By Roderick Heath

Jump to review index

Jump to Favourite Films of 2025 List

Both personally and in cinematic terms, 2025 has been a very rough road, and perhaps the end of the line in general. As some of you have noticed, I stopped writing new film pieces this year. For the present I’m still calling this an extended hiatus rather than an outright retirement, partly caused by changing personal priorities, and also by sheer exasperation with the general goddamn mess at the moment, both within and beyond the cinema scene. I had the distinct feeling at the start of the year watching Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, an excruciating lump of tortured, hambone claptrap from a foremost fauxteur, that I no longer understand, or just plain don’t like or care, what a lot of cinephiles and audiences want, beyond a kind of branded craft-art emblazoned with trademarked style and loud thematics but absent any genuine personality and depth of enquiry. An excessive response, perhaps, but one that lingered with me a long time.

But in any event I resolved to deliver my annual Confession regardless, as a compensation and a reckoning. Plus I just wouldn’t know what to do with myself otherwise.

Perhaps the most urgent and defining motif of 2025’s cinema was the feeling of a pressure cooker boiling up relentlessly towards the point of exploding. At first I thought this might just be own psychic state infusing the movies, but no, this feeling permeated works including One Battle After Another, Eddington, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, It Was Just An Accident, Hedda, A House of Dynamite, The Lost Bus, Highest 2 Lowest, Sinners, Bugonia, Eenie Meanie, Mickey 17, Fountain of Youth, and Warfare. This was often accompanied by another proliferating motif: 2025 was a year busy with heroes trying with all their might not to become monsters, from President Ross in Captain America: Brave New World fighting transformation into a rampaging hulk, to K-Pop Demon Hunters’ Rumi suppressing her demonic aspect, Bruce Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere sweating over whether he’s inherited his father’s dark and ugly side, the orphan tempted to become the victim/protégé of a predatory actress in The Ice Tower, the heroine of Ash who tries to expel the parasitic alien trying to suborn her, the young priest trying to keep his violence in check in Wake Up Dead Man, both the increasingly desperate dissident Elphaba and the sparkly tool Glinda in Wicked: For Good, and the spiralling mother of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You who can’t stand the demands on her to stay functional. The theme was at its most literal in Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, with its hapless dad metamorphising into a rampaging beast, the manufactured man of Frankenstein, and the hapless Bob transformed into the schizoid embodiment of depression in Thunderbolts*, whilst at least one of the twin heroes of Sinners found being a vampire actually not that bad.

Others embraced monstrosity with gusto, particularly many of the year’s female characters, like Hedda’s titular Olympic-level shit-stirrer and game-player, working for inchoate ends, Eden’s narcissist rebel Baroness, The Dam’s warrior heroine who chooses an inevitably self-sacrificing conversion to save others, the lead of Ballerina, turned into an engine of destruction to pursue vengeance, or Avatar: Fire And Ash’s Varang, furious and deranged rejected progeny of the earth mother. What happens eventually with the heroine of Eenie Meanie crosses the same line, and also in The Kingdom, whilst the voracious women of Compulsion learned to revel in their total fucked-up-ness, and One Battle After Another’s Steven J. Lockjaw tried to eliminate one part of himself, and the progeny of it, for the sake of another. Characters in Highest 2 Lowest, A House of Dynamite, Bugonia, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and It Was Just An Accident found themselves tortured by choices between self-destruction or the destruction of others. Air’s pilot heroine was schooled relentlessly in the arts of slaughter, until finally karma came calling. Red Sonja counterpointed heroine and villain as both produced by the same formative experience but reacting with vastly different philosophies, whilst Dangerous Animals considered the difference between predator and survivor; M3gan 2.0 offered a reformed villain and her unreconstructed opposite experiencing an existential whirlpool. Counterpoint to this were tales of people who realise too late that life has broken them or passed them by, and all pleasures and glories are fleeting, common to Caught By The Tides, Vulcanizadora, Eephus, Blue Moon, Train Dreams, Caught Stealing, The Smashing Machine, Universal Language, One Battle After Another, Sorry, Baby, and The Mastermind.

Generational change and handover, parental anxiety and sweat-flecked worry about inheritors and legacy, the question of just what in hell we’re leaving to children, fans, and followers, infused a raft of works, including One Battle After Another, The Kingdom, Highest 2 Lowest, The Ice Tower, The Running Man, Hamnet, On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, Springtseen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Sinners, Avatar: Fire And Ash, Frankenstein, Vulcanizadora, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Sirât, Nobody 2, Eden, Sentimental Value, Wolf Man, and even The Naked Gun and Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Even the hero of Superman found himself being tugged in painful directions by his double awareness. Truly desperate choices made in the eye of crisis, often risking or even inviting mortal consequences, resounded in the likes of The Running Man, The Long Walk, Dead of Winter, The Dam, The Mastermind, Sirât, Eenie Meanie, Highest 2 Lowest, and Avatar: Fire And Ash. When the time came for demonic overlords, puppet-masters, and tyrants of variable potency to meet their defeat at last, it came often in compromised and costly ways, as beheld in Nuremberg, The Long Walk, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, Weapons, Wicked: For Good, K-Pop Demon Hunters, A Minecraft Movie, Ballerina, The Ice Tower, Eddington, and Dangerous Animals. The urgent necessity of taking chances and leaping into unknown fields for artists against all pressures of expectation and commerce, for the sake of both personal need and cultural vitality, preoccupied Nouvelle Vague, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Sentimental Value, Hamnet, and Sinners. Scenes of agonised birth in gruelling and dangerous situations recurred in Eden, 28 Years Later…, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The Gorge, K-Pop Demon Hunters, and Materialists literalised the idea of the distance between men and women, whilst Reflection In A Dead Diamond followed the rabbit hole into the depths of the psyche, with the love object is perpetual, illusory, and protean.

Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge whetted interest early in the year with a killer trailer and a basic premise loaded with both thematic potential and raw storytelling promise. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy were, respectively, a former US Army sniper with PTSD and his Lithuanian counterpart, who’s been working as a black-ops assassin. Each was assigned to keep watch over a mysterious, fog-and-monster-riddled canyon in the middle of a remote and rugged locale, as part of a secret East-West pact that’s been operating covertly for a century. The first half of the film, whilst setting up a mystery laced with overtones of otherworldly menace, was first and foremost a romantic tale where the gorge became a multivalent symbol of the distances between men and women, nations, past and present, as well as the urge to overcome them. Teller and Taylor-Joy were terrific and hot as the long-distance flirters (complete with some amusing in-jokes about earlier roles for the two actors, and killer use of Twisted Sister’s version of “O Come All Ye Faithful”) who found a way eventually to become proper lovers. Derrickson was reasonably patient in letting the situation and characters grow, to a degree that felt almost daring in today’s cut-to-the-chase expectations. But when the time actually came for the scene to shift into the gorge itself, as the two fearsome warriors fought to protect each other in a perverted, mutant-riddled hell-hole, the whole thing fell apart. The environs and threats they found there proved too video game-like, and clumsily defined in terms of a coherent and believable historical context, with some truly smelly exposition delivered en route. Despite the presence of Sigourney Weaver as both genre mascot and villain, the finale’s fight-the-man rebelliousness also fell flat, not just because the mechanics of how it played out made no sense, but also in the way it wimped out of contending with the political schisms the whole set-up depended on, instead shuffling things off to the usual nefarious corporation.

Alexey Taranenko’s The Dam also revolved around the mystique of crumbling Cold War infrastructure riddled with mutants and revenants, albeit in a more immediate and resonant context. A Ukrainian film, The Dam was an unabashed flag-waver and parable as well as an eager entry in trashy mayhem. Taranenko followed some Ukrainian soldiers as they descended into an old Soviet underground facility uncovered by the destruction of a dam during fighting with Russians. Most prominent of the gang is dreadlocked damsel Mama (Maryna Koshkina), whose parents were killed in the 2014 Russian invasion and now, as a fully licensed badass, seeks her MIA brother. Providing company is her self-appointed guardian, old schoolmate Bumblebee (Volodymyr Rashchuk) and two more comrades. They soon learn together the bunker was the site of depraved experiments designed to produce superpsychics and zombie warriors, and the son of one of the Russian scientists has returned to try and perfect the breed with an aim to conquering the world. The Dam proved a very enjoyable neo-B-movie ride, sketching its characters and their relationships swiftly but with some humour and feeling, and wove an angry sense of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia in through the story, with a theme of the nation’s young being suborned and destroyed in the name of greater imperial dreams, and also delivering some of the most happily broad propaganda beats in a movie since World War II. The movie wasn’t very elegant in its exposition, was agreeably tacky in its monster makeup and effects, and was deeply indebted to a lot of models. The most original aspect here, apart from the basic novelty value in terms of where it was made and its political tilt, was the way it interwove elements of the supernatural with the more familiar evil government science stuff. But Taranenko’s staging was energetic throughout and he managed the ever-tricky task of balancing a sense of urgency with a blackly comic tone. Koshkina provided an enormously winning heroine, her initially dead-eyed amazon exterior revealing layers off experience and feeling, and finally a heroically self-sacrificing streak willing to dare grotesque transformation in the name of saving her comrades. The very end left off with a promise of more to come: I for one await it eagerly.

Steven ‘Flying Lotus’ Ellison, one of my favourite musical artists and one who’s dipped a toe in directing from time to time, took a stab at making a science fiction movie with Ash. This proved a truly odd endeavour, splitting the difference between immersive, hallucinatory mood piece and B-movie blood-and-thunder. Eíza Gonzalez was heroine Riya, a member of an exploratory party on an alien planet being checked out for potential settlement. She awakens with severe amnesia to find herself alone and surrounded by signs of violence and alien presence, and is haunted by perverse and gruesome impressions of events that seem to have wiped out her comrades. A rescuer, Brion (Aaron Paul), arrives and seems to offer hope of regaining some semblance of reality, but things only get weirder until she realizes she’s been targeted by an infesting, parasitical alien life form offering Faustian promises. Early on Ash presented itself as something akin to a visual companion piece to its maker’s music – apparently the project did begin life as a music video, but metastasized in ambition – unfolding as a tale of disorientation glazed in trippy visuals as parsed by Riya’s unmoored headspace. Both imagery and soundtrack came filled with teeming, pulsing, stroboscopic impressions and mindfuck textures. This was counterbalanced by surprisingly straightforward urges towards honouring classic if tiring genre touchstones like Alien and Carpenter’s The Thing, and their VHS-era spawn, complete with Riya getting a Ripley-esque kiss-off line towards the end. Lotus’s ambitions never quite fused and the result was ungainly: he sustained the off-kilter, dreamlike quality for a surprisingly long time and offered many beautiful images, but got clumsy and trashy when the narrative showed its hand. Gonzalez was, at least, an appropriately mesmerizing presence, filmed with a colour-drenched and dreamy worship by Lotus not that far from how Mario Bava shot Barbara Steele and Daliah Lavi. In the end it was a classic example of the kinds of mistakes many non-cinematic artists make when turning to narrative film, but Lotus also might yet prove a filmmaker.

2022’s most beloved dancing, murdering, bow-wearing robot doll made her return for Gerard Johnstone’s M3gan 2.0, but both movie and doll took a hard swerve away from horror towards sci-fi action and with a rather more jokey, almost-self-satirizing tone – if proving not nearly as a campy as its misleading trailer made it seem. The model this time around was Terminator 2: Judgment Day, as M3gan upgraded from sweetly maniacal killer to stalwart protector and warrior. Left as a disembodied AI after the first movie but still determined to protect her young charge Cady (Violet McGraw), M3gan gradually convinces Gemma (Allison Williams) to give her new, tougher body so she can take on Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), another android seemingly bent on world domination. Just who is behind Amelia’s actions proves a treacherous enigma, as does the question of whether M3gan really is reformed and trustworthy. Director Johnstone had fun both amplifying and lampooning aspects of the first film, as when M3gan tries to charm the sceptical Gemma with one of her recited pop anthems, and another, more elaborate dance sequence. Sakhno, best known for playing a frosty blonde amazon in the Star Wars TV series Ahsoka, here played a frosty blonde amazon with a titanium skeleton, one who, in the early scenes, replaced M3gan as the source of uncanny-valley creepiness, scuttling down walls and reassembling herself from bits and pieces to deal out death and mayhem. Jemaine Clement played a wanker tech lord who became one of her victims. M3gan 2.0 looked good, maintained a rollicking pace, and delivered some good laughs. But it ran into problems on several levels, including trying to pull off a more ambitious kind of genre flick with a cramped production barely more elaborate than the first film’s. The new spin wasn’t really compatible with that movie’s fandom either, swapping out its undercurrent of nasty satire for crowd-pleasing, including a recurring joke built around Cady’s love of Steven Seagal films. The deeper issue was a storyline confused in ways common with a lot of recent movies that didn’t know what message it wanted to sell or how to build coherently to a climax. Johnstone set up M3gan and Amelia as perfect adversaries, then revealed Amelia to be just an empty puppet manipulated by a different wanker tech lord, only to then see her given agency and act just as she seemed to initially, with coldly megalomaniacal purpose. For all that, M3gan 2.0 was still quite a bit of fun, and didn’t at all deserve the rather contemptuous reception it got.

The theme of self-aware AI threatening the world also preoccupied the latest entry in one of Hollywood’s most venerable franchises, one of the most anticipated films of the year, and one received with varying levels of disappointment bordering on aggravation. Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was a slightly rebranded follow-up to 2023’s terrific Dead Reckoning Part One. McQuarrie had to contend with a narrative that shouldn’t have needed much recap and wanted to hit the ground running, but had to be ladled out again because not enough people saw the last movie. McQuarrie as a consequence also had to avoid engaging too deeply with major elements of the precursor, like the death of Ilsa Faust. The resulting air of disavowal meant, for instance, Esai Morales’ foe Gabriel devolved from nascent uber-villain to just another smug and standard-issue baddie, with his eventual comeuppance almost thrown away. The malevolent Entity was largely sidelined where previously it had been chillingly powerful in its grip on an internet-driven world. The film also got itself almost perversely bogged down with justifying its would-be sense of epic legacy reckoning with call-backs to earlier episodes, including multiple nods to the very first film, which felt truly off given that the major hallmark of the Mission: Impossible series has been the determined avoidance of any particular depth and sense of personal gravitas to its formula as well as its hero, Ethan Hunt. Even more exasperatingly, when the film reached its terminus after a long and wearing journey, the promise of a grand finale proved a fake-out. Still, I enjoyed The Final Reckoning more than many seemed to: McQuarrie did his absolute best to make the exposition-clogged first half work like a pinball machine launcher being drawn until the spring was taut and then released, and when launched did its best to live and die by its go-big-or-go-home urges, with setpieces inside a sunken submarine and the final plane chase superbly done. Tom Cruise set out again to prove no one’s allowed to call him old and past-it, and to be fair, again he succeeded.

2025 was busy with cheaper action flicks, many of them slapped together for streaming or just seeking to find their natural, eventual home there. Martin Campbell’s Cleaner was a classic example of this breed with the added spectacle of slumming from some talents who used to be, not that long ago, heavyweight headliners. Daisy Ridley was Joey, a nimble but failed soldier turned high-rise window washer who finds herself pitched into a crisis when the building she works in is taken over by eco-terrorists, led by a tired-looking Clive Owen, determined to extract confessions from and extract punishment upon some greedy tycoons. The situation is exacerbated when the terrorist gang is taken over by an even more extreme cuckoo (Taz Skyler), who was previously posing as Joey’s matey co-worker but reveals a more misanthropic credo as his motive, whilst Joey’s autistic brother is also trapped in the building. Cleaner was definitely a compilation of clichés and tropes built around the old, trusty Die Hard structure, and the whole affair had the air of something done on the cheap and cramped for space and time, with a lot of obvious CGI and green-screen work. Campbell offered a sort of chamber-piece-like approach to action drama, with Ridley spending much of the movie trapped on a dangling gantry. The script gave the requisite number of sympathy jolts to get us on Joey’s side, from bullying bosses to a history of family trauma. But it also evoked another Die Hard knock-off, Air Force One, in its efforts to sneak in some sympathy-for-the-devil political comment as Campbell diagrammed tensions between authentic working stiffs, rich creeps, determined radicals, and nihilist wild cards. When the film finally, really got going, it got juice from Campbell’s still-expert staging even when straitjacketed by limited resources, and from Ridley’s maturing quality as a likeable lead performer and her physical commitment in the rough-and-tumble bits. Skyler’s arch turn as the bad guy, dealing out slaughter and mayhem with a fiercely upbeat brand of self-righteousness, was also fun.

Giving the hero of Cleaner a special-needs relative to take care of was a ploy also used by Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Ice Road a couple of years back, signaling this is new, safely PC ground for story stakes. Coincidentally, Hensleigh returned with Ice Road: Vengeance, a follow up with Liam Neeson again playing trucker Mike McCann, a character it’s easy to see Neeson and Hensleigh both liking, weathered and gutsy but also soulful and curious. This time McCann headed to the lofty reaches of Nepal to scatter the ashes of his late brother and try to set the seal on his mourning, and hired Dhani (Fan Bingbing) as his Sherpa guide and finds her a woman with many hidden talents. Both were quickly forced to come to the aid of some villagers resisting an attempt by some well-connected gangsters to destroy their homes for a dam, sparking a desperate chase across the rugged Nepalese highlands in a rickety tourist bus. Like its precursor, Ice Road: Vengeance was a catalogue of contemporary moviemaking sins in this zone, replete with cheeseball special effects, including digitally-tweaked gunplay and backgrounds, and pretty timid with bloodshed. All that said, though, I enjoyed Vengeance quite a bit more than I probably should have. Hensleigh arranged his character types – like a bratty, phone-obsessed teen (Grace O’Sullivan) who has to mature real fast into a capable survivor, and the bus’s aging, garrulous Kiwi driver (Geoff Morrell) – with seemingly casual yet hook-landing professional aplomb, and delivered a couple of neat twists, including the unexpected murder that really gets the story moving. I liked the quiet, been-around-the-block flicker of romance between Neeson and Bingbing, and the character dynamics gained gravitas as the plot unfolded even whilst barely slowing down. One good set-piece in the The Wages of Fear vein saw McCann and companions trying to get their bus down a terribly steep incline. The film also sported an eye-catching support role for Amelia Bishop, playing what’s swiftly becoming my favorite new archetype in current movies: the lethal, taciturn, perturbingly hot villain’s henchwoman.

One of those lethal, taciturn, perturbingly hot henchwoman also turned up in Heads of State, a film that saw Nobody director Ilya Naishuller shifting ground from that film’s bloody-lipped, quasi-satiric genre riffing to something more overtly colorful, playful, and crowd-pleasing. Heads of State had an immediately intriguing starting point as it threw together Idris Elba, as a former soldier turned UK Prime Minister, and John Cena as an insecure action movie star turned US President, and forced them to use their wits and different talents to survive when an attempt by a ruthless foe to assassinate them on Air Force One leaves them stranded in central Europe without clear recourses, and overcome the differences in their characters and outlooks to reach safe harbour. Paddy Considine was the vengeful villain with a secret, treacherous accomplice at his back; Priyanka Chopra Jonas was Elba’s swashbuckling secret agent flame, who manages to link up with the duo in the field. Naishuller could have easily steered the movie towards an overt satire aiming at the difference between authentic and play-acted toughness and a modern world (and electorates) that can’t tell the difference anymore, or something more serious and gritty in an Alistair Maclean-esque or Air Force One mould. Frustratingly, Heads of State went for none of these, and rather aimed for a tongue-in-cheek approach, with a lot of flashily-shot but weightless action scenes, a generic story that never did much with its driving concept, relying heavily on Elba and Cena’s chalk-and-cheese personas to provide the entertainment value and make the buddy movie beats land. It wasn’t a bad movie at all, but it also absolutely exemplified a product type, the kind you watch once and discard from all thought and memory.

Speaking of Nobody, Indonesian action specialist Timo Tjahjanto took over from Naishuller for Nobody 2, an entry that saw Bob Odenkirk, back in fighting shape again after health worries, return as Hutch Mansell, the seemingly bland suburbanite who’s actually a deadly mercenary and agent for hire but also absolutely earnest about his family life. This time Hutch, burned out after working hard on various dangerous assignments to pay back debts accrued in the previous film, talked his family into going for a vacation in a middle American theme park, a place he had happy childhood memories of. But the vacation goes to hell when he finds the park is actually a cover operation for a nefarious criminal syndicate, aided and abetted by some variably motivated locals, including the nominal, browbeaten owner (John Ortiz), and the petty tyrant sheriff (Colin Hanks), all in thrall to a monstrous crime queen, played with amusing if time-limited verve by Sharon Stone. The sequel never tried to replicate the first film’s surprise value, given we already know Hutch’s skill-set, but half-heartedly reiterated its driving motif, one of frustration and hunger for life in the raw resolved through shattering physical expression, and the way such satisfying self-indulgence demands coping with inevitable consequences. Tjahjanto’s take instead built itself around Hutch’s increasingly exasperated efforts to spend quality time warring with his instinctive need to beat, bash, and break all the bullies put in front of them, particularly when they’re so intemperate as to give his daughter a smack on the ear. As before, Odenkirk was backed up in the mayhem by Christopher Lloyd and RZA, returning as Hutch’s dad and brother and with slightly more to do this time, and Connie Nielsen as his patient, rifle-packing wife. Nobody 2 was another action movie that tended towards the tongue-in-cheek and self-satirising, only doing enough to set up enemy ranks as pretexts for the action (like giving Stone a few patented crazy villain feats to perform), and the big final battle strained to stage large-scale mayhem with much strategic and spatial coherence. But Tjahjanto displayed real chops for staging the more intimate, funny-horrifying slugfests, replete with black-hearted comedy as well as satisfying bloodshed.

Len Wiseman’s Ballerina was a classier, more expensive and ambitious piece of work, one that set out to open up a fresh wing of the John Wick universe. Ana de Armas was Eve Maccaro, a young woman who, left orphaned when her parents are slain by a particularly secretive and intimidating cabal within the already cloistered and murderous underworld portrayed in the Wick films, is trained up into a creature of appropriately balletic movement and bloodthirsty mayhem by a branch of the assassin society called the Ruska Roma, with Anjelica Huston playing her fierce, unsentimental matriarch-mentor. But when she gets wind of new machinations by her father’s killer – Gabriel Byrne as the cult’s coldly messianic boss and representative of a deterministic worldview – Eve breaks away from all loyalties and creeds to wage war on the cult, climaxing in a colossal battle in a snowy Alpine town. Keanu Reeves turned up as Wick late in the film, called in by the underworld bigwigs to punish her, but choosing instead to act as understanding and judicious umpire. Ballerina sported truly great photography by Romain Lacourbas, and was well-assembled by Wiseman, conjuring scene after scene of intricately staged violent spectacle, particularly an astounding late sequence involving flamethrowers worthy of John Woo. De Armas gave the role all her physical acting talent, not just performing the stunts and actions with palpable involvement but depicting Eve’s swift maturation from greenhorn to boss through the medium of violence. The idea of building this kind of vehicle around de Armas clearly came from people high on her scenes in No Time To Die, but the result lacked the humour and surprise value of those, although occasionally Wiseman managed to deliver a kind of psychopathic black comedy. Ballerina also broke from the Wick films insofar as that where those movies spurned the usual kinds of stakes for an action hero’s rampaging, this one sported some more traditional motifs, like Eva’s lifelong quest for familial revenge, and her urge to protect a young girl claimed by the cult. But Ballerina, for all its bravura, still finished up curiously unmoving and unmemorable, because it did reproduce the Wick films’ attitude of everything being basically a pretext, rather than a source of real rooting interest (although Byrne did his best to provide a hissable baddie), and when every scene is a slam-bang battle, with barely any variation in the type and pace of the action, eventually it all starts to become moving wallpaper, the film grammar just a little too stolid to gain the state of visual poetry painted in hues of fire and blood.

A mainstay of 2025’s more enjoyable genre cinema was the thriller involving a small cast of characters in a limited setting, playing out tight, intense situations about predator and prey, with themes of entrapment and the agonising cost of survival. That kind of story’s always been around but has a particular value now as they’re pretty cheap to make and work on an elemental level that’s hard to entirely foul up. Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals offered a neo-Ozploitation take rendered with age-of-streaming slickness and two good lead performances: Hassie Harrison was Zephyr, the American surfer girl in Queensland, a habitual loner after a troubled upbringing who nonetheless makes a connection with Moses (Josh Heuston), a likeable local lad, but is then taken prisoner by Tucker (Jai Courtney), a hirsute and garrulous tour dive operator who gets his jollies by feeding pretty young women to sharks and videotaping the results. Most of what followed was a two-hand chamber piece as Zephyr tried every means at her disposal to escape, whilst Moses tried to track her down. Byrne’s direction was as lean and elegantly nasty as the great white sharks Tucker likes to feed, and Courtney had an absolute blast finally unleashing the edge of yobbo aggression he had to keep damped down in his Hollywood vehicles. The whole thing was basically Wolf Creek on the water but with more emphasis on what the accomplished survivor can countenance in the face of over-confident evil: the film stole a flourish from Night Watch, if in admittedly badass fashion, as Zephyr proved willing to cut her own thumb off to escape. But the movie went on a bit too long and despoiled the pleasure and suspense value in these things, which is seeing people work with tools at their disposal with utterly realistic limitations, by getting a bit silly, as Zephyr was spared by a great white because ultimate survivor recognises its like kind, or some bollocks. There was also some added, dubious psychology (Tucker’s kink is based in a childhood encounter with a shark) and the romance that fuelled much of the story was too rushed to feel as vital as Byrne sold it. Still, the movie was gripping almost until the end and delivered a spectacular comeuppance.

