Vick's picks movie reviews for January 2026
The American Revolution: While attending the Telluride Film Festival in the past, my partner and I were sitting at a picnic in town when we noticed the highly recognizable Ken Burns in line for food. My partner chatted him up and found him highly open and interested in his opinions on his work. But at this point, he had not put out what I think is indeed his masterpiece doc on his take of our homegrown revolution, which changed the world.
As I worked on my MA in history, I took many upper-division and grad courses on this same period and events (one of my profs even discovered a long-lost letter from George Washington). Still, I wish I had seen this newest Burns production at that time since it exposed me to so many more perspectives than before.
Having the two co-directors, Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt, and screenwriter/historian Geoffrey C. Ward collaborate really brought a unique freshness to our founding resistance against Britain. The persistent conveyance and weaving of what it meant in their own words, not only to the British but also to Native American tribes, Canadians, loyalists, women, slaves, other nations such as France and Spain, and many world groups, help us see that this conflagration was perhaps very much a civil war as well as a revolution.
That revelation, along with viewing many iconic historical figures as having both flaws and virtues, is presented as common sense for accurate history. The parallels and comparisons with our present historical and political situation and democracy are here as well.
Burns made this for PBS, with six episodes totaling 12 hours of viewing. Still, it never has a minute of wasted time because he is always clever on his use of Peter Coyote as the main narrator while peppering in a wide variety of American and British historians and highly recognizable voices of actors in various roles like Paul Giamatti, Jeff Daniels, Meryl Streep, Ethan Hawke, Laura Linney (we saw her at Telluride Fest also), Josh Brolin, Morgan Freeman, and more.
The reenactments and incredible paintings and art used (many with the Burns Effect wandering eye) blend effortlessly with the unfolding of the tumultuous political and often quite bloody and ruthless events before and during this seminal event in our nation and the world. This Burns epic breathes life and pertinent relevance.
Warfare: Now that we seem to be in a period where we are blowing up boats and people in international waters while being told we are at war and loudly rattling some rather deadly sabres, perhaps a review is in order of what war really looks like.
That is precisely what directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland accomplish as they place us with a Navy SEAL platoon on a mission in Ramadi, Iraq, one Mendoza was actually on during the Iraq War in 2006.
The nervous intensity builds as the team surveils a gathering of insurgents, and things go progressively wrong. Snipers and explosions bloom all over the place as the disaster is retold in real time based on the memories of the soldiers and Mendoza. We become brutally trapped along with the bleeding platoon, suffering the inevitable realities of modern conflict.
The surprising feature is the total lack of distracting backstory, which immediately forces the viewer’s attention to the gritty, here-and-now life-and-death developments. If you are expecting a war movie that somehow glorifies the endeavor, you should look elsewhere. It does have the bond of brotherhood that can result from such stressful circumstances, but it nonetheless poses many other questions overall.
The narrative requires, at times, some harsh, raw emotions from the actors, but the cast of Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Kit Conner, Charles Melton, and others seemed to fit like a unit. HBO Max is streaming this, and if our nation’s political events continue down the present path, it makes one wonder whether this undesirable scenario could recur.
The Gayly online. 01/14/26 @ 5:26 a.m. CST.