Child's Play: TOY STORY 5

Toy Story 5 could’ve been a smartly updated retelling of the original’s replacement anxieties. You'd think being directed and co-written by WALL-E's Andrew Stanton, who has a writing credit on the whole series so far, would help. Pitched as toys versus tech, it starts with the dolls and figurines in Bonnie’s room freaking out about a new addition: a tablet. The Leapfrog knockoff Lilypad instantly captures the 8-year-old’s days, leaving the toys in the dust. Unfortunately, Lilypad (Greta Lee) never becomes much of a distinct character, with little personality and a character arc that’s foreshortened in two quick reversals late in the game. So, instead of the inciting incident kicking off jostling egos among the familiar faces of returning characters facing off against the interloper, cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack, a delight and given all the best moments) takes it upon herself to get Bonnie better friends than the mean girl cyberbullies the tablet attracts. This sends her off hither and yon in an attempt to save their kid’s feelings, and of course Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) give chase. But the whole thing feels much more cramped and less detailed than the series usually manages. It’s a bland working-over of over-worked tech fears that ends up being more of a pat on the head for harried millennial parents—saying it’s okay to give them tech as long as you check in on their social media messages once in great while. It never takes off into a clever kids’ adventure or engaging object lesson that it could be. 

There is a neat distinction drawn between gaming and playing and the greater social benefit of the latter—it’s nice to see Bonnie make a real friend—but the movie is so focused on the kids’ emotional well-being that it forgets to be much of a toy story. The classic ensemble doesn't even get much in the way of dialogue, punchlines, or story, and the new characters are one-note jokes. My struggling interest finally gave up sometime between Jessie using web-connected toys to manipulate two kids into a play date and a fleet of drones carrying the main cast of plastic beings off to the rescue. I guess I just don’t think toys should be doing all that. This entry in the venerable series—hitherto Pixar’s best!—takes it too far away from neurotic playthings and pushes well past the suspension of disbelief into making them meddling Defenders of Real Childhood. I missed the interest in the frictions and eccentricities of the toy’s personalities and the existential questions about one’s purpose. Here there’s just too little room for interest in their toy society when there’s more time spent on didactically weighing in on ours. Even attempts to connect to the series’ most moving moments—consciously echoing lines and scenes from earlier pictures’ highlights—plays as hollow repetition instead of enriching the emotional texture. Compared to the aesthetic and thematic complications of the previous sequels, which somehow manage to push the detail of the animation and psychology of the characters while maintaining a consistent look and tone in the childish whimsy, this one is all too thin and simple.

Out There: DISCLOSURE DAY

Disclosure Day barely functions as legible paperback thriller plotting, but it is a feast for Steven Spielberg auteurists. It’s a layered work of visual thinking and thematic exploration that’s a buffet of recurring ideas and preoccupations from throughout his oeuvre. And all that plays out as a backdrop for a pretty flimsy central narrative. It makes the movie a totally fascinating experience, and a sometimes distancing one, an open-hearted intellectual and intuitive exercise keeping a chintzy chase picture afloat. Put simply: it’s a MacGuffin chase for stolen government secrets. (There’s also a magic stick, the properties of which shift for the needs of the plot.) The hidden truths within are as follows: aliens exist and the government is covering it up. That’s a little underwhelming after his Close Encounters' transcendent finale of music and science, and E.T.’s fleeting intergalactic friendship, and War of the Worlds’ harrowing invasion and biological protection. Spielberg’s been here before. In Disclosure Day, the characters are ideas. We have Josh O’Connor as a man with a backpack full of USBs containing leaked footage. He’s Technology: research, math, the hard facts. We have Emily Blunt as a TV weatherperson, usually reading the forecasts but now fearful as she finds herself becoming a conduit for brain-scrambling languages and interpersonal connection. She’s The Media: communication, empathy, the messenger. Together they make both halves of the whole message from outer space. They have to avoid the shadowy suit (Colin Firth) who doesn’t want the secrets out. He’s the System. To short-circuit his private army, our heroes need help along the way from another whistleblower (Colman Domingo) who’s orchestrating the big reveal. He’s building a simulacrum from which to trigger their latent memories. He’s Art. The chase also involves a lapsed nun (Eve Hewson). She’s Philosophy, Theology. “You haven’t lost your faith in God,” she’s told by a wise elder nun (Elizabeth Marvel). “You’ve lost your faith in people.” 

So it is that the movie’s about alienation in all senses of the word. It’s set in our modern world where we suspect that there’s more to the official story about most everything, but many aren’t convinced the truth will make a difference. It’s Spielberg spinning a metaphorical web so quickly and masterfully, with such a vivid mess of intentions and references, that it can’t help but skate over some yawning plot holes in the process. His fluid camera teases and traverses spaces, separates and joins perspectives, locked into who sees or knows what and when, easily slipping between perceived realities. It’s a movie that’ll be far too open-hearted for the incorrigible pedantic quibblers in the audience. Spielberg is using the raw materials of his most crowd-pleasing popcorn pictures to make something deep and strange. But it’s an honest movie, and one that risks silliness at most every turn. And, sure enough, the characters are flatly representational and all the running around doesn’t add up to much for which it’s worth investing. But in the high-gloss B-movie mess of it all, Spielberg’s really making a movie about the power of movies to show us what’s really important—a fiction that takes us to deeper truths. This one opens in media res with a smeary digital image—an elbow to the ribs from our master filmmaker—that’s immediately contextualized as diagetic camerawork at a cheap phony wrestling match. It’s a parodical muscle man in red and another in blue playacting conflict for a cheering, jeering, invested crowd. The real conflict happens in the shadow behind them—a confrontation between the leaker and the forces who wish to stomp out his message. 

