"Song Sung Blue"

  ☆☆☆½ 

Movie screens used to be filled with films like Song Sung Blue, which exist for no reason other than to entertain a large number of people, to give them two hours of simple entertainment grounded in humanity rather than spectacle. Song Sung Blue makes no great demands on viewers; it only wants to please them. The entertainment industry has largely moved on from movies like this, but thankfully writer-director Craig Brewer refuses.

Song Sung Blue is a lot like its central characters, Mike and Claire Sardina, who have a dogged, sincere and almost singular determination to entertain and please audiences, which they do by impersonating popular singers. Claire specializes in Patsy Cline. Mike is sort of an all-purpose pinch-hitter, though as the film begins he's aware he can go too far. The six-foot-something White guy, who's a recovering alcoholic, draws the line at performing "Tiny Bubbles" like Don Ho.

Neil Diamond, though. There's an idea. Pretty soon, Mike is trying ridiculous haircuts, donning sequined shirts, and urging his dentist-slash-manager to get a leaf blower so his hair will move in the wind. These are not unserious people — they are just very serious about rather unserious things.

Song Sung Blue is a simple, quirky slice-of-life comedy, and it's filled with songs by Neil Diamond, one of those singers you might think you don't know until you start humming along to all the songs.

Hugh Jackman plays Mike. It's long-since established that Jackman is a consummate performer with a strong, clear singing voice, and he uses every trick he has to make his character come to life. It helps that the movie is based on a documentary about the real-life Mike Sardina, who really did form a Neil Diamond cover band called Lightning and Thunder with the woman who became his wife.

That woman is played by Kate Hudson, who has long been hampered by her connections — for many audiences, particularly those who are in the target age demographic for Song Sung Blue, she's been "Goldie Hawn's daughter." She's been strong on screen before, stronger than perhaps most people remember, but Song Sung Blue lets her finally break free. She takes a role that seems simple and one-note and finding stunning dimension.

Though the story is primarily about Mike, who Jackman plays with enormous appeal and heart, Hudson becomes the movie's emotional anchor. Song Sung Blue is built around her ability to sing, to charm, and, ultimately, to descend to some depths that are never even hinted at in the way the movie is positioned.

This is, at one level, a sweet, audience-pleasing comedy, but there is tragedy, and it turns out to be the kind that doesn't feel manufactured or predictable. Director Brewer remains true to both the real-life story that inspired it, and to the realities of the hard-scrabble lives its characters live. They may present themselves as happy and glamorous, but nothing comes to them easily.

The movie's fundamental challenge is that a lot happens to the Sardinas and their family, and Song Sung Blue is pretty overstuffed. From the start, it glosses over the nuance, doesn't spend a lot of time on subtlety, and its determination to fit in everything that happens to Mike and Claire can feel a little underdone. Mike, in particular, proves troubling as a character — a man who is so determined to follow his big dream that he neglects too many of the smaller, more urgent details.

But Brewer always returns to honest emotion, including moments of genuine suspense and earned pathos. With the constant strength of Hudson, whose Oscar nomination this week was both surprising and incredibly well deserved, Song Sung Blue is like a Neil Diamond song: a little schmaltzy, a little predictable, and sometimes even a little embarrassing, but it makes you misty-eyed, it makes you smile and, manipulative as it may be, it gives you no choice but to sing along.

Viewed January 22, 2026

Digital Screener

"Disneyland Handcrafted"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

For many of us, Disneyland has always existed. Even for those old enough to have known a world without the physical theme park in it, Disneyland has become such a ubiquitous presence — not just a place but a concept, an ideal — that it's basically impossible to conceive of it not existing.

But, as the fascinating new documentary Disneyland Handcrafted shows, there was indeed a time when Disneyland was just an idea, and not a very popular one at that, and when all that land in Anaheim, Calif., was just a bunch of orange groves.

