Talk to the Animals: GOAT and HOPPERS

I bet if you’re an aspiring animator looking to innovate these days, it’s Sony where you’d want to work. They’ve had the edge on style and cleverness lately. Twenty years ago, it was just the dense, imaginative, emotive Pixar against the scrappier, sarcastic DreamWorks. Now Pixar is struggling to find that striking originality, and DreamWorks is content to play around with textures on simple structures. That leaves room for Sony to emerge as the new freshness, despite lagging behind them for most of this century. It helps that at they’re best they’re a mix of the two competitors, the heart with the experimentation, the fresh with the sturdy. The tangled, zippy Spider-Verse pictures are a riotous hodgepodge of exciting comic book logic and The Mitchells vs the Machines is electric high-speed family sentimentality via wild sci-fi. Even the smaller personality-driven efforts like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Cuban kinkajou musical Vivo and Adam Sandler’s class pet comedy Leo are a more standard, cuddlier, comfortable match for the talents of their stars. And they’ve hit pop culture gold with KPop Demon Hunters’ blend of catchy songs, cultural specificity, and genre tropes. The studio’s willingness to play around with style and tone has become an increasingly reliable force in the family film market. Their latest is Goat, a movie directed by Bob’s Burgers vet Tyree Dillihay and produced with basketball star Steph Curry. It’s set in a Zootopia-ish world that’s much like our own but all anthropomorphic animals. Set in a bustling urban setting composed of painterly backdrops, smeary colors, and jangled movement, their version of basketball is called Roarball. It’s dominated by enormous animals wielding their physicality: elephants, rhinos, ostriches, panthers. (They also have voices with great personality—Gabrielle Union, Aaron Pierre, David Harbour, Nick Kroll.) Can a scrawny goat (Caleb McLaughlin) make it in the big leagues? What do you think? The movie is extremely predictable sports movie cliche, but it’s shot through with a hyperactive, hyper-modern swagger—bumping hip-hop inflected scoring and a manic social-media flurry of notifications and plot swerves. And the wild slam dunk action is a gleefully exaggerated Space Jam pyrotechnic display of creativity. It’s every basketball-obsessed youngster’s wildest cartoon dreams. 

It’s a stark contrast with Pixar’s latest. Hoppers looks like a Pixar movie, moves like a Pixar movie, but feels less than a Pixar movie. It’s technically proficient, but just fine. It is well-structured, cutely designed, sometimes-funny, and warmly-voiced. It has a nice message about getting along and taking care of the natural world. And it has a spark of creativity to its concept. A college environmentalist discovers her professor has built a machine that allows her to inhabit a robotic beaver and study their environment. It also lets her talk to the animals. (It’s hand-waved with a reference to Avatar.) Of course the kid hijacks it to talk the critters into fighting the materialistic mayor’s plans to demolish their dam. At its best it has some of the clever rules and escalating action of vintage Pixar. Think of all those movies that end with a mad dash of most of their characters through some complicated world. But there’s something a little off about this one, a kind of haphazardness and shallowness to its world building, and a sense of obligation to its complication. One gets the sense that everything—from its dollops of sentimental familial sadness to its swerves into silliness—are a bit schematic and formulaic. Sure, the folks at Pixar are still terrific at rendering environments and balancing tones. But they can be pretty airless when the edges are all so totally rounded, and the fantasy muddled, the story at once too-familiar and overly complicated, and the supporting characters only one pixel deep. To be sure, Hoppers has some warm laughs and silly action and a few genuine dips into nastiness. (A surprise squishing of a bug is maybe the meanest thing this studio’s ever attempted, especially as a punchline.) It’s all likable enough. And it’s certainly no less predictable than Goat. But it speaks to such a decline in standards. Grown-up audiences used to be able to go to Pixar movies to see something that transcended. Lately if we see a Pixar production it’s out of habit. There are certainly less pleasant ways to pass the time. But they’ve been so much more. 

