In the wake of COVID-19, some changes…
Everyone is feeling the effects of COVID-19 and the entertainment industry, in particular movie studios and theaters, have been dramatically affected. I will be continuing to review new films when I can, albeit many will likely be smaller indies unless Hollywood embraces Video on Demand. I’m also going to make a real effort to continue seeking out Ohio-made indies and providing reviews for them. I will continue what I did for my huge 1999 in Rewind article and look back at my original teenage reviews and assess my current feelings on the movies and my old writing, for the year 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and now 2004. I’ll be on the lookout for amazingly new so-bad-it’s-gotta-be-seen movies (have you seen Love on a Leash?). In short, I’m going to keep writing. I hope you keep reading.
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Regretting You (2025)
I do not care for Colleen Hoover as an author. She exploded thanks to social media and has, as of 2024, sold over 34 million books, primarily romantic dramas, primarily featuring wounded women trying to get back on their feet. She is a full-blown publishing phenomenon. Hoover has become so prolific and successful that she takes up an entire shelf. She’s already joined the ranks of your James Pattersons, Stephen Kings, Danielle Steels, the familiar names of authors that can be found in grocery checkout lanes. Her popularity is indisputable. Her quality is another matter, and that’s where I have trepidation with Hoover as a storyteller. Admittedly, I have never read any of her novels, so take all criticisms with a degree of incredulity. I’m making my judgement based entirely on the movie adaptations of her novels. Again, this might be an unfair guide considering if I did the same thing for, say, Stephen King, it would be easy to form a scathing opinion of the man’s literary work. 2024’s It Ends With Us made me deeply uncomfortable with its misplaced attempts to romanticize domestic violence. It wasn’t just misguided but it offered little insights into the mentality of abuse victims, instead slotting this disturbing story element into the awkward love triangle expected from the genre. It wasn’t good. Next, we have Regretting You, based upon Hoover’s 2019 novel of the same name. At this point, I’m wondering if I need to hold a regular spot in my annual worst of the year lists for the slew of Hoover adaptations to come.
In 2007, Morgan Grant (Allison Williams) and her friend Jonah Sullivan (Dave Franco) are clearly in love. I guess it’s too bad they’re seeing other people. Both are also dealing with pregnancies. Morgan marries Chris (Scott Eastwood) and has her baby, Clara. Jonah abandons his pregnant girlfriend, Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) but comes back many years later to have another baby together (I guess Jenny terminated her earlier pregnancy but it’s never really dealt with). Cut to present-day, and teenage Clara (Mackenna Grace) is smitten with the charming film school aspiring Miller Adams (Mason Thames), a guy ripped out of a quirky rom-com. Then the big tragedy happens: Jenny and Chris die in a car accident, the same car, and it’s revealed the two were engaging in a longstanding affair. Morgan and Jonah must try and navigate these complex feelings of betrayal while also determining how much to tell Clara.
Just glancing through that brief plot synopsis, there are a LOT of elevated, dangerously soapy story elements packed into a two-hour movie, and that’s not including Clancy Brown as a cranky grandfather who Miller feels indebted to take care of as he’s scheduled to begin chemotherapy. There’s a lot going on here, and I’ll just state that there are two movies jostling for dominance that should have been split. The teen storyline does not fit next to the adult storyline. Every time it jumps from one to another, it was tonal whiplash and it became so much more dissonant. That’s because the teen storyline is awash in the burgeoning feelings of new love that we see in many YA tales and teen-centric rom-coms. It’s new and hopeful and very familiar for the teen drama genre. The adult storyline is awash in grief and betrayal, with both spouses trying to make sense of their pain and heartache and uncover what they can of what they didn’t know. One of these stories is bubbly and sunny and comedic, and one of these stories is tragic and searching and painful. They do not work in tandem, each taking away from the appeal of the other.
