2025 Takes a Turn for the Better
* Sirāt (Oliver Laxe, 2025): 5/5
Laxe says that he is trying to heal by making the viewer die before dying. Christ what a goal. The result is a powerful and primal experience that pairs away everything that is unnecessary, placing its characters on a stark and existential stage and puts them through it. And thanks to the bass music and pace, I think it becomes a body movie—what it feels like to be in this body/those bodies. The result was real PTSD (for me). A lot of naysayers talk about it not having enough meaning to justify its cruelty, but for me there was thematic resonance for the actual experience of war for, say, the Palestinian people. Comps sited by Laxe include: Sorcerer/Wages of Fear, Vanishing Point, Apocalypse Now, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Road Warrior, Two Lane Blacktop. You know…some of my favorite movies ever.
Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie, 2025): 4/5
Collateral Damage, the Movie. Marty is a detestable, narcissistic trainwreck who leaves a trail of ruined lives in his wake. But if that alone doesn’t turn you off, there is lots to love and admire in this wild screenplay, vivid characters, suspenseful and exhilarating filmmaking, and superb acting. Dazzling and audacious shit, and I just kept repeating “What the fuck kind of a movie is this?” with admiration.
Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025): 4/5
For me, the most luxuriously emotional movie of the season, a quality not to be underestimated. Between the love and the death, it’s a lot to put yourself through. But finally it’s a powerful expression of the power of art to make your pain something that everyone can feel and share—to help carry the burden. Helped me to see Hamlet as the tragedy it professes to be and not just a story of revenge gone wrong.
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025): 3.5/5
Starts as a pretty effective and suspenseful heist-gone-wrong movie, then slowly morphs into a heist-gone-sad movie. Not unlike Dog Day Afternoon, but really just feeling like a lot of 70s movies (compliment). John O’Connor is convincingly non-plussed.
Is This Thing On? (Bradley Cooper, 2025): 3.5/5
Not the disaster that I had been led to believe. Really about how you can’t look to the other person in your relationship to make you happy; you have to stoke your own fire. The script getting us there isn’t great, but the filmmaking elevates it.
Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch, 2025): 3/5
This would be a good document to send to aliens to demonstrate the normal relationship between grown children and their parents. Neither side really feels compelled to dig into the details of their own lives and complexity, so they just end at vague updates and comforting and non-invasive generalities. This is a kind of love, and neither side objects.
I hear people say that they would love to have a conversation with one of their parents who has died, and I do sometimes think about the things I would like to ask my dad. Like, why he didn’t seem to like to engage and play with me more? (Something I like to do with Jack, and I’m the age that Dad was then). But this is something I never really asked him at the time, because I wouldn’t have liked to complain and I don’t think he would have had the words for it anyway. So yeah deep thoughts, though a very paltry drama.
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025): 2.5/5
Narratively and stylistically wandering and wooly. As with the spaceships in Bacarau (which I was also not wild about) there’s just stuff that doesn’t add up or pay off. (I’m looking at you Hairy Leg). An ambient thriller, meaning the notes are there but they just kind of hover rather than coalesce into a tune.
Rebuilding (Max Walker-Silverman, 2025): 2/5
A sad character moves from point A to point A and ½ on the emotional scale. The most internal of the three John O’Conner performances that I saw in 2025 (still haven’t watched The History of Sound), and the least successful.
The Plague (Charlie Polinger, 2025): 2/5
The oft-told story (Lord of the Flies, here at water polo camp) didn’t evolve swiftly enough, and the stylistic flourishes didn’t much work for me.
The Housemaid (Paul Feig, 2025): 1.5/5
Ludicrous and incompetent. The marketing sets up a two-hander between the two women in opposition to one another—and at least that would have granted a kind of power to both. But [spoiler] they both turn out to be powerless victims of a man. Many times, I asked myself, “Why is this scene in slow motion, and without dialogue,” and I think the reason is always that the drama was so unconvincingly shot that this was the only way to save the scene. And fer chrisakes, why is this movie 130 minutes??
