Send Help: Raimi's still got it

★★★★★--Super early yet, but this is my favorite film of 2026 thus far. Sam Raimi makes one hell of a horror movie. No one does splatter and gross-out humor like him. And he keeps you guessing. This movie was fun as shit. Go in knowing just what you see in the trailer.  
 
Caught Raimi's three common easter eggs in all of his movies ("The Classic," the Evil Dead necklace, and Bruce Campbell). Most of the time they are pretty easy to spot. I was sort of surprised I saw all of them in this flick as I'm not very observant and these were somewhat well hidden.  My favorite of the three was the Bruce Campbell portrait in the son's office. 
 
Anyway, yes, this is the ultimate "good-for-her" flick. No character is a true hero or villain in any Raimi movie, even the superhero ones. Such is the case here to the extreme. For example, the male lead, the POS CEO played by Dylan O'Brien (he is mostly thought of as the guy in those Maze Runner movies) is comically unlikable. Every time you think he is actually alright, then he comes back extra douchey, practically screaming "fuck you for thinking I'd change!" But you understand why he is that way and sort of feel for him in the end. 
 
Rachel McAdams is always fantastic, but is all-time here. Surprisingly does a pretty good job of making her kind of gross early on, but she's smoking by the time she is on the island. Doesn't surpass Regina George, but the woman has range. I'm sure this will go down as one of her most memorable performances.

Push: Evading a supernatural killer while having a baby is what Republicans think abortion is

★★★--Tense home-invasion having a baby while evading a killer movie. Really ups the ante here. Some memorable shit goes down, which the flick definitely has going for it. There are some good, scary scenes, most notably one featuring an elevator. 

 

Directed by David Charbonier and Justin Powell (they directed The Djinn together a few years back), and starring Alicia Sanz and Raúl Castillo (never seen either of them before but they were solid). It was alright. 

 

I was crazy about it until the third act. Becomes a real bummer of a movie at that point, and maybe goes supernatural. The end also implies that the survivor girl and her baby actually die and the killer is out on the loose. Then it all could have been a dream. Pretty obnoxious.

Presence: Soderbergh offers fresh take on the haunted house genre

★★★★--Told from the point of view of an unseen spirit, the film was really interesting and fresh. Takes the familiar haunted-house setup and gives the audience this intimate experience. We are inhabiting the ghost’s perspective as it observes a family unraveling. Good stuff. 

 

Lucy Liu is the only real star. She is still great and looks as good as she ever has. Julia Fox, the woman from Uncut Gems with hella ass, makes a brief appearance. Chris Sullivan, who plays the dad, I’ve seen around. He also delivers a strong performance. I see he and I are the same age… The kids, Callina Liang and Eddy Maday, are better than fine. 

 

Steven Soderbergh is so good with restraint. Turns the new family home into a space of tense, unspoken trauma. This meditative, unsettling thriller that lingers. Even made me pretty emotional. So many bangers from that guy. For whatever reason I don’t think he gets talked about a whole lot, but dude always brings it and is crazy prolific. I will see any movie he makes as long as he is making them. 

Neighborhood Watch: How much Jack Quaid can you handle?

 

★★★★--Jesus, how many movies was Jack Quaid in last year? This one was pretty fun. Low budget regular Shmo‘s thrown into an investigative situation. My kind of flick. has some flaws. Gets a little off track at some point. But rights the ship in the end. Reunites Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Malin Ackerman from Watchmen. Sort of funny because of Quaid and The Boys. I really like all three of those actors. Directed by one Duncan Skiles. I’ve seen and liked two of his three feature-lengths, the other being The Clovehitch Killer. Not a bad flick.

Stargate: A foray into 90s CGI

★★★★--Scanners meets Micky 17 with teleportation. When I saw this in the theater in 1994 as a child, I thought that we had reached the pinnacle of special effects. The CGI sucks. I was an idiot! Pretty good movie though. And like nothing I'd seen at the time. To quote the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, “Of the four star franchises, 'Wars,' 'Trek,' 'Gate,' and 'Search,' 'Gate' is easily my third favorite." 

Kurt Russell and James Spader are both solid and fun. Jaye Davidson from The Crying Game, if ya know, ya know, plays the alien dude. Directed by Roland Emmerich, the so-called "master of disaster" for being the go-to the-world-is-literally-falling-apart-guy. He's maybe  the biggest directors that isn't a household name. His films include Universal Soldier, Independence Day, the maligned Godzilla (1998), 2012, White House Down, Independence Day: Resurgence, and Moonfall, among others. According to Wikipedia he is the 17th-highest grossing Hollywood director of all time, which is nuts. 

