drama

Italy’s Oscar Submission, Asks, “What Shall We Do with Daddy?”

Brandon Judell — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:01:14 +0000

Italy’s Oscar Submission, Asks, “What Shall We Do with Daddy?” Brandon Judell September 1, 2026 - 10:01

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It was Christmas, possibly in 1977, when my working-class brother-in-law, John, after drinking a previously unopened bottle of Kahlua, which I had unwisely gifted him, turned over the dinner table heaped with holiday goodies in front of his five children. He then took a rifle and chased my sister down a steep road with a rifle in hand. I called the police, and the family was broken up forever.

John was a “nice man”: selfish, funny, often sober, a major fuck-up now and then, and slightly charismatic in that stereotypical Italian Moonstruck way.

Once, years earlier, while my sister was in the hospital giving birth, I had been staying at their house to babysit. John, after being out all night, shuffled on in, but not from the maternity ward. Before the door had shut, he started bragging that he had just spent the night with two prostitutes. I was perhaps 12 or so.

I never told my sister. How do you tell a sister post-labor or otherwise that?

Decades later, after she discovered some of his infidelities, she phoned. “Did you know?” she asked. I could only answer with silence.

Poor Sister! She only married to escape a violent father who, on a hazy Bronx night, left a belt mark under her left eye. Reason: a bottle of shoe polish had spilled in his den. (Actually, my fault.)

Yes, men can at times be flawed, rather hostile creatures as Richard Gadd depicts so well in HBO’s Half Man. But isn’t it worse when they are someone you are supposed to be able to love in real life? Half Man I could put on pause? Diane had no remote control for her life. Cancer instead pressed her "off" button.

If you can relate, you might find yourself nodding when in director/co-writer Francesco Constabile’s prize-winning Familia, Fulvio (Enrico Borrello), a local fascist leader, in his one humane moment, notes: “These fucking dads, they can’t help but ruin your lives.”

Fulvio’s addressing a young man, Luigi Celeste (Francesco Gheghi), a character based on the real Luigi’s memoir, It Won’t Be Like This Forever (Non sarà sempre così) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DB4DDZCG?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback. The Amazon synopsis of the book begins: “There are many roads to hell, but very few leading out of it.”

Well, who knows at the time that life is undermining you that this trauma you’re not coping well with is not forever? Who could have ever guessed Luigi’s serial anguish would one day find its way between hardcovers and then into neighborhood cinemas? Certainly not Luigi.

With a slight bow to neo-realism, showcasing a mamma role Anna Magnani would have killed, Constabile has fashioned out of oft-examined tropes an affecting film that rises above others exploring the same through finessed direction, superb casting, Giuseppe Maio’s subconscious cinematography, and Valerio Vigiliar’s angst-producing score.

Familia begins in an ill-lit hallway. Muffled voices are heard. One might be a mother’s scream. Another a father’s jealous rant. Listening are two scared boys, brothers, frozen in place, eyes agape. Marital rape is not yet part of their vocabulary.

Alessandro (Stefano Valentini): Stay here.

Luigi (Francesco de Lucia): I want to go.

Alessandro: When there are noises, we have to wait.

Gently cupping his brother’s face, Alessandro coaxes: “Breathe.”

Jump. It’s the early 2000s. Mother (the wildly emotionally transparent Barbara Ronchi) is a smoker and a cleaning woman. Dad (Francesco De Leva), a one-time bank robber, is being released from prison. Mother changes the locks on the door. Dad sidesteps her, showing up unannounced where the boys are playing soccer. Luigi runs and hugs him. Alessandro stands back in fear. Dad slaps him, then smilingly orders: “Give me a hug!”

The three go to the fair. They ride the roller coaster. Dad teaches Alessandro how to shoot a gun. A teddy bear is won. Through wily manipulation, the family is united until Luigi writes a Father’s Day essay for class, a seemingly loving one that includes the wish that his dad would stop hitting his mom. The boy’s teacher is concerned. The social services and the police will shortly arrive, and the family is torn even further apart than before.

Jump. The boys have grown up. Alessandro works. Luigi, now with a girlfriend, has joined a fascist group where the shirtless skinheads pogo riotously to a pounding beat while screaming: “I despise what you are! . . . You’re prey for my thirst. . . Duce! Duce! Duce!” Give them a knife or a stick, put them on a street, and you better watch out.”

So has Luigi become his father or is he just the same scared little bambino who’s now shaving?

