For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of April 10-12, 2026):

1 (1) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

2 (2) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

3 (3) The Drama (15) **

4 (4) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

5 (5) Hoppers (U) ****

6 (new) BTS World Tour 'Arirang' Live Viewing in Goyang & Japan (12A)

7 (new) You, Me & Tuscany (12A)

8 (new) undertone (15) **

9 (new) California Schemin' (15)

10 (new) The Stranger (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Stand By Me

2. The Stranger

3. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow

4. Orwell: 2+2=5

5. Akira [above]

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

2 (4) Sinners (15) ****

3 (5) One Battle After Another (15) ****

4 (6) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

5 (2) The Housemaid (15)

6 (7) Wicked: For Good (PG)

7 (3) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

8 (9) Hamnet (12) **

9 (8) G.O.A.T. (PG)

10 (22) Apollo 13 (PG) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

2. Nouvelle Vague

3. Die My Love

4. Song Sung Blue

5. Marty Supreme

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Jurassic Park (Saturday, ITV1, 7am)

2. Don't Look Now (Friday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

3. Four Weddings & A Funeral (Tuesday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

4. Pearl (Friday, Channel 4, 1.05am)

5. The King's Speech (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

Un air de famille: "Father Mother Sister Brother"

Much as any family is composed of disparate parts, so too Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother - surprise winner of last year's Venice Golden Lion - is made up of separate, only loosely connected items. This new film marks a return to the portmanteau form of Jarmusch's earlier Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes: it's really three shorts, of roughly thirty minutes apiece, on a familial theme. The first, "Father", finds a straight-edged brother and sister (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) venturing deep into the New Jersey woods to pay a long-overdue visit with the hermit-like father (Tom Waits) who's been scrounging money off the pair of them. "Mother", set in and around Dublin's suburbs, describes a gathering of matriarch Charlotte Rampling and her two daughters, uptight Cate Blanchett and pink-haired free spirit Vicky Krieps; it's unclear whether or not it's a good sign that all three women have shown up wearing Bergman scarlet. (Ingmar, not Ingrid.) Finally, in "Sister Brother", the most wide-ranging of the three shorts, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play recently orphaned American twins in Paris, wondering what to do with the apartment - and the material objects - their folks have left behind. A very Jarmuschian - indeed, very indie - idea of the family emerges: people have secrets they hide from one another, communication is often awkward, strained and unnatural, and were it not for the fact they share a surname and a bloodline, nobody would think to put some of these individuals together. (For starters: Adam from Girls and Blossom from Blossom. And you're telling me Tom Waits gave life to these two?!) And yet: in a moment where America's conservative faction is getting weird (again) around the family unit and the roles we play within it, there is something heartening about Jarmusch's Zen insistence we could all stand to be a good deal chiller about everything familial. So yes, some of our relatives are flawed and imperfect; and yes, those closest to us by birth are still often kind of unknowable. But - and here you can almost hear Jarmusch adding a "hey man" as a footnote to every frame of each story he tells here - that's cool, too.

Onscreen, the worldview manifests as a radical simplification of form. The shorts are self-contained units, affording ample time and space to small, manageable casts whose individual components have either worked with this director before or are hip enough to know the effect Jarmusch seeks: not straining but being, with no labouring of the point. "Father" is an especially effective platform for Waits to play the sly old goat (or Jersey Devil); one of its takehomes is that every film would be improved with a bit more Tom Waits. While we wait for Hollywood to address that issue, Jarmusch leaves us to savour the eternal pleasures of the uncluttered frame: FMSB is unmistakably the work of a creative who's been left to do his own thing for nigh-on fifty years, who feels beholden to no contemporary trend. The crisp, clear photography - credited to veteran Lynch favourite Frederick Elmes and the versatile, much-travelled Yorick Le Saux - allows a hundred tiny gestures to register; one overhead shot of a table set for tea in the second part may be the most elegant spread I've seen in the American cinema this side of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. (Jarmusch finds it so tasty he keeps cutting back to it.) If there's a slight limitation, it's that the film's overarching philosophy is consistent to the point of repetition. Jarmusch acknowledges as much, writing in links between the three shorts: shots of passing skateboarders (liberated from familial duty, unlike his main characters), a recurring use of the phrase "Bob's your uncle" (more family), an ongoing discourse on the properties and uses of water (being thinner than blood). Everything (kind of) connects, but only the third short feels like any true progression - being what happens after mother and father, and indeed "Mother" and "Father", have passed - and Moore and Sabbat work up what feels instinctively like an authentic, earnest sibling bond. (They've got one another's backs, which still counts for something in Jarmuschland.) The whole project is as vibes-based as the contemporary cinema gets without the manager hanging crystals up in the foyer, but it's fun to see Jarmusch, erstwhile king of ironic detachment, getting a little cuddlier with age: he's still chill, but he's grown into welcoming a little more warmth into his frames.

