November 21, 2025 | View in browser

A man points a bow and arrow while a woman watches.

By Mark Olsen

Staff Writer

Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

This week our film staffers published a holiday wish list of the movies we are looking forward to for the remainder of the year. It includes everything from Josh Safdie's ping-pong fantasia "Marty Supreme" starring Timothée Chalamet, to the animatronic thriller "Five Nights at Freddy's 2," a sequel to Blumhouse's highest-grossing release. Dive in and get these titles on your radar.

Elsewhere in our coverage, Emily Zemler, our correspondent in London, sat down with Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal to chat about the bruising grief drama "Hamnet," directed by Chloé Zhao and sure to be a major awards contender (it releases Nov. 26). Mary McNamara had a revealing career conversation with Alice Brooks, the cinematographer of "Wicked: For Good," who candidly discussed her setbacks over the years. And Maureen Lee Lenker spoke with a playful Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson about the forthcoming "Song Sung Blue," written and directed by Craig Brewer, still making movies about American dreamers 20 years after his "Hustle & Flow."

Revolutionary cinema at UCLA

Launching tonight, the UCLA Film and Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater will present a series titled "Reel Politik: Seizing the Means of Projection with Nathan Gelgud" that will include a number of films that grapple with notions of revolutionary rhetoric and action. Movie fans will recognize Gelgud's drawings from the series of tote bags, T-shirts and other merchandise he has done for venues and organizations in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. He's seemingly become the official cartoonist (and satirist) of cinema culture.

His new book, "Reel Politik," expands on a series of comics that he began on Instagram. It's the story of a group of small-town movie theater employees who form a revolutionary cadre. (They hijack the Criterion Closet van.) Movie lovers will likely recognize themselves in the characters' small-stakes bickering over such topics as assigned seating and film formats.

On the phone this week from his home in South Pasadena, Gelgud, 47, explained how he became a cinema-centric cartoonist.

"I've been a cartoonist for a long time and a few years ago I just kind of decided that I should really be doing comics about movies, just because that's the thing that I know about and that I love the most," he says, "and that my comics would probably get, if not better, they would at least have more of me in them. I would just find a voice, a more effective way of making comics and speaking to readers if they were just always about movies."

The UCLA series, extending five nights between Friday and Dec. 20, includes movies that don't screen that often, so all of these events are worth checking out. Things kick off with Jean-Luc Godard's brilliant and funny 1967 provocation "La Chinoise," about a group of students who refashion themselves as revolutionaries, starring Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anne Wiazemsky. Gelgud will appear in-person for a conversation with frequent Godard collaborator Jean-Pierre Gorin. (Gelgud will also be at other evenings when possible.)

Other films in the series include Peter Watkins' 1971 dystopian "Punishment Park," Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1979 terrorist drama "The Third Generation," Robert Downey Sr.'s 1969 "Putney Swope," the anarchic 1935 Marx Brothers comedy "A Night at the Opera" and Brian De Palma's "Hi, Mom!," starring a young Robert De Niro.

The series also comes at a time when many recent films, including Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another," Kelly Reichardt's "The Mastermind" and Ari Aster's "Eddington," grapple with how to depict political engagement. A recent entry of Gelgud's online comic specifically took on the way revolutionary ideas combine with action aesthetics in "One Battle" and how successful (or not) the movie is in its ambitions.

"It's important to me that when we talk about movies, we don't say, 'Well, it did this one thing that I found objectionable, so I object to the movie in its entirety,'" says Gelgud. "I've gotten really uninterested in whether you like or dislike a movie. It's just not that interesting.

"It's way more useful to talk about what a movie is trying to do and how you feel about what it's trying to do and whether it's doing those things and why it's doing those things and why is it doing those things now." He says. "The idea of liking it or disliking it is kind of immaterial and it's such a nonproductive conversation."

Points of interest

Michael Schultz's 'Krush Groove' and 'The Last Dragon'

As part of Vidiots' ongoing 40th anniversary celebration, on Friday they will show two films directed by Michael Schultz, both from 1985, "Krush Groove" and "The Last Dragon," with the filmmaker in person. Schultz will be joined by cinematographer Ernest Dickerson for a talk after "Krush Groove" and Schultz will introduce "The Last Dragon." Both movies now exist as prime examples of high-'80s style.

"Krush Groove" stars Blair Underwood as a young entrepreneur trying to get his fledgling record label off the ground, but really works best as a cavalcade of talent including Run DMC, Kurtis Blow, the Fat Boys, Sheila E, LL Cool J, New Edition, and the Beastie Boys. The movie arrived as part of an early wave of films that tried to capture the energy of an emerging hip-hop culture. It's hard to remember just how new it felt at the time, as evidenced by an Oct. 1985 wire story about a thousand kids showing up to a midnight screening of the movie in Nassau County, N.Y. — a piece that explained (in almost professorial language), "'Krush Groove' features 'rap' performers whose rhyming street talk is set to music."

