My Week In Film: November 24, 2025
Babies, Battles and Broken Hearts
It’s wonderful to have Jennifer Lawrence back in the awards conversation, we never should have let her drop from the top ranks after her initially breaking out as a star, and it’s always great to have the pleasure of another Lynne Ramsay movie. I also caught up with the new Alex Garland, giggled myself senseless at the latest Dakota Johnson experience, finally watched an early Nicole Kidman movie that I’d never seen before and indulged myself in some shameless voyeurism.
Die My Love
Lynne Ramsay, 2025
Rating: BBBB
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, LaKeith Stanfield, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, Gabrielle Rose, Debs Howard, Sarah Lind, Marcus Della Rosa
Jackson (Robert Pattinson) and Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) are madly in love and lust, entering the house they inherited from his uncle and barely able to wait for the screen door to fall off its hinges before tearing each other’s clothes off on the dirty floor. Nestled in a dreamlike fantasy of a pastoral farming community, the home is the promise of a new start for the couple, but things don’t stay calm for long, as Grace gives birth to a baby and suddenly the unpredictable impulses that made her seem so glamorously sexy as a lover become worrisome in a mother. Maybe Jackson didn’t pay attention to her habit of crawling through the fields with a giant butcher knife for kicks before his son came along, but now that she’s stripping down to her underwear at neighbours’ pool parties or going for walks all night with their baby in her arms, it is perhaps time to face the possibility that she needs help. The help she could get from equally complicated family members, however, is questionable: Sissy Spacek is terrific as Jackson’s mother, who keeps handing out platitudes about post-partum willies but knows something much more serious is going on, but who is also never more than a few inches from her rifle since her husband (Nick Nolte) died. Is it possible to know who is unstable in this family, when Jackson thinks that a dog who never stops barking twenty-four hours a day is the cure for Grace’s melancholy?
Ramsay is a bit too obsessed with observing Americans with a fetishizing lens, her view of the heartland has more to do with a Terrence Malick movie than anything convincingly rural, but it could easily be argued that the vibrant artificiality of the setting is reflective of Grace’s state of mind, one which no one around her understands. Lawrence, in her most layered performance in quite some time, gives exuberance and humour but also a thoughtful desperation to a character who feels like her happiness is always just beyond her grasp, her energy convincing us that the film’s rich visuals are letting us in to her state of mind rather than distracting us from them. Ramsay creates one of the most sympathetic portraits of a woman on the verge since Cassavetes, thanks to a fully rounded experience that allows us to enjoy the sexy kinks and fun of the character’s rebellion while also caring deeply about her plight.
Warfare
Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland, 2025
Rating: BBB
Cast: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Adain Bradley, Joseph Quinn, Nathan Altai, Heider Ali, Charles Melton, Finn Bennett, Noah Centineo, Evan Holtzman, Henry Zaga, Alex Brockdorff, Aaron Deakins
Garland teams up with Ray Mendoza for an attempt at a war movie made with as little editorializing as possible, presented in real time and based on Mendoza’s own experiences as a Navy SEAL. Following the 2006 Battle of Ramadi, a SEAL platoon takes up residence in a safe house that turns out to be anything but. Having already terrified the family living on the main floor, the unit sets up shop above, threatened with genuine boredom as they observe the goings-on of the neighbourhood, unaware that the enemy is closer than originally presumed. A devastating attack is immediately followed by every attempt to stay alive while waiting for evacuation, both air and land meeting with varying results as bullets and grenades keep pouring in and choices are made under increasingly stressful circumstances. None of the artful photography of Black Hawk Down or swelling music of patriotic war movies like Saving Private Ryan is employed here, the plan is to give us documentary-level realism, but even the best documentaries have a sense of artful invention to them and this movie could really use some of it. Garland and Mendoza have cast a series of talented but not particularly charismatic actors in a bunch of roles that never distinguish themselves from each other. To be moved by their plight is natural, I hope, but we don’t actually care for these people so much as flinch at seeing unpleasant injuries, and the result is impressive for its technical know-how but doesn’t linger on the mind as a deeply personal experience.