Brian Kirk’s Dead of Winter approached a similar situation from a different viewpoint and in equally remote setting if with a contrasting climate: the frigid woodlands of Minnesota in midwinter (albeit filmed in Finland!). Emma Thompson played Barb, who braves the ice-wrapped landscape to scatter her recently deceased husband’s ashes in the frozen-over lake where they had their first date decades earlier. But there she finds herself lone witness to the kidnapping of a teenage girl (Laurel Marsden), performed by a local dimwit (Marc Menchaca) at the behest of his fearsome wife (Judy Greer) for reasons that soon become gruesomely clear. Barb, stuck for the duration, doesn’t shrink from trying to save the girl. Kirk did a solid job whipping up tension and weaving the behaviours and interesting motivations of the characters amidst the straightforward gamesmanship of the situation. Barb, played with verve by Thompson obviously relishing a different kind of role, was an almost caricatured exemplar of Minnesota Nice, the kind who keeps apologising for swearing even in life-and-death battles, but gained depth as her backstory evolved and her nuts-and-bolts intelligence proved capable: Thompson’s daughter Gaia Wise played Barb in flashbacks. Moreover, there was a substantial subtext built around Barb’s grieving and the theme of accepting death (whilst also seeing in the imprisoned girl the daughter that she and her husband never had), contrasting the increasingly maniacal nature of Greer’s determination to live at all costs, and so offering a partial inversion of the usual stakes of this type of story. The photography was gorgeous and the setting palpable: where too many modern movies and the actors in them seem utterly detached from landscape, everyone here really looked like they were cold, and their suffering was my pleasure. The result was foiled to a degree by some story mechanics and contrivances that Kirk, mostly a big-time TV director, was slapdash in working through, like the truck that gets bogged at the worst possible time only to be freed easily later by obvious means, tools for escape and battle all being kept within reasonably convenient reach, and a finale that challenged credulity a bit. But the crucial, cathartic moment of Barb deciding to accept the dark and also drag her crazed nemesis with her had power.

Christopher Landon’s Drop chose as its high-pressure setting a plush and elegant-seeming locale, unfolding mostly in a gleaming, glass-walled high-rise restaurant. This time the victimised heroine was Meghann Fahy’s Violet, a prospering single mother trying to put an abusive marriage behind her by going on a date with an apparent nice guy (Brandon Sklenar) who works for the mayor’s office. But someone is watching Violet via the web of tech that surrounds the average urban dweller these days, and keeps airdropping her messages demanding she steal documents from her date and then feed him poison, on pain of ordering the killing of her small daughter back at her home. Knowing her tormentor must be close at hand, Violet tries to ferret them out before being forced to follow through on their demands. Drop looked good in a slick and glitzy way, and strongly recalled fare like Nick of Time, Red Eye and Non-Stop, with just a little bit of Hitchcockian paranoia, and an edge of fashionable psychological portent, as the unseen tormentor works not just on Violet’s vulnerability but also her proven capacity for violence in self-protection. Drop definitely wasn’t any kind of classic, or even particularly memorable, with thin and pretty obvious characterisations, and a glitzy-glossy look to both the settings and the actors that felt more like TV: it was the kind of movie that finishes with people dangling out of a shattered window but nobody seems to get cut by studs of glass. The use of domestic violence as a psychological McGuffin was also maybe a bit much, whilst the setting and milieu had an imprecise quality that’s becoming more and more common, as a movie made in Ireland but set in a generic US city without any hint of local flavour or detail. The comeuppance for the chief villain was also hurt by unconvincing mechanics. Still, the movie earned some relish from the clever reveal of the villain’s identity and their performance, Fahy was a likeable lead, and the whole thing delivered a diverting hour and a half or so.

William Kaufman’s Osiris was another film fitting the template of the cheaply-made programmer unfolding mostly in a small, enclosed locale and involving a constant fight for survival. This one, however, staked out different genre territory, as a sci-fi action flick with strong, obvious inspiration from the likes of Predator and Aliens. Kaufman kicked off with an overlong and practically incoherent scene depicting a bunch of mercenary soldiers battling for their lives in some war-torn zone, only to then be zapped by an alien spaceship and awakening some time later, now trapped within deep with the craft’s murky, labyrinthine confines. The soldiers begin a desperate effort to fight their way out of the ship, making swift alliance with some other entrapped humans who’ve been inside the craft for years, including a teenager (Brianna Hildebrand) who’s grown up entirely in this place, and her mother (Linda Hamilton), a tough Russian warrior. Kaufman gave Max Martini a lead role that suited and depended upon his aura of grizzled, been-around-the-block-twice sturdiness. Hamilton had some fun with a plummy accent whilst letting Kaufman pay overt homage to his inspirations, but her contribution was negligible. Osiris made me feel like I was privy to watching what the future of cinema, or at least this kind of movie, is likely to be. The running time seemed to consist of about 90% sprinting about the same set of indistinguishable corridors and firing guns, the result fodder for people who don’t like boring things like story and dialogue, and executed to fill a streaming service “Recommended for You” tab. Characters were barely delineated, with Kaufman’s budgetary limitations-blurring shaky camerawork only exacerbating the lack of any specific sense of these people, in stark contrast to those classic models: all I got an impression of was some beards and mouths behind them dropping the odd tough-guy-ism.

After the popularity of The Invisible Man and Upgrade, blends of cool conceptualism and retro minimalism in genre filmmaking, people got hyped for Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, another modern revision of classic monster movie fare. But the hype failed upon first contact with the result. Whannell depicted a melancholy but conscientious young father, Blake (Christopher Abbott) with a young daughter and a rocky marriage to glum journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner), who decides to take the family for a hopefully healing stay at his father’s home out in the Washington state backwoods. Upon arrival, though, they’re attacked by a ferocious monster that proves connected with Blake’s childhood experiences and troubled family legacy. The basic conceit of Whannell’s take was to narrow the theme of lycanthropy as a parable for “toxic masculinity” as the temptations towards monstrous, reactive, violent extremes, represented Blake’s uneasy inheritance from his tough, terse, balefully protective but intimidating old man and the whole world of such old-school machismo. A theme with some potential, particularly given that father-and-son relationships have been common in the werewolf movie since the film’s 1941 near-namesake. By far the best scene was a long prologue depicting the child Blake and his own father weathering an encounter with one of the monsters haunting the woods near their home, its presence suggested but not fully revealed – a scene charged with suspense and clever manipulation of viewpoints and setting. The car crash set-piece that set the main drama in sudden motion was well-done but more a filmmaking stunt than thrilling, and as the story proper unfolded, Whannell gave far too much of the running time over to the quasi-Cronenbergian experience of Blake slowly taking on lycanthrope traits, fancifully done but never coming close to rivalling something like An American Werewolf in London for sheer visual impact. Then it became just another movie where the characters run around in the dark a lot. The situation offered little chance for big surprises or even entertaining gore, and the one major plot twist was obvious from the get-go. Abbott seems to have some cache as a rising indie actor of repute, but his lead performance provoked no great sympathy or fear, only underlining the script’s vague and stodgy uncertainties about its characters. Garner was stuck with a particularly colourless version of her usual role as the pale and shivery but slowly hardening survivor type. This all led to an ending that should have been emotionally affecting but instead only made me glad it was finally over.

The theme of fathers and sons on a hunt charged with uneasy portents about loyalty and inheritance also arose in 28 Years Later…, a continuation of the quasi-zombie series kicked off way back in 2002 by director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland with 28 Days Later…, now with apparent designs to expand it into a full-blown franchise. Boyle and Garland reteamed to reveal what’s happened to Britain after a quarter-century of isolation and quarantine designed to keep the populace of “rage virus”-infected at bay. Many infected humans have survived with a very crude kind of pack animal mentality, and have also started to mutate. A small community of the uninfected has prospered on an island just off the coast, and the movie opened with father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and son Spike (Alfie Williams) venturing on the mainland on a foraging trip intended to blood the lad for situations of real danger. But this ancient ritual of manhood is despoiled as the son perceives darker truths: his beloved mother (Jodie Comer) is beset by a ruinous disease, dad screws around behind her back, and his own combat readiness proves shaky in the face of terrifying threats. Nonetheless, he sets out with determination to take his mother to see a mysterious, possibly mad doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who lives inland, with cosy habits like maintaining a towering pile of skulls as a memorial for the manifold dead. I’ve never understood the high opinion a lot of genre aficionados hold 28 Days Later… in – it’s a gratuitous rip-off of Wyndham and Romero with some notably stupid sequences and a truly annoying style mostly intended to show how Boyle and Garland held themselves aloof from common horror fare. 28 Years Later… now saw the writer-director team nicking ideas from Neil Marshall’s Doomsday and Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, and blending them with pretentious visual stylistics and insubstantial social commentary. Some of that commentary was aimed at Brexit-era politics, a fantasy of all-in-together retro hominess lived out on the island poking fun at the right-wing, whilst the depiction of a rewilding UK replete with wandering herds of naked yahoos could be read as a yearning reductio ad absurdum of green left ideals. A patronising but dimwitted shipwrecked Norwegian sailor with working tech dropped in at one point. To be fair, the movie started moderately well, with a strong sequence as Jamie and Spike battled some pursuing rage-zombies, a baptism of blood Spike feel he doesn’t truly pass. But the whole thing proved a wild goose chase, as Garland retreated into one of his blatantly metaphoric corners – this time about accepting death – and one of his sub-Conrad odysseys, with Fiennes playing a sort of nice-guy Colonel Kurtz. The movie ended with a cliffhanger as irritatingly goofy as its satirical target was weird and facetious.

Another venerable franchise about outrunning things that want to eat you is the apparently inexhaustible Jurassic series: Gareth Edwards took on helming the latest entry with Jurassic World: Rebirth. This entry, set five years after Jurassic World: Dominion, kicked off on a jolly note with the free-roaming dinosaur populace rapidly dying off except in hospitable tropic climes, and everyone’s totally over the magic of movies-  ah, sorry, dinosaurs. Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali played Zora Bennett and Duncan Kincaid, two weathered mercenaries with bad bush in their past, and Jonathan Bailey was nerdy but plucky palaeontologist Henry Loomis. These three are hired by pharmaceutical company honcho Krebs (Rupert Friend) to venture to the fantasy island of Greenscreenlandia, where one of the InGen research facilities lies forgotten (how many of the damn things are there?) and the dinosaurs are still thriving. The goal: to extract blood samples from different living species for some stupid reason that’s going to make lots of money. Along the way they run into a family left shipwrecked after a close encounter with a mosasaur, but lots of stupid things happen and they get wrecked on the island and separated and take different paths to a rendezvous at the facility where there just happens to live a colossal voracious mutant dino. Anyway, yadda yadda big pharma and plastic waste bad, okay? Rebirth was an enervating experience all round: bad signs proliferated early, like a variation on the “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear” joke from the original film, but this time with Friend in the mirror rather than a t-rex because humans are the real monsters, dude. A prologue depicting how that mutant hell-beast got loose was surprisingly mean and effective, but also saw Edwards ripping off the best scene in his own Godzilla; the rest of the movie recalled Edwards’ debut Monsters without the artisanal appeal. There was also a fairly decent bit involving the obligatory t-rex, and a sequence perversely determined to pay hyperbolic homage to Jaws. Nearly everything here felt recycled and rote or half-hearted, with the regulation morality play touches absolutely exhausted and plied without a hint of wit or twist, and the heroes were uniformly unconvincing: Johansson in particular, for all her star power, was blatantly miscast. The original Jurassic Park promised vast new cinematic vistas thanks to CGI: now the result is plain, as actors kept marching for reel after reel through digi-jungle, whilst the climactic scenes were practically incoherent, including a would-be ironic fake-out involving Ali’s character that might have had impact if his character made any impression at all.

Jalmari Helander’s Sisu was one of 2023’s cinematic surprises, and the prospect of a sequel was mouth-watering for action fans. Helander’s follow-up, Sisu: Road To Revenge, saw Jorma Tommila return as Aatami Korpi, the pure incarnation of Finnish masculine grit. This time around Korpi ventures over the border of Finland in 1946 into territory ceded to the Soviet Union at World War II’s end, where the cabin that used to be his family home is located. Korpi’s objective is merely to disassemble the cabin and transport it back to his country. But the Soviets, catching wind of his presence on their soil, seek revenge on Korpi for killing hundreds of their soldiers during the Winter War. So a KGB bigwig (Richard Brake) plucks Yeagor Dragunov (Stephen Lang), the man who murdered Korpi’s family and accidentally forged Korpi into the weapon of war he is, out of a Siberian prison to take out the legendary warrior, setting in motion a bloodbath as Korpi races for the border. Helander had some room to move in trying to best the first film, but Road To Revenge narrowed its focus a little too monomaniacally. Where the first film had some supporting heroes whose fates intersected entertainingly with Korpi’s marauding, this entry was concerned only with Korpi and Dragunov’s mutual, relentless campaigns, and amped up the macho suffering to the nth degree. As it was the movie proved a little too straightforward and Helander seemed to be having trouble working out how to sustain the template he’d forged. Some of the impatience was woven into the fabric of the movie, as Helander kept breaking up his sequences with unnecessary jump-cuts and swerves into the excessively cartoonish. Teaming up Lang and Brake as our hero’s deadly foes ought to have delivered movie villain rapture, but they proved largely wasted. Still, the movie delivered the requisite number of hilariously gruesome kills by Korpi, particularly when Korpi first cut loose on Dragunov’s welcoming committee, and a chase involving some armoured motorcyclists, in sequences that split the difference between Coyote-vs-Roadrunner and Grand Guignol, and despite the lack of ambition still delivered a cleaning bath of gore and mayhem, with the motif of Korpi absorbing incredible physical suffering but never quitting pushed to the point where he secreted a knife under his skin. Tommila’s performance was also a thing of peculiar beauty, making his character’s extremes of suffering, rage, cognition, and, finally, unexpected pathos all perfectly legible without a word of dialogue or risking being hammy.

The year’s compulsory bad Guy Ritchie movie dropped in the form of Fountain Of Youth, another product from the aging bad boy that had a lot of things going for it in theory, an Indiana Jones wannabe that also referenced a particular kind of old-fashioned, jaunty, globetrotting yarn about a family of adventurers. John Krasinski played Luke Purdue, the unregenerate scion of a daring if ethically challenged clan of relic raiders and tomb hunters; Natalie Portman was Charlotte, his gone-straight art historian sister, who is forced to join Luke in a quest to locate some magical McGuffin, a quest sponsored by a seemingly frail and timid tech billionaire (Domhnall Gleeson). Out to stop them is a shadowy cabal who don’t want the McGuffin found, with Eiza Gonzalez playing Esme, their most elegantly dangerous operative, engaging in swordplay and flirtation with Luke across a variety of international locales – but just who here are the heroes and the villains was an open question. This all should have been awesome fun, or at the very least a better Indiana Jones film that The Dial of Destiny, with just about every conceivable element for a great adventure movie and plenty of Apple’s money to do it on. Fountain Of Youth also had formidable technical chops, including DP Ed Wild’s fluid drone shots. All without any sign of an actual artistic intelligence behind it all: this was the kind of movie that made the real, actual, true-blue pyramids of Giza look dusty and boring. The whole affair had the frenetic, overbusy quality of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, and not even a toe planted in something like grounded reality. The repartee and roguish shenanigans, like the way Luke ropes Charlotte into his scheme, were teeth-grindingly forced and unfunny, and deployed with Ritchie’s usual, restless, arrhythmic touch. Fountain of Youth had its moments, like a well-staged opening, and a scene where Gleeson suddenly revealed badass moves to save himself and a Purdue kid from goons. Gonzalez gave her part her all, yet again, but Krasinski and Portman were both badly miscast, with the former in particular about as charmingly disreputable as a can of Diet Coke. The story built to a climax where the usual Faustian comeuppance stuff was painfully drawn-out, and the whole affair had the timid, bloodless, sexless, deracinated vibe that afflicts everything today: a lot of emphasis was placed on Luke and Esme’s frenemy flirting, but all we got for it was a safely sisterly kiss and a threat. Also, it’s interesting to note that where this sort of thing is supposed to play sensitive these days when it comes to violating cultural sanctums, Ritchie had absolutely no problem with his heroes raising the Lusitania, a war grave.

Onetime Napoleon Dynamite auteur and indie hero Jared Hess made a foray into blockbuster fare and turned out one of the year’s most (and few) profitable big-budget Hollywood films, with A Minecraft Movie, spun off from the extremely popular video game. Hess tried his best to get his crowd-pleasing entertainer on as he swiftly set a pleasantly ridiculous scenario in motion. Jack Black played a misfit who finds a zone of endlessly malleable creativity in a bizarre alternate world he finds a portal to, only to be tasked with preventing an evil sorceress and her army of porcine goons from taking it over. Sometime later, back on Earth, a mismatched gang of characters all defined by need – a flailing ex-gaming champion (Jason Momoa), a young woman trying to make a go of things as a social media PR rep (Emma Myers), her inventive teenaged brother (Sebastian Hansen), and a hapless real estate agent (Danielle Brooks) – are led to the other world and help Black battle the blocky hordes. Despite being a movie based on a game about construction and inspired use of elements, A Minecraft Movie could barely feign interest in that sort of thing, instead blending the kind of tongue-in-cheek nerd-bro silliness Black and Hess have both specialised at in the past with the genre-and-commercialism-kidding humour offered in the likes of The LEGO Movie. Trouble is, that sort of thing’s getting played out, and here despite all the waggishness the story was a pretty straightforward fantasy adventure, but also one that couldn’t be bothered doing any of the work that makes that sort of thing good. Momoa lampooned his image playing a has-been nerd pretending to be an ultra-cool alpha male (at least he came off better than in that bloody Fast and Furious movie), but the characters and their specific journeys were all only sketched in the barest possible terms. Most of the actors were likeable, but they were given very little to do in a movie that made a classic mistake with this sort of thing: mistaking everyone screaming and shouting all the time for high spirits. Black in particular was called upon to deliver every line with dopey cool-dad enthusiasm. Also, there was a rather perturbing amount of (safely digital, at least) animal cruelty going on. Still, it was a moderately enjoyable movie, with flashes of Looney Tunes-like zaniness, and younger kids probably relished it: it was, at least, a movie aimed at them not also trying to pretend it was too cool for them. Kudos also for scoring an action scene to The B-52’s’ “Private Idaho.”

One movie just about everyone watched this year was a fully animated Netflix film, Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans’ K-Pop Demon Hunters. The title referred to three young women commissioned to be the latest in a long line of warrior-bards who keep dark hordes at bay through both swordcraft and song, sustaining a magical barrier with the latter talent that keeps a satanic entity trapped in a netherworld. The heroic trio – stalwart Rumi (Arden Cho), fierce Mira (May Hong), and talkative Zoey (Ji-Young Yoo) – grow into a hugely successful K-Pop group called Huntr/x. They seem on the verge of total victory over the demons when one wraith, Jinu (Ahn Hyo-Siop), once a talented musician who became the victim of a Faustian bargain, tries to tilt the scales for evil by forming a demon boy band to defeat Huntr/x in musical popularity – although he’s not exactly a loyal subject of the dark lord. Also complicating matters is the fact Rumi herself is the product of her late mother’s relationship with a demon, and the effort of keeping her split identity a secret is consuming her. Kang and Appelhans’ movie was so perfectly, cunningly crafted to ride current trends of youth audience taste, particularly teenage girls, from enthusiasm for Korean pop music and its pretty denizens to themes of sisterly solidarity and being true to yourself, it could well have been suggested by an algorithm. And yet K-Pop Demon Hunters had a genuine charm and substance that belied cynicism, starting with its amusingly loopy yet coherent premise, and its hyped-up but usually keen humor, from gags ranging from inside jokes for performers to Korean quack remedies and poking fun at genre canards, as when the girls are tricked into making a horrible noise sliding down ramps in their combat leathers. A lot depended also on how much you like the particular kind of processed pop celebrated throughout – I, personally, could very easily be convinced K-Pop is a demonic plot to suck the world’s soul – but the soundtrack was fine. It’s also pretty obvious that the reason recent Asian animation (although this was really more of a calculated hybrid) appeals to teens so much more than western fare is that it meets them on their level, with the plethora of stylized beauty in both the male and female characters exemplifying a simple understanding of teenage tastes, rather than trying to engineer them. Most importantly, the emotional dynamics were simple yet sophisticated, particularly in the uneasy romance of Rumi and Jinu, and the pay-off when Rumi’s secret is revealed in the worst way had sting. But the film resolved a bit too quickly and easily, skipping really engaging with Rumi’s need to find understanding with both her comrades and her demon-slaying, truth-repressing adoptive mother, sapping a lot of its ultimate impact.

Musical legacy was also a driving theme for Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (look, I’m trying to make these transitions smooth, but it’s hard sometimes). The utterly beggaring and tragic death of Reiner and his wife was a shock that inevitably casts a pall over his last work, a movie that was both a portrait and a product of nostalgic fervour, a sense of waning yet still-powerful artistic mystique drinking in the last chance saloon. Reiner returned playing Marty DiBergi, the filmmaker and Spinal Tap fan now trying to document a reunion concert for the aging band (Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer), who forgive DiBergi mid-movie for his previous effort. The reunion requires them putting obscure ill-feeling behind them and negotiating some roadblocks, including a manager (Kerry Godliman) who’s the clueless daughter of their old maestro, a concert promoter (Chris Addison) who can’t mentally process music, their own physical creakiness, and the eternal problem of finding someone willing to risk being their drummer. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues looked set to be a try-hard afterthought as a sequel to a movie that’s beloved but also a quite uneven in its own right. And, well, that’s what it was, constantly provoking a feeling of a missed opportunity in taking aim at the disparity between the imperial days of rock and the burned-out shell of the music business today, and only occasionally tapping the comic potential in the feedback loop of myth-making for a band whose most humiliating escapades are now part of their mystique. But I’d also happily describe this as better than expected: it delivered some solid gags, like the boys constantly being bothered by ghost tours in the New Orleans house they’ve rented for the duration, an anecdote about how the band was rejected by the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame (“It just said, ‘Fuck off’”), and a comradely visit from Paul McCartney that dissolves into bitchy confusion. The movie also got a dose of fun new blood from Valerie Franco as the wild girl drummer who takes a chance: whilst the character was the subject of a very obvious joke, the choice of making her an infectiously positive super-fan was a good one, and she was vital to a great punchline at the very end. The main lack was of any new music of interest, with the band and movie happy to trot out the hits, which was perhaps the most accurate element, leading to a final collaboration with Elton John that saw him and the band crushed under a now proper-scale Stonehenge prop. And oh how they danced…

Disney offered another attempt to turn the 1982 semi-classic Tron into a franchise, this one trailing so long after 2010’s Tron: Legacy that it had to ply another awkward generation shift, and negotiate some big, axle-jarring speed bumps getting a fresh story moving. So, like, apparently Kevin Flynn’s company Encom is now battling its biggest enemy, a rival company founded by old antagonist Dillinger: the young Dillinger scion, Julian (Evan Peters) has set his villainous sights on bringing digital beings and constructs from the Grid into the real world in order to make gazillions from military contracts. But nobody’s been able to crack the coding needed to make those constructs persist for more than half an hour. Encom passed into the hands of a pair of wunderkind sisters, one of whom has died in the interim: the living sister, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), is frantically seeking the code for permanence Flynn supposedly developed. Meanwhile Dillinger’s Master Control within the Grid, dubbed Ares (Jared Leto), is used as the model for Dillinger’s super-digi-soldiers and is also a nimble cyber spy and hacking tool. But he’s developed ideas above his station and wants to break free, making an alliance with Eve so they both can get what they want. Tron: Ares sank like lead at the box office as a franchise extension no-one asked for and mostly avoiding engaging with any elements from the last entry, sporting Leto, an actor who seems to upset a lot of people just by breathing the same air as them, and pairing him with Lee, star of the modest adult drama Past Lives, which just screams youth audience appeal. Add in director Joachim Rønning, practiced at wrapping Disney strategizing passed off as storytelling in a sheen of visual allure (see 2024’s Young Woman and the Sea). And yet Tron: Ares proved not just watchable but very good, a superior entry amidst the year’s general weak big-budget harvest – good-looking, fluently staged, solidly written, and with a few genuinely spectacular, even hallucinogenic set-pieces, particularly a light-cycle chase through the streets of San Francisco, and Ares and Eve’s escape from the Dillinger Grid. Rønning pulled things together after the info dump opening to get things moving nicely, boiling the narrative down to a fairly simple race despite the nested realities and quasi-existential ideas. Jots of humour depended greatly on the tension between Leto’s cool, stoic, low-key-soulful performance and Ares’ nerd leanings – his great passions are Depeche Mode and classic tech – and the film ought to have amplified this element considerably, given how this franchise started off as breezy fun but has become oddly po-faced. Jodie Turner-Smith galvanised meanwhile as Ares’ former subordinate turned chief adversary, set on his heels by junior Dillinger and operating with a maniacal sense of mission that swerved towards pathos right at the end. Jeff Bridges turned up as Flynn, clad in warrior mu-mu and persisting in a remnant of the ‘80s-style Grid, a great touch. This made up somewhat for the way Peters’ Julian was yet another recent Hollywood villain modelled after would-be imperious but wimpy, charisma-deficient Silicon Valley bosses. A brief coda with his character went some way to closing the franchise loop in a cool way, but given the box office we’ll likely never get a pay-off to that. Again.

