Movie Reviews
‘The Last Critic’ Review: A Captivating Portrait of Robert Christgau, the Brilliant Mad Professor of Rock Critics, and How He Made the Grade
As a critic, I should probably take offense at the title of “The Last Critic.” The movie is a captivating portrait of Robert Christgau, the legendary music writer who was one of the founding fathers of what was once known as “rock criticism.” (These were the days before poptimism, not to mention the Taylor Swift fan base.) To be fair, the film never asserts the claim of its title — that Christgau was or is “the last critic.” He was, in fact, one of the first writers to establish rock criticism as a vibrant and essential form, the others being Greil Marcus and the late Ellen Willis (both of whom he was close to; Marcus is featured in the documentary) as well as Lester Bangs, the brilliant bad boy who died in 1982.
The singular thing about Christgau is that he invented, and owned, his very own form of criticism. Born in 1942, he started out as a gifted writer and reporter, with the makings of a star journalist (in 1966, he published an award-winning piece about a girl who died from being on a macrobiotic diet). Attracting the attention of Esquire magazine, which was then at the epicenter of a hip new media world, he began to write a youth-culture column there, and in 1969 he came up with Christgau’s Consumer Guide, a monthly series of capsule reviews that would evaluate — and grade! — the latest slate of rock albums.
That doesn’t sound too remarkable, but Christgau’s prose had a quirky electricity, and in a world where rock writers were nerdish monks (Marcus was a rich-kid academic who smoked a pipe), he had a sixth sense for how to brand himself. An acerbic wise guy, brimming with egomaniacal snark, he once jokingly introduced himself as “the dean of American rock critics,” and the label stuck. From that point on, that’s how he was referred to and thought of.
In the Village Voice, where the Consumer Guide became one of the fabled alt-weekly’s go-to features from the ’70s through the ’90s, Christgau wrote like a possessed fan who breathed insight, making every capsule sound like a psychedelic sonnet. And the notion of affixing each densely compact review with a letter grade (from A+ to E-) was so counterintuitive — at least in the post-counterculture world — that it became Christgau’s signature.
He was playful in his judgments (on Prince’s “Dirty Mind”: “He takes care of the songwriting, transmutes the persona, revs up the guitar, muscles into the vocals, leans down hard on a rock-steady, funk-tinged four-four, and conceptualizes — about sex, mostly.” On Bryan Adams’ “Reckless”: “Maybe I’ll let Bruce Springsteen teach me how to hear John Cougar Mellencamp, but damned if I’m going to let John Cougar Mellencamp teach me how to hear Bryan Adams”). He was famous enough to inspire disgruntled album-track shoutouts from Lou Reed and Sonic Youth, and I guess that you could also call Christgau the unintentional godfather of Entertainment Weekly. At one point in the documentary, Christgau talks about a certain grade category he thinks of as “a high B+,” adding that “no one knows what that means” except him. As a critic who handed out grades at EW for decades, I may be just about the only other person on the planet who knows exactly what that means.
In “The Last Critic,” we meet Christgau as an elder stateman of rock-crit (he’s now 83), a downtown stalwart knocking around the streets of the East Village. He’s a bit more bent than he was, with white hair and a touch of arthritis, but he’s still a wry specimen, lean and mean, with a machine-gun mind, ageless in his vigor (and in his hunger for new music). And God bless him, he still pumps out the Consumer Guide each month (it’s now on Substack). The way he goes about it is the real subject of the documentary, because writing the Consumer Guide is the very spine of Robert Christgau’s life; every aspect of it reflects his obsessiveness. The film opens with him tapping out the following quote on an old word processor: “To the eternal ‘Opinions are like assholes — everyone’s got one,’ I just say, but not everybody’s got ten thousand of them.” Christgau has 14,000 reviews and counting, and that’s his glory and his compulsion.
He and his wife, the writer Caroline Dibbell, have lived in the same 2nd Ave. apartment for 50 years. And though it has seven rooms, Christgau has it organized like the encyclopedic pack rat he is. The place is lined with hundreds of feet of books, and he built special industrial shelves to house his 36,000 vinyl albums and CDs (and even cassette tapes), which cover every square inch of wall space in his cramped office. It’s his cave of knowledge, and he sits each day at the center of it, fumbling with CD players that kind of work, listening to music all day long, tapping out his thoughts on an old computer, feeling at every moment that this is his bliss. It’s criticism as a calling, a mission, a drive to find all the new music that’s good, and to capture each album’s worth in one heightened poetic paragraph. That’s what makes Christgau get up in the morning, and what keeps his spirit young. (Recovering from surgery, he won’t take three days off and not write.)
He has mellowed with age (actually, not much), but he’s still a wit and a scholar and a bit of a pedant. He’s bluntly contentious — in his heyday, he was not only a critic but a Village Voice editor who became fabled for his literary-dictator ways. He would make writers sweat (but only in the quest to make them the best version of themselves), and he would sometimes bike over to their apartments to stalk them for copy that was late. But what cemented the Christgau legend was the weirdly rational mania that informed the Consumer Guide. When it came to music, Christgau genuinely believed in the existence of a hidden grand order. He wanted to turn the act of consuming records into a system — a celestial hierarchy of judgment, of which he was the all-seeing lord.
That’s a way of thinking that some critics have (exhibit A: myself). Yet Christgau, through the Consumer Guide, was the only music critic to wear his system-making brains on the outside. The title of the column was a provocation, because here was this writer on the cutting edge of a rock world that still imagined itself as a “revolution,” yet he had the audacity to say that the revolution was a form of consumerism. He meant it as a joke (“I was thumbing my nose at my colleagues,” he says), the joke being that he was actually serious about it. He was going to grade the counterculture like the ultimate professor of cool.
And that’s what Christgau became. The documentary features plenty of footage of him back in the day, when a bohemian New York critic could still be a celebrity, and when he was just about the only person you could name who turned having long hair and oversize glasses and an ironic smirk into a punk look. He was like a sexy underground version of Poindexter. By the late ’70s, it felt like he was the last guy left with stringy hair that reached his shoulders, but the attitude was as far from hippie as you could get. Christgau was from Queens, the son of a fireman, and he had that working-class outer-borough lack of respect for the elites, even as he himself became one.
“The Last Critic,” directed with lively reverence by Matty Wishnow, is full of pithy testimonials to Christgau’s special qualities as a critic. We hear from writers like Kit Rachlis and Ann Powers and Amanda Petrusich and Chuck Eddy and Rob Sheffield. Nelson George and Greg Tate make the vital point that Christgau, in orchestrating a music review section in the ’70s that showcased diverse voices, walked the walk of what the Village Voice was supposed to be about. As someone who grew up in the early rock-crit days, I especially enjoyed the film’s portrait of Christgau’s friendship with Greil Marcus, an equally legendary critic based on the West Coast (we see the two of them seated today in Christgau’s living room, looking like the Statler and Waldorf of rock criticism). They wrote letters to each that were like intellectual mash notes, and they spoke several times a month on the phone but had serious disagreements. “I don’t think he feels hip-hop,” says Christgau of Marcus. “And I think that’s a function of whether you feel James Brown. And that’s a real gap.”
Christgau felt James Brown, all right (he was a major advocate of funk), but I would argue that his Achilles’ heel as a critic is that he didn’t feel pop. We see him in a TV interview from the ’80s where he catalogues his eclectic tastes, saying, “I love African music, I really love some country music, I like the best of what’s called world music, I love rap, I’ve got nothing against pop, I like funk and dance music quite a lot…” Consider that statement: I’ve got nothing against pop. It reflects something that nearly all the formative rock critics (with the exception of Stephen Holden) felt about pop music, which is that they actually did have something against it. They thought it was glossy, superficial, sentimental, fake, confectionary, corrupt, “commercial,” or some other descended-from-the-left-wing-ether bullshit. At one point in the documentary, we see a roster of albums in different Christgau grade categories, and forgive me, but I don’t live in a world where Sleater-Kinney’s “Dig Me Out” is an A and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is a B. (I live in a world where Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” is an A+, and where Hall and Oates are greater than the Replacements.) The anti-pop animus of classic rock criticism reflected nothing so much as a neurotic puritanism, or maybe just a snobbish inability to hear the deep beauty of pop.
My grousing aside, the early rock critics actually forged their own brand of beauty. The reason they were able to plant this form of criticism on the map is that they were extraordinary writers. What you feel, in every Robert Christgau capsule, is that he’s channeling whatever he’s writing about, and that’s what always made the Consumer Guide such a compulsive read — the drama of listening to Christgau let each of those albums flow through him. “The Last Critic” is a portrait of a venerable voice, but mostly it’s a testament to everything a great critic is: a priest, a fan, an assassin, an aesthete, a merciless truth-teller, and a vessel of love.
Movie Reviews
‘Finnegan’s Foursome’ Review: Edward Burns’ Spiky-Quaint Sports Dramedy Is a Tale of Family Therapy Through Golf
Thirty years after “The Brothers McMullen,” the writer, director, and actor Edward Burns looks preserved in amber — his hair and beard have some silver, but at 58 he’s still lean and handsome in that prince-of-the-working-class Irish-American way. And it’s not just Burns who’s more or less unchanged; so is his filmmaking style. “Finnegan’s Foursome” is his 16th feature, and he’s still doing that shaggy-likable, spiky-quaint, semi-low-budget Edward Burns dramedy thing — the script that’s talky and kind of funny, though in a way that often sounds like a script; the camerawork that never strays too far from the functional; the acting that hovers between lively and broad. The style Burns works in is now closer to television than movies, and given that “Finnegan’s Foursome” is getting a streaming release (starting today), you could say it’s a minor indie movie that has found its rightful home.
It’s a sports comedy, about golf and Ireland and family conundrums (it would be overstating it to call them demons), and a key thing that might put you in the audience demo for it is if you happen to be a serious golfer. It’s a movie spun out of the love of the game. Burns, who first shows up in a samurai man-bun, plays Freddy Finnegan, a wealthy clothing entrepreneur who seems to have a happy and settled life, except that he’s got anger-management issues, all stemming from his rivalrous relationship with his irascible Irish father, Jack (Ian McElhinney).
At first, we think the movie is going to be about these two facing off. Jack, at his home in South Carolina (he came over from the old country in 1959), is hosting the latest edition of the Finnegan’s Cup — an annual golfing competition in which four members of the family face off against one another, mostly as an excuse for Jack, a retired golf instructor, to tell his old jokes and stories and reminisce about the days when he was good enough to rub shoulders with the Big 3 (Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player).
He’s a blustery egomaniac, though he strikes us as a warm-hearted one. And Freddy, of course, resents the hell out of him. But what we think are going to be the fireworks between these two come to a halt when one of the players hits a hole in one and Jack keels over in shock, dead of a heart attack.
The family now has to scatter Jack’s ashes in the four locations he has chosen in Ireland (two of them are golf courses). And that’s an excuse for Freddy, who resents his da even in death; his more benign older brother, Teddy (Brian d’Arcy James), a novelist who has been suffering from writer’s block; Freddy’s musician son, Frankie (Brian Muller), whom he treats nearly as cavalierly as his father treated him; and Teddy’s adult daughter, Marie (Erica Hernandez), to take a week’s vacation in Ireland, where they’ll play out the Finnegan’s Cup at a handful of fabled golf courses, smacking around some home truths along with the ball.
There’s plenty of on-the-nose dialogue (“His dying wish was to get us all back here to Ireland”), as well as cornball boasting (“It’s not about the clubs, little brother, it’s about the man who’s swingin’ ’em”) and generic braggadocio (“I believe that is what you call an eagle!”). Freddy and Teddy never stop making side bets and busting each other’s chops, mostly about who has the better golf game, this being the locker-room form of brotherly love. If the family tension simmers, it’s mostly because Freddy and Teddy have opposite feelings about their father. Listening to their back-and-forth taunts, Marie says, “I’m sorry, so this entire trip is nothing but constant ball-busting?” Swap in “movie” for “trip,” and you’ve got an idea of “Finnegan’s Foursome,” though you should also toss in Frankie doing his cringe mock-sports-announcer banter.
