Together didn't have the votes

I've just discovered exactly how far out on a limb I may be with my #1 movie of 2025.

The Australian Film Critics Association, of which I am a member, did not even consider it one of the six best Australian films of 2025.

You may recall that in this post, in which I took a deep dive into my first Australian #1, I said the following:

"Usually when I get the email that contains the nominees for this year's Australian Film Critics Association awards, which mostly focus on films with a strong Australian connection (they do have one "international" category so they can include something like One Battle After Another), it's a bunch of fringe nominees indeed. Yes an Elvis sometimes sneaks its way in there, but this list is usually comprised of films made by, but also only seen by, Australians. I've heard of these movies because I live in Australia, but most outside Australia won't know them from a hole in the ground.

That email has not yet come out this year, but it when it does, I suspect it will include my #1 movie of the year."

Yeah, no.

In fact, I tried to stack the deck in favor of this happening by finally voting on the nominees myself. I've never done it before, though the emails we get remind us of the fact that it is an obligation of membership to do so.

I ranked Together as high in every category -- you give preferential rankings to an existing list of eligible options -- as I possibly could, and yet it did not score a single nomination. Not in any category.

Instead, the six best picture nominees are:

Bring Her Back
The Correspondent
A Grand Mockery
Inside
Lesbian Space Princess
The Surfer

A grand mockery, indeed.

I've only seen half of those films, and I've only heard of five of the six. A Grand Mockery was completely unknown to me. 

Bring Her Back, which was in my top 20 overall (exactly #20), was my second nominee in all those categories, and I like Inside and The Surfer as well. But my third nominee, Spit, also got shut out, while my fourth nominee, Dangerous Animals, only got a lead acting nomination for Jai Courtney.

I guess the pickings weren't as slim as I blithely assumed them to be.

I have two theories on the zero love for my beloved:

1) It may have been a film made in Australia by an Australian crew and director, but in most respects it is not an "Australian film." In other words, while the location is never named, all the characters have American accents, so at best it's set somewhere in Canada. I can imagine, at this moment in our geopolitical history, that a bunch of Australian critics are not interested in rewarding an Australian film that is basically passing itself off as an American film.

2) There's a controversy regarding Together that I haven't touched on previously, because my love for the movie has prevented me from digging too deep into it. I've just read the Wikipedia summary to refresh my memory, and the creative team behind the 2023 film Better Half sued the creative team behind Together because the idea for Better Half was supposedly pitched to Dave Franco and Alison Brie in 2020, but they rejected the offer because they wanted to produce it themselves and bring in their own writer. Considering that movie was ultimately made with stars I've never heard of, I'm skeptical that it would have ever been the correct size of project for Brie and Franco, though now I feel like I should eventually see this film just to assess the similarities for myself. In any case, if the AFCA critics were already biased against Together for passing itself off as American, they certainly wouldn't have appreciated claims that it might have been plagiarized. 

Although I understand the logic behind both of those factors above, I'm still peeved enough that I might not actually vote to crown a winner.

The spoiler that made Together my first Australian #1

Here we are on my final post that puts a bow on 2025 by taking a deeper dive into my #1 and how it came to reach that height. Some years my #1 inspires me to write about a larger, related topic that delves into my ranking history, but this year, the movie itself contains a ton of things I still want to write about. So I'll use this space to do so.

Up front, though: Because I mentioned spoilers in the subject of this post, I should tell you that I won't be properly spoiling Together until the fourth of these four segments. Things get progressively more spoiler-y through the segments, so if you haven't seen the movie and you sense yourself starting to get exposed to things you don't want to be exposed to, you can bow out then. 

My first Australian #1

Usually when I get the email that contains the nominees for this year's Australian Film Critics Association awards, which mostly focus on films with a strong Australian connection (they do have one "international" category so they can include something like One Battle After Another), it's a bunch of fringe nominees indeed. Yes an Elvis sometimes sneaks its way in there, but this list is usually comprised of films made by, but also only seen by, Australians. I've heard of these movies because I live in Australia, but most outside Australia won't know them from a hole in the ground.

That email has not yet come out this year, but it when it does, I suspect it will include my #1 movie of the year. 

You wouldn't know Michael Shanks' Together was Australian on the surface of it. The stars, Alison Brie and Dave Franco, are both American, and though the film never specifies its location, everyone else in the movie speaks with an American accent. The only real settings are an urban area (for a very short time at the beginning) and a rural area (for the rest of the movie).

But the keen observer will note Australian actor Damon Herriman as essentially the only other prominent actor in the cast. While him being Australian does not, of course, limit him to appearing in Australian movies -- Herriman was also Charles Manson in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood -- it does make you wonder if, indeed, it might have been shot in his home country.

Well Shanks is also Australian, and I would assume most of the crew are as well, because it doesn't make sense to import Americans to do jobs Australians can do perfectly well. So it's also shot here, and I discovered recently that one of the producers is a neighbor of mine in the town where I live, and also friends on Facebook with some of my friends. (Hi Mike Cowap, if you're reading this. I don't know you but I hope to meet you sometime soon.)

Needless to say, I've never had an Australian #1 before. While this movie is not "Australian" in the sense of being set in Australia within its own world, it's a full-on Australian production, and that definintely counts. 

Because I've got a lot of other things to write about here, I won't go through and figure out how high an Australian movie has gotten previously in my rankings, but another one that was produced here but set in America -- the aforementioned Elvis -- did make my top ten a few years ago. In terms of movies actually set in Australia, Sweet Country was a top 20 movie for me in 2017. 

Does this mean I'm finally embracing the country that has been my home for going on 13 years now? That wouldn't really be an accurate conclusion. I mean, the fact that this movie hails from Australia is very much extra-textual to the movie. But I do appreciate the symbolic value of it, and hopefully my next Australian #1 will even take place here. 

Dave Franco equals his big brother

James Franco has fallen on hard times, to put it mildly, but he'll always have a place in my personal cinematic history in that he was the star of one of my past #1 movies, 2010's 127 Hours. That means I've got his name in a spreadsheet where I track people to see if they might eventually appear in more than one. 

Fifteen years later, Dave Franco has now achieved the same thing. Barring a big comeback from James that might only result from a very sincere apology tour, Dave seems like the only one who will have the chance to ever appear in another.

I don't specifically have a lot to say about this, but I did think it was worth making a quick mention in a post where I am touting Together's feats.

Body dysmorphia goes back-to-back

I don't know if you remember when I wrote this post last year after naming The Substance my #1 of 2024, but the premise of that post was that a horror movie had gone back-to-back with my #1 of 2023, Skinamarink, which was quite a surprise since I had never previously named a horror movie as my #1. I then went on to try to explore if The Substance was "really" a horror movie or if it was just body horror. Yes I considered that distinction pretty carefully. 

