H IS FOR HAWK

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A
Editing: B+

One might be forgiven for watching H Is for Hawk and saying: We all experience grief, I get it! How many films in recent years have tackled the subject of grief, in one way or anther? And, across genres—countless horror films in particular, presented as “a metaphor” for grief. Grief, grief, grief! Bad grief, weird grief. Good grief!

Well, here’s the thing. I was much more taken with H Is for Hawk that I expected to be. And when it comes to grief, it really cannot be repeated too many times that everyone deals with grief in different ways, all of them correct. In this case, it’s quite the specific expression of grief: college professor and avid birder Helen (a wonderful Claire Foy) gets herself a goshawk to take care of as a massive distraction from dealing with the death of her beloved father (Brendan Gleeson, not given nearly enough screen time, most of which is in flashbacks of Helen’s memories). She lets the massive challenge of taking care of this bird of prey keep her from confronting her emotions, plummeting herself into a deep depression.

I went in thinking, based on the trailer, that this would be a story about a woman who adopts a bird and the experience helps her through her grief. But, it’s actually the opposite: she uses the bird as an excuse not to confront her grief. This does make for a pretty fascinating story, even as her mother (Lindsay Duncan), her brother (Josh Dylan), and especially her close friend Christina (Denise Gough, in quite the departure from her iconically villainous performance as Dedra in Andor) look on helplessly, and attempt to reach out to Helen with increasing futility.

This would all be compelling enough, honestly, but I must mention cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen, because so much of H Is for Hawk is beautifully, stunningly shot. Helen spends a lot of time building trust with the hawk she pointlessly names Mabel, building up to taking her out to fields and forests where the bird can hunt. This film features several scenes of Mabel hunting, and they are absolutely incredible, with some shots defying the imagination. I cannot find any information on whether CGI was used in this film, only reports of the painstaking manners in which cameras were camouflaged to pick up the birds they used for filming. Several stunning shots are in perfect focus of the bird in flight, though, and one memorable shot has the camera trailing the bird in flight—I can’t imagine how they did that practically, but it absolutely looks real. For an indie British drama about a woman denying her grief, they went truly above and beyond with the visuals in this film, to a far greater degree than they needed to. But it left me deeply impressed.

The questions it raises about keeping wild animals in captivity is perhaps another story. H Is for Hawk is impressively frank and objective in how it avoids any anthropomorphization of a bird of prey, and even Helen as a character is quick to clarify that this is a species that does not feel affection. Helen holds no illusions about how Mabel feels about her, and I love that about how this story is told—but, Helen also allows herself to get far too attached to Mabel. There’s even a moment when Christina says to her, “I think you might be overidentifying with Mabel.” Helen responds by saying she’s certain she is not, even though she clearly is.

But, beyond all that—why buy the bird to begin with? When Helen buys the bird, she meets the seller on a pier, and Christine, who is with her, says, “This feels like a drug deal.” Indeed. Conversely, H Is for Hawk features a memorable scene in which Helen is giving a public talk about Mabel, and a dipshit young man attempts to take her to task for “killing for fun,” as if a natural predator is just hunting for kicks. Helen is memorably struck between defending the bird of prey hunt as a natural act and getting flustered due to her state of grief. But what I often thought about, and what the film does not ever directly address, is whether any of this is actually good for the bird itself.

I can’t say that affected my appreciation for the story being told here, however. To what degree a film like this might upset conservationists, I have no idea. My focus remains on the fact that Helen is making ill-advised choices in the thick of grieving the loss of her father, and this is done incredibly well. I am frankly not a fan of any birds, and this movie gave me a new appreciation for them, so there’s that. I suppose we could have a separate conversation about the ethics of how the birds were used in the filming of this movie, and arguably we should have just left the source text of Helen Macdonald’s autobiographical book of the same name at that. To my mind, I am only here to judge what is onscreen, and ultimately, H Is for Hawk just really worked for me.

Helen (Claire Foy) walks her unconscious distraction through the streets of Cambridge.

Overall: B+

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Music: B+

The Testament of Ann Lee is a musical like none other. It’s almost like a musical on a technicality: it has people breaking out into song, for sure, but nothing lyrical or catchy. Instead, it repurposes actual, 18th-century Shaker hymns. The voices, especially that of Amanda Seyfried as the title character, are angelic. But, they are only ever used as a tool to convey deep piety and faith. There is even dancing, but in a sort of physical version of speaking in tongues—the faithful allowing the spirit to move them.

There is a curious and fascinating element to this film, in that it never casts judgment on Ann Lee or her followers. One might even be tempted to call her a cult leader, but we only see the story through her experiences. This is a woman who bore four children, all of whom died before reaching the age of one. The one sex scene that is included features Ann Lee and her husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), is early in their marriage, and completely devoid of tenderness or sensuality. Abraham is weirdly obsessed with a ritualistic act in which he whacks Ann Lee on the ass with a sort of broom of switches. It’s unclear to me whether there was some genuinely devotional aspect to this, or if he was just looking for an excuse to engage in a particular kink.

Whatever the case, Ann Lee clearly does not enjoy sex—whether because she’s never had it with her own pleasure in mind or because she’s simply not into it at all is perhaps an open question—and, as she allows herself to become the prophet of a religious movement, she makes celibacy a central tenet of their belief. You cannot be close to go when engaging in the pleasures of the flesh, that sort of thing. I would argue the opposite, but whatever. My life experience is nothing like this woman’s.

There’s something very odd, and detached, almost impenetrable, about The Testament of Ann Lee. It feels like the kind of “high minded” film that regular filmgoers just aren’t going to get. I felt like I barely got it myself. It has an excellent lead performance in Amanda Seyfried, solid performances among the rest of the cast, scenes that are very well shot, beautifully performed music that is otherwise fairly inaccessible to modern audiences. It’s the story itself that seems to aspire to greatness without quite getting there. I can easily imagine a select few people finding this film to be an amazing experience, but I could never fully connect with it.

This may just be a personal thing. While director Mona Fastvold, who cowrote the script with The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet, never cast judgement on the “Shakers” (so named because of how they dance in religious ecstasy), neither do they explicitly endorse them. The story is narrated, a little too much for my taste, by Ann Lee’s close friend Mary (Thomasin McKenzie), with clear reverence for her. We also see Ann Lee’s rise as a religious figure, from Manchester to New York, looked upon by Abraham with utter befuddlement. There’s a scene in which he demands she perform her wifely duties and I feared it would take a dark turn, which thankfully it doesn’t—although what he then does right in front of her is not much better. We’re clearly not meant to be on his side, but I never felt compelled to take her side either, at least not as a religious figure claiming to be the Second Coming of Christ in female form.

This is simply a telling of her story. Ann Lee certainly does suffer some serious hardships, over many years, from the deaths of all her infant children to a horrifying and degrading attack by neighboring locals in New England. There are suggestions of Ann Lee being a witch, but only somewhat in passing. I won’t spoil the age to which she lived, even though it’s a matter of historical record, but I found myself surprised by it. This is a film that follows her from childhood to her death, making it quite definitively a biopic. I’m not a huge fan of life-spanning biopics, and even here it seems like huge swaths of her life get gleaned over. And yet, clocking in at 137 minutes, the style of the storytelling often makes it feel like a bit of a slog.

