"Pillion"

 ☆☆☆☆

Pillion does something so rare in movies it's easy not to notice how special it is: It presents us with a relationship that we don't understand, maybe aren't meant to understand, and it never once judges anyone in the movie for the choices they make and the actions they take. Pillion wants us only to see two lives that intersect, and we do.

A "pillion," for those, like me, who don't know, is the word for the back seat on a motorcycle. It's also used to refer to the submissive partner in a BDSM relationship. It takes on both meanings in Pillion, and from that you might assume the movie is sort of the gay equivalent of Fifty Shades of Gray. But you'd be wrong.

Whether Pillion correctly represents a BDSM relationship is better left to those with more knowledge. What it clearly depicts is a consensual, intentional relationship between two people with specific, different needs that are sometimes complementary and sometimes at cross-purposes. To that end, Pillion is about as honest a mainstream film as could be made about two men who enter into a relationship the outside world is not meant to understand. They might not even understand it.

One of the men, Colin, is meek and gentle. He sings in a barbershop quartet and lives with his parents. His mother is dying. She would like to see him happy before she goes. On Christmas Eve, the pub where Colin sometimes sings is visited by gay bikers. They catch Colin's eye. One of them, a man named Ray, catches everyone's eye. Ray knows it. He gives Colin his phone number with instructions to meet him the next night. Colin's family is even more excited (and anxious) than he is.

It would be unfair to reveal exactly what happens next, but it's worth pointing out here that Pillion is not a movie that shies away from depicting sex between men. There are moments it comes close to matching the extra-steamy, extra-nude Stranger by the Lake for its unblinking depictions.

Colin winds up in a relationship with Ray. Since Ray is played by the impossibly tall and good-looking and magnetic Alexander Skarsgård, and since Colin is played by Harry Melling, who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies, this does not seem to be, at least on the surface, a relationship of equals.

Nor is it meant to be. Ray is a taciturn, demanding, dominant and secretive man. Colin is sweet and shy and, he comes to realize, has "an aptitude for devotion." The movie is written and directed by Harry Lighton in an incredibly assured and impressive debut, and based on a novel called "Box Hill" by Adam Mars-Jones, and it never stops to question why Colin agrees to his situation. For that matter, it never pauses to investigate why Ray turns to Colin, when he could have his choice of any man and likely any woman he wants. (Indeed, his chest bears cryptic tattoos of women's names.)

Pillion doesn't care about the why. Neither, it's worth considering, does love or attraction. "Why did they end up together?" you may have asked yourself a hundred times about couples you've known, and this is just another one of those couples.

Pillion wants to get at some deeper questions about love and commitment, about the way we open up to others, and often how we refuse to do exactly that. As the movie progresses, Colin and Ray just make sense together, though it's sense that not everyone can comprehend. A wonderful scene in which Colin's mother (Lesley Sharp) expresses her strong reservations is a high point — and sets the film spinning into a different, altogether unexpected direction that refines and redefines everything that's come before.

While it plays as a light and breezy, if sometimes inexplicable, sort of gay rom-com for two-thirds of its running time, it moves into a third act that surprises with its depth of perception and its willingness to stretch its characters into the most uncomfortable places. Both Skarsgård and Melling inhabit their characters so fully that even when we don't understand them, even when we don't like them, we can't wait to see what they do next. And what they do turns out to be surprising and memorable.

Pillion won't be for everybody, but for those it is for, it's going to be hard to forget.

Viewed February 18, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

1310

"Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie"

 ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie puts me in a bind. I saw it as part of AMC's "Screen Unseen" series, which presents movies without giving away the title. The auditorium was crowded, and based on the scant hints provided by the AMC listing, I went in anticipating a low-budget horror film coming out soon.

When the Neon studio logo hit the screen, a little buzz went through the audience. Maybe others had expected that horror movie, too. I settled in, not sure at all what to expect.

The lights came up an hour and 40 minutes later, and I was elated. A movie I had never even heard of, about which I knew nothing at all, had left me feeling like the weight of the world had just lifted off of me. I was smiling. Others were, too. In the lobby, people were still laughing, talking to others, wondering if what we had just experienced was actually real — could a movie actually make people feel this good?