Father Mother Sister Brother is now playing in selected cinemas.

Midsummer night's dream-film: "Miroirs No. 3"

Our beleaguered arthouse distributors are having a firesale on festival favourites before this year's Cannes gets under way: everything must go on release. As of tomorrow, the new François Ozon will find its screens under threat from a new Christian Petzold, the German writer-director whose naggingly academic dramas have, in the past, left this viewer markedly more quizzical than many of my colleagues. (I'm not looking to write a thesis; I'm really just here for a good time.) Miroirs No. 3 is a miniature - an 86-minute four-hander - but also a throwback to the ambiguous artfilms of yore; like some cross between Three Colours Blue and Philip Haas's underrated movie adaptation of Paul Auster's The Music of Chance, it pivots on a car crash before making vague movements in the direction of a study of happenstance. The crash, on the backroads of the German countryside, robs pianist Laura (recent Petzold favourite Paula Beer) of her boyfriend, but throws Laura herself clear into the home and life of Betty (Barbara Auer), an older woman who was first on the scene. Betty, who initially appears hung up on painting the fence surrounding her roadside property, refers to Laura as Yelena, and wistfully recounts the story of Tom Sawyer to her bedbound charge as a means of getting her unexpected new housemate to pick up a paintbrush of her own. It feels like the kind of bedtime story a parent might well tell her child, much as the film around this scene gradually shapes up as a Petzoldian reverie, shifting away from the taut psychological realism of this director's early, breakthrough films in favour of something altogether more dreamlike.

The signs are there from the off. Miroirs' early scenes are somehow too bright, too sunny, too placidly quiet to belong to the real world. If we're being rational about it, it makes no sense for Laura to move in with a stranger like Betty, save that this is exactly the sort of spiritual connection the women have in, say, certain Bergman movies; it also makes no sense that Betty's rough-edged husband and son (Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs), mechanics who make their living tampering with the GPSes on sportscars, should have left Betty rattling around on pills in a remote country property, except that's what bluffly unthinking men do in arthouse movies. (Well, that and ply the women who pass through their lives with beer. I can't rule out the possibility Petzold is floating a free-associative pun on his lead actress's surname in such moments: it's that kind of film.) The scene strategy is generally perverse, as it would be in any dream. No character is ever quite where they ought to be, which occasions a lot of huffing and puffing around between Betty's home and the garage where the men work; whether bikes, dishwashers or cars, things keep breaking down or falling apart; and Petzold positions Beer upfront as a postergirl for preoccupation. (Setting us, in turn, to wonder whether this is a limbo of Laura's own making, or one which exists solely inside her own imagination; on the soundtrack, Frankie Valli belts out the night begins to turn your head around.) Miroirs does enough, in this way, to invite spectator speculation: this, you feel, is one reason we critics have collectively had such a soft spot for everything Petzold. (He often needs explaining.) It's also that flight of fancy a filmmaker only gets to make once the moneymen have learnt to trust in them totally. As a narrative, the film feels loose, rattly, as if it too could fall apart at any moment; this script's screws forever seem in need of tightening. But it does conjure up an idea of leisure, of being far from home with no particular plans: it wouldn't surprise me to learn Petzold made it because the money and actors were available, the weather was good, and he had a gap in his schedule. Minor, but intriguing.

