‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’ Delivered Me to Somewhere, And I Bet I’m Not the Only One

November 11, 2025

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Like a Boss, even when you’re not feeling like it (CREDIT: 20th Century Studios/Screenshot)

Starring: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Gaby Hoffman, Odessa Young, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz, Grace Gummer

Director: Scott Cooper

Running Time: 119 Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: October 24, 2025 (Theaters)

Folks, I feel compelled to say something, and I’m going to be totally honest here: Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere isn’t really a biopic. Well, okay, I guess it does technically fit the definition of a biographical motion picture, insofar as it features actors playing real people (primarily Jeremy Allen White as American singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen) based on situations that actually happened. But in this case, the question of how closely the portrayals match the real deal feels especially beside the point. Instead, this whole movie is really a feature-long work of advocacy about the importance of mental health services. Bruce was in a dark place in the buildup to his 1982 album Nebraska, and it eventually becomes clear that he needs professional help if he’s going to make it through. That realization sneaks up on you, but it’s also what the story is building up to the entire time, and I hope whoever needs to see it gets to see it.

Grade: Good on You, Bruce and Everyone Looking Out for You

‘The Damned’ is a Fairly Interesting January 2025 Movie Release

January 17, 2025

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Portrait of The Damned in Snow (CREDIT: Vertical Entertainment)

Starring: Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Rory McCann, Siobhan Finneran, Francis Magee, Turlough Convery, Mícheál Óg Lane, Lewi Gribben, Andrean Sigurgeirsson, Guillermo Uria

Director: Thordur Palsson

Running Time: 89 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: January 3, 2025 (Theaters)

I don’t want to be damned! Nor do I want to be in the location where the Thordur Palsson-directed movie The Damned is set, i.e., an Arctic bay that’s days away from the nearest village. Brr, that sounds cold! Although that’s not the biggest problem. I could find a way to survive the below-zero temps, but the lack of sunlight would really just not work for me. Also, the hallucinations that are apparently running rampant don’t sound so great. I enjoy analyzing hallucinations from the outside, but actually interacting with them – and living to tell the tale – is a little trickier.

Grade: Frostbite & Brainfreeze

All I Want for Christmas is for More People to See ‘The Order’

December 14, 2024

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Order up! (CREDIT: Vertical/Screenshot)

Starring: Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Jurnee Smollett, Alison Oliver, Marc Maron, Odessa Young

Director: Justin Kurzel

Running Time: 116 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: December 6, 2024 (Theaters)

The Order came out in theaters on the first weekend of December, aka the dumping ground between the mega-blockbusters of Thanksgiving and the mega-blockbusters of Christmas. So it probably won’t be on the big screen for much longer! But if you’re in the mood for a bleak, based-on-a-true-story crime thriller as the mercury plummets and the wind starts whipping, then you may just want to check out Jude Law as a weary FBI agent hunting down Nicholas Hoult as an ambitious white supremacist terrorist. (Marc Maron also pops up as an outspoken radio host!) It’s a worthwhile watch if you want to reckon with the most portentous corners of society.

To sum it all up, I’d like to paraphrase my own headline: all I want for Christmas is for the world to be cured of neo-Nazism.

Grade: 4.5 Attempts to Contain the Disorder out of 6 Kids Birthday Parties

I Saw ‘Mothering Sunday’: Here’s What I Saw

March 31, 2022

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Mothering Sunday (CREDIT: Sony Pictures Classics/Screenshot)

Starring: Odessa Young, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Sope Dirisu, Patsy Ferran, Glenda Jackson

Director: Eva Husson

Running Time: 110 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: March 25, 2022 (Theaters)

For a good stretch of Mothering Sunday, Odessa Young walks around a big English country estate while totally naked. She’s by herself, just exploring the place, luxuriating in her own body. There’s a few moments when it cuts to some other characters and you think she’s about to be discovered, but that’s just misleading editing, because they’re in some other time and/or place. Anyway, it’s the most long-lasting incidental nudity I can ever remember seeing in a movie, and it had me thinking, “Well, I guess she’s comfortable.” Anyway, her character starts out as a maid and eventually becomes a highly acclaimed writer. Not a bad way for a life to turn out. Elsewhere, Colin Firth and Olivia Colman play characters who get very emotional.

Grade: 3 Typewriters out of No Clothes

Josephine Decker’s ‘Shirley’ Presents Elisabeth Moss as Shirley Jackson in Her Latest Acting Tour de Force

June 3, 2020

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CREDIT: NEON

Starring: Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Odessa Young, Logan Lerman

Director: Josephine Decker

Running Time: 107 Minutes

Rating: R for Acid Tongues and Sexual Encounters in Multiple Directions

Release Date: June 5, 2020 (Hulu, On Demand, and Drive-Ins)

When writing a movie review (or a review about anything, really), it is wise to focus on the details that you care about most. So with that in mind, after watching Elisabeth Moss play Shirley Jackson in the Josephine Decker-directed biopic Shirley, I must say: I love the shirts! Shirley favors short-sleeve button-downs, including an absolutely tremendous one with a mallard pattern. The film takes place in Vermont, but you wouldn’t know it from all the exposed forearms. In another context, her sartorial choices could easily fit on a painfully ironic hipster or a dad joke-spewing goofball, but when Shirley wears them, they say, “This is who I am: deal with it. Or don’t. Either way, I’ma do me.”