“Finnegan’s Foursome” is structured as a sports movie, and Burns, working with the cinematographer Jeff Muhlstock, connects you to the geometric majesty of the links. But when you watch a film like “Tin Cup,” part of the thrill is that you want to see the Kevin Costner hero win; that’s the dramatic Zen of a sports film. Watching “Finnegan’s Foursome,” we’re not overly invested in whether Edward Burns’ entitled a-hole gets a winning golf score over his novelist brother.
There’s a touching scene where three of the characters sing “The Parting Glass” at a pub. But here’s how “Finnegan’s Foursome” is a bit soft. The movie is about Freddy coming around to see that his da really did love him, and that he wasn’t such a bad guy (he gave him the love of golf, after all). But the reason we readily buy this is that it’s so apparent from the outset. Jack’s big crime? Being away “at the office” (i.e., the golf course) too much. As ultimate sins of parents go, it’s kind of a dated sin. You want to say to Freddy, “Stop whining.” Especially because the Jack we see, in his competitive Irish way, had a lot of spirit; he was no ogre. Of course, he also tried to “get into Freddy’s head” on the golf course, but that’s kind of a privileged problem. It’s Freddy who needs to dismantle the ogre of resentment in himself, and that’s not quite a movie — that’s therapy.
The blithe and likable “The Brothers McMullen” won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and went on to have a healthy theatrical life, launching Burns’ career as a homespun auteur — at the time, he almost seemed like the shoestring Irish-American answer to Woody Allen. I was a fan of the early Burns films (especially “She’s the One,” his 1996 crossover movie, costarring Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz), but his moment in the spotlight didn’t last long. After crossing over, he kind of crossed back, retreating into the not-fully-on-the-radar indie wilderness. That’s where he has remained, and watching “Finnegan’s Foursome” you see why: He’s trying to stay true to his world (all the Irish chop-busting and piss-taking), but he hasn’t grown as a filmmaker. Then again, maybe that’s not so important. He doesn’t hit long drives, but by the end of “Finnegan’s Foursome” the ball is in the cup.
Photo: 1-2 Special/Everett Collection
The English director Mark Jenkin works a bit like a local artisan from another era. Filming in and around his native Cornwall, he shoots his pictures himself on a 16mm Bolex, the kind of camera that might have been used by film students decades ago and that produces tactile, slightly grainy images. He also edits the movies himself, and records his sound later, layering in dialogue and effects and music (sometimes composed by himself) with an austere, handcrafted precision. This gives Jenkin’s work a certain timelessness, as if it belongs to the past but not to any specific period of the past. True, such an old-fashioned approach could feel performative, like an unusually well executed Instagram filter. But Jenkin’s style ties directly to his subjects and his expressive philosophy. His latest, Rose of Nevada — which stars two name actors, Callum Turner and George MacKay, and opens in New York today after doing the festival rounds — has the beguiling simplicity of a fable and the captivating textures of a dream. It stays with you like an unexpected and unanswerable question.
Jenkin privileges atmosphere through the collection of minute, sometimes abstract details. Set in a sparsely populated and depressed fishing village, Rose of Nevada opens with the unexpected return of the empty boat of the title, thought lost decades ago. Its arrival is announced by close-ups of barnacles, of rusty edges on ancient metal, of curious plant growth and moldy, tangled coils of black rope, as if its return was just part of a broader natural order. The Rose of Nevada clearly has a tragic history, which perhaps explains the psychological paralysis of the few remaining townsfolk. But it’s here, and so it must set off on a new fishing voyage.