Well now, in the space of just a little more than two years, if you count January of 2024 and January of 2026 as bracketing that period, horror has gone from a #1 underdog to a #1 favorite. This is the third straight year you could describe my #1 as horror. I mean, Together is more definitely a horror than The Substance.

But even more so, it is a body horror, and even more so, it is a body horror in which body dysmorphia is a prominent theme. 

Some of the discussions of the body dysmorphia get into my next section where the real spoilers start, so let me get into the other similarities I noticed with The Substance that suggest I am definitely predisposed to this sort of movie:

1) Both movies have essentially three actors, with all other parts barely even being speaking roles.

2) In both movies, there is a central dynamic between two characters, and a third supporting character who acts on them as a catalyst. 

3) In both movies, those two characters are concerned about things that are happening physically to their bodies. 

4) Both movies feature some sort of physical monstrosity, but that's all I'll say about that at the moment. 

Let's stop dancing around it and go on to the next and final section ...

The final shot of Together that blew my mind

SPOILER ALERT.

So when anyone asks me why this seemingly ordinary horror movie became my #1 of the year, and they don't care about having it spoiled, the experience I'm about to recount with the movie is what I'll point them to. Hello, you, if you are reading now and this describes you. 

So just to clearly establish where we are in the story ... 

Millie (Brie) and Tim (Franco), who have been dating for years and living in the city, move to the country so she can take up a teaching job. His attempts to succeed as a musician have basically failed, and he's belatedly accepted her proposal, made in front of all their friends, to live together? get married? it's not entirely clear. What's clear is he did initially botch the acceptance of the proposal, leading to considerable awkwardness in the moment. Obviously there's something about taking his relationship with Millie any further that is scaring him. 

After moving to the country, Tim and Millie are on a hike and they fall into a hole in the ground where they come into contact with a mysterious force that causes their bodies to start to fuse together. We already know this force is pretty dangerous as we see what happened to two dogs who drank the same water that Tim and Millie drank. We also know there are some other hikers who were reported missing in this area. We'll meet them later.

Tim has shown commitment jitters the whole time, and won't have sex with Millie, which makes her somewhat more receptive to the friendliness/flitrations of a senior teacher at the school, Jamie (Herriman), who we later learn is gay so Tim actually didn't have anything to worry about. But Tim gets jealous anyway. 

The worse problem, though, is the steady attempts of their biology to fuse together, which once happens while they're having sex, and other times when they're sleeping. It gets so bad that their bodies are literally pulled together as if by unseen forces. The force is so powerful that it sends them into a bit of a trance, leading to a memorable scene of Tim in the shower and Millie against a frosted glass door. 

Eventually it seems like one of them will have to sacrifice themselves to save the other. They both try to do it, which is a touching indication of how much they actually do love each other. But then, to prevent Millie from dying of what should be a fatal knife wound, Tim decides to just let their bodies merge. This is accompanied by the great needle drop of "2 Become 1" by the Spice Girls, which we earlier learned was Millie's favorite band. Yes, this movie has a sense of humor, and we start to see the bodies fuse beyond the point of no return. We already saw this happen earlier with the hikers, so we know it doesn't end well. 

What seems like it will just be a button is Millie's parents later arriving at the house for a Sunday lunch, one she's mentioned twice previously in the narrative. I think we're meant to assume it's the first time they've been to the couple's new country home. After they've rung the bell, we're bracing ourselves for what deformed freak is going to answer the door. After all, we saw both the dogs and the hikers that previously fused together into an unspeakable monstrosity.

The person who answers the door is:

A non-binary person, who says to their parents, casually, "Hey."

Roll credits. 

This is not Alison Brie. This is not Dave Franco. This is a different actor, and a different person entirely. 

Suddenly I realized that this movie was operating as an allegory for coming out as a trans person. 

And then I started to backtrack.

If I rewound 30 seconds -- in my mind only, since I saw this in the theater -- I realized that when Millie's parents got out of the car, they looked a little nervous but cautiously optimistic. It was not a look they'd have on their faces just from visiting their daughter's new home for the first time. It might be a look they'd have if they had been quarreling with her and this was an olive branch by both parties, but that's not something that was mentoned in the narrative. 

No, this is a look the parents would have if they were meeting their daughter for the first time after the daughter had come out either as non-binary or as a trans man. 

And this is what probably got me about that: One of my big emotional triggers is when a parent accepts their gay, trans or non-binary child. I can't explain exactly why this is an emotional trigger for me, because I don't have anyone in my family who can be described that way. But maybe it's just that as a parent, I hope I would do the same thing in their position, even if I were scared and even if I didn't fully understand. I would hope I would just love them unconditionally.

And it's unconditional love we see on the faces of Millie's parents, mixed in with their nervousness and cautious optimism.

So then I rewound a little further and remembered a line of dialogue earlier that told us what we were supposed to think about this visit by Millie's parents. It's the second time she mentioned it. In an argument with Tim, she said, "My parents are coming for lunch this weekend, and I don't think you should be here for that."

In other words, this alternate version of her should not be there. She was doubting she was ready to come out to them yet. 

We know she did eventually change her mind, and maybe "she" became a "they" when "two became one." Otherwise, Millie's parents would not have that look of nervousness and cautious optimism on their faces as they approached the house, ready to meet their daughter as a trans man or a non-binary person for the first time. 

On my second viewing, I couldn't map out everything perfectly. There's a subplot about Tim's recently deceased parents that seems like a red herring in terms of this interpretation of the movie. Unless ... unless you see this as a projection of the fact that Millie's parents might be "dead to her," in a sense, if they do not accept her new publicly presented identity. 

But I think that's because Together doesn't want this to be the only interpretation of the movie. On Filmspotting when talking about Weapons, Josh Larsen recently said that a school shooting metaphor was an "available" interpretation of the movie. I think Shanks and company also wanted the trans allegory to be an "available" interpretation of their movie, not the only one -- but with plenty of Easter eggs for those wanting to follow that interpretation to its logical ends. Such as:

1) There's a scene earlier in the film when a slightly possessed Tim, who is basically becoming sickened by his compulsion to be near Millie, arrives at her school to finally have sex with her. They run into a nearby available bathroom to do this, but of course, this is a school bathroom used by students, and we see a pair of young feet appear outside the cubicle, wondering what's going on inside there. When Millie emerges by herself, leaving Tim to remain hiding, we realize that this is a boys bathroom, and the senior teacher, Jamie, says to her, trying to put her transgression in context, "Miss Wilson, this is a bathroom for little boys." On the surface, yes, this is a problem because it suggests an inappropriate relationship between an adult and a child. But if you are already looking at this as a trans allegory, it's a moment of shame for Millie because she is trying to use a different bathroom from her biological gender assignment. 

