With Christy, David Michôd directs the story of Christy Martin, who single-handedly popularized female boxing from the early 1990s to the 2000s under the nickname coined by huckster-promoter Don King: “The Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Sydney Sweeney plays her in a performance that many critics have hailed as transformative. However, underneath frumpy clothes and an unconvincing wig, Sweeney never disappears into the role—it’s not, say, Linda Hamilton changing her physique to become a badass for Terminator 2: Judgment Day(1991). And as the standard sports movie template descends into a dark account of drugs and domestic abuse, Christy bears a curious similarity to Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, another underwhelming sports biopic this year with a showy performance at the center. Produced in part by Sweeney, the whole production screams Oscar bait in the most cloyingly pedestrian way.
Raised in West Virginia, Christy, a sporto and closeted lesbian, clashes with her conservative, disapproving parents (Merritt Wever, Ethan Embry) who want her to see a priest to “get her straightened out.” Instead, she competes in an amateur boxing match “for fun,” with little knowledge of the sport: “All I knew was that I had to beat the shit outta that bitch before she beat me,” she remarks after her win. Soon, she meets a potential trainer, Jim (Ben Foster), whose creep factor is off the charts. Despite his being decades older and saddled with a beer belly and bad combover, Christy falls for him, ignoring his possessiveness and virulent anti-gay views while buying into his claims that he will make her “the greatest female fighter in the world.” Her mother certainly approves, believing Jim is her ticket to a “normal life.” Meanwhile, the viewer sees all the warning signs and awaits the inevitable fallout.
Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes wrote Christy, and they adhere to a typical sports movie structure, charting Christy’s meteoric rise to fame while ignoring the real boxer’s early-career losses and draws in favor of presenting a seemingly flawless winning streak. Cue the typical training and fight montages, here set to Young MC’s “Bust a Move.” While building a name for her, Jim goes full Vertigo(1958) and tells Christy to cut her hair so it’s not so “butch” and puts her in an all-pink getup so she looks “cute.” Before long, they sleep together, marry, move to Florida (where else?), and present themselves as an ambitious Average American couple. “I’m just a regular wife who happens to knock people out for a living,” Christy claims. She also shuts down any feminist take on her success with the press, pronouncing she doesn’t care about advancing other women or getting more money for them; she only cares about herself and her own success.
Christy’s brainwashing by Jim and her parents grows even more twisted when boxing doesn’t pay the bills, prompting him to arrange seedy hotel room fights for her with a 300-pound man for cash, and later, to record porn tapes with her for the underground market. That’s even after she becomes the first woman to fight on Pay-Per-View—a sequence shot in slow-mo and set to choral music, striking an ill-fitting tone compared to the rest of the movie. Additionally, very few of the boxing matches impress. They’re sloppily choreographed and shot by cinematographer Germain McMicking, who doesn’t bring any distinct visual flair to the proceedings. All the while, Christy is surrounded by people who don’t stand up for her, regardless of witnessing what’s obviously an abusive relationship. Her mother dismisses her claims that Jim has become violent (“You sound crazy,” she tells her daughter, in a maddening scene); she’s more concerned about keeping up appearances. Only Christy’s onetime opponent and later training partner—and later still, wife—Lisa Holewyne (Katy O’Brian) can see Christy’s true self enough to question the pretense.
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“You make it real easy for people to dislike you,” Lisa observes. Indeed, she likes to talk smack in front of the press, calling out Lisa as a lesbian while passing as straight. That’s part of what makes her a success: performing for the camera. However, she doesn’t exactly endear herself to the viewer; I struggled to get on Christy’s side, which made the 135-minute runtime feel particularly long, especially in the repetitive second half. Although Jim’s domestic abuse, not only at home but also in the ring while sparring, gives us no choice but to empathize with her. Her only hope seems to be her former high school girlfriend, Rosie (Jess Gabor), who comes in and out of Christy’s life when the story needs her. Soon, drugs enter the mix, and the increasingly paranoid Jim reacts with a brutal attack that brings some finality to their marriage.