Another franchise rooted in a 1980s pop culture favourite rapidly fading in immediate generational relevance is the Predator series. 2025 saw not one but two entries in that universe, one an animated film, and the other a second feature entry by Dan Trachtenberg, who helmed 2022’s successful and solid streaming hit Prey. Predator: Badlands went much bigger and grander, befitting its righteous return to the big screen, and had a doozy of a hook. This one offered one of the Predators themselves, or Yautja as they’re called here (as per lore from the Predator comic books), as the protagonist. Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is forced to flee the Yautja home world after his fearsome father declares him a runt and demands he be culled. Poppa even slays another son for instead trying to help Dek in his efforts to prove himself. Dek arrives on Genna, the so-called “death planet” even Yautja are cautious of, to hunt a ferocious beast that’s also almost unkillable because of its regenerative, Lambton Worm-like powers, and return justified. On the way he encounters Thia (Elle Fanning), a bifurcated Weyland-Yutani android with an irrepressibly curious and upbeat manner, and Dek finds himself evolving into both an exemplary Yautja but also something a little different. Meanwhile the real enemy proves to be Thia’s coldly remorseless pseudo-sister Tessa (Fanning again) and her army of fellow androids, following company programming to harvest the planet’s life forms for exploitation. As with Tron: Ares the theme was protagonists trying to break out of programming of various kinds. Badlands wasn’t entirely problem-free – the midsection had some pacing issues, the death planet wasn’t as constantly and deliciously Sadean as the concept promised, and Trachtenberg’s action staging sometimes got a little garbled in his efforts to keep his camerawork and framing hyper-fluid. But Badlands proved overall a refreshing, clever, and seriously entertaining movie, readily claiming the title of the best series entry since Predator 2. The idea of making a movie where the heroes are all aliens or half an android took real chutzpah, and yet Badlands made it work, partly because it rooted Dek’s sense of mission in emotional imperative very early and effectively. Trachtenberg didn’t make the mistake of anthropomorphising the Yautja too much – they speak in their own, guttural language throughout, even when conversing with the translating wiz Thia – and the portrait of the way their society works, rooted in strength as honour with, of course, some digs at ogrish patriarchy thrown in, was fleet and reasonably sensible (although I’d still like a movie to explain how a species with cumbersome claw digits living on a planet without apparent resources became so technologically proficient). The climactic scenes were particularly great, sporting lots of gleeful (if bloodless) violence as Trachtenberg reversed the usual series motif, with Dek utilising various weapons taken from the planet’s natural arsenal, and even Thia’s self-willed lower half proved a witty weapon of war.

Neil Marshall was an exciting genre film voice not that long ago, but his reputation started bleeding away even before his recent string of low-budget features made in close collaboration with his wife Charlotte Kirk, movies accused of blithely splitting the difference between tacky, unambitious B-movie fare and lust-struck paeans to Kirk. I don’t agree entirely with that – I loved The Lair despite its tackier aspects. Compulsion, the latest, proved a tribute to 1970s and ‘80s sexy thrillers, with manifold nods to filmmakers skilled at dancing along the art-trash border like Brian De Palma, Paul Verhoeven, and Dario Argento, and to their mutual touchstone Hitchcock – with a lot of late-night cable TV skin flick chic too. Kirk this time played Diana Shaw, a brassy, brazen lowlife shacked up on Malta with her partner in bed and crime (Zack McGowan): they set their sights on Eva Kawalska (Anna-Maria Sieklucka), a tycoon’s stepdaughter who seems a bit prim and touchy, and is also queer, so Diana gleefully steps up to the plate of trying to seduce and distract her long enough to rob her blind. But there’s also a mysterious female clad in fetish garb killing random people on the island, bringing down the attention of a local detective (Giulia Gorietti) trying to live up to her boss cop dad’s reputation. On the face of things Compulsion certainly looked like a final surrender to cheesy make-work projects for Marshall and Kirk: somehow even the English members of the cast managed to look and sound like they’d come out of some Croatian-shot porn film, all the women with their hover-boobs and dudes with designer stubble on sharp-cut jawlines, and the erotic tension occasionally felt like a lezzed-up Carry On film in broadness. And yet, Compulsion managed to be riotously entertaining, despite and because of its shame-inducing indulgence. Even on a very low budget fodder Marshall made the film look really good, and entered almost purely into a zone of full-blooded erotica delirium, not caring if his switchbacks of plot and character made any sense, instead purely delighting in creating the kind of movie universe with leather-clad lesbians parade in lace masks and wield samurai swords. The opening scene offered a variation on De Palma’s travelling POV shots; a mid-film set-piece managed to nod at both the farmhouse murder in Torn Curtain and the They Live alley fight, with Kirk and Sieklucka trying to knife a man to death in a tag-team but finding it bloody hard work. This segued into a rite of cleansing a la Psycho that then became a Sapphic fuck-fest filmed by Marshall with a ripe sense of tactile pleasure that showed he at least knows how to make digital cinema work for him. Compulsion was exactly the sort of movie a lot of people have been wishing for lately, purveyed with immoderate glee. What let it down was a twist-happy script probably trying to emulate John McNaughton’s Wild Things, and which never came alive in its marginalia in the same way Marshall’s early work did, partly because of the flat, anonymous, often thick-accented supporting cast.

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, the deadly duo who debuted with the mesmeric, abstracted giallo tribute Amer, got back into action with their first movie in several years, Reflection In A Dead Diamond, a movie fixated on the same fetishistic energy found in classic Euro thrillers as Compulsion, but where Marshall observed them in their natural habitat, so to speak, Cattet and Forzani as is their wont broke them down into art exhibition fragments, then recomposed them into a visually dazzling, mind-melting romp. The fragmented and surreally distorted storyline seemed to at first to describe a retired gentleman of leisure, and former spy, John Diman (Fabio Testi), relaxing around the Cote d’Azur: the setting recalls his most perplexing and haunting assignment, protecting a creepy oil magnate who murdered Diman’s comrade for one of his perverse art projects, and in turn attracted the attention of Serpentik, a mysterious femme fatale and rival whose true appearance is impossible to identify because she wears a variety of disguising masks. Then it seemed as if all this was merely the jumbled imaginings of a troubled movie actor who can’t tell his most famous role from reality anymore, but that truth might in turn be the hypnotic effect of one of Serpentik’s allies, who specialises in making foes think they’re in a movie. As well as the relished spectacle of pure imagery flowing into narrative abyss, the real subjects of Reflection In A Dead Diamond were the flux of memory and the eternal allure, and eternal impossibility, of getting to the bottom of a love object, yearnings that constantly change form and torture through tantalising, in a movie that owed as much to Death In Venice and Proust as to cult B-movies. Maria de Madeiros turned up late in the movie as the woman who may or may not be the older Serpentik. Cattet and Forzani threw in all their favourite peccadilloes – teasing eroticism colliding with sadistic jollies, flourishes of transformative beauty morphing into grotesquery, particularly glimpses of sliced flesh and wince-inducing body damage. All seemed to well out of a Jungian void along with a volley of art jokes – a beheading suggested with a cutaway to Caravaggio’s painting of Judith slaying Holofernes; bits of faces scattered about like Magritte paintings escaped their frames; a car chase depicted in comic book panels – whilst the filmmakers chased down a theme of obsession with obsession, and honoured a style of movie traced back through De Palma and Argento and Bava all the way back to Louis Feuillade. There was tremendous art and wit in the movie, but it never quite accessed the ultimate realm of delirium it chased, and couldn’t match Amer as a genre disassembly that sought to boil down the mysterious affinity between tropes and underlying desires and anxieties.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners provided 2025’s most singular success at the US box office: a 1930s-set vampire thriller with added elements of social-cultural parable and musical. Coogler had regular collaborator Michael B. Jordan play not one but two roles – twin gangster brothers Smoke and Stack, who return to their Deep South home after a sojourn as successful bootleggers. Determined to open a honkytonk for local Black folk, the brothers fully expect trouble from the powers that be, but find their true nemesis to be far stranger, when a grinning, Irish-accented white stranger (Jack O’Connell) and a couple of companions knock on the door and ask to join in the fun and music. Sinners then unfolded as a sort of combined variation on From Dusk Till Dawn and Idlewild as the honkytonk denizens have to fight off a proliferating horde of vampires. Coogler’s mind was on more than just a monster movie, offering the situation as a metaphor for the history of African-American music and culture: said vampires drain not just blood but songs and spirit. In a year when hunks of vapid corporate tripe kept bombing and sending apocalyptic tremors through Hollywood’s foundations, Coogler’s hit with Sinners was stirring on that level at least, echoing the success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out as a perfectly timed vehicle for rejection of the second coming of President Trump. And Sinners, on the face of it, was a movie I feel I should have absolutely loved, containing many things I have a passion for. And yet it left me feeling almost entirely cold, and the reasons for that fit fairly well with my previous misgivings about Coogler. It was a perfect dud as a horror movie, recycling scenes and motifs from other films, and the climactic battle with the bloodsuckers was weak. Coogler did admirable work in the first half-hour situating the story in a flavourful, real-looking milieu, Autumn Durald Awkapaw’s photography was tremendous, and Delroy Lindo as an old blues hand was as great as always. But the attempt to weave an instant mythos around Smoke and Stack was wounded early on by a corny scene depicting them killing a CGI snake, and a lot of what followed had a similar, posturing, false-feeling quality. Jordan’s characterizations were wooden and interchangeable. Supporting characters were stereotyped or ill-defined, the nominal romances utterly chemistry-free. The opening and closing scenes made a big deal out of the event being a defining experience for blues guitar hero Sammi (Miles Caton, later Buddy Guy), turning his back on negative religion as embodied by his preacher father in favour of the vitality of art, but this was perversely cut off from the rest of the story, as Coogler went for the lower-hanging fruit of a racial theme. The ease with which popular discourse decoded Coogler’s thesis revealed it as received wisdom dished up for receptive hipsters and poorly integrated into the story texture. Just how coherent it was also remains dubious, with oddities like Hailee Steinfeld’s character, a mixed-race woman proving to be the vehicle for the vampire-appropriators to get a foothold in the community, arriving with unpleasant implications I hope wasn’t what Coogler was going for. He tried to illustrate his songs-of-ancestors themes with interludes of quasi-surreal, would-be outrageous but actually just goofy interaction between generations, and the film’s best musical moment was O’Connell and company’s weirdly joyous version of “The Rocky Road to Dublin.” Only right at the end, sporting a punchily-filmed shootout between Smoke and some slimy Klansmen, did the film finally seem to stumble upon what it should have been.

The release of Zach Cregger’s Weapons, the follow-up to his attention-getting Barbarian, gained serious hype as another horror movie from a so-hot-right-now talent, and another one with pretences to pressing social commentary. Weapons was, indeed, a signal monument to the power of a good story hook, opening with the sight of a number of children leaving their homes in a small US town the middle of the night and vanishing into the dark. The disappearance tears up their community, who, looking for someone to blame, place their ire squarely on the one person who connects the kids, their teacher Justine (Julia Garner). Justine, flailing in the face of suspicion and a background of dubious behaviour, looks instead to the one member of the class who didn’t vanish, the enigmatic Alex (Cary Christopher), whilst the fuming father of one of the kids (Josh Brolin) begins to detect a physical pattern to the mystery. Weapons started well, with the instant mystique of the kids running with arms outstretched investing the scene with a note of childlike pleasure, and some effectively creepy sequences followed. One well-written-and-acted scene saw Justine trying to seduce her seemingly more level-headed but actually even flakier cop ex-boyfriend (Alden Ehrenreich), just to get out of her own head for a while, part of a motif of imperfect people trying to inhabit upright social roles. Cregger also relished moments when his patient set-ups converged and clicked. But Weapons was, like Barbarian, another serious case of far less than meets the eye. As the nature of the mystery was revealed, the invocation of anxieties around school shootings (with a character at one a point having a dream vision of a giant assault rifle in the sky) were revealed to be entirely inane, in a movie that started off warning about the dangers of witch hunts only to resolve with a proper and necessary witch hunt, which Cregger maybe considered ironic. The idea of a panoramic horror movie describing collective trauma was raised but weakly articulated, the script anchoring itself to specific viewpoints and failing to evoke any detailed sense of the wider community, and wasting time with subplots. The only target the film actually hit, in fact, was the spectacle of weak-kneed authority hiding behind touchy-feely clichés and aversion to emotional heat, an idea embodied by Benedict Wong as the school’s gay principal, another example of a director achieving a slightly unpleasant inference he might not have intended. The last portion of the film, revolving around the revelation that Alex, his family, and the other children have fallen under the influence of a garish, apparently ancient witch (Amy Madigan), explained things in detail and offered a peach of a performance from Madigan. But it also spurned any deeper idea, and the climax, whilst superficially satisfying as a sequence of raucous, releasing payback, was a little overdone for my blood.

Ari Aster’s Eddington was also preoccupied with evoking the panorama of contemporary American angst through the microcosm of a small town, in a film that occupied the treacherous mid-ground between thriller and satirical comedy with aspects of horror and tragedy as well – Our Town by way of Ibsen, Taxi Driver, and The Parallax View. The title town was a struggling burg in Aster’s native New Mexico, in a movie aiming to recapture the mood of the COVID-19 pandemic and the crazy, waning days of the first Trump administration. Aster’s antihero was the town’s sullenly folksy sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who goes up against the smarmy liberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and tries to rope general discontent with COVID restrictions to further his agenda, whilst Black Lives Matter protests erupt and draw in much of the town’s variably motivated youth for displays of feverish emotion. I hadn’t watched any of Aster’s films since the overblown Hereditary, but fair cop to him: Eddington was definitely the work of a filmmaker who isn’t timid, constantly ratcheting up the sweat-inducing aesthetic duress whilst taking swings at a swathe of targets in trying to diagnose the current state of American society, as well as more immediately depicting people driving each other crazy. These included relatively mild teasing of aspects of the BLM moment and the general state of progressive US politics, which still earned Aster some ire from that flank. His more sustained engagement was with the way people channel personal resentments and needs into reactionary politics, with Joe finally driven by his disintegrating private life towards murder and cover-up, only to then become a target in turn for some shadowy underworld operatives profiting off sowing chaos and mistrust. To say Aster bit off more than he could chew would however be understating things. Almost nothing in the story wasn’t posited to represent a demarcated rhetorical bloc, even if the characters were invested with some superficial contradictions – Joe was carefully defined as no foam-mouthed antivaxer or MAGA type but rather a hapless, half-smart opportunist; one of his deputies was a Black man accosted by the BLM protestors for doing his job. But this also let Aster spare himself from having to get in too close to any worldview: Joe evolved into a Travis Bickle-like character but without any clear sense of his inner identity. The last act was spectacular and effectively disorientating, but also begged an awful lot of questions, and whilst Aster’s direction was muscular it was also oddly lacking in a real feel for the place, including a finale where a running gunfight in the streets barely gained anyone’s attention. In the end Eddington, both place and movie,  was just a Potemkin village for talking points and discursive paranoia. That said, Aster delivered an extremely mordant coda where several people got all they really wanted.

The imprint of Stephen King’s work on a generation of American creative minds was at a particularly high pitch in 2025, whilst the year also saw not one but three versions of novels by the writer himself. Two of those were adaptations of books King penned under the penname Richard Bachman; both concerned fantastically-exacerbated parables for winning and losing in American society, and perhaps represented a pop culture feedback loop given properties like The Hunger Games and The Purge series were informed by King’s example (although King’s works in turn owed much to Peter Watkins’ movies The Gladiators and Punishment Park, and even that’s apt given Watkins’ passing during the year). The first of these released was Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk. Lawrence’s choice to tackle King’s story was at once an evident extension of Lawrence’s success making several of the Hunger Games series entries, whilst also aiming to contrast those with King’s far darker-hued storytelling. The set-up was a future America, albeit one rendered according to the lo-fi expectations of the 1970s when the book was written, that’s suffered economic collapse and fascistic government. Dozens of young men volunteer to participate in the title event, a non-stop trek across a belt of the Midwest and run by an enigmatic Major (Mark Hamill), as their only possible ticket to riches, but there’s only one winner and everyone else is shot when they can’t keep going. Lawrence did himself a favour by assembling a strong cast of rising actors, with Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson doing excellent work as the protagonists anointed to be the last men treading. The Long Walk worked best it was when it was preoccupied with the lads trying to work through pain and fear by yammering, arguing, forming cliques and confronting how perfectly they’ve been conned, and also how deeply their innermost characters and motives will determine the outcome. Lawrence is one of those technically accomplished filmmakers who know how to make a movie look at once polished in a high Hollywood fashion and also vivid and charged with heightened reality. And yet The Long Walk just didn’t add up to much. For one thing, the story benefited on the page from King’s talent for obliging identification with his characters through describing their physical and mental straits, but when converted into imagery was just obvious and a bummer, a process of waiting for the characters, each one a designated broad type reminiscent of a war movie, to get gruesomely offed. For another, Lawrence wanted to get gritty and confrontational with the violence, but undercut that with his blatantly CGI gore. That kind of flashy violence was easy, too, whereas Lawrence never got in close and queasy to register the physical wear of the walk. There was a tonal mismatch between the yippie satire-tinted portrayal of the cliché-spouting, jut-jawed militarist creep Major, with Hamill giving a downright bad performance, and the lower-key realism of the rest, and the script was clunky, characters still puffing out credos and thesis statements when they were supposed to be exhausted. The ending slightly revised the source to deliver at least a bit of payback, but it wasn’t enough to make up for a pretty cheerless slog.

The other Bachman adaptation was Edgar Wright’s take on The Running Man, previously filmed by Paul Michael Glaser as the gleefully gaudy 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. The essential selling point of Wright’s version was staying closer to King’s acerbic text, and this one also promised to be perfectly suited to the Trump II era, but tried at the same time to retain some of the first film’s moving-comic-book pep. Glenn Powell played Ben Richards, a husband and father fallen on hard times in another dystopian America, where the main entertainments are variably sadistic TV game shows. Strapped for cash to help his sick baby, Ben decides to try out for a show, although he wants to avoid The Running Man, the most popular, where volunteers are hunted over a month and killed if caught, with the promise of a colossal reward at the end no one’s survived to claim. Ben finds his anger and aggression, so far his curse, attract the attention of corporate overlord Killian (Josh Brolin) who sees him as The Running Man’s ideal star. Killian finds he’s more right than he counted on, as Richards proves rare game indeed, thanks to his blend of toughness and street smarts, and a lot of ordinary people willing to help him. Wright’s edition was released to bad box office and some punitive reviews even from his long-time fans. The movie did have some issues – it went on a bit long, as the 1987 film’s smartly compressed version of the concept was swapped out for a lengthy, cross-country hunt, something reality TV got to ages ago if without the head shots, and the way the movie walked a line between the glossy burlesque of the Glaser take and the gory, grimy evocations of King’s prose was, initially, a tad abrasive. But that abrasiveness eventually turned out to be part of the movie’s point, with Wright pushing his penchant for hyped-up and manic energy to the limit in concert with Powell’s stylised performance. Like its precursor Last Night In Soho, The Running Man was treated with gross unfairness as the director mixed his familiar, sarcastic approach to movie genres in new proportions. It was indeed more of a straightforward action-thriller than anything he’d done before, but was still sprinkled with flourishes of puckish, personal humour and meaning. In riposte to a regime armed with instant AI reality-revising machines and armies of vicious goons, Wright’s vision of a Resistance movement involved nerd warriors pumping out cottage industry zines and truth-revealing videos filmed like ’80 hip-hop videos. Powell’s irrepressible leading man physique was tapped as a source of dissonant humour, his profile and full-face shots reproduced on a screen behind him at one point as if to mock his efforts at diguise, and a major action scene played out with the actor sporting only a towel for protection. Michael Cera had a grimly hilarious cameo as a nerdy but homicidal rebel seeking revenge. The climactic scenes saw reality and valiant struggle threatening to vanish into a whirlwind of instantly fabricated manipulations and distortions, opening up a frontier of anxiety that’s only going to become more urgent and deliriously unstable in years to come. Wright teased delivering the novel’s notorious ending straight, but revised it reassuringly with the hero remade as the spirit of the repressed, reduced to a kind of emblematic, empty-faced figure, re-emerging to deal out righteous reprisal.

Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag offered Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as Kathryn and George, married, high-ranking employees of MI6 who throw a dinner party for a handful of colleagues with diverse personal angsts, a date for collegial bonhomie that gains an edge of nastiness as it unfolds, and sets in motion a deadly game as the likelihood the spy agency has a mole in the ranks emerges. Black Bag tried to dramatize the concept of marital trust and loyalty through its two leads, each of whom engages in clandestine trickery and opaque behavior in a way that leaves it unclear if one or both of them might be fakes and traitors in both the patriotic and personal senses. The film started well with a long, sardonically well-observed scene that split the difference between Edward Albee and John Le Carré as personalities and rifts between the colleagues and partners – professional and romantic – were exposed and inflamed during the dinner. Soderbergh indulged himself a little to make sport of the weak romantic propensities and childish habits of a lot of supposedly adult moderns compared to his elegantly sexy, still hot-to-trot central couple – Soderbergh even served up a little Blanchett cheesecake to prove she still got it. The cast was packed too, with Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela all providing classy support, and Pierce Brosnan was amusing as their shifty boss. But as with too many of Soderbergh’s films, this applied superficial stylistic pleasures to what proved an empty bauble. The storyline played through its myriad twists and beats without any particular passion, surprise, or tension, offering no good reason to give a damn about any of its characters – even George and Kathryn were, frankly, a bit obnoxious – or the to-and-fro of secret agents. There was a vague pretence to political relevance offered in there somewhere about the surveillance state and geopolitical alliances, but the film was only really persuasive when rolling in the lush pleasures of high-end London real estate.

Shawn Simmons’ Eenie Meanie was a sneaky entry in the year’s action stakes, kicking off what seemed at first like a comedy-infused variation on the type of getaway thriller exemplified by the likes of The Driver and particularly Baby Driver. Here the first and most obvious fresh touch was the driver being Samara Weaver’s Edie Meaney, a young woman fighting to stay on the straight and narrow after spending her wayward teenage years outrunning the police after heists, her personal history defined by her sleazy, drug-addled parents and her good-natured but fatefully shambolic, trouble-making boyfriend John (Karl Glusman). She’s drawn back into John’s life when she finds she’s pregnant by him and he’s facing a nasty fate for some of his reckless actions, and agrees to be the driver for a heist involving stealing a small fortune from a casino to pay off his debts. Andy Garcia played the local kingpin who is both a dread figure in Edie’s life but also something of a paternal stand-in, whilst Steven Zahn played her actual father, a physically broken man who has nonetheless turned his life around, just not with her in it. Simmons revealed serious filmmaking chops in Eenie Meanie with superbly staged chases and blackly comic mayhem erupting early on, including a hilarious sequence of Edie and John trying to outrun pursuers in cars and then on foot despite John being stark naked. Simmons had an ideal linchpin for the movie in Weaver, expertly playing a woman with potential and smarts, who still has an edge of slightly down-market sexy-trashy verve, and is constantly foiled by an inner frailty involving loyalties and affections for people who can never give her what she needs. Glusman was equally good as the alternately charming and infuriating lover who only really functions properly when running on raw adrenalin. Their performances were crucial as Simmons tried an unusual shift in tone and meaning for the end, as it turned from a seemingly light romantic thriller towards a darker and more perturbing theme with a bitterly unromantic edge: the cruel necessity of cutting loose people you may love but will inevitably destroy themselves and you with them. Whether the movie really sold this shift was a little debatable, as it still felt a bit out of gear with what came before, but the film was one of the year’s quieter successes, and deserved more than a streaming dump.

Joseph Kosinski, aiming to capitalize on the success of his Top Gun: Maverick, swapped out Tom Cruise for Brad Pitt as star of F1, a racing drama with a similar emphasis on an old and young dog clashing, contending, and finally collaborating in the course of a mission, in a narrative that also doubled as a meta thesis on the spectacle of aging former golden boy movie stars still setting the pace. The dynamics here though felt more particular to Kosinski’s tastes, and the stakes were slightly less momentous. Pitt played Sonny Hayes, a former Formula 1 wunderkind who dropped out of racing for a time after a gruesome crash, but after a late resurgence in other racing classes is approached by his old pal turned car team owner Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who urgently needs another driver to compliment his talented but erratic young star, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris). Sonny whips up controversy, but also proves shrewd and effective, through his willingness to appear the reckless villain on the track in order to buy chances for his initially ungrateful and suspicious protégé. F1 sparked a good deal of embarrassment and suspicion during its promotion because it was made under the auspices of the real Formula 1 brand (which insisted this be referred to always as F1 – The Movie ™, but no, that wasn’t the title). Still, it did prove a solid hit, one built just about entirely around Pitt’s weathered yet ineffable magnetism, used to illustrate conviction that experience and tactical intelligence, as well as the plain old human touch, take time to hone. Kosinski approached F1 with all his ferocious technical and graphic skill: the opening sequence, depicting Sonny’s swashbuckling on the track set to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” was particularly superb filmmaking and got things off to a killer start. Alas, the film slowly trickled away to almost nothing by its end despite its many good qualities, mostly because the script did painfully little to revise one the most stock storylines in Hollywood, and hit beats with dolorous professional duty. The storyline refused to gain any momentum, partly because of way too many oh-no-all-is-lost scenes rather than simply letting the dynamic build. The film was so timid about upsetting the brand managers it even shied away from having any well-defined racing antagonist for Sonny and Joshua, so it provided some safely unaffiliated business jerks to give us someone to boo. An array of real drivers including Lewis Hamilton popped up for dramatically ineffectual cameos. Idris was okay but displayed little specific charisma, whilst Kerry Condon provided some refreshingly mature and spunky love interest as Cervantes’ chief car engineer, quarrelling and igniting with Sonny in turns, and yet I just didn’t buy that aspect either: so many of the interpersonal scenes felt forced and skittish. Also, Kosinski leaned very heavily on something I loathe in this sort of movie: using race callers and announcers to provide constant narration/exposition/hype for what’s going on in the races even when it’s perfectly obvious.