Moor Drama: "WUTHERING HEIGHTS"

In Charlotte Brontë’s preface to her sister Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights, she wrote that it was “hewn in a wild workshop…” Nearly 200 years later, that wild workshop’s product continues to reveal itself as an unexpected book of lurid details and quicksilver emotional turns. It has joltingly vivid imagery—a ghostly hand reaching through a window, a child dropped from a staircase, a dog bite. These disquieting visuals lead us through the characters’ tempestuous melodramas. In twined temptations of love and revenge these drives are twisted and gnarled into generational trauma. It’s a story of abusive behavior and addiction, with ideas of race and class and gender that are both of the time and astonishingly contemporary. And it is told with prose that is both nestled with first-person narratives-within-narratives in traditional Romantic 19th century style, and swirled with propulsive, jangled punctuation and pulsing interpersonal rifts. Is it a story of damaged people eroding the quality of life for everyone around them? Is it a stormy tale of endless yearning on the windswept moors? Isn’t it all of the above? The book’s dark power resonates for its closed-loop cycle of dysfunction. 

The first half of the story gives us the younger years of Cathy and her father’s troubled ward Heathcliff. They are drawn to each other and doomed to fall apart. The story grows only more thorny and layered in the second half of Brontë’s work, which carries the conflicts to a second generation. Most screen adaptations, pursuing simplicity, clarity, and rounder edges, don’t bother with that part. It’s become, in most filmmaker’s eyes, a story of a big dark house and missed connections, ghostly desire and thwarted happiness. William Wyler’s 1939 film was glossy black and white melodrama with a stentorian mood and simmering subterranean cruelty. Andrea Arnold’s 2012 version was intimate, quivering, raw and subtextual. It takes Emerald Fennell, however, to say: what if it’s a Jane Austen story if Jane Austen was a Goth girl? Not even Kate Bush pushed it that far. Fennell’s adaptation is titled self-consciously with quotation marks included, making clear that it’s simply a “Wuthering Heights,” not the definitive Wuthering Heights. That sense of looseness helps set the mood. 

The movie’s shot in striking filmic theatricality, with realistic windy moors contrasted with ostentatiously designed sets for a crumbling Gothic manor and its neighboring dollhouse estate. At the former lives Cathy (Margot Robbie) who clearly has quasi-incestuous desires for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi). He’s a scruffy low-class orphan who was brought into their house as a boy. He took the brunt of her cruel father’s beatings. That bonded them. Now they’re each well into marriageable age—and supposedly around the same age despite the actors being, and looking, seven years apart. The movie mainly revolves around their frisson of taboo chemistry, crossing class boundaries and familial ties. They’re each quick-tempered and difficult, and she loves to boss him around. He’s playmate, pet, and servant. For his part, he just wants her. That’s thwarted when rich new neighbors move in and she tosses Heathcliff aside for a potential wealthy beau. This sets off the stormy bad feelings that swallow up the rest of the movie. This is the only through line it's interested in exploring, and collapses a small, claustrophobic dynamic into its intricately designed grotesques making subtext text—enormous piles of empty bottles to denote a character’s alcoholism, say.

The film’s desire to be an edgy romantic tragedy somehow avoids letting its characters expand beyond the programmatic places for them. It’s a movie that closes down ambiguities in its main characters while opening up a sense of vagueness in its supporting players. (The likes of Hong Chau and Alison Oliver are making fascinating choices in the margins, without ever being allowed to come into focus as fully rounded figures.) Fennell adjusts the character dynamics to fit her usual feel-bad vision of the world, without even a ghostly chance for reconnection. Here people make permanent choices to chase revenge and lust and are left only worse off for it. She wants to shock and provoke with fluids and teasingly naughty sexual tensions. It’s of a piece with her clumsy filmography to date. Her nasty Promising Young Woman’s sense of righteous anger is undone by its paradoxically Pollyannaish misanthropy. Her Saltburn is a wicked thriller about how the frivolous bourgeoisie needs to watch out for scheming proletariat interlopers. That seemed a flaw, and deeply unfair, but at least it feels like an honest personal statement. She does it again here, turning the under-class into threats. Her films are increasingly competent in terms of style and design, but have remained stubbornly simplistic in their approach to humanity. 