Miroirs No. 3 opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Needles and the damage done: "Diamonds/Diamanti"

Completing this week's line-up of festival faves: the Turkish-born, Italy-based Ferzan Özpetek, whose early Noughties melodramas positioned him as a back-up Almodóvar. (To the extent that he would later bill himself, with no small measure of grandiosity, as simply Özpetek.) Much as the beloved Pedro has started to get self-referential with age, so too, apparently, has Özpetek: his latest Diamonds, its maker's biggest domestic hit, opens with footage of the filmmaker gathering his favourite actresses together for a meal at which he announces he has a new project for them all to star in. One of the party, observing the almost exclusively distaff line-up, wonders whether the project might be titled Vaginodrome, a suggestion her director overrules as inappropriate. Yet Diamonds does unfold within a milieu that might indeed merit such a description: a demanding costumier's female-staffed workshop in 1970s Rome, sprung into frantic life to provide the clothes for a (female) Oscar-winning director - for which cinephiles are bound to read Lina Wertmüller - as she gears up on her next production. (Özpetek, we should note, has never even been nominated for an Oscar, but a fellow can dream.) By day, the assembled minions measure, cut, ruche and stitch, pausing in between to bicker and gossip; after hours, they endure a variety of issues, from ingrate children to abusive spouses. They're the real diamonds, you see.

As a rugged, red-blooded heterosexual male keeping one eye on this year's tense Championship run-in, your correspondent is almost certainly not the target audience in this instance, but even he could broadly see the appeal: for two-and-a-quarter hours, Özpetek outlines a lavishly furnished safe space into which viewers might retreat for a few laughs, tears, sobs and swoons. (An alternative title: Glamma Mia!) Although he gets distracted when, for some reason, his women have to measure up a phalanx of shirtless young actors in tighty-whities, this is clearly a director who adores actresses, granting even the lowliest of clothiers a close-up, a moment or a signature flourish; Özpetek ends the film with a list of those grande dames he still wants to work with, which is either touching or desperate. Only if you switch on your critical faculties do you notice there's no variation of tone, no heightening of stakes, a liability in a 135-minute feature: even when Diamonds turns its hand to something more dramatic - as in the domestic abuse subplot - it soon snaps back so as to give the other gals something light to do. Everything is sunny, fabulous, bella; everyone is handsome, sassy, well-dressed; the year's most insistently applied musical theme, meanwhile, plods and pulls its strings. There are, of course, worse things for a semi-prominent filmmaker to do with the money afforded him; and there are worse ways for us to spend an afternoon than being cosseted. (It's the movie equivalent of a spa day or long lunch on someone else's dime: an indulgence.) Yet there's a reason Almodóvar is routinely hailed as a great of world cinema and Özpetek isn't; I came away from Diamonds with a newfound respect for the way Jocelyn Moorhouse's slightly under-appreciated The Dressmaker, from a decade or so ago, troubled to mix up its camp.

Diamonds opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

On demand: "My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow"

In a generally patchy year for the documentary form - too much reality for everybody, not enough funding to do those events justice - the Oscar went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the tale of a smalltown teacher and part-time videographer whose self-shot footage revealed the insidious creep of Putinism into his community as Russia began its "special military operation" in Ukraine. Had the Academy time, they might well have watched and voted for Julia Loktev's My Undesirable Friends: Part I, a variant of the same story told in granular detail at far greater length. (As a five-hour, five-chapter enterprise, no less, complete with built-in episode breaks.) Loktev, who was born in Russia before emigrating to the US as a child, returned to her homeland in October 2021 to make a film about her friend Anna Nemzer, a journalist with the independent Moscow media channel TV Rain. As the film opens, TV Rain has just been restricted to broadcasting online, and several correspondents, including Nemzer, have been designated "foreign agents" by Putin's administration, meaning their every public statement has to be prefixed with a preamble in pure legalese. (Nemzer dubs it "the fuckery"; fascism always begins with labels and tags.) Part of Loktev's project here has been to reflect TV Rain's output in the run-up to and early days of the Ukraine conflict, which provides a counterpoint to all those Putin pressers Western news outlets carry live. In her interview series Who's Got the Power?, Nemzer is seen talking with activists fighting the cause of minorities in today's Russia, be they queer, homeless, handicapped or merely opposed to the PM's policies. This programming - sober, intelligent, well-researched yet open-minded journalism - would be no issue whatsoever in a free society; trouble is, this Russia is far from a free society.

