Last Minute (2025)
Last Minute, Michael Cusumano's warm little period comedy, is the kind of unassuming short that sends you out with a smile and a pang of recognition. It is funny, relatable and nicely made, and I had a thoroughly good time with it. Three and a half stars.
Set in the days before the internet, it follows a single mother forced into a late-night scramble when her twelve-year-old son waits until the night before to start a major school assignment. With the clock ticking and no Google to fall back on, the two of them have to improvise their way through, and what unfolds is a sweet, comic portrait of a parent going to heroic lengths for her kid.
Its great strength is how sharply it remembers a particular vanished world. As the poster has it, before Wikipedia, before ChatGPT, there was Mom, and anyone who grew up in that era will feel a jolt of recognition. I certainly did. I remember those nights of homework done through sheer research, improvisation and blagging, cobbling an assignment together from whatever was in the house, and the film captures that scramble and that resourcefulness beautifully.
The performances are solid, with a nicely judged double act at its centre, and I was especially taken with how deftly it introduces its side characters, giving the little community around the pair real texture and comic life in a short running time. The soundtrack is good too, adding to the easy, affectionate period feel without ever overwhelming it.
Three and a half stars. Last Minute is not reaching for anything grand, and it does not need to; it is simply a good little short, funny, warm and wonderfully relatable, that turns a very ordinary domestic panic into something genuinely charming. A lovely, nostalgic small-scale gem.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from United States: The Drive (2025), Hot Water (2026)
More from the 1980s: Cinema Paradiso (1988), Ran (1985), Day of the Dead (1985)
More comedy: Lady (2026), Girl in the Night (2026), Flies (2026)