In particular, the adult drama deserved its own showcase to really explore the details of its complex feelings. Discovering after death that your spouse was not who you thought they were is so conflict-rich, especially that they were linked to another person experiencing that same shock and loss and confusion, it’s a recipe for real anguish and an unknown path of healing. Morgan and Jonah should never have known one another, let alone had an unrequited romance that hangs over them as adults. All this does is set up the obvious coupling, cruelly killing their spouses so these two can finally be together as destiny demands. It would have been far more intriguing for them to discover one another through this shared betrayal, but then again that might remind people of Random Hearts, but then again I doubt anyone recalls much about this 1999 movie that has an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This is where the real drama lies, but like much else of Regretting You, it’s unexplored and replaced with tropes and predictability. The exploration of grief and anger isn’t even given its proper due. Morgan primarily sits on her couch and drinks wine throughout the day. Jonah at one point rejects his new baby thinking he’s not the biological father. This conflict is, like many others, resolved so simply, merely having Morgan tell him to man up. These characters should be discovering unexpected aspects of themselves through this unique circumstance. These two characters should be striving to process their varied emotions but it’s all too easily distilled into a predictable payoff to their decades-in-the-making romantic matching. It’s reductive and boring.
The YA-styled romance is also too familiar and underdeveloped as its adult drama. Miller (I hate that his first name is “Miller” – apologies to all first-name “Miller”s out there reading) is the kind of kid who loves movies but never seems to talk about what he loves about them or even make references to them. He wants to be a filmmaker but we don’t see his projects. That’s because Miller isn’t so much a character but being a dreamy ideal boyfriend, a sweetheart who is always concerned for Clara’s well-being and is so respectful of her boundaries and desire to wait to be intimate. He requests help moving a town limits sign a couple blocks every so many days with the intention of eventually having the ability to order from his favorite pizza place that said his home was out of their delivery zone. This is the kind of cute, whimsical activity we expect from the Manic Pixie Dream Girls of romantic comedies. If you think harder about this it actually becomes nonsensical. Why would the pizza shop change their earlier refusal because now there is a sign in front of Miller’s home that says it’s within city limits? It’s only a single sign. The house hasn’t physically moved, the distance is still the same, and the store’s GPS would still indicate as such (“But-but there’s a sign, and even though the sign is inaccurate, you should abide by it”). This is only a silly detail that I don’t mean to harp on but it’s indicative of the lackluster character writing. Because of this there’s really no genuine conflict between the two young lovers. He’s a dull dreamboat ideal.
Really, the only drama present with Clara is when she will discover the harsh truth about her father, and so you’re just waiting for this eventual Sword of Damocles to fall, to have her question why her mom would make this choice. In some regard it makes sense, to hide a painful truth from her daughter, to delay further having to process it herself, but it’s also something that cannot be contained forever. She’s going to find out eventually, and then she’s going to be additionally upset that her own mother withheld this news from her. It’s not like Morgan has complete ownership of this information. It likely would be common knowledge that they died together, in the same car, and it’s hard to believe rumors would not emerge, with classmates snickering behind her back through the school hallways or taunting her directly. It’s a shame that this looming hard truth is the only thing that Clara has going for her in this movie. Their relationship is generally conflict-free, or what conflicts there are are so easily resolvable. She’s young, in love, and her dreamy boyfriend easily ditches his girlfriend, the one obstacle to their union. This is because Clara is not her own character, not even a reflection of her mother; she is only a plot device to be plucked into tears.
There are a few creative decisions that caused me deep confusion. Chief among them is the choice to have the same actors play their mid-to-late 30s selves as their high school selves. The opening high school graduation just establishes the four characters’ relationships, the obvious fact that Jonah and Morgan feel something for one another but oh well, and that there are unexpected pregnancies. From there the movie makes a sizable time jump but doesn’t make that clear this has happened. So we went from Morgan at a graduation party to Morgan chatting with Clara, and I thought she was a younger sister. Why would I have automatically assumed this is now the 16-year-old daughter that we had just confirmed was a zygote in the previous scene especially when Williams is made to look exactly the same over those 17 or so years? I don’t think the opening was even necessary. They could have established these character histories without a direct flashback where Jonah literally says that maybe they’re with the “wrong people” as he stares deeply into her eyes. This is also the kind of movie that has no faith in its audience, and yet we’re intended to catch the big time jump. Clara sees a movie at Miller’s theater, and he asks her why she’s crying at the conclusion of a Mission: Impossible sequel. She says it’s because her dad took her to a lot of movies. We get it. She associates the movies with her father who she dearly misses. But then the movie adds an additional line where she literally says, “That’s why I’m crying.” Thanks, movie. Ugh.