That's what's on the box, yet another critical aim of Loktev's project is to gently investigate what's going on inside Anna Nemzer's head as the state propaganda machine gears up and the war drums sound ever louder. The choice Nemzer faces, which she outlines to Loktev in car on her daily commute to and from the broadcaster's studio, is a stark one: stay put in the country you love and face mounting charges for essentially doing your job - as with so many recent Russian dissidents, including the late Alexei Navalny - or emigrate, if the visa system and international borders allow, and start from scratch somewhere else. The quandary sticks in the forefront of the film's own mind, because in the course of her day job, Anna is interviewing those who find themselves in a comparable bind, while her colleagues are under pressure themselves, worrying where and how to cache their laptops, material and sources in the event of FSB raids on their properties in the small hours. During a promotional photoshoot for the station, Anna idly ponders what she might look like in a prison uniform; a regulation passport renewal sets her to wonder how long she'll get to use it. One of the journalist's colleagues has just moved into a new flat in one of Moscow's hipper enclaves: while giving Loktev the grand tour, she confesses that, since being declared a foreign agent, she's wondered what the point is of doing up the guest room. Her friends have already started fleeing town; she herself might have to follow at some point. One way or another, Putinism arrives on your doorstep.

Visibly, this is a tentative, trepidatious, drainingly temporary way to live. The "Raindrops" - as the journos call themselves - are trying to think of the bigger picture: the future of Russia, the future of TV Rain, in some cases a future for their children or for the children they hope to have. Yet they're continually obliged to roll back their ambitions and think about themselves, their own future, their own safety: one journalist admits to thinking at length about the underwear she's choosing to put on in the event of a nocturnal raid on her home. Such quandaries may well seem oddly relatable to non-Russians who've seen their own states' mechanisms hijacked by ideologues and zealots, lunatics and maniacs in recent years: what Loktev's film most closely describes is the process whereby despotism - like so many isms, including Trumpism - can get into and foul up your head. The personal and the political, then, become utterly inseparable. Loktev's secret weapon - her stealthiest decision here in the matter of engaging an audience - is that she's basically made a diary film, the work of a trusted pal checking in, day after day, to see that Anna and colleagues were still there, still visible, still fighting, still standing. As hinted at early on by the film's second chapter, in which Loktev spends an evening drinking, smoking and chatting with Anna's colleagues Ina and Alesya, My Undesirable Friends could even, in some reality, be claimed as a hangout movie. The camaraderie and solidarity this camera observes afford us some hope, but as the film progresses and the mood music darkens, the conditions for hanging out get steadily worse and worse - to the point where you fear hanging out itself might be deemed a crime, seditious conspiracy against an all-controlling state. One of the tragedies Loktev filmed: the sudden dispersal of a close-knit friendgroup, seen from the off to be watching out for one another.

Loktev and co-editor Michael Taylor identify a clear, compelling narrative arc: by chapter four, opening on the very eve of the Russian invasion, the station is forced into round-the-clock hyperdrive, even as the restrictions on reporting and reporters ("put out propaganda and only propaganda", as Raindrop Sonya summarises) become so tight as to prove stifling. The journos, several of whom have friends and family in Ukraine, are left reckoning with what one calls "the monster" that has been growing unchecked inside Russia for the best part of twenty years. Here as elsewhere, Loktev identifies an initially curious-seeming recurring quirk: the tendency among the younger, more Westernised Raindrops to reframe breaking news in terms of the Harry Potter franchise. Chronologically, I guess, it makes sense: these twenty- and thirtysomething journos, clinging to their Insta and TikTok stories as one might a teddy bear, are part of a generation raised on such fairytales, with their olde-worlde belief in people doing right and the inevitability of good's triumph over evil. Yet if the years since The Deathly Hallows have demonstrated anything, it's surely that those rules no longer apply - and, indeed, that those pushing such fictions, as Putin pushes his claims that Ukraine requires denazification, may themselves be far more capable of evil than good. What Loktev's magnum opus ultimately bears witness to is a foul sorcery, less event-movie spectacular than grimly humdrum, whereby freedoms, restful nights and eventually any semblance of a normal life are magicked away. As Anna puts it - on the morning Putin announced his military misadventure, shortly before she too vanishes from this story - "I don't have a country any more". It's left to a veteran activist, taking her leave from the journos in the aftermath of one subsequent anti-War protest, to have the final words, infused with both the blackest Russian humour and an inkling of things to come: "Believe me, everything will get worse."

