Hilarious and profound The History of Concrete cements John Wilson’s cinematic reputation

Hilarious and profound The History of Concrete cements John Wilson’s cinematic reputation BARRY HERTZ PUBLISHED 53 MINUTES AGO Open this photo in gallery: John Wilson's feature film debut, The History of Concrete is about far more than the second-most-used substance in the world (after water). JOHN WILSON/SUPPLIED COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. The History of Concrete Directed by John Wilson Classification N/A; 101 minutes Opens in select theatres Sept. 25 Critic’s Pick It takes a singular filmmaker to make the most glamorous and expensive situations imaginable look like dirt-cheap garbage. To portray, say, a luxurious dinner in Los Angeles with Kim Kardashian as the harshly lit gathering of sycophants that it really is. Or to unearth the flop-sweat anxiety of frayed nerves and bad skin that backgrounds the ostensibly glitzy environs of the Emmy Awards. But such are the unrivalled talents of documentarian John Wilson, who has been gifted with an eye for stripping our world down to its no-frills basics, and still somehow revealing a cold, raw beauty deep within our dumpster fire of a world. The American filmmaker is best known for his three-season HBO series How to with John Wilson, in which he used seemingly simple queries such as, “How to improve your memory” or “How to put up scaffolding” as prompts to paint outrageous, eccentric, absurd but above all poetic portraits of American life that are all too often airbrushed to palatable pleasantries by his cable-TV colleagues. His episode looking into “How to appreciate wine,” for instance, begins with Wilson exploring the vagaries of the sommelier world but ends with the filmmaker – who narrates each episode but rarely puts himself on screen – revealing his history with the founder of the infamous NXIVM cult. Wilson’s overarching vision is ugly yet beautiful, simple yet profoundly strange. Fall culture preview 2026: All the films, television, exhibits, music and more to look forward to this season And now, Wilson has made his feature-film debut with the hilarious and beguiling The History of Concrete, which, as you might guess by this point, is about far more than the second-most-used substance in the world (after water). Open this photo in gallery: Wilson has not only delivered a solid primer on concrete – which works on a practical, philosophical and even existential level – but…