t entirely successful with their German accents, as Ritter and Strauch, although they otherwise slide deftly into the sort of eccentric tics and mannerisms that would be expected of a couple isolated for so long.

 

Law looks appropriately rugged and hardy, and he puts considerable grim intensity into Ritter’s contemptuous denouncements. Kirby’s Strauch is softer, with a fondness for the burro that ferries their heavier goods; she also limps painfully, having embraced this rustic lifestyle in the hope that her multiple sclerosis will go into remission.

 

Law plays Ritter as an obstinate fanatic; Kirby is more nuanced. Strauch tends to walk around barefoot; the first of this film’s many wince-inducing moments comes during the couple’s evening ritual, as Ritter carefully digs parasitic insects out of Strauch’s skin.

 

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: Ferociously memorable

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2024) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for violent/bloody images, profanity, sexual assault and underage smoking and drinking

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.20.25 

Films this powerful don’t come along very often.

 

Director/scripter Embeth Davidtz’s boldly unflinching drama is adapted from Alexandra Fuller’s award-winning 2001 memoir, which depicts the author’s childhood in white-controlled Rhodesia, before and after that country’s 1980 independence and re-christening as Zimbabwe.

 

Sarah (Zikhona Bali), the family housekeeper, is the only adult who takes any interest
in young Bobo (Lexi Venter), who has become an almost uncontrollable feral child.

At first blush, Davidtz seems an unlikely choice as filmmaker; she’s best known as the accomplished actress who delivered memorable performances in Schindler’s List, Junebug, Mansfield Park and television shows such as Mad Men and Ray Donovan. As it happens, though, at age 8 the American-born Davidtz moved with her South African parents to Pretoria in the early 1970s, where she grew up confronted by that country’s institutional racism.

It's not hard to understand what drove her to this material.

 

Her film gets its quiet, skin-crawling intensity from the casual indifference with which its “superior” characters of privilege — or power — turn a blind eye to casual, systemic cruelty. In that respect, Davidtz’s film deserves pride of place alongside classics such as Schindler’s List and The Zone of Interest, although this one is even more disturbing because of its child’s-eye perspective.

 

The story’s primary character — she cannot possibly be termed a “heroine” — is 7-year-old Bobo Fuller (Lexi Venter, simply amazing), who lives on a family farm on the outskirts of Umtali, with her teenage older sister Vanessa (Anina Hope Reed) and their parents, Tim (Rob Van Vuuren) and Nicola (Davidtz). Three dogs are a constant presence.

 

It’s a dangerous time, days away from a presidential election between Robert Mugabe, favored by Black Africans, and the Western-educated Bishop Abel Muzorewa, viewed by his countrymen as a puppet controlled by the minority white population. Unrest has turned violent, with members of both races being slaughtered (although radio and TV coverage focuses on white victims).

 

The girls are warned never to enter their parents’ bedroom at night, because they sleep with loaded guns.

 

To say that Bobo runs wild is an understatement. She’s a completely unsupervised feral child: perpetually grimy and smelly, often dressed in the same ragged shorts and a gray T-shirt with the slogan “Come to Umtali and get bombed,” which is a) tasteless for somebody her age; and b) laced with an unsettling double meaning.

 

She often roars through a nearby village on a dirt bike, rifle slung over one shoulder, taunting the Black children to chase her. She parrots racist beliefs — “Black people have no last names” — not because she understands how hateful they are, or even what they mean, but simply because that’s what she hears her parents and their friends say.

The Luckiest Man in America: A quirky, fact-based morality tale

The Luckiest Man in America (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for frequent profanity

Available via: Amazon Prime and other VOD options

By Derrick Bang

This is an excellent thematic companion to 1994’s Quiz Show.

 

But while that earlier game show scandal drama is a handsomely mounted major studio production, this new film from director/co-scripter Samir Oliveros is cheekily retro and unapologetically low-budget ... which adds to its sense of period authenticity.

 

While fellow contestant Ed Long (Brian Geraghty, left) watches attentively, Michael Larson
(Paul Walter Hauser) prepares for his firt spin of the "Big Board" on the TV game show
Press Your Luck.

