What to Watch: "A Little Prayer" and "The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos"

Two new excellent, unknown films on VOD, plus new releases "Kiss of the Spider Woman " and "Roofman" and lots more.

What to Watch: "A Little Prayer" and "The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos"
"The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos"

This is why I write this newsletter: To bring to your attention two absolutely wonderful little movies that surfaced a few years ago at festivals, barely got a theatrical release (one didn’t see theaters at all) and that now wash up on the shore of video on demand like rare and delicate creatures from the ocean depths. You want something to watch this weekend? Try one of these – or both.

Honestly, I never thought I’d get another chance to see “The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, streaming on Kanopy, $5.99 to rent on Amazon and Apple TV) – an exhilarating, crowd-made tale of African resistance and resilience – after catching it at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2024. Directed by the Agbajowo Collective, a coalition of Nigerian slum activist-residents, with a bit of outside filmmaking help, “Legend” is a gripping magical-realist tale rooted in the real-life injustice of Lagos neighborhoods getting bulldozed by corrupt Nigerian government officials to make room for resort casinos from which they’ll profit â€” a community tragedy that continues. Professionally shot, evocatively scored and edited like a thriller, the movie features a meaty central performance by Temi Ami-Williams as a grieving mother who transforms into an avenging angel; how she becomes the “queen” of the title is phantasmagoric and inspiring, and the entire film is a tribute to the power of cinema as a social weapon. Playing like a distant cousin to “Beasts of the Southern Wild” but standing defiantly on its own collective feet, “The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos” was the best under-the-radar movie I saw at TIFF 2024 – hell, it was a bogey flying so close to the ground that most of my critical colleagues still don’t know it exists. But now you do.


David Strathairn in “A Little Prayer”

Calling all David Strathairn fans – and who amongst us is not – “A Little Prayer” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐, $6.99 to rent on Amazon and Apple TV) is the rare movie to give this great, undervalued actor a lead role. He is heartbreakingly fine as a working-class husband and father (and grandfather) who sees his small, complacent world start to crack apart when he learns that his grown son (Will Pullen) – a partner in the family sheet-metal business – is cheating on his wife (Jane Levy) with the company secretary (Dascha Polanco). Touching gently on issues of class, alcoholism, moral character, moral failings and the struggles of America’s war veterans (of both Vietnam and Iraq, which the film rightly observes are two vastly different things), “A Little Prayer” is written and directed by Angus MacLachlan, who wrote “Junebug” (2005) and who sets “A Little Prayer” in the same closely-observed corner of North Carolina. It is, in the end, a movie about kindness and loss, and in the relationship between father-in-law Strathairn and daughter-in-law Levy, it achieves a transcendent awareness of grace and sorrow that nods to other, greater films. As I wrote in my Washington Post review

MacLachlan has spoken in interviews of his admiration for the films of Yasujiro Ozu, who along with Jean Renoir may be the most humane director in the history of the movies. Certainly the relationship between Bill and Tammy, so tender and compassionate, echoes that of the father and daughter in “Late Spring” (1949), perhaps the Japanese master’s greatest film. (Squint a little and Strathairn even looks like that movie’s Chishu Ryu.) But all of “A Little Prayer” is alive in its modest way to the beauty and the disappointment of human existence. MacLachlan has given us Ozu in the heartland, and I can think of no greater praise than that.

 I saw this back at Sundance 2023 and wondered if it would ever see the light of day. Two distributors later, here it is – a nearly perfect movie and one of the best of 2025.


New in Theaters:

 â€œKiss of the Spider Woman’ (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) is better than you’d expect, or at least better than I was expecting – a lavish filming of the 1992 Kander and Ebb stage musical that was based on the 1985 movie that was based on Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel. After all that titration, the plot still holds: A prison cell in 1975 Argentina, where political prisoner ValentĂ­n Arregui (Diego Luna) is thrown together with Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay man arrested for public indecency. The latter regales the former with the remembered plot of a fictional Hollywood B-movie (see title) starring the fictional Aurora (Jennifer Lopez), which director Bill Condon (“Gods and Monsters,” “Kinsey,” “Dreamgirls”) stages as a series of homages to classic Hollywood musicals, from Astaire and Rogers to Gene Kelly and MGM’s Freed unit to Howard Hawks’ “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” to Bob Fosse and “Cabaret,” all with a dash of Maria Montez in 1944’s “Cobra Woman.” The movie’s greatest weakness (aside from the built-in cognitive dissonance of subject and style) is JLo, who gets the steps and the singing right but has little of the spirit of Chita Rivera in the original staging or mystique of Sonia Braga in the first movie; its greatest strength is Tonatiuh (TV’s “Vida”), who walks the line of camp and tragedy with self-aware wit, and who can sing and dance like a pro. Classic musical hag that I am (annoyed Entertainment Weekly colleague to me at a morning meeting in 1995 after I’d been burbling about some Bette Davis movie: “Why aren’t you gay?”), I loved the musical numbers, which Condon stages as he should, proscenium-style without any of that petit mal “Chicago” editing. I’d say see this on a big screen or not at all.


“Roofman” (⭐ ⭐ 1/2, in theaters) casts Channing Tatum – that human Bill Ding block who, unaccountably, is a really good dancer – plays a real-life goofball felon, Jeffrey Manchester, who robbed McDonalds restaurants by breaking through their roofs, went to prison, escaped from prison and lived undetected for the better part of a year in a Toys R Us store while romancing a local church lady (Kirsten Dunst). Again, it happens. He’s charming, Dunst is charming, the supporting cast (including Ben Mendelsohn and Uzo Aduba as a pastor and his wife and Peter Dinklage as a prissy/pissy store manager) is charming, and the movie, at two hours and six minutes, overstays its welcome by about half an hour. Director Derek Cianfrance, who co-wrote the screenplay with Kirt Gunn, is known for the bruising love/hate story “Blue Valentine” (2010) and the heavyweight multi-generational melodrama “The Place Beyond the Pines” (2012); this is his first comedy, and it shows. It’s best for the quiet scenes between the leads, in which Dunst knows exactly what to do and shows her co-star the way.


New releases on VOD: