Butterfly (2025)

This short animated film is nominated for the 2026 Academy Award in that category. It depicts the life of Jewish French swimmer Alfred Nakache, who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany. It begins peacefully enough. In the sea, a man swims. It is quite beautiful at first. But as he continues, memories come to the surface. From his early childhood to his life as a man, all his memories are linked to water. Some are happy, some glorious, some traumatic. This story will be that of his last swim. It will take us from the source to the river — from the waters of childhood pools to those of swimming pools — from a North African country to the shores of the Mediterranean in France — from Olympic stadiums to water retention basins — from concentration camp to the dream beaches of Reunion. He experiences glory and humiliation. The joy is from his love of swimming--the butterfly stroke--and he is denigrated for his religion and the color of his skin. It could not come at a better time, when the United States government is killing people based on the color of their skin. Again.

The Personal Librarian by Maie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

This is an ordinary fictional biodrama about a truly extraordinary woman. So it is well worth reading even though it is not spectacular literature. This tells the life of Belle da Costa Greene, born Belle Marion Greener, who was a Princeton-educated librarian who lands a high-profile job with steel magnate J.P. Morgan. She had an illustrious career that was all the more remarkable because she was a woman. She successfully out maneuvered everyone to build a world class and widely renowned collection that went from private to publicly available after the death of J.P. Morgan. Even more remarkable is that what J.P. and the elite New Yorkers she encounters do not know is that Belle is a Black woman passing as white. Belle quickly learns that being white will not allow her to overcome prejudices against women working in the male-dominated field of art and rare book collecting. She also learns at a party at the Vanderbilt mansion that women in this world are bold and use flirtation as social currency, an approach that runs counter to the modesty and invisibility Genevieve, Belle’s mother, has always advised. In several flashbacks, the reader learns more about Belle’s history. Belle’s parents, Richard and Genevieve, had a promising start in life. They were free blacks before the Civil War, and in the brief but heady time of Reconstruction, they had great opportunities. Richard, the first Black man to graduate from Harvard, married Genevieve, the beautiful and ambitious daughter of the elite Fleet family of Washington, D.C., and moved his family to South Carolina so he could work as a philosophy professor at an integrated state university. The family later left under threat of lynching when Reconstruction ended in the South and the school became segregated. Genevieve never forgot the precariousness of that time. Once the family moved to New York, she listed the family as white to avoid ejection from their fine New York apartment. When Richard discovered this lie, he abandoned the family. From that moment, Belle became the focus of Genevieve’s ambitions to secure the family’s financial future—by passing them as white. It decribes the ins and outs of why this was both painful and profitable to do.

Bugonia (2025)

This movie is bizarre and in the end, unexpected. It is a casually black comedy in the vein of the Scandanavians. The driving forces are a paranoid beekeeper and a stereotypically amoral biomedical CEO. The apiarist, a sweaty, dirty, and smutty Teddy (Jesse Plemons), teams with his impressionable cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) to kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), believing she’s an alien from the Andromeda species intent on destroying humanity. Their theory comes from conspiracy podcasts, crackpot online sources, and Teddy’s own experimentation. The pair’s plan will require them, in the words of Teddy, to cleanse themselves of their “psychic compulsions.” The success of the film requires the audience to make a similar suspension of belief. I did not love this, and I am also pretty sure I didn't quite get it, and so far it is in last place for me in the Best Film category. I even liked F1 a lot more than this, and I am no Formula One racing fan. It is an unusual movie in a year where there are quite a few unusual movies contending for awards, and Emma Stone is incredible, as per usual.

Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo

The book, a Reese Witherspoon pick, is about a fiftysomething mixed race protagonist, Anna Bain. She is a Welsh-Bamanian (Bamana is Onuzo’s fictional west African state) who lives in London, and has a life time of belonging nowhere--she is constantly confronting notions of difference and belonging. After Anna's mother, who raised her, dies, Anna uncovers a diary in her mother's belongings that was written in the late 1960s and belonged to Francis Aggrey. Aggrey was a student from the fictional Diamond Coast; while studying in London, he became part of a set of young African scholars agitating for their native countries’ freedom from colonial rule. Through excerpts from these diaries, the plot rapidly delivers us to Anna’s discovery that Aggrey is her father. After his studies, Aggrey returned to his homeland. There he transformed himself into a revolutionary who became the first president of the newly independent Bamana – a country that bears more than a passing resemblance to Ghana. The novel briskly tracks Anna’s wrestling with feelings of abandonment and loss, and follows her literal and figurative journey to try to connect with her father. It is quietly thought provoking, which for me is a hallmark of the Reese picks. I continue to enjoy her picks and working my way toward 100% completion.

