Skippable rambling intro (don't skip; I'm in your house right now, looking over your shoulder as you read this)
Since the overwhelming, life-altering double whammy of my wife's metastatic breast cancer diagnosis and the pandemic (remember the pandemic?) in 2020, I've used these introductory paragraphs in my annual favorite movies of the year posts to open a vein and bleed all over. Yes, it's an odd way to introduce a post about movies, but I have my reasons. I'm trying to illustrate the relationship between my lived life and my internal life (I don't really separate these things), and I consider these posts a never-ending partial autobiography about a guy with a movie obsession (along with two or three other all-consuming obsessions) instead of a "hey, check this out, three and a half stars" consumer reports-style recommendation buffet. I'm thrilled if you give a whirl to any of my particular favorites and get anything out of them, but in these posts I'm primarily using movies to try to explain myself (and my particular aesthetic approach to every part of my life) to myself and to anyone else who cares, so of course my personal circumstances are going to be part of the package. My other main goal in these introductions is to attempt to close the ever-widening distance between my life and the lives of my friends and family since 2020. The life changes cancer delivered to my wife and me can be extremely lonely and isolating (especially for an antisocial hermit such as myself), and these introductions are part of my attempts to make people understand that isolation. I was hoping it would give people a reason to reach out and have a real conversation beyond "how you doing," but, excepting the first one in 2020, which got a lovely response from several people in my circle (maybe because I put all the cancer talk in the middle in a section I called an intermission, maybe because the diagnosis was recent instead of old news, maybe because we all needed something to do in 2020), people have been careful to avoid talking to me about the heavy shit I bring up in these intros even when they give me positive feedback on the rest of it. My conclusion is that most people either skip this part or that all the darkness and negativity pushes them away. Other people's problems are always off-putting. Come on, we can all admit that. Unless you're one of those rare selfless types or you get off on sticking your nose in other people's biz, my problems are not your problems, and enough already from this guy, am I right? And do I really want people to constantly reach out to me? That sounds like a living nightmare. I guess I just want people to remember I'm still here and to try to understand a bit of what it's like to be in my situation. And I want them to do that for everyone else in their lives. And I wish I was better at that. Honestly, I just want people to be able to read my mind at particular moments chosen by me.
How to move on? I was a high-functioning insane person for most of the last five years, so I didn't know how to have a real conversation, I didn't know how to pick up where I left off pre-2020, and part of me wanted to hurt and punish people and make them feel guilty about being healthy and continuing to live in the manner in which they were accustomed. I felt like all my friends or relatives on social media were taking four vacations a year with their healthy partners or playing in three bands or releasing their albums or going on tour or publishing their articles or stories or books or eating at a great restaurant every night or exhibiting their paintings or art installations or falling in love for the first or second or third time or having a laugh with close friends and family or starting or continuing a career that was somehow actually fulfilling instead of soul-destroying or retiring from that soul-destroying career or jet-setting to foreign lands or getting the hell out of their red states or communing with nature or just quietly making art. I felt all their experiences mocking mine, their productivity and freedom of movement flipping the bird at my artistic and social paralysis.
Of course no one was doing any of this to spite me, but I spent some of my darker nights convinced otherwise. It was all a cosmic fuck you to yours truly, somehow both the center of the universe and the least important man who ever lived. I was not engaging in what anyone would call clear thinking. People are living their own lives, consumed by their own problems and passions, and I haven't exactly been there for other people, either. My life outside of my home has been a two-way street that no one is driving, but I'm slowly starting to feel the blurriness and bitterness and anger turn into focus and acceptance and, on my best days, gratitude. My jealousy of other people's lives is ratcheting back down to healthier levels, and I feel some pieces of myself slowly reattaching. (I've also taken two solo vacations to Memphis in the last two years to see some live music, but I'm not yet able to make the leap and travel somewhere with the specific goal of interacting with friends or family. The idea somehow makes me freeze in terror, but I hope to make it happen again some year soon. I also don't know how to start making music again, but I'd like to make that happen one of these days.) Long story short, I'll probably stop doing these kinds of intros in the future and get down to business with less rambling, even though I was born a ramblin' man. I'm tired of talking about this stuff, especially when it gets no response and leads nowhere.
Speaking of saying too much, I will be spilling some of my personal business in these movie descriptions/analyses, despite my philosophy of checking that personal biz at the door when engaging with a work of art or entertainment and not trying to find myself in it or impose myself on it. I couldn't help it. A few movies in 2025 were directly and indirectly singing my life back to me in ways I haven't seen onscreen often, if at all. I'm putting one of them into a specific category of its own because it shared so much of what I've been living and what I may have to live, and I didn't know how much I needed that until I saw it. After that special case, I break down the rest of the new release movies I watched in a theater in 2025 into three categories. The best of the best is self-explanatory, the rest of the best is movies I liked almost as much, and the rest of the rest is the flawed but worthwhile honorable and slightly dishonorable mentions. As always, certain movies are absent because they didn't play in Austin or because life got in the way. A combination of oppressive work hours in the first half of the year, life events, other interests, and a crowded end-of-year release schedule kept me from seeing a handful of movies I would have otherwise checked out, including Sinners and Peter Hujar's Day. Don't get mad at me because Sinners isn't here. When it played in theaters, I was working crazy hours or my wife was in the hospital. I will catch up.
NEW RELEASE MOVIES SEEN IN THEATERS IN 2025
The special case
The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)
I'm not one of those people who wants writing or film or music or painting or photography or any of the other arts to reflect or rubber-stamp my own experiences back to me. I know who I am, and I've been stuck with that person for 48 years. I'm much more interested in how other people turn their life experiences and private internal worlds into aesthetic shapes that I can then absorb into my own private internal world. However, my wife's cancer diagnosis five and a half years ago, besides radically transforming our lives in ways I'm still discovering/being pummeled by, has created a near-insurmountable chasm between me and the people in my life. I feel like I can't relate to anyone not living in my house, and they can no longer relate to me. I don't feel the connections I used to feel. I've been isolated and lonely and volcanically angry and a little crazy and full of love for my wife and gratitude for her medical team and hate for insurance companies and capitalism and partially unhealthy resentment for anyone with a healthy partner and icily bitter fear of the future and disgusted awe at the crazy fucking things cancer and its treatments can do to the human body, and I've come to realize I would maybe like to see ANY of these experiences reflected back to me in a book or movie in a non-bullshit way so I could maybe feel a little less isolated and nuts. I got the movie this year, The Shrouds, from one of my favorite directors, David Cronenberg, and it's a testament to his artistry that I had two extremely different experiences during my two viewings of this movie while my admiration for it never diminished.
David Cronenberg has gone through what I'm going through. His wife Carolyn died of cancer in 2017 after living with the disease for many years. (I don't use the ridiculous phrase "battling the disease." Lost your battle? I guess you just didn't want it enough, didn't fight it enough. Interesting/disgusting to see which chronic illnesses get the battle label and which ones don't. People are always battling cancer but you don't often hear about a battle with diabetes or emphysema or heart disease.) The Shrouds is Cronenberg's semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional reckoning with pieces of that loss in his own particular, peculiar, body-focused way. This is not a movie about overcoming the adversity of grief or living with a terminal illness or dying of a terminal illness or inspirationally beating the odds. (The Hollywood cancer movies are fantasies for people who have never had cancer and who don't think they ever will. It's tragedy cosplay for healthy daydreamers.) This is a movie specifically about a husband mourning his wife's body and the physical touch and feel of her, and not wanting or knowing how to let that go even after her death and not knowing how to rejoin the world. In pure Cronenberg style, he is more attached to her as a body than as a person, which was clearer to me in my second viewing when I was able to distance myself from the character. I've never seen a non-Hollywoodized movie (or possibly any movie) about the unique experience of being a cancer husband and the changes that causes to the physical relationship. (My wife and I use the term "cancer wives" to refer to the unlucky women characters whose illness is a plot device to give the main character a tragic past.) It's also a movie about post-pandemic paranoid conspiracy brain and modern technology surveilling every aspect of our lives and taking over functions we used to handle ourselves. Cronenberg skillfully weaves these elements into the whole. (It's also one of the most beautifully composed pieces of digital cinema I've seen. Take notes, jokers and clowns who keep making digital movies that look they're shot inside a cave at night or conversely are so brightly lit they look like the inside of a Best Buy.) As you can probably guess, I saw myself and my experiences in the lead character Karsh (Vincent Cassel) to an almost unhealthy degree when I watched The Shrouds for the first time on a late April evening. My wife's cancer treatment was in a particularly uncertain place at that point in the year because of a large Cronenbergian tumor in her armpit (thankfully surgery and radiation shrunk it into oblivion, though not without several complications and a long recovery), and my temporarily insane work schedule was isolating me even more than my antisocial norm, so the movie was an expressway to my skull. I felt like I was watching a fictionalized manifestation of my own present and future lives, despite the late-night crowd being mostly twentysomethings who lost interest halfway through and who laughed uncomfortably during a scene that hit me like a freight train because I'm living it and have never seen it expressed in an artwork. (Parts of the movie are deliberately, intentionally funny, but the scene I'm referring to is not, especially if you're actually experiencing it every day.) On a second viewing, I was able to detach myself from Karsh and look at him more critically. I could be outside the film and take it all in instead of feeling like it was about me. On that first viewing, I was alone in the theater in April during a particularly dark time in my life, surrounded by young people who (generalizing by their ages and reactions) couldn't yet relate to chronic illness and disrupted romantic lives and serious loss and who had more present and future than past. I watched it a second time at home with my wife while in a much healthier mental state. I saw less of myself in it (though it still hit home pretty hard in a handful of scenes) and was more disturbed by certain aspects of Karsh, but I loved it just as much, despite and because of how it holds the audience at a remove. Cronenberg, like Kubrick, is frequently and unfairly called cold. His films are definitely not warm and fuzzy and they use distancing effects to keep the viewers' emotions from running wild, but they're not cold. These are deeply felt movies about our bodies and our minds.
The best of the best
Abiding Nowhere (Tsai Ming-liang)
Knowing this was a largely narrative-free film where a monk (played by Tsai regular Lee Kang-sheng) walks extremely slowly through parts of Washington, D.C. and having seen Tsai gradually pare his narratives to the bone over the course of his career, I expected a much more minimal, still, and drowsily meditative experience. I wasn't expecting to feel so energized and engrossed. To put it in Brian Eno terms, I expected Music for Airports and got Another Green World. Tsai frequently changes locations and camera placement, and the film moves back and forth between exterior and interior spaces, isolated areas and places bustling with people and vehicles, the natural world and city streets, and Kang-sheng and a younger actor, Anong Houngheuangsy. The sound design contains snippets of conversation, police and ambulance sirens, insects, various water sounds, and both diegetic music and carefully and sparingly used film score. There are so many choices about what to look at and what to listen to in each frame, and the final image is one of my favorites of the year.
By the Stream (Hong Sang-soo)
My memories are a little hazy, particularly because I forgot to jot down anything about this movie after I watched it, but this has so much of what I want from Hong Sang-soo: a pragmatic and demystified depiction of the work of making art, cryptic misunderstandings, lots of eating and drinking, inebriated outpourings of emotion, a substantial role for Kim Min-hee, and surprising moments that made me reconsider what came before from multiple perspectives.
Friendship (Andrew DeYoung)
The zeitgeist and I don't often meet in the middle, but I share the popular opinion that Tim Robinson is insanely funny. Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave are two of my favorite TV shows of the past decade, and it's a crime against humanity that Detroiters was canceled after two seasons. Writer/director DeYoung makes excellent use of Robinson's comedic persona and timing, but he also taps into the emotional current of Robinson's characters' desperate need to connect with other people and the hilarity and darkness in the way he carries that desperation to extremes after botching the attempt. This movie hurts so good if you're a socially isolated adult yearning for connection, it's weird, it's funny, it's human, it makes incredible use of Ghost Town DJ's' "My Boo," and it's also one of the rare movies that's smart about cancer. In the opening scene, Robinson's character Craig and his wife Tami (Kate Mara) are at a cancer survivors' support group. Tami knows that her cancer could come back at any time and talks about living with that fear while Craig is in absolute denial of that ever being a possibility. This scene by itself delivers the entire movie's emotional honesty and comedic absurdity in miniature, and it informs almost everything that happens afterward even though cancer is never brought up again. I loved it, and I'm enormously confused by certain criticisms of it as an I Think You Should Leave sketch stretched to feature length. This is a real movie, son.
Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)
Speaking of funny and devastating, Mike Leigh's latest is both, sometimes at the same time. A return to contemporary settings after a couple of historical films (Mr. Turner and Peterloo), Hard Truths is a tough and uncompromising movie, even for this Mike Leigh superfan, but he's not going to soften characters who shouldn't be softened, and if you give yourself over to his methods, the rewards are endless. All the actors here, even the ones with a few lines, make you think they've lived these characters for a lifetime. On paper, the contrast between sisters Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Chantelle (Michelle Austin) sounds overly simplistic. Pansy, comfortably middle class, suffers from long-term chronic pain and depression that has turned her bitter, angry, and miserable. She wants everyone around her to suffer, too, and her husband and twentysomething son, weary of always being next to a lit fuse, have shut down emotionally, the husband retreating into his plumbing business and the son lethargically detaching with junk food and video games. Chantelle, a working-class single mom, is bright and joyful, taking pleasure in her hairdresser job and her two successful twentysomething daughters, and her apartment is full of sunlight, laughter, music, food, and visits from her kids. As always with Leigh, things aren't quite that simple, and a scene where Chantelle's daughters lie to each other about their respective horrendous days at work (maybe seeing their aunt's constant negativity has made them afraid to express anything but positivity) and a couple of emotionally wrenching scenes where Pansy drops her wall of defenses (one with the sisters at their mother's gravesite, the other with both extended families attempting to eat lunch at Chantelle's apartment) reveal a complicated tangle of motivations and experiences inside Pansy's venom and Chantelle's light. I can't remember who said the wise words about the best art being a door and not a mirror, but I can't help looking at Pansy as a cautionary tale for my own recent trajectory. In too many other directors' movies, a character like Pansy would have been portrayed as a villain or given a false life-changing redemption that turns her warm and fuzzy, but Leigh and Jean-Baptiste treat her and her pain with respect and empathy without softening any of her self-destructive, alienating qualities or pretending like those qualities are lovable quirks that can be smoothed down with the right inspiration.
