Somewhere in Queens (2022)

We loved Ray Romano's directing debut, a dramedy in which he plays a man whose son's basketball achievements are more important to the father than to the son. With Laurie Metcalf as the wife/mother, Jennifer Esposito as a sexy neighbor, Jacob Ward as the son, and what rogerebert.com calls a stacked cast of East Coast character actors (the one most familiar to me was Jon Manfrellotti who plays Petey).

Romano co-wrote the layered script with Mark Stegemann and they elicit plenty of laughs, some cringes, and some sweet and sad moments. The Italian heritage of the family is central and the big family scenes provide both humor and pathos. The basketball games are fun, too.

I'm streaming Mark Orton's lovely soundtrack on Apple Music and here's a list of the songs played in the movie.

Romano was last mentioned in these pages for Bad Education, and blogged more fully in The Big Sick, Metcalf for Lady Bird, and Orton for The Holdovers. This is Ward's feature debut. Manfrellotti was in Romano's serieses Everybody Loves Raymond and Men of a Certain Age, among others. Stegemann's credits include writing jobs, including executive story editor, on 54 episodes of Scrubs, and four each of Men of a Certain Age and Raising Hope, to mention a few.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics and audiences have found themselves averaging 90 and 92%. Jack and I watched it December 15 on Hulu.