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+
* Re-issue (no new review, or no full review)
** SIFF advanced screening
*** Viewed streaming at home
**** Tasveer South Asian Film Festival

MARTY SUPREME

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

The last feature film writer-director Josh Safdie did was Uncut Gems in 2019, an extraordinarily stressful film which featured Adam Sandler as a gambling addict, in what was arguably his best performance since Punch-Drunk Love. I have recommended that film to several people, always qualifying how deeply stressful it is, which I think is a fair warning to make.

Uncut Gems was co-directed and co-written with Josh’s brother, Benny Safdie; Josh has gone it on his own with this new film, Marty Supreme, but it seems worth noting that it follows a very similar arc: it’s about a guy with a single-minded passion, who makes countless bad decisions in service of that passion, usually not seeing how said bad decisions are actually a form of self-sabotage. The key difference is that this time it’s about a guy enamored it his own talent as a table tennis player, and set in the 1950s. But, all the needle drops are eighties pop songs, and that incongruity I still remain ambivalent about.

Marty is played by Timothée Chalamet, a perennial favorite, and who will almost certainly get nominated for an Oscar for this role. It could be argued that this is one of those parts where a beautiful actor becomes “ugly” for a part in a bid for an Oscar nomination. Chalamet, as Marty, is nowhere near as beautiful as he usually is, right own to almost-pointedly visible pock marks on his cheeks. He also wears glasses, and has a thin mustache, giving him a very distinctive 1950s, self-important 1950s “young New Yorker” look.

There is a pregnancy that figures as a key part of the plot, though not what I would call prominently—but the opening titles still run over images of sperm cells racing for the egg. Ultimately, this serves as the reason why Marty Supreme ends with a far more upbeat note than Uncut Gems. Marty Supreme still ends with a whole lot of hopes and dreams unrealized, but basically Marty sort of realizes his dreams should be shooting for other things. If nothing else, at least Marty Supreme doesn’t end tragically.

And there is certainly a lot going on in this movie’s 150-minute runtime, which I am not convinced is a length that fully justifies itself, although to this film’s credit it doesn’t have a single dull moment in it. This seems to be a hallmark of the Safdies’ work, this incredible propulsion of plot and narrative. Marty is convinced he is destined to be “on a Wheaties box,” because of his undeniable talent. What he doesn’t seem to see is that table tennis—ping pong—will never be as popular in the United States as it is in Asia. Marty keeps going around telling people he’s a “professional athlete.” He’s fundamentally a conman, doing all he can to score the funds he needs to get where world championships are being held. Marty spends a lot of time barely getting out of scrapes. Until, of course, he doesn’t.

When Marty runs across retired-actress Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, better than we have seen her in years), we know immediately that his interest in her is entirely self-serving. Soon enough we see them fucking in her hotel room shower, and at first I was baffled by him unhooking her necklace so it falls down the drain. But then it became clearer, as he does find a way to retrieve it later—it’s what happens after that with the necklace that is somewhat of a surprise.

Kay is married to Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), the rich owner of a pen manufacturing company, so Marty finds a way to weasel his way into Milton’s awareness as well. This is in service of Marty’s desire to get to Tokyo for the world championships, so he can attempt a rematch with the Japanese table tennis superstar, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, given a lot of screen time but no actual lines to speak of), who defeated him the year before. This is really all Marty thinks about, whether he’s having sex with a faded film actress twice his age, hustling amateur table tennis players with his Black friend Wally (Tyler the Creator), or teaming up with the woman he impregnated, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), to retrieve a lost dog for reward money. That dog is a whole thing in Marty Supreme, the impetus for more than one wild sequence that involves either fire or water or gasoline or gunfire or murder, depending on the sequence.

Given how much is going on, the writing is pretty impressive, well plotted and unpredictable in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat, even though is neither a suspense movie nor an action movie. Except it kind of is both of those things, just of different sorts. I didn’t find Marty especially likable—Kay is maybe the only truly likable character in this movie—and he’s not even the sort of lovable loser you find yourself rooting for even when they make plainly bad decisions. Marty is objectively a kind of self-involved dipshit. The minor magic trick of this film is that in spite of that, you still find yourself invested. You still want to know how things turn out for him.

Marty Supreme is mercifully not as stressful as Uncut Gems, but it still gets about halfway there. Marty lives in a wildly chaotic universe, and we are just taking a ride through that universe with him. Beyond the undeniable craftsmanship of this film, I didn’t find it to have quite as much depth as I might have hoped—although there is some incredibly well-observed nuances of national pride among the Japanese people at this time set only about a decade after the U.S. ended the second World War with two atom bombs on their people. These are fascinating details otherwise incidental to the primary plot here, though, and I rather wish the primary plot were as fascinating. Ultimately, this just about a guy obsessed with his own talent as a table tennis player.

But hey, it’s still a story told in a way that locks you in from the start, and so much is going on that you barely notices the unnecessarily excessive run time. The comparatively quiet but upbeat note on which the film ends is a bit of a relief. Although I should say that “comparatively” is a key word here, as the last scene involves the baby room at a hospital, and the cacophony of baby cries then plays over the end credits, which is kind of funny. It’s a way to amusingly annoy the audience, which is basically what Marty himself has been doing all along.

Marty doesn’t reign quite as Supreme as hoped.

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH

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

I think James Cameron wants the Avatar films to be the 21st-century equivalent of the Star Wars films—a modern mythology, with the same cultural impact as well as staying power. (Some might argue that Marvel already achieved this, but their moves are not going to have the same staying power.) Cameron is such a directorial megalomaniac, he’s probably convinced these films already have that status. He would be wrong.