That vibe of defiance is thick in the air of Shirley, in which the writer and her Bennington College professor husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg) “welcome” newlyweds Fred (Logan Lerman) and Rose (Odessa Young) as guests into their home. If that setup has you thinking Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, you’re in the right area. If you’re also thinking there might be a heavy influence of Jackson’s most famous works, that, however, is not precisely accurate. There’s no stoning of anyone like in the short story “The Lottery,” nor are there any hints of the supernatural akin to her oft-adapted novel The Haunting of Hill House (save for the ghosts of marital discord). Despite the lack of one-to-one connections, the Jackson home is plenty scary, which Rose and Fred soon discover as they get caught up in a swirling psychosexual adventure.

When it comes to successful visionary movies, they let audiences in on a way of feeling that they fundamentally just get in their psyches (or souls, or hearts, or whatever) without necessarily having to understand the logic of it all. And that’s Shirley for me (and perhaps for some of you as well). I didn’t quite feel that way with Decker’s last film, Madeline’s Madeline, which struck me as a bit too foreign (at least on first viewing) to truly attach to it. But with Shirley, I have the key to open its lock for the cinematic language to feel just right. The psychology of why Stanley feels compelled to torture Fred over his dissertation or why Shirley and a very pregnant Rose find themselves frolicking by the bathtub is not spelled out in concrete terms. Travelling into this abode is like a trip through Hades. It’s pretty exhilarating, at least if you know you’re going to come out eventually. But for those stuck there, it’s a little more exhausting, and my mind will be stuck on them for a while.

Shirley is Recommended If You Like: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Making sarcastic comments at a party, Patterned Short-Sleeve Button-Downs

Grade: 4 out of 5 Typewriters

This Is a Movie Review: A Hacker Spurs a Town Into Nightmarish Vengeance in the Uncompromising ‘Assassination Nation’

September 19, 2018

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CREDIT: NEON

This review was originally posted on News Cult in September 2018.

Starring: Odessa Young, Suki Waterhouse, Hari Nef, Abra, Joel McHale, Bella Thorne, Bill Skarsgård

Director: Sam Levinson

Running Time: 110 Minutes

Rating: R for Very Bloody Violence, Scandalously Lascivious Behavior, and Casual Drug Use and Profanity

Release Date: September 21, 2018 (Limited)

Assassination Nation paints the picture of what might happen if online rage riots coalesced beyond the screens. A hacker who goes by “Er0str4tus” dumps the personal files of the Salem, Massachusetts mayor, exposing him for the hypocrisy of running as a family values, anti-LGBTQ candidate while he gets up to lascivious behavior with other men. The moral calculus is a lot harder to square when the next data dump victim is the local high school principal, who gets labelled an abuser for having nude photos of his young daughter in the bath. He (justifiably) insists that he has done nothing wrong and refuses to resign, further inciting the mob that the entire town is becoming.

We see the consequences of the hacking play out through the lens of the high school, particularly four tight-knit friends: Lily (Odessa Young), Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), Bex (Hari Nef), and Em (Abra). They all demonstrate their bona fides when it comes to having a social conscience, Lily especially so. She is wise beyond her years, but angry in a way that belies her youth. She has insightful thoughts about feminism, the male gaze, and just generally treating people with respect. Whenever someone is the target of rage, she considers them fairly and compassionately, recognizing that everyone is a person and contains multitudes. But she is far from perfect, as she is carrying on a rather sleazy emotional affair with her neighbor Nick (Joel McHale), the father of a girl she used to babysit.

When Lily’s secrets are exposed and evidence suggests that she might be behind the hack, she and her friends become the target of the town’s unhinged id, as a full-fledged vengeance-seeking posse takes bloody devastating form. Plenty of women have been threatened with rape and murder for the mistakes that Lily has made (or even milder sins), and the climax of Assassination Nation illustrates how terrifying it would be if a mob of people made good on those promises. While she has transgressed, it is nothing to be killed over, and her attackers correspondingly look insane and inhuman. Ultimately, Lily and her friends are able to fight back in some stylish red leather outfits. It might strain a little credulity that they are suddenly so capable in guerrilla combat, but this film is more feverish than believable, and besides, they have the power of righteousness on their side.

Assassination Nation is Recommended If You Like: The Purge, ’80s John Carpenter, American Horror Story: Cult, South Park Season 20

Grade: 4 out of 5 Red Leather Jackets