But here's the thing: If I tell you any more, I'll rob you of the experience to walk into this movie utterly unprepared.

Please, if you stumble across this review somehow and you get the urge to look up the title online, please don't. If you are wondering if the movie is for you, it is. As long as you're an adult in reasonably good humor who can handle a few surprises, this is the movie you need to see.

Yes. You need to see it.

It's not fair to heap such a burden on to a movie this wonderful, but I'm going to do it anyway: This movie is an antidote for everything else you read, hear, see, every toxic online conversation you take part in, every anger-inducing headline.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie clicks into place almost immediately. You needn't know anything about the movie (I didn't, and you shouldn't, either) to more or less instantly get what you're seeing. But what you're seeing in the first few minutes, the things that make you laugh right from the first scene, are only the beginning of it.

This movie will make you smile. It will make you feel a little less lonely, a little less beleaguered, and a lot sillier. And that's all I'll say.

Except one more thing:

I think Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie may be the first great movie of 2026. I think it actually might be something like a masterpiece.

Time will tell.

But don't take my word for it. Go see it. Don't research it. Just see it. I am certainly you will be glad you did.

Viewed February 9, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

1900

"Send Help"

  ☆☆☆½ 

Send Help makes you feel at least a little sorry for Dylan O'Brien. He's a terrific actor. He was jaw-droppingly good in the little-seen and strongly recommend Twinless, and he's fantastically effective in Sam Raimi's new gory, funny and exciting thriller.

It's worth taking a few moments to appreciate what he does here: namely, to play someone so thoroughly unredeemable that every time he steps into the frame, the audience should boo and hiss and cringe. O'Brien makes anyone seeing Send Help do something else, something harder. When his character, a nepo baby CEO named Bradley Preston, appears for the first time and even when he appears for the last time, we're repulsed because we know exactly who he is.

O'Brien and Raimi lean into that familiarity. They know we want to smack him. And O'Brien doesn't even try to find something redeemable. Still, he's so pathetic, so utterly incapable of doing anything at all that he we don't care about his fate. After his private plane crashes somewhere in the Gulf of Thailand, and all but two people perish, Bradley can die, as far as we're concerned. He's hateful.

But, he's the boss of Linda Liddle from strategy and planning. And she cares what happens to him. And since Linda Liddle from strategy and planning is played by Rachel McAdams, we kind of care, too. Because McAdams does something far more extraordinary than even O'Brien in this film, which by and large is a two-hander: She walks away with it. There hasn't really been a role or a performance like this since Kathy Bates won the Oscar for Misery, and, no disrespect to Bates, McAdams might be even better as a put-upon, forgotten woman who blends into the background in the real world ... but comes into her own when isolated with a helpless man.

Send Help may not do anything particularly unique with the concept of opposites stranded on a desert island. But where Anne Heche and Harrison Ford foundered in Six Days Seven Nights, and where Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis were wise enough not to give Cast Away a supporting character who wasn't a volleyball, Send Help makes it all work.

That it feels effortless comes in no small part from the two leads — and, did I mention, especially McAdams? If O'Brien has the harder task of not really changing much at all from the start of the movie to the end (though there are moments where we do wonder if we're wrong about him), McAdams plays a fun and fantastic range here. Raimi tries a little too hard, maybe, to make her look unattractive, adding in facial moles and warts, for instance, and dressing her in the frumpiest of clothes, but there's no hiding what McAdams is or what she will become.

Her character is presented (rather perfunctorily) as an obsessive fan of TV's Survivor, which is primarily used to help explain why she knows immediately, instinctively, what to do when they wind up on the island. Away from the things of man, Linda Liddell thrives. She finds her purpose.

The movie, meanwhile, finds plot strands from TV's Lost, from Survivor itself, and from 2022's audacious Triangle of Sadness, and very little happens that you probably can't guess. That doesn't make the movie any less entertaining.

What does distract and detract a bit are some visual effects shots that look so cheap and second-rate that it's hard to believe they're in a movie from a director of Raimi's stature. Some scenes in the movie look almost laughably phony, a glaring but ultimately minor irritation in a film that is otherwise massively entertaining.

