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FINDING BEAUTY: HAGIOGRAPHIC HOUSE OF McQUEEN SEEKS BALANCE BETWEEN ART AND COMMERCE

Alexander McQueen (Luke Newton) and his sister Janet (Jonina Thorsteinsdottir) face adversity in House of McQueen (photo by Thomas Hodges)

HOUSE OF McQUEEN
The Mansion at Hudson Yards
508 West 37th St. between 10th & 11th Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through October 19, $40-$185.05
www.thehouseofmcqueen.com

“Find beauty in everything. People perceive what they are most afraid of as ugliness. I find beauty in what we fear,” Lee Alexander McQueen (Luke Newton) says halfway through the world premiere of House of McQueen. “The tragedy of it is, fashion isn’t going to cure your nightmares, or child abuse, or cancer — or anything else for that matter. At the end of the day, it’s just clothes.”

Of course, it’s not just clothes, as the play, which opened last night at the newly constructed Mansion at Hudson Yards, chaotically tells the audience over and over again. The show attempts to capture the fierce energy of a McQueen runway extravaganza but instead gets mired in overuse of technology, a narrative that offers little sense of time and place, and characters that don’t grow or develop across two hours (plus intermission).

Lee was born in 1969 in the East End of London, the youngest of six children; his father, Ron (Denis Lambert), was a taxi driver and his mother, Joyce (Emily Skinner), a teacher. While Joyce and his oldest sister, Janet (Jonina Thorsteinsdottir), encourage his artistic abilities — Janet even gives him her old album of paper dolls — his father worries about his future, particularly when it comes to his son’s apparent sexual orientation. “When are you going to listen to me? You’re gonna get hurt doin’ this!” his father argues, referring to both class and homophobia. When the teenage Lee expresses his desire to become a tailor on Savile Row, Ron declares, “Even if they hired you, they’d let you go soon enough. Those Savile Road types don’t want someone like you. And they never will. They’ll break your heart. Don’t try to be somethin’ you’re not.”

At sixteen, the ambitious and determined Lee quits school and heads to Savile Row with a garbage bag filled with samples of his work. “I want to learn everything, everything, everything,” he says. He lands a job as a tailor, which kickstarts a career that will take him around the world as he attends the prestigious Central Saint Martins university, creates designs for Gigli, Givenchy, and Gucci, and is taken under the wing of magazine editor and well-connected fashionista Isabella “Issie” Blow (Catherine LeFrere), who buys out his entire first collection, which surprises his mother and sister.

“Oh, dear, how are we gonna tell him? It was gruesome!” Joyce says to Janet, who replies, “All that blood! How could he do that? It was awful!” Issie jumps in, proclaiming, “It was perfect! I’ve never seen anything so perfect in my life.” She didn’t think his name, Lee, was perfect, advising him to go by his middle name, Alexander, professionally, although his close friends and family continued to call him Lee.

The press (Margaret Odette) agrees with Joyce and Janet, making such statements as “McQueen’s debut was a horror show” and “McQueen’s brand of misogynistic absurdity gives fashion a bad name.” But he contends, “I just want women to fight back!”

Explaining to a professor (Odette) where he gets his ideas, he comments, “Grew up East End. Same neighborhood as Jack the Ripper. Inspired by viscera, slashings, streams of blood. Happy childhood, loving parents. Tons of encouragement. Dreams of becoming the next Yves St. Laurent. Yadayadayada . . .”

But the fame and notoriety he achieves as l’enfant terrible of the fashion industry come with a price as sex, drugs, partying, and the desperate desire to remain on top take over his life.

Alexander McQueen’s fashions are on display in world premiere play at Mansion at Hudson Yards (photo by Thomas Hodges)

House of McQueen is written by Darrah Cloud (Sabina, Turning) and directed by Sam Helfrich (Owned, Tape), in collaboration with Gary James McQueen, a textile designer and creative director who is Alexander’s nephew; several of his lenticular skulls are on view in the extensive lobby gift shop at the entrance to the theater. The nonlinear story feels stitched together somewhat randomly, then splattered with various bells and whistles to inject much-needed drama. A dance competition referencing McQueen’s collection inspired by Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? falls flat, and surreal scenes in which the young Lee wears a diving helmet — the sea is a leitmotif, for good and bad — feels frivolous.

