Grand Tour (12/11/2025) |
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I’m not sure I really got this one. This was my first encounter with Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, a guy who’s kind of been a fixture on the festival circuit but whose films haven’t really caught on too much on this side of the Atlantic. I’d been meaning to dive into him in a little more depth in the past but never got around to it and I wonder if his latest would have made a little more sense to me if I’d been primed a bit. My understanding is that he’s a guy with a bit of a Guy Maddin-esque interest in modernizing older filmmaking techniques and that’s the case here as well as it’s a movie where time on some level seems to be in flux. Ostensibly it’s about a British colonial official (the British characters here all speak Portuguese in place of English, sort of a reverse “Shogun”) in 1920s “Burma” playing “runaway bride” and abandoning his wedding and trotting around various East Asian countries to escape much about his old life. Most of the more standard story oriented sections clearly have period garb and sets and are shot in black and white but as the travelogue goes we also clearly start seeing area b-roll that was shot in the present day featuring more contemporary technology and music some of it in color (kind of like old 8mm film) but not all of it. Some of this has been compared to Sans Soleil but this is more heavily fictionalized than that movie but I’d still say this could be called “experimental” in nature. I sort of appreciated the idea at times but it never quite clicked with me and at a certain point I found watching it a touch tedious. I still intend to look a bit closer at Gomes’ filmography at some point and maybe then I’ll revisit this but for now I’m just not that into it. **1/2 out of Five |
Afternoons of Solitude (12/12/2025) |
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| Afternoons of Solitude is a documentary from a Spanish filmmaker named Albert Serra, who is a talent of some note but who I mostly haven’t crossed paths with. The film follows a matador named Andrés Roca Rey and is a fairly intense and at some times rather graphic look at the practice of bullfighting, so this probably isn’t a film for PETA members. The film does not incorporate any conventional voice over or interviews and looks at a few different bullfights that Rey conducts. We get some “day of the fight”-esque footage of Rey before and after these fights including some cross-talk with some other members of his matador team but the main appeal here is meant to be the way Serra films the fights themselves which are done almost entirely in medium shots without any sort of overhead type establishing shots, meaning you get a good look at Rey’s face pretty much the entire time he does his tango with these angry bovines. That’s probably what’s best about this, the guy seems like quite the performer in his way and there is fascination in seeing these intense looks on his face as he engages in this rather danger activity and we do witness some rather close calls where the bulls come close to getting the upperhand on him. However, he unsurprisingly does end up winning all the fights as this is kind of a “sport” where the house always wins. We’re told at various points in the movie that Rey is doing really well but I can’t exactly say I know what would constitute doing a bad job at this is so long as you’re getting out alive and the bull isn’t and the fact that the movie isn’t giving you additional context is sort of the point, it’s sort of one of those visual “in the moment” docs of the Leviathan variety. I was interested through the first “fight” and parts of the next one but I must say the film did get repetitive at a point and I feel like this approach might have been more effective in a shortened format. Still, some of those shots are hard to be angry at. *** out of Five |
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Blue Sun Palace (12/14/2025) |
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I didn’t really hear much about Blue Sun Palace when it came out earlier this year but it’s been showing up in some of the more “independent” themed award shows like the Gothams and the Spirit awards come year end so I thought I’d give it a look. This is an American film primarily set in New York but it’s almost entirely focused on the Chinese diaspora community and is predominantly in Mandarin. If there’s any movie this reminded me of it was probably All We Imagine as Light, a movie this isn’t really that similar to in plot but the two are very similar in both look and general vibe. That movie is recent enough that it probably didn’t directly inspire this but perhaps they share common influences like Wong Kar-Wai or Tsai Ming-liang leading to similarities. The film is set in the world of a Chinatown massage parlor and a worker there and her relationship with another immigrant who is not being terribly honest with his family back home about what his stateside life is like. The film has been described as “slow cinema” and that’s probably fair and that’s a style that I can be pretty hit or miss on, possibly depending on the mood I happen to be in when I watch any given movie. This one had me for a while but maybe lost me a bit toward the end. At a certain point I kind of do want movies like this to finally end up somewhere and I guess on some level this one does end up somewhere but it’s not somewhere I found particularly satisfying. Then again I concede that I might be missing something, these things sometimes take a couple of watches. There’s enough here that I was interested and would like to see more from director Constance Tsang but this didn’t quite “get there” for me. *** out of Five |
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk (12/16/2025) |
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| On April 16th 2025 photographer Fatima Hassouna was killed in her sleep along with nine of her family members when the IDF blew up her Gaza home in a targeted missile strike, putting her on a very long list of journalists who’d been killed (possibly deliberately) over the course of that whole accursed conflict. Prior to this killing she and a Franco-Iranian filmmaker named Sepideh Farsi had collaborated on a film about her experiences in Gaza which had been completed and accepted to screen at Cannes, a development which was announced on April 15th, one day before she was killed in her sleep. In typical “Streisand Effect” fashion this ended up greatly raising the profile of this movie that had previously only been accepted into a side-program at the festival into something of a must-see among those attending and unlike a lot of Palestine related films this actually got real distribution from Kino-Lorber rather than a vanity label like Watermelon Films. In fact I might suggest it’s gotten more attention to this than it can bear as it is in many ways a film that started out with somewhat modest aims. The film is basically a series of video calls between Hassouna and Farsi, which were