Darren Aronofsky’s long been a visceral, idiosyncratic filmmaker but also one who could use lightening up now and then. He gave it a shot with Caught Stealing, another entry in the subgenre I’m dubbing “loser-noir,” adapted by Charlie Huston from his own novel. Austin Butler played Hank Thompson, a bartender in mid-1990s New York who’s haunted by the car crash that ended his promising baseball career and killed a pal, and only finds his relationship with funky, spunky girlfriend Yvonne (Zoe Kravitz) a partial salve for his aimless subsistence. He finds his life swerving towards the abyss when, thanks to his drug-dealing neighbour Russ (Matt Smith), he’s targeted by rival camps of gangsters who start terrorizing him in the belief he’s involved in Russ’s schemes, first robbing him of a kidney and then of Yvonne, forcing Hank to finally find some measure of gritty, improvising zeal, and the fighting spirit he’s been sorely lacking, to stay alive. Aspects of Caught Stealing tended towards the arch, akin to playing bingo with neo-noir motifs, like the touch of two gangsters being Hassidic Jews and played by a nearly-unrecognizable Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber. The movie also really lost something when Kravitz’s character was killed off, as the early scenes really sang with a sexy, intimate vibrancy that feels increasingly rare in mainstream cinema, as Hank and Yvonne got drunk, screwed, argued, and generally came across like a proper pair of hot young people, the kind without which inner cities are just passages to offices, as well as showing off Butler and Kravitz as natural movie stars. But Aronofsky maintained a surprisingly loose, blindsiding energy right through, and his feel for the environs of the city was palpable (the first of two ravishing NY adventures this year for Matthew Labatique), an evident nostalgia for the rowdiness of even the ‘90s inflecting things, with flourishes like Griffin Dunne playing Hank’s boss, a cocaine-huffing bar-owning old hippie guarding his turf with a shotgun. Nor did Aronofsky entirely spurn his characteristically raw sense of physical suffering, as Hank’s humiliations and brutalisings mounted, body marked by violent stigmata testifying to his half-hearted gestures at standing up for himself, demanding he really get stuck in, which he finally does to gleeful effect. Regina King was also terrific as a two-faced detective, and Smith was hilarious if broad as the punk ne’er-do-well who accidentally fouls up Hank’s life.

Rian Johnson released the third instalment in his popular Knives Out series, Wake Up Dead Man, an entry that moved away from the extravagance of Glass Onion towards more serious ground, if still punctuated with a lot of smart-aleck humour and sideswipes at contemporary social ills. The setting this time was a Catholic church in a small coastal town, the viewpoint figure Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud. Jud is a boxer turned priest (itself a cliché) who finds himself in a combative relationship with the ferociously egotistical and bigoted Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), who specialises in keeping a small flock of victim-followers as parishioners with his ranting zealotry and specific cunning for tapping their private anxieties. But then he’s murdered in seemingly impossible circumstances, and Jud is the main suspect, so Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) swoops in to investigate. Wake Up Dead Man was definitely an improvement on the shrill satire, clunky plotting, and endemic smugness of Glass Onion: Johnson came armed again with a terrific cast as an array of suspects and investigators (including Mila Kunis, Cailee Spaeny, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Jeremy Renner) asked to play in a slightly more restrained key than in the previous entries, but a lot of them were wasted as plot mechanics and showmanship began chewing up space. Glenn Close gave a performance that could seem bravura or scenery-eating depending on one’s mood, as the most fanatical, repressed, and hate-filled of the flock, who nonetheless proves deeply involved with the enigma; Brolin’s fearsome turn, likewise not subtle but not meant to be, was missed once he exited, because with him went real fire. Johnson, to his credit, engaged a subject with great, almost Bergmanesque potential: the disparity between liberal and conservative versions of faith (as well as, by inference, politics), the former represented by the compassionate but insecure Jud, the latter by Wicks, with a brand of charismatic thuggery that nonetheless has sway because it offers certainty and appeals to emotional grievance. The twist of then planting the sardonic unbeliever Blanc amidst this situation was doubly promising, given the intrinsic relationship of whodunit form and confessional ritual. And yet Johnson finished up shrinking away from his theme beyond saying a nice, sympathetic priest is better than a bullying jerk. The religious context was awkwardly smudged – sect-specific but also trying to evoke the broader swathe of American evangelism. Jud acted almost idiotically naïve and malleable in places for the plot to happen – although O’Connor fought tooth and nail to make the character work, imbuing the film with almost all its emotional integrity. The mystery twisted and turned back on itself so often it stopped being much fun, too much action took place off screen, and whilst its mechanics connected to the deeper ideas of the film, nonetheless they failed to illuminate them in a well-articulated manner. Craig’s Blanc was as fun as ever, but also often felt a bit marginalised and superfluous, and the finale was hurt by some strained theatrics involving his character present mostly so Johnson could split the difference with his audience in regards to the questions of faith he brought up, and Blanc was shuffled off back into the closet, both sexual and intellectual, to avoid having any fights on the topic.

The desultory state of comedies made for mainstream audiences seemed set to get a shot in the arm as The Lonely Island member Akiva Schaffer set out to renew the The Naked Gun series, a revivalist act of faith that seemed to get off on the right foot by casting Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr, son of Leslie Nielsen’s klutz cop hero of the Jerry and David Zucker and Jim Abrahams-helmed trilogy. As well as featuring a grab-bag of slapstick and surreal non-sequitirs in line with the originals, the new edition also took some pot shots at police violence and lackadaisical official oversight on cop behavior. The Naked Gun definitely did some things right, including an early dig at the whole phenomenon of legacy franchises as all the next-generation Police Squad cops were pictured kneeling and weeping before photos of their daddies from the other movies, except for the luckless not-son of OJ Simpson’s Nordberg. A few extended sequences were strong, like a car chase and a spoof of noir nightclub scenes replete with sight gags. Also a real plus was a spry comic performance from Pamela Anderson, as a romance writer playing at detective when she’s drawn into one of Frank Jr’s cases. The movie still finished up a thing of shreds and patches, with some authentic ZAZ-style gags, some of them slight revisions of classics, laced in with shtick borrowed from other sources and humor styles (including a variation on the silhouette gags from the Austin Powers films – now comedy classics, apparently) that didn’t quite fit together. The actual storyline was an awkward filch on the first Kingsman movie, already a send-up. Schaffer just didn’t always stage and pace things that well – one gag involving the line “Take a chair” actually worked better in the film’s trailer, where it was well-cut, than in the overextended way it played out in the movie. There was a tonal mismatch, too, between evoking Nielsen’s character and performance, which had a holy fool quality to it, oblivious to the chaos he caused despite usually having his heart in the right place, and asking Neeson to lampoon his latter-day badass persona, so his Frank Jr proved a simmering macho jerk, adding up to a subtle but wounding dissonance. Danny Huston, playing the suave villain, basically only got asked to do what he does in every suave villain part. At least with the film proper running only a bit over an hour, it didn’t outstay its welcome.

2025 saw a further decline in the fortunes of the superhero film, even if it saw a slight uptick in general quality. The first big entry of the year, Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World, showed all too clearly why the Marvel Cinematic Universe has travelled a fast arc from juggernaut to caboose. Onah’s film finally surfaced after, rumour had it, being reshot and revised several times at enormous cost, and yet none of the second guessing pleased anyone. Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, formerly the Falcon and promoted to heft Captain America’s big shield, struggled to prove his mettle without the usual superhero boosts and set out to discover who is behind an apparent attempt to assassinate the US President, ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross (Harrison Ford). At the same time he had to help Ross keep a lid on threatened world war as various nations try to exploit the resource-rich dead god left over at the end of Eternals, because apparently we had to be reminded that movie exists. Brave New World had interesting story elements, including Carl Lumbly as a Black man given the Captain America supersoldier serum but hidden away for decades as a Tuskegee Experiment-like embarrassment, and Ross, long the Incredible Hulk’s nemesis, falling prey to a nefarious scheme by a vengeful villain to ironically turn him into another hulk. But the movie was also clearly the victim of feet turned not so much cold as arctic, particularly a subplot involving a US skirmish with a renascent Japanese Navy, a foe totally not obviously revised on the fly from China. The seams were often painfully apparent throughout: Onah seemed utterly out of his depth too often, as just about every non-action scene was filmed with the most dolorously simple camera set-ups and two-or-three-people-talking blocking, and yet somehow even when contained within the same frame a weird feeling of detachment seemed to persist, as if the actors were in different rooms giving different kinds of performances and pasted in together. Story elements and call-backs drawn from earlier MCU entries felt random and barely coherent. The drama seemed to be building towards some spectacular rupture and yet, in what’s proving to be a tedious new trend, Ross’s Hulk became little more than a big red ‘roid-rager needing to be talked down. The wonder of it all was, though, that the film didn’t entirely waste some of the good things going for it: Mackie was still immensely winning as Wilson, Ford was surprisingly engaged taking over the Ross role from the late William Hurt, and there was one strong scene where Ross desperately tries to stop himself hulking out during a crisis, a reminder that Onah cut his teeth on intimate psychodrama.

Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts – sigh, okay, Thunderbolts* – charted the formation of a ragtag bunch of morally-challenged misfits from various wings of the MCU franchise into an effective hero team known as the Suicide Squ – ah, the Thunderbolts, whose name apparently has nothing to do with ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross. Schreier’s story kicked off when loose cannon spy boss de Fontaine (Julia-Louise Dreyfuss), trying to outwit a Congressional investigation into her activities, decides to expunge all her rogue operatives, and lures them into an underground facility to be deep fried. Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster proved a swift casualty, but Black Widow sis Yelena (Florence Pugh), disgraced alternate Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell), and former Ant Man antagonist Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen) survived and joined forces, along with a seemingly normal if dreamy young man called Bob (Lewis Pullman). David Harbour’s Red Guardian and Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes later helped fill out the team. But Bob proves to be a nascent superman thanks to de Fontaine’s experiments and when he starts manifesting powers, she moves quickly to suborn him to her cause and make him into a weapon. Thunderbolts* proved somewhat better than Brave New World, particularly in its first half, which depended almost entirely on the repartee of the boffo cast contending with undignified situations like trying to climb a vertiginous shaft together. But it proved overall another MCU film lacking strong story stakes and proper, blood-pumping melodrama, or even much real sense of how to employ its spiky, intransigent heroes. The film tried, to its credit, to do something new with this realm, with the transformed Bob proving to be a sucking void of materialised, nihilistic depression of a kind his companions have all been fighting in themselves, and so saving the day means wrestling themselves and Bob from the abyss. A nice idea, but not one that really worked in this context. Perhaps the best aspect, surprisingly, was the lovely note of haughty and patronising aggression Dreyfuss wielded.

The fact that the MCU was hiring no-name TV craftsmen like Schreier and Matt Shakman for Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps signalled Disney abandoning its attempts to make cultural as well as standard capital from attaching auteurist and hip indie film names to factory product. The Fantastic Four: First Steps was supposed to correct course and recapture glory for the franchise by finally bringing Marvel Comics’ First Family into the MCU. And it tried to do so with a potentially delightful gambit: the titular gang were introduced as existing in an attractively retro-futurist, alternate-universe version of the 1960s (albeit one where Chet Baker can still be heard) where their technological genius and personal gifts made them celebrities. But terrible threat looms when the Silver Surfer – now in distaff form and played, of course, by Julia Garner – arrives and heralds the coming of planet-eating titan Galactus (Ralph Ineson). Galactus promises to spare the Earth from his all-consuming hunger if Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) will give him their infant son, as the lad’s inherited superpowers make him able to take Galactus’s place as cosmic garbage disposal. Given this property received two iterations in the recent past, The Fantastic Four: First Steps decided to simply let us glean the history of the team via a TV report, but this just felt gimmicky. Things improved once the Surfer arrived and the Four ventured into space to meet Galactus. Shakman retained Galactus’s canonical appearance, and he and his production team actually managed to honour Jack Kirby’s imagery and feel for mythic spectacle in the comic book form, apparent in the visions of the monstrous, glowing-eyed demon-god lurking in his colossal spacefaring lair. Also, some very mild flickers of erotic splendour and mythopoeic meaning apparent in the scenes of the blazing Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn), a vision of the Dionysian urge, trying to make contact with the Surfer, embodiment of the Apollonian and now quite definitely female. The storyline, too, had an aptly Biblical underpinning. Shakman pulled off one really strong sequence as the Four fled Galactus and had to outrun the pursuing Surfer through space whilst Sue was suddenly brought a-birthing, a sequence charged with just the right kind of hectic, amped-up intensity. And yet The Fantastic Four: First Steps ultimately proved just another slow bleed-out to disappointment. The stylised retro-world wasn’t realised with much wit or detail, and the potential drama of the storyline was lost in a succession of lackadaisical scenes, including a laughable one where Sue talked down an angry mob. The meat of the plot was skimmed over like distractible teen scrolling on their phone, like the barely intelligible subplot of Johnny’s efforts to communicate with the Surfer. It was admirable on one level that the film wanted to present a mature gang of superheroes, and yet the allure of the characters was muffled, with even Quinn’s Johnny made kind of milquetoast and reduced to mumbling about the “sexy alien.” Despite being targets of ire and mockery in the hype for this one, the 2000s films made by Tim Story remain better.

The only real success of the year in the cape realm was James Gunn’s Superman, an attempt to revive not just the stature of the first and most famous of superheroes, but the fortunes of the DC film imprimatur and Warner Bros. as a studio. And even it might not have been enough of a hit, given Warners was soon put up for sale. David Corenswet played Kal-El the Kryptonian and his Earthly alter-ego Clark Kent: adding to the trend of skipping origin tales, Superman here was introduced a good way into his superhero career in a world where the presence of metahumnans is already familiar, even over-familiar. Targeted for destruction by the megalomaniacal tech lord Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who employs a mysterious superpowered rival as well as myriad political plots and even internet trolling to further his ends, Superman had to weather incarceration and torture in a pocket universe, whilst girlfriend and colleague Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) enlists the not-quite-eager help of the Justice Gang, his colleague-rivals in the day-saving business, to find him. Gunn’s mission brief was to dump the moody gravitas of Zack Snyder’s takes and restore the optimistic, overgrown boyscout image of Superman. But he did so in some odd and dispiriting ways, starting with inverting the usual personae of its hero. What little we saw of his Clark showed the breezy, confident guise and Superman became the aw-shucks galoot, rattled after defeat in a battle and constantly on the back foot until the last reel. His Krypton parents were revised into imperialists advising their son to conquer and impregnate earthlings, whilst his Kansas adopters were made homey Red State caricatures. To be fair, Gunn tried throughout to thread the needle with authentic emotional earnestness about his hero. But he also applied a lot of his familiar shtick: cute animals contrasted with human meanness, via relentless employment of Superman’s dog Krypto, and action scenes set to jolly pop songs. His penchant for eccentric segues and amusing marginalia delivered entertainment but also threatened to take over the film, including a last-minute but attention-getting cameo by Millie Alcock as a drunk and truculent Supergirl, manna for everyone nostalgic for trashy-hot 2000s party girls. Indeed, Gunn’s to be mildly congratulated for letting some flickers of violence with a little bite to it and sex appeal sneak through, in opposition to the MCU’s insipid puritanism. The result overall remained a palpable example of profit and loss. Brosnahan’s Lois was dead on and a great early scene ran with the idea of what a monumental pain being Lois Lane’s boyfriend could be. And yet she was left largely extraneous to the plot, amidst signs quite a bit of the movie finished up on the cutting room floor. Gunn handled Superman’s one-on-one fights well, but couldn’t make more complex and expansive scenes visually interesting and urgent, like the same-old-same-old city-endangering calamity people couldn’t be bothered running from until it’s too late, and a subplot involving a threatened Third World country that seemed to consist of a bunch of people standing around a random patch of desert waiting to get shot.

Red Sonja, another comic book character with a spotty screen history, got a fresh chance, now in the shape of Matilda Lutz, star of Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, in a vehicle directed MJ Bassett, who, after trying to film Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné tales years ago, at least got to tackle another beloved fantasy hero. Bassett’s take on the crimson-locked Hyborean warrior presented her as a survivor of a nation massacred by an evil, fast-spreading, waste-laying empire. After growing up into a hardy and self-reliant forest dweller and sustaining her people’s nature goddess-worshiping faith, Sonja is captured and forced to become a gladiatrix. Seeing the empire’s new, young but unremittingly cynical and power-hungry ruler Draygan (Robert Sheehan) as her personal nemesis, Sonja breaks free and begins leading a guerrilla war against him, but finds a shared secret heritage connects them. Wallis Day displayed frosty charisma as Annisia, Sonja’s doppelganger, a champion gladiatrix turned Draygan’s bodyguard and eternally foiled and addled would-be lover, and Rhona Mitra’s presence connected the movie with other works of the modern thud-and-blunder canon. Red Sonja was a genuinely peculiar and sharply uneven product: as with much of Bassett’s earlier work, this one struggled to gain headway against a limited production scope in a movie plainly made as streaming fodder, had some very generic fantasy flourishes (like the Orc-like ape-men), and was messy in structure, constantly returning to poorly interpolated flashbacks outlining the fateful events that connected the child Sonja and Draygan. The multiplicity of accents and performing styles made it feel, in apt similarity to sword-and-sandal flicks of yore, like it was dubbed even when it wasn’t. And yet, as with her oddball killer lion flick Rogue, Bassett managed to make something better and more substantial than expected. She had a way of rummaging through B-movie motifs and genre detritus in search of flashes of eccentric characterization and personal meaning, manifest in scenes of Sonja’s mystic rebirth laced with intimations of trans experience, Draygan’s fierce yet revealing denunciation of a captive priestess for abandoning children, and Annisia realizing the ghosts she thinks haunt her are actually contrived controls on her psyche. More superficially but with entertainment value, Bassett managed to both honour and lampoon Sonja’s standard skimpy apparel from her comic books before giving it an upgrade, delivered some vigorous action scenes, and the movie looked better than a lot of similar recent stuff with far greater resources.

Warfare, a collaboration between action choreographer Ray Mendoza and writer-director Alex Garland, saw Garland building upon the punchy combat sequences in his Civil War infused with Mendoza’s nuts-and-bolts feel for producing realistic battle footage, aiming to deliver an immersive account of the stress and toll of warfare. The movie recounted a true incident, not marked by any particular strategic importance or displays of superhuman bravery but still utterly momentous for those involved: unfolding in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006, Warfare recreated the ensuing fight when a unit of US Navy SEALS was sent out to take up a post in a civilian family’s suburban house and provide cover for an operation, only to realise they’ve been spotted and insurgents are converging on their position, seeing an ideal enemy target to isolate and wipe out. A brief prologue found a simple and very telling way of situating the viewer in time and place, with a glimpse of the soldiers gawking at the sexed-up video for Eric Prydz’s dance cover of “Call On Me,” a stark reminder that the merrily dopey days of the new millennium were unfolding at the same time as murderous warfare, and a yardstick for the fast-receding imminence of these events despite still feeling so recent. After that the film desisted from familiar niceties, skipping any introduction of the warriors and plunging into their predawn deployment, the anvil of battle the entire business here. Garland and Mendoza aimed to note small differences in personality and ability in each soldier, both their individuality and their interchangeableness as trained military operatives factors in the drama, as the film studied the awful cost of modern warfare on human bodies whilst also coherently diagramming the clash between the chaotic and fast-evolving nature of a crisis and the kinds of training and brains that keep people alive in such situations. Warfare nodded back to Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and its queasy sense of the disconnection between a military with all kinds of technological advantages and the eternally visceral, chaotic reality of combat, but with a more cool-tempered approach, with the filmmakers revealing sympathy for the locals caught into between the duelling gangs of armed men. Soon the war-torn home was littered with shattered bodies, and the reality of boots-on-the-ground, poor-bleeding-infantry experience noted as one littered with new versions – IEDs and rocket launchers – of ancient dangers. You could even see Warfare as a contemporary edition of soldiers-under-siege tales as far back as John Ford’s The Lost Patrol and beyond. But the braver aspects of Warfare were also what limited its impact to a degree, though, as it didn’t quite penetrate any new realm of insight into either the soldiering mind or the you-are-there realist war film stakes. The gruelling quality of the violence was hampered by the mere functionality of our sense of the soldiers – Joseph Quinn and Will Poulter were the two best-known names in the cast but none of these men emerged as more than “moustache guy” or “scared kid”, and the murky, in-close cinematography was sometimes as distancing as it was immediate. The coda showing the actors and the men they played seen side-by-side, some in photos and some visiting the set during production, gave the movie an extra edge of poignancy it didn’t quite earn on its own. Nonetheless, Warfare was very good, and the best thing Garland’s put his name on to date.

Kathryn Bigelow came out swinging with her first film since 2016’s Detroit, with A House of Dynamite, a thriller designed to provoke audience anxiety about the current, increasingly unstable state of nuclear deterrence. The film unfolded in three parts, each depicting the same crucial situation from different viewpoints, as an unknown missile is launched towards the United States, destined to strike Chicago. No one knows who fired it or even if will explode, and all attempts to fend it off fail, building to the excruciating spectacle of a President (Idris Elba) faced with the choice of retaliating against a possibly non-existent enemy or suffering devastation without recourse. Bigelow applied the narrative thumbscrews expertly, starting from the viewpoint of the overseer of the White House Situation Room (Rebecca Ferguson) and then sprawling out to other players, and evoked the true terror of the apocalypse being managed via a Zoom meeting. A House of Dynamite courted obvious comparisons with the likes of Fail Safe and The Bedford Incident, given an updated gloss, and with a sarcastic sense of the modern American government and security populace not being nearly as competent and stalwart as their post-World War II and high Cold War ancestors, or perhaps only cursed now with us knowing too much about them. Elba’s President in particular was revealed as electably charming but also malleable and overwhelmed. In there too was the old, perhaps clichéd anxiety that a coldly pragmatic military sensibility, represented by Tracey Letts as a top general, can so easily take precedence over wise caution. The script by Noah Oppenheim worked hard to coherently expostulate how such a drama could unfold today, even if occasionally I felt like I was hearing a few magazine articles being recited, with some active contrivances and obfuscations in play to make the drama play out as it does. The result split the difference unsatisfyingly between fleshed-out human tragedy and raw-boned docudrama. The tri-chapter structure was less a necessary device for depicting complex events than one awkwardly demanded by a desire to make a pressure-cooker thriller despite the time period the crisis unfolds in not being long enough to sustain a feature, where once upon a time it at least took bombers a little while to get to their targets. First among equals in a seriously stacked cast, Elba and Ferguson made their characters’ confrontations with the impossible feel agonisingly real, and Jared Harris was particularly affecting as the slick Secretary of Defense who finds himself confronted by the personal cost of failure and can’t weather it. Otherwise the film finally lacked impact on a character level beyond the obvious – lots of emphasis on people trying to make possibly final, furtive contact with loved ones. A House of Dynamite decided to leave its story unresolved, one of those choices that will variably strike viewers as appropriate and provocative or a galling cheat and lack; personally I was more frustrated by the lack of real force to the imagery and the overly-diagrammed sense of standing on the edge of the void. 

James Vanderbilt, long-time Hollywood producer and screenwriter and director of the glumly earnest Truth from 2015, took another swing at manufacturing Oscar bait with Nuremberg, a based-on-a-true-story-except-the-bits-we-made-up epic depicting the landmark first trial of leading Nazis in 1946. Vanderbilt approached the event via a reasonably original angle, taking as viewpoint character Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), an on-the-make army psychiatrist appointed to get close to the Nazi bigwigs, and Hermann Goering (Russell Crowe) in particular, to glean information and prevent suicides, whilst Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) fights to put the trial together and taps Kelley to learn how to outmanoeuvre the captives’ defence tactics. It’s telling perhaps how much the style of interest and discourse around this sort of movie has changed over the years: where once any film tackling holocaust matters were heavily analysed for moral sensitivity and legitimacy, Nuremberg had no hesitation in remixing this story as a blend of a The Silence of the Lambs-like battle of wills, and a Rocky variation building up to Jackson and David Maxwell-Fyfe (Richard E. Grant) doing a tag-team KO of Goering on the stand. Vanderbilt’s script was littered with anachronistic lines and cheap tricks, whilst subjecting the tragic Kelley to some standard screenwriting shtick for suspense in the all-is-lost beats. Anyone looking for a solid, serious, or even intelligent history lesson here would definitely be advised to look elsewhere, even the 2000 miniseries with Brian Cox as Goering and Alec Baldwin as Jackson. The feeling of a missed opportunity pervaded this one, with Vanderbilt prioritising his own sense of how to sell a movie over insight into the event, except for a long, gruelling inclusion of authentic death camp footage. It’s hard to deny, though, that the film also goes down real easy for anyone drawn to the promised convergence of stars, subject, and production polish. The main appeal was to see heavy-hitter actors butting heads in a situation of automatic high drama, and to be fair, Vanderbilt delivered that. Crowe gave a big, overripe, but entertaining performance, Shannon channelled his gift for conveying fulminating anger towards good instead of evil, and Malek was vigorous as the over-involved, brilliant but fatefully facetious shrink. There were also some peculiar asides, like a former Jewish German turned GI translator (Leo Woodall) offering a small fillip of mercy to the hateful but pathetic Julius Streicher (Dieter Riesle) on the way to the gallows, an odd, would-be humorous aside illustrating the infamous flight and capture of Rudolf Hess (Andreas Pietschmann), and a strained coda depicting a flailing Kelley failing to warn about the potential for fascism everywhere.