It’s not always clear when and where things are happening; Alexander is always in the same white T-shirt and plain pants, although he adds an unbuttoned shirt later. The costumes, which include re-creations of some of McQueen’s designs, are by Robert Wierzel, but you can check out the real deals in the exhibition “The Company of Melancholiacs,” which is open before and after the performance as well as during intermission, a kind of miniature version of the Met’s smash 2011 “Savage Beauty,” held the year after McQueen’s death at the age of forty.

Brad Peterson’s videos and projections create a nearly nonstop barrage of images on a wall of monitors and overhead screen, from crackling static to clips from actual runway shows (Highland Rape, Plato’s Atlantis, La Dame Bleue, Deliverance), pseudo-fashion reports, and seemingly endless live scenes of Joyce asking Alexander questions for a BBC program, based on a print interview mother and son did for the Guardian. Jason Ardizzone-West’s set features a pair of platforms that rise and lower; G Clausen’s sound and Robert Wierzel’s lighting don’t add to the mayhem.

Newton (The Shape of Things, The Book of Mormon), best known as Colin Bridgerton in Bridgerton, does what he can but is hampered by the uneven narrative and such aspirational and overwrought dialogue as “I’m a tailor, not a fighter,” “I’ve got to show them how wrong they are,” and “I need people to understand me!” Tony nominee Skinner (Suffs, Side Show) battles through the maelstrom as McQueen’s devoted mother, and LeFrere (Confessions of a Young Character Actress, The Green Knight) munches on the scenery as Issie. The cast includes Tim Creavin, Fady Demian, and Joe Joseph as some of McQueen’s many boyfriends; Joseph also plays Terence, Janet’s then-boyfriend and later husband who was physically abusive to her, which is in the play, but also sexually abusive to the young McQueen, which is not. (The play never mentions McQueen’s other siblings.)

In addition, the hagiographic, superficial House of McQueen depicts Alexander as a modern-day Joan of Arc, the misunderstood French military hero who fought against England and was tried and executed for blasphemy and wearing men’s clothes. McQueen’s Voss collection was influenced by Joan of Arc’s chainmail, primarily the outfit that Issie dons near the end of the show, and close-ups of Renée Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc are projected on the monitors, making McQueen both saint and demon as he searches for balance between art and commerce.

The concept of the play is credited to filmmaker Seth Koch and executive producer Rick Lazes; Lazes and Gary James McQueen are also behind Provocateur, an immersive multimedia McQueen experience, written by Cloud, that is scheduled to open October 1 in Los Angeles. In a program note, Lazes writes that “House of McQueen is flamboyant, unflinching, and achingly human — a requiem for a man who turned beauty into a weapon and fashion into art.”

McQueen said that one of his goals was to “find beauty in everything,” but it’s hard to do so with this show, which feels a lot more like commerce than art. It’s even a stretch to call the theater the Mansion at Hudson Yards, since Hudson Yards, which is anchored by a high-end shopping mall, does not technically extend to Thirty-Seventh St.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

AN APPETIZING TRADITION: NEW RUSS & DAUGHTERS COOKBOOK

Russ & Daughters cookbook is starting a tasty New York City tour

Who: Niki Russ Federman, Josh Russ Tupper, Gabriella Gershenson
What: Book launch and tasting
Where: Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center, 1 East 65th St. between Madison & Fifth Aves., and online
When: Thursday, September 11, $43 (includes copy of book), 6:00
Why: Latkes, matzo ball soup, smoked whitefish chowder, babka, rugelach, black-and-white cookies, bagels — those are only some of the recipes collected in Russ & Daughters: 100 Years of Appetizing (Flatiron, September 9, $39.99). In 1907, Polish immigrant Joel Russ sold Jewish food in a pushcart on the Lower East Side; seven years later he opened J Russ International Appetizers in an Orchard St. storefront before moving in 1920 to 179 East Houston St., changing the name to Russ & Daughters. The business, currently run by cousins Josh Russ Tupper and Niki Russ Federman, the fourth-generation co-owners, expanded to a popular café at 127 Orchard St. in 2014 and has more recently added an outpost near Hudson Yards. The book, a follow-up to 2013’s Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built, by Mark Russ Federman and featuring a foreword by Calvin Trillin, also includes anecdotes and personal reminiscences from the smoked-fish institution’s storied history.

