BRUNO
2007 · 34m · USA
Directed by Sam Goetz
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic
Derek, an asthmatic misanthrope obsessed with bicycles, and his sweet, all-American sitcom-loving cousin Bruno share a small house in Trenton, NJ. The film follows their day-to-day collisions as two temperamental opposites stuck together.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Asthmatic misanthrope plus sitcom-loving cousin, 34 minutes in Trenton — that's either gold or unbearable, no in-between. NoBudge wouldn't run it for half an hour if there wasn't something there, but I'm bracing.
Trenton-as-texture and a 34-minute commitment to two mismatched cousins suggests the patient regionalism of Ronald Bronstein or early Safdies, and NoBudge's straight-faced runtime warning ('buckle up') is itself a curatorial gesture I respect. A real character piece, if it earns its length.
Thirty-four minutes is a brutal length for a NoBudge character study — that page literally tells you to 'buckle up' — and committing to Trenton, NJ texture for that long is either patient regional realism or self-indulgent. With essentially no detail about craft on the page, I'm cautiously curious.