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? 

I'm not taking a half day off work to see Marty Supreme

Here we are, down to my last post before I reveal my 2025 rankings tomorrow.

And as much as I would have liked to have written a post called "Final movies of the ranking year with Timothee Chalamet," it's not to be. 

You see, my last movie of 2024 was A Complete Unknown, which was a strangely timed Friday night advanced screening that capped off that ranking year. Similarly, this year, Chalamet appears in Marty Supreme, which opens in Australian cinemas today.

In another year, I would have gotten in Marty with ease, because I'd have had plenty of time after work to see the movie and to adjust my in-progress rankings accordingly for this final entry. It wouldn't be until 12:30 a.m. that night, which is of course really the next day, that I'd need to finalize those rankings. 

This year, though, I am going to see David Byrne in concert tonight. It was supposed to be with my wife, but she's had to be out of town, so it will be with my younger son, who basically doesn't know any Talking Heads or David Byrne. That should be interesting. 

When I first heard about this conflict, and didn't yet know my wife was going to be out of town, I imagined going into the office today, and then meeting her at the concert site in time for David to start plucking the strings. In between the end of my workday and the start of the concert, there would be a Marty Supreme-sized window of time -- or at least, the window of time necessary for a movie of moderate length, unlike the presumably bloated 149 minutes of Marty Supreme.

But now that I have to accompany my 12-year-old into the city, there just isn't the time, and I'm not willing to take a half day off just to fit in this movie.

Yeah, that was another option. And I have actually taken days off to fit in juicy new releases on the final day, which was necessary in 2014 for Inside Llewyn Davis and Her, and in 2016 for The Hateful Eight, Carol and The Big Short. (Those are the years in which the Januarys fell, not the release years of those movies.) 

But the cost-benefit analysis seems to favor at least two movies for this to be worth it, and considering that it's something I haven't done in ten years now, it's also something I haven't considered worth it in any respect in quite some time.

And certainly not for a movie that a critic I trust said gets very repetitious and ultimately exhausting, which I might have known from the movie to which it is drawing the most direct comparisons, Uncut Gems, also directed by Josh Safdie. Will-to-power narratives where the main character has an excessive amount of arrogance are not really my bag, especially not for the price of a half day's salary. 

You can't get in every movie, but this year, I got in a higher total than any other, and that will have to be enough.

A cinematic connection between New York City and Oklahoma!

I didn't expect to be writing about Richard Linklater's Blue Moon again so soon, but I guess that's the risk you run when you write about a movie in anticipation of an upcoming viewing. You never know what the actual viewing will inspire.

This is a superficial observation only, and maybe I could have fit it into one of my year-end wrap-up posts later this week, but let's just do it now and get it out of the way. I have nothing else planned for this particular Wednesday. 

Blue Moon makes you think a lot about New York City, where it is set, and the show Oklahoma!, which is the catalyst for change among its characters. As I was ruminating on these topics, I was reminded that it is not the only 2025 film that features both of these elements.

Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest memorably opens with drone shots (or maybe they're helicopter shots) of New York City, specifically the part of Brooklyn on the opposite side of the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. And what music, counterintuitively, is playing over it?

Why that would be "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" from, you guessed it, Rodgers and Hammerstein's first and most popular collaboration, the one at the center of Blue Moon, Oklahoma!

But wait that's not all.

Of course in late 2025/early 2026, we're all thinking a lot about Rob Reiner. I've already written about the guy a good five times since he passed. And he's got a role in this as well. 

In Reiner's 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally, in one of their moments of bonding that is interrupted by Harry spotting his ex, Harry and Sally are walking through a store singing "Surrey With the Fringe On Top." The store is, of course, in Manhattan, and the song is, of course, from Oklahoma!

If there are more movies that would fit here, I'm not going to try to figure them out today. 

Accidental Christmas movies

I have a rule about not watching Christmas movies after Christmas. My rule is so extreme that I don't even really like to watch a Christmas movie on Christmas day. Christmas Eve is pretty much my cutoff. So January 19th is certainly out of the question.

But when it happens accidentally, well, there's not a lot I can do about that.

This was the case with The Baltimorons, my penultimate viewing of 2025 before I post my rankings early Friday morning my time. I was already committed to my $5.99 rental by the time I was ushered in to the movie by the familiar sounds of what sounded like the Vince Guaraldi version of "O Tannenbaum" from A Charlie Brown Christmas. (Looking it up online, I can see that this was just composer Jordan Seigel's loving homage/ripoff of Guaraldi.)

There were two reasons I had to doubt/never consider that The Baltimorons might be a Christmas movie:

1) The title. It wasn't A Baltimorons Christmas or Jingle Balts or something that would have given it away.

2) The release date. When I looked it up on IMDB to confirm its eligibility for 2025 -- this being a movie I only recently realized I should watch, it being directed by a Duplass brother -- I saw that it had hit U.S. theaters on September 5th. The second half of the year, at least, but not otherwise within the logical range of releasing it in conjunction with the holiday.

