November 21-27, 2025

Hello, friends!

If last week was packed with lots of movie goodness, this week is even more so!  Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (Nov. 21-24 only), Die My Love (Nov. 22-25 only), The Running Man (Nov. 21-25 only) continue for a few more days at the Pickford on Grand before we say goodbye to them; Frankenstein will also spend a few final days with us, Nov. 21-23 only, this time at the Grand, and Guillermo del Toro’s stunning production design will look absolutely gorgeous there, projected in 4K. The galvanizing Bugonia and the lyrical and beautiful Train Dreams also stay at the Pickford’s Bay St. location for one more week. 

And I am also delighted to say we have no less than five new star-studded movies joining the Pickford’s cinematic constellation:  Wicked: For Good (Bay St.), Peter Hujar’s Day (playing Nov. 21-25 only, on Grand Ave.), Rental Family (Grand Ave.), Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (opening Nov. 25 on Grand Ave), and Zootopia 2 (opening Nov. 26 on Grand Ave.)

While many doubted the wisdom of splitting the hit Broadway musical Wicked into two halves for a cinematic adaptation and I’ve certainly felt the impatience of waiting for the second half for a whole year, after loving Wicked part 1, the great news is Wicked: For Good is finally here! Both parts of the film were shot all at once, and the continuity shows here, with a seamless pairing in production design, acting, and energy between the halves. For those who know the story though, either from the stage production or the book, or indeed, from the original Wizard of Oz, this second half has, by necessity, a bittersweet quality not present in the first.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; there is just less “defying gravity” here and more courageous grappling with reality in what can be a painful world. 

It’s a narrative that feels particularly poignant for our times, and there was a real power for me in two particular story elements of Wicked: For Good: 1) in a decision the talking animals of Oz must make, whether to risk their lives to stay and fight for their home country or to leave and find safety, and 2) in a decision Elphaba must make about whether to fight to try to tell the facts to a populace who would rather believe a lie. It was the songs from the first half that I could not help singing on my way out of the theater last year; this year, it’s the potent questions the story posits that linger with me most.  

I should also note that in Wicked: For Good, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande continue to delight, particularly when they are on screen together, their performance chemistry offering such joy and their singing voices together offering a kind of ecstasy every musical lover understands. One duet in particular – you’ll know it when you experience it – is a showstopper, and if you’re a big softie like me, when it comes to stories of women’s friendship, you might want to grab some tissues before entering the theater. 

And perhaps the polar opposite of Wicked: For Good, relative to production design and splashy buzz, we’ve also got Peter Hujar’s Day, the gentle and quietly witty new film from Ira Sachs, whose raw and wonderful film you may remember from 2023, Passages, starring Ben Wishaw, Franz Rogowski, and Adele Exarchopoulos.  

Peter Hujar's Day brings Sachs and Wishaw back together, and like Passages, showcases Wishaw's incredible talent as an actor and in a way that is perhaps even more aweing because Wishaw has to hold the audience's attention almost entirely through the power of his voice and body language while in a single location. 

Peter Hujar's Day reimagines one single day in 1974 in the life of renowned photographer and gay liberation activist Peter Hujar when his friend, writer Linda Rosenkrantz, interviewed him about what he'd done the day before: she wanted to know, down to every small detail, what he did in a single day -- what he ate, whom he saw, whom he talked to, what he talked about.

It was an attempt on Rosenkrantz's part to understand the lives of New York City artists at the time, to capture a snapshot of their world for posterity. She recorded the interview and eventually transcribed it into a book, and Sachs has now translated this transcript into the film. 

While it may be hard to imagine how the prompt "what did you do yesterday?" and the resulting answer can be cinematic, this film is joyously so. For one thing, it offers a stunning showcase of the talents of one of the best actors working today, but it also offers a kind of tender intimacy -- of conversation, of feeling, of everyday life, of friendship -- that can only be captured on film. 

Rebecca Hall, who plays Linda Rosenkrantz, matches Wishaw beautifully, and you never doubt for a moment that these two are close, dear friends--matching one another's wit, humor, intellect, curiosity, and sensibilities--and by the film’s close, I didn't want any of it to end. I could have stayed forever with those two lounging around Peter Hujar's apartment talking.  (The apartment, by the way, is to die for. I want to live there.) 

I suppose the adjacent film this season would be Linklater's Blue Moon, which also features a great actor in a single room talking, but that film has a showiness and a kind of underlying anxiety that this one doesn't have. In that film, Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) is talking -- or rather, performing -- to everyone in his vicinity, witty but anxious about his own relevance. In this film, Rosencrantz and Hujar are dear friends with nothing to prove to one another, and in each other's snug company, they reflect together on their world and their experience of it. It's simultaneously one of the coziest and most intellectually stimulating films of the year.  

