If you lived in or around Indianapolis in the late 1970s you probably know the real story that inspired this film, but it was new to me. The versatile Bill Skarsgård plays a man who has grown so furious with his local mortgage company that he takes the owner’s grown son hostage. He fashions a noose-like rope around his neck and attaches it to a rifle, all in broad daylight. His brazen act stirs what we now call a media circus. It’s an absurd and desperate desire for revenge against the businessmen who have wronged him, but he is nothing if not determined. With a passing nod to Dog Day Afternoon, young screenwriter Austin Kolodney fleshes out the narrative with incidents and character quirks that make…

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I didn’t know what to expect from a movie about a man and woman who perform as a Neil Diamond tribute band…but I found myself falling in love with Song Sung Blue. Cheers to writer-director Craig Brewer for recognizing the potential in this story, which he learned about from a 2018 documentary of the same name. The Milwaukee couple billed themselves as Lightning and Thunder in the 1990s. He has taken dramatic license to show us the essence of two people for whom performing is as vital as oxygen.   Their meet-cute occurs on the grounds of a county fair one night where she is channeling Patsy Cline (complete with a dark wig) and he is checking out the other talent set to take the stage. Their attraction…

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Ralph Fiennes is always worth watching, and he heads the cast of The Choral, an absorbing drama directed by the eminent Nicholas Hytner and written by the last living member of Beyond the Fringe, Alan Bennett. Their previous collaborations on stage and screen brought us The Madness of King George and The History Boys. I surveyed the reviews this latest effort has recieved, and a number of critics have damned it with faint praise: too genteel, to predictable they say. I beg to differ. The harshest word I would use in describing this admittedly old-fashioned movie is “conventional.” Given the cinematic output of 2025 I would welcome more conventional fare like this in the new year. The backdrop for The Choral is England in 1916. The World War is raging and decimating an entire generation of young men. The town of Ramsden has lost its choirmaster to the Army and his would-be replacement has been working in Germany, of all places. Eventually hired by the committee, he recruits singers from every crevice of the village, welcoming women and teenage boys. He is single-minded in his dedication to producing a concert the town can be proud of. The Choral may not be exceptional but it is beautifully crafted and performed. The…

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THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN BY MY FRIEND AND COLLEAGUE ALONSO DURALDE. LEARN MORE ABOUT HIM HERE. WHAT’S NEW ON DVD/BLU/4K IN DECEMBER: BUGONIA, BEAU GESTE, THE HANDMAID’S TALE, AND MORE!  NEW RELEASE WALL Bugonia (Universal): Nobody would have guessed that the actress from Easy A and the director of Dogtooth would become a potent moviemaking duo, but Emma Stone’s box-office clout and Yorgos Lanthimos’ uniquely dark take on the human condition have given us a string of complex movies that get under your skin. They’re at it again with this unnerving tale of a conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemons, reteaming with this duo after Kinds of Kindness) who’s convinced that a successful CEO (Stone) is actually an alien bent on destroying mankind. It’s another Lanthimos movie…

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Any filmmaker who asks a moviegoer to sit still for more than three hours had better have a really good reason. James Cameron does not. I lost an afternoon to the latest AVATAR movie and I can’t get it back. Let the record show that I fully appreciate the visual marvels Cameron has at his command. The characters and settings are so perfectly rendered that they put some earlier attempts at motion capture to shame. The integration of flesh-and-blood characters with the animated ones is absolutely seamless. Cameron doesn’t like using gimmicky 3-D but the opening minutes of this epic do serve to show off the dimensionality in a pleasing way. Then there is the matter of the bloated screenplay, which is credited to the…

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Watching the latest film from Noah Baumbach, which he wrote with the gifted actress Emily Mortimer, I couldn’t help but picture Marcello Mastroianni, taking stock of his life in Fellini’s 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita. Baumbach’s version of this overall idea is a bit long, somewhat messy—not unlike the main character—but it’s also exhilarating and, at times, brilliant. No one could pull this off except George Clooney, the quintessential Movie Star.  He puts no distance between him and Jay Kelly. Clooney isn’t winking at us at all; he surrenders completely to the character, surveying the circus that has become his life, and the people who populate it. Chief among them is Adam Sandler, who is revelatory in a dramatic part as Jay Kelly’s manager.…

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Director Richard Linklater has one of the most unusual resumés of any American filmmaker. He has defined slacker culture—while discovering bright young talent—with his debut feature Dazed and Confused, explored three stages of a relationship (in Before Sunset, Before Sunrise and Before Midnight), watched an adolescent grow up over twelve years’ time (Boyhood), and experimented with animation built on live-action footage (Waking Life), just for starters. This year he has delivered a one-two punch with Blue Moon (set in 1943 NYC) and Nouvelle Vague. The latter film was shot in the French language on the streets of Paris, like the movie it depicts and emulates, Breathless. It is in black & white and shown in the old aspect ratio of approximately 3×4. Here are all the players who used their passion for film  to…

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