Once upon a dream, Disney was in the business of producing world-class visual art. Now they’re just in the business of business — corporate acquisitions and such. The dream is over. So it goes.
That corporate culture shift didn’t happen overnight. At minimum, it happened over a decade. The 1950s saw Disney’s earliest, mightiest strides to diversify its portfolio, expanding into television and amusement parks after spending its first couple decades focused on its core mission: overworking & union-busting animators. Still alive, engaged, and at the helm, Walt Disney himself was conscious of the ways his company’s corporate expansion could dilute the quality of its feature films, so he made a point to reaffirm dominance in the field through technically accomplished pictures like Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Fittingly, the studio closed out the decade with the most back-to-basics title of the batch, 1959’s fairy tale romance Sleeping Beauty.
This feature-length adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s thinly plotted ballet is, above all else, a formal flex. Narratively speaking, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t accomplish anything that wasn’t already covered by Snow White or Cinderella. It’s yet another princess-in-distress fairy tale of a fair maiden being rescued from a jealous hag’s curse by a macho hero’s kiss. Only, it’s stripped of any defining characteristics that would make its doomed lovers lastingly memorable. Nothing about Princess Aurora is especially iconic, to the point where she’s more often referred to nowadays by the film’s title than by her proper name. All memorable character quirks are instead reserved for the women in charge of her fate: the three goofball fairies who protect her from Evil (Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather) and the villainous Mistress of All Evil (Maleficent, the only character here deemed worthy of her own spinoff franchise).
Without any of the usual pesky plotting or character concerns getting in their way, Disney’s team of technicians could focus entirely on the animation’s visual majesty. Afforded an extreme “Technirama” aspect ratio to paint his elaborate backdrops within, artist Eymind Earle crafts an extravagantly detailed tableau in every frame. Walt Disney tasked his crew with evoking Medieval tapestries in the film’s design, and Earle goes so overboard in his traditionalist craftsmanship that he upstages the characters that populate his backdrops. In turn, his collaborators create an incredible depth of field through cell animation techniques, especially in early sequences where the wicked witch Maleficent and her fairy foes bless & curse the newborn baby Aurora through a series of magic spells. Roses, specters, lightning, and other abstract premonitions swirl in psychedelic montage as Aurora’s fate is decided at the foot of her royal crib. It’s a divine intersection of the fairy tale traditionalism of Snow White and the pure orchestral illustration of Fantasia — two mighty Disney triumphs from decades past, the best animation money can buy.
I have no interest in recounting Aurora’s troubled path to womanhood here. She’s cursed to die on her 16th birthday but is saved by a good nap and a classic case of puppy love. The rest is all arranged royal marriages, goofy sidekick antics, and sitcom-level mistaken identity hijinks. Even the mighty Maleficent is more memorable for her visual design than for her words or actions. We love the drag queen pageantry of her devil-horned headpiece. We love the green-on-black color scheme of her magic spells. We love her climactic transformation into a purple, fire-breathing dragon — another grand achievement in classic, hand-drawn animation. When the evil witch is defeated and Aurora is saved by the kiss of her sweetheart prince, the picture ends with the young couple dancing in the clouds. That’s also where the audience’s heads are supposed to be, not sweating the details of the storytelling on the ground.
When was the last time Disney was more focused on the visual majesty of it’s animation than on the marketability of its characters? Every in-house Disney production is now shrewdly designed to stock some toy shelf, amusement park attraction, or T-shirt screen press with fresh, sellable IP. It’s difficult to imagine an instance where they’d set aside character quirks & catchphrases to wow an audience with a return to classic, elegant animation. At this point, the company’s animation wing is a product delivery mechanism, like an assembly line conveyor belt. It used to be their entire raison d’être.
Do movies ever premiere on airplanes? I’ve occasionally seen ads from airlines proudly declaring that they are the exclusive in-flight entertainment home for a recent theatrical release, as if there’s a customer base out there willing to book a flight on Delta instead of Southwest specifically so they can watch Predator: Badlands on the back of a headrest. Has that kind of competitive bidding on fresh in-flight content created enough of a market to support direct-to-headrest film productions, though? Could it possibly be lucrative for a traditional Hollywood movie to skip theaters entirely and instead exclusively premiere as in-flight entertainment? I ask this having just watched the supernatural romcom Eternity, which drifted quietly through American multiplexes without much fanfare but will soon make for a major crowd-pleaser as an in-flight movie selection. It’s cute, harmless, weightless, and just overall pleasant enough to make a long fight go down smooth, already evaporating from you brain by the time you walk to baggage claim.
Miles Teller & Elizabeth Olsen star as an elderly suburban couple who die within a week of each other, rematerializing as their younger, happier selves in a Limbo-like eternity. Their decades of functional but unexciting marriage are threatened to be undermined by the return intrusion of Olsen’s first husband: a noble war hero hunk played by Callum Turner, who died tragically young. Now, she has a short span of time to choose between which of her two deceased beaus to spend her eternity with, essentially choosing between bright romantic spark and long-term marital comfort. Despite all of the supernatural shenanigans that distract from the competition between her two love interests, it’s a fairly straightforward romcom dynamic, which the movie openly acknowledges by having one of the two competing husbands rush to the train station to stop her from leaving at the climax. There isn’t even much tension in guessing which of the two men she’ll ultimately choose, not if you keep in mind that hot people don’t write movies; they just star in them. Of course the more nebbish Teller is inevitably going to be selected as Olsen’s prize; no hunky Turners were invited to the writers’ room.
If Eternity has any major flaws that keep it from rising above standard-issue romcom fluff, it’s all in the casting. Miles Teller simply isn’t enough of a certified uggo to contrast Callum Turner, whose main selling point appears to be that he is tall. We’re told by the script that Turner is as handsome as Montgomery Clift, but we can clearly see that is not the case, so he plays the stand-in idea of Montgomery Clift instead of the real deal. Olsen is also a kind of symbolic stand-in, playing the torn-between-two-hunks heroine with just enough blank-slate blandness that anyone watching from home (or, ideally, from the plane) can imagine themselves in her place without being distracted by the distinguishing specifics of her character. The only signs of life among the main cast are in the comic-relief pair of “Afterlife Coordinators” played by Jon Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who are employed by the unseen corporate gods of Limbo to talk this trio of lost souls into one afterlife or another as if they’re hurriedly selling timeshares out of a brochure. They’re funny, but not too funny. Nothing about the movie is too anything, presumably by design.
