Archive for the ‘Drama’ Category
Tuesday, January 27th, 2026
F1 (advertised as F1® THE MOVIE) is a slick, well made, big budget car racing/Brad Pitt movie. Nothing more or less, really. It’s from Joseph Kosinski, director of TOP GUN: MAVERICK, and continues in the exploration of a stubborn, aging hot shot butting heads with, teaching, and then passing the torch to a younger generation, and it shoots race cars similar to how that movie shot fighter jets. You’re clearly looking at the actors inside actual fast moving cars, not just green screen, and that goes a long way. Of course, flying was more exciting.
Brad Pitt (CUTTING CLASS) plays Sonny Hayes, legendary bad boy racer who had a terrible crash in the ‘90s (when he had long blond hair) followed by a stint as a professional gambler and cab driver before his surprising comeback. In the opening scene he helps his old buddy Chip (Shea Whigham, NON-STOP) and his team win in Daytona, then leaves without taking the trophy. I think he’s living in a van when another old friend, Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO) tracks him down at the laundromat and asks for help with his racing team.
Rubén used to race against Sonny, now he wears incredible suits and owns the APXGP Formula One team, who are in last place and in danger of being sold by the board if they don’t win a Grand Prix. Of course Sonny refuses the call, then changes his mind and struts onto the track looking like the coolest dude anybody there ever saw. But they’re mostly not impressed. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: best picture nominees, Brad Pitt, car racing, Damson Idris, Ehren Kruger, Hans Zimmer, Javier Bardem, Joseph Kosinski, Kerry Condon, Samson Kayo, Sarah Niles, Shea Whigham
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Sport | 13 Comments »
Monday, January 26th, 2026
TRAIN DREAMS is the chillest and maybe artiest of this year’s best picture nominees. It was also nominated for best adapted screenplay (from the 2011 novella by Denis Johnson), best cinematography (Adolpho Veloso) and best original song (Nick Cave). If you never heard of it, it’s because it’s only on Netflix, and because it’s a peaceful, contemplative movie about the unremarkable life of a logger in Idaho. There’s a bit of THE TREE OF LIFE in it, but it’s not as slow or humorless as that might sound. I liked it in more than a “pretty good for homework” type of way.
It tells the story of Robert Grainier (the Master Gardener himself Joel Edgerton), who grows up an orphan in and around Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and doesn’t have much passion for anything until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, THE TEMPEST). They get married, buy an acre of land next to a river, build a cabin, have a daughter. He gets some work helping build a bridge for the Spokane International Railway but has a bad experience, then spends most of his life doing seasonal logging work, away from where he wants to be, and worrying he’s cursed. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alfred Hsing, best picture nominees, Brandon Lindsay, Cliff Bentley, Clifton Collins Jr., Denis Johnson, Felicity Jones, Greg Kwedar, Joel Edgerton, Kerry Condon, Nathaniel Arcand, Paul Schneider, Will Patton, William H. Macy
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 11 Comments »
Wednesday, January 14th, 2026
IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT is last year’s Palme d’Or winning film by Iranian writer/director Jafar Panahi (THE WHITE BALLOON, OFFSIDE). It’s a wrenching drama about ordinary people who were once political prisoners and suddenly stumble across a chance for some payback.
It does start with an accident, when a man (Ebrahim Azizi) driving with his wife (Afssaneh Najmabadi) and kid (Delnaz Najafi) at night hits one of the many stray dogs that roam the streets, damaging his car. He stops at a garage where one of the mechanics, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri, NO BEARS), perks up at the sound of his squeaking prosthetic leg. He clearly recognizes him.
The next day Vahid follows the guy. Watches him. It’s very tense. He’s circling around in his car. He has a shovel. He hits him with it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Iran, Jafar Panahi, Palme d'Or winner, revenge, Vahid Mobasseri
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 2 Comments »
Monday, January 12th, 2026
FREMONT (2023) is an odd, dry little indie film I came across. I guess if forced I’d have to classify it as a drama, just so nobody gets mad at me for it not being a laugh riot. But it’s not really heavy, kind of a strange undertone of sad and funny, which is why I liked it.
Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is an Afghan refugee in Fremont, California. She lives in the same building as some other Afghans, including one (Timur Nusratty) who won’t even acknowledge her. She says it’s because she “worked with the enemy” by being a translator for the U.S. Army. She did that for a visa, for a chance to get the fuck out of there, to get anywhere else. Not necessarily here.