Much of The Testament of Ann Lee is like an immersion into her psyche. Sometimes a religious-themed film is something conservative Christians can take as an extension of their own faith, but that does not seem likely here. I think Ann Lee is likely to be as alienating to faithful Christians as she would be to those of us who practice no religion at all. This is still a compelling idea, given that the movement she led is a variation on longstanding Christian beliefs from her own culture. It’s so insulated in this way that this film barely touches on her disdain for slavery when she witnesses it for the first time in New York, and we see just one shot of Shakers interacting with an Indigenous man. Surely there are countless nuanced implications here, especially considering this was a group of White people migrating from Britain to the “New World,” but Fastvold isn’t much interested in examining them.

This is all about Ann Lee, and her unquestioning faith in God—her God, anyway. She’s careful to state that people should join them of their own free will, but should they break the rules, they are cast out. One wonders if Ann Lee had a mental health disorder. It’s impossible to say, as this was so long ago that The Testament of Ann Lee essentially amounts of speculative fiction. A fair amount of that speculation is fascinating to me from an intellectual standpoint, but as narrative storytelling I found it to be just slightly less than the sum of its parts.

Overall: B

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

Lest we forget, after four movies, there are technically no zombies in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. They’re called the infected. And by this film, they are almost incidental. They’re just a normal part of the landscape, something the skilled survivors on the abandoned island of Great Britain dispatch with dispassionate ease—good guys and bad guys alike.

Although Alex Garland wrote and directed 28 Years Later, released just last June, and returning after having written the original 2002 Danny Boyle film 28 Days Later (I guess we’re all expected to just ignore 28 Weeks Later, released in 2007 and written and directed by neither of them—but still pretty good), Garland once again only wrote the script for The Bone Temple; the director now is Nia DaCosta, who directed Candyman in 2021, giving her horror bona fides, as well as The Marvels in 2023, giving her, let’s say, attempted-blockbuster bona fides. It would seem that The Bone Temple is DaCosta’s most critically acclaimed work to date by a healthy margin, and I would say she’s suited well enough for the project.

I found last year’s 28 Years Later to be compelling but flawed, with very high highs (including some stellar cinematography) and some very low lows, including the coda at the end which I still maintain was dumb as shit, when young Spike (the excellent Aflie Williams) is saved from attacking infected by a group of kids doing parkour off of rocks. The only appropriate response to that was: What the fuck is this shit? DaCosta evidently understands that, and opts not to show the “Fingers” gang doing any parkour in The Bone Temple, thank God.

In the opening scene this time around, Spike is forced into a fight to the death with one of the Fingers, and strikes a lucky blow to a main artery in a young man’s thigh. Aflie Williams is still very good in this film, but isn’t given very much more to do than look understandably terrified, forced into this gang of psychotics as an option barely better than dealing with the infected.

The flashy parts go to the two biggest names in the cast: Ralph Fiennes, who returns as Ian, the iodine-covered doctor who has built a shrine to the dead out of all their many skulls; and Jack O'Connell (previously seen as Remmick in Sinners—this guy knows from unhinged) as “Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal,” the leader of the Fingers and effectively a Satanist cult leader. Personally, I prefer the playful Satanists who use freedom of religion laws to expose Christian hypocrisy, but those guys wouldn’t fit in a 28 movie. This is horror, after all. We need at least one scene in which multiple victims are skinned alive just for the fun of it.

O’Connell really digs into a meaty part as a truly horrifying, human villain; the flip side of this coin is Fiennes, who really goes for it as Dr. Ian Kelson, taking the character’s nuttiness a step or two further than he did in the last film. It’s nice to see really talented actors having fun, especially when we get a subtle but unmistakable This Is Spinal Tap reference.

That said, last year’s 28 Years Later spent a whole lot more time on effective world building, placing us squarely in a place abandoned to these horrors for three decades, but with indicators of how life has moved on around the rest of the world, as well as some fascinating evolutionary changes to the infected. It had some truly funny moments that are noticeably absent here; The Bone Temple leans much harder into the gory-horror aspect of the storytelling of these movies. That doesn’t make it any worse, per se; I just prefer a nice sprinkling of humor. Still, I would have preferred a bit more of the world building as well, and this film sticks mostly to how horrible some of the survivors are—a well-worn idea that the original 28 Days Later already presented with far greater finesse.

We do once again get Chi Lewis-Parry with a giant prosthetic schlong as an “alfa infected,” which you might like to know if you’re into that sort of thing. We get no more evolutionary changes of the infected, but instead Dr. Ian Kelson makes some advances in the possibility of treatment—a concurrent narrative thread with Spike’s harrowing experience with the Fingers, through roughly the first half of the film.

The Bone Temple is also beautifully shot, though—not quite as stunningly as some of the sequences in 28 Years Later, but close. Cinematographer Sean Bobbit treats us to several fantastically composed overhead shots of Ian’s Bone Temple, particularly after he lights it up for a climactic sequence that is delightfully weird and features Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast.” The story concludes in this setting, with multiple sudden double-crosses that are pretty exciting, and in the context of a horror film like this, deeply satisfying.

The Bone Temple does have its own coda, and although it clearly sets up the next film (not likely to be released for a few years, as this one is not yet even in production), I feel fairly neutral about it, the surprising cameo it features notwithstanding. At the very least, it’s far better than the coda to 28 Years Later, which was so dumb it really dragged down an otherwise pretty great experience overall. In the end, albeit for different reasons, I feel the same about this movie as I did about the last one: a horror movie whose memorable performances and great cinematography don’t quite elevate it from being simply a solid B movie.

Take me to church!

Overall: B

GREENLAND: MIGRATION

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B-

Watching Father Mother Sister Brother and Greenland: Migration back to back is quite the one-two punch of bad movies—wildly different in every conceivable way, except they are bad. Oh sure, they both have their few barely-redeeming elements—again, in completely different ways—but the unredeeming qualities easily weigh them down. I wonder how many other people in the world have watched these two particular movies right after each other? Surely it’s just a small handful. Well, I’ll say this much for Greenland: Migration: at least it kept me awake.

I’m dropping the “2,” by the way, because that’s how the title card reads in the film itself. Posters and promotional materials are listing it as Greenland 2: Migration, which I don’t understand, because the two words together and unbroken actually work as a phrase, as well as a direct reference to what happens in the film. It’s arguably the only sensible artistic choice made in the final cut. And now, our hero, John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their now-15-year-old son Nathan (Roma Griffin Davis—not the same actor who was in the first film) are forced out of the Greenland bunker they’ve been living in for the past five years by tectonic plates causing earthquakes that tear it apart. Over the course of this film’s 98 minutes of utter preposterousness, they make their way to Southern France, where they understand an impact crater has somehow become a shield to all the storms and radiation and is lush green with life. Nobody talks about how safe this spot is from more meteors, by the way.

We’re meant to feel for this family undergoing harrowing hardships, but honestly, all things considered, John Garrity is leading a straight-up charmed life. Oh sure, he barely escapes a tsunami that we see obliterate what’s left of Greenland (a visual high point in the film), and he encounters marauders, and he nearly falls to his death in a somehow dried-up English Channel, among other things. But also, nearly every step of the way, the Garritys encounter some kind-hearted soul willing to help them out. Someone is always coming along to help them through whatever scrape they’re in, far more than would ever realistically occur in an actual post-apocalyptic wasteland. But we’re not here to think about that, we’re here to be entertained.