The movie’s wandering chase sequences and flat exposition then build up to a finale that’s all about listening. It has some of his crisp cross-cutting and Movie Star awestruck gazes and some screens-within-screens of CG effects. But the emotionality rests entirely on a TV reporter played by Courtney Grace, a relatively unknown actress who pulls it off with astonishing work as she narrates for her audience through an array of heightened confusion, wonder, bewilderment, and context collapse. It’s a moving moment of processing the unimaginable in real time. It’s not so much about what she, and we, see in those moments. (What’s actually there teeters on the edge of silly cliche.) It’s about the human connection in that moment, bound together by something real, for once. Spielberg wants us to really listen, to understand each other. To hear a truth is the start of enlightenment. He believes it to the point of transcendence—math and art, mind and heart, The Fabelmans of his own making. It’s that reconciliation that breaks down our all-too-human isolation, between nations, between individuals, and within our own heads. He thinks we need to believe—in a higher power, in the potential to move beyond our selfish fears, in the transformative possibilities of witnessing together. He believes in cinema. He believes in UFOs. He wants to believe. He’s our greatest living filmmaker. His movies are usually airtight and precisely calibrated to function at a high level, on multiple levels, while pleasing crowds. This one dares to fall apart in personal, idiosyncratic moments that resolve in ways only Spielberg’s instincts could pull off. The real disclosure here is his own. 

Dad Jokes: POWER BALLAD and THE BREADWINNER

Sometimes you just want to go to the movies and see a light story about plausible people in slightly implausible scenarios adjacent to real life. Like if your life had a sprinkling of movie magic over it, you might stumble into something like this, too. That’s something that Irish writer-director John Carney seems to understand well when he gets the formula exactly right in building his light dramas that are lifted to something closer to transcendence through the power of music. It was there in his intimate, casual street-busker romance from 2006, Once, and in his 80s coming-of-age garage band musical from 2016, Sing Street. And it’s there again in his latest: Power Ballad. (I guess he gets it right exactly once every ten years.) It stars Paul Rudd as an expat American singer-songwriter working as the front man to a wedding band. He gave up his dreams of stardom to settle down in a Dublin suburb with an Irish wife and daughter. But he never stopped writing. This is the part that is definitely believable. 

The slight fantasy of the movie is that his band gets a gig at the reception for the childhood best friend of a former boy band member. Wouldn’t you know it that the fading celeb (played by an aptly cast Nick Jonas) is planning a comeback and is in town to write his new album? He shows up at the wedding, jams with the band, and connects with Rudd. They have fun buddy chemistry as they share some works in progress with each other and part ways feeling good about meeting a simpatico artist. Six months later, Rudd hears one of his songs over the speakers at the local mall. The star stole his song. Carney explores the ramifications with a degree of generosity to both men, and watches as the one’s anger and the other’s guilt keep them apart. But the movie’s light tone and strain of good humor—not to mention the great original songs—make some kind of happy ending inevitable. That might keep the movie’s scope, and emotional range, small, but there’s something so deeply satisfying about watching a well-oiled sentimental script go through its paces with likable leads and catchy tunes. It’s the John Carney special. 

Even lighter and less substantial is The Breadwinner. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t satisfy in its own way. Starring and co-written by standup comedian Nate Bargatze, it’s a down-the-middle sitcom of the sort that comics of his observational, family friendly kind would do all the time in the 80s and 90s on TV and the big screen. As such, it has a throwback, even retrograde, premise. He’s a husband, a father, and a well-meaning oaf. His wife (Mandy Moore) has a great business opportunity, care of a sequence in which the Shark Tank judges play themselves. (I'd say part of the fantasy here is that her invention would even get a deal.) Now she has to leave for two weeks to launch her product, which means he needs to be the sole parent to their three adorable daughters. Hijinks ensue. If you’re already imagining burnt toast, laundry shenanigans, and driving the wrong way to school, you have the right idea. It might seem a little unusual to imagine a dad so far out of the loop these days. But this isn’t a movie about all dads; it’s a movie about this dad. And Bargatze makes a believably unaware guy. His standup works because of its low-key befuddlement, like an affable guy who’s slowly learning about how to process his own life. Though obviously his observational style relies on some intelligent comprehension, he knows how to approach everyday problems with an unassuming gee-didja-notice? attitude. He has the right slightly stunned look to sell the well-meaning confusion. 

He brings to the movie that sense of middle class bewilderment, and a gooey sentimentality about the love of family that draws a guy out of his bubble of privilege and into fuller responsibility. It helps that the kids are so cute, and the jokes are actually pretty funny—bolstered by a supporting cast including Will Forte, Colin Jost, Kate Berlant, Zach Cherry, Kumail Nanjiani. It has all the charms of the throwbacks it’s copying, with a little Everybody Loves Raymond here, a little Home Improvement there. But it has mercifully none of the gender anxiety the premise might provoke. He genuinely doesn’t mind that his wife has to be the main breadwinner and wants to help her. He’s just not used to doing without the valuable co-parenting work she’s been providing. It feels, if not exactly true to life, true to some lives. Like the Adam Sandler movies of twenty years ago, it’s cleanly shot, stuffed with silly asides, and loaded up with product placement. (Thanks, Toyota, KFC, and Walmart, I guess.) It's not vulgar or crass, just sweet and gentle. We don’t get live action comedies in theaters much, and certainly not family friendly ones. It’s nice to remember what it’s like to be in room of people chuckling along with one that gets the job done. 

