"La Bola Negra"

 ☆☆☆☆☆

La Bola Negra is something truly rare: a milestone film, a watershed moment for queer filmmaking, a grand and sweeping historical epic that places homosexuality at its center and makes no apology. It is an essential film for queer audiences. Whether it has crossover or mainstream appeal is irrelevant: it is a movie made by and for the LGBTQ+ community.

It's also a challenging piece of historical drama that is entirely comprehensible without knowing the specifics of the Spanish Civil War or the life of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, but that invites curiosity and then deepens exponentially because of that knowledge.

All that may sound daunting, and I went into La Bola Negra assuming it might be a movie that I could admire more than love, that would be important without being genuinely moving. I was wrong on all counts. It's a remarkable story that is accessible and legible without any advance preparation. It is a movie that no queer person and nobody who cares deeply about film will want to miss.

It's so beautifully crafted and so visually impressive that even though it will appear on Netflix in December, it's well worth the effort to see it in a movie theater during its initial run. Directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, who share screenwriting credit with Alberto Conejero, La Bola Negra is complex, intelligent and profoundly moving.

Anyone who thought Digger was too "meta" may go apoplectic when they try to make sense of La Bola Negra, in which Lorca himself is a character and also the inspiration for the film's story, which is in part based on an unfinished (only four pages long) play he was writing at the time of his murder by Spanish Nationalists. Lorca's partner, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún is a major character in one of three interwoven narratives that make up the film.

In one, Rapún is a Spanish Republic soldier taken prisoner during the Spanish Civil War and watched over by Nationalist soldier Sebastián, who has no strong loyalty to the Spanish government. He became a solider after his village was destroyed by Italian forces, and finds himself strongly attracted to Rapún, who he does not know is gay. Their relationship deepens, but is threatened by the realities of war.

Even as Sebastián hides the secret of his sexual orientation, Rapún himself hides an even deeper secret — the play that Lorca was working on, and that Rapún has vowed to protect at all costs.

That play, La Bola Negra, or "the black ball," becomes a second storyline in the film, telling of a young man before the Civil War who must hide his own identity in order to gain admission to an elite society. His self-doubt grows when a man he may love, Enrique, tries to persuade him to renounce society and join the dissidents.

The third story takes place in the present, as a frustrated Madrid playwright named Alberto discovers he has come into an inheritance — one his embittered mother doesn't want him to accept. When he finds out what the inheritance is, the entire shape of this bold and ambitious film comes clear.

A huge cast, which includes Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close (largely speaking Spanish), is uniformly brilliant, especially Spanish musician Guitarricadelafuente and impossibly handsome Miguel Bernardeau as the ill-fated lovers caught in the war; and the seemingly more straightforward but ultimately intensely complex role of Alberto, the present day writer-researcher, that becomes quietly devastating in the hands of Carlos González.

La Bola Negra is about the legacy that persists on far beyond our human lifespan. It challenges the conventional wisdom that because we often don't have children or large families, and historically haven't lived openly, gay men are destined to leave less of a mark on the world. It recognizes and understands the fundamental pains of living life secretly, while also confronting broader generational trauma — not just of gay men but of everyone who lives through private and public wars — with dignity, grace and beauty.

Its story structure is massive in both scope and execution, but La Bola Negra reaches a simple and moving conclusion: We all matter. Every single one of us. No one's pain is less than any other, but some of that pain reaches through the decades to shape who we become. This is an astonishing, audacious film, certainly one of the very, very best in a remarkably strong year.

"Other Mommy"

☆☆

If you're a fan of intelligent horror, carefully constructed characters, slow dread and well-conceived terror and you're tempted to see Other Mommy, here's my best recommendation:

See other movie.

This is an aggressively silly movie, one that combines a certain base level ridiculousness with an almost aggressive aversion to things like plot and character development.

A little girl talks to "other mommy." That's the setup. That's it. That's all.

Why? How? Who's the real mommy that leaves her wishing she had another mommy? Is this an imaginary friend, a real demon? Who knows? Who cares? Certainly the filmmakers don't.

Imagine The Exorcist beginning not in Iraq or in Georgetown or with the longtime effort of Father Merrin to find the demon or with Chris and Regan MacNeil and their relationship, but with Regan saying, "My bed is shaking," and, in the next shot, spinning her head.

That's more or less what happens here. Other Mommy (Jessica Chastain, who's also Actual Mommy) shows up and real Daddy (Jay Duplass) not only can see her, but she nearly sets the house on fire, while Bela offers no insight into who this creature might be. 

