Part of a group of wunderkind indie filmmakers that emerged in the haze of the 1990s Sundance movement, which counted Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, Bryan Singer, and Todd Haynes amongst them, writer/director/actor Edward Burns had arguably one of the biggest debuts. His first feature, 1995’s The Brothers McMullen, premiered at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and won the top Grand Jury Prize.
Made on weekends for a scant $25k while Burns was working as a PA for the news/talk show series Entertainment Tonight, it would arguably be his highest critical and commercial moment. Reviews for the film were glowing, equally elated with its narrative about Irish-Catholic brothers navigating love and family in Long Island, as they were with Burns’s own story of making it. Roger Ebert would even collapse these narratives when he remarked in his review, “Lots of young directors make independent films on weekends, but few of them show Burns’ introspection and serious purpose in a film that is, also, intermittently, a comedy.”
Burns would write about this indie ethos in his 2015 memoir/manifesto Independent Ed, where he notes:
“When I sat down to write the script for The Brothers McMullen, I knew I had to keep my budget in mind. I was going to write a screenplay that I could shoot as inexpensively as possible. Which meant this story would be a contemporary tale with no car chases, shoot-outs, or large party scenes with hundreds of extras.”
So, it felt more than a bit odd when his return to the creative well of the McMullen clan, last year’s The Family McMullen, landed on HBO Max with a collective shrug. After 16 feature films, two TV shows, and a novel since his debut, Burns has been prolific. Yet, The Family McMullen, like Millers in Marriage the year before it and Finnegan’s Foursome now in 2026, did little to reignite Edward Burns’s box-office or creative stature. Of course, Burns isn’t the only 1990s filmmaker to go back to the beginning in the hopes of reviving a seemingly stagnating career.
For example, Kevin Smith, another Sundance acolyte, premiered his debut Clerks at Sundance just a year before Burns. After his own creative slump, as well as personal health issues, he released the Jay and Silent Bob Reboot in 2019, followed three years later by Clerks III. While these films might seem like nostalgic regressions for the filmmakers — an attempt to recapture the type of run-and-gun ethos that brought them critical plaudits and long, stable careers — it’s increasingly obvious, for Burns at least, that he’s really only interested in an audience of one: himself.
Not that that’s a critique, per se. It’s just that with a prolific output, in addition to a shrinking audience, one has to wonder who Burns is trying to reach. With the release of his newest — Finnegan’s Foursome, a dramedy that premiered in June on VOD that strikes all of the greatest hits — it’s obvious that Burns has become so perfectly attuned to his own rotation of themes and preoccupations that bringing in a new audience has to be the furthest thing from his mind.
The film is about four members of the Finnegan clan who travel to Ireland for a family golf tournament and to spread the ashes of their recently deceased grandfather, a brusque golf pro who was emotionally distant to his two sons (Burns and Brian D’Arcy James). If those tropes sound familiar, perhaps you’ve also seen either of the McMullen films, The Fitzgerald Family Christmas, or Millers. Needless to say, Burns writes what he knows.
Finnegan’s Foursome is fine, which actually is a critique. It’s a film so utterly devoid of conflict and drama that one has to wonder if it was just an excuse for Burns to take his friends golfing in Ireland. Yet, its charms start to accumulate during its languid 121-minute runtime. There’s something soothing about hearing Irish brothers (and their children) bicker and shit-talk their way through 18 holes with the Irish coastline in the background.
Are there any revelations? No, but that seems to be the point. Burns has almost exclusively turned towards unfussy dramas about the problems of the upper class in his last three films.
All auteurs have their preoccupations, of course. Edward Burns’s filmography feels as if it’s attacking the same theme from every possible angle, with only the characters’ furniture and apartments getting an upgrade since the 1990s. We’ve got pent-up frustration with absentee and abrasive fathers, romantic ills that play out in apartments furnished by Restoration Hardware, and colorful, Irish, ball-busting. Names like McMullen and Fitzgerald and Finnegan populate, with a rotating cast of familiars: Connie Britton, Kerry Bishé, Michael McGlone, and most recently D’Arcy James, who’s been in the last four Burns films.
Yet when The Brothers McMullen was released, more than a few critics heralded the filmmaker as the second coming of Woody Allen, transposing Allen’s trademark Manhattan neurosis onto the Long Island Irish-Catholic crowd. Burns did little to dispel the comparisons, making a series of films that are so heavily influenced by the then-famed (and, of course, now infamous) New York filmmaker that one wonders if Burns might’ve done himself a disservice.
His 2001 comedy/romance Sidewalks of New York effectively recasts Allen’s Husbands and Wives, from 1992, for Gen X. His few excursions outside of the talky NYC-set indie romantic drama, including 2002’s moody crime saga Ash Wednesday, are even less known, and less acclaimed. These are odd curios in an oeuvre made up of singular fixations.
