Is This Thing On? (2025)
Directed by Bradley Cooper
As their marriage quietly unravels, Alex faces middle age and an impending divorce, seeking new purpose in the New York comedy scene while Tess confronts the sacrifices she made for their family—forcing them to navigate co-parenting, identity, and whether love can take a new form.
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18 films that influenced Is This Thing On?
What critics say influenced Is This Thing On?
Dern, having played a high-powered divorce lawyer just a few years ago, embarks on her own marriage story here.
Audiences might draw comparisons to Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, due to the topic of divorce and another magnetic performance from Laura Dern.
Although unintentional, the film would make a suitable companion piece with Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), for which Dern won an Oscar.
Is This Thing On? shares a touch of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in its portrayal of comedy as catharsis, but its emotional DNA is much closer to Marriage Story: intimate, piercing, and unwilling to look away.
This has become one of my favorite movies about marriage, the likes of Marriage Story, Past Lives, and Kramer vs Kramer, though that one is more of a divorce legal drama.
Comparisons to Noah Baumbach’s thematically similar divorce picture Marriage Story, which earned Dern multiple acting prizes, are inevitable, although Is This Thing On?’s novel milieu should help distinguish it.
…(films like Before Midnight, Kramer vs. Kramer, and even The Parent Trap ponder the idea of reconciliation with more profound or even joyously fruitful verve)…
This has become one of my favorite movies about marriage, the likes of Marriage Story, Past Lives, and Kramer vs Kramer, though that one is more of a divorce legal drama.
There’s so much success in Is This Thing On?, which is destined to become a family-drama classic like Marriage Story and Kramer vs. Kramer.
Is This Thing On? shares a touch of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in its portrayal of comedy as catharsis, but its emotional DNA is much closer to Marriage Story: intimate, piercing, and unwilling to look away.
Though Is This Thing On? has echoes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, another story where a separated parent finds purpose through spilling their guts on stage, once Alex’s comedy has served its function by providing him with therapy through public confession, the film largely shifts to being a story about Alex putting his family back together.
…he also doesn’t display the raw, Mrs. Maisel-like aptitude that leads to a manager chasing him down the street afterward wanting to make him a star…
…whether it’s Bob Fosse’s Lenny or the Mary Elizabeth Winstead-starring All About Nina, they’re able to translate the disparity or similarity between life on stage and life off it…
I’ve always found the idea of making a movie about stand-up comedy so interesting, whether it’s Bob Fosse’s Lenny or the Mary Elizabeth Winstead-starring All About Nina, they’re able to translate the disparity or similarity between life on stage and life off it.
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…whether it’s Bob Fosse’s Lenny or the Mary Elizabeth Winstead-starring All About Nina, they’re able to translate the disparity or similarity between life on stage and life off it…
I’ve always found the idea of making a movie about stand-up comedy so interesting, whether it’s Bob Fosse’s Lenny or the Mary Elizabeth Winstead-starring All About Nina, they’re able to translate the disparity or similarity between life on stage and life off it.
Max Ophüls knew this, as his dizzying La Ronde shows…
…(films like Before Midnight, Kramer vs. Kramer, and even The Parent Trap ponder the idea of reconciliation with more profound or even joyously fruitful verve)…
…(films like Before Midnight, Kramer vs. Kramer, and even The Parent Trap ponder the idea of reconciliation with more profound or even joyously fruitful verve)…
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If A Star Is Born and Maestro were self-consciously heavy stories about the damage wrought by adulation—how fame, like myopia, can become a barrier to creativity—Is This Thing On? finds Cooper working in a more upbeat vein.
Is This Thing On? is not flashy in the ways that A Star is Born or Maestro was.
Is This Thing On? is a less obvious fit for the New York Film Festival than Maestro, which played the fest two years ago…
…taking on the biopic of one of America’s great composers with Maestro…
Like Cooper’s previous directorial films, Maestro and the A Star Is Born remake, it takes sentiments and stories we often take for granted and breathes a new sense of humanism into them.
Su segundo film fue «Maestro» (2023), una biopic de Leonard Bernstein más centrada en sus relaciones amorosas que en su profesión.
…in what may be the first Hollywood quasi-biopic of an 8 Out Of 10 Cats panellist…