They even pick up a very pretty teenage French girl along the way (Nelia Da Costa), and director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen) is surprisingly subtle about how we definitely need these two beautiful teens to start making beautiful babies. Maybe part 3 in this franchise can be called Greenland: Copulation. It wouldn’t be any less ridiculous than anything we see in Migration, which is easily the dumbest movie I have seen in recent memory.

There’s a peculiar quality to Greenland: Migration, that almost saves it, this sense that it barely takes itself too seriously. This is not a movie that is “in on the joke,” which in a way makes it more fun. There are plenty of laughable moments that are not intended to be. There’s a death scene in which a callback to an earlier scene is used, where Nathan recites a prayer he previously questioned. Never mind that in the scene being referenced, John is burying the body of an expendable character who had been in the car with them, and I just thought: These guys just dodged a bunch of meteors. I would not be wasting time burying a body. To say this film is filled with lapses in logic would be an understatement. In another scene, when John has run out of bullets defending his family against marauders, Allison comes to the rescue with her own gun. The thing is, we have only ever seen John get handed a gun, so where the hell did Allison get hers? I guess she pulled it out of her ass. She never seemed uncomfortable sitting on it, so color me impressed.

I should note that I am hardly the only person being much harder on Greenland: Migration than I was on the original Greenland, which was originally scheduled for release in 2020 but later released on VOD and which I did not watch myself until the VOD price went down, in February 2021. At that time, most of us were still working from home if we had jobs where that was possible, covid was still an actively scary thing, and a movie like this provided welcome escapist entertainment, even if it was a bit darker than most disaster movies. It didn’t hurt that it was relatively well paced and was better than most might have expected, particularly on a $35 million budget.

Well, Greenland: Migration had two and a half times the budget, and it is markedly worse. This time, it isn’t better than expected—it quite squarely meets expectations, and that’s not really a compliment. Gerard Butler pivoted into a full-time career of these B-movie disaster or action vehicles, several of which have actually been fun on their own terms, but we’ve reached the point where we’re getting diminishing returns even in that context.

So here’s the key difference between Greenland and Greenland: Migration. The first film used its special effects sparingly and effectively, and this film leans so much harder into the effects that their still-limited budget is even more apparent. This could have been a compelling survivalist drama if the script weren’t so deeply stupid, which means that even with what tools they had available, they could have at least entertained us with more thrilling set pieces. The greenland tsunami that we see is very early in the film, and the most thrilling sequence in it. It’s all downhill from there. Or rather, across the Atlantic Ocean, through a flooded Liverpool and a dried-out English Channel (someone explain this to me), and across war-ravaged France from there. There is a meteor shower that recalls the coolest action in the first film that’s relatively thrilling, if brief.

But in the end, something so dumb occurs that I covered my faces with my hands while saying “Oh my god.” This film has an earnestness that has no self-awareness, which makes it amusing in its way. I laughed several times. And now I can check this one off my list, and never watch it again.

I am stunned too. By how dumb this is.

Overall: C+

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C-

Look. Don’t talk to me about the “beauty in the ordinary.” We all get more than enough of the ordinary just walking down a residential street on any given day. Or, in an example much closer to the vibe of Father Mother Sister Brother, simply staring at a blank wall.

Every time I see a movie like this—or, more to the point, a movie that leaves me baffled by its very existence—I find myself imagining the talent reading the script for the very first time. All these people, in this case an ensemble cast of eight mostly-great actors, wanted to do this?

It would seem there is a whole lot here just flying way over my head. Over at MetaCritic.com, this film has a rating of 76 out of 100. It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 81%. It seems worth noting that the user ratings on these sites are 6.4 out of 10 and 46%, respectively—and there’s nothing “woke” here for people to stupidly review-bomb. This may be a rare case in which the populist response is actually the voice of reason. You won’t find any pretensions toward an inflated sense of worth in this review—Father Mother Sister Brother does more than enough of that on its own.

Which is to say: holy Christ was I bored by this movie. In my opinion, writer-director Jim Jarmusch has a spotty record at best; my favorite film of his would have to be Only Lovers Left Alive, about a vampire couple contending with the prospect of being together for eternity, and I gave that a solid B. It was an absolute thrill ride in comparison to this film.

Jarmusch’s project this time is to present an anthology, three separate stories with a thematic connection: the death of a loved one hangs in the air at all times. There are some viewers who find something profound in this. I did, too: profound boredom. Halfway through the first story, “Father", in which Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play siblings on a deeply awkward visit at the home of their widowed father played by Tom Waits, I thought: Is the whole movie going to be like this? It was not long into the second story, “Mother,” in which Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps play sisters on an annual visit for tea with their mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, before I realized: Yes, I guess it is. And when the third story was presented as “Sister Brother” and I realized there was only one more story and not two, I thought: Oh, thank God. In that one, by the way, Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore play twins visiting the emptied home of their parents who died in a small plane crash while one of them was flying it.

There are several details Jarmusch playfully—I use that term loosely—puts into all three stories. All of them feature extended shots of the adult children driving cars. All of them feature characters wearing, and commenting on, a Rolex watch. In all three of them, one character utters some version of “Bob’s your uncle.” In all of them, the characters have tea—although in the third one it switches to coffee. In only the first and third one, a toast is made with their drinks; in the first the question is asked whether you can toast with tea, and in the third the question is asked whether you can toast with coffee.

Playing the game of keeping track of these common details in all three stories is the best chance you’ve got at staying awake. Seriously I could have slept through this entire movie and gotten as much out of it. Even identifying the common details got tedious after a while, because it was the closest thing to anything actually happening in any of the scenes, and by the end these touches felt forced and contrived.

I took particular issue with “Sister Brother,” in which the twins’ backstory made little sense. They’re clearly in France, they’re ostensibly visiting the apartment they grew up in, but they both have American accents? Maybe the family moved here when they were teenagers. But then they examine multiple IDs and birth certificates left behind by their parents, and this is somehow the first time they learn they were born in New York.

Father Mother Sister Brother is brimming with intentionality; it’s clear that nothing in it is accidental—including the long, awkward silences that characterize most of the 110-minute running time that felt to me like an eternity. I can’t remember the last time I was so happy a movie was over. There is a tone here not far off from that of the 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which somewhat famously topped the latest Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll in 2022. That film also marinates in the ordinary, only in that case for three hours and 22 minutes. The key difference is that Jeanne Dielman has a point it makes far more clearly. I left the theater at a loss as to the point in Father Mother Sister Brother.

Maybe Jarmusch is your thing. He really isn’t mine.

Overall: C

THE SECRET AGENT

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Those Brazilians, man. They sure know how to convince the world that their movie is significant, worthy of attention, and worthy of awards. The did it with I’m Still Here—a much better film, in my opinion—last year, and they’re doing it again with The Secret Agent this year. The thing is, I’m not fully convinced. Sure, this is a competently made film, but it also takes some truly bizarre turns, and it overall strikes me as compelling but flawed.

More importantly, The Secret Agent clocks in at 161 minutes, and I cannot see any reason why that was necessary. There is a climactic sequence that is genuinely exciting, the kind of crime thriller stuff you love to see in the cinema—but it happens after a solid two hours of languid plotting. I hesitate to say it was worth the wait.