Brick: Early Rian Johnson neo-noir holds up

★★★★--Joseph Gordon Levitt and Rian Johnson team up. Was crazy about it when it came out. Holds up. Love neo-noir with the hard-boiled dialogue, the seedy characters, the femme fatale. Especially into it when the person investigating is just a normal shmo. Also, if it’s high school. Those seem to have been super popular around that time. I feel it goes from being all right to pretty good to great by the end. My complaint is that it could be tighter.

Top 10 of 2025: 1. One Battle After Another

★★★★★--Paul Thomas Anderson making a movie based sort of on a Thomas Pynchon novel staring Leonardo DiCaprio and deals with stoner/leftist politics and offers a little bit of hope. Was this made for me? To quote Bludo in the flick, “yeah, kinda.” 

How was it? Loved it. Easy favorite of the year. Hell, this is in the running for my favorite movie of the century. In the company of Mulholland Drive, There Will Be Blood, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Zodiac. 

Watched it back-to-back the first and second time it played. Theater was packed in both. Saw it again a week later, and then once more in IMAX. The only movie I’ve ever seen four times in the theater. Went as Ghetto Pat for Halloween even. I absolutely adored this movie. Anyone who didn’t is a loser and probably MAGA. 

Speaking of, the Thomas Pynchon novel it’s based on, Vineland, which I love, was a critique of Regan policies and the hippie movement. This is also a critique of right-wing BS but mostly has to do with white supremacy. Also, way more accessible. I did watch a few winger reviews. Lot of bitching about Hollywood being woke, PTA being overrated, and them not getting laid. They called it propaganda and said it glorified violence. Cry me a fucking river. Obviously probably not going to like it if you are on the right side of the political spectrum, i.e. a piece of shit, but this movie doesn’t give a shit about you, so fuck you, Nazi. 

Stellar acting. Easy to do a lot with characters written this well. Leo is an absolute legend. I think he maybe wins his second Best Actor statue, though Michael B. Jordan is ridiculous in Sinners. I was a little concerned that the tone wouldn’t be right from the first trailer. Not comedic enough. Leo’s character seemed a little unlikeable, not one of my stoner buddies. But ends up being your zany far-left terrorist flick with characters that share a lot of similarities with some of my closest friends, if ya get me. “Viva la revolución!”

Have other Academy Award winners in Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. Benicio is throwing a 100 miles an hour in this flick. He has a Harriet Tubman situation going on. Penn is pretty amazing as a deeply unlikeable racist federal agent. Great at making him scary and also buffoonish. Both are nominated for Best Supporting. Again, a strong performance from Delroy Lindo in Sinners may box them out. Teyana Taylor is great, but her character is a real bummer. One of several hard to watch postpartum depictions this year. Best that her character is mostly out of the picture after the first act. She got the Supporting Actress nod, though Regina Hall and newcomer Chase Infiniti, from Indianapolis(!), are both amazing.

Out of PTA’s movies, where does One Battle After Another rank? For me, it’s second. There Will Be Blood still ranks as the best movie of the century, IMO, and is an untouchable masterpiece. Then I like The Master and Phantom Thread, but they aren’t nearly as rewatchable as this one. Magnolia and Boogie Nights both fell way down the list for me with my most recent rewatches. Punch-Drunk Love, on the other hand, I now see as one of his best. So, my official listing goes thus: 1. There Will Be Blood, 2. One Battle After Another, 3. The Master, 4. Phantom Thread, 5. Punch-Drunk Love, 6. Inherent Vice, 7. Licorice Pizza, 8. Boogie Nights, 9. Magnolia, 10. Hard Eight. That said, I truly love them all. 

A few final notes: Love the dark humor. Also that it is more hopeful than the novel. Good guys win. Looks at the youth as really having a lot of potential, which is refreshing with the way people generally shit on them. Lastly, there is a car chase scene where they are going up over these hills. Like riding waves. Fantastic effect. It is out of this world. 

