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).
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 his 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.
It is... kind of okay once it starts, though the aforementioned momentum annihilation hurts it quite a bit, and I had somehow gotten the impression there would be a skater-based action scene, which there is not. But at least the constant movement (geographical and camera) during the middle hour is a kind of replacement for the affect of an exciting movie, and the last forty-minutes-or-so is a legitimately pretty awesome thriller sequence with some neat telephoto lens photography and extremely creative uses of the three-dimensional topography of a highway such as I've never seen before, such as probably would have justified the 100 minute version of this. Unfortunately, even the decent parts and even the good parts are running against the headwinds of Johnny Greenwood, anxiously banging on his piano, and once I consciously noticed it there was obviously nothing else for his noise score to do but to start getting on my fucking nerves, which is a problem when it's "plonk plonk plonk" for half of a very long film. I'll also cop to finding a fair amount of it pretty ugly to look at, and to no small degree deliberately (there are, even then, some Southwestern Yellow bits that are pretty inexcusably dire), but the "immediacy" of Michael Bauman's cinematography sure did start to wear on me. It's also weighted down with the significant drag of the majority of its performances: whether on their own initiative or, probably, by the dictate of their director, DiCaprio, Penn, and (to the extent she's in the movie) Taylor's decision to approach cartoon characters through acting naturalism is mostly annoying—in a movie that frequently feels like it surely must be some kind of comedy or satire (I mean, these fucking character names) but which never coheres, DiCaprio actively half-ruins the one bit that (for all the ICE trappings) seems to have much to do with anything that's happened in American culture past the publication of the Thomas Pynchon source novel, when his 70s revolutionary dumbfuck has a negative customer service interaction with some 21st century Woke 1.0 dipshit at Revolution Inc. and the movie evinces roughly equal contempt for both of them—which is why the film's very obvious MVP is Benicio Del Toro, who approaches his cartoon character, named Sensei Sergio, as a cartoon character.
I guess I'm glad if this offered some cathartic experience for you—I mean that sincerely enough—though I really don't see why, when its insistence on a 70s-born neverwhen means that, in practical, logistical, and technological terms, it has about as much to do with fighting authoritarianism in the present tense as a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical.
*I'm pretty sure anyway? Reverse Commando? Pop quiz, what's the stupider name, "John Matrix" or "Steven Lockjaw"?
Score: 5/10
A bit of an obvious observation a year after the fact, but it is largely summed up "racialized From Dusk Till Dawn," with twin brothers "Smoke" (Michael B. Jordan) and "Stack" (Michael B. Jordan) returning home to the South from what sounds like a much more cohesive movie about Prohibition Era gangsters up North, taking their proceeds from the booze trade to invest in a black juke joint. Indeed, it draws the crowds, including a music-loving vampire from Ireland (Jack O'Connell), who'd very much like to be invited inside.
There are, in fact, a lot of elements here (it's certainly a vastly more complicated movie than From Dusk Till Dawn), some of those elements being good and none really being outright bad, thrown into one strikingly generous runtime for a vampire movie (effectively a single location vampire movie) that seems like it should have room for all sorts of things. And I guess it does, but it sure didn't gel for me like it gelled for a lot of folks. Sinners, in fact, wasn't an Oscars catch-up watch. I saw it in theaters like a great many others did, and I just didn't want to write about it because I barely like what those elements amount to—and I still barely understand exactly what it's going for, months of (honestly, only occasionally) thinking about it later—and I didn't want to rain on anybody's parade, when everyone had determined to love this thing so suffocatingly much that I'm more than a little surprised it didn't win Best Picture. (And I guess I would've been rooting for it too, as far as front-runners were concerned.) But for one thing, I can't even figure out what the movies racial politics are, which seems like a problem when "doing racial politics" is possibly the biggest element of all here, and not just a subject it wants to gesture at without making a point, and it is, though maybe not by that much—and maybe not even before a century-later coda!—at least a little more complex than "white people sure are vampires, huh?" It's pretty content with letting that be the top-line summary (regarding my aforementioned occasional ponderings, I think it's ultimately a conflicted, and deliberately-unresolved, meditation on the pros and cons and, indeed, the inevitabilities of assimilation in a multicultural society, and how you keep the culture alive not through blood but careworn curation, embodied here in music, but that coda is doing alllll of the real work of getting there in just five minutes, though it retroactively explains what the hell the centerpiece-that-got-everybody-talking-about-it is actually for). But whatever else, it was obviously going to be hard to get any kind of bead on the sociological priors of a movie whose sociological priors can feel like fog, and that, right off the bat, throws in a scene where the heroes gun down two ne'er-do-wells in broad daylight in Mississippi in the 1930s to such shrugging non-response that it's like this was one of those Western parody cartoons, where the population sign has rotating digits. Whatever it's doing with the Irish diaspora specifically is even harder to grasp, amounting to maybe something as simple as our villain replicating the colonial mindset even if he would fervently deny such a thing (for our vampire does certainly maintain his culture's music as fastidiously as anyone, and the movie wants you to think that's pretty cool of him), though when dialogue strongly implies that one of his ancient beefs re: colonization was the general concept of "Christianity" being imposed upon Ireland by our Anglo-Saxon overlords, maybe "shrugged shoulders" should be my response too.