To be fair. it had long been widely understood that it is a mistake to underestimate James Cameron. But these movies can only run on their own steam for so long. Avatar was a monumental technical achievement in 2009, and was worthy of its Best Picture nomination (although it would have been a crime had it won). The same could be said, actually, of Avatar: The Way of Water, the sequel Cameron took 13 years to make because he was waiting for technology to advance enough so it could achieve his aims. And it’s worth repeating that The Way of Water was so stunning on a visual level, it arguably moved visual effects forward for the entire industry in a way no other film has since Jurassic Park.

So here is where we run into Avatar: Fire and Ash, only three years after the last one—usually a pretty standard duration between films and their sequels, but we all know the Avatar franchise is a different beast altogether. And the criticisms of this film as being entertaining but repetitive are fundamentally valid. With one notable exception, the characters are all the same as they were in the last film, and the things that happen onscreen offer us very little that’s new. Okay, there are some very cool new Panodorian creatures, including giant floating beasts that pull ships for travel, and vicious squid-like creatures that live in the oceans.

None of them feature as actual characters, though. The only beasts who do are the Tulkun, the highly intelligent whale-like creatures that featured prominently in The Way of Water, and do again here. And so does Quaritch (Stephen Long). And so does Captain Mick Scoresby (Brendan Cowell), who—spoiler alert!—did not die in The Way of Water after all. I walked out of this movie saying that if this series has taught us anything, it’s that any onscreen “death” cannot be trusted. More than one character in Fire and Ash meets an end that is one way or another is left ambiguous. But even if it were unambiguous, would it matter? This is a world in which “sky people” (humans from Earth) can be transformed into Na’vi and there can be an Avatar-maculate conception, after all.

Side note on the Tulkun whales: who the hell does their piercings and tattoos, anyway?

All of this is to say: if you’re looking for a 2025 blockbuster with endless opportunity for nitpicking, I present to you Avatar: Fire and Ash. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but it’s worth mentioning that this has a franchise-record runtime of three hours and 17 minutes (exceeding The Way of Water by five minutes), and it is far less successful than its predecessor at justifying its own length. The Way of Water is easily broken up into three parts, the middle of which is world-building that easily wowed audiences; the last of which is a truly thrilling succession of action sequences. Fire and Ash attempts to building on that foundation, but does far less world-building, overindulges on action sequences, and at the sacrifice of character development.

To be fair, I was still perfectly happy to have gone to see this movie, as many of its action sequences are indeed thrilling. The visual effects are nearly as stunning as they were in the previous film; the inevitable downside to this coming out only three years later is that it’s unable to offer us anything truly novel on that front. The visual effects are the reason to see any of these movies, though, and they are what sets these films apart from others that use 3D as a cheap trick. Cameron knows how to make 3D worth the effort, and this is an extremely rare case in which I was also thrilled to see it in that format. That said, while the creature and Na’vi designs are exceptional, there are still moments when characters leap long distances and don’t quite move the way they should. It’s very subtle, but still gives them a hint of looking like video game characters rather than a believable character in a richly built universe.

In addition to Quaritch, who is really growing stale as an antagonist in all three of these movies, Fire and Ash does give us one new major villain: Varang (Oona Chaplin), leader of the Ash People, a clan of Na’vi whose forests have been decimated by a nearby volcano. This is a compelling addition to this world, especially the idea of warring clans on Pandora whose beefs actually have nothing to do with the Sky People. Except the Ash People’s motives, and especially Varang’s, are never clearly defined, and as a people they are given far less nuance than the Na’vi. At least we can understand the Na’vi as a narrative example of cultural appropriation. The Ash People are just angry and sadistic, and read a little too much like so-called “savages” of the Old West who are thought to commit unspeakable horrors against outsiders for no discernible reason.

I wish Varang had more depth as a character, and certainly more autonomy. Here she’s just hungry for the power of Sky People’s military guns, and that hunger is easily manipulated by Quaritch. Thank Eywa we have the likes of Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña) and Kiri (Sigourney Weaver, a 76-year-old woman again doing motion-capture as a teenager) and Ronal (Kate Winslet) to serve as women characters who actually have some dimension. At least Fire and Ash passes the Bechdel Test.

Most of the time in Fire and Ash, though, there are just battles raging. One after the other, and this with multiple subplots that don’t all feel necessary. Maybe Cameron feels all of these narrative threads are vital for what’s to come in future sequels, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Kiri’s power to lock in with Eywa stayed mysterious through all of The Way of Water, and gets some further expansion and explanation here—some of which is legitimately dumb. I suppose that could be the tagline for Avatar as a franchise: “great action epics, some of which is legitimately dumb.”

Fire and Ash does bring Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) back around to his status as “Toruk Makto,” the legendary leader who unites the clans—his Leonopteryx, the giant bird-like creature he rides, is a loyal friend who is to a degree a creature-character in these films, as are, to a lesser degree, the banshees ridden by all the other Na’vi. None of this changes the problematic trope this title represents. When we hear the line, “Toruk Makto is coming!”—what. heard was: “White Savior is coming!” (Just because Jake was transformed into a blue-skinned human/Na’vi hybrid does not change what he represents in the narrative.)

And yet. And yet! This is how it is with all Avatar movies: they are riddled with flaws, particularly in the writing but also increasingly in the plotting and even the editing—but the things that are actually great about them make the flaws easier to overlook. Is that right? Perhaps not. Does James Cameron even understand a nuanced discussion of these things? I have my doubts. Is the man still a master at delivering mesmerizing entertainment? Absolutely. There is no question that I was on the edge of my seat and dazzled by Fire and Ash a whole lot of the time. I can’t say I was ever bored, in spite of the bloated runtime. What still defines this film more than anything, however, is this franchise’s diminishing returns. We can only hope that Avatar 4 will offer us something genuinely new, but being the fourth film in a series makes that a pretty tall order. It may be that we underestimate James Cameron at our own peril, but it’s starting to feel like he’s getting tired.