I don’t even fully understand the title. How is Armondo (Wagner Moura) an “agent,” exactly? Does going into hiding from government officials who have put out a hit on youn make you a “secret agent”? This title suggests a spy thriller, but Armondo doesn’t spend any time spying. Granted, he does assume different identities, and depending on the circumstance he is known as Fernando. (To muck things up even further, Armondo also has a young son, Fernando, who we later see in flash-forward to present day, and the adult Fernando is also played by Moura.)

Don’t get me wrong, I actually liked The Secret Agent. I just have a lot of nitpicks, and enough of them to leave me mystified as to the idea that was one of the year’s best films. For example: there’s a single tonal shift that is so wild a departure from the seriousness of the rest of the film that I found it to be a true “What the fuck?” moment. It has to do with a running subplot about a severed human leg, first discovered swallowed inside a shark, and later snatched by local law enforcement and dumped into a river. We cut back to our regular programming for a while, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, the narrative jumps to the leg washed up on a riverbank, and it suddenly twitches on its own. It’s alive! Suddenly we’re in a park with a bunch of late-night public sex going on, both straight and gay. In one of the latter cases, a guy on his knees giving head is completely naked—like, what? did he just walk there from home without his clothes? or did he completely strip and toss his clothes aside in the park just to give head? This really isn’t how these things go down. Anyway, this severed leg with a bloody stump at about mid-thigh just goes on the rampage, hurling itself through the air to kick all the horny park patrons in the face, leaving them screaming and bloody.

I was stupefied. To be fair, I suppose, this sequence jumps to the group of people being protected in secret, Armando among them, reading this account from the local newspaper, cracking up at how the story is written as though this really happened. It turning out to be a sort of fantasy sequence notwithstanding, it’s a whiplash-inducing shift in tone.

There’s a lot of the rest of The Secret Agent that I quite liked; I might even be more inclined to think of it as a Great Movie if it simply cut out that attack-leg sequence altogether, and cut the rest of it to maybe half an hour shorter. The acting is solid, especially Wagner Moura himself, as a man achieving an outward calm while clearly often being deeply frightened. In the opening sequence, which I would argue is itself overlong, Armondo is stopping for gas after days of travel, and there’s a random dead body covered by cardboard in the dry dirt nearby. Armondo is clearly unsettled by this, but he also needs gas. This effectively sets the stage for what it’s like for him to navigate his native country of Brazil in 1977, during their military dictatorship.

We then spend a lot of time meeting a lot of characters, including a duo of hired assassins, stepfather and stepson Augusto and Bobbi, played by Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone, respectively. This is most notable to me only in that I hope to see more of Gabriel Leone because holy hell is he gorgeous. I guess it doesn’t hurt that he’s also a pretty good actor. On the flip side, there is also a cat with two faces that hangs out in the building where the people being sheltered are staying, and while I get the symbolism of duality, it’s a pretty unsettling sight.

There are also the local police chief in Recife, the northernmost major city in Brazil (it’s near the easternmost point of South America), and the chief’s henchmen; the guy who hires Armando to pretend to be a desk worker when a sham of a deposition is held in a space only made up to be the police station; several of the other workers in this space that is also an archive office; the Jewish holocaust survivor the chief harasses; Armando’s fellow political refugees also under protection; the government officials who hire the hitmen; and the father of Armando’s late wife who runs a local cinema—too many characters to name. I suppose I can credit the slow plotting for how easy it actually is to keep all of these characters straight.

Mind you, I am fully open to the idea that The Secret Agent really is some masterpiece and it’s just not for me, because I don’t get it, and I am unable to—because I am not Brazilian, and the only history I glean from that country is through movies like this. Even the wild leg sequence could be explained as an illustration of the ridiculous ways the media of the time was used to obfuscate otherwise blatant corruption. I just found some of the depiction of queerness in it to be a bit misinformed, and the narrative contextualization of the entire sequence to be inadequate. But, that’s just me. I feel confident that the average movie watcher will be bored to tears by this film, and plenty of film snobs will hail it as a masterpiece. I don’t quite fall into either camp, in that I clearly have a lot of notes, but I’m not sorry I saw it.

I guess the secret is exactly what kind of agent he is.

Overall: B

IS THIS THING ON?

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

People like to make fun of Bradley Cooper for his unabashed earnestness as both an actor and a filmmaker, but you know what? I am here for it. A Star Is Born (2018) was shockingly good—both the movie and his performance—and although reviews were much more mixed for Maestro in 2023, I genuinely adored it (it was my favorite movie that year, in fact). I am so consistently impressed with this guy—much of The Hangover aging poorly notwithstanding—that I’m now leaning toward the position that he is underrated. And what’s wrong with being passionate about what you do? Isn’t that a good thing?

Which brings me to Is This Thing On?, which exceeds expectations on nearly every front. Cooper co-wrote the script with Will Arnett, who is also the star, and Mark Chappell, this is an unusually down-to-earth portrait of two middle-aged people unhappy in their marriage. But what sets this movie apart is not just that the protagonist, Alex Novak (Arnett), discovers standup comedy and that he loves doing it, but that both he and his wife, Tess (Laura Dern), gradually realize that the reason their marriage wasn’t working was not because they were unhappy with each other, but because they were unhappy with their own lives.

Now, they also have “Irish twin” boys, both of them—for a few months at most—ten years old: played by adorable and impressively natural Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten. Arnett is 55 years old and Dern will be 59 next month, which means if we are to think of their characters as the same age, then they had these kids in their mid- and late-forties. Not unheard of, granted, but unusual—I’m much more used to people in their fifties being grandparents. The script takes care of this by noting that Tess had children using fertility treatments. (It may still be worth noting that Alex’s parents are played by Ciarán Hinds and Christine Ebersole, who are both 72. I guess they had Alex when they were 17, which is actually quite plausible.)

I spent the first half or so of Is This Thing On? unsure of exactly how great I thought it was. Alex and Tess agree to “call it” early on, but then Alex, alone and without direction, walks into a bar and signs up for the open mic as a way to get a free drink. Is This Thing On? has a lot of scenes with Alex onstage, but it’s not overstuffed with it, and I spent a lot of time dreading how awkward it might become—but then, kind of miraculously, it never gets that way. He’s never shown being particularly good at comedy (and a fellow comic literally tells him “you’re not good at comedy,” albeit in a loving way), and this film’s many very funny scenes tend to happen between Alex and his family and friends. As all of this unfolds, the story becomes increasingly well-constructed. There’s something both sad and funny about a fellow comic calling Alex “Sad Guy,” and thanks to Cooper’s knack for compelling and innovative storytelling, you can’t help but feel for this broken down, sad, middle-aged White guy.

The trick, I think, is that Arnett plays Alex as a smart guy, who is also smart about comedy, even while he’s not particularly good at it. You believe it when he manages to hold his audience’s attention, even when he’s not being hilarious. They give him a lot of courtesy chuckles, but they also clearly support him.

There’s something wonderfully warm-hearted about this movie–even in the setting of the comedy clubs Alex frequents, which is not often how we see such spaces depicted. Here, the other comics see a newbie with potential, and they offer him tips and tricks of the trade. There’s no resentment among the ranks, which actually seems more realistic, and that’s not what this movie is meant to be about anyway. We get to see real-life comedians here and there, including Amy Sedaris (who shows up multiple times as an emcee) and Dave Attell, among others.