And can Mother ever escape the threatening mistake she made in her youth that continues to stalk her?

It’s hard to escape.

I remember when my dad ran down the hall of our apartment holding the back two legs of a chair, ready to smack it down on my head. I grabbed to other two legs and pushed back. Dad fell. I ran out shoeless, flying down five flights of stairs into the street forever.

Familia makes you remember, inciting forgotten incidents you might rather forget. Damn that past that rises up again.

In Patrimony: A True Story, Philip Roth writes of his father: “To be alive, to him, is to be made of memory—to him if a man's not made of memory, he's made of nothing.”

At the end of Familia, amidst the end credits, what has become of Luigi is revealed, a strong argument that there are layers and layers of hope in our lives, and all might not be dashed.

Familia is now available for purchase and rental on Amazon Prime and Google Play.

(If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, please know that help is available. You can contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline 24/7 by calling 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or texting "START" to 88788.)

(Wikipedia shares a rather anemic list of 32 American films with instances of domestic violence.)

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Careful What You Wish For

Chet Kozlowski — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:18:08 +0000

Careful What You Wish For Chet Kozlowski June 24, 2026 - 11:18

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How far will you go for love? That’s the question posed to the characters of the new film Skin of Youth.

Set in Saigon, Skin of Youth centers on Nam and his transgender love, San. They are embroiled in a torrid romance, and both make a living with their bodies: Nam is a scrappy boxer, San is a bejeweled dancer in a drag cabaret show. San dreams of a sex change and scopes out the men who frequent her club. One, Mr. Vuong, offers to finance her operation (and throw in enough for a vacation besides), in exchange for, well, whatever the rich guy wants. Nam is crushed by the fact that he can’t help but love himself. He marries San in a fanciful ceremony. “Grandma,” he exclaims, “I have a wife!”

Nam’s grandma provides traditionalism: all she wants from Nam’s marriage is grandbabies, something San can’t biologically provide her. While San does Mr. Vuong’s bidding, Nam takes up with a prostitute, intending to make her pregnant. Mimi is barely an adult herself, and when San sees her protruding belly she resents her, then takes her in, and establishes a unique family.

Mr. Vuong has many uses for San. He is a sadist and abuses her. Which propels Nam: he’ll finance her surgery himself by abandoning “legitimate” boxing—where he is headstrong and resents rules—and getting into the bone-crushing “dog cage” circuit, where the stakes are higher, and he’s beaten to a pulp nightly.

If the subject is tawdry, the production is anything but. Writer/director Ash Mayfair immerses us in Nam and San’s lurid world, all neon and sweaty shadows. With elegant staging and jackrabbit editing, she crosscuts between Nam’s bloody carnage and San’s glitzy performances. For the most part, Skin of Youth is suspenseful, solid filmmaking. Ms. Mayfair spares us nothing, and the world she depicts is complex. The fights are blistering, while some of the most effective scenes simply show the characters moving around their humdrum life of Saigon poverty. Ms. Mayfair has a good eye for the telling detail and endears us to her characters within minutes. The sex scenes are frank and essential.

The performances are all excellent. Trân Quân as San has a doe-faced radiance, by turns seductive and tragic. She is heartbreaking as she yearns for and plans her surgery. Nam, a wide-eyed, rooster-haired Võ Diên Gia Huy, is earnest as he scoots through crowded alleys and markets on his motorcycle, barely avoiding the police. Phan Thi Kim Ngân plays Mimi with an endearing childlike innocence. And Hajime Onoue is properly sinister as Mr. Vuong.

On the downside: perky pop music takes the sting out of some hard-hitting scenes (was that a decision of its Western distributors? If so, it’s misguided). As the story unfolds and we wonder how Nam, San, and Mimi’s fates will be resolved, we are plunged into a courtroom drama. It’s a narrative copout. The climax is generic when it should be as powerful as all that comes before.

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Skin of Youth. Directed by Ash Mayfair. 2026. Vietnamese with English subtitles. Runtime 122 minutes.

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Who’s Your Daddy?

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:48:56 +0000

Who’s Your Daddy? Chet Kozlowski June 16, 2026 - 15:48

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Palestine, 1928: lonely widower Moshe hires a woman, Yehudit, from a neighboring kibbutz to help raise his two children and work his farm. She arrives, surly and strong-willed, with few possessions and insists on sleeping in the stable, not the house. She is deaf in one ear and screams in the night.

