Hello Readers!
What a difference a year makes. Looking back on 2025, I’m struck by just how much ground we covered together. From witnessing TIFF celebrate its golden anniversary at the electric TIFF50 to attending SXSW, Tribeca, and Fantastic Fest virtually, to celebrating our fantastic Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival right in my backyard – this year expanded my festival horizons in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I even managed to catch screenings while on vacation, because apparently I can’t help myself.
Your continued support and engagement have made this website more than just a collection of reviews – it’s become a community where we can freely discuss, debate, and celebrate the art of filmmaking. This year brought some exciting milestones: I began writing as a staff contributor for the Rotten Tomatoes-approved Loud and Clear Reviews, site traffic increased, I hit 11K followers on Instagram, and I’ve seen my reviews translated into other languages and even featured in movie trailers. After 12 years and nearly 3,000 reviews, I still feel that same gratitude every time I see a reserved seat with my name on it.
I’ll be honest with you: last year’s awards season left a bitter taste. Anora‘s bizarre hot streak swallowed the conversation whole (has anyone mentioned that film since March?), Emilia Pérez became more controversial than celebrated, and watching Demi Moore’s sensational comeback momentum get cut short was one of the most egregious letdowns in recent Hollywood history. I turned off the Oscars after she lost – something I’ve never done.
This year is shaping up to be another season of expected nominees, all worthy, but nothing that signals the Academy is taking real chances on truly risky work. If you have the money, you get noticed. Plain and simple. Otherwise, performances like John Leguizamo in Bob Trevino Likes It, Diane Lane in Anniversary, Nina Hoss in Hedda, Dylan O’Brien in Twinless, and young Everett Blunck in Griffin in Summer would be part of this conversation. So would the creatives behind their films. But I digress – and I’ll save the rest of that rant for another day.
Now, about “Best” and “Worst” lists. I’ve noticed some critics shy away from ranking films altogether, as if there’s something unsavory about calling out movies that didn’t meet expectations. I disagree. When you see hundreds of films a year, you earn the right to have strong opinions – and readers deserve honesty about what worked and what didn’t. I also think it’s perfectly valid to leave consensus favorites off your top ten. When you’re watching everything from studio tentpoles to tiny indies that a press agent quietly slipped into your inbox, sometimes that small film resonates just as deeply – if not more – than the one with the massive marketing budget. Given the choice, I’ll champion the smaller movie every time, because that’s how these films get seen and, more importantly, how they continue to get made.
So what’s ahead? 2026 is already packed with promising releases, and I’ll be here giving you front row seats to all of it – the triumphs, the disasters, and everything in between. After twelve years of doing this, I’ve learned that the best part isn’t just watching movies; it’s talking about them with all of you. Every comment, every share, every friendly debate about whether a film deserved three stars or four – that’s what keeps this site alive.
Thank you for being part of this journey. Whether you’ve been reading since day one or just discovered The MN Movie Man this year, I’m grateful you’re here. Now let’s dive into another year of cinema together. Pull up a seat. The show’s just getting started.
BEST of 2025
Sometimes a film finds you at exactly the right moment. I’d resisted Tim Robinson’s particular brand of comedy for years—too loud, too absurdist, I told myself. Friendship proved me gloriously wrong. Robinson plays Craig Waterman, a man so aggressively average he practically blends into his taupe suburban wallpaper. When Paul Rudd’s effortlessly cool weatherman Austin moves in down the street, Craig latches on with the desperation of someone who’s forgotten how to want things for himself. Austin’s polite rejection only accelerates the spiral. What makes Andrew DeYoung’s film so wickedly effective is its patience—the cringe builds slowly, organically, until you’re watching through your fingers. Robinson walks an impossible tightrope, keeping Craig sympathetic even as he careens toward disaster. You’ll laugh, you’ll squirm, you’ll recognize something uncomfortably familiar. Beneath the comedy lies a raw truth about loneliness and the terrifying vulnerability of wanting to be chosen. A24 has another cult classic on its hands.
The best romantic comedies understand that love isn’t the obstacle—it’s everything around it. A Nice Indian Boy finds its spark in that tension, delivering a film that feels both warmly familiar and refreshingly specific. Karan Soni is esweetly earnest as Naveen, a doctor who’s spent years compartmentalizing—dutiful son in one box, gay man seeking connection in another. Those walls start crumbling when he meets Jonathan Groff’s Jay, whose deep roots in Indian culture (he was raised by Indian adoptive parents, speaks Marathi, and dreams of a traditional wedding) flip the expected dynamic entirely. There’s no fish-out-of-water fumbling here; Jay belongs, and that’s what makes the story richer. Soni and Groff generate the kind of easy chemistry that carries you past the occasional predictable beat. But the secret weapons are the parents—Zarna Garg as Naveen’s mother, whose aggressive allyship is both hilarious and painfully recognizable, and Harish Patel as his father, whose observation from the sidelines gives way to a late-film scene with Groff that will wreck you. By the time the wedding sequence arrives, you’ve earned every happy tear. This is how you update a genre without losing its heart.