oddly captured by Farsi simply pointing a camera at her cell phone instead of doing a more sophisticated video capture, in which Hassouna describes her experiences living amidst the bombing and destruction in Gaza. Both women fluently speak English and communicate in that language as a common tongue and Hassouna proves to be quite the effective unofficial spokeswoman for the people of Gaza as she maintains an oddly upbeat and hopeful demeanor despite the death that surrounds her. It is morbid to say this but the fact that Hassouna died likely makes this documentary a lot more affecting than it otherwise would have been as it sort of serves as a requiem for this woman and what the world lost with her, but without that layer I’m not sure that a lot of what she’s reporting on these calls is all that revelatory and I might go so far as to suggest that the film’s 113 minute run time can border on the tedious even with that context. Part of me wants to view this as an important document, another part of me thinks the actual filmmaking here isn’t doing a lot of work and that the film just happened to find an interesting person to profile. How much one values these factors may effect one’s ultimate feelings about the movie. *** out of Five |
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Familiar Touch (12/17/2025) |
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Familiar Touch is yet another American indie film that I didn’t hear much of anything about until it came to the end of the year and some of the more independent skewing awards started getting handed out. The film was made by a woman named Sarah Friedland, who seems to have mostly worked in experimental and installation work prior to this, and while this feature debut isn’t exactly “mainstream” it’s not a movie that’s breaking the formal mold or anything and is a relatively straightforward piece of filmmaking outside of being kind of episodic in nature. The film follows an elderly woman played by Kathleen Chalfant after she is checked into an assisted living home for people with Alzheimer’s/dementia and from there it largely just shows her adjusting to this new life which she does not entirely understand. At first she’s under a sort of delusion that she’s checked into a normal hotel rather than a nursing home and makes mistakes like expecting the cafeteria to have a menu, but she does sort of go back and forth in lucidity and self-awareness. From there it’s mostly just scenes in the life of this woman and the long-suffering employees of the facility she’s living at. One’s interest in that will probably vary, but it seems like a pretty realistic and down to earth account of this kind of life to me and it avoids either sugarcoating this or turning it into a depressive slog in a way that’s sort of impressive. *** out of Five |
Resurrection(1/5/2026)
One of the more vexing film going experiences I’ve had in the last decade happened in mid-2019 when I went to see the Chinese arthouse film Long Day’s Journey Into Night from the director Bi Gan, which despite the title is not related to the Eugene O’Neil play of the same name but that’s the least of what’s hard to parse about that film. The movie was probably most notable for ending on an extended “oner” shot that that lasted almost an hour and (unlike the rest of the film) was in 3D, which probably makes the film sound a bit more kinetic than it is when it’s instead this really slow paced and kind of dreamy mood piece; a film that almost plays like that challenging final episode of “Twin Peaks: The Return” extended to feature length. Ultimately I came to respect the film and gave it a solid “thumbs up” despite being a bit baffled by it but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t struggle with it a bit along the way. At the time I said I’d maybe need to give it some re-watches before I came to any conclusions about it, but I haven’t revisited it since then in part because the 3D element kind of discourages re-watching so I never really adjusted my opinion and the movie sort of faded from memory until now some seven years later when Bi Gan has finally made his follow-up called Resurrection which is in some ways actually more understandable and accessible than Long Day’s Journey Into Night but in other ways is even harder to decode and parse.
Resurrection is actually nominally a science fiction film though it doesn’t always exactly feel like one. The basic premise is laid out upfront via a couple of title cards: it’s set in a distant future in which humans have found a way to live extended lifespans but at the expense of no longer being able to dream, but there are some people called “Deliriants” who break the rules around this and continue to dream and these people get hunted down by people called “Other Ones” tasked with taking them out and they will temporarily dream in order to find “Deliberants.” The exact mechanics of all of this are a bit unclear and we rarely actually see the “reality” of this future because almost all of the film takes place inside the dreams of a Deliriant (Jackson Yee) who is found and killed in the first segment but then given a chance to live out another (in his perception) hundred years of dreaming before dying for real and the rest of the film plays out in a series of five segments which represent those dreams.
Now important to all of this is that the film views the cinema as a form of dreaming (apparently taking a page from Mitzi Fabelman) so each of these “dreams” are both set at different points in the 20th Century but also take on characteristics of the cinema of their various eras. For instance the opening “dream” in which the Deliriant is found is set in a 1920s opium den and takes the form of a silent film. It’s still in color but it’s in the academy ratio and all the dialogue in this section is in title cards and it openly adopts the imagery of German Expressionism. Then the second section appears to be set around World War II and takes on some of the feel of an Orson Wells-esque spy movie and so on and so forth. I don’t want to spoil the set-up for all of the segments but I will say that the cinematic homages after the first two become a little more subtle or maybe they’re just more specifically referencing Chinese cinema that I’m not familiar with. Notably Jackson Yee stars as a central character, ostensibly the Deliriant’s conception of himself, in every one of these “dreams” meaning that he essentially has a quintuple part in the film and plays everything from a Tony Leung-esque con artist to a Nosferatu-esque creature under heavy makeup and really becomes something of a chameleon in each of these forms. This element was a little reminiscent of Leos Carax’ Holy Motors which also feels like something of a celebration of and requiem for cinema with a showy performance at its center but the film’s format probably reminded me even more of the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas, which also sort of has someone being re-incarnated through six related segments through history though here they play out more linearly.
