"Bugonia"

☆☆☆☆☆

A word of warning for those about to watch Bugonia: Afterward, expect to find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of inquiry about the latest Yorgos Lanthimos movie, which is, in every sense of the word, a Yorgos Lanthimos movie.

He is the director who made Poor Things, The Favourite, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, among others, all of which are movies that developed fervent admirers and bemused detractors in equal measure, and Bugonia is like those movies only — and here's the real kicker — more so.

While I'd never advise doing too much research into a movie before seeing it, in the case of Bugonia even the most spoiler-filled description of the movie is going to be insufficient to prepare you for the experience of watching it, which is glorious, bewildering, offensive, hilarious, gory, off-putting and thought-provoking, sometimes in the same scene. It's also blessed with one of the best scores of the year, by Jerskin Fendrix, and reading about the creation of the music is like finding a rabbit hole that branches off into another rabbit hole that leads to its own set of rabbit holes.

There is a simple way to explain the basic plot of Bugonia: A pair of conspiracy theorists kidnap a wealthy CEO believing her to be an alien who wants to destroy Earth. Astonishingly, this is not the first time that story has been told on film. Bugonia (caution: this is the first step into the hole) is based on a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet. Lanthimos may seem the ideal director for Bugonia, but he wasn't originally going to make the film — the original director, Jang Joon-hwan, was going to remake it, but bowed out, in what may be one of the most fortuitous moments in moviemaking history.

Emma Stone plays the CEO, a woman named Michelle Fuller, who is one of the world's worst practitioners of faux empathy. Jesse Plemons, in his best screen performance to date, is Teddy, a man who has spent far too much time on the Internet, which is ironic because that's what watching Bugonia makes you do. He doesn't just believe Fuller is an alien emissary from Andromeda, he has staked his entire identity on it. He's also convinced his autistic cousin Don (an astonishing Aidan Delbis), and together they redefine the idea of focused commitment, as the CEO might say.

To try to explain anything more about Bugonia would largely be impossible, except that it's worth noting that the movie opens on a closeup of a honeybee, and Teddy is an amateur apiarist. He knows how to keep things. He believes it is his mission.

Remember, please, that this is a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, which means that a description of the plot is only an approximation of the experience. As the film progresses, it muddies and confuses — with all intention — what it's trying to say, and hides its true intentions, until we're as mixed up as Don professes to be. Who are we supposed to be siding with here? Is the film really making the bold, angry, unexpected pronouncements that it seems to be making, or is that all for show?

Lanthimos is a master at bringing the audience along on stories that by all accounts should be unwatchable. (More than a few people claim they are unwatchable, though I'm not among those.) The things Lanthimos shows us, the things he gets us willing to believe, are often outrageous and offensive to delicate sensibilities. Bugonia goes even farther than he's gone before, in many respects, and Stone, Plemons and Delbis are right there with him, doing things that should, and do, shock us, even while they get us to think, laugh and avert our eyes at things that other, less daring directors wouldn't even think about putting up there on the screen.

When it's over, you'll want to know what it all means. Just be careful in that rabbit hole. It's a long, long way down.

Viewed November 18, 2025 — AMC Century City

1935

"Die My Love"

☆☆☆½

Some people will argue (its director, Lynne Ramsay, says wrongly) that Die My Love is about post-partum depression. I agree with Ramsay, but that begs the question: what is it about? And few people who see Die My Love are likely to agree on an answer, if post-partum depression really is off the table.

First and foremost, I'd argue that it's about a very specific mood, the dangerous one that comes from something much deeper than melancholia and maybe even transcends depression. It's about despair and hopelessness, and the unexpected ways that life, in all its weird beauty and expressiveness, can slice through that heaviness but never relieve it.

It's also, on a more complex level, about moviemaking itself, and the way images and sounds, dialogue and performance can all co-exist and never quite tell a cohesive story yet also never fail to tell a story, anyway. In that regard, it's a little like watching an anguished, existential, homebound 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's in love with moviemaking, the way Ingmar Bergman was, and like his films (especially Persona and Cries and Whispers) it's possible it will leave you scratching your head, but still feeling ... something. But what? Hard to tell.

Die My Love, as the title suggests, is probably not going to leave you buoyant, and yet it's filled with such indescribably good things that if you like movies it will be hard not to feel at least a little energized. To begin with, there are the central performances — and not just Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a woman whose mind is coming undone, and whose breakdown may or may not be related to her new motherhood. Her husband Jackson is played by Robert Pattinson, who is powerful as a man who does not understand the person he married, or, worse, the person that marriage has made him become.

Also delivering interesting, worthy performances here are Lakeith Stanfield as a man whose sexuality is so alluring it seems unreal (and may be); Sissy Spacek as Grace's mother-in-law, who wants to be supportive but understands fractured reality more than she lets on; and, briefly but memorably, Nick Nolte as Jackson's father, who is both sick and haunted by his own demons.

For much of its running time, Die My Love is a series of images rather than a coherent story. If the book was written as fractured internal monologue, the film takes on that busy, anguished mind through images that are sometimes hard, occasionally brutal, to parse. When the story does kick in, it's minimal, which is only sometimes a problem because the film's images are so daring and brave, brought to life by a cast that is willing to do remarkable things to make us believe in these people.

Lawrence stands at the center, raw and ... what? Frightened? Exasperated? Exhausted? Hopeless? Yes, all of those things, but Die My Love is wise not to try to name them. The novel on which it's based was told in first-person form and made Grace its focus; in the film, the story is no doubt hers, but the way her behavior affects others and the way the others affect her behavior become important factors. Grace does some terrible things in Die My Love. (Fair warning for those who are sensitive: some of them involve animals.) Most of the things she does are incomprehensible.

But what Ramsay seems to want to convey, and does with unnerving flair, is that life is often incomprehensible. The things people do often make no sense. Her goal here seems less to be one of explanation than lyrical, sometimes beautiful, often empathetic observation, but always from a distance, always with remove — a remove that may make the film feel cold and inaccessible, though in fairness that's also the way Grace feels most of the time.

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Note: Days after watching Die My Love, I added a half-star to my rating. The film remains challenging and even problematic, but few movies have stuck with me as persistently or convincingly. It's a tough film to shake, and that deserves a higher rating.

