Monday Miniatures: The Runner, Czech New Wave, and ’70s Classics

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.

Music by John Williams: Five favorite scores

John Williams has composed music for roughly 125 feature films, in addition to things like the Olympic theme and the theme to NBC Sunday Night Football and the NBC Nightly News. In addition to the works mentioned in this piece and the rest of his Steven Spielberg collaborations, you would also instantly recognize his themes for Harry Potter, Home Alone, Superman, and Fiddler on the Roof. It’s a gargantuan oeuvre to narrow down to five favorites, but that’s what we do here.

I love film music. I have written about it many times here on the site. Williams is by no stretch my favorite composer, but the importance of his work to film history and to my personal history with film cannot be overstated. I was not exaggerating when I said that he wrote the soundtrack to my childhood. I saw Jaws when I was 3 years old. It terrified and intrigued me. I couldn’t get enough. Home Alone is a holiday-season classic from my youth. Raiders of the Lost Ark and, to an even greater degree, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade taught me what adventure movies could be.

This music is a part of me in a very real way. It’s a part of most of us. So, how does one pick a favorite? You just go with your heart. This is what my heart says:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark – One of the things that makes Williams such a master of the craft is his work with leitmotifs, or character themes. They are the repeated phrases in the music that remind you of who this character is and what he’s about. The “Raiders March” is one of the great character themes in history – you know which one that is; it’s the music you hear in your head when you hear the name Indiana Jones – but “Marion’s Theme” is not to be slept on. One of the key elements of any adventure film is romance. “Marion’s Theme” is one of the most romantic pieces Williams has ever written, and it gives the Raiders soundtrack a depth of feeling and breadth of composition that lands this at the top of my list.

2. Home Alone – Think of how many Christmas songs there are and how much Christmas music there is. Now, try to think of how much of it is relatively new. And, I only mean newer than Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift for You. There’s not much. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” counts. And Williams’ main theme for Home Alone. That’s how difficult it is to enter something new into the canon of Christmas music. Sixty-plus years, and I can think of two things. The main theme to Home Alone, apart from being a Christmas staple, evokes all of the moods of the film. It’s sentimental, a little dangerous, a little mischievous. It delivers you right to this time and space.

3. Jaws – There is only one reasonable rival here: Bernard Herrmann’s “The Murder” from Psycho. You know it. The shower scene. Roughly 100 years of modern film scoring, and it comes down to these two cues for the most iconic. Here’s how you know: The parody is accomplished through the music alone. Most parody relies on story beats, characters, costumes, images – it is a visual medium, after all – but to parody or homage Jaws, you need just two notes. The same is true of Psycho. Entire film universes are contained within these cues. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, as well, how much fun so much of the rest of the non-shark Jaws music is. It’s a really jaunty adventure score. “Out to Sea” is particularly memorable. Williams says in the documentary that he thinks of Jaws as a pirate movie, and you can hear that influence in the music.

4. Catch Me If You Can – I’m sure Williams has fun every time he composes a new score, but it feels like he’s having the most fun with the jazzy, fanciful compositions he crafted for Spielberg’s cat-and-mouse story. Listen to the interplay of the instruments. It sounds like a cross-country chase, the way the instruments move back and forth and through each other. I learned from the documentary of Williams’ roots in and love for jazz. That love is infused into every note of this wonderful score.

5. Hook – This is the blatantly sentimental pick, and I presume it would be for many a millennial of a certain age. Hook is the much-maligned Spielberg film our microgeneration reclaimed. As someone who doesn’t much care for Goonies and has been told you need to see it when you’re young, I think of Hook as our Goonies. You have to see when you’re young for it to get its, well, hooks into you. 

Williams’ music hits the three key elements of the film. This is a sentimental family movie in its opening passages. Then, there is the adventure story of discovering Neverland and joining up with the Lost Boys. But, he undercuts all of this with a sense of dread and menace. In the story, the pirates are the menace, but thematically, of course, the menace is the unstoppable march of time that turns you from a child full of wonder to an adult lacking in imagination. The deft artist Williams is, he communicates all of this in 89 seconds of perfectly drawn music with the “Prologue.” Talk about delivering you to a time and a space.

New movie review: Music by John Williams

Whether you are Gen X, millennial, or Gen Z, John Williams probably wrote the soundtrack to your childhood. If you were to list out the 10 most famous music cues in film history, Williams almost certainly wrote half or more of them. With 54 nominations and five awards, he is the second-most-nominated person in the history of the Academy, behind none other than Walt Disney himself. At 92 years old and still working, his cultural legacy is staggering, almost beyond comprehension. As such, it’s a little more than one can fit into a 106-minute movie.