I found the movie a bit more easy to grasp than Long Day’s Journey Into Night even though it in many ways has an even more “out there” concept, in part because you can kind of just enjoy it as an anthology film even if you don’t “get” how this whole “Deliriants dreaming” concept because each of these dreams is interesting on their own merits regardless of all that. There’s also something inherently interesting in going through the history of the 20th Century in this medium and seeing how different eras will be interpreted through different cinematic lenses and I do suspect that someday we’ll get some commentary written about this which outlines some of the references to Chinese history and culture that I was probably missing on this first viewing. Moment to moment there were definitely places where I was a bit lost in part because these “dreams” appear to use, well, dream logic. Like, I’m still not exactly sure I know what was going on with the “case” in the second segment or what the deal was with some of the more science fiction-y elements of the segment mean (is this the “Other One” interfering or just part of the “dream’s” world and story?). I’m also still not entirely sure I fully understand how it all connects or if I’m even supposed to be worrying to much about that in the first place. It definitely feels like a movie that will benefit from rewatches but for now I’m satisfied that I was consistently fascinated by the movie the was put in front of me and am more than happy to dig deeper into it in the future.
**** out of Five
Home Video Round-Up 12/10/2025
The Family McMullen (12/5/2025) |
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I wasn’t expecting much from this thirty years removed sequel to Edward Burns 1995 indie hit The Brothers McMullen given that it wasn’t really given a festival run and has kind of been unceremoniously dumped onto HBO Max, but to my surprise the film is pretty decent. I guess this could be broadly termed a legacy sequel but it doesn’t really lean that much into nostalgia for the original film and can probably be enjoyed by people who haven’t even seen it… in fact if you’d told me that this started as its own thing and had the “franchise” elements added on after the fact it wouldn’t surprise me and I almost feel like its sequel status is more of a distraction that sets unfair expectations. The focus here is primarily on the young adult children of Burns’ now middle aged character and their romantic travails. Michael McGlone’s character is also here but he’s not very plot relevant and sort of disappears in the second half and the third McMullen brother (who was played by Jack Mulcahy, who appears to be retired from acting) is said to have died between the movie and is represented here by Connie Britain as his widow but she’s mostly a side character as well. Fortunately the new generation of McMullens prove to be fairly charming with Pico Alexander and Halston Sage proving to be good screen presences and the film manages to avoid trying to make cringey observations about Gen Z culture, instead opting to make young people who feel almost removed from the passage of time and could have come off pretty similar in any era. That’s true to some extent about most of the movie; for the thirty years removed sequel to something rooted in 90s culture it doesn’t feel very steeped in nostalgia and instead kind of stands as this sort of feel good romantic comedy. That might annoy longtime fans of the original, which was a lot more interested in getting into the messiness of youth where this one is more interested in driving people towards cozy happy endings and is willing to indulge contrivances to do it (it borders on being a Hallmark movie for urbanites), but taken in the spirit it’s clearly intended to adopt I think it basically works. *** out of Five |
Grand Theft Hamlet (12/6/2025) |
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| In 2020 at the height of the pandemic lockdowns a couple of temporarily unemployed actors named Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen were playing “Grand Theft Auto V” online and when they stumbled upon that game’s equivalent of the Hollywood Bowl, stepped onto the stage and started quoting off some Hamlet, and hatched a crazy idea to stage the entirety of Shakespeare’s play within the world of this crazy violent video game as a sort of ultimate fusion in high and low culture and this documentary shows them trying to make that happen. Almost the entirety of the documentary is taken from in game Machinima footage like the documentary “We Met In Virtual Reality” and is both about the quotidian frustrations of hearding people into volunteer projects as well as the frequent annoyances of trying to do something in a video game that is not really built to do what you’re using it for. We frequently see these people standing in the game environment doing their soliloquies only to have other online players unaware of what they’re doing and just roll up and “killing” them. If one wanted to get poetic about it one could maybe see some subtext about how our own violent and chaotic world still somehow manages to create great art despite a multitude of obstacles, but you do need to reach a bit to get to that. As a doc unto itself this one does feel a touch padded; I’m not sure we really needed a full ninety minute movie to tell this story and spending all that time looking at kind of inelegantly captured video game footage gets a little old and the final “performance” was maybe less impressive than the build-up seemed to promise. ***1/2 out of Five |
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Pepe (12/7/2025) |
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There were many extravagances in the home of drug lord Pablo Escobar but none quite as flashy as his private zoo which included four hippopotamuses imported from Africa and after Escobar’s downfall these semi-aquatic Megafauna escaped from his compound and began to establish a breeding population in the jungles of Colombia, one of the most extreme examples of an invasive species thriving. It’s an odd real world story and it became a jumping off point for the new experimental film Pepe, about the one Colombian Hippo which was killed by wildlife officials before public outcry led the government to cease any culling activities. The film is narrated via voiceover by the ghost of Pepe as he sort of recounts his life as it intersects with other people, a bit like the donkeys in Au Hasard Balthazar and EO but perhaps even more abstract because it brings in the experiences of humans less frequently and when it does their exact connection to Pepe isn’t always as clear, especially in the film’s second half. In fact that second half is probably where the film started to lose me as we really start to move away from the hippo but the humans being looked at are given such brief glimpses that you don’t get too attached to them either. I kind of see why they went in that direction, there was only so much they could really do with the hippo, but maybe the solution there was to just cut a half hour. I did dig the film’s visuals and aesthetics though, with director Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias finding some interesting ways to build a unique language for his movie and obviously came up with a pretty bold concept but I’m not sure he really stuck the landing. Doing crazy stuff like this isn’t easy and not every bold idea like this is going to entirely work out, but I appreciate the attempt just the same. *** out of Five |
