So when I come to the slight defense of Him, understand the parameters. I don’t really think this is a good movie, exactly. It lacks a legible narrative and never lands on anything close to a coherent thesis. Those are not small potholes. But it does have buckets of style where many peers are content to “do an A24,” slap on a droning synth, and call it a day.

The film doesn’t help itself by having shockingly little of substance to say about football or being an athlete. Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers) wants the dream; Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is the retiring legend dangling it in front of him; the plot sets them up as frenemy rival-partners through a nonsense conflict about Cam filling White’s roster spot if he passes White’s tests. Nothing here actually feels like a sport; more like an Wagnerian struggle for Cam’s soul. And yet the movie wallows in the high drama and linguistic cadence of sport and its culture: The script wields the title of “G.O.A.T.” upon its characters in truly idiotic terms, like Cam and White are running for mayor against each other. For a movie allegedly about the identity and cultural power of athletes, quarterbacks especially, Him keeps football mostly offscreen, swapping the nuts and bolts of the sport for a cult pageant about abstract notions of “greatness.”

Him’s tone is cranked so high it becomes hysterical parody, yet performed with a straight face. Jordan Peele’s name is plastered everywhere (he produces), and the marketing all but begs you to treat this as a stealth Peele joint. And I actually see something in that: The comic DNA aligns with Peele’s Comedy Central days deconstructing Black identity, macho performance, and the ridiculous showmanship of sports culture (see: the names in “East/West College Bowl”). I laughed a lot: Wayans intones “football, family, God” under spaceship lighting while Elsie White (Julia Fox) twerks on the floor. That’s either self-evidently hilarious or self-evidently awful, and I while I land on the former, I gather most see it as the latter.

The movie is also drenched in Jesus iconography: crosses, crowns, rituals, processions, blood resembling stigmata. This is ostensibly critiquing the way we uncritically canonize athletes in the modern media landscape. Mostly it reads as an excuse to frame Withers and Wayans in painterly tableaux, Christ-like but mood-lit, with satanic symbols and blood spatter sprinkled like glitter. The depiction of hyper-masculinity doesn’t register as a moral stance so much as pushing the exaltation of celebrity athletes past breaking point, with an appropriate amount of steroid and drug use shown, too.

Tipping arranges everything like a hyper-violent parody of the commercials you see in any NFL broadcast: those hagiographic mini–art films courtesy of Gatorade and Nike and Adidas. Kira Kelly’s cinematography favors neon-bathed shrines and crystalline sweat beads; Taylor Joy Mason’s cutting has all sorts of fast and slow rhythms in it, which is pleasing, though shapeless in any sort of overall storytelling arc. Shots rely heavily on slow-mo and aggressive coloring. The images are sometimes stunning and/or revolting, but they’re not especially memorable, which I think is because they’re not really arranged into any sort of statement. They just sit in a line of moments instead of developing into anything human. Compare it to The Substance: on the surface, both interrogate the appeal and power of youthful strength and beauty, but where Coralie Fargeat escalates with vicious control, Tipping drifts. Him is an airy, aimless film that has moments but never builds.

Withers does his best to hold a non-character together, and he does sell the awe and the nausea of being subsumed into the “big leagues,” but I never buy him as a person. Wayans plays against type, except it doesn’t feel “against type”: he’s so effortlessly a sermonizing tyrant you forget he’s a comedian. Julia Fox plays Julia Fox. Tim Heidecker, the legendary absurdist comedian, is the best performance here as the oily agent Tom, a perfect vector for the movie’s funniest nastiness.

And it is indeed a nasty, funny movie. My favorite gag in the film is a football-to-the-face practice session (not to be confused with football-to-the-groin): it’s upsetting and ludicrous (and more connected to actual football than just about anything else here). My least favorite scene, whatever it is, has already evaporated from my neurons: Him is the kind of movie whose success is in linear proportion with how much it can jolt you into astonishment or outrage at any given moment.

At no point while watching Him did I think I was watching a functional piece of narrative cinema, so I don’t think I can give it a pass. And still, I feel weirdly fond of the film. Maybe movies like Him and Poolman, which make my heart glow even when I feel intellectually dishonest actually recommending them, actually are good movies. Maybe “good” isn’t a useful unit of measurement for art worth engaging with. Maybe I shouldn’t have tethered this review site’s whole brand to a quasi-ironic rating system that reduces creative output into a number and that I came up with five minutes before recording a podcast episode. Maybe you shouldn’t listen to me, or to any critic, and should form your own opinions. Maybe we live in such noisy, depressing times that movies are just more stimulation for our polluted brains. Maybe the fact that I’m crashing out with no punchline in sight means I need to end this review and go for a walk. Go see Him. Or don’t.

Sure enough, the movie version of The Woman in Cabin 10 features lots of chewy psychological and mystery tension. The story is half Gaslight, half The Lady Vanishes. Finish the concoction by sprinkling some Rear Window on top, though I suspect the book embraced that film’s flavor of ambiguous truth more than the movie, which leaves little doubt the actual crime occurred. The film successfully sustains intrigue throughout its reasonable 95-minute runtime, so I can’t pan it too hard, and yet it has plenty of issues that hold it back.

The story follows Lo Blacklock (Keira Knightley), a burnt-out investigative journalist looking for an easy job as a vacation following an especially tragic and taxing investigation. Lo boards a billionaire’s boutique yacht to cover his cancer-stricken wife’s charity work. After a boozy first night onboard, she witnesses something terrible in the next cabin (guess which number): a scream, a splash, a blood smear. But the passenger manifest says that cabin is empty, and everyone from the billionaire to her photographer ex-boyfriend to the ship’s security chief politely (and then not-so-politely) insists she imagined it. Soon, she’s following little whiffs of clues down narrowing corridors while the ship’s champagne-and-canapé veneer curdles into increasingly poisonous and Orwellian behavior.