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
This is going to seem like a wild digression until we get to the movie, but bear with me. It connects. For most of 2025, I felt like I was permanently imploding from stress, the only relief being the sudden flashes of self-aware laughter at the misfortunes raining down on my wife and me. Every time I asked the universe to take a burden away, a new burden was added. It was almost comical. Here's the condensed version: The cancer treatments my wife has undergone since 2020 have mostly done what they were supposed to do, but a small yet tenacious cancerous progression in a lymph node in her left armpit has forced several treatment changes, a minor surgery, and a course of radiation. This year, the cancerous lymph node mutated into a full-fledged monster armpit tumor that started pouring blood early one morning, necessitating a trip to the emergency room. The tumor was removed during a surgery later in the year, where my wife also made the decision to have her left breast and its primary tumor removed, with the decision supported by her surgeon, her oncologist, and me. The surgery went smoothly, but a post-surgical infection put her back in the hospital for several days. At present, most of the cancer in her body is gone except for a few small, stable metastases in her bones (though those are still very much a big deal), but it was a long, hard road getting there, and we don't know where it'll take us next.
During a large chunk of this period of instability and uncertainty, I was also working 50 to 90 hours a week at the day job. I work as an editor for a nonpartisan state agency that provides services for each member of the state legislature. My job has a relaxed schedule with much comp time, vacation, and flexibility when the legislature is not in session (though it's still a pain in the ass), but when the legislature meets for five months every other year and in special sessions (which our governor has been calling like they're going out of style), my work schedule is mostly a grueling slog. I put up with it for the freedom and time off I have in the months when they don't meet, the quality health insurance, and the likelihood of retiring in my fifties, but I really, really hate it. The timing of this particular legislative session was horrendous for me. I mean, they're all bad, but this one was mentally catastrophic. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time in my own life, something I've often felt since I was a child.
Hey, guess what? That's not all. Amid the cancer turmoil and intense work schedule, our attic was invaded by rats. This has been an ongoing problem in our house since we purchased it (the tenacious rodents put it in our price range), but we usually get rid of them for years at a time through a backflow valve on our sewer pipe until they eventually chew through it or find a loose roof shingle to shimmy under. This time, our solution didn't work, and our exterminators said they'd done all they could and we needed a plumber. The plumbers discovered what we already knew — the cast-iron pipes underneath our 1960s-built house had finally reached the end of their road and were corroded and hole-y (and unholy) enough to give the rats permanent ingress to our abode until we replaced the damn things. We knew this was something we'd probably have to do shortly after we bought the house, but it was 10 to 15 years ahead of us and easy to compartmentalize. No one told me that if you live long enough, 10 to 15 years becomes now. Have you guys heard of this shit? Anyway, a plumbing crew had to dig a giant hole under our house and replace the pipes, which took weeks and weeks and was plagued by numerous delays and complications. It was enormously expensive and drained a huge chunk of our savings. Also, the drilling noises stressed our cat out so much that she got a urinary tract infection, which hadn't happened since she was a kitten. Fortunately, there has been zero rat activity in our home since, though a frantic raccoon ripped up several shingles just last weekend trying to find shelter during a freak 3 a.m. wind storm, and we had to get that fixed. Our home has turned into a money pit rivaling the mediocre 1986 Tom Hanks/Shelley Long vehicle The Money Pit. (While I'm airing grievances, please retire the hack phrase "ah, the joys of home ownership" and never say this to anyone again.)
There's more, and let me preface this by saying my non-cancer problems are small potatoes compared to what certain people targeted by the ghouls I'm about to mention are going through. I'm not sure if any of you follow politics, but a whole bunch of dummies voted for a corrupt, racist, fascist, conspiracist, xenophobe grifter lunatic who already fucked up everything once and was thankfully voted out in 2020 but then staged an unsuccessful coup to try to hold on to power and whined for four years with no proof about a stolen election and then the Democrats kicked themselves in the dicks like they always do and the average American voter got the selective amnesia they always get and this withered dipshit was elected again (winning the popular vote, too, this time, which is shameful and disgraceful) and now he's destroying whatever shreds of democracy we had left (with enormous help from a corrupt Supreme Court) and kidnapping immigrants off the streets and extrajudicially killing alleged drug traffickers who are probably just fishermen in a pretext to steal some oil and rolling back decades of progress and using his presidency to enrich his private businesses and posting AI videos of himself dumping excrement on his own citizens and tearing down parts of the White House to build a ballroom and putting up tacky gold shit all over (on top of everything else, the guy has rotten taste), and the incompetent cabal of superfreaks in his cabinet are trying to destroy all our futures (RFK Jr. being in charge of health policy is a particular nightmare for my wife and me), and a lot of people are having the most predictable too-little-too-late buyer's remorse ever. Fuck anyone and everyone who voted for this shit or who did such a bad job combating it that we got a supercharged second round. Maybe all this needed to happen so we can tear it all down and build a better world, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Even if that's the case, too many people's lives are getting ruined right now. This nightmare and related nightmares in countries all over the world are on my mind every day and night. I thought life was going to be better than this, but we've become the ugliest and most rancid versions of ourselves and we keep going lower.
Somehow, I got through the last year, and I only asked God to kill me five times (and I'm an agnostic), which is a looooong way to say that Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is playing a part that I can understand, to paraphrase my man Neil Young. She plays Linda, a Long Island therapist on the verge of a major breakdown of her own. She's the sole caregiver for her chronically ill elementary-school-aged daughter (whose face we mostly don't see, though we do hear her voice) while her naval officer husband (played by Christian Slater) is at sea for months. Her daughter has a tube in her stomach that was supposed to come out already, but complications have ensued. She does not get along with her daughter's doctor (played by director Mary Bronstein), who is really laying the pressure on thick to get the daughter's weight up so the tube can be removed. Meanwhile, the ceiling of her apartment collapses, flooding the place, so her and her daughter stay in a nearby motel while the interminable delays of the repair process drag on and on. She develops a strange, sometimes antagonistic semi-friendship with a fellow motel tenant (played by A$AP Rocky) and has a strange, antagonistic professional relationship with her own therapist (played by Conan O'Brien), who is also a work colleague in the same office building. Like my life this past year, a lot of other shit piles up on top of these problems. Also, my description thus far does not even hint at how wild, strange, darkly funny, and intense this movie is. I found it nerve-rattling as hell, meditatively soothing, and formally exciting.