A24 is reportedly looking to upscale their in-studio productions to reach a wider market, recently trying their hands at the big-budget war thriller with Warfare, the movie-star sports drama with The Smashing Machine, and the period-piece Oscar player with Marty Supreme, with other mainstream audience ploys to come. I have to wonder how much the greenlighting of Eternity was influenced by that boardroom conversation. Was its marketing potential as a surefire in-flight entertainment favorite part of the justification behind that decision? The movie largely feels like it’s set in the liminal corporate spaces of an airport lounge & bar, with Early & Randolph’s afterlife realtors costumed as retro flight attendants. My only other theory on the initial pitch for the film’s commercial appeal is that it would make a great backdoor sitcom pilot, since Olsen gets to briefly taste-test different afterlives with her potential forever-husbands as she debates which eternity to settle into. There’s some brief magical twee whimsy in her climactic sprint between those worlds as she defies the laws of Limbo to reunite with her true love that recalls previous work from hipster auteurs in the A24 mold: Michel Gondry, Julio Torres, Girl Asleep‘s Rosemary Myers, etc. There just isn’t enough budget to fully flesh out the idea, though, so it ends up being a proof-of-concept sketch for a potential Good Place-style supernatural sitcom, coming soon to an Apple TV console near you. In the meantime, enjoy this low-stakes, low-emotions romcom set at the edges of those infinite-possibility worlds, for now boiled down to simple-concept settings: mountains, beach, train station, etc. And if you can, go ahead and pair it with a complementary ginger ale and a single-serving pack of pretzels — the way it was clearly meant to be seen.
By the time he started playing the title role in the 1951 season of The Adventures of Kit Carson, actor Bill Williams was thirty-six and had a respectably rugged face. A mere five years earlier, when playing dim-witted himbo sailor-on-leave Alex Winkley in Deadline at Dawn, he was so baby-faced I wouldn’t have believed he could transform so much in such a short time. This is a pretty important part of the plot, as the boy has to be so guileless that hardened city gal June Goffe (Susan Hayward) believes his innocence in the death of Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), even when he’s not too certain himself. We in the audience, of course, know that Edna was alive enough to trade barbs with her blind, pianist ex-husband Sleepy Parsons (Marvin Miller) after she realized “the sailor” had taken her wad of cash and skittered off into the night, much to Sleepy’s annoyance. Deadline is another film in The Criterion Channel’s recently curated “Blackout Noir” collection, and the blackout experienced in this one is Winkley’s; he comes to his senses at a NYC corner newsvendor’s stall with way too much money in his pocket on a blisteringly hot night, and all he remembers is going up to Edna’s to fix her radio after being plied with alcohol. Alex Winkley stumbles into a dance hall and meets June and confesses that he stole money from a woman for no reason that he can recall, and she accompanies him back to the place so that he can return it, only for them to find her dead. To ensure that Alex doesn’t get clapped for the murder, they have to figure out who really did it before he has to catch his bus back to his naval base at dawn.
Deadline at Dawn was the only film directed by Harold Clurman, a name I didn’t recognize. He was a stage director primarily, directing over forty plays for Broadway, and entered into an artistic partnership with playwright Clifford Odets early in his career, directing Awake and Sing! in 1935 for the Group Theatre, which Clurman had co-founded. Odets was a name I did recognize, if only from theatre department shelves; it is the nature of theatre that its writers’ legacies are longer and have more reach than its directors do. It makes sense that this film was penned by a playwright, in that it has a tighter ear for dialogue than it does for narrative coherence and consistency. Early in their overnight investigation, June and Alex meet a kindly cabbie named Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas), who has a bit of a verbal tic that causes him to preface his observations with “statistics say” and derivations thereof. Better still, when June and Alex buy a cup of orangeade on the street but don’t drink any of it, the cashier bids them to come see him again by saying “Don’t drink our grapeade next time.” The film is peppered with all kinds of fun New Yawker types whose brief appearances tell a whole story about their offstage life: the irascible superintendent who doesn’t get paid enough, the lonesome man seeking to make a wife out of a dance hall girl, a frantic man with an injured cat, the boarding house matron who doesn’t want to rent to a woman because “Girls want kitchen privileges and they wash their things in the sink.” That’s the good stuff.
The noir stuff, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. The death of Edna Bartelli ends up having too many red herrings. The late Edna turns out to have been a blackmailer whose extortions eventually took her down. Our unlikely trio track down a woman who was seen leaving Edna’s building and confront her, but she was only there to confront Edna for blackmailing her husband and couldn’t have committed the crime. But did her husband? Did Sleepy Parsons? Could the killer be Edna’s lover Babe Dooley, a washed-up baseball player who periodically calls up to her window from the street like a drunken dog? Over the course of the film, the characters make far too many of what could charitably be called “Bat-deductions,” so named for the way that Adam West’s Batman could often parse together incomprehensible and unrelated “clues” into accurate conclusions despite no logical connection between the things. There’s a sequence in which Alex and June walk down to the corner from Edna’s place “because the killer might have done something like that,” then get drinks that they don’t finish, saying “Hey, maybe the killer would have bought a drink and then failed to drink it too!” It’s nonsensical, but how well the film plays for you will depend on what you want out of it. As a conveyance for delivering quippy dialogue and to show off Lukas and Hayward’s respective talents, it’s effective and fun. As a mystery film with a satisfying series of clues and payoffs, it’s less so. Perhaps the big reason for this is that the killer is someone we’ve come to like and trust over the course of the film, which means that the investigation, such as it is, was being guided by the guilty party for decent portions of it. It’s an emotionally convincing ending, even when it’s not necessarily a narratively convincing one. Enjoyable, but not a must-watch.
After another stellar outing for Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man, I found myself realizing that there were still parts of Rian Johnson’s filmography that, despite our coverage of Brick (and Poker Face), The Last Jedi, Knives Out, and Glass Onion, were still untapped. I didn’t see Looper when it first came out, but I remember its production well, as it was shot in New Orleans (one of the best places to go to capture images of dystopian poverty in the immediate and long-term aftermath of Katrina) while I was in grad school there. In fact, my roommate at the time of filming was an extra; he was the piercer at the tattoo parlor that we lived in the back rooms of, and there was a casting call for “weird looking people” for a group scene. Having now seen the film and having scoured the big party scenes that I would have assumed he would have been in, I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t find him, alas. That’s not the kind of close watching that this film necessarily relies upon, but as with all of Johnson’s films, you better be paying attention if you want to get the maximum amount of satisfaction.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a hitman living in Slumsville, USA in 2044. Addicted to an unnamed drug administered via eye dropper, Joe funds his habit as a “looper,” a specialized killer working for a crime syndicate that’s three decades in his future, where surveillance technology alerts law enforcement anytime someone dies. The mobsters of the 2070s skirt this by sending their victims into the past (the police apparently not being alerted if someone simply disappears), where Joe and the other loopers kill the doomed future victims and dispose of their bodies in exchange for silver. The loopers are themselves damned as well; all of them know that, sooner or later, they will have to “close their own loop,” meaning killing their own future selves (and getting one last big payday) and retiring, with the knowledge that they have only thirty years to live. When Joe’s buddy Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his loop and allows his older self to escape, we get to see the lengths that temporally local crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) to make sure that Seth stays just alive enough not to destabilize the loop while also ensuring maximum suffering.
When one of Joe’s victims does not appear on schedule, he’s sufficiently distracted that the man, who turns out to be his own older self (Bruce Willis) is able to escape. As it turns out, Old!Joe is on a mission to answer the age old question of “Would you be able to go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” with a resounding “Yes, and anyone else born that same day at that same hospital, just to be safe,” which turns out to be less morally straightforward than he expected. In the future, there’s an underworld figure toppling and absorbing various criminal enterprises into one evil force, the “Rainmaker,” and Old!Joe eventually fell in love with a woman who died at the hands of the Rainmaker’s goons. With Abe’s organization after both of them, Young!Joe and Old!Joe find that they can’t trust one another despite being one person. Meanwhile elsewhere, Sara (Emily Blunt) is raising her young telekinetic son on a farm; he’s not the only one, as about 10% of people have barroom card trick level telekinesis at this point, but he has potential to become much more.