Big Screen Scares: OBSESSION and BACKROOMS

The YouTubers have arrived. We’ve occasionally had filmmakers emerge from amateur efforts on that site, for better (the Filipou brothers’ scary Talk to Me and Bring Her Back are massive leaps beyond their channel’s horror shorts) and or worse (Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks is a dull, cliched, irritating horror film). Now 2026 seems to be doing its best to say there’s perhaps more promise to be plucked from those ranks of creators, like television and music videos and theater before it. Funny that so far they’re all horror, which has often been a calling card for new indie voices. It’s been mere months since play-through poster Markiplier’s independent adaptation of the video game Iron Lung turned a big profit in theaters. I found the movie a bit repetitive and disorienting, but was quite impressed by how it was effective on its own terms. He played to his strengths making a one-location movie in which he essentially sits at the controls and plays the game. Now we have two more YouTuber film debuts: Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms. Judging them on formal control and narrative ambition, it’s clear that they could be two big new talents. 

Barker’s Obsession has a simple premise: what if there was a magic wand that gave you one wish? He has this device fall into the hands of a young man (Michael Johnston) who has a crush on a girl (Inde Navarrette). He can’t quite bring himself to admit it to her, even though she’s given him multiple opportunities. Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s self-conscious. Maybe he’s stressed. Maybe he’s afraid of rejection. Maybe it’s a toxic stew of all of these things. He can’t be honest with himself; how could he be honest with another? He doesn’t entirely believe the magic wand—a One Wish Willow he finds by happenstance in a witchy novelty shop. But that doesn’t stop him from using it to wish the girl would “love him more than anything in the world.” Anyone whose ever read, or even heard of, “The Monkey’s Paw” can guess where this is going. She becomes demonically obsessed with him with occasionally unpredictable results (like duct taping his front door shut from the inside while he sleeps). And, dud that he is, he likes her obsessiveness. Mostly. For a while. (The tape thing gives him slight pause). 

Barker gives the movie a great creepy crawling pace and lets the two lead performances wiggle around in the premise’s discomforts. He shoots in a boxy aspect ratio and glides the camera with an eerie otherworldliness as the actors play out the inevitable tragedy. Navarrette in particular does well signaling otherworldly devotion and dissociative trauma in the same wide-eyed glances. It’s clear that the movie is aware the young man is the villain, and the girl is trapped in his wishful delusion. She’s not really in love with him, and there are weird supernatural cracks in the intensity of her clinginess. Eventually it erupts in horror gore—but the sense of surprise is pretty much gone. The shallowness of its insights catch up to it. I’m sure it’ll be a great, provocative watch for people who’ve never had thoughts about male entitlement, unhealthy relationships, or wishes-gone-wrong before. For the rest of us, it’ll be admiring the filmmaker’s chops while wishing the script had a little more meat on the bone. 

Parson’s Backrooms is an even more impressive feat. As a work of sustained mood and space it’s incredible. He builds one of those great movie places and gets a little lost in it. But who can begrudge that? I was completely enveloped by its sense of a porous boundary between the reality and surreality of its premise. To be on its wavelength practically demands leaning in to try to see around the next corner as the camera slowly turns. Based on a series of YouTube shorts he made in his teenage years—Parsons is still only 20!—it concerns those eerie liminal spaces that were all the rage in meme horror some years back. Have you ever been alone in an empty office building or a back hallway in a mall that’s been almost, but not entirely, cleared of furniture? Now imagine a maze of those rooms, inconsistently lit, with distant muffled footsteps, and an increasingly surreal sense of architecture. Halls go nowhere, doors open onto stairs, stairs lead to doors, doors lead to ramps, ramps lead to rooms that narrow to another door. You get the picture. All of it is set to ominous low rumbles and the buzz of florescent lights. It is unsettling, but pulled forward by an inquisitive momentum. What is this place? I was uneasy, but also didn't want to leave.

That’s the same sensation, and compulsion, for the lead character, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. He’s the owner of a struggling discount furniture store who discovers, late one night, that he can step through a wall in the basement and end up in this befuddling place. And then he just has to know more. The movie’s at its best as it follows these excursions, sometimes in creepy clean digital photography, sometimes in fuzzy Blair Witch-style VHS found footage aesthetics. (It’s set in a strangely convincing 1990—15 years before the director’s birth, another unsettling realization.) I honestly could’ve watched Ejiofor and his two employees, camcorder in tow, explore this space for the entire runtime. The camera creeps along with them, sending shivers with each half-glimpsed shadow in the darkness just beyond our perspective. But the movie moves perhaps too quickly to broaden the scope and jumps to some big character shifts when the mystery of the moment was enough. There’s also a therapist (Renate Reinsve) who worries that her client has lost it in delusions describing the backrooms, and has odd flashbacks implying her own traumatic backstory. She goes looking for him. Then there’s a guy in a white lab coat (Mark Duplass) who seems like he’s going to explain things, but mercifully doesn’t know much more than we do by that point. To Parson’s credit, there is no answer, but that does leave the movie saying only: Huh, look at this place. Weird, right? But, hey, this is a weird place worth seeing! 