That said, 10-year-old Arabella Olivia Clark is pretty astonishing in this role, despite being in a terrible movie, and has a real screen presence. She's a natural at this.

But Jessica Chastain, a Juilliard-trained multi-Oscar nominee and Oscar winner? What's she doing here? I think I know what she needs: other agent.

This isn't a good movie. And it's not bad enough to rise to the level of entertaining. Maybe it's made for streaming, where nuances of character and plot don't matter? When you're making dinner or half-paying attention to a Zoom call, all you really need to know is: a little girl is stalked by a creepy other mommy! 

Why? How? Does the little girl's compass, shown in a dozen shots, have something to do with it? If so, what? Where does this creature come from? Why does it want to be loved? And if it wants to be loved, why is it punching its fingers through the jaws of unsuspecting men? And why add in a subplot about Real Mommy's infidelities and Real Daddy's pot smoking and a "revelation" that feels so arbitrary and pointless that it doesn't add a single thing to the movie?

Oof.

Other Mommy is bad. And not just temperamentally.

Viewed October 13, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"The History of Concrete"

 ☆☆½

Believe me, I know what it looks like from the outside to see me with a book or a magazine or—far, far worse, I think—my phone. My husband tells me often: I get too absorbed. I've always been that way, from the moment I could read (at age 3, allegedly, my parents claim): when the term "rabbit hole" was used only to describe where Alice went, I fell down them constantly.

Cereal boxes, Yellow Pages, TV listings, classified ads, Reader's Digests, whatever I had at hand was good enough for me to read, which I did, constantly. The summer my mom volunteered me to clean up a neighbor's home stacked with old newspapers, no one realized the end result would be that I read them much more than I threw them away.

All of which made me, I thought, an ideal audience for John Wilson's documentary The History of Concrete, which I knew purported to be almost anything but. I assumed Wilson, in his funny, nasally voice, would begin in one place and much, much, much later wind up somewhere so entirely different that the result would be fascinating for a non-linear, information-absorbing brain like mine.

Indeed, the movie does exactly that, tracing a long, circuitous route of facts, weirdnesses and odd personalities to get wherever it might or might not be going. The trouble is, none of it is particularly fascinating.

Over on Letterboxd (I'd be happy if you followed me), I gave The History of Concrete three stars the night I saw it, when I felt a little more pleased with it than I turned out to be. Sometimes it takes a while to know how a film is going to work on you, or if it's going to work on you. And that was the problem with The History of Concrete: the morning after seeing it, I forgot about it. I forgot even to write this review.

It's all a little too smug, a little too pleased with itself as it careens from one idea to the next. James Burke famously did that in the 1970s series Connections (to start you down your own rabbit hole, here's that series on YouTube, but don't say I didn't warn you). The brilliant writer Susan Orlean did it in her astonishing, revelatory book The Library Book, which claims to be about a fire at the Los Angeles Public Library and turns out to be about libraries and, well, a whole lot of other things. Like, a dizzying array of other things.

That's a little of what I hoped The History of Concrete might be. Alas, it's not like those things. It's scattershot. It's flippant. It finds an interesting subject then goes out of its way to avoid it. Yes, it ends up in quite an odd place, chronicling the loves and losses of a cover-band singer, but it feels arbitrary and forced.

Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's even intriguing and disturbing, like when it veers into the strange world of tattoo preservation — actually preserving a dead person's skin and the tattoo that was on it. And that winds up in a place that might make The Golden Girls' Sophia Petrillo cry: talking about the death of Chef Boyardee.

If The History of Concrete had trusted itself more to be genuinely curious about these subjects and where they led, it might have been worth the effort. As such, it may wind up playing much better on TV than in the movie theater. In the movie theater, we're stuck watching it all unfold. I'm usually one of the world's biggest proponents of seeing movies in a movie theater for precisely the reason that betrays The History of Concrete: you have to watch. Or go to sleep. Or leave. The choices are limited, unless you have no manners. (And let's not get into that right now.)

But on TV, on streaming, you'll be able to sit there with phone in hand, Googling everything Wilson says, falling down your own rabbit holes while paying half-attention to this documentary that should have been a lot better. So, when it's on streaming, do watch it. You may learn something. Just likely not from the movie.

Viewed October 3, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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I Was Wrong About "Digger"

☆☆☆☆☆

The first time I saw Digger, I went into it with a set of expectations built on some misassumptions. I was looking for flaws, and was sure I found them. Yet, the more I thought about the movie, I wondered if I had been wrong.