Thus this “Wuthering Heights” loves a heightened style. It swoons with original Charlie XCX songs—a pulsating sonic highlight to pump up the montage—and gaudy fabrics, lovingly photographed garish backdrops and snow and skies so false that it feels like vibrant matte paintings and soap flakes. It wants to be a tempestuous doomed romance in elaborately appointed lush tableau. And the sheer wall-to-wall design of it all sells quite a bit of its excesses. Even so, the ending is undone by its moment-to-moment sensations failure to craft real character and not just signifying and posing. Still, I’d rather see a marvelous failure than a tepid success. What’s most astonishing is how Brontë’s shock effects still seem so elusive on screen, and even a would-be provocateur like Fennell can’t locate them. Its interest in being an aesthetic object leads it to be pretty compelling moment to moment, like discussing a complicated book with a reductive, but passionate, young reader encountering them afresh. But it also slowly drifts away from a coherent point, finally jamming its way to an ill-fitting over-the-top romantic tragedy conclusion given the mixed messages leading up to it. I was continually impressed with it as a work of craft, less impressed as a work of acting, and least impressed as a feat of writing and directing. Fennell’s wild workshop, though opulently stocked with images, continues to produce muddled results. 

The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2025

 

1. It Was Just an Accident

2. The Secret Agent

3. One Battle After Another

4. Blue Moon

5. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

6. Splitsville

7. Sinners

8. Weapons

9. The Plague

10. Presence

 

Honorable Mentions: 

28 Years Later; Black Bag; Companion; Cover-Up; Eddington; Eephus; F1; Friendship; Highest 2 Lowest; KPop Demon Hunters; Lurker; Marty Supreme; M3GAN 2.0; Mickey 17; The Monkey; Ne Zha 2; On Becoming a Guinea Fowl; The Perfect Neighbor; The Phoenician Scheme; Predator: Killer of Killers; Predators; Roofman; The Shrouds; Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost; The Testament of Ann Lee; Twinless; The Voice of Hind Rajab; Wake Up Dead Man; Warfare; Zodiac Killer Project; Zootopia 2

 

Other Bests of 2025   

Other Bests of 2025

Best Cinematography (Film):

Lurker

Marty Supreme

One Battle After Another

The Secret Agent

Sinners

 

Best Cinematography (Digital):

Eddington

F1

Presence

Train Dreams

28 Days Later

 

Best Sound:

Eddington

F1

One Battle After Another

Sinners

Warfare

 

Best Stunts:

Ballerina

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

One Battle After Another

Splitsville

Warfare

 

Best Costumes:

Bugonia

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

One Battle After Another

Splitsville

The Testament of Ann Lee

 

Best Hair and Makeup:

One Battle After Another

Sinners

The Smashing Machine

Warfare

Weapons

 

Best Set/Art Direction:

Marty Supreme

One Battle After Another 

The Phoenician Scheme

The Secret Agent

Splitsville

 

Best Effects:

F1

Jurassic World Rebirth

Sinners

Thunderbolts*

Tron: Ares

 

Best Song:

"Baby" - Freakier Friday

"Golden" - KPop Demon Hunters

"I Lied to You" - Sinners

"Trunks" - Highest 2 Lowest

"Waiting on a Wish" - Snow White   

 

Best Score:

One Battle After Another

Sinners

Splitsville

Thunderbolts*

28 Years Later  

 

Best Editing:

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

It Was Just an Accident

One Battle After Another

Sinners

Weapons

 

Best Screenplay (Original):

Blue Moon

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

It Was Just an Accident

The Secret Agent 

Splitsville

 

Best Screenplay (Adapted):

Mickey 17

One Battle After Another

The Testament of Ann Lee

Wake Up Dead Man

Warfare

 

Best Non-English Language Film:

It Was Just an Accident

Ne Zha 2

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

The Secret Agent

The Voice of Hind Rajab

 

Best Documentary:

Cover-Up

The Perfect Neighbor

Predators

Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost

Zodiac Killer Project

 

Best Animated Film:

Arco

KPop Demon Hunters

Ne Zha 2

Predator: Killer of Killers

Zootopia 2

Best Supporting Actor:

Miles Caton - Sinners

Michael Cera - The Phoenician Scheme

Benicio del Toro - One Battle After Another

Alden Ehrenreich - Weapons

Delroy Lindo - Sinners

 

Best Supporting Actress:

Naomi Ackie - Mickey 17

Adria Arjona - Splitsville

Chase Infiniti - One Battle After Another

Amy Madigan - Weapons

Wunmi Mosaku - Sinners

 

Best Actor:

Leonardo DiCaprio - One Battle After Another

Ethan Hawke - Blue Moon

Wagner Moura - The Secret Agent    

Vahid Mobasseri - It Was Just an Accident

Denzel Washington - Highest 2 Lowest

 

Best Actress: 

Rose Byrne - If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

Susan Chardy - On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

Kirsten Dunst - Roofman

Jennifer Lawrence - Die My Love

Amanda Seyfried - The Testament of Ann Lee

 

Best Director:

Paul Thomas Anderson - One Battle After Another

Mary Bronstein - If I Had Legs I'd Kick You  

Richard Linklater - Blue Moon

Kleber Mendonça Filho - The Secret Agent  

Jafar Panahi - It Was Just an Accident

  

 

 

 

  

Game Over and Over: IRON LUNG

Twenty or thirty years ago it was common to find critics saying a particularly deadening action movie felt like watching someone else play a video game. Little did they know that millions of people apparently wanted to do just that. I don’t get it myself, but younger audiences apparently are all about it, turning watching others play video games into a big business. YouTubers and Twitch streamers get sizable audiences and followings (and paydays) for bringing their viewers along level by level. With 38 million subscribers, YouTuber Markiplier’s gotten quite a large fanbase. Now he’s self-financed an independent video game adaptation called Iron Lung. He cast himself in the lead. He’s a late-30s gamer with long dark hair, broad shoulders, and a deep voice. Squint and you’d think he’s Keanu Reeves’ stunt double. He makes himself a reasonable leading man, especially considering he’s the only one on screen. It shouldn’t be surprising to find a guy who has built a following out of people wanting to watch him for hours on end would make decent company in a movie that’s basically all him. 

The story is set in an apocalyptic future, built out of incomprehensible word-building that’s more alluded to than explained. (Maybe it overly assumes familiarity with the source material.) The guy is a convict trapped in a tiny submarine and tasked with looking for monsters on the floor of an ocean of blood. (It’s the kind of dark Mad Libs that pass for edgy in some sci-fi circles.) This practically means we hear him listening and responding to commands crackling over a radio, then strategizing as he clicks and types, operating nobs and switches and levers while reading charts and numbers. So we’re watching him play the game. I’ll confess my heart sank a little as I realized that we’d never leave the tiny, dingy, dimly lit set, watching iterations on the same scenes over and over, level by level. It’s an adaptation of the game, but just as much an adaptation of his videos playing through it. Yet the movie finds convincing, enveloping sound design and steady canted angles and sweaty closeups to make its little space feel genuinely lost in a larger picture, buffeted by unseen threats, creaking leaks, and pressure changes. A conceit of a large screen flashing pictures from a radioactive camera as the only way to see outside adds some interesting visual interest. And even though the plodding pace grows claustrophobic, it’s also partially the point. 

I found myself wishing the whole was as interesting as the parts as the 127 minute run time gets quite repetitive. We watch the coordinates on the sub’s instrument panel tick by, hear garbled voices rumbling over the speakers, see Markiplier talking to himself. Lots of insert shots and tedious mumbling fill up time. And in all that time, it’s never really getting around to fleshing out backstories or context. We see lots of shots of condensation and vague, grainy underwater creatures, and glimpses of inscrutable flashbacks. Blood drips down pipes. Bolts creak. Lights flicker. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. The whole thing feels as lost and adrift as the submarine we are trapped in. We’ve quickly seen all the movie’s tricks. Soon its surprises aren’t surprising. Even the conclusion, which reaches for wild imagery, ends up closer to discount Event Horizon. I had the feeling that this would be quite a clever calling card feature at 70 or 80 minutes. In the world of cult classic one-location horror debuts, it’s not as clever as the geometric maze torture chamber Cube, but it’s also not too far off. A little energy, concision, and clarity would’ve gotten it there. But, perhaps because YouTubers have been trained by the algorithm to stretch for time, this movie just keeps going and going. 