Weathering with You: PRESSURE

Pressure is a movie for people who’d rather doze off in a movie theater instead of falling asleep on the couch in front of the History Channel. It’s a World War II drama about the last three or four days of planning for D-Day. The epic moment is narrowed down to just a few rooms through the limited perspective of the meteorological team. At first they think it won’t be stormy weather. Then they do. The top weatherman is played by Andrew Scott. He has a nice pregnant wife at home and now he’s sequestered with the top brass barking at him to make a call. Is he sure? It’s a prediction. He’s a little worried that they don’t know how weather forecasts operate. He goes against the other top weatherman in the room (Chris Messina). General Eisenhower—a growling Brendan Fraser—looks at him with skepticism, then reluctant agreement that still bubbles up with skepticism. A storm could ruin all their planning and maybe even tip the course of the war. Damian Lewis plays a general whose reaction to hearing about the impending bad weather’s potential for delaying his invasion plans is to rant that they should just start “taking Kraut lessons now!” Scott has a great stiff upper lip and slightly teary eyes that sell the stress of being the naysayer in a situation like this. It’s a movie that, if nothing else, will make you say, yeah, I guess it would be a lot of pressure to tell the assembled Allied Commanders whether or not their closely guarded plans will be stymied by high winds. 

There’s just not much going on here beyond the obvious. First Scott has to argue it’s about to storm and the leaders growl. It’s sunny outside! They begrudgingly respect him when it starts raining a few hours later. A key scene comes late in the picture where Scott has decided that the weather is about to change. Eisenhower yells something like: “You say don’t go when it’s sunny, and to go when it’s storming!” Something tells me the real guy knew a little bit more about how weather works. But here’s a movie that’s desperately stretching to make drama out of its little corner of a massive event. I don’t doubt there was actual drama here, but the movie doesn’t much find it. Going deeper into the actual process of collecting data for their forecasts, instead of glossing over it with montage, might’ve helped. Instead we have little montages of devices and charts followed by broad scenes of flat dialogue and pat, easily resolved tensions. Director Anthony Maras has assembled a fine cast, dressed them in period costumes and set them in convincingly historical rooms. It looks and moves and sounds like a proper prestige picture, all surface polish. But screenwriter David Haig, adapting his own stage play, seems to trust the subject matter to do the heavy lifting. The movie ends with an abridged combat sequence that mostly reminds viewers of Saving Private Ryan’s much more successful balance of the personal stakes in the epic terror of combat in this very historical moment. I wanted to like a talky movie about WWII strategy. But this is a flat foregone conclusion of a movie. 

Robbin' Good: I LOVE BOOSTERS

Rapper-turned-writer/director Boots Riley has a lively imagination and a righteous sense of social satire. Together those qualities make for movies that are electric and chaotic in equal measure. His first feature was the unpredictable 2018 comedy Sorry to Bother You, in which a Black call center employee gets big bucks for deploying an unctuous “White Voice.” That hook soon spun off into wild flights of fancy that slowly diluted its emotional punch in favor of vulgar shocks. Now, nearly a decade later, we have Riley’s second film: I Love Boosters. It has more focus, and even tighter control over the filmmaking fundamentals. It’s a riotous, candy-colored story of have-nots versus a have. It also indulges in bits of magical realism until they take over and turn the movie’s heightened reality into nesting dolls of metaphorical unreality. Yet if it gets less funny as it gets more fantastical, Riley never loses interest in double, triple, quadruple underlining every satiric point. It helps ground all of its interests that the characters are such big, likable personalities. The film’s snappy start introduces us to the Boosters: a lovable group of shoplifters who sneak expensive designer clothes and accessories out of department stores for the reselling. Steal from the rich and sell at a discount to the poor. “Fashion forward philanthropy,” one says. Their ringleader is Keke Palmer, one of our most appealing leading ladies in another of her bubbly, appealing underdog roles. She has an easy, relaxed charisma and a hustling forward momentum. Her accomplices are Zola’s Taylour Paige and Mickey 17’s Naomi Ackie. They give the trio a loose, charming chemistry as they enact increasingly unlikely daring midday heists. Their determination and their friendship dovetail nicely. 

One step ahead of getting caught, and two steps ahead of bill collectors, they’re a scrappy, working class counterpoint to the stylish villain of the picture. From a leaning luxury apartment in the middle of San Francisco, a billionaire fashion designer demands her underlings find these thieves who threaten her retail empire, and further commands her Chinese sweatshops ignore safety and work harder for less to make up for her losses. Demi Moore plays her as if every line was a speech bubble in a political cartoon. She comes across as blend of Cruella de Vil and Miranda Priestly—but somehow both more evil and more believable. Riley has such a clear, totalizing vision for the movie. It has broad, almost cartoonish stylistic curlicues—editing as punchline, pop-art titles, background sight gags, Palmer hallucinating a literal ball of stresses—and then, by the second half, gives way to total fantasy. You might not expect from the small-scale opening that it’d build to a largely stop-motion action finale—let alone a supernatural creature that’s merely a minor side-character or a sci-fi device that operates at the speed of plot. But that’s Riley for you. The movie doesn’t have much of a sense of who its characters are beyond ideas in the points its scoring. But it’s fast and funny and they careen through an increasingly crowded ensemble and convoluted plot. The story’s mechanics lose a few springs and gears in the hard turns, and a finale that wraps up with a flourish of wishful thinking. But the vibrant colors and coordinated gestures and cartoon logic and vulgar jokes build to bold conceits. In an increasingly bland, homogenized cinematic landscape, I’m glad we have Riley out there making movies so distinctive, delirious, and committed to shouting sharp satiric points with style. 

