Andrea Pirrello
MOVIE REVIEW
La grazia (2025)
Paolo Sorrentino’s latest and this year’s Venice International Film Festival opener, “La grazia,” is the antithesis of “Il divo” and “Loro,” his previous features centering on political leaders, despite it also starring his go-to leading man, Toni Servillo, who played Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi, respectively, in the previous films.
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Music Box Films
MOVIE REVIEW
A Little Prayer (2025)
With its premiere at Sundance Film Festival in 2023, Angus MacLachlan’s “A Little Prayer” immediately landed distribution with Sony Pictures Classics. It made sense, considering the company’s previous success with “Junebug,” which Mr. MacLachlan also scripted. It’s now finally seeing the light of day two and a half years later courtesy of Music Box Films. The press releases are careful to avoid the term “shelved,” but the fact of the matter is Sony Classics did keep the title on its website and extranet for the longest time – which also makes sense if you saw it at Sundance in 2023.
Focus Features
MOVIE REVIEW
Honey Don’t! (2025)
I don’t know what’s with writing and domestic partners Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s weird obsession with lesbians, especially ones that look like Margaret Qualley. Following “Drive-Away Dolls,” they return with “Honey Don’t!,” yet another very blah entry in their supposed sapphic noir trilogy.
A24
MOVIE REVIEW
Highest 2 Lowest (2025)
This is Spike Lee’s second stab at remaking an Asian masterpiece. The first, 2013’s “Oldboy,” based on Park Chan-wook’s 2003 Cannes Grand Prix winner, was faithful down to replicating the iconic single-shot corridor fight scene. But it wasn’t well received at all. The result wasn’t as dark or as sickly funny as the original. Perhaps Josh Brolin should have chowed down on a live octopus for good measure.
Bobby Bukowski
MOVIE REVIEW
Gonzo Girl (2023)
“Gonzo Girl” is thinly-veiled autobiography, based on a “novel” by a young writer who briefly found herself working for someone so clearly based on gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson the names didn’t really need to be changed. What is gonzo journalism, which Thompson invented and irritating generations of following journalists have imitated? Well, it’s 1. making yourself part of the story; 2. focusing on the seedier side of whatever you’re there to report upon; 3. actively participant in said seedier side, probably by doing buckets of drugs; 4. thereby rejecting your talent as a writer-journalist to focus on your talent for exploring life’s seedier side. This is not what anyone would have predicted Patricia Arquette would choose as the subject for her directorial debut, though she does competent, lively work. Yet despite the high-powered cast and a steady tour of the festival circuit culminating in this year’s Tribeca, it hasn’t been picked up for wider distribution. That’s because while there’s nothing really wrong with “Gonzo Girl,” unfortunately there’s nothing really right with it, either.
Tribeca Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Nobu (2025)
“Nobu,” Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary on celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa, credits the autobiography “Nobu: A Memoir” as its source material, but for the most part the film looks like a corporate video for the namesake luxury hospitality empire that boasts a portfolio of some 57 restaurants and 21 hotels around the world. The use of A.I. for dialogue enhancement, as indicated by end credits, does not help blunt the corporate video charges.
The documentary’s New York premiere at the Tribeca Festival feels like a foregone conclusion, given Robert De Niro’s involvement in both organizations. Besides, he apparently has a lot more to say on the topic of Nobu, of which he is a founding partner, than he did during the “Rendez-vous With . . . Robert De Niro” at Cannes and “ ‘Casino’ 30th Anniversary Screening With Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese” at Tribeca combined.
Tribeca Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Sun Ra: Do the Impossible (2025)
No shortage already of moving pictures studying Sun Ra from one direction or another, whether tackling the man, the music, the mysticism, the fact he said he was from the planet Saturn, or some combo of the lot. Christine Turner's documentary "Sun Ra: Do the Impossible" keeps the lid on its mind-expanding contents by narrowing the focus, mostly to testimonies from past members of the Sun Ra Arkestra about life in the big man's big band, plus some scholarly perspective on the social currents swirling around him in the civil rights era. It doesn't follow those threads too far out to other stations, such as his personal life, or influence on Kenneth Anger and the American underground, or his beaming directly into the nation's living rooms via "Saturday Night Live" in 1978. It's a sampler rather than a study guide, a summary of something resistant to summary; a Sunny interval.
CBS
MOVIE REVIEW
Bodyguard of Lies (2025)
The promotional copy for "Bodyguard of Lies" ahead of its Tribeca screening said that Dan Krauss's documentary "rips the veil off one of the most costly and controversial chapters in recent American history: the war in Afghanistan." How many people are still behind a veil of ignorance at this point about the Afghan War as a piece of U.S. foreign policy is a question. You might also note the spotting of the word "recent," since as the documentary itself points out the legacy of the Vietnam War lurks in plain sight and not all that far in the past. Neither equivocal nor designed to be, the film puts on-camera statements and speeches from U.S. politicians and military leaders during the war next to material from the later "Afghan War Lessons Learned" interviews, a set of recorded debriefings loosely instigated by Congress and which formed the basis of a Washington Post exposé in 2019. The Post is among the producer credits here, making this doc an adjunct to its existing reporting on the topic. It hardly needs saying that the public statements and the private testimonies are from different planets.
Universal Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Since Disney is resolved to mine and recycle all its animated I.P. into live action, DreamWorks is also joining in on the act – or at least that’s the logical conclusion that redditors on the r/DreamWorks sub are already drawing. The studio is so gung ho about the odds for the “How to Train Your Dragon” live-action remake that a sequel is already in the pipeline for 2027.
A24
MOVIE REVIEW
Materialists (2025)
Spoiler alert: Celine Song always chooses the white dude.
In “Materialists,” the follow-up to her much-lauded debut, “Past Lives,” Ms. Song once again finds her heroine – this time Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a professional Millionaire Matchmaker – amid a love triangle. At her clients’ wedding reception, she spots her next most eligible bachelor, Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal). Thing is, he is more interested in her than being her customer.