Viewed November 19, 2025 — AMC Topanga

1215

"Nuremberg"

☆☆☆

It's an awful, damning truth that far too many Americans — and, based on global affairs, it can be assumed citizens of many other countries — don't know enough about World War II and the atrocities committed by Nazis in Germany. For those who don't know enough, Nuremberg will be an effective introduction into the famous war-crime trials and the still-incomprehensible acts that they covered.

For everyone else, Nuremberg feels like a three-part network miniseries from the 1980s, filled with recognizable actors of normally fine quality hamming it up and delivering performances of such varying quality and efficacy that you wonder if they were all called in to film their scenes on different days.

Reducing Nuremberg to the same level as, say, War and Remembrance or the movie in which George C. Scott played Benito Mussolini undermines a little of the film's intended importance, and there are some moments in Nuremberg that attain the gravitas the filmmakers were going for, but they are too few. More often, it's a movie in which English-speaking actors strive mightily to emote with distracting, unintentionally funny German accents. It's a movie in which the raw truth of what happened during and after World War II is overwhelmed by too much gloss and an ill-conceived glamour.

It's possible Nuremberg might have worked a little better if it had been made a few years ago, before the harrowing, sobering Zone of Interest, but with scenery-chewing lead performances by Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, both of whom are rather badly miscast, it's hard to imagine this version of Nuremberg being anything but a big-budget, glossy, slickly edited misfire.

And yet ... 

Halfway through Nuremberg, scenes from the real black-and-white documentary shot by John Ford that was used at the Nuremberg Trials take center screen, and they are as harrowing now as they were 80 years ago. To watch this footage is to feel the overwhelming pain and the mental inability to process the images of so much death, torture, incomprehensible violence and cruelty, to understand that what you're seeing is pure, unadulterated evil. The decision to show this footage is the best decision writer-director James Vanderbilt makes in this long, disjointed film. How Ford and his crews managed to film these images, much less to edit them together and supervise their production, is itself a great wonder.

The rest of Nuremberg can't come close to achieving anything like the magnitude of emotion those few minutes convey. In part, that's because of a script that never settles on a tone, opening with a scene that feels uncomfortably like a romantic comedy before focusing its story on the psychiatrist (Rami Malek) who spent time questioning and getting to know Nazi leader Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe). It's an odd story, no matter how true it is, and an even odder decision to focus Nuremberg on this specific relationship, rather than, say, the here-tangential story of the actual preparation for the trials and the role of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon).

There are uncomfortable echoes of The Silence of the Lambs as Malek's earnest young doctor gets a little too close to his subject and tries to ply him for information. There's also an extraneous — but undeniably affecting — subplot involving the young translator (Leo Woodall, whose American accent is far superior to his German) who becomes a more important figure as the film wears on. There are so many supporting roles in Nuremberg, so many small subplots, that the film begins to resemble a 1970s disaster movie, and threatens to become more soap opera than disturbing tragedy.

Despite the often-silly performances by its leading actors and the expansive, sometimes meandering script, Nuremberg is never less than entertaining. Maybe that's the problem. A movie about the Holocaust and its atrocities of immeasurable proportion should be a lot of things — insightful, relevant, shocking, uncomfortable, disturbing, depressing, overpowering ... but entertaining? It's both a blessing and curse for this movie that remains worth seeing despite its significant shortcomings.

Viewed November 15, 2025 — AMC Burbank 6

1715

"Roofman"

  ☆☆☆☆

There aren't many pleasant surprises in the world these days, which makes Roofman something to cherish. It's a disarming surprise, a movie that is hardly hinted at by its comedic-crime-caper marketing, which dresses up Channing Tatum in silly clothes and gives him a gun. That's close to false advertising — not quite, but close.

Channing Tatum does wear some silly clothes. In more than one scene, he wields a gun. Maybe it's something about Tatum? It's the same problem that dogged his movie Magic Mike, which focused on the sexy prospect of seeing men strip down to nothing and hid the true depths of that movie.

Roofman also has some real depth. You wouldn't know it from the marketing, and you wouldn't know it from the first 30 minutes of the movie, which are not all that great. Tatum's character, Jeffrey Manchester, is an odd mix of hardened criminal and heartfelt nice guy — he breaks into businesses through their roofs, but really, really doesn't want to hurt anyone. Everyone, even the people he takes hostage, seems to like him.

In a very long setup, the Roofman, as he comes to be called, gets caught, goes to prison, escapes, gets rejected by his family, and goes on the run. It takes a long time for the story to kick in, and the quirkiness of the movie's early scenes feel a little too much like an attempt to ape the Coen Brothers.

But give Roofman a chance. That opening is, at least, entertaining, which is not a surprise coming from director Derek Cianfrance, whose movies Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines are far more serious but just as captivating. Then something happens.

Jeff finds a place to lay low, to keep out of the way until his prison friend Steve (LaKeith Stanfield) can help him create a new identity. Jeff finds just the place to do this: an out-of-the-way alcove inside of a Toys "R" Us store. Now, you can easily find out what happens by looking up the real story of Jeffrey Manchester, who changes his name to John Zorn. Roofman isn't as much about what happens than who it happens to: a man who knows he's making terrible decisions, and people in his community who don't know a thing about him.

Roofman finds itself — finds its soul, really — by turning itself into a story about someone who gets a true second chance, who can remake himself and finds that he likes the new version a lot better than the old one. As John, he finds himself falling for a woman who works at Toys "R" Us and who has two kids and who isn't looking for anyone new, but finds them anyway.

Kirsten Dunst is the woman, and you may expect you know what her character is and how she'll act, and the real, unexpected beauty of Roofman is that she often does just that. She behaves the way a real person might behave. Most of the people in this movie do, but through the lens of empathy and understanding — the movie takes a kind and forgiving view of human nature, and uses this odd story to discover some of the truths about community and acceptance and moving on.

Again, you can find out what happened to the real Manchester just by searching his name. But I hope you won't. It's not that anything about Roofman is really surprising — the story ends mostly how you think it will. But through the most charming and self-effacing performance by Tatum, who is downright magnetic here, and through the real humanity of Dunst and the excellent supporting cast (including Peter Dinklage, whose movie The Station Agent isn't too far removed emotionally from Roofman), there's something genuinely revealing about this movie. It ends just as you expect or fear it will, and yet it still feels surprising, disarming and even soulful.

