March 2026 [9-15]
Bugonia, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Black Dynamite, Mr Nobody Against Putin, All the Empty Rooms, Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud, The Devil Is Busy, Cutting Through Rocks, Perfectly a Strangeness, Children No More: Were and Are Gone, Zootopia 2, Kokuho, It Was Just an Accident
- Bugonia [2025] - 86
With 4 more noms coming Yorgos’ way for his newest film, Bugonia — an adaption of a Korean film I’ve yet to watch called Save the Green Planet! — Tim Burton can officially disappear from the modern conversation, because someone is doing weird film right. I’ve either really liked or loved everything I’ve seen of Yorgos’ thus far, with Bugonia likely being my second favorite of his works [Poor Things, The Lobster, The Favourite, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer being the others]. While I definitely feel a little weird celebrating Bugonia as a narrative piece since Save the Green Planet! came out in 2003 and is likely only kind of an “unknown” because of its budget, there is an absolutely undeniable charm to all of Bugonia’s artistry and presentation that really shows Yorgos’ skill at turning any given situation into something strange. I can’t believe that Jesse Plemons isn’t nominated for his role in this and I think it would have made a better winner for Original Score than Sinners did… But what do I know.
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street [2007] - 73
Breaking between Oscar nominations for something I’ve meant to watch for years and years [and also forgot to talk about when I actually watched it], Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is an interesting animal that rarely feels like a 20-year old film. Despite a few too many characters and music that doesn’t necessarily enhance its plot the way musicals tend to prefer, Sweeney Todd — to accidentally talk about him twice in a row — is one of the few films where Burton’s touch actually works and breathes an interesting character into the experience, even managing to make Helena Bonham Carter stomachable for the movie’s 1:56 runtime. I liked the story of this one a lot and I’d love to see an adaption of this that isn’t a musical because I don’t think that any of the songs are terribly compelling, most of them almost distracting from the greater drama instead of enunciating it the way things like Les Misérables or Moulin Rouge! do.
- Black Dynamite [2009] - 64
I also forgot to review this one the week I actually watched it so uh… Here it is now [I know you’ve all been waiting]. Black Dynamite is a 2009 spoof on blaxploitation and largely does a great job at exactly what it intends to. It’s wacky, it’s absurd, it’s well researched and stylized, and it has some genuinely hilarious bits during its first act. What drags Black Dynamite down is everything that happens after that first act. Upon getting everything together in my spreadsheet for this week, I was shocked to see that this film only runs 90-minutes, because I was poised to launch my usual complaint of “at 2+ hours long etc. etc.”. Something about Black Dynamite’s pacing and narrative density just makes this experience feel like an absolute SLOG once you hit a certain point in the story, which is really too bad because, up to that point, this is a goddamn funny movie.
- Mr. Nobody Against Putin [2025] - 82
Mr. Nobody Against Putin [*sigh] the obvious pick for the Best Documentary Oscar. Not the best documentary, but the obvious pick [*yawn]. A weird way to start with something I gave an 82, it’s just so boringly predictable that something about America’s favorite bad-guy is going to win awards. ANYWAY… Mr. Nobody Against Putin bravely documents the rapid decline of the Russian school system from educational to indoctrinal following the invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Writing blatantly false histories using scripts for both students and teachers alike, teaching weapons familiarity and marching drills, and forcing the school to observe the national anthem to start their day, Mr. Nobody Against Putin truly is a great documentary… It’s just a little obvious, and dubiously avoids completing its own story by reflecting upon many of the parallels within the American school system. I still liked my time with this and think Pavel Talankin is incredibly brave to have made it, I just can’t help but feel it’s a little incomplete and a little pandering.
- All the Empty Rooms [2025] - 87
And then I started watching the nominated documentary shorts. Beginning with another entry into “oops, I’ve hurt my own feelings”, All the Empty Rooms is Joshua Seftel and Steve Hartman’s look into children’s bedrooms left now forever unoccupied by the carnage of American school shootings. This is an incredibly sobering 34-minute documentary and something this nation needs to pay considerably more attention to… Among other things. Many of these rooms remain untouched by the children’s parents as Steve and photographer Lou Bopp work to document each of these individual tragedies and, similar to The Voice of Hind Rajab from last week, this is a film that both nobody should have to see, and everybody should have to see.
- Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud [2025] - 78
Briefly chronicling Brent Renaud’s life and history with humanitarian and warzone documentary filmmaking, Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud is both an obituary and a warning that shouldn’t be ignored. Killed early in the invasion of Ukraine, Brent Renaud was an incredibly brave individual working to document both the cost and needlessness of war around the world. I hope the things he managed to capture move someone in a seat high enough to actually change things one day but, for now, we just have this very moving tribute to someone who worked hard making sure that the things normally unseen could be felt worldwide.