Cowboy and Alien: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

Star Wars has always been a pulp genre melting pot. You know the litany of influences: westerns, samurai adventures, medieval fantasies, small-town drag races, WWII dogfights, creature features, space opera action serials. In the unique stirring of George Lucas’ mind, the whole production becomes a sui generis construction, a blend of his interests that’s uniquely personal for something so outsized. It’s also been a central pillar of our last several decades of pop culture production. Every science fiction fantasy blockbuster is downstream of its innovations, and the trouble with non-Lucas attempts to extend his world is getting the mix wrong. You shouldn’t make a Star Wars movie out of copying Star Wars; you should go back to the source code. What made for fun with The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars television show, when it debuted on Disney+ seven years ago, was its success in making cinematic images roughly congruent with the movie series, while bottling it up in the roving bounty hunter episodic structure of so many TV westerns of yore. It had a setup to run for years. But given the sluggish pace of modern TV production we’ve only had two more seasons and a handful of vaguely connected parallel series since. We’ve also had a franchise increasingly incapable of getting a movie out of pre-production. So it is that Disney decided to get a Star Wars-shaped thing in theaters for this Memorial Day. Getting a supersized episode of the show off the ground seemed the quickest way to do so. 

Show-runner Jon Favreau helms it himself. It’s not exactly a fourth season of the show. Instead, it’s a two-hour tide-me-over. It looks like an episode of the show, although that says a lot about how TV has gotten glossier and movies have gotten flatter. Nothing much of consequence happens, but we do get to hang out with the eponymous Mandalorian bounty hunter and his tiny green Force-sensitive "Baby Yoda" ward Grogu. They’ve become iconic for a reason, with clean silhouettes and archetypal simplicity. When they first step into frame in an elaborate opening action sequence, there’s a pop of excitement. Just like in the show, they’re off on a mission that branches into side quests then weaves back into the original goal. Every twenty to thirty minutes the minor objective and setting changes while building to one overarching major objective for a climax. We fly to a snow planet to a beach planet to a swamp planet to a city planet and back again. Some locations are neatly imagined with fun whimsical details like a trip to a new location: space Chicago crawling with gangsters and fixed fights. Other locales, like goopy underground tunnels in a Hutt den, are blurry brownish-green eyesores. Favreau, a veteran of this sort of thing through Iron Man and Zathura and Cowboys & Aliens, gives the movie a bland professionalism that dutifully pushes fans' buttons. It’s very familiar and largely unsurprising, cramped and small, but manages some diverting appeal from time to time. 

For long-term fans of the whole franchise, it’s recognizably similar to the small-scale stories tossed off as comic book one-shots or short stories in anthologies during the 1990s Expanded Universe of multimedia spin-offs. Realizing that helps tamp down expectations and allows the movie its best chance of working for you. It’s a light, inessential doodling in the margins of the main storylines. Stormtroopers get shot. We meet lots of little aliens with funny voices. Sigourney Weaver appears for a few moments, barely longer than she’s in the trailer. A couple minor characters from a different show get killed off. X-wings swoop in at the last second. It has all the noises and lights you’d expect from the franchise. Ludwig Göransson’s score bangs and wails with suitable techno-spaghetti western flair. Mando looks cool as takes down waves of bad guys. Grogu’s puppeteered for maximum affecting cuteness and growing power. And yet for this we go to the theater? It can’t help but feel like a diminishment of the franchise from a mythic cycle to just another thing to see. When shows like the literate, political Andor and the vibrant, kinetic Maul: Shadow Lord have kept the series’ vitality alive through streaming, it’s a shame going back to the movies for this universe feels so inconsequential and small.

Pop Goes Her Heart:BILLIE EILISH: HIT ME HARD AND SOFT (LIVE IN 3D) and MOTHER MARY

James Cameron approaches a Billie Eilish concert like he does deep sea creatures or the Titanic wreckage. He’s gone to see it and wants to tell us: huh, would you look at that? The cinematographic curiosity ends at the level of procuring the footage. His documentaries—Aliens of the Deep, Ghosts of the Abyss, and now this—are chronicles of interesting sights presented with cutting edge technology. In the case of Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), it’s a pretty standard concert movie in form. We see her perform songs largely uncut, with lights and lasers and pyrotechnics and, of course, her own charismatic performance in the center of the dazzle. These are intercut with lots of obtrusive closeups of weeping fans, and sequences that cut away to behind-the-scenes moments that are interesting only as far as a skimming the surface of the rigamarole of modern stardom can be. Eilish is undeniably a great stage presence and her music is largely catchy and earnestly felt, whether upbeat dance bangers or slow-tempo confessional ballads. What Cameron does in the film’s best moments is set up his tech and let it capture her in action. He shot in the high frame rate 3D he’s been developing with his Avatar movies. Here that format’s hyper-detailed deep focus and lack of motion blur somehow looks natural. Concert movies are perhaps its ideal use case. Paired with booming sound the crystalline images take on a real immediacy. It captures every sweep of the light show and climaxes with a dazzling dimensional clarity to the typical end-of-concert confetti blizzard.