Director Laurent Bouzereau’s film follows most of the conventions we have come to expect from documentaries of this type. We get a little bit of background information on Williams’ parents – his father was a jazz drummer who worked with the greats; his mother was an actress and dancer; they met on the set of a movie they were both working on. We get Williams’ introduction to performing music, a little of his time in the service, and how he got started in movies. Then, we work chronologically through the biggest movies in his career.

If you watch enough of these types of movies, you’re familiar with the beats. What helps separate out Music by John Williams comes down to two related factors: 1) the “biggest movies in his career” also happen to be many of the biggest and most important movies in the history of the art form; and 2) because of that, the talking-head interviews are a who’s who of film history over the past 50 years. Of course, the best insights come from Williams himself and his greatest collaborator, Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg changed the face of the film industry forever, multiple times, but there is an argument to be made that he does not accomplish this without Williams’ contribution. I had this debate with a colleague earlier today, and I actually came down on the side of Spielberg likely succeeding nearly as well with someone like Alan Silvestri (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) at his side. But, there is not a bone in my body that believes had that been the case that we would have five scores as iconoclastic as Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, and Jurassic Park.

These films are full of images we can hear, and that is thanks to Williams. An unknown POV underwater: BUH-BUM. An adventurer running from a boulder: BUM-BUH-BUM-BUHHH. A boy and his best friend flying in front of the moon. We know what that sounds like because of Williams.

Any one of those five films would be the crowning achievement of any other composer’s career, and yet, it is possible none of them serves in that position for Williams because, of course, there is Star Wars. One of the documentary’s truly special moments comes in hearing people describe their reaction to the opening fanfare at the beginning of A New Hope. It is as though Williams discovered fire and suddenly there is light and warmth in the world.

The other major highlight of the film is listening to Kate Capshaw describe Williams playing the Schindler’s List score on the piano for her and Spielberg for the first time. The story brings a tear to her eye – and to ours.

Moments like this will be catnip for fans of film history and fans of these movies, but they also hint at the doc’s great flaw. Every interview, every conversation, every sequence is so geared toward the legacy of Williams’ accomplishments that Bouzereau treats the compositions themselves almost as fait accompli. It sure is a lot of fun to listen to famous filmmakers talk about music we all love, but it would have been more valuable to interrogate Williams’ process of creation. Why does that horn go there? What does this violin solo accomplish? What would one more note here or one fewer note there mean?

The closest we get to this is in listening to Williams talk about his famed five-note composition for the climax of Close Encounters. He shows the camera a music sheet with 20-30 different five-note combinations and points at the circled one, buried innocuously at 15 or 16. That’s the one they used. He then demonstrates the difference a single note makes in the sequence and briefly explains the emotional effect of completing a musical phrase in different ways. This is gold, and I wish the film had space for more sequences like this.

Similarly, there is a good section of the film devoted to Williams’ time as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops, a tenure that proved somewhat controversial due to the perceived illegitimacy of film music. Williams did a lot to break down that barrier, and the film rightly credits him for that specific cultural shift.

These tangible impacts are what the movie needs more of to be fully rewarding. We understand inherently the ephemeral nature of Williams’ work, so deeply rooted in nostalgia for our childhoods and the cultural artifacts we cherished then and still hold dear now. What might give this film some depth is a deeper exploration of that nostalgia. Ultimately, Music by John Williams is like a really delicious cake. It’s sweet and satisfying and you greatly enjoy it as you consume it, but it’s not as nourishing as a full meal.

See it? Yes.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Original Score

Welcome to this year’s edition of Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, where we will break down each of the 23 categories, analyze the films, and make some guesses at their awards prospects.

Best Original Score

The nominees are:

American Fiction

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Killers of the Flower Moon

Oppenheimer

Poor Things

American Fiction

Laura Karpman’s jaunty jazz numbers are the perfect accompaniment to Cord Jefferson’s satire of the literary world. Karpman expertly plays the emotions of the film without ever telling the audience what emotions to feel. It is an elegant piece of work. I had the chance to see Karpman and Jefferson talk about their collaboration after a screening at Vidiots in December, and it sounded like a match made in cinema heaven. Hopefully, these two keep working together because Karpman displays just the right touch to play the full range of feelings Jefferson is trying to evoke.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

I might be getting a little rude about the Diane Warren thing over in the Best Original Song category. If that’s the case, I’m sorry. I just think she might be garnering undue acclaim for arguably mediocre work based on a long history of quality and success. So, how about that John Williams, eh? The second-most nominated person in Academy history, this is Williams’ 54th nomination (48th in this category). He is inching ever closer to Walt Disney’s record of 59, though at 92 years old, that might be asking a lot.