Overall: B

DUST BUNNY

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

Why does nobody know about this movie? This is a movie that deserves to be known, and I can’t even remember where I heard about it. If I ever saw a trailer, it was only once. Dust Bunny opened this last weekend on 402 theater screens and it made . . . $341,283. It was #17 its opening weekend. To be a little fair, it made an average of $848 per screen (and if we average $15 per ticket that’s about 57 tickets per screening). I can tell you this much: at the showing I just went to, I was one of three people in the theater. It’s hard not to conclude that someone in the marketing department at Roadside Attractions really dropped the ball.

Granted, Dust Bunny, a dark and twisted fantasty-action-monster movie, is not the kind of movie people pack theaters to see anymore. I actually took a public transit ride, on both a light rail train and a bus, for nearly an hour to a suburban theater to see it—and I found it to be completely worth the effort. I doubt I could find another person who would feel the same. Perhaps a fair number of people will soon discover it on a streamer. I can only hope. I’m already eager to introduce it to people I’m sure will have never heard of it.

This is a pretty impressive feature film debut by writer-director Bryan Fuller, who up to now made a long career out of writing and producing television shows, from Pushing Daisies to Hannbial, not to mention no fewer than four different Star Trek series over the past three decades. Dust Bunny stars Mads Mikkelsen, who played Hannibal Lecter in the aforementioned Hannbal series. This is the one major involvement in Fuller’s past career that has a clear connection to Dust Bunny, which is a lot like a cross between Where the Wild Things Are and Kill Bill.

To be fair, I struggle to pinpoint who exactly the target audience is for Dust Bunny, unless you count—me. I am exactly the target audience for Dust Bunny, which I found utterly delightful. Its playful use of a child’s wild imagination crossed with real-world violence is very much my jam. It’s a fantasy movie, a monster movie, and an action movie all rolled up into one. It has a sensibility largely like a kids’ fantasy, with a little girl named Aurora (a wonderful Sophie Sloan) at its center. Mikkelsen plays the unnamed neighbor hitman who Aurora hires to kill the monster under her bed, who she believes ate her parents.

In the opening sequence, we see a tuft of dust floating through the air, past a city skyline that is clearly a mashup of London and New York, and into an apartment window. The camera follows it as it wafts through the apartment, picking up more tufts, until it becomes a little bunny, hiding under Aurora’s bed. Aurora is terrified, and over the course of the film, the bunny grows into a monster that lives under the floorboards of her room. The angled boards tip up in very cool ways as the dust bunny eventually breaks through the floors to eat its victims—and, spoiler alert, there are many victims.

Several scenes go by before it becomes even halfway clear what the hell is going on, but I was locked in from the first frame, with the darkly colorful production design and swooping camera movements, almost like the movie Hugo had gone through some kind of underworld filter. Aurora follows the hitman through the city, observing him from rooftops as he appears to slay a dragon—something he later insists was a group of men. Many scenes follow in which Aurora insists there is a real monster under the floor, and the hitman insists she just thinks that’s what she saw but there have been dangerous men in her apartment. Dust Bunny never wants to make clear which thing is actually going on, although it does eventually lean hard on one side, at which point I’ll admit that if it was going for metaphor, it kind of lacks clarity on that front.

But I can hardly be bothered to care, I had such a good time with this movie, from start to finish. I haven’t even mentioned Sigourney Weaver yet, who shows up as an associate of our hitman, evidently a longtime mentor, perhaps something with a deeper connection. Weaver is 76 years old now, and after seeing her clearly de-aged in the Avatar movies, it’s refreshing to see her actually looking her age. Her Laverne in Dust Bunny is both subtly and delightfully villainous; two characters get key moments in this movie involving stiletto heels, but Laverne’s hybrid pistol-heels are my favorite. There are also well-played smaller parts by The Woman King’s Sheila Atim and The Suicide Squad’s own Polka-Dot Man, David Dastmalchian.

There’s a peculiarness to the tone of Dust Bunny that really speaks to me, such as the moment we are introduced to Laverne, she suddenly opens her mouth wide in an almost grotesque way, explaining that she needs to do it in order to un-clench her jaw. Laverne spends the entire movie talking about how Aurora needs to be killed, because she’s seen the hitman’s face, and other killers are apparently after her. Eventually we learn that Aurora is a foster child now in her third family; this, I guess, makes it easier to take that who we initially assumed were her parents disappear from the movie after only a couple of scenes. Mikkelsen’s hitman has taken a liking to Aurora, which Laverne deduces is his attempt at working through his own childhood trauma.

The whole London/New York vibe is hard to pin down given that all the characters speak with American accents, save for the hitman, who speaks with Mikkelsen’s Danish accent—something quite directly looped into a running joke about his inability to pronounce “Aurora” correctly. Clearly, Dust Bunny exists out of time and place, lending itself to the fantasy element it leans hard into. As for why the monster under Aurora’s bed is a giant bunny, I couldn’t tell you—except that it rings true as a creation of a child’s imagination. Aurora admits, after all, that she wished for the monster, and I guess she got more than she bargained for out of it. There is a key moment when the hitman says, “He’s your monster, and you’re going to have to live with it.” Aurora says she wished for the hitman as well, though she catches his attention by offering him money, the source of which I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say that Aurora proves to be a pretty effective badass in her own right. This is a kid who not only knows where the bodies are buried but actively helps dispose of them. What more do you want?

Overall: B+

WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

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

Is Josh O’Connor the new Pedro Pascal? This guy is everywhere! Six movies in the past three years, four of them in 2025 alone: Rebuilding (which I had intended to see but couldn’t thanks to bullshit limited release locations); The History of Sound (loved); The Mastermind (dreadfully dull); and now, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (spoiler: delightful). Even with the varied results, I don’t mind so much. O’Connor is a deeply talented actor, it’s great that he’s trying so many different types of roles, and frankly, he’s way hotter than Pedro Pescal. I said what I said!

