September 26-October 2, 2025

Hello, friends! 

 It’s a big week at the Pickford this week, with the opening of one of the biggest, most buzzed about movies of the season (One Battle After Another); our Robert Redford tribute; the first film of our brand new Halloween series; and, of course, the Opening Night film of our signature event of the year, Doctober. It’s an exciting time for movie lovers! 

We’ve got some films continuing -- the nostalgic Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and the romantic and sweet A Big Bold Beautiful Journey on Bay St., and The Baltimorons at the Grand -- and Weapons, too, one of the year’s biggest breakout hits, returns to Bay St. for a brief final run. But here’s a quick rundown of our new releases and special events:

First up, I could not be more excited about Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film, One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Alaina Haim, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Kevin Tighe (who is the narrator in the Pickford’s beloved annual event film The Mountain Runners!) 

Paul Thomas Anderson, aka “PTA,” has been wowing audiences ever since his feature film debut, Hard Eight, and then with films like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood, he’s proved himself to be one of the country’s great modern directors. The rapturous praise from critics and early audiences for this new film, One Battle After Another, indicates it will be an awards season contender, and it’s probably not too soon to start talking “Best Picture” nominations.  

A film that is being described as both wildly entertaining and profoundly smart in its socio-political commentary, it’s one audiences shouldn’t miss seeing in the cinema. As Robert Daniels noted in his review for Ebert, it is “a kinetic, fast-charging evisceration of present-day America,” and it functions as “one of the more cogent political statements delivered by a major American filmmaker.” Seattle critic Chase Hutchinson joins Daniels’s assessment, saying, it is “the most entertaining, exhilarating movie you’ll see all year . . . an incision into a raw nerve. A thrilling, tense portrait of modern life, it’s Anderson’s most urgently relevant work yet.”  

As we increasingly look to our artists to help us make sense of these strange and unsettling times, it seems critics agree: PTA is up to the task. 

Next, the unerringly wonderful June Squibb is back on our screens at the Grand. If you loved her in Thelma, you’ll love her in this new film, Eleanor the Great.  As Scarlett Johansson’s assured directorial debut, too, the film demonstrates that Johansson has an exciting new phase of her career ahead of her. 

In this sweet and moving drama about friendship, grief, family, and community, Squibb plays the titular Eleanor, who, at the beginning of the film is a widow, enjoying life with her best friend Bessie, a widow herself and Holocaust survivor. Their friendship gives both immense mutual joy, and the daily rhythms of their lives revolve around each other.  When Bessie passes away, Eleanor struggles to find meaning, and seeking comfort, accidentally ends up joining a Holocaust survivors group, where she tells Bessie’s story and the story is assumed to be hers, a misapprehension that Eleanor does not correct. Eleanor eventually becomes so deeply involved in the warm new relationships in this group, that it becomes harder and harder to overturn the lie. 

 It’s a tricky story to portray, given the historical trauma it taps, but Johansson does so with great sensitivity and delicacy, ultimately bringing us to a conclusion that does not downplay the gravity of Eleanor’s lie but also helps us to find understanding and compassion for her. The supporting cast, particularly Erin Kellyman, who plays a 19-year old student who befriends Eleanor, along with a wonderful ensemble of actors who play those in the Jewish community, also gives the film beautiful emotional depth. 

As a note of interest, too, I was intrigued to learn, after I saw the film, that June Squibb herself converted to Judaism in the 1950’s. It’s a fact that adds additional depth and nuance to the film and to Squibb’s lovely performance. 

Ted Lasso fans, rejoice, for All of You brings us Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent in Ted Lasso) and Imogen Poots in a lovely romance that offers a bit of sci-fi on the side: the film asks the question, what if a tech company created a test that could match you with your soulmate? Co-written by Goldstein, the film, playing at the Grand, is also co-written and directed by William Bridges, whose credits include Black Mirror. But All of You is gentler and kinder than Black Mirror’s dystopian sensibilities, and Caroline Siede of the AV Club notes that while “[t]here are surface similarities to sci-fi romances like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Timer . . . at its heart All Of You is more like a cross between two pre-dating-app classics: When Harry Met Sally and Brief Encounter.”

It feels increasingly rare these days that we get a straight romance for grown-ups on the big screen, and if you’re like me, you miss being able to go to the theater on a given weekend and find a romantic drama there that fits the bill. All of You might just fill that gap for us, and as Siede further notes, All of You is an “adult drama” that isn't necessarily breaking new territory, but it offers a genre film we can appreciate: “As with so many great onscreen romances, it’s not that All Of You is doing something that’s never been done before, just that it’s doing it really well, with a great pair of actors at its center.”

In addition to our theatrical-run films, don’t miss our special events this week; we’ve got lots to choose from: 

We’re pleased to be honoring the great Robert Redford, an actor, director, producer, and co-founder of the Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Institute. He was an artist and lover of film, a cinema legend, whose loss is hard to measure. It was difficult to choose from among his body of work -- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Sting, and many more -- but we’re pleased to be able to play a handful of films that were available for theatrical licensing on short notice: The Natural, where Redford plays a role that was instantly iconic; Sneakers, a late-season film for Redford and an ensemble film that demonstrates Redford was as continually charismatic on screen as he was generous with his fellow actors; and A River Runs Through It, one of Redford’s directorial features that moves me most, offering a stunningly beautiful view of Montana and standing as one of the best adaptations put to screen, a masterful rendering of Norman Maclean’s exquisite novella. 

Each film is playing three times this week -- The Natural on Saturday, Monday, and Thursday; Sneakers on Friday, Tuesday, and Thursday; and A River Runs Through It on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. 

And Kid Pickford is back with something of a cult classic, the beguilingly strange Labyrinth, starring Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie and directed by none other than Jim Henson. It’s weird, it’s magical, it’s wonderful. Join us on Saturday at 1:30 pm or Sunday at 10 am; tickets are just $7.