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Reviewing the movie, Patrick Goldstein compared it to the rock-and-roll exploitation films of the 1950s, saying, "Just set your pop time machine for 1985, and you'll find a similar drama unfolding 'Krush Groove,' a lackluster new film where the songs sound different, the slang has been updated but the story remains the same."

Produced by Motown Productions, "The Last Dragon" stars Vanity and Taimak in a Harlem-set story of warring gangs of martial artists.

In his review, Michael Wilmington wrote, "'The Last Dragon' is that delectable rarity, a good dumb movie: one full of flaws and holes that winds up entertaining you anyway. The movie has a special whacked-out alchemy. Much of what seems obviously bad (ridiculous situations, outrageous overacting) somehow works. Call it what you want — 'dumb fun,' 'camp,' whatever — you begin by laughing at it, then realize you may be laughing with it. Before long, if you're smart, you'll give up making distinctions; laughter is laughter."

Gia Coppola with 'Hearts of Darkness'

A few months back I spoke to filmmaker Fax Bahr about his work on the documentary "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse," about the making of "Apocalypse Now" directed by Bahr and George Hickelooper from documentary footage captured by Eleanor Coppola.

The Academy Museum is showing the documentary in its new 4K restoration in the big David Geffen Theater on Sunday in celebration of Eleanor's posthumously released memoir, "Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving." Her granddaughter, filmmaker Gia Coppola, will be there in-person.

'Home for the Holidays'

Thanksgiving is an oddly underrepresented movie holiday and arguably one of the best Thanksgiving-specific films is Jodie Foster's 1995 "Home for the Holidays," screening on Saturday at Vidiots. Starring Holly Hunter as a single mother who travels alone to her childhood home to visit with family, the film also features Robert Downey Jr., Dermot Mulroney, Claire Danes, Geraldine Chaplin, Charles Durning and Anne Bancroft.

In his middling original review, Kenneth Turan wrote, "Comedy loves misery, and few things manufacture discontent as efficiently as ritualized family gatherings. 'Home for the Holidays' hopes to find the laughs in the mad chaos of one miserable Thanksgiving, but like many holiday wishes it doesn't quite get fulfilled. … 'Holidays' isn't able to differentiate between reproducing the insanity of a Thanksgiving run amok and making that nightmare amusing. What results is a film with some bright spots but whose effect is finally as muddled and wearying as the event itself sometimes is."

'Out of Plain Sight'

The Times-produced documentary "Out of Plain Sight" is currently getting a theatrical run at the Laemmle Noho following a successful string of festival appearances. Directed by Times journalist Rosanna Xia and filmmaker Daniel Straub, the film is an expansion of a series of stories by Xia, first published in 2020, about how as many as half a million barrels of toxic waste had been dumped into the ocean off the coast of Los Angeles decades ago.

The filmmakers will be present for a series of Q&As during the run, with moderators including cinematographer Wally Pfister and representatives from the group Heal the Bay.

In other news

Village Theater plans for 2027 reopening

As reported by Josh Rottenberg, this week Jason Reitman and a coalition of more than 30 filmmakers announced that the American Cinematheque will operate and program the Village Theater in Westwood as it undergoes a $25-million restoration for its planned reopening in 2027.

"Last year, some of the greatest living directors rallied to save a Los Angeles monument, the Village Theater in Westwood," Reitman said in a statement. "We often like to think of movie theaters as churches. If so, the Village is a cathedral and with the American Cinematheque, we found our congregation."

Also part of Reitman's Village Directors Circle are such bold-faced names as Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Damien Chazelle, Bradley Cooper, Alfonso Cuarón, Ryan Coogler, James Gunn, Denis Villeneuve, Karyn Kusama, Rian Johnson, Lulu Wang, Chloé Zhao and many others.

Founded in 1984, the American Cinematheque also operates the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica and co-programs both the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood and the Los Feliz 3, staging more than 1,600 screenings a year with such signature programs as Beyond Fest, Bleak Week, This is Not a Fiction and Ultra Cinematheque 70 Fest. (But if you're reading this newsletter, you likely already know that.)

In other local theater news, this week the Central Hollywood Neighborhood Council offered unanimous support to the conditional-use permit that would allow the Arclight Hollywood and Cinerama Dome to serve alcohol. This hopefully puts the two venues, closed since 2020, one step closer to reopening.