A character in “Ballad of a Small Player” tells a story about a gambler who dies and discovers that in the afterlife he is still gambling, but now he always wins. “This heaven?” he asks in amazement. “No,” he is told. “You’re in hell.”
Copyright 2025 Netflix
The import of the story may be lost on the person it is told to, but it is not lost on the audience, who will understand that it is the story we are watching. Not because he is a winner, but because winning or losing, the gambling compulsion is its own hell.
In this film, the part of hell is played by Macao, the real-life gambling capital of the world, gorgeously photographed by James Friend. It looks like gambling may feel to someone who cannot give it up; thrilling, glamorous but also seedy, seductive, and dangerous.
The character who calls himself Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) is a gambler. He wakes up in a luxurious hotel room littered with the clutter of a dozen different room service meals. He shaves and dresses in a handsome and expensive-looking green velvet suit, and fails to duck the hotel management that would like him to pay up on the $350,000 he owes them. A bellman explains he can no longer get access to the hotel limos, but whispers the name Rainbow, a casino that gives credit.
The big money game is Baccarat, and Doyle tells us millions can be won and lost in a single hand. The hostess/purveyor of credit is Dao Ming (Fala Chen). Later, after a gambler commits suicide by leaping out of a window, his widow accuses Dao Ming of causing her husband’s death and Doyle protects her. Dao Ming brings him back to her apartment. The next morning, he wakes to find her gone, but she has written a number on his palm.
The pressure on Doyle intensifies when he is tracked down by an investigator from London (Tilda Swinton), seeking repayment of money he stole when he was still called by his original name, Riley. If he does not pay back almost a million pounds, she will have him arrested.
Elements of the film tell us it may be a dream, a fantasy, or a deathbed hallucination. Or perhaps it is hell, with Doyle/Riley stuck in some kind of loop of big risks and bad decisions.
Parents should know that this film includes suicides, strong language, drinking, smoking, drug use, and criminal behavior.
Family discussion: How are Riley and Dao Ming alike and how are they different? What part of this film is a dream or fantasy?
If you like this, try: “Hard Eight” and “Molly’s Game”
Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, some language and suggestive references
Profanity:
Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
None
Violence/ Scariness:
References to the Holocaust, sad death
Diversity Issues:
A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:
September 26, 2025
Copyright 2025 Sony Pictures Classics
Scarlett Johansson’s first film as a director shows the careful attention she has been paying as a performer, starting with the importance of casting. The irreplaceable June Squibb stars as the title character, an outspoken 94-year old who moves from her home in Florida to New York after the death of Bessie (Rita Zohar), her roommate and best friend.
The opening scenes show the ease, comfort, and support of that friendship, as they strap on their velcro-strap shoes, grab Eleanor’s cane, go for a walk and shop for groceries. Bessie collapses in the store, and we see them in the hospital, Eleanor making sure Bessie sees a doctor right away by telling the nurse Bessie is a member of the family who donated the money for a wing at the hospital, despite the fact that it is not true. She also lies to a nosy neighbor, just to annoy her. This comfort with deception appears at first to be harmless but it is an indication of the dangers ahead.
In New York, Eleanor reunites with her recently divorced daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), and college student grandson, Max (Will Price). In contrast to her relationship with Bessie, her connection to her family is prickly, contrary, and sometimes judgmental. Lisa has signed Eleanor up for a singing group at the Jewish Community Center and encourages her to look at assisted living options. Eleanor is not interested. At the JCC, she wanders into a meeting, not realizing it is a support group for Holocaust survivors. When called upon to introduce herself, she uses one of Bessie’s stories. Sitting in on the meeting is a journalism student named Nina (a radiant Erin Kellyman), who is captivated by Eleanor’s story and wants to write about her.
Nina’s mother died six months earlier and her father, a television news reporter (Chiwetel Ejiofor as Roger) has been distant, dealing with his own grief. The dislocation and grief they share leads Nina and Eleanor to become close friends very quickly.
The chemistry between them is palpable, so we want that friendship to continue to be a source of connection and healing for them. But we know, as Eleanor realizes at some level, that the “stolen valor” lie at its foundation must detonate, causing great pain for both of them. What is unexpected is compassion and generosity of the way it is resolved, I suspect the reason Johansson and Squibb were drawn to the story.
Squibb is, as we saw in “Nebraska” and “Thelma,” a treasure and this role gives her a chance to play a character who is fully human, flawed, grieving, and still learning. The British Kellyman has an impeccable American accent and she is a gem, lighting up the screen with her vulnerability and the way she treasures and is reassured by her friendship with Eleanor. Johansson created a space for superb performances by everyone in the cast, including Jessica Hecht as Eleanor’s frustrated daughter and Zohar as Eleanor’s roommate and lifelong friend.
Sqiibb, Kellyman, Johansson, and first-time screenwriter Tory Kamen have made a film about loss, friendship, and compassion. Eleanor may not always be great, but this movie lets us see the parts of her that really are.
Parents should know that this movie includes some strong language, references to the Holocaust, and grief over the deaths of a wife and mother and a friend.
Family discussion: Why did Eleanor lie? Why was it hard for her to be as nice to her daughter as she was to Nina and Bessie? Were you surprised by Lisa’s response?