Sophomore slumps are common in horror. Zach Cregger didn’t get that memo. Where Barbarian was tight and contained, Weapons sprawls with ambitious confidence—a Pennsylvania town becomes the epicenter of a nightmare that unfolds like a puzzle box soaked in dread. Seventeen third-graders vanish at 2:17 AM. From there, Cregger weaves together a grieving father (Josh Brolin), a blamed teacher (Julia Garner), and a troubled cop (Alden Ehrenreich) into something that feels novelistic in scope. The nonlinear structure keeps you off-balance, each thread adding texture to an increasingly disturbing picture. But it’s Amy Madigan who deserves her place in the horror hall of fame—her performance radiates mystery and menace in doses that’ll have you gripping your armrest. Larkin Seiple’s cinematography shifts seamlessly between intimate grief and large-scale terror. The Stephen King comparisons are too obvious: another small town, another flame-haired monster with an insatiable hunger. Weapons delivers genuine scares, but it’s the hopelessness that follows you home. Cregger isn’t just arriving—he’s announcing a career.
Some films you watch. Sirât finds you. Óliver Laxe’s Cannes Jury Prize winner doesn’t operate by conventional rules—it’s less a narrative and more a slow excavation of things you’ve buried and hoped would stay down. A Spanish father and his young son arrive at a Moroccan rave searching for a daughter who vanished into this world of desert gatherings and never came back. When the party moves deeper into the Sahara, they follow. I won’t tell you what happens next; the film’s power lives in its refusal to go where you expect. Sergi López delivers career-defining work as a man utterly unequipped for the emotional terrain he’s crossing—almost childlike in his inability to process what unfolds. Mauro Herce’s camera captures Morocco as something that shifts between refuge and danger, often in the same frame. Kangding Ray’s electronic score throbs underneath everything, never letting you settle into comfort. The title translates to both the bridge between heaven and hell and simply “the path.” By the time credits roll, you’ll feel the weight of both meanings.
#6 ~ Sentimental Value
What do we owe the people who shaped us, even when that shaping left scars? Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value circles that question with ruinous precision. Reuniting with Renate Reinsve, he’s crafted something that surpasses even The Worst Person in the World—and that’s not a sentence I expected to write so soon after its release. Reinsve plays Nora, an actress whose anxiety has calcified into career-destroying stage fright, forced to reckon with her estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a celebrated director who resurfaces with a script that feels uncomfortably personal. When Nora refuses the role, Elle Fanning’s Hollywood star swoops in, hungry for artistic credibility. The film that follows blurs every line—art and exploitation, memory and manipulation, love and control. The performances land like body blows, but Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Nora’s sister Agnes is the revelation, conveying entire histories through a shift in posture, a swallowed response. Trier bookends the film with Terry Callier’s “Dancing Girl,” and that haunting track lingered with me for days. I’ve watched it twice now, and it only cuts deeper on that second viewing. If you’ve ever spoken your rawest truth and heard only an echo return, this one’s for you.
I walked in ready to roll my eyes. A movie about a Milwaukee couple who started a Neil Diamond tribute band? I’d just caught the Beautiful Noise tour—my sequin quota was met. But Craig Brewer had other plans, and Song Sung Blue might be the most emotionally sneaky film of the year. Hugh Jackman plays Mike “Lightning” Sardina, a Vietnam vet and recovering alcoholic who exists for performing. Kate Hudson is Claire “Thunder,” a single mom doing Patsy Cline covers in dive bars when they meet. Together they build something from garage rehearsals to opening for Pearl Jam—that’s not a typo. In the past, both actors have had a tendency toward grating earnestness when they sing, a polish that can feel like too much. Here, playing people who are rough and hungry and unrefined, that earnestness transforms into an asset. Jackman delivers his strongest work in years as a man so locked into his dream that nothing can shake him. Hudson, a recent Golden Globe-nominee for this, reveals depths I didn’t know she had—and when the story demands a shift in emotional tone, she meets it completely. Singer King Princess makes an impressive screen debut as Mike’s estranged daughter while Ella Anderson brings an assured warmth and maturity as Claire’s girl Rachel. Amy Vincent’s cinematography captures cramped dive bars and arena stages with equal care. The film takes unexpected turns I won’t spoil, building toward a climax that had me cheering through tears. It’s an unabashed, top-tier crowd pleaser that sneaks up on you.
Ryan Coogler has been building toward this his entire career. Sinners isn’t just his most ambitious film—it’s the moment everything clicks into place. On paper, it sounds like a dare: supernatural horror meets 1930s Southern gangster drama, anchored by Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers. On screen, it’s a revelation. Jordan’s work as Smoke and Stack goes beyond impressive technical acting; he inhabits two men so completely—different postures, different wounds, different ways of breathing—that you forget the trick entirely. They return home to open a juke joint, hoping to leave their criminal past behind. But as the sun dips and the music starts, something ancient and hungry stirs awake. Coogler surrounds Jordan with his deepest ensemble yet: Wunmi Mosaku and Hailee Steinfeld as women who are forces, not footnotes; newcomer Miles Caton, whose faith gets tested in ways that’ll gut you; Jack O’Connell radiating pure menace. Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s IMAX cinematography doesn’t just use the premium format—it justifies its existence, particularly in one mid-film sequence so audacious that audible gasps rippled through my screening. It’s the kind of filmmaking that will be studied in classes for generations. Ludwig Göransson’s score slips from Delta blues to gospel to Irish folk like something possessed. This is mythic American filmmaking—spiritual, terrifying, and built for the biggest screen you can find. Sinners is why we still go to the movies.