Men are instantly smitten: Moshe (who considers her wife potential), the shrewd shopkeeper Globerman, and Jacob, a quiet intellectual who forsakes his marriage to the most beautiful woman in the town. The men circle her. Moshe teaches her the ways of the farm. Yaakov releases a cageful of wild canaries as a show of passion. Yehudit accepts them on her own terms, beds each, and soon is pregnant. She doesn’t care about paternity and isn’t about to marry anybody. Her child will have three fathers.

This story is the core of the film For the Love of a Woman. It has the contours of a folktale with hints of magical realism.

The film adds another flourish. For the Love of a Woman opens in the year 1978, focusing on Esther, a writer and a woman who exemplifies the era’s feminism and free love. Esther is headstrong and independent, very much her own woman. Upon her mother’s death, she receives a letter from her mother and a mission: that she travels to Israel, armed only with an old photo of her as a child with her father, which is torn to omit a mysterious third person.

For the Love of a Woman toggles back and forth between 1928 and 1978. Esther arrives and enlists the aid of a quiet academic, Zayde, who takes her around and, in the process, tells Yehudit’s story as a parable.

The film, guided by Guido Chiesa’s intelligent direction, is enthralling and well-acted. Mili Avital is elegant and sexy as the modern woman Esther. She has an air of ruined aristocracy about her. She and Zayde (Ori Pfeffer) take on a friendship that grows convincingly as Esther gets closer to her mother’s truth. Ana Ularu exudes arch, formidable beauty as Yehudit; one can see how Alabn Ukaj (Moshe), Marc Rissmann (Yaakov), and Serhii Kysil (Globerman) would drop everything to be with her. Fine cinematography by Emanuele Pasquet uses a limited color palette for 1978 that complements the sunburnt authenticity of the 1928 scenes.

For the Love of a Woman is expertly made, so it’s surprising that some sequences, especially those set in 1978, appear disjointed. Esther doesn’t feature as a character at all in the source novel “The Loves of Judith” by Meir Shalev. The filmmakers have added her, and one wonders why: did they decide the 1928 tale (1930s in the book) was too quaint, or might not hold the interest of a modern audience? Regardless, the framing device is underdeveloped and stitched together in editing. Mr. Chiesa and his co-screenwriter Nicoletta Micheli bring the stories together in the climax and their solution, while clever, comes off as contrived and a little, well, creepy.

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For the Love of a Woman. Directed by Guido Chiesa. 2025. From Panorama Films. An Italian production in English and subtitled Hebrew. In theaters. Runtime 117 minutes.

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Man Overboard

Chet Kozlowski — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:16:01 +0000

Man Overboard Chet Kozlowski June 15, 2026 - 10:16

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Rose of Nevada is the sort of movie you’ll be tempted to begin again as soon as you finish. The film is a puzzle, and the clues are all upfront.

A decrepit fishing boat thought lost suddenly appears in the harbor of a small fishing village. It’s the Rose of Nevada, and its gears and machinery are rusted with age. Mike, the town steward, boards it and finds it’s abandoned. The cabin shows no signs of life except for a weathered red cap and a photo of a town woman, Tina.

Tina lives in a dour house with her daughter. She and Mike have a bond — undisclosed to the audience — that leads them to agree that the Rose of Nevada must go back out to sea. A crew is enlisted: Nick Dyer, a townie with a mournful expression and a young family, and Liam, an unruly roustabout. The men are teamed with Murgey, the gruff captain, thinking they’ve signed on for a fishing expedition. Actually, it’s a voyage into destiny.

Nick returns to find himself a man out of time: the newspaper is dated 30 years in the past. Folks who were ancient when he left are now middle-aged. They call him by another name. Liam has taken up with Tina. Everyone acts out of character. Who are these people? Who, for that matter, is Nick himself? An elderly neighbor excuses what we at first read as his wife’s dementia: “She gets the past and present mixed up.” She’s not the only one.

The film is the confident work of director Mark Jenkin, who wrote the screenplay based on an original story with Mary Woodvine. Visually, Mr. Jenkin lays out a mosaic of mysteries. The camera lingers on motor parts rusted as red as blood, mold the green of idyllic fields, a curtain being drawn closed, rain-slicked stones, a towel drying a woman’s wet hair. These montages are not mere verisimilitude. The textures and tones are emotional cues. Mr. Jenkin also composed the haunting sound design and score.