It's still early days, but I think I'm safe in saying that Rose Byrne gives one of the all-time great performances. She's in Gena Rowlands territory. I wasn't surprised that Conan O'Brien is a good actor, but I am surprised he had this one in him. Bronstein takes away all his tricks except for his sense of timing, and he truly becomes someone else. Her framing of the action and use of closeups is masterful and unrelenting and so particular to her, and the sound design is incredible. This one retains the uncompromising spirit of her first movie, Yeast, with higher stakes, more complexity, and a more expansive visual palette. Excellent use of "Hot Freaks," too. I hope we don't have to wait another 17 years for Bronstein's next movie, but I'm sure it'll be worth it if we do.
Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)
We jump now from one Bronstein to another. Mary Bronstein's husband Ronald cowrote and coedited this one with director Josh Safdie, and movies like this are why I love movies so much. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser (loosely based on flamboyant table tennis champion Marty Reiser), another in the long line of Safdie/Bronstein selfish, charming, manipulative, insanely driven, chaos-agent, bundle-of-energy protagonists. Marty is an enormously gifted ping pong player and classic overconfident New York hustler who constantly wriggles in and out of trouble (and financial solvency). I never get tired of movies about that personality type, especially when Safdies and/or Bronsteins make them (I keep thinking they're going to cinematically exhaust the subject and form, but they keep finding gold), and Chalamet is a natural fit for their aesthetic. My Chalamet skepticism is gone. He does some incredible work here. I don't want to say much more because the movie's near-constant pleasures, forward momentum, shocks, and surprises deserve a fresh audience. It's a movie that's lit up with energy, humor, eccentricity, character detail, anachronistic but aesthetically satisfying uses of '80s music in a '50s period piece, tension, and release, and I find something hilarious and oddly soothing about its frantic but organized chaos. The more stressful my life gets, the more I love a Safdie/Bronstein project. For his supporting cast, Safdie continues his tradition of assembling an insane collection of people you never thought you'd see in the same film who somehow fit perfectly together and give the movie so much flavor and personality. The lineup here includes Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A'Zion, music writer and Bob Dylan associate Larry "Ratso" Sloman, Tyler the Creator, former NBA player George "Iceman" Gervin, reality TV contestant Luke Manley aka Lukey Lunchbox, Fran Drescher, Sandra Bernhard, filmmaker Abel Ferrara (yes!), venture capitalist and Shark Tank cohost Kevin O'Leary (I regret to inform you this jackass is a naturally gifted actor), high-wire artist Philippe Petit, viral video star/radio personality Ted Williams, David Mamet (who has become politically insane), a nearly unrecognizable Penn Jillette (who has become politically sane), and Isaac Mizrahi. There are no weak links, but I needed more Drescher and Bernhard. (Release the Drescher and Bernhard cut.) I also need to mention Jack Fisk's wonderful production design. Fisk is an incredible and undersung artist whose production design and art direction have contributed to so many great films by Brian de Palma, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese and several of my favorite cult '70s b-movies, and he's been married to Sissy Spacek since 1974. The guy clearly knows how to live.
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
This is one of Reichardt's best, I think, though even her weakest movies are pretty damn good. It's a great '70s period piece with contemporary relevance about a small-time art heist committed by an underachieving rebel without a cause and the heist's damaging aftermath. Reichardt's so good at the quietly devastating accumulation of small moments, details, and gestures, and, like a lot of my favorites this year, her movie is simultaneously funny and brokenhearted. She does the damnedest thing with her lead character, played beautifully by Josh O'Connor. He's a selfish, disconnected, and politically and emotionally apathetic guy who keeps making the wrong choices while the hole he digs around himself gets deeper, but his sheepish half-charismatic likability and propensity to keep moving through failure after failure kept a part of me rooting for him even as I felt every sting of the hurt, disappointment, and precarity he caused his family, friends, and a few strangers. I also need to praise Rob Mazurek's jazz score, especially Chad Taylor's drumming.
Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)
This compelling semi-thriller about sex in which no one ever has sex is almost conventional by Guiraudie's standards but still weird enough to baffle and perturb the two elderly women who were sitting across the aisle from me. I don't know why I wasn't expecting this to be so funny, but it is. I love a good going back to the old hometown movie, a murder coverup movie, a disturbance in the equilibrium of a small French village movie, a why is this guy still at our house movie, and an every single character in the movie is horny for another character in the movie but the character they are horny for is not horny for them (or afraid to be horny for them) movie, and Misericordia gives you all five at once.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)
Nyoni follows up her excellent I Am Not a Witch with an even stronger work that hasn't been getting enough attention. I don't want to say too much about this one because I'd really like people to go in cold, but Nyoni juggles so many complex motivations, emotions, and cultural, sexual, and generational conflicts, and her images and storytelling structures have a way of finding surrealist poetry in everyday realism. She's so good at knocking you off guard as a viewer and then slowly picking you back up.
One Battle after Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
Paul Thomas Anderson continues to be one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, and I get a nervously excited anticipatory feeling in the pit of my stomach for each new release, which doesn't happen to me that much as an adult. The only two I find less than great are Hard Eight (which is merely good) and Magnolia (a semi-poorly aged hubristic, sweaty, coke-addled mess that still manages to be half-great and is never boring). (Most of you are wrong about Licorice Pizza. It will be vindicated.) In One Battle after Another, loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Anderson returns to the present for the first time since Punch-Drunk Love with the biggest budget he's ever had to make an exciting, suspenseful large-scale action-thriller about the country's descent into fascism and white supremacy that also retains his kooky, oddball personal vision and sense of humor. An especially beautiful stretch of this film really knocks me out, beginning with Bob's (Leonardo DiCaprio) entrance into the dojo of Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro, the movie's MVP), the karate teacher of Bob's daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti, the movie's other MVP), and ending with a three-car chase, particularly the movement through Sergio's apartment (major kudos to the set and production designers here), Bob's phone charger search and phone call (a friend pointed out that Bob's vape is always charged but his phone is always low on battery), the El Paso skateboarders in shadow leaping from rooftops, and the hilly two-lane road in the final car chase sequence. The camera closing in tight on this road and dipping up and down over the hills delivers one of my favorite film images of the year. It's like a meditative, experimental landscape short dropped into the middle of a high-tension action sequence and it somehow fits together perfectly. Some of the reactions to this movie have been a smidge hyperbolic (I'm that weirdo who prefers The Master and Inherent Vice), but Anderson is engaging with our modern political insanity in ways most of his fellow mainstream big-shot contemporaries aren't, and I think this movie can carry and survive the hype and the awards season hoopla and live a long cinematic life post-2025. My favorite thing about this movie (in addition to what I mentioned earlier)? Its defiant, un-Pollyanna, guarded positivity. Echoed in his lead characters, Anderson is a white dad showing love to his mixed-race kids during the most overtly racist United States administration since slavery and putting his faith in them and their generation to carry some hope and keep the fight going.