Pavements (12/9/2025) |
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| I’ve never really gotten into the band Pavement. Never disliked them really but it’s one of those bands that the critics always fawned over but which just sounded kind of unremarkable when I tried to give their albums a spin. I also can’t say I’d ever had much reason to know about their story, which isn’t exactly the stuff of legend as these guys often seemed relatively chill as rock bands go and kind of lived up to the “slacker” reputation of Gen X rockers in a way that the very un-chill Nirvana never did. That makes them an odd subject for the filmic biopic treatment and that’s kind of the sarcastic joke at the center of Pavements a (sort of) documentary about the band from Alex Ross Perry. Nominally the idea behind the project is to cover the band in three different ways: as a standard documentary, as an off-Broadway jokebox musical, and as a big budget musical biopic. Of course this idea is insane, the very notion of Pavement being the subject of a movie like Bohemian Rhapsody is nuts and being the subject of “Mamma Mia” style stage production is even crazier. Indeed, once we actually see clips from the “movie” (featuring Jason Schwartzman as a frustrated manager) it’s plainly a parody of such films complete with a “For Your Consideration” watermark on the over-dramatic scenes we’re shown. The off-Broadway show (which I’m led to believe actually did play off broadway for paying audiences, who do appear to have been in on the joke) seems a bit more sincere in a way, but all the “behind the scenes” documentary elements we see about the production of both do not “give the game away” that this whole thing is a prank and Alex Ross Perry et al act like these are normal productions done in earnest perhaps making the “documentary” elements as fictional as the “fictional” elements. That said there are also documentary elements here about the actual band that do seem to be the real deal, but there’s also not a whole lot of running time dedicated to that which is probably why the experimental elements were needed to pad things out but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I feel like I would have “gotten” the central joke here if I was a bit of a bigger Pavement fan going in but I see the playfulness here regardless and kind of dug it even if it didn’t blow my mind or anything. *** out of Five |
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Bring Them Down (12/10/2025) |
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I’ve been meaning to catch up with this Irish thriller pretty much all year and now that I’ve finally gotten around to it I guess I’m a little underwhelmed. The film is about a pair of sheepherders who get into a feud, and that particular farm animal reminds the viewer of the Icelandic film Rams but in this film entire families become involved so it’s maybe closer to something like Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories. I must say though that the film didn’t really introduce its characters very well or get the audience off on the right foot with many of them and that made it pretty hard to really invest in the stakes on either side all that well. From there I’d say some of the developments in the feud and its escalations were more interesting than others, but few of the major developments ever really felt particularly memorable. The film does have a pretty decent cast though including Ireland MVPs Barry Keoghan and Colm Meaney and most of them are doing a pretty good job. As a debut film it’s promising; I didn’t really get a whole lot out of the aforementioned Shotgun Stories initially either but Jeff Nichols has still gone on to bigger and better things so it’s probably worth keeping an eye on this Christopher Andrews guy. **1/2 out of Five |
December Round-Up 2025
Eternity(12/2/2025)
The 1997 blockbuster Titanic famously ends with Rose, having died of old age decades after her sinking ship adventure, seemingly returning to the Titanic in the afterlife to kiss ghost Jack by the clock while all the other spirits on the ship applaud their reunion. It’s a touching moment but, uh, wasn’t it established that Rose re-married after Jack died? Was that guy chopped liver? She sure seemed happy to abandon that dude’s spirit to hang with the dude she knew for all of one week as a teenager. So much for the notion that her “heart will go on.” I kid, but this does bring up kind of a real question: people imagine that they’ll be reunited with their loved ones after they die but how does that work if you remarry after being widowed? That is explored in the new movie Eternity, which in the tradition of A Matter of Life and Death or Heaven Can Wait imagines heaven as something of a complicated bureaucracy with rules people need to work through, posits an ecumenical afterlife where people arrive at a sort of hub where they’re expected to pick a themed “eternity” to live in but can never return from. When an elderly couple (who revert to their younger selves in death and are played by Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen) die within a week of each other they are re-united at the hub but then a monkey wrench gets thrown in the gears when the woman learns that her first husband, who died in the Korean War, is also there and had been waiting all these years for her to arrive forcing her to decide which of these men she wants to live with forever.
For a movie about death Eternity is pretty upbeat, dare I even say it’s “nicecore” if that’s a phrase we’re still throwing around. Its characters aren’t perfect with both men clearly having their share of jealousy issues and are occasionally a bit temperamental but at the end of the day both genuinely seem to sincerely want the best for the women they’re trying to win over and there isn’t really a “villain” here except for the rules of this fictional afterlife which do occasionally feel a bit contrived for the purposes of setting up this thought experiment. Get past that and there are things about this conception of the afterlife that are fairly amusing like the impatience of the workers there and some of the “eternity” scenarios that make for decent little jokes. There’s plenty to enjoy here generally but the movie does have some pacing issues and I’m also not sure that director David Freyne quite has “the goods” to really punch this up into the next level; he doesn’t do anything glaringly “wrong” per se but he also doesn’t necessarily add enough extra “right” to elevate the material into something truly uniquely cinematic. In general it probably feels like the kind of thing you’re probably alright “waiting for streaming” on, but it gets pretty close to that next level and that’s nothing to scoff at.
