Reviews from gulag: Get behind me 2025 (part 1?)

More capsule or at least capsulish reviews as we finally finish cleaning up the movies of the previous year, three months and change into the new one.  Herein we discuss Resurrection, House of Dynamite, Black Bag, and The Running Man.

RESURRECTION

Can you guess the theme of these five graybles?  I didn't, despite it being exactly as childishly simple as The Senses, which I choose to hold against the movie rather than myself because it did "taste" twice; or at least it obscured "touch"—the segment with vampires is the one that does "touch"—though since that one is also the long take with the stabilized camera, maybe that was intended to expand our consciousness and include "the vestibular."

Resurrection is legitimately less than the sum of its parts, as sometimes happens with anthologies, and I'm not even altogether sold on most of the parts, though the opening is pretty nifty and seems like it ought to be in possession of a more interesting movie following on from it, not so much because of its framing narrative (that framing narrative—"IN A WORLD WHERE DREAMS ARE AGAINST THE LAW, ONE MAN IS A CINEPHILE"—is, I'm sorry, as off-puttingly wanky as it gets), but because it's a fascinating pastiche of silent cinema and early silent cinema at that, remarkably opting not to surrender color nor even allowing itself to be restrained by the primitive limitations of early color processes (though handschiegl and general-issue tinting are, nevertheless, 100% evoked), but still very much managing to remind you of early Technicolor despite blatantly surpassing its capabilities, and bridging the rest of the gap with aspect ratio, shot selection, what amounts to basically non-editing, set design, obviously that framerate, and some good old Meliesisms.  Very cool, and I was a bit stoked to see how the advent of sound was treated as we follow Jackson Yee, playing a dreamer in various guises in various dreams, is explicitly sent on a death odyssey through history, generally, and the history of film, specifically, an art form well known for its engagement of all of the five senses.

Reviews from gulag: Kinda dropped the ball on the Best Picture nominees this year, wonder why that could be, I place so must trust in the Academy and its judgment

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).

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

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.

Not the bees

BUGONIA

2025

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Written by Will Tracy

Spoilers: severe

Any given Sunday

HIM

2025

Directed by Justin Tipping

Written by Skip Bronkie, Zack Akers, and Justin Tipping

Spoilers: moderate

Just what is going on in that piratical mind of yours?

THE SEA HAWK

1940

Directed by Michael Curtiz

Written by Howard Koch and Seton I. Miller

Spoilers: moderate

Volcano girls, we really can't be beat

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH

2025

Directed by James Cameron

Written by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and James Cameron

Spoilers: high

Walt Disney, part LXXXIV: Why did it have to be snakes?

ZOOTOPIA 2

2025

Directed by Byron Howard and Jared Bush

Written by everyone with a script by Jared Bush

Spoilers: high

It's a t-rex, they've been around since, I dunno, the 90s?

JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION

2022

Directed by Colin Trevorrow

Written by Derek Connolly, Emily Carmichael, and Colin Trevorrow

Spoilers: moderate

I had before been moved by the sophisms of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his fiendish threats: but now, for the first time, the wickedness of my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price perhaps of the existence of the whole human race.

FRANKENSTEIN

2025

Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley)

Spoilers: moderate

Tubular! Radical! Awesome! Reaganomics!

BARBARIAN

2022

Written and directed by Zach Cregger

Spoilers: oh, severe

Cardboard Science: When man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world

THEM!

1954

Directed by Gordon Douglas

Written by George Worthing Yates, Ted Sherdeman, and Russell Hughes

Spoilers: moderate

Plutonian shores

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

2022

Written and directed by David Cronenberg

THE SHROUDS

2025

Written and directed by David Cronenberg

Spoilers: moderate

You take your car to work, I'll take my board

THE SURFER

2025

Directed by Lorcan Finnegan

Written by Thomas Martin

Spoilers: moderate

They'd forget their precious gold if they had to dig their own

GOLD

1974

Directed by Peter Hunt

Written by Wilbur Smith and Stanley Price (based on the novel Gold Mine by Wilbur Smith)

Spoilers: moderate

When will you make an end?

