I’ve been working a new movie adjective into my lexicon: “Black Listy,” named after the famed Black List, which tracks buzzy, unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood executives’ desks. The phrase is not a compliment, although it is not strictly negative. It describes a story built on a provocative high-concept logline, the kind that sounds more like a creative writing exercise than an actual movie. Done right, a Black Listy movie is a real hooky good time: The Menu, a 2019 Black List alum, was satire so broad it would have faceplanted without a sense of fun, and it had fun to spare. Done wrong, you get a gimmicky concept with no real storytelling scaffolding. One Night Only is about as Black Listy as it gets, and not the good kind. Fittingly, Travis Braun’s script didn’t just land on the Black List; it topped the 2024 edition, a year after his horror script Bad Boy did the same.

I’ve been dodging saying what the concept is, so here goes: The Purge, but sex. People are only legally permitted to have premarital sex on one night per year. The mind immediately boggles at worldbuilding questions: How is this tracked? (You get embedded with a sensor, or something.) What acts constitute sex? (The devices seem to track arousal, so maybe all acts? Maybe even watching a particularly steamy R-rated movie?) Are extramarital affairs policed? (Not addressed.) Masturbation policies? (No idea.) It’s a premise that frustrates: It raises questions the movie isn’t equipped to answer, assuming we’ll accept some brushing off of details. I had a similar gripe with last year’s Eternity, another Black Listy romance, whose afterlife I described as “a half-baked pile of rules that appear when the plot needs them,” of which you could say the same here.

The law, known as the Mandate, allows 12 hours of legal fooling around, and New York treats the occasion like a horny holiday, brands cashing in and all. Owen (Callum Turner), a pizzeria owner, has the night planned with his longtime girlfriend, Malika (Maya Hawke), until she ditches him for someone else. Across town, Allie (Monica Barbaro), a commercial jingle singer with stage fright (the kind of profession that exists only in movies), is sick of getting ghosted after the annual free-for-all and wants someone who’ll stick around until morning. They meet, they click, and then a string of mishaps keeps bouncing them in and out of each other’s orbit all night.

If a movie is going to build itself on a hook this wild, I’d at least want it to take a swing. Get goofy with it. One Night Only doesn’t. It is content just to be a down-the-middle romantic comedy that uses its scenario no differently than a hundred other stock setups. You could make almost this exact movie, with only minor rewrites, about two people lonely on Valentine’s Day or two bickering singles at a destination wedding. The latter, in fact, is what Will Gluck most recently made before this, the surprise 2023 hit Anyone But You starring ascendant Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell. Curiously, Braun has said that film’s success, proof that R-rated romcoms could still work in theaters, is part of why he wrote this script in the first place. (Gluck sneaks in both of them, too: Sweeney turns up on Owen’s dating app, and Powell, seen only in a phone photo, is the hunky neighbor Malika ditches him for. It’s as if he wants to remind you of a movie you’d be better off watching.)

For a film about a world where everyone is desperate to hook up ASAP before the clock runs out, One Night Only is weirdly sex-averse. Compared to Anyone But You, which was popping with steam and sexual tension even if its execution was phoned in, this one is scripted like a PG-13 movie about 90% of the time, and a mediocre PG-13 romcom at that.

The first act makes a couple of satirical jabs at the zealots and hypocrites who’d dream up a law like this, and yet the ending lands on a very ambivalent note about sex, as if the movie doesn’t have any strong opinions one way or the other about the topic it’s built around. It doesn’t help that Gluck, who rewrote Braun’s script himself, has said he cut “so much nudity” after test audiences squirmed, citing Gen Z’s (and, he argues, everyone’s) diminishing appetite for sex on screen. This from the director of Friends With Benefits, exactly the kind of frank, R-rated studio romcom the world needs more of. Okay, but why make this specific movie, Mr. Gluck?