Some directors talk about their dream projects. Guillermo del Toro spent twenty-three years circling his, too terrified to commit because a dream realized can never live in imagination’s perfection again. He finally took the leap, and Frankenstein was worth every year of waiting. This isn’t the bolt-necked monster of Universal’s legacy—del Toro returns to Mary Shelley’s 1818 text and finds what was always there: a deeply Catholic, deeply Mexican tragedy about fathers who destroy what they cannot love, about children made and abandoned, about the sacred ache of wanting to belong. Jacob Elordi’s preparation borders on obsessive—studying Japanese butoh dance, observing his golden retriever’s innocent movements—and the result is a Creature who moves with unsettling grace. But it’s the stillness that rattles you: a tilted head, a searching look, the debilitating pain of rejection. Oscar Isaac plays Victor with tragic bravado, a man whose genius blinds him to consequence. Mia Goth pulls double duty in roles that add an uncomfortable Freudian pulse. Dan Laustsen’s cinematography finds grandeur and intimacy in equal measure; Alexandre Desplat’s score knows when to thunder and when to mourn. At 149 minutes, this demands a theater, demands your full attention, demands you sit with its weight. Cinema didn’t need another Frankenstein. But after del Toro’s, it’s hard to imagine anyone daring to try again.
How do you follow a film like The Brutalist? If you’re Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, you don’t flinch—you go deeper. The Testament of Ann Lee stands as the companion piece to last year’s masterwork, another excavation of American mythology, this time training its lens on the 18th-century founder of the Shakers. It should not work. A historical drama about religious communal living, shot on 35mm for $10 million, with extended sequences of experimental hymn-singing? Every studio said no. They were fools. Amanda Seyfried delivers the performance of the year—and I don’t say that lightly. She spent over a year preparing, teaching herself a 1700s Mancunian accent without a single audio reference to guide her, relying only on historical research and instinct. The physical demands alone would shatter most actors: four childbirths depicted with unflinching directness, using prosthetics that refuse to sanitize the brutality of that era. But it’s not the big moments that haunt you—it’s watching her disappear so completely into Ann Lee that you stop seeing an actress entirely. Daniel Blumberg, fresh off his Oscar for The Brutalist, builds a score from original Shaker hymns that defies every convention. The singing isn’t beautiful. It isn’t meant to be. It’s a woman on her knees reaching for something beyond language, beyond understanding. When the world turns hostile in the final act—and it turns with historical cruelty that feels sickeningly relevant—you won’t just watch it. You’ll feel it crawling up your spine, settling into your chest, refusing to leave. Fastvold and Corbet have now delivered back-to-back films interrogating the promises America makes and the destruction it leaves in the wake of those promises. Both were made for budgets that wouldn’t cover catering on a studio tentpole. Both feel like they’ll outlast everything around them. The Testament of Ann Lee is challenging, uncompromising, and utterly essential. When awards season comes calling—and it will—remember: this is the one asking the right kind of questions. Are the others?
Everything is so loud now. Films fight for your attention with spectacle, with volume, with relentless pacing designed to keep your thumb from scrolling. And then there’s Train Dreams—a film that trusts you enough to sit still, to lean in, to let silence do the work. I can’t remember the last time a movie asked that of me. I can’t remember the last time I was so grateful to give it.
Greg Kwedar & Clint Bentley adapt Denis Johnson’s novella into something that feels less like watching a story and more like holding a life in your hands. Robert Grainier is a logger in the early 1900s American West, a man whose existence follows the rhythms of labor and landscape—felling trees, building railroads, carving out something modest with Gladys, the woman he loves. And then loss arrives. I won’t say how. The film doesn’t dramatize it with swelling strings or shattered close-ups. It simply lets the moment fall, like a tree in a forest with no one around, and asks you to sit with the absence.
Joel Edgerton has always been one of those actors people forget to celebrate. Not anymore. What he does here is career-defining—a performance built almost entirely from what he doesn’t say. The way he listens. The way he stands in a doorway. The way grief lives in his shoulders for decades without ever being named. Felicity Jones makes an indelible mark in limited screentime, bringing a grounded grace to Gladys that makes her presence linger long after she’s gone. Kerry Condon arrives later and matches the film’s emotional frequency with calm, steady precision. Will Patton’s narration adds a mythic frame without ever feeling intrusive.
Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso shoots Washington’s forests with tactile, settled beauty—you can smell the pine, feel the frost crunch underfoot, sense the weight of fog settling into valleys. Bryce Dessner’s score moves with the film rather than ahead of it, heightening what’s already there without ever demanding attention for itself. Every craft element serves the story with the kind of restraint that only comes from absolute confidence in the material.
Train Dreams doesn’t force catharsis. It accumulates. Scene by scene, season by season, it gathers weight you don’t notice until suddenly it’s pressing against your chest and you realize your eyes are wet and you’re not entirely sure when that happened. This is a film about a life that was never built for reinvention—just lived, one season, one loss, one swing of the axe at a time. In a year full of films shouting to be remembered, Train Dreams whispers. And somehow, impossibly, it’s the one I’ll carry longest.