Something amusing to me that I doubt anyone else would really notice is the design of the movie theater. Miller works at an AMC movie theater so there are a few sequences, including the big rom-com rush to greet one another and have the big swooning kiss moment. Because the movie is a Paramount production, there are only posters present promoting other Paramount movies, 2025 releases like The Running Man and the latest Mission: Impossible, but then also classic movies like Sabrina and The Godfather. God forbid a movie theater advertise other titles from competing film studios. Perhaps this is just a very singularly loyal theater. Anyway, as a person who worked at a movie theater for over a decade, this little incongruous detail stuck with me. It’s the same thing with Miller’s bedroom. All of his posters are Paramount movies, which means he just loves that studio so much. Maybe that’s why he works at a movie theater that plays exclusively Paramount movies (the corporate synergy reminds me of young Christian Grey having a Chronicles of Riddick poster in his childhood bedroom brought to you by Universal). Perhaps somehow Miller doesn’t even know the existence of non-Paramount movies and is in for a world of shock when film school students talk about stuff like Godard and Cassavetes and Fincher and Tarantino, and he’ll just be so pitifully confused.
With a title like Regretting You, it allows for so many ready-made quips, especially when the finished movie isn’t quite up to snuff. The term “soap opera” is usually referenced as a pejorative, that a movie has so much heightened incidents to be distanced from the nuance of adult reality. However, just because something is soapy in scope doesn’t mean it cannot be fascinating and engrossing in execution. The films of Pedro Almadovar (All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Parallel Mothers) are often, on paper, a random assembly of soap opera histrionics, and yet the man’s creativity and empathy finds, almost without fail, ways to really open up and explore the details of his characters and their unique emotional states. The premise of Regretting You could have done this, but the desire to be appealing to teenagers with the YA-styled teen romance, sabotages the exploration of grief and betrayal into a clipped and frustratingly tidy little package. It’s not good storytelling, folks, but it had some potential to be. There are two more Colleen Hoover film adaptations slated for 2026, and most definitely more even after, so it’s best to prepare dear reader because It Ends With Us wasn’t actually predictive with its title. It only begins.
Nate’s Grade: C-
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Marty Supreme (2025)
Marty Supreme is like the Oscar bait version of 2019’s Uncut Gems. Director/co-writer Josh Safdie, one half of the Safdie brothers that literally gave us Uncut Gems, has applied that same panic attack-inducing formula to a more broadly friendly combination of elements (example: this movie doesn’t open on a colonoscopy). Timothee Chalamet plays the titular Marty, a young man in 1952 New York City with a dream of being the best ping pong player on the world stage. He’s so supremely confident of his abilities that he never seems to plan beyond the immediacy. He’s a born hustler, and the majority of this 150-minute exercise is watching him work multiple schemes to gather the funds to secure a plane ticket to Japan. Reminiscent of Uncut Gems, it’s a movie of antic episodic events, with a charismatic but self-destructive lead spinning collapsing scheme upon collapsing scheme, one ending while another begins, and struggling to keep them all spinning and paying out. It makes for a frantic, propulsive experience, and even though there are some shady characters eventually and threats of violence, the stakes feel less dramatic and therefore more accessible to endure for so long. This is the kind of movie where, upon finally getting an item that will pay for that ticket, Marty’s own uncompromising hedonism has to be satiated in that moment of supposed triumph, all for it to get taken away again. In many ways, Marty is his own worst enemy when it comes to actually achieving his goals.