Meanwhile, Tess, who is a former Olympic volleyball player now long past her prime, is putting out feelers about becoming a coach and thereby finding a way back into a world she once had great passion for but gave up long ago. This is a significant subplot, which means Is This Thing On?, in spite of the implication of its title, is not just about a divorced dad discovering standup comedy. It’s about a couple in a marriage who have lost their way with each other because they either gave up on or have yet to discover what truly makes them happy. There’s also discussion about wanting to be unhappy together, a point about successful relationships that I really liked. Marriage isn’t constant bliss, and it’s finding the person you want to weather rough patches with that really makes it work.

Tess and Alex are part of a friend group that includes one straight couple and one gay couple. The straight couple figures more prominently in the story, both because we get a taste of their own struggles, and because they are played by Andra Day, who honestly doesn’t get the most interesting stuff to work with (although she does get one great monologue in which she shares with Alex why she detests him), and Bradley Cooper himself, as a real self-centered dipshit of an aspiring-actor guy. This character, who everyone actually calls “Balls,” seems at first like a bit of self-parody, except that Cooper embodies him well enough to give him dimension, even as he’s providing a good portion of the movie’s comic relief.

Is This Thing On? is mostly a drama, but with a lot of comedy in it—the best formula for the twin goals of entertainment and relatability. More than anything, though, it’s progressively uplifting. This is a movie about good but unhappy people finding the simple things that bring them joy, and that was the feeling I had as I left the theater.

Listen, Alex Novak. It’s on, okay!

Overall: A-

NO OTHER CHOICE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

No Other Choice is so much of a piece with the 2019 Best Picture winner Parasite, the comparisons are inevitable. It would seem that darkly comic examinations of South Korean capitalism—most of which can be applied globally—are part of an evergreen idea.

I’m not sure which of the two movies is objectively “better,” but Parasite certainly has the gigantic advantage of having come first. Setting aside its Best Picture win and the fact that No Other Choice has no such hopes, had No Other Choice been released in 2019 and Parasite released now, we might very well be having this exact same conversation, just in reverse.

It could be said that No Other Choice is more cynical. Multiple murders happen in this movie, and ultimately without consequence. It’s all in service of getting the good job: Man-su (a fantastic Lee Byung-hun) has been laid off after 25 years working at a specialty paper manufacturer, and takes increasingly desperate measures to pull ahead of three competitors for a similar job at another company.

What I love about these measures is how unpredictable they are. Just like Bong Joon Ho, famed Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook (who also co-wrote) has a very specific sensibility to his storytelling, the kind of thing it’s easy to see being ruined by any attempt at an American remake. And before any of the real action starts, we get to know Man-su’s family: a wife, Mi-ri (Son Ye-jin), who proves both refreshingly complex and surprisingly loyal; a teenage stepson he’s been raising with her since he was 2, Si-one (Woo Seung Kim); and a young cello prodigy daughter who doesn’t speak much, Ri-one (So Yul Choi). They even have two dogs, named Si-two and Ri-two—hence the “ones” of the children’s names.

This is a family of very fully realized characters, who are all very used to the comforts of the life Man-su’s career has brought them. Man-su is convinced he’ll have another job in three months, and 13 months later, he’s working at a Costco-like warehouse. There’s a very odd scene in which he evidently quits that job in order to chase a mid-afternoon opportunity, and he’s forced to strip out of his work jumpsuit and stand on the loading dock in his tank top and boxer shorts. Unless there’s something I am missing about Korean culture, that seemed a little over the top.

Granted, Man-su is enagaged in multiple attempts at murder not long after this, so I’m not sure how fair it is to judge this film for being “over the top.” There’s a lot of humor at play here, and, also much like Parasite, it doesn’t come on strong until pretty far into the movie—particularly a tussle between Man-su, his first competitor applicant, and that man’s frustrated wife, all tumbling comically over each other in their living room and wrestling for sole control of a pistol. A key difference is that Parasite had delightful plot twists no one could see coming; No Other Choice, by contrast, leans a bit more into hijinks.

That said, No Other Choice makes clear that there is some irony in its title: Man-su, and multiple others, have plenty more choices than they will admit to, even as they resort to what seem to be life-or-death measures—until that’s actually what they become. There’s a scene where Man-su verbally berates Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min), his first target, for his stubbornness in refusing to look for reasonable alternatives, and he could just as well be speaking to himself.

That first attempt goes to some wild places, involving everything from surprise infidelity to a snake that may or may not be poisonous. But whether it’s Goo Beom-mo, or Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won), another laid-off worker now reduced to selling shoes, or social media influencer Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon), all of Man-su’s targets are presented with full stories of their own, sometimes deeply flawed but always easy to empathize with in their own situations. This is perhaps part of the point: the job market is a cutthroat world, and sometimes you have to turn into a sociopath to get ahead.

There are some technical things that really make No Other Choice stand out, though, particularly some beautiful and clever cinematography. There’s a memorable shot of Man-su parking his car on a street surrounded by fall foliage, and another incredible shot of people’s reflections in an iPad screen while the screen pages are being slid to the side with someone’s finger. This makes for a movie that is often as fun just to look at as it is to engage with.

In years past, No Other Choice would be about a downtrodden, unemployed guy we can’t help but root for. Man-su is a peculiar character in that you are absolutely compelled by him, but whether you’re rooting for him gets much more complicated as the story unfolds. This is a family who, by the end, we slowly realize are living their lives as though the ends justify the means. The means is often quite entertaining to us, but deep down it’s a cynical reflection of what unchecked capitalism actually does to people.

I mean, there are lots of choices here.

Overall: B+

ANACONDA

Directing: C+
Acting: C
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I wonder how many people are going to see the 2025 Anaconda without ever having seen the original 1997 film? The friend I went to see this with, and I both fall into this category. And it would seem that to say your mileage may vary is an understatement: my friend laughed so hard she was crying. I, on the other hand, vacillated between feeling embarrassed that I occasionally laughed at some of this movie’s knowing stupidity, and being genuinely annoyed by some of the straight up lazy filmmaking.

Ironically, I was tempted to say I might have been better off just watching the original—except that film has a score of 37 on MetaCritic; this one has a score of 44. This was an improvement?

There are just too many things in this movie that are nonsensical. Over and over, the giant anaconda in this movie lunges at people, or moving vehicles—and misses. Is this snake on sedatives? Maybe this is something that also happens in the original film; I wouldn’t know. I can’t gauge how much in this movie is knowingly leaning into its lack of logic. There are some who note that Paul Rudd and Jack Black are both 56 years old, but we’re supposed to believe they loved the original Anaconda as kids—even though they would have been 28 when the film was released. There is a very brief line in which they say they were in college when the movie came out, so I guess maybe they’re playing six or seven years younger than their actual ages?

I knew about this age complaint going in, and was actually ready to give it the benefit of the doubt: this is a movie that’s all about being a fun, dumb monster comedy, and maybe this was part of that. The homemade film we see that these characters actually made as kids was actually called Squatch, about a monster Sasquatch. And yet, apparently, the dream they’ve had all their lives is to reboot Anaconda,

Well, Griff (Rudd) convinces his friends that in his time pursuing acting in L.A., he met a relative of the original writer of the source novel (the 1997 Anaconda was actually an original script) who gave him the rights. After some initial protestations by Doug (Black), who is ostensibly the most responsible family man of the bunch, two other friends, Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn), join them in a hairbained scheme not only to shoot their version of Anaconda, but to literally travel to Brazil to shoot it in the Amazon.