A couple of smaller complaints, since I’m already venting. Visually, the film is deeply generic, with the frictionless sheen of a pharmaceutical ad, which at least suits Allie’s day job singing pop hits rewritten as drug jingles (the thread about which is the movie’s sharpest satire, honestly). Less fitting is the product placement — Dunkin’, Durex, and Equinox all cash in on the big night — so relentless that it’s hard to tell where the satire of advertising ends and the advertising itself begins. (Gluck swears none of it was paid. He says he had to beg brands to let the movie twist their products into “one night” jokes, which means the brands got to approve the jokes made at their expense. Corporate sanctioned satire; hooray.)

I’d actually be pretty open to the film if not for the astringent mismatch between its premise, which begs for something daring, and its tone, which is not daring in the slightest. That stings, because on paper this is a movie I’d have a soft spot for. One of my sterling rules of filmmaking is the Superbad axiom that a silly sex comedy with a warm relationship at its core, set over one crazy night, is a tough formula to screw up. One Night Only, which has its leads fighting over the last condom in town (a scene less funny than it sounds), gets most of those ingredients right, it just has the wrong recipe. Gluck is one of the industry leaders at this kind of easygoing, cast-focused, not-quite-a-throwback romcoms: Barbaro and Turner have decent chemistry, the story moves at a steady clip (even if the night’s near-misses get repetitive), and you’re really pulling for the pair by the end. Usually, that’s enough to win me over. Not this time; the whole thing just feels off.

My biggest individual gripe as far as the romcom itself goes: Gluck shows the characters finally hooking up, then cut saway to reveal it was only a fantasy. It gives us a meaningless catharsis, the payoff of seeing the characters connect, yanked away the moment it arrives.

As with any romantic comedy, most of what works here comes from the cast. Barbaro is the best in show, and this is a role designed to make her a bona fide movie star like Sweeney in Anyone But You, but it won’t. She projects a complex and lovable human (and, I confess, she’s major crush material here). In A Complete Unknown, Oscar nomination notwithstanding, she seemed a little baffled by Joan Baez; here she’s wonderfully at ease, and she gets to show off her singing once more. Turner’s deal, here as in Eternity, is that he’s tall, handsome, and likable, which is not nothing. Together, they click more as comic partners than as lovers, which, given how little lovemaking is actually on the table, may have been the plan. Molly Ringwald and LeVar Burton, as Owen’s mom and her partner, get a few amusing moments but barely enough screen time to matter.

Barbaro deserves a better showcase, and so does the romcom, a genre that can’t afford to squander its rare trips to the multiplex on a failed gamble this hollow. Anyone But You proved romcoms could still work in theaters; One Night Only, which opened to a scant $5.5 million domestically, is an underwhelming counterpoint. It dangles a provocative world it won’t explain, then refuses actually provoke once we’re inside it. I gave the premise its half second. Then I gave it 102 minutes. It’s stupid.

The mood on this one is great, shot in Greenwich Village with great scenes set in clubs and on the streets. Legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe gives it groovy, green-heavy lighting; he said he had a blast experimenting with tinted lights and filters on this one. It also benefits from an extremely charming supporting cast: Jack Lemmon playing a gay-coded warlock, Ernie Kovacs as a paranormal-obsessed writer, and, most importantly, a remarkable cat named Pyewacket. Novak’s Gillian is about as bewitching as any woman has ever been on film (this and I Married a Witch make a great double feature of contrasting but magnificent examples of eye-popping beauty and screen command with Lake and Novak). Funny that it’s ever-great Stewart who is the closest thing to a wet blanket among the bunch; he’s a bit too old and stodgy for the part, and it’s no surprise this is generally considered his final turn as a romantic lead.

It’s a lightweight affair, and its ending feels a bit like a selling out of the spirit of witchy, feminist freedom that Gillian displays throughout the film, but it’s a good time nonetheless.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

But the film is completely backbroken by its slim, repetitive story that drags on for a grating two hours. Witch antiheroine Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson) ensnares and kills men one at a time like she’s a slasher villain crossed with a black widow, but the cadence and payoff of those scenes never escalate in a rich enough manner to justify making this as more than a short film, or maybe one of those 75-minute turbo-features.