So, the movie itself, which is the real issue: I can't really gainsay the long lead-up to the siege, as the ensemble cast (just a ton of people) is pretty swell; meanwhile, if the ensemble sprawls too far it's really not by that much. But the downside of having all this stuff to play with means that virtually all the good things never get used to their utmost. For instance: Jordan playing dual roles is good, and it feels as much like a technical exercise in finely distinguishing extremely similar characters, which as one of our better current actors he obviously excels at, while the actual narrative function of spending God knows how much money on the technology for there to be two slightly-distinct Michael B. Jordans in this single-location horror movie amounts to very little. What they're doing with Michael B. Jordan Red and Hailee Steinfeld straight-up leaps right to its conclusion, almost the exact same moment the supernatural dramatics have even begun. Michael B. Jordan Blue's denouement could have the words "indulge me, I wanted to do this too—Ryan Coogler" flashing on the bottom of the screen for as effective as its placement is. O'Connell doesn't get a third as much to do as he ought to, and hits this weird place where he's too freighted with themes to simply be an eccentric vampire villain pitching undeath as a superior way of life, yet still too enigmatic and mixed-up to serve the purpose of allegory, and to the extent he's an ideological threat, and I think he is primarily intended to be an ideological threat, nobody even gives the dude the time of day till he bites them, so it's just Us v. Them the whole movie with the caveat that Them tends to get bigger as Us grow smaller (and not even that as much as you'd think, given that about two-thirds of the siege is vampires whining about being let inside). And I think it really should be more frequently mentioned that Coogler, a 39 year old man, has written some dialogues here about cunnilingus that feel like he'd only discovered such a thing existed the week before.
Above all, while I'm arguably letting myself get stuck in a screenwriting 101 swamp, the whole deal with musical magic, primarily as a result of Miles Caton's aspiring blues musician who has one hell of a lot of "it," feels like it should be a huge deal, but has nothing (at least nothing literally) to do with anything besides that centerpiece art installation that's awfully cool but also the first, last, and only time an otherwise pretty dang literalist movie takes a swing half as wild. Even when it gets down to brass tacks, Coogler has never been a great action director (Creed is his high-water mark and that's a pretty ritualized form of "action" if you're counting it), and it's of a desultory nature more akin to his Black Panthers (somewhere between the first and second, actually), and he has never been a horror director, so there's some real trouble with figuring out how to make the thrills encroach without the vampires just all busting through the breach at once, which is basically what happens. The better news is that, weirdly even, it doesn't ever feel like it's 138 minutes, and it's terrific at making its music feel important, as much through its incidental music as its musical setpieces (I've come to the conclusion I outright love that freakishly corny Tales From the Crypt-unto-Are You Afraid of the Dark?, electric "vampire danger" cue), though the sound mix that Coogler and Ludwig Goransson have chosen worked better for Goransson's silent movie for Christopher Nolan than this one where the dialogue audibility is frequently actually important. That epilogue is so vital, suggesting messiness was the point and it doesn't want to tell you how to feel about any of the foregoing; but a lot about it feels more incompletely defined than merely messy.