She commutes to San Francisco to work at a small fortune cookie factory. “I thought it would be lovely to see Chinese people sometimes,” she explains. The process of how the cookies are made is also a pretty lovely thing to see in a movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anaita Wali Zada, Babak Jalali, Carolina Cavalli, Eddie Tang, Gregg Turkington, Hilda Schmelling, Jeremy Allen White
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, January 7th, 2026
Look, I’m not one of those people who brags about their ignorance like it’s some badge of working class authenticity. I’m mostly a smart guy, and would love to be smarter. But I’m honestly admitting here that I’m not all that qualified for the works of William Shakespeare. I’ve enjoyed some of the adaptations, mostly the more stylistically adventurous ones like TITUS or ROMEO + JULIET or even THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH. But the language (beautiful as it may be) is a real obstacle for me. I always struggle with following what anyone is talking about, and you mostly gotta know what they’re talking about to know what’s happening.
Even the ones I can get a grip on I barely retain memory of afterwards. Sometimes I can’t even remember if it’s Macbeth or Hamlet that has the Ghost Dad. I really have to go into my brain and do the following math: oh yeah, in THE NORTHMAN his name is Amleth, so that’s inspired by the same story that Hamlet is inspired by, so Hamlet is the one where his uncle killed his dad. And that was also the one that STRANGE BREW was riffing on and that had the Ghost Dad. Okay, got it. I know all about Hamlet.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amblin, Chloe Zhao, David Wilmot, Emily Watson, Jessie Buckley, Joe Alwyn, Maggie O'Farrell, Noah Jupe, Paul Mescal, William Shakespeare
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 15 Comments »
Monday, December 29th, 2025
SENTIMENTAL VALUE (Affeksjonsverdi) is the beginning of my awards season viewing ritual of seeing movies that I know almost nothing about except they’re supposedly good. It’s on all the lists of predicted best picture nominees, but also my friend Matt Lynch told me to see it, so I was planning to.
It’s from the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, who has been directing features for almost 20 years but the only one I’ve seen is 2021’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, which I enjoyed but did not review. This reunites him with that film’s star Renate Reinsve (who made her debut in his second film, OSLO, 31 AUGUST). It’s one of those director-actor combinations that works so well I assume they’ll make five or ten more.
The story centers around the Oslo home of the Borg family. In the opening scene, a narrator (Bente Børsum) describes it through the perspective of Reinsve’s character Nora, when she had to imagine a building’s feelings for a school assignment. It’s a poetic description of the personality of a house and its meaning to the people who spend their lives in it, multiple generations of the same family living and dying in the same rooms. I thought of Robert Zemeckis’ HERE in this sequence, with its match cuts between time periods, showing the same locations in the dress of entirely different eras. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anders Danielsen Lie, Andreas Stoltenberg Granerud, Elle Fanning, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Joachim Trier, Lars Varinger, Norway, Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgard
Posted in Reviews, Drama | 3 Comments »
Thursday, December 4th, 2025
CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT is a movie that I heard about last Christmas but it wasn’t on video yet. Some people were really flipping for it and that’s really all I knew about it, so I checked it out when I saw it was on blu-ray this week.
I think what they were responding to is that it’s very old school in many ways: beautiful cinematography, big ensemble cast of mostly unfamiliar faces who seem very natural, an emphasis on characters and moments over any sort of plot, a shockingly low amount of conflict. It’s about a huge family get-together and involves multiple age groups but the movie it most reminds me of is AMERICAN GRAFFITI. Probly not coincidentally the cast features a couple children of George Lucas’s friends (Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg).