Which leads me to writer-director Rian Johnson, whose only feature films have been Knives Out movies for the past six years (though he did direct four episodes of Poker Face in 2023). I struggle to think of another filmmaker who so consistently makes movies with star-studded ensemble casts with such success—and all of them in the same genre, no less. Ensemble films with too many big stars in them have long been known to tip toward failure, but perhaps Johnson has a new insight: on average, his casts lean more toward “great actors” than “movie stars.” Granted, we’ve long since moved into an era when being a movie star doesn’t mean what it used to.

Josh O’Connor, for example, is a mid-level “movie star” at best, but he long ago proved himself a talented and versatile actor. Even his queer roles have all been great, from 2017’s God’s Own Country (when I first noticed him) to 2025’s The History of Sound, and I’m going to go ahead and include 2024’s Challengers—O’Connor’s biggest box office earner, at least among major roles—as well. Rain Johnson has perfectly cast O’Connor in Wake Up Dead Man as Father Jud Duplenticy, who gets transferred to another parish after rashly punching a rude deacon in the face (we never hear what the deacon said to him, as he is an otherwise inconsequential character whose face we don’t even see, but I was still mildly disappointed by that). Somewhat ironically given all that I have said about O’Connor thus far, Jud, being a priest, is completely sexless in this film, not just celibate but never even indicating any desires. His passions are reserved for a steadily growing hatred for the priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, Monsignor Jefferson Wicks. Josh Brolin is also perfectly cast as Wicks, a complicated but blustering control freak of a man. Wicks, incidentally, is not so celibate, at least not by the strict rules of Catholicism: he regularly asks Jud to take his confession, and is constantly confessing all the times he’s masturbated, including the locations and varying techniques of it.

So this is where the ensemble cast aspect of it comes in: the inevitable murder happens, and the small number of regulars who remain loyal to Wicks’s congregation are all quickly identified as suspects: Martha the deeply devotional church lady (Glenn Close); Nat the town doctor (Jeremy Renner); Vera the lawyer (Kerry Washington); Lee the best-selling author now in a professional slump (Andrew Scott); Simone the former concert cellist rendered disabled by an undiagnosable chronic pain disorder (Cailee Spaeny); and Cy the YouTube-obsessed aspiring Republican politician (Daryl McCormack). None of these characters get a great deal of development, but that’s beside the point of the exercise in a film like this; what’s important is that each one of them gets assigned a clear motive.

And on top of all that, we get Mila Kunis as the local police chief in this small New York State town; Jeffrey Wright as the bishop who assigns Jud to Wicks’s church (Wright is always a welcome presence and he doesn’t get enough screen time here); Thomas Haden Church as Martha’s groundskeeper lover; and my favorite surprise appearance, Bridget Everett, comedian and star of HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, as a gabby construction company employee.

You may have noticed I haven’t yet even mentioned Daniel Craig. Well, now I have! We do see his face first in Wake Up Dead Man, but he’s reading a written account of what has transpired at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, which quickly cuts to that backstory as the narrative, introducing all of these characters and leading up to the murder. Craig isn’t seen at all through all this backstory, at least half an hour or more, until the police chief has called in Private Detective Benoit Blanc, he meets all of these characters in question, as well as the writer of the aforementioned account, and we finally figure out how he came to be in possession of it—in a way not quite suggested at first, by how this movie is cleverly edited.

And yes, the story and the vibe are both very close to that of 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion—which is by design. Which is to say: if you enjoyed those other two movies (and I very much did), then you will enjoy this one. They all feature effective humor, intriguing mystery, solid performances, and a big reveal at the end of who the murderer is and exactly how the deed was done. It’s formula, sure, but also the point: it’s a formula that works. And to Rain Johnson’s exceeding credit, even people who usually figure out the mystery before it’s revealed don’t do it so easily in Johnson’s films. My husband cycled through four different theories—including that all the suspects worked together to commit the murder—until the final reveal proved all his predictions had been wrong.

Wake Up Dead Man does have a few minor details that don’t make sense under scrutiny, such as local police using sirens when merely arriving for a meeting with someone. There is a quasi-meta moment when Benoit Blanc notes that they are not in a mystery fiction, even though of course they are. And, as always, your mileage may vary on Daniel Craig’s Kentucky-fried accent, which some find fun and others find ridiculous. I fall somewhere in the middle on that one, though as these movies go on, it feels sort of like an essential trademark of the series. The bottom line is that I alway have a blast watching these movies, and while I would also love to see Brian Johnson branching out into other genres again, I would happily take another five of these, so long as the quality stays consistent. So far, it has—the first film is the easy favorite, of course, as the kick-off to the series, but I found the second one nearly as delightful (though one wonders how well it will age over time, given how much of its covid-era production was worked directly into the script).

I should note that Wake Up Dead Man made me laugh quite a lot, often really hard, especially in its first hour or so. The humor certainly tapers off as the tensions rise, and I kind of missed the humor in the second half. But, being set in a Catholic church and with congregants as most of its characters, Wake Up Dead Man also weaves in themes of duty, morality, and loyalty with a nuance not quite present in the previous films, which injects the Knives Out series with a new kind of life. Rain Johnson is a consummate writer, and particularly designer of plot construction, which is the real star of all these movies. I’ve been careful not to spoil anything here, as there are unsurprisingly many plot twists (watch out for the deliberately misleading trick of Blanc saying “Why’d you do it?”). Suffice it to say that Wake Up Dead Man is every bit the entertainment mystery it is designed to be. The only true disappointment is that, even by comparison to the previous two films, its theatrical release was significantly limited, mostly confining its access to Netflix. These movies are always more fun in theaters, but the flip side is that now millions of people have instant access. So fire it up and watch it right now!