It’s a viable story, but the trouble is you can practically see the pages being ripped out, torn up, and taped back together. The script is a proper hatchet job of an adaptation: character arcs are shaved to nubs and detective work is so shortcut it reads as divination. Director Simon Stone, also one of the three adapting writers, grafts on an action climax for the closing 15 minutes that is just utter nonsense. The robust ensemble of red-herring suspects mostly gets literally a sentence or two of characterization per suspect; surely they had more to do in the novel. The exposition is awkwardly paced, including a revelation dump about an hour in where three twists emerge at once. Many of the story points wilt under even casual scrutiny (e.g., if someone’s planning a murder, why do it when an investigative journalist is hanging around with nothing to do?). I imagine these issues are less of a problem when you’re breezing through hundreds of pages on vacation, with more space to explain away oddities, but more of a problem in a mystery film aiming for tight Hitchcocky snap.

What keeps the film afloat for me is the mood. Stone fills the story with icy Scandinavian skies and brooding drone shots of choppy waters, setting a gloomy and dangerous tone. And the production design is quite good, though it’s poorly used. We’re stuck on a yacht with a great upstairs-downstairs contrast: twisty, steely corridors sitting below spacious, toxic, mahogany luxury: glass balustrades, chrome fixtures, and antiseptic whites that practically dare you to leave a bloody handprint. You can imagine a much tenser use of the contrast between the overexposed, yawning upstairs versus the pressurized, chilly caverns beneath, with implicit class tension therein. Instead, the camera and story bounce around, and we dart through settings and scenes incoherently, seldom mapping the space or letting us feel the ship’s geography squeeze. The fascinating yacht stage becomes a backdrop rather than a pressure cooker.

So yes, The Woman in Cabin 10 diverts well enough, especially as far as Netflix originals go, and the atmosphere occasionally clicks into place. But The Woman in Cabin 10’s messy screenplay keeps tripping over itself, undercutting the film’s strengths, the whole effort a few degrees off course from properly suspenseful. It’s not the worst of the post-Gone Girl thrillers (see: The Woman in the Window). But The Woman in Cabin 10 is still a minor disappointment.

The Bad Guys 2 is a bit lighter in the plot than the original. This shifts the movie’s focus towards its biggest strength: the outstanding animation and action sequences. Director Pierre Perifel keeps the caper bones but pushes every scenario a bit further to the outer limits: The shenanigans push farther than I expected. Many of the scenarios and images are pretty outrageous, almost subversive. I will not spoil the film’s wacky climax action set piece or its even wackier post-credits stinger, but even if I did, I’m not sure I could convey their kookiness — the film’s joy is its constant escalation.

After a fun Indiana Jones-flavored flashback prologue, the film’s story picks up where the first one left off, with the reformed crew trying (and failing) to make it straight. Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell) spends down time with Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz) while Mr. Snake (Marc Maron) gets cagey about his new routine and cheerfulness. The other three original Bad Guys, Ms. Tarantula (Awkwafina), Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos) hang around, too. They’re applying for jobs and trying to get a break.

Their fortunes change for both better and worse when a slippery new thief called “the Phantom Bandit” starts grabbing headlines by using The ex-Bad Guys’ old tricks and calling cards (think Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief). Police Commissioner Misty Luggins (Alex Borstein) suspects the old crew is really behind the robberies, but reluctantly hires them them to track down the bandit.

This kicks off the movie’s string of wild chases, gags, and action sequences: A sting at a lucha-libre spirals into chaos. Later, the Governor recreates the iconic interrogation of Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs. Before long, an all-female trio of rival thieves — featuring butch leader Kitty Kat (Danielle Brooks), quick-talking Doom (Natasha Lyonne), and muscle Pigtail Petrova (Maria Bakalova) — hires The Bad Guys for “one last heist” that might redeem or ruin them.

Perifel and the animators give the film a caffeinated, sketchbook energy: thick outlines, speed lines, painterly smears. The character designs are mostly terrific fun (though a few of the humans are stuck in bean-mouth hell). The animators turn every chase and skirmish into well-orchestrated turmoil. The lucha sequence, in particular, is a micro-masterpiece, staged with breathless momentum and culminating in one of the cleverest uses of space and particle physics in an animated movie since Spider-Verse 2 and Puss in Boots 2. Just as great is the big, gravity-shifting climax, which has apocalyptic vibes, anchored by a central, golden image that makes use of shape and color that borders on abstract. (It also has a fart joke that spans several scenes, but such is the cost of watching movies marketed to the same audience as Dav Pilkey’s books.)

The shift away from character work and towards action is a pleasant change (especially given how mediocre The Bad Guys‘ script was), but it comes with a cost. The main crew arcs are a little undernourished. The script boxes in the ostensible emotional core of the story, Rockwell’s temptation to backslide into crime, into just a couple of scenes. Another theme that fits into the material, about the lines you’re willing to cross to protect the ones you love, only gets fleeting consideration. But, the writing only exists to provide sufficient stakes for the action, and in that regard it succeeds.

All in all, The Bad Guys 2 is a much more fun and vibrant experience than the original, which exerted too much energy on its “heist for kiddos” narrative. This sequel feels looser and more assured, like the franchise finally shrugged off its need to prove it knows its Ocean’s 11 beats and instead made its own kind of Spider-Verse kinetic joyride. If DreamWorks keeps upping the energy in this series, I would absolutely love to see a third. The box office intake was a modest success, and I expect this will have streaming legs, so I predict we’ll get The Bad Guys 3 that the crew have said in interviews they’d like to make.

The film opens with a search and rescue team hunting for some missing hikers. Two dogs slurp from a hidden cave pool and, later that night, fuse into a writhing tangle — a nasty image of intimacy turned hyper-literal and grisly. Cut to the new folks getting ready to move into town: Millie Wilson (Alison Brie) and Tim Brassington (Dave Franco), relocating from the city to the countryside as he grieves the death of his parents and she pushes forward and tries to pave a quiet but steady future as a couple. Shortly after their move, a mishap during a rainy hike drops them into the very same cave from the opening. Dehydrated Tim guzzles from the haunted pool of water. (Unrelated, but I can’t type “haunted pool” without thinking of Night Swim.)

