For our final movie of 2025, K wanted to watch a better doc than Predators and… we didn’t quite manage. Good badminton scenes, at least. Wife hires a consultant/confidante/spy who finds excuses to get alone time with husband and his mistress in order to (successfully) talk them out of their relationship.
Tag: 2020s
Predators (2025, David Osit)
We love when a documentary immerses us in a world of scumbags and creeps then offers no comforting answers, don’t we folks?
Less enthused about Osit’s personal angle, largely because expecting a meaningful, peace-imbuing response to “Help me understand” seems painfully naïve … and the climactic Hansen interview’s kind of a bust, for more or less the same reason that Errol Morris got little of genuine interest from Donald Rumsfeld — his quarry came well-armed with practiced soundbites, and Hansen’s far better than Rumsfeld at making them sound sincere. (Maybe they even are, a little.)
Wake Up Dead Man (2025, Rian Johnson)
Priest Josh Brolin, Gardener Thomas Haden Church, and Doctor Jeremy Renner conspire with Glenn Close to perform a miracle, but she kills them all, confounding disheveled priest Josh O’Connor until our guy Blanc figures it all out.
The bar with a hell theme has a Ricky Jay poster:
Pinocchio (2022, del Toro & Gustafson)
After Don’t Look Now and The Church, I’m on edge when there’s an artist on scaffolding in a movie. Pinocchio (the puppet) is a real horror, created in a drunken rage. Fascists insist that P go to school, but carnie Christoph Waltz wants to kidnap him into the circus instead.
When you are being puppeted by a monkey:
The technical “perfection” doesn’t work in the movie’s favor – it doesn’t look handmade, but composited. Feels like the voices are on one plane, visuals on another, and they are not in unison. At least Waltz (who cannot pronounce Italian names) is having a flamboyantly good time. And have I mentioned it’s a musical for children?
Have I mentioned Pinocchio is Jesus Christ:
When you meet Dragon Cate Blanchett in the afterlife:
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Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964, Larry Roemer)
I had never seen this before, at least not in living memory. Mildly distressing to discover it has better songs, better voice acting, and better stop-motion than the Guillermo. Nobody ever talks about the team’s follow-up, a James Cagney Smokey the Bear movie.
Miroirs No. 3 (2025, Christian Petzold)
Paula Beer is in a car crash, losing her family, in front of the house of a family who lost their daughter/sister, so she naturally falls in with them.
If I was properly caught up with my Petzolds I’ve have seen the mom in Yella and The State I Am In.
Babybel:
The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt)
Regular family guy Josh O’Connor, haunted by his past life as an art thief in La Chimera, and in love with Arthur Dove, puts together a halfassed plan to steal four paintings from a local museum. All three of his accomplices turn on him (one drops out, one goes to the cops, and one goes to the mob, who re-steal the paintings), he borrows money from his parents that he can’t pay back, his wife is mad at him, the friends he’s staying with kick him out, he finally robs an old lady to afford a border crossing then gets randomly arrested while laying low in a protest march.
This has more of a commercial period genre feel than Reichardt’s other crime movies (Night Moves, First Cow, River of Grass) but with a pleasingly soft grainy look, and requisite time spent on important details (Josh laboriously negotiating a barn ladder while stashing the paintings). Rob Mazurek contributes the best score of the year.
Josh’s mom Hope Davis:
Robert Rubsam in Defector is really good.
The Mastermind is Reichardt’s third film in a row about a frustrated artist … These are lonesome characters, isolated by their means and their practice, persistently frustrated by the knowledge that they could accomplish something great, if only their true labor held any temporal or monetary value … Yet when it comes to his own heist, he’s more than happy to shunt the labor to his fuck-up friends, keeping his hands clean of criminal drudgery. You get the sense his career probably foundered long before the work dried up.
He seems infinitely more comfortable when stashing away the stolen goods than he does relating to his kids or pleading with his wife. Swaddled in the loving embrace of family and suburbia, he acts like a man living hand-to-mouth, creating new problems so that he — and the women in his life — can solve them. Like a cornered animal, he must do something, or die. It’s not so much a high-wire act as a slow ascent up a shaky ladder with no way to climb back down.
Bugonia (2025, Yorgos Lanthimos)
So soon after Train Dreams, here’s another new movie people are attacking for botching its adaptation of an original work (in this case the Korean movie Save The Green Planet!) but which I watched in blissful ignorance of the original work and greatly enjoyed. Theoretically not a fun movie, as a conspiracy obsessive and his dim relative kidnap and torment a businesswoman into confessing that she’s a space alien, but I cackled more than once, then floated away happily after she escapes to her ship and kills all the humans.
Stone and Plemons and his cousin Aidan Delbis are the whole show, though Stavros Halkias shows up as a perv cop just long enough to get murdered by bees. Not until after the kidnapping and head-shaving does Jesse let us know that he thinks she’s an alien. More of his craziness is gradually unveiled (he’s a loner whose mom told him about mind control, he tells Stone “everybody denies it at first” revealing she’s not his first victim, she runs the major company where he works a menial job) and he seems to be making up space alien stuff as he goes along, so all his stories being true was the only decent twist the movie could have. I guess he and the cousin didn’t have to have their heads blown off after Jesse is tricked into murdering his comatose mom, and Stone escaping from an ambulance and running back to the crime scene seemed like padding, but the payoff is worth it.
Jesse flashes his tascam, pretty sweet:
Not all life! Just the humans:
The Hyperboreans (2024, Joaquín Cociña & Cristóbal León)
Actress is on a soundstage recreating a lost film with Cociña and León, in which everyone but her is replaced by puppets. She ends up entering a spreadsheet cheat code, entering the hollow earth, and arguing with the Hitler-worshipping filmmakers. I don’t know what it all meant for Chile or for cinema, but I enjoyed every scene. After The Wolf House and Los Huesos, dudes are on a roll – and I’ve just learned that they did effects for Beau Is Afraid.
Antonia Giesen and her rock & roll patient:
Shooting a flower-creature shadow with a camera-laser:
The “directors”:
The Piano Accident (2025, Quentin Dupieux)
Pampered internet-famous masochist flies into a murder-suicide rampage after discovering that she might suffer a consequence for past actions. However, the makeup woman knew what was going on, and shouldn’t have stood under that piano. Adele Exarchopoulos is up for anything, as usual – her little speech mannerisms are the whole movie, more or less. Her long-suffering assistant is comedian Jerome Commandeur, and their blackmailer is Sandrine Kiberlain, who just wants an interview with the press-averse star, who would rather die than participate. Happy ending for the bird, at least! Nothing inventive here from Dupieux, just a misanthropic little comedy.
