There is nothing obviously wrong with Audrey (Moon Choi). The 36-year-old has a physical therapist job she cares about, with coworkers she mostly likes. Her Brooklyn apartment looks small and a bit shabby, but comfortable. She’s single, but seems to enjoy an active, lightly kinky sex life on the apps.

It’s just that she seems adrift, somehow — as if she’s not only lost her way but forgotten where she was trying to go in the first place, if indeed she ever knew.

Bedford Park, Stephanie Ahn’s poignant directorial debut, follows Audrey on her path toward something like self-actualization, sparked by a chance encounter with a similarly lonely soul. Though its unflashy style and delicate emotionality are unlikely to sweep viewers off their feet, its eye for fine detail and bittersweet tone make it an absorbing experience worth seeking out.

This transformative relationship enters Audrey’s life through the unlikeliest of avenues. Eli (Son Sukku), a rough-around-the-edges ex-wrestler, is the other party in a car accident that leaves Audrey’s mom (Won Mi-kyung) with an injured wrist. The incident forces Audrey back into her childhood home in suburban New Jersey to help take care of her, and into Eli’s orbit to help square away the insurance information and repair bills.

Audrey and Eli’s first meeting is a contentious one, with accusations and rude words and eventually pieces of fruit getting thrown around in all directions. (Between this and Netflix’s Beef, there’s apparently no better outlet for Korean American Millennial angst than car-based tantrums.) But a second encounter takes a turn when Audrey finds herself in a vulnerable position, and Eli, a decent guy underneath his prickly exterior, steps up to help. The mutual thawing turns into a mutually beneficial carpool arrangement, which warms into friendship and eventually more.

The script, also by Ahn, leans slightly too much on contrivances to nudge the relationship along. And while Eli’s solitude is explained by his circumstances (he’s laying low from a shady situation engineered by a toxic relative), it’s harder to tell whether we’re meant to understand Audrey as having no other friends whatsoever, or if it’s just more convenient for the screenplay that whatever pals she does have forget to text her the entire time she’s in New Jersey.

But it helps make up for these minor missteps that Ahn has such a firm grasp on who her characters are and where they’re coming from. Combined with her eye for small but telling details — an introductory scene of Eli eating peanut butter directly out of the jar with his fingers speaks volumes about where this man is in his own life, before he even speaks a word — it ensures that even when certain plot beats feel a bit engineered or random, the emotions rippling out from them are wholly believable.

As the central not-quite-couple, Son and Choi are intriguingly unpredictable together at first, like a pair of stray cats sizing each other up, ready to pounce or run as needed. When they finally begin to let their guards down, one awkward car-ride convo or hesitant food court meal at a time, the connection is more profound and more tender for being so hard-won.

What brings Audrey and Eli together, other than a slow-burn attraction, is a sense of stuckness — of being trapped between the heavy expectations of their families and the dissatisfaction they harbor about lives that haven’t quite turned out as they’d hoped (even if they themselves probably couldn’t articulate what exactly it was they did want).

Audrey, the single and childless and PhD-less product of a stable but unhappy home, has fallen short of the life planned out for her by her parents. In the present, her mother lies to her church friends about Audrey’s nonexistent medical career, pressures her to date a nice and rich but hopelessly boring divorcé and guilt-trips Audrey into extending her stay. Eli, whose childhood was fractured by tragedy, dodges a mother who seems more interested in asking him for money than offering him love, and hides out from an ex and young daughter whose life he apparently fears ruining.

No wonder they feel that in each other, they’ve finally found the one person around whom, as Audrey puts it, they can finally breathe — someone who comes to them with no preconceptions or expectations, who see them for the person they actually are and not the person they want them to be.

Woven through this entire messy tangle of relationships is the issue of their shared Korean American identity, in all its variously beautiful and burdensome complexities. It is a gift that Bedford Park grants its leads the space to navigate that complex terrain on their own terms, rather than falling back on stereotypes that position it solely in opposition to a “mainstream” (white) culture.

It empathizes with Audrey, who is unwilling to be the dutiful girl her mother wants her to be, but isn’t ready to entirely reject the role, either. It’s gentle about Eli, born in Korea but raised by a white mother, feeling self-conscious because he prefers forks to chopsticks and barely understands the language of his birth parents.