The performances here are fantastic. This was probably Willis’s last great outing (and I say that as a Moonlighting fan, so you know I’m always rooting for him), and he brings a lot of gravitas to the screen. There’s a moment where Young!Joe demands to see the photo of Old!Joe’s wife, saying that he can avoid ever speaking to her and thus ensure that she’s safe from being killed by the Rainmaker’s gunmen in 2074, but Old!Joe refuses; it’s not enough that he keeps her safe, but he wants his life back, specifically, no matter what he has to do. There’s a moment where Old!Joe realizes this about himself, that his decision is much less selfless and much more self-serving than he had convinced himself, and Willis conveys every moment of it with conviction. Gordon-Levitt, despite acting through prosthetics that are intended to make him look more like a young Willis, is nuanced in his interpretation of Willis’s body language, intonations, and idiosyncrasies, without it ever feeling like he’s doing an impression. Despite his small role, Dano makes his usual meaty meal out of a cowardly sleazeball, and it’s always a delight to see. Particularly impressive is the amount of menace that playing-against-type Jeff Daniels is bringing to the table. Perhaps glaringly, the person I haven’t mentioned yet here is Blunt, which is in some part due to her relative lack of screen time, as she doesn’t really appear until the midpoint of the film. But it’s also that she’s not given as much to do, as she’s relegated to a role that’s not really all that demanding, although there’s a scene where her son starts to pull a Carrie that shows her pull out some fierce chops.
The sci-fi conceits of the plot are fun. The introduction of the idea that telekinesis has been discovered and is widespread but is limited to what amounts to little more than parlor tricks feels like a weird tangent given that it disappears from the plot for a while, but when it comes back, it’s relevant and feels like a piece falling into place. That’s always been one of Johnson’s strengths as a screenwriter, and one that feels very satisfying to me as a bit of a systems thinker myself. The film doesn’t spend any time faffing about with trying to justify its time travel conventions, as Old!Joe gestures to a bunch of drinking straws on the table between them and says that they could give themselves headaches making diagrams with them or just get on with things, and that’s what they (and the film) do. One gets the sense that Johnson was the kind of person who may have made just those kinds of diagrams in his younger days and knows exactly what complaints to expect and how to make them irrelevant.
I still have yet to see The Brothers Bloom, but I do know that it’s a bit of a departure from the serious noir-at-a-high-school vibes of Brick and the techno noir of Looper, which is a bit of a bummer. I don’t foresee myself growing tired of Benoit Blanc (or Poker Face, although its fate hangs in the balance as of this writing), but I wish there were more noir reinventions from Johnson to watch now. Since it’s been over a decade since Looper and he hasn’t gone back to that well, I don’t know if we’ll see him release another one soon, if ever. I’d like to see him try his hand at one of these again, as it’s always a pleasure to see.
In 2026, the Star Trek franchise will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, and this upcoming summer will mark thirty years since the thirtieth anniversary marketing push coincided with my being babysat by a family of Trek fans who introduced me to what has become a lifelong obsession. That 1996 anniversary was marked by a huge jump in merchandising of toys, knick-knacks, and fan publications, and since the franchise had two shows airing at the time (Deep Space Nine and Voyager) and that November saw the first solo feature outing of the Next Generation crew in First Contact, it had significant cultural visibility. Ten years later, the fortieth anniversary in 2006 found the franchise dead, as the end of Enterprise in 2005 meant that ‘06 was the first year since 1985 that the franchise hadn’t produced either a film or a season of television. The first show to air post-Enterprise, prequel (at least at first) series Star Trek: Discovery, would miss the fifty-year anniversary by a year and premiere in 2017, where it proved … divisive. Nevertheless, Discovery ushered in a glut of Trek content, having now concluded its fifth and final season, Picard had a three-season run, animated sitcom Lower Decks aired five seasons, and kids’ cartoon Prodigy ran for two seasons. With all of these having concluded, that unwieldy number of series has come to an end. As of the sixtieth anniversary, Strange New Worlds is the only continuing series, with even that having already wrapped its final two (yet to be broadcast) seasons, with a new series, Starfleet Academy, launching in January.
Both of the then-running series produced episodes for the thirtieth anniversary. DS9 aired “Trials and Tribble-ations,” which used state-of-the-art compositing to insert characters from the series into one of the original show’s most memorable episodes; Voyager less successfully produced “Flashback,” which relayed the untold story of what Sulu was up to during the events of Undiscovered Country. One would think that, having missed doing anything special (other than releasing Beyond to very little fanfare) for the fiftieth anniversary, the franchise’s current helmers might have considered doing something special for the sixtieth, but instead, we got a surprise “feature film” dumped directly onto streaming a year early, sometime after it was first announced as another series in Paramount’s massive streaming library. To explain, I’ll have to build you a timeline because, just like this movie, this review has to dump a lot of exposition on you multiple times in order for any of this to make sense.
On October 6, 1967, Star Trek airs “Mirror, Mirror,” the first of what will be far too many trips to the so-called “mirror universe,” where the peaceful Federation is replaced by the brutal and totalitarian Terran Empire. In April of 1998, Deep Space Nine airs the first episode of the series to reference “Section 31,” a covert operations unit acting within Starfleet against its declared principles of egalitarianism, democracy, and peace. On the 24th of September 2017, Star Trek: Discovery, a new series starring Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, debuts; Burnham is introduced as the first officer of Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), who dies during the two-part feature length premiere. Later in that same season, Discovery takes its own adventure into the mirror universe, where Yeoh returns as the evil version of Georgiou, the emperor, who returns to “our” timeline at the end of this galavant for a redemption arc that was, at best, misguided from its inception. Georgiou is eventually recruited into Section 31 as part of the second season’s story arc, and the news was released that Paramount was developing this as a spin-off to star Yeoh. This was put on hold due to COVID, and then in March of 2023, Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, meaning that she didn’t really have as much time for all this Star Trek nonsense as she had before. I assumed that the project had simply been cancelled, but it was suddenly re-announced as a one-off non-theatrical feature and hastily dumped into everyone’s home screens, where it managed to be hated by just about everyone. I kept this one in my back pocket for a while because I knew our well of Star Trek annual podcast discussion topics was starting to run a little low. After covering First Contact in 2023, we talked about the documentary Trekkies in 2024 and the even more tenuously Trek-related Please Stand By in 2025; I figured this one would do for our 2026 topic. In those malaise-filled days during the holidays, however, I decided to give this one a pre-screen watch, and I could not in good conscience subject Brandon to it.
