A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Posted on September 16, 2025 at 3:35 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	F word used many times
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Sad off-screen death of a parent, medical issue for an infant
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	September 19, 2025

Two strangers meet at a wedding, and the next day find themselves — in both senses of the term — on a car trip, guided by a mysterious GPS, through apparently endless unoccupied rural landscapes, stopping at doors that appear unconnected to any structure but turn out to be portals to the past. The journey, with a script by “The Menu’s” Seth Reiss and directed by Kogonada is romantic in the dictionary meaning of the term, “characterized by themes of love, emotion, imagination, and nature.”

Margot Robbie plays Sarah, and Colin Farrell, who starred in Kogonada’s “After Yang,” plays David. They both arrive at the wedding unaccompanied. And, as we will learn, they both arrive in vehicles provided by a very quirky firm simply called The Car Rental Agency, “specializing in emergencies.” The agency, which operates in a gigantic warehouse with just two cars, 1990s Saturns. Its two proprietors (Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge) sit behind a table and, when David shows up having found his car with a boot for unpaid tickets, a flier for the rental company conveniently nearby, they have a file on him. He initially turns down their GPS, insisting that he can just use his phone. But they warn him that phones can fail, and it is clear they won’t let him go without the GPS, so he takes it.

The GPS works normally on the way to the wedding, where David and Sarah meet, drawn to one another but hesitant. It seems like a missed connection. The next morning, the GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith, Farrell’s co-star in “After Yang”) invites David on an adventure and then directs him to get a “fast food cheeseburger.” Sarah is there, also eating a cheeseburger. As they leave, her car won’t start and the GPS tells him to give her a ride. The big, bold, beautiful journey begins.

The first doorway is mostly to get them used to the idea, and then each successive doorway takes them to more complicated and painful memories. Two of particular impact show us separate past encounters that intersect in meaningful ways. Others allow David and Sarah to understand their parents (sensitive performances by real-life couple Lily Rabe as Sarah’s mother and Hamish Linklater as David’s father). They get to glimpse how their time at the wedding could have been different. The one audience may respond to the most viscerally, because it’s high school, takes David back to his performance at age 15 in the lead role of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” The details of these encounters are wisely chosen and performed with the delicacy and authenticity of Kogonada’s previous films. The affection for theater kids (notice the posters in Sarah’s high school bedroom and the song David sings in the car) underscores the importance of finding the truth in stories.

Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb (also of “After Yang”) brings a poetic sensibility to the images, enhancing the fantasy element of the story but grounding it (literally) in the landscape. The shape and bright primary colors of the umbrellas are striking, and overhead shots evoke a heroic adventure. The story’s encouragement for those who have the courage to take a risk and change old patterns has a quiet optimism that may send some of us to open a few bold and beautiful doors ourselves.

Parents should know that this movie includes many uses of the f-word, some sexual references, and a brief, non-explicit sexual situation, a sad death of a parent, and a medical issue involving an infant.

Family discussion: How are Sarah and David alike? How are they different? How did what they learn about themselves change the way they thought about each other? What moment in your life would you want to go back to in order to learn from it?

If you like this, try: “9 Days” and “All of Us Strangers”

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Posted on September 11, 2025 at 5:09 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG for smoking, suggestive material, some thematic elements
Profanity:	Mile language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol and cigarettes, characters get tipsy
Violence/ Scariness:	None
Diversity Issues:	Class issues
Date Released to Theaters:	September 12, 2025

You could have a very successful drinking game if you took a swig every time someone in “Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale” talks about change, coping with it, changing with it, or trying to ignore or prevent it. But you’d be far too tipsy to enjoy this movie’s many pleasures for those who have watched the characters in the title estate for the past 15 years, through five television seasons and two previous feature films. Beginning with the death of the heir to the estate in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, through world events and domestic developments, the series explored social norms, family dramas, both of the titled family and their servants, and the impact of world events. It was romantic and glamorous. (Those clothes! Those dinners! Those romances!) It had everyone’s favorite, Dame Maggie Smith as Lord Grantham’s mother, the acid-tongued Violet, Dowager Countess. It was often thoughtful and endearing, as characters adapted and matured and relationships reconciled. This film will be of greatest interest to those who have followed the story, though you need not have seen or remembered every detail. But for those who have come to care about these characters, it is a very satisfying conclusion.

This film takes place in 1930, and as it begins the family and some of the servants are attending a glittery performance of Noel Coward’s operetta, Bittersweet. After the show, Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), his wife (Elizabeth McGovern), their daughter, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), and Lady Edith Hexham (Laura Carmichael) and her husband (Harry Hadden-Paton) go backstage to congratulate the play’s star, Guy Dexter (Dominic West), who became a family friend after appearing in a movie filmed on the estate. The Grantham’s former footman, Thomas Barrow, is there as well because he is now Dexter’s companion/manager. As Lord Grantham says, their relationship appears “hearty.” Dexter introduces them to Coward (a louche and very charming Arty Froushan).

