Mixing Fact and Fiction: More cinematic notes from the Stream & Dream Lounge

By Juan-Carlos Selznick

Small Things Like These– a 2024 film adapted from the novel by Claire Keegan, Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small Irish town. It’s Christmas 1985, and as he makes his rounds, Furlong begins to notice small signs that something is very much amiss among the young women housed as unwed mothers at the local convent. The story has echoes of the real-life Magdelene Laundries scandal, but the film’s chief focus is on the everyday lives of people trapped in the stifling moral paralysis of a tyrannically Catholic town. Murphy’s Furlong is a rather quiet guy who is reluctant to make waves, but on this particular Christmas, the “small things” he’s been glimpsing are slowly awakening feelings he can’t ignore. Director Tim Mielants and his crew give the film a richly textured sense of time and mood and place, and Cillian Murphy’s quietly brilliant performance tells much of the story with wordless behavior. Plus, spoiler alert, the ending is both genuinely “happy” and hauntingly inconclusive.

Dark Winds– This TV series, adapted from Tony Hillerman’s fiction about tribal police detectives in Navajo country, is something I’ve enjoyed and admired through three entire seasons. But the final episode of the recently completed Season 3 was exceptional in ways that elevated my admiration even further. The final 45 minutes yielded a climactic chase sequence of cinema-quality intensity and then followed that with a surprisingly moving series of quieter scenes in which several individual personal dramas reached several subtly moving resolutions. The suspense in the chase sequence was uncommonly fierce and intimate, and the “resolution” scenes were a compelling array of happy endings variously haunted by heavy emotional costs. At the finish, I felt a little as though I’d just seen one of the best movies of 2025.
Footnote: Erica Tremblay, a producer-director who has worked on both Dark Winds and Reservation Dogs, has made her feature-film directing debut with Fancy Dance, a lively character/action drama set in tribal territories. Lily Gladstone is good in a wry sort of way, an anti-heroine role. All told, it’s a missing-woman tale that threads its way through a swamp of social and ethnic injustices, winding its way to a provisionally happy, variously haunted ending of its own.

Biopics x 4

Up first, two literary biopics that seem to have flown under the radar and are worthy of special mention, even though neither is lavishly praiseworthy.

Wildcat– This film, written and directed by Ethan Hawke, is a kind of hybrid portrait of the great short story writer Flannery O’Connor. It’s a meandering tale which mixes biography and fiction — sometimes indiscriminately, but mostly to intriguing effect. Hawke sometimes plays fast and loose with both the life story and the excerpted fiction, but the end results — more evocation than document of O’Connor’s life — have their rewards. Maya Hawke, the actor/director’s daughter, is good as the movie’s version of O’Connor, and the notable supporting cast includes Laura Linney, Willa Fitzgerald, Liam Neeson, Steve Zahn, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Philip Ettinger.

Dance First– In 1969, Samuel Beckett — author of Waiting For Godot and much else in fiction and drama— was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In Dance First, filmmaker James Marsh uses that event as a framing moment in which Beckett (nicely played by Gabriel Byrne) immerses himself in the reminiscences of a lifetime, a stream of remembered people, places, and events that becomes the substance of the entire film. Born in Ireland but fleeing to Europe early on, he will come into his own in Paris, writing in both French and English and making contact with cultural modernism in its mid century heyday. We catch glimpses of his involvement with the French Resistance in World War II and his sporting interests as well. But prime attention goes to his relations with fellow Irish expat James Joyce (played by Aidan Gillen) and with the women in his life, including especially his wife Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire). The overall result is more document than drama, always interesting but rather pale emotionally.

A Complete Unknown– This strand of Bob Dylan biography in film form might rate more as biographical episode than as a full-on biopic. For me, either way, it was consistently entertaining but rather oddly insubstantial. The crucial indication of that might be the tendency toward facile impersonation in the central performances. Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, are mostly sketching their roles — mildly sympathetic caricatures rather than full characterizations. Edward Norton, by perhaps ironic contrast, seems to fully inhabit his role as Pete Seeger.

Queer– Luca Guadagnino’s wildly stylized adaptation of an early William Burroughs novel qualifies as an offbeat biopic in that the main character (“Bill Lee,” lushly played here by Daniel Craig) is plainly a luridly fictionalized version of Burroughs himself. The raucously complex portrait that results — from the director of Call Me by Your Name and the author of Naked Lunch in wickedly brilliant partnership — puts this film well ahead of the three biopics mentioned above. And it helps a lot that Daniel Craig, after a long run as “James Bond”, so boldly and suavely inhabits “Bill Lee.”