SORRY, BABY (2025), written, directed, and starring Eva Victor, invites us into the intimate-life world of Agnes, a newly minted Liberal Arts professor. The unsavory underbelly of academic power dynamics and the sexual transgressions therein, play out against life’s ever-changing seasons and stages.
This off-beat tale, with its penetrating depth, authentic psychological sophistication, and quality cast performances have helped Sorry, Baby attain a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The NCP Film and Mind Series is delighted to film critic Peter Ranier and Chicago-based analyst David L. Downing to serve up cinematic and psychoanalytic morsels of thought.
David L Downing, PsyD, ABPP is a board-certified psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist, trained in Los Angeles and now in private practice in Chicago. Nonetheless, he is core NCP faculty and serves as Chair of NCP’s Progression Committee. He is a Past-President and Fellow of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychology. He is a retired tenured Full Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in Clinical Psychology of the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Indianapolis. He has held the presidencies of a variety of national and international psychoanalytical organizations, and has lectured widely. Dr. Downing has also been active Fellow and Board member in the American Psychological Association. He is the current President of Section I, Psychoanalyst Practitioners, of the APA’s Division of Psychoanalysis. He is the former Dean and a supervising and training psychoanalyst of the Center for Psychoanalytic Study in Chicago. He is also on the core faculty of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Dr. Downing is the author of a number of papers on the treatment of psychosis, psychoanalysis and film, and psychoanalytical education, to name a few. He is the co-author and co-editor of four books on psychoanalytical matters, including the treatment of psychosis. He was named to the APA’s Task Force on Serious Mental Illness and Severe Emotional Disturbance.
Peter Rainer is the film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and the NPR affiliate radio program “Film Week.” He is the author of Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1998 and is a three-time winner of the LA Press Club’s criticism award. For fifteen years he served as chairman of the National Society of Film Critics. He previously served as film critic at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Los Angeles Times, New Times, and New York Magazine. He has taught and lectured at colleges and film schools around the world. He also wrote and co-produced the A&E documentaries on Sidney Poitier and the Hustons.
