Palookaville
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Theodore Collatos
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
JoJo wakes up in Brooklyn convinced he's the boxing legend Joe Louis and proceeds to walk through his deli shifts and family obligations in full delusion. A blow to the head as character development, basically.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A failed TV pilot that's better off failing — now it's a glorious untethered character sketch instead of a six-season slog. Loss for the network, win for us.
Collatos finds something Bressonian in JoJo's deli-counter delusion that he is Joe Louis — psychosis rendered as routine rather than spectacle. The kind of New York character study that earns its melancholy.
Loving the Bressonian shrug here — Collatos refuses to mine JoJo's Joe Louis delusion for either uplift or tragedy and lets the deli-shift naturalism do the bruising. Ensemble cast feels lived-in, and the pathos-meets-awkwardness register is harder to pull off than it looks.
Reviews
An off-kilter character battling a newly-induced psychosis, leaving open the question of what the man might make of himself next.