Modest production values aside, Oliveros nonetheless gets the most from a strong cast, as this jaw-dropping saga unfolds. And although he and co-writers Mattie Briggs and Amanda Freedman carefully insist that some details have been “massaged” for dramatic intensity, much of what unfolds here — including the names of all key participants — goes down just as it happened.

Following a brief first act, events take place during a single day of taping for Press Your Luck, a CBS game show that ran from 1983 to 1986 ... and likely would be entirely forgotten today, were it not for what happened on May 19, 1984.

 

Shy, withdrawn, down-on-his-luck ice cream truck driver Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser), a hapless social misfit, sneaks into Press Your Luck auditions. He cheekily claims somebody else’s appointment slot, gets caught and ejected ... but not before winning over executive producer Bill Carruthers (David Strathairn), who suspects the guy would make “good television.”

 

Michael has a great back-story. He admits driving across the entire country in his ice cream truck, and hopes to win enough cash to impress his estranged wife and young daughter.

 

Casting director Chuck (Shamier Anderson) is dubious. Something doesn’t seem right about the guy.

 

Carruthers nonetheless books Michael for the next day’s taping. As requested, he arrives wearing a suit jacket and tie ... making him even more comical, atop baggy shorts (which won’t be visible during taping). The obviously nervous and twitchy Michael is ushered onto the set by Sylvia (Maisie Williams), a kind-hearted production assistant who nonetheless eyes him warily.

 

Michael takes the middle “hot seat” between co-contestants Ed Long (Brian Geraghty) and Janie Litras (Patti Harrison): the former a minister, the latter a dental assistant.

 

Walton Goggins is note-perfect as smarmy show host Peter Tomarken, whose occasional off-color jokes — sometimes at the expense of contestants — delight the studio audience.

 

(Tomarken is a product of that still less-enlightened time. Remember how Richard Dawson always kissed every female contestants on Family Feud? Yuck!)

Nonnas: A delectable repast

Nonnas (2025) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for no particular reason, and suitable for all ages

Available via: Netflix

By Derrick Bang

This is a total charmer.

 

Director Stephen Chbosky’s quiet dramedy is inspired by actual events — which are adorable in their own right — although Liz Maccie’s script takes liberties with what actually went down, in order to generate enough dramatic tension for a two-hour film.

 

Joe (Vince Vaughn) challenges each of his new chefs — from left, Roberta (Lorraine
Bracco) Teresa (Talia Shire) and Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro) — to amaze him with
one of their best dishes.

Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with Maccie’s various shadings of truth, particularly when the result is this entertaining.

Chbosky’s film also has strong echoes of 1996’s Big Night, in the sense of lovingly prepared food bonding strangers into a “family” they get to choose.

 

This also joins the ranks of all-time best “foodie movies,” right up there with Babette’s Feast, Chocolat, Tom Jones and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. You’ll be ravenous before this one’s half done.

 

And when blessed with a cast top-lined by the always enjoyable Vince Vaughn — who gets plenty of competition from his quartet of veteran scene-stealing co-stars — what’s not to love?

 

The setting is a working-class Italian neighborhood in present-day New York. Joe Scaravella (Vaughn), a single MTA worker, has recently lost his mother; on this day, the house he shared with her is laden with loving friends and sympathetic well-wishers. Vaughn’s bearing throughout is note-perfect: somber, quick with a polite smile when addressed, but with a faraway gaze that bespeaks bereavement, abandonment and the hopelessness that comes from wondering what the next day will be like ... and the one after that, and the one after that.

 

Everybody eventually departs, having left a home-cooked token of love.

 

Memory flashbacks show an adolescent Joe watching in rapt fascination, at the edge of the family kitchen, as his mother and nonna (grandmother) prepare a meal; every ingredient is added in just the right amount, from memory and long practice.

 

Joe grew up retaining this fascination with food, and has become a respectable scratch cook ... within limits. He’s never been able to nail down the ingredients in his nonna’s Sunday gravy.

 

As the days inevitably pass, longtime best friend Bruno (Joe Manganiello) and his outspoken wife Stella (Drea de Matteo) encourage Joe to use his inheritance money for something fun, or wild, or meaningful ... but definitely new. Joe takes that advice in the worst possible way, and makes a down payment on a dilapidated former Staten Island restaurant, a ferry ride away from his home and work.

 

And announces that he intends to create a restaurant where all the chefs are nonnas.