After 2024’s excellent Hit Man, Richard Linklater seemed set to really hit his stride, choosing to chase that success with not one but two projects more overtly concerned with creative people and urges, and portraying specific artistic legends. Nouvelle Vague took the biggest risk, tackling a personage Michel Hazanavicius got keelhauled for daring to study not that long ago – Jean-Luc Godard. Linklater’s focus was on Godard’s (Guillaume Marbeck) determination to follow his fellow critics and pals into making movies, both dazzling and dismaying collaborators with his risky, eccentric, on-the-fly method as he plans and shoots Breathless. Those collaborators include Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), portrayed as a jovial, up-for-anything, scrappy chancer and, most crucially, the intrigued but dubious, tart-tongued Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). Linklater worked with cinematographer David Chambille to studiously recreate the monochrome beauty of Raoul Coutard’s photographic style, and his casting was almost scarily impeccable, particularly given that Linklater was fastidious not just in recreating the period milieu but also in staying true to its almost entirely Francophonic nature. But as Nouvelle Vague unfolded it proved dismayingly shallow, with very little to say about any of the figures and artworks it set out to evoke and pay homage to. Linklater’s thesis was obvious – Godard as the hero to all would-be independent artists, demonstrating his rule-breaking, do-what-feels-right method. And yet Linklater’s approach was resolutely banal and superficial: frankly, if you weren’t already the type of viewer interested in seeing these people portrayed on screen by lookalikes, there wasn’t anything to be had here – no real drama, character insight, not even much situational comedy arising from such fly-by-night filmmaking. The portrait of Godard danced right up to the edge of describing him as being equally genius and flimflammer, mouthing placards and mystifications to sustain himself through lulls of inspiration. Which might well be perfectly valid, and yet still saw Linklater failing absolutely to come to terms with the man’s authentic talents. It’s also difficult to imagine a film depicting the New Wave’s vital figures, and Godard in particular, without any form of cultural, intellectual, or political argument, and yet Linklater steered as far away from any of that as he could – the closest he managed to come was in charting the tension between Godard’s native sexual cynicism and Seberg’s nascent feminist spirit. In the end Nouvelle Vague provided eye candy and spot-the-name bingo for nostalgic cineastes. Indeed, if I was feeling particularly vicious, I might suggest it represented the final embalming of the New Wave ethos by the kind of middling, middlebrow art that ethos took aim at

Companion piece Blue Moon saw Linklater engaging with a different kind of artistic hero and one bred closer to his home, in the form of legendary songwriter Lorenz Hart. After a brief prologue depicting the squalid events immediately preceding his death in 1943, Blue Moon jumped back a few months to depict Hart (Ethan Hawke) weathering an evening loaded with both excited anticipation and a cavalcade of woe, as his former songwriting partner Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) seems on the brink of epochal success with Oklahoma!, written by Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), a much steadier and more fulsome but also way squarer partner. Hart holes up in the bar of Sardi’s, although he’s trying painfully to give up drinking, to wait for the show crowd to arrive in triumph, and frets endlessly about the college girl he’s smitten with, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley) whilst chatting with bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy). As the evening unfolds it proves a brutal succession of humiliations and rejections for a mercurial man. Blue Moon was particularly engaging as it set itself the challenge of unfolding like a play, with its compressed setting and unified dramatic and psychological action, and it proved how effective such an approach can be. Things depended a lot on Hawke’s superbly sustained if necessarily theatrical performance, armed with waspish dialogue and a rolling, musical sense of verbal animation. The whole cast was excellent; Qualley managed the difficult task of capturing what was earnest about her character when it could have easily been played as a callow opportunist, even if Weiland also proved not terribly interesting. Scott smartly described the streaks in Rodgers at once coldly, professionally pragmatic but also equally affectionate and exasperated with his old pal. Blue Moon arguably got a bit arch with its digressions, like having Hart give White the idea for Stuart Little, encouraging Weiland’s college pal George Roy Hill (David Rawle) to tell buddy stories, and encountering a still-prepubescent but already intimidating Stephen Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan). But, as, with Nouvelle Vague, Linklater was fascinated by cultural connection points, and here found lucid, amusing ways to depict them, as well as illustrating a deeper conviction that Hart was a horn of plenty for others but received far too little in return. The film was more aggressive and perhaps a bit unfair in presenting Hart as another avatar for Linklater’s ideal of the artist as self-willed and outside the mainstream sensibility, and taking constant digs at Oklahoma! for its commercial folksiness without any apparent understanding of its art form-changing originality. Still, Linklater also evoked Hill’s The World of Henry Orient in its evocation of a romantic New York through the limited but exactingly evoked setting, and captured something bitterly true about the closely linked nature of illusions and artistic creation.

Playwright-turned-film director Celine Song delivered her follow-up to Past Lives with Materialists, a movie that gained attention in being sold to the public as a mature and realistic take on the most basic triangle found in the average romantic comedy, and the eternal choice in partnering between money and love. Central character Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker at a high-end Manhattan dating agency who pursues her job with a mix of zeal for her clients and mathematical appraisals of their desires versus the market. The irony of her position begins to emerge when she’s romanced by an extremely rich and charming financier, Harry (Pedro Pascal), but finds she’s still emotionally attached to her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans), a talented but perpetually broke theatre actor and part-time waiter. But she really begins to question her outlook and priorities when one of her well-matched couplings results in a sexual assault. Materialists stepped sideways from Past Lives in some respects but also maintained distinct connections, both thematic – the persistence of attachment, the hard imperatives of worldly existence, sympathy for romantic also-rans – and stylistic, with an emotionally coaxing tone and chic look: this was a film both about the allure of real estate porn and a stag reel of it. As with the diverging paths shot in Past Lives, Song delivered a couple of strong visual tableaux that summarised her concerns, particularly a shot of Lucy lost in a squall of shame and disgust whilst one of the inane celebrations she usually reigns over breaks out in the office behind her. Trouble was, though, those were the moments where all the cinematic invention went. Otherwise the movie was a string of sequences sporting good actors trying to put life into a lot of exchanges where all that was asked of them was to stand or sit around mouthing Song’s sometimes insufferably arch and verbose dialogue, in a manner barely transposed from the kind of stylised theatrical zone Song herself makes a little fun of, in a glimpse of a play John stars in. Also, for a movie pitched as a romantic comedy or variation thereof, it was peculiarly witless – Song never found a way of converting the theme of guilty pleasure into guilty laughs (the closest it came was a vignette where Lucy is dazzled Harry’s enormous apartment), in a narrative that was schematic on every level in illustrating the ideas at play. The best vignettes then were the more serious ones, like Lucy’s pathetic encounter with the woman she failed so badly, a bristling confrontation later walked back in a contrived fashion. The strongest elements here were the three leads, with Evans particularly good and Johnson delivering a meta rebuke of her own star-making Fifty Shades vehicles.

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value took up the theme of art and life as inseparable experiences for creative souls where human wreckage is both the burden and spur. Trier approached this topic via the most tired and tedious theme in contemporary cinema – the hailed artist hero with resentful and troubled progeny – and tried to do something new with it. In this case, said artistic hero was Stellan Skarsgard’s Gustav Borg, an internationally renowned, aging film director whose feature career has gone fallow but wants to get a highly personal project off the ground. Of the two daughters he had in a failed marriage, one, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) who used to act as a child in his movies, is a relatively happy family woman, whilst the other, Nora (Renate Reinsve), is a talented but neurotic actress, and both hold their father at arm’s length as he reclaims the family home now that their mother has passed on. When Borg tries to interest Nora in appearing in his new movie, she angrily rejects him, so he turns to an admiring Hollywood star, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who eagerly enters into his creative process, only to be increasingly troubled by certainty she’s not right for the part, which is rooted in Borg’s attempts to understand his disturbing family history and legacy. Sentimental Value gained a lot of awards attention and plaudits for occupying an increasingly sparse zone in current cinema. Gestures towards metafiction and flecks of anxious cinephile humour, and nods to historical awareness and the concept of generational trauma (Borg is haunted by the suicide of his mother, who was tortured during World War II, because no European prestige movie earns its stripes without Nazis), all offered as tinsel wrapped around a straightforward, Bergmanesque bourgeois family drama. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Sentimental Value, like Trier’s earlier movies, penetrated only a shallow distance into the characters and dynamics portrayed, and his deftly framed and lit shots were only a partial compensation. There was some wit and thematic meaning to some of flourishes – what looked like a purgative session for Nora proving instead to be a stage performance, signalling the way artistry can both process and fend off real emotion – whilst Trier avoided expected beats in terms of Borg and Rachel’s collaboration, which shades into something close to an emotional surrogacy. A lengthy early scene of Nora having a panic attack before a barnstorming performance was very well-done. But the movie was happy to throw in some cheap jokes too, like Borg gifting his prepubescent grandson with some very grown-up movies, which might have cued something interesting arguments about ideas of art and parenting, but was instead simply used to designate Borg as clueless and befuddled in a strained and phony-feeling way. A vaguely surreal interlude of the family’s blurred-together faces harked back to Bergman’s Persona but in trite, calculated manner, as was the touch of the family house having a big House of Usher-like crack in it. As a whole, the movie proved a pile of pieces Trier couldn’t assemble into a coherent whole, tonally or intellectually, proving the kind of family drama with lots of cleansing weepiness it seemed to be making fun of at first, and the final scene’s attempt to dovetail the earnest and meta elements didn’t pack any true power.

Nia DaCosta, recovering from ill-fated adventures in franchise land on The Marvels, returned to her roots in drama driven by fierce women, and did so in an admirably risky fashion by delivering a semi-revisionist take on Henryk Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler, a play that’s travelled a long arc from a landmark of theatrical and psychological realism to old warhorse. DaCosta’s edition shifted the setting from Victorian-era Norway to a hazily defined, semi-historic 1950s, and made her version of Hedda (Tessa Thompson), the illegitimate offspring of a general turned uneasy guerrilla warrior within the hidebound bourgeoisie, both mixed-race and bisexual. The plot followed Ibsen fairly closely except it gender-swapped the figure of Lovborg, former lover and academic rival of Hedda’s more stolid husband, allowing DaCosta to cast Nina Hoss in the role of a brilliant but fragile scholar who only needs a couple of shoves from Hedda to self-destruct. DaCosta applied a strong technical hand to proceedings, succeeding in whipping up increasingly fraught, hothouse emotions in an epoch defined by uneasy transitions, and Sean Bobbitt’s photography looked utterly delicious. But DaCosta’s approach proved as ostentatiously self-sabotaging as Lovborg’s boozing, turning a subtle, remorseless piece of theatre into a site of bellowing of showmanship that sometimes approached high camp in its sexed-up melodrama and awkward amendments. The overlarge, credulity-stretching gestures started early with Hedda nearly shooting someone, and Hildur Guðnardottir provided pushily neurotic scoring. Thompson’s performance was arch and showy; fortunately Hoss and particularly Imogen Poots, as Lovborg’s timid but burgeoning lover-collaborator, were both tremendous. The deeper problem was that DaCosta’s revisions were spasmodically conceived, to the point where I wondered if she, like Garth Marenghi, feels writers who use subtext are cowards. She doubled down on Hedda’s outsider sublimating through the added racial angle, but then rendered that theme irrelevant by making the figure of Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), Hedda’s rich and indulgent would-be lover, also Black, and so spurning clear social context. She also turned Brack’s insidious attempts to get Hedda under his thumb into silly, showboating thuggery. Likewise, the shift from the musty strictures of Ibsen’s world to a ‘50s academic-bohemian conclave, complete with cocaine snorting and screwing in the hedge maze, lost the more immediate dramatic and psychological stuff of the play and instead reeked of a common approach to courting millennial audiences. The emphasis on sexism also saw most of the male supporting characters reduced to caricatures, even as the portrayal of queer women wasn’t exactly flattering. The very end, too, proved unwilling to follow through on the darkly ironic, tragedy-tinged comeuppance Ibsen provided, leaving not much behind, except perhaps Lindsay Pugh’s cunning costume design.

Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby provided a festival and critical hit for its potentially provocative mixture of tones in touching on an eternally thorny topic. Victor also wrote the film and starred as Agnes, a young and talented literary academic, whose quiet, self-isolating life in a small house is only occasionally interrupted by visits from her former college roommate and best friend (Naomie Ackie) and neighbour/sometime bedmate (Lucas Hedges), and she weathers an uneasy reunion with other college friends and rivals. A narrative step back in time clarifies just why Agnes is so estranged, despite her success at work: a rape committed by her ostensibly admiring thesis adviser Preston (Louis Cancelmi), which left her shattered and lost. The process of Agnes gluing the pieces of herself and her capacity for worldly interaction back together unfolds in painful spasms. Sorry, Baby was only nominally risky: in truth, it had a strategized feel, alternating between archly deadpan, internet-flavoured quipping and earnest yet carefully tailored engagement with ugly experiences and the discourse around them. Dramatic gestures were neatly disposed to please hip viewers – making Ackie’s character both Black and queer, a type of character swiftly replacing the gay male BFF as the ideal box-ticking accessory for middle-class self-congratulation (although Ackie played the role as well as it could be, with an edge of loyal warmth hard to fake), and scenes ticking off compulsory activist talking points like insensitive questioning by a doctor, fake-sympathetic, useless college bureaucrats, and a maladroit scene where Agnes talked her way out of jury duty. Too much of Victor’s script had the feel of something that hadn’t been fully revised after being written for a first-year college writing class, particularly the use of a haplessly jealous colleague (Kelly McCormack) as a button for laughs and moral superiority for its tone-sensitive heroines. The direction was tuned well enough to the essential beats of humour and touchy-feeliness, but the film had little visual expressiveness except in one, key sequence. Where the film did work, and was most interesting, was in engaging with Agnes’s dizzied and fractured sense of herself and the meaning of her rape, including her confused sense of how it happened and her complex attitudes towards Preston. The result overall might have been better if the actual assault had been kept in deep background or if the push and pull of Agnes and Preston’s association had been portrayed in more depth. Worth comparing with Rungano Nyoni’s more eccentric but ultimately far more affecting and original efforts to deal with the same subject with On Becoming A Guinea Fowl.

Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You had many similarities as a work by an actor-turned-filmmaker tackling a realm of particular female experience and grievance, although Bronstein’s style and method were quite different. Rose Byrne gave a barnstorming performance as Linda, a therapist who’s been left alone to care for her sickly daughter whilst her cruise ship officer husband (Christian Slater) is away: Linda spirals into a dazed, bedraggled, emotionally volatile state as crises amass, from the daughter failing to put on enough weight to end her necessary regimen of feeding by an implanted tube, to the collapse of her apartment ceiling, requiring they move into a hotel room for the duration. Her workplace is no refuge either, with one of her clients running away and abandoning her baby with Linda, and Linda herself engaging in a weird, sublimation-happy tug-of-war with her own therapist, one of her colleagues (Conan O’Brien). Bronstein’s movie came on with flourishes of dark and absurd comedy as well as some hallucinatory, dissociative interludes, the result of Linda’s occasional recourse to drugs to chill out. Bronstein and Byrne did a great job in conjuring a heroine as often exasperating and just plain obnoxious as she is sympathetic, the possibility she’s not actually meant to be a mother one that torments her and also the viewer, each side informing the other, and the film sported fascinatingly excellent support from O’Brien and Rakim ‘A$AP Rocky’ Mayers as a flirty handyman at the hotel. The degree the film worked depended on how one responded to its in-your-face, strongarming aesthetic choices, particularly the stylistic regimen designed to ram home Linda’s isolation, filmed in near-constant close-up. Her daughter was rendered a kind of absent presence by avoiding depicting her properly until the very end, her alternating whiny neediness, finicky whims, and moments of genuine distress only registered vocally with calculatedly aggravating effect, a gimmick also employed with her husband over the phone, to a degree that started to feel mannered and manipulative. The choice of making her a therapist who couldn’t heal herself was arch in a sophomoric manner, as was a laboured bit of cable TV dark comedy show shtick involving a hamster, and the trippy sequences chased a particular feeling but felt redundant in a movie that nudged being too long. The film was also evasive about just what happened to the daughter and why Linda feels culpable for it, with the understandable aim of perhaps making it feel universal, but given this was a portrait of a very particular person being vague on that level was a bit of a cop-out. The climactic scenes didn’t quite work either, with Slater’s husband appearing out of nowhere in a way that made no sense and a very final moment that suggested the carer and cared-for were now reversed in a manner that was a little cute. Still, the spectacle of Linda trying to get her inner melodrama heroine on and flee to a watery death in the ocean but not even managing that packed a hint of the truly tragicomic.

I recall once I was excited to see what Yorgos Lanthimos would do next – I think that was sometime between Alps and The Lobster – but now it only stirs in me a queasy, let’s-get-this-over-with feeling. His latest, Bugonia, was a semi-remake of a 2003 South Korean film, an obvious show of affinity given themes common to much South Korean cinema and Lanthimos’ include fascination with entrapment and nasty power games, and a suspicious, bewildered sense of social cues and structures. Bugonia also resembled a return to Dogtooth territory if staged in reverse, with Jesse Plemons playing Teddy Gatz, a shabby autodidact denizen of fringe Georgia, who, with the aid of his easily-cowed special-needs brother Don (Aidan Delbis), sets out to kidnap Margaret (Emma Stone), a powerful female corporate executive at a pharmaceutical company. The spur is Teddy’s espoused belief that Margaret is really a member of an alien race that’s covertly invaded Earth and is busily manipulating and degrading humanity – although his motives are all poisonously mixed up with his family history and the impact Margaret’s company had on it. Through its first half, Bugonia seemed to be a weaving a special take on a familiar type of kidnapping tale, one about psychological gamesmanship between captive and captor, by adopting a thematic spin common to much of 2025’s cinema – fascination with broken realities and paranoid thinking in the internet age, and the way conspiracy theories allow people to cling on to certain illusions even whilst affecting to liberate them from blinders. Lanthimos nudged The Twilight Zone territory whilst also filtering the themes of Carpenter’s They Live through a filter of genre-teasing. The drama was raised to a sweaty, agonizing pitch by the perfect impasse between Margaret’s glibly tactical verbal dexterity and Teddy’s impenetrable circular thinking. It’s not hard to see why Stone seems to enjoy working with Lanthimos, as her roles for him involve challenging physicality, at once despoiling her movie star lacquer yet also buffing it, and Plemons was even better as the fraying, desperate, lunatic avatar of a species perhaps not worth saving. But as the story unfolded, Lanthimos’ usual, wearying tendencies asserted themselves. We got segues into showy violence and sadism (including a hard-to-stomach torture scene), sour games about who if any of these people was the sympathy figure, and a particular tenor of hipster misanthropy, which became manifest in the film’s final twist, where it was revealed – spoiler! – Margaret really is an alien with anti-human intent, but with motives quite different to those Teddy expects. As well as rendering all of what unfolded before it incoherent in terms of ideas, dynamics, and basic story sense, this twist notably allowed Lanthimos to have his cake and eat it on several levels in ways that confirm he’s devolved into an astoundingly spurious artist.

Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, his long-awaited follow-up to the success of Parasite, arrived as a big-budget Hollywood adaptation of a novel by Edward Ashton. The initial premise felt however very similar to Duncan Jones’ Moon, as Robert Pattinson inhabited the role(s) of Mickey Barnes, a loser who flees a future Earth as a member of an expedition aiming to settle a distant, frozen planet. He’s only made it aboard because he volunteered to be an “expendable,” someone who can be killed over and over on dangerous jobs or for experiments, and then remade with almost all his old memories. He finds himself in real trouble when his seventeenth incarnation is believed dead but survives, and faces another version of himself: such doubling is extremely verboten to the powers that be, including the expedition’s puffed-up tycoon and would-be messianic leader Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). Meanwhile the colonists face a strange species on the new planet only Mickey has some rapport with. Pattinson did very well as the slightly different versions of Mickey, with 17 a good-natured drip and his replacement an angry cynic, and the narrative took a couple of neat swerves when it came to the ramifications of Mickey’s quandary, as when there seemed to be a romantic triangle in the offing involving the Mickeys and his tough but smitten girlfriend (Naomie Ackie), only for her to find the thought of two Mickeys in bed appealing – and also a rather odd, discontinued subplot with a bisexual crewmate (Anamaria Vartolomei) who also wants her own Mickey. The occasional good idea and flash of wit was lost amidst an overlong, confused movie thickly caked with Bong’s well-trodden shtick, including his usual methods of goading the audience – severed limbs, animal cruelty, and ideas so obvious they can be seen from space. The result recalled his Snowpiercer but without that film’s rigorously linear narrative momentum, the script replete with unnecessary subplots, poorly defined supporting characters, and satirical flourishes that were broad and blatant but also smudgy, taking aim at Dear Leader worship and religious zealotry. Despite all that the film dodged contending with the ramifications of Marshall’s desire to found a “pure” state, and mostly only provided a pretext for Ruffalo and Toni Colette (as Marshall’s nasty wife) to give the worst performances of their careers as arch grotesques. Worse, Bong paused now and then to hint a deeper character drama, as Mickey passed through unique realms of existential experience that stirred the curiosity of others, but kept shoving this theme away as a comic distraction, and the movie never engaged with just why the various Mickeys have such distinct personalities. Instead, the last act was a riff on Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. In short, it was a mess.

The eternal touchstone of science-themed Faustian tales is, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, and in one of the most inevitable-feeling artistic choices in recent years, Guillermo del Toro stepped up to offer the first major, direct Hollywood film of the text in thirty years. Del Toro’s passion project cast Oscar Isaac as a maniacally driven, emotionally oblivious edition of the scientist who gives life to an assembled cadaver, with the bulk of the two-and-a-half-hour movie emphasising Victor’s early years and zealous pursuit of his project. Despite being another version proposing itself as a faithful adaptation, del Toro’s was just as wayward as many others. Odd revisions included making a Elizabeth (Mia Goth) fiancée to Victor’s brother, hostile to Victor and semi-smitten with the monster, who, as played by Jacob Elordi, was a sort of towering himbo with glamorously patchy blue skin, conceptually reminiscent of Abe Sapien from the Hellboy movies. Cristoph Waltz played an arms magnate financing Victor’s experiments in hoping for eternal life, in what might have been del Toro’s metaphor for getting your movie financing where you need to. Charles Dance was Victor’s mean daddy, in a movie that might represent the ne plus ultra of the mean daddy narrative trend. Del Toro cherry-picked flourishes from various earlier versions – Frankenstein: The True Story’s notion of the monster being immortal and kind of hot, several gestures from The Curse of Frankenstein, and touching base with the blind man scenes from The Bride of Frankenstein. Del Toro’s Frankenstein was as beautifully-mounted a movie as could be imagined with its huge, detailed, lush sets and flashy costume design: you could almost hear the Netflix money being converted into production values. As with his Nightmare Alley, what del Toro was after in story terms came second to his scrupulous art direction – the disused factory where Victor sets up his experiment was for some reason as fantastically gothic as the expressionist castles in The Scarlet Empress – which meant the Monster’s story, crammed into the last third, unfolded without horror or the grand emotion del Toro wanted. In the end, creator and creation forgive each other in florid dialogue, like an encounter group session as written by Mary’s husband Percy. Granted, del Toro’s always been more about making dark fairy-tales than horror. But on a dramatic and conceptual level this proved something close to a disaster, jumping tones without rhyme or reason, and failing in its attempts to paint a coherent portrait of the scientist, with del Toro swerving between plainly sympathising with his vehement, visionary independence and hissing at his frustrated papa act. Del Toro finally didn’t deliver the pure take on the novel he promised, nor did he have the boldness to offer daring fan fic like Franc Roddam’s The Bride. In any event, it’s easy to see why this was finally a version of Frankenstein deemed worthy of award contention, with its toothlessly humanist, cheaply social media-fit understanding of the story, and heavy-footed litterateur references. All this built to a scene in which Victor was told by his dying brother that he’s the monster, perhaps the most reeking example of subtext-stating in recent cinema, and that takes some doing.

In another wing of the revisionist fantasy school, Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good (crime #1: that title) brought to a close the two-part adaptation of the extremely popular stage musical, itself loosely drawn from Gregory Maguire’s novel, which in turn strip-mined L. Frank Baum’s Oz tales. Yeesh. This one kicked off with Elphaba (Cynthio Erivo) waging a soft guerrilla war on the forces of the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum), whilst her lover Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) pretends to hunt her, and her former confidant Glinda (Ariana Grande) plays the glammed-up Useful Idiot for the Wizard and his campaign of animal apartheid. Wicked: For Good had at least one major quality going for it that the first one lacked, as the various character arcs intensified emotionally, and came to some jarringly odd climaxes – like the fate of Ethan Slater’s Bok as well as Fiyero himself, and a potentially interesting theme of people destroying what they love by holding on too tight – a theme the film itself was terrified of plying too firmly in case the target audience started looking for a cupboard to crawl into and hyperventilate. As with the first film, the sheer lavishness of the production counted for a lot. But the negatives began to pile up exhaustingly, starting with a narrative that proved both disjointed and rushed, scenes unfolding as either spasmodically concatenated or very drawn-out. This episode entirely lacked good songs, and all the major-league belting by Erivo and Grande and florid arranging by John Powell in the world couldn’t make the ones it had better. Chu’s staging was often embarrassingly listless – the flashes of spectacle and energy almost entirely came from the special effects team, in a movie that compounded the first movie’s crime of putting off all the creative world-building and impact onto the digital wizards whilst having its few, amazingly tepid productions numbers performed in the most limp fashion imaginable. Grande, spryly witty in the first film as a shallow person stumbling upon substance, here seemed rather more conspicuously out of her depth. Bailey and Erivo were forced to play out some passionless romance, playing second fiddle to the official BFF story between Glinda and Elpheba, with a lengthy climactic song for the pair that was bewildering in its lack of emotional content and relentless, corny teasing of everyone off screen daring it to become a Sapphic snog-fest. Chu also insisted on playing the late-in-the-game entry of Dorothy into the drama like we’d stumbled into a sort of day-glo version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (vale Tom Stoppard), encouraging the viewer to take all this for what was going on along different camera angles from the 1939 film. No, Jon, no you will not do that.

Speaking of Hamlet-adjacent stories: Chloé Zhao was another director swerving back to dramatic, award-ripe fare after an ill-fated excursion to the Marvel brand. She made Hamnet, one of 2025’s widely well-regarded films but also one that tended to sharply divide viewers. Based on a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, who co-scripted with Zhao, Hamnet proposed to tell the story of a young, not-quite-named Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) meeting his wife, here dubbed Agnes (Jessie Buckley) presumably to avoid sniggers from millennials, the death of his son (Jacobi Jupe) from plague, and his eventual composition of Hamlet as a combination of therapy session and peace offering to his grief-stricken spouse. Zhao offered a gorgeous-looking movie that reiterated the ability she established on The Rider to blend a gritty, documentary-like awareness of place with visual beauty, but also like The Rider it also revealed Zhao tends to take realist textures and apply them to a single, hammered emotional topic. Hamnet had no real pretences to gleaning an accurate biopic from Shakespeare’s ever-enigmatic life, but more an Amadeus-like exploration of a theme, or a take on the historical artist portrait of the kind Ken Russell used to make at his most florid and incisive. That’s the charitable reading, anyway. Will and Agnes were used as metaphorical vessels at first, as the movie tried to capture Shakespeare as a product of a specific place, his sensibility couched in the earthy exigencies of his home town rather than effete courtliness, for all his fancy reading, and his relationship with Agnes as a possible metaphor for an oral folk culture giving way to the urban and dramatic. Mescal as an actor has an innate blend of the raw and the fine that could actually underpin a convincing portrayal of the Bard. But the movie totally retreated from such possibilities, swapping the for a raft of modern clichés and concepts, like having Will defined by a volatile relationship with his macho artisan father, and his departure for a career in London a really big deal in a time when people did things like go half-way around the world to catch whales to make a living. Agnes’s embodiment of the nature-child feminine mystique was established by having her lounge around forest glens and vaginal portals of the earth goddess – also known as holes in the ground – then uneasily drawn towards domesticity and social identity, only to be cruelly shattered by fate. The narrative whittled itself down to a trite and monomaniacal obsession with parental suffering, subjecting the period experience depicted to the standards of modern helicopter parenting, with only Will’s poetic gift capable of delivering the kind of healing that eludes their mere fleshy parts. This entailed the ultimate social media-isation of cultural inheritance, ushering Hamlet as a work of art into the realm of the Relatable and Art Is An Empathy Machine-like slogans. This culminated in a sequence where Agnes and others in the Globe audience reach out to grip hands with the young actor playing Hamlet on stage, one of the most embarrassing moments in recent cinema. Buckley was award-worthy, insofar as she turned emoting into an Olympian sport. The film’s most gripping portion, ironically, was when it simply portrayed the players acting out the climactic sword fight of Hamlet, even with Horatio and Fortinbras missing – who needs them when you can have all the feels?