Joining the journey, almost as if they were pulled towards it, are Nick (MacKay), a downcast man who needs money and seems incapable of meeting his young family’s most basic needs, and a drifter, Liam (Turner), whom we first see running down a road as if he were fleeing something. Both men are alienated from their environs, though for different reasons: MacKay conveys Nick’s quiet awkwardness well, and Turner has a charming, freewheeling energy that suggests he’s up for anything. When they return from the fishing expedition, however, the two men find that they’ve transported back several decades in time, and they’re mistaken for — or rather, they appear to be inhabiting the bodies of — two young deckhands who died long ago. Now that it’s the 1990s again, the fishing village is thriving, its local pub crowded with people and blaring pop. Nick and Liam see the younger, happy versions of the broken townspeople they’d left behind. Liam (now known as Alan) suddenly has a family, and Nick (now known as Luke) suddenly has parents. It’s almost as if the young men have been offered to the harvest gods as a sacrifice. And it’s worked.
So, it’s a ghost story, and a time travel story, and a folk tale, and something of a kitchen sink drama, but it’s also none of these things, really, and that’s where Jenkin’s formal gambits come in. His filmmaking has a lovely, homespun directness. We can feel scenes and moments being constructed, which fixes our attention on seemingly simple exchanges. An example: Early on, we see Nick hand his daughter a candy. Other filmmakers might shoot such a scene in a quick, offhand manner to mask its emotional weight, but Jenkin goes in the opposite direction, shooting everything in relative close-up and cutting the action to both extend and clarify it: We see Nick pull the candy out of its box, we cut to the girl receiving the candy, we see his wife see the girl, we cut to the wife taking the candy, we cut to a close-up of her unwrapping it, we cut to the girl getting the candy back, and we see Nick’s response. On some level, this could be an introductory filmmaking exercise: a whole series of extremely deliberate shots and edits designed to show this man’s feeling of inadequacy. But within the general precision of Jenkin’s style, the moment doesn’t stand out. Instead, it’s one in a long line of specific, human moments through which he builds his narrative and conjures a mood.
Such straightforwardness give Rose of Nevada a fable-like quality: There’s no narration, but we feel the deliberate rhythms of the storytelling, the telling emphasis on certain details over others. But weirdly, it also has something of the opposite effect: The film’s intimacy and Jenkin’s attention to the elements (along with his fondness for elliptical, well-timed flash frames) lends everything an otherworldly aura. Despite the time travel premise, nobody’s running around looking for a time machine to take them back, nor are they wasting much time trying to figure out how the dynamics of time travel work. The writer-director lets the unexplainable remain unexplained, because he’s interested more in our emotional response to it. We watch how people interact with these transformed versions of Nick and Liam, and we watch Nick and Liam’s own disparate responses to this new world, to the competing philosophies of life that emerge from this bewitching film. Rose of Nevada’s power lies in its peculiarities.
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Movie: Maa Inti Bangaaram
Rating: 2.5/5
Banner: Tralala Moving Pictures
Cast: Samantha, Gulshan Devaiah, Srinivas Gavireddy, Manjusha Mukkavilli, Diganth, Sreemukhi, Gautami, Anand, Lakshmi, Rachana, and others
Music Director: Santhosh Narayanan
DOP: Om Prakash
Editor: Dharmendra Kakarala
Producers: Raj Nidimoru, Samantha, Himank Reddy Duvvuru
Written by: Raj Nidimoru, Vasanth Maringanti
Directed by: BV Nandini Reddy
Release Date: June 19, 2026
Nearly three years after her last lead-role outing, Samantha returns to the big screen with “Maa Inti Bangaaram.” The film marks an important milestone in her career, serving as a comeback vehicle and also her first collaboration with husband Raj Nidimoru, who has co-produced the film and penned the story for this family action drama.
The big question is: has Samantha delivered a strong comeback with “Maa Inti Bangaaram”? Let’s find out.
Story
Swarna (Samantha) arrives with her husband at her in-laws’ village home to attend a family wedding. It is their first visit after marriage, as her husband had married her against his parents’ wishes.
Hoping to win over the family, Swarna settles into the household and tries to impress everyone, even seeking help from a friend for her cooking.
Just when she begins to feel accepted, trouble arrives. A group of men starts searching for her, determined to find out whether she is really Swarna or someone named Jhansi.