As I noted in last week’s newsletter, Rental Family is one of the sweetest films of the year, a film with a beautiful, big heart. It’s a joy to see Brendan Fraser back on screen, particularly after his Oscar-winning turn in The Whale, a well-deserved award for a tough-to-watch film.  Here, Fraser plays Philip, a lonely expat American actor living in Tokyo who finds unexpected companionship through a new acting gig, playing a fictional person in real people’s lives: he plays a groom to a woman whose parents want to see her "happily married"; he plays a reporter to interview an aging actor whose daughter wants her father to feel important again; he plays a father to a girl whose mother needs a "husband" in order to enroll her daughter in a prestigious school. 

While Philip's initial qualms about the ethics of such acting jobs is profound, he slowly warms to the assigned roles, beginning to feel that his characters give people true happiness. But the line between the roles and the reality begin to blur for Philip, too, and he finds it is not so easy to emotionally disentangle himself from those who believed his characters were real.

It is, ultimately, a truly lovely story about human connection and community, and it's kind of the perfect Thanksgiving-week movie. 

And oh, what a joy it is to have Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on our screens for Thanksgiving! I've loved both of Rian Johnson's previous Knives Out films, but this one might be my favorite if that's possible. I found it, at any rate, the most moving, while also the most hilarious, brilliantly plotted, and cast.  

Daniel Craig returns as the charming Benoit Blanc, and he is joined by Glenn Close, Josh O'Connor, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, Caliee Spaney, Daryl McCormack, Thomas Haden Church, and Jeffrey Wright, a jaw-droppingly good cast that convinces me every great actor in Hollywood must want to join in the fun of a Knives Out mystery.  

One of the things I love about the Knives Out films is they manage to be beautifully constructed mysteries--smart nods to the great "cozy murder mysteries" that writers like Agatha Christie produced--while also offering pungent socio-political commentary . . . while also not seeming to take themselves too seriously. There’s a strong sense of joy and play in each and every film, right alongside the wit and socio-politically attuned intelligence. The first film offered commentary on class, race, wealth, and politics; the second film offered commentary on class, the pandemic, and tech bros; this film offers commentary on faith, politics, and Christian nationalism in America. And yet, despite that serious subject matter, Wake Up Dead Man somehow manages to be a rollicking good time, acknowledging what we're experiencing in this country but doing so without making us feel wretched about it. It even offers something like catharsis. 

It’s a catharsis I felt right along with the audience of 2,000 at the Princess of Wales Theatre at the Toronto International Film Festival when I saw it with a full house back in September: we laughed (a lot), we cried (to my pleased surprise), we applauded. It's meant to be seen with an audience, offering the kind of communal joy and release that can only be found in the cinema and that perhaps we need more than ever during these holidays in America in 2025.

I’m also very pleased to say that, in addition to Wake Up Dead Man, Zootopia 2 will be on our screens for Thanksgiving. It's been a while since, here at the Pickford, we've had a wide-release, commercial, animated American film targeted towards a younger audience (I think, in fact, Across the Spider-Verse is the only one we've ever played), but since the opening of the Pickford on Grand, I have been hoping we could add more family-friendly, all-ages, films for kids to our arthouse repertoire. 

Some of my earliest, most precious memories are of seeing new release and re-released animated Disney films in the theater–The Fox and the Hound, 101 Dalmatians, Fantasia– and I credit them with the beginning of my lifelong love of movies. One of my dearest hopes is that a new generation of cinema lovers might be born at the Pickford, and while it might surprise some to think of a commercial film like Zootopia 2 being a good candidate for sparking cinephilia, I am firmly convinced the magic of movies can be found in every film, especially when experienced on the big screen. 

And Zootopia 2 isn’t just the broad sort of film with the kind of cheap humor we often see today in big commercial movies marketed to children: it's a smart, lovely film and a sweet follow-up to the terrific original Zootopia. And while I’m not sure any sequel can quite match the level of any inspired original, Zootopia 2 deftly continues the first film’s story of the wonderful and unlikely pairing of Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) as bunny and fox cops tracking down crime in the city of Zootopia. Zootopia 2 has a good-hearted (and especially relevant) message about inclusivity, anti-gentrification, and strength in diversity, with lots of clever gags and humor (and even one really great The Shining reference, along with more Godfather references for adults) and fun voice-acting.  Ke Huy Quan joins the cast this time as Gary De'Snake, and he's a marvelous addition to the story.  The singer Shakira returns to this film, too, with an effervescent animated presence and a new song I couldn’t not sing while walking out of the theater.  

If you are a Pickford member, we’d love for you to help us spread the word on this one: I know anecdotally and statistically, most folks in the county expect to find animated kids films like this only in commercial theaters, although one mom of young kids recently told me, mournfully, that she wished she could take her kids to the Pickford instead. I’ll be letting her know Zootopia 2 will be playing November 26-December 18 at the Pickford on Grand, and we hope you can tell your friends, too!