2) Then there's Jamie. Is it a coincidence that Jamie has a name that could belong equally well to a man or a woman? I think it isn't. Part of the character's function in the story can be interpreted as trying to draw Millie out and show her it's okay to come out as trans. We are very much meant to believe this is a journey Jamie already went through, which is hidden within a plot about the cult that used to operate out of the cave where Tim and Millie drank that poisonous water.

3) In this allegory, Millie is the "real" character and Tim is an embodiment of the potential future version of herself. She's trying to get Tim to "commit" to being the forward-facing personality, and Tim's refusal to do so is the thing that saddens her so much. But it's really Millie who can't commit, and Tim is just the symbol of her struggle. Although Tim is not portrayed effeminately in any clear way -- remember, this is a Trojan horse interpretation built into this otherwise mainstream movie -- some of his costume choices and hairstyle choices read as androgynous, if you are looking for this. 

4) When both Tim and Millie try to save each other at the end, it could be interpreted as the character's flirtation with suicide. We know that a person with this sort of body dysmorphia, who does not believe they can come out as another gender becaue of how their loved ones will react, often considers suicide. So the decision to finally come out is akin to the choice not to go through with the suicide. So in a way, the new half of the personality has saved the original one from extinction. The character's journey is to realize that selecting to present yourself as a different gender, or no gender at all, does not mean that the world will view you as an unspeakable monstrosity. 

I could go on, but you get the idea. 

If you've seen the movie, and you either didn't see this, or saw it but didn't think it worked, or saw it and thought it worked within the context of the movie but you don't care about this as a mission for a movie, that's fine. You do you. I'll just say that for me, this was a revelatory way of sneaking in a hidden intepretation of a movie that doesn't demand to be dealt with, but is "available" if you want it.

It doesn't even matter that the hidden interpretation was about a trans person considering coming out. I know that could make it divisive to some viewers. What matters, to me, is that it's got a hidden interpretation at all. The fact that this hidden interpretation also has a socially forward function that I embrace, and that this can therefore be seen as an extremely happy ending, just makes it all the better in terms of my appreciation. 

And you know what? Maybe it isn't even the only hidden interpretation in Together. It's just the only one I happened to excavate. 

Movies that operate on multiple levels, with multiple available interpretations to different viewers, are always the best uses of the unique tool that is cinema. 

The fact that I didn't even realize it was doing it until the very final shot?

Well for me, that's something worth celebrating by making it my #1 of the year.

2025, all together in one place

New Year's resolution: It's time to stop judging myself for breaking viewing records.

A year ago, after ranking 177 movies that qualified for 2024, and besting my previous record by two movies, I told you it didn't bother me because I was sure to lose 25 movies from that total in 2025. My logic was that I was going to Europe for six weeks during the second half of the year, when there are a lot of current year movies available for rental and when I start to really goose my numbers, and if I kept up my usual pace during that stretch, I'd be doing Europe wrong and somebody should slap me.

As it turned out, I did go to Europe, I did only watch nine movies in the month of September (only five of which qualified for ranking this year), and yet at some point, I still noticed I was 19 movies ahead of last year's pace. And even as events in my real life intervened in December and January, and I made intentional efforts of throttling my viewing, I could tell at a certain point that I still had a lot of must-see movies. Even a reasonable viewing schedule over the remaining days was going to result in a new record. 

So that's what happened as I finished with 184 movies ranked in 2025, a new record by seven. At least I didn't beat it by 19. 

These things should be as organic as you can make them. You can't specifically fear a certain total of movies because you're worried about what it says about you and how you spend your time. I've long since gone all in on watching movies at the necessary expense of other ways I could spend my time -- the fact that I have no nighttime sports to watch in Australia helps with that -- and no mid-life reassessment will likely cause me to reconsider. I should just own it and damn the consequences, which are nothing more than your perception of me and perhaps my own perception of myself. (My family life has not been suffering from it, at least not that I know of.) 

I knew, as it was early January and the record was looming, that I wasn't going to arbitrarily sacrifice some of the movies I hadn't yet seen just to avoid some arbitrary ranking total. This process is about seeing a large sampling of movies from the year, in as many genres as possible, both significant and insignificant, to build up a dynamic list that contains both awful howlers at the bottom, and movies I never imagined I'd see rising to the top. It's not about aiming for a specific total or avoiding a specific total. Let the chips fall where they may in the course of living your life. 

Maybe if I really want to diet in 2026, I shouldn't fatten up on buddy comedies straight to the streamers in March and April, since those are not likely to be either great or out-and-out terrible, and are really just list filler. But then, if I had such a cynical view of the potential of unexpected movies to be great, I mightn't be doing this in the first place.

Regarding 2025 specifically, my top ten is not going to look like last year's top ten, when I had six movies that went on to be nominated for best picture. I predict only one or two this year. And consistent with the weird 2025 it was, I did not have a single dominant film that demanded to be my #1, though I became more comfortable with my eventual #1 after a second viewing confirmed and in fact deepened my appreciation of it. 

So without further ado, let's get into it. 

Even when I set records, there are still movies I regret not getting to, movies that sat on my Letterboxd watchlist a good chunk of the year and could never be freed from it. Here are the five omissions from the following rankings that I am sorriest about:

5. The Testament of Ann Lee - I hear great things about Amanda Seyfried's performance. Pretty much no one got to see this one in time.

4. Father Mother Sister Brother - I was looking forward to this Jim Jarmusch film all year, but it never really surfaced. I guess now it's available on MUBI, but it wouldn't be in Australia, even if I still subscribed. 

3. Eternity - This was available in theaters and for a $19.99 iTunes rental, but I just couldn't fit it in, though high-concept movies like this are just my bread and butter. 

2. Marty Supreme - It opened yesterday in Australian cinemas, but my date with David Byrne, as I wrote about earlier in the week, prevented me from seeing it. 

1. Sirat - I understand this is wild, but seeing it at an advanced screening in two weeks is not early enough for it to make this list. 

And five other prominent movies that I just couldn't or didn't fit in:

5. Ballerina - I've had enough of the John Wick Universe.
4. Lilo & Stitch - I am purposefully excluding one Disney movie per year these days. This was it for this year.

3. Song Sung Blue - End of year crunch, Neil Diamond not enough of a draw for me. 

2. Christy - I did see the three other Sydney Sweeney movies in 2025. 

1. Rental Family - End of year crunch, was sort of intrigued by this. 

As usual I will go into detail on my top ten and less detail on my bottom five, then leave the whole enchilada for you to consider. 