Rose of Nevada looks like an 8mm home movie. The editing is clunky. The screen shape is square, not the horizontal aspect ratio of most current films. A flare shows up on the edge of the frame, as if the film were exposed to light. This may seem amateurish, but its naivete pays off. Flourishes like an earthbound character locking eyes with one in the heavens, and showing another repeatedly in shadow, then illuminated by an open door, suggest a distinct cinematic vision. This DIY style is an extension of the “found footage” genre. It creates an artificial nostalgia and the sense that all the lives have been witnessed and are preordained, adding to the eeriness.

As Nick, George Mackay (seen in 1917) grounds the film. His sharp features and knotted brow reflect our own confusion. Rosalind Eleazar simmers in a range of emotions as Tina and has been so good in Apple TV’s Slow Horses. Callum Turner (in The Boys in the Boat and the Fantastic Beasts series) exudes a working-class coarseness as Liam. Yana Emily Penrose as Tina’s grown-up daughter and Mae Voogd as Nick’s wife round out the cast nicely. They’re a compendium of fine young acting talent that you’ll see much more of in the future.

Once you’ve finished Rose of Nevada, begin again. The clues are all there. They’re cryptic, but patience pays off: revisiting them adds poignancy to an already intriguing trip.

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Rose of Nevada. Directed by Mark Jenkin. 2025. United Kingdom. Runtime 114 minutes.

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Don’t Be Cruel

Chet Kozlowski — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:29:41 +0000

Don’t Be Cruel Chet Kozlowski May 20, 2026 - 01:29

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Poor Nore. She just wants to get laid, and none of the men will do it.

They know her. She’s a regular at the bar, and most of them have either bedded her or heard about her. She asks the owner. No go. The bartender. No go. A married man is sitting on the couch. She tells him she has nowhere to sleep, and he offers to pay for a room. But he won’t be joining her.

The new film Easy Girl is writer/director Hille Norden’s feature debut. Upfront, it asks the question: How hapless must a girl be to offer herself and be rejected?

All this is witnessed by Jonna, a shy tomboy who can’t take her eyes off Nore. When a man finally responds to Nore’s proposition, Jonna insinuates herself between them and drives him off. Jonna offers her a spare room in her apartment.

Nore moves in. Jonna doesn’t necessarily want sex with Nore, she just wants to bask in the glow. Jonna is fascinated. She watches her dress. Nore makes her own clothes, blowsy gowns that make her look like a cross between Tinkerbell and Blanche Dubois—fairy princess as predator. But even as Nore remains upbeat, Jonna notices her body is covered in bruises and self-harm scars.

Nore brings home a succession of damaged men: a masochist, one with one eye. Jonna takes up with the ones Nore has brought home and discarded. The men profess their love, but they get a cup of coffee in the morning, then get out. If they balk, Jonna defends her friend: “Do you have a problem with her liking sex?” One guy, Michel, can’t get it up for Nore, yet takes up with Jonna and becomes the women’s guardian angel.

And then the bottom falls out. Literally. In an unexpected cinematic trick, we plunge through the looking glass into Nore’s psyche. There’s her younger self, open and naïve and seen in what we suppose is a flashback, being violated by her first love. We hear her abuse happen off camera as her adult self and Jonna observe from across the room. Jonna asks, “Who would hurt someone they love?” Nore replies, “What’s the point of hurting someone you don’t care about?”

It’s this second half that sets Easy Girl apart. Surreally, the younger Nore joins her adult self and Jonna on the dance floor and on the prowl. The film switches from a depiction of casual sex to an intense meditation on the long-term consequences of sexual violence.

Easy Girl is writer/director Hille Norden’s feature film debut. It’s an incredibly intimate film, rendered with rich imagination. Ms. Norden has tricks up her sleeve and a story to tell. Her directorial style is at once earthy and flamboyant.

Easy Girl’s advertising campaign is misleading, suggesting a softcore thriller. Its title is sexist: who but a male would consider Nore “easy”? (The original title “Lihtne tüdruk” translates to A Simple Girl, closer to the mark. The film has also been seen under the title A Smalltown Girl, which is totally beside the point.

As Nore, Dana Herfurth is mesmerizing, as lean as a lightning bolt. She’s a waif, a lithe body with a strawberry cream complexion. Nore seeks out men (“I can’t be alone”) and accepts defilement, and her shift from party girl to abuse survivor is convincing. Luna Jordan plays Jonna with an impish charm that ripens into wisdom as she helps her friend. Jonna is Nore’s foil and alter ego until young Nore (Vera Fay) comes along. As Michel, Jakob Gessner simmers with razor-sharp conviction, you’re never sure what he’s capable of or how his impotence and suppressed rage will manifest.