Walt Disney is one of the most remarkable people ever to have lived, and it really is something of a shame that the company he created owns and cultivates his image so carefully that we'll likely never get a true look at the complexities of the man. Disneyland Handcrafted is no exception: You'll find no shots of Walt Disney smoking or drinking, rarely doing anything except smiling, certainly not angry or frustrated or worried.

And yet, surprisingly, filmmaker Leslie Iwerks (granddaughter of one of Walt Disney's earliest colleagues) a certain outline of that complicated man emerge in a 95-minute film filled with rare color footage of Disneyland's creation. Walt himself, perhaps oddly, isn't really at the center of the documentary — no single person is, because this is a film about the people who actually built Walt Disney's vision.

Most of them are glimpsed only briefly, though they are heard through audio recordings. Ardent Disney fans will likely know all the names, though it's a little tough to keep up with who's who as they speak off screen. But what they say is revealing throughout the movie, which begins one year before the planned July 1955 opening date of Disneyland.

As the film opens, that opening date seems impossible: there's nothing but dirt in the midst of orange trees in what appears to be the middle of nowhere. Today, Disneyland is in the middle of the urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles; back then, it seemed so impossibly far away as to make people laugh.

Iwerks stitches together truly revelatory footage, augmenting it with extensive foley work — detailed sound effects that fool you into thinking that silent footage actually has original sound. The effect is uncanny, even if it futzes with the strict definition of a documentary.

There are astonishing scenes of accidents and fumbles, along with shots of small details being put in place, some of which still exist at the theme park to this day, making the movie a true love letter from and to Disney fans. Full disclosure: I worked for Disney at its Burbank corporate headquarters, both as employee and consultant, for more than a decade, and have visited Disneyland frequently over the years. Seeing how many of the original touches remain in place is part of what makes Disneyland Handcrafted so special.

But what makes it really worthwhile for Disney fans and history buffs in general is the footage that brings a very early version of Disneyland to vivid life. No matter how many times you've been there, you've never seen Disneyland look like this.

It's worth noting that your appreciation of Disneyland Handcrafted will likely depend on your own fondness for Disney and its history. Those who aren't as familiar with Disney may want to drop a star or so from this assessment, but even for them Disneyland Handcrafted is a worthwhile trip down memory lane — with a tantalizing hint of the complexity of the man who risked everything he had on Disneyland, and lived to see it succeed beyond his wildest dreams.

Viewed January 21, 2026 — AMC Burbank 8

1545

"Megadoc"

 ☆☆☆ 

Moviemaking is a curious art form. Individuals are recognized as the creator of films, and yet dozens, scores, hundreds, even thousands of people are involved in bringing a film to screen. Unlike writing, music, painting, dance, acting, it's almost (not quite, but almost) inconceivable that an individual could ever create a film, especially one that can be shown theatrically.

That curious paradox of film — that A Film By Famous Director — really isn't at all "by" that person becomes all the more curious when you consider a movie like Megalopolis. It sprang from the mind of Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote the screenplay and directed the movie. But ... did it? Because the number of people it took to bring the film to screen is staggering. It's overwhelming. It's unmanageable.

Which is exactly what Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis became: unmanageable. To viewers, to actors, to the craftspeople who built it, to Coppola himself, it becomes clear during Mike Figgis's simultaneously remarkable and bewildering documentary Megadoc, which is available on the Criterion Channel.

In an extraordinary act of hubris matched only by that time Brian de Palma invited journalist Julie Salamon to be a "fly on the wall" of the set of his notorious disaster The Bonfire of the Vanities, Coppola asked Figgis — the noted director of Stormy Monday and Leaving Las Vegas — to document the production of his personal epic.

The movie, Coppola promises time and again, will heal the world. The first time he says it, the words seem odd, almost comical. The first time someone else says it, you realize what went wrong with Megalopolis, which the documentary doesn't flinch from revealing: Nobody could tell Coppola "no." This emperor must always, under all circumstances, have clothes, especially when he didn't.