Job Insecurity: SEND HELP

If the only thing exciting in Send Help is the filmmaking and the lead performance, well, oh boy, that’s enough. It’s an unsurprising bit of genre fluff—a little Lord of the Flies here, a little Triangle of Sadness there, a splash of Misery elsewhere—in which a plane crash leaves a frumpy office worker (Rachel McAdams) on a deserted island with her callow young boss (Dylan O’Brien). The situation leads to an expected role reversal as the boss is laid up with a sprained ankle and a total lack of survival skills. Meanwhile his employee is a survivalist with a vindictive streak. It’s all good, nasty fun as orchestrated by director Sam Raimi, who at long last gets to stretch his horror-comic talents again for a sustained exercise in tension. His glee for near-cartoonish reaction shots, swirling establishing shots, and punchy pushes and pans are a fine match for a movie which needs that kind of egging on. The performers are game, with McAdams a fine, slippery protagonist made astonishingly unglamorous at first, and steelier as the show goes on. O’Brien, for his part, transforms into a perfect weasel, weaponizing his good looks until he’s untrustworthy even when he’s playing at earnestness. The cat and mouse game is made up of traditional jungle beats, the kinds any boomer filmmaker would’ve imbibed with every local late show or weekend matinee: spears, rafts, vines, coconut cups, wild boar, cliffs off which to dangle. It has everything but the quicksand. And to each twist of the script’s knife, Raimi is willing to add gallons of fluids from arterial spray and vomit and snot. Even early office-set scenes have a zippy, mean-spirited satiric edge, and the later mind games and inevitable violence—from an off-screen slice leading to an eruption of bloody gobs, to a literally eye-gouging thumb under an eyelid—are jumps and jolts with a sick glee. It may not have the novelty of his Evil Dead or heft of Drag Me to Hell, two far superior comic horror efforts rocking and rolling with laughs and screams. But this new picture has a similar vivid, cynical spirit of a karmic comic book. Raimi knows how to pace horror and violence so satisfyingly like a comedy, literal sight gags and punch lines. It’s why his Spider-Man trilogy remains some of the only superhero movies to do justice to every bit of the phrase comic book movie. And it’s why even as slight a screenplay as Send Help comes jumping to life with invigorating style. 

Life After Deaths: 28 YEARS LATER and28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland wisely understood that the most interesting part of returning to the world of their 2003 zombie picture 28 Days Later for 28 Years Later is to see how a society has reshaped itself in the wake of a devastating, isolating event. In the world of this series, a zombie apocalypse has left the island of Great Britain cut off from the rest of the globe to prevent the spread of the “rage virus.” Talk about Brexit. Picking up the story so many years after the original’s inciting incident gives Boyle and Garland a chance to show a people re-forming, finding a deeper need to cling to family and to ritual, new and old. The older folks can remember the world before zombies roamed the countryside and the uninfected live in small fortified villages or lonely domiciles in the wilderness. But 28 years is a long time, and for the younger folks this is all they’ve known. They were born into this world. What reads to us as post-apocalyptic is, for them, merely the world. It’s humbling to be reminded that, throughout history, generations have lived through what might’ve felt like an end, not surviving to see descendants emerge into a different world not knowing any different. 