That said, I’m tempted to give the film a passing grade just on how brilliant the production is and how well-cast Robinson is in the lead. The film has gorgeous colors, lovely costumes and makeup, terrific sets, and an overall intoxicating visual vibe. It’s too bad I just couldn’t get on its narrative wavelength.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

Where the film stumbles is in the final act when a new conflict emerges after Jennifer and Wallace get together that turns Jennifer’s father Daniel (Cecil Kellaway) into an antagonist. It’s significantly less fun than everything that leads up to it, but not enough to blunt the overall delight of I Married a Witch.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

Contained within that technical mastery are some powerful stories: A womanizing priest named Grandier (Oliver Reed), who rules Loudun, creates a sexual furor bordering on bewitchment among the residing nuns, most especially Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). Meanwhile, a group of civic and religious bureaucrats connive to wrest control of Loudun from Grandier. The film’s characterization is searing and occasionally nuanced; Grandier is both a true cad and a true believer; Jeanne is a bundle of contradictions.

And yet I found the film tough to get through. I wouldn’t go quite so far as Roger Ebert, whose sarcastic 0-star review mocks it as a self-important parade of torture and orgies dressed up as brave truth-telling, but I do find it to be an edgelord, try-hard piece of art, displaying contempt for everything it encounters. A little bit of punk-rock fury aimed at all pillars of the establishment is okay, especially when you’re a magician of a filmmaker, but The Devils left me with the same gross aftertaste as Texas Chain Saw and Trainspotting: It pushes its buttons of dour cynicism so hard it circles back to uninteresting for me. It features some filmmaking for the ages, but is just a bit too frothing for me to give it anything more than an academic thumbs-up.

(N.B.: Although The Devils is inspired by a documented historical “witch craze” incident, it is essentially not a witch film, but I included it here because I watched it in prep for the podcast about witch movies. Also: after decades of censorship, a 4K restoration of Russell’s uncut version opened in North American theaters for a currently-active one-week run.)

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

What makes this movie so powerful is the contrast between Rosemary’s dreary domestic life and her growing fear that she is bearing spawn of Satan. She is belittled in so many ways – demeaned by neighbors, dismissed by her husband, betrayed by a doctor she confides in. Any of these actions in isolation might be a normal thing that happens to a pregnant woman living in a stately old Manhattan apartment building and married to an actor; yet in accumulation they create a deeply unsettling depiction of evil.

Mia Farrow is phenomenal as Rosemary and she’s buoyed by a great supporting cast including John Cassavetes as her husband and Ruth Gordon as her domineering neighbor. (Gordon won an Oscar for her performance, the movie’s only golden statuette.)

It’s a miraculous achievement of a horror film, perfectly paced and so canny in building dread with only sparing use of supernatural imagery (really just a dream sequence of uncertain literal reality). I’m especially infatuated with the production, turning Rosemary’s apartment into a Gothic prison full of suffocating rooms and haunted corridors.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

Directed by cinematic titan Carl Theodor Dreyer, the film is textbook European art cinema: It is so precise, patient, and still in its observation that it occasionally feels stiff. But it is truly marvelous as drama, with rich and surprising characterization, and a steady, doomed arc for its characters. It’s also a feminist and anti-fascist commentary without ever beating its themes’ drums.

The film follows a priest organizing the local witch-burnings, Rev. Absalon (Thorkild Roose); his young wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin), whose mother was accused of witchcraft but spared in exchange for Anne’s hand; and his son Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), who falls in love with Anne. Anne and Martin’s connection grows stronger as the flames of the witch craze climb higher and higher.

Day of Wrath is an immaculate achievement. For a slow, talky film, it is always engaging. It’s gorgeously produced in enclosed spaces (the only outdoor shots occur when characters are feeling romantic and unburdened, or else frenzied during a witch burning), with world-class lighting, cinematography, and shot blocking. Dreyer employs gentle but powerful camera movements. The acting, especially Movin’s, is outstanding. Terrific film.

This review appeared in Goodie Bag: Witch Movies

My podcast co-host Brian and I recently appeared on the Alternate Ending podcast for its witch episode, The Podcast: Witches, a great full-circle moment for me: Alternate Ending’s podcast was a big inspiration for The Goods: A Film Podcast, and the writing of Tim Brayton, the critic who publishes on Alternate Ending’s web site, is a major inspiration for my own film reviews. We spent much of the episode trying (and failing) to define what a witch even is as we discussed many of cinema’s depictions of witchcraft.