P.S. This movie reunites Regina Hall and Shayna McHayle aka Junglepussy, who shared the screen in Andrew Bujalski's Support the Girls. More people need to see that movie. It's really good, and I'm not just saying that because you can see part of my elbow for half a second in Bujalski's Beeswax. (I was an extra. I was paid in barbecue.)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
Even better at blending the personal and political than One Battle after Another, The Secret Agent is a vibrant, eccentric, warmly human widescreen thriller mostly set in 1977 (with some contemporary scenes) in Recife, Brazil. Its two hours and forty minutes fly by. Wagner Moura plays Armando, a widowed academic on the bad side of both the government and a multi-millionaire creep who funds much of his department's research. He lays low in an apartment complex in his hometown of Recife with other political refugees until a fake passport can be arranged to get him and his Jaws-obsessed young son (currently being raised by his in-laws) out of the country. (I can strongly relate to being a little boy obsessed with a movie I haven't even seen yet.) Armando's problems intensify when the rich creep sends a couple hit men to take him out. If this plot synopsis reads like something you've already seen, the presentation is far from it. If you've seen Filho's Aquarius or Bacurau, then you know he uses classic movie conventions in highly unconventional ways while retaining their effectiveness and old-school pleasures. This is one of those films that has such an unpredictable opening scene full of atmosphere, character detail, visual texture, mystery, offbeat humor, and a strong sense of place that I immediately felt the excitement and satisfaction of knowing this filmmaker was in charge of my next three hours. If you can see this on the big screen, do it. The widescreen compositions and sound design are made for the theatrical experience. You also get one more appearance from the late, great Udo Kier in a memorable scene. (As a bonus, he appears in the background of a second scene partying Udo-style at Carnival.)
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (Johan Grimonprez)
Belgian multimedia artist Grimonprez takes an invigoratingly fresh approach in his political documentary/essay film about the complicity of the Belgian, UK, and US governments and their mercenaries for hire in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first post-colonial prime minister of the Republic of the Congo after its independence from Belgium, effectively making surprising and thoughtful connections between anti-colonialist movements and counter-movements in Africa, '50s and early '60s geopolitical history, Malcolm X and his place in the US civil rights movement, and American jazz music and musicians of the same period, some of whom were used (in some cases willingly, in others unwittingly) by the CIA to burnish the United States' reputation in Africa. The movie hits you with wall-to-wall music from so many of the all-time jazz greats and delivers its message in a formal style not too far from the world of short-form videos and reels on YouTube and social media sites, though Grimonprez's approach is more cinematic in scope. Besides the history lesson, great music, and style meets substance pop-art delivery system, I was struck by how the same exact palpable evil emanated like cartoon stink lines from the unkempt, maniacal mercenaries and the expensively dressed, quietly composed, smugly pleased US, UK, and Belgian intelligence agents despite their wildly contrasting surface differences.
The rest of the best
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
The first of Linklater's two 2025 historical fictions released almost simultaneously, one about the beginning of a life in art and the other about the end, Blue Moon presents an imagined version of one of the last nights in the life of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, one-half of the famed songwriting duo Rodgers and Hart. Hart's alcoholism drove a wedge between the two in the early 1940s, and, except for a brief reunion for the revival of A Connecticut Yankee in the fall of 1943, Richard Rodgers switched his partnership to Oscar Hammerstein. Hart died in November of 1943, aged 48. In Blue Moon, Linklater and his screenwriters follow Hart during an afterparty at Sardi's following the Broadway premiere of Rodgers and Hammerstein's first collaboration, Oklahoma!, where Hart's past, present, and denied future all share space. Linklater keeps Blue Moon looking and feeling like a movie despite most of the action being confined to a single location and despite its almost continuous dialogue, most of it in soliloquy from Hart (Ethan Hawke). Blue Moon is aggressively screen-written, performative, and exaggerated but also naturalistic, lived-in, and emotionally raw, an admirably and contradictorily tricky accomplishment that is so fitting for a movie about musical theater people. I can be an Ethan Hawke skeptic, but he's slowly winning me over as he ages, and there's a look on his face here as he exits a restroom that is my favorite thing he's ever done.
Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke)
A difficult film to write about and a mostly impenetrable one if you haven't seen most of Zhangke's previous work, Caught by the Tides was filmed over the course of 22 years (the digital camera image quality varies wildly as technology improves, though what's in the frame always impresses) while Zhangke was working on other projects. He also includes outtakes from many of those other films, rolling them into this one's loose narrative. Starring his wife and frequent collaborator Zhao Tao, Caught by the Tides comfortably carries so many contradictory elements. It's formally experimental but carefully structured; abstract yet emotionally direct; collagist in format and style but straightforward in chronology, with a slowly emerging narrative; deeply melancholy in tone but with a soundtrack of bouncy club beats, punk rock, upbeat pop, and enthusiastically and exuberantly performed traditional Chinese folk and opera; and a sort of greatest hits and outtakes collection that is also a completely new work. I don't think this is a good movie to start with if you're interested in checking him out (I recommend Unknown Pleasures, The World, and Still Life as entry points), but I'm happy to be wrong about that. As a longtime Zhangke fan, I found this one a slightly difficult but unconventionally moving depiction of how countries, cities, artistic mediums, technologies, relationships, and human beings age.
Cloud (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is so good at exploring the anxieties of the present moment, and his body of work will be a valuable resource in deciphering what it felt like to be alive in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He's also very good at gradually shifting the genre of his films while maintaining their tone. Cloud slowly morphs from a quiet class-struggle drama about online resellers into a suspense thriller into a horror film into an action movie, but the shifts feel natural and inevitable. Cloud is possibly less complex than many of his other movies (narratively speaking), but we're currently living in powerfully unsubtle times.
Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay)
Lynne Ramsay, in all her films, takes some of the darkest, most depressing subject matter and presents it with such ecstatic energy and propulsive movement. I'm also a fan of her pointed use of a wide variety of music and the rhythms and disruptions of her narrative structures. Die My Love is an excellent canvas for all of this in its story of a couple, Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who move from New York City to Jackson's hometown in rural Montana (in a house in the woods Jackson inherited from his uncle, dead from a suicide) after Grace gets pregnant. Jackson is a neglectful, probably unfaithful partner, and Grace has beyond serious mental health issues. What could go right? While I was watching this, I thought Jackson's fuzziness and lack of development was an unavoidable flaw (we never get to know him or find out whether he's worth getting to know) because of the intense focus on Grace's point of view, but after living with it for a while, I think Jackson's vagueness really works. Grace doesn't really know her partner (and he doesn't really know her), and they seem like a poor match in every area but the physical one. She's also a sympathetic but wildly unreliable, fractured protagonist, so we're never sure how much of what we're seeing is accurate, though it all feels emotionally honest. Having a fixed, stable interpretation of either character would have betrayed the movie's form. I suspect the same is true for the Lakeith Stanfield scenes, but I need to ruminate on those a little more. Great supporting work from Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte here, too. So glad to see those two onscreen again.
