Week Ending 12/26/25

Marty Supreme firmly cements the recent cinematic formula serving as Josh Safdie's oeuvre with or without brother Benny. I thought Uncut Gems was a more polished, cohesive evolution on Good Time and my initial reaction of Marty Supreme is that it's a remixed Uncut Gems with a purely unlikeable character to concoct a fate worse than death. It's enough to ensure its unquestioned success, but perhaps not enough to avoid the "familiar" label.

I love the idea of Safdie using a Marty Reisman book and his uncle's 1950s NYC table tennis scene tales to plant the seed of chaos that birthed this high-octane love letter to the moment, but there's too much happening. Yes, it conveniently meshes to give each insane cameo purpose (Tyler the Creator, Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara, Fred Hechinger, David Mamet, Penn Jillette, Isaac Mizrahi, etc.), but more as an exhilarating stunt than anything else.

That's great for a technical showcase (the ping pong is truly compelling), but I could only invest in Odessa A'zion's Rachel. Intentionally so. My genuine desire for Timothée Chalamet's Marty to fail is the point. This charismatic conman could truly sell a pair of shoes to an amputee while failing upwards on the backs of those willing to believe in him. But his power is fleeting. While he aspires to be Milton (Kevin O'Leary was a nice surprise), he's really another Kay.

It's captivating to watch a guy hustle his way towards a dream he's destined to sabotage, though. I don't think Chalamet is that guy for real, but I often thought about his SAG Awards speech while listening to Marty's ego talk. He channeled that confidence, dialed it to eleven, and might just earn an Oscar for the trouble.

7/10

The most telling part of Geeta Gandbhir's The Perfect Neighbor is that it's told almost completely via police cam footage. Through everything that occurred—and all of it pitted an entire community with corroborating stories against one woman dead-set on saying her version was the truth—Susan Lorincz never once set-up a security camera. Why? Because she wasn't actually scared? Maybe. I'd wager, however, that it was so she couldn't incriminate herself.

All that police cam footage also proves the most damning part of the film since it reveals how often officers were dispatched to deal with the same conflict over multiple years. They went so often that they started commiserating with the parents about Susan being crazy. They went so often that they knew exactly where she lived. And there's zero chance they didn't know she owned a gun. Where's the psychiatric hold? How about abuse of emergency services?

This is a well-told narrative "objectively" edited from first-hand documentation of an escalating situation with all the earmarks of ending in tragedy. Its "look at the Marion County police's job well done" eventually plays like copaganda on its road to justice, but the path to manslaughter remains critical. Because that "job" is proven yet again to be more about protecting property than saving lives via a refusal to believe white women are homicidal until after they commit homicide.

7/10

I like what Charlie Polinger is trying to do with The Plague (inspired by his own journals from when he attended a sports summer camp). To portray the social anxiety inherent to that transition between middle school and high school wherein friends groups dissolve and a desire to be popular starts overtaking many kids' hope to be themselves. Pick on the weirdo, earn cachet by initiating the taunts, and turn anyone who questions your power into a pariah too.

I do, however, wish he leaned further into the body horror of it all. Between the score and stylistic visual choices, he's obviously going for a nightmarish filter despite an immovable ambition to maintain the authenticity of the story's reality. I'd argue it's better to let the metaphor live rather than allude to its existence. The message gets lost when you try to straddle that line by giving audiences both simultaneously. It seeks to merely use genre trappings, not be a genre film.

Everett Blunck as the sensitive protagonist who literally finds out you can't be a "good Sith" and Kenny Rasmussen as the easy target of ridicule and abuse are both great, but my favorite performance of the whole is Kayo Martin as the ring-leading bully. Cruelty is easy. Apathetic indifference is not. His Jake is engaging in psychological warfare above just name-calling and incitement. That grinning ability to calmly converse with his victims is truly chilling stuff.

Conformity was the real plague all along.

7/10

An extremely memorable debut in its authentic handling of sensitive subject matter and narrative structure. For first-time filmmaker Eva Victor to give us where Agnes is today as a sort of unreliable litmus test of how she's doing sans context before rewinding to show just how far she's come from the worst day of her life proves a thought provoking approach to fear, guilt, and uncertainty that guarantees we stay emotionally invested throughout.

Sorry, Baby is a collection of moments—touchstones on its lead's road to recovery that never shy from their inherent awkwardness thanks to how careful Victor is in giving Agnes the autonomy to keep details of what happened private. It really helps the rougher (Kelly McCormack's Natasha's admission) and sweeter (John Carroll Lynch's Pete's ability to prove his distinction between "asshole" and "honest" correct) moments shine equally.

Because there's no right or wrong way for Agnes to move forward. Only the people she allows to remain in her life during those next steps. Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges are fantastic in those roles, the supporting cast embraces their characters' imperfections, and Victor delivers a quietly heartbreaking yet hopeful central performance that ties the innate drama of traumatic experiences to the unavoidable humor that comes from confronting them without concrete rules.

