MOVIES: The History of Concrete (2026, John Wilson)

John Wilson is to documentarians as Douglas Adams is to novelists. There is a topic/plot in their work, but only as much of it as is absolutely required to hold together the digressions which are really at the heart of what they're doing. So it's not surprising that this documentary, while it touches on concrete, wanders far afield to cover a business that preserves the tattoos of the deceased as framed artwork, a 3,100 mile road race that consists of running around the same New York block for months, a Christmas album from the late rapper DMX, and a trip to Rome that pretty much blows the budget for the movie.

It is Wilson's distinctive gift to edit together images from his near-constant videotaping of New York street scenes, interviews with people in quirky professions (meet the guy who sandblasts chewing gum off the sidewalk!), and the slightly fumbling drone of his own second-person narration into dryly witty meditations on urban life. The strange topical leaps and the unexpected detours become a commentary on human interconnection, and the meandering always does somehow circle back to the ostensible topic, if only tangentially.

To the extent that this movie has a throughline, it's Wilson's struggle to find funding for a movie on such an apparently drab topic. We get Zoom calls with potential funders, and the way the light drains from their eyes when they hear the title becomes a running joke. Wilson heads to the one course the Writer's Guild is offering during its strike -- "How to Write a Hallmark Movie" -- and decides to use those guidelines as a guide to structure his movie, which he sort of does, in his own digression-forward way.

My expectations were high walking into this movie. I adored his 3-season HBO series, How To with John Wilson, which gave us similarly semi-focused 25-minute video essays on things like how to appreciate wine, or make small talk. And the best moments of the movie live up to the standard set by that show. But it's a lot easier to make this style work in short doses than it is for 100 minutes, and the droll melancholy does wear thin at times.

If you're already a Wilson fan, this will give you enough of what he does well to be worth your time. If you're a newcomer, it might be a good idea to look at an episode or two of the TV show first, because Wilson is not everyone's cup of tea, and if you're not on his wavelength, this will be a very long 100 minutes.