Of course, if I'd actually read its synopsis, I would have been set straight: "A newly sober man's Christmas Eve dental emergency leads to an unexpected romance with his older dentist as they explore Baltimore together."

I guess in the end I'm kind of glad I didn't, because I would have skipped it and then might have continued skipping it in perpetuity. When December rolls around each year, we tend to watch new Christmas movies and classic Christmas movies, rarely seeking out the middle ground between the two. 

But it wasn't only liking the movie enough to be glad I'd seen it. It was that I happened to also be taking down our Christmas tree last night, so it seemed appropriate.

Yes in my house we keep our Christmas tree up for most of January. Traditionally we don't take it down until Australia Day, which is next Monday, but I'm starting early this year. I'm giving up the ghost on Christmas. My wife is out of town and has been so all month, tending to a family matter. She won't be back by Australia Day, so unless she reads this, she won't even know I took it down early -- nor will she care. But it's been dead for several weeks now and in the Australian summer, that becomes a fire hazard.

I was slow-walking the undecorating. I'd started it the day before, but then got distracted by another household chore, since I'm doing all of them myself at this point. (I'm not bothering to make my kids help me with them. Let them have their summer.) But I resumed last night while watching the Australian Open, and soon I'd gotten all the ornaments I could see removed from the tree. In order to help see them better, I turned on the Christmas lights for the first time in probably two weeks.

That looks nice, I thought.

So I didn't unstring the nights, deciding I'd let them illuminate my second-to-last viewing of 2025, whatever it might be.

And of course it ended up being a Christmas movie. I felt the coziness of the holiday there in my living room, even on January 19th.

And it's kind of nice that the Michelle Pfeiffer film Oh. What. Fun. is not the only new Christmas movie I watched in 2025. That one was forgettable, or rather, bad enough to be memorable, which is probably worse. It didn't give me that warm fuzzy feeling.

This one did, and I'll take it, even on January 19th. 

A premature end to a long ranking year

The way I feel right now, totally exhausted, I'm not sure how anything could be "premature" about the end of ranking 2025 movies, which will come later this week after a record total ranked this year. I'll save any further discussions of that record for later in the week. 

It's premature only because it's not coming as much later in the week this week as it usually does.

The Oscar nominations are revealed at 12:30 a.m. Friday morning, my time, which is early Thursday morning in Los Angeles. I usually work it out so I have a movie finishing no later than 10:30 on Thursday night, giving me two hours to finalize things -- and to hope that the last movie I chose to watch doesn't totally throw a wrench in the parts of my rankings post I will have necessarily prewritten.

This year, that last viewing is early enough that any and all wrenches can be easily dealt with. 

At the moment my plan is to watch that final movie tomorrow night, Tuesday night rather than Thursday night, which means only two more total to watch, including whatever I watch tonight.

No, I haven't suddenly turned into the sort of person who finishes something well in advance of the deadline. I never finished a paper in college more than 12 hours before it was due, and it makes sense that I always work up to the deadline in this case, considering that the deadline itself is the thing that tells me it's time to stop watching movies. 

No, it's that this year, I have conflicts on not one, but both of the final two nights before my ranking deadline. 

And they both came in the form of Christmas presents. 

When I got tickets to the Australian Open, which will be my first time going since 2021, I noted the date of Wednesday the 21st and thought "Hmm, that's right before my ranking deadline." When it was later revealed that I got tickets to see David Byrne at the Sidney Myer Bowl, the very next night, I thought "Hmm, that's right on my ranking deadline."

Of course I did not make these thoughts known to the givers of the gifts. I just thanked them for their generosity, with plenty of real gratitude. Indeed, I am excited to do both things. 

But there was a part of me that acknowledged that this year's home stretch will feel a bit different, as I won't be running right up to the wire as I usually do, and am already now down to my last two movies of the year. Better choose carefully. 

I'm including the Blue Moon poster with this post because I expect this to be my last viewing. I've waited as long as I could for the rental price to come down on this one (it isn't out in Australian theaters yet) and it did, at some point, come down from $19.99 USD to $14.99. That's still a lot more than I've paid for any other rental this year, but at least I did save a couple bucks by waiting. If I wait until tomorrow night instead of watching it tonight, there's a small chance it will be down to $9.99 by then. 

I might have just let this one go by, but there's something I'm planning to do that requires me to have seen this movie, the details of which will be revealed later in the week.

I tell you, though, I won't mind having the extra time to smooth over my rankings, rather than feeling under the pump to get it just right with only two hours to spare. 

Twenty twenty-five was certainly a "different sort of year," to put it mildly, so I suppose it makes sense that I'd be finishing it in a slightly different manner. If we were going only on last year's ranking deadline, I'd already be on my second day of recap posts by today, so no wonder I feel so exhausted. 

Double Tap

No, I did not just revisit the sequel to Zombieland.

Yes, I did just confront my first Rob Reiner film since the director was killed last month. 

Two of them, actually.

