"The Musical"

☆☆☆

If Alfred Hitchcock had directed The Bad News Bears or School of Rock, the result might have looked a little bit like The Musical, a small, independent comedy with some pretty big ambitions.

It's got a considerable pedigree. With backing from the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute, director Giselle Bonilla and writer Alexander Heller have created exactly the kind of small indie movie that cinephiles on social media are lamenting don't exist anymore. Subject matter aside (we'll get to that in a moment), it's a movie that could have been made in the indie-crazy 1990s, and just the fact that it exists is a wonderful reminder that the movie industry is still chugging along.

Will Brill stars as Doug Leibowitz, a sad-sack middle-school drama teacher who is subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune everywhere he turns. He's been dumped by fellow teacher Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), who he thinks he might still be dating. But Abigail has started seeing the school's odious, unctuous Principal Brady (Rob Lowe). He keeps applying for fellowships and keeps getting turned down. Life is not cooperating with "Mr. L.," as his kids call him.

Principal Brady is hoping to get the school a prestigious honor. The review committee will be visiting soon — coinciding with this year's play. Doug has selected West Side Story.

But he's changed his mind. He sees the play as an opportunity to humiliate Doug while persuading those hoity-toity review committees that he can write something different. What he chooses is ridiculous — a musical of his own creation called 9/11. Clearly the 12-year-old kids he's directing in it have little concept of what they're doing.

The first two-thirds of The Musical are both cringe-worthy and funny. The movie finds and sustains a black-comedy tone not unlike Throw Momma from the Train, which was even more directly inspired by Hitchcock.

The best thing about The Musical and Bonilla's vision is how it adopts the language of Hitchcock's films, as well as their sound. The movie has a great visual dynamic, and is framed and shaped in ways that feel very unlike most modern films. What's more, the score by Matteo Nossa adopts the rhythm and mood of Bernard Herrmann's best Hitchcock scores, especially Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest. For cinephiles, these moments are fun to watch and fun to hear.

Yet, just when The Musical should be taking its biggest and most audacious risks, it pulls punches. We see precious little of the 9/11 musical itself, and if it contains any music beyond a hip-hop song and Enigma's weirdly mismatched Return to Innocence, we never hear it.

That's the real problem: the very thing we came for is missing. We don't get the performance, we don't get to see what it's all building up to, instead of snatches. There's no A Taste for Love (from Forgetting Sarah Marshall) or Songbird! (from Death Becomes Her). Sure, there's the issue of budget, but it would be fun to hear something. The little snippets we get of the kids pretending to be Rudy Giuliani, Osama bin Laden, or, in one of the movie's best sight gags, George W. Bush only begin to show us what we're missing.

There's a lot going on in The Musical that makes it worthwhile, and some real laughs from Brill's exasperated, put-upon Doug, but its lack of an actual musical that would help it live up to its title makes it fall just a little short of recommended.

Viewed September 19, 2023 — AMC Universal 16

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"Coyote vs. Acme"

 ☆☆☆½

Had it been made a generation ago, Coyote vs. Acme would have been hailed as a visionary masterpiece, a film of technical innovation and ingenuity. But since Who Framed Roger Rabbit got there first 38 years ago, Coyote vs. Acme can't claim high ground. That leaves the question of whether it works on its own, as a clever satirical comedy, and it mostly, but not completely, does.

What happened to Coyote vs. Acme on the way from its origins as a New Yorker magazine article — a sly spoof on the ridiculousness of corporate legalese — to a movie released by a tiny company called Ketchup Entertainment is strange and convoluted. It's stupid and unbelievable. It would have made a great cartoon.

In a nutshell, you probably know, Coyote vs. Acme was deemed a financial liability for the studio that produced it, Warner Bros., taken as a tax write-off, and shelved. For a couple of years, it sat, completely made and completely unseen. Now, little Ketchup has managed to get it into movie theaters.

Is it worth the wait? Maybe. Is it worth all the legal hand-wringing? Absolutely not. It's a fun, silly, weird, slightly overlong blend of animation and live-action, in which the long-suffering Coyote finally has it up to here with exploding, malfunctioning, injury-causing Acme products. You know, the ones he uses to try to capture, kill and eat the Road Runner, who only wants to speed through the desert going beep beep. (Or, as many fans insist, meep meep.)