After a pre-credits sequence that establishes Georgiou ascended to the throne after killing her own family before scarring and enslaving her last competitor (and lover) for control of the empire, we’re in the primary narrative dimension of the 23rd Century, where a ragtag group of mercenary specialists has converged at a space station outside of Federation territory to prevent the sale of an omnicidal weapon. Coincidentally, the sale is set to take place in a bar/hotel/space station operated by the fugitive Georgiou. She catches on rather quickly and the leader of this group, Alok (Omari Hardwick) explains the situation and introduces his team: shapeshifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), psionic “honeypot” Melle (Humberly González), exoskeleton-bound Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), and Starfleet liaison Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), the only character here with a canon precedent. Also on the team is Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), who appears to be Vulcan but is actually a microscopic life form operating a humanoid mech suit. Georgiou teases them about their ho-hum plan and then introduces a new, more exciting one that predictably goes awry, allowing for her to discover that the weapon is of her design from her previous life as Terran Empress before it’s taken by a masked man. A “now it’s up to these unlikely heroes to save the galaxy” plot ensues.
To this movie’s credit, it certainly looks expensive. That’s not the same thing as looking good, mind you, but it is worth noting. A hefty chunk of change was clearly invested in the Section 31 series, which is probably why this exists in the first place. This “film” is so clearly cobbled together from the ideas of an unproduced TV series that it’s actually divided into episodes, I mean “transmissions,” with individual titles. Even without them, the episodic narrative beats of cliffhanger and resolution at forty-minute intervals would telegraph this structure. This makes for narrative chaos, since instead of three distinct acts we’re dealing with a film divided into thirds which are then subdivided into their own rhythms of rising and falling action; it’s muddled, to say the least. The writing likewise leaves a great deal to be desired. Screenwriter Craig Sweeny’s background largely lies in mystery procedurals, as he was an executive producer on Elementary, of which he wrote sixteen episodes, and has since gone on to create and serve as exec producer for Watson. Section 31 tries to have some mysteries, but if there’s anyone who didn’t assume that the masked villain was Georgiou’s presumed dead lover/enemy from the moment they appeared on screen, then that person has probably never seen a movie before. The mole—there is, inevitably, a mole—likewise is the person you’d most suspect based on simply having seen any movie of this kind before.
This might have worked better if there had been some breathing room. If the audience had a week between the installment where we introduce the fact that Fuzz can fly out of his Vulcan mech suit and into other cybernetics to futz with them and the next episode where said mech suit seems to be operating on autopilot while Zeph’s exoskeleton is acting up, then maybe it would have felt like more of an “ah-ha” moment. As it is in the text itself, it feels like more of the script’s tendency to overexplain the new elements that it introduces while also showing the frayed edges where character arcs are whittled down. This is most obvious with Quasi, who was presumably so named because his shapeshifting would have been a metaphor for being unsure of himself in the version of this that went to series. The characterization for this is thin throughout before becoming unusually pivotal to the climax when he has to trust his instincts and push one of two buttons. It’s all very surface level and rote.
Worst of all, however, are the film’s shuddering attempts at comedy. Sam Richardson is primarily a comedic actor, but the lines he’s given to deliver here are all absolute duds. The joke about whether the galaxy-threatening MacGuffin is called “godsend” or “god’s end” must have lasted less than thirty seconds but felt like it went on forever. Fuzz’s constant leaps to anger over perceived microaggressions about his size or species are, as comedy, dead on arrival. This film forced Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh to use the phrase “mecha boom boom” as a reference to sex with a person with cybernetics. Overall, however, the person I felt the most sympathy for throughout was poor Kacey Rohl, a Vancouver-based actress who’s one of those performers who’s always giving a quietly powerful performance, whether as budding sociopath Abigail Hobbs on Hannibal or in (my favorite) her recurring role as tough-as-nails hedge witch Marina on The Magicians. Yeoh is capable of making every stupid line given to her in this work on at least some level, but Rohl is tasked with some lifting that made me embarrassed on her behalf, like when she has to give herself a pep talk about how she’s a science officer and “science is just controlled chaos” in a scene that sees her skedaddling out of frame repeating “chaos, chaos, chaos!” She’s also the one given the most jarring instances of modern slang, like “whatevs” and calling Georgiou a “bad bitch.” Not a single comedic moment lands, which means that if you’re not going to be surprised by any of the film’s twists, you’re not going to find satisfaction in good character arcs or the humor, meaning that there’s nothing of value here to make the investment of the studio’s money or the audience’s time worthwhile, a film truly for no one.
If we wanted to think of this one as something close to an anniversary special, it’s worth noting that virtually every member of this by-the-numbers ragtag group seems to be functioning as a reference to a previous Star Trek film. As mentioned above, Melle is a Deltan, an alien species introduced in The Motion Picture, and Alok is a genetically augmented human left over from the Eugenics Wars like Khan while the “godsend” device also functions very similarly to the Genesis Device from that film. Fuzz is introduced as a Vulcan who laughs uncharacteristically, as was Sybok in the cold open of Final Frontier, and Quasi is identified as a Chameloid, a species only ever heretofore mentioned in Undiscovered Country. The use of future Enterprise-C captain Rachel Garrett references the launch of the Enterprise-B in Generations, while Zeph’s cybernetic exoskeleton deliberately evokes the image of First Contact’s villainous Borg. These allusions are relatively subtle in comparison to the more overt bits of fanservice that Trek fans are presumably supposed to gawk at, which I won’t bother to get into. The truth of the matter is that Section 31 is not only a bad Star Trek movie, it’s also a bad film in general. Despite the film angling for a continuation in its final moments, I hope we never get another one.
Midway through the 1988 police-corruption thriller Shakedown, Sam Elliott’s undercover cop hands a revolver to Peter Weller’s disheveled lawyer and asks, “You know how to use one of these?,” and Weller responds in his default, deadeyed deadpan, “Fuckin A, bubba. I’m from New York City.” It’s a throwaway action-movie one liner, but the entire picture is framed within that assumption that anyone who’s tough enough to survive 1980s NYC street life is always a half-second’s notice away from engaging in some good, old-fashioned gun violence. The movie opens with Law & Order veteran Richard Brooks minding his own business smoking crack in Central Park, when he’s approached by an undercover “blue jean cop” who reaches into his jacket for a concealed weapon. By the time the ambulance arrives, both men are bleeding to death on the ground from gunshot wounds, with no witnesses having seen who shot whom first. To determine whether the crack dealer (Brooks) fired his gun in self defense, the public defender assigned to his case (Weller) has to team up with the only blue jean cop he trusts (Eliot) to shoot even more guns at even more cops & drug dealers across the city’s seedy underbelly. They start shootouts in the backroom brothels above 42nd Street porno theaters; they pistol-whip perps during fistfights on Coney Island roller coasters; they chase stolen cop cars through homeless encampments and set fire to the resulting wreckage. Fuckin A, bubba, welcome to New York City.
