On my way to Cinépolis for my first screening of DIFF 2025, I heard a ping from my phone. As I drove, my car’s robot voice delivered the incoming message from a North Texas Film Critics Association colleague. He was letting the NTFCA Discord channel know that he saw one of the DIFF opening films, called Omaha, at Sundance, and that it was his favorite film of that fest. I was, in fact, on my way to see that very movie.
My fellow critic wasn’t wrong. Omaha is a quietly devastating film about the millions of families who struggle with homelessness and crushing poverty in this, the greatest and wealthiest country on the face of the planet. It’s a spiritual sibling to Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 picture Wendy and Lucy, as well as both the 2021 Oscar Best Picture winner Nomadland and the 1941 Oscar Best Picture nominee The Grapes of Wrath.
Omaha tells the story of a family of three on a road trip. At least, that’s what the two children, Ella (age 9) and Charlie (age 6), think is happening. Their father can’t explain to them what is obvious to us in the opening minutes of the film. This family, after the death of Ella and Charlie’s mom, is being evicted from their home for not being able to pay the rent.
Told largely from the perspective of the kids – although the movie does occasionally focus on the father’s anguished mental state at points throughout – Omaha depicts, in its brief 83 minutes, the panic and desperation of a parent with small children who has nowhere to go and no one to help him.
One reaction to Omaha that I encountered online after the screening dinged the movie quite heavily for being emotionally manipulative, ending the critique by lamenting that this is a movie that “just wants you to cry.” My retort to that is that the leaders of our country recently kidnapped and expelled a two-year-old US citizen to another country for the crime of being with her mother at the time of the kidnapping. Perhaps there is too little emotional manipulation going on in our culture if our leaders – and millions of their followers – find this kind of sick and disgusting behavior acceptable.
John Magaro – whom I first discovered in Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow – is superb as the father. At only eleven years old, Molly Belle Wright displays an incredible emotional intelligence in her portrayal of Ella. So much of Wright’s performance is telegraphed with worried glances and other non-verbal cues. Our society is fucked up, and Omaha shines a light on that through a deeply intimate portrait of what people struggling with homelessness must endure in a country that has more than enough for everyone.
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Day two of DIFF 2025 offered up a surprisingly hilarious (considering the subject matter) documentary, a block of shorts, and a surreal journey into the heart of anti-comedy.
André Is an Idiot is the debut feature from director Tony Benna. The documentary chronicles the health struggles of André Ricciardi after he is diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. Ricciardi was an ad man who wanted to focus the pain and fear generated by his diagnosis into a project that would document his existential battle with cancer.
The title of the movie comes from André’s own mother, who chided her son for not catching one of the most treatable forms of cancer before it became deadly because he skipped his medically recommended colonoscopy at age fifty. His mother’s blunt reaction to André’s diagnosis gives you a glimpse into the irreverent and hilarious world of Ricciardi. He lived his life by the mantra “nothing sacred” – as well as, until he got sick, “no cops, no doctors” – making jokes about the darkest subjects. He sure as hell wasn’t going to treat his terminal cancer with any undeserved respect.
Throughout the film, I couldn’t get over the fact that, if you caught a glance of him out of the corner of your eye, you might mistake André for a younger Tommy Chong. The connection was made stronger for me as we learn about André’s love of cannabis and other psychoactive substances. Imagine my surprise and delight upon the filmmakers’ decision to cast the one and only Tommy Chong to portray André’s father – who we learn is too private of a person to be interviewed for a documentary – in one touching yet funny sequence.
I saw A LOT of myself in André’s irreverent and laugh-out-loud response to his shitty – pun absolutely intended, as André mostly likely would have appreciated – luck. André Is an Idiot takes on existential dread with the same “fuck you” attitude as the whimsical and touching Dick Johnson Is Dead. All the laughs act as the spoonful of sugar to help the unimaginable grief of the situation go down. And that’s exactly what André wanted. It was easy to make jokes in the early going, as the dying man tells us. To be able to keep laughing in the face of death and at the cancer that utterly ravages his body was, according to André, the real victory.
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My last screening of day two was one I missed at SXSW 2025. Regular readers will remember that I did have a brief encounter (no, not that kind) with the stars of Friendship, the new bonkers anti-comedy from Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson, while covering SX.
If you’re on Robinson’s wavelength – which many people, including my wife, are not – you’ll absolutely love Friendship. It’s essentially 105 minutes of Tim Robinson speaking and responding to everyone around him in the most awkward and off-putting way imaginable in each scene.
The movie is about Robinson’s character, Craig Waterman, meeting and fixating on a new neighbor, played by Rudd – who comes close to full-on Anchorman mode here as TV weatherman Austin Carmichael – when Craig delivers a package mistakenly dropped at the Waterman house.
This new friendship forms as Craig’s wife, Tami, has beaten a cancer diagnosis. The film opens with Craig and Tami at a cancer survivor support group. If you’re completely unfamiliar with Robinson’s brand of humor, the opening salvo of Friendship will tell you all you need to know.
As Tami tells the group about her fear of her cancer coming back, Robinson gently pats his wife’s arm. He says to her, and the group, in the most satirical, mocking delivery of a cliché response to this concern, “It’s not gonna come back.” Tami then tells the group about her lack of orgasms since the cancer diagnosis. (Kate Mara does as much as she can with what she’s given as Tami, but the character is practically a prop. Friendship is, first and foremost, an opportunity for Robinson to do his thing.)
Robinson’s Craig gets a disquieted look on his face at this announcement. He then proudly makes an announcement of his own. The situation has been trying, but he’s orgasming just fine, thank you very much.
And that’s it. That’s the whole bit. It’s Robinson’s character saying and doing the most awkward, cringy thing possible and the chaos that ensues because of it. If you dig that sort of humor, Friendship is for you. If not, it’s best that you avoid it altogether.
Made me laugh to beat the band. Parts, anyway.
I think it works for me because Robinson’s comedy is predicated on saying out loud the thoughts that most of us probably have, but know better than to voice within earshot of others. His is the comedy of pure id. The way Robinson’s character spits expletives when he gets frustrated or surprised – as happens many times in Friendship – is funny because of how relatable it is (at least to me).
This debut feature from writer/director Andrew DeYoung – a TV veteran whose credits include directing episodes of Dave, PEN15, and Our Flag Means Death – is somewhat structured like The Cable Guy, but from the perspective of Jim Carrey’s unhinged cable installer Chip instead of Steven, Chip’s hapless victim, played by Matthew Broderick.
It was good to see Paul Rudd return to form in Friendship after his uninspired and rather boring performance in the underwhelming recent release Death of a Unicorn. His intonation when telling Craig to “stay curious” upon their first meeting is priceless. There’s also a cleverly staged drug trip sequence involving Craig and a psychoactive toad that is as weird as it is mundane.
Friendship, like the comedy of Tim Robinson, is very much an acquired taste, but if you’re on its wavelength, you likely won’t be disappointed.
This will be my only update during the actual fest, but check back here next week for my post-mortem on DIFF 2025.
Onward!