Top 10 of 2025: 2. Sinners

★★★★★--One of three movies I watched this year where a single actor played twins. Most years this would have been my favorite film. There is a polarizing scene where past and present come together and time gets transcended. I thought this was genius. However, I could hear people laughing and mocking this in the theater on opening night. WTF? I’ve talked to people that felt both ways. Regardless, amazing music and story and an abrupt needle drop that flips the genre from a musical drama to horror. If it stuck with one genre, I still would have loved it.  Michael B. Jordan is incredible, as are Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, and Delroy Lindo. The guy that looks like Popeye Jones is pretty solid, too. Incredible flick. 

Top 10 of 2025: 3. Eddington

★★★★★--Another film that I absolutely adored that I suspect will be in my top 10 for the decade. A Covid movie about mask mandates, political divisions, and unwillingness to compromise, even when it means death. 

Shares some DNA with Needful Things, except the thing that they all want is a speck of power.  We basically see a man whose desperate grasps for authority results in further loss of power/control, a guy that can’t get out of his own way. He’s not the only one, of course, as everyone lives in their own separate reality. Everyone realizes there is something wrong, but what that is and who they blame is different, even though in the end, they all have the same enemy. 

Great performances from a great cast—Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O’Connell, Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, Austin Butler, and others—another Ari Aster home run. His fourth film—Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid—he hasn’t made a bad movie in my book. For me, this and Midsommar are my favs. 

Top 10 of 2025: 4. Good Boy

★★★★★--Oh my god. I cannot even write about this movie without crying. Yet another example of how we don’t deserve dogs. This is an awesome take on animals being able to see into the spirit realm. I don’t think any film has made me cry more. Love that Indy, the dog star of the film, is raking in awards. He is really the best boy. I LOVED this film. 

Top 10 of 2025: 5. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

★★★★★--Ever feel like you’re on the edge? Well this is the movie for you! It’s also about massive holes, both real and metaphorical.  One of two really solid mothers under extreme stress movies this year (the other is Die My Love). In this one Rose Byrne stars as a woman that is worse off than being alone. All the men in her life (her neighbor played by A$op Rocky, her absentee husband played by Christian Slater), hell, pretty much everyone in her life (example: the hotel manager played by Ivy Wolf), is actively working against her. 
 
No one listens to what she needs, offering what they think is best, things that are not at all helpful, never giving her any answers about what she can do to help her child and herself. “Why won’t you listen to me! I just want someone to tell me what to do,” she tells her psychiatrist, played by Conan O’Brien. This while people like her child’s doctor, played by director Mary Bronstein, tells her “I’m on your side here.” But she’s not. Setting unrealistic goals for the child’s progress. “You set us up to fail,” Byrne says. The only person that seems to understand is a patient of hers, Caroline, played by Danielle Macdonald, who is contemplating murdering her child. She at one point abandons the infant with Byrne, saying “you know” in a way that acknowledges the horror at the center of the movie. 
 
Just Bronstein’s second movie. Her first since Yeast from 2008, which starred herself, Greta Gerwig, and Benny Safdie. Gerwig seems to have been in roughly 100 movies from 2008-2012. This one is great and should be required viewing by shitty dads. 

Top 10 of 2025: 6. Dead Mail

★★★★★--This was a movie my friends and I were watching trailers for movie night, noncommittal on what we wanted to watch when we came across this. Everyone was instantly enthralled. Goes back to the 1980s Peoria, Illinois to tell a story with high creep factor (actor John Fleck is always unsettling) and loads of suspense involving physical mail and one of the effortlessly coolest characters I’ve ever seen, Jasper, played by Tomas Boykin. Co-directed Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy, if you have some nostalgia for video store finds from childhood, genre fans so of course you are, this is the perfect Saturday night flick with other cinephiles.

Top 10 of 2025: 7. Jay Kelly

★★★★★--Movie about looking back after a lifetime of success and realizing you fucked up. Watched this the day before my sister’s wedding. A wedding I was officiating. Seemed like the best movie possible going into the occasion. 

George Clooney plays title character Jay Kelly, who is a famous actor much like George Clooney who also starred in all the same roles the real George Clooney starred in. Things get pretty meta. He is always wonderful, this maybe especially so. Noah Baumbach directs. Wrote it with Emily Mortimer who plays Jay Kelly’s hairstylist.