And it understands that the umbrella of that identity might cover even those who’d rather reject it — like Audrey’s mother, who moved to the U.S. in search of a better life for her children but now bemoans the fact that they’re too American; or her father (Kim Eung-soo), whose pride has never recovered from the loss of status he suffered when he traded his cushy office job in Korea for blue-collar grocery store work in the States.

Almost inevitably, Bedford Park makes its way to the Korean concept of han, defined here by Audrey as “an ancient heartache when a person carries their family’s trauma.” Is it “carried voluntarily, like a sense of duty,” she and Eli wonder over beers and bar food, or do they have no choice in the matter?

The film doesn’t have any firm answers to counter these questions, let alone any easy reassurances or even a tidy happy ending. But in its nuance, its curiosity and its deep affection for its characters, it offers anyone familiar with burdens like Eli and Audrey’s the same thing they give to each other — the chance to sit down and take a breath, with someone who really gets it.

Oscar nominations are officially out, meaning for the next couple of months social media feeds will be saturated with debates over who and what is worthy of a statue. Leading that discussion is another Ryan Coogler masterpiece, this time “Sinners,” which is up for a record-breaking 16 awards, including best picture.

Set in the Mississippi Delta during the Jim Crow era, the film is often characterized as a horror movie, which is understandable given the villain is a vampire. However, what elevates “Sinners” beyond the gore — what makes it a delicious piece of historical fiction — are the details woven into the story’s fabric. From the presence of the Indigenous Choctaw people to the segregated sides of the same street, Coogler paints a picture of 1930s America with a documentarian’s brush. In traditional horror movies, fright is centered and dialogue is a backdrop. “Sinners” prioritizes the moment in time in which the fright occurs — both visually and sonically — making it as much a period piece as it is a movie with vampires in it.

How many Oscars “Sinners” will win is good fodder for all that social media debate. However, what is not debatable — in fact, what is painfully clear — is that Coogler made the best picture for our times. That’s because at its core “Sinners” is a story about belonging — both who does and who does not. There are no grand speeches about diversity undergirded by uplifting music. Instead, Coogler methodically reminds the audience that this country has always been a multiracial kaleidoscope by meticulously portraying life in America just a century ago.

The vampire Remmick is more than just an antagonist with fangs.

He is the immigrant son of an Irish man whose homeland was stolen and faith stripped away during the centuries of English rule. We don’t know how old the vampire is. But we do know that by 1690 roughly 80% of Ireland’s best farmland had been confiscated and turned into large estates for wealthy colonizers, displacing millions of people in the process. We know in 1845, potato fields — the primary source of food for the poor — became infested with a devastating fungus that destroyed 40% of the crop. The following year, nearly all of the potato fields had been infected, leading to years of famine.

Between 1846 and 1851, more than a million Irish people died from starvation or disease. And we know the vast majority of them did not have to die.

For while the Irish people fell from hunger, the healthy crops that were grown on their land were shipped to England, to feed their oppressors. Mass evictions — punctuated by women and children being dragged out of their homes in the dead of winter by British soldiers — compounded the devastation they endured. Countless fled to America and elsewhere in the hope of a better life.

By today’s standards, some immigrated to this country legally.

Most did not.

Almost all were greeted with racist hostility, sometimes by Irish Americans who thought distancing themselves from their desperate countrymen would grant them favor from the very people who despised them. Some pseudoscience in the late 1800s portrayed Irish Americans as members of a different race from other Northern European immigrants; they were not viewed socially as fully white until World War I. That was made clear from the “Irish need not apply” signs displayed in windows. It was evident by the anti-immigrant platform the Know Nothing Party adopted.

Who are they, you ask?

Well, you remember the way then-candidate Donald Trump claimed he didn’t know anything about Project 2025 or the way MAGA Republicans such as House Speaker Mike Johnson greet awkward questions with claims of “don’t know” or “don’t recall”? That is a strategy ripped from the pages from some of the ugliest moments in American history, some spearheaded by the Know Nothing Party. Ours is a history in which New York robber barons used the promise of belonging to splinter the poor into factions and manipulate them into fighting among themselves during the Gilded Age.

Perhaps this is why Jake O’Kane, a comedian and columnist based in Northern Ireland, recently said this about Irish American immigration agents: “You have betrayed your great-grandfathers and mothers who traveled on ships as immigrants to the country where you now hunt down immigrants. There is no Irish in you. You are house slaves.… Field slaves, they don’t want to take care of the massa. They don’t want to take care of the house. They want to burn the house down. And that is where you originated from. That’s the people you came from and now you are nothing but … house slaves.”