I really thought Hettienne Park's lawyer was coming back as a much bigger piece of the puzzle, but am glad she didn't because providing Agnes another deer-in-the-headlights voyeur to her pain would undercut the message. I do, however, hope Victor mirrored her profession elsewhere to force us to consider and dread their potential connection.

8/10

Having no reference point for who the Shakers were, I truly absorbed myself into the format by which Mona Fastvold pays tribute to their leader. She provides this self-proclaimed "second coming of Christ" a Biblical testament of her own that speaks to her conviction, compassion, and piety. Led by disciple Sister Mary's (Thomasin McKenzie) narration, we bear witness to Mother Ann Lee's (Amanda Seyfried) stewardship through the three distinct chapters of the church's life.

The Testament of Ann Lee finds itself constantly breaking into songs inspired by Shaker hymns and traveling through varying accounts of so-called miracles that helped secure her legend. Sometimes it's goofy (David Cale's fingertip being pulled by an invisible force). Sometimes horrifically tragic (the inevitable result of patriarchal zealots dismissing Lee as a witch). Sometimes keenly aware of how a series of lucky results can feel like divine intervention.

Seyfried is fantastic and McKenzie, Cale, and Lewis Pullman each shine beside her, but the film's real strength is Fastvold's direction. She's conducted a technical masterclass with gorgeous cinematography and even better editing that makes good on her mission to use Lee's "yearning for justice, transcendence, and communal grace" through therapeutic confession as a means of portraying her own artistic desire to "strive to create the impossible."

Stay through the credits for drawings of each Shaker church and their respective peak populations (as well as the combined peak and current total as of July 2025). I see the numbers as evidence of just how intrinsically bonded hate and power is to the religious salvation promised by a major church. And just how much humans truly love sex.

8/10

The Malick comparisons are apt where aesthetic is concerned, but something tells me forty minutes of Clifton Collins Jr. aren't on the cutting room floor a la Adrien Brody in The Thin Red Line. That's not to say Clint Bentley doesn't earn his praise for Train Dreams' beautifully powerful imagery and rumination on our place within the tapestry of life. Its vignetted fluidity just feels premeditated rather than discovered in the edit purely via gut instinct.

It's easy to get caught in its themes, though, considering we're experiencing a similar era of technological change and unchecked violence. I felt Robert's uncertainty and confusion. His sense of growing old prematurely and wondering if he is of a different world or has simply been passed by. Must he endure such incredible tragedy to help augment that loss of identity? No. But it gives Bentley and author Denis Johnson the necessary drama to inject profundity into an otherwise familiarly mundane existence.

That said, Joel Edgerton is amazing. Perhaps the best work of an already impressive career. His Robert breaking down in tears in front of Ashton Singer's Avery is a gut punch. His conversations with William H. Macy's Arn, John Diehl's Billy, and Kerry Condon's Claire (all three are wonderful) prove a balm for the soul and a reminder that death is both undefeated and a crucial piece to this puzzle we call life.

So, I get why many love the film and others think it hollow. I don't therefore mind finding myself stuck in the middle with the realization that its often shallow machinations do ultimately add up to a whole lot.

7/10

What if Logan Roy was Benjamin Netanyahu and he stole his amusement park idea from a Palestinian, buried the latter's entire community under snow for a winter wonderland section, and transformed its former inhabitants into exiled pariahs too fearsome to ever be accepted back? Well, you'd be the background plot to the latest hijinks-fueled investigation from Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde.

From animal metaphor commentary on American racism to animal metaphor commentary on global xenophobia, Disney has upped the ante with Zootopia 2 in ways that force me to stop giving this series the benefit of the doubt. Why? Well, it's two-fold:

One, we no longer live in a society where racism is deemed abhorrent as a matter of principle. The Vice President literally just said, "you don't have to apologize for being white anymore." to his Nazi constituents. Two, Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people is such a complex, generationally propagandized topic that some people will say Gary De'Snake is actually a Zionist reclaiming his ancestral home from Palestinians despite Gary being played by an Asian (Ke Huy Quan) and the Lynxleys having insane power, wealth, and control.

"Oh, now who's being racist?!"

Yes! Exactly! That's the problem with this franchise! The moment you stop just letting your anthropomorphic animals be cute-looking humanoids and focus on their specific stereotypical traits as a means of skewering the often very racist stereotypical traits of who they represent is the moment you start to perpetuate what you believe you're satirizing. You aren't creating distance from the taboo. You're just giving yourself cover to be racist.

So, come for the Coca-Cola bear bit, The Shining maze chase, and whatever other pop culture references are included and stay for the reductive geo-political one-state solution hinged upon a document of original ownership that is both a real-world impossibility and an example of the human demand for hierarchy that makes Apartheid possible in the first place.

"Jump scare!"

5/10