This is my number one. It found me exactly when I needed it. I suspect it’ll find you too.
Honorable Mentions
Good Boy, Sketch, Barron’s Cove, She Rides Shotgun, Black Bag, Dead of Winter, The Ballad of Wallis Island, Anniversary, In Our Blood, Jay Kelly, Hamnet, The Life of Chuck, Wake Up, Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
WORST of 2025
#10 ~ Captain America: Brave New World
I wanted to believe. I really did. Sam Wilson taking up the shield felt like the natural next chapter—earned, necessary, overdue. And then the reports started trickling in. Release dates shuffled. The title changed. Effects scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. Characters vanished entirely; others had their origins hastily rewritten. Reshoots pivoted the tone from action thriller to political thriller, as if anyone involved could agree on what story they were actually telling. The result is a film at war with itself, a Frankenstein’s monster of competing visions stitched together and shoved into theaters before the sutures could heal. Good actors—actors who’ve proven themselves elsewhere—look lost here, stranded without a coherent throughline to grab onto. This should have gone the way of Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme: a tax write-off, a cautionary tale whispered in studio hallways. Instead, it limps into existence, accomplishing nothing of consequence for the larger Marvel universe. Maybe that’s the mercy. You can skip this entirely and miss nothing. Whether that’s strategic or accidental, I genuinely couldn’t tell you. Call it the only gift this disaster has to offer.
Universal keeps trying to make the Dark Universe happen. At this point, it’s less a franchise and more a haunted house they keep wandering back into. Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man trades Victorian fog for Oregon rain, stranding a fractured family in the Pacific Northwest woods where something with teeth and trauma awaits. Christopher Abbott plays Blake, a man returning to his childhood home with wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) after inheriting property from his mysteriously deceased father. A roadside attack sets the transformation in motion—not just physical, but psychological, as Blake begins losing himself in ways the script only half-heartedly explores. Abbott does what he can, bringing wounded humanity to a role that deserves more specificity. But Garner floats through the film like she wandered in from a different production, generating no friction with her scene partners despite a marriage supposedly on the rocks. (Is it strange that both Abbott and Garner appear in two films on my Best Of the Year list as well?) Young Firth ends up carrying the emotional weight by default, which says more about the screenplay’s failures than her talents. Whannell showed real growth between Upgrade and The Invisible Man, but here that momentum stalls. The single-location conceit should create claustrophobic tension; instead, it just feels limiting. Wolf Man wants to be domestic drama wrapped in monster-movie dread. It ends up being neither—just an underwhelming exercise in half-measures that never commits to being scary, sad, or anything in between.
We’ve been waiting years for the erotic thriller to make a proper comeback. Pretty Thing is not that comeback. Alicia Silverstone plays Sophie, a high-powered Manhattan PR exec who picks up Elliot (Karl Glusman), a much younger artist-bartender type, at a downtown bar. Chemistry ignites. She whisks him to Paris. They return to reality. Then she ghosts him—and that’s when things should get dangerous. In the golden age of the genre, this is where Glenn Close boils a rabbit, where Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs, where obsession curdles into something genuinely threatening. Here? Elliot mopes. He texts. He shows up places looking sad. Sophie seems mildly inconvenienced, like she’s dealing with an overeager Tinder match rather than a man spiraling toward fixation. Silverstone, who once defined ’90s seduction in The Crush and carved out icon status in Clueless, seems uncertain what register to play. She’s dressed for dominance—austere trench coats, power suits—but delivers none of the heat the wardrobe promises. Glusman, who went full frontal (and more!) in 3D for Gaspar Noé’s Love, is inexplicably muted, his Elliot more sad puppy than legitimate threat. The genre thrives on escalation, on consequences, on the slow tightening of a noose. Pretty Thing offers none of it. No danger. No steam. No pulse. We’re overdue for something smart and sexy in this space. This isn’t it—just a film too scared of its own premise to commit to anything worth watching.
On paper, this had potential. Pete Davidson as a graffiti artist doing community service in a creepy upstate eldercare facility? James DeMonaco, architect of The Purge franchise, behind the camera? Sign me up for some genre weirdness. What I got instead was 94 minutes of squandered promise and narrative chaos. Davidson plays Max, a troubled artist still grieving his foster brother Luke, sentenced to mop floors at Green Meadows after a tagging incident. The residents are sharper than expected—particularly Mary Beth Peil’s Norma, who brings genuine warmth to scenes that don’t deserve her—and something sinister lurks on the forbidden fourth floor. So far, so atmospheric. Then the movie falls apart. Logic evaporates. Characters die or disappear without consequence. Every time tension builds, DeMonaco undercuts it with a fake-out scare or baffling editorial choice. The production design screams “we had two weeks and a Spirit Halloween budget”—all flickering lights and set dressing that looks rented by the hour. Davidson, to his credit, seems to be acting in a better movie, carrying genuine grief beneath his half-lidded delivery. But he’s marooned in a script that can’t decide if it wants to be social commentary, supernatural horror, or gross-out gore-fest. The finale delivers buckets of blood and a particularly gnarly fence impalement, but viscera isn’t catharsis. Strip away the splatter and The Home is hollow—not scary, not meaningful, just loud and unpleasant in equal measure.