Scott Cooper built a career out of emulating and mimicking the mystique of a particular kind of 1970s cinema, replete with shambolic musicians and blue collar strivers in a zone of fog-window diners and dinosaur Detroit cars, so it was close to inevitable one day he would tackle Bruce Springsteen as either a source for a story or the topic of one. With Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, he went for the latter, a music biopic that did, at least, take on a relatively difficult and original focal point for such a movie. Rather than charting Springsteen’s rise to fame or the apotheosis of his moment as “The Boss,” Cooper adapted Warren Zanes’ nonfiction account of Springsteen writing, recording, and fighting to release Nebraska, the dark, majestic acoustic album exploring realms of Americana replete with killers, losers, wannabes, and sadsacks. Cooper connected the record squarely with the personal crisis Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) was undergoing at the time, reckoning with discomfort with fame, and lingering disquiet from his childhood and his relationship with his father (Stephen Graham), whose depressive tendencies the son feels he’s inherited. The theme of pursuing unflinching artistic truth in the face of pressure to simply deliver hits was one Cooper himself tried to follow, only offering a couple of glimpses of Springsteen’s performing bravura, and instead making a movie consisting almost entirely of moody dialogue exchanges and even moodier glimpses of Springsteen wandering around, in a movie that channelled the original Rocky only with the heroic final bout only implied in the recording session of “Born in the USA.” Odessa Young played Faye, an invented love interest, the exemplary pretty little miss of Springsteen’s home turf, who orbits him in ardour and frustration. Cooper did his best to keep the movie in the same gnarled, knotted emotional tone as the album, but his filmmaking never came close to achieving aesthetic parity, with his generally drab and simplistic dramatic approach and visual style, constantly toggling between scenes of Springsteen writing songs and black-and-white recollections to ram home direct connections without any sense of Springsteen’s cleverness as a dramatist. White was quite good portraying a talented, troubled guy, but notably lacked not just Springsteen’s hunky, natural-born-lover-boy stature but much trace of humour and charm. Jeremy Strong was well-cast as Jon Landau but it proved a thankless role, in a script that suggested Landau and his wife existed purely to swap thematic analysis and liner notes in their home. The feeling of a generic template for serious indie drama being applied was particularly notable in a breakup scene between Bruce and Faye, whilst, in a choice that felt emblematic of the whole, Cooper included an anecdote Springsteen recounted in his memoir about the near-tragic road trip he took after making the album, but excised its most piquant and fascinating detail, regarding a teddy bear, something a real director could have made the linchpin of evoking neurosis. Unlike Nebraska, which has novelistic depth, this damn thing was earnestly one-note to the point of exhaustion, and made one long for less artistic purity and more “Rosalita, Come Out Tonight.”

Over the past couple of decades a distinct new mode of Americana has fused in movies, blending elements of influences like Robert Altman, Terrence Malick, Ken Burns, and Cormac McCarthy – visuals with lots of surveys of beautifully blasted frontier zones, sun through wheat, and crane-necked glimpses of giant trees, soundtracks punctuated by a contrast of mumbly, earthy dialogue and voiceovers filled with folky wisdom and poetic paeans pitched in Jovian strains musing on the mutability of man and life and the eternity of the forest or something. Most notably this brand has a mood of the elegiac and the mournful rather than the brassy positivity of the old-school John Ford-ish brand of Americana. In any event, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams belonged to the new school, and was one of 2025’s anticipated award favorites, a prestige-wrapped adaptation of a regarded Denis Johnson novella pitched in a similar, vividly sketched succession of vignettes reminiscent of his Jesus’ Son stories. Train Dreams recounted the life story of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), a solitary laborer whose life, whilst unremarkable in itself, possesses some abiding luster signaled as an essential American character. Edgerton inhabited his role with a deep-set conviction, vibrating on a level beyond the writing plane, playing a man who makes his living at first as a lumberjack and later as a hauler and has only one, brief interlude of familial contentment thanks to his idyllic but ultimately tragic marriage to the breezy Gladys (Felicity Jones). He’s dogged by the memory, and possibly ghost, of a Chinese worker he saw obscurely murdered, and along the way he grazes other outsider lives, like William H. Macy’s grizzled old-timer, Kerry Condon’s spry but haunted fire spotter, and Nathaniel Arcand as a Native American storekeeper who helps Robert weather desolation. Bentley’s filmmaking was slavishly indebted to Malick in its running montage editing and photography that certainly looked great. But the mostly straightforward grammar meant it didn’t achieve the state of a poetic, free-flowing impressionistic evocation, and certainly wasn’t a character study. There weren’t any hidden layers or deep thoughts or convictions to be found in Robert. Indeed, Robert typified a protagonist type I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with, the blank, placidly dissociated observer, the supposedly elemental man whose greatest trait is a lack of them beyond soulful vagueness. The basic story and theme resembled Jeremiah Johnson but updated and shorn of rowdy and entertaining qualities. Now and then an annoyingly precious music score broke out. As she did for 2024’s The Brutalist, Jones gave the movie something it needed and missed when she left, a sort of claiming feminine energy that threw the rest of the glum manliness into high relief. The result was definitely absorbing and moving, but it didn’t quite find deeper substance in its anecdotal structure, and the attempt to summarize it all as having meaning right at the end felt false and abrupt.

Oliver Saxe’s Sirât was another movie that garnered great praise, including the Cannes Jury Prize, blending a spare, spacy, often cryptic aesthetic with a palpable evocation of extreme locales and physical straits, and hints of parable in approaching an intriguing premise. Sergi López played Luis, a portly, middle-aged Spanish man searching for his adult daughter, who’s been out of touch for six months and was last heard of having joined a nomadic populace of partygoers and dropouts chasing rave scenes across Morocco. Combing the crowd at one such rave with his younger son Esteban (Bruno Nunez Arjona), Luis latches on to a small convoy of these nomads after one of them tells him his daughter might turn up at a scene they’re heading onto. This means traversing vast stretches of rough terrain and eluding military patrols who are trying to round up foreigners, because meanwhile there are reports of a conflict breaking out that might well be spiralling into World War III.  Sirât nodded to some inspirations – a little bit of Heart of Darkness here, some Easy Rider there – as it unfolded, contrasting the small clique of scruffy but likeable dropouts, some of whom judging by their missing limbs might be war veterans of various stripes, their endless pursuit of solipsistic idylls in music and the small fraternity of comrades they’ve whittled their world down to, and the slightly absurd emissaries of the square world tagging along in their small, inadequate van. Saxe’s strategy was sneak-attack shocks, with two jarring pivots suddenly shattering hope for friendship and exultation with scenes of violent death. One of these, taking place almost exactly an hour in, is one of the most deadpan yet effective narrative swerves I’ve ever seen in a movie, capturing just how swiftly an adventure can turn into a tragedy when people venture out of their depth. Saxe had symbolic dimensions in mind, with the title referring to a poetic idea of a bridge between heaven and hell prefiguring a climax involving a walk of blind faith through a literal minefield, hints of an inversion of the patterns of exile and wandering between Africa and Europe, and a coda that sought to evoke the concept of shared humanity barrelling down the line to who knows what fate. This aspect proved to be knotted in with the way the climactic scenes play out, and just how much one liked the movie probably depends on the degree to which one bought it all. I didn’t completely: as well as the slight whiff of a sort of modern take on those old sick-soul-of-modernity tales so big in 1960s Euro cinema, the film depended to a surprising extent on its characters acting like fools, particularly as some of the nomads seemed to be hardened survivors at some points and acted like twits at others. At some point I started seeing Saxe’s strings. The theme of inverted circumstance might also have had more punch if Laxe showed any actual interest in Moroccan people. Still, an extremely well-made movie that dragged me along with it until nearly the end, with Oriol Maymó’s photography delivering some truly haunting images.

Paul Greengrass’s The Lost Bus was one of those high-pressure dramas based on true events that have been the director’s passion in works like Bloody Sunday and United 93. The Lost Bus depicted the 2018 Camp Fire that tore through California, sparked by drought and poorly maintained power lines. Greengrass fixed squarely on an unlikely hero of the event, school bus driver Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a divorced dad trying to put his life back on track and hold onto his job when he’s dispatched to ferry kids from one school to another outside the fire danger zone. This twist of fate flings him into the company of teacher Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera) and with a load of young lives in charge, and proves the start of a life-or-death adventure. McConaughey, looking aptly gaunt and harried-looking, was playing the put-upon everyman, and the film piled on reasons to sympathise with McKay with such a heavy hand – in the first fifteen minutes we got his angry son, his aged mother, his deceased father, his ex-wife harassing on the phone, his money and job worries, his jerk-around employers, and even saw his dog getting put down – it started to feel like a send-up of a country song. But then the story got going, and Greengrass’s best talents kicked in, with a big chunk of Apple’s money to work with. The portrait of catastrophe gained palpitating intensity, unfolding for the most part as one epic sequence as the normal and humdrum suddenly became a zone of infernal scenes, mostly fixed on McKay and Ludwig’s travails but also depicting the efforts of firefighter chief Martinez (Yul Vazquez) and his team to keep pace with the chaos. McConaughey signalled identification with his character by casting family members as his on-screen clan, and the interest here wasn’t just in how extreme straits bring out the best in people but also in how McKay’s improvising zeal is a product of his already strung-out and overloaded synapses, beating an all-devouring calamity only a particularly exaggerated version of making it through life. Ferrera was equally good as the teacher who does her job to the limit of duty. Greengrass avoided preaching but made sure to accuse the negligent and incompetent corporate honchos responsible for the immediate problem and grazed the imminence of global warming as a factor in its intensification. The level of sheer cinematic craftsmanship and production effort on display recreating the fire was startling, building to a truly thrilling and remarkable sequence as McKay made his last-ditch, desperate attempt to escape a seemingly imminent death and broke into the clear, suddenly released with surreal effect into a placidly sunny day.

In 2025 Benny and Josh Safdie split up to each direct a movie with a sports-related subject, and to extend their preoccupation with characters to extreme reaches when trying to prove themselves masters of their fate. Benny’s entry in the diptych was The Smashing Machine, a portrait of pioneering MMA figure Mark Kerr, played by Dwayne Johnson in a role tailor-made for him and one that seems to have involved some keen sympathy, as well as an obvious pitch for award action. The Smashing Machine focused on Kerr trying to cope with his first-ever career defeat in a 1999 bout in Tokyo, a loss that precipitated an effort to kick a painkiller addiction he’d developed, and to regain his fighting shape and mindset. All the while he’s locked in a volatile, borderline co-dependent behaviour with his pretty, loyal, but shallow, insecure, button-pushing girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), whilst his old friend Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader) recovers from a bad patch to become a champion. The Smashing Machine explored the mentality of a man defined by physical prowess, one who’s no dummy or brute but is obliged to live out his life in the realm of the most primal emotions and actions and how that practically infantalises him when out of the ring. Safdie was fascinated all the while by the blend of raw force and peevish delicacy on display, something he matched stylistically with his observational, behaviourally-preoccupied approach and scepticism about the theatre of machismo usually amped up to 11 in the MMA world, an approach enhanced by Nala Sinephro’s dreamy score. The Smashing Machine wasn’t the average heroic sports drama, given the lack of any traditional inspiring coda to Kerr’s story, as it proved more a study in learning how to lose and see the value in it. The movie was both a worthy and interesting attempt to nudge the Safdie brand into a more commercial and popular realm, and found something surprisingly watchable and entertaining in such a relatively unusual subject. But it’s also one that was to a certain extent foiled by something inherent in the story and the approach to it: where in his best previous films with his brother Safdie cranked up a sense of crisis and compulsion to great, consuming effect, here Benny’s effort to avoid the usual highs and lows of this kind of movie left mostly repetitive scenes of bashing and getting bashed in the ring and of Kerr and Dawn rowing in different registers in their house, except in one potently handled scene where Kerr stalks out of the ring following his first defeat in a state where animal bristle and brittle pathos coexist. Johnson did good work, although Blunt outshone him in finding substance in a character who might have been easily caricatured, one who like her partner can be very good and deeply obnoxious. The other Safdie movie of the year, Josh’s Marty Supreme, has alas not come my way yet.

Julien Colonna’s The Kingdom tramped across thematic territory that’s quite familiar in gangster movies – the journey of a young innocent connected to a crime family who’s drawn into their business enterprises by personal loyalties – but in an original and interesting way. Colonna’s film, set on Corsica in the mid-1990s, began as a portrait of a seemingly average teenage girl, Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti), close budding adulthood and edging towards having her first romance with a local lad, but then obliged for vague reasons to go off and stay with her father, Pierre-Paul (Severiu Santucci). Daddy, it slowly emerges, is the head of a criminal clan closely connected with the island’s political rivalries, and also lives in hiding, especially now that a rival gang seems to be trying to muscle his out. Lesia absorbs the nature of the situation and subtly matures amidst a blend of hints, discursive glimpses, inferred meanings, and, finally, vivid and awful witnessing. Members of the clan vanish or turn up dead, and others venture out in turn for battles they might not come back from; beloved, pot-bellied family members and friends are also ready assassins and doomed warriors in a guerrilla war. At one point Lesia’s attentiveness and quick-thinking help her father escape swooping cops, but this only delivers him to a different impending fate. All the time Pierre-Paul tries to keep Lesia at a safe distance from the violence and dark lore of this world, but ironically their time on the run together becomes a treasured interlude of closeness for father and daughter, one eventually bought at a horrible price. Colonna’s guiding motif was the proximity of the banal and the primal, gentle family feeling and everyday life colliding with savage violence and shadowy conspiracies, the business they’ve chosen essayed in terms of what sometimes resembles an extended beach party or one of the family’s hunting expeditions, unfolding on a Corsican landscape filmed often with dancing hand-held camerawork and a sense of place manifest in rustling leaves and insect trills. The Kingdom was moody, well-made, and intriguing, and only faltered towards the end when it engaged more literally and immediately with question of family example and legacy in the Corsican gangland tradition, with an act of revenge a little too neatly contrived, and the self-imposed limitations of Colonna’s style also placed limits on how deep the story could delve.

With Caught By The Tides, Jia Zhang-ke edged back from his recent works of accomplished fiction filmmaking, towards something closer in style to his early fusions of cinema verite with dramatic aspects, but also pursuing that style more radically: a movie that began life as a casually shot video project evolved into an ambitious study of passing time and the changing landscape of China filmed over the past 20-odd years and interwoven with a sparely-told human story, unfolding initially in the gritty, growing mining town of Datong City. Jia’s wife and regular collaborator Zhao Tao played Qiaoqiao, initially glimpsed as a young would-be singer and dancer, hooking up with an older lover, Guo Bin (Li Zhubin), a man looking for any kind of break, and eventually he flees Datong to look for prosperity whilst promising to send for Qiaoqiao when he’s found it. Several years later, Qiaoqiao searches for Bin, who’s become involved with some corrupt officials during the free-for-all days of the Three Gorges Dam project, and then, in 2022, they meet again back where they started amidst the Covid pandemic. Caught By The Tides was an often mesmerising and peculiarly poetic movie that found a vital, vivid way of exploring civic and personal history as entwined things, usually simply filming his actors drifting through authentic settings amidst everyday happenings, charting along the way the transformation of locales, like Datong City, evovling from a dirty, crumbling backwater replete with tattered relics of the Mao era to a clean and prosperous place, and the awesome, wrenching scale of imposition caused by the dam, whilst charting the toll of people such breakneck transformation has cost, shifting from the ramshackle but energetic community glimpsed in the first portion in 2001 to a bewildered and fragmented present-tense. Marvellous little vignettes and tableaux came scattered through the movie, often with the unmistakeable vitality of the actual, almost to the point where the attempt to fuse it all together with its occasional jots of character and story felt close to unnecessary. The movie made occasional gestures towards the kind of crime study and panoramic enquiry seen in the likes of Stray Dogs and Ash Is Purest White, but they were only gestures. Like Ash Is Purest White it was also fascinated and perturbed with the motif of lovers doomed to grow old not quite together, Zhao and Li aging through the movie in unswervingly charted detail to a degree that counted as an album of the two actors and also a subtle personal statement from the director. The very end went for a note of poignancy that had quite a different energy to the rest of movie, but was also Jia at his most shrewd, efficient, and doggedly moving.

Very different in tone and production, but not dissimilar in its keynotes of bemused wandering and the toll of time, was Joel Potrykus’s Vulcanizadora. Michigan filmmaker Potrykus has been earning attention for a while on the film festival circuit with his extremely low-budget yet intelligently minimalist, cunningly assembled portraits of outsiders, miscreants, fractured hipsters, and other hapless beings. His latest took up the lives of two characters he’d earlier portrayed in his earlier Buzzard, although seeing one wasn’t necessary to grasp the other. Potrykus himself played Derek, who treks out into the woods making for a quiet stretch of Lake Michigan’s shore along with his pal Martin (Joshua Burge). The two men seem like polar opposites, Derek insufferably talkative, energetic, and nervous, Martin glum, quiet, and tetchy. As the trek unfolds the men’s stories and intentions become clear: Martin’s been in prison and expects to go back for arson, Derek hates his life since he got divorced and can’t seen his son, so they’ve agreed on a suicide pact, having built bizarre headsets for themselves that look props for a Saw movie so they can instantly blow out their brains with bottle rockets. Potrykus initially took up where Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy left off as a portrait of frazzled exiles-within-society bemused and tired of a world they just can’t quite cope with venturing into the neutrality of the woods to crystallise their angst. Then Potrykus pushed deeper into a darker, more perturbing, but also gently absurd study in pathos, as Derek dies in the pact but the other survives, leaving Martin eddying in confusion and trying to make sure the gesture isn’t simply swallowed into a void of ambiguity. Potrykus wove his portrait of doomed human flotsam with care, building to small classics of excruciating behaviour, including encounters with cops who won’t listen even to a guilty man who wants to tell the truth, and an irate ex-wife and her new beaux. At the bottom of the film was an almost Hamlet-ish dichotomy, the sheer difficulty of living contrasted with the sheer difficulty of dying. The degree to which the film worked its spell depended greatly on how one takes to its particular kind of rambling, ironic realism and the aggravatingly heightened, sometimes one-note behavioural contrasts, particularly in the first half, but it delivered a conclusion that managed to be poignant without a hint of mawkishness.

Speaking of Kelly Reichardt, she danced the closest she has to the mainstream thus far for The Mastermind, a deadpan period tragicomedy that played in part as another tribute to shuffle-gaited lo-fi 1970s cinema whilst drawing on a real incident of the era and trying to weave an allusive meditation on similarities between then and now. It was also one of Reichardt’s portraits of people who inhabit the margins of society and only seem energised to operate when they see an angle and flout social rules to work it. In this case, Josh O’Connor played James Moonie, a carpenter and art school dropout with a wife and kids and a judge father (Bill Camp) who is, well, judgmental over his son’s lack of ambition and prosperity. Wandering around his local art gallery in Framingham, Massachusetts, James realises how easy it would be to steal some valuable modern art pieces, and so slaps together a shoddy heist that succeeds, but James is soon confronted on how poorly he’s thought things through and goes on the run. Reichardt’s slightly more energetic storytelling didn’t depose the sleek, painterly poise and sufficiency of her camerawork, and utilised a great jazz score from Rob Mazurek to invest a deceptive texture of swinging energy devolving into dizzy alienation. O’Connor readily let himself fade into Reichardt’s aesthetic, in a movie that followed on, in its way, from both Night Moves – what happens next to the man who suddenly realises his whole life has been a preparation for being a criminal fugitive? – and to aspects of Poor Cow and Showing Up. Solipsism was part of the subject here – James’s half-smart, charm-coasting, asocial tendencies have the mischievous energy and outlook of a radical and yet he himself is a peevish square and totally ignores reality around him, as Reichardt repeatedly notes news reports about Vietnam – and also a certain wry conviction that often with people there’s a lot less than meets the eye. Reichardt pictures her antihero suffering a terrible fate from the standards of both his bourgeois background and his own arty awareness when forced to subsist in a boarding house decorated with hideous kitsch, before then, in a grimly funny punchline, he gets swept up by thug cops suppressing an antiwar demonstration. The film’s strengths and pleasures didn’t however deliver anything quite as serpentine and surprising as Reichardt’s best earlier films, provoking the feeling in me at least that Reichardt has visited this thematic well once too often, and settles instead for using a greater part of the movie to offer fetishized ‘70s loser-mystique images like O’Connor in baggy cap under hazy sun patinas and walking down misty roads. The characterisations were curiously shallow and either familiar or evasive, the jots of satire a bit hackneyed, and there was a feeling of waste to the strong supporting cast, particularly Alana Haim as James’s wife. I was left in the end with the feeling of a director in transition.

∙

∙

Performances Of Note

Pamela Anderson, The Naked Gun
Austin Butler, Caught Stealing
Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Oona Chaplin, Avatar: Fire And Ash
Cynthia Erivo, Wicked: For Good
Chris Evans, Materialists
Elle Fanning, Predator: Badlands / Sentimental Value
Jared Harris, A House Of Dynamite
Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon
Zoe Kravitz, Caught Stealing
Amy Madigan, Weapons
Rakim ‘A$AP Rocky’ Mayers, Highest 2 Lowest / If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Matthew McConaughey, The Lost Bus
Conan O’Brien, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Josh O’Connor, The Mastermind / Wake Up Dead Man
Robert Pattinson, Mickey 17
Joaquin Phoenix, Eddington
Anastasia Talyzina, Air
Jorma Tommila, Sisu: Road To Revenge
Jodie Turner-Smith, Tron: Ares
Denzel Washington, Highest 2 Lowest
Samara Weaving, Eenie Meanie
Ensemble, Eden
Ensemble, Eephus
Ensemble, One Battle After Another
Ensemble, It Was Just An Accident

∙

∙

Favourite Films of 2025

.

Air (Vozdukh, Alexei German Jr)

It’s perfectly understandable that in AD 2025 not many people are in the mood to watch Russian films. Never mind a Russian war movie casting its mind back to the exalted and heroic days of the Great Patriotic War, times that were, at once, the absolute abyss of human experience and a moment of eternal national pride, and also now provide fodder for justifying the revanchist Putin-era project, something that made a lot of recent Russian films hard to swallow. I well remember the pain of trying to sit through Fedor Bondarchuk’s Stalingrad, a ripe hunk of propagandist flimflam gussied up as a movie, or the stupid, paranoid end of Karen Shakhnazarov’s otherwise interesting Moby Dick-esque parable White Tiger. As a consequence, Air, directed and written by Aleksey German Jr (son of the regarded Hard To Be A God auteur), took some time to gain any kind of international airing. But Air is proof there is still not just life in Russian cinema but soul, poetry, and criticality too, and in style and scope recalls works by the likes of Soviet-era cinema heroes like Tarkovsky, Klimov, and Shepitko. The official theme was a kind of heroism then novel in the world: German Jr depicted the experiences of a squadron of women fighter pilots, called into service as the Nazis besieged Leningrad. Air seemed primed to be a type of drama that’s very common these days, ones about the marginalised and scorned defying expectations and finding their inner heroes. And certainly the film was quick to paint how even in a state supposedly governed by egalitarian, emancipationist precepts, such women still faced harsh sexism inflected with doubt and dismissal, and remained sidelined until things got so dire they had to be put into service, whereupon they prove great fighters.

But German Jr was unremitting in acknowledging that the price of getting to fight with the men was dying like flies just like them, as the pilots are whittled down one by one by the relentlessly cruel attrition of the combat, in a movie that structurally recalled All Quiet on the Western Front. The central figure was Zhenya (Anastasia Talyzina), an angel-faced and seemingly delicate young woman who comes into the realm of war trailing a grim personal history, as her father, himself a renowned pilot, was executed by the annoyed Stalinist regime for reporting problems with a new plane, along with his wife into the bargain, and Zhenya spent the last few years maturing in a ballerina school where she was raped by a male teacher. And yet she’s not, at first, a warrior who can tap her inner ferocity, utterly unable to kill despite being a significantly better pilot than most comrades and foes, requiring a hard lesson in how to pull the trigger from her mentor. Her evolution into an accomplished aerial duellist was a journey German Jr didn’t paint in the usual hooray terms, but instead as a gruelling and perturbing study in brutalisation, required for self-defence – an idea illustrated on both the macrocosmic level as the Soviets battle off a genocidal invader, and also on the microcosmic, in Zhenya’s travails, as she knifes to death a German in a dugout and finally, coldly executes one of her own, jealous male colleagues when he tries to rape her. The art of learning to kill is also the process of learning to be killed, eventually, with the first batch of female pilots relentlessly decimated in action around Leningrad and, later, Stalingrad.