10. Train Dreams - One of my fiercest competitions this year was between my #10 and my #11, and in deciding which one ultimately won out, I just asked myself which one's merits I felt better able to declaim in a short capsule form like this one. And so I ultimately went with Train Dreams, and you can look below to see who lost out in order not to further cut into the real estate earned by Clint Bentley's film. (Also, this does allow Netflix to get one movie in my top ten, after just missing out on two others.) Train Dreams is like what I want every Terrence Malick film to be, but what they so rarely are. Using a memorable voiceover from Will Patton, the film follows a number of years in the life of a logger, railway worker and other completer of small jobs (Joel Edgerton) that require him to be away from his wife (Felicity Jones) and child for extended periods of time, in the Pacific Northwest between approximately the 1920s and 1960s. Like Malick's Days of Heaven specifically, it appears to be shot entirely at magic hour, and it's wonderful to be transported both to this part of the world in these moments of history, and to an older school style of filmmaking that we don't see much anymore. The deep melancholy of this film connected with me in the way that frequently occurs with films that explore what I have called the "uncontrollable slippage of time," as Bentley beautifully uses an elliptical style to remind us that we sometimes aren't present for our life until it's too late, and sometimes not even through any fault of our own. I suspect I will revisit Train Dreams again just to bathe in its vibe, even if part of that vibe is to acquaint us with the loss and regret we all feel.

9. Companion - The sixth movie I saw in 2025 stuck with me, and I knew it was not going to get a lot more clever this year than Drew Hancock's film. Prompting me to ask at the time: Drew Hancock, where have you been all my life? Everybody knows by now that Companion is a movie about a world where people have sex with and relationships with artificial intelligence robots, but the joy the movie takes in teasing this out in its first few minutes, through suggestive dialogue and other environmental queues, is just a preview of Hancock's masterful command of the perfect time and way to reveal information. And there are plenty more surprising reveals in the movie, which genuinely surprise in the moment, even though after the fact you feel like you should have been a step ahead and guessed it. Excellent writing prevents a viewer from getting ahead of the story, and I was putty in Hancock's hands. The story constantly sets up information and pays it off in funny ways, but this is more than just a "friends in the woods when shit goes down movie," though it's also a very enjoyable version of that. Companion also has profound contemplations on the selfhood of artificial intelligence, and whether it's possible to be exploiting such a being while also actually being in love with it. This is one of those good times that just keeps escalating and making smarter decisions as it goes, and I'm looking forward to my third viewing. Bonus points to Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid for their really charismatic performances. 

8. Vulcanizadora - One of the bleakest films of 2025 actually held my #1 spot for a while, before I realized it was not something I was coming back to regularly in my thoughts. A sequel of sorts to Joel Potrykus' 2014 film Buzzard, in that it features the same characters (one of them played by Potrykus himself, who was just a minor character in Buzzard), this is the grim story of two depressed friends who head deep into the woods to carry out a solemn pact, which I won't spoil for you, but which is probably pretty close to what you might be imagining. The exact details of that pact, though, are specific and horrifying. It's hard to talk about this film without going into more details about the story, but let's just say it spends a significant amount of time without revealing what the pact is, as these men engage in mumblecore-style conversations about ordinary topics and hypothetical scenarios. (The other is played by Joshua Burge as the wonderfully named Marty Jackitansky.) These men also show how stunted they might be, as they spend time on what seem like childish activities, messing around with fireworks and banging trees with sticks. When the depths of what's cast a cloud over them finally become clear, it swoops in with devastating emotional impact, and without saying what happens when they reach their destination, the remainder of the film deals with the aftermath. Buzzard never hit harder for me than as a weird curiosity that I admired, but Potrykus takes it to the next level here, while never sacrificing any of the weirdness and never letting us off the hook with pat conclusions. It's this year's version of The Coffee Table for me in that it's not for the faint of heart, but it should be for everybody else. 

7. 1001 Frames - My #6 is also a movie I saw at this year's MIFF, but my #7 takes my annual slot for "MIFF movie no one has ever heard of, at least not yet." It's one of two Iranian films in my top ten, and it heavily features what has historically been a trademark of the country's feature films: their blending of reality with fiction. The premise is that a famous director, mostly off screen, is interviewing actresses to play Scheherazade for his new film version of her story. Over the course of 87 minutes, we see as many as 20 of them on screen, sitting in (or sometimes pacing around) a single chair in an empty warehouse. Some are timid, some are brassy. Some the director knows from previous experiences, some are brand new to him. All become increasingly upset as he makes insinuations about what might be needed to win the role, and as he invades their personal space. And it soon becomes clear that getting out of the room won't be as simple as just walking to the door. This would not have been one of my more tense and intense viewing experiences of 2025 if it were just an ordinary #metoo cautionary tale about a director with too much power and too few checks on his behavior -- an especially frightening prospect in a patriarchal society like Iran. So it's obviously more than that, but I care enough about keeping its secrets not to tell you how it's more than that. I will tell you, though, that the director character, Mohammad Aghebati, is playing himself, and though I don't believe they are ever named, the actresses are playing themselves as well. The actual writer-director of the film is Mehrnoush Alia, and I can't wait to see more from her -- including possibly her 2015 short, Scheherazade, of which this is a feature-length version. 

6. The Ballad of Wallis Island - The guy who nearly made John Carney's Once his #1 of 2007, until There Will be Blood came along, is still in there somewhere. There are plenty of more "important" films that will finish lower in my rankings, but The Ballad of Wallis Island reminds us that sometimes we go to the movies to be transported into gentle comedies with a heavy dose of wistfulness, that take place entirely on an island off Britain too small to even have a proper dock for arriving boats. The Once comparison comes from the fact that Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan were once McGwyer Mortimer, a folk duo who made sweet harmonies that are reminiscent, perhaps only in a superficial way, of those made by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. If there's a reason these two can't be together romantically, it's because they've already tried that and it didn't work. Now, about a decade after breaking up, they've both been called out to the titular island by an eccentric man with a bushy beard who lives there (Tim Key, who co-wrote with Basden), for a reunion gig -- the circumstances of which neither of them signed on for. Especially led by Key's performance, James Griffiths' film embodies the sort of low-key British humor we've loved since the run of films started by The Full Monty, adding one more local eccentric (Sian Clifford) to balance the two musicians and give us whimsy in small enough doses to charm our pants off. There's also loss and regret baked into this film that sensitively considers our capacity to love and make art. I can only really describe it in the way I started out my MIFF review of it, that Wallis Island is a "dopey grin" movie -- which is not an underhanded compliment in the slightest. 