Viewed November 5, 2025 — AMC Topanga

1400

"Good Fortune"

 ☆☆☆½

The easiest and most obvious movie to which to compare Aziz Ansari's Good Fortune is Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, but the comparisons might be a little too obvious — an angel is sent to Earth to help straighten out the life of a down-on-his-luck Everyman who has lost his way.

Yet the two movies I kept thinking most about while watching Good Fortune were two other films written and directed by actors: Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (co-written with Elaine May and co-directed with Buck Henry) and Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life. You sort of have to wonder what it is about actors that makes them think this deeply about heaven, angels and the precious, unappreciated nature of life.

While Brooks and Beatty were primarily concerned with the afterlife, Good Fortune is most decidedly about this life, but Ansari's film shares the whimsical, sardonic, kind-heartedness of those earlier movies while mostly eschewing Capra corn.

So, here's the kicker: While I didn't like it quite as much as Heaven Can Wait or Defending Your Life, I liked Good Fortune quite a bit more than the quintessential American Christmastime classic, largely because of the astonishingly perfect casting of Keanu Reeves as the angel who has to set things right.

Reeves is Gabriel, an angel's name if ever there was one, but as far as angels go he's pretty low on the pecking order. Every angel, it turns out, specializes in one particular area of life that can go wrong — airplane accidents, for instance, or choking. Gabriel's focus is texting and driving. Turns out, humans really like to do that.

Higher angels have higher causes, and Gabriel can't hide his jealousy for Azrael (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who guides people who have lost hope. Chief Angel Martha (Sandra Oh) empathizes with Gabriel's frustration, but her understanding only goes so far. When Gabriel stumbles across hapless gig worker Arj (Ansari), who is at the end of his rope after being fired by tech bro Jeff (Seth Rogen), he intervenes.

Up to this point, Good Fortune isn't far different from Capra or Beatty, but when Martha tells Gabriel she has no choice but to take his wings away and force him to live among humans, Reeves steps to the fore and takes control of the movie. The film's main plot should be about the way Arj and Jeff's lives get reversed, and how once-destitute Arj becomes wealthy beyond all measure while Jeff — who swears he came from "nothing" (his parents didn't give him money, that was his grandfather, after all) — struggles to make ends meet in a dead-end, gig-economy life.

Grappling with his newfound wealth, Arj assumes money will be an aphrodisiac for his former co-worker Elena — but as brought to life by Keke Palmer, she's an idealistic, passionate and grounded woman who sees an opportunity to take a short cut, but refuses it. She doesn't know what's happening with Arj and Jeff, but she sees right through the wealth and sheen and rejects a life that rewards the easy and the effortless.

If the movie had stopped there — if Palmer's role had been like Julie Christie's in Heaven Can Wait or Meryl Streep's in Defending Your Life (and Palmer shines as brightly as either of them) — Good Fortune could have been something special, especially with Reeves as the befuddled angel who struggles (al-)mightily with his fate.

But Ansari makes a last-minute swing for the fences by tacking on a "message" to his movie. Given that this is a movie about heaven and angels and the afterlife, it's fortunately not a religious message — but it's heavy-handed nonetheless, and the movie loses momentum at a crucial moment. The fumble means Good Fortune won't be as perpetual a classic as Capra, Beatty or Brooks, though I wouldn't be surprised if, after it spends a few years on streaming, Ansari's film becomes something of a favorite, thanks in large part to the affable, delightful and disarming presence of Reeves. Watching a fallen angel roam the Earth has never been as adorable.

Viewed November 2, 2025 — AMC Burbank 6

1400

"After the Hunt"

 ☆☆

I could lie. Lying would be thematically appropriate when talking about Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, which is a movie about truth, lies, beliefs, philosophies, all that heady stuff. So, I could easily lie and tell you that the movie had me riveted. But here's the truth, and it's one I don't like to say: I dozed off watching After the Hunt.

On paper, After the Hunt should be fascinating and compelling, but something goes terribly wrong, and the movie is only interesting in fits and starts and sometimes it moves so slowly, so coyly, that ... well, I can't make excuses. Yes, I nodded off, and I'm embarrassed about it, so take that into consideration.

Is it fair to write a review about a movie that I watched in such a state? What's fair, anyway? Maybe I'm entitled to do so simply by virtue of having been in the theater while it screened. It's the kind of argument that one of the film's characters might make.

They're all academics — not just any sort of academics, either, but professors and students at Yale University, where Julia Roberts is Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor who lectures about Foucault's Panopticon and is on the tenure track. So is Andrew Garfield's Hank, who she used to mentor. Alma has a long and passionless and shockingly unbelievable marriage to Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg, playing it soft and emasculated), and they have an even more shockingly unbelievable house where they hold a party at the beginning of the movie.

During the party, a PhD student of Alma's named Maggie (Ayo Edibiri) engages in the kind of witty banter in the warmly lit living room that might feel like it was lifted straight out of a Woody Allen film shot by Carlo DiPalma or Sven Nykvist. To a large degree, After the Hunt seems to revere Allen, down to the opening titles — white Windsor Light lettering against a black screen.

But ... Woody Allen? The once-hallowed director brought down by allegations of sexual misconduct? What is Guadagnino saying here? Within moments, it's clear: After the Hunt exists less as a melodrama than as a political statement against the sins of political correctness, cancel culture, and ultra-liberal moral relativism.

After that opening party, Hank takes Maggie home. The next day, she alleges that Hank may have done ... something. She tells Alma, who is not just good friends with Hank, but also has had an affair with him. All of which sounds intriguing, except After the Hunt takes a ... very ... very ... long ... time ... to establish all the contours of its plot, and when it finally does, all of it feels half-thought.

It's as if Nora Garrett, the screenwriter, is aware of all the hot-button topics the movie covers, but just barely. The movie doesnt' dive too deeply into any of them. After the Hunt takes about a dozen big issues, ranging from trans rights to cancel culture to academic politics, and gives all of them lip service but can't figure out how to narrow in on the most salient ones. It's a weirdly unfocused movie, which combined with its glacial pace makes it a challenge to sit through.

Is it about the aftermath of sexual assault? Is it about personal responsibility to speak out against injustice? Is it about entitlement? Gender disparities? The decline of patriarchal authority? Sexual identity? Academic integrity? Maybe it's about all of those things, but scattered among them is a specific story about Alma, her problematic past and her (yes, really) pill addiction. 