Score: 6/10
In Brazil in 1977, dissident "Marcelo Alves" (Wagner Moura) is in fear of his life, and ought to leave the country, but before he can, there's secrets in the archives of the Bureau of Identification to unearth; and much else happens besides as, despite the metaphorical and as the opening scene makes clear often-literal stench of decay of society, life carries on under the military dictatorship. (For example, Jaws is released in South America.)
I have to admit it, I got a little antsy with this one (the Hulu presentation, with ads, obviously wasn't going to help), and I initially clocked it as a little too aimless and loose, "novelistic" but more in the way of the kind of television show I don't like, and not wacky or compelling or idiosyncratic or revealing enough of Brazil in 1977 enough in its meanderings to entirely justify what felt like a pretty wheel-spinning pace as it circled through its 161 minutes. And I wouldn't say I initially clocked it altogether wrongly, either: a movie that stumbles into what that leg eventually gets up to should probably be a lot weirder and woolier, as a baseline, rather than banking on jarring "WTF" surprise just to goose a laugh out of me. But going into its final third, the threads do get braided together even as they'd spent an entire feature's length threatening to have nothing to do with one another, up to and including what I would've happily bet five bucks was the totally superfluous one, a belatedly-introduced 202X framing device with an archival researcher kid. Lo, it turns out not to be superfluous at all but rather essential to the argument it is making about historical memory, which, fascinatingly enough, sure doesn't strike me as the usual old saw about "telling our stories" or whatever, given that our principal focus in the longeurs of the film almost undoubtedly would have preferred our ironically-dubbed "agente secreto" to have anchored himself more securely in his present rather than scraping about through what barely even counts as his own past.
And before that, we get a terrific albeit extremely unusual finale, that gets to have its austere fuckery cake and eat it too—a thriller and anti-thriller stacked right atop another, and I genuinely appreciate the generosity of the gesture (it's practically a statement from writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho, "now of course I can do mechanical thrills, and tremendously well, and I likewise understand that I have essentially promised you some, by naming the movie what I did and setting it up as I have done, so here they are; but that is, nevertheless, not the purpose of my movie, and it is not meant to be cathartic or otherwise satisfying"*)—and all throughout the production it's giving some rather nice photography plus one really hip soundtrack. Also, I'm very fond of (unfortunately, I think we may recognize) the way that Filho's direction, in addition to his semi-chaotic script, keeps imposing a sense more of vague unpleasantness than impending doom (the way so many shots end with the camera apropos-of-little panning up to one of the omnipresent portraits of presumably Ernesto Giesel being the big way), to get at the manner in which society is perhaps more often subtly deformed over the long haul by authoritarianism than it is subjected to some kind of Wagnerian (uh, the other one) apocalypse. For all that, I do feel like Moura (mostly as-written but to some degree as-performed) is far too much of a too-nebulously-rendered, too-understated semi-nonentity for his more colorful yet still-oft-underrealized supporting cast to do their shticks at (the time spent establishing everyone in the boarding house, who have very, very little to do in the movie, is what I mean by "the kind of television show I don't like"), and this pertains for something like half of this very long movie; whereas the juncture at which he fully departs from this, well, it's only being the right kind of understated, on behalf of an entirely different narrative track. Some gorgeous phone booth design in this thing, however.
And hey, at this rate of improvement, next year the Academy's apparently-now-customary filler Best Picture nominee about the Brazilian dictatorship tapped in order to try to psychologically grapple with our own slide into same will give me something I positively adore, assuming of course they haven't all been rounded up by then, and accordingly no longer in a position to nominate things.
*One may also appreciate that our director at least ensures there's a radio playing over the roll of fourteen hundred production company/film fund logos such as invariably precedes a movie like this one these days.
Score: 7/10
Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton), an Idahoan logger born in the late 19th century, lives for 80 years in the country, while the entire world changes around him, and he loses everything that mattered in his corner of it.
Lotta talk in this about clearing too many trees at the expense of the natural world, about how a redwood might be God and so maybe it's a crime on the level of the crucifixion to kill it, but I just want to point out that if this motherfucker had cleared more trees, his house wouldn't have burned down.