On September 11, Tupper, Niki Russ Federman, and coauthor Joshua David Stein (Notes from a Young Black Chef, The Nom Wah Cookbook) will be at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center for “A Century of Schmears,” a book launch and tasting with James Beard Award–winning food writer and editor Gabriella Gershenson that kicks off the fall Festival of Jewish Ideas & Culture. You don’t have to grab a number when you enter, as tickets are available in advance and come with a copy of the book. You can also livestream the event at home. The book tour then stops at Platform by JBF at Pier 57 on September 14 with Rozanne Gold, the Center for New Jewish Culture in Brooklyn on September 18 with Daniel Squadron, P&T Knitwear on September 20 with a scavenger hunt, walking tours, and more, and the New York City Wine & Food Festival, where Tupper will host a Smoked Fish Master Class on October 19 at the Institute of Culinary Education.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

A DIFFERENT WORLD: A CELEBRATION OF SONGS SHE WROTE

Who: Michael G. Garber, Miss Maybell, Charlie Judkins
What: Book talk with music
Where: Ceres Gallery, 547 West 27th St. between 10th & 11th Aves., #201
When: Thursday, September 11, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $15), 6:30
Why: “This book celebrates women who wrote popular songs in the early twentieth century. These female composers and lyricists deserved greater opportunities and fame and to be more highly valued. Generations later, the same could be said for many of their sisters in songwriting in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Hopefully, looking at the past will inspire change in the future. To do this, we must travel in our minds back to what was, in effect, a different world.”

So begins historian, professor, scholar, and artist Michael G. Garber’s Songs She Wrote: 40 Hits by Pioneering Women of Popular Music (Rowman & Littlefield, March 2025, $36), an illustrated journey into that different world, focusing on women’s contributions to popular music, including ragtime, jazz, Broadway, and Hollywood. Featuring a foreword by Janie Bradford and Dr. Tish Oney, the book explores such tunes as Lucy Fletcher’s “Sugar Blues,” Lovie Austin and Alberta Hunter’s “The Down Hearted Blues,” Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” Dorothy Parker’s “Serenade from The Student Prince,” and Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.”

Charlie Judkins and Miss Maybell will perform as part of book event at Ceres Gallery

On September 11 at 6:30, in conjunction with the Tin Pan Alley American Popular Music Project, Garber (My Melancholy Baby: The First Ballads of the Great American Songbook, 1902–1913) will be at the nonprofit feminist Ceres Gallery for a free book talk with live performances by Jazz Age artists Miss Maybell and Charlie Judkins, surrounded by Carlyle Upson’s nature-based “Submerged” watercolors and Marcy Bernstein’s “Evocative Abstractions” paintings, which Bernstein says “invite viewers to look inward. They’re filled with allusions to the raw energy of creation itself,” a fitting sentiment that applies to Garber’s book as well. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $15.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

NOTHING LASTS FOREVER: TRAVELING IN BARDO WITH ANN TASHI SLATER

Ann Tashi Slater will discuss her new book at Rizzoli with Dani Shapiro on September 10

Who: Ann Tashi Slater, Dani Shapiro
What: Book launch with reading, conversation, and signing
Where: Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway & West 26th St.
When: Wednesday, September 10, free with advance RSVP, 6:00
Why: “In a world where nothing lasts forever, how do we live?” writer, speaker, and traveler Ann Tashi Slater asks in her new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World (Balance, September 9, $29). Slater will address that question and more at the book launch at Rizzoli on September 10, where she will sit down with Dani Shapiro, author of such books as Signal Fires and Inheritance and host and creator of the podcast Family Secrets and who provided the foreword to the book.

“In my work, I explore how our personal histories and cultural roots shape us and how we find meaning in a world where everything — including we ourselves — changes and ends,” Slater explains on her website. “Traveling in Bardo interweaves explorations of impermanence in relation to marriage and friendship, parents and children, and work and creativity with stories of my Tibetan ancestors and Buddhist perspectives on the fleeting nature of existence, offering a new way to navigate change and live life fully.”

