Dangerous Animals is a wonderful date night horror movie. It’s not super gory, but is just scary enough to make you tense. It’s funny, but not fully camp. It’s good, but not significant enough to dominate your evening completely. This kind of movie is unspectacular and often disrespected, but it's a necessary bedrock of the theatre-going experience. Sometimes people need to be able to just go to the movies and watch hot people survive shark attacks.
Horror is, more than a lot of fans of it would maybe like to admit (including myself), usually deeply silly. Most horror films don’t really want you to feel bad; they want to introduce tension, dread, and excitement, then show characters overcoming it.
Bring Her Back doesn’t want that. It wants to put you in a state of grief, confusion, and anger along with its characters and hold you there to the bitter end. It is not fun, it is not cathartic, it is excruciating. If the goal of a movie is to get you to feel something, then Bring Her Back accomplishes that incredibly well. Fair warning though, those feelings are genuinely terrible.
Bring Her Back is the best movie I’ve seen so far in 2025, it’s incredibly well made and everyone involved should be as proud as they possibly can be of having made it, but be warned that it’s not something to see lightly.
John Wick movies are like a new friend you have who’s an incredible cook. The first four times you visited them the food was amazing, better and better each time, but the quality of the conversation varies. Sometimes it flows great, sometimes it’s awkward, but once the food is out you’re in heaven. Ballerina is definitely the worst that the conversation has been, but goddamn if the food isn’t still amazing. It makes you float in your seat, it sends electricity through you, a pure bodily joy. Thankfully, the visit is about 80% eating, so at the end of the day it’s still al time well spent.
I am not a conservative person in most things. I tend to like art that’s different and I don’t tend to place a moral wrong on people trying something culturally new in their personal lives. At the same time, though, I do tend to believe that most of what people want, in life and in their art, comes down to a desire for love and support. My favorite part of The Phoenician Scheme, and why I think it’s a good movie, is that it expresses that human need for love and support without tying it to something old and worldly, like religion. It doesn’t rebuke such things, but it knows that that desire for love and support can come in many shapes and sizes and that it’s most satisfying for us to see that desire filled.
I went to the ritual to see Dan Stevens, my favorite Dan. I’ll see anything he’s in, knowing absolutely nothing else about it, just to watch him do his thing. The Ritual is, unfortunately, most useful as a Dan delivery vehicle. It’s not badly made, but it doesn’t have very much to say, both thematically and as a horror film. Other than some admittedly fun camera work, I’d be hard pressed to tell you much that makes it unique from other exorcism films, which is a shame since there are already so many that play out almost exactly like this one.
It’s hard to write about Materialists. I don’t dislike it, but I feel a bit cheated by it. I hadn’t seen any trailers before seeing it, it wasn’t like I went in with an expectation, but the first fifteen minutes present quite possibly my favorite type of movie; an urban rom-com in high-ish society where a beautiful woman has to choose between two beautiful men and shenanigans ensue. Then, in Materialists, there are no shenanigans. That’s not really a problem, the filmmakers are allowed to make the movie they want to, not the one I want to see, it’s just… damn, do I really want to see this cast and this director get up to those shenanigans.
Sinners is great. That’s old news now, you’ve probably already heard that, and when it comes to deeper analysis of the film there are many people much smarter than me who have written lots about it. What’s interesting to me is how, even if we want to act like it’s not the case, we as a society we really do like horror. Sinners is one of the highest grossing movies of the year now and in it lots and lots of people get brutally ripped apart by vampires. They get stabbed, they go up in flames, they get shot all different kinds of ways. And audiences LOVE it. I can hear an argument now that this success is despite the horror elements, that people are here for sexy movie stars and incredible music. I’ll concede that that is a large part of it, but you know what else is? Lots of people like to be scared, they like the thrill, and even if they don’t want to admit it, they like the blood and the gore.
I think it benefits us all, personally, to be honest with ourselves about what we like, so that we can begin to examine why we like it and understand ourselves better. Being aware of who we are as people and how we relate to art is important and I’d like to think Sinners is a good example of how more people like the red stuff than they’d like to admit.
As a series gets bigger, it has to continually one-up itself. More, more, MORE! It’s an unsustainable drive, something that necessitates remakes, reboots, and breaks between installments. Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning is the result of not doing any of that, of letting the thing grow and grow and grow. The action is still excellent, the cast are all charming, it looks breathtaking, but goddamn if I could tell you why any of it happened or what any of it meant. The previous films in the series did a good job communicating the story and keeping the audience on track. Sometimes it was a lot very fast, but it always felt manageable, something you could get your head around by the end of the movie. Final Reckoning has lost that and in its place left a swirl of absurdly high stakes and grandiose proclamations. It’s not all the way bad (there’s a hell of a plane fight in there towards the end), but it’s hard not to feel like we haven’t lost what made previous films in this series so excellent.
Zombies are one of those monsters that are a useful touchstone for where culture is at at any particular moment. 28 Years Later is especially useful in this regard, coming as a sequel nearly eighteen years after its predecessor, 28 Weeks Later, and twenty-three years after the first film in the series, 28 Days Later. The zombies haven’t changed much, but our approach to them has. Out is the military approach of 28 Weeks or even the hopeful emphasis on found family of 28 Days; in is loss and a feeling of sweet melancholy, of finding how to grow up in a world that doesn’t make any sense. We’re not watching society spin out of control anymore. The zombies have won, it’s their world now, and we just have to find a way to stay out of their way. If that doesn’t scream 2025, I don’t know what does.
I think the original Jurassic Park is one of the best films ever made. A shocking and unusual opinion, I know. It really is that great though, fun for every age, just scary enough, deep and approachable at the same time. It’s about parenthood and existing as humans in a complex ecosystem of species! And dinosaurs are rad too, huh?!
Jurassic World Rebirth is Jurassic Park watched through the bottom of six expensive shot glasses of varying quality. This most recent shot glass is made very well, it looks stunning and is full of fun performances (I know, I know, the metaphor is leaving me), but after this many layers of refraction and distortion a lot of the details that made the original great are gone. It’s a Jurassic Park shaped movie, but it’s significantly messier and less refined.
Elio is a bit frustrating, because it’s at its most fun by far when it’s doing its best to be E.T. The scenes of childhood fascination with space and the mysterious, unencumbered by bills and jobs and car loans, is arresting and very easy to get swept up in. As soon as we get to space though, it becomes a lot more loose, fast, and a little vapid. Lots of stuff flies around, the jokes are quick, it’s not bad… but damn, that stuff on the ground felt great.
I love Pavements and before seeing it I’d never even heard of the real life band it’s about, the almost titular Pavement. Writing analysis of Pavements is a bit hard, as more than even presenting an argument or a thesis, it presents an extremely clever meta circus show. “And now, the amazing Pavements! Watch as it juggles a real band, the band’s past selves, the band’s current selves, a museum, an off-Broadway musical, and a big budget Hollywood movie!” Sure, I could try to derive some deeper meaning from the act, I’m sure it’s there, but I have no interest in that. I just want to whistle, clap, and cheer it on.
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