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

1965

Directed by Carol Reed

Written by Philip Dunne (based on the novel by Irving Stone)

Spoilers: Michelangelo did, in fact, finish the Sistine Chapel ceiling

Time just went

HERE

2024

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Written by Eric Roth and Robert Zemeckis (based on the comic book by Richard McGuire)

Spoilers: maybe high, more like inapplicable

Note: runs slightly long, but it was the most movie of 2024, whether we treated it that way or not

Reviews from gulag: Down with the Oscars (this isn't about the Oscars)

But I will indulge myself a moment, because today I watched Robert Zemeckis's Here—the boldest Goddamn movie of the year, in its way, just a real achievement, and one that deserves a full review—but perhaps just as importantly, I also watched I Saw the TV Glow, the third feature (second anyone's heard of) from Jane Schoenbrun, the follow-up to their torturously boring and bad We're All Going To the World's Fair; and, in tandem, they very briefly restored my faith in the state of cinema, one being a fearless late-style swing from a tottering master that does some truly new shit, the other being the kind of redemption I genuinely want to see from a filmmaker who might've burned me terribly in the past, but is willing to evolve towards good, exciting work.  And this feeling was shattered, because 2024 now bears the ineradicable stain of producing Anora as America's putative Best Picture of the year, and now it's all just a bunch of morbid considerations about that whole "state of cinema" thing: the possibility that Zemeckis might never make another movie (because hardly anybody's seen Here and I do not think its reputation will grow going forward); the possibility that Shoenbrun's literal physical well-being could be jeopardized, let alone that of their career; and the certainty that Sean Baker is going to go on to keep making the worst motherfucking movies in the world for decades and decades to come.

Anyway, we'll get to I Saw the TV Glow, but I also watched Marielle Heller's Nightbitch, and now they're together, because they're both obtuse horror movies or something.  I'd say it's because they're both about nighttime, but I believe Nightbitch takes place mostly, like at a 3:1 ratio, during the day.  Oh, whatever, it's fundamentally arbitrary.

NIGHTBITCH

It's not clear whether it was Nightbitch source novelist Rachel Yoder, or its writer-director Marielle Heller, or its coterie of producers, but clearly it was decided that what women needed was their own 1994's Wolf, though I certainly can't tell you what all these women thought women must've done to deserve that.  And, somehow, the results are even less impressive: both Wolf and Nightbitch are using a story of canid transformation as a means of actually pursuing a fantasy about middle-aged rebellion and rejuvenation, and, as we weigh each film against the other, Nightbitch ought to have an advantage, because it's at least not embarrassed of being a fantasy movie like Wolf was; yet it's counter-intuitively interested in being a fantasy movie even less; and while Wolf is surely not good at "being a werewolf movie," and does not deliver on the genre pleasures which a movie about Jack Nicholson playing a werewolf has blatantly promised, at least it did have Jack Nicholson fucking a woman half his age and pissing on his corporate rival's shoes, whereas Nightbitch isn't concerned with the genre pleasures of either the werewolf movie or those of the middle-aged rebellion story.  For the long, repetitive middle half the most Amy Adams's (oh boy) unnamed mother (credited thusly, though I could've sworn she received a name) ever gets out of being a human dog, or a rebellious middle-aged woman, is... well, I guess let's just say that Heller must actually hate cats, but at least the storytelling in the corresponding sequence of Can You Ever Forgive Me? suggested she understood the concept of not hating cats.  Her movie's "nighttime" photography isn't as risibly bad as Mike Nichols's.  Let's give Heller that much.

Reviews from gulag: Police abuses

Well, it's probably not the most inappropriate connection I've drawn between two films, but we are trying to do an end-of-year wrap-up here with barely 48 more hours to go before it's moot, so that's what we're going with.  Today's subjects: I'm Still Here and Hit Man.

I'M STILL HERE

Ainda Estou Aqui

I'm Still Here, concerning the extrajudicial murder undertaken by the Medici-led military government in Brazil that triggered the mid-life ascendance of famed human rights lawyer Eunice Paiza to prominence, is exactly the kind of movie you'd guess it was from the "I'd never heard of it till it was nominated for Best Picture" thing it's got going on, and even then you'd probably ask "of the movies broadly like it, why this one?", though a more charitable response would be "why not?"  Maybe it's because it looks alright, albeit mostly by virtue of being shot on film (a 35mm so grainy I thought it was 16, and now I'm a little unsettled about it); maybe it's because it couldn't possibly offend anyone, though it does come off categorically anti-military coup, and I think that's just awfully closed-minded of it.

Still, I can't help but think it's sort of wrongheaded, as a matter of its overall narrative strategy.  Which isn't to let the tactics off the hook: take, for instance, the extended pre-inciting incident first act that's just this naturalistic slice-of-life for a Brazilian family, one that I assume was this large and of this composition in real life, because there are, like, at least three more children than the actual film can handle in its extant configuration (something the film even sub rosa acknowledges in numerous ways throughout, for instance being noticeably relieved to have gotten rid of the eldest daughter by way of a long trip abroad once her function of "being a politically-conscious teen" and "providing some almost nauseatingly-shaky Super 8 home movies" has been accomplished), but this is a slice-of-life that has no goal whatsoever besides impressing on you that bad things can still happen to nice people.  And they are, for sure, nice: with the obvious exceptions, it seems like it'd be cool to be in this family, and live in their cool beach neighborhood, and enjoy the 70s Brazilian lifestyle of wearing underwear or overclothes but not both simultaneously, but this does not, by itself, make them all that interesting to watch.  (And as long as we're talking small stuff, then the constant reference to period pop cultural signifiers is a routine example of the movie's naturalistic tolerance of dead air—I assure you, I do get that it's right at the transition to the 1970s.)