Slater will also give an in-person and virtual talk on September 12 at Columbia’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute with Lauran Hartley and take part in a Q&A and signing on September 16 at Tibet House.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here. Full disclosure: Mark’s wife is Ann Tashi Slater’s literary agent.]

THE LABOR OF LAUNDRY: LYNNE SACHS, LIZZIE OLESKER, AND FRIENDS AT UNNAMEABLE BOOKS

Who: Lizzie Olesker, Lynne Sachs, Silvia Federici, Veraalba Santa
What: Reading and performance
Where: Unnameable Books, 615 Vanderbilt Ave., Brooklyn
When: Monday, September 8, free, 7:00
Why: “This is not a play. It is something else. / Call it a blueprint, a map, a documentation / of something that has already happened / but could happen again — / a rendering in book form of a performance. / Making a mark, words on a page instead of bodies in space. / A book that contains what’s remembered and what could be. / All of it written down and placed here, into this / Hand Book: A Manual,” Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs write in the introduction to Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry (Punctum, June 2025, 425). “We are a playwright and a filmmaker who discovered a shared interest in making work that magnifies quotidian elements of life in the city where we live. We met years ago in Brooklyn while sitting on a bench waiting for our young daughters to finish their music lessons. A conversation began about our lives as mothers and working artists. We couldn’t yet know that those early encounters would lead to a ten-year theater and film collaboration. Now in our sixties, our daughters fully grown, we continue to build an experimental model for making live performance and film, engaging in a dialogue on how art-making can alter our understanding of urban life.”

Olesker, an actor and playwright who has penned such shows as 5 Stages of Grief, A Kind (of) Mother, and Night Shift, and Sachs, a fiction writer and filmmaker who has directed such works as Which Way Is East, Your Day Is My Night, and Film About a Father Who, are the coauthors and codirectors of Hand Book, which Sachs describes as “a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within a neighborhood laundromat.” In addition to sections by Olesker and Sachs, the illustrated, colorfully designed book (by Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei) features contributions from Margarita Lopez (“A Thousand Pieces a Day”), Jasmine Holloway (“Taking on a Role”), Stephen Vitiello (“Shake, Rattle, and . . .”), Amanda Katz (“Sound of a Machine Door Closing”), Emily Rubin (“Loads of Prose: From the Beginning”), Veraalba Santa (“Score for a Folding Dance”), and others. The foreword, “A New Refusal and a New Struggle,” is by feminist historian, author, and activist Silvia Federici.

On September 8, Olesker, Sachs, Federici, and Santa will be at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn for a reading and performance. There will also be a reading and signing September 13 at noon at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and a performance, reading, and signing September 28 at 2:00 at Torn Page with Tony Torn and Alvin Eng. Sachs continues, “As authors, Lizzie and I along with our many collaborators construct a model for making art about essential work that often goes unrecognized. Turning a page becomes a quasi-cinematic encounter, calling to mind the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THIS IS OUR KINGDOM: LINDA LINDA LINDA RETURNS FOR TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY

Four girls prepare to play in their high school rock festival in Linda Linda Linda

LINDA LINDA LINDA (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, September 5
www.ifccenter.com
gkids.com/films

The twentieth anniversary 4K restoration of Nobuhiro Yamashita’s 2005 teen cult classic, Linda Linda Linda, is reason to sing and dance and celebrate.

Opening at IFC Center on September 5, the film is a brilliant exploration of teen angst, a kind of Japanese John Hughes tale involving female friendship, jealousy, young love, and establishing one’s identity as an all-girl band prepares for the annual Shiba High Holly Festival. But unlike most Hughes flicks, there are few parents and teachers to be seen, and only in extremely minor roles; this is all about the children, on the cusp of adulthood.