It's no wonder, then, that as good as the actors are — and there are moments when Roberts comes close to equalling some of her best work — they often seem lost. When Chloë Sevigny comes on screen in an unflattering wig and glasses, she seems genuinely confused about what she's supposed to be doing. If the other actors appear relatively more confident, they're also perplexed about the film's viewpoint and motivations. The performances may be technically sound, but they're uniformly unconvincing.

So's the film — so much so, I lost the struggle it posed. The final third is nominally better than the rest of it, until a final epilogue scene that feels so irrelevant and unbelievable that it undermines the already shaky ground the rest of the movie occupies and presents such a morally and ethically unlikely scenario that it seemed to undermine many of the film's primary arguments.

Frustrated, often confused by motivations, I finally had to give up. You may have a different response. But if you do go see After the Hunt, go ahead and bring along a pillow. Just in case.

Viewed October 28, 2025 — Regal Sherman Oaks

1215

"Frankenstein"

 ☆☆☆☆

More and more, the question to ask about movies isn't, "Is it any good?" but, "Can I watch it at home while doing sixteen other things?" Movies are being made to appeal to viewers who treat "content" (Hollywood's favorite word of late) as "second-screen" or even "third-screen" entertainment. They've turned their streaming service to a movie, but they're watching Instagram videos on their iPhone while talking with a friend on FaceTime.

When it comes to movie watching in 2025, the movie is almost beside the point.

Netflix has come to excel at these sorts of disposable movies for fractional attention spans. It doesn't matter if they're good or bad, as long as they're ... on.

And yet, once a year Netflix comes out with a half-dozen movies made to feel like old-fashioned movie theater movies, the kinds of films that compete for Oscars and get recognized by critics. This year, Netflix begins its "halfway-decent-movies" juggernaut with Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. What an odd thing to do. Anyone who tries to watch this movie while doing something else will come away perplexed.

To most people, even after 90 years, Frankenstein's creature is still Boris Karloff with the flat head and the neck bolts and those boots. To those who know anything about Mary Shelley's novel — and Guillermo del Toro knows a lot about it — Dr. Frankenstein and the creature he creates is not like that at all.

Viewers expecting a "horror movie" will be nonplussed to discover del Toro's made a gothic melodrama, a movie in which one character dies so beautifully that crimson blood spreads under her stunning dress as she's laid on a rock and whispers words of love that Jane Austen might have found a bit too silly.

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein demands patience, attentive viewing, and careful listening — not qualities that Netflix has tended to encourage in viewers. And despite the existence of 55-inch and 65-inch and even 95-inch TVs, much of what del Toro has created for this film will be lost on motion-smoothing home screens.

That's because del Toro has made a real, honest-to-God movie with Frankenstein, and I had the pleasure of seeing it in a movie theater, projected on 35-millimeter film, and it’s a captivating experience. If nothing else, the movie is masterful at creating and sustaining the exaggerated, almost campy, high emotions and extreme drama of Gothic fiction. If you thought del Toro indulged his gory, Gothic whims a little too much in Crimson Peak, wait until you see Frankenstein.

The general contours of the tale are well known — the "mad scientist" who stitches together corpses and re-animates them through electricity, creating a fearsome and often pitiful creature. The surprisingly large scope of Mary Shelley's original novel is maybe less known (though it has been adapted rather faithfully a number of times), so del Toro plays with a lot of the ideas in it.

He plays a little too much (and illogically) with the ways Frankenstein's "monster" can be killed, and because del Toro takes a lot of liberties here, the movie winds up being almost ponderous in its repeated ruminations on life, death and the meaning of existence. 

But del Toro has assembled a cast that is more than game and willing to risk looking very, very silly in billowing costumes with wild hair that blows in the wind to help express emotion. Oscar Isaac, Christoph Waltz, Charles Dance, Mia Goth and most especially Jacob Elordi are unafraid to look silly — courage del Toro's direction rewards.

Isaac is the doctor and Elordi is his creation, and while we remember from the 1930s (and 1974's "Young Frankenstein") that the creature mostly expresses himself through grunts and moans, that's neither true in Shelley's novel nor here, where the "monster" becomes more and more eloquent. Since he's played by tall, handsome Jacob Elordi, he also becomes almost comically sexy, though Elordi always finds a strong beating (if undead) heart. He's impressive, expressive and surprisingly elegant.

So is the movie. It really is. True, it goes on for about 20 minutes too long and contains far, far too much CGI (the central set looks like it was digitally ported over from Wicked), but this is a compelling, thoughtful and exciting movie. Is it any good? It most certainly is — but will anyone notice?

How strange and sad (much like the monster itself) to imagine how little attention most people will pay to watching it. It's a movie truly designed to be seen in a movie theater, yet like the poor monster himself, it is fated to have a miserable, ignoble existence that ignores its true potential. It’s going to be another piece of interchangeable content.

Viewed October 21, 2025 — Egyptian Theater

1200

"Good Boy"

☆☆☆½ 

As a horror movie, Good Boy is pretty toothless. It's an okay haunted-house story with a couple of really nice jolts and a PG-13 rating that seems a bit on the strict side. There's a solid argument to be made that on the horror scale, Good Boy is more of a family film, pretty safe for everyone who wants some gentle scares.

But as a star vehicle, a movie that exists to present the world to a new screen sensation, Good Boy excels.

The performer in question is named Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever who technically co-stars alongside a few human performers, but because the whole movie is told from Indy's point of view, they're almost never seen.

What happens to Indy's human, a man named Todd (played, almost incidentally, by Shane Johnson) moves into a remote house in the middle of some rather forbidding woods. Todd is suffering from a serious illness, and he's having a hard time. His sister, Vera, doesn't like the idea of him being out there in the house that used to be owned by their grandfather, who died under some rather awful and potentially horrifying circumstances. Grandpa had a loyal dog named Bandit, who has been missing since the old man's death.

Indy is a loyal dog, a good boy if ever there was one, and watches Todd go through his physical decline, all the while paying attention to a rather sinister presence in the house that he, but not Todd, can sense.

The presence comes closer. It's shadowy and scary and lurks in all the dark corners, and Indy is ... aware.

Indy worries about Todd. And when the thing comes closer, it coincides with Todd's decline in both physical and mental health. Todd does some very mean (but don't worry, dog lovers, not that awful) things to Indy, but Indy never loses his faith in the man.

