Phantom thread

MOTHER MARY

2026

Written and directed by David Lowery

Spoilers: moderate

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.

All the other kids, with their pumped-up kicks

WEAPONS

2025

Written and directed by Zach Cregger

Spoilers: moderate, I think

Hamlet's bogus journey

SCARLET

2025

Written and directed by Mamoru Hosoda

Spoilers: moderate

Not the bees

BUGONIA

2025

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

Written by Will Tracy

Spoilers: severe

mother!

DIE MY LOVE

2025

Directed by Lynne Ramsay

Written by Enda Walsh, Alice Birch, and Lynne Ramsay (based on the novel Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz) 

Spoilers: moderate

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.)

There is nothing so ruinous to good character as to idle away one's time at some spectacle

GLADIATOR II

2024

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by Peter Craig and David Scarpa

Spoilers: moderate (arguably high, but not if you've seen the first three minutes of the movie, I'd think)

The land after time

FLOW

2024

Directed by Gints Zilbalodis

Written by Matiss Kaža and Gints Zilbalodis

Spoilers: moderate

Love is inferior to you

NOSFERATU

2024

Written and directed by Robert Eggers (based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker)

Spoilers: moderate, but it's also Nosferatu, which is also Dracula, so... you know

Douglas Howser–Reanimator

DEADLY FRIEND

1986

Directed by Wes Craven

Written by Bruce Joel Rubin (based on the novel Friend by Diana Henstell)

Spoilers: moderate

La cité obscure

MEGALOPOLIS: A FABLE

2024

Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Spoilers: moderate

Now that you are sole heir to our world, you will have every opportunity to achieve wickedness

GAS! -OR- IT BECAME NECESSARY TO DESTROY THE WORLD IN ORDER TO SAVE IT.

aka Gas-s-s-s

1970

Directed by Roger Corman

Written by George Armitage and Roger Corman

Spoilers: moderate

A lovely sort of death

THE TRIP

1967

Directed by Roger Corman

Written by Jack Nicholson and Charles B. Griffith

Spoilers: moderate, somewhat inapplicable

Disney's Challengers, part XI: Après moi, le déluge

ROCK-A-DOODLE

1992

Directed by Don Bluth

Written by David N. Weiss and numerous others (based on the play Chantecler by Edmond Rostand)

Spoilers: moderate

Should General MacArthur be concerned? No, I don't mean about Godzilla

GODZILLA MINUS ONE

2023

Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki

Spoilers: moderate

When it comes to the universe, we're all shareholders

WISH

2023

Directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn

Written by Jennifer Lee, Allison Moore, Chris Buck, and Fawn Veerasunthorn

Spoilers: moderate

Redundancy, redundancy, and redundancy

THE KILLER

2023

Directed by David Fincher

Written by Andrew Kevin Walker

Spoilers: moderate

Gimme some Sugar, baby

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR and six three more

2023

Written and directed by Wes Anderson (based on the short stories "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," "The Swan," "The Rat Catcher," and "Poison" by Roald Dahl)

Spoilers: moderate

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all

HAMLET

1996

Written and directed by Kenneth Branagh (based on the play The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare)

Spoilers: hey, remember that time Norway conquered Denmark?