Shakedown doesn’t have the same lost-and-found mystique as the recently restored Night of the Juggler, but it emerged from the same vintage gutter sludge. Narratively, it’s a by-the-books buddy cop thriller, except one of the cops happens to be a lawyer . . . and maybe also a robot. Peter Weller is as glaringly inhuman as always in the lead role of a long-suffering public defense attorney who’s tempted to leave the street-level grime behind in favor of a cushy yuppie lifestyle at a private firm. He says he’s tired of having to defend the “the scumbags, the jerkoffs, the sex freaks, and the killers” of NYC in court, but anyone who knows him sees right through the facade. When he’s assigned to defend the Central Park dealer who killed an undercover cop in self-defense, you can tell he loves the job far too much to ever walk away. In order to prove his client’s innocence, he has to team up with the only non-corrupt cop left in the city: Sam Elliott, a humble Texan expat. We meet Elliot in a grindhouse cinema, watching an absurd downhill skiing shootout from director James Glickenhaus’s previous feature The Soldier, teasing the insane action spectacle to come once he & Weller hit the streets and turn up the heat. The movie quickly delivers on that promise, scoring its whirlwind tour through pre-Giuliani New York City with the infinite supply of “ghetto blaster” boomboxes that used to decorate every street corner, along with the dealers & sex workers who operated them.
Shakedown is classic NYC sleaze with a stacked cast of always-welcome reprobates. Honeymoon Killers legend Shirley Stoler briefly pops in as a takes-no-shit security guard. Corman veteran Paul Bartel plays a night court judge in a single scene. David “Richie from Sopranos” Proval plays the corrupt cop who mans the evidence desk at the local precinct, stubbornly blocking Weller from the evidence that proves his client’s innocence. It’s a never-ending parade of celebrity cameos for anyone who happens to be the kind of person who would be watching a 1980s corrupt-cop thriller named Shakedown. After recently seeing Weller in Of Unknown Origin & Naked Lunch, Stoler in Frankenhooker, and Bartel in Basquiat & Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, it felt like a kind of season finale for my personal year in trash movie watching. So, I’ve come up with a quick, arbitrary metric to see how it ranks against other vintage New York schlock thrillers I’ve watched this year: determining its production crew overlap with my two most recently watched TV shows. According to the IMDb “Advanced collaboration” search, Shakedown shares 50 collaborators with Law & Order and 27 with The Sopranos. That’s ahead of Night of the Juggler (28 Law & Order, 6 Sopranos) but behind Cop Land (an impressive 75 Law & Order, 73 Sopranos). Of course, that’s more raw data than it is analysis, but all you really need to know about this movie anyway is that it’s aggressively grimy and Glickenhaus blows shit up real good. The rest is just character actors & mise-en-scène.
00:00 SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2025 15:30 The Secret Agent (2025) 43:35 Best Actor 57:33 Best Actress 1:10:13 Best Supporting Actor 1:16:52 Best Supporting Actress 1:25:06 Best Ensemble 1:29:41 Best Director 1:35:54 Best Original Screenplay 1:42:27 Best Adapted Screenplay 1:50:26 Best Animated Film 1:56:53 Best Documentary 2:13:46 Best Foreign-Language Film 2:23:00 Best Cinematography 2:34:45 Best Score 2:39:52 Best Editing 2:45:07 Best Costuming 2:49:34 Best Young Performer
It’s that time of year again! This is the tenth time I’ve made one of these and I finally got started at a reasonable time.
I’m not including documentaries in the main list of best films of the year this year, since I’m not even sure how one would compartmentalize ranking some of this year’s most serious topics in a countdown alongside something like The Naked Gun, so I won’t try. The best documentaries that I saw this year, in no particular order:
Secret Mall Apartment – A surprisingly moving story about a cadre of art students whose statement about the need for gentrifying forces to occupy all public space turned into something more. Finding a void in the facade of a shopping mall, these young RISD co-eds and their mentor install an almost functional apartment within it, documenting the entire process on 2000s era video tech. It’s about ephemerality in art and in life, and works surprisingly well. Read my review here.
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found – This film is many things: an international mystery, an epistolary elegy, a warning that the past and the present are always the same. Last but not least, it is a portrait. From my review: “This documentary is deeply felt, wonderfully composed, and unfortunately timely. The portrait of Cole that is created is a warm but not overly sentimental one. The narrative choice to use only Cole’s words is one that means that the voiceover informs but does not contextualize and, thus, requires you to build the story yourself from the juxtaposition and editing rather than having your hand held about what you should be thinking or how you should feel.”
No Other Land – You already know why. Read my review here.
Although Hereditary was my number one in 2018, Midsommar my number nine in 2019, and Beau is Afraid my number four in 2023, Eddington, despite being another stellar entry from him, didn’t crack the top twenty (hell, it didn’t crack the top twenty-five). Read my review here.
It feels like it’s been ages since Companion was being advertised based on its connection to Zach Cregger (via his production credit), given that the rest of the year was dominated by Weapons, his follow up to Barbarianfrom a few years ago. This film finds Sophie Thatcher’s Iris in what seems at first to be the enviable position of Josh (Jack Quaid)’s girlfriend, but we learn fairly quickly that this is not a place anyone would want to be. The two of them join his friends at a remote lakehouse, and when she kills the host in self-defense after he attempts to force himself on her, she learns that there’s more to herself and to her situation than meets the eye. If you managed to avoid the marketing for this film that spoiled the first act twist, just trust me on this one and go in with as little foreknowledge as possible. If you’ve already seen it or already been spoiled, read my review here.
19. Sister Midnight
A not-quite-vampire story about a woman in an arranged marriage who slowly loses her sanity and seems to take on a curse when she kills an insect at a wedding. Is she mad? Is she a goddess reborn? Is she both? Listen to Brandon and I discuss Sister Midnighthere.
18. 28 Years Later
The long awaited sequel to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s iconoclastic early aughts zombie film, 28 Years Later follows the life of a young boy named Spike coming of age in a small community that is insulated from the effects of the Rage virus and those contaminated by it due to its inaccessibility other than a land bridge that emerges at low time and is easily defensible. He accompanies his father to the larger islands on a foraging expedition and faces off against the Rage mutants living there; he returns changed and is further disillusioned about adults and their lies, enough so that he secrets his mother across the land bridge in the middle of the night in the hopes of finding her medical assistance from a supposed doctor on the “mainland.” A breakout performance for young actor Alfie Williams and a stellar turn from Killing Eve star Jodie Comer, who plays his mother. Read my review here.
17. The Long Walk
Fifty boys, one from each state, participate in a televised competition in which they must maintain a speed of three miles per hour or die, with the understanding that there will only be one victor, who gets whatever they want. Based on a Stephen King novel inspired by nightly newscasts about the Vietnam War, The Long Walk as a text both preceded (and possibly inspired) many dystopian YA franchises and pre-emptively deconstructed them, showing the real, brutal effects of the regime without ever making our protagonists feel heroically defiant in the face of all odds. Not fun, but quite good. Read my review here.
16. Rabbit Trap
In the future, I may chalk this one up to little more than recency bias, but I’ve meditated on this one every day since I first saw it. A movie that evokes an otherworld through electronic distortion of natural sounds, Rabbit Trap is more about evoking a sonic, psychedelic experience than delivering a narrative that ties up all of its loose ends, and is all the better for it. Read my review here.
15. Boys Go to Jupiter
A very cute, very fun movie that captures both the listless ennui of unoccupied time between school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Read Brandon’s review here.
