Concessions

Bluesky

The Royal Alamo is closing. It's a small town cinema in a municipality minor enough that the local news channel can commit a reporter to standing outside all of its last day. Across its final films we'll meet those who have called it something close to home. As in American Graffiti or Dazed And Confused, imminent change is an opportunity to examine how we react to the passage of time, but mentioning those films it's hard to avoid the trap of complaining that nostalgia isn't as good as it used to be.

Concessions makes few, resisting temptations to sugarcoat or moderate an interlocking series of tales that will cover everything from the structural racism of Star Wars to allegations of bestiality. That's a wider range than the candy counter, but this is the movies. All human life is here, from scholarship to bloodshed. The spectre of death isn't as prominent as in The Seventh Seal or, perhaps more appropriately, Last Action Hero, but that shade's shadow does feature. This will be remembered in part as one of Michael Madsen's last films, and as much as he brings to the role of Rex Fuel, Kevin Bacon's stunt double, he's far from the only reminder of Quentin Tarantino we'll see.

The films showing on the last day are threefold. Bad Bloke In Brooklyn, one of Rex' works, an action thriller in the mould of Crocodile Dundee, translating the Ozploitation of Mad Max to Manhattan. It's screening with Schindler's List: Refuelled, though how that Vin Diesel vehicle sequel looks is best left to the imagination. We do get some moments from Taft! The Musical, in which Russell Crowe is, indeed, unrecognisable. Why that is, perhaps unsurprisingly, is one of the film's more amusing moments.

I don't know if it's proximity or programming, but this was one of several films at the 2025 Edinburgh Film Festival broken up into chapters. That's something shared with I Live Here Now and Two Neighbours and here it serves a deliberately episodic structure well. The sketches that make part of it are somewhat diegetic, one of the staff is an artist, photographing the last day. Those pictures will form part of the credits, that recursive reminiscence harking back all of an hour and a half.

Mas Bouzidi's first feature, this expands on his 2021 short of the same name. Several of the cast, including Rob Riordan and Jonathan Price as popcorn purveyors Hunter and Lorenzo return. Their discussions are the core of their relationship and their relationship is the core of the film. The handful of women, some of whom are named, and fewer of whom speak, mostly get to talk to them about each other or be talked about by them. Many of the names have hints of cinema, enough that I'm not sure if Hunter should in fact be Hudson. The Royal Alamo is, despite its Texican name, in upstate New York. The short was a cineplex but this uses a repertory cinema, the Lafyette in the town of Suffern. It's main cinema is a proper picture palace, and it was a delight to see its velvet seats and balconies from the newly refurbished and reopened Edinburgh Filmhouse.

As a love letter to the joy of movies, Concessions is in good company, but that context makes it difficult to recommend. What is likely to be heartfelt and attractive to a specific audience might seem mawkish and self-indulgent if the target isn't properly understood. Other scholars of film have suggested that a love letter is a bullet to the brain, though a bit more frankly, and that balance of power and damage is one that Concessions doesn't trouble. It is faint praise to say that it's pleasant enough, but faint praise is what I can muster. The fates might have decreed that the Royal Alamo will close but there's nothing damnable about it. Not hellfire but the tepid, flaming hot Cheetos are no substitute for brimstone. It does meditate on the metaphysical, muse about movies, but I don't know if my rejection is that this feels like retrograde replication rather than rediscovery.

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