Sorry, Baby
Eva Victor, 2025
Rating: BBB
Cast: Eva Victor, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, Louis Cancelmi, Kelly McCormack, John Carroll Lynch, Hettienne Park, E. R. Fightmaster, Cody Reiss, Jordan Mendoza, Jonathan Myles, Liz Bishop, Natalie Rotter-Laitman, Alison Wachtler, Priscilla Manning, Celeste Oliva, Chhoyang Cheshatsang, Conor Patrick Sweeney
Four years after defending her dissertation and earning a doctorate, Agnes is now a professor at the same, small (fictional) New England College that she graduated from, and is happily expecting a visit from her former college roommate Lydie (Naomi Ackie). Lydie’s visit is accompanied by news of marriage and family which makes Agnes happy but further emphasizes her own state of mind, stuck in a cynical, bookish pose that we soon learn, in flashbacks, she didn’t have when she was still a student under her handsome, chummy thesis advisor Preston Decker (Lous Cancelmi). The reason for her haunted personality is that Agnes successfully completed her degree around the same time that she was assaulted by a man she revered, the memory of which she is still living under, somehow able to remain at the same institution and teach Nabokov’s Lolita with an intelligent, ironic distance but at the same time unable to move forward emotionally.
Victor, who writes, directs and stars as Agnes, and does all these jobs with charismatic flair, gives us far more good than bad in this impressively shrewd debut: her Agnes is a character for whom you come to care very quickly, though her comedic sarcasm covers up her pain so often that, at times, it feels like she has overwritten the Passion Fish-style dialogue for effect. The film is about the ghosts of trauma that linger around us despite our ability to cope, but going so far as to have the character work in the same office as the man who harmed her might be pushing the theme towards too neat a sense of dramatic irony. The film’s assets, however, are far more admirable and exciting than its drawbacks, particularly a central sequence in which Victor, in a long, single take in close-up, details the experience of the incident with breathtaking skill (behind and before the camera), simultaneously relating the horror of losing control of a situation while also thoroughly confused about her own participation in it. In wanting to make a film with no easy answers, Victor might have kept the film running a tad too long, then comes closest to letting it all fall apart in a monologue she delivers to the titular infant at the end that plays like overdetermined grad school drama. As a film that manages to be a sharp and pointed about respecting a victim’s truth while defining them by more than just their worst experience, however, it’s a gem to be cherished.
Splitsville
Michael Angelo Covino, 2025
Rating: BBBB
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Adria Arjona, Kyle Marvin, Michael Angelo Covino, Nicholas Braun, David Castañeda, O-T Fagbenle, Charlie Gillespie, Simon Webster, Nahéma Ricci, Tyrone Benskin, Letitia Brookes, Jessika Mathurin, Stephen Adekolu
The writing, acting and directing team of Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin follow their insouciantly funny The Climb with another hilarious lampooning of the fragility of the male ego. Carey (Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona) are driving to visit their wealthy friends’ summer home when the impulsive choice of highway sex is soured by the witnessing of an accident that then, spontaneously, leads to her telling him that she wants to break up. Carey arrives at the home of his hosts, Paul (Covino) and his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson), and announces this change in his relationship situation, and is shocked to learn that Paul and Julie are actually in an open marriage and find that it helps preserve their connection to each other. A round-robin of couple swapping then begins as partners try each other on for size, everyone hurting everyone else while in denial about how insecure they make each other feel. Carey returns home to Ashley but insists on not getting back together with her, instead setting up a haven for all her rejected lovers, while Paul goes on his own path of irresponsible indulgence that sees his fortunes change in surprising and unpredictable ways.
This very funny comedy sets up a series of increasingly outrageous situations that allow for Elaine May-style long-con comedic silliness, and through the humour of its exploring the hypocrisy of modern sexual morality (namely the foolish notion that our modern spins on ideas of monogamy and sexual morality are anything but new) finds something sweet and sympathetic to reveal about the struggle to be happy in a world where so little validation can be gained from anyone but ourselves. The acting from the entire cast is marvelous, with Johnson making a snappy impression despite being set up as the guest in a two-man comedy show. I’m still laughing over the goldfish.
Billy Bathgate
Robert Benton, 1991
Rating: BBBB.5
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, Loren Dean, Bruce Willis, Steven Hill, Stanley Tucci, Mike Starr, Steve Buscemi, John Costelloe, Billy Jaye, Timothy Jerome, Stephen Joyce, Robert F. Colesberry, Frances Conroy, Moira Kelly, Kevin Corrigan, Xander Berkeley, Barry McGovern, Terry Loughlin, Paul Herman, Jack Mulcahy, Katharine Houghton
Production delays and the disintegration of Dustin Hoffman’s working relationship with Benton resulted in a botched release and the studio abandoning this film for awards season. It’s a shame, as the end result, despite being so different from E.L. Doctorow’s novel that the author also disavowed the adaptation, is actually a marvelously entertaining film and undeserving of its reputation as a bomb. Its coming so soon after GoodFellas with a more or less period version of the same plot couldn’t have helped matters, but the passage of time has been generous to a film that moves with a great deal of energy and whose performances all rise above cliches. All except Hoffman’s, ironically, whose (alleged) obsession with steering the script towards his ideas of perfection results in something mannered and uninventive, where everyone arounds him feels loose and spontaneous.
