Vick's Picks movie reviews for April 2026

 - Vick’s Picks
   by Vick Silkenpen

Together We Are Heavy: This 80-ish-minute documentary ran three times at the Stillwater Community Center theater recently during an important anniversary period in the university town of Stillwater. On March 14, 2025, a wildfire raged through neighborhoods and the surrounding countryside, destroying hundreds of homes.

This blazing disaster coincided with an annual event drawing thousands of visitors called the Mid South, a huge multi-day gravel bicycling and endurance festival featuring 100-mile events (some shorter, some longer) along with 50k and half-marathon running events on the surrounding red-dirt roads.

Director and filmmaker Josh McCullock was filming the inner workings and unfolding of that fateful 2025 Mid South, giving us an uncanny perspective on what goes into pulling off such a mammoth undertaking as cameras follow the District Bicycles main sponsors and creators of the festival, Bobby Wintle and his wife, Crystal.

Then, as the wildfire interjects itself in that town’s awareness, we watch in shock as the best laid plans begin to go awry. Chaos rears its head as the emergency deepens, and the wild winds of that day, mixed with dust, smoke, and flames, threaten everything. There were some misty eyes and even some sobs in the audience during the showings.

From the ashes, we see into the lives of some of the residents of Stillwater (including yours truly) as they try to pull their lives back together after such a fiasco. As I sat and watched this documentary, I noticed my own breathing rate increased, and my palms got a little sweaty, no doubt from a little triggering and residual PTSD. Those feelings can also come when I hear the wind whistling in our temporary, rented home or when I hear distant sirens. That is to be expected, since the same wildfire took our wonderful home, leaving only the chimney and some smoldering cinderblock.

But the doc takes us further into the events, with more positive endnotes as the community begins to rebuild with help from others, including many bicyclists who are raising funds to help those affected.

In the most recent 2026 Mid South, everything went very well, with strong participation from across the U.S. and, to a degree, globally. The phenomenal band lineup rocked the downtown finish line at Block 34 for days, and everyone will remember the positive party atmosphere. This doc will hopefully make the film festival circuit, have more special-venue viewings, and perhaps eventually be available online. It has some legs.

Nuremberg: Before I was a teen, I heard on the radio news that Adolf Eichmann, the fugitive Nazi organizer of Hitler’s “final solution,” had been captured, hanged and then his cremated ashes scattered at sea. I asked my WWII vet father for more on what this was all about. He referred to what happened to many of “them” and especially the second-in-command Nazi officer Hermann Goering. As he described his battles against the Nazis and their fall, it seemed somehow totally removed from my experience of life at the time.

The book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist is now brought to the screen (on Netflix) by director James Vanderbilt as a historical psychological thriller, starring Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Richard E. Grant, and more.

Malek is the psychiatrist Douglas Kelley in the U.S. Army and assigned the task at the end of the war of describing the personalities and analyzing the mental states of high-status Nazis captured and being put on trial for war crimes and other charges in the international court setting up in Nuremberg, Germany.

Reichsmarshall Goering (played well by Crowe) had previously surrendered himself and his family in Austria.

Shannon plays the associate justice Robert Jackson, who manages to establish the new international tribunal by lining up endorsements of countries and going so far as even getting the Pope’s grudging approval by threatening publicity of the church’s possible early complicity with the Nazi regime. 

Kelley is somewhat charmed as he engages with the narcissistic Goering, initially with the help of an interpreter, until it becomes obvious that Goering speaks and understands English. The mental dance becomes fascinating as Kelley struggles with his ambition to write a book about this psychological endeavor and with the confidential factors he should reveal to the prosecution.

In court, Goering denies knowledge of Jewish exterminations and defends himself as only participating in their planned exiles, even after the shocking films of the extermination camps are shown. However, his blind loyalty to a dead Hitler even in the present circumstance becomes revealed. But Goering has a way to avoid the hangman. 

What sticks with you is the obvious message that the quest to reveal what made these people into nefarious Nazis and murderers may not be that unique nor exotic to our species or even culture. In fact, Kelley spent the rest of his life trying unsuccessfully to sound the alarm about future regimes like the Nazis being allowed to form. The irony is that his own life ended by the same method as Goering’s.  

The Gayly online. 4/24/26 @ 6:17 a.m. CST.