Kenny, a guy from their hometown of Buffalo who calls himself “Buffalo sober” (only beer and wine, “and some of the lighter liquors”), is the cinematographer. Griff and Claire are starring in the film, and Doug is both directing and writing. There are several shots of Jack Black “writing” the script, which basically inolves him looking intently at a laptop screen and raising and lowering his eyebrows.

I love a meta approach, and Anaconda frequently has characters referring to the movie they are making, and thus also the movie we are watching, as “a reboot” or “a spiritual sequel.” They even encounter another film crew on the river. Some of this is mildly amusing, but the meta aspect, as with just about every aspect, could have been done much better. Just about everything in this movie is forced, and not in the quirky, endearing way it’s clearly intending.

Inevitably, this group of characters comes across not just a giant anaconda, but illegal gold miners. They meet a local woman named Ana (Daniela Melchior, honestly giving the best performance) who proves to have a surprisingly significant part. By the end there will be cameos by more than one cast member from the original movie.

Aside from fans of the first movie, I’m not quite sure who this one is for. Why did I see it, then? The trailer made it look like silly fun—which was very much how my friend took it in, and she had a blast. My problem is that I have seen too many other movies that achieved the vibe this one is going for, with far greater cleverness and wit. I won’t begrudge a group of people just having fun, but I still hope for something more than utterly brainless. Okay, utterly mediocre, I guess is better: I did get some good chuckles here and there, which balanced out the oppressively bad parts to an average of mediocrity. The sequence with Jack Black and a boar strapped to his back actually was pretty funny.

The thing is, there’s silliness, and there’s well-executed silliness. It’s a difficult thing to do well. There’s a scene in which Doug is lying on a bed and instead of pointing with his finger, he lifts his leg to point with his toes, putting his foot unnaturally close to the camera. Anaconda could have used a lot more of that kind of silliness. It spends way too much time on these friends being earnest about following their dreams and how much they enjoy making things together. Like, who cares? Isn’t this supposed to be a movie about a giant killer snake?

This was why I enjoyed Cocaine Bear, which wasn’t as popular with others who felt it was too one-note: that movie absolutely delivers on its promise. It’s about a bear on a rampage while high on cocaine. There’s no token earnestness in that movie. I rather wish Anaconda had been more like it. There’s a few fun scenes in which the snake actually swallows people, but there’s also a lot of scenes in which some of those people are trying too hard to be funny and not quite getting there. I’m looking at you, Selton Mello, as Carlos Santiago Braga, the snake handler.

When Anadona steers straight into its ridiculousness, it almost works. It even has surprisingly good visual effects for this kind of movie (a critical qualifier). But the performances almost across the board are oddly unnatural, all of them feeling under-rehearsed. Is that part of the gag? If it is, it’s too subtle. The gags in this movie should only be obvious, like when they’re talking about their movie’s story and they keep repeating the word “themes!” This movie has no coherent theme, except its own superficialities. This might have worked really well as a ten-minute short, actually. That makes this movie about ninety minutes too long.