Here’s a film that thinks it’s about reinvention but is actually about delusion. Will Arnett plays Alex Novak, a recently separated father of two who stumbles into New York’s stand-up comedy scene as a form of post-divorce self-discovery. The premise has real potential—midlife crisis meets creative awakening, grief processed through punchlines. But somewhere between concept and execution, Is This Thing On? loses the plot entirely, becoming a fantasy so disconnected from reality that you start wondering if anyone involved has ever met a working comedian. Arnett is talented in specific registers—BoJack Horseman proved that for four seasons—but this role demands emotional vulnerability he can’t access. His stand-up scenes are painful, and not in the way the movie intends. The jokes bomb, sure, but we’re supposed to believe he’s on the verge of stardom anyway. At one point, Alex signs up for an open mic just to avoid paying a cover charge. A few scenes later, he’s opening for headliners. In what universe? Laura Dern shows up as his ex-wife Tess, doing heavy dramatic lifting opposite a scene partner who keeps fumbling the ball. Their scenes together feel mismatched—she’s playing real human pain while he’s coasting on charm that isn’t landing. Director Bradley Cooper (yes, that one) pops in as Alex’s best friend “Balls,” bringing a weird energy that briefly livens things up before the movie forgets he exists. The film’s fatal flaw isn’t its lead performance, though that doesn’t help. It’s the total refusal to interrogate its protagonist’s privilege—a 50-something white guy failing upward through a comedy scene that, in reality, would chew him up and spit him out. Is This Thing On? wants to be a heartfelt story about second chances. It’s actually a tone-deaf fairy tale for people who’ve never had to earn anything.
Somewhere, a rhyming app is owed a screenwriting credit. Juliet & Romeo arrives with the audacity to reimagine the “true story” behind Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, which apparently involves gutting the play’s poetry and replacing it with the kind of lyrics you’d find in a discarded greeting card bin. The songs blur together into two indistinguishable categories: mopey ballads and vaguely empowering mopey ballads. Autotuning runs so rampant that half the cast sounds like they’re singing through a malfunctioning drive-thru speaker. Clara Rugaard survives with occasional flashes of genuine presence; Jamie Ward mistakes sulking for smoldering and generates zero heat opposite her. The supporting cast reads like a hostage situation. Jason Isaacs and Derek Jacobi deliver their lines with the enthusiasm of actors calculating how many days until their contracts expire. Rebel Wilson appears for five minutes, barely sings, and escapes relatively unscathed. Dan Fogler’s apothecary number is an assault on both the eyes and poor Jacobi’s dignity. And then—the finale teases a sequel. Someone genuinely believes this warrants a franchise. It lands less as a promise and more as a threat. Shakespeare’s tragedy endures because it understood that young love burns bright and destroys everything it touches. This film understands nothing except that IP is still IP, even when it’s 400 years old.
The original I Know What You Did Last Summer understood something fundamental: slashers work when guilt has weight. Four friends hit a man, covered it up, and spent a year rotting from the inside before the hook came calling. Twenty-eight years later, this legacy sequel learns none of those lessons. Five post-college twenty-somethings witness a death tangentially connected to a minor traffic incident—emphasis on tangentially—and rather than do literally anything reasonable, they pinky-swear to forget it happened. A year passes. Someone starts stalking them. The math doesn’t math. The stakes don’t stake. The kills cut away right when they should land. Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson moves her camera with no sense of where anyone is in relation to anyone else; characters wander through compositions like they’re lost in a screensaver. The young cast tries—Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders shoulder most of the dramatic lifting—but the script gives them nothing but placeholder dialogue and deaths that register as inconveniences rather than tragedies. Then Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr. show up, and suddenly you remember what this franchise used to feel like. Their weary chemistry, their lived-in history—it briefly jolts the film to life before it shuffles them off to the sidelines. The real slap? A 60-second mid-credits sequence that’s cleverer than the entire preceding 100 minutes. Someone knew what this movie could have been. They just didn’t make that one.
The erotic thriller is a high-wire act. Lean too far one direction and you’re campy; too far the other and you’re a Lifetime movie with better lighting. When it works—Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct—you get psychological tension and genuine heat in equal measure. Bone Lake wants membership to that club but shows up without the credentials. Two couples double-book a lakeside Airbnb and, despite every red flag waving in their faces, decide to share the space anyway. What follows should be a pressure cooker of desire, manipulation, and escalating danger. Instead, it’s four attractive people having mildly tense conversations in nice rooms. The script gestures toward mind games without ever committing to playing them. It hints at seduction without risking actual heat. It’s terrified of its own premise—afraid to be too sexy, too twisted, too anything. The marketing team deserved an Oscar: provocative posters, NSFW teaser clips, the promise of a film that would push boundaries and leave you rattled. What audiences actually got was one nude scene, a couple of lukewarm arguments, and a climax that arrives approximately forty minutes after everyone stopped caring. In a genre built on danger and betrayal, Bone Lake commits the one unforgivable sin: it plays it safe. You can’t seduce an audience from behind a locked door.