I was indeed wrong.

On first viewing, Digger is so audacious, so unexpected—and, there's no way to deny it, so loud and aggressive—that it's impossible to take it all in. After watching Digger once, I knew I had seen a wild, ambitious, complex movie, but I was left with the distinct impression it didn't quite all fit together. Some key performances, especially the ones by John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg and Sandra Hüller, seemed wrong: too broad, too loud, too weird.

The movie didn't seem able to find and sustain quite the right tone, and sometimes the world in which Digger takes place felt uncomfortably inconsistent. Despite all that, Digger made a big impact.

The more I thought about it, and I thought about it a lot after that first watch, I began to think the problem wasn't with the movie, it was with me. I couldn't get Digger out of my mind, so I went to see it again.

This time, knowing one of the plot's central secrets (one I would never think to divulge, though a discouraging number of people aren't as willing to play along), every bit of Digger made sense. The second viewing was revelatory.

Director Alejandro Iñárritu, star and producer Tom Cruise, the bevy of story and screenwriters, production designers Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, editors Stephen Mirrione and Conor O'Neill, and the film's expansive cast all know exactly what they are doing. Do they ever.

The error I made is an easy one for a first-time viewer: I confused the story the film tells with the film itself, assumed that what I saw as slip-ups were unintentional. They're not. I can't imagine a film more tightly and carefully created than Digger, a movie in which every shot must have required asking every single person involved with the film: "Is this what we're intending?"

This may all seem frustratingly vague to anyone who hasn't seen the film. I get it. Just as the movie's trailers and marketing campaign have been criticized for not explaining what the film is, it's impossible to write about Digger without revealing too much. The things that need to be hidden aren't "twists" in the way that Cole Sear revealing he could see dead people made us rethink The Sixth Sense. What happens in Digger — and it doesn't just happen once, but multiple times — shows that we have mistaken what we've seen for what we believe.

Digger pulls off an amazing ontological feat, making us not only rethink what we're seeing on screen, but — and I don't think this is taking it too far — what we see and experience the moment we set foot outside the theater. As soon as we head back into the "real" world, a world that Digger takes one last audacious stab at infiltrating before it ends for good, it's impossible not to think back to the long, loud, aggressive, vexatious monologue Digger Rockwell delivers to an august body of legislators and policy makers.

Except he doesn't deliver his monologue to them. He delivers it directly, scathingly, mockingly directly to us. He implicates us in everything we see on screen — all of it.

But if Digger succeeded only on the level of its message (which is as shockingly progressive and, simultaneously, as bleak as anything mainstream Hollywood has offered since the 1970s), it would fail. It would be nothing more than a "message film," and Digger is much, much more than a message film.

It's a deconstruction and analysis of the very thing Cruise himself praised when he released Top Gun: Maverick — the healing power of communal entertainment, the value of sitting in the dark with strangers and experiencing something. Digger exists on this extraordinary meta level while never letting its core story waver.

Once we see how it all works together, it makes perfect sense why Goodman, Stuhlbarg and Hüller are so broad and hysterical; why Cruise's Digger has moments that seem weirdly out of character, why the whole affair seems so precariously on the brink.

In Digger, Iñárritu has made a movie that may be too ambitious for its own good, if its "good" is to be measured by box office and unanimous acclaim. What critics have faulted as too big, too silly, too satirical are not flaws. It's easy to see them as such, as grand, systemic mistakes of execution, of conception, of intent. They are cited as what's wrong with Digger.

But Digger argues, over and over, that what you think is wrong—with the world, with politics, the environment, the way we interact with each other—may not be what’s wrong at all. They aren’t the problems, they’re the evidence of the problems: the symptoms. The actual dysfunction goes much, much deeper, in ways no one wants to acknowledge.

So it is with the movie itself. What’s allegedly “wrong” with it is what’s wrong with the system, really. 

The whole of the entertainment industry seems to be reacting with the over-the-top glee of Digger himself, as if shouting into the ether: "What did I tell you, motherf---ers? Hoo-hooooo! It's a failure!"

They're all eager to hop on board the failure train, to take what they see on the surface as reality. They'd do well to read the final words that appear on screen in Digger. They're just three words, but much as Digger has done all along, they force us to reconsider everything we've seen, and everything we know. About the movie, and about ourselves.

I was wrong about Digger. It isn't good. I think it's something close to greatness.