Sweeney once again never convinces in her performance, which is becoming a theme in her work, looking at last year’s Immaculateand this year’s Eden. Foster and Wever fare better, but like Sweeney, they’re all wearing equally silly wigs that render their performances unintentionally funny. Similar to The Smashing Machine, which was based on an earlier documentary and sanitized in its dramatization, viewers might be better off watching the documentary on this subject. Released on Netflix, Untold: Deal with the Devil (2021) tells Martin’s complex story without the typical overdone sports movie structure. Michôd, once a promising Australian filmmaker behind Animal Kingdom (2010) and The Rover(2014), appears to have lost his edge in recent years, starting with War Machine(2017) and The King(2019). With Christy, his approachis annoyingly stuffed with big speeches and dialogue that sounds like a Hallmark movie, and its generic, familiar quality never gives way to something worth the hype.
The primary question in all matters concerning Melania Trump is “What is she thinking?” The First Lady is an endless font of utterly puzzling behavior. So it’s fitting that at the premiere of her film Melania on Thursday night she stood before the audience and declared, basically, “Ceci n’est pas une documentary.”
“Some have called this a documentary. It is not,” she said. “My film is a very deliberate act of authorship, inviting you to witness events and emotions through a window of rich imagery. It is a creative experience that offers perspectives, insights, and moments that only few have seen.”
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How could the Amazon-produced, Brett Ratner–directed film project, which was described from day one as a documentary possibly be anything else?
Surprisingly, after viewing the film, I find Melania’s statement makes sense. Not literally, but in that this collection of random words feels like something ChatGPT might produce if it were asked to describe a behind-the-scenes documentary about the First Lady and the attempt to summarize human emotions and artistic endeavor broke its little AI brain.
The first scene of Melania is jaw-dropping. As the stilettoed, impeccably styled once-and-future First Lady makes her way into a motorcade, we hear the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” It’s three weeks before Trump’s return to power, and Mick Jagger is warning of the impending apocalypse. The line “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away!” blares as we zoom in on Melania. Could it be that Brett Ratner — Brett Ratner, of all people! — duped Melania into making art that actually has something to say about the return of the Trump regime, like Christopher Anderson’s brilliant and grotesque photo shoot for Vanity Fair?
Alas, no. As the film continues, it quickly becomes clear that this needle drop isn’t meant to be subversive. It’s more of a reflection of Donald Trump’s habit of willfully ignoring the meaning of the show tunes and classic rock bangers. Next we’re hit with Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (way later in the film we learn it’s one of Melania’s favorite songs, but it’s a bizarre soundtrack for her entering Trump Tower). Then the music transitions to “Melania’s Waltz,” a dreamy, looping orchestral theme that was composed for the movie.
We never really leave this hazy, hallucinatory state. Footage of the Secret Service whisking Melania from Mar-a-Lago transitions into scenes of her giving inane directions on the tailoring of her inauguration suit, then blandly expressing her approval for the invitation, schedule, and tableware. It seems all of these design decisions were actually made off-camera, weeks before filming began. We move from a conference room overlooking Central Park to a gilded Mar-a-Lago dining room to the marble hallways of Trump Tower and back again. We’re totally sealed off from fresh air and outside reality. “Melania’s Waltz” plays again and again. It feels like we’re inside a gaudy gold jewelry box, watching a perfect MAGA-tized ballerina spin around and around. We’re trapped — but if Melania ever feels that way there’s no sign of it in this film. There’s not a second where it seems that Melania wants out of this life or has even given her strange circumstances a second of deep thought.
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The dialogue has a slightly off quality, too, like Eyes Wide Shut if Kubrick directed hours of Melania B-roll. All of the First Lady’s interactions with other people feel rehearsed or reenacted. She also provides weirdly detached, substance-free narration throughout the film. In one scene, her father is being interviewed, but we don’t hear what he has to say about his late wife; Melania’s bland voice-over drowns him out. Knowing that the First Lady is a huge AI-enthusiast (the audiobook of her memoir is entirely AI-generated), I started wondering if she’d also had some nonhuman help in drafting her narration. She describes Mar-a-Lago as “more than a home. It is warm. Sunshine. Family. Friends.” At one point, we overhear Donald Trump praising their son, Barron. Melania responds robotically, “Yeah, I love him. Incredible mind.”