In preparation for that episode, I caught up with several witch-associated movies, and watching them back to back, a pattern jumped out at me: Given that witches are almost always women, the films about them are very often about gender and sexuality; and about the men (and churches, and neighbors) who would very much like to keep women in line. That thread runs from Day of Wrath’s quiet feminism straight through to The Love Witch, which drags the subtext outward. Here are some mini-reviews of what I watched:

Day of Wrath (1943)

Is It Good? Exceptionally Good (7/8)

Day of Wrath is a strong candidate for the best movie about witchcraft, or, at least, alleged witchcraft. This period piece about a witch craze in a Danish village in the 1600s was filmed during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. As such, an unrelenting sense of oppression and injustice accompanies the film. (It makes a good companion piece to Häxan, the witchcraft essay film that fellow Dane Benjamin Christensen made two decades earlier.)

Directed by cinematic titan Carl Theodor Dreyer, the film is textbook European art cinema: It is so precise, patient, and still in its observation that it occasionally feels stiff. But it is truly marvelous as drama, with rich and surprising characterization, and a steady, doomed arc for its characters. It’s also a feminist and anti-fascist commentary without ever beating its themes’ drums.

The film follows a priest organizing the local witch-burnings, Rev. Absalon (Thorkild Roose); his young wife Anne (Lisbeth Movin), whose mother was accused of witchcraft but spared in exchange for Anne’s hand; and his son Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), who falls in love with Anne. Anne and Martin’s connection grows stronger as the flames of the witch craze climb higher and higher.

Day of Wrath is an immaculate achievement. For a slow, talky film, it is always engaging. It’s gorgeously produced in enclosed spaces (the only outdoor shots occur when characters are feeling romantic and unburdened, or else frenzied during a witch burning), with world-class lighting, cinematography, and shot blocking. Dreyer employs gentle but powerful camera movements. The acting, especially Movin’s, is outstanding. Terrific film.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Is It Good? Exceptionally Good (7/8)

Roman Polanski is an awful, woman-terrorizing human being; so, I guess it sorta fits that he’s made one of the most gripping and unnerving depictions of a woman being terrorized by something awful. In this case the awful thing is a baby, as you might guess from the title, but a baby she suspects comes from the devil rather than her aloof husband.

What makes this movie so powerful is the contrast between Rosemary’s dreary domestic life and her growing fear that she is bearing spawn of Satan. She is belittled in so many ways – demeaned by neighbors, dismissed by her husband, betrayed by a doctor she confides in. Any of these actions in isolation might be a normal thing that happens to a pregnant woman living in a stately old Manhattan apartment building and married to an actor; yet in accumulation they create a deeply unsettling depiction of evil.

Mia Farrow is phenomenal as Rosemary and she’s buoyed by a great supporting cast including John Cassavetes as her husband and Ruth Gordon as her domineering neighbor. (Gordon won an Oscar for her performance, the movie’s only golden statuette.)

It’s a miraculous achievement of a horror film, perfectly paced and so canny in building dread with only sparing use of supernatural imagery (really just a dream sequence of uncertain literal reality). I’m especially infatuated with the production, turning Rosemary’s apartment into a Gothic prison full of suffocating rooms and haunted corridors.

The Devils (1971)

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

The Devils is one of those films that forces you to ask why it is you watch movies, and I frankly don’t know what to do with it. Ken Russell constructs this like a man possessed, his filmmaking on fire such that every howling image lands with provocation and gusto. Some of these compositions are so inventive and charged that I could barely breathe as I watched; it is not an exaggeration to call it one of the grand masterpieces of film production in cinema history. Derek Jarman’s production design, his first work in cinema, turns the walled town of Loudun into a gleaming, white-tiled asylum. Jarman and Russell are visionaries in the way they carefully build a visual language of black and white only to tear it asunder with red blood and pink flesh.

Contained within that technical mastery are some powerful stories: A womanizing priest named Grandier (Oliver Reed), who rules Loudun, creates a sexual furor bordering on bewitchment among the residing nuns, most especially Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave). Meanwhile, a group of civic and religious bureaucrats connive to wrest control of Loudun from Grandier. The film’s characterization is searing and occasionally nuanced; Grandier is both a true cad and a true believer; Jeanne is a bundle of contradictions.

