What to Watch: "Mr. Nobody Against Putin" and more

Oh, hey, tomorrow, January 30 is National Shutdown Day. I hope you’re planning to observe. I worry that a hastily-planned event like this needs a longer runway if it’s to achieve the momentum to actually bring the commerce of the country to a grinding halt – enough to have an impact beyond a futile if necessary gesture. But maybe do it anyway, hope for the best and at worst consider it a practice run for next time. Or the time after that. The way all those No Kings protests over the past year have brought out more and more people who never marched with a sign before. (Remember, if you get enough people, you get a Minneapolis.)

I’m currently bingeing Sundance 2026 movies from home in the brief window they’re available to the press and public online (today and tomorrow for civilians) and will report back next week on what I find. For now, though, a few streaming recommendations for weekend anesthetization.

“Mr. Nobody Against Putin” (2025, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, $5.99 rental on Amazon) – The Mr. Nobody of the title is Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, a cherubic young teacher and school videographer in the rural Russian industrial town of Karabash who films over several years the militarization of his students under Vladimir Putin’s propaganda campaign in the early days of the Ukraine invasion. A quiet sort of rebel – his most overt act of resistance is piping Lady Gaga’s version of the American national anthem over the school’s sound system – Talankin nevertheless amasses a wealth of footage that itself is radical in its unstinting documentation of children’s minds being forced shut under a curriculum that can only be called mass brainwashing. To see his fellow teachers fearfully cave in, the most rabid pro-Putin history teacher be given a cooked-up award and Talankin’s favorite pupils start to avoid his office as their older brothers are shipped off to die in battle is to watch a community being ground under the heel of dictatorship. Behind all the macho declarations and nationalist fervor is finally just an enforced cult of personality, and if you don’t hear the echoes here at home, you’re not listening closely enough. Talankin has fled Russia by the film’s end and “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” has been nominally directed by American filmmaker David Borenstein, but the guiding intelligence and pervading mournfulness is all Pasha’s as he watches the light in his students' eyes slowly dim to darkness.