Soon, his body becomes a flesh magnet of sorts. He develops a longing for Millie’s body that borders on hunger. It has sinister elements, but also horny ones, serving as an antidote to his chilliness towards her since his parents’ death. He starts to feel off-kilter whenever Millie isn’t around. Tim’s “episodes” yank him physically toward Millie, even if they’re miles apart. Meanwhile, a kind neighbor and new coworker to Millie, Jamie (Damon Herriman), offers comforting talk that suggests a nice-guy work husband crush on Millie. Jamie offers some lore on the town’s history with a new-age cult. The film’s first half is all setup and dribbles of anxiety, with a couple of gross gags. Shanks barely hides the movie’s themes: the alternating lust and loneliness of love, and how the tender comforts of steady romance can become a curse once complacency and resentment kick in.

But the film ultimately pulls its punches, rarely giving enough horror energy for the over-explicated thoughts in the script. Together has a handful of clever grace notes, but its ideas are even flatter than they seem. The metaphor of codependency as body horror is a good starting point, yet almost every beat is telegraphed early, so the tension isn’t “what happens?” but “how far will Shanks go?” And the film’s answer is: about 50% of the way. Where something like The Substance pushes imagery of its obvious ideas until it has surpassed its reasonable limit, and then one or two gruesome steps further, Together winces just as it gets going. Whether Shanks’ limit was budget or vision, I don’t know, but it turns away from (or rushes through) all of the gnarliest ideas of fusing flesh it suggests.

On a craft level, almost everything is at operating at replacement level. Shanks and his team clearly worked hard on the contortions and conjoinments, and it occasionally achieves its nauseating aspirations. The effects are achieved with an impressive and well-realized blend of prosthetics and CG. Everything besides the gore is routine; and horror that settles for “routine” has already failed. Other than a couple key moments, including the second-last scene (from which the most horrifying images of the posters and promotional material derive), the imagery settles for safe choices that keep the movie watchable but rarely memorable.

Brie and Franco, also producers of the film, are fine. I’ve cooled on Brie since her Community days, which perfectly cultivated her doe-eyed charm that could edge into unhinged territory. Franco’s hangdog demeanor generally works better in comedy. If nothing else, it’s always fun and fascinating to see a real-life married couple playing opposite each other and the subsequent energy and chemistry that emerge. But the characters of Millie and Tim are as generic as they come: She’s a patient schoolteacher who wants commitment; he’s an emotionally stunted musician who hasn’t given up his dreams of being a rock star. Brie and Franco do little to bring those sketches to the next level.

The film has one joke that properly lands: a climactic needle drop of “2 Become 1,” which pays off a setup line about Millie’s Spice Girls fandom from earlier in the script. It’s the movie’s best crossover between the obvious comedy chops of its leads and the horror pitch. I wish the rest of the movie leaned into this same silly-scary energy.

Together is not bad, just underwhelming. It’s a passable bit of gross-out provocation with a good hook, a few squirmy images, and some over-cooked thoughts on romantic codependency. But it’s also timid where it should be going for broke, neat where it should be messy, stern where it should be frisky. I’ve learned not to give up on hungry and ambitious directors; heck, my beloved Substance is the sophomore effort from a director whose grisly debut didn’t set my world on fire. Here’s hoping Shanks returns with sharper fangs and a stronger grasp of getting the story, scares, and laughs calibrated. For now, though, my fear of the hyped horror debut stands strong.

F1 is such a natural extension of and companion piece to the similarly outstanding Top Gun: Maverick that everyone has rushed to call it “Joseph Kosinski’s follow-up to Maverick,” except… that’s not true. Not a single review site I frequent or Letterboxd pal of mine has brought up the fact that Joseph Kosinski released another in the interim, the panned and instantly forgotten Spiderhead starring Chris Hemsworth, which I still haven’t seen (and I’m guessing most of those folks haven’t either). Everyone would rather match up F1 and Maverick than connect F1 to Spiderhead. But fair enough: Maverick made $1.5 billion and was a rare all-crowds pleaser; Spiderhead wasn’t even the most popular Netflix original the summer it came out.

More to the point, F1 marks the second pairing between Kosinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a titan of satisfying blockbuster spectacle, following Maverick, so that is indeed its lineage. Tying the web even tighter, two of Bruckheimer’s earlier crown jewels are Tony Scott’s Top Gun and the racing picture he made a few years later, Days of Thunder (which continually shoots further up my “how the hell have I still not watched this?” list given my love of Top Gun). And now in 2022-25, we have another Bruckheimer Top Gun film and his racing follow up. For the record, I’m one of those rare folk who thinks the original Top Gun is the better movie (by tiny fractions) and the more interesting one (by very large fractions) than its legacy sequel Maverick.

The “it’s like Maverick, but about racing” narrative around F1, while accurate, is a bit like rehydrating the raisin: Maverick already had sports movie DNA baked in (but then, sports movies have a hefty amount of war cinema in their genetics, so good luck unwinding that ouroboros). What F1 clarifies is how perfectly the simple, durable machinery of a sports story fits Joseph Kosinski in this filmmaking mode. The sport in question is powered by fast, noisy machines that make your bones rattle, much like Maverick’s military discipline is powered by fast, noisy machines that make your bones rattle. Thus, Kosinski can reuse and refine the same visual grammar: cockpit POVs and close-ups, shot in motion and with tension and energy, the spatial geography of set pieces so clean and satisfying you could diagram it with graph paper.

F1 has what I call the Bull Durham stock plot: a cynical, washed-up star butting heads with the talented greenhorn until their grudging synthesis unlocks victory and actualization. (Other movies got there first, I’m sure, but none that I’m familiar with did it better than Bull Durham, so it gets ownership of the template.) Christopher McQuarrie is out as writer, but Ehren Kruger carries over from Maverick and brings a similar knack for sturdy writing built around set pieces. Kosinski also gets story credit this time.

The washed-up old-head, in F1’s case, is Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), who is a halfway point between Pitt’s razor-sharp executive in Moneyball and his breezy thief in Ocean’s Eleven. If that character hybrid doesn’t entirely make sense, that’s fine, because the part ultimately asks for “Brad Pitt, the effortlessly cool leading man,” and he delivers exactly that in the right register. (He’s not quite as outstanding as a faded star as he was in Babylon, but still very good.) One upside of having Pitt in the lead is that he is unafraid of being humbled and kicked around by his movie. He doesn’t sand down the creaks in the joints or over-nurse the ego scabs. You buy that he’s a little bit washed. This makes his eventual competence feel earned rather than ordained. This is in contrast to Maverick’s biggest problem, which is that it has to split the difference between “Tom Cruise is aging” and “Tom Cruise is ageless,” building its story to elevate the mythos of Cruise as the last real movie star as much as any of its other stakes. No such secondary objectives in F1.