The film begins with a teen crew making a video for the festival: “Don’t let anyone tell us that when we’re no longer kids, we grow up,” a student says. “When we grow up, we won’t quit being kids. Where are the real we? Should the real we be here? We’ve only got a little more time to be the real us. . . . ”

When guitarist and lead singer Moe Imamura (Shione Yukawa) has to drop out of the group after damaging the middle finger of her left hand, drummer Kyoko Yamada (Aki Maeda), bassist Nozomi Shirakawa (Shiori Sekine), and keyboardist Kei Tachibana (Yuu Kashii) have to make some fast changes if they are to perform at the show. Kei switches to guitar, but they need a vocalist. The Japanese trio briefly considers former band member Rinko Marumoto (Takayo Mimura), but she is in a fight with Moe.

Sitting outside, they decide to choose the next girl they see, and it turns out to be Son (Bae Doona), a Korean exchange student who is learning Japanese. Son initially says no but ultimately changes her mind and joins the band. They rehearse in Kei’s ex-boyfriend’s (Masaki Miura) studio, where at first they sound terrible as they practice songs by the Blue Hearts, a popular Japanese punk band that existed from 1985 to 1995.

With the pressure on to improve in time for their performance, they experience more adolescent growing pains, as Kyoko develops a crush on Kazuya Oe (Katsuya Kobayashi); the extremely nervous Makihara (Kenichi Matsuyama) confesses his love for Son; the bandmates go food shopping for dinner; master guitarist Takako Nakajima (Yuko Yamazaki) decides not to play at the event; and school music club leader Abe (Keisuke Koide) has her work cut out for her once the concert starts.

Written by Yamashita with Kōsuke Mukai and Wakako Miyashita and named for a Blue Hearts song, Linda Linda Linda feels as fresh and exhilarating today as it was twenty years ago. It’s thrilling watching the band members, always in their school uniforms of white shirt with a green bow, nearly knee-length dark socks and skirt, and light-yellow sleeveless vest, develop as individuals and a group; all the actors play their own instruments and do their own singing, which was not an issue with Shiori, who is the bassist for the Tokyo rock band Base Ball Bear, two of whose songs also appear in the film. The score was composed by guitarist James Iha of Smashing Pumpkins.

Bae (The Host, Air Doll), Aki (Battle Royale, I Never Shot Anyone), Yu (Lorelei: The Witch of the Pacific Ocean, Death Note), and Shiori are terrific as their characters discover new sides of themselves while coming together as a band, even knowing that it’s just for three songs and then they will all likely go their separate ways when they graduate. There’s a particular moving focus on Son, who spends time at the festival’s Japan-Korea Culture Exchange Exhibit, a fish out of water attempting to adapt to her new environs.

Adults exist only on the periphery; even Koyama (Masahiro Komoto), the teacher in charge of the music club, keeps an eye on them but doesn’t understand the dynamics involved. In one hilarious scene, he tries to send a message to the band through Rinko, but he stumbles over words and Rinko cuts him off, asking, “Can I go now?” as he stands with his hands on his hips, not quite knowing what to say but thinking about his own musical past and, perhaps, choices he made.

Hands and fingers serve as a leitmotif throughout the film, metaphors for the students taking more control of their lives as they prepare for the next step. Moe’s broken or sprained finger, suffered while playing basketball in gym class, sets everything in motion. Kei strums her guitar under a poster of Bob Marley smoking a joint, his giant hand practically blessing her. Son grabs a microphone like she’s holding on for dear life. A young girl throws darts at a poster of the different cuts of meat in a cow. The student making the festival video stands defiant, her fists clenched by her side as she declares, “We won’t let our high school days become a memory. . . . This is our kingdom.” And then there’s the strange gift Tomoki gives Kei with her mother (Lily) present.

Linda Linda Linda is a stirring, touching film about the pain and pleasure of youth, concluding with an unforgettable finale that is likely to have you jumping out of your seat, fists raised high in the air.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CLIFF CASHEN: A CHRISTMAS MOVIE TO REMEMBER

Didi (Liz Larsen) and Cliff (Michael Strassner) have a Christmas Eve to remember in The Baltimorons

THE BALTIMORONS
IFC Center, AMC Lincoln Square, Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn
Opens Friday, September 5
www.baltimoronsmovie.com

“What’s wrong with you?” dentist Didi asks her emergency patient, Cliff, early in The Baltimorons. He immediately replies, “Everything.”

