André is an Idiot
(2025 | USA | 88 minutes | Tony Benna)

André is an Idiot opens with one of the most embarrassing and physically unsettling personal recollections from adolescence that I can remember seeing depicted on film. It’s a squirm-worthy story, told straight to camera that tells you right from the jump that you’re in for a documentary of incredible candor. The title refers to San Francisco advertising executive André Ricciardi and indeed the idiocy of the film surpasses that of the opening story of teenage self-pleasure turned horrifically painful. His greatest blunder, by far, turns out to have been brushing off his 50th birthday colonoscopy (even after his best friend suggested they do theirs together as a kind of spa day, except with far more excrement and sedatives).

For him, the consequence of an eighteen-month delay is that by the time his colon cancer is detected, it’s a stage four, almost certainly terminal. A lifelong creative and screwball, he turns this dire diagnosis into a headlong life-affirming irreverent documentary, in which he shows his version of facing cancer on his own terms. Like its subject, whose instincts for perpetual humor serve as a self-defense mechanism for himself and the people around him, the film refuses to wallow. A funny, clear eyed, and movingly personal view of living the last years of one’s life, even in the face of the ultimate unbeatability of death.

Get you damn colonoscopy!

André is an Idiot played as an official selection of the US Documentary Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is available for online viewing from January 30-February 2.