Lightning doesn’t strike twice. It certainly doesn’t strike when you spend three years trying to bottle it. The original Old Guard arrived during lockdown like a gift—78 million households tuned in, starved for something that felt propulsive and fresh. Netflix saw those numbers and did what Netflix does: ordered a sequel. What we got instead felt cursed from its opening frames. Despite a bigger budget and years of tinkering in post-production, The Old Guard 2 stumbled onto the platform looking bruised and bewildered, somehow cheaper than its predecessor despite costing more. Victoria Mahoney took over directing duties from Gina Prince-Bythewood, and the downgrade was palpable—where Prince-Bythewood brought clarity and momentum, Mahoney delivered sequences that felt either chaotic or inert, with nothing in between. Charlize Theron, who turned the first film into a showcase for middle-aged action heroics, appeared to have mentally checked out somewhere around day three of shooting. She moved through fight sequences with the energy of someone going through airport security. KiKi Layne, so magnetic in If Beale Street Could Talk, seemed to be performing via satellite delay. The emotional core—Theron’s Andy reconnecting with Vân Veronica Ngô’s Quỳnh after centuries of separation—should have devastated. Instead, their scenes landed with all the heat of two strangers making small talk at a bus stop. Only Uma Thurman seemed to understand the assignment, chewing scenery with the commitment of someone who knew the movie around her was sinking and she needed one more square meal. Barry Ackroyd’s cinematography coated everything in a waxy sheen that screamed “Bulgarian tax incentive.” In the end, all you could say about this was that it was a high-profile sequel to a surprise hit action film that seemed embarrassed by its own genre. The first Old Guard made immortality feel vital. This one just made it feel exhausting.
I need you to understand how much I wanted to like this. A dark comedy about a gay couple’s chaotic journey to parenthood, directed by LGBTQ+ filmmakers, with a cast that includes Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells? Sign me up. What I got instead was far and away the worst movie I had the displeasure of watching this year.
I Don’t Understand You plays like something unearthed from a time capsule nobody asked to open—the kind of gay-panic comedy that felt dated in 2005 and feels genuinely harmful in 2025. Kroll and Rannells play Dom and Cole, a wealthy Los Angeles couple celebrating their anniversary in Italy while awaiting adoption news. After a series of cultural misunderstandings at a rural restaurant, bodies start piling up with the comedic timing of a broken clock. This is meant to be farce. What it actually plays as is a feature-length argument against gay adoption written by someone who hates gay people.
Dom and Cole aren’t characters—they’re caricatures assembled from the laziest possible tropes: shrill, shallow, selfish, incompetent, and so catastrophically self-absorbed that they literally kill their way across the Italian countryside without a flicker of genuine remorse. The film mistakes their snarky entitlement for wit and their bumbling cruelty for physical comedy. It confuses being provocative with having something to say. Every beat reinforces the worst stereotypes about gay men: that we’re vapid, that we’re careless, that we shouldn’t be trusted with children. I sat watching the film actively rooting for these men to be arrested. I wanted them to lose the baby and the privilege of being parents. That’s not dark comedy working—that’s a movie failing at its most fundamental level.
Here’s what makes it unforgivable: this was made by LGBTQ+ filmmakers. David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano reportedly based it on their own journey to parenthood, which makes the final product even more baffling. In a political climate where queer families are under legislative attack, where adoption rights are being rolled back, where “groomer” rhetoric poisons every conversation about LGBTQ+ parenting—this is the movie they chose to make? Two privileged white gay men murdering their way to fatherhood and facing zero consequences? It’s not subversive. It’s not satirical. It’s ammunition, gift-wrapped for every bad-faith argument already circulating.
And then there’s the cherry on this rancid sundae: Amanda Knox is a producer. Yes, that Amanda Knox. The woman whose own Italian murder trial became a global obsession is now producing a comedy about Americans getting away with killing people in Italy. I genuinely don’t know if this is tone-deafness elevated to performance art or simply the most staggering lack of self-awareness in recent Hollywood memory. Either way, it tells you everything about the level of taste operating behind this production.
Amanda Seyfried shows up in what amounts to a glorified cameo, likely filmed in a single weekend as a favor she’s probably regretting. The Italy locations look flat and lifeless. The tone lurches between slapstick and sincerity without earning either. And at its center, two performers I genuinely enjoy are stranded in roles that ask them to be nothing more than punchlines in a joke nobody should be telling in 2025.
I have a high tolerance for transgressive comedy—I’ve laughed at things I probably shouldn’t have. But I Don’t Understand You isn’t transgressive; it’s regressive, cosplaying as edgy while reinforcing every stereotype it should be dismantling. It’s smug without being smart, cruel without being honest, provocative without a single genuine provocation in its hollow little heart. What’s truly shocking is seeing Rannells here, considering he starred in Broadway’s The Book of Mormon—a show that did everything right in terms of social commentary that I Don’t Understand You gets catastrophically wrong.
If there’s a film this year that made me genuinely angry, it’s this one. Not because it’s offensive—I can handle offensive. Because it’s offensive and boring. Because it had the chance to be something subversive and chose to be something destructive. Because in 2025, queer audiences deserve so much better than this contemptuous, cowardly mess.
The title is I Don’t Understand You. Trust me—the feeling is mutual.