If the movie fails to cohere much as a movie per se—the interviews are too shallow, the behind-the-scenes too sparing, the focus a little too scattered, the performances a little too chopped up—it’s still quite a tech demo, and a decent look at a star in this particular moment of her career. For a more in-depth view of her story and personality along with musical performances, there’s R.J. Cutler’s documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. For a more straightforward concert movie, there’s Robert Rodriguez’s Happier Than Ever. (Now having worked with both Cameron and Rodriguez, one wonders if she’d like to make Alita: Battle Angel 2 happen.) This particular movie simply shows why she’s one of our most appealing pop stars. She has great songs sung well, and great stage swagger, comfortable in her typical Kevin Smith-style jersey and shorts. And the movie’s at least a little bit about the parasocial dynamic of modern music fans. It looks at the tearful fans who talk about her with unrestrained awe—pure and earnest. One boy says she’s better than therapy. At the end a girl is crying as the camera pushes in on her. From off screen we hear Cameron’s chipper question: “How’d you like the show?” Duh. 

A scarier look at modern pop stardom is in the spooky, folkloric Mother Mary. Writer-director David Lowery takes his penchant for making movies that feel like eerie campfire stories and turns it on a diva in crisis. She’s Mother Mary, played by Anne Hathaway in a startlingly complicated portrayal that’s both imperious showbiz razzle-dazzle surface and deeply wounded vulnerability churning beneath. In need of a new dress right away, she attempts to reconcile with an old friend (Michaela Coel) who used to be her chief designer and visual collaborator before some unspoken falling out, or maybe betrayal. But it turns out the wound in their friendship has come to haunt them both in the intervening years. The movie proceeds as a two-hander between the women as they talk it out in a cold, dim, drafty barn, spending their time alternately needling and needing each other. Their conversation, bleeding inevitably toward magical realism, is interrupted for elaborate concert flashback sequences that exist with blinding spotlight on Mother Mary in impressive regal headdress and sequined bodysuits, surrounded by impressive implication of screaming fans in the dark, illuminated by flashing lights. 

The whole production is a cohesive design. The songs are euphoric modern pop at its best. These could be Swift or Gaga or Eilish. They’re catchy and pulse-pounding and match the darkness in her character. Written by producer Jack Antonoff, responsible as anyone for the sound of the last decade, and Charli XCX, whose party-girl brattiness is also a key tone for hit modern music, the songs’ verisimilitude goes a long way toward selling the movie’s gnarled low-key fantasy. But they wouldn’t work so well if not for Hathaway’s performance. She’s credible as a pop star toggling between performative persona and raw interpersonal nerve. And this performance bounces so perfectly off of Coel’s steely wounded pride and confident control. Together their shared haunting winds its way to inevitable surrealist metaphors that threaten to overwhelm the simplicity with literalness cloaked as ambiguity (and vice versa). But this is a Lowery film through and through. He makes Hollywood pictures shaped like art house films (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), compelling hooks populated with movie stars told with a slow-drip mood. And he makes art house films inside Hollywood pictures (Pete’s Dragon, The Old Man and the Gun, Peter Pan & Wendy), broadly appealing movie star movies with a sadder, slower mode inside. Mary is more the former. It’s a talky, haunted, elliptical movie about the psychosis of stardom. 

Playing Games: THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE and MORTAL KOMBAT II

Video game fans in general seem quite appreciative of the latest wave of video game movies. They’re slavishly devoted to their inspirations’ iconography and gameplay, and seem to have built their stories out of the same dynamics that take you level to level with the barest connective tissue between sequences. That’s certainly the case with Illumination’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie which, unlike the Sonic’s attempts to build actual movies out of the run-fast simplicity of the side-scrolling games, is content to build out settings and characters first and foremost. It returns us to the Mushroom Kingdom where Princess Peach and Toad go off to search outer space for the missing Princess Rosalia. In their absence, Mario and Luigi are supposed to take care of the castle. Wouldn’t you know it? That’s when Bowser Jr attacks and knocks them into a cosmic journey of their own. The movie was clearly worked out backwards from which places and peoples from the Nintendo world the filmmakers wanted to highlight. Here’s a spaceport. Here’s a casino shaped like a cube in which every side has its own gravity. (That one’s kinda neat.) Here’s a giant bee. Here’s a hellish amusement park. There’s no rhyme nor reason to the stops on the journey, and rather than building characters arcs or dramatic tension or adventurous momentum, it accumulates a sense of just one thing after another. It even weirdly skimps on the first film’s most popular element — Jack Black’s Bowser. He gets an undernourished plot and the only time he’s even close to singing a song to follow up his absurdly popular “Peaches,” the movie cuts him off for a joke. Still, the movie is quickly paced and easy to look at. It has the rounded edges and pleasant colors and Pavlovian sound effects that’ll flatter fans of all ilks. 

