One Battle After Another (PTA, 2025): 3.5/5

Very good! Not best of the year, and certainly not of Anderson, but a real good time. Fun, funny, exciting, the definition of propulsive. Doesn't feel a bit of its runtime.

Also: unbelievably good wardrobe choices for the Christmas men. A grown man in a Lacoste polo SHOULD be scary.

HIM (Justin Tipping, 2025): 2.5/5

A slick and punchy scratch at the sport industry's bourgeoisie excesses—packed within the confines of a tense and suspenseful horror film. While the film points in plenty of valid directions regarding the ridiculous brutality of football, these directions are never investigated and the potential for genuine thematic brilliance slips through the cracks. There's nothing going on here that isn't deducible from the trailer. Fortunately, a well-integrated soundtrack and a strong performance from Marlon Wayans anchor this confused clunker. Also Tim Heidecker for some reason?

Good Boy (Ben Leonberg, 2025): 2.5/5

Indy the Dog has more acting range than Gal Gadot.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (Rob Reiner, 2025): 2.5/5

Certainly not as revelatory as the original, which remains one of the greatest mockumentaries ever made. And much like an amp that only goes to 10...I feel like this wasn't nearly as great as it could have been.

Adjunct (Ron Najor, 2024): 3.5/5

Triggering! It’s insane that UCLA really did offer an adjunct position without pay.

The Naked Gun (Akiva Schaffer, 2025): 4/5

[V.O.] "She had a bottom that would make any toilet beg for the brown." I ALMOST CHOKED TO DEATH.

A modern miracle. Brilliantly blends the classic slapstick and deadpan humor of the original Naked Gun with a mix of modern comedy styles; everything from absurdism to meta-humor, visual gags, clever wordplays, and even some surreal moments. It’s not just copying the old formula; it’s updating it, remixing it, and trying new things. And mostly, it works like a gangbuster.

"And that's when it hit me. Like an idiot's completed jigsaw puzzle, I was being framed."

Oh, Hi! (Sophie Brooks, 2025): 2/5

I can fix her (I'm talking about the script)

Relay (Daivd MacKenzie, 2025): 3.5/5

“Hello, this is the Tri-state relay service.”

“Yes, hello?”

“A person is calling from the relay service. Have you received a relay call before?”

“I don’t think so…”

A broker/fixer of a lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the whistleblowers who threaten them breaks his own rules when a new client seeks his protection to stay alive. RELAY's use of the relay telephone service—where city operators relay text-based conversations sent by people who are deaf and hard of hearing—is wildly brilliant. A solid throwback to 70's paranoia thrillers with an engaging story, compelling characters, and a unique hook to its concept.

Mars Express (Jeremie Perin, 2023): 4/5

French sci-fi animated film that feels like you're watching the adaptation of a bright, confident, brain-stimulating, fully mapped-out classic novella from someone like Clarke, Heinlein or Philip K. Dick, contemplating our trending tech topic of late, the integration of artificial intelligence into the human world and whether androids/robots deserve any independent rights.

A bit BLADE RUNNER and GHOST IN THE SHELL with the droids being hunted, the noir sensibility, and the labyrinthine convolutions of conspiratorial villain motives that propel the unfolding mystery narrative, but the greater thing about MARS EXPRESS is the teeming onslaught of intriguing, ingenious futuristic concepts all over the place that the movie expertly shows as part of this world during the course of this story without ever having to focus much on. Every few seconds there's another little device or setting or advancement in everyday life that makes you go "whoa, cool!"

Finer world-building efficiency and imagination than most big-budget live action sci-fi films out there. Plus a fitting techno score (what happened to movies using those?), 88 minutes of gimme-more brevity, and an ending with a cleverly/movingly binary interpretation.

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (Nebojsa Slijepcevic, 2024, 14 mins): 3.5/5

Paramilitary: Sit down and shut up, that's none of your business.

Tomo: It is. You’re treating honest folks like animals.

Paramilitary: Oh, you’re a Muslim-lover?

Tomo: Is there no law in this country?

Paramilitary: I told you to sit down!

Tomo: You’re not an army, you’re a bunch of criminals.

Bearing witness to one massacre from the systemic genocide of Bosnian Muslims carried out by Serbs in the early 1990s. What it takes to truly stand up for the victims. A powerful short film.

KPop Demon Hunters (Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang, 2025): 2.5/5

sometimes it’s just you, your secret hot demon situationship, and his silly ass blue tiger and a sassy six-eyed magpie against the world

Masking Threshold (Johannes Grenzfurthner, 2021): 4/5

Beautifully shot, disturbingly inventive, and shockingly effective. MASKING THRESHOLD is a psychological horror film about a tinnitus sufferer's descent into madness. The entire 95 minutes takes place in one single location, focusing on a single character's mental illness in the framework of unfathomable cosmic horror contrasted by the use of macro cinematography and ASMR.

A unique and enthralling cinematic experience with a nice mix of Ron Fricke, Pi, Chuck Palahniuk, and Gaspar Noe. Kudos to the claustrophobic framing, sheer volume of footage shot, and gradual deterioration charted in the protagonist's wall of dialogue. Deeply unsettling. Very ingenious.

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025): 4/5

An enjoyable and wide-ranging action film. At first, I was disappointed that it wasn’t more PTAish. But it’s hard to be churlish about what is on-screen, which is expertly rendered, epic, and often fun and funny ("a few small beers"). As DeCaprio gets older, he’s figuring out how to drop the DeCaprio persona and step into others—it's one of his best performances. Packed with eerily 2025-relevant content such as immigration, racism, and out-of-control government forces. There’s been talk about how this is a call for more rebellious actions against politics we don’t agree with—but more meaningful to me was the idea that it’s PTA thinking about the present and future of his own partially black daughters. Will certainly improve with re-watch. 