Easy Girl most resembles Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), a similar study of sexual license, except that protag presented as a symbol of liberation and free love. Nore’s psychic wounds come from trauma, and they go deep: according to her, “You’re allowed to love people who hurt you,” even while carrying a burden of guilt and pain.

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Easy Girl. Directed by Hille Norden. 2026. In German with English subtitles. Runtime 124 minutes

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O The Humanity

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:45:35 +0000

O The Humanity Chet Kozlowski May 7, 2026 - 15:45

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We are fascinated by the workings of hospitals. Evidence every TV show from Dr. Kildare to E.R. to Grey’s Anatomy (now in, what, its 79^th year? Kidding, 22) to the current fave, HBO’s The Pitt. We thrill to dedicated professionals charging purposefully down pristine halls, barking instructions and jargon. So much at stake, so many skills on display. They assess, they race against time, they grieve. We admire them and identify with them.

Medical dramas work best as episodic series. They are a continuum: save some, lose some; there’s always more to come. The new drama Late Shift is self-contained. It feels like it's happening in real time, but crisply distills an eight-hour shift to two. It’s a day in the life of Floria Lind, a nurse, not in the E.R., but nonetheless dealing with life and death.

Floria arrives at the hospital on public transit, the picture of empathy and cool efficiency. She’s cheery and professional, a locus of calm in an understaffed world. We trail her from room to room as she checks in with patients. Most are appreciative, like the African immigrant about to undergo surgery who shyly drops that he has no relatives or friends to stay with him. “I’m your friend,” assures Floria. To calm another, she sings to her.

Others complain: their test results have not come back yet; an ornery patient on private insurance times his services with an expensive watch and declares them mishandled. Inattentive doctors display a lack of humanity. Overworked and losing her cool, Floria’s mantra becomes “there are only two of us on duty.”

Of course, the center cannot hold. The shift wears on, and Floria’s patience wears out. She becomes harried and fed up. She deals with that damn watch. And finally, she turns her attention to the quietest of the lot, a squeaky wheel who hasn’t asked for notice, and whose circumstances turn out to be the most dire.

As Floria, Leonie Benesch is a perfect Everyperson. I’ve seen her in another workplace film on Netflix, The Teachers’ Lounge. She’s extremely watchable. As Floria, she presents as stalwart and natural. We believe in her. We root for her. Ms. Benesch has also been in Babylon Berlin and The Crown.

Director Petra Volpe has several films to her credit. She is as efficient as her protagonist. In her hands, Late Shift is Steadicam heaven: Ms. Volpe’s camera glides and dodges and hovers around Floria, a frenetic witness to the mayhem. The viewer is invested in Floria’s plight: with so many successes, it’s the failures that haunt. The climax is quietly devastating and set to Hope There’s Someone by Antony and the Johnsons, itself a haunting coda. Late Shift concludes as a parable and offers an incisive view of a health care system that is humane yet still imperfect.

Floria faces mortality itself, and we realize that tomorrow, or on her next shift, she will do it all over again.

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Late Shift. Directed by Petra Volpe. 2025. A Swiss and German production, in German with English subtitles. 92 minute

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Are We There Yet?

Chet Kozlowski — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 02:46:21 +0000

Are We There Yet? Chet Kozlowski April 22, 2026 - 22:46

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Endurance is the theme of the new film The North. Physical endurance by way of a 350-mile hike through the Scottish Highlands. Endurance that tests the bonds of friendship. And endurance of spirit, how far will you go with a secret inside you? The walk is, of course, a metaphor, but one that is enthralling and well executed.

Boyhood friends, now approaching thirty, embark on the 30-day trek. All starts out well: they are polite and deferential. Chris (Bart Harder), strapping and red-headed, is married, planning a family, and beset by a business that keeps calling him along the way. Lluis (Carles Pulido) is swarthy, unattached, and more upbeat. “Even a bad day in nature is better than a good one at the office,” he tells Chris. The pair are frequently seen as REI candy-colored specks dwarfed by a vast expanse of green, rolling hills. There is rarely anyone else in sight.

They do run into other hikers, at rest stops and in the few towns they pass through. But mostly they are alone with each other and with their thoughts. For all the camaraderie they don’t talk much about important matters. They walk, sleep in a lightweight tent, go through sun, fog, relentless rain and crippling wind.

