Vague Visages’ Concessions review contains minor spoilers. Mas Bouzidi’s 2025 movie features Michael Madsen, Steven Ogg and Josh Hamilton. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Mas Bouzidi’s Concessions takes viewers to the Royal Alamo Cinema on its final day in business. The story takes place in the modern day, something that’s inferred from the sight of vape pens and smartphones, and the fact that the theatre’s owner, Luke Plimpton (Steve Ogg), blames streaming services for the theatre’s demise. But while its setting is contemporary, Concessions’ spirit is pure 90s. 

Concessions’ whole set-up is similar to Empire Records (1995), following the staff of a small business over the course of a single, incident-filled day. Like Allan Moyle’s 90s film, Bouzidi’s 2025 movie neatly captures a work paradox — a theatre position is simultaneously the absolute dream job for any arts-obsessed kid and an exercise in relentless minimum-wage monotony. Being surrounded by movies and people who like movies is great. Slinging popcorn and sweeping floors for eight hours still sucks. 

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Hunter (Rob Riordan) and Lorenzo (Jonathan Price) like to pass their time behind the concessions counter by engaging in long, Clerks-style debates about whether George Lucas is a racist or if Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) was the last truly daring blockbuster. Over on the ticket booth, their vaguely Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ish colleague Deana (Lana Rockwell) spends her shift hiding behind a chunky old camera or a giant paperback, popping out occasionally to deliver a blunt bit of life advice. The plot, insomuch as there is one, unfolds with lackadaisical pacing of a Richard Linklater movie, and the film’s visual style often recalls Wes Anderson — lots of flat compositions and close-up shots, all of which burst with color thanks to Derrick Chen’s rich 16mm photography. 

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Naturally for a film obsessed with movies, there’s also plenty of Quentin Tarantino in the mix, especially when the late Michael Madsen arrives as an over-the-hill stuntman named Rex Fuel. He shows up looking like the platonic ideal of a QT Madsen character — sprawled out in a truck with a cigarette dangling from his hand, dressed like a cowboy and surrounded by empty whisky bottles — and then walks into the Royal Alamo and immediately recreates the “what if I’m in the movie” bit from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019).

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Basically, it quickly becomes clear that Concessions knows and loves its 90s films and filmmakers. And there’s a lot of fun to be had just sitting back and clocking the references, all of which gain an extra nostalgic glow from that gorgeous cinematography and the ghostly presence of Madsen in one of his final roles. Concessions is essentially a collage, taking bits of other films and sticking them together to make something pretty. But it struggles when it comes to time to say something of its own.   

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Over the course of Concessions, the Royal Alamo staff wonders about what the cinema’s closure will mean for them. There’s a tension between Lorenzo — who’s a young man with a whole post-Alamo life laid out neatly before him — and Hunter, who has been hiding out in this job for his entire adulthood. They seem to talk endlessly about this situation without the conversation ever moving meaningfully forward, occasionally tagging in Deana to offer a comment of her own. The dialogue is filled with the sort of insights that sound incredibly deep when you’re 19 but not nearly as profound afterwards, and much of it is written in a self-conscious, semi-literary style that quickly becomes a little grating. Simply put, Concessions is essentially a hangout movie, and these guys just aren’t that good a hang. 

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Outside of the workplace bantering, Concessions doesn’t seem that funny. Bouzidi constantly has the right idea for jokes but can’t quite make them land. Some of them are too labored, like a gag about an unfortunate tattoo that seems to drag its one note on and on, while other jokes are just too obvious — specifically, one about a Vin Diesel-starring Schindler’s List (1993) sequel feels like something BoJack Horseman (2014-20) would have come up with and then replaced it with something more creative. 

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The “almost but not quite” nature of Concessions’ comedy is best summed up by one of the fictional movies that’s playing at the Alamo on its final day — a Hamilton-style musical about U.S. President William Howard Taft, complete with that iconic gold-and-black poster, only with a much more rotund figure silhouetted upon it. It’s not a bad joke, just a highly unoriginal one — amongst many others, the Gears of War video game franchise made the same gag back in 2019, and the whole thing is inherently funnier when it occurs in a world of chainsaw-bayonets. The clip of “Taft!” in Concessions is more of a generic movie-musical parody than a send-up of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s particular style.

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In Concessions, Hunter is a man stuck in a stage of film nerd-ism that lots of young people go through, one defined by caustic opinions and a constant desire to argue over the most menial things. It’s a phase that most people grow out of when they realize that to be a good hang, you have to be more than the movies you love. Ultimately, that’s a step that Hunter still needs to take, and perhaps one that Concessions needed too.

Ross McIndoe (@OneBigWiggle) is a freelance writer based in Glasgow. Other bylines include The Skinny, Film School Rejects and Bright Wall/Dark Room.

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