Indy doesn't understand what is happening. Then again, neither does Todd. But Indy knows that there's something in the house.

That's pretty much the whole movie. Indy watches this thing in the shadows, which sometimes makes an appearance.

When I was a kid, the dog movie Benji became a huge hit. Benji wasn't about much. The filmmakers kind of constructed a movie around the things that Benji (the actor) did as Benji, the character. But we all loved it, because Benji seemed so ... human. What an actor! Well, let's just say that Benji has nothing on Indy. Benji was a performer. Indy is a star. It's possible to imagine other movies told from Indy's perspective. Indy manages to hold the film in ways most human actors can never manage.

Like I said, Good Boy is just passable as a scary movie. It's only 72 minutes long, for one thing, barely long enough to qualify as a feature film. It turns out there's a reason. Playing with Good Boy when I saw it, placed after the film, is a five-minute featurette with writer-director Ben Leonberg, in which he explains how the movie was made.

It turns out that the secret to this movie was an almost infinite amount of patience. Leonberg took an interesting concept — telling a story from the dog's point of view — and pulled it off by using a film technique known as the Kuleshov effect. It's a fascinating thing: a man with a neutral expression is juxtaposed with a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, and a pretty girl, and even though the man's expression never changes the audience perceives him as hungry, sad, and lustful based solely on what he's implied to be looking at. It's this effect, Leonberg explains, that allows Indy to become a great performer.

Indy is mesmerizing. He makes the film. So what if the performance happened in the editing room? It might be a first for a dog, but it's happened to plenty of human actors who became stars.

The dog should have such a fate.

Viewed October 17, 2025 — AMC Universal 16

1330

"One Battle After Another"

 ☆☆☆☆☆

Don't be fooled by appearances. Although it's been more than a month since my last post about a current film, those weeks have been filled with moviegoing. The focus, however, has been on the growing number of theaters in the Los Angeles area that specialize in older films, and given the selection of big-budget studio releases lately, watching the massively underrated Joe Versus the Volcano or Terry Gilliam's messy and disjointed marvel Brazil have seemed far better options.

Paul Thomas Anderson's sprawling, unpredictable, and almost impossibly entertaining One Battle After Another makes for quite a spectacular return to the current cinema. No Anderson film has ever been without its interesting qualities, and some, like There Will Be Blood and Magnolia, are among cinema's great achievements.

So it's no small feat that with One Battle After Another, Anderson tops even himself. While there are moments in which it can seem too overstuffed, too complicated and byzantine, every excess is ultimately forgivable in a film that makes a 2 hour, 50 minute running time seem like nothing at all.

Even more astonishing is how One Battle After Another was decades in the making and more than a year in production, but is so prescient and pointed about current political flashpoints that conservative, MAGA-style pundits have begun actively complaining about the movie, saying it's loaded against them, that it glorifies left-wing politics and makes heroes out of its "Antifa-style" protagonists.

Which it does. Gleefully. Proudly. Inspired by or loosely based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (enough that Pynchon and his novel get on-screen credit), the movie telegraphs its political leanings right from the start, putting us into the thick of a mission by leftist revolutionaries to free hundreds of detained immigrants from the clutches of a militarized police force so vile it's run by a man with the cartoonish name Lockjaw (Sean Penn). The revolutionaries are called French 75 and are led by Perfidia Beverly Hills  (Teyana Taylor) and Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). She's a fierce, committed warrior, unafraid to come face-to-face with Lockjaw, and certain about her cause. He's idealistic, laconic, and hopelessly in love with Perfidia Beverly Hills.

But she won't let love get in the way of her fight, and after she gets pregnant, she leaves the baby girl in the care of Bob and fellow French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall), and sixteen years later the girl is a young woman who is testing the boundaries of her life, which has been constrained by Bob's fear of being found. He's right to be afraid, because Lockjaw has vowed to hunt him down.

Most of the movie, while set against some extreme (and distressingly familiar) political violence, becomes the story of Lockjaw's relentless pursuit of Bob and the daughter, Willa (played with incredible intensity by Chase Infiniti), after Perfidia — following an incident of terrifying violence — drops out of the world. To escape Lockjaw's dogged determination to find them, Bob and Willa seek the help of a Spanish-speaking karate sensei who leads a sort of underground railroad allied with what's left of Bob's revolutionary idealism.

For a moment, it looks like Bob and Willa might be safe, but Lockjaw won't let it go. He is Ahab to Bob's constantly stoned, Dude-abiding whale. The setup, both complicated and, ultimately, remarkably simple, gives Anderson the opportunity to do something he hasn't done before — show that he knows how to make an action movie. Does he ever. Woven into his story of politics, loyalty and relentless dedication to a cause are scenes of seat-gripping, gasp-inducing intensity. They're also — and this is the really unexpected thing — enormously fun and funny.

Anderson wastes no opportunity to make One Battle After Another into many things rolled into one: intense drama, sensational action, and, most satisfyingly, unpredictable comedy. I laughed harder than I have in even the highest-profile comedies, but they're mixed with bold and surprising action, so well edited and shot that a few of the chase sequences almost certainly will be included alongside the all time great action moments.

One Battle After Another is a movie that earns both the attention it receives from rapt audiences, and the many laughs and gasps it elicits along the way. It's a movie of big ideas, big images, and big characters. Penn's Lockjaw will go down as one of the most loathsome and wildly inappropriate military creations since Dr. Strangelove, a movie that shares some of the same DNA. Lockjaw's story leads to some of the most unexpectedly pointed political satire of recent years. It's no wonder conservative extremists are so worked up over One Battle After Another. They are the targets that this film aims for — and constantly, satisfyingly, always hits.

Viewed October 3, 2025 — Vista Theater

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"Lurker"

 ☆☆☆½ 

There's something about the title Lurker that implies — not quite promises, but more than suggests — a very different movie than Lurker turns out to be. It isn't about a stalker, not in the traditional sense, and it isn't about someone who sits around on the sidelines and watches. So if you go into this movie as I did, knowing nothing about it except the title, you'll be in for a lot of surprises.