You’ll figure it out as soon as they do.

Overall: B+

JAY KELLY

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

There was a time, thirty-odd years ago, when there was a recognizable element of a “made for TV” movie. Later, twenty-odd years ago, we got a higher level of movie on TV, usually originals made for premium cable channels. Still later yet, maybe ten years ago, we moved into a recognizable original movie made for streaming platforms—largely but not limited to Netflix. There are slight variances in all of these examples, but what they all have in common is a certain tone, a certain level of production value, a certain quality of the writing. All of it was at least one step down, sometimes more, from the level of quality you might expect in a theatrical release.

Enter Jay Kelly, which feels very much like a prototypical “Netflix Original” of the 2020s era. And don’t get me wrong, there are always exceptions—indeed, in their days, there were also exceptional made-for-TV movies and premium-channel originals. But when enough of these things get made, they kind of fall into a recognizable average, and that’s the space Jay Kelly exists in. It’s a decent enough movie, but just not quite good enough to feel like it would have been worth seeing in a theater.

I realize I’m speaking like a person out of time, given the wildly changing movie landscape, the siloed nature of audience interests, and even how many truly terrible movies you can actually still see in theaters. But Jay Kelly is trying to provide the kind of “movie for adults” that used to be moderately successful in cinemas and just don’t exist there anymore. But it also falls short of what the best of those sorts of movies used to provide when they were given a chance to thrive.

And there is an unforeseen downside to the touted tendency of Netflix to give filmmakers total freedom to make whatever they want, to create a “pure vision.” It turns out, sometimes studio notes are actually good, and unchecked indulgence isn’t always all that great. In this case, it’s director and co-writer Noah Baumbach, who previously brought many Oscar nominations to a Netflix Original with Marriage Story (2019), a much better film than Jay Kelly. There was a couple of years there where Netflix was helping shepherd filmmakers to near-masterpieces.

It’s too bad, because Jay Kelly had a lot of potential, starring George Clooney in the title role as a movie star in the twilight years of his career, looking back on his life with melancholy, loneliness and regret. His manager, Ron (Adam Sandler), is a long-suffering and thankless friend who Jay rarely sees as anything other than someone he pays. The same goes for his publicist, Liz (Laura Dean), and to a bit of a lesser degree, his hairstylist, Candy (Emily Mortimer, who co-wrote the script with Baumbach). A bunch of other recognizable faces show up: Jim Broadbent as Jay’s longtime professional mentor; Billy Crudup as Jay’s old acting school buddy; Patrick Wilson as another actor managed by Ron; even Greta Gerwig as Ron’s wife—and it’s lovely to see Gerwig in front of the camera again, even if relatively briefly.

The trouble is, the script for Jay Kelly is often unnecessarily obvious, garnished with some clunky exposition, as when Ron and Liz talk about the night 19 years ago when she left him at the Eiffel Tower. They tell each other things that fill us in on the story but would never be the level of detail people would actually say to each other when recalling a shared memory.

I feel like I understand what Jay Kelly is going for, about a man both running from himself and afraid to actually be himself (it’s mentioned more than once how hard that is to do). It just misses the mark a bit. The performances are decent across the board, and Clooney is well cast in this role, even if it’s a very odd choice for a tribute event for Jay to feature retrospective clips from his film career that are all clips from George Clooney’s actual film career. What exactly are we doing here? One might assume this is a meta commentary on Clooney’s own life—right down to the first-consonant sounds of both first and last names—except for how clearly and fully fictionalized Jay Kelly and his life are. Not enough of Jay Kelly makes us think about the real-life George Clooney until this moment, and this retrospective of his career makes us think only about George Clooney and not enough about Jay.

Baumbach also makes a consistent choice regarding Jay’s reminiscences, where he will walk through a doorway into another room that turns out to be one of his memories. I always found these moments awkward and not especially well executed. In one scene, he calls one of his two grown daughters on the phone, and suddenly the daughter is walking with him through the woods—an unnecessarily foggy woods, mind you—and speaking to him face to face, even though we are to understand they are actually on the phone. I just felt Jay Kelly would have worked better without all these odd transitional flourishes.

It took a bit of time, but Jay Kelly did ultimately hold my interest; there are too many really good actors in it for it not to. That said, I have long far preferred Adam Sandler as a dramatic actor to his mostly-awful comedies, but while he is decent in Jay Kelly, his performance here falls far short of the incredibly dynamic screen presence he had in films like Punch-Drunk Love (2002) or Uncut Gems (2019).

Again, this all comes back to the unchecked freedom now characteristic of, particularly Netflix Original films. It increasingly brings with it a kind of looseness that does not necessarily serve the movie. Jay Kelly has a very compelling premise and pretty solid performances, but it also would have benefitted from polishing, maybe even a bit of trimming. It has a satisfying trajectory of story beats, but this is not a movie that needed to be 132 minutes long. It features no dramatic catharsis that makes it feel worth the time investment.

Or: maybe it’s worth having on at home, and that’s exactly the point. My counterpoint, I suppose, is that this approach has done nothing over time but lower our standards. It was fine, I guess. Okay let’s watch another blandly effective entertainment that’s Up Next!

Jay Kelly, George Clooney, then and now: an actor reflects.

Overall: B

ZOOTOPIA 2

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

If you really want to see a movie as delightful as Zootopia (2016), nine years later, then . . . why not just watch Zootopia again? That’s what I did, and I had a blast. I nearly forgot how good it was, how clever, how consistently funny. I probably would have enjoyed Zootopia 2 more had I not watched both movies one day after the other.

Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy Zootopia 2; I did, generally. It’s the “generally” that I’m a little hung up on, because this new film is something that takes a clever concept and then does little more than rehash it. A ton of the gags in this film aren’t even original, but rather simply a trotting out of the hits we already saw in the first one. You might not be as prone to noticing this if you don’t watch the films back to back, but you might still notice that Zootopia 2 has a bit of old-school sequel-itis. I kept thinking about Die Hard 2, and how many characters it brought back from the first film for the sake of nothing but having us say, “Hey! That guy!”

As always, none of this is going to matter to kids. They’ll just eat this up, I’m sure. But what historically sets Disney apart from other animation is how well it works as entertainment for grownups as well as the kids. To be fair, Zootopia is still relatively entertaining for adults too, albeit in a bit more of a pandering way. Disney has just been far better at it in the past—including the past Zootopia movie, which had a sly message about unlearning prejudices and a consistently effective sense of humor at the same time. A lot of the gags here feel kind of like they would have been cut from the first film, and then just got reassembled here.

We even get a return of Shakira as the pop star Gazelle, right down to the “live concert” footage that plays with the first few minutes of the end credits. Beat for beat, Zootopia is simply the same experience as Zootopia, just without the novelty or certainly any of the originality. Granted, even the original Zootopia recalled the 1973 animated Disney film Robin Hood, a favorite of mine in childhood, but at least it put a new spin on the concept. There are no new spins to be found in this new film, which throws out a lot more movie reference gags for the grown-ups: a hedge maze with the iconic The Shining synthesizer score, a brief reappearance of Bellwether the sheep (Jenny Slate) behind a glass wall like The Silence of the Lambs (get it?). Unlike the first film, in which a reference to The Godather also served to move the story forward, these references exist only for their own sake.

They’re still fun, I guess. And although the relationship between Judy Hopps the bunny (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde the fox (Jason Bateman) strangely skirts the edges of romance but consistently lands firmly in the realm of “friendship,” an inevitable rift between them and their subsequent emotional reconciliation actually got my eyes a little damp. Maybe I’m just getting as soft as these animals.

Except, here’s the “twist” in Zootopia 2: instead of a society consisting only of mammals (side note, maybe my favorite gag was when they crash a “Burning Mammal” festival), we learn of an underground society of reptiles, pushed to the edges of Zootopia a century ago, the city being tricked into thinking of them all as untrustworthy. Never mind that this is nearly identical to the rift between two factions in the first film, predator versus prey. The cartoon logic of how these animals “evolved” made more sense in the first film, but the more into the weeds it gets in this second film, the less the logic holds. Not that cartoons were ever meant to be logical, I get it! There’s still something to be said for skilled weaving of a narrative, and Zootopia 2 is just a slightly degraded copy of an original. We do get a snake voiced by Ke Huy Quan, and a beaver voiced by Fortune Feimster. The aquatic mammal borough of Zootopia proves more fun and interesting than the reptile underground.

The animation is very well rendered, if often hard to focus on with all the quick-cutting action. The plot holds okay, as we learn about “weather walls” that control separate climates for different borough/habitats of the city, while I find myself wondering how any of them can visit any other, more inhospitable environments for any real amount of time and in so doing keep a whole city humming. But then, I think too much. It’s not that deep, right? Except Zootopia 2 clearly wants it to be, what with the continued, and slightly less sly, messaging about accepting each other for who we truly are. The allegorical component remains strong in this film, it just has a comparative lack of finesse. It’s just fun enough, but unexceptional, time at the movies.

I never thought I’d be this happy about the distraction of a beaver.

Overall: B

RENTAL FAMILY

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

There’s something about Brandan Fraser’s performance in Rental Family, a kind of forced “aw-shucks” quality I found slightly off putting. He also keeps doing this thing with his mouth, where he sort of scrunches his lips to one side. To be fair, it’s very different from anything he’s done in other roles, but all I could think about was how he was simply making specific acting choices for this character. But isn’t that the kicker—that I should not be conscious of acting choices? I should readily suspend disbelief, and accept Phillip Vanderploeg as an individual.

I feel bad dumping on Brendan Fraser like this; I do like him as an actor, generally speaking—his performance in The Whale was incredible, and was the only thing that kept me from dismissing that wildly problematic film completely. Considering these respective performances, I suppose the next step is toward the director, in this case a Japanese director named Hikari, who apparently goes professionally by one name, like Madonna or Beyoncé. She most recently directed three episodes of the excellent Netflix series Beef, and has one other feature film on her resume, about a young Japanese woman with cerebral palsy called 37 Seconds and which ironically had a runtime of 6,900 seconds (115 minutes). Anyway, I can only imagine that either Hikari was happy with the performance Brendan Fraser gave her, or this was what she coaxed out of him. Either way, I found it a little cloying.

The performances of everyone else in the cast ranges between pretty good to great—the latter applying to the very impressive 11-year-old Shannon Mahina Gorman, whose very presence improved Rental Family any time she was onscreen. Finding a child actor who is both talented and natural is a difficult feat. Gorman is biracial, as is the young character she plays, Mia, whose single mother hires the “Rental Family” agency to provide a stand-in American dad for her. Mia’s mom is trying to get her accepted into a good school, which she believes previously rejected her because of the absent dad. Enter Phillip, here playing another person as provided by the Rental Family agency.

Rental Family follows dual plot threads, one where Phillip bonds with Mia, and another where Phillip pretends to be a journalist interviewing an elderly actor named Kikuo (Akira Emote) who is afraid the country is forgetting his life’s work—his daughter hires the agency in an effort to make him feel better. The story moves into these other two plot threads after we see Phillip’s first job, as a hired groom at a wedding, staged for the benefit of the bride’s parents. This sequence ends with a particular reveal that I won’t spoil, except that it seems to serve as a justification for the agency’s existence, and is fairly moving.

