Sydney Sweeney transforms into a boxing pioneer in David Michôd’s Christy, a real-life drama shamelessly engineered to attract Academy attention.

Sydney Sweeney plays Christy Martin (née Salters) across several decades, from her humble beginnings in West Virginia to the top of the female boxing world. Originally a basketball player, her victory in a strongwoman competition garners the attention of a local boxing trainer, who quickly realises he has something special on his hands. Cue a move to Florida, a change of coach, and the beginning of a historic career as one of the greatest ever professional female boxers. Along the way, she struggles through toxic relationships, drug addiction and a fight for fair pay as she almost single-handedly puts the women’s sport on the map. 

Sweeney’s performance will be the one on everybody’s lips, and not without good reason; her physical transformation is pretty remarkable and Christy’s brash attitude and propensity for foul language are quite the gear change from the star’s demure public persona. She’s especially endearing as the plucky teen discovering that boxing is ‘her thing’, with a precious look of disbelief on her face each time her arm is raised to signal another win, but inhabits the character convincingly through every phase of her life. All that said, there’s nothing Sweeney does here that tops Margot Robbie’s turn as the similarly cocksure sportswoman Tonya Harding in 2017’s I, Tonya.

Ben Foster is appropriately sleazy as Jim Martin, Christy’s coach and then husband (25 years her senior), whose tough love approach in the ring descends into outright physical and emotional abuse at home. When our protagonist seeks help from her Christian conservative mother (Merritt Wever), the latter is just happy she isn’t dating women anymore and sides with Jim. She only appears in a handful of scenes, but Wever is a chilling presence. Chad L. Coleman is on hand with some much-needed comic relief, playing the renowned boxing promoter Don King. His Eddie Murphy-esque performance seems to have spilled over from a different film entirely, one that I’d happily watch.

The fights and training montages are perfectly well shot; boxing is one of the most cinematic sports after all, and the oppressiveness of Christy’s home life is conveyed through smart lighting and a foreboding score from Antony Partos. Aesthetically speaking, there’s no moment when the film puts a notable step wrong, but its obsessive safeness is what renders it so lifeless at times. When the marriage takes an even darker turn in the final act, the violence is partially obscured in the name of good taste and the effect muted. It’s shocking stuff of course, but I’d have felt just as much revulsion if I’d read an account of events on Wikipedia instead.

It’s a good thing Christy boasts such a strong cast, who just about overcome a flaccid script and tame visual direction. This textbook inspirational story feels blatantly engineered to attract Academy attention, and yet may still fall short in the age of Everything Everywhere All At Once and Anora. While the story of Christy Martin is well worth telling, a game changer like her deserves something more radical than this.

David Michôd’s Christy (2025) was screened at TIFF on September 5, 2025 and will be released in US theatres on November 7, 2025. In the U.K., the film will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 17.

The biopic is the vulgar but necessary tribute inherently populist cinema pays to more traditional, higher-brow art. Scholars and snobs might sneer at these films, and especially the way they love to transmute childhood trauma into creative drive, all in the service of a tidy narrative arc. But we secretly sort of love them too, especially when they’re a little tacky, and preferably accurate enough to offer the cinematic equivalent of a well-edited Wikipedia page or, for the more serious-minded, a scholarly biography. It helps if the subject, in addition to being admired and talented, if not sympathetic, had a dramatic and interesting life, like mentally imbalanced painter Vincent Van Gogh. Even better: a life we know very little about, like playwright and poet William Shakespeare, making plenty of room for fictional invention.

Given that the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was not famous in his lifetime, it’s remarkable that we know as much about him as we do. Indeed, it’s a miraculous fluke that we know his work at all given that he instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all his writings and personal letters after he died. Luckily, Brod was, in some ways, the world’s worst literary executor — although he did risk his life at points to smuggle the work out of Czechoslovakia as he escaped Nazis to make his way to Palestine, as dramatized in Franz, Agnieszka Holland’s excellent new biopic.

In fact, as far as I can work out, this may be the only proper, life-spanning biopic made so far about Kafka, although there are several films that turn him into a character caught in a world much like his own absurdist, menacing fiction (see Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 exercise Kafka) or ones that memorialize a small slice of Kafka’s bio. (German directors Judith Kaufmann and Georg Maas’ The Glory of Life focuses on the last year of the writer’s life, for instance.)