There's no way I'd ever want to ruin any of them, because, at least until it starts to come apart a bit in its final third, Lurker is a movie that is worth seeking out. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has read this blog even a little that I recommend seeing Lurker in a movie theater, and if you do and you're lucky enough to see it with a responsive, appreciative audience as I did, you'll have a classic moviegoing experience — feeling absorbed by the movie, yet also responding to the vibe of the audience. Lurker benefits from that sort of response.

Revealing anything about the story will be saying too much, but it bears mentioning that Lurker has a long and impressive lineage, not just in the background of its writer-director, Alex Russell, who wrote for the TV series Beef and The Bear, but also in intense movie thrillers that ...

Damn it. There I go again. Okay, fine, it's giving nothing away to say that Lurker is a thriller, and a very good one, though also one that falls victim to the same things that have long tripped up thrillers — it's got a great setup, an amazing follow-through, but it stumbles as its nears its end. The careful structure and intricate plotting that sees everyone in the film wind up in the same awful place near the end starts to come undone. Lurker lets the audience do what a thriller like this must never, ever let the audience do: ask questions. "But what about ... " and "Wait, didn't he say earlier ..." and "I don't understand, I thought ..." are not things that should run through an audience's mind in the last 20 minutes of a movie like this, but phrases like that kept creeping into my thoughts.

Key moments that should surprise or shock or unnerve and vaguely confusing, and even though — this is important — Lurker ends on a perfect note, there's no way to deny it gets there in the hardest possible way. I wanted Lurker to be as clear about its intentions and its characters' motivations near the end as it was at the beginning, and the movie frustrated me.

That's not the fault of its cast, particularly its two lead actors, the unnervingly ingratiating Théodore Pellerin and the effortlessly charismatic Archie Madekwe, who perform an odd and unexpected dance that in some of the best possible ways reminded me of characters in a Hitchcock film. The way they meet and then ...

Oops. No. I'm not going to reveal more. Despite its flaws, which are not inconsiderable, Lurker remains spellbinding in part thanks to these two actors and a flawless supporting cast who manage to feel relaxed and natural and effortless even while they tell a story that is far more deeply plotted and carefully controlled than it seems.

There are so many ways in which Lurker could have been better ... but even more, and more catastrophic, ways it could have gone wrong. That it mostly gets it right is worth celebrating, and Lurker is a movie worth seeing, and letting get under your skin — which it will. Those two lead actors will be sure of it.

AMC Burbank 6 — Sept. 6, 2025

2000

"Weapons"

 ☆☆☆½ 

It would be hard to conceive of a better set-up for a movie than the one Zach Cregger has dreamed up for his new thriller Weapons: 17 of the 18 children in one elementary school classroom get up out of bed at 2:17 a.m., leave their homes and run, arms trailing behind them like airplane, into the night.

They vanish.

Why?

Who's responsible?

Has some terrifying force, some evil spirit, taken possession of all of these children? And why is one boy left in the classroom where Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) teaches?

It's a story filled with tension, with deep uncertainty, a paranoia that goes far, far deeper than any ordinary tragedy — say, a school shooting, which the movie wants to evoke — would have generated. As a directer, Cregger has an amazing gift for milking that tension, both visually and through montage. This is a finely crafted movie, and though it utilizes many of the tropes of horror films, it plays much more like a disturbing, anxious update of the paranoid thrillers that were popular in the 1970s.

There is so much tension, that just the sight of a woman walking toward a car can get an audience screaming and fidgeting. The audience I saw it with seemed to regard this movie with a genuinely rare sense of dread, and Weapons leaves no doubt — particularly coupled with his previous horror film Barbarian — that Cregger is an incredible filmmaking talent.

It's in the fulfillment of the promise of those first 30 minutes that Cregger falters. Weapons bears more than a passing resemblance to the films of M. Night Shyamalan, even down to the rural Pennsylvania setting (though the film was shot in Georgia). The comparison extends to a fascination with creating a twisty, unpredictable plot that never quite connects all of its various threads.

Strangely, perhaps, there's another movie that came to mind while watching Weapons, one that I learned Cregger acknowledged served as sort of storytelling inspiration: Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 masterpiece of anxiety, Magnolia. Thematically, the movies couldn't be more different, but certain elements — an overwound cop, a constant rain, a cascade of interrelated stories, an oppressive sense of foreboding — combine to make Weapons ambitious and impressive. But still ...

Like Magnolia, Weapons begins with an omniscient narrator who establishes the mood and then disappears. What the narration and the first third of Weapons never hints at (just as Magnolia didn't) is the out-of-nowhere event that will change the course of the story. In the case of Weapons, it's impossible to describe this event without spoiling things — and this is a movie that, despite my reservations, shouldn't be spoiled. In Magnolia, the event (frogs raining from the sky) needed no explanation; its randomness, its weirdness, its lack of any greater meaning was the point.

In Weapons, the event and the character who embodies it also get no explanation, and that proves to be the movie's undoing. Without a sense of motivation, without crucial details about what this person wants, exactly, and why, the story begins to fall apart. Weapons is a movie best enjoyed in the moment, and the good news it can be enjoyed in the moment, quite a lot. But if you're like me, and you begin to try to answer any of the many questions Weapons leaves wide open, the car ride home after watching this movie is going to be a long one. And frustrating.

Weapons needs, earns and demands a sense of mystery. But ultimately even David Lynch needed to offer contextual explanations for a lot of his weirdness. Weapons not only doesn't offer the explanations, the movie left me wondering if it even cared that people might wonder. It's a puzzle, all right — a moody, tense, sometimes frightening puzzle, but every puzzle needs to have a solution. I'm not sure there is one for Weapons.

Viewed August 10, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Sketch"

  ☆☆☆ 

Many movies make the mistake of having a great setup with a disappointing payoff. They've got a great idea, communicate it perfectly, and get the audience so excited that the inability to stick the landing makes the whole film suffer by comparison.

Sketch does things the other way around, which works to the movie's benefit. The opening 20 minutes are rushed and don't take the time to explain what it is we'll be seeing, that it's easy to imagine the rest of the movie failing on similar terms.

So, it's nice to report that after that failed opening, Sketch just keeps going and keeps on getting better and more intriguing, until its final few minutes, which are every bit as good as you may have hoped.

Those opening scenes, though, feel like something's missing — the story is about two motherless children, siblings Jack and Amber. Since the death of their mother, their father (Tony Hale) has been struggling, too, and has recently put the house up for sale, to both the delight and chagrin of a neighborhood real estate agent who's also a family friend (D'Arcy Carden).