Among those 54 nominations, six have come for Star Wars films, four for Indiana Jones movies, including this one, and two for Harry Potter. I am not claiming to have the world’s greatest ear for music, but I do defy you to listen to the scores for The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker and tell me with 100 percent confidence which one is which. Anyway, I didn’t think Dial of Destiny was all that bad, and the music is Indiana Jones music. It’s a ripping good time. What else do you want?

Killers of the Flower Moon

It would be an overstatement to claim this was the dearly departed Robbie Robertson’s crowning achievement. I mean, he was the leader of The Band. He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. He performed with everybody. And, yeah, he has been a key collaborator of Martin Scorsese’s over the years. So, I’m not saying the score for Killers of the Flower Moon is the best thing Robertson ever did, but damn if it isn’t absolutely note perfect from beginning to end.

Robertson was indigenous on his mother’s side and split his childhood between Toronto and the Six Nations reservation outside the city. In a way, that made him the perfect person to write the score for a film about a native world beset by white interlopers. Much like Robertson, himself, the music has a foot in both worlds and belongs wholly to neither. It is something else, something grander, something special.

I would urge you to read Chris Willman’s full piece in Variety, covering the last interview Robertson gave before his death in early August last year. It’s an excellent article. But, I want to pull out one quote Robertson gave that has stuck with me: “On something like this, where its soul is from Indian country, for me, it comes down to: You couldn’t have written this. You couldn’t have made something like this up. This is so magical.” Magical, indeed.

Oppenheimer

When I think of composer Ludwig Göransson, I think of him as Ryan Coogler’s guy – the same way you might think of Williams as Steven Spielberg’s guy. Göransson met Coogler at USC and the two have collaborated on every feature Coogler has made. He won an Oscar for his Black Panther score and was nominated alongside Coogler for Best Original Song last year for “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I imagine they will continue to do great work together.

But, for now, it appears Göransson has picked up the baton from Hans Zimmer to become Christopher Nolan’s guy, as well. He joined the Nolan team on Tenet and continues the collaboration here with a propulsive, dread-filled score that perfectly matches the tone and energy of this richly layered biopic. Göransson particularly shines during the lengthy Trinity test sequence, when all of the film’s threads come together at one of the most significant moments in human history.

Poor Things

It was necessary that Yorgos Lanthimos’ weirdo sci-fi fantasy – which I say with love and admiration – have an equally gonzo score. The director found the right man for the job in British musician Jerskin Fendrix. Fendrix deftly blends classical score structures and instrumentation with more experimental synth pop to arrive at something akin to Casablanca by way of Björk. It is both wholly original and wholly appropriate, filled with the same sense of wonder and discovery that the film’s lead character experiences throughout the story.

The final analysis

So, we’ve reached the point in this series where we’re going to be doing a lot of talk about Oppenheimer. There are 10 categories where it is not nominated, and we’ve already covered seven of them. Of the 13 categories where it is nominated, it is the clubhouse leader in at least seven or eight, including this one. What I’m saying is get ready to hear a lot about it. Promise we’ll try to keep it interesting.

In another year, Robertson’s Killers of the Flower Moon score would have a real shot here. It is a perfect, beautiful score to a much loved film, and a posthumous Oscar would be a fitting tribute to one of the musical legends of our times. But, it’s an Oppenheimer kind of year and I fully expect Göransson to win his second award. 

Will win: Oppenheimer

Should win: Killers of the Flower Moon

Should have been here: May December

A note about my favorite snub: The Music Branch would never deign to nominate something as interesting and experimental as Marcelo Zarvos’ work on Todd Haynes’ May December. Zavros composed a number of original pieces for the film but also spends a significant portion of the soundtrack interpolating Michel Legrand’s original compositions for the 1971 film The Go-Between. It is daring, inventive work that plays an integral role in establishing the tone of Haynes’ film. 

The Music Branch is always wary of nominating work that combines previously existing material with new compositions – these are the same people who refused to nominate Zimmer’s iconic Inception score because of its use of “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” – so recognition was always unlikely. But, these are the kinds of nominations the Academy should open itself up to if it wants to remain fresh and relevant in the coming years.