This article is part of Film Comment’s Best of 2025 coverage. Read all the lists here.
Weapons (Zach Cregger)
There isn’t a scene, there isn’t a line, there isn’t a single gesture in which David Strathairn pushes into the realm of artifice in Angus MacLachlan’s A Little Prayer. MacLachlan, best known for writing the precious Junebug (2005), has quietly been forging a directorial career of unprepossessing but soulful films, informed by his work as a playwright and imbued with the texture of his hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He mines matters of the mundane and the domestic without histrionics, which is perhaps why his work tends to go unnoticed by moviegoers looking for fireworks. In Strathairn, the director has found his perfect muse, an actor whose great value has always resided in his simple ability to be present. As Bill, an aging Vietnam War veteran confused about how far to insert himself into the fracturing lives of his wayward, alcoholic son and long-suffering daughter-in-law, the 76-year-old Strathairn avoids every innate pitfall in playing the patriarch: there’s neither studied gravitas nor doddering angling for the audience’s commiseration. His enormously touching work is a reminder that great performances often emanate from an actor’s accrued experience rather than self-conscious “immersion.” Strathairn’s Bill has undoubtedly existed in this place, this neighborhood, for most of his adulthood. Facing life’s disappointments, he’s a wholly convincing latter-day Chishû Ryû.
While Straithairn’s thoughtful work matches MacLachlan’s unforced humanism beat for beat, 80-year-old Kathleen Chalfant’s delicate starring turn in Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch is a master class in how a performer can elevate her surrounding material. She plays Brooklyn-born Ruth Goldman, a former professional cook starting to suffer memory loss and adjusting to life in a care facility. Theater veteran Chalfant is purposeful and mesmeric, never more so than when she tries to prove her mind’s strength to a new doctor by maniacally reciting the recipe for borscht: the delight in her insistence on red wine and balsamic over apple-cider vinegar; the fervor of her command to use “just a pinch!” of caraway seed; the frustration when she momentarily mistakes lettuce for cabbage! While Familiar Touch plays games familiar to cinematic dramatizations of dementia (an inherently false subgenre for the way it presumes interior portraiture on an unknowable disease and too often falls back on platitudes and ethereal metaphors about memory), and begs off troubling issues of class and race endemic to such high-end eldercare facilities, Chalfant imbues Ruth with a fervent desire for connection. The past is always clear on her beatific face even as her present is slipping away.
Another veteran actor outclassing the joint, 75-year-old Amy Madigan provides the ice-cold center to Zach Cregger’s flamboyant horror hit Weapons. The film squanders a fertile premise that would seem to speak to contemporary anxieties about the welfare of our children and the mania that surrounds American parents’ attempts to protect them, instead delivering a sensationalist thrill ride. Yet somehow the film’s most disappointing plot revelation (oh, it was a witch all along) coaxes out its most watchable element: the evil sorceress Aunt Gladys, a genuinely horrible creation, embodied with full, revolting gusto by Madigan, whom I didn’t recognize for half of the film despite having been a longtime fan of her idiosyncratic work. It was only a matter of time before Madigan—allergic to bathos even in tearjerkers like Field of Dreams (1989)—went full villain. Despite the buckets of gore, the unpredictable Madigan allows moments of vulnerability. A confident unsentimentality unites the work of Madigan, Chalfant, and Strathairn; watching them, I felt secure that I was never being forced to react with undue empathy, sympathy, or fear.
Michael Koresky is the senior curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image, and a member of the National Society of Film Critics. He frequently writes for the Criterion Collection, and hosts and curates the Criterion Channel series Queersighted. His latest book is Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness (Bloomsbury).
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