My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow is now streaming via MUBI; a follow-up, Part II - Exile, is currently in postproduction.

Being and nothingness: "The Stranger"

There's a new François Ozon; there usually is. Yet after a decade or so of middling period pieces and familial melodramas, one senses this one might mean a little more in the long run, and demand more from its maker than merely converting France's apparently infinite public funding for cinema into middlebrow festival fare. In adapting The Stranger this far into the 21st century, Ozon has set himself a proper challenge: translating the colonial-era concerns of Camus' 1942 novel, revered touchstone of post-War existentialism, for a post-colonial audience who've long sensed existentialism was just a phase our polonecked predecessors felt they had to go through. Perhaps wisely, the writer-director adopts a double-jointed approach. With one hand, he ensures this narrative looks like a thing of the past, filming the novel's Algiers setting in a lush monochrome, high-contrast blacks and whites bookending suggestive shades of grey; the choice allows this Stranger to mesh both with the Casablanca of Casablanca and the Algiers of The Battle of Algiers, to exist on a timeline somewhere between the early 1940s and the late 1960s. (Some part of Ozon has elected to make the movie the French film industry would have made not long after the book became the literary sensation it did.) With the other hand, though, Ozon gives his material a rigorous, modernising tweak, maintaining Camus' focus on the mopey Meursault (played here by emergent star Benjamin Voisin) while also fleshing out those Arab characters he encounters and finally takes up arms against.

In suspending the action between two states of being, two moments in time, Ozon preserves a certain strangeness essential to Camus's book: what we're watching feels like a dream - then a nightmare - unfolding under the blazing noonday sun, which might be as good a definition as any of the whole colonial project. Working closely with cinematographer Manu Dacosse - better known for his striking horror/fantasy endeavours (2015's Evolution, 2025's Reflections in a Dead Diamond) - Ozon affords his typically considered and handsome images a new, uncanny twist, positioning most of these set-ups somewhere between 1950s Buñuel, Welles's Kafka and de Chirico's etchings. We notice, because - after a run of chatty Ozon tales - this one is told chiefly through images, the most lingering of which is the blankness of Voisin's face. It's one of those performances that shouldn't work - where a director has clearly told an actor to do less and less, until he's finally seen to do all but nothing - and yet it's one that grows only more effective (and troubling) by the frame: a facade hiding very little. This Meursault, less obviously heroic than Camus's, is a wastrel, a benumbed observer who lets slip the odd shudder of horniness (in a relationship with Rebecca Marder's Marie, which he blows) but otherwise betrays no fellow feeling, no empathy, merely a cruel indifference to the world around him. He is, in Ozon's eyes, pure white privilege, a walking critique of every role Tom Hiddleston has played over the last decade and a half; he's an enigma to be puzzled over if not ultimately figured out (there may be nothing there; there may be nothing there but self-interest), yet no more an enigma than the colonial mindset that inspires certain states to try and lord it over others.