(Dis)Honorable Mentions
SPECIAL MENTIONS
Most Misunderstood
I have a bone to pick with Neon. They’re one of the smartest distributors working today—responsible for launching Parasite, I, Tonya, Anatomy of a Fall—but their campaign for Presence borders on malpractice. The trailers promised relentless terror. The posters screamed nightmare fuel. What Steven Soderbergh actually made was something far more interesting: a meditation on grief, loss, and the way trauma echoes through a household long after its source has gone silent. Lucy Liu delivers some of her all-time best work as a mother holding her family together through sheer force of will while something unseen observes from the corners. The conceit—we experience everything from the perspective of the presence itself—could have been gimmicky. Instead, it becomes a lens for examining how families fracture under the weight of things left unsaid. This isn’t the scariest film ever made. It’s not trying to be. It’s a ghost story where the real haunting is emotional, and the scares that do land hit harder because they’re earned. Had Neon trusted audiences with what they actually had, Presence might have found its people. Instead, viewers expecting Hereditary got Ordinary People with a spectral POV. Their loss. Seek this one out with proper expectations, and you’ll discover one of the year’s most thoughtful genre exercises.
The MN Movie Man’s Humble Pie Award of 2025
(awarded to the film that looked like a dud but turned out to be a winner)
I owe this movie an apology. After Captain America: Brave New World face-planted so spectacularly, I had mentally written off Marvel’s 2025 slate entirely. Another team-up movie built from B-list characters and franchise table-scraps? Hard pass. Then I actually watched Thunderbolts*, and somewhere around the second act I realized I was grinning like an idiot. This is the Marvel movie I’d forgotten they knew how to make—scrappy, funny, character-driven, unburdened by universe-ending stakes or mythology homework. Florence Pugh leads a ragtag ensemble of antiheroes and reformed villains, and she’s magnetic in every frame. The genius move: keeping the scale intimate. No celestial threats, no multiversal chaos. Just broken people learning to trust each other while punching their way through problems. The action sequences have actual choreography and spatial logic—remember when that was standard? The humor lands without undercutting emotional beats. The cast, uniformly excellent, seems to be having genuine fun rather than fulfilling contractual obligations. Thunderbolts* reminded me why I fell for these movies in the first place, back when Iron Man built his suit in a cave and that felt like enough. Sometimes superhero films just need to be fun. This one remembers that. I was convinced it would stink. I’ve never been happier to eat crow.
Movies You Probably Haven’t Seen but Should
This is the one I’ve been waiting to tell you about. I caught Griffin in Summer at Tribeca over a year ago, where it swept multiple awards and left me wondering which studio would be smart enough to snap it up. The answer, apparently, was none of them. Searchlight? Asleep at the wheel. A24? Busy elsewhere. Instead, Vertical gave it a quiet fall release that barely registered, and one of the year’s best coming-of-age films slipped through the cracks. That’s a tragedy, but it’s also your opportunity. Everett Blunck delivers a star-making debut as Griffin, and I mean that literally—this is the kind of performance where you’re watching someone’s career ignite in real time. The writing sidesteps every cliché the genre falls prey to: no manic pixie dream girls, no wise mentors dispensing fortune-cookie wisdom, no third-act speeches that solve everything. Just a kid navigating a summer that will quietly change him, rendered with the kind of observational specificity that makes you feel like you’re remembering your own life rather than watching someone else’s. In a landscape dominated by noise, Griffin in Summer trusts silence. It trusts its audience. It trusts that small moments can carry enormous weight. Seek it out. Make the effort. This one deserves to be found.
The Perfect Neighbor
I’ll admit it: I’m the person who falls down YouTube rabbit holes watching bodycam footage at 2 AM. Entitled passengers getting escorted off planes. Routine traffic stops that spiral into neighborhood drama. There’s something grimly satisfying about watching consequences catch up with people who thought the rules didn’t apply to them. The Perfect Neighbor starts in that territory and then drags you somewhere much darker. This documentary is constructed entirely from police bodycam footage surrounding a 2023 incident in a Florida neighborhood, and “constructed” is the right word—director Geeta Gandbhir assembles these fragments into something that plays like a slow-motion car crash you can see coming but cannot stop. What begins as petty disputes between neighbors escalates with sickening inevitability. You watch relationships deteriorate. You watch systems fail. You watch people make choices that cannot be unmade. It’s horrifying, infuriating, and essential viewing. This isn’t primarily a document of broken institutions, though the justice system’s failures in the final third will leave you speechless. It’s something more unsettling: a portrait of how we see each other, how we fail each other, how communities unravel one interaction at a time. Between this and The Alabama Solution, documentary cinema delivered two urgent examinations of American dysfunction this year. I hope awards voters are paying attention. Films like this are how spotlights get trained on problems that need solving.
Also Worth Checking Out
Jay Duplass helped birth mumblecore two decades ago with The Puffy Chair. Now, directing solo for the first time since splitting from brother Mark, he’s made something that reminds you why that movement mattered—and why intimate American indie cinema still has plenty to say. The Baltimorons is a Christmas Eve romance between two people who have no business connecting and somehow can’t stop. Michael Strassner plays Cliff, a newly sober improv comedian who cracks a tooth right before his fiancée’s family dinner. His frantic search for an emergency dentist lands him in the chair of Dr. Didi Delacroix (Liz Larsen), a woman burying her own holiday grief beneath no-nonsense professionalism. What unfolds is a one-night odyssey through Baltimore—broken families, surprise comedy sets, tentative confessions, the slow thaw of two people who’ve built walls for good reason. Strassner and Larsen don’t have movie-star chemistry; they have something better. They have the awkward, halting, real-time vulnerability of two souls figuring out whether to trust again. Larsen, a Broadway veteran, deserves serious recognition for a performance that softens almost imperceptibly, scene by scene, until you realize you’re watching someone decide to hope. Duplass shoots Baltimore’s working-class neighborhoods with unsentimental affection, and the score channels A Charlie Brown Christmas in the best possible way. Small, honest, and unexpectedly profound.