 

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle (Haruo Sotozaki, 2025): 4/5

I found this movie’s inter-fight flashback structure audacious and rich. Inserting 45 minutes of backstory during a fight (!) to create empathy for the #3 baddie is incredible. Plus, really getting into what the opponents are experiencing and thinking over the course of a long fight (with stuff like flashbacks to something useful your dead father taught you while killing a huge bear)—this has never been done in American cinema to my knowledge. Very cool to look at too.

 

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025): 4/5

Magnolia with horror elements, by which I mean it presents a wide range of emotions and tones. It’s also chaptered according to which character you are following, and there’s fun overlap as characters and timelines cross one another. After a great, eerie opening sequence (forever owning George Harrison’s Beware the Darkness) and an uneasy first hour, it’s not exactly frightening, but always entertaining. There are (perhaps too many) free-floating themes going on here, including school shootings and growing up too early with alcoholic parents. But the one that appeals to me the most is Boomers continuing to suck the vitality out of the next generation and the next generation after that. 

 

Splitsville (Michael Angelo Covino, 2025): 4/5

Chaotic and very funny. Reminded me, at times, of Rushmore. Romantic rivalry, jealousy, anger, retribution—all in a comic tone. And Coelho sounds and looks like Jason Schwartzman and has similar timing. Funniest movie of the year so far.

 

The Self Tape, 7m (Michael Angelo Covino, 2024): 3.5/5

A funny and painful preview of the Splitsville vibe. Loved how the script and reality makes a counterpoint. 

 

Freaky Tales (Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, 2025): 3/5

Low budget, lowbrow, funky and fun. 

 

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025): 3/5

I like that some of the zombies behaved like gorillas or lions, naked and in a small pack with an alpha. And I liked the more outre editing, rapid insert shots, play with color, jittering techniques—different and newish. The third act is disastrous on every level.  Based on The Beach, 28 Days Later, Annihilation, and this one, Garland is obsessed with Apocalypse Now—and its breach of the sacred and corrupt compound.

 

 

The Sea Horse, 15m (Jean Painlevé, 1935): 3/5

A beautifully lit and surprisingly informative presentation, using poetry, science—and what must surely be the most state-of-the-art underwater, microscope cameras of the day. Perhaps this film was even inspired by the new technology itself.

 

Silkwood, rw (Mike Nichols, 1983): 3/5

i saw this in the theater at 16 and found it kind of boring. 38 years later I thought: now I will have a better appreciation of Mike Nicols’ direction, Nora Ephron’s writing, Cher (pretty butch) and Kurt Russel (all-time snack), bit parts from Fred Ward and David Straithern, and Meryl Damn Streep in a haircut my mom definitely had. And I did! But I still found it kind of boring. It’s very lived in, there just not that much story there.

 

 

Leftover Altman Film Festival 

26 movies in, and we’re getting down to the endgame of Altman completionism here. Still, in this context, I enjoyed watching all of these, even the ones I didn’t like. Will I ever watch Health, Streamers, Fool for Love, Beyond Therapy, O.C. & Stiggs, Vincent & Theo, Cookie’s Fortune, Dr. T & the Women, and The Company? 

 

Countdown (Robert Altman, 1967): 2.5/5

Conventional drama following James Caan preparing for and on a solo mission to be the first man on the moon to beat the Russians. Fun to seen Caan and Robert Duval working together five years before The Godfather. Here the roles are reverse:  Duval plays the older-brother-energy hothead, and Caan the rational one. Ends in a singularly ineffective moon sequence. It was made with NASA’s cooperation, so there is a liberal display of authentic hardware, but Warner Brothers made Altman edit out his developing style of overlapping dialogue and loose rhythm. So the film is realistic but boring.

 

A Cold Day in the Park (Robert Altman, 1969): 3/5

A Bermanesque psychodrama involving an odd, mute young man who is rescued by an odd, lonely, suppressed, slightly-older woman. Sandy Dennis is excellent, and the films gets surprisingly perverse.

 

A Perfect Couple (Robert Altman, 1979): 2/5

Altman’s idea of a joke is a romance between two characters who remain completely incompatible throughout. Altman often supplemented his dramas with live musical performance, and here there is a Broadway-ish rock band plays lots of songs, which unfortunately are terrible.

 

Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979): 3.5/5

A rare sci fi movie from Altman (see Countdown, above), this one with more heavy Bergman vibes (and Bibi Anderson) but also a lugubrious and opaque Tarkovsky quality. The world building and imagery is terrific—and it’s made on what must have been a massive refrigerated sets, as vapor is often seen coming out of the actors’ mouths when speaking. It’s also shot with a crazy lens that distorts the edges—a complete artistic swing for the fences that I’ve only ever seen in Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, and some passages of silent movies. Plot is nil, and it’s all set-bound, play-like and artificial. But after watching so many difficult international masterpiece messes from Muratova, Ackerman, Larisa Shepitko, Aleksei German, Sukarov, Pedro Costa, Guy Maddin, etc., this makes sense to me. High-wire filmmaking.

 

Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980): 2/5

Live from planet cocaine. Some good songs, some charmingly low-tech sight gags, and Shelley Duval is perfect. The rest of it’s a bust. 

 

Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982): 3/5

A meeting of two of the greatest weirdos of 70s Hollywood, Sandy Denny and Karen Black—and Denny is again brilliant here. Another of Altman’s Bergmanesque, women-centered dream plays (like Images, A Cold Day, and 3 Women). Full of slippery time and pasts revealed.

 

Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984): 3/5

A towering and very watchable performance. But the conspiracy theory (true, I’m sure) and Agnew jokes don’t hold as much water 50 years later.