Lluis’ knees give out and Chris goes on by himself, left alone with his thoughts and the concern—for Lluis, for his life—shows on his face. Lluis meets up eventually, with maps, insisting that they will fare better without their phones and GPS, like the pioneers did. Fellow travelers comment on their sleeping in the same tent: “You must be really close. Or hate each other.” Lluis casually reveals to one stranger a medical diagnosis he had never told Chris. That startles him; how could Chris not have known?

The filmmaking of The North is straightforward and unassuming. Director/writer Bart Schrijver lets the locations speak for themselves, the desolate and unforgiving beauty of the West Highland Way and Cape Wrath Trail, Likewise the acting: Mr. Harder and Mr. Pulido are both understated and naturalistic, an unlikely couple and increasingly sympatico to each other. The trip tests their bond. They show the fatigue of people who are too close for too long.

The smartphone is a player in all this. Technology imposes itself in modern ways. When Lluis ditches GPS, they flail. Poor Chris gets shrill calls from work at the most inconvenient times. Still, the very lightness and stealth of the technology and the equipment used in the filmmaking makes the narrative immersive. We glide alongside the men (interesting shots here of depth of focus), not giving a thought of the camera’s presence. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some shots were done on the phone as well.

Set pieces are subtle and effective; a dark interlude sequestered in the tent as rain pours down; Chris, annoyed, striding along the beach, tosses off his backpack, walks on then thinks better of it and goes back to retrieve it; Lluis’ eventual submission to his pain is heartbreaking exactly because it sidesteps conventional drama.

Director Bart Schrijver’s adeptness at second unit work contribute to his eye here helming a feature. He is known also for Human Nature (2022).

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The North. Directed by Bart Schrijver. 2025. Distributed by Tull Stories. Runtime 130 minutes.

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Fallen Angels and O.G.s

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:57:40 +0000

Fallen Angels and O.G.s Chet Kozlowski March 23, 2026 - 20:57

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Fantasy Life is a welcome throwback to low-impact comedy like Annie Hall, Goodbye Columbus, and Blume in Love. Writer/director Matthew Shear’s work fits perfectly into the mold of Jewish-centric comedy. You half expect him to unzip from the forehead and the pre-pariah Woody Allen to step out. It’s not a bad model to follow, yielding laughs and knowing insights about the caprices of human nature.

When we meet 30-year-old Sam (played by the multi-tasking Mr. Shear), he is being let go from his job. Dazed and confused, he recounts this to Dr. Fred, his shrink, who tells him his son and his wife need a “babysitter” and suggests Sam apply.

David the son is a charismatic musician, a rock bassist. Diane the wife is a once-popular actress who has fallen out of demand and hopes to be “re-introduced” to the filmgoing public. Sam accepts the job watching their three daughters while David goes off on tour, and Diane, depressed about “aging out” (one scene has an autograph seeker mistaking her for another actress, Lake Bell), wanders through the house like a sleepwalker. She starts chatting with Sam, and soon they’re watching old movies together. Sam is smitten. A bond forms. Things come to a head when David returns and the extended family summers on Martha’s Vineyard, where tragedy almost strikes when Sam, who is prone to panic attacks, puts the children at risk.

It’s a simple enough premise and handled with wit and aplomb by Mr. Shear. Fantasy Life assumes an old-school structure, a few steps removed from sitcoms and passed through a Mumblecore filter. Besides Amanda Peet (Diane) and Alessandro Nivola (David), both believable and appealing actors, Mr. Shear must’ve practically peed himself to get the rest of the cast: O.G.s like Judd Hirsh (Taxi, The Fablemans) as the shrink Dr. Fred, Andrea Martin (Only Murders in the Building, et al) as Dr. Fred’s receptionist, and isn’t that Bob Balaban (Asteroid City, et al) and Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise) playing the grandparents? Season this with turns by Zosia Mamet (HBO’s Girls), Holland Taylor (Bombshell) and the vivacious child actors Romy Fay, Callie Santoro, and Riley Vinson as the kids, and you have a satisfying feast indeed.

Amanda Peet has many films and TV shows to her credit, including The Whole Nine Yards, Dirty John, and Your Friends and Neighbors (I have a special place in my heart for her in Aaron Sorkin’s single-season Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). Ms. Peet can be comic, elegant, and sexy at the same time. Her performance here as the conflicted Diane is subtle and a little heartbreaking. “I’m a wealthy white woman and I always feel like a victim,” she opines. She’s the prom queen in purgatory. Ms. Peet renders with delicate sorrow Diane’s quest to maintain her roles as mother and wife while remaining marketable. Ms. Peet is also listed as a producer of Fantasy Life.