The kids discover that a nearby pond holds the power to fix things and make artistic submissions come to life. Bianca Belle is the daugher, about 11 years old. She's been coping with her sense of loss and helplessness by drawing pictures in her notebook and posting them social media. They're odd pictures. They are mostly of giant creatures and imaginary monsters.

Then, Jack accidentally tosses the notebook into the pond, and before you can say lickety-split, the monsters are running amok.

The performances are the key in Sketch, and the performers are all uniformly game, especially Kalon Cox, a child actor who has impeccable timing. All of the performers, especially the adults, are subjected to some terrible indiginities, but they all are impressive under the circumstances, particularly the adults. Tony Hale and D'Arcy Carden seem both aware and committed to the idea that they are making a family film that may be aimed at kids but isn't made solely for kids.

The action leads up to a sincere, cathartic climax that feels earned and appropriate, and underscores the movie's wisdom about the impossibility of moving on in the face of devastating loss.

But something feels off about the whole endeavor. Sketch follows in the footsteps of Weapons, a movie that couldn't be more different in tone, in refusing to explain anything about its central conceit. Anything. Why is the pond magic? How is it possible they've never noticed? Does a movie made primarily for a family audience need to explain a lot? After all, Mary Poppins could do all sorts of magical things, but no one ever knew or cared to ask why.

It may be fair to say the same concept should apply, but Sketch exists in an arguably more sophisticated world, and its kids have come of age in the time of cell phones and instant communication. The movie stumbles around as it tries to get us to buy into its basic approach. Kids will be less critical. They'll accept the explanations for the magic, and they'll probably be delighted (if not a little traumatized — parts of Sketched are undeniably scary).

Adults: your mileage may vary. 

***

Postscript: It's worth noting that Sketch was produced and released by Angel Studios, which says it has a mission to release uplifting, family friendly films. Hardcore Christian messaging is usually part of these movies, and after further digging it's clear that Angel Studios is a faith-based film company. Sketch does not contain any overt messages about Christianity or religion. But Angel Studios has a clear, stated goal, and some viewers may want to know that before going in so they can make informed choices. The movie also contains an explicit fundraising message in its end credits, which may also turn off some viewers.

Viewed August 9, 2025 — AMC Universal

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"East of Wall"

  ☆☆½ 

The indie vibe that suffuses many major film festivals is at the heart of East of Wall, an intriguing and not altogether successful blend of fiction and reality, a documentary that tells a story, or a story that fits into a documentary. Without the big question-and-answer sessions that follow most film festival screenings, it's difficult for an audience to know quite what to make of this film, though that doesn't mean it fails. Not quite.

East of Wall "stars" Tabatha Zimiga and Porshia Zimiga, who are real people whose lives on a horse ranch in South Dakota form the basis of the movie. Tabatha is the matriarch of the farm, Porshia is her oldest daughter, and together they are part of an expansive, eclectic household of many, many children, some of whom were adopted by Tabatha, others of whom live with her in loose relationships.

Tabatha trains wild horses, then sells them at auction. After the death of her husband, Tabatha is struggling. The film feels a little bit like a documentary, but not quite, and for anyone who doesn't know what to expect — for instance, for those who didn't read about it in a film festival program — it's an odd an unsettling experience.

I went into East of Wall with no awareness of it whatsoever — it screened as part of AMC's "Screen Unseen" program, which presents movies before they open without revealing the titles. I walked into East of Wall not even knowing what movie I was going to watch, much less anything about its genesis, and I couldn't figure it out. The performers seemed simultaneously authentic and stilted, like they were reality show contestants trying to recreate moments from their own lives.

It turns out, that's pretty much exactly what East of Wall is — neither fiction nor cinema verité documentary, it's an uncomfortable but sometimes affecting exercise in creating docudrama with real people. And some not-real people. For instance, actress Jennifer Ehle plays Tabatha's mother. Actor Scoot McNairy plays a wealthy Texan who tries to convince Tabatha to sell her farm to him.

Other real people appear, sometimes acting out written scenes, sometimes letting the camera capture their lives, and it's never quite clear what's what.

The story sort of meanders along without much plot — which is odd. Writer-director Kate Beecroft has invested a lot of passion in making her story feel authentic and real, as if it weren't scripted. But it is. So, why make a movie utterly devoid of the kind of storytelling beats that work best in movies? Why create a story that's both hard to follow and lacking in tension?

Which isn't to say that East of Wall doesn't have some fine things to recommend it, including the quasi-performance (or is that performance-based reality) of Tabatha Zimiga in the lead role. She's playing herself, mostly convincingly, and she's quite a character — bold, independent, strong-willed, yet vulnerable. When the movie finally gets where it's going (which, truth be told, isn't very far), it's hard not to feel a little proud of this woman for what she accomplishes.

As a slice of modern Americana, a look at the way people live amid desolation and hardship, it's never uninteresting. It will probably best appeal to people who love horses and the broad, uninterrupted vistas of the midwest — the movie is partly set in the surreal, windswept crags of the Badlands. Whether that audience is likely ever to encounter this movie is a legitimate question. For those who harbor less affinity for its setting or its subjects, East of Wall may be a struggle.

Viewed August 4, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

1900

"Superman"

 ☆☆½ 

Every generation, it's said, gets the government it deserves. The same, it appears, is true for Superman, whose debut in comic books was followed quickly by on-screen appearances, first in animated shorts, a serial, and some cheesy B-movies that captured Superman as a hero for a post-Depression and post-War America.

After a TV series came, of course, Richard Donner's 1978 film Superman — a sincere, even simple hero in a world that had been rocked by moral, ethical and political complexity. Superman was a salve. But the sequels got progressively worse as studios chased dollars. When the films collapsed came TV shows that reformatted the story not just for the small screen but for teen audiences.

By the 2000s came the age of the franchise, when studios started to please shareholders and equity investors, showcasing "risk aversion." Superman movies largely gave way to superhero movies. Marvel took the spotlight. Despite attempts to revive him, Superman seemed an anachronism.

Now, James Gunn, who helped make Marvel into the juggernaut it became, particularly with the jokey, music-driven Guardians of the Galaxy movies, has moved to DC, and is the primary creator behind the newest version of Superman. It should come as no surprise, then, that Superman has, for a generation that grew up on Marvel movies, become, well, a Marvel movie — not just any Marvel movie, but a jokey, music-driven one. In 2025, Superman is determined to fit into the mold that has been created by previous similar films — the "comp titles" of a risk-assessment justification. It's a movie made to please a Wall Street investor, first and foremost.