And yet I found the film tough to get through. I wouldn’t go quite so far as Roger Ebert, whose sarcastic 0-star review mocks it as a self-important parade of torture and orgies dressed up as brave truth-telling, but I do find it to be an edgelord, try-hard piece of art, displaying contempt for everything it encounters. A little bit of punk-rock fury aimed at all pillars of the establishment is okay, especially when you’re a magician of a filmmaker, but The Devils left me with the same gross aftertaste as Texas Chain Saw and Trainspotting: It pushes its buttons of dour cynicism so hard it circles back to uninteresting for me. It features some filmmaking for the ages, but is just a bit too frothing for me to give it anything more than an academic thumbs-up.

(N.B.: Although The Devils is inspired by a documented historical “witch craze” incident, it is essentially not a witch film, but I included it here because I watched it in prep for the podcast about witch movies. Also: after decades of censorship, a 4K restoration of Russell’s uncut version opened in North American theaters for a currently-active one-week run.)

I Married a Witch (1942)

Is It Good? Very Good (6/8)

It’s tough to imagine a movie aging better than the screwball comedy I Married a Witch: We get one of the too-precious-few starring roles for a prime Veronica Lake, an all-time Hollywood firecracker. She’s in feisty sexy gremlin mode here. Her utter disregard for man’s society feels liberated and the exact opposite of fusty, a total delight to watch 84 years later. Director René Clair’s depiction of mischievous magic is cauldrons of fun, and the central storytelling gimmick of Lake’s witch Jennifer accidentally using a love potion on herself, flipping the film’s original dynamic on its head, is inspired. Romantic co-lead Wallace Wooley (Fredric March) is just fine but mostly gets out of Lake’s way.

Where the film stumbles is in the final act when a new conflict emerges after Jennifer and Wallace get together that turns Jennifer’s father Daniel (Cecil Kellaway) into an antagonist. It’s significantly less fun than everything that leads up to it, but not enough to blunt the overall delight of I Married a Witch.

Bell, Book and Candle (1958)

Is It Good? Good (5/8)

Tell me if you’ve heard this one: Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak star as romantic leads in a 1958 Technicolor film. This, of course, describes Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, an all-time masterpiece, but it also applies to a fluffy little delight of a witch-themed romcom that has some beatnik flavor to it, Bell, Book and Candle. Stewart landed this role as the other half of the trade that sent Novak to Paramount for Vertigo. (Essentially all documentation I can find on the film eschews the Oxford comma in the title. The film’s own opening title card goes even further and skips the commas entirely.)

The mood on this one is great, shot in Greenwich Village with great scenes set in clubs and on the streets. Legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe gives it groovy, green-heavy lighting; he said he had a blast experimenting with tinted lights and filters on this one. It also benefits from an extremely charming supporting cast: Jack Lemmon playing a gay-coded warlock, Ernie Kovacs as a paranormal-obsessed writer, and, most importantly, a remarkable cat named Pyewacket. Novak’s Gillian is about as bewitching as any woman has ever been on film (this and I Married a Witch make a great double feature of contrasting but magnificent examples of eye-popping beauty and screen command with Lake and Novak). Funny that it’s ever-great Stewart who is the closest thing to a wet blanket among the bunch; he’s a bit too old and stodgy for the part, and it’s no surprise this is generally considered his final turn as a romantic lead.

It’s a lightweight affair, and its ending feels a bit like a selling out of the spirit of witchy, feminist freedom that Gillian displays throughout the film, but it’s a good time nonetheless.

The Love Witch (2016)

Is It Good? Nearly Good (4/8)

The Love Witch is a film of both glimmering achievement and exhausting frustration: Its singular vision by auteur (director, writer, production designer, etc.) Anna Biller simply hums. It’s even more vibrant than the Technicolor movies it pays tribute to, e.g. Bell, Book and Candle. And its idea to take the barely-subtext feminist themes of witch cinema and make them explicitly investigated text is a fascinating choice, one that places it in a half-ironic zone that isn’t all that far off from my beloved Z-O-M-B-I-E-S movies… at least, if they had lots of nudity.