As I mentioned in this post, in 2026 I am going to rewatch six of my favorite Reiner films and watch six previously unseen Reiner films for the first time, all part of intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner.

I also mentioned that I had a seventh of each type of movie that wouldn't directly fit into the series, so I'd watch them first as a double feature, before formally starting the first bi-monthly series later this month.

Those are, of course, This is Spinal Tap and its sequel, the 2025 new release Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. 

It's not every day you get a sequel to one of your top ten movies of all time, and that's what This is Spinal Tap is, currently my #9 on Flickchart. So why, you ask, didn't I rush out to see this when it was in theaters? Long before Reiner's sad demise? 

Well its September 12th release was smack dab in the middle of my trip to Europe. And though I did see two movies in the theater when I was in Europe, it wasn't playing at the Barcelona cinema within walking distance of my Air BnB when I saw The Conjuring: Last Rites on that exact day. As it turns out I didn't see another movie on the trip, but if I had, I was trying to catch One Battle After Another in Greece. 

I might have watched it earlier on video, but then came the sudden shocking news of Reiner's passing. I needed a few weeks to get over that. In fact, I might have taken longer, but now my ranking deadline is the end of next week, and I wanted to include The End Continues with my 2025 rankings.

Well, it was tremendous to watch this as a double feature, and each movie is so short that I think I watched them both in the time it took for the last battle to play out in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Not only are these movies short, but they have such delicious comedic pacing that they feel even shorter than they actually are. 

Now clearly, that is more of an attribute of the 1984 original, which benefits from the actors being young and spry, and from shooting in a number of different locations around the U.S. (Or at least setting scenes in a number of locations, whether they were actually shot there or not.) There was never any question as to which of these movies was going to be better in that regard. To even suggests that there could have been a question is silly. 

However, I did really appreciate how well these actors remembered how to play their roles. The best in that regard is Christopher Guest, even though we'd ordinarily give more credit for their ongoing abilities to Michael McKean (recently in Better Call Saul) and Harry Shearer (in The Simpsons for nearly 40 years now). Perhaps without the distractions of other significant work, Guest was better able to home in on what made Nigel Tufnel Nigel Tufnel. Though they all provide credible incarnations of their earlier selves as those characters. 

If there was one I was disappointed with, it may have been Shearer, possibly because he just doesn't have enough to do. Derek Smalls is a low-key MVP of the original film, the "lukewarm water," as he describes himself, that allows him to function as glue for the group -- which has a fairly literal interpretation now, as we see Derek as the proprietor of a glue museum. I just didn't feel like the character got so many opportunities to shine in this low-key way -- never stealing the scenes, but sometimes being the funniest aspect of them anyway -- in the new movie.

Still, I liked The End Continues even a bit more than I expected to, which is why I'm giving it four stars on Letterboxd. Yeah, some of that may be nostalgia and my out-sized love for the original. If you were to try to argue with me that this is really more of a 3.5-star movie, I'd cede the point to you pretty quickly. 

But the minor miracle this movie pulls off is how similar it feels to the original. And part of that is Reiner's central role, both as a director and as a character. He's playing the same Marty DiBergi here as well, the same earnest filmmaker who allowed Spinal Tap to be who they were on camera, never for a moment doing anything less than being perfectly generous to them. 

That was something I appreciated about Reiner's performance this time when watching the original. He certainly questions the things the musicians say -- the most famous example, of course, being when he wonders why they couldn't just make 10 the highest volume setting on the amplifier when the volume units are arbitrary units of measure anyway. But he never questions them with the intention of embarrassing them, and it's this kind of kindness that make us love both him and them. They are able to show their foibles, their imperfect understandings of the way things work, and he just continues to encourage them, though not, you sense, because he thinks it's dynamite footage that is going to make his movie better. 

In fact I think the only thing that didn't totally work for me about Spinal Tap II was its very last image, which I think I can spoil, but if you don't want to know what it is, you can skip the next paragraph after this SPOILER ALERT. 

Interviews play over the closing credits here just as they do in the original, another strong choice to remind us of that original. The final interview is with the band's current drummer, an enthusiastic young woman who happens to be gay, though that's not important right now. She's played by Valerie Franco, a real musician. The subject of this interview is of course her ability to survive her experience with the band without dying in a gardening accident, choking on vomit (hers or anyone else's) or spontaneously combusting. I could see the joke coming from a mile away, that she was then going to start choking on the piece of fruit she was eating, at which point DiBergi jumps in and starts to give her the Heimlich Maneuver. The movie ends on a mid-Heimlich freeze frame. I think it would have been stronger to end with one of the band members, preferably Nigel as in the original, and not on a freeze frame, which is a cinematic device that's beneath someone like Reiner. 

I could probably go on and on about both films, but I've seen This is Spinal Tap so many times that I'm not sure if I'm actually getting new things from it each time I see it. I did, however, want to delve into one thing that has always puzzled me but that I've never actually looked up before, so I just fed Google this prompt to see what AI would say:

"Why is Bruno Kirby listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap?"