The whole thing is built upon the performance of Chalamet, who dominates the movie. There’s maybe five total minutes where Marty isn’t on screen. It’s a movie that needs a charismatic anchor. Chalamet digs in as the smooth-talking, impulsive, manipulative con man literally looking for his big ticket to stardom. It’s a brash performance of bravado, and it’s easy to get carried away by the actor, or at least intrigued to see how Marty is going to get out of all these crazy jams of his. The whole movie kind of takes a note from its lead to be bold. There’s digressions upon digressions. There’s key supporting roles for Tyler the Creator and Kevin O’Leary, yes, the bald guy from Shark Tank. There’s an opening credits sequence following sperm fertilizing an egg. The last 20 minutes is almost all ping pong action. There’s anachronistic music throughout. It’s remarkable how much of it works, but the frantic, anxious nature of the plotting covers up the hollowness of Marty. Perhaps he’s always yammering because a second of silence could force introspection. I don’t know if this man is capable of reflection, despite what the final image might infer. It’s a wild, whirling, consistently surprising movie that blends in so many characters and incidents to keep you entertained, but I don’t know if, much like Marty, there’s anything deeper under the surface of that desperation
Nate’s Grade: B
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Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
Being the third in its franchise, we now have a familiar idea of what to expect from a Knives Out murder mystery. Writer/director Rian Johnson has a clear love for the whodunit mystery genre but he loves even more turning the genre on its head, finding something new in a staid and traditional style of storytelling. The original 2019 hit movie let us in on the “murderer” early, and it became more of a game of out-thinking the world-class detective, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig). With the 2022 sequel Glass Onion, the first of Netflix’s two commissioned sequels for a whopping $400 million, Johnson reinvented the unexpected twin trope and let us investigate a den of tech bro vipers with added juicy dramatic irony. With his latest, Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson is trying something thematically different. Rather than adding a meta twist to ages-old detective tropes, Johnson is putting his film’s emphasis on building out the themes of faith. This is a movie more interested in the questions and value of faith in our modern world. It still has its canny charms and surprises, including some wonderfully daffy physical humor, but Wake Up Dead Man is the most serious and soul-searching of the trilogy thus far, and a movie that hit me where it counts.
In upstate New York, Pastor Jud (Josh O’Connor) has been assigned to a church to help the domineering Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). The congregation is dwindling with the exception of a few diehards holding onto Wicks’ message of exclusion and division. The two pastors are ideologically in opposition, with Pastor Jud favoring a more nurturing and welcoming approach for the Christian church. Then after one fiery sermon, Wicks retires to an antechamber and winds up dead, with the primary suspect with the most motivation being Pastor Jud. Enter famous detective extraordinaire Benoit Blanc to solve the riddle.
I appreciated how the movie is also an examination on the different voices fighting for control of the direction of the larger Christian church. Wicks is your traditional fire-and-brimstone preacher, a man who sees the world as a nightmarish carnival of temptations waiting to drag down souls. He sees faith as a cudgel against the horrors of the world, and for him the church is about banding together and fighting against those outside forces no matter how few of you remain to uphold the crusade. Pastor Jud rejects this worldview, arguing that if you think of the church as a pugilist in a battle then you’ll start seeing enemies and fights to come to all places. He’s a man desperate to escape his violent past and to see the church as a resource of peace and resolution but Wicks lusts for the fight and the sense of superiority granted by his position. He relishes imposing his wrath onto others, and his small posse of his most true believers consider themselves hallowed because they’re on the inside of a special club. For Pastor Jud, he’s rejecting hatred in his heart and looks at the teachings of Jesus as an act of love and empathy. It’s not meant to draw lines and exclude but to make connections. These two philosophical differences are in direct conflict for the first half of the movie, one viewing the church as an open hand and the other as a fist. It’s not hard to see where Johnson casts his lot since Pastor Jud is our main character, after all. I also appreciated the satirical tweaks of the church’s connections to dubious conservative political dogma, like Wicks’ disciples trying to convince themselves the church needs a bully of its own to settle scores (“What is truth anyway?” one incredulously asks after some upsetting news about their patriarch). It’s not hard to make a small leap to the self-serving rationalizations of supporting a brazenly ungodly figure like Trump. At its core, this movie is about people wrestling with big ideas, and Johnson has the interest to provide space for these ideas and themes while also keeping his whodunit running along pace-for-pace.
There is a moment of clarification that is so sudden, so unexpectedly beautiful that it literally had me welling up in tears and dumbstruck at Johnson’s capabilities as a precise storyteller. It’s late into Act Two, and Blanc and Pastor Jud are in the thick of trying to gather all the evidence they can and chase down those leads to come to a conclusive answer as to how Pastor Jud is innocent. The scene begins with Pastor Jud talking on the phone trying to ascertain when a forklift order was placed. The woman on the other side of the line, Louise (Bridget Everett, Somebody Somewhere), is a chatty woman who is talking in circles rather than getting to the point, delaying the retrieval of desired information and causing nervous agitation for Pastor Jud. It’s a familiar comedy scenario of a person being denied what they want and getting frustrated from the oblivious individual causing that annoying delay. Then, all of a sudden, as the frustration is reaching a breaking point, she quietly asks if she can ask Pastor Jud a personal question. This takes him off guard but he accepts, and from there she becomes so much more of a real person, not just an annoyance over the phone. She mentions her parent has cancer and is in a bad way and she’s unsure how to repair their relationship while they still have such precious time left. The movie goes still and lingers, giving this woman and her heartfelt vulnerability the floor, and Pastor Jud reverts back to those instincts to serve. He goes into another room to provide her privacy and counsels her, leading her in a prayer.