Coppola spent $120 million of his own money to make Megalopolis. He sold off shares of his successful winery to fund the movie. In his mind — and it's one of the most cogent, coherent things he says in the documentary — there's no point to dying with a lot of money in the bank. He'd rather go bankrupt funding his dream.

Whether Coppola is bankrupt, I don't know. Whether his dream was worth staking his entire fortune on is something filmmakers can judge for themselves by watching Megalopolis, which I did last year. Whether he was able to communicate his dream to those hundreds and hundreds of people who helped him spend all the money is much more clear: No, he wasn't.

Nor is he able to fully communicate the idea of Megalopolis to Figgis, which is what makes this both a compelling and extraordinarily frustrating documentary. It's compelling because watching movies being made is never less than compelling. It's a staggering feat, and in the middle of the chaos — a word Coppola eschews — is the director, the one person everyone turns to over and over for answers. Coppola has none.

Without answers, Megadoc means watching something being made but not knowing what any of it means. The action itself is interesting, but the intention is unclear. Throughout Megadoc, Figgis incorporates on-screen titles that detail the staggering, unbelievable amounts of money being spent: $10 million for costumes, $1 million for catering. As a director, Figgis seems incredulous that Coppola is so profligate.

But he almost never stops to ask the fundamental question: Why? Nor does he show us the result. Megadoc ends when the film screens at Cannes, but ignores its rocky theatrical release or the overwhelmingly puzzled response the movie got from critics. Figgis allows people to make claims about the ways Megalopolis will "heal the world" but never challenges them. When Dustin Hoffman says he has no idea what he's doing in the movie, a more incisive documentary would have explored that.

It's Coppola's film. He's the director. As Jean Hagen said in Singin' in the Rain: "It says so right there." It took so many people to make it, though, and it's clear throughout Megadoc that most of them never really understood what they were doing or why.

Ultimately, Megadoc leaves the viewer almost as wanting for answers as Megalopolis itself — but it's vastly more entertaining. It's a must-see for anyone fascinated by the communal art form of filmmaking. For others, especially those intrigued by the artistic process of directors, writers, designers and performers, it's a bit too opaque. Though perhaps that's fitting for a documentary about a movie that seems to revel in its opacity.

Viewed January 19, 2026 — Criterion Channel

"Is This Thing On?"

 ☆☆½ 

At the beginning of Is This Thing On?, Alex Novak (Will Arnett) really needs a drink, because that's the only way he can think of to cope with the fracture in his marriage that is leading to divorce. The cover charge is $15. He doesn't have cash. So, he signs up for open mic night and tries his hand at comedy.

It turns out he's really bad at comedy, doesn't have a clue about its nature, its rhythms, its meaning, but he gets up there anyway, and because this movie has determined it's going to be about a man who stumbles into a career as a stand-up comic, he keeps at it. He doesn't know why. Neither does the movie.

What's most surprising about Is This Thing On? is that it was directed by Bradley Cooper, who also directed the vastly superior Maestro and A Star Is Born, and watching this movie reveals something about those films in retrospect. They are each strangely paced, following a trajectory that favors a discouraged glumness. In that regard, Is This Thing On? is recognizably a work of Cooper's, because once again it favors depressed seriousness over actual revelation.

It's also co-written by Arnett, along with Mark Chappell, and between the three of them it's almost alarming that they can't come up with a single joke. Alex's stand-up routines are nothing more than the rantings of an angry white man, and if anything the film is at least honest by not having the audience react with uproarious laughter.

There's not much funny at all in Is This Thing On?, which leaves the film to be a revealing and painful look at marriage and self-discovery, but it's neither of those things, either. Alex's soon-to-be-ex-wife Tess (Laura Dern) has more of a handle on what she wants and why. She's a former professional volleyball player who is encouraged, during the film, to set her sights on coaching the U.S. Olympic team in 2028. A pipe dream? Perhaps, but she pursues it with intent and clear-eyed dedication, which is far more than can be said for Alex.