You would reasonably say that Kirby has no bigger role in that movie than any other actor who has a cameo of a minute or less. Yet he gets the "And Bruno Kirby" credit at the end of the movie. Why?

Here's what AI says:

"Bruno Kirby is listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap (1984) because, despite having a relatively short on-screen role, his performance as Tommy Pischedda, the limo driver obsessed with Frank Sinatra, was a significant improvised contribution to the film's success."

Well that's dumb because they had to create the credits before they knew whether the movie would be a success. Wrong again, AI. 

I guess that one will remain a mystery. Maybe he was better known at the time than the others who made cameos. AI goes on to speculate that it has to do with his close relationship with Reiner, appearing in several of Reiner's movies, but that's another retroactive analysis, considering that this was Reiner's first film. 

As for the sequel, I did enjoy the bits that I thought some others may have had issue with, like the cameos by Paul McCartney and Elton John. But in terms of "Can they still do it," I was indeed impressed by the vocal and musical fortitude of these three actors in their late 70s and early 80s (Shearer is 82). Any staging they did of any song we knew was a pretty darn good version of that song, as far as I was concerned, especially the little studio bit they did of, I believe, "Give Me Some Money," which ends with them fading out into just quieter and quieter repititions of the chorus. Some great harmonica, which I assume was real, by McKean there, too. I also love their reaction to realizing they've just been in total harmony and knocked out of the park.

The great thing about both movies is that this kind of earnestness is embedded within a world defined by partying and showboating. They allow us to see the humans beneath the rock stars. And that's Reiner all over, earnest to a fault, earnest to the end. 

I don't know what the form will be of Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale. For what it's worth, Reiner is not listed on IMDB as an actor in this movie, so it could just be a concert film, without a lot of jokes or great moments from characters we know and love. Maybe it was conceived just as a way to show us how much these men could really do as musicians.

I'll take any last little bit I can get, because it will, indeed, be the last. 

Seeing the one-timers twice in 2026

I've told you about my bi-monthly series in 2026 -- which is actually two intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name but slightly different functions -- but I have yet to reveal the details of my proper monthly series. 

Well friends, the wait is over.

(You weren't actually waiting.)

This one is about my Flickchart, or uses it to get the movies, in any case. (Actually, the bi-monthly series, at least one of them, sort of does as well.)

First I should say that I expect my experience with Flickchart to change at some point in 2026.

I'm a "Flickchart insider," which means I know personally (though not IRL) the Flickchart creators, and then all sorts of Flickchart superfans who communicate with each other in a Flickchart Facebook group, and do movie challenges. One of the two creators, who I know significantly better than the other, shares the same favorite band with me, Nine Inch Nails, so we chat about them from time to time. I also take pride in having recommended him one of his favorite movies of all time, also one of mine, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, in one of the aforementioned challenges.

Anyway, from chats in this group, I have been expecting a change in the core dueling mechanisms of Flickchart, for something like ten years now. It's been known as v. 2, and indeed, they've been working on it forever. Some users are currently beta testing it, though it has a lot of bugs at this point. Viewing this as an outsider in that sense that I'm not one of the ones on v. 2 yet, though I could be if I wanted to, I know it uses a strange, more counterintuitive algorithm for how films duel each other and how they move within your chart once they win or lose that duel. I suppose it's strange to me only because I don't understand it.

For now, I am happy to not yet be on this new version. Because as I've told you many times in the past, I like to keep an offline version of my Flickchart in an Excel spreadsheet. Which is easy to do, because a victorious movie just jumps one head of the movie it beats, which is easy to keep on top of in a spreadsheet. This new method may not be so easy.

I probably didn't need to give you this whole preamble, though I do think this prospective change in the ranking mechanism happens to lend additional urgency to doing this series this year, because I'm not sure what my chart will look like after I'm ported over to v. 2 along with all the other Flickchart users out there in the world. 

So what I want to do in 2026 is rewatch my 12 favorite movies, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once. I am calling these "one-timers," and so the series will be called Audient One-Timers.

Now, the term "one-timer" usually connotates a movie with either subject matter you can't bear to sit through a second time, or gargantuan length. Both of those will likely apply here to some extent. In fact, I can think of one movie each in my top 100 that could potentially qualify for each.

But in my case, it's more literal, in that it's a movie I love, but I've only seen it once.

The purpose of this will be twofold:

1) If you love a movie, you should see it more than once. That's just being kind to yourself. It's always good to expose ourselves to things we love a second time. 

2) If you love a movie, you should prove to yourself that you actually love it by a second viewing, especially if you are committing that love to the "permanence" of something like Flickchart.

So yes it's possible that some of these will be movies I don't love as much on the second time -- in fact, I'm pretty sure that's inevitable. At the moment, I don't plan to forcibly re-rank them on Flickchart to a more appropriate position after each viewing, though there have been some instances in the past where a rewatch has revealed a Flickchart position so out of whack with my actual thoughts on the film, that I've been compelled to do this anyway. My most recent experience with Field of Dreams, for example -- as described here -- was one such case. 