For one hour and 44 minutes, it feels like we might be on the verge of seeing some actual interesting content. In the back of a limo, someone off-camera (maybe Ratner) coaxes the First Lady into sort-of singing along to “Billie Jean.” Kamala Harris rolls her eyes while waiting to enter Trump’s swearing-in. Melania and Donald start to discuss whether it’s smart to walk down the street during the inauguration, considering he just survived a near assassination. Melania remarks, “Barron will not get out of the car. I respect that,” but then they agree to have the rest of the conversation off-camera. It’s like Melania, who executive-produced the project and had final cut, purposely stripped the film of any real emotions, so it’s all perfectly styled shots, no humanity allowed.
The only reprieve is when Donald Tump appears. Trust me, I never thought I’d be yearning to see more DJT. But the fact that he’s the only Trump onscreen with natural star quality is glaringly obvious, even though he’s unusually low-key throughout the film. All Donald really does is praise Melania as an amazing First Lady, make some quips to staffers, and rant about his stunning electoral victory on the other end of the phone. Yet whenever Trump’s not onscreen, all you’re thinking is Where’s Trump?
Admittedly, I am not really the intended audience here. While many journalists booked tickets in blue-leaning cities and had the theater practically to themselves, I experienced Melania in the belly of the beast (okay, slightly Trump-leaning Suffolk County, Long Island). Literally every seat in the 100-person theater was filled at 1 p.m. on a Friday. Unsurprisingly, the audience was very old, almost exclusively white, and heavily female. They clapped when Trump Force One appeared onscreen, chuckled anytime Donald said anything even mildly amusing, and whooped during the inauguration scene. Though they were silent when the president wasn’t onscreen, I only heard positive reviews as I exited the theater (one person even remarked, “Wow, that was great!”).
But, of course, people paying $17 to see Melania on premiere day are just a small sliver of the eventual audience. As I fought to keep my thoughts from drifting off as Melania fussed over the trim on her Carmen Sandiego hat, I couldn’t help but think of the millions of people who will sit down to watch this film in their own homes whenever it streams on Amazon Prime. Perhaps they’ll be hoping for some insight into the Trump administration, a peek into what it’s like to be Melania, or even just a chuckle. But this movie contains none of those things. It won’t be long before they drift off, lulled to sleep by Melania’s soulless narration.
New documentary offers a flattering view of Melania Trump without shedding any light on who the first lady is.
First Lady Melania Trump on the American experience
First Lady Melania Trump shares her immigrant story and American pride while revealing her Dolce and Gabbana look at the “Melania” premiere.
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“Melania,” an unprecedented new documentary about first lady Melania Trump, is in theaters now.
Director Brett Ratner returns from Hollywood exile to helm the film.
The movie covers the 20 days leading up to President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration.
When is a documentary not a documentary? When the subject is Melania Trump.
That’s not quite a riddle, but the first lady is quite the enigma in “Melania” (★½ out of four; rated PG; in theaters now and streaming later this year on Prime Video), director Brett Ratner’s less-than-revelatory look at the life of the former fashion model and wife of President Donald Trump. The film, which follows the 20 days leading up to the 2025 presidential inauguration, is part reality show and part White House historical video, as Melania Trump narrates a behind-the-scenes glance at her personal and private lives.
“Melania” doesn’t quite work as a documentary, though that doesn’t matter: People who don’t like the Trumps won’t go near the theater, and those who love the Trumps probably will. Just don’t expect much insight either way: While it does offer an extremely flattering view of all things Melania, outside of a few candid glimpses, you’re not really going to learn a lot about who she really is.
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The film begins with the first lady in her element: in heels and on the move. With the Rolling Stones playing in the background, Trump jets from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Trump Tower in Manhattan, ready to navigate the “complexities of my life” leading up to her return to Washington.
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She meets with her longtime stylist about her inauguration coat and an interior designer about redecorating the White House. Over the next three weeks, she also attends the funeral of President Jimmy Carter; meets with French first lady Brigitte Macron and Queen Rania of Jordan about her “Be Best” campaign; and finally partakes in inaugural parties and balls on what her husband calls the “big day.”
“Melania” marks Ratner’s first feature film since 2014, following a period of Hollywood exile after sexual harassment allegations. No criminal charges were filed and Ratner denied the allegations.
