Week Ending 11/28/25

This thing holds up. Not just as an "in-context" offering either. Because the issues most people seem to focus on now aren't actually a matter of political correctness since James L. Brooks and Mark Andrus refuse to pretend that any of the horrible things Melvin says are just for the joke.

They speak to this misanthropic character's flaws and our impulse (sometimes rightfully so) to ignore and/or reject people without fully understanding why they act the way they do. The reactions to him by others and his reaction to those responses both confirm his objective foulness and, perhaps, his guilt-stricken desire to do better. I therefore think your enjoyment depends more on whether you're a romantic or cynic.

Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt earn their Oscars. Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr., and Shirley Knight are on par with them too. But how crazy is this cast beyond just the principals? "House" alums Peter Jacobson and Lisa Edelstein as the couple Melvin berates with antisemitism. Jamie Kennedy as Skeet Ulrich's hustler friend. I didn't even notice Maya Rudolph, so that credit had me wanting to rewind and find her.

Then there are all the filmmaker cameos too. Shane Black as the diner manager (where Missi Pyle and Wood Harris also work), Lawrence Kasdan as Melvin's uncompromising psychiatrist, and Todd Solondz with some immaculately awkward physical comedy while silently dealing with Hunt invading his space on the bus as she waves goodbye to her son.

It's a bona fide classic that neither talks down to its audience nor its characters. I probably still would have gone with Titanic in Best Picture and Good Will Hunting in Best Original Screenplay too, though.

8/10

It's funny that so many people think Guillermo del Toro made Jacob Elordi's Wretch "too sympathetic" as though he changed what Mary Shelley wrote rather than chose it precisely because it already aligned with his sensibilities. It's funnier still because the opening scene on the ice shows Victor Frankenstein's creation ripping sailors apart despite only ever killing members of his creator's family in the novel. If anything, del Toro made him more monstrous than ever.

This bloodshed gave me pause as far as what I was about to witness and the first chapter did not assuage that trepidation considering it was more an adaptation of James Whale's 1931 film than the source novel. I get it, though. Audiences want to see the Wretch come to life in a giant tower. They want to see the horror icon that pop culture has turned the victim into instead of reckoning with the true monster: the man who forced him to live in a world that would never accept him.

Thankfully, the second chapter does go back to the text. The filmmaker has thus provided the best of both worlds while still adhering to the morality tale at the center of Shelley's work. Yes, the desire to pass down the Wretch's pain as an inheritance of fathers beating sons is an oversimplification that undercuts the idea of humanity collectively teaching him hate, but it does work in the context of brevity. So too does having Oscar Isaac's Victor and the Wretch meet on the ship to personally tell its captain (and us) their respective tales.

This way del Toro can mirror their paths via his climactic apex of tragic deaths and distill good (love) and evil (hubris) down to a manageable number of characters while still adding new ones (Christoph Waltz) to reinforce his motifs. Elordi steals the show and proves his casting was about more than just the utility of his size. The whole looks amazing. And the creature design is so much closer to what I envisioned reading than the version adopted for Halloween costumes.

Beyond giving us a faithful adaptation via a miniseries, I'm not sure you could do better justice to Shelley's themes or the character's subsequent legacy than this.

8/10

Why is everyone being so mean to Linda (Rose Byrne)? Her husband (Christian Slater) calls her while he's away for two months captaining a sea vessel just to tell her that her job as a therapist isn't hard and he'd love to switch places to struggle with work and their sick daughter instead. Her child (Delaney Quinn) shrilly screams about everything like it will kill her and demands Linda hold her hand to walk two feet. Her therapist (Conan O'Brien) refuses to answer basic questions. And strangers all but tell her she's a terrible human being.

Why? Because that's what Linda believes she deserves. That's what she needs to hear to keep hating herself for everything that's gone wrong. Everything she has no control over. Every literal and figurative hole forming beneath her feet and above her head to make it so she cannot breathe long enough to calm down let alone sleep. Everything that she tells her own patients (yes, she's a therapist too) isn't real. Linda knows what's wrong and what must be done, but that doesn't mean she can just flip a switch and do it.

We can't therefore assume the filter through which we see If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is reality when writer/director Mary Bronstein is constantly jerking her lead character awake when she isn't even sleeping. It's an unnerving technique both in its surprising visual jolt and its ability to make us question if Linda has been asleep this whole time. While I wondered this fact in a literal sense for a good portion of the film, however, my suspicions soon moved to the metaphorical. She is physically present in every frame, but she's definitely not all there.