"Digger"

☆☆☆☆

For months, Digger has been so wildly hyped and also so shrouded in mystery that it had developed a reputation even before anyone saw it. Some claimed it was a secret musical, others that its run time was close to four hours, and many, many people said it was a colossal failure.

As with many myths and urban legends, none of those things turned out to be true. Digger is not a musical, though it contains one scene that ventures close to that mark; it's only about two hours long; and it's anything but a failure.

It's also not an outright success, and there will be plenty of people who won't be able to stand it, not even a little bit. Its director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, directed the Oscar-winning Birdman, which many found brilliant and I found pretentious. The opposite may prove to the case here, though the split may be similar: on one side will be people who think the whole thing is an unsuccessful overreach, an obvious and unsuccessful attempt at satire; on the other will be people taken by the performances and by the unexpected and bold surprise the movie springs on viewers.

In fact that revelation (I'd be hesitant to call it a twist) comes into play not just once but twice, and on the second appearance it deepens the film immeasurably and recontextualizes everything that has been happening, even the opening credits. The most frustrating part about discussing the film with someone who hasn't seen it is keeping that revelation a surprise—not because knowing it ruins the film, but because its appearance throws everything into such a different light.

Digger is, above everything else, a satire. And satire is, as George S. Kaufman famously said, "what closes on Saturday night." That is, satire rarely works. A lot of people will feel it doesn't work here, but I'm not one of them, even if the movie and its performers can never quite settle on the right tone. (And that might not be a mistake.)

Tom Cruise finds the tone well, though, and if a cynical view is that he's made Digger to show off his acting chops, the truth is: it works. In manic, well-past-middle-aged oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, Cruise has found a character that embraces his own larger-than-life mystique and allows him to deconstruct it. By the time Digger ends, Cruise has done something many actors never do: he's convinced us he really is the character we're watching.

That can't really be said for others in the cast, especially the overly outré John Goodman, tonally inconsistent Michael Stuhlbarg, and radically underused Sandra Hüller. Each seems to have walked in from a different movie.

Goodman, channeling the spirit of George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, is the U.S. president at some unknown time in the near future, and Stuhlbarg is his vice president. They meet with Digger Rockwell after learning that a massive glacier in Greenland where the U.S., through Rockwell's company, has been drilling for oil (yes, the parallels are that obvious). The glacier, warns Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) will hit Europe and cause massive flooding. Which it does. And Digger has to accept responsibility.

In one of the movie's most captivating scenes, he delivers a blistering and outrageous speech that implicates the audience itself in the climate crisis. Cruise is brilliant, the writing — by Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone and Sabina Berman, from a story by Iñárritu, Berman and playwright Jez Butterworth — is sharp and angry, and the movie turns into something so wildly over-the-top it borders on surreal.

It's in this scene that Cruise, though excellent, makes us doubt our commitment to Digger, who seems charismatic, perhaps, but a horrible human being. If that's your feeling, too, stick with it, because Digger is about do to something wild.

Whether that something works will be open to interpretation and personal taste. I think it does, aided by Plemons and Sophie Wild, who probably won't get the credit she deserves for helping make Digger work.

This won't be a movie for all tastes. To judge whether it will work for you, consider your own reaction to the 2022 satire Triangle of Sadness, which some people hated even as it was nominated for Best Picture. (And if you've never seen that film, you might not be in the right audience demographic for Digger.)

If you're willing to meet it halfway, you may find Digger bold and memorable. And if not, you may have a pretty miserable time.

Viewed October 2, 2026 — AMC Century City

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"The Weight"

☆☆☆☆

There is a brutal physicality to The Weight that is both impressive and difficult to watch. I don’t know with any certainty how much the film relies on CG or modern visual-effects technology, but it seems very little — this is a movie that feels grounded in a harsh and unforgiving reality.

The Weight is both a serious and moody Depression-era drama about the lengths desperate people will go to in order to survive; and it’s a captivating and at times almost unbearably tense heist and adventure film. It might not have quite the ineffable gravitas of The Revenant, but it’s still an intense and fulfilling work.
 
Ethan Hawke stars as Samuel Murphy, a single father struggling to make ends meet at the height of the Great Depression. Evicted from his apartment, he even has to sell his daughter’s precious teddy bear for few quick cents. Searching for an apartment in a seedy area of Eugene, Oregon, Murphy is attacked by crooked cops, thrown in jail and separated from his daughter.
 