But, thanks to an occasionally muddled script, cowritten by Hikari and American writer and executive producer Stephen Blahut, there are times when even Rental Family seems ambivalent about a service like this, which is apparently quite prevalent in Japan. Is Hikari making a statement, or a judgment, about them? I can’t quite tell. This film seems to support some of their services, such as what is revealed to be the reason for the wedding, but not some other services, such as “apology services” where cheating husbands hire a fake mistress to apologize to their wives. Do none of these husbands think of apologizing themselves?

Multiple times in Rental Family, a character will comment on how people outside of Japanese culture will never fully understand it. This is coincidentally in keeping with my experience of this film, which I could never fully connect with. I wanted more dimension to the characters, and particularly to Phillip, who spends far more time onscreen pretending to be someone he’s not. The only thing we know about why this “big American guy” has been living in Japan for the past seven years is that a widely seen toothpaste commercial was what brought him there to begin with. Do actors really move to Japan just for one commercial gig? I want to know more about his family back home, and why he had such an apparently absent dad. But, evidently the only reason we know even that much is so he can express reservations about playing a parent himself.

We lean early on that Phillip is lonely in Japan, no friends to speak of, no romantic partner, just a woman who is evidently a sex worker—also a very undeveloped character, although I can appreciate that at least in this movie she’s much more than just a sex object, a thoughtful woman who also provides Phillip companionship. Really, all the characters around Phillip are far more interesting than he is, not just because they are all have a fair amount more dimension to them, but because Phillip’s only mode seems to be uncomfortable awkwardness.

There’s nothing egregiously wrong with Rental Family, I just found it somewhat lacking. It’s a blandly pleasant entertainment, and I tend to want more than that. Others may locate more insight in it than I did. It won’t elicit much passion: it’s fine for what it is, and it won’t be long remembered.

I kind of wish the movie were about her instead.

Overall: B-

HAMNET

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

The final sequence in Hamnet involves the staging of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, with Shakespeare himself (Paul Mescal) playing the part of the Ghost, and Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), at the front of the floor crowd crunched right up against the stage, having made an unannounced visit to view the play. This is a scene with a lot of extras, thankfully none of them computer-generated, and the staging—if you’ll pardon the pun—is superb. It’s not often that even the performances of the extras in a scene is impressive, and this is a testament to the directing skill of Chloé Zhao (who also directed and co-wrote the Best Picture-winning 2020 film Nomadland). Agnes becomes deeply invested in the story unfolding onstage in front of her, but so does this entire crowd, who at one point take a subtle collective action as led by Agnes, which is one of the most moving moments in the film. We do not see any of William Shakespeare’s productions up until this point, and this sequence alone makes Hamnet worth seeing, and it’s worth waiting for.

It’s also worth noting that Zhao also co-wrote Hamnet, along with Maggie O’Farrell, author of the 2020 novel of the same name—and that this story runs with a lot of historical conjecture, such as the idea that Hamlet is at all directly tied to the death of Shakespeare’s one son: Hamnet. Indeed, we are told with an opening title card that in their time, the names “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were virtually interchangeable. This film literalizes this notion when, upon first seeing the play start, Agnes shouts at the actors “Don’t you dare say my son’s name!”

As O’Farrell and Zhao tell it, The Tragedy of Hamlet ultimately served as a way for William and Agnes to come to an understanding regarding the grieving of their son. This is reportedly the product of speculation, but in the film, it is very effective. I cam to this film armed with tissues, and it did not disappoint on that front—although I will admit to expecting to weep a bit more than I did. I still wept plenty.

The focus of Hamnet is never truly on the title character, but on how his life and death of his parents, one of whom is arguably the most famous artist ever to live in the Western World. Long before any of the children are born—and there are three; an older daughter, Susanna (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), and a pair of fraternal twins, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes)—the story focuses on the love story between William, and Agnes, the local orphaned child with a reputation for being a witch. Hamnet only leans slightly into the witchiness of Agnes, with her insistence that she can see visions by touching people’s hands, or her deep, generational connection to the forest. She even gives birth to Susanna by herself in the woods. This, of course, is well after William and Agnes secure their betrothal, in the face of certain lack of permission by either William’s parents or Agnes’s guardian, by simply getting pregnant.

I find myself wondering how these plot threads play out in the novel, as although the film clocks in at a quite-reasonable 125 minutes, some of these details felt a little bit rushed to me. Most notably, the contempt this couple’s parents or guardian have for their beloved, which seems to have dissipated on the part of William’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson), within a couple of scenes—as soon as the narrative jumps forward to the birth of Susanna. As for Agne’s stepmother, Joan (Justine Mitchell), we see her very briefly in only a few scenes, and when Agnes much later says to her very coldly, “You are not my mother, and you never were,” we have seen so little of Joan that the nastiness feels unearned.

The narrative also jumps forward from the twins’ infancy to their age at around ten, and we do not get a lot of time getting to know any of them, either—though we do get to know Hamnet himself slightly better than the others. Just enough, indeed, to get a sense of how much these children mean to their parents. Jessie Buckley’s performance of maternal grief is so stunningly visceral that I found myself wondering if she has children of her own (she has one), and Paul Mescal has kind of already made a career out of tortured interiority. These two do not express grief in the same way, and in this telling at least, it takes the writing of Hamlet to bring them back around to each other

Hamnet is more than anything a love story, and that is indeed where it shines. The performances are phenomenal, especially those of Buckley and Mescal, but really across the board—right down to the aforementioned extras in the theater watching Hamlet in the final sequence of the film. And although I’m sure it would help deepen the appreciation, you need not have a detailed knowledge of Shakespeare’s work to appreciate this story, or indeed even how Hamlet is used therein. Shakespeare himself was well known for writing “a play within a play,” which is effectively what is happening here—quite similarly using the play as subtext. By the end, though, it becomes the text, in a way deftly executed, so that even with the quibbles I had with the plotting, I felt emotionally cleansed.