As the story unfolds, her hidden past comes to light. Years ago, she escaped from her mentor Karuna (Gulshan Devaiah) after discovering his true intentions. Since then, she has been living under different identities before eventually finding love and marrying her husband. Now, Karuna, who has completed a prison sentence, is back and determined to reclaim her at any cost.
Can Swarna protect herself and her newfound family from Karuna?
Performances
Samantha slips comfortably into the role. Despite returning to a lead role after nearly three years and overcoming health challenges, she retains her star presence and carries much of the film on her shoulders. While this may not rank among her best, she convincingly handles both the emotional and action-heavy portions, particularly in the second half.
Diganth plays her husband and delivers a decent performance, though the role offers him little scope. Gulshan Devaiah initially makes an impact as the antagonist, but the character gradually becomes routine, limiting his effectiveness.
Manjusha Mukkavilli gets a well-written supporting role and leaves a positive impression. Sreemukhi is adequate in her brief part.
Vennela Kishore appears in a cameo, while the rest of the cast performs within the requirements of their conventional roles.
Technical Aspects
Santosh Narayanan’s background score works reasonably well and elevates several scenes, especially in the latter half.
Cinematography is functional without offering any standout visuals. Production design serves the narrative adequately.
The film’s biggest technical shortcomings lie in its writing and editing. The dialogues rarely stand out, and the screenplay unfolds without enough surprises or dramatic highs.
A tighter edit and shorter runtime could have significantly improved the film’s overall impact.
Highlights
Samantha’s screen presence and performance
A few engaging moments in both halves
Some clever references
Drawbacks
Predictable screenplay
Unconvincing backstory
Lack of strong dramatic moments
Analysis
“Maa Inti Bangaram” is neither the emotional family drama audiences typically associate with Nandini Reddy nor the stylish action-driven narrative one expects from Raj Nidimoru’s storytelling sensibilities. Instead, it attempts to blend family drama with action, placing Samantha in a role usually reserved for a male commercial hero.
The basic premise feels familiar. Like many mainstream action films, it revolves around a protagonist whose troubled past threatens the peaceful life they have built. The difference here is that Samantha occupies the center of that narrative, taking on responsibilities and action beats traditionally assigned to male stars.
The first half unfolds largely as a family drama. Nandini Reddy focuses on the dynamics between the new daughter-in-law and her in-laws, presenting a series of domestic situations and emotional tests. The portions involving Samantha seeking help from her friend to impress the family with her cooking generate some humor and provide the film with a few enjoyable moments. Apart from these stretches, however, the narrative progresses at a measured pace.
The film gradually reveals why Jhansi became Swarna and why Karuna remains obsessed with finding her. While the backstory involving Naxalism provides the necessary motivation for the conflict, it never feels entirely convincing or emotionally compelling.
Once the central conflict is fully revealed by the interval, the film shifts gears. The second half becomes a straightforward battle between Swarna and the force threatening her family. While this creates a clear objective, it also reduces the scope for surprises.
A couple of scenes work reasonably well, and the climax action sequence inside the house provides some excitement, but the overall narrative goes on expected manner.
The film deserves credit for attempting something different within the commercial framework. Giving a female protagonist the kind of role usually written for male stars is a refreshing idea. Unfortunately, the execution lacks the emotional depth and dramatic strength needed to make the concept truly resonate.
Even the husband’s character feels somewhat artificial, functioning largely as a gender-reversed version of the supportive spouse often seen in hero-centric films.
Interestingly, some of the film’s most enjoyable moments come not from the action but from its lighter touches. References to older films, the creative use of the song “Mutyamantha Muddu,” and Samantha’s largely saree-clad appearance throughout the film, including during action sequences, add a distinctive flavor.
Ultimately, “Maa Inti Bangaram” attempts to merge family drama with female-led action. However, predictable storytelling and underdeveloped drama prevent it from reaching its full potential. The film remains watchable largely because of Samantha’s star appeal, but it never evolves into the engaging and emotionally satisfying experience it aspires to be. It makes an okay watch.
Bottomline: Not Pure Gold
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