5. Predator: Badlands - I'd say I can't recall the last time two consecutive movies in a series made my top ten, but a) it just happened with Dune and b) it's not actually happening with the most recent two Predator movies, because 2025 also featured the animated movie Predator: Killer of Killers to split them up. But there is now zero doubt after Prey (#7 of 2022) and Predator: Badlands that director Dan Trachtenberg has totally taken control of this previously moribund franchise, and steered it into the realm of the consistently creative and the frequently jaw-dropping. He dropped our jaws then by putting a Yautja (I didn't know they were called that either) up against Comanche of the early 18th century, and he does it now by making a Yautja the lead character -- and not featuring any humans in the cast at all. (Elle Fanning plays a Weyland-Yutani android -- two of them, actually.) The thing that amazed me most about Predator: Badlands is that it amazed me. Although I think the Yautja effects are mostly practical, the movie relies on digital for some of the other things it's doing -- like showing us only half of Fanning as an android without legs -- and it's been some time since digital effects delivered such sheer wonder to me. The movie also captures the prestige and alienation of the aforementioned Dune movies, but you know what it does that the Dune movies don't? It makes us laugh, with Fanning producing some of the year's funniest line deliveries, and even Kiwi actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi getting off some good one-liners -- in a made-up language, no less. Oh yeah, that's another amazing thing this movie does: It only translates his dialogue through subtitles. We should demand that our popular entertainment demands more from us in terms of our traditional comfort levels, because the rewards are rich indeed. This was my only five-star movie of the year, though that counterintuitively landed it at only fifth for the year. 

4. Echo Valley - How did a "well-made Lifetime movie of the week," as I have heard Echo Valley described, make my top four of the year, and at one point hold the #1 spot for more than a month? Easy: A terrific lead performance from Julianne Moore, and a nightmarish dilemma for parents of wayward children, seen out to its logical ends. Moore plays a recently widowed lesbian who is now trying to oversee their horse farm by herself, who was once at least passing for heterosexual and had a daughter (Sydney Sweeney), who in her early 20s is now a certified disaster and drug addict, mixed up with sketchy people. The daughter relies on her mother for support, financial and otherwise, making nice until she gets what she needs from her, and then goes off the rails again. Instead of reminding me of a Lifetime movie of the week -- the acting and directing (by Michael Pearce) are too good for that -- it reminds me of one of these intimate domestic crime thrillers of yesteryear, something like Ulee's Gold, which is high praise from me. Proving a mother will go to incredible lengths to protect even a child she should have written off years ago, the sequence of events that plays out in this one is a doozy -- but sadly, may only be one example from a toxic relationship dynamic where the mother just can't quit her daughter. Sweeney, in a smaller role, is also great, and there's terrific support from Fiona Shaw as a fellow lesbian who tries to help out, and a particularly icky Domhnall Gleeson playing a much more three-dimensional villain that he played in Star Wars. It all adds up to something that sticks with you -- or at least, as a parent, it stuck with me. 

3. It Was Just an Accident - I spent the first portion of It Was Just an Accident thinking that Jafar Panahi would just never be able to measure up to perennial top-tenner and fellow countryman Asgar Farhadi in my heart, and then the movie came thundering home for me in its final 30 minutes. Turns out all I needed was for Panahi to stop experimenting with non-films (many of which were made as such to get around government censorship) and make something of a Farhadi-style social drama. This is a great "strange bedfellows" movie, as a steadily accumulating number of former Irani political prisoners begin riding around in a van carrying a bound and gagged man, the man they believe tortured them when they were held captive. But they can't be sure it's him because they never properly saw him, only going on his voice and on the fact that he's got an artificial leg. Here Panahi explores the limits of the revenge impulse, especially when the desire for righteous fulfillment of that impulse is complicated by the fact that it could be targeting an innocent man. On what becomes a sort of circular road trip movie, there are a number of developments and reversals and moments when the characters' basic humanity comes into the light, when they do things to help this man and his family, even if he is who they think he is. The film really stakes its claim to greatness in the endgame, as there's a powerful confrontation followed by a final image that is both ominous and, in my mind, unspeakably optimistic, depending on whether you take it literally or metaphorically. How can one movie end on a note that is both ominous and optimistic? That's the little miracle -- the little accident, you might say -- of It Was Just an Accident. 

2. Sinners - Instead of emphasizing why Ryan Coogler's Sinners made it all the way up to my #2, I'll start by telling you why it isn't my #1. There is a not-insignificant portion of the second half of this film -- like, maybe as long as a half-hour -- that has major pacing problems and sequencing problems, placing lower stakes developments later in the narrative than higher stakes developments. That such a large portion of the running time could have these problems, and yet the film could still finish as my runner up for the year, tells you just how good the rest of the movie is, and just how close Coogler came to becoming the first Black director to earn a #1 from me -- instead settling for his second second-place finish after Creed in 2015. Everything before the sun sets in Sinners -- in other words, before anything really happens -- is an absolute master class in drawing a time, a place, and a series of characters, who we feel we know intimately despite the economy of time we've spent with them. The supporting cast is all first rate, but it's the two Michael B. Jordans -- with two distinct personalities as Smoke and Stack -- to whom this film really belongs, as Coogler continues to get the absolute best from his muse. And then, not long after the sun does set, we get maybe the cinematic set piece of the entire year, a musical sequence I could probably spoil -- who hasn't seen Sinners? -- but won't, just for the one or two of you out there who may not have. It's kind of what Damien Chazelle tried to do at the end of Babylon, only it works -- in fact, it works like such gangbusters, I still get chills any time I think of it. It's this true movie magic, and not the vampire stuff, that makes Sinners such an indelible experience -- though the vampire stuff is fun as hell, too. The race allegories are not perfectly delineated, but they also give us something to chew on, which feels especially urgent this year. 