What’s right with the film? Just about everything.

The Baltimorons is a bittersweet, hilarious escapade from the Duplass Brothers, directed by Jay Duplass and written by Duplass and Baltimore native Michael Strassner. Strassner stars as Cliff Cashen, who, in the first scene, fails pathetically at trying to hang himself in his attic. Six months later, a sober Cliff is driving with his fiancée, Brittany (Olivia Luccardi), to her mother’s house for Christmas Eve dinner. Cliff is an improv comic, but Brittany is worried when fellow comedian Marvin (Rob Phoenix) texts him about participating in a show that night; Cliff has promised Brittany that, as part of his sobriety, he has given up comedy as well as booze.

On his way into the house, he trips over a loose brick and smashes his face against the side of the door, causing significant damage to his mouth and teeth. He finds Dr. Didi (Liz Larsen), apparently the only dentist working on the holiday, and meets her in her office. Cliff might be a bear of a guy, but he is a sensitive man-child who is afraid of needles; it’s also nearly impossible to know when he is telling the truth or joking around.

Upon leaving Didi’s office, Cliff sees that his Cadillac has been towed; with no other options, he accepts an offer from Didi — a divorced mother and grandmother whose ex-husband (Brian Mendes) just got married that morning — to drive him to the impound lot so he can reclaim his car, which was originally his father’s. That leads to a series of extremely funny, moving, and dangerous adventures in which doctor and patient seem stuck together, facing personal and professional challenges that make them take a hard look at who they are and where they are going.

Duplass, who previously worked with his younger brother, Mark Duplass, on such films as The Puffy Chair and Baghead and the series Togetherness, met Strassner through the latter’s Instagram (@strasshola), where Strassner posts wildly unpredictable short videos. They quickly clicked and were soon writing The Baltimorons, which is loosely based on Strassner’s real life. Duplass cast Tony winner Larsen (The Most Happy Fella, Law & Order) after seeing her play matriarch Shelly Pfefferman in A Transparent Musical; Duplass had portrayed one of that character’s children in the hit streaming series. The role of Didi was then adjusted to reflect some elements from Larsen’s life.

It all combines to give the film a realistic feel, with Baltimore a character unto itself; it’s very much a love letter to the city as Jon Bregel’s camera guides us to the since-collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, Federal Hill, the annual Miracle on 34th Street holiday lighting display in Hampden, the Rocket to Venus restaurant, and other locations; there are also several mentions of the Baltimore Ravens and their All-Pro quarterback, Lamar Jackson. (Although the film is not political, it is difficult to think of the National Guard and other military being sent in to save this lovely city.)

Strassner, who played Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown when he was in the seventh grade, is a veteran of the Groundlings improv group and has appeared on numerous sitcoms, but he instantly takes hold of the film; it’s virtually impossible not to connect with Cliff, a complex gentle giant who went through a bad time and is now trying to reframe his life. Strassner balances solemnity and gravity with humor and Cliff’s infectious world view; although it essentially makes no sense for Didi to keep sticking to Cliff, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be exactly what we would do if we were in her situation, and Larsen (The Most Happy Fella, Law & Order) excels as the distraught doctor, melding her obvious and necessary cautiousness with an inner desire to break free, to gain control of a life that is getting away from her. You don’t have to be a sober comic or a lonely dentist to appreciate, understand, and, most important, want to spend more and more time with these two oddly matched people in search of something else.

The Baltimorons is a Christmas movie to remember, worthy of a place in the holiday canon; Jordan Seigel’s charming score even recalls Vince Guaraldi’s music for A Charlie Brown Christmas. There’s a reason why the film won the Audience Award at four different festivals. See it now, but add it to your annual Christmas list as well.

The Baltimorons opens September 5 at IFC Center, AMC Lincoln Square, and Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Brooklyn; Duplass, Strassner, and Larsen will be at IFC for Q&As following the 7:15 screenings on Friday (moderated by athlete, author, and podcaster Rich Roll) and the 4:40 show on Saturday (moderated by actor David Krumholz); they will also be at Alamo for Saturday’s 7:00 show.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]