The entire scene is magnificent and serves two purposes. This refocuses Pastor Jud on what is most important, not chasing this shaggy investigation with his new buddy Blanc but being a shepherd to others. It re-calibrates the character’s priorities and perspective. It also, subtlety, does the same for the audience. The wacky whodunit nature of the locked-door mystery is intended as the draw, the game of determining who and when are responsible for this latest murder. It’s the appeal of these kinds of movies, and yet, Johnson is also re-calibrating our priorities to better align with Pastor Jud. Because ultimately the circumstances of the case will be uncovered, as well as the who or whom’s responsible, and you’ll get your answers, but will they be just as important once you have them? Or will the themes under-girding this whole movie be the real takeaway, the real emotionally potent memory of the film? As a mystery, Wake Up Dead Man is probably dead-last, no pun intended, in the Knives Out franchise, but each movie is trying to do something radical. With this third film, it’s less focused on the twists and turns of its mystery and its secrets. It’s more focused on the challenging nature of faith as well as the empathetic power that it can afford others when they choose to be vulnerable and open.
Blanc doesn’t even show up for the first forty or so minutes, giving the narration duties to Pastor Jud setting the scene of his own. Craig (Queer) is a bit more subdued in this movie, both given the thematic nature of it as well as ceding the spotlight to his co-star. Blanc is meant to be the more stubborn realist of the picture, an atheist who views organized religion as exploitative claptrap (he seems the kind of guy who says “malarkey” regularly). His character’s journey isn’t about becoming a true believer by the end. It’s about recognizing and accepting how faith can affect others for good, specifically the need for redemption. Minor spoilers ahead. His final grand moment, the sermonizing we expect from our Great Detectives when they finally line up all the suspects and clues and knock them down in a rousing monologue, is cast aside, as Blanc recognizes his own ego could be willfully harmful and in direct opposition to Pastor Jud’s mission. It’s a performance that asks more of Craig than to mug for the camera and escape the molasses pit of his cartoonish Southern drawl. He’s still effortlessly enjoyable in the role, and may he continue this series forever, but Wake Up Dead Man proves he’s also just as enjoyable as the second banana in a story.
O’Connor (Challengers, The Crown) is our lead and what a terrific performance he delivers. The character is exactly who you would want a pastor to be: humble, empathetic, honest, and striving to do better. It’s perhaps a little too cute to call O’Connor’s performance “soulful” but I kept coming back to that word because this character is such a vital beating heart for others, so hopeful to make an impact. It’s wrapped up in his own hopes of turning his life around, turning his personal tragedy into meaning, devoting himself to others as a means of repentance. He’s a man in over his head but he’s also an easy underdog to root for, just like Ana de Armas’ character was in the original Knives Out. You want this man to persevere because he has a good moral center and because our world could use more characters like this. O’Connor has such a brimming sense of earnestness throughout that doesn’t grow maudlin thanks to Johnson’s deft touch and mature exploration of his themes. O’Connor is such a winning presence, and when he’s teamed with Blanc, the two form an enjoyable buddy comedy, each getting caught up in the other’s enthusiasm.
