Come See Me in the Good Light (Ryan White, 2025). This is an astoundingly intimate documentary. Director Ryan White does a fine job of balancing the heaviness of Andrea Gibson’s protracted bout with cancer with a deeply felt consideration of their humanity. Giving plenty of screen time to the experience of Gibson’s wife, Megan Falley, has a lot to do with that particular attribute of the film. Come See Me in the Good Light is so focused on the physical and emotional toll of terminal illness that it almost plays like a procedural of preemptive grief. Powerful as the approach is, some other details feel slightly shortchanged. The financial damage wrought by a broken U.S. health system, for instance, gets no more than a passing comment. More disappointing is the distance the film keeps between Gibson the patient and Gibson the creative force. I wish Gibson’s own art was showcased more. The moments that are given over fully to them presenting a poem on stage are stunning.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025). Ferocious and bravely relentless in its abrasiveness, Mary Bronstein’s film is a feminist firestorm. Linda (Rose Byrne) is a mother who is driven to the brink of exhaustion by the heavy medical problems endured by her daughter (Delaney Quinn). The father is away for work, leaving Linda to shoulder the burden of care entirely on her own while also balancing stressful work as a psychotherapist. Bronstein makes daring, fascinating choices throughout, including keeping the daughter mostly unseen. In the grammar of the film, the daughter is an impediment for Linda rather than a full-fledged person. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You constantly, ruthlessly tests the audience’s sympathy for the lead character. Bronstein’s script regularly has Linda making terrible choices, all of them logical responses of her emotionally battered state. The hallucinatory elements of the film don’t always work for me. It feels like Bronstein is straining for unsettling visuals when the ferocity of her main story is more than enough. It’s Byrne’s fearlessness that impresses the most. Her performance is one of the few that deserves to be described as undeniable in its impact.

Song Sung Blue (Craig Brewer, 2025). Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) is a Milwaukee singer and musician who’s grown weary of the hackneyed tribute gigs that make up his main income. He starts a romance with Claire (Kate Hudson), a fellow performer on the circuit, and she encourages him to develop an act that he’s passionate about, a loving celebration of Neil Diamond. Song Sung Blue is based on true events that were previously covered in a documentary directed by Greg Kohs. For the fictionalized version, I understand that writer-director Craig Brewer wants to make space for all the startling twists of fate experienced in real life by Mike and Claire, who go by the monikers Lightning and Thunder on stage. Even so, it’s a cinematic crime that this film isn’t, say, a tight hour and forty-five minutes rather than stretching to more than two hours. The film is better when Brewer emphasizes the clear crowd-pleasing parts of the story and worse when he lets the heavier drama curdle into melodrama. Hudson really is pretty great here — the Oscar nomination isn’t undeserved — and there are nice supporting performances by Ella Anderson and, of all people, Jim Belushi.