Continuing the trend of biopics with A-list actors that perhaps aren’t interesting or important enough to warrant such a big-budget production, the Timothée Chalamet-led Marty Supreme (Dune, Beautiful Boy) is among them. The story is based loosely on a period of American table tennis player Marty Reisman’s life. If you’ve never heard of Marty Reisman, you aren’t alone. He lived a very unremarkable life, one that is far from the kind of role that would require one of the best working actors to spend time on during the peak of his career. This wasn’t a story about the Marty Supreme. This was about creating a character that Chalamet could lead to his first Best Actor Oscar win, which I believe will happen.
Category Archives: Inspired by True Events
Is This Thing On? (2025)
The 2025 film that felt the most real to me was one of the year’s final releases. Bradley Cooper’s (A Star Is Born, Maestro) is a poignant and personal look at the end of a marriage and the lengths we will go to overcome the loss that accompanies it. Will Arnett (Semi-Pro, Blades of Glory) delivers the best performance of his career as Alex, recently divorced from Tess (Laura Dern – Wild, Jay Kelly), trying to navigate a life in a new apartment and spending half as much time with his two elementary school-aged boys while still maintaining his career and career for his physical, mental, and emotional health. To escape his troubles, he ends up at a bar one night and on stage for an improv comedy skit.
Hamnet (2025)
Hamnet was the one film of the year that you expected to feel the most heartbreaking emotions from. It had all the elements, including glowing reviews from film festivals held months before its release. Though still relatively new to the director’s chair, Chloé Zhao has a penchant for directing a couple of super affecting movies in The Rider and Nomadland, for which she won her first Oscar. Add, perhaps, Hollywood’s next leading man in the already accomplished Paul Mescal (Aftersun, All of Us Strangers, Gladiator II) as William Shakespeare, and equally young and accomplished Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter, Beast, Chernobyl) as his wife, Agnes along with the tragic play Hamlet, and this had the formula for a film that would leave an entire audience sobbing by the ending credits. Unfortunately, Zhao never took us there in her tender, though underwhelming Hamnet, the true story of William and Agnes’s son, who inspired Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most recognized and revered play behind Romeo and Juliet.
Sommersby (1993)
My first viewing of Jon Amiel’s (Entrapment, Copycat) Sommersby was when I was 17. I liked the story, was intrigued by the slow unraveling mystery, and ate up the sentimentality created by Richard Gere (Pretty Woman, The Mothman Prophecies) and Jodie Foster (Panic Room, The Silence of the Lambs). Had I reviewed the film in 1993, I likely would have given it an A-. As I watched the movie most recently, some 30 years later, I was impressed by how well it once again grabbed and held my interest. Much of that was trying to spot each clue that connected the start and end, which rewatches allow. However, as simple as the story was, I fell victim to Jack Summerset’s (Gere) six-year return to Laurel (Foster) following the U.S. Civil War.
The Bikeriders (2024)
Director Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud) is an expert at creating ordinary characters, putting them in everyday situations, and allowing interactions and relationships to carry the story. He has masterfully accomplished this through films I adore, such as Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, and Mud, and through films, such as Midnight Special and Loving, that aren’t quite as good as a whole but still have well-crafted characters. The Bikeriders, his most recent film, follows a similar blueprint but fails to tell an exciting story or have a single character we genuinely care about. While well made with a stellar cast that put forward the effort, the film was a snoozefest.