Johnson has assembled yet another all-star collection of actors eager to have fun in his genre retooling. Some of these roles are a little more thankless than others (Sorry Mila Kunis and Thomas Haden Church, but it was nice of you to come down and play dress-up with the rest of the cast). The clear standout is Glenn Close (Hillbilly Elegy) as Martha, the real glue behind Wicks’ church as well as an ardent supporter of his worldview of the damned and the righteous. She has a poignant character arc coming to terms with how poisonous that divisive, holier-than-thou perspective can be. Close is fantastic and really funny at certain parts, giving Martha an otherworldly presence as a woman always within earshot. Brolin (Weapons) is equally fun as the pugnacious Wicks, a man given to hypocrisy but also resentful of others who would reduce his position of influence. The issue with Wake Up Dead Man is that elevating Pastor Jud to co-star level only leaves so much room for others, and so the suspect list is under-served, arguably wasted, especially Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers) as a red-pilled sci-fi writer looking for a comeback. The best of the bunch is Daryl McCormack (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) as a conniving wannabe in Republican politics trying to position himself for a pricey media platform and Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus) as a cellist who suffers from deliberating pain and was desperate for a miracle delivered by Wicks. He’s the least genuine person, she’s hoping for miraculous acts, and both will be disappointed from what they seek.
Wake Up Dead Man (no comma in that title, so no direct command intended) is an equally fun movie with silly jokes and a reverent exploration of the power of faith and its positive impact, not even from a formal religious standpoint but in the simple act of connecting to another human being in need. This is the richest thematically of the three Knives Out movies but it also might be the weakest of the mysteries. The particulars of the case just aren’t as clever or as engaging as the others, but then again not every Agatha Christie mystery novel could be an absolute all-time ripper. That’s why the movie’s subtle shifts toward its themes and character arcs as being more important is the right track, and it makes for a more emotionally resonant and reflective experience, one that has replay value even after you know the exact particulars of the case. If you’re a fan of the Knives Out series, there should be enough here to keep you enraptured for more. Because of that added thematic richness, Wake Up Dead Man has an argument as the best sequel (yet).
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Predator: Badlands (2025)
This movie plain rules. I was a nominal Predator fan beforehand but these last two movies, both directed by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane) and written by Patrick Aison, have taken the concept of a badass alien bounty hunter and made it so much more interesting than its killing prowess. Badlands is the first movie told entirely from a Predator’s perspective, also known as the Yautja. We’re set on an alien world, a proving ground that has claimed many who attempted to make their mark, and we’re following a “little brother” Yautja named Dek who wants to make big brother proud and stick it to dad. There’s also just the general struggle for survival in a hostile world where even the grass can kill you. That’s what I loved about Badlands, how seamlessly it drops you into its perspective and the fascinating sense of discovery along the way. Every ten or so minutes introduces another obstacle, character, or environmental detail that creates such a more vivid picture of this planet, and those details will almost all come back in important and satisfying ways for our climax, proving Dek has learned many lessons. Where the movie goes from great to amazing is when Thia (Elle Fanning) is introduced as a legless android from a Weyalnd-Yutani corporate expedition. It’s a perfect buddy pairing: he’s stoic and inflexible and quiet, and she’s chatty and goofy and friendly. The way the two of them genuinely bond and grow to become allies is surprisingly satisfying on an emotional level, which is not something I thought I’d ever say about a Predator movie. The action is immersive and clever and quite creative with its various details, but the real winning formula is just how structurally sound and engaging it is from the character dynamics. I cared. I celebrated their victories. I celebrated their rewarded faith in one another. Badlands is badass as delightful sci-fi/action but it’s also badass as a funky found family movie that felt like magic. Even if you’ve never enjoyed a Predator movie, or seen one, give Predator: Badlands a well-served trip.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Bugonia (2025)