F1’s other key figures include the rookie Sonny feuds with but ultimately mentors, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). He’s a wunderkind, with everything a great racer needs except the pesky “winning races” requirement, a perfect sponge for Sonny’s wisdom once they both drop their egos. The team boss is Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old chum who yanks Sonny out of his stateside detours in desperation for his flailing team. The last key figure is Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), APXGP’s technical chief and the de facto romantic interest for Pitt. Despite my Bull Durham comparison, this never threatens to become a triangle; everyone clocks the Pitt–Condon chemistry from “go,” and the movie even lampshades this: Bardem barely blinks when he finds Sonny half-clothed in Kate’s hotel room.

If you’ll permit one more clunky metaphor: the engine of this film, the thing keeping it always moving forward and clicks every gear in sync, is the racing itself. It’s terrific, and it never gets old. You feel the roaring heft of the acceleration and the jitter of every twitch of the steering wheel. Because so much of the footage is practical rather than CG, with Pitt and Idris actually flinging themselves around in tin cans moving 150+ mph in real life, the footage carries a lived-in menace that computers can’t fake. Kosinski keeps changing the framing and the rhythm just enough so it never gets boring or blurs into sameness, despite the fact that professional racing boils down to “turn left a bunch of times.”

The story fills the spaces between those set pieces like tendon and muscle between bones, but the real narrative shape occurs within the races: the micro-dramas of passes, safety cars, and pit stops. You observe the characters develop lap by lap. That part works gangbusters… up to the movie’s favorite punchline: the crash. It’s undeniably cinematic: failure made fireball. But after the fourth or fifth crash, it loses its sense of danger. Whenever a race starts, you might wonder: Will this one end in a near-fatal crash? Spoiler: The answer is almost definitely “yes.” This pattern undermines the supposedly dramatic revelation that Sonny’s body has become chronically damaged from repeated crash injuries. Wow, getting in high-speed accidents over and over isn’t considered good self-care?

F1, as a cinematic package, is assembled with the utmost industrial love. The returning Maverick brain trust clicks back into place: Hans Zimmer (with Steve Mazzaro co-credited) delivers a sensational score that’s a blend of retro and modern, electronic-tinged but soaring, as if it was written for a vintage Tony Scott movie but with Dolby Atmos in mind. Claudio Miranda’s cinematography is a bit of a throwback, too, evoking some ‘80s texture that’s not so glossy or gray-brown as you’d expect from a 2020s tentpole. And Stephen Mirrione, Steven Soderbergh’s preferred hand, cuts 155 minutes surgically. For a movie this long and this shiny, its pulse is quite steady.

One recurring criticism of F1 among the mixed or negative takes is that the movie is just a big ad for Formula One racing. It’s true the movie is stuffed with racer cameos and corporate logos, and it carries a constant air of calculated, risk-free fun. And this take isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s merely a byproduct of F1 doing its job really damn well. Top Gun: Maverick made the Navy look cool because flying planes fast is cool; F1 makes racing look cool because driving cars fast is cool. The Formula One branding is a natural part of the racing world rather than shameless product placement.

Since half this review is “kinda like Maverick, but…,” here’s the part where I answer the question I didn’t expect I would even need to ask, but am glad to. Is F1 better than Top Gun: Maverick? Could this film actually be a more satisfying watch than the film that is a strong contender for the decade’s most revered blockbuster? It’s close. Maverick was one of my favorites of 2022; I expect F1 to race near the front of the pack when 2025 wraps, too. But I still give a tiny edge to Maverick, which lands a few more emotional body blows — the Val Kilmer scene has no match here, and I cared more about mustachioed Miles Teller and Glen Powell than I ever did Damson Idris. That said, the mere possibility of a photo finish is proof that F1 is a resounding success and a contender for my favorite big-budget movie of the year.

And yet I’m a little hesitant to rave too much, for a couple of reasons. First, the movie is kind of strange; not as idiosyncratic as Ham on Rye (another film I felt self-conscious about fawning over), but clearly the product of a quirky, off-center viewpoint sure to be divisive. Second, it tackles a fearless sprawl of ideas and moments: some angst, some romance, some dry one-liners, some borderline slapstick. That blend won’t hit the same for everyone. The humor tickles against the bruise; at other moments, the melancholy lingers when you expect the film to look away. I adored that elasticity, but I can also imagine others bouncing off it.

Sorry, Baby tells the story of Agnes (Eva Victor), who starts the film as a grad student at a mossy New England liberal-arts college, orbiting a tight advising circle with her closest friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) and the department’s star professor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). An after-hours visit to Decker’s home turns into a nightmare with an off-screen rape, witnessed entirely through Agnes’s shell-shocked morning after, and the university promptly offers empty procedure without justice or remedy. The film hopscotches across Agnes’s recovery and the years that follow. She adopts a cat she finds in the middle of the road. A bittersweet twist of fate occurs when Agnes receives a prestigious faculty appointment herself, but gets assigned her assailant’s old office, setting off another spiral. Meanwhile, Lydie drifts further away from Agnes with her own life story, falling in love and expecting her first child.

On paper, the film’s premise invites two traps: First, the masochistic gauntlet of bummers that come with “trauma cinema,” and second, the noodling aimlessness of an episodic diary story with no single overarching narrative. Victor keenly dodges both. She keeps re-framing the central psychological wound rather than re-exploiting it, so each consideration of it feels like a new insight rather than another whack to the shins with a crowbar. And the non-linear structure prevents drift and drag, giving the story curiosity and momentum as we find Agnes’s bearings with each subsequent time hop, while still managing to avoid excessive cuteness or exertion in telling the story unconventionally

The real attraction here is the portrait of Agnes, and Victor’s performance is wonderfully rangy. She plays prickly without nastiness, neurotic without shame, and vulnerable without pleading. Victor has a wiry screen presence to her that makes tossed-off lines and facial expressions land with some combination of tragic and hysterical. Her comic timing is excellent, with a dry and intuitive delivery. What I find most impressive is how much personality she packs into the negative space: little fidgets and flinty smiles that are not showy but revelatory. Victor’s name is sure to be on my shortlist of best performances of the year for the 2025 B.A.D.S.