The end result should be that I've seen every movie in my top 175 on Flickchart at least twice. That's right, my current 12th highest one-timer is exactly at #175 on my Flickchart. 

Now, it's possible I will end up having to watch some movies that are ranked lower a second time, because there may be some of these that I can't get my hands on for a second viewing. Their lack of availabililty may be why I've only watched them once. 

But I'd still like to start out with my 12th best one-timer first, and go forward from there. It's more exciting to build toward the best than starting off at the best. And then if there's a higher ranked movie I can't find, that month I will shift and watch the 13th best, or the 14th best if it happens twice, even though that means going out of order for at least that one month. 

I should note two other rules:

1) If, through the normal course of dueling movies on Flickchart, a movie that is not currently among my top 12 one-timers defeats a higher ranked film, and therefore becomes part of my top 12, I will do my best to include it. This is not particularly likely to happen, but it could happen.

2) Even less likely is that a brand new viewing will be so beloved by me that I will rank it within that top 175 just from a first viewing. I don't think it serves any point to just go immediately watch this movie a second time because it is now within my top 12, so if such a thing happens, I will exclude it from consideration for this series. (That's especially less likely because I remain very far behind in adding my new viewings to Flickchart.)

I'm including as the art of this post my current 15th best one-timer, because a) I think it's unlikely to be part of this series, and b) even if it were to come up as a potential replacement for a higher-ranked unavailable movie, I doubt I could find it. John Cameron Mitchell's 2006 film Shortbus, currently my #191 on Flickchart, contains scenes that can accurately be described as pornography, or pretty darn close to it. It's also beautiful and made me cry. However, the porn adjacent aspects are what made it very difficult for me to get my hands on originally, and potentially impossible to get now. 

One-timers, they come in all shapes and sizes. And in 2026, I will be engaging with a dozen of them, either deepening my appreciation of them, or potentially, at worst, sending them to a more appropriate place on my Flickchart than they've been occupying since I saw them, in many cases years in the past.

Seems like a worthwhile venture to me. 

Broken English

I'm so focused on seeing movies from the just completed year in January, that I clearly remember the movies I've seen that fall outside those goals. 

To show you how far back my memory goes on these things, in January of 2017, for example, I clearly remember watching the 2009 film Mystery Team while we were staying in Los Angeles and I was in the home stretch of my viewings for that year. That viewing was on the 7th of January, and came up as a joint viewing with my wife -- I'm sure a reluctant viewing on my part, but I'm also sure that I never let on about it, because any time she wants to watch a movie with me, I'm game for whatever it is.

Then two years ago it was an unscheduled rewatch, on the 14th of January, while we were away for the weekend with friends. They wanted to watch something that our older kids could also watch -- I'm pretty sure my younger son was sequestered elsewhere for this one -- and though I'm sure I tried to nudge them toward a 2023 release, what we ended up watching was Michael Bay's The Rock. The funny thing is, most of the people watching ended up peeling off before it ended, and because I like to complete what I started (so I can add it to my lists, in this case my list of rewatches), I was one of the few who finished.

Of course I am leading up to telling you about that exception for this year, which will live on in my memory largely because of how much I disliked it.

First I should tell you that we are becoming big Rowan Atkinson fans in my household. A few years ago we really got into watching Man vs. Bee, his Netflix TV series about an extended fight between a housesitter and a buzzing insect in a fancy smart home, which I actually wrote about here despite the fact that it is not a movie. (And yes, my mention of it now means that I am tagging this not-movie for the second time on my movie blog.)

Well, Atkinson has made a sequel to Man vs. Bee called Man vs. Baby, which we also watched earlier this month -- though should have watched last month because it's set at Christmas. Oh well, I bent my usual rules that stipulate you aren't allowed to watch Christmas-related material after Christmas. I think I enjoyed this one even more, because Atkinson's main character is less cringe-worthy and more competent this time around, which is something we really want for this charming, loveable goof. 

That is not the charming, loveable goof I got when I watched Johnny English with my younger son a few nights ago. He rewatched Man vs. Bee after we watched Man vs. Baby and was primed for more Atkinson material. 

It was actually me that suggested my own reluctant viewing this time around, but only because he had already told me he'd looked up the Johnny English movies to figure out where we might find them on our various streaming services. At the time he mentioned it, it was in the context of something we might do together at some unspecified future date. A couple hours later, I got the benefit of seeming like a hero for "spontaneously" suggesting it for that very evening, which proved to him that I hadn't earlier been just nodding in generic consent without ever intending to do anything about it.

Now that I've seen Johnny English, I'm not sure I have any interest in seeing the sequels, even as a gesture of good fathering to my son.

I think my son did like it more than I did, but he probably couldn't have liked it less. 

My biggest problem is that this movie does not showcase the same kind but hopeless Atkinson that we usually get, who stumbles into disaster despite his best intentions. I don't know that I want Atkinson to play the same role in everything, but the specific comedic persona he had built on things like Mr. Bean and later burnished with the Man vs. shows does make you long to see that brand put to use. (I also showed my son his one scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral, because obviously it would not be worth watching the whole movie just for that one scene -- not for a 12-year-old.)