Throughout the movie, Ratner peppers in bits and pieces of Melania Trump’s personality: In one scene, she sings along to her favorite Michael Jackson song, “Billie Jean,” and is also caught doing the “Y.M.C.A.” dance after an inaugural ball. The camera even captures a few interesting moments that aren’t really the focus along the way, like a worried tailor skeptical of a change Trump wants in her inauguration outfit and then-Vice President Kamala Harris looking at her watch backstage with seeming annoyance during the swearing-in ceremony.
But overall those moments showing real personality – especially in regard to the title subject – are few and far between. There’s a long sequence where Trump memorializes her mother Amalija Knavs, as the first anniversary of her death coincides with Carter’s funeral. However, instead of old pictures being shown of Melania and her mom, or a close-up interview with the first lady, the first lady speaks over footage of herself visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In that moment, and others, she talks about being emotional but doesn’t immerse the audience in what she’s feeling. In one case, Melania is seen watching cable news footage of California’s deadly 2025 wildfires and the camera zooms in for tears that never come.
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Because she doesn’t address the camera, “Melania” suffers from a brutal disconnect. Trump speaks about son Barron, but he doesn’t speak about his mom. (Barron, by the way, is low-key the most compelling person in the entire movie because you’re dying to know what this teenager thinks about these events he’s going through.) She talks about a reverence for the military, but Ratner doesn’t show her conversations with soldiers. It’s a strange filmmaking choice for a documentary, though maybe one that’s by design: Melania Trump produced the movie through her new Muse Films company and this is definitely her show.
Everything surrounding “Melania” is political but the movie itself isn’t, for the most part. The president pops up sporadically: His first appearance is as a bobblehead in Melania Trump’s pilot’s cockpit, with “Terminator”-style sunglasses and machine gun. He grumbles about why the national college football championship is the same day as the inauguration (“I think they did that on purpose”), but he’s mainly there to say how great and influential his wife is.
The film ends with the first lady having her official black-and-white photograph taken, and this cinematic portrait, which could have shown insight into a rather unknown public figure, isn’t much more colorful.
A still from ‘Valavaara’.
| Photo Credit: Morph Productions/YouTube
Moments before the intermission of Valavaara (meaning favouritism), the movie’s lead character, Kundesi (Vedic Kaushal), lets out a huge cry of desperation. The scene is a testament to debutant director Sutan Gowda’s control over the craft, as he ensures we are as anxious and stressed about the film’s central plot point as the little boy, Kundesi. We then see a subtle yet “mass” interval bang, as Kundesi breaks the fourth wall with a smile.
Just like the scene, Valavaara maintains a nice balance of tension and hope throughout its nearly two-hour runtime. Kundesi’s trouble arises when his cow goes missing. Without the cow, he can’t think of going back to his house to face his father, whom he hates and fears in equal measure.
Kundesi often wonders why his father (Malathesh HV) is disgusted with him. The little one’s disappointment grows manifold when he sees his father showering his younger brother, Kosudi, with unconditional love. Kundesi’s biggest respite is his mother, who means the world to him. The bonding reimagines Kannada cinema’s familiar trope of mother sentiment with several poignant moments.
One of the film’s strong suits is the comedy; the humour is drawn from hilarious situations and funny dialogue, mostly involving a carefree, aimless youngster, Yadhu (a charming Abhay), who often secretly meets his girlfriend to make love. Yadhu’s arc blends nicely with Kundesi’s pursuit of getting back the cow.
Storyline: A young boy’s quest to find a missing cow that ties into his familys struggles.
A heart-warming film, Valavaara reminds viewers how the Kannada big screen had missed the feeling of tenderness. The slow-growing friendship between Yadhu and Kundesi is fleshed out beautifully. The writing triumphs, as despite tonal shifts, we are never detached from the proceedings. Every plot point leads to Kundesi’s search for his cow, and every time he messes up, we sigh in disappointment.
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Director Sutan Gowda’s economical storytelling ensures the film isn’t pulled down by melodrama. Valavaara has the spirit of a show-burner, but it never forgets to entertain and engage. The captivating cinematography by Balaraja Gowda and Manikanth Kadri’s moving score elevate the movie.
Some dialogues sound philosophical. The film also slightly overstays its welcome. These are minor shortcomings that can be easily ignored, for Valavaara has several moments that shine thanks to the commendable performances of the lead cast.This is a film that feels like a warm hug.
