What to Watch: The Republic, If You Can Keep It

It has not been the best of weeks for the Watch List, what with A) a health issue flaring up (nothing life-threatening, just a back problem that makes it feel like someone’s repeatedly stabbing me in the legs), B) a Kafkaesque health-insurance bureaucracy that has me not wanting to go the full Luigi but at least gives me a sense of where the guy was coming from, and C) next week’s island vacation with Mrs. Movie Critic that we’ve now had to cancel because I can barely walk across a room.

But it’s all good, because you know what didn’t happen to me this week? I didn’t get shot in the face by a trigger-happy paramilitary freak cosplaying as a government agent. My kids aren’t orphaned, my partner isn’t devastated, my community isn’t rising up in grief and fury. (Well, actually, my community is pretty pissed, and I hope yours is, too. Check your local listings.) I often worry that this country is too big and widely dispersed to sustain the kind of civic momentum necessary to effect change – that we’re too busy staring at our screens to get off our asses and do something (guilty as charged), that we’ve grown so accustomed to our first-world comforts that we’re scared to put ourselves in the line of fire (absolutely guilty as charged). To which I would advise you to indulge in two thought experiments. One is to watch, if you haven’t already, the Ken Burns’ documentary series “The American Revolution” (streaming on PBS.org; episodes and series for purchase on Amazon and Apple TV), and consider what it took for the equally divided if much smaller American colonies to come together against an authoritarian force that wasn’t actually in the building, for lack of a better phrase. (Will we someday look on Renee Nicole Good as a 21st century Crispus Attucks and her murder as a galvanizing “Minneapolis Massacre”? Or will it take more bloodshed, more victims, before enough is enough for our elected representatives or the crowds in the street?)

The other thing I would urge you to do is pay attention to what is happening in Iran right now, as protests in that country are nearing a pitch that, for those of us old enough to remember, seems reminiscent of the revolution that culminated in 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah and the installation of a theocracy that quickly became one of the most repressive governments on the planet. The UK-based news site Amwaj,media seems to be offering the best on-the-ground reportage of a population that has had enough and maybe can achieve the momentum necessary to kick the bastards out. (Although Reza Pahlavi, the exiled Crown Prince of Iran waiting in the wings, has an awfully meet-the-new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss vibe to him.) Anyway, shit’s going down, even if we’re so understandably focused on what’s happening in Trumpkinland that it’s easy to miss the totterings of a police state on the other side of the globe. The murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, shot by a sniper as she stood with friends on the fringe of a protest, was 15 years ago now. Maybe Renee Nicole Good is our Neda as well as our Crispus Attucks, and maybe, God help us, we have a similarly long road before we see daylight again. If so, let's get to it.

I’m in a crappy mood, as if you couldn’t tell. I know, I know you come here to learn about movies. For what it’s worth the Washington Post is running my first review for the paper in months, for Park Chan-wook’s devilish black comedy of homicidal unemployment “No Other Choice” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – you can read it on the Post site or, for paid Watch List subscribers, below the jump. (Am I back at the WaPo? On a case-by-case basis, it seems, or whenever my editor, a longtime colleague and friend, wants to bring me in.)

I also have another bit of satire running in the Boston Globe today, tilting a lance at Dear Leader’s new hobby of invading sovereign nations. The piece rings a little glib in the wake of Renee Nicole Good's death – it was written beforehand – but there you go. Also at the paper’s site and, for paid subs, below.

Okay, movies. For the art-house curious or those who simply want to steep in the air molecules of a bygone time and place, I can heartily recommend “Peter Hujar’s Day” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2), which is currently in selected theaters but just started renting for a reasonable $9.99 on Amazon. One of my faves of last year if not quite in my Top Ten, I saw it at Sundance in January of 2025 and reported on it thusly:

Everybody has a cultural scene that they just missed being at (and thus worship with the force of unconsummated nostalgia), and for me it’s downtown New York in the 1960s and early 1970s – the clubs, the lofts, the art, the music. Director Ira Sachs (“Passengers”) captures two lightning bugs in a bottle with this recreation of a day-long 1974 conversation between Hujar (Ben Wishaw), a photographer with one foot in the downtown demimonde and the other in uptown magazine assignments, and writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), who was working on a never-completed project in which artists reconstructed a single day in their working lives. The result is more anti-movie than movie, bristling with name-drops that have been lost to most people’s cultural memories (if they were ever there at all) and hewing closely to the typed transcript that was the only surviving document of the project. But the two pitch-perfect leads breathe a lovely, intimate banality into the proceedings, and the movie is lit with the glow of a New York moment that flickered and was gone. I quite liked it; another friend thought it was "like a painfully abridged version of Andy Warhol's diaries."

To which I can only add that my friend is wrong.

Another little gem from last year’s Sundance just hitting VOD is the po-faced “Zodiac Killer Project” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, renting for $5.99 on Amazon and $6.99 on Apple TV), less a true-crime documentary than a droll takedown of the entire genre and, among other things, an example of making cinematic lemonade from lemons. Back then I wrote:

Charlie Shackleton tried to make a film about a police detective who spent years on the trail of California’s infamous serial killer, but then he lost the rights to the detective’s story and instead decided to make a movie about the movie he wasn’t able to make. In the process, he eviscerates with wit and onscreen receipts the conventions of the true-crime documentary that have been hammered into cliché over the past decades, using clips from every HBO murder doc and basic cable special to deconstruct a genre that’s become a Pavlovian cultural addiction and an excuse to exploit misery for ratings.

For reasons I’ve never quite understood (nor properly looked into, honestly), the films of John Sayles are haphazardly represented on demand. “Lone Star,” “Return of the Secaucus Seven,” “Passion Fish,” “Eight Men Out” are available one way or another, and “Baby, It’s You,” a personal favorite, has reappeared after a long absence, but “Matewan” (1987, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐), Sayles terrific, heartbreaking epic of the American labor movement, just popped up exclusively on WatchTCM, in a brief window that has only six days left. Beautifully shot (by Haskell Wexler) and scored (hello, Mason Daring), it marks the film debut of the brilliant actor and low-key Boston area dude Chris Cooper. As the old New York Times TV listings used to say, “Pounce.”

Random notes: As mentioned above, I was supposed to go away on vacation starting Sunday, and even though that got scotched by unplanned events, I’ll be taking the next week off to pretend I’m on vacation and maybe noodle with a few side projects. I’ll also be skipping Sundance this year, at least in person – thus missing the festival’s farewell to Park City, but so it goes – but will be watching many of the films online and will post a pre-fest rundown and some reviews. Watch this space, see you in a bit, and, please, take time to practice self-care.