Movies in 2025

december 28 2025

I began this year exclusively watching movies from the soviet era to mostly falling for the novelty of 2025 release dates. As much as I respect nothing about the oscars, I can’t help but want to participate in pop culture sometimes. This article might be obnoxiously negative but I promise I like movies; I thought I was above hate-watching but hate-watching seems to describe the experience of most of the movies on this list …

Mickey 17

I expected Okja Bong Joon Ho, not Parasite bong Joon Ho, and that’s what it was. I think it’s a social commentary movie that began from the idea “I want to make a social commentary movie” and improvised from there; it’s anti-capitalism for people that just realized a billion is a big number (but a million is OK). but I will be fair because the movie is clearly not taking itself seriously, though the humor is too millennial to get away with being a good comedy. The short review I wrote closer to my first watch:

does the double trope better than the substance, I'm sorry women. and anora could take notes on the jealous women trope. good and rare poster design for a modern movie.

The best praise I could think of was that I was slightly less underwhelmed than the last two times I went to the theater (excluding Nosferatu).

The Phoenician Scheme

I forget.

One Battle After Another

I was actually writing a blog about One Battle After Another but I got too caught up with school to finish it. Here’s the very rough draft:

My favourite Paul Thomas Anderson movie is There Will Be Blood. So, I was excited to notice in the credits that it was based on a novel of Upton Sinclair, Oil!, who also wrote The Jungle, a favourite book of mine. If you know anything about Upton Sinclair, it’s that he wasn’t a subtle socialist. He was a journalist and his novels were a form of his journalism; The Jungle made a sensational account of the cruel working conditions in the American meat industry of the early twentieth century and had led to real-life legislation against the industry’s health risks. However, Sinclair was disappointed that the public was more scandalized by the book’s exposure of unsanitary food practices than the destitution of his working-class characters. The Jungle resolves in an optimistic embrace of the socialist movement and it seemed like no one had read that far. And our director Paul Thomas Anderson is evidence that the journalist’s audience remains equally ignorant all the way into the 21st century. Oil!, published 20 years after The Jungle, is almost obnoxious in its socialist messaging, and should be entirely inescapable from the reader. It revolves around Bunny, the son of the oil prospector Daniel Plainview of There Will be Blood, and the conflict between his socialist sympathies and the bourgeois class he inherits from his beyond unethical father. The movie adaptation features absolutely none of that. From a novel written with an almost journalistic engagement with its contemporary politics, we receive a film dskgl inward

After successfully neutralizing Sinclair’s politics in There Will be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson seemed confident enough to submit his application to the CIA, One Battle After Another. This time, he goes so far to apoliticize even revolution itself. A commodity making billions in theaters

Pretty bad, but I still want to say what I wanted to say; revolution isn’t something we do anymore but something we fantasize about it in the movie theater. Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Opus, and this year, Mickey 17 and Bugonia; this genre of “eat the rich” movies so egregiously commodify anti-capitalism, and One Battle After Another reducing a revolution plot to a quaint story about family is entirely what Deleuze and Guattari meant about Oedipus … don’t get me wrong, I absolutely enjoyed it, it was a PTA movie, it was fun. I liked the clever car chase scene! But it is so very much a product of its postmodern time.

Sinners

I can always like a period piece but I don’t like action. My attention is lost whenever a climax is entirely action.

Bring Her Back

served the purpose of mindless entertainment on Halloween.

Weapons

Horror has to be a degree of artsy for me to like, and weapons was just generic. I liked the part with the cop and the addict but then it became a horror movie again.

Bugonia

I know I criticized Bugonia a little in the One Battle after Another section, but it’s my favourite movie of the year. I’m surprised it wasn’t received so well, maybe because people are tired of evil CEOs, and so am I, but the tension was so good that it made up for the lack of substance. Every twist worked for me. Bugonia kept me guessing who was smart and who was stupid, who was in power and who wasn’t, and the ending was strangely satisfying. It was a movie that I thought was fun to watch without my opinion changing after leaving the theater and thinking about it, like One Battle after Another and Anora. maybe the lack of expectations helped. I also just like Yorgos Lanthimos, I absolutely adore the favourite and bugonia used many of the similar color and lighting tricks. It’s rare for directors to know how to light dark scenes anymore. And I later watched the lobster, which I surprisingly enjoyed despite my distaste for dystopias, maybe because it lacks the self-seriousness shared by most in the genre.

Nouvelle Vague

nouvelle vague didn’t have to exist but I have to confess that I really enjoyed it; pointless fanservice is OK if it appeals to me. I can understand the marvel multiverse now because I felt the same thrill at all the appearances of old French directors and actors. I didn’t even like Breathless when I first saw it, and maybe that’s why I’m not so concerned by linklater’s faithfulness, but nouvelle vague was so much fun.

Train Dreams

I don’t understand dead wife movies. too sentimental.

Frankenstein

The CGI wolves ruined the entire movie for me. They moved so animatedly, did they hire Disney animators? It’s not even the realism that concerns me (I’m not Cinema Sins), it’s the exaggerated violence. The entire movie is about the unjustified ostracization of a monster, and then they make the wolves essentially monsters in their nature. I’m not PETA either, the thematic inconsistency just pisses me off. And I wish the camera work would have stopped moving for at least 5 seconds. The wolves, the camera, too much movement!

Marty Supreme

I also ended 2024 with Timothee, it was the bob dylan biopic. Marty Supreme was a lot better than the bob dylan biopic. I thought as I watched that it reminded me of Uncut Gems — I swear on my whole life, I did not know Josh Safdie directed uncut gems until 2 minutes ago. Intensity seems to be the theme this year, after One Battle After Another, bugonia, and marty. Besides for the tension, I was also reminded of uncut gems because of the terrible protagonist that’s still sympathetic to the audience. The character writing is great. And I was happy that it was barely a sports movie because I don’t like sports movies and their hero’s journey romances (which seems to be the subversion here). thematically, I liked sports as theater, and the law as theater, and everything as theater. Otherwise, I feel similarly to marty supreme as I do bugonia: I will remember it for its clever building of tension rather than for any deeper meaning.