Song Sung Blue (20250

I watched this because Kate Hudson is nominated for Best Actress in this, which is the only nomination the film received. She and Hugh Jackman do all the singing in this, and having grown up with two parents who loved Neil Diamond, I have familiarity with his music and they do a fantastic job of impersonating singers who impersonated him. The story is not entirely a happy one. It starts off well, though. This is based on a documentary of Lightning and Thunder, a couple in Milwaukee who channeled their love of music into a passion project that became a Neil Diamond tribute show. Mike is a recovering alcoholic Vietnam War veteran who’s tired of singing half-hearted Don Ho covers at the Wisconsin State Fair and elsewhere. He wants to do something different and Claire, who does Patsy Cline, is intrigued by his passion. Their chemistry is instant, they become a couple, and have real small time success performing together with some help from their friends. Then a tragedy occurs--really for both of them, and they have to work to come back from that. The music is fun, the script is a good one, and the performers do it justic.

Things In Nature Merely Grow by YiYun Li

Even when compared to other memoirs that cover the landscape of a personal response to tragedy, this is a standout. I have been a mental health professional for 40 years and I have heard a lot of tragic stories. This stands alone. Her experience is so particularly moving and painful that I would say she really opens her broken heart very wide-- she writes about the suicide of her 19-year-old son, James, in 2024 after having healed --- to an extent --- from the death of her 16-year-old son, Vincent, who did the same in 2017. It’s devastating yet so practical, humbling and numbing that it will take readers down many paths of their own and keep this book on their shelves as a message for grief in all shapes and sizes. Reading through her understated and clear eyed way of living with her pain will help you stop in your tracks and try to face the next time anyone you love upsets you with gratitude. To see them is to have another chance to appreciate them, something she no longer can do. It is a reminder to live each day fully and to try to find beauty even where it might be deeply hidden.

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

This is nominated in one of the action movie categories for the 2026 Academy Awards, which is where this whole series of movies belong. The movie, as you might suspect if you have seen even one of the myriad of previous Jurrasic movies, is the situation where people are in danger of being devoured by freakish, mutant dinosaurs--that is pretty much it. But it takes an awful lot of slogging through the jungle, literally and figuratively, to get there. ANother thing about it is that they are not wanting for talent--however, a wildly overqualified cast can only do so much with what’s not on the page. Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey do an excellent job at gawking at oversized creatures intent on eating them, runnning to keep one step ahead of them, and hanging precariously from things when required, but we don't really get to know them, beyond one of them is there for the science, and three of them are there for the money. These blovkbuster stars seem game for both the silliness and the physical rigors of making a blockbuster like this but we do not get to know them, despite some long and plodding coversations throughout the movie. They mainly just sit around explaining things to each other.

The Sour Grape by Jory John and Pete Oswald

This is from a series known as Food Groups, and this is my first foray into it. My youngest son works in an elementary school and he has a button down shirt featuring the characters in this book--really fun. I loved this story about a grape who has a difficult experience as a young grape that sours him on others for quite some time--up until when he has a series of unfortunate events that make him very late for a date, and is met with a disgruntled friend--he feels unfairly judged, and it gives him the insight that maybe something went wrong in his pivotal event--which he discovers is true--and that maybe it is better to forgive and move on rather than hold on to the resentment. Really nice message and advice.

Blue Moon (2025)

This is a sad one. It is nominated in several categories for an Oscar in 2026, which chas been a surprisingly fruitful year for interesting big budget films. This one is intimate and raw. Ethan Hawk does a masterful job of portraying the heart and soul of the writer through one of the last nights in the life of Lorenz Hart, who was once one of the most acclaimed Broadway songwriters on the scene before fame and passion stopped returning his calls. He’s now the drunk at the end of the bar, the guy who gets there first and leaves last, and the one who can barely hide the pain behind his non-stop commentary on film, Broadway, and everything else around him. THe director, Richard Linklater, has crafted one of his finest docudramas, a consistently fascinating exploration of the frailty of the artist, buoyed by one of Ethan Hawke’s most remarkable performances.

The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong

There is a lot to learn about Korea in this memoir. Today, the South Korean capital Seoul is one of the most modern on the planet while North Korea, historically the more prosperous half of the Korean peninsula, lives on the edge of hunger. It's easy to forget that, in the 1960s, South Korea's per capita GDP was less than that of the socialist paradise to the north, or of countries such as Ghana. Even as late as the 1970s, there was little to choose between living standards in Seoul and Pyongyang. Today, South Korea is the world's 15th largest economy and London worker bees would buzz with envy at the superfast internet connection their counterparts in Seoul enjoy on their air-conditioned subway journeys to work, all courtesy of enlightened government investment. The author and her family moved back to Korea in 1985, and in the course of describing her life there, she also goes on to bust many myths in her highly entertaining account of how South Korea, once one of the world's poorest and least fashionable countries, became a cultural superpower. One is that private enterprise is invariably a more effective driver of growth than government action – 25% of venture capital in Korea in 2012 came from the government – and that government intervention makes people lazy. May we all learn our lesson.