A far more unpleasant experience is Mortal Kombat II, which once again saves for the very end everyone’s favorite part of the game—the theme song. The journey there is bone-headedly simple. The Mortal Kombat tournament starts up again. Several challengers have to outlast a guy with a big hammer. None do. Until one does. For fans of the classic arcade fighting game that might be enough to see the character strut out in live action again. But for a franchise that’s indebted to both cheap-o Hollywood fantasy filmmaking and vintage Hong Kong fighting pictures, this entry is woefully under imagined. Despite adding Karl Urban to play fan favorite Cage, the characters in this sequel to a reboot might as well be a flat pile of pixels. The choreography feels perfunctory and repetitive. The escalations and resolutions of the fights feel arbitrary. And every sequence appears to have been shot on a tiny set in which almost everything on the frame, including parts of the actors, is some sort of digital effect. It’s so flat and claustrophobic that even the typical ponderous exposition about the fate of the world feels small. It makes one yearn for the comparatively classical cornball charms of the original Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation from the 90s, the only one of these movies close to good. Sure, that one was cheaply made and narratively simplistic, too. But at least its effects and action had energy and atmosphere. (And it put the theme song first, starting things on literally the right note.) This one’s just endless bland repetition.

Who's Bad: MICHAEL

Basically no one involved in Michael wanted to make an honest story of Michael Jackson’s life. That’s not unusual for a biopic officially approved by a cautious estate. (It happened to Bob Marley and Freddie Mercury recently.) But the details of Jackson’s life are so darkly troubled that not even the emptiest hagiography turning a deliberate blind eye to the worst of his eccentricities and criminality can fully escape the gravitational pull of the freak show tragedy of his tabloid final decades. We simply know the story too well. And anyone paying attention knows its contradictions and complications are far more fascinating than an easy greatest hits skim can do justice. Here’s a movie that tells the story of a talented little boy whose abusive father makes into a song-and-dance star as part of a sibling band. As a young adult he goes solo and becomes a superstar while awkwardly, eventually, extricating his own ambition from his family ties. Along the way he makes some of the catchiest, grooviest, and most successful, pop music of the 20th century. That’s all undeniably true. But here’s also a movie with Peter Pan fantasies, predatory adults, a backyard zoo, plastic surgery, pain medication, and a pet chimpanzee. It has a scene where the emotionally stunted Jackson makes his security guard take him to a toy store and, while waiting in line, is interrupted by a starstruck mother who makes her reluctant young son get an autograph. And this is the version that isn’t going to get into his psychological problems or abuse allegations? It’s like someone left in all the signifiers while leaving out what they signified. It’s a glossy, up-tempo celebration ominously pointing at the tragedy that’s on the cutting room floor. 

Director Antoine Fuqua directs a capable, anonymous production that’s supposed to be nonstop music and recreations of iconic moments from concerts and music videos. That’s all faithfully recreated here. Jackson is played by his nephew Jaafar, who has the look and the moves with an eerie impression of the fluttery high speaking voice and belting singing tone. The supporting cast, from the rest of the Jackson 5 to Motown’s Berry Gordy and beyond, are completely anonymous. (You can’t even tell the brothers apart, while Colman Domingo’s father figure is a vivid, cartoonish, presence.) There’s little attempt to make Jackson himself a character; he’s just a fragile boy pushed along by the march of time. Forget about interrogating a scene like when he, a grown man, grumbles that his adult siblings would rather go have sex with their girlfriends than stay home and play Twister with him. He’s just too pure. (Sure.) The movie is entirely and naively shallow surface. It has the notes. It has the rhythm. It has the dances. It has the costumes. But all those are so empty that they can’t stop the oddities and ugly implications from fighting their way up from beneath the glossy surface. We can’t forget who we’re watching, and where it’s all headed, even as the movie is convinced it isn’t telling that story. It ends on a high note—Jackson in 1988 freed at last from his father’s grasp, on a solo tour singing a big hit—and this text: “His Story Continues.” Given where it’s headed, that feels like a threat. 

Romancing Atone: YOU, ME & TUSCANY and THE DRAMA

If I started listing everything that annoyed me about Kat Coiro’s You, Me & Tuscany it’d start sounding like my reaction was more negative than it was. It’s a big, bright, broad romantic comedy and grooves along pleasantly. It has a cute leading lady (Halle Bailey) playing an aspiring chef who cashes out her meager savings to visit Tuscany. Once there she crashes in a vacant villa and is promptly mistaken for the owner’s fiancé. She decides to go with it because the big stereotypical Italian family are so welcoming and lovely—and travel into each scene en masse like the family in the Big Fat Greek Wedding movies. (No wonder Nia Vardalos cameos in the first scene). As she learns to love life under the Tuscan sun, our heroine’s quickly attracted to a handsome vineyard owner (Regé-Jean Page) who feels a connection with her but doesn’t pursue it, thinking she’s engaged and all. Quite a conundrum. But it’ll work itself out more or less how you’d expect. There’s something to be said for the comforting rhythms of formula storytelling. It almost carries the movie over low-res establishing shots, clunky ADR exposition, flat chemistry from the leads, and a supporting friend character who exists almost exclusively to repeat plot points over FaceTime. Funnily enough for a movie about a wannabe chef, it just adds to a feeling that the whole thing is just a little undercooked, under-spiced, and on too low a boil. It’s the kind of middling dish that gets the job done, but doesn’t truly satisfy. But how often do we get rom-coms that rise to even that level these days, especially in a theater? 