German Jr wove the human story through the warfare with a sense of gentleness and pathos to contrast the ferocious combat scenes, the horror and brutality constantly counterpointed with proofs of loyalty and the sustenance of solidarity. Zhenya’s attempts to do right by a refugee woman and ferry her baby into Leningrad turns into a miniature tragedy. Zhenya hooks up with her regimental commander, Alexei (Sergey Bezrukov), sometime after his own great love, the women’s “amazon” leader dies in combat: Alexei and Zhenya’s first kiss arrives as a moment of pure carnal delight amidst the existential dolour. When Zhenya kills the comrade who assaults her, two of the loyal mechanics draw straws to decide which of them will confess to the deed to cover for her. The depictions of aerial combat in the period, life-and-death battles taking place in tiny, creaking, vulnerable shells, are the best ever seen in this kind of war movie, as was a vignette in which Zhenya had to bail out only to land right in the middle of Stalingrad where she cowers and fights for her life. This scene delivered a completely convincing and dizzying depiction of hell on earth but also one that led into a quiet diminuendo where the reassertion of comradeship and community was emphasised, as the Soviet soldiers relax and sing after their travails. Perhaps the chief flaw of Air was its episodic nature, but that was also part of its attempt to describe the expanse of war in a succession of strobe-lit moments, often tableaux-like in its flowing camerawork reminiscent of Klimov and Theo Angelopoulos, blending the ultra-realistic with the lyrical and mournful.

.

Avatar: Fire And Ash (James Cameron)

Knives seem to have been waiting for James Cameron’s third instalment in his conquering series of sci-fi adventure fables, odd at a time when cinema so desperately needs such genuine showmanship and sheer screen-filling fervour after a decade and a half of superhero pap left movie-going like a steroid-made body, falsely pumped and then utterly withered. But then I’ve always found the way people talk about the Avatar films extremely odd, given they shamelessly offer the most elemental and essential cinema pleasures as noble fusions of cutting edge spectacle and ripe, old-school pulp fiction: no, we are not above such things. The craft and splendour to be found here is absurdly rich, the story carved out of the repurposed baleen ribs of the most primal storytelling. All that aside, Fire and Ash proved the best of Cameron’s series yet. Taking off where previous entry The Way of Water ended, Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) are mourning the death of their eldest son in their different ways, but still trying to keep their heads down as the now-Na’vi-ised Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) hunts them whilst also seeking his son Spider (Jack Champion). Whilst travelling back towards their old stomping grounds, the family Scully only just survive a brutal attack by the Mangkwan, a tribe of Na’vi who have rejected the worship of and connection with Eywa, the great planetary biosphere-god-brain, kicking off a multi-strand drama where the most seemingly miraculous and positive event – Spider gaining the ability to breathe the planet’s air and other common Pandoran traits – provokes the deepest anxiety about what this means for humans on Pandora. Meanwhile Dark Father Miles finds his ideal match and mate in Varang (Oona Chaplin), the ferocious, cynical, witchy leader of the Mangkwan, who joins forces with Quaritch and proves the greatest threat yet to the Scullys.

Some familiar issues with the Avatar films certainly raised their heads here, including amusingly cringe SoCal high school-isms in fantastic settings, and Cameron recycled several elements, including reviving ratbag Aussie tulkun hunter Scoresby (Brendan Cowell) for the sheer pleasure of killing him again. The climax basically conjoined the endings of the first two, albeit with Varang shaking things up hard. But Fire And Ash was overall an astonishingly crafted and visualised tale that came on with a rollicking force harkening back to the days of Leigh Brackett and Planet Stories, and also with all Cameron’s hippy-dippy concerns, metaphor-leavened misanthropy, and sheer love of melodrama beats undimmed. The pleasure and strength of the Avatar films has always been connected with elements they’re often criticised for – yes, they’re basic-model space operas where the chief appeal is to sensual and aesthetic immersion, and that’s what makes them good. This time the call-backs and repetitions were part and parcel with the movie’s best quality – the sheer breakneck plunge into this universe Cameron has created for himself and delight in its many moving parts, down to asides like bringing back Giovanni Ribisi’s smug dipshit Selfridge and have him butt heads with Edie Falco’s contemptuous military honcho. Where The Way of Water’s considerable qualities were hindered by Cameron basically reiterating the first film’s particular brand of lysergic travelogue mixed with blatant greenie propaganda before getting down to the action, Fire And Ash swiftly connects with the surprisingly complex emotions of its heroes and villains, before really catching fire with the Mangkwan attack on the aerial trader convoy the Scullys ride with, one of the best shot and directed action sequences I’ve ever seen.

This in turn proves the cue to introduce some complexity and contradiction to the Na’vi world, hinging the movie on Chaplin’s vehement, virile, perversely sexy performance (however digitally interpreted) as a batshit villainess who extols the virtues of deicide, resentful towards an Eywa who ignored her tribe’s pleas, and who takes to a space marine pulse rifle with raw pleasure in destruction as self-expression. This led in turn to the kind of scene I never expected in these movies, with Quaritch taking his pleasure in getting high and bedding his new blue mate. Against them was pitched Sigourney Weaver’s Kiri, maturing into a shamanka who can turn the natural world itself into a weapon and has no qualms about doing so. Meanwhile Quaritch, whilst always sticking to his basic job of providing an unremitting antagonist, grew steadily into something like an antihero, still a vicious, expedient bastard, but also one increasingly granted dimensions and dramatic vitality denied to the earnestly protective Jake, who at least eventually recognises the impossibility of keeping himself and those he loves out of danger. Jemaine Clement had more to do this time as the radicalised biologist Ian Garvin. Cameron builds to a vignette of pure Old Testament angst as Jake tries to work up the nerve to slay his adopted offspring for the sake of potentially saving Pandora from being completely overrun by humans. The final battle between the two fathers and their jealously sought son had a crazily visualised emotional ferocity blended with highwire directorial control not seen in the big movie realm since the last reel of Revenge of the Sith, and there was also a hilarious revision of the most famous line of Aliens, once again delivered by Weaver. Of the Avatar films there are many naysayers, and yet I am not one.

.

Eden (Ron Howard)

It’s funny how time can change one’s attitude to a filmmaker and the kind of movie they make. Ron Howard was, in the 1980s and ‘90s, considered a natural mainstream talent who could turn out small gems like Parenthood, The Paper, and Apollo 13, even as he also turned out good-looking junk like Backdraft and Far and Away, betraying the uneven instincts of a filmmaker who nonetheless applied himself to the difficult task of making different kinds of movie for the broadest audience possible. Then in his mannered A Beautiful Mind-and-after prestige moment he was the subject of hot cineaste loathing, and his adaptations of Dan Brown were the cine-literary equivalent of herpes. But in the context of an era badly lacking his kind of classic Hollywood ability and ambition, disdain has transmuted into a certain admiration for him as a now-weathered pro who still constantly pushes himself technically and stylistically. His strong car racing film Rush (2013) kicked off a spotty late career stride, evinced in flashes during the lumpy In the Heart of the Sea (2015), the underrated Solo – A Star Wars Story (2018), and particularly the very good Thirteen Lives (2022), a movie that once would have been a red-hot Oscar night hit but proved just another piece of streaming fodder in our bitter new age. Eden follows Apollo 13, Rush, and Thirteen Lives as the kind of true story Howard particularly thrives on, but also pushed through into a realm of cruel physical and psychological drama closer than one would expect to Werner Herzog or Peter Weir, and a very long way from Howard’s roots in playful comedies and fantasies. But it’s also, quite tellingly, a study in different species and energies found in movie stars, in a movie about self-dramatising people.

Eden recounted events that unfolded on one of the Galapagos Islands in the 1930s that are still officially mysterious, although the movie has no qualms about filling in the blanks. When émigré German philosopher and writer Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his partner Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), who came to the island for splendid isolation and freedom to work, extol the virtues of their chosen, remote lifestyle in the press of their homeland, they unintentionally attract another married couple wanting in on the idyll. Heinz (Daniel Bruhl) and Margret Wittmer (Sydney Sweeney) prove less exalted but more practical and motivated people, abler and smarter in adapting to the place than the two intellectuals, although the presence of their sickly son and Margret’s new pregnancy complicate matters. Then real trouble arrives in the form of the “Baroness” Eloise de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), a fake aristocrat, self-promoter, and a kind of miniature sex-cult leader, who lands with two male concubines, proposing to build an exclusive luxury resort on the island and claiming to have official sanction. In the meantime her clique specialises in stealing from the others on the island, whilst the Baroness stokes enmity between the Ritters and the Wittmers on a divide-and-conquer thesis, setting the scene for a constantly ratcheting crisis that pays off in murder and bloodshed. The first and major pleasure of Eden was one of sheer narrative intrigue, for the increasingly tense and fulminating situation and cross-section of character types. That situation proves a teeming microcosm and parable for many things – for class and gender warfare, for pre-World War II German politics, for modern western politics, for the constant failure of utopian and countercultural endeavours. Even for contemporary phenomena: one can easily see the Baroness as a proto-influencer who needs her content, greedily feeding off the labour of others, whilst the earthy Wittmers prosper only to be plundered and the Ritters devolve into mutual loathing and degradation. And when it comes, of course, the revolution proves a bloody, self-consuming enterprise.

As for the movie stars, Bruhl was excellent as usual in a self-effacing way, befitting his role as a man who suffers and obliges his family to suffer in pursuit of some small slice of sovereignty, whilst Sweeney provided the relative surprise as an initially timid and doltish woman who becomes a flinty realist and bedrock-steady matriarch. Law, Kirby, and particularly de Armas gave studies in big acting perfectly suited to the setting and to Howard’s meta concerns, Kirby fierce when inhabiting the part of the genius’s muse who evolves into a dark Valkyrie, Law the posturing dreamer wiping sweat from his stinging eyes whilst pounding out his never-ending tome filled with idealistic fudge whilst his wife feeds him poison chicken. De Armas meanwhile owned all her scenes as a natural phenomenon combining charisma, sex appeal, and a jiu-jitsu master’s feel for the weak points of others and how to pinion them, at least for a while, as instruments of her will. Determined to prove her power in the world but misusing it to a fatal degree, her arc swings from airy, seductive titan to demonstrations of sadistic authority before finally reduced to swift improvisations whilst her eyes vibrate with rat-in-a-trap terror as she realises her little reign is over. It’s the kind of performance big Hollywood actresses used to give like second nature, a performance Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck or Gene Tierney could have given. Meanwhile Howard forced the crisp digital palette work for him in the relentless three-dimensionality of the imagery and palpable physical context, finally finding real purpose for the hyped-up lensing effects and camera movements he toyed with on the likes of The Missing and In the Heart of the Sea, crescendoing in sequences like the hide-and-seek scene of the Baroness’s boys trying to rob the Wittmers whilst Margret goes into labour and is harassed by hungry wild dogs, a masterful unit of high-stress cinema, and the remorseless tracking shot roving around de Armas as she tries to talk her way out of a bullet in the head. Howard will never be the cool kid’s choice of director, and yet with Eden he achieved a riveting career consummation.

.

Eephus (Carson Lund)

The title of Eephus refers, as is explained in the movie with a comedic blatancy of metaphor, to a particular kind of baseball pitch that sees the ball seem to hover and stop, and the movie itself tried to sustain that same feeling of hovering, floating, tricking the eye, the illusion of seeming to last forever and yet proving, like all things, transient. In rarefied and gentle-paced fashion, Eephus scarcely seemed to tell a story, but rather simply appeared to document an amateur baseball game between two teams comprised of Massachusetts suburbanites, some of them former athletes and players of at least local status, but mostly just ordinary guys hanging out and doing something they love, over the course of a long afternoon, evening, and into the night. The event has a bittersweet, totemic mood, as the park they’re playing in is going to be razed for an extension to a local school, and none of them are sure their teams will reconstitute elsewhere, so it’s probably going to be the end of something that’s given community and shape and rhythm to their lives. As the game grinds on, some players are forced to leave and are substituted, some play better than others, but the communal experience has a texture that lingers and envelops. A soccer game is being played in a neighbouring park, a hint of cultural pressure and alternative where the participants seem to be having more fun, and a few onlookers wander in and out, momentarily fascinated by the haphazard yet concerted play, as well as a couple of sarcastic (“How many touchdowns?”) but easily thwarted stoners. The business of men doing manly things is a cult that has to ride commitments out to the bitter end: thus the teams become determined to play this final game to a proper win, even when that means playing long after the sun goes down in a park without lights, demanding they do it by car headlights.

The cinematic realm here was as far as it’s possible to get from the big, romantic mythmaking of baseball films like The Natural or Field of Dreams. Rather, Eephus was conceptually reminiscent of some other tales in the Americana film tradition, like Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and Eagle Pennell’s Last Night at the Alamo, and with hints of the wistful ending of Eight Men Out, with a laidback yet deceptively taut, earthy, precisely observed evocation of change and severed connections and traditions. But its aesthetic was even more subtle than the movies it evoked, its tenor laconic but with a constant tug of melancholy and also a kind of sublimated frustration that becomes more acute as the game drags on. The feeling of almost subliminal mourning that permeates the film despite its humour and gentle sense of the absurd gained immeasurably from factors beyond its control, but is also certainly part of what Lund goes for. The comic highpoint, also just about its median scene, saw one team’s coach/pitcher Ed (Keith William Richards) suddenly forced to leave the game when his angry brother turns up to drag him off to a niece’s christening, much to Ed’s unenthused sense of clannish duty (“This is your family, you son of a bitch!”), a brief glimpse into a more Scorsesean zone of the garish and combative side of American life. Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a real-life former baseball star, played the enigmatic old dude also named Lee who wanders in, turns on a load of eccentric charm, and finally volunteers to serve as pitcher for a spell. The array of types scattered on the field and dugouts and hovering around the fringes are all touched with hints of specific personality and varying backgrounds – some have futures, some are burn-outs, some don’t care too much, and a lot of them are there to get away from their lives for a spell every weekend, one factor in the difficulty of getting the teams together again in any other form. It’s one of the few films I’ve ever seen where I felt like I could know every character in it, all regular cast members and cameo players in humdrum life.

The film was also a quiet marvel of staging, with barely noticeable yet precise camera movements and angles charting the game action, and constantly cutting out interesting, telling, even humorous framings from the sparse setting and the difficulties of coherently organising the on-field players. Balls vanish into the increasingly shadowy woods, and finally the players are swinging and running and trying catch in a warren of light and dark. Forcing the game to an actual, proper end is an agonising ordeal, something that’s not fun and not necessary, but vital as a ritual, the park that’s vacated after all the empty beer cans are picked up a suddenly silent, darkened place, and might as well be the megalithic remains of a long-lost past, the ghosts of old suppliants lingering. The film’s release early in 2025 seemed to court and capture a pivotal moment in modern American life: although set sometime in the 1990s, it was perfectly present-tense in feeling. Lund evoked a sense of mourning for things passing – sociability in the pandemic-and-after moments, most obviously; a sense of sports as an arena of everyday life rather than bludgeoning elitism and money-lust; of the atomisation of both public and social media spaces in the past few years when once-thriving online communities have scattered and fled before the churn of politics and technology. Even, perhaps, an entire way of life, of America as a cohesive organism and a country with a good, forward-pushing mindset and people who could always meet in a shared space of cheer at once defined by differing skills and commitment but ultimately egalitarian.

.

Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee)

Spike Lee doesn’t need to prove he’s got cojones the size of the Brooklyn Bridge. But he definitely put things on the line with a project that risked cinephile ire even more than his uneven and variably received makeovers of Oldboy and Ganja & Hess – a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. This move had some built-in irony, as Lee officially returned the Evan Hunter source novel to its original climes, and yet also imposed some very Lee tweaks, as he offered his own blend of thriller and paean to the melting pot glories of New York in Highest 2 Lowest. The figure of the magnate targeted by a criminal’s punitive scheming was revised into Denzel Washington’s David King, the head of a once-mighty, now-waning record label and specific champion of Black artistry, who faces an agonizing choice when the son of his driver is kidnapped in mistake for King’s own son and faces paying a ransom that will wreck his fortunes. Other revisions included making King’s son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) and the driver’s son Kyle (Elijah Wright) teenagers, and the chauffeur himself, Paul (Jeffrey Wright), an ex-con trying his damndest to stay sanguine but buzzing with anxiety and paranoia. The film’s first half recreated many beats of its precursor, including the subplots of corporate intrigue and thwarted ambition, but Lee wasn’t particularly interested in translating the specific blend of intense moral calculus and cool procedural method that defined Kurosawa’s version. Instead he steered the movie more towards traditional melodrama, as David and Paul chased down the kidnapper themselves, to the point where it felt as much like a tribute to 1980s and ‘90s thriller fare like Ron Howard’s Ransom as to the 1962 film. And, indeed, why not: Hollywood could really use that sort of movie again.

Like many Lee films, Highest 2 Lowest was uneven whilst constantly suggesting the director himself sees the bugs as features, the pure-sprung product of his own enigmatic gut instincts, a desire for movement and proofs of emotional and aesthetic life aiming for something closer to the state of a fresco rather than standard, slick drama. For instance, I never quite bought any of the scenes between King and his wife (Ilfenesh Hadera), whose great strength is her temperate self-certainty. But a confrontation of father and son crackled with intemperate emotion and different kinds of authority, imperatives towards sympathy and challenging infused with natural tension between bull male and growing calf, paying off in a display of fierce paternal suppression of his son’s accusing anger, only to be hit with a lethal zinger, promising he’ll be remembered, if he fails to help Kyle, as “the man with the best ears in the business but the coldest heart,” a line that simply and efficiently closes the moral aspect of the story. The amusing trio of cops who arrive notionally to save the day (Dean Winters, LaChanze, and John Douglas Thompson) prove variably dedicated, exasperated, and irritable, spurning King’s special capacity to help in tracking down the perps – his keen eardrums and knowledge of music as well as his city. Lee also happily declared himself indifferent to the moment, at least in terms of not caring whether anyone still thinks he’s cool, with his cringey, pamphlet-like racial consciousness flourishes and swerves towards old-school, declarative B-movie style (emphasised by the way Howard Drossin’s florid scoring constantly nudged old Hollywood style but resolved at last into something more flowing and intricate).

In this regard King was Lee’s obvious avatar, decrying gimmicks, AI art, and impersonal, deracinated business choices applied to art and culture. But Lee also challenged anyone to think he’s checked out: indeed, it was the very blatant quality of the above details that proved cumulatively interesting. This was Lee saying, here is my fortress, you shits; if you think you can topple it, give it a go. What was on Lee’s mind was infused in gleaming veins through the movie, rendering it a kind of thematic sequel to Mo’ Better Blues and seeing Lee strongly concerned with legacy and the ties that bind people, and by implication communities, together. Perhaps the most engaging aspect of Highest 2 Lowest, indeed, was the way, at a moment of profoundly low spirits in the cinema and music worlds and cannibalistic politics in the US, it was boldly positive-minded, urgently searching for the possibility of rapprochement between street and penthouse. This was funnelled through Lee’s evangelical love of New York as a place (care of Matthew Labatique), evinced first in a notably unironic use of “Oh What A Beautiful Morning” at the outset (c.f. Blue Moon) and then in the film’s central movement, which might indeed be Lee’s finest unit of filmmaking ever – a lengthy, intricately staged sequence of King delivering the ransom money on a metro train that turns into a pursuit unfolding amidst a street festival. This was a sequence of sheer filmmaking joy and skill, littered with jots of observation, humour, and dynamic staging, tying together Lee’s concerns and sheer passion for his city and its denizens, even in its contradictions, as when the crowd boos the cop trying to apprehend a fleeing suspect, one of Lee’s most ironic touches. Rakim ‘A$AP Rocky’ Mayers gave the second of two terrific turns for the year as the kidnapper, an angry reject rapper who gets his chance at proving himself sympathetic, even worthy, not the outright psychopath of the Kurosawa film but finally still just an opportunistic shark. One who revels in his moment of popular attention as, in the topsy-turvy zeitgeist of the moment, he becomes a popular success with hordes of protestors backing him up at his court dates, whilst King himself begins again with bounding confidence.

.

The Ice Tower (La Tour de Glace, Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Dreamlike, quiet, sparse, almost entirely dominated by mood and aesthetic and allusive visuals that broke down barriers between narrative and fantasia, persona and psyche, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s fourth feature film defied any clear genre definition whilst yoking together manifold cinematic artistic touchstones. Nods to Hitchcock and Powell and Pressburger, the social outcasts and wanderers of Truffaut and the Dardenne brothers, the dreamy realms of Cocteau and Christian-Jaques, even a little of Val Lewton’s horror cycle and ‘70s lesbian vampire flicks – all fused together into a frosty cocktail. Hadzihalilovic’s protagonist was Jeanne (Clara Pacini), a teenage resident of a group foster home in a town in the Haute-Alpes, where she’s both the beloved and steadying elder sibling to many of the younger kids, and someone trapped in an impossible personal flux, yearning to venture out into the world and realise herself but with no means to manage it. Inspired by a postcard from one of her fellows who’s left the foster home sent from Torino, Jeanne sets out there one day by trekking through the mountains alone. But she can’t find any trace of her friend and, without much money or recourse, she breaks into the basement of a large institutional building, and sleeps the night there, only to discover that it’s being used as a movie studio. A film based on her favourite fairy-tale about an Ice Queen is being shot, the Queen played by famous actress and beauty Cristina Van Den Berg (Marion Cotillard). For most of her colleagues, Cristina is an infuriating diva and a thuggish personality who some say enjoys humiliating and dominating co-stars and crew, but Jeanne becomes fascinated, even enraptured by her, a grip that grows only tighter as similarities and peculiar, unsettling affinities between herself and the actress emerge.

Through a series of chance events, Jeanne even finds herself joining the movie company, first mistaken for an extra and then replacing one of the ingenues who just can’t get along with Cristina. Jeanne takes on the name Bianca for more mature charisma in her efforts to establish herself as the kind of woman she wants to be, and this brings Jeanne fatefully into the star’s mysterious gravity. This is the sort of set-up you can take in just about any direction, from screwball comedy to a heart-warming tale to an All About Eve-esque study. Hadzihalilovic, for her part, churns all the influences together and plunges the viewer into a world where even when it’s daylight you still feel locked in a perpetual nocturnal miasma, the frigid mountains above glimpsed in towering, remote silhouette and faint, bleakly beautiful dawn light, the street level a warren of patchy brilliance. One theme here is the try-hard and tacky nature of moviemaking transforming into mesmeric and transporting imagery, turning what is solid, tangible, and threadbare into the stuff of myth; another the diverse functions of fairy-tales as modes of communication. Jeanne’s first glimpse of Cristina seems almost like any veil between her imaginative yearnings and reality have dissolved as Cristina is glimpsed through a half-closed door in her full costume, before the more prosaic and yet equally promising, transformative reality manifests. Hadzihalilovic’s evocations of a fairy-tale world came with multiple dimensions, unfolding on a standard narrative level with its tale of a young orphan’s adventures as an innocent abroad, on another level invested with Freudian glamour as a place where the forces that underlie human designs and desires wear masks, and finally also nodding to the original function of such stories as cautionary tales, hints of the nature of what can harm and destroy encoded in dream logic.

The closer Jeanne draws to Cristina the more her psychic landscape distorts, registering on a subconscious level the perverse possibilities and choices before her, dreaming herself the slavish and obeisant handmaiden to the Ice Queen who might sacrifice herself for the glory of the idol, or as dark pupil drinking blood of crows to prove an inheritor. Here and there Hadzihalilovic offers moments of droll relief, like casting Gaspar Noe as the film’s director, a rather moth-eaten-looking bloke out of his depth when not behind the camera, mumbling something about Hitchcock at a party who wants to make his next movie “about fear.” But The Ice Tower otherwise sustains its concerted style, its air of cold delirium, until the very end, when reality breaks down entirely and the future becomes an array of possibilities glimpsed in a crystal. Cristina herself is enigmatically attached to a psychiatrist, Max (August Diehl), who might also be her drug dealer and procurer, murmuring nostalgically about the wild animal Cristina was as a girl whilst in function recalling Morpho the manservant from Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos. The similarity crystallises in the climactic moments, where the predator-and-prey dynamic between Cristina and Jeanne clarifies. Jonathan Ricquebourg’s magnificent photography conjures the twilight world the whole movie subsists in, including a scene where Cristina leads Jeanne up to a high mountain ledge to gaze upon Mount Blanc in the moonlight, communing with natural forces within and without. Jeanne even seems willing to give herself to Cristina for the sake of what she seeks, but finds what Cristina wants is not love in any form but to consume others in sadistic power rituals – only to find, like many a fairy-tale villain, the innocent foundling isn’t easy meat. A rarefied gem that’s certainly not for everyone, but for those who do connect with it something close to sublime.

.

It Was Just An Accident (Yek tasādof-e sāde, Jafar Panahi)

As I said in 2024 about The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the best works of recent Iranian cinema have tended to be both about and examples of heroic resistance to a point that sometimes feels almost beyond critical jurisdiction. Jafar Panahi’s latest was entirely inseparable from his personal travails as perpetual thorn in the side of the ruling authorities, and the film’s making, shot in secret, sounds like an epic tale in itself: movies and TV shows have been made about much less interesting film productions. It goes without saying that Panahi’s a clever and nimble enough filmmaker to make all limitations work for him, and It Was Just An Accident harked back to the more becalmed, minimalist, coolly efficient brand of cinema Panahi and other Iranian cinema heroes were known for in the 1990s, compared to, say, Panahi’s own son and his more expansive palette. The compulsory, emblematic scene of the national cinema – the starkly composed landscape shot with a few wind-bent trees in the frame – was included perhaps with some kind of dark mirth, particularly as this time the tree was very noticeably dead, overlooking the scene where one man comes close to burying another alive. Panahi’s theme was the allure of vengeance, commencing with a seemingly normal and heart-warming family moment as a father, Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), his wife and daughter ride in their car down a dark road, until they hit a dog that damages the car. Heading to a repair shop in the nearest town proves a fateful act: an employee at the shop, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), hearing the voice and the squeaking prosthetic leg of Eghbal, hides in alarm and then follows the family to their home for initially ambiguous reasons. The next day Vahid tracks Eghbal until he gets a chance to waylay him, knocking him out and locking him in a box in the back of his van.

