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The History of Concrete (2026)

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Hey, New Orleans. The new John Wilson documentary The History of Concrete is currently playing at Canal Place, which is likely only exciting to you if you’re already a fan of John Wilson. Convincing the uninitiated to join you on a Friday night for a documentary about concrete would take a heroically persuasive sales pitch, but fans of the show How To with John Wilson already know to expect that this doc will hardly be about concrete at all. Yes, Wilson’s comedic HBO docuseries is surprisingly fixated on urban infrastructure, but each episode gradually proves to be more about the infinite variety of people who populate New York City than the building materials of the city itself. As Wilson’s first feature-length effort in this project, The History of Concrete is very much just an extended episode of How To. It starts off as a willfully naive, wandering exploration of the history & production of concrete, but it’s constantly on the hunt for one-of-a-kind interview subjects to profile along the way. Wilson edits & narrates his voyeuristic man-on-the-street journalism with the same wry, soft-spoken humor that he deploys on his television show, including all of your favorite well-timed vocal tics & throat clearings to liven up concrete’s otherwise absurdly dry history. You don’t have to already be a fan of the show to find the movie funny or poignant; every episode of How To is self-contained enough to work perfectly well on its own, this extended one included. You’re just unlikely to spend your precious free time after work going to see a documentary about concrete unless you already trust Wilson’s Muppet-like voice.

If you are already a fan of How To with John Wilson, you might be worried about how the show’s format could sustain a 100-min runtime, nearly five-times longer than the usual episode length. Thankfully, The History of Concrete does a lot of that worrying for you; it’s just as much about the outlandishness of its own production as it is about urban construction materials. Wilson confesses early in the runtime that a major reason he stopped making How To episodes back in 2023 is that the show depleted his personal archive of digicam footage from public life in NYC. At a loss on how to start fresh without forcing his slice-of-urban-life observations into being instead of finding them naturally, he seeks out more traditional methods of feature-length commercial moviemaking. He learns narrative structure by attending a screenwriting workshop on how to successfully write & pitch a Hallmark Christmas movie, a course that is offered as a life raft for filmmakers who are struggling with the lack of sellable work in the industry’s current production dip. On the documentary-specific end, he discusses in voiceover how the only sellable subgenre in the current market is the “rockumentary”: fluff piece profiles of famous musicians that populate the splash page on every streaming service. His application of these industry lessons to his own work are, as you’d expect, ironic. When Wilson seeks out musician subjects to arbitrarily profile in his concrete doc, he’s exclusively drawn to no-name noise artists that he runs across in the D.I.Y. punk venues he frequents socially. He does eventually stumble onto a How To-worthy interview subject who works a double life as a liquor sales rep and the lead-musician in a dive-bar cover band, but that lonely, lost man’s screen persona does not exactly scream star appeal. He does offer Wilson an emotional core for the film’s narrative that can be edited into the vague shape of a Hallmark Christmas movie, but Wilson’s constant Zoom meetings with potential financiers don’t successfully convey the commercial potential of the project.

While Wilson continuously struggles to sell The History of Concrete to potential buyers in the industry, he immediately makes the clearest pitch to his audience yet about what makes his filmmaking style so compelling in the first place: documentation of mundane modern living while most other media is obsessed with recreating the past. Part of documenting the absurdity of everyday public life in New York City means that Wilson regularly runs across other, more robustly funded film crews. He’s at odds with the professional film & television projects that cross over onto his turf, not just financially but also philosophically. So many movies that film in the neighborhoods he frequents make an art project out of dressing the city up to look like its past historical self, instead of setting stories in those spaces as they look now. That’s what’s so quietly radical about the How To television show; it accurately captures the daily experience of modern city life, of meeting an infinite number of kind souls and unimaginable weirdos on public sidewalks and public transit from one task to the next. I even see my own specific city life reflected on the screen in the rare episodes where he attends construction-material conventions in New Orleans, including one for concrete. It’s oddly validating to see that mundane modernity treated with such wide-eyed reverence from John Wilson the character and with such barely-contained amusement from John Wilson the filmmaker. That’s especially true in The History of Concrete‘s case, since it offered the rare opportunity to laugh & react to urban life’s absurdism with a full theatrical audience instead of alone in my living room. It reminded me of going to see Downton Abbey movies in theaters in that way; Molesley’s colossal fuckups serving dinner to royalty weren’t any funnier in the movies than they were on the television, but they got much bigger gasps & laughs from a crowd that was happy to celebrate their favorite show together with likeminded nerds.