*** out of Five
Dust Bunny(12/13/2025)
I don’t think I’d seen a single trailer for this Mads Mikkelsen/Bryan Fuller “Hannibal” reunion before it came out but then I did hear some interesting things about it on social media and was just interested enough to give it an impulse viewing and… for something that’s ostensibly trying to be mainstream entertainment this is very weird. The film is a sort of dark fantasy thing about a little girl whose apparently being haunted by a monster under her bed which is a literal giant dust bunny (a giant rabbit made of fallen hairs) which through some sort of magic emerges from beneath the floor of her apartment to eat people who walk on the floor. When it eats her parents she decides to hire her next door neighbor, who happens to be a professional hitman, to help her kill this monster seemingly unaware that literal monsters aren’t really his usual target but he does play along with this thinking that her parents were actually killed by humans that were targeting him. Despite being a fully American production something about all of this feels very French to me for some reason, likely because the “hitman and little girl in an apartment” setup rather loudly reminds viewers of Leon: The Professional and if you’d told me either Luc Besson or Jean-Pierre Jeunet had directed this I’d have probably believed you. That’s not to say this has the perviness of that movie, fortunately, but it certainly has its lightly surreal elements and the incorporation of a (probably?) real monster does make it even stranger. The film also walks the kind of odd tightrope that movies like Pan’s Labyrinth need to walk where dark but childish whimsy is juxtaposed with very human violence and I’d say it does that rather awkwardly. The film also just has some aesthetic elements that didn’t thrill me; the lighting in the movie seemed oddly dim (maybe it was just my theater?) and the set-pieces maybe lacked a certain something that would have taken them and the movie to the next level. I’m sure there are some people out there who will dig the movie’s oddball energy but I don’t think I’m one of them and to my eyes it’s kind of just an odd misfire.
** out of Five
La Grazia(12/15/2025)
I’m a pretty consistent fan of Paolo Sorrentino’s but I’ve never really checked out his movies about Italian politics like Il Divo or Loro in part because I was worrited that they would be a bit too “inside baseball” for me to really comment on intelligently but I did decide to check out his latest film La Grazia and my fears of being lost in it were mostly unfounded. The main thing you need to know is that in Italy the president has a less powerful role than the prime minister but they aren’t strictly a symbolic figurehead either and do hold some degree of veto power over bills and also have the full power to give out pardons. The film looks at a fictional Italian president nearing the end of his term and has three last decisions to make before the end; whether to support a euthanasia bill and whether to give out a pair of pardons to two convicted murderers whose respective cases could be interpreted to have been “mercy killings” in various ways. The president is a fairly staunch catholic who has very complicated feelings about the euthanasia issue and as a former judge he can be rather strict about when pardons should be given out. So the film is mostly about following him as he debates these issues with himself and also prepares to finally return to private life. The film is a bit more restrained and calm than some of Sorrentino’s more maximalist productions but it does still have some flights of fancy like the president’s musical taste and the decision to make the pope in this world a large black man with long braids. Sorrentino also doesn’t slack on the visuals here and still shoots the film with some nicely composed widescreen shots and elicits a fairly strong performance from Toni Servillo as the president. It ultimately probably is a minor work, both within Sorrentino’s filmography and within the world cinema of 2025, but a good one which might have been better served if it came out sometime early next year instead of into the middle of award season.
*** out of Five
Peter Hujar’s Day(12/21/2025)
There’s an audience out there that will love Peter Hujar’s Day. They’re a small but passionate audience of people who are deeply interested in the world of 1970s New York and its art scene and perhaps art scenes more generally, and I am not part of this audience, at all. The Peter Hujar of the title is a noted gay photographer of the same generation as Robert Mapplethorpe and the film is about an afternoon in 1974 when he met with a journalist named Linda Rosenkrantz who was working on a book where she’d ask notable “scene” people to just describe to her in meticulous detail what they did over the course of the previous day. It’s explained in an opening title card that this conversation was recorded but the book never came out and the tape was lost but a typewritten transcript of it was found and became the basis for this film, which more or less reenacts that conversation which took place in Hujar’s loft apartment. So, it’s a movie with just two actors talking mostly in one room, which is one of those things that sounds so “crazy” that you assume the people making it must have some sort of interesting trick up their sleeve. I’m usually willing to give this sort of thing a chance even if it doesn’t initially sound like my kind of thing, who knows, maybe they’ve got the next My Dinner With Andre on their hands. That… did not work out for me here… I was quite bored by the movie. Look, I didn’t know who Hujar was before this movie came out, I didn’t recognize most of the people he was name dropping in his monologs and I was a bit lost here. But you know, I’m sure there are audiences who would be just as lost watching Nouvelle Vague and I wouldn’t have wanted that to be dumbed down for those people and it would be a bit hypocritical to ask the same of this. I’ll also say that if you’re going to make a movie for 70s New York art scene superfans this one does a lot well: that apartment sure looks like it’s decked in authentic period décor and Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall are both come off well here and underplay things effectively. It’s fine to make a movie that’s not for me, but I’d be lying if I said I had any use for it.