And to be fair, I'm not sure that this is the type of role Atkinson has always played. Although I didn't watch the whole series and I saw the parts of it I saw many years ago, I think his role in Blackadder was probably a lot more acerbic. 

Still, it was not what we were hoping for, to see him as an idiot, yes, but more of a blowhard idiot, whose embarrassments result more from terrible assumptions and the ways he parades around like a fool in the prosecution of those assumptions. Maybe a purely bumbling secret agent would have been too similar to the existing incarnations of Inspector Gadget, but this was the version of Atkinson we wanted but did not get in Johnny English. We wanted to like him, at least, but Johnny English made that impossible.

More to the point, it just wasn't funny. This is not easily quantifiable, except that I can tell you the only laughs I squeezed out were forced, so my son would not think I was entirely hating the experience. When he laughed, it was with some uncertainty, and he had to look over to me to see what I thought -- which read to me as an attempt to force his own laughter. 

The one thing I did really like in the movie was Natalie Imbruglia, the singer of the big pop hit "Torn," who I had either forgotten or never known also tried to be an actress for a short time. It's unclear to me why she didn't succeed. She's beautiful here, but also has plenty of charisma and as much of the necessary other skills that this sort of love interest role requires. 

Given that the movie was enough of a hit to prompt two more sequels, you couldn't say that its poor reception was the thing that prevented her from getting more than just a sporadic amount of further work. Maybe people at the time thought that everything in the movie worked except for Natalie Imbruglia, whereas I thought just the opposite. (Another of the movie's casualties: John Malkovich with a very exaggerated French accent.)

If I do watch the sequels, suffice it to say that I'll try to push them until after I've finished watching 2025 movies. At least the next one will be free on one of our services. (Yes, I had to pay to rent the first, adding insult to injury.)

Domestic discord with the live-in help double feature

I said yesterday that I wanted to watch some 2025 movies that didn't cost me anything, so then later yesterday I saw two of them -- and they were both on the same theme.

I have to admit the thematic pairing was not a total coincidence. Once I'd already gone to the theater for a 4:30 showing of The Housemaid, free thanks to my critics card, it was easy to recall that the remake of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, a Hulu original, is available on Disney+ in Australia. 

So it seemed like a good time to get in all my psychopathic maids, psychopathic nannies, psychopathic matriarchs and psychopathic patriarchs, whatever the case may be. (I won't spoil it and tell you which movies contain which, or if some are not in any, but this covers all the possibilities so as to keep things vague.)

I didn't realize how much beyond their superficial similarities these two movies would have in common. And to consider those similarities, I should probably issue a SPOILER ALERT, though the spoilers don't get into anything really juicy about the resolution of either of the plots. 

And since the similarities all have to do with the pairs of women vying for power in the household, and that a housekeeper and a nanny are not exactly the same type of live-in help, I'll refer to them as "the matriarch" and "the outsider."

Consider:

1) In both movies, the matriarch is prone to tirades as a result of a history of mental instability. 

2) In both movies, the oldest daughter also has some version of these emotional problems. 

3) In both movies, the outsider is seen living or recently lived in her car.

4) In both movies, the outsider buys a six-pack of cupcakes with extra frosting as a way of ingratiating herself to the oldest daughter. (I thought this one seemed very specific.)

5) In both movies, the sexuality of the outsider is a threat to the matriarch, though potentially not always because of its impact on her husband. 

6) In both movies, one of the two women lost her family in a fire when she was a young girl, though it's the matriarch in one and the outsider in the other. It's heavily implied that the person whose family was lost was actually responsible for the fire.

7) Again SPOILER ALERT, but in both movies it's ultimately revealed that the person whose family was lost was not responsible for the fire -- though that doesn't mean someone in the movie wasn't responsible for it. 

There were others I thought of as I was watching Hand, but these were the ones I remembered when I started taking notes halfway through. 

Unfortunately, both movies also get only 2.5 stars from me.

Without getting into further spoiler territory that's unnecessary to get into right now, The Housemaid takes a turn at some point that complicates the assumptions we've had all along. This turn dragged the movie up from being something I wasn't enjoying very much to something that felt like it had more promise, but then it came back down to earth as fairly conventional by the end. 

As for The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the thing I cherish about the Curtis Hanson original is how it showcases that director's excellence with tight genre films, the other example being The River Wild. While that movie gets great mileage from playing out in a straightforward manner, this one needed to do more than that to interest me in 2025. (Release year of the movie, not the year in which I saw it.) One thing I'll say, though, is that Ariel Marx's score is one of my favorites of the year, and the movie is almost worth seeing just for its music. 

It strikes me that this is not the only pair of 2025 movies where one is sort of a remake of the earlier movie, and then one is an actual remake/sequel. The same can be said of The Monkey and Final Destination: Bloodlines. Both movies involve gruesome deaths that play out in a manner that seems preordained, though The Monkey is only a spiritual remake of Final Destination, while Bloodlines is obviously the latest in that series. However, in that case, both of those movies earned four stars from me and are currently both in my top 30 for the year. 

