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| Amir Naderi's The Runner |
I want to try something. I watch a heckuva lot more movies than I ever get the chance to write about in depth here, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth writing about and sharing. Inspired partially by the capsule reviews that concluded last year’s 31 Days of Horror and partially by a desire to cover a wider variety of films in this space, I want to share some quick thoughts on the movies I’ve been watching lately.
In that spirit, I give you: Monday Miniatures. Some movies will inspire more writing, others less, but this should be a fun snapshot of how I’m thinking about movies as I watch them. Hopefully, this will be a weekly feature on the site and something I can look forward to doing each Monday morning.
The week of August 18-24, 2025:
The Runner, directed by Amir Naderi
How I watched it: Criterion Channel
An absolute revelation to me, a reminder that though I have seen many films and a high percentage of the so-called “canon,” there is still much left to discover. Made in post-revolution Iran but set pre-revolution to avoid censorship issues, The Runner is quite simply one of the finest films about childhood ever made.
Naderi’s semi-autobiographical film follows an orphan named Amiro (Majid Niroumand) who lives in the rusted hull of a wrecked boat and survives on the money he scrapes together from a variety of odd jobs: sifting through trash, collecting glass bottles from the ocean, shining shoes, etc. He is obsessed with travel, with planes and trains headed to faraway places he can only imagine. He cannot read, so he scans the pictures in foreign magazines, no doubt filling in the gaps with stories of adventure and discovery.
In one scene, he and some other children race after a train, and even after he has lost the race, he keeps running. When asked why, he says he wanted to see how far he could. In the film’s emotionally overwhelming climax, there is another race, wherein we learn just how far he can run. It is a confluence of storytelling, allegory, and filmmaking on par with the best of world cinema. I was floored by it.
Niroumand, an untrained actor who would make just one other film, also with Naderi, gives one of the great coming-of-age performances ever committed to screen. He stands shoulder to shoulder with Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows, Subir Banerjee in Pather Panchali, and David Bradley in Kes among the defining child performances in cinema.
Based solely on my own observations, this movie does not get talked about enough. It belongs in any conversation of great films and certainly among the great films of the Middle East. One can draw a straight line from the social realist filmmaking coming out of Iran (and its many exiled filmmakers) today to Naderi’s beautiful, brilliant film.
The Monkey, directed by Osgood Perkins
How I watched it: Disney+
Perkins’ critical and commercial smash Longlegs didn’t do it for me last year the way it did for so many others, but I went into this with some excitement. The trailer looked fun. A Stephen King adaptation is usually a good reason to be excited. And, while I found the story lacking in Longlegs, the filmmaking is undeniably strong.
So, what of The Monkey? It’s a fun, silly time with one core thematic idea that I think was done better in a different King adaptation from this year. The premise is that the titular toy monkey (don’t call it a toy; it doesn’t like that) will, when activated, kill a random person gruesomely. “Gruesome” is the word Perkins keys on, and I can admit that many of the over-the-top deaths are pretty fun, if occasionally poorly rendered by the CGI. But, I think the important word is “random.”
King’s point – which is not missed by Perkins so much as it is underexplored – is that death is random, unpredictable, and painful. It is just as likely to happen to someone who doesn’t deserve it as someone who does; more so actually since more people don’t deserve it than do. It’s a strong theme, but Perkins is too interested in jokes and gore to make it land.
As alluded to, King’s The Life of Chuck, adapted for the screen by Mike Flanagan this year, carries much the same theme, right down to having the same solution: If we’re all dying anyway, we might as well dance. Flanagan’s film, which I saw twice in theaters, is the more powerful, effective exploration of this idea, and I expect to be writing more about it during my year-in-review series.
One last thought: Theo James is pretty good playing both twin brothers at the center of the story, and more than that, he has an excellent Stephen King Narrator voice. Make of that what you will.
Intimate Lighting, directed by Ivan Passer
Capricious Summer, directed by Jiří Menzel
How I watched them: Criterion Channel
Both films are part of the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s, which gave us a wide variety of classics like The Firemen’s Ball, The Shop on Main Street, The Cremator, Daisies, and Menzel’s own Closely Watched Trains. Not that it’s necessary to pit them against each other, but I would put the Czechoslovak New Wave up against the French New Wave any day in terms of quality and import. Perhaps not in impact, simply because the French films were easier to access in America and, thus, more influential on that up and coming generation of filmmakers.
But, I digress. I love these films and try to set aside time to watch at least a few new (new to me) films each year. Unbeknownst to me, Intimate Lighting and Capricious Summer actually make a fine little double feature, particularly for a lazy Sunday morning. Each film deals with the boredom and aimlessness of quiet rural days, the rye comedy of life, and the desire to exert control over one’s surroundings in a place and time when control was often reserved for the government.