** out of Five
Song Sung Blue(12/25/2025)
Twenty years ago the director Craig Brewer made a pretty significant splash with his 2005 film Hustle & Flow, which starred Terrance Howard as a Memphis pimp who had a dream of becoming a successful rapper and took a risk constructing a studio in his garage to record a mixtape. He followed that up with a film called Black Snake Moan which was also steeped in the Memphis music scene but was otherwise a much different and more genre oriented thing, but that didn’t do great for him and neither did a handful of other films he made. He did, however, end up making a comeback with the film Dolemite is My Name, about Rudy Ray Moore making going out on his own to independently produce the Ed Wood-esque Blaxploitation movie Dolemite. So it would seem that Brewer has, like John Carney, consolidated his career around making movies about nobodies with a dream who set out to create art in a DIY fashion even when the cold realities of life are holding them back and like Carney I think he’s doing it to somewhat diminishing returns. His latest movie, Song Sung Blue is another entrant in this lineage, one that adapts a documentary of the same name about a couple in mid 90s Wisconsin who form a Neil Diamond tribute band called “Lightning and Thunder” and achieve moderate local success in doing so while going through several challenges in their personal lives.
Now, one of the big obstacles the film has to deal with is that it’s about a “tribute act” and tribute acts kind of suck. Like, I have my doubts that DJay’s album in Hustle & Flow was ever going to be a hip hop classic and Dolemite is not a good movie, but those were both stories of people trying to create original works of art while “Lightning and Thunder” are mostly just aspiring to making openly derivative kitsch. They seem motivated less out of a desire to create art and more out of a sort of innate desire to perform for the sake of performing… they’re essentially overgrown “theater kids” and there’s perhaps something to be said for how this can turn into a portrait of how following your heart in this way can lead certain people to something resembling financial ruin, but the film opts for an easier and perhaps more optimistic and “inspirational” end. On the more positive side, there are some fun moments to be found in the movie; the characters may be a bit cringe but they’re not unlikeable and Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play them fairly well (though Hudson’s Midwest accent is pretty questionable) and the film’s look at the dynamics of the lowest levels of the music industry like gigs at Indian casinos and dive bars are interesting and look authentic. People who are a bit more charmed by the accomplishments of this cover band may find the film winning but I’m just kind of disappointed that this once promising director seems to have settled into a bit of a rut when he could have been reaching for something a little more challenging.
**1/2 out of Five
Marty Supreme(12/24/2025)
Director duo “breakups” can be messy things, in part because they invite people to see the “solo” work by respective directors and judge who the real talent was in the operation, often in ways that are simplistic. For example, the fact that Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of MacBeth was so much better received than the Sapphic comedies that Ethan Coen has been making with his wife has solidified in the minds of some people that Joel was the real talent and also that Joel’s talents were primarily dramatic and Ethan’s were comedic, but I highly doubt it was really that simple as human creativity is rarely that simple. Now with the Safdie brothers also making their own movies separately we’ve been given another one of these situations and the brothers themselves seem to have almost invited competitive analysis by giving us a real apples-to-apples comparison in their first projects since the split. Both brothers made period dramas starring buzzy actors about competitors in niche sports that are more popular in Japan while living turbulent personal lives between matches. In the case of Benny Safdie that movie was the Dwayne Johnson vehicle The Smashing Machine, a movie which got respectful but not particularly excited reviews and which is definitely considered a box office failure. It’s probably a little better than its reputation actually but certainly nothing that lives up to the promise that he and his brother showed with Uncut Gems and overall it was a cultural dud. Now Josh Safdie has emerged with his own solo directorial effort, one that seemingly has a less commercial premise and star but which has already gotten a much better reception leading some to suspect that Josh was the real brains of the operation the whole time. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t, but I would say I’m on board with the premise that he made the better movie this time around.
The “Marty” in the title is Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a guy in his twenties from New York who has a strong aptitude for table tennis, an activity that is not taken remotely seriously as a sport in the United States during this time (nor will it in the future) but it is popular abroad and Mauser thinks it’s a future sporting juggernaut that he wants to get in on the ground floor of. So far though this career hasn’t gotten Mauser much, he’s a broke nobody working out of his uncle’s shoe store and having occasional dalliances with a girl named Rachel (Odessa A’zion), but he does have plans to go to a table tennis championship in London and when he scrapes up enough cash to make it there he pretty quickly shows himself to be a pretty cocky player while also conning his way into a stay at the Ritz in London. There, he spots a retired movie star named Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow) who’s now married to a wealthy ink magnate named Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary). Mauser flirts with Stone behind her husbands back but also has the gall to negotiate business with Rockwell, who offers him an exhibition match in Japan to promote Rockwell’s business, which Mauser rejects as demeaning but may come to regret that as once he returns to New York all the sins he committed to get as far as he did come back to bite him and he finds he’ll be frantically running to try to raise enough funds to get to the legit tournament in Japan himself while dodging everything he’s provoked along the way.
Marty Supreme has gotten, to my eyes, a slightly misleading advertising campaign which arguably makes the film look like more of an earnest and “inspirational” sports movie than it is. In fact unlike Benny’s movie this year this feels a lot more like a direct stylistic follow-up to Uncut Gems in that both movies are about philandering amoral New York hustlers who get in over their heads while also highlighting their (seemingly story irrelevant) Jewish identities and they both even go so far as to both have related opening credit sequences. So what’s the difference between the two? Well, while both Marty Mauser and Howard Ratner are driven by a similar amoral hustler drive they’re both people are pretty different stages of life with Ratner having lived this life for decades while Mauser is relatively early in his run and may or may not be less of a lost cause. Unlike Ratner who is more or less a professional salesman and gambler, Marty does have an actual non-exploitative talent in his ping pong skills and can perhaps be said to just be doing what he needs to do to get in the door in that world but his impatience to get exactly what he wants when he wants it and his willingness to hurt the people around him to get it is wildly entitled. Given that the film heavily incorporates his signature ping pong ball which prominently displays “made in the USA” the film is plainly trying to say something larger about the dark side of American capitalism and its “win at all costs” drumbeat, which it nominally disapproves of but also seems to get caught up in the excitement of at times.