Everything is heightened as a result. Not in a way that positions Linda as being crazy, though. There's truth to the chaos, cacophony, and frustration. Like when your anxiety is so high you find yourself overreacting to things that bother you. Small things start to feel like big things. Big things become impossible to even fathom let alone problem solve. And you can't escape the sensory echoes that bounce around your body to simultaneously keep you on high alert for the next thing coming and stuck in a shame spiral thinking about the prior one.

This state of tension is where Linda lives and it's where the film remains for the duration as her world implodes. Bronstein operates in mirrors—the shattered and stacked shards within the uninhabitable bedroom that was flooded with water and asbestos from a ceiling cave-in as well as the parallels between what her character is experiencing and the people around her. Caroline's (Danielle Macdonald) desire to escape her own child's issues? Stephen's (Daniel Zolghadri) forbidden patient/therapist attraction? Linda is stuck in the same patterns.

While she still has the wherewithal to talk them through their issues, she refuses to do the work for herself. Linda becomes her own therapist's worst nightmare. She avoids the doctor (Bronstein) trying to help her work through the mental fatigue of caring for her sick child. And she lashes out at those who act as entitled and superior as she does to others (see the motel attendant, parking attendant, etc.). Linda cannot be alone, but she never feels more alone than those moments when she's forced to be by her daughter's side.

Cue the alcohol and drugs to help her dissociate. Cue the bad decisions like befriending A$AP Rocky's James to score narcotics and have someone around she can treat like crap since she has no real connection to him beyond that use. Cue the self-destructive impulse to blow everything up whether it be her own wellbeing, her colleagues' trust, or her daughter's therapy. What will make her feel better right now regardless of its impact on others? What will make all the noise and doubt and guilt go away?

The answer is, of course, nothing, and Bronstein never shies away from proving it by putting Linda in an ever-worsening state of sanity. And just like we laugh at horror films to relieve our stress, we laugh at these scenarios on-screen too. Bronstein wants us to have this reaction. She intentionally sprinkles dark comedy into the soul-crushing drama so that we understand Linda's irritation. The way the men all act. The annoyance born from every one of Quinn's line readings. Byrne's deer-in-headlights reaction when caught in a lie.

It's an intense ride that won't be easily shaken for those who can't relate to Linda's descent let alone those who do. A large portion of that is due to Byrne's tour-de-force performance, but also credit Bronstein's aesthetic decision to never show Quinn's face. By pushing the child to the fringes, we can more easily absorb into Linda's emotional state. We begin to despise her and want to escape her grip too. Because that's how this works. Our pain inevitably dehumanizes everyone else. Not only won't they help us, their mere presence makes it so much worse.

8/10

Twenty-one years after co-writing/directing recent Criterion Collection title Take Out with Sean Baker, Shih-Ching Tsou has released her solo directorial debut in Left-Handed Girl. The idea was planted way back then after she told the Oscar-winning filmmaker about the time her grandfather told her not to use her left hand anymore because it did the work of the Devil. The two were back in Taipei a few years later to complete a first draft, but it wasn't until premiering Red Rocket at Cannes in 2021 (with Tsou producing) that they finally secured financing.

There's a lot going in with the film as it centers a trio of women upon their return to the city after having lived the past decade-plus in the countryside. Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai) is looking to start over by opening a noodle stand in the night market as a means to get back on her feet after paying off the debts of her ex-husband once he ran away. The hope is for her college-aged daughter I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma) to help, but their relationship is rocky at best. She'd rather work elsewhere and make her own money to do as she pleases.

That leaves little I-Jing (Nina Ye). She spends her days in school and nights at the market serving plates for her mother and running amok while befriending every other merchant in the area. They all know her by name and watch out for her knowing Shu-Fen is busy at work herself. Johnny (Teng-Hui Huang), at the next stand over, even recruits the young girl to help pitch his latest "miracle" product akin to late-night infomercials on TV. Everything is going well until a phone call brings added clarity to their familial friction.

Because it's not just Shu-Fen and I-Ann who struggle to get-along. It's also Shu-Fen and her own mother (Xin-Yan Chao). Money is the main issue between them, so Shu-Fen's ex-husband proves a big part of it too. We sense the disappointment each mother holds for her respective daughter and the not so legal ways in which they all attempt to get by financially—more cause for none of them to really have any legs to stand on when chastising the other. And there's I-Jing listening with curiosity yet being told to stay quiet when the adults are talking.

She becomes lost in the chaos—a truth that initially allows her to simply have fun without needing to worry about the drama surrounding her. Things inevitably change, however, when the women become so busy that I-Jing is forced to spend time with her antiquated grandfather (Akio Chen). This man is so stuck in his ways that he forbids his granddaughter from using her left hand so as not to let the Devil in. But his refusal to contextualize why fosters the opposite result. He teaches I-Jing that deeds done by her left hand aren't her responsibility.

