I mean, part of the reason might be the rather underwhelming slate of Best Picture nominees this past year, and in fairness to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, they
were confronted with a deeply underwhelming year in 2025
—though I think we could all name some very obvious snubs that range from "irritating" (
Die My Love) to "irritating as well as confusing" (
The Testament of Ann Lee) to "earnestly outraging" (
Avatar: Fire and Ash, 2025's very-clear-to-me actual best film, essentially the co-equal second half of
a movie that was in fact nominated for Best Picture in 2022), especially given what did make the grade. (I have not to date seen
Marty Supreme,
Sentimental Value, or
Hamnet, and in all likelihood shall not see them.) Anyway, hopeless as its nomination was
—I mean, are you really just
filling slots?
—F1 forever, everybody! I guess! All in all, at least the Oscars
were less of a sick joke than they were last time.
Nevertheless, apart from the nominees that already got full reviews (
F1,
Bugonia, GDT's dreadful
Frankenstein), I did see these four:
One Battle After Another,
Sinners,
The Secret Agent, and
Train Dreams. I only regret watching one of them, which, hey,
is progress, but then 2025's problem as a film year was never that it produced too many bad movies (some of this is probably that I just watched fewer, but
the worst movie I saw this past year still got a 4/10 out of me) but that it produced very few great ones. Well, the following are edits, hopefully relatively slight edits
—hopefully no more than the (tedious) work of writing some synopsis copy for them
—of Letterboxd capsules I already wrote (of course, as I knew what most of 'em were ultimately intended for, they're perhaps less capsule-sized than that should indicate, though less interminable than usual, to be sure).
In an alternate 2020s following on from an alternate 2000s, that was originally an alternate 1990s following on from an alternate 1970s—and undoubtedly made more sense that way—the former revolutionary currently known as Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) has gone to ground, raising his kid Willa (Chase Infiniti) as a single father in the years since Willa's mother and Bob's former comrade Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) betrayed their resistance group under duress in part administered by jackbooted thug Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who leveraged her into sex and then leveraged her out of prison, leaving her to flee to parts unknown to either of the men in her life, or her child. As for that child, there's a bit of ambiguity about that, of course, and as Lockjaw's star rises in the white supremacist movement that now runs these United States, he sets out to resolve that ambiguity with extreme prejudice.
Now, it's nice of the movie to finally start after clearing its throat for a fucking hour; and I'm confounded (I mean, not really, but if I'd been frozen in 2008 and this was the very first thing I'd been shown—no news, no history—after being revived in 2026, I would have been confounded) that people would be crawling over broken glass to call it a masterpiece and give it awards, eventually culminating in its undeserved-even-in-these-circumstances Best Picture victory. I mean, let's even leave aside the astoundingly cringeworthy elements of that first hour, such as get thrown down like a gauntlet within the first few minutes ("oh, pish-tosh, you're exaggerating for the sake of content" I might've said, but if so, just barely); no, let's leave that aside. That first hour, or maybe it's only forty-five minutes, is as disastrous an exercise in pacing as I could readily imagine, totally fumbling the challenge this story presents, which is that it has something akin to an actual story's worth of backstory—basically Lust, Caution: ICE Edition—to get out of the way, but that it can't tell an actual story with, because its priority is, at least hypothetically, to get to the actual movie. It handles this challenge with a completely inadequate combination: a wrenching, merciless efficiency at the task of laying out its two prefatory plot points without hardly any emotional anchor to them, doing it as essentially all-montage yet somehow circling around and around and, despite what seems like an effort at doing it quickly, managing to make relating these two plot points a full third of the feature's running time. And, likewise, let's be real, that running time is manifestly unacceptable even by the absent standards of the 2020s—a cisapocalyptic action thriller set in a world only two steps away from our own cisapocalyptic reality, in other words basically an exploitation movie, with a plot that any movie ought to be able to execute in less than two hours (and could be done in 100 minutes, even with this unusually-complicated backstory), and is, effectively, just fuckin' Commando*, yet which in his infinite auteur indulgence and frankly blasphemous levels of hubris writer/director/albatross-on-my-neck Paul Thomas Anderson has positively refused to cut down from a bleary-eyed 162 minutes. This is the case even when there's very obvious things that could be cut: at least some fraction of the five-to-ten-minute denouement at the end, whereupon I groaned, "why the fuck is Steven Lockjaw still alive? why in the world does he have a fucking coda where he just dies again?", or consider the momentum-annihilating scene with Lockjaw's fascist junta, the Fathers of Christmas or whatever idiotic thing they were called (oh, let me look it up, ah, it's the Knights of White Satan), a little over halfway through, whereupon Anderson's screenplay re-explains the previous hour and a half's three plot points, and does so in what feels like real time.