14. Lurker
“What’s the difference between love and obsession?” Oliver sings in one of the film’s breathy, whispery, but catchy (I’ll admit it) tracks. “I don’t know but I know I want you.” It’s a pretty explicit recitation of the question that drives the film. Oliver is a pop musician, Matthew is an obsessed fan. Or he might just be in love with Oliver. Or is he in love with the idea of Oliver? Perhaps he’s obsessed with the idea of what attaching himself to Oliver’s rising star can do for him, and love’s not even part of the equation, with Oliver himself only a means to an end. Lurker never comes right out and says which, if any, of these things are true; my interpretation is that Matthew is in love with Oliver, and his obsession builds from his overinvestment in Oliver’s casual intimacy and the fear of “losing” him, with all of his contributions to Oliver’s career merely the means by which he secures a place for himself in Oliver’s life. To me, Lurker is a love story, albeit one that’s also a cautionary tale for both the yearner and the object of adoration, while also being a story about what it’s like when the person who knows you best is the one you hate the most. Read my review here.
13. Wake Up Dead Man
Rian Johnson once again delivers a pitch-perfect presentation of our favorite gentleman detective, Benoit Blanc, even if he takes the back seat more here than in either of his previous two outings. The man we spend the most time with is young Reverend Jud, a former boxer who found an ongoing path to redemption in faith after killing a man in the ring, and whose quasi-punishment for an altercation in his home parish is reassignment to a church that is literally, metaphorically, and in every meaningful way without Christ. Alongside my number five, this is one of the only pieces of Christian propaganda (even if only accidentally) to feel genuine and alive in recent (and even not-so-recent) memory. Read my review here.
12. No Other Choice
Park Chan-Wook returns with another genre-bending spectacle about someone driven too far. Park is a director who knows how to navigate a revenge story, whether it be Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and even Decision to Leave, but unlike the mysterious but ultimately human characters upon whom Park’s protagonists (and sometimes antagonists) enact their vengeance, lead character Man Su of No Other Choice can’t fight the thing that has wronged him. You can’t take your revenge on a system; you can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure lay-offs out to an abandoned school to be tortured, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. Bereft of a valid vessel into which he can pour all of his failures and furies, Man Su finds a man who convinces himself that he has no other choice than to kill his fellow applicants, who are not really his enemies. In the weeks since I wrote my review, I’ve been thinking a lot about the metaphorical relevance of Man Su’s tooth, an ailment that he ultimately remedies by pulling out the damned thing, taking the healthy parts of the tooth out with the rot, and how that relates to his “removal” of his obstacles, both innocent and not. Good stuff; read my review here.
11. Eephus
In his review, Brandon told what felt like a universally familiar story about a grandfather whose frequent (or even constant) viewership of televised broadcasts of America’s pastime makes it feel like one long baseball game playing out over decades. Eephus effectively captures that feeling, but my connection to baseball is a little different, as the first thing that comes to mind are the multiple summers in which I, miserable, was forced to play little league. Baseball is a forgiving sport, by which I mean that it’s not terribly fast paced, making it an acceptable sport for me, a boy with asthma, to play. What this also means is that it’s also a very boring sport, and every Saturday of my childhood and adolescence that I didn’t have to get up early and do yard labor, I was being dragged out of bed to go stand in an outfield in a BREC park somewhere, all of which in the mid-nineties looked like the field in which the entirety of this film takes place. Here, that slowness is the point; the film takes its title from a curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if it’s standing still. The game that we see played out takes an impossibly long time, nine innings stretched out from the dewy dawn hours until so late in the night that the players have to pull their cars onto the field and use their headlamps to play, the eephus hovering in the air as no one really wants this last game to end. Truly special stuff, and funny as hell.
10. Twinless
Director/writer/star James Sweeney’s sophomore feature, a film about two very different men with distinct backgrounds, incompatible sexualities, and contrasting personalities who meet in a support group because of the one thing that they share: the loss of a twin. Dylan O’Brien is fantastic as both Roman and Rocky in one of the best performances of the year, and Sweeney is effectively sympathetic even as his behavior becomes unjustifiable and his secrets reveal a deeply unwell man. Read my review here.
9. Bugonia
Perhaps the greatest and most worthwhile example of a Western remake of an Asian film. The differences from the South Korean original range from significant to almost imperceptible, but the film more than justifies its existence, and features another stellar turn from director Yorgos Lanthimos at the helm. Superb. Read my review here.
8. The Naked Gun
This is the funniest movie I’ve seen all year, and one that I’ve revisited (as well as its inspiration) in the months since, despite my annual personal Q4 goal of cramming in as many unwatched new releases as I can gorge myself on. Liam Neeson is the perfect person to take on the role of Frank Derbin, Jr., and pairing him with nineties heartthrob Pamela Anderson feels almost like a no-brainer. Featuring more sight gags than all the comedies I saw in 2024 combined and a scene in which Anderson scats for her life, by far the funniest film sequence of the entire year was Frank and his new girlfriend going on a wintry romantic vacation that involves bringing a snowman to life (and then ending that life when their creation becomes unmanageable). It’s no surprise that I love this one, given that it was directed by Akiva Schaffer, and I’ve long been a vocal defender of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and co-written by Dan Gregor, who did fine work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. To whomever decided to make the villain’s defeat just like Jonathan’s in the sixth season of Buffy and deliberately stated earlier in the film that knowledge of the slayer and her pals was important to get all the references, my great thanks. Read Brandon’s review here.
7. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
I’ve been remiss in not checking out previous films from the married writing/directing duo of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, other than a screening of Amer that I attended years ago that was filled with distractions that kept me from fully engaging with the experience. Reflection in a Dead Diamond is one of the best films I’ve seen in years, a phantasmagorical journey into the psyche of elderly John Diman (Fabio Testi). The film finds Diman staying at a coastal hotel in an area that he visited years before, although it’s unclear if he did so as a James Bond-esque superspy or merely as an actor who played one. The film opens on a scene that virtually recreates the end of For Your Eyes Only, and we’re given no reason to believe that Diman’s recollections of his days in espionage are meant to be anything other than his memories, but ambiguity enters the picture around the midpoint. Diman’s enemies include a group of opposing agents with themed names: Atomik (who glows), Amphibik (whose gag is scuba diving), and of course the sexy love interest Serpentik, who mostly does Catwoman-esque violence but has a ring that she can use to poison her foes like a cobra. One of these is Hypnotik, whose schtick is that he can make you believe that you’re in a film; in his present day, Diman is repeatedly given clues that his recollected misadventures are nothing more than a misrememberance of a role he once played, but it’s unclear if this is the degradation of a man’s mind in old age or all part of Hypnotik’s suggestion. Stylized, beautifully shot, frequently quite violent, and unforgiving, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is the best Bond film of the twenty-first century. Read Brandon’s review here.
6. Sinners
What else is there to say about Sinners? The initial advertising for the film left me cold, but Brandon texted me and let me know that this would be very much up my alley. And he was right! The film has been covered to hell and back by much more interesting and well-read writers than I am, but if you’re looking for something interesting to fill your time, I highly recommend this YouTuber’s video essay about the relationship between Irish folk and Black American music; it’s good stuff. Hear the primary podcast crew discuss the film here.