Dracula (Radu Jude)
Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude made two of the greatest recent movies about the madness of living in the dystopian lunacy of the 2020s, 2021's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and 2023's Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. His Dracula is just as darkly funny and formally audacious but more of an endurance test, which is by design. Its sweaty, messy, ugly, hilarious, sometimes beautiful, and deliberately troll-ish three hours, mostly shot on his phone, are equal parts thrilling and exasperating, engrossing and mind-numbing, but he's really getting at the way we've let oligarchical interests hijack our imaginations. The premise of the film is that a commercial entertainment filmmaker, who introduces each section of the film from a sparsely furnished bedroom with one window that barely lets in any light, has agreed to make an entirely AI-generated adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel. What follows is a haphazard anthology of scenes supposedly created by AI as the filmmaker keeps trying and failing to teach the program to produce what he wants. Jude uses AI to generate some images (in the ugliest and most grotesque ways possible), but the bulk of the film is made with real actors shot in real locations (though in the conceit of the film, everything we see that is not the commercial filmmaker's intros is written and generated by AI through the filmmaker's prompts). There are also multiple digressions and detours into other non-Dracula stories, some of them probably containing allusions or references to Romanian literature and history that sailed over my head. Though I didn't love this like I loved the Jude films I mentioned earlier, I was constantly amused by it even when it tested my patience. I was also amused by the handful of people who wandered into my afternoon screening expecting a straightforward vampire movie (it was October 31) only to get a full-on troll-art sensory assault. Sadly, most of them walked out before the cock harvest scene. (And I ain't talkin' about roosters.) Jude's other 2025 film, Kontinental '25, hasn't made it to Austin yet. Hopefully I'll be talking about it in this space next year.
No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
Park's visually intricate, narratively unhurried adaptation of the Donald Westlake novel The Ax uses the crime thriller, the family drama, and dry dark comedy to dig into the moral and ethical compromises inherent in maintaining our standards of living in a profit-based system and how dark things are going to get when, to paraphrase Dusty Rhodes in his "hard times" promo, a computer takes our place, daddy. I love his expressive use of slow dissolves.
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
Linklater's second 2025 movie (and his first French-language movie) is a partially factual, partially imagined account of the making of Jean-Luc Godard's first feature, Breathless, one of the early classics of the French New Wave and one of those movies whose innovations have been thoroughly absorbed into the subsequent film culture. When I first read about this project, I thought it was a bad idea despite my Linklater fandom (and my even larger Godard fandom). As an elitist jerkoff film snob (though since I love every era and genre and subculture of film except for 21st century Hollywood, I'd really say I'm the opposite of a snob), I thought it sounded on paper like a way to turn the first feature of one of the most radical and forward-moving filmmakers we've ever had into a warm and cuddly nostalgia piece, a dreaded love-letter-to-the-movies feelgood puff pastry. Also, Breathless is French New Wave 101. If you're interested in that period and its associated filmmakers or have ever taken a film history class in the last 60 years, Breathless is most likely something you watched in your late teens or twenties and maybe even something you've seen multiple times before burrowing further. It's a canonical entry point that's been discussed, copied, paid tribute to, critiqued, and celebrated ad nauseum. As one critic put it, Breathless already does a great enough job on its own documenting the making of itself. Why not dig a little deeper and tackle the filming of Le Petit Soldat or Weekend or King Lear or Hail Mary? (This is why I'm not a financial advisor to artists. My advice would almost always be "do the thing that's interesting and makes NO MONEY.") Netflix bankrolling it also drove me a little bonkers. You're making a movie about a time period and movement where the movie theater was central to the artform and you're getting bankrolled by a streaming service that will give it a brief theatrical run before throwing it on the content pile? And said streaming service has zero French New Wave movies in its catalog, and almost nothing at all predating the 1980s, so anyone watching it who hasn't seen any French New Wave movies is lacking even a shred of vitally important context?? (What can you do in 2025? Filmmakers need to go where the financing is, but it's still disheartening.)
Hey, guess what? Nouvelle Vague is kind of a feelgood nostalgia puff pastry, but it's a really good one. It's forensically detailed, a pleasure to look at, mostly perfectly cast, and genuinely funny. It's light and breezy without being slight, relaxed and lived-in instead of puffed up with the usual overblown and unearned biopic self-importance, and in love with artists at the beginning of their art lives. The casting department did an absolutely insane job of finding people who look scarily like the people they're playing while also being able to act. I have minor quibbles (Zoey Deutch does a decent job playing Jean Seberg but misses Seberg's gravitas and comes across like a young woman with no serious problems, the closing freeze frame and American Graffiti-style what-happened-next title cards are a little cheesy) and I think Blue Moon is the stronger of the Linklater 2025 doubleheader, but I suspect that some of my fellow film snobs who witheringly dismissed this movie had already decided to hate it in advance. (Godard would've probably hated it, though.) By the way, it was incredibly strange to see the Netflix logo on a 35mm print. What a weird era for film distribution (what a weird era for everything).
The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
Isn't it time for a backlash to the Wes Anderson backlash? Every time he releases a new movie, a wave of "here we go again, another whimsical symmetrical doll's-house movie" complaints appears. If you're not a fan, I think it's time to either simply ignore him or come up with a new line of critical attack. We get it already. Like most directors who aren't journeymen and journeywomen for hire, he has a recognizable visual style and a personal approach to performance and subject matter that may or may not be to your taste, but the point has been made (and made and made and made) that Anderson's movies look like Anderson movies. Imagine if we had social media in the 20th century. "Ugh, another meticulously storyboarded suspense thriller from Hitchcock." "A rag-tag group of fellas and a powerful dame who can hold her own and then some? Looks like Howard Hawks is back in town. Call me when he leaves." "Well, well, well. If it isn't Mel Brooks getting silly. Yawn." "Fritz Lang is at it again. Yep. More shadows and sharp contrasts. Zzzzzzz." Honestly, if I'm not in the right mood, I can find his films a little suffocating, and I miss the tension and contrast in his first two movies, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, in which characters in our recognizable world are trying to turn themselves into Wes Anderson characters. However, on those days when I feel like picking up what he's laying down, I'm compelled and fascinated by just how far he continues to push his personal style, naysayers be damned, and I also think there's a rich seam of melancholy, darkness, and real human feeling in his work that is too often ignored.
The Phoenician Scheme is in my upper echelon of Anderson favorites, despite it receiving mixed reviews and mild praise and getting lost in the shuffle of more high-profile releases. Anderson shrinks the huge ensembles of his last several films down to what is basically a three-character movie, all three of whom (Benicio Del Toro, who's really having a great year, Mia Threapleton, and Michael Cera) have pretty great chemistry together and an instinctual feel for Anderson's cadences and dialogue. The rest of the cast primarily functions as seasoning (some of these actors work better for me than others, but nobody spoils the tone). The result is a movie that has a lot of space and breathing room despite its meticulously perfectionist design. The near-death afterlife vision sequences also feel like new ground for Anderson. I like its relaxed, minor-key tone and the weird streaks of darkness inside it, which sometimes come off like a Looney Tunes cartoon made by a severely depressed person.
Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus)
Far too many indie filmmakers approach their independent work as a potential stepping stone to the Hollywood big leagues instead of as an alternative to it. Joel Potrykus is, refreshingly, an indie lifer who prefers to operate free from shareholder interference or audience expectation in his home state of Michigan with a small cast and crew of longtime friends. I find his movies about lonely, immature adult men (usually starring Joshua Burge) funny, sad, empathetic, unpredictable, mildly annoying, and refreshingly free of macho bullshit clichés about masculinity in crisis even though they're kinda-sorta about masculinity in crisis. Though 2014's Buzzard is still my favorite Potrykus and probably always will be, I find them all worthwhile. As so often happens with Potrykus movies and me, just at the point in Vulcanizadora (a story of two semi-estranged childhood and teenage friends who reconnect when one gets out of jail and the other one gets divorced and who decide to execute a really bad idea) when I grow tired of the conceit and the emotionally stunted characters, Potrykus upends things and rips my heart in half. I care about these damaged doofuses, and their loneliness hits a little too close to home.
The rest of the rest, aka honorable mentions
A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)
Kathryn Bigelow is still a great filmmaker, but I miss the golden era from The Loveless to Strange Days when she was making wild-ass genre movies about rockabilly biker gangs, roving vampires, master manipulator serial killers, New Age surfer bank robbers, and the candy-colored lovably dated rave culture '90s version of the dystopian sci-fi future. Even though most of her 21st century output is solid (except for her awkward art-film attempt The Weight of Water and the dark historical drama Detroit, which is well made but lacks the lived-experience point of view a black director would've given it), Bigelow's post-2000 obsession with the U.S. military-industrial complex is getting a bit tiresome, especially in 2025 when nothing in this country is being run with any competence or good faith. Still, A House of Dynamite is a more successful step outside her comfort zone than The Weight of Water. Eschewing both her incredible skill at action sequences and her usual linear narratives, A House of Dynamite presents three versions of the same event (government institutions scrambling to react to a nuclear missile launched at the US) from different perspectives. I like this approach, and I also admire the non-crowd-pleasing but empathetically human decision to end the film before the nuke hits. (An old man sitting behind me in the theater was very angry about that choice and went on a profanity-laced tirade about how good the first third was and how badly the filmmakers blew the rest. The man felt he was robbed of the carnage he was owed as a paying consumer.) The acting's solid, there are some pleasantly surprising narrative and visual choices (and some predictable ones that seem a little too infected with generic prestige TV aesthetics), and a scene at a basketball camp makes excellent use of the "In the Air Tonight" drum fill. I don't know if it adds up to much or has anything complex or novel to say about nuclear annihilation, and, damn, I wish Bigelow would make something fun again, but I think there's some good stuff here.
Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro)
Del Toro's Frankenstein lacks the delicacy and moral complexity of the Mary Shelley novel (and the classic James Whale movies) and the CGI wolves and scenes of physical violence are a little too generic blockbuster, but I mostly found this an enormously pleasurable big-screen experience with strong, committed performances from Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Jacob Elordi, and Christoph Waltz. I'm sympathetic to much of the criticism lobbed at this movie, but del Toro's movies just work for me. They put me back in touch with the wide-eyed monster-loving kid I used to be before life kicked my ass and turned me into a sour and haunted curmudgeon, and no other contemporary mainstream big-budget genre films do that. Del Toro seems to be out of fashion with much of the cinephile crowd who otherwise share my taste, but my sentimental attachment to his work remains.
Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes)
I'm a little torn about putting this one in the honorable mentions category. Gomes is one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, and this is an exceedingly ambitious and insanely good-looking movie, but it also made me a little nuts. I have no idea how I feel about it. A major character in the film's second half has the irritating habit of blowing a raspberry instead of laughing when she finds something funny, and she finds a lot of things funny. This is such a nitpicky irritation, but it really drove me crazy, and I otherwise enjoyed the character. If she did it three times, it would've worked, but it kept happening. Raspberries aside, I'm still chewing on several unanswerable questions. Is this my least favorite Gomes movie? Is it a major achievement? Is it seduced by the same colonialist exoticism it's critiquing? Is that part of the point? I don't know whether this is a near-masterpiece or a partial failure. I love the way Gomes moves back and forth between the studio-shot fantasy-world 1917 setting and documentary-style contemporary location footage of the places where the characters are traveling, but I don't know if I'll ever know what I think of this movie as a whole.
Honey Don't (Ethan Coen)
I'm once again at odds with the general consensus in enjoying the second film directed by solo Coen brother Ethan, which, like his previous film made without his brother Joel (Drive-Away Dolls), was co-written with his wife, film editor Tricia Cooke, and features Margaret Qualley in the lead role. People do not like these movies, especially this one, but I do. I think Coen audiences want the brothers to reunite so badly (they do plan to work together again when they get their schedules aligned) and are comparing every moment in the solo films with the best moments of the brothers together that they refuse to engage with these movies on their own terms. Maybe they're also somewhat unfamiliar or unappreciative of the b-movie tradition Coen and Cooke are playing around with in these movies. Call me a soft touch, but I really liked Qualley's performance, the Don Swayze cameo, and much of the dialogue. I also particularly enjoyed the anticlimactic, meandering, loose-ended semi-resolution of the central mystery's plot strands. Reviews in both established publications and on social media have revealed to me that most people do not share in that enjoyment. I have sadly learned over the course of my disappointed life that the majority of the general population does not share my love for loose, meandering narratives, but I will always care about character, atmosphere, and visual detail more than I care about plot, and I'm a big fan of Raymond Chandler and other hardboiled pulp crime novelists who never fully untangle their tangled webs. (Those pulp novels are another influence on these movies.) Yes, this is not as sharply written or as visually detailed as the Coens at their best, but it's a silly good time with a lot of flavor and moments of surprising darkness (the birdcage scene, in particular).
It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi's latest is getting a lot of attention and award nominations on this side of the globe, and I think it's a good movie, but it also feels like a belated acknowledgment of a lifetime of better work, a little like when Al Pacino won a best actor Oscar for Scent of a Woman or Martin Scorsese won best director for The Departed. Panahi's been making great stuff since the early '90s, and he's also a fearless activist against the repressions of the Iranian regime. He's continued to make movies through legal loopholes and open defiance despite the Iranian government arresting him on multiple occasions, sentencing him to house arrest, banning him from making movies for extended periods of time, imprisoning him (he went on a hunger strike until he was released in one instance), and, most recently, sentencing him to a year in prison and banning him from future international travel for two years while he was out of the country hitting the festival circuit. He's currently appealing that decision. Panahi shot It Was Just an Accident in secret, and it's a compelling and effective political thriller with great performances. The opening third is up there with his best work, but once the initial mysteries are explained and the characters' reasons and behavioral motivations are revealed, the movie takes on a blunt force messaging that lacks the lyricism and complexity of Panahi at his best, and I didn't feel the emotional impact of the ending as intensely as I think I should have. I may change my mind on a second viewing, but I don't think this is up there with Panahi's great movies. It's still well worth seeing, and if you like it, keep going back, especially to his 1990s and 2000s movies where he got to execute his full vision without the government trying to destroy him.
Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho)
Wacky, satirical Bong Joon Ho is my least favorite mode of operation for the director, but there's some really good stuff here (and some not so good stuff). It's an ambitious attempt to blend a personalized human drama about exploitation of the working class by the uber-wealthy, bleak dystopian sci-fi, Star Wars-esque epic blockbuster family-friendly sci-fi, and over-the-top dark satire in the vein of Gilliam's Brazil, with some creepy-cuddly creatures that are a sort of space bug/Sendak wild thing/E.T./Dune sandworm/Ewok/Totoro/Alien chest-burster hybrid. (Picture a portable Sarlacc crossed with a giant beetle wearing a fur coat.) Some of it works beautifully, some of it stops the movie dead. Robert Pattinson nails the tone, playing a screwup of moderate intelligence named Mickey who gets in some trouble and has to get off Earth quickly. He signs up for some dangerous grunt work in space without reading the fine print. His contract allows him to be cloned when (not if) he dies on the job, so there's always a fresh replacement Mickey. Through a comedy of errors, a clone is generated while the previous Mickey is still alive, creating a ripple effect of drama and chaos. While Pattinson and several other actors deliver performances rooted in believable human behaviors and emotions even when they go big or are in the middle of heightened, ridiculous circumstances, the movie dies a little whenever Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette show up. They play a billionaire married couple who own the company Pattinson works for, and their cartoonishly exaggerated performances suck all the air out of the room. I'm sure the parts were written and directed to be performed like this, but it just doesn't work. It's a big swing that misses for me. There are enough bright spots here that it's still worth seeing if you're a Bong fan or someone who enjoys multiple Pattinsons.
Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
Yeah, this is a late 2024 release, but I didn't see it in theaters until early 2025, so call off the time police. I love, love, love F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake/homage. Eggers' version is a distant third for me, but it's a fascinating approach to familiar material. As in all of Eggers' films, the period detail is exhaustively researched and viscerally physical, but his Nosferatu is loud and lumbering where Murnau's and Herzog's were lithe, dreamlike, eerie, and dryly funny. Eggers' take is lacking in (intentional) humor (except for Willem Dafoe's cat-loving, enormous pipe-smoking von Franz) and less dreamy, and his Nosferatu is a big, loud, menacing Eastern European baron, with a surprising mustache, instead of the rodent-like spectral nightmare-creature of the Murnau and Herzog films. In shocking contrast to the earlier versions, I sometimes felt like I was being pummeled (especially in the middle chunk) instead of hypnotized, but the first third and the closing scenes are atmospheric and effective and the sense of impending danger and brutality is much more full-bodied here.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry)
I'm still trying to decide how I feel about this meta but earnest documentary/mockumentary/fake biopic/prank/onion about the indie rock band Pavement as a longtime fan who saw them in small clubs in different Midwest venues in their original run and bought the albums as they came out and who is still trying to come to terms with the nontactile Big Tech 21st century. I do know it did not make me feel old, but it did make me feel all of my 48 years. The '90s are over (don't tell the teens who were losing their minds at The Breeders show I attended a few years ago, and not just for The Breeders but for every '90s song played over the PA before and between sets), and I'm still hanging on, like a Nice Price sticker stuck hard to a CD jewel case. The movie, like the band, like myself, is a mixture of earnestness and smart-assedness, and the formal structure suits them and their music, but I was also exhausted by the final third and more interested in the straightforward documentary pieces than the po-mo conceits, though Joe Keery is very funny playing a Method actor version of himself playing Stephen Malkmus. But would I have enjoyed a more traditional rock-doc approach? Probably not. I just wish Perry had given us one full song from one of the reunion shows at the end. That may be an uncool opinion, but nobody's cool in 2025. I do want to watch this one again and see if it hits me differently.
The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie)
Safdie/Bronstein hive was eating good this year. I apologize for that disgusting lapse into online-speak, but I'm a big fan of the work all four of these related people have put into the world over the last couple decades, and they had a ridiculously productive 2025. Mary Bronstein made one of my favorites of the year, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, her husband Ronald cowrote another favorite, Marty Supreme, his longtime collaborator Josh Safdie directed that one, Josh's brother Benny went solo as a director with this honorable mention, and Ronald Bronstein and the Safdies coproduced Matt Wolf's beautiful HBO documentary about Paul Reubens, Pee-wee as Himself. (I also belatedly caught up to the excellent and wildly original 2023 TV show The Curse, which Benny cowrote and acted in with Nathan Fielder.) The Smashing Machine tones down the gleeful Safdie eccentricities and frenetic tension in favor of a surprisingly more conventional, minor-key biopic about MMA fighter Mark Kerr and his girlfriend (and, later, wife and ex-wife) Dawn Staples (played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Emily Blunt). Even though it's a movie with several MMA fights and intense domestic arguments between Kerr and Staples, The Smashing Machine is quieter and more deliberately paced than most of what we've seen from Safdie (The Curse's slow burn was infused with a constantly unsettling menace and unexpected jolts of laugh-out-loud comedy), and though it didn't hit me as hard as the rest of the Safdies' filmography, I still admire it and think it's a pretty solid little movie. Those Safdie eccentricities I love are mostly just here as seasoning instead of a main ingredient, but they give it a lot more flavor than the usual standard generic biopic. As usual with the Safdies, the cast is a mixture of professional actors and nonprofessionals from other walks of life with a connection to the subject matter. I love the energy this gives their work. Instead of the modern digital sheen ultra-slick ultra-clean period piece theme park look, Safdie shot most of the film on 16mm. I've said it many times before, but I love the texture and grain and color of 16mm (even when it's transferred to a digital print). He also leaves out so much of what other biopics beat to death, though I think he may have overcorrected and left out a little too much to the movie's detriment. (I wish we'd been shown at least some of his time in rehab, met the sponsor who talks to him several times on the phone, and learned more about Dawn.) A final scene of the real, present-day Mark Kerr shopping at Whole Foods is both kooky as hell and emotionally affecting. And, contrary to the Hollywood approach for a movie about guys beating the hell out of each other for money, the struggle to kick drug addiction, and domestic turbulence, Safdie uses Belgian ambient jazz harpist Nala Sinephro as his composer (she also has a cameo playing the national anthem before a fight) and soundtracks a pivotal emotional scene with a Cleaners from Venus song (the photo of Martin Newell and The Rock with their arms around each other at a premiere is something I never expected to see in my life). (What next, an archival pic of Hamish Kilgour and "Macho Man" Randy Savage embracing? Please share if you have that.) Yes, The Rock taking on this role was probably a calculated career move from a guy who's about 80 percent Hollywood schmooze at this point (time to pivot to movies that get award nominations), but he gives a legit and sometimes even subtle performance that uses and subverts his charisma. Emily Blunt has a thankless biopic girlfriend part, but she has great screen presence and gives it plenty of life and energy. I was left wondering, though, if there was more to Mark Kerr than just loving to fight and if there was more to Dawn Staples than just loving or being exasperated by Mark Kerr.
Part 2, about the older movies I watched in a theater in 2025, is coming soon.