But the film is completely backbroken by its slim, repetitive story that drags on for a grating two hours. Witch antiheroine Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson) ensnares and kills men one at a time like she’s a slasher villain crossed with a black widow, but the cadence and payoff of those scenes never escalate in a rich enough manner to justify making this as more than a short film, or maybe one of those 75-minute turbo-features.

That said, I’m tempted to give the film a passing grade just on how brilliant the production is and how well-cast Robinson is in the lead. The film has gorgeous colors, lovely costumes and makeup, terrific sets, and an overall intoxicating visual vibe. It’s too bad I just couldn’t get on its narrative wavelength.

Other witch movies reviewed on The Goods

Still in a witchy mood? Here are a few more I’ve reviewed:

• Häxan (1922)
• Suspiria (1977) and its remake, Suspiria (2018)
• The Witches of Eastwick (1987)
• The Blair Witch Project (1999)
• The Witch (2015)
• Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025)

The discussion opened with some movies we’ve seen recently, then discussed a few dozen depictions of witches throughout cinema history, what some of the recurring themes approaches are, and what even is the definition of a “witch.”

Thanks Alternate Ending for hosting us!

Part of my love for cinema came from the dual blessings of being a child during the Disney Renaissance and a teenager for much of Pixar’s imperial reign. It turned me on to animation in a big way, to the point where I was happy to look for the best in any film that was animated and hold them up as art. I’ll never forget the chills I felt listening to Anton Ego’s monologue near the end of Ratatouille, to say nothing of watching my childhood end before my very eyes in Toy Story 3. Alan Menken’s tunes for Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast scored my childhood, as I’m sure they did many people reading this. These movies are part of my movie-watching DNA, and How to Train Your Dragon is as well.

By the late 2000s, DreamWorks Animation had become the punchline among animation studios: the company that put out various Shrek clones whose protagonists all made the same smirk, content to animate their films like sitcoms. But the winds started to change in 2008 with the miraculous Kung Fu Panda, a film that offered mythic sweep, high adventure, stylized and kinetic animation, and a surprising amount of heart. The panda still made that damn face, but otherwise it suggested a new era for the studio, one that How to Train Your Dragon would fulfill two years later.

How to Train Your Dragon is loosely based on the book series of the same name by Cressida Cowell, and it pulls some names and ideas from the books, but it is essentially an original story. It very nearly wasn’t this story at all: The project’s first incarnation hewed close to the books and skewed young, and the studio found it too sweet and whimsical for its growing ambitions. So DreamWorks brought in Chris Sanders, who recruited his Lilo & Stitch co-director Dean DeBlois, and the pair workshopped it into something far bigger and bolder. A key moment in the film’s development came when legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins joined as a visual consultant, advising on lighting and the overall look: how to make the film feel richer, more like live action, and more visual in its storytelling.

The story that Sanders and DeBlois landed upon is one of the most sophisticated and humane that DreamWorks has ever told, even as it treads on well-worn themes. The narrative framework itself is familiar, essentially Avatar and Pocahontas: A misfit from the established society has an encounter with someone from the native population his society is at war with, falls in love, and realizes that his people had it all wrong about the natives. In this case, the natives are dragons, and the love is a pet-caretaker symbiosis that borders on fraternal love.

Here, the misfit is Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the scrawny, sarcastic son of Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), chieftain of the Viking village of Berk. Berk is constantly besieged by relentless dragons, which raid the island for its livestock and set fire to whatever they don’t carry off. Hiccup is the apprentice to the blacksmith Gobber (Craig Ferguson), and would give anything to kill a dragon and earn the respect of his father and his peers. But he has neither the muscle nor, it turns out, the killer instinct, and spends his time tinkering in the blacksmith shop. During one raid, one of his contraptions actually works. He fires a bola that brings down a Night Fury, the elusive terror with a sonic fire blast that never shows itself and never misses. Of course nobody believes him. But he tracks the downed dragon into the woods. It’s his big break: he hasn’t just caught a dragon; he’s caught the most fearsome of all.