5. The Colors Within
Ever since I caught this one so that we could engage with it in conversation with the director’s earlier film Liz and the Blue Bird for one of our recent podcasts, I haven’t been able to stop singing its praises, recommending it to everyone that I’ve talked to about my favorite films of the year. Maybe there’s some recency bias there, but there’s also a recurring theme this year that a lot of my favorite movies; this one, my number one, Eephus, Sister Midnight, and Boys Go to Jupiter are films that have no real antagonist. Even within those, however, there is an external force that has created the situation in which our characters find themselves, respectively inconvenient construction, arranged marriages, and capitalism-inscribed gig economy woes. The Colors Within doesn’t even have those kinds of systemic threats at play; it’s just the story of a lonely girl with such pronounced synesthesia that she can see music and perceive people’s auras, who then makes friends with a cool upperclassman who plays guitar and forms a band with another lonely kid. Brandon sold this one to me as being similar to Linda Linda Linda, a film that I loved, and while there’s no doubt in my mind that the earlier live action film was an influence on this one, Linda featured our main characters under a time crunch to learn and play three songs by the end of the week for their school festival. In Colors, the kids in this band are just kind of puttering around and getting to know each other for most of the runtime; by the time one of the nuns at the girls’ school recommends that their band play the Valentine’s festival, you’re ready to simply accept that as where the story was always going, and it’s nice that the film gives the audience and the characters so much room to breathe and let the characters do the work rather than have them driven toward a goal from the start. An animated film that justifies its medium with its psychedelic sequences, this is a (soft, quiet, cozy) blast. Read Brandon’s review here.
4. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
This year, while visiting with family in the Carolinas, one of my relatives mentioned that it wouldn’t be long before my maternal grandmother passed away, and that they would be going back to Louisiana when this happened. At present, my father and I are not on speaking terms, and I don’t expect that to change in this lifetime, and I knew this conversation would come up because I don’t intend to return to the homestead for the rest of my life, and I had a discussion with my therapist about it prior to my travels. I told her that I had spent my entire miserable, abusive childhood crying for help into a void, and that there was no laying bare of the scars on my body, mind, heart, or soul that had ever given anyone in my family pause. I asked her how much worse it would have had to be for any of them to care, to even listen, to stop repeating useless platitudes about forgiveness and the harm that holding onto hatred causes and think about just how monstrous things must have been for a child of eight years old to start having suicidal ideation. I asked her if it would have even made a difference if he had molested me, if that would have been evil enough for them to understand just how deep the damage goes … and she said “No.” In fact, she said, most of the time when that does happen, the family just covers it up and blames the victim for rocking the boat; and as soon as she said it, I knew she was right. I had heard this before from many victims, but never has it been so visceral, so infuriating, so frustrating, as it was when depicted on screen in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. In the film’s opening moments, we see Shula (Susan Chardy) observe the dead body of her uncle in the road, and as she turns, we see a young Shula likewise stare impassively at his corpse. Thus begin the rites of the dead and the rituals of mourning, both of which attempt to sanitize the life of Uncle Fred, a lifelong and unrepentant pedophile, whose family has kept his danger a secret for so long that the trauma he has caused is intergenerational. Even in death, his sisters, who have a seven-year-old nephew via Fred’s currently still teenaged wife (she’s such a child that her smartphone case has sequined Mickey Mouse ears), blame the girl for failing to keep Fred fed and happy. “No family wants to admit that it’s dysfunctional,” my therapist told me months ago. “And more often than not they turn on the victim for complaining and protect the abuser. We don’t know why.” Every elder in Shula’s family has maintained a lie about Fred’s faith, fidelity, and goodness for so long that he never had to pay for his sins or his crimes in life, and even in death his victims aren’t free. A very, very strong showing that left me burning with righteous fury. Read Brandon’s review here.
3. Bring Her Back
My overall apathetic reaction to Danny and Michael Philippou’s freshman feature Talk to Me (which I mentioned at the top of my review for Bring Her Back) meant that I was interested but not overly invested in their sophomore outing. I wasn’t prepared for the emotional ride that this film took me on, with such palpable and almost unwatchable violence (it’s got the worst tooth/mouth gore I’ve seen all year, topping even the borderline nauseating tooth removal in No Other Choice). Sally Hawkins gives a star turn as a monstrously abusive foster mother hiding a secret agenda, one that we can empathize with even as we are stricken ill by the lengths that she will go to in order to try and bring back the daughter that she has lost. Not to be missed.
2. The Phoenician Scheme
To allay any confusion, let it be known that although we are very pro-Wes Anderson around here, we are not shills. I still haven’t gotten around to seeing Isle of Dogs, and I was lukewarm at best about The French Dispatch (Brandon responded quite well to it). I was all in on Asteroid City, though, and I find myself once again delighted by Mr. Anderson’s most recent release. Read my review here.
1. Universal Language
I was a latecomer to Universal Language, only managing to see it within the last month of the year, but it skyrocketed to being my top film of the year within just a few minutes. In trying to come up with a comparison point, I found myself reaching for some of the same touchstones that Brandon did in his review, including some of the visual stylings of Wes Anderson, the playful specialness of True Stories, and the sense of humor and historical revisionism (as well as the utter Candadianity) of Guy Maddin. Because of the various ways that the interconnected narratives wove together and then separated before colliding with another character’s storyline, I would best describe this as Maddin’s Magnolia. Just like P.T. Anderson’s film, it stays within the realm of the plausible (if quirky) until it goes for broke in its final moments; for Magnolia, that meant a one-off musical number and a rain of frogs, but for Universal Language, there’s a full-on personality crisis (get it while it’s hot!) and identity confusion, which makes for a somber and provocative ending to a movie that I couldn’t stop laughing with for most of its run time. Fantastic.
Cinema is a democratizing artform. While the average family might not be able to afford a trip to see an opera or a ballet in-person, anyone with a library card can get a taste of those highbrow artforms by borrowing Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann from the library for free. Moviegoers regularly get exposed to great works of literature, far-off gorgeous vistas, and heady academic pursuits just by keeping our eyes on the screen, distracted from the financial inequalities that separate us from enjoying those experiences in real life. For instance, as a small child growing up in Chalmette, Louisiana, there was no chance I was ever going to travel to Paris to see the iconic American painting Whistler’s Mother in person, but thanks to the British culture-clash comedy Bean, I was educated on the piece’s historical importance anyway. Thanks to Bean, I was also exposed at an early age to the refined tastes of dry British wit, as embodied by the titular rubber-faced goon, Mr. Bean.
The basic premise of Bean hinges on Americans’ assumption that because Mr. Bean is British, he is therefore an erudite sophisticate. In reality, he is a working-class dolt who can barely keep his job as an art museum security guard, which mostly entails sitting quietly in a chair. Bean is such a disastrous embarrassment that his employer ships him off to America as the unlikely shepherd for the aforementioned James McNeill Whistler painting, risking major lawsuits & profit loss just to be rid of him for a while. It takes a few days for the Los Angeles clout chasers who are purchasing that famous painting to catch on that Mr. Bean is not the art-history expert Dr. Bean they made up in their heads when they heard he works for a British art museum. By then, he has already destroyed the multi-million-dollar painting through a series of escalating slapstick pratfalls, threatening to take down the life & reputation of an American museum curator with him (played Ghostbusters II‘s Peter MacNicol). And so, Whistler’s Mother was never the same again, in the film or out.