Another key difference between this and Uncut Gems is of course that this one is set in a distant period setting of the 1950s (I don’t think a specific year is given), which partly adds a certain sense of irony to all these proceedings since the audience knows that competitive ping pong does not have as much growth potential as Mauser thinks it does and all this “hustling” is for something that will only be slightly more valuable than the average NFT. In addition to that there’s maybe something a bit more “American” in the primal about the 50s as a setting what with all the gray flannel suits and whatnot, though the 1950s presented here is a bit less clean-cut than it’s often presented. The New York City here is pretty dirty and not always filled with people who look like extras from a Superman movie and its more reflective of the old tenement neighborhoods than the suburban mileaus we usually get and the characters in the movie are a lot more horny and profane than what you’d see in an old sitcom. The film also opts for a very contemporary energy, sporting an electronic score by Daniel Lopatin and also uses some anachronistic 80s songs like “Forever Young” by Alphaville and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. Timothée Chalamet’s performance in the lead is also quite the spectacle to behold and like Uncut Gems the film has a very eclectic cast including interestingly cast veterans like Gwyneth Paltrow, buzzy up and comers like Odessa A’zion, and also a surprising number of non-actors like Tyler the Creator and Abel Ferrara who blend in surprisingly well… kind of wish that instinct didn’t extend to casting known billionaire asshole Kevin O’Leary in a fairly prominent part but I’d be lying if I said I’d have any issue with his performance if I didn’t know who he was.
The main thing about this movie that’s maybe holding me back a little is its ending, which I won’t give away here and which I’m still kind of processing as we speak. This is another place of contrast with Uncut Gems which pretty definitively punished Howard Ratner for his antics by the end and while I wouldn’t say that it necessarily rewards Marty for his actions it does let him off a bit easier than that guy. Call me a moralist but after years of hearing about the “sigma grindset” and watching grifter after grifter try to sell people on the likes of crypto I have less tolerance than ever for people like Marty and I would not have minded seeing him get shot in the face at the end if Josh Safdie wanted to go there, but they go another possibly less moralistic route and I’m not sure if it’s entirely earned. You’re left to think that he may have achieved some degree of growth or at least finally found a principal that might be worth standing on but it’s not entirely clear what sparked that. The film pretty clearly references Robert Rossen’s The Hustler in its late stages and that’s not necessarily the most flattering of comparisons as far as endings go. Still, the movie is a hell of a ride for the most part, at least if you’re willing to go along with its incredibly unlikeable protagonist. I will say that the movie borders on being a bit indulgent and “showoff-y” in that early Paul Thomas Anderson kind of way but just the same I think I’ll take that over relatively restrained work that Benny Safdie gave us with The Smashing Machine. At the very least this likely establishes Josh as likely being the mastermind behind the brothers’ biggest success to date with Uncut Gems and if he wants to make a third “hustler” movie and make this a trilogy I’d be pretty interested.
**** out of Five
Home Video Round-Up 12/4/2025
Left-Handed Girl (11/28/2025) |
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Left-Handed Girl is the solo directorial debut of a woman named Shih-Ching Tsou, who has a co-director career on Sean Baker’s 2004 film Take Out and since then has continued to work with Baker as a producer on most of his recent films (though unfortunately not the Oscar winning Anora, presumably because she was working on this film) and Baker seems to be returning the favor here contributing a writer and producer credit to this movie and likely helping it get attention and I think it’s fair to view it on some level as being within the lineage of their previous collaboration. This film looks at a Taiwanese family consisting of a middle aged mother, a young adult daughter, and her kid sister that’s returned to Taipei recently and from there it becomes a somewhat episodic slice of life watching this family get by. The film was actually shot on an iPhone like Tangerine was and that can be a bit jarring at first (lights really blow out on the image at times) but ultimately does work well enough. The film does seem to capture life in Taipei pretty vividly though the movie maybe lacks a novel high concept or something that would really establish why we’re following this particular family. We eventually do get something of a reason they stand out pretty late but it isn’t quite as interesting a revelation as the film maybe wants it to be. Just the same I was pretty interested in what I was watching. Our protagonist is a complicated and sometime frustrating character who’s not always the easiest to read and her family members also have their own interesting travails. Looked at as a continuation of the larger Sean Baker cinematic project this is maybe a step backwards or two, but as a debut film it’s pretty promising and worth a watch. ***1/2 out of Five |
The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo (11/30/2025) |
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| There are something like a dozen news photographs that have taken on a life of their own and are held up as examples of the power of photography to change minds and effect the world and the “napalm girl” photo is one of them. The photograph depicting a naked girl fleeing after having been burned by napalm in an attack captured the horror being inflicted on Vietnamese civilians during that war more than anything else that came out of that war. That photo was long attributed to AP staff photographer Nick Út but newly uncovered evidence, particularly the testimony of AP photo editor Carl Robinson, has called that attribution into question and suggested that it was actually taken by a “stringer” named Nguyen Thanh Nghe and that another photo editor named Horst Faas opted to credit Út out of some professional courtesy. The film follows a man named Gary Knight as he investigates these accusations and attempt to track down both Nghe (who they don’t even know the name of at first) and anyone else with information about the event. The film culminates in a CG re-enactment of the event based on the various photographs which certainly seems pretty damning about the official story but also kind of reminded me the dioramas of the “magic bullet” theory of the Kennedy assassination and that kind of gives me pause about all of this. Nick Út did not cooperate with the film and if there are refutations of all this I would have liked to hear them, but in the absence of other points of view it would seem to be that they’re onto something here. I also might have liked a deeper investigation into how much any of this even matters. Út might not have taken the most famous picture of the napalm girl, but he was on the scene that day and so were several other photographers and videographers who got similarly harrowing images of her, so if the stringer didn’t take that one particular photo would those other pictures not have had the same effect? That’s maybe a bit more philosophical than the exposé format they went with but for what the film did decide to be it does a pretty good job. ***1/2 out of Five |