And yet, knife in hand, he can’t bring himself to kill the creature. He uses his blade to cut it loose instead, and it spares him in turn. This kicks off the film’s best stretch: near-wordless sequences of Hiccup and the Night Fury getting to know each other — observing, learning, and bonding. He names the dragon, which resembles both a cat and a dog at different moments, Toothless (a fully ironic moniker). Toothless is a marvelous visual creation, animated with tremendous life. Crucially, he moves and acts like an actual animal, as compared to the “animals” of movies like Madagascar and even Kung Fu Panda, which are in fact humans shaped like animals. Much of his life comes through in the eyes: big, vividly colored, and endlessly expressive. Those eyes are one of my favorite visual touches in the film (one that The Sea Beast would later lift, along with most of this movie’s plot). We learn that Toothless lost half his tail fin when Hiccup shot him down. So Hiccup builds him a new one: a prosthetic. And as he attaches it, something magical happens: Toothless takes off. Hiccup becomes the first Viking ever to ride a dragon. Hiccup and Toothless learn the prosthetic tail only works with a rider to operate it, creating a bond: Neither can fly without the other.

Meanwhile, Stoick is off searching for the dragons’ nest to try and put a permanent end to the dragon problem, and Hiccup is enrolled in dragon training alongside Berk’s other teens, including Astrid (America Ferrera), the fierce overachiever he’s hopelessly sweet on. In the arena, he flails. In secret, he keeps sneaking off to study Toothless.

Some aspects of the animation have aged like unrefrigerated soft cheese. I have admitted I was a little nervous about revisiting Dragon, since two Spider-Verse movies had set a new bar for animated flight. I needn’t have worried. The Deakins-informed emphasis on space and perspective still pays off: I have yet to find a movie that captures the sensation of flying through the air — of soaring through the heavens, of defying gravity — as gracefully as this one. Additionally, few films do as much to capture two such different scales at once: the sweep of an entire world, and the three-dimensional space you have to move through to cross it. (I imagine the filmmakers watched a lot of Finding Nemo for inspiration.)

Deakins’ fingerprints are all over the lighting, too. He pushed the film darker than animation usually goes, which reportedly ruffled some of the DreamWorks artists who couldn’t understand why a shadow would be more interesting or expressive than a flatly lit expression or motion. That unorthodox, more realistic lighting gives Berk real atmosphere, especially in the fire-lit night raids. The color design is just as smart, and certainly more sophisticated than most other animated films: Hiccup is in green, Astrid is in light blue, every character readable at a glance. Additionally, every human has a dragon whose color, design, and motion mirrors it, setting up the payoff of the third act when the dragons and humans unite. (DeBlois predictably muted that palette in his blow-by-blow 2025 remake, a casualty of live-action brownification.)

Sixteen years on, the screenplay’s structure holds up as a well-oiled and deeply satisfying machine. Line by line, the script has some wonky dialogue, but its architecture builds out the story’s themes with total seriousness and intricately interlocked concepts, all supported by story details. Every setup gets a payoff, even the setup you didn’t initially identify as such. Dragons’ hatred of eels becomes one of Hiccup’s tricks in the ring; Astrid’s punch-then-kiss “That’s for…” routine comes back in multiple contexts; the pests of Hiccup’s opening narration become the pets of his closing one; and the fact that dragons are highly flammable on the inside (also a pretty good metaphor for adolescence) turns out to be the key to the finale. Most striking of all (spoiler warning for a movie old enough to drive): the tail fin Hiccup accidentally takes from Toothless is mirrored by the leg Hiccup loses in that finale, leaving boy and dragon with matching prosthetics. The entire story builds towards a theme of pacifism and symbiotic coexistence more powerfully than any of the many other kids movies that have tackled such themes. (Sorry, Zombies 4.)

A major piece of what makes the film so effective is the way it builds real stakes, starting with the danger of the world itself. This is not a cartoon war: Berk is a village where every building is new because the old ones burned, where the town blacksmith is missing two limbs, and where the chief keeps sailing off in desperate hope of saving his people. Stoick’s hard line on dragons isn’t prejudice for its own sake; it’s generations of scar tissue.