- The Devil Is Busy [2025] - 72
The Devil is Busy is a short documentary that follows Tracii, the head of security at a Georgian women’s healthcare clinic, as she both preps for the day and manages staff during their operating hours. While I think the production overall is a little shallow and not terribly insightful, what it does well is highlight the hypocrisy of the loudest voices in favor of removing these medical protections for women. Tracii is a deeply religious person and we see her tap her faith for strength more than once throughout the film. While the people outside use their teachings to spew hate and guilt, Tracii grasps those same parables to fortify her work and those that need it. It’s an interesting take on the subject, it just doesn’t do enough with it to be something truly memorable.
- Cutting Through Rocks [2025] - 74
Cutting Through Rocks is one of those documentaries that should be really good and very important, but is massively held back by its presentation and overall production. Telling the story of Sara Shahverdi as she works to become the first female councilor of her small Iranian village, there’s a lot that Cutting Through Rocks does well, but its presentation is… It’s just very boring, and that’s really too bad. Sara showcases not only incredible work ethic and vision, but the ability to get things done and enact real change in ways that her fellows [women especially] desperately need. It truly is an inspiring story and has more than a couple very intense and interesting parts, it’s just shown in such a bland and unmotivated way that it feels more like reading a Wikipedia page than watching a documentary film.
- Perfectly a Strangeness [2025] - NR
Uh… I’m not even sure what all to say about Perfectly a Strangeness. This feels like a joke submission that the Academy also thought was funny enough to include in the actual nominations. We follow a group of three donkeys aimlessly wandering around a hilltop observatory as the sun falls and we’re spliced in with scenes of the observatory moving and viewing the stars. Like, I get what this film is going for and the themes its trying to touch on [I think], but calling it a “documentary” is not only a stretch, it’s kind of a slap to the other things nominated here. There’s nothing wrong with Perfectly a Strangeness, but it’s a “short film”, not a “documentary” and it’s very weird to be hailing it as such.
- Children No More: Were and Are Gone [2025] - 73
Jumping back into global war politics, Children No More: Were and Are Gone has both a title with one too many words [omit “are” please] and a plot with one too few layers of context. I think that there’s a real responsibility for filmmakers to get this kind of information out to the world and showcase the things that governments or other interested parties would rather keep quiet, and that’s why I harp on things like The Secret Agent, It Was Just an Accident [below], and Kolya [next week] for not providing context to their stories such that a total outsider can connect and/ or understand whatever conflict their showcasing. Children No More does something similar, making this short documentary about the children killed during the genocide in Gaza a little more confusing than it is touching. Still interesting and important, I just wish this had provided more background for the various factions and ideals put into conflict here.
- Zootopia 2 [2025] - 55
Alright, out of documentary land and into finishing off the Animated Films nominees… I should have just skipped this one really. Zootopia 2 comes as a direct sequel to the 2016, Zootopia… A film I only vaguely remember. Presenting like a brainstorming session gone long, Zootopia 2 is a movie that feels less like a well congealed pudding and more like a box full of dry ingredients thrown at the wall. Its plot is so loose and shifting that you never have time to invest in anything, every comedy bit is followed so quickly by the next that nothing ever has time to really develop, and the credits come so quickly that the nicest thing I can say about this film is that I probably wasn’t bored. I say “probably” because I hardly even remember watching it just a few days later. I don’t know, I guess Disney has to get nominated every year or the Oscars will implode or something.
- Kokuho [2025] - 74
Nominated for Hair and Makeup, Kokuho is an exquisitely beautiful film likely held back from my top 20 of the year simply because of its NEEDLESSLY LONG runtime of THREE HOURS… Oh just kidding, it’s only 2:54… My bad 🤧. Anyway, this is actually a supremely excellent movie with a wonderfully touching story that I was very engrossed in during said ridiculous runtime. A movie about the Japanese art of kabuki, Kokuho tells the tale of Kikuho as he rises through the ranks of the theater; losing his father, being adopted, finding friends within his family, losing it all, and coming home once more. I’d love a version of this film that removes a handful of elements and clarifies a handful of others [the title of the film “Kokuho” vs the name of the main character “Kikuho” being a great example of many of the film’s “what is going on” moments], but there’s so much that director Sang-il Lee and writers Satoko Okudera and Shûichi Yoshida do well here, that it's difficult to criticize their art as a whole. And it’s that whole that I mostly come away from this experience with because, in recollecting Kokuho’s overall narrative and isolated beats, I am moved all over again by both the breadth and intimacy of this incredible story.
[It’s still too long.]
- It Was Just an Accident [2025] - 40 DNF
I don’t know if my patience is just worn out after another week of 10+ movies, my reading comprehension has vanished what with everything going audio/video in my life, or if people are simply glomming onto this film because its about another favorite global villain [Iran], but this movie was so hopelessly obnoxious that I didn’t even make it all the way through. There’s so many elements of this movie that are weirdly convenient, overly annoying, and outright repetitive that I just cannot figure out why this is getting so much hype, other than the above [it being about the Iranian dictator state and getting revenge on a member of their secret police]. I’m sure this is [obviously given its ratings] someone’s cup of tea, but I just don’t think it provides enough context or clarity for anything its trying to communicate, and the repeated bit of “I don’t know if this is the guy, but I know a guy who will be able to tell you if it’s the guy” is funny once… but not the like 45 times this tries to pass it off.
