Since I posted my 2024 rankings, I have already watched five movies that I'd already seen, fulfilling that part of the deal. But by Friday night, when I watched my fifth movie from 2025 before the calendar even flipped over to February, the count of 2025 movies to pre-2025 movies that I hadn't seen was 5-4.
Incidentally, this has to be the first time I could already make a complete top five of the new year before January was even over.
It's obvious why that might be the case. Up until the last decade, but really maybe only the past five years, you had to go to the theater if you wanted to start compiling titles for the new year. And since many of the new titles released that time of year were not particularly appetizing, I often skipped them until they were available on video. Sometimes, I wasn't even making my first theater trip of the new year until mid-February.
Streaming? There was no such thing. And even when streaming started, the streamers were in the business of bringing you those old movies, the kind that would usually fill my first six weeks after my ranking deadline, not titles they were launching themselves as brand new content.
But true enough, Friday night's viewing of Presence, Steven Soderbergh's new "horror" movie (more on those quotation marks in a moment), marked my fifth viewing of 2025, following Back in Action, Wolf Man, The Sand Castle and You're Cordially Invited. If I get my way and get out to the theater tonight, Companion will make that six movies by February 2nd. (I'm going out of sequence writing about these movies, for the purposes of time sensitive elements in some posts. I've already got a post about The Sand Castle -- or inspired by The Sand Castle, not really about it -- in the can, along with about three other finished posts that will one day see the light of day.)
Easily my favorite of those movies, Leigh Whannell's Wolf Man, I have not even written about. And I'm actually aware of at least a couple other titles -- Dave Bautista is in one of them -- that have a 2025 release date on one of the streamers, but that I haven't watched yet.
Now, I've still only been out to the theater once, for Wolf Man. That should have been how I had to see Presence, but this was the unusual case of a truly high-profile movie from a truly high-profile director that got offered to me as a screener at home. I guess they do that if they don't plan to schedule an advanced screening in the cinema, but I was surprised to see that for this one, especially with a director like Steven Soderbergh attached, and a star of Lucy Liu's general (but fading) prominence.
And so when I watched it, it was a wee bit of a distraction to see my own email address burned into the upper right-corner of the screener, to safeguard against piracy. Not too much of a distraction, I think, to give the movie a fair assessment.
Which I don't actually have to do, because I'm not the one reviewing it. One of my other writers is, and given that he'll have had more than a week to see it and write the review before the movie actually opens on Thursday, and can watch it from his own couch, I hope it's not one he'll be able to flake on. (This comment is not to undercut him or any of my other writers, but let's just say I'm older than they are, and I understand my own commitment to the commitments I've made better than I understand theirs.)
I put the genre "horror" in quotation marks because I did not find the film to be very scary overall. I found it to be more in the register of something like David Lowery's A Ghost Story, which also does have a few frightening moments. And should ordinarily be a great point of comparison, given that this movie was my #1 of 2017, but I didn't find that Soderbergh executed exactly what I wanted from his POV ghost story, despite some great moments and an overall clear-eyed perspective on what he wanted to do. I think it was what happens at the end that didn't work for me, but of course I won't tell you about that.
Companion, if I see it tonight, could really get me back on track after a couple movies in a row that didn't live up to my expectations. It's got a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it seems like a mix of horror and comedy that just crowned a #1 for me in The Substance. Speaking of #1s.
Now that I am, indeed, sprinting toward the possibility of a new record number of movies watched in 2025 -- a record I really don't want to set -- at least I think I might stop going fishing. What I mean by that is that on Wednesday night, when I watched The Sand Castle -- a movie I had never heard of before going into Netflix that night -- I went on the service with the intention of casting about for my third movie of 2025, not sure what would bite the bait. Now that I've almost doubled that total a few days later, maybe it's time to take my foot off the gas again and just go back to watching random crap from other years.
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