Lady Mary is unaccompanied because she and her husband are getting divorced, at the time so scandalous she will become a “social pariah,” thrown out of a fancy party by the hostess (Joely Richardson) because members of the royal family are about to arrive and it would be unthinkable for them to be in the same room with someone who is divorced.

Lord and Lady Grantham have both lost their mothers. The memory of Violet and Smith lofts above the story, with Violet’s portrait in the hall and frequent references, and hopes for the disposition of the American estate of Lady Grantham’s mother because Downton always needs money. Lady Grantham’s brother, Harold (Paul Giamatti) arrives to tell her it is not what she hoped, and he brings with him an associate named Gus Sambrook (the always- excellent Alessandro Nivola).

“Downton Abbey” creator and screenwriter Julian Fellowes has a gift for melding drama with an exquisite sensitivity to social hierarchies. He understands the smallest details and the way they reflect the emotional and social upheavals. When Lady Mary is shunned by even those they thought of as close friends, her sister, Lady Edith, who has perhaps come the longest way of the characters in the show, is wise and sophisticated enough to know that the world has changed (there that word is again) enough so that there is one path to putting her back in the social world, and it is not about the old hierarchies of noble titles but about another kind of social currency.

As always, the lives of the servants are of equal importance. Two of the key figures are retiring, in a parallel to the difficulties Lord Grantham has in letting Mary take control of the estate. That means two others in the downstairs community have new responsibilities, underscored by Lady Merton (Penelope Wilton), whose more populist views come into play as she brings two members of the downstairs staff into a prominent role in community affairs.

And, as always, it is gorgeous to look at and revel in. The tiaras! The Royal Enclosure at the Ascot races! The sumptuousness of the surroundings and the empathy for the characters bring this saga to most a satisfying conclusion. If Fellowes cannot resist a wink at the audience by giving a character a speech about the importance of screenwriters, what can we do but wink back at him?

Parents should know that this movie includes sexual references and non-explicit situations as well as family difficulties.

Family discussion: How do we decide when to change and when to hold on to traditions? Which of the characters is best at adapting?

If you like this, try: the “Downton Abbey” series and earlier films and Fellowes “Belgravia,” “The Gilded Age,” and “Dr. Thorne.”

Highest 2 Lowest

Posted on August 14, 2025 at 5:22 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for brief drug use and language throughout
Profanity:	Constant very strong language including the n-word
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol and drug use
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril and violence including guns, characters injured
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	August 15, 2025

Denzel Washington and Spike Lee reunite for the first time since 2006’s “Inside Man” for an elegiac but vibrant story that is complicated and messy. Like life. It is an engrossing crime drama, a family story, a commentary on culture and society, bursting with ideas, masterfully acted by Washington, who just keeps getting better.

The movie begins with Washington’s character, notably called David King, on top of the world. Soaring shots of New York City’s skyline at its most glamorous and inviting are accompanied by Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” from “Oklahoma.” We end on a spectacular penthouse balcony, with King greeting the day. We will see his Architectural Digest-ready apartment, filled with fine art and elegant furnishings.

It may not be a beautiful day for King. His company is about to be purchased by a conglomerate with no special background or interest in music or in supporting the emerging Black artists who are so important to King. He predicts that what they want to do is dismiss all of the newer talent and monetize the archive by licensing it for commercials. His plan is to raise the money to buy back enough of a share from a board member, Patrick (Michael Potts), so he will be able to veto the deal. Putting this deal together causes him to let down his wife, Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera), who was about to make a large contribution to charity, and break a promise to his son, Trey (Aubrey Joseph), to watch him at a basketball camp led by former Boston Celtic Rick Fox. Trey is disappointed, but happy to meet up at the camp with his best friend, Kyle (Elijah Wright), King’s godson, and the son of widower, ex-con, and King’s chauffeur, Paul Christopher (played by Elijah Wright’s real-life dad).

Then, King gets a call that Trey has been kidnapped for ransom and they are demanding $17,500,000 in Swiss francs. The reason it has to be in francs, not dollars, is clever, like many of the details of the crime, but for some reason this kidnapper makes no effort to stop King from calling the police. The kidnapper also makes another mistake. He mistook Kyle for Trey. Will King continue with plans to take the money he needs to keep his company to pay ransom for someone else’s son?