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Homebound (12/1/2025) |
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Homebound is India’s submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars and most ceremony watchers seem to view this as having been the correct choice, and it certainly does seem to walk the tightrope of what that committee wants for their choices. The film isn’t a musical at all in any way and seems to be made with a certain degree of western-style seriousness but it doesn’t feel like a European arthouse movie either which is reportedly what soured the committee on All We Imagine as Light last year. This is a relatively mainstream movie, sort of a weepie of sorts, focused on a friendship between two guys who are seeking to apply to be police officers (which is apparently a highly respected and difficult job to get in India) and are both marginalized, one for being Muslim and one for being “low caste.” The film is not, however, entirely a movie about prejudice so much as that’s there in the background and is instead a bit more focused on male friendship and manages to make the two protagonists pretty good examples of relatively healthy non-toxic masculinity. I will say, however, that the event this all eventually culminates in feels a bit like a random unfortunate event moreso than a culmination of the film’s themes and that’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world (life doesn’t always throw you thematically relevant curveballs) but I’m not sure it entirely drives home what the movie’s about like it maybe should. This is a good little movie, probably closer to my tastes than what I normally see coming out of the Indian mainstream than what I’m often shown, but still not necessarily a heavy hitter to my eyes. *** out of Five |
One to One: John and Yoko (12/3/2025) |
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| I do sometimes laugh at the sheer quantity of Beatles and Beatles adjacent documentaries that get made every year and it’s probably easy for this film, which looks at the immediate post-Beatles activities of John Lenon and Yoko Ono, to get lost in that shuffle which is unfortunate because this one is a bit more interestingly constructed. The film uses no contemporary interviews whatsoever and is instead constructed entirely of archival footage and the occasional title card and it’s especially focused on television footage of the central couple’s time as hippie activists in early 70s New York as well as other footage of other news events of the era that it occasionally cuts to while simulating channel surfing and making a sort of collage while also serving as a linear narrative. I like to think we’re living through one of the most chaotic parades of crazy news in decades but as an era the early 70s might have been up there with us and the film does a pretty decent job of conveying the tenor of the era. We also get some rather candid phone call recording here which I think we have because Lennon was being wiretapped by Nixon’s stasi-like FBI, which is pretty queasy to think about. The narrative ultimately culminates in Lennon and Ono’s “One to One” benefit concerts (one of the only real concerts of Lennon’s solo career). The film intersperses this footage at throughout the film rather than ending on it, and some of it is decent but this shouldn’t really be viewed as a concert film as that ultimately takes up a pretty small amount of its runtime. It’s maybe not quite as candid as it could be and avoids some of the less flattering things Lennon was up to in this period like his petty feuding with Paul or his or that song he wrote comparing the plight of women with the plight of African Americans but I wouldn’t call it a puff piece either as it is at least unflinching about Lennon’s world if not Lennon himself and as someone who’s hungry for biographical documentaries that come up with even remotely interesting ways to present these stories I found it kind of refreshing. ***1/2 out of Five |
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The Wedding Banquet (12/4/2025) |
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Was remaking Ang Lee’s 1993 indie classic The Wedding Banquet a good idea in 2025? I don’t know, maybe. Lee’s film is less than 35 years old but when dealing with queer themes that might as well be a century so one way or another there were probably going to need to be updates. The original movie was about a gay Taiwanese man living in San Francisco who, because of circumstances, needed stage a marriage to a woman for his elderly parents’ benefit, and this new version ups the conflict by making the woman in this lavender marriage also part of a queer couple who have their own complicated reasons for getting involved in such a thing. Furthermore, the film kind of blows up the formula pretty early when the parent figure figures out the scheme pretty much immediately upon arrival in America and this instead becomes more a staging for the rest of the extended family. This version is a bit more light hearted than Ang Lee’s version, which wasn’t deadly serious per se, but did lean more into the potential emotional pain of all this while this version feels more like a comedy that doesn’t leave you in too much suspense about whether or not this will all work out in the end. I wouldn’t necessarily consider it an improvement but the film is saved by a rather over-qualified cast including Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran, Joan Chen, and Youn Yuh-jung who are all doing pretty solid work even if the movie is never quite sure how seriously it wants to take itself. Ultimately it’s a pretty cute little movie with characters I liked being around for a couple of hours, which made some interesting little tweaks to a familiar story, should serve people well when they’re looking for this sort of thing. *** out of Five |
The Movie Vampire 