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