Passer’s film is the more accessible of the two, dealing with a family and friends who gather to play music and drink and tell tales at a farm house on the eve of a big orchestra performance. It is equal parts sweet, funny, and sad, with touches of Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika or Wild Strawberries from the decade before. Beautifully captures the melancholy of old friends passing like ships in the night, wishing time would slow down just so we could hold onto the precious moments a little longer but so rarely recognizing those moments when we are in them.
Capricious Summer, which was Menzel’s direct followup to the acclaimed Closely Watched Trains, is meaner, bawdier, and generally a less pleasant hang, despite being a fine film. If the setup sounds like a joke, that’s because it is: An athlete, a soldier, and a priest walk into a bar – okay, not quite, but those are the characters and they spend their days lounging around a river during a particularly rainy summer. When a traveling magician and his beautiful young assistant arrive in town, lovers are taken, loyalties are tested, and relatively speaking for this small rural enclave, all hell breaks loose.
I enjoyed each film in both style and substance and can’t wait to dive even deeper into this wonderful movement.
The Hospital, directed by Arthur Hiller
How I watched it: MGM+ (through Amazon Prime)
It is tempting to say screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky could see the future, given just how well his two Academy Award-winning original screenplays seem to describe our current cultural malaise. Sadly, brilliant as he was, Chayefsky was no prophet. It simply is that in 50 years, our societal afflictions remain largely unchanged, worse and more acute perhaps but with the same roots.
As a journalist, I am, of course, familiar with the 1976 masterpiece Network, a skewering of media so pointed its prick remains painful to this day. I had never before yesterday, however, seen The Hospital, and I can only imagine it would strike my cousins – one an ER nurse, the other a firefighter – the way Network strikes me. That is to say: quite hard.
I found it brilliantly constructed and am a little at a loss for those who feel it goes off the rails in the final act. To me, that final act is what brings it all together. The pitch-black humor hasn’t aged a day (give or take some unfortunate sexual politics); the social commentary about an understaffed, underfunded, overflowing hospital remains distressingly astute; and George C. Scott delivers an all-timer of a performance just a year after he won and famously refused the Best Actor Oscar for Patton. To describe the plot is to spoil too much, so suffice it to say, this gets my highest recommendation.
Rocky II, directed by Sylvester Stallone
How I watched it: Amazon Prime
It is a near certainty I will write more about the Rocky franchise in the future – possibly next year for the 50th anniversary of the first film – so I will not go too deep here. I love Rocky. The franchise, the character, the symbol. It’s all fabulous stuff. I was obsessed as a kid, and I’ve seen the original five films in the series at least 15-20 times a piece, some of them many more. But I have not revisited the sequels since a full franchise rewatch ahead of Ryan Coogler’s Creed, so it’s been a while.
Happily, this remains the same film I remember and adore. As a child, I preferred Rocky II to the original because he wins. It was as simple as that. He’s the hero. I wanted him to win. I know better now, but this is still an excellent time at the movies. Stallone’s second directorial effort after the little-seen Paradise Alley, he mostly sticks to the template established by John G. Avildsen in the Oscar-winning predecessor. It would not be until Rocky III that the films would veer into “only the good parts” self-parody, which is enjoyable in a different way.
The ending still hits in a truly special way, and it remains fascinating that the franchise’s most iconic line caps this sequel, not the original film. Of course, he must win the championship to be so moved as to declare, “Yo, Adrian! I did it!” It is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise, where in the oft-misquoted, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question. ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” does appear in the first film, but the somehow more iconic, “Go ahead, make my day,” doesn’t appear until Sudden Impact, the fourth film in the series. Fun stuff.
I watched Rocky III a few weeks ago, and I’m certain I’ll be watching Rocky IV at some point in the near future. Out of order or not, these movies are like Pringles. Once you pop …
John Williams: Maestro of the Movies at the Hollywood Bowl, performed by the L.A. Philharmonic
Lastly, this was not a movie but a movie-related experience. Courtesy of my new job, I was able to wrangle a ticket to the annual celebration of composer John Williams at the Hollywood Bowl, where the L.A. Philharmonic performs a selection of his best and most iconic film scores. The first half of the show was not accompanied by film clips, which allowed those of us in the audience to focus fully on the intricacy and complexity of Williams’ compositions and orchestrations.
The second half of the show, which contained a lot of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, was loaded with clips. While fun, they did distract a tad from the music, but hey, a good time is a good time. If you’re interested in more of my thoughts on Williams, you can check out a review I wrote last year of a recent documentary on his life, as well as my ranking of my five favorite Williams scores.
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