This is a child who needs a watchful eye at a moment when sister, mother, and grandmother are too busy trying to carve their own slice of joy within a world beating them down. I-Jing's ignorance to her grandfather's rule therefore turns her into a rather successful thief insofar as letting her left hand do the dirty work so her conscience remains clear. Except, of course, that the adult talk about money and commerce everyone presumes she ignores ensures her family's stress is projected onto her too. Maybe it's all her Devil's hand's fault.

What at first seemed way too many moving parts that split our attention between the four main women on-screen to the whole's detriment does eventually gain clarity and purpose as everyone converges at Grandma's sixtieth birthday celebration. We have a much better sense of the culture where it comes to financial responsibility and inheritance by then. I-Jing's thievery leads to a crucial act of fate. And the impending revelation of a secret (or two) finally gives shape to the numerous strains of animosity shared between the characters.

It's only when everything is aired out that Shu-Fen and I-Ann can appreciate why they both made the choices they did. The unspoken frustration and anger that caused the latter to act out and the former to feel defeated become two sides of the same coin that only served to hurt themselves rather than each other. And the wider the chasm got between them, the farther away I-Jing was pushed. There are a couple moments where the child's independence almost leads to grave tragedy before inadvertently saving the day. All because they refuse to be vulnerable.

That's the lesson in the end. Tradition and responsibility are complex concepts and our actions don't occur in a vacuum. They affect everyone else too whether Shu-Fen's loyalty to an undeserving man or sisters resigning themselves to the fact the only money they'll ever see from their parents is for their weddings if a brother stands to inherit the rest or a child being exposed to death, accidents, and crime without the tools to understand it. Who we are should mean more than who we "should be." Mistakes happen. It's how you respond that matters.

8/10

One might think my initial reaction to the first twenty minutes of this film being a thirty-year exposition dump would be regret for having just rewatched the fourteen-plus hours it recapped. But the opposite is true. It actually made me happy because I knew that level of narrative gymnastics and overly serious line readings all but guaranteed I'd leave Final Reckoning knowing it couldn’t live up to the journey preceding it.

The whole film falls prey to many of the same pitfalls that hamstrung No Time to Die. The same wrong lesson that Hollywood learned from Marvel before its own Cinematic Universe proved itself unsustainable in its desire to hold audiences hostage to its every whim. The Mission: Impossible franchise is fun because of the characters, action, slapstick, and chaos. Why would you then turn that chaos into a grand messianic tapestry that only undercuts any suspense it hopes to build by designating everything from Part III onwards was a plan rather than good moral people who love each other risking their lives for humanity?

The result is the series' second weakest entry, albeit still entertaining enough to warrant sitting through its three-hour bowtie (unlike Part II, regardless of people trying to say otherwise). How they wink back to the Rabbit's Foot is insane. How they extend the "Person of Interest" theft from Dead Reckoning only confirms its inferiority. And what is the sense behind that climactic biplane fight? Gabriel has cracked so badly that he doesn't care he'll be dead before he can take control of The Entity? Ethan can't connect the poison pill before discovering whether he'll survive even though he verbally admitted he was expendable? No suspense at all.

Tramell Tillman and Katy O'Brian are the MVPs. So much fun. Bringing back another surprise OG cast member for closure was a fantastic touch while connecting a current member to an OG in the eleventh hour was not. And was it just me or was that shot at the end panning up to the parachute reveal an intentional nod to the Bad Robot logo animation?

6/10

If only this film had come out in 2016, maybe the free exposure would have kept Toys "R" Us stores open in the US. I give Derek Cianfrance all the credit in the world for not making one Geoffrey the Giraffe joke despite the lead character and his love interest's ex both being named Jeff.

It's an insane story with an objectively fascinating antihero. He really had too big of a heart to be a successful criminal. Couldn't leave his kids. Couldn't allow bullies to win. And ultimately let love delude him into believing those he hurt might let him off the hook. It would be an easier sell if he acted out of hubris, but he was just a too-smart-for-his-own-good dude who so desperately wanted to give his family everything that he never realized they only wanted him.

A fun departure for Cianfrance despite still staying true to his emotional drama ethos. I'm a sucker for a director's former cast members popping up via small roles in their latest films, so seeing Emory Cohen and Ben Mendelsohn brought a smile to my face. And Channing Tatum is very, very good. Always great in comedies, but he really nails the sorrowful pain here too.

7/10