He also presents as one risk among the many Ozon forces himself to take here: a protagonist who's a decidedly odd and cold and slippery fish, who probably shouldn't be the hero of a motion picture. (For starters, Meursault doesn't act, he shrugs; he shrugs his way into a courtroom where, even with the advantage of time and perspective, nobody can quite explain the events to which we've all borne witness.) Ozon keeps his Meursault front and centre so as to keep an eye on him; it's an example of a director tracking a character he knows we cannot trust. But he also doesn't blind himself to the flickers of actual life around this void: the vivacious Marder, with increasingly poignant hope in her eyes; Denis Lavant as Meursault's scrofulous, dog-beating neighbour Salamano, who proves preferable company to Meursault, in that he at least misses the dog after it's gone; Algiers itself, a far livelier destination than its overlords would prefer; and Hajar Bouzaouit as the drained, exhausted sister of the Arab Meursault kills (in a scene Ozon frames as almost a cruising-ground encounter gone bad; is Meursault a stranger even to his own sexuality?), who has good reason to feel numb. Mostly, this Stranger stays at Meursault's shoulder, not to exalt him, but to detail, in as much as any camera can, his fetid, cowardly, nihilistic and finally deadly worldview. It's that rare film adaptation of a tricky text that doesn't in the least shy away from what's prickly, difficult, perhaps alienating about its source; it may, in fact, be at least as much critique as straightforward adaptation, as though someone had refilmed The Fountainhead with a pompous, egotistical jerk of a hero whose architectural dickswinging fouls up multiple city skylines. It is the work of Ozon the enfant terrible who wanted to shake up and scatter the bourgeois audience's assumptions, but also that of the worldly, professorial figure Ozon cuts today, who spies the dangers inherent in youthful posethrowing. It is, finally, a L'Étranger for grown-ups, and not the mooning hipsters and adolescents who've historically taken this book and its worldview to their hearts. If that makes Ozon's film hard to like or embrace especially, I also doubt we'll see a more admirable adaptation in 2026.

The Stranger is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Song Sung Blue"

We've arrived at the point where one of Hollywood's most pressing creative concerns, going into the year of Our Lord 2026, was paying tribute to a real-life Neil Diamond tribute act and thereby engineering a Neil Diamond jukebox musical: Song Sung Blue is one for the teenagers, and two for the show. Hugh Jackman toplines as the somewhat improbably named Mike Sardina, a jobbing musician and recovering alcoholic eking out a measly living on Milwaukee's chicken-in-a-basket circuit at the turn of the 1990s. Backstage at one such gig, he crosses paths with a Patsy Cline tribute act, Claire Stingl (Kate Hudson); the pair click, fall for one another, and re-emerge on the circuit as Lightning and Thunder, belting out "Cracklin' Rosie", "Forever in Blue Jeans" and other such standards. Despite Mike's understandable reluctance to perform "Sweet Caroline" (the most overplayed song in Christendom, an anthem for sheep, baa baa baa), the duo start to get somewhere before fate intervenes, and we realise this must have been one of those long-gestating projects afforded a leg-up by the success of 2018's A Star is Born redo: the folks putting the show on here aren't the fresh faces you'd find in Glee or any other bandcamp, rather midlifers with baggage beyond the remit of any roadie (addiction issues, depression, a family at home to raise). It's a vision of showbiz as last-chance saloon, serving until late.

Writer-director Craig Brewer, who oversaw the rap game melodrama Hustle & Flow in another life, duly sets about soliciting texture and experience: the film's backdrop is an unfussy, lived-in, come-as-you-are blue-collar America, and even as the narrative wades into sticky, TVM-adjacent territory in its second half, a distinctive editing strategy makes unusual bedfellows of unlikely developments in the Sardina household. That's one selling point: between senile motorists and Mike's dodgy ticker, the arc is never as predictable as you might think. (The wrinkles of life haven't been entirely smoothed out of it.) And it's fun in a broad-brush kind of way. Brewer evidently prefers performers who can come on and give a longish film some necessary oomph here and there: Michael Imperioli as a silver-fox Buddy Holly impersonator, Fisher Stevens as Mike's dentist manager, Jim Belushi as a phlegmy local entrepreneur. We also get an oddly miscast Eddie Vedder when this story takes a sharp leftfield turn (and the actor in question is actually supposed to be playing Eddie Vedder, not an Eddie Vedder tribute act), but elsewhere Brewer clears ample space for Jackman (wearing the sideburns well, which is to say unironically) and Hudson (who seems to be turning into Janice Long) to be as impressive offstage as they are on. You buy this pair as a double act, which is crucial; they're like an unpretentious Aldi own-brand variant of Joaquin and Reese as Johnny and June. What's around them is often cheesy and corny, caught singing an at least semi-familiar tune; we are, ultimately, many miles from the cinematic cutting edge, and at least three decades removed from where the rest of the American cinema is at in 2026. But that's part of Song Sung Blue's plaid-covered charm: not unlike the real Diamond's secular hymns, Brewer's film has a way of bypassing your most critical faculties. Stick it on, and it kinda works.

Song Sung Blue is now available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and on DVD and Blu-ray via Universal.