Notes From The Program Director | Week of October 17th, 2025

Hero Image

heading

Notes From The Program Director

Week of October 17th, 2025

Melissa Tamminga

Rich Text

October 17-23, 2025

Hello, friends!

As the weather turns colder and rainier and fall begins in earnest, it’s a happy thing to know we’ve got so many good things to see indoors at the Pickford. Our full slate of Doctober films continues, with new encores added for some of our most popular docs (Unearth, Jimmy & the Demons, Girl Climber, and Seeds), as does the powerhouse that is One Battle After Another (which I’m already itching to re-watch) and the delightful Roofman.

We’ve also got three new quite special films that we’ve added this week to our line-up at the Grand: Urchin, Are We Good?, and The Summer Book.

Urchin is the feature film directorial debut from actor Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness, Babygirl, The Iron Claw, Scrapper), and he hits it right outta the park on his first try. Dickinson -- who also wrote the screenplay -- proves himself to be an assured director, deftly balancing tonal control, the film’s delicately constructed narrative, and some truly beautiful sequences of cinematography and thematic pungency. He also shows himself to be an actors' director--perhaps unsurprisingly, given his own brilliance in acting--and here, he gives Frank Dillane, who plays the lead, the space to embody what is, for me, the performance of the year. It's altogether riveting, a performance that feels lived in and that features an emotional depth that is rare and always astonishing to experience. And, indeed, the jury at Cannes was eager to honor such a performance: Dillane won Best Actor, Un Certain Regard.

The story follows Mike (Dillane), an unhoused man in London struggling with addiction, who commits a crime, serves a sentence, and is then given a chance, with state help, to start a new path -- a job, a place to live. But the film reveals the precarity and loneliness of someone like Mike, who, with no family or established community, can so easily lose everything again when even just one support in his new life fails.

It's a deeply humane and beautiful film. One of my very favorites of the year.

A film like Are We Good? perhaps needs little introduction. For those of us who have been fans of comedian Marc Maron and his podcast, WTF with Marc Maron--which launched in 2009 and just aired its last episode this past week on October 13 with guest Barack Obama--Maron has been for us a constant earbud companion, serving up an extraordinary mix of comedy, personal confession, catharsis, sociopolitical commentary, arts commentary, music commentary, along with what we must surely call some of the most remarkable interviews ever recorded. There’s nobody quite like Marc Maron, and the loss of his podcast leaves a gap nothing else can fill.

This documentary, Are We Good? (a title Maron’s fans will recognize as a frequently repeated question on the podcast), then, may help ease that loss. Here, director Steven Feinartz (who also directed Maron’s last two comedy specials) follows Maron in the years after the sudden death of his beloved partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton, offering a snapshot in time when grief had a central role in his life and as he grappled with how the profound loss would shape and inform his comedy, his identity, his approach to life. While the documentary never quite reaches the level of confessional intimacy Maron’s own podcast did -- perhaps because Maron’s podcast was his own and here, the project is a sometimes uneasy collaboration between Maron and Feinartz -- it is nonetheless a doc well worth seeing, particularly for those of us who have admired and loved the singular artistry of a person like Marc Maron.

The Summer Book, based on beloved artist and author Tove Jansson's novel of the same name, stars Glenn Close (in a fantastic performance) and Anders Danielsen Lie (Worst Person in the World) and terrific newcomer and child actor Emily Matthews. Readers who are familiar with Jansson’s work, either The Summer Book or her children’s books featuring the nature-loving Moomin characters, will, I think, be delighted with the adaptation, and those unfamiliar are in for a benevolent treat.

The film offers a lyrical, delicately told story of a family in the midst of loss but finding comfort in the natural and peaceful beauty of their summer island home in Finland. The relationship between child and grandmother offers the warm center of the film, the two spending sun-dappled days together outdoors, enjoying the forest, the rocks, the sea. As Nell Minnow notes in her review for Ebert, “The Summer Book is a haiku of a movie, conveying profound thoughts about time, memory, loss, and nature through a simplified, meditative, cinematic language of exquisite images and gentle music.” It's the sort of movie to sink into and perhaps escape into, particularly as the last rays of our own summer have turned into the winds and rains of fall.

In addition to our theatrical-run films playing all week long, we also have some special events with limited 1-2 day showings: First up, we’ve got the anime film Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle playing on Grand Ave on Saturday and Sunday. It’s a film that is primarily for established fans of the long running Demon Slayer manga series and of the film franchise, and it is the final film in the wildly successful three-film series, so anyone brand new to the Demon Slayer world will likely feel a bit at a loss in terms of story and character. Still, as Toussaint Egan points out in his review for Ebert, “the story of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba has never been the real draw of the series’ appeal. Instead, that would be its animation, more specifically its action sequences, brought to life by the team of animators at Japanese animation house Ufotable lead by Haruo Sotozaki, who has directed every season of the television anime to date.”

Demon Slayer is, truly, a visual stunner, and it’s, thus, all the more a delight that we’re able to play it on our new 4K projectors at the Grand.

Next, our Kid Pickford series returns in this spooky month with Return to Oz, the 1985 film that delighted and terrified a whole generation of the Gen X kids who saw it, myself included. It’s a film that opened to a poor box office upon its release, even though it received an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects, but it’s gone on to gain a well-deserved cult status and devoted fans. It’s the kind of kids’ film they used to make in the 1980’s, films like Gremlins, The Neverending Story, Labyrinth, and The Dark Crystal, films that weren’t quite “safe” in the way most kids’ films are today and which might contain frightening sequences, scary characters, and dark themes. The “Nothing” in The Neverending Story and the tragic loss of the horse Artax are comparable to some elements of Return to Oz, and few characters in a kids’ film are more unsettling than Return to Oz’s Wheelers.

But that warning in place -- and we do encourage parents who want to take their kids to do some reading first, e.g. on Common Sense Media -- Return to Oz is an imaginative delight. I credit my own viewing of it when I was 9 or 10 years old as a key marker on my journey into cinephilia: few other films I saw at the time made the same impression and showed me just how exciting cinema can be.

Film lovers will also be interested to know that Return to Oz is the one and only film that renowned and brilliant editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, American Graffiti, The Godfather, The Conversation) ever directed, and it’s a loss to cinema he never directed anything else.

Note: We have three showings of Return to Oz, daytime showings on Saturday at 1:30 and Sunday at 10 am, and a Kid Pickford “After Dark” showing at 8:25 pm for the kids-at-heart. All tickets are just $7.

Our Halloween series, 70’s Horror Classics, also continues this week on Wednesday evening at 8:15 pm with the terrific The Omen, starring a superb Gregory Peck and Lee Remick and beautifully directed by Richard Donner (Superman, Ladyhawke, Lethal Weapon). It’s a wonderfully stylish and elegant film with a devastatingly haunting musical score with religious overtones from Jerry Goldsmith, and in look and feel it’s perhaps the polar opposite of something like the grimy Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and more akin to Old Hollywood than New Hollywood. It is all the more wonderful for that, light on the gore (but with some of the most delightfully dramatic deaths in cinema), patiently suspenseful, and with masterful performances. Don’t miss this one -- it’s gonna be fab on the big screen! 

Finally, we’ve also got some special previews on Thursday, October 23, for those of you who want to be among the first to see two films that promise to be the talk of the awards season: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Christoph Waltz, and Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White in a transformative performance as The Boss. I’ll have more to say about both films next week, but for now, you’ll have to choose which film about a tortured genius and his creation you want to see most first: Frankenstein plays on Bay St. at 8:00 pm and Springsteen plays at the Grand at 7:45 pm.

See you at the movies, friends!

Melissa