Rowan Atkinson is hilarious as Mr. Bean. That’s just a fact. It’s easy to brush off his style of humor as a haphazard collection of silly face contortions, but I believe there’s a genuine, traditional elegance to his sub-verbal shenanigans. He brought some classic Charlie Chaplin & Harpo Marx silent-comedy clowning to the 1990s video market, whereas American equivalents like Jim Carrey & Robin Williams were more focused on shouting t-shirt worthy catchphrases. When we first meet Bean in the opening scene, he breaks his ceramic mug while running late to work, so he resolves to mix his entire instant coffee concoction in his mouth to not waste time: coffee powder, sugar, cream, and boiling water straight from the kettle — swished around like mouthwash before painfully swallowed. While traveling by plane to America, he manages to explode a barf bag all over his fellow first-class clientele. The movie’s most infamous gag involves losing his wristwatch while stuffing a turkey. When he looks inside to find it, he ends up wearing the entire bird on his head, suffocating to death while stumbling around like a buffoon. Every room he enters is a potential disaster zone. Characters beg him to understand that, “If you do nothing, nothing can go wrong,” but he persists in fucking up everything he touches anyway. Children everywhere love him for it, as do the smartest of adults.
I was only being partially sarcastic in that opening paragraph. Bean really was my first exposure to Whistler’s Mother as a 10-year-old Chalmatian, and most of the movie’s plot revolves around showing that painting respect as one of the most important works of American art, positioning it as the nation’s Mona Lisa. Of course, the comedy’s art museum setting is mostly an excuse to shoehorn Mr. Bean into a quiet, stuffy atmosphere where his goofball theatrics can do the most damage, but it made an impression on me at that age nonetheless. Its jokes about the crass commercialization of fine art in the wide range of Whistler’s Mother merch designed for the LA museum’s gift shops is the kind of low-level satire that kids can feel smart for catching onto. It’s mixed with for-their-own-sake gags like Mr. Bean ironing his tighty-whiteys—which are funny to kids for reasons unknown—but the satire’s there all the same. One slapstick gag involves Bean getting smacked in the head by giant Alexander Calder mobile in the museum’s driveway, which is the perfect meeting point between its high-culture setting and its dumb-as-rocks humor. We’re always going to make idiotic slapstick comedies for kids as long as we’re making movies at all, so we might as well smack the little tikes over the head with some great works of art while we’re at it. It’s a public service, an investment in our future.
1. The Phoenician Scheme — The violence is Looney Tunes, the business negotiations are Three Stooges, the religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of this for any other director’s work. Another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.
2. Eephus — A slow-paced, aimless movie that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game in real time … except that every single dialogue exchange & character detail is either deeply charming, riotously funny, or both.
3. The Plague — The scariest movie I watched all October was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a water polo summer camp. I don’t know if it qualifies as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Kids are monsters, man; be thankful you never have to be one again.
4. Weapons — Semi-functional alcoholism, conspiracy theory paranoia, Ring camera surveillance, cops harassing the homeless, mob justice vigilantism, institutional scapegoats for abuses at home … Oh yeah, we’re rockin’ the suburbs.
5. One Battle After Another— 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline felt like a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before being chopped up and sold for parts). I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio action spectacle at this point in my life, but it’s encouraging to know the genre can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.
6. Sinners — A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. It’s funny & sexy too, improbably.
7.Marty Supreme— Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. He may be an annoying twerp, but lil Timmy Chalmette really is going places.
8. The Ugly Stepsister — A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the neverending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. Sometimes “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process.
9. The Shrouds — Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only David Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.
10. Dead Lover— Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Dead Lover pairs some of the most gorgeous, perverted images of the year with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates each punchline with ADR’d fart noises.
11. Fucktoys — A low-budget, high-concept horror comedy about a sex worker struggling to earn the cash needed for a ceremony to lift the mysterious curse that’s constantly derailing her life. The fantastical Trashtown setting will likely earn this a lot of comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously, garishly bratty.
12. Rats!— A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but I don’t know that any other post-Linklater buttscratchers have ever been this exceedingly gross or this truly anarchic. It’s a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens.
13. The Surfer — An Ozploitation throwback in which a workaholic yuppie drives himself mad trying to prove his manliness to a beachful of toxic, brainwashed bullies. As the Aussie sun wears him down, it gradually transforms into Nicolas Cage’s version of The Swimmer, retracing Burt Lancaster’s surreal heat-stroke journey into his own macho psyche and hating everything he sees.
14. Sirāt — When it’s time to party*, we will always party hard.
*distract ourselves from impending apocalypse and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke
15. Sister Midnight— A Mumbai-set horror story about what happens when a live firecracker gets married off to a dud, quickly going insane with the boredoms & frustrations of isolation as a housewife. It would make a great pairing with Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love in that respect, although I dare say it’s got a cooler look and its story takes more surprising turns.
16. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man— A microbudget, based-on-a-true-story comedy about a fecal terrorist who dumped buckets of piss & shit on his fellow Torontonians in 2019, seemingly at random. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is surprisingly sincere about the severe mental illness that would inspire someone to attack strangers like that. What’s even more surprising is that it’s not necessarily the piss & shit itself that earns all the biggest laughs; it’s the custom-made parody songs about piss & shit, all of them comedy gold.
17. The Naked Gun— There was something infectiously sweet about Liam Neeson & Pam Anderson’s tabloid romance that made this goof-a-second spoof feel more substantial & relevant than it possibly could otherwise. It was already a generous enough gift that the PR power couple gave me an opportunity to laugh all the way through an 85min comedy with my friends, but it was also fun to get worked by their kayfabe love affair in the headlines outside the theater. They made me their snowman.
18. Grand Theft Hamlet — Starts as a document of an absurd, highly specific art project (staging a community-theatre production of Hamlet entirely inside GTA Online), then quickly becomes a broader story about how hard it is to complete any collaborative art project. The circumstances are always stacked against your success, in this case literalized by people firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to rehearse.
19. Boys Go to Jupiter — Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City. I’m still amazed that it screened in neighborhood art houses instead of premiering on Steam Deck consoles.
20. The Colors Within— Exceptionally quiet for a story about the formation of a rock ‘n’ roll synth pop band, and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. When all that restraint melts away during the final performance, though, it feels good enough to make you cry.
HM. Mr. Melvin — A new edit of Toxic Avengers II &III, (both initially released in 1989), now Frankensteined together into one unholy monstrosity. Objectively, the best Toxic Avenger film is likely either the bad-taste original from 1984 or Macon Blair’s punching-up revision that was also released this year, but I can’t help but admire this one as a completionist’s timesaver. It’s all the best parts of the official Toxie sequels (the Japanese travelogue from II, the Toxie-goes-yuppie satire of III, not a single frame from IV) with at least 70 minutes of time-wasting junk erased from the public record. Mathematically speaking, it’s the most efficiently entertaining Toxic Avenger film to date, which technically qualifies it as public service — something to be considered by Lloyd Kaufman’s parole board.
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