About That Vanishing Indie Ethos
So what happened to Edward Burns? Why does Finnegan’s Foursome feel like it’s already been memory-holed despite premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival less than two months before this writing? Compared to Kevin Smith’s similarly nostalgic and anodyne The 4:30 Movie (2024), which at the very least got some passing praise as a mild return to form, Finnegan’s Foursome seems destined to be fully forgotten by anyone who didn’t have a hand in making it. Perhaps because, unlike Smith and others in his Sundance cohort, or even Allen, Burns never built a singular following.
There’s no nerd-credentialing with Edward Burns films as there are with Kevin Smith or the same critical plaudits of, say, Richard Linklater or Todd Haynes, two filmmakers that also had films premiere at the same 1995 Sundance film festival as The Brothers McMullen with Before Sunrise and Safe, respectively. Indeed, despite having only a few years between films, Burns has only five films that are considered “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, an admittedly unfair metric that nevertheless captures his critical footprint (or lack thereof).
This might help explain why more than a few of his films have effectively been erased from public consciousness. His black-and-white drama Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies has seemingly only had a single screening at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival before falling into the black hole of unreleased indie dramas. Never mind that Variety critic Tomris Laffly called it “his most mature work to date.” Also, good luck finding his 1998 romantic drama No Looking Back or his 2010 indie rom-com Nice Guy Johnny. To watch either, you’ll need an eBay account, some spending money, and a DVD player.
While his 2015 TNT show Public Morals might be available to buy on various services, I’ve never met anyone who’s watched it, even if it’s a fascinating ten-episode genre experiment about NYPD officers on the public morals squad in the 1960s. Written and directed in its entirety by Burns, it’s a show that feels so wildly outside of anything he’s ever done that, of course, it’s fallen into a deeper obscurity.
Edward Burns is perhaps more prolific than he’s ever been, suggesting no problem finding the finances and cast/crew for these independent excursions. Millers in Marriage counts Gretchen Mol, Morrena Baccarin, and Patrick Wilson as its stars. Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies has Jennifer Ehle apparently giving what Laffly called “one of her career best performances.” (We’ll never know if this statement rings true, I suppose).
Is Finnegan’s Foursome worth your time? Perhaps, if you’ve already bought into the story of Edward Burns, filmmaker, where a single film is less important than the overarching narrative of his career. Because it’s only recently that his films have seemingly abandoned that guerilla style that put him on the map way back when. His 2007 dramedy Purple Violets was the first film to premiere to debut on iTunes, presaging the streaming-only revolution.
His 2011 two-hander Newlyweds was shot for only $9k, an absurdly small sum (and, not so shockingly, one of his best films). Like those reviews of The Brothers McMullen so long ago, the narrative of the process and the constraints that Burns put around his work is just as important as the actual film. As he continues in Independent Ed:
“Prior to creating my first television show, Public Morals, I made eleven movies in twenty years, and half were considered failures. They either didn’t find their audience or they got terrible reviews, and in some cases both. It happened and there are any number of reasons why. In some cases, the film wasn’t as good as we thought or the marketing wasn’t right. In other cases, we were just unlucky. In hindsight, I can see now that none of that matters. It’s not about the box office or accolades or the money or any of the other perks; it’s about the process. The only thing that matters is process.” (306)
Yet there’s something soothing about the idea that he’s perhaps a filmmaker alone, pumping out variations on a theme with the type of regularity so rarely seen from contemporary filmmakers, and a willingness to experiment in financing and distribution, if not exactly filmmaking and writing style. At this stage of his career, does he need to make films for anyone other than himself? That creative restlessness has seemingly evaporated with the last three features.
This also means that perhaps he is the closest thing we have to a writer/director like Woody Allen, a cringeworthy comparison, I know, considering the shameful sexual abuse allegations against Allen that have effectively overtaken the story of his career. (Burns, for the record, seems like a pretty normal guy). However, it’s important to remember that sometimes Allen, despite his horrid personal predilections, directed films so singularly good — Match Point or Midnight in Paris — that everyone is forced to remember that he was actually a good writer/director. Then, he’d go on to release a Scoop or To Rome with Love, falling back into the type of critical disregard that defined much of his late-stage work.
Edward Burns’s Finnegan’s Foursome is probably more in the latter category; a breezy film that’s a fine way to spend two-plus hours but will barely be a footnote to his career.
Burns has the ability to pivot, as well as an eagerness to redefine his filmmaking approach, if not always the content of those films. What does that look like? Perhaps another swing towards genre fare, or even another DIY project on a small budget. I don’t know, but I’m sure it won’t be long before we hear from him again.
In the meantime, check out Newlyweds or Ash Wednesday or even Public Morals. Despite their flaws, they represent the type of self-reliant ethos that Edward Burns has cultivated in his 30-year career and one that, I fear, is all but disappearing from indie filmmaking.