Matthew Shear is a hyphenate to watch. This is his first feature film. As a writer, his script is witty and unpredictable; as an actor, he projects into Sam a vulnerability and self-awareness. His directing style is loose and not showy. In all roles, he’s willing to step back and give his able cast room to shine.

If I have any complaint about Fantasy Life, it’s a reliance on the lilting score by Christopher Bear. The music’s fine, don’t get me wrong. But too often, Mr. Shear undercuts the power of his scenes with its whimsy. Its placement softens some strong emotion. This instinct will hopefully relax as Mr. Shear gains confidence. I’m looking forward to his next effort.

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Fantasy Life. Directed by Matthew Shear. 2025. From Greenwich Entertainment. Runtime 91 minutes.

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"Trust Is A Red Herring"

Chet Kozlowski — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:59:42 +0000

"Trust Is A Red Herring" Chet Kozlowski March 3, 2026 - 16:59

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drama

In the opening montage of the faux-documentary Group: The Schopenhauer Effect, various New Yorkers walk to the Group session, heeding their inner voices, which are ambivalent, argumentative, insecure, and so on. Once in the room, under their therapist’s guidance, they express their turmoil and, in doing so, help each other. The Group rules are simple: what’s said in Group stays in Group, and the participants can’t meet separately outside the office. It’s a closed unit and an effective form of therapy. The film is based on a successful web series that chronicles the fictitious practice of real-life psychoanalyst Dr. Elliot Zeisel.

The conceit of the film has the participants returning from Covid’s limbo of Zoom. They meet weekly and are happy to be back in person. A new member creates a disturbance: Alexis, a filmmaker who wants to observe the Group as research for an upcoming project. He’s been convinced by Dr. Zeisel to join and commit for real. His presence throws the balance off. The others object, fearing he’ll mine their serious purpose for trivial entertainment. They are wary of him until he proposes a plan that will encourage them all to make real therapeutic progress.

Sounds dry, I know, but fans of Showtime’s Couples Therapy, HBO’s In Treatment, and even Netflix’s Love is Blind (once they leave the pods) will find much to enjoy. First, there’s the buzz of identification (from common issues and skirting mental ruts; Dr. Zeisel’s probing questions and jolting statements —“Trust is a red herring”— blasts oneself out of complacency), and the superiority that comes with the illusion of solving the troubles of others.

The ensemble is seasoned actors, and the film and series are scripted and improvised. Thomas Sadowski (of HBO’s The Newsroom) is Alexis, the surrogate of the film’s director Alexis Lloyd (30 Beats). The cast is rounded out by Lucy Walters, Teresa Avia Lim, Ezra Barnes, Bernardo Cubría, Gabriela Kohen, Elisha Lawson, and Cara Ronzetti, all giving empathetic performances. The characters, even the disagreeable ones, become familiar quickly.

The mise-en-scène blurs the line between reality and fiction. It’s lots of close-ups by a handheld camera in a room. Yet Mr. Lloyd makes it compelling (my online screener kept bugging out, making me frantic to rejoin). I wonder how Group: The Schopenhauer Effect will play out on the big screen, given its YouTube roots. Watched on a phone or laptop, the segments put the viewer in the Group as well, producing an intimacy that could be lost when expanded. The conversion to a feature film also freezes the premise, making it a one-off rather than a reliable ongoing series. But the actors are appealing, and the insights edifying. We are sad when our time is up.

___________________________

Group: The Schopenhauer Effect. Directed by Alexis Lloyd. 2026. From Abramorama. Runtime 119 minutes.

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How Not to Survive Pre-Adolescence

Brandon Judell — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 13:22:10 +0000

How Not to Survive Pre-Adolescence Brandon Judell January 6, 2026 - 08:22

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Film Review

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drama

"Carrie's got the curse! Carrie's got the curse," sang out the teens stomping onstage in a locker room in the short-lived 1988 Broadway adaptation of Stephen King's ode to menstruation.

Don't be surprised then if "Ben's got the plague! Ben's got the plague," is being chanted likewise in the near future. If "that time of the month" with a dash of telekinetic powers can inspire a musical, why can't a lad with a ghastly rash do the same?