He's not much of a character at all, just a man who regrets whatever choices he's made, though what those are, we can't be sure. The movie doesn't even give him an identity, other than a father and a man whose marriage fell apart. We see his sitcom-style parents and some of his sitcom-style friends, but they offer no insight, either. A few times, Alex is dressed in a suit and tie, but what he does for a living is unclear, though it's enough to help him pay for an apartment in Manhattan, to buy a new electric mini-van for the kids and, I guess we can assume, keep it parked somewhere. In New York City, that's not nothing. So, who is he?

No clue. He just stumbles into comedy, and we're supposed to relate to his plight, I guess. The movie at least surrounds Alex with that group of friends, like loopy actor Balls (yes, Balls, for reasons never made clear, and perhaps that's for the best), who's played by Cooper. Balls has a wife named Christine, played by Andra Day, who almost, but not quite, comes to life as a character with her tough talk. There are also a couple of anonymous, asexual gay friends who join everyone at a big house on the shore for long weekends.

Those are mostly setups for Alex and Tess to have long discussions that inevitably lead to fights or to make-up sex or both, but despite Dern's valiant attempts to find a beating heart at the center of the film, none of it adds up to much. As a comedy about marriage, it's empty, but not nearly as empty as being a drama about comedy. Alex sort of plods along, as does the film, which is never less than amiable, sometimes (though not as frequently as it should be) fairly engaging, and unfortunately overlong.

Maybe it's true: Comedy is not pretty. At best, in Is This Thing On?, it's fitfully amusing.

 Viewed January 18, 2026 — Alamo Drafthouse Los Angeles

1600

"The Secret Agent"

☆☆☆½ 

A man named Marcelo walks into the lobby of a popular movie theater in Recife, Brazil, in early 1977. As he does, three women emerge from the auditorium, one of them in hysterics. Marcelo reports to the projectionist that one of the women appears to be possessed. "It's this movie," he says, and the camera shows us the inside of the theater, which is showing The Omen. The audience screams in delight.

Movies are at the heart of The Secret Agent, which isn't actually about movies, except that, in a way, it is. Movies are the escape for many Brazilians during the 21-year military dictatorship that ruled the country with authoritarian brutality. In The Secret Agent, one of the characters, Marcelo's little boy, desperately wants to see the movie Jaws. He's obsessed with it. Problem is, the poster alone gives him nightmares. Still, he's determined.

Movies are also the heartbeat of this film, which was written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacarau, Aquarius), and which contains sequences that revel in pure filmmaking. In one, a disembodied leg is reanimated and appears in a park where gay men have sex at night. The leg beats them up.

What are we supposed to make of this? Is it a metaphor? If so, for what? Politics? Sexual repression? Or is it all just a zany only-in-the-movies moment that also shows how, in 1977, long before cell phones and computers, everyone could be brought together by the most weird, wild, and probably untrue tall tales?

The "Hairy Leg" is just one strange moment in a film filled with strange and wonderful moments. The Secret Agent does tell a cohesive story, though in a relaxed and roundabout way. Once in a while, it punctuates the story with shocking violence, and occasionally there is a framing story about two students who are listening to audio tapes that chronicle the story of Marcelo and the way the oppressive, trigger-happy government targeted him for ... what, exactly?

It takes some patience to track the core of the story. It's easy for that patience to flag. It's easy to imagine Filho and producer-star Wagner Moura getting irritated by the demands of modern filmmaking, which at least suggest if not require a coherent, cohesive story. The Secret Agent gets there grudgingly.

It has set its mind, instead, on dropping us into Brazil in 1977, which the film calls, with droll understatement, a "time of great mischief." Do the filmmakers really believe that almost 50 years later they can look back at that time and not be filled with the bitterness and anger that fueled last year's I'm Still Here, a movie with which this film shares some surface-level similarity?