A remake of a 2003 South Korean movie, Bugonia is an engaging conflict that needed further restructuring and smoothing out to maximize its entertainment potential. Jessie Plemons stars as a disturbed man beholden to conspiracy theories, namely that the Earth is populated with aliens among us that are plotting humanity’s doom. He kidnaps his corporate boss, a cold and cutthroat CEO (Emma Stone), who he is convinced is really an Andromedan and can connect him with the other aliens. The problem here is that the story can only go two routes. Either Plemons’ character is just a dangerous nutball and has convinced himself of his speculation and this will lead to tragic results, or his character will secretly be right despite the outlandish nature and specificity of his conspiracy claims. Once you accept that, it should become more clear which path offers a more memorable and interesting story. The appeal of this movie is the tense hostage negotiation where this woman has to wonder how to play different angles to seek her freedom from a deranged kidnapper. Both actors are at their best when they’re sparring with one another, but I think it was a mistake to establish so much of Plemons and his life before and during the kidnapping. I think the perspective would have been improved following Stone from the beginning and learning as she does, rather than balancing the two sides in preparation. The bleak tone is par for a Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things) movie but the attempts at humor, including some over-the-top gore as slapstick, feel more forced and teetering. I never found myself guffawing at any of the absurdity because it’s played more for menace. The offbeat reality that populates a Lanthimos universe is too constrained to the central characters, making the world feel less heightened and weird and therefore the characters are the outliers. I enjoyed portions of this movie, and Stone’s performance has so many layers in every scene, but Bugonia feels like an engaging premise that needed more development and focus to really get buggy.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Zootopia 2 (2025)
I’m genuinely shocked it took nine years for Disney to drum up a sequel to their billion-dollar “woke” allegorical hit, Zootopia. It used anthropomorphic animals living in a modern metropolis to analyze prejudice, racism, and segregation through the dichotomy of predators (untrustworthy animals beholden to vicious nature) and prey (docile animals). Specifically, it was about plucky police officer Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) learning to work with con artist-turned-ally Nick Wilde (voiced by Justin Bateman). Now the partners are back and on another wild case uncovering yet another long-standing mystery of the city’s history entrenched in blame and suspicion of a “kind of people,” namely serpents/reptiles, who were driven out of town generations ago. There is a slight repetition in the message about looking beyond staid stereotypes and accepting other animals as equals (will Zootopia 3 be about finally accepting insects?), but when the tolerance message is essential to what made the 2016 original movie so much more thoughtful and relevant and satisfying, then keep it. The movie rises on the bickering but engaging buddy dynamic between Judy and Nick, who obviously love one another but don’t know how to admit it (consider me a shipper). The mystery tackles themes of gentrification, forced relocation, on top of its anti-prejudice and pro-tolerance foundation, so there’s plenty to unpack thematically while also taking in the visual whimsy and action slapstick. I laughed heartily at several points, including a very unexpected but transparent reference to a classic horror film complete with heavy music cues. It’s not as fresh or as finely developed as its predecessor but Zootopia 2 is further proof that this universe and its creativity can house many adventures, even if some of those plots and themes get repetitive.
Nate’s Grade: B
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Train Dreams (2025)
What a superb, tender, and deeply humanistic portrayal of life through the eyes of one man, Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton), a logger in Idaho in the early twentieth century. His life isn’t too different from the lives of many. He wants to spend more time with his wife (Felicity Jones) and child, less time away for months on end for logging, and he has difficulty making friends in his profession of hard work and inherent transience. He feels more connection to the natural world, of which he is felling one tree at a time. The nature of the script, adapted from the 2011 novella by author Denis Johnson, is episodic, people coming in and out of this man’s personal life. The narrative feels like a collection of memories, jumping back and forth in time, connected by ideas and imagery like we do in our minds, and providing a sum total for a life lived. There’s an inherent solemnity and awe to the movie, whether it’s about the transcendence of man’s place in the world, the march of progress, or merely the pull of tragedy and love that seeps into our core being. There is a personal tragedy that defines Robert, and it is devastating to experience and process with him. Director/co-writer Clint Bentley (one half of the same creative team behind last year’s Sing Sing, one of the best movies of 2024) uses this character to represent the totality of the human experience, making the movie feel deeply felt and empathetic even decades removed from its subject. That’s because logging isn’t the movie. It’s about the people, places, and experiences that define us. William H. Macy hasn’t been this good in years. You give me a wise, elegiac narrator in the spirit of Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with such pristine details readily supplied, and I’m already a sucker for your movie. The only thing holding back Train Dreams for me was that post-tragedy doesn’t get the attention I think it deserves. You’d expect the second half of the movie would be the process of grieving and coming to terms, and in essence it is, but the movie is far less direct about its processing, which I felt was a minor misstep for an overall great movie.