Victor also surrounds Agnes with a terrific gallery of supporters you’re glad to have on screen. Lydie is the most conventional of the bunch, a perfect best friend so attentive and patient she risks sanctimony, but Ackie colors the character with her charm and magnetic smile. Gavin (Lucas Hedges) offers a gentle, funny corrective to Agnes’s gathering cynicism around men and sexuality; Hedges plays him with unrushed, guileless warmth; their post-coital bathtub conversation is one of the better scenes of the year. I also love Pete (John Carroll Lynch), a sympathetic sandwich shop owner who appears for one scene and has the exact right things to say.

Formally, the movie is comfortably in the indie lane. Mia Cioffi Henry’s cinematography is clean and unfussy but unremarkable, and Victor’s direction offers mostly conventional spaces and framing, with some inviting New England autumnal chill for flavor. Alex O’Flinn and Randi Atkins’s editing keeps the timeline from unspooling into confusion or boredom, and they nail the punch of a few key images and moments. When Victor does press, you feel it: the sequence of Agnes reacting to her assault tense and unflinching, bordering into thriller for a few minutes without tipping into exploitation. It’s not a showy package, and I don’t think it needs to be; the craft here mainly gets out of the performances’ way.

Sorry, Baby separates itself from the pack of “well-observed” debuts (Good One and Janet Planet and company) not through some showy formal breakthrough but through an astonishing grip on tone and timing. Its boldness is the blend: bone-dry comedy braided with sexual abuse survivorship; its brilliance is the beauty of both ends of that emotional spectrum: a movie with true highs and lows. Not every single moment works; Agnes teaching Lolita is a bit on-the-nose, and the university’s doctors and administrators are a bit unbelievably cold. A scene of a jury questionnaire bends the suspension of disbelief a little too far so the movie can announce a few themes. But this is a triumph with astonishingly few missteps. Victor keeps choosing the gentler, trickier path: jokes as breathing room, silence as aggression, recovery as a crooked road. The film keeps landing in that rare space of well-earned, non-pandering empathy. When the credits rolled, my heart had expanded. Sorry, Baby is one of the best films of the year.

It turns out that Mitchells vs. The Machines is an apt comparison, actually, because KPop Demon Hunters operates in a similar space: A well-produced and technically impressive piece of animation by Sony Pictures Animation in the Spider-Verse Lite style, distributed but not produced by Netflix. This time, the style is executed by way of K-pop stagecraft and Korean folklore. That pitch is much more convincing to me than the “trending on Netflix with lots of Twitter-friendly gifs” that had been my impression before we hit play following days of my 8-year-old begging us to watch it for family movie night.

The film follows a three-member K-pop girl group named Huntr/x (pronounced “Hun Tricks” like the climax from Mulan). Its three band members are Rumi (Arden Cho), Mira (May Hong), and Zoey (Ji-young Yoo), who are basically the three Powerpuff Girls personalities: Rumi the strong-willed leader, Mira the snarky grump, and Zoey the bubbly ditz. The trio are not an ordinary product of the K-pop media machine, however: they are part of a long lineage of girl musicians who secretly double as demon hunters, their music the source of their anti-demon magic. In flashback, their ex-idol manager Celine (Yunjin Kim), also the adoptive mother of Rumi, guides and trains the group for both music and monster battling. Nowadays, Bobby (Ken Jeong) runs the operation, though he’s oblivious to their demon hunting.

The film opens with Huntr/x on top of the world and on the verge of finally freeing the world from the demon army led by incorporeal Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun). Their imminent victory slips away when Gwi-Ma unleashes a clever counter-measure: He releases a rival boy band that takes the airwaves from Huntr/x, replacing Huntr/x’s protective music magic with darker energy. This rival group, Saja Boys (no connection to “Crank That”), is led by prettyboy Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop), whose remarkable face card masks a dark deal-with-the-devil past. As Huntr/x fights back and preps for the Idol Awards (I guess the K-pop Grammies) where they hope to sweep the trophies, Rumi’s voice begins to crack under pressure, and we learn she has her own dark secret. Huntr/x’s fandom turns on the group as their public performances go badly. The story gradually expands from demon-tinted sitcom into mythic-scope saga. It culminates in an end-of-the-world concert that either spells salvation or apocalypse, much like the climax of Trolls World Tour.

Visually, KPop Demon Hunters exceeds its streaming profile. Imagine Sony’s trademark, space-mastering 2D-on-3D style, not quite so transcendently adventurous and kinetic, but shot through gel filters, stage lighting, touched up with fashion magazine gloss, and sprinkled touches from classic Asian art styles. The fight scenes pop like choreography reels, with real music video energy where combat aligns with events in the music (e.g. a demon appears as the bass drops). The camera never stops gliding. Outside of the battle, the film still has decent visual energy and flavor, including the much-giffed scenes when the character animation goes full chibi, bringing out the girls’ cartoonish side.

As for the music: While I don’t self-identify as a poptimist, I happily defend a lot of chart-topping hits; and yet, I am a full-on tourist in K-pop land. I’ve never connected with K-pop for a bunch of reasons, including limited exposure but also slight repulsion at its specific flavor of manufactured emotion. That said, the songs here make a good case for the genre: clean hooks and production that really pops. “Golden” is the standout, and is charting on Billboard in a way that presages a Best Original Song shortlist. (I also predict Best Animated Feature consideration.)

The film’s story is formulaic, and yet it has a bit of a perssonal touch as a passion project for co-director and co-writer Maggie Kang. The emotional arc is a “be yourself” teen stock plot: Rumi must accept her own flaws and reunite her band in the climax. The film shines when it ties together the character beats, the music, and the epic demon-battling action all together, heightening the emotions.