Oscar Shorts
The Singers, 18m (Sam Davis, 2025): 3.5/5
Live action. A singing contest in a run-down bar expresses the best of humanity and of artistic expression.
The Girl Who Cried Tears, 16m (Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerbowski, 2025): 3/5
Stop-motion. A nice metaphor for the people who make money off of artists, and very impressive on a technical level.
Retirement Plan 7m (John Kelly, 2025): 2.5/5
Animated. When did the Oscar’s start nominating New Yorker cartoons for best short?
* GOAT (Tyree Dillihay, 2026): 3/5
Typical under-dog/under-goat sports story, but entertaining and swift. It aimed to please, and it did. The nice thing about sports movies is that no one has to die at the end, just lose. Jack cried (for joy) at the climax.
* Wuthering Heights (Emerald Fennell, 2026): 2.5/5
All adaptations of Wuthering Heights must reckon with the fact that in the original text, the first half is sweepingly romantic and the second half is the romance-free story of Heathcliff returning rich and taking his bitter revenge on the two families over two generations. Many versions simply elide the second half. Fennel’s version mixes the romance and vengeance, filing the first half with longing and the second half with plenty of (pretty hot) sex. Especially dirty is the proto-BDSM scene where Cathy is laying in a loft and peeking at two servants having sex, when Heathcliff lays down on top of her and covers her eyes with his hand. As with Saltburn, Fennell is better at creating images (that final dance in Saltburn is an all-timer) than at creating coherent characters or real emotions.
Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001): 3/5
Begins with energy and authenticity—and becomes more cartoony with every plot development. Denzel so dominates the film that it’s a bit unsatisfying that he wouldn’t win in the end. A very adolescent vision, although this is not necessarily an insult.
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe, 2019): 3/5
Some tremendous images—including great scenes with cows, horses and dogs, as well as all-timer forest fire scenes. Still, it fails to build a story of dramatic power.
Requiem for a Vampire. (Jean Rollin, 1972): 3.5/5
Despite being short and almost wordless, the film expresses the yolk that is put upon a new vampire and the despair of forever being tied to particular location. Some tasteful softcore scenes express both desire and queasy revulsion.
Something’s Gotta Give (Nancy Meyers, 2003): 3/5
Nice that it takes seriously the love- and sex-lives of people in their 50s and 60s, and the Hamptons interior-decoration porn is on point. But Nicolson at this age kinda grosses me out. Will Diane Keaton choose nice and loving Doctor Keanu Reeves or lecherous Nicolson (who owns the most successful rap label in history???). I wonder.
Nocturne, 8m (Lars von Trier, 1980): 3/5
You wake in the middle of the night and are haunted by obscure imagery. Part Bergman and part Eraserhead. Four years before von Trier’s feature film debut.
Book Corner
Shadow Ticket (Thomas Pynchon, 2025)
Silly, fun and inessential - akin to late works like Hawks’ Hatari. This is not an artist at the height of his powers. Instead, it’s an 80-year-old not giving a fuck and just doing what he likes, which in this case means goofing around with genre, systems and vectors of power, multiple overlapping non-publicized international organizations, some slap and tickle, and tons of puns. For example, although the main subject is the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, most of the so-called plot revolves around the missing daughter of “the Al Capone of Cheese.” General loose-limbed pursuit of the silliest, funniest and most satiric ideas down to their logical conclusion. Stay open to arcane and fake-arcane references as well as to sudden veers into deep wells of emotion and historical relevance.
Vigil (George Saunders, 2026)
Really disappointing. Complete retread of Lincoln in the Bardo, which was my least favorite of his works anyway. Same disembodied voices dealing with people who are dead (and in this case dying) but also adds a somewhat preachy (if, admittedly, accurate) environmental handwringing. Bummer.