Of course, that led to a horrifying realization that AMERICAN GRAFFITI was set 11 years before the time of its release, while this is set sometime in the aughts, so it’s more like 20 years ago, but doesn’t seem like it. The biggest differences are flip phones and one family still has a station wagon with faux-wood paneling. It kinda feels timeless though because the music is much older and the fashions aren’t very aggressive. It could almost be five years ago, or thirty, or forty. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carson Lund, Chris Lazzaro, Christmas, Elsie Fisher, Eric Berger, Francesca Scorsese, Gregg Turkington, Kevin Anton, Maria Dizzia, Matilda Fleming, Michael Cera, Sawyer Spielberg, Tony Savino, Tyler Taormina
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Drama | 6 Comments »
Monday, December 1st, 2025
BACURAU is a weird 2019 Brazilian film that I know my friend Charles recommended to me years ago. Udo Kier is in it, and his death reminded me to finally get around to seeing it. Only the next day did I realize that Kleber Mendonça Filho, who wrote and directed it with Juliano Dornelles, finally has a followup and it’s THE SECRET AGENT, which just came out and has been getting great reviews. So there’s another title added to my list to hopefully not take as long to get around to.
The title BACURAU refers to the setting, a fictional settlement in western Pernambuco. It’s “a few years from now” and things are pretty surreal. Protagonist Teresa (Bárbara Colen) has been away for some years, but she’s coming home for her grandmother’s funeral, riding in a water truck that runs over a bunch of empty coffins dumped on the road by a crash. Feels kinda poetic, but I don’t know what it would mean. Definitely ominous. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Barbara Colen, Brazil, Juliano Dornelles, Mendonca Filho, Sonia Braga, Thomas Aquino, Udo Kier
Posted in Reviews, Drama, I don't know | 8 Comments »
Thursday, November 20th, 2025
CHRISTY is a biopic of Christy Salters, once known as Christy Martin, a pioneer of women’s professional boxing, competing from 1989-2012. It’s a very effective movie that hits some of the pleasing notes you want out of a normal sports drama, plus the additional joys of watching a woman be tough and rowdy at a time when most of society demanded she be “ladylike.” And if you know any biographical details of Salters at all you will be able to imagine a few other ways it stands out from every other boxing movie.
It’s directed by David Michôd (ANIMAL KINGDOM, THE ROVER), written by Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes (JUDY AND PUNCH), story by Katherine Fugate (THE PRINCE & ME), but all the discussion has centered on its star, Sydney Sweeney (THE MARTIAL ARTS KID). It’s another acting achievement unlocked for her – she reportedly put on 30 pounds during 3+ months of fight training so she wouldn’t have to use a stunt double. To my ignorant eyes she looks good in the ring, first with no discipline, then an evolving style. And that doesn’t necessarily seem like the hardest part of the role. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ben Foster, boxing, Bryan Hibbard, Chad L. Coleman, Coleman Pedigo, David Michod, Jess Gabor, Katherine Fugate, Katy O'Brian, Merritt Wever, Mirrah Foulkes, Sydney Sweeney
Posted in Reviews, Crime, Drama, Sport | 13 Comments »
Thursday, November 6th, 2025
MATERIALISTS is a movie I missed in theaters, caught on blu-ray a while back, and this week it will start streaming on Home Box Office Maximum, if you want to catch it to. I really needed to see it because it’s the second movie from writer/director Celine Song. Her first was PAST LIVES (2023), which I didn’t review, but I loved it. It’s about an American woman (Greta Lee) reuniting with a guy (Teo Yoo) who she knew before her family left South Korea when she was little. He’s handsome and in love with her and reminds her of her roots, but also she loves her life and her boyfriend and oh man. It’s so good. Swooningly romantic, achingly beautiful, keenly observant, feels so true to people and to life, never like a formula. Why didn’t I write about it? Maybe I was afraid I couldn’t do it justice. I should watch it again.
Celine Song Joint #2 is pretty different. Another classy A24 production, but with beautiful movie stars* and a little bit of a satirical or social commentary aspect to it, in that it depicts a world of entitled people with superficial and unattainable demands for relationships. Madame Web herself Dakota Johnson (NEED FOR SPEED) stars as Lucy Mason, a top matchmaker for a New York City company called Adore. She has a great reputation for success, so her clients feel comfortable bluntly talking about people as lists of statistics: salary, net worth, race, age, weight, height. Most of it is very demeaning and presumptuous.
Everyone wants to marry rich, and Adore throws Lucy a party every time she hooks up a big wedding. At one of those (notch #9 on her belt) she tries to match the groom’s brother, Harry Castillo (Maxwell Lord himself, Pedro Pascal, THE GREAT WALL) with another client, but instead he begins pursuing her. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Celine Song, Chris Evans, Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal
Posted in Reviews, Drama, Romance | 15 Comments »