Even if you see some of the plot points telegraphed almost from the start, Send Help is fun, exciting, entertaining — and impressively acted.

Viewed Feb. 7, 2026 — Alamo Drafthouse

1915

"Hamnet"

  ☆☆ 

"Keep your heart open," exhorts the poster for Hamnet, the wildly acclaimed, careful, quiet, and deeply earnest movie that almost everyone says will wring tears from your eyes with ruthless efficiency. I kept my heart open as best I could, and I waited. Nothing happened.

I admit I had been conditioned to respond this way to Hamnet by having read Maggie O'Farrell's novel, which left my eyes equally dry and my open heart equally unmoved. And frustrated. Why had the world responded so fully and extravagantly to both the novel and the film while I sat there stone-faced?

Look, I'm the kind of person who got weepy at the end of Sinners, who sobbed in the final moments of Train Dreams. I can be reduced to a blubbering fool by some movies, and will never forget the time I couldn't leave the theater after a screening of The Bridges of Madison County because I was shaking. I like movies, I like being moved by them, I can fully submit.

But Hamnet did nothing for me except make me marvel at all the ways this exquisitely shot, finely acted film uses every trick it has to manipulate its audience. I watched it the same way some people watch a magic trick, looking to see how it's done. Clearly, a lot of people believe in the magic of Hamnet.

Does it stem from the slow, quiet, anguished way the movie proceeds? This is a film that plays everything restrained mode until someone needs to cry, scream or yell, then it lets its actors — who are all, there's no denying it, excellent, especially Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal — go wild. It's like 3-D filmmaking, where the director waits for just the right moment to turn on the gimmick. Director Chloé Zhao knows how to wield her tools, that's for sure.

Is it the spare music score by Max Richter that waits until just the right moment to unleash his own wildly overused composition "On the Nature of Daylight"? That piece is the ultimate piece of sonic manipulation, and has been used over and over to wrench tears out of audiences, regardless of what's on screen. Hamnet uses it unashamedly, and it feels, at this point, any movie that uses it should be at least a little ashamed.

Is it the emotional simplicity of Hamnet's basic story? A mother watches one of her children die. That's it. That's really the heart of it. To both the movie and the novel, it seems almost irrelevant that the mother is the wife of William Shakespeare, and that the child's name is Hamnet, which both movie and book say right up front is interchangeable with Hamlet.

Is it the story's pointed focus on the mother, to the exclusion of the father — the one whose fame is the impetus for writing the story to begin with? In Hamnet, Shakespeare is a supporting player, at best, and he's absent for almost all of the story, though the film gives him a bit more to do than the novel, ostensibly because they've cast Mescal in the role, and he needs screen time.

The structure of the story, the meaning of the story, would not change at all if the mother were the wife of a farmer or janitor or accountant. It's not until the last few scenes that Shakespeare's Hamlet factor in to Hamnet, and when they do, the tearjerking revelation that comes could just have easily stemmed from the mother randomly seeing the play.

But this is the scene that, as I understand it, makes audiences weep. Leading up to it, we've seen scenes of torture and suffering, which are mercifully briefer in the movie than the are in the book, which seems to delight in describing the enormous pain the child is in. We've seen the mother in excruciating anguish. Her name is Agnes, rather than Anne as you've always believed Shakespeare's wife was named. There is an explanation for this, though it is never spoken in the movie version and only offered in an afterword to the novel.

In the movie, this climactic scene is one in which Agnes watches Hamlet being staged at the Old Globe Theatre, and although the play is about a prince of Denmark and his father, and is about murder and revenge and takes place in a castle and not in a forest (as the stage production's background oddly depicts), and though Agnes is presented as simple and uneducated, she is moved by the play.

She is so moved that she weeps in stunned, disbelieving silence, overcome by cathartic emotion, and this is when it seems everyone who sees Hamnet becomes inconsolable. Except me, I guess. Honestly, though, I tried. I really did.

Viewed January 25, 2026

SAG Screener

"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