Overall: C+

Cinema 2025: Best & Worst

Below are the ten most satisfying and memorable films I saw in 2025: 10. Hard Truths A- This is the first of three films on this year's list that are technically 2024 films but did not get released in my local market until 2025—and I refuse to ignore an excellent movie just because it's only technically from the year before. This film, about a deeply depressed and obstinately, aggressively negative woman played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, is packed with stellar performances—and Jean-Baptiste was criminally robbed of an Oscar nomination. Pansy, the main character, is surrounded by a cast of family members, particularly a husband, a sister and two nieces, who love her and want to be there for her, but are faced with the constant challenge of Pansy making that difficult for them. The amazing trick here is how a woman with such a horrible demeanor and attitude can be rendered so empathetically. What I said then: Mike Leigh isn’t exactly known for movies with much in the way of uplift. He makes movies about deeply unhappy people, but with a curious knack for sprinkling in truly funny bits here and there—even in the case of Hard Truths. Still, this film does end on a truly downbeat note, with the suggestion that people like Pansy don’t tend to change. Not without treatment, anyway. But this film was something I found to be an emotionally cleansing experience.
9. Weapons A- I'm not by default one for horror movies, but Zach Cregger's previous film, Barbarian, was an undeniable blast, so I was all about seeing Weapons—which is a rare case of a sophomore effort being even better. Both movies are best seen going in blind, with no knowledge of what's going on whatsoever, except with the promise that they are by turns terrifying and hilarious. Acknowledging that this idea makes it pretty difficult to market a movie, all you can do is the best you can. My greatest hope is that one day Creggor can become so well-established in the industry that he can get by with trailers that amount to little more than glorified teasers. A bit disappointingly, his next project is a film adaptation of video game Resident Evil, but these two movies have proven his ability so well that I will likely see that film based on Creggor's name alone. I'd almost certainly never bother with it otherwise. What I said then: There is no allegory or metaphor to be found here; Weapons is simply a magnificently structured and cleverly written horror story, the kind that makes you remember how exhilarating it can be to go to the movies—especially with a crowd of people.
8. Black Bag A- Maybe the most memorable pleasant surprise of the year, I totally expected to enjoy Black Bag as a serviceable spy thriller, but not necessarily a particularly memorable one—until it proved itself to be so. Michael Fassbender and Cate Blachett have a crackling energy as married intelligence agents George and Kathryn, and when George is tasked with secretly investigating whether Kathryn has betrayed her country, Blag Bag doubles as a tense marriage drama. The film works incredibly well as both spy thriller and marriage drama at the same time, a delicate balance seamlessly achieved by director Steven Soderberg and writer David Koepp. An incredibly written and staged dinner party scene alone makes this movie worth the time. What I said then: Black Bag is intrigue at its finest, a feast of sleek production design as a backdrop for a mystery both complex and concise. Not a moment is wasted in this movie, which is so well done, it leaves you wondering why so many other similar movies dwell on their own plotting so pointlessly.
7. I'm Still Here A- This is the second of the three films on this list technically from 2024, but is so skillfully constructed it would be a crime not to include it. Fernanda Torres is incredible as Eunice Paiva, the real-life wife of Brazilian Congressman Rubens Paiva, who was abducted by the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1971. Eunice, until then not especially engaged in politics or activism, was spurred by this incident into resisting this government, to the point where both she and her eldest daughter were themselves imprisoned without charge and interrogated—her daughter for one day; Eunice for twelve. Eunice's story in I'm Still Here uses these incidents as a jumping-off point to tell her extraordinary story, as her tenacity in getting answers about the fate of her husband turned her into an activist, and she went to school and became a lawyer. With a rather poignant epilogue featuring Torres's own mother, Brazilian actress Fernanda Montenegro, as Eunice at the end of her life, I'm Still Here offers a memorable lesson in how oppressive regimes can only strengthen the resolve of those they mean to keep down. What I said then: With I’m Still Here, [director Walter] Salles has created something so straightforward that it doesn’t seem all that profound while watching it. But there is something ingenious about its construction, a subversive thread that is an indicator of the sinister nature of dictatorship, especially when daily life seems basically unchanged for anyone besides those directly affected. This is a film that could not possibly be more timely.
6. Sentimental Value A- It would be tempting to say Danish-Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier's films are typically of a piece, but that's only because both Sentimental Value and his previous film, 2021's The Worst Person in the World (my #2 movie of 2022), feature exceptional performances by Renate Reinsve, and are incisive explorations of complicated relationships (one romantic, the other parental). Sentimental Value has great performances all around, but uniquely nuanced deliveries by both Stellan Skarsgård as a legendary director and absent father attempting to reconnect with his actor daughter late in life in the only way he knows how, and Elle Fanning as the American actress he casts and who tries hard but cannot fully connect to the semi-autobiographical part she's playing. What I said then: All of this comes together in a plot that is complex but never difficult to follow, and perhaps may even be a bit slowly paced for some viewers. It’s worth noting that although this is a family drama about two sisters with deep resentment toward their father, there are no histrionics here, no scene made for an Oscar clip. Where other movies of this sort go for familial cruelty, this one leans more heavily into a kind of benign neglect. There’s something about Stellan Skarsgård’s performance, though, that still elicits empathy. Few people can convey subtly tortured interiority like Stellan Skarsgård.
5. The History of Sound A- The History of Sound got mixed-positive reviews overall, a 63 rating on MetaCritic, making it the film with the most-mixed reaction that I still put on my top 10 this year. But this movie really, really spoke to me—especially as a gay man. I long ago abandoned any attempt at making these year-end lists wholly objective; they never are even if I pretend they are. Why not stop pretending? I'm a gay man, and between a movie like this and a show like HBO's (Crave in Canada) Heated Rivalry, stories featuring queer joy, and love stories that pointedly reject any focus on queer trauma, tend to leave me deeply moved. The History of Sound is even a period piece, about two men who fall in love while collecting wax cylinder recordings of original folk songs among small communities of World War I-era New England. It's a quiet and meditative story about yearning, about love and loss only because these two are separated by circumstance rather than tragedy, and it's punctuated by performances of gorgeous folk music. This movie certainly isn't for everyone, but it felt like it was made specifically for me. What I said then: I can see how some might lose patience with the pacing in this film, but it would never have worked as well if the plot moved faster. This is the nature of longing, is it not? This is a film that will deeply move those with a mind to be spoken to in the way it’s communicating.
4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig A- The Seed of the Sacred Fig is technically a 2024 film, and it has a close 2025 comp in the similarly excellent It Was Just An Accident. Both films' writer-directors, Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi respectively, have extremely similar backgrounds: criminalized, imprisoned and exiled from their native Iran for their art. Both films were even filmed in secret. I just found myself slightly more taken with The Seed of the Sacred Fig, about the strain on a family when the father and husband, just appointed as an investigating judge to approve judgments by his superiors without assessing evidence, suspects his wife and his two daughters when the gun he's been issued goes missing. This all takes place with nationwide protests against the government as an expertly contextualized backdrop, with Rasoulof seamlessly editing in real social media footage into his narrative. While both of these films are deeply effective indictments of the Iranian government, this was what placed The Seed of the Sacred Fig slightly ahead for me, as the very real stakes at play hit a bit harder as a result. What I said then: This film is unusually long, at two hours and 47 minutes, but a lot goes down, it is never slow, and almost none of it feels like wasted time. The run time allows for an illustration of how ideologies can gradually either strengthen or unravel, depending on the person and the circumstance.
3. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You A- It's difficult to put into words just how much I loved If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, given by definitive inability to relate: this is about a woman who feels so unqualified as a mother, taking care of child with a debilitating medical condition and feeling so overwhelmed by it all that she makes a succession of wildly irresponsible choices. But it's a credit to Rose Byrne's extraordinary performance as Linda that I felt sympathy for this character, in a film easily compared to Uncut Gems in that the entire story is a deeply stressful ride, along which the protagonist's choices are constantly worse than the last. There's just something about the way writer-director Mary Bronstein made this film, which makes it absolutely electric from start to finish, this complex portrait of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A great turn by Conan O'Brien as her deeply uncomfortable therapist is just icing on the cake. What I said then: This is a film that ends on the kind of hopeful note that comes with a ton of baggage. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time, and that’s a good thing. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is constantly harrowing, sometimes darkly funny, heartbreaking and uniquely humane.