Writer/director Charlie Polinger's The Plague, with its current 100% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating, is a raw, painful look at pre-adolescence based on the director's actual journals from when he was 12, a time he notes "when social anxiety is so visceral that every day feels like life-and-death." He labels his mesmerizing film "psychological horror."

With its trauma-inducing score (Johan Lenox), its eerily immersive cinematography (Steven Breckon), its perfect casting of both awkward and bullies (Rebecca Dealy), plus its riveting pacing (editors Henry Hayes and Simon Njoo), The Plague does for pre-teens what Jaws did for sharks and The Shining accomplished for recovering alcoholic authors with writer's block. You'll want to keep them at more than an arm's length.

Although shot in Bucharest, Romania, the film takes place somewhere stateside in the summer of 2003 at the Tom Lerner Water Polo Camp, 2^nd session.

Opening shot: a huge, uninhabited swimming pool. A screen of discomforting, gurgling blue. Suddenly, one boy jumps in from a distance. Then a multitude follows. Within seconds,s all we see are dozens of headless, flailing tweens kicking to and fro. Sound: disembodied blasts as if from a ship leaving port.

Cut to the boys' torso-less heads bobbing up and down above water as they clap hands in the pool, rather reminiscent of a Synchronized Swimming Olympic event as choreographed by Sweeney Todd? Fear not. It's a cheerful visual. Not a slaughter. The chaps are having fun. It's only the soundtrack that's at times rather worrying, plus your own memories, especially if you hid in bathroom stalls during your junior high years.

(Warning: After watching The Plague, be prepared for the rising up of flashbacks of some of your most traumatic pubescent trials by fire that you once thought were submerged forever. One of my own: After school was out, Howard B., who lived in my building, gleefully told me in the elevator that everyone in gym class that day noticed that my testicles were hairless. How they saw, I didn't ask. Worn-out undies? Anyway, I hadn't yet read Questions Children Ask by my mom, who borrowed the book from Susan Rosenhouse's mother across the street. Consequently, I didn't know I was supposed to be hirsute down there. By the way, the first two questions in that pragmatic guide were "Why don't I have one?" and "Why is Daddy's bigger than my own?" Thankfully, my father, who exposed me to many mental horrors throughout the years, avoided exposing himself, so I never even thought of asking that final one, and clearly I had no need to ask the first. But wait! They come in sizes? Clearly, a lack of sex education was just another reason in the Bronx in the early '60s to ridicule someone already blessed with a higher voice, uncoordinated limbs, and an inability to play punchball. Don't worry. Gyms and facial hair rid me of the taint.)

Back to critique: Class time. Coach Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton), who himself had a depressive youth, understands lads and is forgiving even when someone draws a penis with an unerasable red marker on the whiteboard he's utilizing for instruction. The probable artistic villain of this dastardly deed and the apparent leader of all non-scholastic on-campus delinquent doings is the ever-smirking Jake (Kayo Martin, nominee for several Breakthrough Performance awards at the moment). He's been around the whole summer and knows the ropes.

Not so for the new boy, the fragile Ben (Everett Blunck, who was so brilliant in last year's Griffin in Summer). He's walking through life as if feeling his way across a newly frozen lake. Every step can be a fatal misstep. But so far, the in-crowd is accepting him even if Jake immediately unearths Ben's flaw. The youth pronounces "stop" as "sop" and "Boston" as "Bosson." That's teasable, but not enough reason to be ostracized.

Happily, Ben is accepted at the "popular" lunch table, and he's even asked his opinion on such heady philosophical questions as would he rather have sex with a dog without anybody knowing or not have sex with a dog with everyone thinking he did.

Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) isn't so lucky. This quirky, shapeless youth, who's been around since the beginning of summer, has suddenly broken out with a body rash which Jake and pals have deemed a highly contagious form of leprosy. Don't touch Eli or sit where he has sat, or you'll have to run to the shower and soap up rigorously.

Ben feels both the absurdity and the injustice of this ostracization, but can he both befriend the boy with the dermal eruptions and still pal around with locker-room elite who lie about their sexual exploits when the lights go out? Of course not.

Edward Burne Jones, the pre-Raphelite painter, once noted: "I can only come near to what I wish, and am unhappy in consequence." Ben could wear that on a T-shirt.

In the end, what might at first sound like a Netflix 8-episode trek through the agonies of acne and the want to be accepted is instead a nigh-perfect film that is terrifying from beginning to end without the need of monsters because we, intentionally or not, are the monsters.

(Please note: the appropriately named Spooky Pictures is one of the production companies involved here.)