Sometimes the family you need isn’t the one you were born into. Barbie Ferreira plays Lily, a young woman whose biological father has made a sport of disappointing her—showing up just long enough to inflict fresh damage before vanishing again. When he cuts off contact for good, she does what many of us have done in moments of desperation: she searches for him on Facebook. Instead of finding her father, she accidentally connects with a Bob Trevino—John Leguizamo’s construction manager from a neighboring town, a stranger who starts interacting with her posts with the gentle encouragement of the dad she never had. What builds between them is slow, authentic, and achingly moving. Director Tracie Laymon based the film on her own experience, and that honesty radiates from every frame. There are no high-concept twists here, no third-act reveals that reframe everything. Just two wounded people finding unexpected connection in a world that’s given them plenty of reasons to stop trying. Ferreira exposes vulnerability without ever begging for sympathy. Leguizamo delivers what might be his finest work—a good man learning to open a door he thought he’d closed forever. Bob Trevino Likes It refuses to resolve abandonment with tidy reconciliation or excuse cruelty with forced forgiveness. Instead, it offers something rarer and more hopeful: the possibility of being made whole by people who chose you.
Empty nest comedies tend to follow predictable beats: parent mopes, parent rediscovers themselves, parent learns heartwarming lesson. Suze knows you’ve seen that movie and has no interest in making it again. Michaela Watkins plays Susan, a divorced mom who’s poured everything into raising her daughter Brooke—only to find herself completely unmoored when Brooke leaves for college without so much as a backward glance. Then Gage shows up. Brooke’s ex-boyfriend, recently dumped via text, lands in Susan’s orbit after a water tower incident puts him in the hospital. What follows isn’t the odd-couple comedy the setup suggests. It’s something thornier and more rewarding: two people at completely different life stages recognizing something in each other, forming a bond that defies easy categorization. Charlie Gillespie plays Gage not as comic relief but as a fully realized person—aimless, yes, but earnest in ways that gradually become an asset rather than a punchline. Watkins is phenomenal, finding laughs without sacrificing emotional honesty, exasperated but never cruel. Directors Linsey Stewart and Dane Clark trust their characters enough to let scenes breathe, to let silence carry meaning. Suze is the rare comedy that earns its sentiment—funny and warm without ever tipping into schmaltz.
Here’s a film that looks like a hangout comedy about sad divorced guys and turns out to be something sneakier and more resonant. Griffin Dunne plays Peter, a New York dentist watching his 35-year marriage dissolve while simultaneously caring for his elderly father Simon (Richard Benjamin), whose own divorce from Peter’s late mother casts a long shadow. Meanwhile, Peter’s two sons are navigating romantic disasters of their own during an ill-fated bachelor party in Tulum. Three generations of Pearce men, all fumbling through love and loss, none of them equipped with the emotional vocabulary to talk about it. Director Noah Pritzker could have leaned into self-pity or cheap laughs at his characters’ expense. Instead, he approaches them with wry empathy, letting them be messy and frustrating and recognizably human. Dunne brings weary charm to a man who knows his old playbook isn’t working but can’t quite bring himself to write a new one. Benjamin, in just a handful of scenes, delivers something genuinely moving as a father whose late-life rebellion is complicated by encroaching dementia. Ex-Husbands doesn’t aim for grand revelations about masculinity or marriage. It just observes, with sharp humor and surprising tenderness, how relationships shift over time—and how none of us, regardless of generation, ever really figure it out.
GRAND TOTALS
Click HERE for a full list of films seen in 2025
Total Movies Seen in the Theater: 154
Total Movies Seen at Home: 415
Grand Total for 2025 (not counting films seen multiple times): 569
That’s an average of 1.56 movies per day for the entire year!
Fun Facts & Interesting Data:
🎪 Festival Champion!
I saw 111 festival films across 5 major festivals.
🎟️ My Theater of Choice:
AMC was my go-to with 62 visits to various AMC locations (Southdale, Rosedale, Eden Prairie, etc.)
📅 Special Mentions:
Attended the 50th Anniversary of TIFF 2025 in September and caught a whopping 41 films!
Attended The Lord of the Rings trilogy all-day marathon at Riverview Theater on 1/25/25
Classic film screenings with the MN Orchestra (The Empire Strikes Back, The Goonies, The Muppet Christmas Carol)
🔁 Movies I Loved Enough to See Again in Theaters:
Seen 3 Times:
JAWS (including a 4DX experience in Toronto!)
Wicked: For Good
Seen 2 Times:
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Sinners
Thunderbolts*
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Weapons
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Once at TIFF, once at MN theater!)
Frankenstein (2025) (Both at TIFF)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) (well…see my The Worst list….)
Jurassic World: Rebirth