---
title: "Ella McCay (2025) review"
description: "This is a nearly four hour long neoliberal fever dream that asks us to find the good in a terrible system. You can tell this is written by a well-meaning 85..."
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/ella-mccay/
---

![A still from Ella McCay (2025)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/ella-mccay/backdrop.webp)

# Ella McCay (2025)

Feb 4, 2026 | Rated 2 out of 5 | Dir. James L. Brooks

This is a nearly four hour long neoliberal fever dream that asks us to find the good in a terrible system. You can tell this is written by a well-meaning 85 year old billionaire.

Ella McKay is about a good but flawed woman trying to make change in a corrupt system. The plot is simple. The screenplay is needlessly complicated - insane flashbacks, fractured timelines, narrative detours that add nothing. There is no way in fucking hell this movie warranted a three and a half hour runtime.

I did find it sweet how throwbacky it felt. It made me yearn for those days, and I do love James L. Brooks’s early work - Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, the stuff that had heart and edge in equal measure. But this is late Brooks. This is a well-meaning 85-year-old man who’s amassed an ungodly amount of money, looking down upon us from on high and saying “It’s okay, the system works, right?”

It doesn’t. And this was a tough watch.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/ella-mccay/)

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