Coyote, let's be honest, isn't a nice guy. Never has been. But the point of the cartoons is that nobody, even someone who wants to catch, slaughter and consume a little desert bird, deserves all that pain and torture. It's fun to see him hurt because he's trying to do such an awful thing. Then again, he's trying to do it because he's hungry. Really hungry.

Coyote, then, is a bit of an anti-hero. We want to see him succeed, but maybe not really. In Coyote vs. Acme, he enlists the help of a human lawyer Kevin Avery (there are lots of inside jokes for Looney Tunes fans), who sues Acme all the time for a few lousy bucks. But Coyote wants more. Much more. And soon the cartoon and the human are uncovering a vast conspiracy by Acme to do awful things to cartoons.

Yes, it's a lot like Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There's even a scene where the human and cartoon characters enter a tunnel. It doesn't have Roger Rabbit's visual wit or satirical intelligence, but it's still pretty good. When it finally gets to the courtroom, things bog down, and there's a very strange decision by the writers and director to make a sweet, popular and mostly (but not always) innocent character into a genuine bad guy. 

Nonetheless, fans of Looney Tunes and cartoons as a whole will have a great time; people who grew up with Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies always on in the background will also enjoy this. Animation purists may be on the fence, since it takes liberties with a lot.

But it's inarguably entertaining, Will Forte brings humor and intelligence to his work as Kevin, and it's all  visually splendid and just funny enough. At times barely maybe, but it is good-humored and good-natured enough to be consistently entertaining while offering a wonderfully sly little wink-and-nod to what's happening in the world today. 

Viewed September 10, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"Tony"

☆☆☆☆☆

An unusually strong year for movies continues with Tony, a highly fictionalized account of Anthony Bourdain's formative years before he dropped out of Vassar to attend the Culinary Institute of America. Tony could easily have turned into hagiography or, worse, perhaps, into a boring recitation of facts, but instead manages to become one of the most surprising and best movies of 2026.

Tony begins with a telling quote from Bourdain's own Kitchen Confidential: "I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking."

The promise of that title card may seem a big promise to fulfill, and a challenging one. The movie, directed by Matt Johnson, rises to that challenge by presenting us with teenaged Tony Bourdain played by Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as every bit as narcissistic and thoughtless as the real Bourdain suggested. 

He's remarkably confident, as maybe a lot of intelligent 19-year-olds are, and despite all evidence to the contrary, he is certain he is going to be the recipient of a novel-writing fellowship. When he doesn't, he steals from his parents and runs off to Provincetown, where he plans to find and woo a girl who wants nothing to do with him.

But crude, loud-mouthed Tony doesn't get much of a welcome in Cape Cod, and it's not long before he's sporting a black eye, broke and stuck. It's here that the unexpected theme of Tony kicks in, and it's got nothing to do with believing in yourself, or making your own way, or having courage — there's something deeper and richer at play.

On one level, Tony watches a young man discover who he is going to become, through a series of incidents that seems both natural and implausible — much like life is for many of us. Tony winds up a dishwasher in a local seafood joint that most people write off as a kind of fast food. It's run by a chef (Antonio Banderas), who would not like Tony much if he thought about him at all, which he doesn't. One of Tony's co-workers is Sal (Leo Woodall), who's no good for anyone, but he's magnetic and cheerful and impossible to resist. And slowly, that girl, Nancy (Emilia Jones) takes notice of Tony.

Little by little, life begins to happen to Tony, and the movie embraces — openly and sweetly — its central thesis: that "providence" is real, that if you look closely, what's happening to you isn't just what's happening to you, but is your life taking shape.

As someone who has never seen an episode of Bourdain's shows or read Kitchen Confidential, I walked into Tony with no awareness at all of its subject, intrigued only by a confident trailer. Though it could so easily have been, this isn't a move made only for Bourdain's fans. It is, in the best possible way, the "buildings-roman," as over-confident Tony repeatedly mispronounces bildungsroman. It's a coming-of-age story that happens to be about someone who became famous and wealthy — but the film, to its credit, never once mentions that.

It succeeds on the strength of its four remarkable central performances — Sessa, Woodall, Jones and Banderas, each of whom creates a rich and vibrant character, the kind of people you can imagine having full and interesting lives when they aren't on camera. Director Johnson, working from a screenplay he wrote with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, finds real joy in his storytelling, even in its darker moments.

In Tony, he's taken the ingredients of a movie that could have been obvious, rote and endlessly reverential to its subject and instead created a rich and varied repast that's unexpectedly warm, satisfying and nourishing.

Viewed August 29, 2026 — AMC Topanga

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