This Superman is anchored by the formidable, appealing, comfortable presence of David Corenswet. He looks and feels just right in the role of Superman, the alien (we are told, over and over and over) come to Earth to do good deeds. He is, without doubt, the best part of this Superman. More than anyone who has donned the cape since Christopher Reeve, he looks, sounds and behaves the parts of both Superman and Clark Kent.

He does that in spite of working with a script that goes more or less disastrously wrong from the start. This isn't an origin story for Superman — we're expected to know a lot of his background going in, and the movie cuts corners in its first scene, giving us a written prologue that establishes we're already 33 years into the Superman story. There's no scene-setting, no exposition, no introduction to characters; Superman jumps right in and expects us to keep up.

That's mostly all well and good, except it gives us no emotional center to the film — we don't know what this Superman's personality is, what he believes in, who he is, only the trope that's in our heads when we walk into the auditorium. Superman and Lois Lane? They've been dating for three months when this movie starts. Superman's secret identity? It's hardly a thing, and Lois knows it, anyway. Lex Luthor? He's the bad guy — you don't need to know why.

The first third of Superman is an abject disaster, skimping on characterizations, plot set-up and dramatic exposition. These aren't small things for a movie to dispense with. Eventually, Superman gets going, though it seems almost by accident. None of the actors are given any time to create characters, the movie assumes you'll do the heavy lifting. This proves particularly problematic for Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, who never develops as a character throughout the entire film. She's plucky, she's got the voice down, and Brosnahan does more than try, but this Lois isn't much more than window dressing.

She's lost in a film that has far too many characters — other superheroes from the "Justice Gang"; not just Lex Luthor, but his henchmen and cronies; warring (and fictional, lest the film offend anyone) nations somewhere in some weird part of the globe where Eastern Europe abuts Pakistan, plus a host of other minor players who become all but impossible to keep track of. By the time the movie reveals a — SPOILER ALERT — dark and evil clone of Superman, the whole thing feels off the rails.

As Superman encounters black holes, proton rivers, "pocket universes," and much more, it's almost impossible not to long for the simplicity of putting one hero up against one grand villain until Superman wins and proves he's fighting for truth, justice and the American Way.

It's hard to know what this movie wants to be, except, of course, a franchise extension, a lucrative new effort to tell a Superman story for a new generation.

But like I said up front, every generation gets the Superman it deserves — so this one seems particularly telling and disconcerting. It's a meaningless piece of "action-adventure" overstuffed with CG monsters (and, sadly, a CG dog, who's adorable despite not being an actual dog at any time); saddled with the dullest, most generic and least inspiring musical score in Superman history; and directed by a man whose overriding objective is to "extend franchises," not simply make good movies.

At its best, this is an entirely adequate Superman movie, one that looks and feels like a Marvel movie, one that is, first and foremost, a superhero movie in the ways that bean-counters like best. It's essentially risk-free. It's designed to maximize value, to inspire consumer products, and to do very, very well on streaming — which is where it will find its largest audience, who will be forgiving, uncritical and largely unaware that 47 years ago the movies proved Superman could be a real movie star.

Nearly a century after he was created, Superman deserves so much better than this. David Corenswet deserves so much better than this. It's frenetic, it's illogical, it's slavishly faithful to its comic-book origins — and it's usually minimally entertaining. It's the Superman this generation deserves.

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird ... it's a plane ... it's an IP-forward entertainment franchise extension with strong consumer product potential and long-term revenue-value as a streaming title!

Viewed July 20, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

2000

"Sorry, Baby"

   ☆☆☆☆ 

Agnes isn't the most comfortable person to be around. Even when she's trying to get cozy, there's something ever so slightly off about her. So as Sorry, Baby begins, it takes a little while to understand just how profoundly disturbed she is, how difficult life has become for her.

This small, profoundly insightful movie is written and directed by Eva Victor, the woman who plays Agnes. She is a fascinating person to watch. As the movie jumps around in time — a method of storytelling that is as effective as it is sometimes distracting — it is clear that Agnes has never had the same ease in life that comes so naturally to others. She is always just a little nervous, always just a little tentative. She looks like she might break easily.

It turns out Agnes does not break easily at all. What she does is bend — uncomfortably, perhaps unnaturally, and in ways she never expected.

Sorry, Baby is about the way Agnes experiences, survives and then recovers from a sexual assault, but it isn't a Movie of the Week or Afterschool Special sort of story, where lots of people misunderstand what happened or don't believe her or think she must have brought it on herself. It's about the way she comes to terms with what happened, and the way everyone around her, like her close friend Lydie (Naomi Acker) and rural neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges) try in their limited but loving ways to help.

This is a slow, quiet movie, filled with uncomfortable silences and scenes that feel disjointed and moments that seem emotionally inappropriate and half-formed, and none of that is meant to imply that Sorry, Baby isn't a tremendously well-made, deeply insightful movie. It's just that for someone like Agnes, life after her experience is slow, filled with uncomfortable silences, and often feels disjointed and half-formed.

This is a rare movie, because it tries to observe a truth — not delve into the mind and heart of a character, but to watch as she struggles with the kind of ordinary tragedy and bland betrayal that exists in too many lives. There are moments when Agnes struggles to recount just what happened, or to clarify for others why it matters to her so much; it's a movie about people who have trouble expressing themselves, so in that way, it's a movie about pretty much every one of us.

There are times when it feels almost too slow, when it seems to meander a little too much, and then Sorry, Baby does something wonderful and completely untelegraphed in its final few scenes. Agnes meets a stranger who seems fundamentally to understand what she cannot make sense of. Their interaction is brief but deeply moving. And then there is one more moment between two important characters.

I'm not going to explain what it is or how it happens, only to say that in the final moments of Sorry, Baby, the title makes perfect and beautiful sense, and suddenly this movie about one very specific person dealing with one very specific moment in her life becomes —spectacularly but quietly — about everyone in the audience who is just trying to find a way forward in a world that doesn't make enough sense. Or, really, maybe, any sense at all.

Viewed July 4, 2025 — AMC Century City

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