The way the ransom exchange and subsequent events play out, including a subway train filled with excited Yankees fans and a Puerto Rican Day festival featuring “Do the Right Thing’s” Rosie Perez is tightly constructed. We may think we are in the middle of a gritty first-class thriller, but it turns out there is more. As often happens in Spike Lee movies, the world before us is heightened and the storyline becomes less linear. Is this the story of a crime? Is it about the moral assignment of responsibility? About money? About mistakes? About forgiveness? About risk? About art? About family? All of the above. Like life.

There are winks at the audience, references to Lee’s well-known love of basketball and the Yankees (look for a cheeky sign in the subway car), and a door labeled A24, the name of the film’s studio, to remind us what a personal statement it is. The score by Howard Drossin is arresting but unexpected, a Celtic tone that contrasts with what we might expect for a suspenseful moment.

Washington is utterly mesmerizing as King, crafty, calculating, but essentially a good man, devoted to his wife and son and to music and the people who make it. He knows that what made his company great (there are framed magazine covers with his face on them in his office and references to his many Grammy awards) was his “best ears in the business.” And he knows that the business is not as great as it once was. The supporting cast is superb, with stand-out performances by A$AP Rocky as rapper Yung Felon and Princess Nokia as a young mother. The highlights of this magnificent film, even more than the crime thriller section, are the (mostly) quiet conversations King has with both characters.

Lee and Washington know, as King tells an aspiring singer, that “the hard times will come from the money and the mayhem follows.” They know that “all money isn’t good money” and how to tell the difference. This is a literal masterpiece, based on the term’s origin as work that shows all of the mastery of an experienced creator. It is a crowning achievement by men who have put in the work, learned the lessons over decades, and bring out the best in one another.

Parents should know that this film has extended strong language including many uses of the n-word and a crude and sexist term for a body part. Characters smoke weed and drink alcohol. The story involves a violent crime. Most of the violence occurs off-screen, but there are guns and shooting and characters are injured.

Family discussion: What made King change his mind about paying the ransom? What does he mean about “trying to be practical?” When were the police helpful and when were they not helpful? What does it mean to say “attention is the biggest form of currency,” and do you agree?

If you like this, try: “Inside Man,” “Malcom X,” “Do the Right Thing,” “Chi-Raq,” and “He Got Game”

F1

Posted on June 26, 2025 at 12:00 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for strong language and action
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense driving sequences with some serious accidents
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	June 27, 2025

Brad Pitt poster for F1 movie — Copyright 2025 Warner Bros.

“F1” is exactly what summer blockbusters are supposed to be, exciting, romantic, funny, glamorous, and purely entertaining.

It has a classic set-up, and if it seems reminiscent of “Top Gun: Maverick,” it is because it has the same producer and director. It’s pretty close to the same movie with cares instead of airplanes plus a touch of “Ted Lasso.” Also, it’s a classic set-up, guys with exceptional skills and cocky attitudes showing off, having conflicts, taking risks, and overcoming obstacles, all looking very, very cool.

Formula One is ” the highest class of worldwide racing for open-wheel single-seater formula racing cars.” We’ve seen Formula One racing in films like “Rush” and “Ford vs. Ferrari,” based on true stories, and the documentary “Senna,” and Netflix series based on the life and death of Brazilian champion Artyn Senna.

Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a race car driver who is “not a has-been but a never-was.” Once considered, with his long-time friend Reuben (Javier Bardem) to be the most promising up-and-coming young racers in Formula One, his career, like his car, went off the track. Now he takes any chance he can to race. He’d drive in a soapbox derby if that was all he could find.

Here’s how cool he is. He wins a low-stakes race with dash and skill, then waves off the trophy. He is “a guy who makes teams better.” He stops to do his laundry at a coin-op, when an old friend walks in. It is Reuben (Javier Bardem). Once they were young up-and-coming hot shots on the cover of a racing magazine. Now Reuben has an F1 team and a talented but undisciplined driver, and he needs Sonny’s help. At first, Sonny turns him down. But if he doesn’t agree to join Reuben’s team he’ll never know if he could have been the best of the best and we wouldn’t have a movie.

Reuben’s hot shot is Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), who is both threatened by and contemptuous of Sonny. He asks, ‘When was the last time you won a race.” “Sunday.” “I mean a F1 race.” “Same as you.” This is full of tough talk, like “Who said anything about safe?” Game on!

And do I need to even mention that the team’s head of car mechanics is a beautiful Irish woman named Kate (the terrific Kerry Condon of “The Banshees of Inisherin”)? Wait for the scene where they play Texas Hold ‘Em.

Fi is a place where people have many different ways of expressing emotion by the way they take off their headphones and they get excited over finding a way to cut their time by half a second.