The expensive time of my movie year

Movies are expensive these days -- but not usually for me.

Yes, I did have to pay something like $160 for me and my two sons to watch Avatar: Fire and Ash last week, which is in AUD, and which also includes snacks. That was going to happen in a 3D viewing anyway, but adding to that, we were out of town, so my critics card would not have worked. (And it's not really fair to count money spent on the tickets for other people.)

Normally, though, theater tickets are "cheap as" -- to use the Australian phrasing -- due to the aforementioned critics card, which allows me free entry. It's hard to get cheaper than free. 

But when a bunch of must-see rentals get stacked up and all have to be watched within a short period of time? That's when things get expensive.

And because I've already watched most of the movies that I want to see that are available for me on streaming -- we'll see if I fit in an F1 viewing before next Thursday -- it's gotten expensive since the start of the year. 

Let's go back to Christmas. Since Christmas, I've watched and spent the following, with the currency listed afterward. (I buy things both through U.S. iTunes and through Australian Amazon, so two different currencies. AUD is usually about 60% of the value of USD.) I've watched these:

12/26 - The Long Walk - $6.99 AUD
1/1 - Him - $6.99 AUD
1/5 - Sorry, Baby - $6.99 AUD
1/7 - The Smashing Machine - $6.99 AUD
1/8 - It Was Just an Accident - $9.99 USD
1/9 - The Naked Gun - $6.99 AUD
1/10 - On Becoming a Guinea Fowl - $5.99 USD
1/10 - One Battle After Another (second viewing) - $6.99 AUD
1/10 - Splitsville - $6.99 AUD
1/12 - Twinless - $5.99 USD

And yes I finally saw Twinless! (See here.) 

The one thing I haven't had to do -- yet, anyway -- is splurge for the $19.99 USD premium rental. That usually happens in my final few days, when I've waited as long as I can wait for the rental price to go down but I just have to have the movie -- usually a movie released late in the year in the U.S. that has not yet been released in Australia.

The most expensive I've gone so far is the $9.99 USD rental of It Was Just an Accident, which is why that movie gets the art for this post. That was my "best get" of the season so far and best reminder why my U.S. iTunes subscription has such value to me. The movie doesn't even come out here until January 29th. And that viewing certainly paid off, as the movie became an instant contender.

Just because I have been shelling out so much money, by my standards, I'm looking to find a way to add some movies without money. And hey! I can do that by going to the theater! There are a number of things that came out on Boxing Day here that interest me, such as The Housemaid, Song Sung Blue and Rental Family, and I might see one of them today after work.

Then there are also a few lesser priorities available on streamers. For some reason, though, I just can't seem to pull the trigger on F1. 

Nagging inconsistencies in One Battle After Another

I teased you yesterday that I might not reveal, at least not before I reveal my rankings in ten days, whether One Battle After Another rose in my estimation after a second viewing. 

Clearly there was a part of me that wanted it to rise, to jump into the upper half of my top ten so my feelings would be consistent with those of the rest of the critical community, to say nothing of the audience community. After all, I did watch it for the first time on the same day I returned from Europe, which could have muted my appreciation of the film for all sorts of different reasons. 

Well, I held off on revealing this for exactly one day. 

And I'm writing about it because I do want to air some of the nitpicks that prevent me from embracing it quite as warmly as some other people do. (I do embrace it, just not as much as they do.)

Let's start with Leonardo DiCaprio's Bob Ferguson, a.k.a. Ghetto Pat, a.k.a. Rocketman. 

The thing people seem to relish most about the character -- and I would argue the movie, at least from a comedic perspective -- is his ongoing tete-a-tete with Comrade Joshua, who refuses, over the course of two different phone calls, to give Bob the rendezvous point because Bob can't answer the question "What time is it?"

Bob's anger over Joshua's apparent pettiness is funny, though Joshua is only doing what he's been told to do, based on prudent precautions, especially at a time when their whole network is threatened. That's not what bothers me. It's Bob's attitude toward these safeguards that is problematic, given his own recent behavior toward his daughter, Willa.

Bob was the one exercising possibly superfluous caution, when his daughter left for the dance, what, an hour earlier? Even though this was just an ordinary Tuesday at their house -- okay probably a Friday, since they don't usually hold school dances on Tuesdays -- Bob had to give her his whole song and dance about taking the trust device with her. You know, the thing his fellow revolutionary programmed to play a tune when in range of another such trust device.

Obviously this bit is just for our benefit in the audience, but it does play awkwardly within the reality of these characters' world. For one, it's been 16 years since Bob fled with baby Willa, and they have no reason to think, on this particularly Tuesday, their years of quiet and successful hiding was about to be overturned. He wouldn't need to specifically tell her to bring the trust device; bringing it or not bringing it would just be part of their standard routine. They wouldn't be discussing it this night, one way or another. 