1. Together - We know movies must make a good first impression. Professionals vetting a script will give up on it if they aren't grabbed within five pages. But it's the final impression that determines how you feel about a film, and I had a unique experience with this year's #1: the very last image of the film entirely changed my impression of what the movie I'd just been watching had actually been doing. In a year in which I gave out only one five-star rating and it was for a sci-fi action movie, that was reason enough to honor Michael Shanks' Together as my #1 movie of the year. I've been steadfast in keeping the secret of that final image, because I want people to have the experience I had with the movie. But let's just say that even before you realize the untold thematic depths of this movie -- which only became richer for me on my second viewing -- you've already got a very sturdy and very icky body horror that is using the potential merging of the bodies of two people (real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie) as a metaphor for commitment jitters. Together does the work of convincing us it might exist purely on this simpler genre level, as it's replete with gross moments -- but also scary images that are among the best that recent prestige horror has to offer, that don't specifically rely on fusing flesh. Franco and Brie fully commit, as it were, with a sprinkle of supporting help from Aussie Damon Herriman. (Together also has my favorite needle drop of the year, in a moment that reveals its sense of humor.) But as I said, there's something deeper going on here than this film's skin suggests, and if you come back three days from now, I might be writing a spoiler post that reveals what that is. The best proof that this was my favorite of 2025 was that tingle of anticipation I got when I sat down, three weeks ago, to watch it again and confirm its spot. It's the same tingle I got anticipating my second viewing of last year's #1, The Substance, to which this bears some similarities that I may also explore in the coming days. When something reaches the pinnacle of your affection, you feel it in your bones -- again with the biological metaphors -- and that's the feeling I have toward this year's #1. 

And before we get to the whole list, we are duty bound to shine the interrogation room lamp on the five worst as well:

180. Shelby Oaks - Kogonada is a good YouTube film essayist-turned-movie director. Chris Stuckmann is not. When I thought this was just a found footage horror movie, I thought it was a perplexing anachronism in 2025 but I was still cautiously optimistic. When I then discovered, after something like 20 minutes, that it was actually a bad regular horror sloppily affixed to the trappings of the found footage horror, I thought it was a total, and at times laughable, failure. 

181. Superman - Never have I wanted to separate myself more from the right-wing trolls who were deriding the film because James Gunn called it an immigrant story. Never have I been less able to make a case for that separation based on the contents or quality of the film. Nothing about the politics of the film has anything to do with the fact that it is an incoherent, bloated mess that features things like a pocket dimension, Lois Lane flying a spaceship, and an annoying super dog. I was out from the first minutes. 

 

182. Fear Street: Prom Queen - In 2021, Leigh Janiak made a really interesting three-movie Netflix series set in three different time periods and using three different styles of horror movie. In 2025, Matt Palmer followed that up with a single steaming pile of shit that was totally lacking in any of the inspiration of its forbears. 

183. Holland - Unless you've seen Holland it is impossible to describe what a bizarre little disaster this movie is, which is a shame because I really liked Mimi Cave's previous film, Fresh. Yes, Nicole Kidman's face looks weird in it, but the worse problem is that her frozen face is a metaphor for exactly how uncanny and poorly conceived this domestic thriller, about the titular Michigan town, really is. I was sure this would end up as my worst film of the year, but ... 

184. War of the Worlds - Oh my. If we're talking outdated gimmicks in the reference to Shelby Oaks a moment ago, the "it all takes place on a screen" movie is similarly bereft of value, but especially so when it features an inert Ice Cube fused to his desk chair, robotically sending out communications to his children and others out there in the world as aliens attack. Rich Lee's film feels like a COVID movie in the worst way, and this is as stilted of a performance and a script as they get, never mind the impossibility of keeping track of everything through screen swipes and footage that comes in fully edited from camera angles that could never exist. It's been a long time since I've seen a 2.5 rating on IMDB for a movie that wasn't being specifically targeted by trolls. 

And all 184, start to finish! 

1. Together

2. Sinners

3. It Was Just an Accident

4. Echo Valley

5. Predator: Badlands

6. The Ballad of Wallis Island

7. 1001 Frames

8. Vulcanizadora

9. Companion

10. Train Dreams

11. Twinless

12. A House of Dynamite
13. The Perfect Neighbor
14. The Life of Chuck

15. Wolf Man
16. Good Fortune

17. The Monkey

18. One Battle After Another

19. The Naked Gun

20. Bring Her Back

21. Zodiac Killer Project

22. Sex

23. Splitsville

24. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

25. The Penguin Lessons

26. Prime Minister

27. Blue Moon

28. Final Destination: Bloodlines

29. Paddington in Peru

30. Jay Kelly

31. Nouvelle Vague

32. Familiar Touch

33. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

34. Grand Tour

35. Caught Stealing

36. Die My Love

37. The Roses

38. One of Them Days

39. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

40. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

41. Spit

42. Freaky Tales

43. Sketch

44. Lurker

45. Ash

46. Dangerous Animals

47. Eephus

48. The Salt Path

49. Sentimental Value

50. Deep Cover

51. The Secret Agent

52. Weapons

53. The Assessment

54. The Electric State

55. Titan: The Oceangate Submersible Disaster

56. Resurrection

57. Pavements

58. The Long Walk

59. Sorry, Baby

60. Deaf President Now!

61. The Phoenician Scheme

62. Thunderbolts*

63. No Other Choice

64. Oh, Hi!

65. One More Shot

66. The Mastermind

67. Banger

68. The Rule of Jenny Pen

69. Predator: Killer of Killers

70. 28 Years Later

71. Back in Action

72. The Actor

73. Jurassic World: Rebirth

74. Tron: Ares

75. The Friend

76. Bugonia

77. Eden

78. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

79. Mistress Dispeller

80. Happy Gilmore 2

81. Eddington

82. The Baltimorons

83. Frankenstein

84. A Minecraft Movie

85. Avatar: Fire and Ash

86. The Woman in the Yard

87. Wicked: For Good

88. Nonnas

89. Hedda

90. Captain America: Brave New World

91. Inside

92. Parthenope

93. Steve

94. Highest 2 Lowest

95. F1

96. Elio

97. Brick

98. The Toxic Avenger

99. When Fall is Coming

100. Presence

101. William Tell

102. Bob Trevino Likes It

103. The Surfer

104. The Alto Knights

105. F Marry Kill

106. The Woman in Cabin 10

107. KPop Demon Hunters

108. Heads of State

109. The Wrong Paris

110. Novocaine

111. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

112. Honey Don't!

113. Rust

114. By Design

115. Becoming Led Zeppelin

116. Death Does Not Exist

117. Zootopia 2

118. Inheritance

119. Freakier Friday

120. Love Hurts

121. The Housemaid

122. The Shrouds

123. Warfare

124. Last Breath

125. The Thursday Murder Club

126. Karate Kid: Legends

127. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

128. La Dolce Villa

129. The Smashing Machine

130. Until Dawn

131. Havoc

132. The Gorge

133. Swiped

134. The Sand Castle

135. How to Train Your Dragon

136. Con Mum

137. In the Lost Lands

138. Opus

139. Death of a Unicorn

140. Shell

141. G20

142. The Life List

143. Black Bag

144. Him

145. Ballad of a Small Player

146. She Loved Blossoms More

147. Roofman

148. Hamnet

149. Friendship

150. The Old Guard 2

151. The Fantastic Four: First Steps

152. Redux Redux

153. Good Boy

154. Hurry Up Tomorrow

155. After the Hunt

156. The Pickup

157. Heart Eyes

158. Fountain of Youth

159. Five Nights at Freddy's 2

160. Another Simple Favor

161. Black Phone 2

162. Drop

163. I Know What You Did Last Sumer

164. Kinda Pregnant

165. Keeper

166. The Running Man

167. Night Always Comes

168. The Conjuring: Last Rites

169. Anaconda

170. The Amateur

171. M3GAN 2.0

172. Oh. What. Fun.

173. Clown in a Cornfield

174. Snow White

175. Mickey 17

176. A Working Man

177. You're Cordially Invited

178. Materialists

179. Playdate

180. Shelby Oaks

181. Superman

182. Fear Street: Prom Queen

183. Holland

184. War of the Worlds

And finally, ten movies from this list that I thought required a line further of explanation:

12. A House of Dynamite - I was taken aback for about ten seconds, but then I actually liked that ending! 

24. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey - This was supposed to be Kogonada's big whiff, but the family role-playing stuff in the final third really got me. 

49. Sentimental Value - I have one Australian friend who agrees this is overrated, who calls it "bang-on fine," which is a phrasing I would like to steal.

52. Weapons - Zach Cregger's cinematic energy is something I really cherish, but this film also left me nit-picking, just like Barbarian did. 

87. Wicked: For Good - A far cry from the first one, which was my #2 of last year.

111. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl - I was too mad that they showered so much posthumous praise on Uncle Fred, such that it affected my ability to properly assess the movie itself. 

117. Zootopia 2 - A far cry from the first one, which was my #3 of 2016. 

148. Hamnet - Stop it, Chloe Zhao. I have zero interest in crying, and the more you try to make me, the less interest I have.

175. Mickey 17 - Bong Joon-ho has had better days and will have them again. 

178. Materialists - Celine Song has had better days but may not have them again. 

That's a wrap on another year. No wait, it isn't. Two more wrap-up posts on the next two days and then a deep dive into my #1 the day after that. Won't you join us? 

New duplicates

There's a lot I could say about Michael Shanks' Together, which has jumped up near the top of my 2025 rankings, but some of what I would say is deep into spoiler territory, as well as my own alternate reading of the film, which didn't occur to me until its very last shot.

But, I'm sick.

So I'll just set aside the really interesting stuff today and write my second straight post about movie titles.

July was an interesting month in that I added four titles to my big movie list that were already on it.

How is that possible, you ask? How can you add a movie to a list when it is already on the list?

I didn't say the movie was on the list. I said the title.

It's not so profound as my succession of short paragraphs makes it sound. I mean, it isn't a hugely surprising thing to see a movie that has the same title as another movie you've already seen.

It is, I would argue, somewhat unusual to see so many within a short period of time. 

As you recall from this post, in April I did a mini project of ranking movies by their titles. The project entailed me finding movies with the same title that were not remakes of or sequels to each other, and determining which shared titles represented the best collective quality between all the movies that shared that title, all the way down to the worst. Yes, I have too much spare time on my hands, apparently.

That project produced only 47 titles that qualified during my whole history of watching movies. So yes, it's unusual that I would have added four to that list in only a single month this year.

The first of those is Thirst, a 1979 Australian vampire film directed by Rod Hardy that I quite liked, which I watched on July 3rd. That made it a duplicate of Park Chan-wook's 2009 film Thirst, which I also quite liked, and is also a vampire film, but not a remake of the 1979 film -- believe me, I checked. Thirst is just a good title for a movie about creatures who desire blood.

Moving forward a little more than a week, on July 11th I watched The Avengers, Jeremiah S. Chechik's 1998 film that I watched on the plane when I could not watch any more 2025 films that I had to give my full attention. This was also the film that, when Joss Whedon's The Avengers was released in 2012, made me think "We already had a movie called The Avengers." Little did I know what kind of behemoth would be launched by Whedon's film.

The final two have come within the past week. Last Sunday night I watched Brick, a 2025 German language film directed by Philip Koch, which was sold to me by Netflix as in the same vein as Cube and The Platform. It is, sort of, but it is not as good as those movies. That made this a duplicate of Rian Johnson's 2005 film Brick, which is certainly technically a better film than Johnson's, but which I probably don't like as much because I had a pretty negative reaction to it when I first saw it, and a second viewing only improved my impression somewhat. 

Finally we have Together, the movie about a couple in a rut who start to get physically stuck to one another (and so much more), watched on the final day of the month. This shares a title with Lukas Moodysson's 2000 film Together, which I wrote about lovingly here, about Swedes living on a commune.

So what?

Yeah except I like to write posts like this. Hang with me. It's been an issue in my life a little bit lately, for reasons I'll explain.

I actually don't like watching movies with the same titles. I grumble and think that the second film should have tried harder to think of something distinctive. There are an unlimited number of possible combinations of words out there -- just think of a different one to describe the events that happen in your movie. Yes many repeated titles are the generic rather than the specific ones, and a generic title can be preferable because it can be easier to remember. But you know, then I have to include the year in parentheses after the title when I update a list that includes both movies, just to distinguish them from one another, when you could have done that yourself by just thinking about it for another 15 minutes and coming up with something else.

But you know what? I am actually taking the opposite position in a scenario I'm very tangentially involved in, in my real life.

I won't go into too many particulars to protect her privacy, but my wife is actually producing a film for a director trying to make his first feature film, whose short she produced about eight years ago. The title of this film is a woman's name. Or was. Or actually still is, but now it's a different woman's name.

See, the original title has been dropped because it shares the name of another film. This other film is not even a film I've heard of, though the director is well known. The sales agent argued, quite unfoundedly I think, that they can't use the original name because it would cause too much confusion with this other film -- this other film that I, a person who has seen 7,033 films, has never heard of. I'm not sure that my wife or the director were compelled to take this advice, but they'd have to have a fairly convincing reason not to, so they've taken it.

Now the original name, exotic but familiar enough to remember, has been replaced by a name that's very exotic and very hard to remember, because it's not a name I've ever even heard before.

I tried to convince my wife not to take the advice of the sales agent. That's how I'm tangentially involved. But there was never very much of a chance my opinion would provide them a perspective that they hadn't already considered themselves, and indeed, they are going forward with the new name for the main character and the movie proposed by the sales agent.

My point in telling you this is: I'm inconsistent as hell.