The film mostly avoids making Pitt a sage elder. He’s not Crash Davis in “Bull Durham,” one final season as he passes the baton and some life lessons to a talented but undisciplined newcomer. (If the young competitors were talented AND disciplined there would not be much of a movie unless they had time to put in some huge setback or make him the Iceman in contrast to the Maverick.) Pitt, like Sonny, in every sense of the term is running his own race. Pitt is an actor of exceptional range but this role is smack dab in the middle of his sweet spot. He appears effortless, but it is the kind of effortlessness that requires superb understanding and control.

Like the plane scenes in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the race scenes in this film set a new standard, placing us inside the 200 mph action. For me, the pit stop scenes were some of the best, and I also liked seeing how many people it took, rows of people with headphones staring into screens almost like a rocket launch. The dialogue is sharp and smart, and if the plot twists are low in surprise they are high in satisfaction. So is this very entertaining film.

Parents should know that this movie includes intense racing scenes with some serious accidents. There are sexual references and a non-explicit situation and characters drink and use strong language.

Family discussion: How are Sonny and JP different and how are they similar? How does Sonny make teams better?

If you like this, try: “Rush,” “Grand Prix,” “Winning,” “Gran Turismo,” and “Ford vs. Ferrari”

The Life of Chuck

Posted on June 15, 2025 at 12:24 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol
Violence/ Scariness:	Apocalyptic themes, sad off-screen deaths including parents and grandparents, references to suicide
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	June 13, 2025

When a movie begins with “Act Three,” it is an invitation to open our minds to something unusual. “The Life of Chuck” is based on a story by Stephen King, and it reflects his more mystical side. While it includes dark and tragic themes, it is a story of profound humanity, ultimately spirit-expanding.

It begins at the end in more ways than one. A teacher named Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is meeting with parents who seem oddly disconnected from concerns about how their children are doing in school. The world seems to be collapsing. A major earthquake has knocked California into the ocean. The internet is shutting down. Couples who have been together are splitting up and those that have split up are getting back together. Marty’s ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan) is an exhausted nurse in a hospital where most of the arrivals are attempted suicides. And somehow, signs – billboards, skywriting, bench posters, even projected in the windows of suburban homes — are appearing everywhere thanking someone named Chuck.

In Act Two we meet Chuck as a young boy and see him grow up. His parents were killed in an automobile accident, and he lives with his grandparents (Mark Hamill as Albie and “Ferris Bueller’s” Mia Sara as Sarah) in an old house with a padlocked room in a cupola on the top floor that he is warned never to open. He is very good at math but what he loves is dancing, and a dance class leads him to what will be one of his life’s most profound and satisfying moments, in part because after moments of doubt and fear of being judged (he is in middle school, the judgiest part of life), he finds the courage to follow his heart and take a risk. Later, as an adult, and, as we are told by narrator Nick Offerman, nine months from his death due to a still-undiagnosed brain tumor, he will have another sublime moment of dance, when he passes by a busking drummer on a break from an accounting conference.

To say much more would be to say too much; this is a film that benefits from an audience without expectations or advance guidance. But for those who have seen it and would like to know what I think it means, I have some spoiler-filled comments at the end of this review. For now, I will just point out that twice in the film teachers share a selection from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself in their classrooms, the part that goes

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

When Chuck’s teacher (played by Kate Sigel) explains this passage to him, she places her hands gently over his ears and asks what is between them. It is the multitudes within each of us, every emotion, every memory, every wish, every fear, every sublime moment, every crushing disappointment, every tiny quotidian interaction we are not even aware that we noticed.

This movie is a labor of love from both King and writer/director Mike Flanagan, whose wife (Seigel) and son (as the youngest version of Chuck) appear as key characters. It has a transcendent, poetic humanity that should make us better appreciate our own lives and the people we value. And take the time, at least once in a while, to dance.

Parents should know that a child’s father and pregnant mother are killed (offscreen) in a car accident and there are apocalyptic events. A central character dies and there are references to other deaths, including a suicide. Characters use strong language and there are references to pornography.

Family discussion: What multitudes are in you? Who would you want to be with if things were scary? What do we learn from Marty’s conversations with Sam and Gus? Should Chuck have listened to his grandfather’s advice?

If you like this try: “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” and “Stranger Than Fiction”

Stop now if you don’t want spoilers.

CLUES: What does it mean that we see Sam and Gus in different time periods but they do not seem older or younger, while Chuck is played by four different actors as he goes from young childhood to middle age? Why is the Whitman poem so important?

MY VIEW: Every character in the movie is a part of the “multitudes” that make up one person, Chuck Krantz. The thank you signs are a part of his shutting down as he dies. When we die, our stories, our memories, our relationships, the multitudes within us stop, at least in the form of being contained in one individual consciousness. What Chuck saw in the locked room represents the recognition we all have that our lives are temporary.