2. Sorry, Baby A The first of only two films I gave a solid A in 2025, Sorry, Baby stands apart as a film about sexual assault that does not follow the countless narrative tropes about the subject established over decades of film history. This treats the inciting incident with all the seriousness it deserves but without actually depicting it onscreen, but also pointedly features characters who move through their lingering trauma with moments of genuine humor as well as their inevitable sorrows, giving them a sense of grace and dimension not often granted. This is an incredibly self-assured feature film debut by director, writer, and star Eva Victor, who identifies as nonbinary and actually manages to incorporate subtle details of gender variance into the narrative of this film in organic ways I have never seen before. What I said then: I feel lucky to have Victor take me through Sorry Baby, a film that turns deeply complicated issues and themes into a gem of poignant simplicity.
1. One Battle After Another A The movie of the year in every sense of the word—except, I suppose, in the sense of box office, which is not in the least bit relevant to this particular list. Anyone who tries to suggest such a claim is ridiculous can go back to rotting in front of Superman. We all have our own lanes. And I'm certainly not above admitting a deep bias when it comes to director and co-writer Paul Thomas Anderson, who I have been convinced is a genius filmmaker for two and a half decades. This was the man who first convinced me it was possible to make Adam Sandler tolerable, after all—and Punch-Drunk Love is in the running as my favorite film of his. In any case, Anderson has been deserving of reward for decades, for many different movies, and there is a developing "it's time" narrative around One Battle After Another for months now, a fact I can only hope does not result in backfiring its Oscar chances. Because this is classic P.T. Anderson through and through, just with an unprecedented budget, the kind of thing that contributes to endlessly irrelevant debates about its actual "success." None of that shit matters in the face of the fact that this movie about contemporary revolutionaries, using the 1970s actions of revolutionary militants The Weather Underground as inspiration and repositioning them within real-world issues of the first quarter of the 21st century, is a straight up masterpiece. It's propulsive, it's suspenseful, it's hilarious, and it's the best movie of the year without question. What I said then: The more I think about One Battle After Another, the more impressed I am with it. This is the sign of a great movie. I didn’t have the wherewithal to think about whether it was a Great Movie while I was watching it, because I was too absorbed by it. I wouldn’t even say I was blown away by it, per se—and I mean that as a compliment. I was simply invested in every single character onscreen. I only had the bandwidth to reflect on it once it was over, and then, after some time, it gradually dawned on me: that was an amazing movie.
Five Worst -- or the worst of those I saw 5. Nobody 2 C+ Back in 2021, I found Nobody to be a surprisingly fun romp—a solid entertainment with an amusingly simple premise that turned Bob Odenkirk into an unlikely action star. Its story about a family man who turns out to be a violent fighter getting sucked into a war with a Russian crime boss was not wholly original, but the age and ability of its star gave it a novel quality. I probably should have expected that, by definition, a sequel would have no ability to retain that quality, and would be little more than a retread. What I said then: I won’t lie, I had kind of a good time with Nobody 2. That can happen when you just surrender to what a movie is, in this case a moderately amusing action movie with modest ambitions and zero pretense. That doesn’t make this movie good, and this is just a rehash of a previous film that barely succeeded on such flimsy merits.
4. Tron: Ares C+ Shame on me, I guess, for thinking I might enjoy the third in a series of films in which I really haven't been crazy about any of them—and for even bothering to see a movie starring professional dirtbag Jared Leto. I'm not quite sure why people keep thinking the passage of a decade or more somehow results in another entry in this franchise is a good idea; the special effects are kind of fun in their time but quickly dated, and the stories are always completely hollow. What I said then: Who even cares about Tron these days, anyway? Even people who were kids in 2010 are young adults now; young people who were into the original in 1982 are basically retirees in 2025. Predictably, just about everything you see in Tron: Ares is recycled, either from previous Tron movies or other science fiction.
3. The Running Man C Beware the idea that a film as "a new adaptation" of the source novel as opposed to a remake might alone make it good. And I really wanted this movie to be good. Or at least fun. Instead, it was oppressively clunky, weighed down with awkwardly written exposition, and overlong. Michael Cera shows up and infuses the proceedings with some welcome energy, but this happens far too late to stop the fuse of what was destined to be a box office bomb. (On a budget of $110 million, this movie earned $69 million.) What I said then: All of this shit is going in one ear and out the other of anyone watching, who are just there for escapist entertainment in an American cultural hellscape. The very existence of this film is the product of what it’s pretending to be preaching against. It’s worth noting that the one thing this movie does that we haven’t seen much of before is use AI as a plot point, with The Running Man’s gameshow manufacturing footage that isn’t real in an effort to keep the audience against the contestant—except it’s never addressed as “AI” and only ever declared “not real” in ways, again, we’ve already heard a thousand times. The only thing that could make this entire production—with a budget of $110 million—more perfectly cynical would be to learn that AI was actually used in the making of it.
2. Things Like This C It pains me to say Things Like This was the second-worst movie I went to see all year, as I would much rather have seen it succeed. I love the idea of a gay romantic comedy in which one of the guys happens to be fat, except that writer-director Max Talisman wrote himself into binge-eating cake frosting straight out of a can, at the end of the opening scene. Then it never comes up again. What does follow is a cast whose performances are mostly flat, leads who have no chemistry, and a plot so predictable and unrealistic it's tiresome. What I said then: There are many problems with Things Like This, but the fundamental one is the one-dimensional nature of nearly all of its characters. There’s earnestness here, even occasionally effective sweetness ... but no depth. There is always a sense that there is some depth around, somewhere, but this movie is always out of it.
1. Love Hurts D+ This movie, for which I have no love, hurts. Every aspect of it is phoned in, and the script is straight up garbage, easily the worst writing I sat through in a theater this entire calendar year. The direction, the acting, the cinematography, the editing, the action—all emblems of medicrity. The script is utterly worthless. This was the major release for Valentine's Day this year, and such movies are historically hit or miss; this was a miss by a long shot, and it's too bad because Ke Huy Quan absolutely deserves better than this. What I said then: It’s difficult to express precisely how bad this movie is. To be fair, there was some talent that went into it—Quan himself is in it, after all, and he’s the one person in it giving a passable performance. But oh my god, the script! Something truly unexpected comes to mind: the old Christian quote about how Jesus answered when asked how much he loves us: “'This much,' he answered: then he stretched out his arms and died.” Time to flip the script, so to speak: that’s how much I hated the writing in this movie. I should really be admitted into a hospital.
Complete 2025 film review log: 1. 1/3 The Fire Inside B
2. 1/9 Better Man B
3. 1/11 The Brutalist A-
4. 1/14 The Last Showgirl C+
5. 1/17 One of Them Days B
6. 1/18 Hard Truths A-
7. 1/21 The Room Next Door B+
8. 1/24 Presence B
9. 1/25 September 5 B+
10. 1/25 Nickel Boys B
11. 2/1 Dog Man B
12. 2/2 The Seed of the Sacred Fig A-
13. 2/6 Companion B
14. 2/9 I'm Still Here A-
15. 2/11 Love Hurts D+
16. 2/13 Paddington in Peru B
17. 2/20 Universal Language B
18. 3/1 My Dead Friend Zoe B+
19. 3/8 Mickey 17 B
20. 3/14 Black Bag A-
21. 3/18 The Penguin Lessons B
22. 3/20 Novocaine B
23. 3/24 The Assessment B
24. 3/28 Death of a Unicorn B-
25. 3/29 Daddy Dearest *
25. 4/1 Bob Trevino Likes It B-
26. 4/3 A Minecraft Movie B
27. 4/10 A Nice Indian Boy A-
28. 4/11 The Amateur B
29. 4/12 The Ballad of Wallace Island B
30. 4/14 Drop B-
31. 4/21 The wedding Banquet B+
32. 4/22 Sinners B+
33. 5/6 Thunderbolts* B
34. 5/7 The Accountant 2 C+
35. 5/13 Fight or Flight B
36. 5/15 Friendship B+
37. 5/20 Things Like This C
38. 5/22 Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning B+
39. 5/25 Twinless B+ **
40. 6/12 The Phoenician Scheme B
41. 6/13 Materialists A-
42. 6/15 How to Train Your Dragon B-
43. 6/18 Jane Austen Wrecked My Life B
44. 6/19 28 Years Later B
45. 6/20 Elio B-
46. 6/26 F1 B+
47. 6/30 M3GAN 2.0 B-
48. 7/3 Jurassic World: Rebirth B-
49. 7/10 Superman C+
50. 7/15 Sorry, Baby A
51. 7/17 Eddington B-
52. 7/29 Oh, Hi! B-
53. 7/30 The Fantastic Four: First Steps B-
54. 8/2 The Naked Gun B+
55. 8/8 Weapons A-
56. 8/18 Nobody 2 C+
57. 8/23 Honey Don't B
58. 8/28 Caught Stealing B+
59. 9/1 The Roses B-
60. 9/11 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale B
61. 9/12 Spinal Tap II: The End Continues B
62. 9/13 The Long Walk B-
63. 9/20 The History of Sound A-
64. 9/21 The Baltimorons B+
65. 9/26 One Battle After Another A
66. 9/28 Eleanor the Great B
67. 10/3 Anemone B
68. 10/4 The Lost Bus B+ ***
69. 10/8 Are We Good? B
70. 10/9 By Design (B-) / The Sale (B) / Yakshi (B+) ****
71. 10/10 Tron: Ares C+
72. 10/12 Roofman B-
73. 10/14 Kiss of the Spider Woman B
74. 10/17 After the Hunt B-
75. 10/18 Good Fortune C+
76. 10/23 The Mastermind C+
77. 10/24 Blue Moon B
78. 10/25 Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere B-
79. 10/26 If I Had Legs I'd Kick You A-
80. 10/28 A House of Dynamite B+ ***
81. 11/2 Bugonia B+
82. 11/4 It Was Just an Accident A-
83. 11/8 Die My Love B
84. 11/9 Predator: Badlands B
85. 11/11 Frankenstein B- ***
86. 11/13 The Running Man C
87. 11/20 Wicked: For Good B
88. 11/21 Train Dreams A- ***
89. 11/23 Sentimental Value A-
90. 11/24 Sisu: Road to Revenge B
91. 11/26 Eternity B
92. 11/29 Hamnet A-
93. 12/1 Rental Family B-
94. 12/3 Zootopia 2 B
95. 12/9 Jay Kelly B ***
96. 12/12 Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery B+ ***
97. 12/15 Dust Bunny B+
98. 12/21 Avarar: Fire and Ash B
99. 12/27 Marty Supreme B+
100. 12/30 Anaconda C+
* Re-issue (no new review, or no full review)
** SIFF advanced screening
*** Viewed streaming at home
**** Tasveer South Asian Film Festival