If you like this, try: “Thelma,” also starring June Squibb
Rated R for pervasive language, violence, sexual content, and drug use
Profanity:
Constant very strong, bigoted, and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:
Drinking and drugs
Violence/ Scariness:
Characters in peril, some injured and killed, graphic and disturbing images, guns and bombs
Diversity Issues:
A theme of the movie, racist characters
Copyright 2025 Warner Brothers
Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “The Phantom Thread”) has taken a novel written 35 years ago by an author often described as “unfilmable” and turned it into a vital, provocative, and disturbingly (in a good way) of-the-moment two hour and forty minute film that seems to go by in half the time. The film is a grand epic anchored by three Oscar-winners bringing their A game. It balances action, politics, metaphor, and satire, with heightened characters who are larger than life but still feel real and a knockout, urgently percussive score from Johnny Greenwood. There is also humor, some slapstick, though not handled quite as deftly.
While much of the story is original, like Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 book, Vineland, the story is about a couple who were in a militant activist group, here called the French 75. The couple is identified by the authorities just after their child was born. The woman went into the witness protection program and the man and the baby got new identities and were relocated by French 75.
Elements of the story evoke the unrest of the 1960s, when the most extreme activists protesting the Vietnam War and racial injustice broke the law, even becoming violent. The Weather Underground’s name was inspired by the Bob Dylan line that “You don’t have to be a weather man to know which way the wind blows.”Weather Underground’s Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert served more than 20 years in maximum-security prisons for their roles in a 1981 Brink’s robbery in upstate New York, in which a guard and two police officers were killed while Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were on the run from the authorities (partly inspiring the film “Running on Empty”).
French 75 is a Weather Underground-inspired group, but their attacks are even more militaristic and violent. Anderson’s script is very loosely based on the book and substitutes more timely issues and attitudes. While, like the group in the Pynchon book they have broadly anti-capitalist, anti-oppression views, we meet them as they are about to raid a US immigration center on the Mexican border.
The character who will be called Bob for most of the film (Leonardo DiCaprio) is in charge of explosives. Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) is one of the leaders, with a fierce, aggressive attitude and a lot of guns. The soldier in charge of the center is Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn in an incendiary performance, one of his best in years. Just watch the way he walks, the heft of his shoulders. Perfidia confronts him in a scene charged with highly sexualized power dynamics. He is humiliated and enthralled.
French 75 operatives zip tie the hands of the military and unlock the cages filled with rows of cots with people shivering under silvery Mylar blankets, one of innumerable striking images from cinematographer Michael Bauman. The raiders lead the immigrants into a truck and take them across the border into the US.
Perfidia is passionate about the issues and perhaps even more by the excitement and adrenaline of their raids. Bob, a bit shy and nerdy, shows her how he builds the explosives and she finds it thrilling. Soon they are a couple. Meanwhile, Lockjaw is obsessed with her. When she is captured, he says he will help her if she is nice to him. That means naming names of French 75 members and it means sex.
Perfidia has a baby, but soon leaves the infant with Bob and disappears. Sixteen years later, the couple and the baby are hiding out. No one knows where Perfidia is; she ran away from witness protection. The father and daughter, now called Bob and Willa (an outstanding debut by Chase Infiniti), are living quietly in a small Colorado town.
Lockjaw, still in the army and still deeply conflicted, wants to find Willa to determine if he is her father, and if so, to eliminate her. Perfidia is Black and Lockjaw, like Bob, is white. Lockjaw is desperate to join an elite club of the ruling class, which accepts only members who are “homegrown” (white, American-born, and gentile, with no ties to anyone who is not). If Willa is his daughter, he will not be eligible for membership. He finds out where Bob and Willa are hiding and fabricates a reason to be deployed to the area, arriving with a platoon of heavily armed soldiers.
Willa is frustrated by Bob’s constant use of marijuana and alcohol and by what she sees as his paranoia and overly strict rules. She goes to a school party with friends and is captured. Bob, with the help of Willa’s martial arts teacher, known as Sensei (Benicio Del Toro), goes after her, still wearing the ratty bathrobe he was wearing as he waited for her at home, smoking weed and watching “Battle of Algiers.” He has a special gizmo that French 75 gave him to help find her 16 years earlier, but it has been a while and he has abused many substances, so he cannot quite remember the passwords he needs to get help from the underground network or find a place to charge his phone. (The humor of this situation wears thin.)
We go back and forth from the military interrogations (even the bravest crumble when their families are at risk) to exceptionally well-designed, very exciting various efforts to capture and rescue Willa and her attempted escapes. There are fascinating characters along the way, including weed-growing nuns, the “homegrown” cabal, and a Native American tracker/hitman.
There will be a lot of conversations about this film, and a lot of arguments about how to unpack it. Anderson has enough respect for the audience not to make it easy and enough pure talent to keep us enthralled enough to try to parse it. While there are some exaggeratedly blatant villains in the film, the more important characters are the conflicted Lockjaw and the ineffectual Bob. The best clue is with the title, reminding us, again, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Parents should know that this movie includes peril and violence with characters injured and killed and graphic and disturbing images. guns, bombs, militant and military activity, guns and bombs. Characters smoke, drink, and use drugs and very strong and crude language. Characters are bigoted and use offensive terms.
Family discussion: How have things changed since the book that inspired this movie was written? Is Bob a good father?
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.”
Copyright 2025 Columbia
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”
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.
Copyright 2025 Focus
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.”