Agnes is deeply moved, and so are we.

Overall: A-

ETERNITY

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

I really enjoyed Eternity, but I also have a lot of nitpicks. Let’s go through them all!

But let’s back up a step, to the premise, which is that our three main characters spend time in a place called “Junction,” where they have as long as a week to decide a single environment (or world, or universe, whatever you want to call it) in which to spend eternity. The twist, and the whole reason for this story, is that Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) is also faced with another agonizing decision: whether to spend eternity with the first husband, Luke (Callum Turmer), who died in the Korean war, or her second husband, Larry (Miles Teller), with whom Joan enjoyed 65 years of happy marriage.

The first death we see is Larry’s, and it’s the circumstances of this death that is my first major nitpick. It happens at a gender reveal party for one of their great grandchildren. A gender reveal party? Really? To be fair, the script, by Patrick Cunnane and director David Freyne, passingly acknowledges how stupid these parties are: “People die at these things!” says Larry as an old man, played by Barry Primus (Joan as an old woman is played by Betty Buckley). There is even a bit of a callback to this gag when a later couple met in Junction is revealed to have been killed in a freak accident at a gender reveal party. Still, the deliberately inoffensive jokes aside, the use of a gender reveal party in the opening sequence of this film both reflects and participates in the preposterous normalization of "gender reveal” parties. These things are both pointless and blithely presumptuous, and might as well be called “Genital Identification Parties.” But nobody in this movie dares say that.

We learn on the car ride to the party, before Larry dies, that Joan has cancer, and is waiting until after the party to tell the rest of the family. When Larry wakes up in Junction, he’s the first character we follow there, and at first the story is just from his perspective. But, we already know that Joan is not far behind, and basically the second act involves a shift in perspective to hers. Not long after that, we learn that Luke has been waiting for Joan in Junction for the past 67 years.

The rules of how things work in Junction are both undeniably entertaining and often nonsensical. This film clearly owes its existence to the widely loved (I always thought it was just fine) 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, except instead of a character pleading his case for having lived a life worthy of spending eternity in a better place, here characters merely have to choose where to spend eternity—and in this case, with whom.

Why time means anything in Junction at all escapes me, but it very much does: “clients” are assigned an Afterlife Coordinator (“AC”) as a guide to help them choose, but they get one week in which to do it. The people who work these jobs in Junction, whether they are ACs or janitors or bartenders, are people who have chosen, for various reasons, not to go to any eternity at all. Some of them just enjoy helping others and that gives them a feeling of purpose. Some are waiting for their beloved to arrive, as in Luke, who has waited there for 67 years. It’s a little weird that measurements of time should be so important in Junction when it means nothing in eternity, but whatever.

The thing is, in the film Eternity, it’s all the scenes that take place in Junction that are really fun and compelling—and, crucially, contains all of the surprisingly effective humor in this film. Now, it also makes no sense that the system here should be so modeled on capitalism, with representatives from countless “Worlds” trying to sell it to people passing through Junction—not with money, but just simple persuasion, I guess. We see characters walking past countless booths (or in some cases, watching commercials) for different “Worlds,” from Paris Land to Smokers World to 1920s Germany “with 100% less Nazis.” Larry’s inclination is toward Beach World, and Joan’s is toward Mountain Town—basically the same argument they had in the car on the way to the party. I loved seeing all these examples of eternities, and when I saw booths for Queer World and Studio 54 World side by side, I thought: I’d have a hard time choosing between those two. That said, why does this system only have a selection of offerings created by someone else? Can’t we just create one of our own? What if I want to spend eternity in Andrew-Garfield-and-Timothée-Chalamet-Sandwich World?

Junction is also made much more fun by the supporting characters who are Larry’s and Joan’s ACs, respectively: Anna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and Ryan (John Early). These two are very invested in their clients but also have a sexual past together, which is an odd turn in this film given how openly and obviously queer John Early is. He does marvel at the handsomeness of Luke, a running gag in the script, but he later explains to Anna that he could never do polyamory because “I am a one-woman man.” Oh really, John Early? The oddest thing about that exchange is that it is the one time in Eternity that polyamory is brought up, and it’s only within the context of Ryan and Anna’s relationship. Why does no one ever bring up the idea to Joan, Larry and Luke? Couldn’t they at least test out Polyamory World?

It seems like that’s the only thing that could be a suitable compromise for all three of them. Why should Joan have to choose? Isn’t eternity supposed to be the place they choose in which they’ll be happiest? This script does, amusingly, acknowledge how one eternity could quickly get tedious: enforcement officials are constantly running down people trying to escape the eternity they have chosen, one of whom shouts, “Museum World is so boring!” But would not any eternity be so? Whether it’s an eternity at the beach or in the mountains?

Indeed, there’s a ton of detail in Eternity that is really easy to pick apart, not least of which is the fair amount of time spent in different eternities in the second half of the film. These scenes are constructed so that characters can reflect on whether or not they made the right choice, but when the backdrop is just serene mountains or an inexplicably overcrowded beach (why would there be a limit on the amount of beach that can be shared for eternity?), Eternity, as a film, instantly just becomes far less interesting, compelling, or fun. It’s less fun without Early or Randolph around. And the technique for rendering the “Archive” building in each Eternity where characters can view replayed memories from their lives is mystifying: they see themselves as tangible people, but in a sort of diorama box with the environment of these memories rendered in large hand drawn backdrops. I can’t tell if this was a legitimately artistic choice or if it was a production cost saving measure. It sure felt like the latter,

Eternity is the kind of movie that is undeniably entertaining but also does not stand up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. I laughed a lot the entire time the film was set at Junction, from the many sight gags to the delightful performances of both Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early. This made me happy to have seen this movie even though none of it really makes any sense.

Overall: B