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama is also technically a romantic comedy, insofar as it is about romance and has a consistently percolating sense of humor bubbling over into hugely funny moments. But to call it a rom-com would lead potential viewers astray. For all its surface gloss and handsome New York apartments, this is a spiky, prickly movie about a relationship on the brink of marriage and the precipice of disaster. It’s the week of the wedding and the happy couple are given a trust exercise. Name the worst thing you’ve ever done. Big mistake. Robert Pattinson’s flustered Brit — he’s giving 90’s Hugh Grant — becomes slightly, slowly, then all at once undone by the admission of his fiancé (Zendaya). I shan’t spoil her answer, but it’s worth mentioning the movie’s tricky tone and prankish social satire comes out of the sheer liability of the leads and the jolt of electric discourse that their confessions inspire. The movie smirks as it watches others with comparable, or worse, behaviors get sanctimonious, and as it finds characters asking if you can ever really know another person. Here’s a movie about the baggage everyone carries, and how difficult it can be to open it up for someone, even the closest someones, knowing that you’re risking judgment. And, if you’re getting married, you know their baggage will be weighing you down, too. It allows scenes of usual pre-marriage jitters to compound the stress through squirming social situations and escalating psychological sweatiness. The movie’s a sly conversation starter like that, tossing up awkward behaviors and philosophical posturing and watching as the characters flail to get back to a livable normal. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. 

Apocaloptimists: PROJECT HAIL MARY and THE AI DOC

Like The Martian, screenwriter Drew Goddard’s previous adaptation of an Andy Weir sci-fi novel, Project Hail Mary is a cheerful problem-solver of a space adventure. That earlier film was a gear-headed Ridley Scott picture with astronaut Matt Damon stuck on Mars. It cut between the stranded explorer and the scientists back home on parallel tracks thinking their way through complications to get him home. This newest film is also a stranded-astronaut story problem. It finds a science teacher (Ryan Gosling) waking up years from Earth, alone in a capsule as he regains his memories and finishes his mission. He’s supposed to figure out a way to make the sun immune to a space bacteria that’s causing it to burn out. He’ll do so by scooping up samples from a distant star. The movie’s parallel tracks are past and present. In the past, Gosling’s working with a team of researchers desperate to save the planet. In the present, he’s talking to himself—mostly. The halves joined by a seriousness of purpose and a cheerful optimism, a sense that if the world were to end tomorrow, the government would ask smart people to stop it today. Isn’t it pretty to think so? 

Gosling makes a fine star for such a feat, charming and self-deprecating and flustered, but ready to lock in and put his intelligence to work of all of us. He’s hugely likable here, and has great chemistry with his scene partners, both Earthbound (Sandra Hüller) and ones who are more imaginatively deployed later to help puppet scenes to a surprisingly moving climax. The movie surrounds him with convincing special effects of the kind of pop-art realism you’d expect from a movie that’s part Interstellar. It has the hard sci-fi edge with a sentimental open heart. It comes from Lord and Miller, the filmmaking team behind the joke-a-minute Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie, and who last directed 22 Jump Street twelve years ago. They’ve returned to us with their sense of humor intact, but proportioned well here as leavening to the stakes that enhance the emotions and the spectacle instead of deflating them. It actually cares. How nice to find a huge crowd-pleaser that valorizes intelligence. It watches Gosling connecting with extraterrestrial awareness with a sense of awe at mankind’s ability to solve problems with hard work and mental energy. 

It’s a stark, and welcome, contrast to those who think we can build computers to replace us. Consider those who talk endlessly at us about Artificial Intelligence. (I cringe even to use the term, a deliberately nebulous buzzword meant to obscure all manner of tech company advertising and spin.) There are those who think an emergent super-intelligence is going to bring about mankind’s abrupt extinction any day now. There are those who think it’ll hasten a dawn of a global golden age where no one will work and all disease will be cured. Those in the middle seem to think it’ll just enslave us to super-wealthy authoritarians. (Plus ça change.) A new documentary from Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell wants to serve as a level-headed primer on these issues. Its feint toward definitiveness is in its direct title: The AI Doc. Its quirky subtitle Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a signal of its whimsy. The movie’s a standard-issue talking-head doc loaded up with little stop-motion animations, showy transitions, and squiggly hand-drawn titles. And it’s wrapped around the personal story of the impending birth of Roher’s first child. He narrates and appears as an on-screen interlocutor, driven to wonder about these issues because he’s worried about bringing a baby into this uncertain future. 

He’s suitably curious. But the movie is largely credulous. Mostly confined to researchers and speculators, with a late stop at a few CEOs who hype up their products and playact concern, the movie mostly takes for granted the huge stakes, no matter the extremes expressed. It doesn’t quite understand that the pro crowd and the cons alike are merely falling into a fictional framework (call it Terminator v. Star Trek) instead of actually addressing the reality of the situation. He briefly invites on some humanities professors to poke at the bubble—let’s think about the resources, and who benefits from setting the discourse frame at peak freak out about the future that makes it, good or ill, seem inevitably world-changing. But they get shuffled off after a few soundbites. The movie reaches one of those issue doc call-your-congressperson QR-code endings. Its ambivalence ends up making the case that AI is, like so many problems of our modern day, something most people want to regulate, but financial pressures means no one will. But, sure, call a congressman about it. See how far that gets you. 

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 quite a 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