Holland, whose last film Green Border was one of her best, seems to know conventional biopics are inherently cheesy, and risk being boring and shapeless if they plod chronologically through the subject’s life. Plus, she has to contend with the fact that Kafka’s life wasn’t especially eventful on the surface. He grew up in an affluent German-Jewish family in Prague; had a rocky relationship with his overbearing father Hermann, but a better one with his mother and sisters; worked in the legal department for an insurance company; got engaged but broke it off and never married; caught tuberculosis and died, aged 40.

His writing, to which he was devoted, was the most interesting thing about him, an intensely rich and motley life of the mind. Only his near contemporary, the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (who survived into old age), who weirdly enough also was a lawyer for an insurance company, rivals Kafka in terms of the inverse proportion of literary originality and canonical significance to dullness of life story.

In order to surmount the challenges the raw facts present his biopic-makers, Holland, screenwriter Marek Epstein, editor Pavel Hrdlicka and the team have opted to create a ludic, kaleidoscopic montage film that flits like a fevered mind around the subject’s life and beyond, leaping decades with a single cut.

That said, the structure never feels random; there are obvious causal connections. For instance, we see young Franz (played as a child by Daniel Dongres) being “taught” to swim by his father (a superb Peter Kurth) by being chucked into a river after just a few lessons, compelled to sink or swim (he sinks). That scene is directly followed by flash-forwards to tourists in the present day admiring a riverbank spot where the adult Kafka would always rest after a swim. Similarly, a section that touches on how prolific a letter-writer the adult Franz was (now played by Idan Weiss, a dead ringer for the real Kafka but also a subtle, gifted performer) then cuts to a tour guide (Emma Smetana) at the Kafka museum pointing out that, in sheer weight, his personal papers are dwarfed by the mountain of wood pulp about him produced over the years.

Indeed, Holland takes a puckish delight — one that Kafka would probably have been equally amused by — in showing how this introverted, neurasthenic perfectionist has become an icon in modern-day Prague, with burger restaurants, statues, tours, tourist traps and all manner of tchotchkes pedaled in his name.

Nevertheless, the film strives to offer a rounded portrait of Franz that gets across his intellect, his sense of humor (there’s a great scene where he reads, smiling broadly throughout, passages from The Trial to a room of guffawing peers), and his complex emotional inner life. A fair amount of screen time is devoted to his tortured relationship with Felicie Bauer (a tender Carol Schuler), the Berlin-based relative of Brod’s to whom Kafka proposed. Not long before their engagement was to be officially announced, Franz became besotted with Felice’s best friend Grete Bloch (Gesa Schermuly) and started writing letters to her, an absurd romantic farrago that would seem farcical if it weren’t so very sad. The closest the film comes to a happy-ish ending is the limning of his later affair with married journalist Milena Jesenska (Jenovefa Bokova), a relationship that at least made him happy for a time.

Even with its two hour-plus running time, Franz feels dense but nimble, Tomasz Naumiuk’s cinematography often in motion, or static as the characters flow frenetically from room to room within the frame, especially in the Kafka family home. We come to appreciate why Franz would crave silence so as to be able to pursue his craft. Even so, the original score by Mary Komasa and Antoni Komasa Lazarkiewicz, supplemented by sadcore indie tracks by Trupa Trupa, is a presence throughout, acting like a sonic glue that holds the chronologically disparate sequences of the film together while adding a distinct modernity to the tone.

However, it will be newcomer Weiss’ intense, playful, sweet rendition of Kafka that people will remember this film for — a portrait of a complicated man who lived mostly in his head but was capable of tenderness with friends and lovers. Also, Franz doesn’t minimize the centrality of Kafka’s Jewish identity and Zionist beliefs, but neither does it pander in any way to any particular audience. The fact that almost none of his family survived the Holocaust is not neglected. But the film doesn’t dwell on that part of the story, all of which unfolds long after Franz’s death.

The tense near-final scene where Brod just escapes the scrutiny of a Gestapo officer on a train, with all of Kafka’s papers in his satchel, is all you really need to know about the rise of fascism that Kafka foretold in a way. Similarly to his writings, Franz the film is interested in a distilled, abstracted meditation on power, the law, control and desire that transcends the banal borders of realism.  

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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.