The film’s biggest flaw is its voice acting. Despite casting separate voice actors and singers for each of the main characters, the vocal performances are surprisingly flat and graceless. Maybe there’s a vocal texture or accent that I can’t put my finger on that’s bugging me, but I kept being pulled out by awkward line deliveries or weird chemistry between characters. This flattens the talkier scenes a bit, especially next to the polish of the music/action segments.

But KPop Demon Hunters has enough flavor in its visuals and design work to make up for it. Huntr/x sports norigae-coded stagewear, while the boy band goes full monochrome reaper chic. The animal sidekicks are equal parts plushie cutie and creepy portal guardian.

All in all: a win, and a solid one. KPop Demon Hunters is not a canonical entry in the animation pantheon the way Sony’s Spider-Verse movies are, but it’s far more inventive and stylish than I expected from a release platform that often serves as a digital dumping ground. It barely squeaks into the rating I give it below, but that certainly puts it as a nominee in my own B.A.D.S. awards for my favorite animated film of the year. If you haven’t seen the film yet, try catching it during the theatrical run (which Netflix hastily threw together after the film’s popularity exploded). Heck, I might even see it again. KPop Demon Hunters is one built for crowds and big screens, especially if you can see it with kids like I did with my own. Both my 8-year-old and my 5-year-old each unreservedly adore the film, and that means something, even if my ears have some regrets: They’ve been humming “Golden” for two days straight now.

The film is set in the titular New Mexico town as it prepares for a mayoral election in May 2020, COVID lockdown and malaise in full effect. We track one candidate, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a mask-skeptic sheriff aghast at the moral deterioration he sees everywhere, somehow missing the rot taking hold in himself. Across from him is incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who has an unobjectionable personality, a professional operation, and a sane, proactive approach to public health messaging. Tensions mount as Cross’s campaigning becomes more erratic, and one night the brittle calm snaps into a hurricane of ultra-violence that takes us to the credits.

The first problem with a film that aims to literalize the tensions of lockdown into physical carnage is that the violence was already literal. Police brutality, angry protests, nasty counter-protests, and, oh right, a suffocating plague that killed millions. Damn, Ari, you’re saying that was a hard time for us? You don’t say.

Maybe if any part of the film was organized into actual thoughts, it’d be worth engaging with. Instead it’s shrill and flop-sweaty, spewing bile in every direction. The reason nobody can agree on its politics is because it doesn’t have any beyond a baseline nihilism: brainrot is the true virus, the movie shrugs, and we’re all infected whether or not we wore a mask. Life is pointless; morality does not exist. Eddington doesn’t raise the discourse, it beats it with a baseball bat.

The narrative is flat-out busted. I’m sure Aster broke it on purpose, but intention doesn’t redeem the fracture. The movie lines up a row of semi-interesting subplots — the election campaigning, a thorny romantic history with some suggested trauma, a seductive cult leader in town possibly involved in human trafficking, a funding scheme linking City Hall to Big Tech… and then Aster flips the table so it all smashes together in one big, bloody mess. Nothing pays off, nothing interlocks, there are no provocative reversals of fortune, just self-destruction masquerading as resolution. Uncontrolled chaos isn’t clever; it’s a waste of time.

Meanwhile, a bunch of talented actors are left trying to corral the noise into something interior. Phoenix, back from Beau is Afraid, gives a more human turn but still skews so neurotic that two and a half hours in his head feels like a Herculean trial. Emma Stone shows up for something like four minutes as Cross’s disturbed wife. Austin Butler gets maybe half that. The supporting players do what’s asked and then vanish into the dust cloud, or the bloody miasma, as the case may be.

I won’t deny Aster’s fundamental directing chops. As a pseudo-neo-western, Eddington gives him a canvas to stage chases and gunplay with a nasty, credible impact. Darius Khondji, in his first pairing with Aster, frames the desert so we can practically smell the baking asphalt, and the second-half mayhem occasionally finds a brutish rhythm that almost passes for momentum. The western totems are there in twisted modern forms that might pass as clever and thoughtfully rendered if they were used for anything: You have a mystic drifter, clouds of dust, bangs from rifles, town saloons, sunset showdowns, a morally complicated sheriff, and some cowboys-vs.-Indians tension. All of that only makes Aster’s haughtiness and rudderless storytelling more aggravating: the craft keeps promising a movie that the script refuses to deliver.

I’ll even give Aster credit for sprinting headfirst into COVID trauma at a moment when most of us are anxious to move on as fast as possible. The ways that era rewired America and its people — our politics, our troubled capacity for empathy, our fizzling attention span, our appetite for conspiracies — are absolutely worth cinematic excavation. And Aster, the biggest and boldest director to go spelunking there so far, swings a very large hammer. But he doesn’t hit the nail; he wallops your toe and declares the throbbing pain the point.

So if there’s nothing to say and no story to tell, what’s left is the Ari Aster vibe check. You could say the same about Beau is Afraid, which I hated less but also bounced off for parallel reasons: too much angst, total dependence on riding his dour mood, masochistic anxiety-as-expression, and a narrative structure addicted to chaos. Gone is the carefully layered dread of Hereditary or the chilly, inside-out horror of the lugubrious Midsommar. With each of his releases I slide further off his wavelength and grow less convinced there’s a signal under the noise. But he’s going to keep blasting that empty noise at full volume, I can promise you that much.

Materialists is not a film absent ideas; and indeed, that’s part of the problem. It so desperately wants to be a satire about the woes of modern dating, a takedown of a new strain of objectification born in the Bumble era, that it feels like it was conceived entirely on that premise rather than as a story. The most obvious narrative inspiration here is James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News, another urbane love triangle parsing different flavors of romantic compatibility. But Broadcast News, one of the towering cinematic dramedies, thrives on sharply etched, vividly lived-in characters. Its three prongs in its love triangle are people you understand just by spending five minutes in their cinematic presence. Materialists’ trio is on the opposite end of the spectrum. I could barely name a single personality trait between them, aside from, perhaps ironically or perhaps intentionally (I genuinely can’t tell), their job titles, their aesthetics, and their tax brackets.