He soon finds himself in a prison work camp, and the movie’s specific 1933 setting becomes deeply important. The camp’s warden (Russell Crowe) makes him an offer: He can arrange to help Murphy get released from prison in time to get his daughter back from the state if he helps out with a little plan.
Franklin D. Roosevelt is about to seize all private gold, and some of the shady people who run the local gold mine want to liberate it before that can happen.

Murphy and three other prisoners — along with Anna (Julia Jones), a Native American woman trying to escape the harsh mining camp — will carry the gold 50 miles through the unforgiving wilderness to a drop point. They’ve got five days.

The challenges they face are harsh and extraordinary. Director Padraic McKinley shoots all of it with both cool dispassion and maximum tension. An effort to get the heavy gold bars over a rope bridge; a race against a river logjam that comes dangerously unjammed at the worst possible time; an encounter with a suspicious miner; and some excruciating business involving a wedding ring and a broken finger are harrowing, sometimes cringe-inducing highlights.

There’s also an impossibly tense sequence set during a rainstorm that strips cinema to its barest essentials: light and sound. It’s an extraordinary scene, masterfully conceived, shot and edited, that on its own is worth seeing.

The movie as a whole feels a little like Wages of Fear meets The Revenant, but if the individual beats sometimes feel overly familiar, the performances — Hawke, Jones and Crowe, in particular — and the movie’s impressive, meticulous production design compensate. (The movie, it's interesting to note, was shot not in the Pacific Northwest but in the massive forests of Bavaria.)
 
It’s a movie that genuinely tests just how much an audience can take, but generally stays on the right side of that difficult line. For those craving an honest, physical, intensely real movie in a sea of digital trickery, The Weight is uncommonly satisfying.

Viewed September 20, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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"The Musical"

☆☆☆

If Alfred Hitchcock had directed The Bad News Bears or School of Rock, the result might have looked a little bit like The Musical, a small, independent comedy with some pretty big ambitions.

It's got a considerable pedigree. With backing from the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute, director Giselle Bonilla and writer Alexander Heller have created exactly the kind of small indie movie that cinephiles on social media are lamenting don't exist anymore. Subject matter aside (we'll get to that in a moment), it's a movie that could have been made in the indie-crazy 1990s, and just the fact that it exists is a wonderful reminder that the movie industry is still chugging along.

Will Brill stars as Doug Leibowitz, a sad-sack middle-school drama teacher who is subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune everywhere he turns. He's been dumped by fellow teacher Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), who he thinks he might still be dating. But Abigail has started seeing the school's odious, unctuous Principal Brady (Rob Lowe). He keeps applying for fellowships and keeps getting turned down. Life is not cooperating with "Mr. L.," as his kids call him.

Principal Brady is hoping to get the school a prestigious honor. The review committee will be visiting soon — coinciding with this year's play. Doug has selected West Side Story.

But he's changed his mind. He sees the play as an opportunity to humiliate Doug while persuading those hoity-toity review committees that he can write something different. What he chooses is ridiculous — a musical of his own creation called 9/11. Clearly the 12-year-old kids he's directing in it have little concept of what they're doing.

The first two-thirds of The Musical are both cringe-worthy and funny. The movie finds and sustains a black-comedy tone not unlike Throw Momma from the Train, which was even more directly inspired by Hitchcock.

The best thing about The Musical and Bonilla's vision is how it adopts the language of Hitchcock's films, as well as their sound. The movie has a great visual dynamic, and is framed and shaped in ways that feel very unlike most modern films. What's more, the score by Matteo Nossa adopts the rhythm and mood of Bernard Herrmann's best Hitchcock scores, especially Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest. For cinephiles, these moments are fun to watch and fun to hear.

Yet, just when The Musical should be taking its biggest and most audacious risks, it pulls punches. We see precious little of the 9/11 musical itself, and if it contains any music beyond a hip-hop song and Enigma's weirdly mismatched Return to Innocence, we never hear it.

That's the real problem: the very thing we came for is missing. We don't get the performance, we don't get to see what it's all building up to, instead of snatches. There's no A Taste for Love (from Forgetting Sarah Marshall) or Songbird! (from Death Becomes Her). Sure, there's the issue of budget, but it would be fun to hear something. The little snippets we get of the kids pretending to be Rudy Giuliani, Osama bin Laden, or, in one of the movie's best sight gags, George W. Bush only begin to show us what we're missing.

There's a lot going on in The Musical that makes it worthwhile, and some real laughs from Brill's exasperated, put-upon Doug, but its lack of an actual musical that would help it live up to its title makes it fall just a little short of recommended.

Viewed September 19, 2023 — AMC Universal 16

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