Let's Talk About the Great Films of 2025
28 YEARS LATER
If there’s one media trope I can’t stand, it’s supposedly sympathetic characters in comedies breaking and entering into other people’s houses. If there’s a second media trope I can’t stand, it’s supposedly educated and qualified professionals breaching security protocols for no goddamn reason. Probably the worst example of this is the Alien quasi-sequel Prometheus, in which trained scientists on the most important, dangerous and expensive space mission in human history – i.e., in theory the smartest humans to have ever lived – arrive on an alien planet, encounter alien remains and chemicals, and immediately remove their helmets, contaminate all their samples and have sex with one another.
28 Years Later is about humans who have survived the zombie apocalypse for 28 years through rigid adherence to safety protocols. Some of those are ignored to advance the plot.
I do enjoy when characters explore other peoples’ abandoned houses and take their stuff. One of the great pleasures of post-apocalyptic art. This film has that. And dads and lads, and moms and lads, and bowhunting, survivalist competence porn, assisted suicide, fast zombies, slow zombies, leader zombies, follower zombies. So many zombie and survivor subcultures as to induce a bit of franchise world-building fatigue, but one never loses pleasure in characters making really efficient use of their stuff.
BUGONIA
I took a lot of drugs before watching this film. Otherwise I suspect I would’ve walked out in overwhelming discomfort (see Friendship, below). Immunized to the terrifying ugliness of the characters’ personal interactions, I laughed at their absurdity. I went with a group of other adults and spent the film texting jokes to them. This was fun.
So it feels disrespectful to review the film itself. It’s about a man who kidnaps a tech CEO, believing on the basis of supposed internet research that she’s part of an alien conspiracy to control humanity. Everyone in it is psychotic, a complete idiot, and/or an actual alien; you don’t know which is which until the end.
Look, one way to look at the oeuvre of Yorgos Lanthimos is on a spectrum between weird, gross, absurd political satire and weird, gross, absurd body horror. His later works, from satire to horror:
The Favourite
The Lobster
Poor Things
Bugonia
Kinds of Kindness
The Killing of A Sacred Deer
You probably know where you want to sit on that spectrum.
FRANKENSTEIN
We know our Great Male Directors by their monsters. Emma Stone has spoken the English language with more inhuman cadence in each Yorgos Lanthimos movie since The Favorite, reaching such a logical conclusion in Bugonia that for the first time in years one wonders where the man goes next. Perhaps, like Tim Burton with Big Fish or Martin Scorsese with Hugo, he’ll retreat to his ‘everything was wondrous when I was a boy’ phase, which I’m sure some Hollywood talent agency pitches as a rebrand-to-elder-statesman.
The cosmetics of the monster vary, as do the themes, and any English major dude can tell you the monster genre dating back to Shelley’s Frankenstein opens itself to numerous avenues of critical interpretation. (Is it a feminist novel? Religious? Marxist? Yes to all.) Inevitably, though, the great monster stories share the defining message that The Real Monster Is Us. Great directors typically trust the audience enough to leave it in subtext, not say it in dialogue. Perhaps the subtext of Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is you can’t have everything.
But Del Toro is the movie director’s monster movie director. His monsters - so many monsters - are focal, detailed, idealized in open nostalgia for golden age cinema. The apt comparison is not Burton or Lanthimos but Alfred Hitchcock. There is in fact little ‘monstrous’ about the creatures in Shape of Water or Frankenstein; they are beautiful and ideal souls played beautifully by beautiful actors. They might as well be Cary Grant. The villains of these films are overweening mediocrities who smash themselves against not only these monumental heroic forces of nature but literal monumental geography - Mount Rushmore, the yet-unconquered North Pole; American Greatness, Individual Greatness.
When you have Cary Grant, or Jacob Elordi, in such a film, that’s who the film should be about. Perhaps Del Toro rightly feared that rebalancing the film toward Elordi would draw unfortunate comparison to another more original and, frankly, fun recent steampunk bildungsroman in a depraved and vaguely Central European setting, Poor Things. Or perhaps Del Toro was simply too enamored with Oscar Isaac in a disheveled European aristocrat costume to spend time with his monster. I did find myself, after the film, googling custom double breasted formal wear.
FRIENDSHIP
I’ve abandoned many films midway, but only twice have I walked out of a theater. In 2007, License to Wed.* In 2025, Friendship.
Look, Tim Robinson does a unique thing and I’ll live and die by the hot dog sketch from I Think You Should Leave, one of many on that program that encapsulates American culture with distressing profundity. Truly, we’re all looking for the guy who did this. (And some days, there’s too much fucking shit on me and I don’t even want to be around anymore.)
But 12 minutes of I Think You Should Leave is often too much. I’ve spent 40 years learning graceful human relations and occasionally medicating myself so that I will not claw my own face off after, e.g., I invite my new nextdoor neighbor to form a babysitting cooperative six minutes after meeting them. (This happened, and much worse.)