It’s grief that animates 28 Years Later. It’s a small troubled family story seen through the eyes of a tween boy in the British isle’s tradition of naturalistic films about just such a subject, like Kes and Ratcatcher. But it’s one turbocharged by its genre premise promising violence and gore. It finds young Spike (Alfie Williams), a sensitive boy who lives in a small community sealed off by fort walls and even further isolated by a land bridge that disappears at high tide. He has a sick mother (Jodie Comer) and a rough father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). His dad thinks it’s time he takes the boy zombie hunting on the mainland. His mom disagrees, but is feverish and bed-ridden and confused, and so father and son head out, armed with bow and arrow, into a survivalist horror movie. Its moves might not be all that surprising—jump scares and splattering fluids—but the characters encountered are vivid, striking, memorable. We see new iterations of zombies—most ominously, an imposing Alpha (Chi Lewis-Parrry) and his pregnant mate (Celi Crossland). We meet a stranded Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding), proof that the world beyond the country is very much ours, and a doctor (Ralph Fiennes) who has made a towering memorial to the dead out of their bones, proof life in this country is very much not like ours. And yet both are reflections of mankind’s reaction to mass death, those who would make austere peace with its heavy import, and those who’d turn a blind eye until it’s very much in their face. Between them is the boy, lead into this world by a father and a mother whose interactions with danger will inaugurate him into the heavy decisions of life in these times. 

Boyle delivers it all in elegiac tones that bolster the intensity of its life-or-death stakes. It’s grief for things that aren’t any more, and never will be again. It’s grief for the mournful facts of life that never change. And yet it’s just as muscular and jumpy as any of his hard-charging films. He shot the original on chunky pixelated consumer-grade digital video, and here trades it for an iPhone. Its images are both prosaic and painterly in the hands of cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. He gets a eye-bogglingly intense green and blue in the landscapes, and an eerie blackish red in the blood. It’s always both hyper-real and intensely stylized, never more so than a swirling star field over a body of water like a mirror. These images are then cut together with Boyle’s usual frenetic montage and stutter-step editing, tableaux of gorgeous pixelated saturation and ugly spectacle occasionally layered with stock footage and references to Kipling and Shakespeare. It’s an extension of the script’s interest in sci-fi devastation exposing what’s essentially human at root, a stripping away that reveals continuity with British pastorals and Romantic ideations of national identity. And because Garland is interested in societal procedures and human frailty (Ex Machina, Civil War), and because Boyle is interested in social dynamics and the ways in which our surroundings and our relationships shape us (Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting), this new picture is a triumphant apotheosis of their intermingled thematic concerns. It’s prickly, propulsive, unexpected, and, amazingly for a movie about the undead and dying, viscerally alive.

What’s just as amazing is that they can hand the director’s chair over to Nia DaCosta for a sequel a mere six months later and get a new movie that continues those ideas while finding ways to jolt and surprise that are all its own. The action moves to Ralph Fiennes’ neck of the woods for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. There he’s working through some experiments to see if he can calm the zombie beasts. He doesn’t have a cure, but he’s got some theories. In a quiet moment, he admits to another that the world used to feel certain. We have a sense that he’s a compassionate man of science who misses the certainty, and in fact clings to a kind of dignity and respect for all life that allows him to maintain a steady center. And yet, coated in disinfecting iodine, living in an ossuary, and stalking the fields with a tranquilizing blowdart mumbling Duran Duran lyrics to himself, he cuts a figure that, from a distance, approaches madness. He scares people, but he’s the most sensitive to their pain. It’s that tension of a sensible man in insensible times that gives the character such a beautiful charge, a patient bedside manner with a dash of danger. 

The Bone Temple slowly draws him toward climactic confrontation with a dangerous, feral gang we met briefly in its predecessor. They’re a roving band of Satanist Teletubbies fans. (That phrase alone signals what mad imagination is on display here.)  They all call themselves Jimmy in tribute to their leader, the self-proclaimed Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), and wear shaggy white wigs in honor of a British TV personality of the same name (who, in our timeline, was revealed to be a sex criminal). They represent death and easy destruction; the doctor represents life and stubborn hope. Of course they’ll collide. The movie takes its time rooting itself in characters (including some carry-overs from the last one), drawing out their perspectives and tensions, and then winds up the plotting with tension until it snaps. It’s just as nasty a violent picture as the others, but this one ends ecstatically with fire, and religious imagery, and a last-minute dash toward a better world. These movies are incredible feel-bad horror efforts about holding on to the faintest glimmer of light in the darkness, even as you—and society—bleed out in the mud.