Ella McCay (2025)

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.

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