But in terms of movies I'm actually watching, I won't let a movie having the same title as another movie prevent me from seeing it. I even intentionally complicated things for myself by watching two different movies called Swan Song that were both released in 2021, meaning I had to include the director's name in parentheses when I listed them in my year-end rankings that I published for you to read. I guess that was preferable to seeing only one of the two movies, and leaving you, the educated viewer who knows all the movies released in any given year, to wonder which of two movies of approximately equal prominence I was actually ranking. 

In terms of the month of July, both the best movie I saw that month (Together) and the worst (The Avengers) were new duplicates. 

I promise I won't hunt out more new duplicates in August just so I can write another post like this a month from now.

Reconsidering the theatrical imperative

There, did I get your attention with my highfalutin, graduate-thesis title? Hope so.

Okay, on with the regular post.

It was pretty unlikely that I'd see Lukas Moodysson's Together even once, let alone twice. Yet last night it became the 429th movie I've seen more than once.

I owe both viewings to a random decision to see it in the theater ten years ago, in the middle of a weekday afternoon. Making it possibly my most unlikely theater-going experience ever.

I wish the idea of seeing a small Swedish film about life on a commune in the mid-1970s in the theater didn't seem so, well, foreign to me. But it's come to be so.

However, let's step back a little bit and consider the conditions under which I saw Together, known as Tilsammans in Sweden.

It was the summer of 2001, and I had only just moved to Los Angeles. Late summer, I guess, since I see that the U.S. release date of Together was August 24th. I was trying to earn my living exclusively as a critic back then, and had no job keeping me pinned to a desk during the day. That period of my life, with too much freedom and not enough pay, lasted only the first year I lived here. But during that year, I really could see a movie whenever, wherever I wanted.

The "wherever" part is the part that really interests me when it comes to Together. It wasn't playing in many theaters, pretty obviously, it being a small Swedish film. In fact, it was probably playing in fewer theaters than it would be today, since there's been something of a boom among theaters that show independent films in Los Angeles in the last decade, perhaps exemplified most in the growth and expansion of the Arclight brand. So to see Together, I had to drive to Pasadena -- which is closer to where I lived then than to where I live today, but still pretty far. Mapquest puts the drive at about 19 miles.

Not so far to go for a film you've been hugely anticipating that might be playing in limited release, but pretty far for a film you know nothing about. That's the thing -- I can't for the life of me remember how Together was even on my radar. It must have been the recommendation of a fellow critic, either made personally to me or something I read, but I just can't remember. But even if the film had been recommended, it still takes a few other factors to go from "hmm, maybe I'll see that" to "I'm buying tickets right now." One of those factors would likely be geographical convenience. Another might be money, and since I wasn't making much of it, I didn't have much of it.

Yet there I was, on a Thursday (let's say), driving to Pasadena and plopping down for the mid-afternoon showing of a delightful little movie about human beings living in close proximity, displaying behavior that runs quite contrary to their idealized philosophies of the world. And leaving feeling absolutely charged by its qualities as a film and the sensation it left with me.

Those were simpler times.

Today, my theatrical imperative has changed entirely. Never mind the fewer opportunities to go to the theater, which go hand-in-hand with my transition from a single freelancer to a married 9-to-5er with a 10-month-old. It's the type of movies I see in the theater that have also changed.

Nowadays, one of my post important criteria for seeing a movie in the theater is whether it will look significantly worse on DVD. You could call it the Avatar Theory. I knew (or at least suspected) that Avatar might not be a great movie, but if I was going to see it at all, might as well see it right -- on an IMAX screen in 3D. Even if there were a couple dozen films I didn't see in the theater in 2009 that deserved it more than Avatar, Avatar got the slot because of the uniqueness of its visual properties.

Now, Avatar may not be such a great example, since it was a bonafide ground-breaker that changed many of the rules. The problem comes when you start to apply Avatar logic to lesser films, whether its lesser visually or lesser in terms of plot. Like, "I better see Battle: Los Angeles in the theater because it won't look as good on TV." Turns out, it didn't look that good in the theater either.

Unfortunately, however flawed it might be, this has become a guiding principle for me, something I still follow today. Sometimes it leads me to smart viewings. For example, with The Tree of Life, I caught a non-blockbuster that needed to be seen in the theater in order to be fully appreciated. But sometimes it leads me to dumb ones, such as Tron: Legacy, because I know that the shred of sensory fulfillment I get from it will only be possible on the big screen. However, in the case of Tron: Legacy, I did find 20-30 minutes of sensory enjoyment to be worth the price of admission. Which, unfortunately, only reinforces my current theatrical imperative.

But last night's viewing of Together made me realize that I don't want to spend all my movie ticket money on loud, visually bombastic films that don't deserve it. I want to reward small movies from Sweden about communists trying to live together in harmony. I want to reward movies that make me leave the theater feeling joyous and fulfilled, not half-satisfied, trying to come up with the appropriately middling terminology to describe my experience.

Because let's face it, Together would never pass my current litmus test. It has a kind of muddy look (I think that's intentional) and it's not shot in a memorable way, though it's more than competent. Practically speaking, it's the kind of movie that's just as good small-screen watching as big-screen, as my wife and I discovered last night, when I was reminded how wonderful it was and she discovered that for the first time. But no movie is really as good on the small screen as the big, and in some cases, we don't even give them that opportunity.

So I hereby commit to changing my theatrical imperative. I hereby commit to not missing out on the Togethers of this world, just because they don't have explosions or aliens. Sure, I may have to commit my next couple theater-going experiences to the likes of Harry Potter, Cowboys and Aliens and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but I hope also to fit a Submarine, a Beginners or a Terry in there. Or something a lot less well-known, something I may not even know about right now because I'm concentrating only on seeing 20-foot-high CGI.

As for Together in particular, I feel like I should say a bit more about it, since it's currently available on Netflix streaming and you'd be well suited to seek it out. As discussed previously, it concerns about a dozen Swedes who live on a commune in 1975. The event that triggers most of the plot is when the sister of one of the commune's residents leaves her abusive husband and moves into the commune with her two kids, aged about 13 and 10. These three become our surrogates, newcomers to the daily commune existence as we are, seeing for the first time a host of colorful characters whose desire to live according to a political philosophy is outweighed only by their human foibles that make that impossible. The film simultaneously celebrates the post-hippie joy of their situation and their decidedly post-hippie tendency to argue and become frustrated with each other's shortcomings. Moodysson does a brilliant job developing his characters and ingratiating them to us, giving them all arcs that resolve in satisfactory ways, without the film ever seeming splintered or aimless. The best evidence of his humanistic approach is that even the man who hits his wife, causing her to seek refuge for herself and her kids in the commune, is essentially a sympathetic character just trying to rise above the things that make him human. The film is funny and sweet and satisfying.

And without a random Thursday afternoon trip to the movies ten years ago, I might never know this.