So it’s too much, too fast, and that’s the point but it never lets up. This tone and pacing is a poor fit for a feature film. The arc of Robinson’s character is that he has a family and a house and a job and he loses these things over the course of the film because of his social faux pas (this is not My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with its revelation of actual mental illness); by the time he’s invading the home of his supposed friend, which is not only taboo but also a felony, one ceases to believe he could have acquired trappings of normality to begin with.
The hot dog sketch works because it ends before we’re asked to believe hot dog man married Kate Mara and rose to executive management at a tech company. Tim should make more Detroiters.
*A movie so poorly conceived and executed it deeply angered both me and my mother, a person I had never known to have deep feelings about art, or to walk out of an experience she’d paid good money for. It feels tiresome to get into specifics; it brings to mind the scene from This is Spinal Tap in which the band’s recent album Shark Sandwich is reviewed as “Shit sandwich.” License to Wed is shit sandwich. I was considering “License to kill yourself” but, you know, Robin Williams.
MICKEY 17
Bong Joon Ho alternates between off-putting Marxist sci-fi creature comedies and gloomy Marxist political allegory. This is the former. It’s a two-act film; the first act is the forgotten 2009 Sam Rockwell vehicle Moon and the second act is Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Watching Toni Collette throw an alien rat tail in a blender to make steak sauce, I was reminded that our political leaders are stupid.
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
We rarely talk overtly about philosophy these days, but most mainstream art proceeds from the premise that life is at least potentially good and killing people is bad. The blackest satire extracts comedy from the corners of culture that subvert this premise. Nuclear war is stupid (Dr. Strangelove); political oppression is stupid (Death of Stalin); terrorism is stupid (Four Lions); organized crime is stupid (In Bruges). These things are stupid, and yet they exist, because people can both philosophize and at the same time betray their own philosophies and just generally be stupid, often at the same time, and this is funny. Black comedy is populated by philosophically driven people doing stupid things, and it’s funny when the villains in these films hurt themselves and cause their own problems.
Ideally one ignores the collateral damage just long enough to laugh. This is the rare trick of a great black comedy. I’ve given up enough art projects halfway in to understand the difficulty in sustaining interest in a merely stupid person or idea – what is compelling about them? Yes, these people are stupid; why do I want to keep watching? One must scorn the characters and also love them just a little, and root for them while temporarily keeping at bay the oncoming tragic consequences of their stupidity.
One Battle After Another brings the stupidity in spades, along with Paul Thomas Anderson’s trademark orgiastic portraits of cars driving California roads. A white supremacist organization overshadows the film’s plot; the group’s name is so joyously stupid I won’t spoil it here although it’s not strictly relevant.
It would be a mistake – if a mistake frequently made in the critical conversation around the film, released for better or worse during the first year of the second Trump presidency, while masked jackboots abduct lawful residents in the name of racial and cultural purity – to overlook the broader stupidity at play. This is a film in which the leader of the guerilla resistance betrays her comrades and abandons her family; where Leo DiCaprio’s legendary warrior gets too stoned to function when the chips are down; where even the most sympathetic and tragic resistance fighter (an underused Regina Hall), in the midst of a plot point revolving around the danger of carrying cell phones, discards one outside a safe house full of compatriots.
In other words, all these people are stupid. Some hilariously, some tragically, not all interestingly. Especially considering Anderson began development years ago, based on a 1990 Pynchon novel, it would be a mistake to read it too heavily into the current political context. But two questions spring to mind: first, is it intentional? Second, do we care? How you answer these speaks to your views on the film’s politics, relevance and overall quality.
In the final shot, DiCaprio, seemingly free from a lifetime in flight of authorities, sinks into a couch and boots up Instagram on a brand new iphone. Does he know how they’re made? How they’re monitored? Does Anderson know? Or are both Anderson and DiCaprio simply at peace with participating in some moderately unjust capitalist constructs, in the temporarily less oppressive surveillance regime most of us noncombatants silently accept?
To the extent the film offers an answer – and if it does, it’s not terribly complete or satisfying, though an Anderson film is always worth watching on craftsmanship alone – it’s in Benicio Del Toro’s martial arts instructor/community organizer. Del Toro appears late in the film and his presence lingers. The fascistic villainy of white nationalist hegemons is obvious, but the opposition’s robbery and murder of innocents is not necessarily justifiable or sympathetic even by comparison. Meanwhile, Del Toro has been, quietly but competently, helping people.
SINNERS
In the pantheon of great screen media concerning twins opening a nightclub only to find themselves invaded by a pathogen-infected outsider subculture, I’d recommend David Simon’s The Deuce over this southern gothic vampire showpiece from Ryan Coogler. Both have great music. But really, I’d rather watch a Coogler-helmed two-season HBO prestige show about Michael B. Jordan’s twin characters running a 1930s chitlin circuit juke joint, than this 140-minute blockbuster beholden to cliches of both Delta blues and vampire mythology, and honestly you could make them for the same budget. You could make it a Boardwalk Empire sequel/crossover - Smoke and Stack in Chicago running with Stephen Graham’s Al Capone. Delroy Lindo could carry multiple episodes.