Anyway, for as long as I've even been reading what people write about movies—and no doubt it has a much longer history; I was born the year Blade Runner came out, after all—complaining about overborne voiceover narration has been the perennial gripe. And somehow (albeit like much else with our times), despite forty-three years and more of people bitching about it, the problem has only gotten worse, so that here in the 2020s we're just facing a rash of screenplays that insist on overexplaining themselves, or effectively replacing scenes with audiobooks, and often altogether unnecessarily.
As you imagined, voiceover narration is the big problem with Train Dreams, just constantly unhelpfully contextualizing (and often nothing but fucking textualizing) things—the amusing part is that the voiceover narration I think literally only mentions what year it is three times, so again, not being helpful or even a facsimile of helpful—bottoming out somewhere about two-thirds in when it explains that our hero, likely delusionally, wonders if he's found his daughter, which is followed by Edgerton fearfully-ecstatically exclaiming his daughter's Goddamn name. I mean, come on. This isn't the only clunk or even the only kind of clunk in the movie: the one that made me giggle adolescently is a transition from wife Felicity Jones riding Edgerton close cowgirl to Felicity Jones saying "maybe there's a better way" in a completely different scene and, yes, in regards to a completely different subject; there's stuff in the first twenty-odd minutes that kind of feels tokenistic in the way they're checking "I assure you, I have a critical understanding of American history" boxes, which "works" because the goal is "chaotic, cruel world," but it's awfully blunt and truncated; and actually our guy did clear a lot of those trees on his plat, so in fact I don't have that great sense of the mechanics of how a wildfire in the Pacific Northwest rain forest managed to turn his house into a literal flat stretch of ash (apparently burning so hot calcium carbonate was likewise turned into ash... you know, maybe our guy isn't so delusional), and I don't think director/co-writer Clint Bentley has a great sense of those mechanics either. But these are more like nitpicks, and the big anchor remains that narration.
Of course there's a reason why it thinks it can get away with the narration, and obviously it does, and to no small extent. But there are 80s movies with some synonym for "extraterrestrial" in the damn titles of them that don't as rabidly bite on Steven Spielberg's style as Train Dreams is nakedly trying to position itself as Terrence Malick! But It Actually Came Out and Wasn't Painstakingly Carved Down From a Thousand Hours of Meanderingly-Captured Footage. I am sorry to bury that lede, but holy moly. And simultaneously, it's about the most knock-offy thing I've ever seen while also often feeling like somebody only had Malick explained to him thirdhand. Hence, narration: voiceover is a hugely Malicky thing; Malick doesn't use voiceover this way, Malick's voiceover is almost always (literally uniformly?) first-person expressions of characters poetically/abstrusely describing their feelings and worldviews, Bentley's voiceover is a third-person narrator possibly reciting the novella this is based on and more often than not simply providing denotative information, and at a far more constant clip than is necessary for the distancing effect it's actually good for. And even when getting Malick right, it can be sort of uncanny, from matters as obvious as "hey, Felicity! I'm gonna need you to be even more unreasoningly happy whilst you frolic in this field" to the gorgeousness of the undisguised digitalness of the photography of the vanishing nature/human interface this movie's all about, that you'll still notice requires that a hilariously-huge fraction of its narrative happens at sunrise or sunset.
On the other hand... I guess we are in need of a Malick, and arguably needed a more-efficient, less-effervescent Malick for fifty years, not counting his ultra-productive and extraordinary 2010s. But Way of the Wind has been coming out next year for six years, and may not ever, and he's in his 80s. And so, setting aside the uncanniness that sometimes pertains, it's usually pretty good Malick, and tends to build on its early successes rather than languishing in the early awkwardnesses. Edgerton's salt-of-the-earth-but-sensitive lost soul is good Malick. The time-collapsing editing and four-dimensional view of history is good Malick. The visions of forests are good Malick. And by no later than the last third and probably more like the second half, this thing is developing some pretty powerful inchoate emotions about our place and purpose in this unpredictable and alienating universe that resembles great Malick and, leaving aside that influence, is a very fine and poignant depiction of loss on its own merits, except for the unerring ability of that voiceover narration to degrade it and make me feel like the movie's hectoring my feelings out of me rather than just letting me feel them. Because good grief, it absolutely would've gotten there honestly, and while I appreciate it giving me a solid handhold for criticism, it feels bad to have to be so ugly to a movie that I kind of love and could've just said "dudes, this rules."
Score: 7/10