‘Concessions’ review: Michael Madsen stars in thinly sketched elegy for the moviegoing experience

Dir/scr: Mas Bouzidi. US. 2025. 90mins.

An elegy for the communal filmgoing experience — a ritual once central to US life that has faded in relevance in recent years — writer/director Mas Bouzidi’s feature debut takes place during the final day of a long-running small-town theatre. But this wistful ensemble piece never builds much comedic momentum, nor does it capitalise fully on its poignant premise.

 Feels more like a gentle shrug than a stirring tribute

Premiering in competition at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Concessions could court buyers due to its marketable hook, which should appeal to audiences who savour the ritual of seeing films on the big screen. Bouzidi’s low-budget comedy drama, based on his 2021 short film of the same name, does not boast major stars, although it does feature the late Michael Madsen in one of his final roles. Best described as a mixture of Clerks’ study of smart-ass slackerdom and Eephus’s affection for a beloved but fading tradition, Concessions may, ironically, prove too modest a commercial proposition to merit theatrical distribution.

It is Saturday at the Royal Alamo, an independently owned movie theatre in upstate New York that is closing after 52 years. This means employees Hunter (Rob Riordan) and Lorenzo (Jonathan Lorenzo Price) need to figure out what to do with their lives. Lorenzo could accept a football scholarship and attend college in far-off Florida, but the sarcastic, slightly older Hunter seems directionless, refusing to be sentimental about the Royal Alamo’s shuttering by insisting that watching films in a theatre is passé.

Bouzidi’s short film focused on the relationship between those two employees, and starred the same two actors, but the feature expands its scope, also spending time with miserable theatre owner Luke (Steven Ogg) who feels he has let down his late father, founder of the Royal Alamo in 1973. We also meet the amusingly named Rex Fuel (Madsen), an ageing stuntman who wants to see one of the Royal Alamo’s final attractions, an action flick titled The Bad Bloke On Bedford Avenue, on which he worked. There is also a touch of the lyrical in the introduction of an unnamed, philosophical pipe-smoker (Greg Roman), who speaks directly to the audience about the beauty of cinema.

Cinematographer Derrick Chen shoots Concessions on 16mm, filling the scenes with a nostalgic glow that suggests this story is not just about one closing theatre — rather, it is a warning that filmgoing itself has become endangered. This small town boasts large, impersonal theatre chains, but the charming and slightly shabby Royal Alamo represents a bygone time. But Bouzidi wisely juxtaposes his romantic view with a jaundiced attitude toward the larger problems bedevilling the film business — namely, Hollywood’s reliance on crass sequels and cheap recycling of once-innovative ideas. Tellingly, the Royal Alamo is screening the dire-sounding action film Schindler’s List: Refueled and a Hamilton knockoff called Taft! The Musical. (One of Concessions’ most biting moments involves a scene from Taft! that features the wonderfully woeful song ’I Am President Now’.)

Concessions moves back and forth between its central figures, each of them at a personal crossroads, but Hunter emerges as its protagonist – disappointing, as the character is a fairly predictable movie-obsessed young man. Riordan invests Hunter with a performative bitterness that belies the sadness he is concealing about the closing of this theatre, which has provided him endless happy memories since childhood. But the character’s Clerks-like exchanges with fellow minimum-wage worker Lorenzo — including a tiresome conversation in which Hunter insists George Lucas’s Star Wars films are racist — lack sharp punchlines or a deeper sense of how cinephilia is struggling in a world of streaming services.

The rest of the ensemble also feels thinly sketched – including Madsen’s veteran stuntman, who spends his time telling anyone who will listen his stories about working with Hollywood stars like Kevin Bacon. Still, it is a melancholy performance as the late actor exudes a weariness meant to embody a dying profession being replaced by digital effects. In that way, Rex is in good company in Concessions, which is populated by melancholy souls whose lament for cinema’s shrinking cultural footprint feels more like a gentle shrug than a stirring tribute.