Soon it becomes clear Vahid thinks Eghbal is the man who tortured him and many other dissidents, protestors, and strikers in prison, a regime thug they nicknamed “Peg-Leg” because he also had a prosthetic, having lost one of his real legs, as he liked to brag, fighting holy war in Syria. The problem is that victims were always blindfolded during their ordeals, so Vahid contacts some other survivors, including photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), her ne’er-do-well ex-boyfriend Hamid (Mohammad Ali Elyasmehr), and bride-to-be Goli (Hadis Pakbaten), to try and nail down if Eghbal really is Peg-Leg, and then to choose a course of action, which could range from eliciting a confession to executing him. Hamid, the most damaged and hot-headed of the group, is very much in favour of killing the captive, and the small gang of kidnappers, which also ropes in Goli’s fiancé, is faced with a moral quandary that’s also, obviously, a ticking timebomb for their safety. But the story takes turns alternately hilarious, humane, and gruelling, as the inaptness of this team of avengers becomes self-evident, even going so far as to intervene to help save Eghbal’s wife, who collapses whilst pregnant. But this doesn’t mean they’re not capable, when push comes to shove, of truly confronting and turning the tables on their tormenter. That Panahi begins with Eghbal and his family was a particularly cunning move as the reality of the family is inescapable, even as Eghbal himself is almost rendered a non-person in the tale as he’s doped up and locked away, in an inversion of state-applied power on the individual. Hamid, even in his most fierce, hysterical, and vindictive convulsions, is also the most realistic of the band: he advises killing Eghbal whether he’s their man or not because he’s a witness and everyone around them might count as a kind of enemy agent.

Another of Panahi’s targets is the endemic corruption of a country that’s supposed to be guided by holy, high-minded precepts. This had a straightforward quality of indictment, the corruption illustrated most literally as various officials use pretexts to shake the band down for bribes to go away, a collapse of civic virtue caused by endemic cynicism and threat. Panahi contrasts this with the ultimate decency of the avenging band who will risk themselves to help their persecutor’s wife and children, but they’re not excluded from the rot, rage and paranoia driving them to acts hard to distinguish from those committed by their persecutors, in a cycle of torment each sees as justified. The peculiar thing about It Was Just An Accident is, for all its tension and the high dramatic force its final scenes, it was also constantly, outrageously funny, replete with sights like Shiva pretending to take wedding photos against an ugly, dreary skyline to avoid security attention, the avengers coughing up cash to pool and pay for the wife’s hospitalisation, and Goli in full wedding regalia reeling out of Vahid’s van, putrid as it is with Eghbal’s effluent, to vomit on the pavement. The climax consisted of a single, epic shot of Eghbal tied to a tree, the light of car brake lights on him turning the scene into an infernal reckoning, the tethered man confessing but also defiant and mocking of his captors, at least until Shiva intimately degrades, insults, and accuses him. A remarkable scene, particular in Azizi’s marathon piece of acting. The subsequent coda seemed to present a breath-relieving diminuendo, but really set the seal on the tale as Vahid, seemingly justified and moving on, again hears the tell-tale squeaking, perhaps imagined, perhaps made by something entirely different, perhaps made by a lurking Eghbal, but very certainly proof of how some things just can’t be exorcised, that the experiences we least want to think are part of us are engraved on our beings.

.

On Becoming A Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)

A weird, funny, trenchant, deeply unsettling film that manages to find a way to delve into troubling and urgent issues without even the slightest whiff of message movie shtick or social media self-congratulation, Rungano Nyoni’s follow-up to her marvellous debut I Am Not A Witch was like that film a sinuous blend of deadpan magic realism and deeply ironic social critique, but also a work of definite artistic growth. The setting and cultural precepts were very specific to Nyoni’s native Zambia, but relevant in universal ways, touching on phenomena familiar just about everywhere. Nyoni hit the ground moving as she depicted Shula (Susan Chardy), daughter of a prosperous Zambian family, driving home from a fancy-dress party, still wearing her incongruous costume, when she spots the dead body of her uncle Fred (Roy Chisa) lying on the side of a dark and lonely stretch of road. Shula’s response is peculiarly muted and troubled as she calls her family and then authorities, and she cringes in depression and aggravation when her drunken, messy, embarrassing cousin Nsansa (Elisabeth Chisela) turns up and cavorts around with seemingly oblivious amusement. Fred’s death presents a supposed mystery Nsansa casually and laughingly solves, realising he probably had a heart attack whilst a brothel down the road, sating his infamously vast, indiscriminate, and often criminal sexual appetite, and was dumped on the road by its denizens. But the family matriarchs and a coterie of cousins play up the mystery as part of a campaign of blame, exclusion, and punishment to ensure Fred’s property can’t be easily claimed by the family of Fred’s wife. Shula, Nsansa, and their teenage relative Bupa (Esther Singini) are all painfully aware of Fred’s appetites, as he sexually abused all of them as children, but the truth about the deceased satyr is constantly fended off amidst the funeral preparations and legal and familial rituals that draw together their large clan.

On Becoming A Guinea Fowl maintained the same dry-ice sense of humour and ambivalent, complex attitude to Zambian society Nyoni evinced in I Am Not A Witch, particularly and most urgently on the way it treats women, perceiving the family gathering as at once an event of enormous, enviable, organic social vitality and meaning, but also riven by deep and dangerous hypocrisy. Part of the irony lies in the way this kind of social ritual is a distinctly matriarchal event, as Shula’s house is invaded by myriad female relatives all eager to gather and share a unifying moment, where the men are largely a supernal audience, but also defined by sexist necessities, as Shula, the nominal host, is pressed to provide for everyone and serve the menfolk. Shula’s absent father (Henry B.J. Phiri) is a happily oblivious divorcee making a living as a security guard in a fancy hotel and asking, as a worried afterthought, if his brother ever did some of his nasty business with her, a question Shula answers with a mollifying lie. Everyone’s soon sleeping on the floor, which only seems to make it feel all the more homey and embracing, even as faultlines in the family unity are quickly identified. Some of the women are just greedy bullies, and just about everyone is involved in a cover-up not just for gain but also because the funeral get-together itself is a major collective event nobody wants to spoil with such downer trivialities. Still, Shula feels increasingly obliged to shatter the familial peace, as Bupa tries to kill herself in her college dorm, seems to recover well, only to then collapse and be hospitalised again. Then there’s the gruesome spectacle of the family constantly humiliating and denigrating Fred’s wife, a pathetically young girl with several children by her husband already, stashed away out of sight, very plainly also the product of Fred’s licentious abuses.

Nyoni illustrated and amplified her concerns with flourishes of surreal happening, the solid and tangible world seen with porous and dissolving edges – Shula dreaming of seeing Fred draped in a bird costume, looking over the scene of his body’s discovery with dull pathos, and water that floods Shula’s house and Bupa’s dorm a symbol of something creeping, invasive, and slowly rotting. The title itself proved to grow out of an odd but cumulatively powerful metaphor, rooted in Shula and Nsansa’s school days when they appeared on television talking about the title animals, birds that are known for shrieking out warnings to other wildlife about danger: that TV appearance is an almost mythical moment for the two women who have grown so differently out of the same soil. Shula’s initial appearance in her outlandish party costume nods to a subtext about costume as identity, Shula having worked overseas and tried to escape her formative experiences good and bad, trying to become a member of a fantastical race but doomed to almost literally run over the corpse of her own past. The film builds to two powerful, contrasting climactic scenes played on tellingly diverse stages: the first comes when the various matriarchs all shuffle into the cupboard where Shula, Nsansa, and Bupa like to hide away from the crowd and share their forbidden knowledge, to offer their communal blessings and support – Nyoni’s cunning, cathartic, poetically apt illustration of understanding, fortification, and responsibility unfolding in the secret life of family. This was then coldly contrasted with another ritual, this one enacted in the public, daylight space, as the two families faced off in an adjudication by elders where Fred’s young wife is accosted, accused, and has her character blackened, and her matriarch is forced to abjectly beg for forgiveness to the disdain of Shula’s bitchy relatives. As this unfolds, Shula herself advances in the background, leading Fred’s children to the meeting, and making the sounds of a guinea fowl, bringing the tidings of a need that just can’t be bought off any longer.

.

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Putting One Battle After Another on this list feels almost boring, given the way it bestrides cinema acclaim and consensus in 2025 like a colossus. The obvious retort to that is that it damn well deserves to. But it’s also one of the most truly peculiar concoctions of recent times, a high-wire act where part of the wonder and admiration is how it works. It’s a Paul Thomas Anderson film, in itself a mini-genre, that blends aspects of stoner comedy and Theatre of the Absurd; the director’s habitual fascination for fraying and shambolic characters poised on the social margins who nonetheless exemplify something vital about that society as they desperately search for a home; surprisingly hard-charging thrills and action; and political anger and awareness that felt close to oracular. It might not even be a better movie than Anderson’s last, the damn near-perfect Licorice Pizza, but where that was a work of wistful, ironic yet fulsome nostalgia, almost cosy in its way, One Battle After Another is present, even future tense. Watching it in a movie theatre with the soft-fascist posturing and cheap thuggery of the second Trump administration in mind was one of the very few times where I’ve ever had the experience of watching a movie mainlining the zeitgeist, akin to what it must have been like watching Bonnie & Clyde or Easy Rider back when. Aptly, Anderson’s film was a thematic sequel to and expansion on Inherent Vice and based loosely on another Thomas Pynchon novel, Vineland, about former 1960s radicals subsisting in Reaganite America, and partly updated. Anderson dug down to roots in 1960s Counterculture precepts and the era’s satirical style as espoused by precursors like Terry Southern. That influence was particularly strong in the early scenes, with insouciant humour and palpitating anxiety freely mingling, and that aesthetic unifying of opposites was also one of the movie’s preoccupations. The story kicks off with a gang of self-appointed revolutionaries who perform raids to free detained immigrants and stage bank robberies to finance their operations, and replete with characters with hilarious names like Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Capt. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn).

Those two represent fatefully dichotomous camps and worldviews and, of course, are deeply turned on by the transgressive appeal each finds in their opposite, fetishizing otherness and antithesis, dominance and being dominated and the swapping of roles, as part of a game where the perversity is a bit sick and also very human. By contrast Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ghetto Bob, the crafty explosives expert who arms the gang with bombs to blow bank vaults and fireworks to hail down glorious distraction and reverse-propaganda spectacle, is the hapless bloke fated to be left holding a baby in his arms by the aptly named Perfidia, his nominal lover, but this gives his life a shape and purpose it otherwise entirely lacks once he’s forced to assume a different name and hide out, persisting in a haze of weed smoke and re-watching of The Battle of Algiers. Bloody assassinations and attempted sexual enslavement don’t quite settle matters, and the girl Bob raises as his own, Willa (Chase Infiniti), grows into a vigorous teenager who’s more mature than her dad (a slight whiff of Absolutely Fabulous there). Lockjaw starts hounding them when he sets his sights on joining an exclusive secret society of white supremacists he thinks will be the ticket to the highest echelons of riches and power, and, suspecting the girl is biologically his, wages a campaign to find her and kill her if it proves necessary to cauterise his past. One Battle After Another’s most urgent target was the idea of modern state and civic power being highjacked for private objectives but also operating according to a repressive purpose encoded in the nature of that power, as represented by Lockjaw and his goon squad. The deep forces in American life were visualised, in a vignette of the most perfect, deadpan surrealism, through the ironic contrast of the figurative underground of the radicals and the underground fortress of the racist cabal, located under a placid suburban tract, with a membership comprised of lookalikes and wizened elders.

Yet One Battle After Another was no pure lefty screed, either, painting with acid detail common failings amidst radical movements – people in love with their own self-image; those who claim dedication to a cause but when really pushed put saving ass first; finicky, word-policing, shibboleth-dealing watchdogs; half-smart cynics; and those doomed to get lost in a perpetual twilight of faded illusions and credos and prefer it that way. Bob and Perfidia both embody more than one of those traits, and also contend with those who embody others: the film’s comic highlight, almost instantly legendary and a career highpoint for DiCaprio, sees Bob arguing with a self-righteous and exacting, but also wimpy phone contact in the underground movement. Along the way Anderson assembles some of the most intricately constructed and surprise-riddled set-pieces in recent cinema, the queasy blending of comedy and tension extending to almost the very end in a way that actually earns comparison with Dr. Strangelove, or; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. A raid by Lockjaw’s goons on Bob and Willa’s town provokes protests and enables despotism, amidst which Bob tries to play the swashbuckling hero chasing after his daughter, in a sequence that takes constant, blindsiding pivots, particularly when the strangely graceful beauty of the young skater-rebels leaping across rooftops gives way to the delirious punchline of Bob crashing to earth. Penn’s stylised performance as a sort of human impersonator contrasted Benecio Del Toro’s, practically stealing the movie as Willa’s chilled-out Zen-minded karate teacher and secret head of an underground railroad for illegal immigrants, who helps Bob get on the trail – and finally Bob’s wayward but unswerving commitment provokes admiration. It might be easy to write off Willa, anointed as the idealised inheritor of generational struggle and progress, for the way she fits almost a little too neatly a contemporary progressive fantasy intersection of traits – biracial, female, and empowered, she set forth at the end as the brave new body. But she’s also one who has to live with a heavy burden, suggesting the degree to which we are all products of something and yet are also all reboots. The truly riveting climactic scenes, which despite their simplicity required the big cinema screen to hit with their intended force, and justified Anderson’s VistaVision photography, managed to all at once be a cunning tribute to the Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons, John Ford’s The Searchers, and a kind of poetic-philosophical joke where the key to defeating evil, or least stymieing it to fight another day, is to stay just that little bit cooler and more aware, and to know how to play off the beat.

.

Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)

A coolly textured, esoteric, melancholy piece of work, Universal Language was also, if you could get on its wavelength, easily the funniest film of 2025. In fact, some parts of it left me almost paralytic with laughter, even as it wove a strange, deep magic. Matthew Rankin, a Canadian experimental filmmaker who recently graduated to features, presents in Universal Language an incredibly wry and slippery blending of concepts, references, satirical games, and genre-play, turning arch gags into vehicles of sly meaning and cumulative punch in a tale of seeking, homecoming, and estrangement. Rankin himself played Matthew, the sad-sack protagonist who journeys back to his home town of Winnipeg after years living and working in Quebec, hoping to reconnect with his mother. His wanderings are intercut with the travails of two schoolgirls trying to find a classmate’s lost glasses and finding a valuable money bill frozen in an icy parking lot instead, and their efforts to dislodge it provoke a small odyssey contrasting and finally intersecting with Matthew’s. All that sounds fairly straightforward, the stuff of typical indie films. But the first and most unavoidable twist on such a modest tale lay in how it was set in a contemporary Canada where, instead of English, the largest language group in the country is Farsi-speaking, as if unfolding in an alternative universe where the greater part of Canada was colonised by Iranians instead of the English, although the same tensions persist with the French-speaking part of the country.

In Rankin’s eyes, Canada’s cities are envisioned as blank, featureless labyrinths of ahistorical and alien existence, with areas of Winnipeg designated as the Grey, Brown, and Beige Districts. Tour guides lead people on treks to visit such wonders as a briefcase left on a bus stop bench, now declared a national monument, and a shopping mall sporting a clock that has no hands because “Portage Place is timeless.” Landmarks and advertising are infused with the aesthetics of revolutionary Iran, like a fresco in that mall rendered in the style of a Khomeini-extolling propaganda scroll but now emblazoned with figures like Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney. Money in this Canada is named after Louis Rial, the leader of an ill-fated revolt once cinematically chronicled in Cecil B. DeMille’s North West Mounted Police. Peculiarities include a turkey-selling outlet that advertises itself with bizarre and cheesy commercials that blend cowboy chic and Middle Eastern TV style, and the walls are decorated with photos of turkeys presented like figures of renown. The satire ran to scenes like an early vignette of Matthew, as he leaves his job as a civil servant, being ordered by his bilious Quebec separatist boss to tell everyone he liked his government job, whilst another employee bawls with loud and anguished tears all the while, and the opening scene where a schoolteacher spitefully insults the intelligence of all his students, whose ranks include a kid who idolises Groucho Marx and dresses like him always, who the teacher exiles to the classroom closet.

The most obvious aspect of Rankin’s playfulness with all this was a cinephile honouring the example of Iranian cinema and Abbas Kiarostami in particular, with credits patterned after the stark, black-and-white titles of Kiarostami’s early work like The Traveller. But this gloss of referential humour was also connected with Rankin’s ruminations on identity, both national and personal, and fascination with aesthetic as something that can float loose of its original context, in a movie where two major characters eventually swap lives and faces. The deepest theme is an exploration of Rankin, or at least his fictional avatar, as a man searching for family and home after abandoning them, as indeed a good enterprising young man is supposed to, but finding nothing is left to properly recognise him when he retraces his steps: life is indeed now like being perpetually immersed in a foreign land. This, in the context of a country where language barriers are not just part of the landscape but have been institutionalised, and Rankin, with a cunning that mixes both frustrated scepticism and sympathy, takes away English-speaking Canada’s claim to dominance through its ready access to the Anglosphere. At the same time he mercilessly satirises the banality of contemporary Canada, the petty dictats of its government and pointless bickering of its social groups, and, by extension, so much of a modern world that congratulates itself on being such but has abandoned the small, hard-won, organic pleasures of a country with a history as deep as Iran’s. This in turn provokes a weird nostalgia for a life unlived, as Rankin celebrates the paraphernalia of a strongly-rooted, carefully nurtured folk culture, as characters occasionally discover little boles of the fecund, the homey, and the welcoming, places with lovingly grown flowers, a few paltry family heirlooms and cups of tea from Persian relics signifying something that invites and rejects at once. In an odd way, Rankin also engaged with a particular quality of Canadian cinema that’s long caught my eye, its preoccupation with architecture, more specifically the modern kind, long regarded with a bewildered and spaced-out eye by the likes of Cronenberg and Arcand and others looking in bewilderment at cityscapes and wondering when the alien overlords conquered the place. Rankin was finally the one to make it a more considered subject. The title’s polysemic play nods to the money that’s the object of the younger protagonists’ efforts and also to the cues of family, the language of familiarity and intimacy. 

∙

Late Additions To Favourites List:

TBA

∙

Runners-Up:

Caught By The Tides (Jia Zhang-ke)
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
The Kingdom (Julien Colonna)
The Lost Bus (Paul Greengrass)
Predator: Badlands (Dan Trachtenberg)
Reflection In A Dead Diamond (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani)
Warfare (Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza)

∙

Underrated / Interesting

Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky)
Eddington (Ari Aster)
Eenie Meanie (Shawn Simmons)
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)
Red Sonja (MJ Bassett)
The Running Man (Edgar Wright)
Sirât (Oliver Saxe)
Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus)

∙

Genre Pleasures and Bagatelles

Ash (Flying Lotus)
Compulsion (Neil Marshall)
The Dam (Alexey Taranenko)
Dangerous Animals (Sean Byrne)
Ice Road: Vengeance (Jonathan Hensleigh)
K-Pop Demon Hunters (Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang)
M3gan 2.0 (Gerard Johnstone)
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie)
Sisu: Road To Revenge (Jelmari Helander)

∙

Overrated / Disappointing

28 Years Later… (Danny Boyle)
Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)
Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)
F1 (Joseph Kosinski)
The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman)
Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro)
The Gorge (Scott Derrickson)
Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)
Hedda (Nia DaCosta)
A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)
The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence)
Materialists (Celine Song)
Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)
Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)
Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (Scott Cooper)
Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)
Weapons (Zach Cregger)
Wolf Man (Leigh Whannell)

∙

Crap

Jurassic World: Rebirth (Gareth Edwards)
Osiris (William Kaufman)

∙

Unseen:

Lots

∙

∙

The Best Older Films I Saw First in 2025

An American Dream (Robert Gist)
Bad Girls (Jonathan Kaplan)
Beach Blanket Bingo (William Asher)
The Brontë Sisters (Andre Techiné)
Beyond The Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos)
demonlover (Olivier Assayas)
Die Nibelungen – Part 1 / Part 2 Kriemhild’s Revenge (Harald Reinl)
Edvard Munch (Peter Watkins)
The Eiger Sanction / The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood)
La Fin du Monde (Abel Gance)
First Knight (Jerry Zucker)
Get Crazy (Allan Arkush)
The Giants of Thessaly (Riccardo Freda)
The Guns (Ruy Guerra)
Hair (Milos Forman)
It’s Only Money (Frank Tashlin)
Jesse James (Henry King)
Justine (George Cukor)
Killer Of Sheep (Charles Burnett)
Napoleon – Extended Cut (Ridley Scott)
Noah’s Ark (Michael Curtiz)
La Pirate (Jacques Doillon)
Pink Floyd The Wall (Alan Parker)
Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls)
Les Possedées du Diable (Jesus Franco)
Salome’s Last Dance / The Rainbow (Ken Russell)
Red Roses of Passion / Young Playthings / Abigail Lesley Is Back In Town (Joe Sarno)
The Servant (Joseph Losey)
Sleeping Car To Trieste (John Paddy Carstairs)
Sortilèges (Christian-Jaques)
Sparrows / Voodoo Man (William Beaudine)
Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow)
Strike (Sergei Eisenstein)
The Trial of Billy Jack (Tom Laughlin)
The Unknown Terror (Charles Marquis Warren)
When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth (Val Guest)
Wise Blood (John Huston)

∙

∙

In Memoriam

∙ Adriana Asti ∙ Joe Don Baker ∙ Brigitte Bardot ∙ Robert Benton ∙ Bertrand Blier ∙ Terry ‘Hulk Hogan’ Bollea ∙ Claudia Cardinale ∙ Renato Casaro ∙ Richard Chamberlain ∙ Souleyman Cissé ∙ Jimmy Cliff ∙ Kenneth Colley ∙ Barry Michael Cooper ∙ Mara Corday ∙ Phyllis Dalton ∙ Samantha Eggar ∙ Taina Elg ∙ Homayoun Ershadi ∙ Jules Feiffer ∙ James Foley ∙ Frederick Forsyth ∙ Connie Francis ∙ Gil Gerard ∙ Bruce Glover ∙ Adam Greenberg ∙ Graham Greene ∙ Peter Greene ∙ Gene Hackman ∙ Wings Hauser ∙ Jimmy Hunt ∙ Olivia Hussey ∙ Will Hutchins ∙ Henry Jaglom ∙ Olga James ∙ Claude Jarman Jr ∙ Peter Jason ∙ David Johansen ∙ Jonathan Kaplan ∙ Tcheky Karyo ∙ Diane Keaton ∙ Udo Kier ∙ Val Kilmer ∙ Sally Kirkland ∙ Ted Kotcheff ∙ Erich Kuersten ∙ Diane Ladd ∙ June Lockhart ∙ David Lynch ∙ Michael Madsen ∙ Jean Marsh ∙ Lea Massari ∙ Robert McGinnis ∙ James Mitchum ∙ P.H. Moriarty ∙ Tatsuya Nakadai ∙ Roberto Orci ∙ Geneviève Page ∙ Mark Peploe ∙ Joan Plowright ∙ Roger Pratt ∙ Robert Redford ∙ Rob Reiner ∙ Clive Revill ∙ Tony Roberts ∙ Michael Roemer ∙ Lalo Schifrin ∙ Masahiro Shinoda ∙ Charles Shyer ∙ Enzo Staiola ∙ Terence Stamp ∙ Tom Stoppard ∙ Drew Struzan ∙ Jeannot Szwarc ∙ Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa ∙ Lee Tamahori ∙ Shoji Ueda ∙ George Wendt ∙ Billy Williams ∙ Brian Wilson ∙ Harris Yulin ∙

∙

∙

Review Index

28 Years Later… (Danny Boyle)

Air (Aleksey German Jr)

Ash (Flying Lotus)

Avatar: Fire And Ash (James Cameron)

Ballerina (Len Wiseman)

Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh)

Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Captain America: Brave New World (Julius Onah)

Caught By The Tides (Jia Zhang-ke)

Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky)

Cleaner (Martin Campbell)

Compulsion (Neil Marshall)

The Dam (Alexey Taranenko)

Dangerous Animals (Sean Byrne)

Dead Of Winter (Brian Kirk)

Drop (Christopher Landon)

Eddington (Ari Aster)

Eden (Ron Howard)

Eenie Meanie (Shawn Simmons)

Eephus (Carson Lund)

F1 (Joseph Kosinski)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman)

Fountain Of Youth (Guy Ritchie)

Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro)

The Gorge (Scott Derrickson)

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao)

Heads Of State (Ilya Naishuller)

Hedda (Nia DaCosta)

Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee)

A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)

Ice Road: Vengeance (Jonathan Hensleigh)

The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi)

Jurassic World: Rebirth (Gareth Edwards)

The Kingdom (Julien Colonna)

K-Pop Demon Hunters (Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang)

The Long Walk (Francis Lawrence)

The Lost Bus (Paul Greengrass)

The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt)

M3gan 2.0 (Gerard Johnstone)

Materialists (Celine Song)

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho)

A Minecraft Movie (Jared Hess)

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie)

The Naked Gun (Akiva Schaffer)

Nobody 2 (Timo Tjahjanto)

Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater)

Nuremberg (James Vanderbilt)

On Becoming A Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Osiris (William Kaufman)

Predator: Badlands (Dan Trachtenberg)

Red Sonja (MJ Bassett)

Reflection In A Dead Diamond (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani)

The Running Man (Edgar Wright)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

Sirât (Òliver Laxe)

Sisu: Road To Revenge (Jalmari Helander)

The Smashing Machine (Benny Safdie)

Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (Rob Reiner)

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (Scott Cooper)

Superman (James Gunn)

Thunderbolts (Jake Schreier)

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)

Tron: Ares (Joachim Rønning)

Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)

Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus)

Wake Up Dead Man (Rian Johnson)

Warfare (Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza)

Weapons (Zach Cregger)

Wicked: For Good (Jon M. Chu)

Wolf Man (Leigh Whannell)