Nate’’s Grade: A-
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Tron: Ares (2025)
Known more for its cutting-edge visual effects, the Tron series has long felt like a franchise that Disney keeps trying to reanimate every generation with the hopes that this time, this time, it won’t be ahead of its time and merely of its time and a measurable hit. I think the issue I’ve had with the Tron movies, the original in 1982 and the 2010 glitzy sequel by debut director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), is that the computer world that the characters get sucked into is, quite simply, boring. The world-building of life inside the computer is dominated by design and less by depth. It’s cool-looking and sleek and alien but it’s also over-glorified setting details without a larger sense of life. That’s probably why every movie has dealt with the threat of the computer world coming into the real world. That’s where Tron: Ares does right, spending far more time in the real world than the computer one, with a flesh-and-blood character (Greta Lee) traveling into the computer realm and a digital one (Jared Leto) traveling out to track her down. On the outside is a war between two tech companies, both racing to be able to replicate structures from the computer world into our own, except they disintegrate after 30 minutes. This is a smart limitation as it naturally presents a goal, to outlast this measure, but it also presents a ticking clock for our computer programs tracking down their missions. Much of the characterization is Leto’s security program, Ares, becoming self-aware and questioning the orders of his superiors, which makes for a pretty predictable arc from a pretty stoic if tedious character. He’s simply the cool fighter that we need for cool fighting, and admittedly, there are plenty of cool fights here. The Tron visual aesthetic of force movements creating warriors makes for some nifty images, especially when those barriers are used for strategic purposes in escapes or combat. You could mentally check out from all the tech mumbo-jumbo and just enjoy the pleasure of the sci-fi action, especially with Nine Inch Nails (really Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross) providing the sonic musical accompaniment. I don’t know if I’ll ever really love a Tron movie but there’s enough offered with Ares that allows me to at least like a Tron movie.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Keeper (2025)
Director Osgood Perkins is becoming an indie horror household name for Neon with three releases in less than 18 months, each wildly different in approach. Granted, Keeper is more in league with Longlegs than The Monkey, which for me is the less appealing comparison. There really isn’t a whole lot to Keeper in style, theme, or execution. It stars Tatiana Maslany (The Monkey, She Hulk) as a woman visiting her boyfriend’s family cabin in the woods. He leaves for extended periods of time and she starts seeing weird visions of dead women and strange and sinister specters. Until the reveal with fifteen minutes to go, the movie is all ponderous atmospheric noodling, with Maslany slowly losing her mind. There’s a few nifty images but the eventual connection to all this mumbo jumbo is pretty outlandish while at the same time feeling pedestrian, delivered with an unintentionally funny expository speech spelling out everything. All this slow burn anticipation for that? I wish there was more concentration on the main character’s personal psychology beyond lingering doubts she has over whether her boyfriend might be cheating. That’s a fairly humdrum conflict given everything (just go home, girl) and makes the character more a mitigating reflection of him rather than her own character with her own issues and history. Some of the eventual monster designs are nightmarish and memorable but for me it was too-little too-late. I wanted better for Maslany and a horror movie that had more going on under the surface to justify its dithering atmosphere. Keeper is a poorly paced and ultimately thin horror movie better left alone and forgotten.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Hell of a Summer (2025)
You’ve likely seen this kind of movie before, and co-stars/co-writers/co-directors Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard (yes, the Stranger Things actor has directed a movie by age 19) are counting on that. Hell of a Summer is a summer camp slasher movie with horny camp counselors trying to score before they get murdered by a masked assailant. The tone, however, is decidedly more heightened and goofy, aiming for more of an unassailable offbeat comedy like Wet Hot American Summer. It works because the horror/thriller elements, and the general mystery of who is the real killer, are never really that compelling, clear pastiche but no more than that. The real entertainment value comes from the silly characters navigating familiar teen troubles like relationships, growing independence, and the scary uncertainty of being an adult, with a heightened seriousness amidst the ridiculous, approaching camp-levels but without being obnoxiously self-aware. That’s why I credit Wet Hot American Summer as its primary influence. There’s a loosely experimental yet admirably confident air to the presentation. Even when the jokes aren’t landing or the pastiche is getting old, I held out with hope that another strange moment might catch my fancy in short order, like Wolfhard being obsessed with the hydration of his peers, or Bryk having a crisis of self-doubt when people suggest the killer is targeting the “hottest counselors” and he’s not been targeted yet. It makes for a silly, inoffensive bauble of a movie with clear affection for its genre influences. If you can’t get on the movie’s comic wavelength, it will make for a slog of 90 minutes. Hell of a Summer might make you smile enough to warrant one pleasant viewing, and who knows, this might just be the beginning of Finn Wolfhard, directing titan.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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