I’ve been a fan of Austin Butler’s ever since I saw him in The Shannara Chronicles. While the series left much to be desired as an adaptation of one of my very favorite epic fantasy series, Butler really did shine as Wil Ohmsford. Little did I know that he would go on to have a remarkable subsequent career, excelling at playing a particular type of tortured and troubled young man, all while looking like a fallen angel. (Yes, I might be a little in love with him after watching his film).

The most recent iteration of this figure is Hank Thompson, a young man who once had a promising career in baseball but, due to a drunk driving accident–one that took the life of his friend–he has spent the subsequent years drinking away his troubles and carrying on a quasi-relationship with Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz). His entire life is turned upside down, however, when his next-door neighbor Russ (Matt Smith) leaves for London, which sets in motion a train of events that sees Hank dealing with a corrupt cop, Elise Roman (Regina King), her goons, and two Hasidic brothers who are more than happy to kill anyone who gets in their way (Liv Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio). While Hank eventually gets a happy ending of sorts, he has to sacrifice much along the way.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Darren Aronovsky’s Caught Stealing is one of my favorite movies of this year. It’s the type of crime thriller that knows what its purpose is and it doesn’t try to be anything else. It is one of a long history of films about an everyman who finds himself caught up in forces that he knows nothing about and has to use all of his considerable skills to survive. There are more than a few bodies left by the wayside, but this isn’t a cynical film. It is, instead, a blunt look at the dreadful lengths to which people will go for money.

Indeed, there’s a beautiful brutality to the film, one that’s anchored by Butler’s performance. He’s one of those actors who manages to combine in his person the beauty and the hardness of masculinity. Part of it is, I think, the cherubic beauty of his face, which looks like it sprang out of a Renaissance painting, and this sits somewhat at odds with the lean muscularity of his frame. Aronovsky gives us many opportunities to appreciate his masculine beauty, and there are moments when his raw sexuality seems to just envelope the screen and us along with it.

At the same time, Butler also makes clear that Hank is a man haunted by his past and, at first, he struggles to make sense of the violent world of which he is now a part, let alone figure out a way to survive. As the violence escalates, he finds that he, too, has to give away a little slice of his humanity in order to make it out alive. This isn’t to say that there isn’t some humor here, too, because there is. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a crime comedy, but there were some moments when I did laugh out loud (though it’s fair to point out that most of these moments involved Bud the cat, who proves to be Hank’s best sidekick).

As much as Caught Stealing is about Hank’s efforts to stay alive–and, if possible, to keep those he loves from getting caught in the crossfire–it’s also about making peace with his traumatic past. At numerous points in the film he wakes up from troubled dreams in which he is forced to relive the terrible moment when his drunk driving ended up killing his best friend and shattering his knee, thus derailing his promising baseball career. It’s only when he takes accountability for what he did that he can move forward, that he can stop running and seize control of his own destiny. There’s something apposite and even poetic about the fact that, in the film’s third act, he slams the car he’s driving into a pillar, killing the Hasidic brothers Lipa and Shmully in the process. Given that these two men were the ones responsible for the death of his beloved Yvonne, this moment is even more satisfying.

Butler might be the heart and soul of this film, but he’s matched by a formidable supporting cast. Of these, the best is, I think, Regina King, who never fails to impress. From the moment that Roman appears in Hank’s apartment, one gets the sense that there’s more to her than meets the eye. She seems to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in playing mind games with Hank, trying to jar something loose, as she puts it. As soon becomes clear, however, she’s brutal and violent and ruthless, and she will do anything to get her hands on the money that Russ has stolen. And, because King is just such a charismatic screen presence–and because she so effortless exudes authority–you almost find yourself wanting Hank to just do what she says so he can make it out alive (even if, as is also clear, she’ll almost certainly kill him once she gets what she wants).

And, lest you be concerned about Bud the cat, let me rush to tell you that he makes it all the way to the end! I must admit that I was a bit nervous, and if this was a movie in which the cat dies I most certainly would have hated it. Instead, the fact that Hank is so willing to look out for a feline companion that Russ foisted on him says a great deal about his innate goodness, and one can’t help but cheer for him as he tries to wrest some control of his life from those who consistently try to take away what little agency he has.

That, I think, is what makes Caught Stealing such a perfect film for our present moment. We’re all at the mercy of bad faith actors, and many of us feel as if we’re playing a game that is rigged against us, with no real knowledge of the rules or who we can trust. This film reminds us that it’s up to us to seize our destiny, though hopefully with fewer bodies left behind.