Interestingly, both The Secret Agent and I'm Still Here give us a glimpse of the damage the time, the country and its political violence wrought on generations by jumping, at the last minute, into the present. They share little else. I'm Still Here wanted to be a stark and affecting political thriller. The Secret Agent is going for something different, I think:

It's a movie about a time and a place. Like Cuarón's Roma, it wants to luxuriate in recreating the time, in letting us be there, and in that sense it succeeds with something close to perfection. I have no idea what Brazil in 1977 really felt like, but I'm convinced it must have felt something like this. It's that sense memory that most interests Filho. And in exploring memories, Filho does something special in The Secret Agent: He recreates the past much in the same way that humans recreate the past — disjointedly, honestly, filled with the sights and sounds and moods of the moment.

Watching The Secret Agent is like someone who lived through a time of great consequence try to tell you about it — they can't keep the narrative clean. They start by telling you one story, but in order to understand it, you really need to know what else was happening at the time, and to understand that you need to know about what the city was like, and to understand that you need to understand what it was like to go to the movies then, and to understand that you need to know what it was like living in a police state, and to understand that ...

And on and on. It might get dull and frustrating, except that the teller of the story has a special way of keeping you mesmerized. So it is with The Secret Agent. I'm still not sure of some of the plot points, but I'm absolutely sure that audience loved watching The Omen, and that the kid loved drawing the poster of Jaws, and I'm not going to forget that hairy leg anytime soon. So it doesn't matter if I didn't grasp the finer points of the story. I got what it really wanted to say. I think. And if not, I had a terrific time anyway.

Viewed January 14, 2026 — AMC Universal 16

1735

"Marty Supreme"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Those of us of a certain age remember our friends who had a certain habit — the nice word for addiction — back in the 1980s and 1990s. "Wired," we called it, still trying to be nice, because these people tended to get a lot accomplished in a very short time. They were always on the move. They could be impressive.

Marty Supreme is wired, to use a nice term. A less nice term is exhausting. A more blunt assessment might add an extra adverb in there. One that begins with F.

Marty Supreme is that friend from 1987. There are times when it's genuinely impressive, a feat of bold and assertive filmmaking. There are a lot more times when it's just f-ing exhausting.

At the center of it is Timothée Chalamet, who also produced it, as Marty Mauser. The movie's poster says Marty is someone who knows how to DREAM BIG, a phrase that demands to be put in all-caps, because the movie itself is IN ALL CAPS. ALL THE TIME. It never lets up.

Director Josh Safdie, who wrote it with Ronald Bronstein, moves like wildfire from its first scene, which finds Marty working in a shoe store in 1952 New York City. But he cannot and will not be constrained by shoes. He is going to find a way to do what he really, really wants and needs to do, the thing he's really good at: playing table tennis. Even in a brief plot description, it sounds ludicrous. A movie about ping-pong? Maybe it's because the movie takes place in the faddish 1950s, or maybe it's just because nothing about Marty Supreme ever, not even for one second, offers room to stop and think about things, the setup doesn't seem odd. Marty Supreme just barrels ahead.

Marty himself makes the first of some terrible decisions in order to get the money he needs to make it to London, where the world table tennis championship is happening. (Honestly, this sounds much sillier than it plays.) There, he runs into wealthy stage actress Kay Stone and her even wealthier husband, writing-pen magnate (I know, I know) Milton Rockwell.

Marty will do anything to pursue his nutty dream. Anything. He is shameless. He is sort of charming — though a lot less charming, I think, than the film and Chalamet believe him to be. He is much more than determined: He is obsessive in his goal.

And this, along with the movie's non-stop forward momentum, is the biggest problem. Despite Chalamet's fundamental appeal, despite the addition of prosthetic makeup to give him a face full of acne scars, despite his presence in every single scene, there's only so much he can do with a character who has such little concern for the well-being of anyone else. After a while, Marty Mauser seems more like a sociopath than a dreamer, and it strains belief that anyone who crosses his path once would ever want to cross it again.

This is a character who begins by making some questionable choices, moves on to making bad choices, progresses to making awful choices, and ends up making breathtakingly horrifying choices — armed robbery, extortion, and worse. At first, we can forgive and even find appeal in his quirky ambition, but by the time he leaves a pregnant woman who has been shot in order to make a flight, it's hard to work up any sort of sympathy. Others may find him endlessly ingratiating, but I developed a certain antipathy toward Marty that diminished my enjoyment of the movie's strengths.