The film presents another kind of danger, too, a social one: The danger of shaking up the status quo. Every lesson Hiccup learns from Toothless makes him a star in the ring, and every triumph in the ring makes his secret more perilous, because the better he gets at befriending dragons, the closer the village comes to handing him one to kill. The film lets that contradiction tighten like a vise around father and son alike until something snaps in a tremendously effective third act, one that depicts the cost of change in a way that I’ve rarely seen in family animation.

The voice cast has two real standouts: Baruchel as Hiccup and Butler as Stoick. Butler sells a man carrying an entire tribe’s survival on his shoulders (the concept itself a bit of a metaphor for general fatherhood, like Mr. Incredible’s superpowers). And yet it’s Baruchel who offers one of my favorite voice acting performances in all of animated cinema. So often the voice actors for animated protagonists are blank ciphers, and so what I love about Baruchel’s performance is how much flavor he gives Hiccup, with a clear and original brand of stammering neurosis. His Hiccup is someone entirely his own yet still recognizable as a pretty normal human teen longing for the things we all want: romance, fulfillment, acceptance, a place to fit in. It’s a funny performance (he nails the deadpans) but one that really sells the highs and lows, too.

The rest of the voice acting is not quite so perfect, though I’ve made my peace with all of the performances. The biggest casting miss, for me, has always been Ferrera. Astrid is written as tomboyish and collected, a character who needs a cool, slightly mysterious allure; Ferrera instead offers a reading that’s too energetic and too surface-level — not quite shrill, but always a little on edge. Still, she nails a couple of the important moments, like when Astrid confronts Hiccup after Stoick has sailed off with Toothless in search of the nest.

The other teens — Snotlout (Jonah Hill), Fishlegs (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and twins Ruffnut (Kristen Wiig) and Tuffnut (T.J. Miller) — mostly deliver hammy, Madagascar-esque shtick, making dumb, flirty quips at each other every other scene. But hey, DreamWorks gonna DreamWorks. Besides, they’re as much a part of the bigger picture as they are a tonal nuisance. This is a coming-of-age story, and the teens are exactly what Berk’s way of life produces: kids who can rattle off a dragon’s stats but can’t imagine doing anything with one except killing it. They’re not quite ready to take on the mantle of defending Berk, but what generation of teens is ever ready for adulthood?

Above and beyond everything else in this movie, though, is John Powell’s score. Don’t get me started. (Too late.) It is one of the greatest adventure scores of all time, probably the best in the genre since The Lord of the Rings, and certainly one of the soundtracks I’ve listened to most in my life, good enough to just sit and pay attention to rather than play in the background. It’s filled with multiple interlocking themes from a variety of influences, all brilliantly orchestrated, and every lovely leitmotif deepens the emotions and impact of the story. Powell layers bagpipes, fiddles, and pennywhistles over a full orchestra and, when it counts, a choir, and he weaves his themes together so tightly that the music tracks the bond between boy and dragon as closely as the animation does: The flying theme introduced in the overture surfaces as a tentative variation in the cove, then returns in full, glorious voice once the two finally take to the sky. It’s the score that cemented Powell as one of my favorite modern composers. (It also landed him an Oscar nomination, which he lost to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for The Social Network; the same night, the film lost Best Animated Feature to Toy Story 3. Two nominations, two losses, both to masterpieces. I’ll allow it, though I would have given the Original Score trophy to Powell.

Every track is a highlight, but if I have to choose: the table-setting “This Is Berk,” which previews a bunch of the themes in a terrific overture; the springy “See You Tomorrow,” a reel straight out of the Scottish Highlands; the exquisite “Romantic Flight”; and, best of all, the heart-soaring “Test Drive,” which carries Hiccup and Toothless through their first real flight together.

The music is, I think, what takes How to Train Your Dragon from an excellent but quirky adventure story, full of heart, to a higher plane of greatness. I’ve watched it over and over, and I know its flaws as well as I know its best scenes. That’s what post-critical means to me: I wouldn’t change a single one of them. Every time Toothless banks out over the open water and Powell’s orchestra lifts off with him, I fall in love with the movies all over again.