The History of Concrete never closes the loop on how it secured its own funding. I suppose that’s a detail best left to its Wikipedia page. It does manage to incorporate preposterous, meaningless footage of big-name celebrities (names as incongruous as Kim Kardashian, DMX, Jacob Elordi, and Michael Imperioli), so maybe that helped. None of those stars have half the impact of Wilson’s more typical interview subjects, though, like the lonely liquor-ambassador musician or the guy whose Gum Busters business scrapes gum off concrete or the guy whose Dead Ink tattoo preservation business might hold the secret to where the real-life Chef Boyardee is buried. Then, there’s the actual concrete of the title, which overwhelms the film’s visual language with the cracked & patched grey infinity of urban landscapes. Sometimes, the documentary can be sincerely informative about concrete, especially when slipping behind the scenes of municipal infrastructure to interview city workers about the scarily short lifespan of the concrete buildings, bridges, and overpasses we use everyday. More often, it seeks out the absurd instances where we’ve intentionally become disconnected from the direct impact of concrete, like at speed-bricklaying competitions or at virtual-reality concrete pours inside convention center tech showcases. Mostly, it’s all just an excuse to walk around and observe the people who populate the concrete around us both as intimate interview subjects and as distanced bugs-in-a-jar specimens of modern urbanity. I don’t know how you sell that idea to an audience who’s not immediately interested, but apparently neither does John Wilson, and it’s a miracle he’s gotten this kind of work distributed to our televisions & movie theaters in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet

Belly (1998)

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If the main metric of cinematic excellence is in the art of the moving image, it’s a grotesque injustice that legendary music video director Hype Williams was locked out of feature filmmaking after just one attempt, Belly. Just before venturing into the sleek futurism of his iconic music videos for TLC’s “No Scrubs” & the Janet Jackson/Busta Rhymes collaboration “What’s It Gonna Be?,” Williams sets this over-stylized action thriller just one year ahead of its release date, in the far-off distant future of 1999. Belly‘s intense monochromatic neon lighting vaguely recalls the sci-fi standard set by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner, even though the story it serves is more like a late 90s hip-hop version of GoodFellas. As you might expect from a music video auteur, Williams subscribes to the term “style over substance” as a personal mantra rather than a potential criticism. Belly’s visuals are as gorgeous as its dialogue is disposable. Its performances (mostly from musicians like Nas, DMX, T-Boz, and Method Man) and its overall narrative are so oddly constructed that the film practically qualifies as outsider art. However, 20 years later, there’s no one film that can be directly compared to its merits as a visual achievement. Long after the emptiness of the narrative & dialogue fade in your memory, the film still lingers as a sensory spectacle, a gold standard in the art of the moving image. If Williams had been paired with a stronger screenwriter for a second feature, I have no doubt he’d be hailed as one of the great auteurs of our time. His debut’s lousy 13% approval rating on the Tomatometer is entirely undeserved, though, as its ambition far outweighs its means. Belly’s vision of an MTV-minded, near-future crime dystopia is a powerful narcotic; getting hung up on whether it has something meaningful to say is almost beside the point.