Those include a surprisingly strong performance by Gwyneth Paltrow as the actress who might relate to Marty a little more than he could ever suspect; and Odessa A'zion, who really excels despite being given the thankless task of standing by Marty no matter what. No matter what.

As it moves from its opening scenes of desire, ambition and talent into car chases, gunfights and explosions, Marty Supreme wears down the audience. Even climactic table-tennis showdown (remember what I said about sounding silly?) loses some of its tension because, by that time, the whole movie has just worn viewers down. It's like being out with that coked-up friend at 3:30 in the morning; after a while, you just want to scream, "Enough already."

Viewer note: Marty Supreme contains distressing scenes of harm to a pet.

Viewed January 6, 2026 — AMC Burbank 8

1545

"No Other Choice"

  ☆☆☆½ 

In the endlessly fascinating, book-length interview between Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut, Hitchcock says of his work in Psycho: "You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another; you keep him as far as possible from what's actually going to happen." Hitchcock would have delighted in Park Chan-wook's No Other Choice.

The movie is based on an English-language novel called The Ax, which has been filmed twice before and was written 30 years ago, but it's easy to see why its story keeps attracting filmmakers. The similarly themed Michael Caine movie A Shock to the System comes to mind, too, because all three imagine the lengths people — well, let's be clear about this: men — will go to when they lose their jobs.

No Other Choice reimagines the story for South Korea, setting it not just in the present but, very specifically now, in this particular moment. It's rendered so perfectly that when the children of Yoo Man-soo, the man who's let go from his 25-year job at the start of the movie, hear that the household needs to take austerity measures, the news that hits them hardest is that they need to cancel Netflix.

They'll also need to get rid of the dogs. Sell the house. Change their lives. And it's all too much for Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun of Squid Games) and his wife Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin). They're knocked for a loop by the news. 

Man-soo's career has hardly been as a standard businessman; his whole career has been built in producing specialized paper. In the AI-driven, electronic age, paper just isn't what it used to be. (Though when the film starts listing all the different kinds of paper the world still uses, it's a little dizzying.) Paths are closed to fiftysomething Man-soo. The industry just doesn't have a need for him.

It isn't so much that Man-soo and a huge number of his co-workers find themselves unemployed that's the problem, one character says. It's how they're handling it. 

The good news is that there are still job openings. But they're few and far between. They're the kind of jobs people like Man-soo might casually say that they'd kill for. Which is what Man-soo does. The film's setup isn't the surprise. The surprise is what happens when he gets determined to follow through. Another Hitchcock quote comes to mind: "One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life."

So, even while Man-soo considers who he might need to target and the lengths he'll need to go to for that job opportunity, not much goes to plan. There wouldn't be much suspense if it did. And suspense is what Park Chan-wook does best: From a living room skirmish that gets massively out of hand to a decision about how to dispose of a body, No Other Choice keeps the audience both squirming and uncertain of what might happen next.

But somewhere along the line, the film's many subplots become a little too hard to track. No Other Choice loses some steam as it brings in detectives who may or may not suspect Man-soo. Their presence complicates matters just when things should become more clear, while motives and key developments get just a little too murky. Even in its lesser moments, though, there's a huge saving grace: Park is a consummate filmmaker.

There are visuals in No Other Choice that are downright stunning, and one scene of a man and a woman talking to each other on a mobile phone — hardly the stuff of cinematic innovation — becomes an incredible visual moment, one in which characters, their motivations, their culpability and their desires all intersect while keeping the dialogue simple and mundane.

It's a film of visual wonders, a movie that conveys its emotion through the use of pure cinema, evoking the best of Hitchcock while cementing Park as one of the all-time great cinema technicians, even in service to a story that could have been just a bit tighter.

Viewed January 3, 2026 — Alamo Drafthouse L.A.

1830