The title character, played by Loren Dean, is the son of a laundress (played by Frances Conroy) from the Irish element of his Brooklyn neighbourhood who looks up to the glamour of Jewish gangster Arthur Simon Flegenheimer, better known as Dutch Schultz (Hoffman). Quick thinking and a little luck get Billy employed as an errand boy for Dutch and his gang, witnessing as he kills a disloyal member of his team (a brief but potent appearance by Bruce Willis) and takes the man’s snooty mistress (Nicole Kidman in an early, very powerful performance) as his own. Dutch is being subjected to that classic mobster snare of the 1930s, charges of tax evasion, and needs to set up shop in an upstate New York town where his men feel the courts will be more lenient on him. Going along as a goon brings Billy into a busy microcosm of egos, tempers and a little sexual temptation that at first feels fun but, as Schultz becomes more unpredictable in his paranoid rages, threatens to place him in great danger.
Movies made in the early nineties but set in the pre-war gangland glories of the 1930s tended to veer on Dick Tracy plushness, but Benton makes sure that the vintage cars have a little wear on them and the rooms feel lived in, it’s a beautiful but layered background against which the action plays. The script, for all that it is the result of so much behind the scenes difficulty, is flawlessly worked out. Kidman earned her first Golden Globe Nomination for her performance, and went on to work with Benton again on the 2003 film The Human Stain.
Fulboy
Martín Farina, 2015
Rating: BB
Cast: Tomás Farina, Jorge Luis Medina, Gonzalo Peralta, Facundo Talín, Cristian Vergara
The pursuit of a career in professional sports and its effect on the maturing minds of ambitious young men is the focus of Farina’s meditative documentary, its thematic explorations combined with a visual style that places its gaze on the beauty of the male forms involved. The director was himself on track to play football (soccer in North America) but didn’t make it, and films his brother Tomás as he and his teammates plan for their own futures. Tomás and his friends are willing to let Martín film them in physically vulnerable moments, there are no scenes on the playing field and we spend most of our time as they linger in the showers or change rooms, but emotional vulnerability is not as easily gained. Tomás cares a great deal about being a good player, but is constantly in denial of the nagging feeling that, even if he’s a huge success, the shelf life of a successful athlete isn’t that long and he might still need to plan for a future after retiring in his early thirties. The film is sold as an indulgence in sexy voyeurism and there is plenty of impressive flesh on display, but it’s possible that being so close to his subjects isn’t good for Farina’s plan to really find the core of his subjects’ sensitivities. We barely get to know the people we’re spending time with and the images have no resonance, it’s a quietly observant but not reflective experience, and leaves very little impression in its wake.
Macho Dancer
Lino Brocka, 1988
Rating: BBB.5
Cast: Daniel Fernando, Allan Paule, Jaclyn Jose, William Lorenzo, Princess Punzalan, Timothy Diwa, Angelo Miguel, Johnny Vicar, Lucita Soriano, Joel Lamangan, Bobby Sano, Charlie Catalla, Anthony Taylor, Tony Mabesa, Ronald Mendoza
Pol is a handsome young man who makes extra cash having sex with an American soldier stationed in his village, but when his benefactor’s tour of duty ends, he must find a new way to support himself. He moves to Manila and gets work as a dancer, meeting fellow performer Noel who teaches him all the tricks of the trade. Noel is making cash while looking for his little sister, she has gone missing and he believes she is being exploited by traffickers, and Pol decides to help him with his search between assignations with clients. Aiding their search is Bambi (top-billed Jaclyn Jose), a sex worker who uses her contacts to find out information about Noel’s sister and with whom Pol falls passionately in love. Brocka doesn’t spare us any overt melodrama in his telling of this ripe, soapy tale, but he also brings out a deep, rich humanity for a group of characters who are wholly sexually appealing and deeply sympathetic at the same time. Pol’s identity as gay-for-pay but seemingly heterosexual is explored in complex and intelligent ways, and Allan Paule’s restrained performance in the role portrays a constant sense of ambivalent curiosity that is impossible to resist. The images of the naughty goings-on in the sex clubs in which these characters perform are exciting and hot, but there’s happening on the street outside that feels genuine and layered; Brocka doesn’t pity the people who are surviving in the world’s oldest profession but he does take it seriously, allowing his hapless characters to have a little fun on the road to their own ruin. Even when the plot turns to a police thriller in the final third, Brocka keeps our connection to the characters’ plight strong throughout. A subgenre of its own was created with the runaway, international success of this sexy potboiler, which was followed by, among others, filmmaker Mel Chionglo’s creating his own series of “macho dancer” movies about the male sex trade in the Philippines (notably Midnight Dancer).