Nas & DMX lead the cast as two tough-as-nails gangsters who’ve become incredibly wealthy though incrementally more dangerous crimes, but dream of leaving the game before it’s too late. There’s a nihilism to their wealth-hoarding that they both recognize as unhealthy (though Nas is by far the first to get there), as indicated by the line, “We’re born to motherfuckin’ die, man. In the meantime, get money.” The dialogue & acting are, to be honest, conspicuously amateur, with near-constant voice-over pulling most of the narrative weight. Thematically, the film can also be downright nasty in its function as a macho power fantasy, with gorgeous women dressed in lacy lingerie patiently waiting in sterile McMansions while their men shoot up nightclubs and coerce teen girls into acts of fellatio. The line between what’s supposed to be glamorous and what’s supposed to be grotesque is a grey area in the film, as everything is framed with a loving, stylized cinematic eye. We do know that theft & murder are A-okay in this world, but selling heroin is a bridge too far (a common theme in these kinds of crime narratives). The casual misogyny & homophobia are on much shakier moral ground, as they’re not directly dealt with in the text. Ultimately, the movie does attempt to pull most of its loose, frayed ends together in a few climactic monologues about the black experience in modern America. Reflections on the prison system, the ravages of addiction & gun violence, kids who’ll never make it past the borders of a housing project, and the spiritual promise of returning to Africa recontextualize the violent excess of the preceding 90min in a near-convincing last-minute turnaround. It’s difficult to know what to do with the information, though, since it’s philosophically at odds with the strange music video glamour of the film’s constant violence & macho posturing, but that moral tension is partly what makes Belly such a fascinating work.

It’s there’s any one clear way that Belly was ahead of its time, it’s in how it fulfills a recent push to pay attention to how we light & film black skin. Titles like Girlhood & Moonlight have earned much-deserved praise for acting as a corrective to a standard way of shooting that favored white complexions on the screen, but even they pale in comparison to the way Belly looks. Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, who more recently shot the “Formation” video for Beyoncé’s Lemonade project, creates otherworldly, monochromatic spaces lit in impossibly rich blues, reds, pinks, and browns. The way these hues compliment black complexions is never more evident than when the few white characters (i.e. cops conducting drug raids) invade these spaces to interrupt the reverie. Hype Williams pairs this lighting-intense vision with fashion photography-minded production design and a distinct sense of music video cool to establish an insular world that is only ever disrupted by the arrival of the aforementioned white cops. The way gun violence & misogyny also look cool in this in this otherworldly space is troublesome, especially in the opening, strobe-lit sequence where Nas & DMX shoot up a strip club & return to a gaudy McMansion homestead to “lay low.” That sense of danger & moral unease is distinctly build into the film’s charm, though. It’s also somewhat thematically undone in a climactic series of speeches about the plight of modern black America. There’s something oddly off-balanced about the image Belly is presenting and the (unclear) message it ultimately tries to convey, but the way it consistently carves out a thoroughly black, American space ties the whole thing together as a cohesive piece. It’s one of the many ways the film’s visual achievements outweigh its narrative shortcomings.

After the opening strobe-lit club raid, DMX entertains his guests at his gaudy McMansion by projecting Harmony Korine’s Gummo on the living room wall. Puzzled, Nas repeatedly asks variations on the question “What the fuck is that?” It’s an irreverently funny exchange that doesn’t hold much narrative significance, but does establish context of what’s to follow. Like Korine, Hype Williams is a highly skilled outsider artist whose approach to cinema is much more concerned with visual, stylistic provocation than it is with having something cohesive to say. His music video work alone should establish him as one of the great directors of our time, but I still find it shameful that he hasn’t made a second feature film in the 20 years since Belly. Where Korine has been afforded the space to develop his voice as a feature filmmaker in the public eye, Williams came out near fully-formed with a powerful debut, then returned to directing short-form videos. The critical disappointment with Belly may have been a result of the movie being framed as an MTV-era commercial product instead of a werido art piece like Gummo. Don’t be fooled by the inclusion of Kurt Loder & the stacked cast of big name, late 90s rappers. This is the exact kind of shaggy, off-balance visual piece that should be projected on the living room wall after a long night of partying so that your friends can ask in wonder & disgust, “What the fuck is that?”

-Brandon Ledet