The film follows Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), a failed stage actress still living in Manhattan who has reinvented herself as a boutique matchmaker for New York’s wealthy singles. She’s jaded about her own prospects, clinging to the mantra that she’ll either die alone or marry rich. Into her orbit come two men, one from her past world and one from her present world: John Finch (Chris Evans), her ex-boyfriend still chasing theater gigs and waiting tables, and Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), a financier with deep pockets and soulful eyes. The film sets up this triangle — idealism versus stability, romance versus security — and observes Lucy navigate the pros and cons of each.

If this sounds more like a premise than a story, you’re not wrong. Materialists spends much of its runtime setting itself up without narrative thrust, introducing its characters and establishing a “status quo” that only barely escalates. Actual incidents are scarce, especially through the first hour. What passes for plot often amounts to Lucy sitting across from one of her suitors while verbalizing the movie’s themes. Now, I’ll happily defend low-plot hangout movies until my dying breath, but that format demands either sparkling character work or an intoxicating vibe. Materialists offers neither.

As someone who started dating his high school sweetheart twenty years ago this September, a full year before my first cell phone even had SMS, I am probably the wrong guy to diagnose the psychology of this film vis-à-vis the modern New York dating scene. But Materialists makes it pretty clear that it’s a realm filled with anxiety. Lucy is an analog matchmaker, but her spreadsheets and instincts are stand-ins for the swipe-right apps: every client distilled into a cluster of metrics and prompts, reduced to “yes” or “no” romantic match based on whether they hit the thresholds of height, salary, age, and placement on the attractiveness matrix.

It’s blindingly obvious from the start that this is dehumanizing and reductive; yet Materialists insists on taking the scenic route to spell that out. We know Lucy is supposed to be a morally compromised figure because she literally announces, “I am a bad person,” with all the gravity of a big reveal. The film treats this like a surprising bit of self-awareness and self-pity, like Lucy is being too hard on herself, which made me question Song’s perspective. Maybe the Manhattan finance-bro dating scene feels like fertile ground for sympathy if you’re close to it. From the outside, though, it looks blatantly toxic from minute one, and Song’s reluctance to say so is off-putting.

The dramatic shape of Materialists is simply broken. Lucy and her would-be partners don’t so much grow or reveal themselves as get gawked at like museum exhibits. The narrative-proper amounts to a handful of conversations between Lucy and each partner about their relative merits and romantic options. Even the comic register never quite lands; Song edges toward irony and acidic bite but rarely crosses into either. A late scene, in which Lucy and John crash a wedding and narrate the couple’s doomed future over the romantic tableau, should be the best in the movie. On paper, it’s a cutting bit of subversion, a lens into just how broken the perpetually lonely hearts have become. In practice, it’s dreary and has no punch, a first draft no one ever sharpened, because it’s just more jaded and low-insight noise.

The cast doesn’t do much to elevate things. I’ve become a defender of Dakota Johnson’s trademark brand of smoldering disaffection, in which her every line suggests she disdains being in her own movie. But here that quality hollows Lucy out entirely. The casting makes sense on paper: Johnson’s detachment could highlight Lucy’s calculating approach to relationships. In practice, whether through poor direction or poor conception of the character by Johnson and Song, it renders her as an alien, inhuman presence. To her credit, Johnson still cuts a striking figure on screen: statuesque and beautiful and confident, every frame a magazine spread. But charisma alone can’t fill in a character who barely exists.

Meanwhile, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal do what they can with thin sketches of characters. Evans comes out slightly ahead, if only because John at least gets moments of friction with Lucy where he and Johnson display some sparks of chemistry. Pascal, by contrast, is stranded as Harry, a genial cipher whose defining qualities are “wealthy” and “nice.” By design, he’s the blandest of the trio, a luxury accessory rather than a person. Still, he anchors one memorable sequence: a long, unbroken take in which Harry and Lucy discuss their relationship in the language of “value” like they’re negotiating a business deal and estimating exchange rates, each a commodity to be appraised. I’d wager this was the first scene Song wrote, maybe even the seed for the entire project, and in isolation it’s easily the sharpest moment in the movie.

Through it all, the film at least looks nice. Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner shoots New York with glossy precision, alternating between well-blocked interiors and lovely exteriors. He and Song apply a consistent formal language, where most of the conversations take place in long takes of slow zoom-outs that mimic the sensation of people-watching, applied even more skillfully than the similar technique in Past Lives. A handful of Materialists’ moments genuinely soar: the dreamy, soft-lit, swooping slow dance between Lucy and John near the climax, for instance, is surely the most romantic scene of 2025. The problem is that these isolated peaks of feeling only underscore the flatness of everything that surrounds it. In Past Lives, Song could coast on a few indelible images and moments because the film’s very project was corralling messy, overpowering feelings and the way we remember them, and what those moments say about us. But in a more idea-driven film like Materialists, those fleeting highs are just pleasant touches.

One plot thread from the film’s second half has earned significant backlash, in which the film addresses a more serious moment of cruelty and abuse. It takes the film out of detached relationship chatter and into reckoning with more grave matters. But I actually think this dark twist enriches the material: Lucy discovers that her glossy brand of compatibility calculus is part-and-parcel with a broader reduction of humanity. It’s one of the few moments I admired the boldness in Song’s writing; she follows her characters’ worldview to its logical and unsettling end. It doesn’t gracefully integrate into the film’s larger arc, and Song bends the writing backwards to fully absolve and redeem Lucy, but the subplot deepens the otherwise thin critique of a culture that treats romance like a free market transaction. (On the other hand, another much-debated plot point, a framing story of cavemen supposedly participating in humanity’s first marriage, is so pointless and trivial that it’s only worth mentioning in this parenthetical.)

Small flashes of insight or cinematic beauty can’t save the whole. Materialists is one of the year’s biggest disappointments: a romantic drama that crumbles under stunted writing and hollow characters. Song clearly knows how to stage a moment; a few images and gestures here remind you why Past Lives made her a name to watch. But sophomore slumps don’t come much steeper than this. For all its talk of value and compatibility, the film itself feels like a bad match: a concept rich in the possibility of bleak satire and fiery character portraiture, executed with the emotional resonance of an ad in Vogue magazine.