The history of the Irish in America is also why the “Sinners” vampire Remmick — in an attempt to convince Black people living under Jim Crow to join him — said: “I am your way out. This world already left you for dead. Won’t let you build. Won’t let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.”

His argument was based in a truth that is apparent today, which is why “Sinners” touched those of us who know what it’s like to be othered in society. For those of us watching some of the worst moments in this country’s history be repeated at the behest of modern-day robber barons making billions, while children are snatched out of schools and the poor fight among themselves.

It will be weeks before we find out whether “Sinners” is named 2025’s best picture. But we already know that it offers the clearest picture of the evil we see around us.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

While the happy and only barely tortured gay romance of Heated Rivalry sweeps the nation, nay the world, it might be instructive, if depressing, to remind ourselves that there are many young queer people who have a much harder time realizing their desires. The new film Leviticus, from director Adrian Chiarella, is a solemn and frightening acknowledgment of that reality, albeit one allegorized into supernatural horror. 

The film takes place in a dreary town in Victoria, Australia, a drab industrial backwater whose people — or, at least some of whom — flock to religion to give their lives the brightness of hope and higher purpose. Teenager Niam (Joe Bird) has just moved to town with his mum (a deceptively sinister Mia Wasikowska) but already yearns to escape it. He finds some deliverance, of the emotional kind anyway, in a classmate, Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a handsome ruffian with whom Niam shares a special bond. They have found love, or at least affectionate lust, in a hopeless place, just as many kids have done before them, since time immemorial.

Chief on the film’s mind is what happens when the relative innocence of that blush of first infatuation — neither boy seems particularly troubled by his proclivity — is spoiled by outside forces, like family and the church. As a hardcore religious right gains traction around the globe, Leviticus challenges the notion, made too easy to accept by the Heartstoppers and Love, Simons of the world, that coming out isn’t really such a big deal anymore. It is still — perhaps increasingly so, in this moment of backslide — monumental and dangerous for plenty of young people, often plunging their lives into horror.

Chiarella is particularly interested in the abuses of conversion therapy, which hideously imagines that something innate can be excised or, at least, wholly ignored. It is a form of torture, one whose effects can cause lingering and sometimes fatal harm. Such trauma is made manifest in Leviticus, in which these afflicted kids are stalked by a sinister force that, cruelly and perversely, takes the form of the person they most want in the world.

It’s a grim and clever conceit, even if its rules don’t always make total sense. What the device does most effectively is force the audience to think about the real-world analog of these characters’ psychic (and physical) pain: the many young people who have been told that their sexual and romantic desire will destroy them, that a fundamental human attraction is something they must flee from in mortal terror. How heartbreaking, and how vile, that any adult claiming compassion would seek to imbue a child with that extreme allergy to their own self. 

Leviticus has a enough gore and jumpy moments to qualify it as a proper horror film. But its true scariness is of the forlorn kind, as Naim and Ryan grow distrustful of each other, not sure if the needful, seductive person they see before them is real or a menacing specter who means to kill them. That doleful eeriness is the film’s best asset, adding a tragic queer love story to the template of youth-curse films like It Follows and Talk to Me. Both Bird and Clausen play this mounting nightmare with the appropriate ache and desperation, elevating the emotional tenor of Chiarella’s sad, frequently bleak film. Sure, Clausen is pretty enough that one wonders why he doesn’t just monetize his Instagram and flee to Sydney, but otherwise both he and Bird appropriately register as two small-towners trapped in a toxic community, starkly rendered in Chiarella’s drab austerity. 

Though his metaphors are awfully on the nose, Chiarella convincingly insists on their power. He has made his argumentative trick work quite well, even if the movie’s messaging sometimes crosses into the obvious or didactic. And anyway, maybe we are at a time, yet again, when such simple lessons bear repeating, when it is not lame or dated to highlight the terrible violations of the most basic kind of homophobia. 

There is also, perhaps, a slightly radical suggestion teased out toward the end of Chiarella’s film, one that harkens back to so many narratives of the past: Those stories told of uncles and sons and countless others who fled their oppression in search of something they knew to be true and decent, waiting for them in distant, glittering cities. Leviticus has the sturdy nerve and conviction to plainly state that sometimes home and family are irredeemable and worth abandoning. It is not so concerned with changing hearts and minds, but with saving lives.