Given that Bob does, however, make a big deal out of it, it's hard to then yield him the moral high ground an hour later when he takes the same eyeball-rolling perspective toward Comrade Joshua that his daughter is taking toward him. We meet Bob as a defender of these methods of identifying simpatico souls, so it's hard to fully be on his side when he repeatedly tears Joshua a new one for requiring the same standard of caution. (Or for us to be on the same side as the other comrade, who ultimately gets Bob approved, but who then makes Joshua apologize, genuinely and profusely, just for doing his job.)

Bob specfiically talks about how he doesn't remember the "code speak," but didn't he tirelessly teach his daughter the same code speak? When she's confronted in the high school bathroom by Deandra -- that trust device sure came in handy quickly -- she repeats back the necessary phrases without any difficulty. She could only do this, of course, if Bob had taught them to her. Not only taught them, but repeatedly drilled them in, so she would never forget them. Which she did not. (Incidentally, you'd think having the trust device would probably be enough, but I guess Deandra wanted an additional level of proof -- even if this 16-year-old standing in front of her could not possibly be working for Steve Lockjaw, and looks exactly like Deandra would expect her to look.)

I think I might be even more troubled by the callback to this code speak in the finale. I probably don't need to issue a SPOILER ALERT but let's just get it out of the way just to be sure.

So after Willa has dispatched the Christmas Adventurer, who could not respond properly to her listing of the names of the three TV shows, she applies the same standard on Bob as he timidly creeps into range of her weapon. I believe the first time she calls out the names of the shows, she hasn't yet clearly seen him. She's obviously amped up and on high alert after just killing a man. 

But the second time she asks for the names of the shows and wants Bob's response, she's already heard his voice, already seen the unmistakeable shambling shape of his bathrobe, and yet she's still not certain this isn't just some exceptional Bob impersonator. I think we are meant to believe she's shell-shocked, but Anderson is trying to create a legitimate worry in the audience that she might shoot Bob, to increase the tension of the moment. I just don't buy it. She's been so eager for a final delivery from this nightmare scenario that it just reads as false that she would be genuinely questioning Bob's identity.

And while we're on the topic of contrivances, I've got a few more:

1) After all is said and done, they just return to living in the same house again? Yes they believe Steve Lockjaw is dead -- he is, but not in the way they think -- but that only means the end of his own pursuit of the pair. Aren't they still wanted for domestic terrorism? Aren't there others who would still be coming after them -- especially at their last known address?

2) The only reason Willa even gets to the end of the movie alive is because the Native American tracker hired by Lockjaw has second thoughts and decides not to leave her in the clutches of the murderous mercenaries, who will kill her without blinking. We are meant to believe that this man does things for pragmatic reasons only. We know he has enough of a code of honor not to kill children, but we also know he knows he's actually playing a role in Willa's imminent death by delivering her to the murderous mercenaries. What did he see about them that would have caused him to change his mind? Did one of the guys have too many tattoos for his liking? So this man, who exists pragmatically and consorts with dirty characters like Steve Lockjaw, decides to his endanger his own life to free Willa, and indeed, does pay for it with his life. I'm tempted to say the only reason he does this is that he's a Native American and the film is squeamish about portraying him negatively, but I think there would have been a cleaner and more plausible way to write this.

3) The only reason Bob even gets to end of the movie alive is because of the extremely poor chain of custody once he's arrested in Baktan Cross. You can almost see Anderson waving his hand through this sequence of events, where two hospital workers conspire to get him out of his handcuffs and down a fire escape. Given that Bob is specifically listed as a target by Lockjaw when he lays out the mission parameters to his team -- a target they planned to "bag and tag," no less -- it seems incomprehensible that there would not have been someone, even Lockjaw himself, overseeing this man in a bathrobe taken into custody after falling off a roof. The arresting officer would not mention this suspicious bit of behavior, especially by a guy who was clearly not an illegal immigrant? How could Lockjaw's team, always portrayed as ruthlessly efficient, botch this one so badly?

My feelings about One Battle After Another did not go up after a second viewing, but they did not go down either. The movie is sitting in the exact spot in my rankings where it sat before I watched it a second time, which you will see, in a few weeks, is quite high.

But I don't think these are just nitpicks. They are, in some cases, genuine plot holes. I didn't even mention the contrived nature of Lockjaw's villain ranting as he hands Willa over to the tracker. If he truly wanted the tracker to believe that she was a "bad hombre" who wouldn't be missed, someone guilty of genuine if unspecified crimes against the U.S.A., why would he indulge in a final rant about how if things had gone differently they could have gotten to know each other? You would not talk about the missed opportunity of getting to know a drug dealer. Who knows how much this contributed to the tracker's ultimate decision to free Willa.

Films heaped with the kind of praise that One Battle After Another has gotten should not have as many questions like this as One Battle After Another has. People are saying it's perfect, when clearly it is not.

So now I have a link I can send to anybody, any time they wonder why I ranked the movie "only" in the spot where I'll end up ranking it.