Also unlike the Disney LARM dregs, How to Train Your Dragon is not painful to sit through. In fact, it is about as painless and faithful an adaptation of one of my all-time favorite animated films as I could have wished for. I don’t especially want the original changed; and director Dean DeBlois (one of the two directors of the original, along with Chris Sanders) has not changed it. This film recreates, beat for beat and almost shot for shot and line for line, the 2010 masterpiece. It honestly borders on the uncanny — almost like one of those AI recreations of classic film scenes in new styles that goes viral on TikTok or Twitter and triggers my gag reflex. This remake is less colorful than the original, and the humans are actual humans rather than 3D models, but so much of the film’s moment-to-moment timing and direction is quoted verbatim.

I’m not even entirely sure how DeBlois managed to alter the remake’s runtime so much. The sleek 98 minutes of the original is up to a nauseating 125, making me wonder if I can even trust my intuition on how similar it is. I didn’t really feel the bloating too much. The most obvious changes are a couple of added lines clarifying that the training is a competition and giving one of the teen characters a disapproving dad. I guess scenes and shots are all a little padded, and that adds up over a movie.

But I found myself curiously, even enthusiastically, soaking in familiar shots and images as I watched… and yet I was still unsatisfied. This How to Train Your Dragon is well produced and sturdily assembled, but I still felt like Edmund gobbling Turkish delight in Narnia; entirely unsated. I cannot in good conscience give the 2025 How to Train Your Dragon a thumbs up. What are we even doing here? This is a $150 million photocopy sent to theaters in exchange for a 400% ROI. It is not a reinvention or a reimagining. It is merely a faithful, reverent duplication.

The original How to Train Your Dragon is a landmark and one of the films that shaped my love of cinema when I was a young adult. Along with Pixar’s imperial era output (their first eleven films), it locked me into animation in particular. How to Train Your Dragon was a milestone not just for DreamWorks (still their creative apex in my eyes), but for CGI storytelling in general. Sanders, DeBlois, and their team — including legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins as a consultant — rendered flight and space and vast scope with unprecedented power for the medium. The film married a dangerous dragon-battling adventure with a coming-of-age arc, capturing the friction of generational change in that framework. The visual storytelling was nimble and expressive. It had wit and weight (and also some underwhelming teen sidekicks). Importantly, it had John Powell’s all-timer score, which has become a go-to reference for modern adventure composing. This remake does pretty much all of that stuff, too, I guess. At least, it goes through the motions of it.

For what it’s worth, the story still holds up. Hiccup (Mason Thames) is the gangly blacksmith’s apprentice and Viking chieftain’s son in Berk, a village constantly under siege from dragons. One day, a gadget he’s built wounds a rare and feared Night Fury, but when he finds it in the woods, helpless and injured, he does the unthinkable: he lets it go. That dragon, whom he names Toothless, soon becomes his best friend and his conduit to understanding the outside world more deeply. Through his bond with Toothless, Hiccup learns that the dragons aren’t bloodthirsty monsters but scared animals forced to feed a parasitic hive-queen dragon to survive, hence constantly scouring Berk for food. As Hiccup uses his connection with Toothless to learn more about dragons, he earns a reputation as a beast-whisperer in Viking training. When Toothless finally gets discovered, Hiccup clashes with his father, Stoick (Gerard Butler, reprising his voice role here in physical form). Meanwhile, Hiccup butts heads with other Viking teens during training, including the beautiful overachiever of the group, Astrid (Nico Parker).

The production itself is competently helmed and effective. To his credit, DeBlois, who also directed the second and third animated films in the series (and presumably will direct those sequels’ inevitable LARMs), returns with clear affection for the material rather than (just) eyes on a paycheck. The dragon CGI, courtesy of Framestore, a British effects studio, integrates well with the humans. The gimbal-aided flight scenes don’t quite replicate the soaring magic of the original, but do as decent an imitation as you might hope for. Some of the on-location shooting in Northern Ireland and the Faroe Islands is actually more lovely than the 2010 CGI vistas. Powell returns to punch-up his great score, though it’s nearly an exact copy of his original work. (Without looking it up, I can guarantee it won’t be eligible for “Best Original Score.”) And, somehow, the added runtime really didn’t bug me too much; the story’s a bit less zippy but still flows well and hits credits in under two hours.

It’s not a flawless production, though, particularly in the costuming and makeup. The Viking costumes often look like they were purchased at Spirit Halloween, and Astrid’s hair braid is distractingly bad. The distinctive color coding in the original (e.g., Hiccup in green; Astrid in light blue) has been neutered a bit in the overall brownification of the “live action” transformation.

Performance-wise, the film is a mixed bag. Mason Thames doesn’t have Jay Baruchel’s neurotic and stammering charm, but he’s a capable screen presence and generic hero. Nico Parker as Astrid is doing a theater kid performance, intense but not quite locked into the charisma and mysterious allure that the character needs. The rest of the teen ensemble — Julian Dennison, Gabriel Howell, Bronwyn James, Harry Trevaldwyn — are frankly slightly improved as human actors in the background, slightly less obnoxious and tone-rupturing than their animated counterparts. Nick Frost is having fun as Gobber, previously Craig Ferguson’s role.

Ever since Disney pioneered the CGI-driven live-action remake in the 2010s (with the Tim Burton Alice movies, then The Jungle Book), I’ve tried to keep an open mind about these LARMs. I haven’t seen it since theaters, but the 2016 Jungle Book suggested to me some possibility in interpretation — shifting stories to new tones to bring out something new in over-familiar narratives. Most do not do this, though. I don’t desire to be a kneejerk hater who prejudges these films to ignominy. As a rule of thumb, I believe it is worth engaging with these films, like any films, on their own terms. Perhaps one or two of them will justify their own existence (I hear Pete’s Dragon does). But the evidence to date does not lie: Whether they remix or remake, desecrate or worship… they all leave me cold. Maybe the big-budget LARM is not, in fact, art; maybe we’ve hit the point where it’s pure capitalism. I guess I should just stop watching them. How to Train Your Dragon might be the most harmless specimen of the form, but it still makes me feel a little empty inside.