Reviews from gulag: Am I out of touch? No, it's the Academy who's wrong

As we approach the 97th Academy Awards—as with all Oscars ceremonies—it's incumbent upon the dutiful film fan to at least make some good faith effort to try to see an appreciable fraction of the Best Picture nominees.  (This is what has been described to me as "a prison of my own making," but if I didn't live in such a thing, whose would I live in?)  It has been a harder task this late winter than maybe it's ever been for me, thanks to a somewhat moribund populist film industry and an Academy that has responded, contrary to their apparently abortive attempts to remain remotely culturally relevant, by veering as far out from the actually-popular culture as it has in years.  It's a particular pity with 2022 and 2023 right there in the rearview mirror, perhaps the highwater marks for any modern—like, post-70s at least—efforts from the Academy at trying to care about what actual audiences care about.  Hey, at least The Substance got nominated for BP.  It ain't gonna win, and I don't know why I ever got it into my fool head that it would, except for that whole "moribund populist film industry" thing and, other than Dune: Part Two I guess, it's the only film with what feels like to me any legitimate cultural impact to have been nominated that also has any right to be there.  (I am speaking incredibly out of turn about Wicked, I guess, and I will disclose that, though I feel pretty confident about it.)  I'm increasingly worried it won't win anything for which it was nominated, which is going to be miserable for me, and then that misery's going to be compounded once the Internet gets mad about it and that anger takes its inevitable form.

In any event, this made for one glum Sunday, and at this point I cannot say with certainty I will continue this quest—with Wicked, for obvious reasons; with Nickel Boys, because I'm not sure I'm interested enough in the two and a half hour race-in-America movie inspired, formally, by video game let's plays, and I think it's not even about cool boxing matches like I thought it was, what the hell; with I'm Still Here because, uh, it's all the way over there; and with A Complete Unknown, because ha ha ha, oh my God, no I'd rather not.  (These movies are also all between 138 and 160 minutes long.)  But I do feel a little bound to do so.  Not to be alarmist, but consider that the 97th Academy Award ceremony could be the last one to take place in a real country.

And yet, despite having been charged with that awesome responsibility, and confronted with that fearsome possibility, they gave us this anyway.  Thhpt.  Here's Conclave, The Brutalist, and Anora, which I somehow did in precisely reverse alphabetical order (because it's also in the order in which I liked them).

CONCLAVE

This is the shortest Best Picture nominee for 2025, in all but one case the shortest by a lot.  It's still 120 minutes long.

But it is, accordingly, also one of the comparative few that seems rightly-sized, and this helps it, this thing that's pulpier than it thinks it is and would likely be better if it were much more.  Despite its theatrical pedigree, director Edward Berger (of the year-before-last's most superfluous-seeming Best Picture nominee, the Netflix-distributed All Quiet On the Western Front) has delivered a film that looks "of streaming," but perhaps appropriately so, these crisp, sharp images from cinematographer Stefane Fontaine, of these semi-identically-dressed men standing or sitting in these sterilized surroundings, belied by the enormity of their institution's history and their readily-acknowledged potential for cruelty, deciding the fate of their religion.  (And so Suzie Davis's production design and to an only slightly lesser degree Lisy Christi's costume design—because it's even more baked into the setting, though I did get a kick out of attending to its subtle variety—are both pretty reasonable Oscar nominees.)  The story is very easy to summarize: the pope's dead and a conclave has been called to elect a new one.  The College of Cardinals convenes in Rome under the administration of their dean, British cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), and thus begins the struggle between the liberal factions (fronted by Stanley Tucci), and the conservative factions (Sergio Castellito, dressed up like Guillermo del Toro for some reason), and the even more conservative factions, albeit representing the long-deferred possibility of an African pope (Lucian Msmati), and, finally, the factions of a mostly-ideology-free, just-wants-to-be-the-pope desire (John Lithgow).  Meanwhle, there are terrorist acts afoot outside in Rome and conspiracies afoot within the Vatican, and there's some secretly-ordained cardinal no one's ever even heard of, from, get this, the archbishopric of Kabul (I feel like the practicing Catholics in an "archbishopric" should run into, at least, the double digits; Carlos Diehz), who keeps picking up what I assumed were protest votes.  Lawrence, against his own nature, will have to intervene to unravel the webs of intrigue that have been woven, and put his thumb on the scale more than he'd have ever liked.

Hanumania

MONKEY MAN

2024

Directed by Dev Patel

Written by Paul Angunawela, John Collee, and Dev Patel

Spoilers: moderate