 

Rest of the cast is star-studded. Adam Sandler knocks it out of the park as Jay’s manager Ron. He has a wife back home, played by director Greta Gerwig (who is Baumbach’s real life wife), but he also has unresolved history with Jay's publicist Liz, played by the ageless Laura Dern. Billy Crudup is an actor/former friend of Jay’s that he screwed over to get his big break. Elvis’s granddaughter Riley Keough is Jessica Kelly, Jay's elder daughter, while Grace Edwards is Daisy Kelly, Jay's younger daughter who he did a little bit better of a job raising. Stacy Keach plays Jay’s dad. And Patrick Wilson plays actor Ben Alcock who is also an A-lister managed by Ron but is not quite on Jay’s level of stardom.

 

While I loved it, it kind of lost me in the last 30 minutes before correcting course to stick the landing. This wonderful meditation on aging, legacy, power, perception, family, stardom, celebrity, celebrity worship, friendship, brotherhood, betrayal, and guilt. Yeah, it’s pretty great.

Top 10 of 2025: 8. Freaky Tales

★★★★--This technically came out in 2024, but you couldn’t see it anywhere until 2025. So I’m including here.
 
God, I’m a sucker for whacky, blood soaked anthology movies. Throw in the summer of any random year from my childhood. And set it in the Bay area. And toss out some obscure 1980s NBA. Goddamn. 
 
This wild, nostalgic ride blends punk, hip-hop, crime, the supernatural, and basketball into a four-part anthology that’s is pure chaotic energy. Solid, fun ensemble cast led by Pedro Pascal (who absolutely kills it), Ben Mendelsohn, Jay Ellis (the best part of the movie), Normani, Dominique Thorne, Jack Champion, Tom Hanks (who is amazing), Too Short, that Angus Cloud kid that died a couple years ago that I keep seeing in movie, and Marshawn Lynch. It is a crazy good time and ends on the highest of notes. 

Top 10 of 2025: 9. F1

★★★★--Any time Brad Pitt is in a movie, it is probably gonna end up on my list at the end of the year. Kind of a commercial for a sport no one in the United States care about, but I’m glad I saw it on the big screen. This was so bad ass. Crazy visuals and sound. There were times when I was stunned. Only happens every so often. I think the last time before this year (the hill scene in One Battle After Another also got me) was Oppenheimer. Before that, Nope. The race footage is that good. Hell, this was one of my favorite sports movies. Doesn’t hold up to the best of the Rocky/Creed movies, but I’d say it could hang with pretty much anything else. 

 

Directed by one Joseph Kosinski. I sort of hate all his other movies. They include: Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, Only the Brave, Top Gun: Maverick, Spiderhead (which I haven’t seen), and he wrote Twisters. Rounding out the solid cast were Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin, Train Dreams, Night Swim) whose character is irritatingly named Kate McKenna (not to be confused with the greatest SNL actor of all-time, Kate McKinnon), potential future-star Damson Idris whom I only know from this, and Javier Bardem. And love that Hans Zimmer score. 

Top 10 of 2025: Tie—10. Mickey 17

★★★★--Some serious Pattinson-on-Pattinson action. The first third is amazing. The second third is solid. The last third, especially in the last 20 minutes, is lame. However, overall, it was fun and silly and my kind of shit. 
 
Bong Joon-ho (of Parasite fame) doing a sci-fi satire. Definitely one for me. Saw complaints about the tone, but I personally loved that part of it. Sort of silly, yeah, while dealing with real issues of life and death in a fucked up time. I found it consistent and good for what the film is. The Running Man it was not. 
 
Stars Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. Pattinson is the clear star, though. He does an amazing job of playing the “Expendable” (Mickey Barnes) in another sort of twin movie. He is part of a group that goes to a distant ice planet with the job of dying repeatedly. Once expired, he is reprinted with his memories intact. Uses this setup to rail against capitalism, authoritarianism, and humanity’s hubris. Lot of absurdist gallows humor. Also doesn’t skrimp on the feels. And what a time to release a movie about how those in power see people and resources as disposable.

Top 10 of 2025: Tie—10. The Monkey

★★★★--Watched exactly 100 movies from this past year. This out of 219 total for the year. First was Get Away. Last was Neighborhood Watch. Neither of them made my best of, though Neighborhood Watch was a lot of fun. 

Some honorable mentions include The Smash Machine, Weapons, Companion, Bugonia, The Shrouds, Invader, Marty Supreme, and Dead of Winter. Any year I struggle to put just 10 movies on my favorite list is a good year. 

 

A lot of these are “better” than the films on my list, these are just the ones that are my 10 favorite.

 

Anyway, The Monkey. The third twin movie on this list. It’s not a perfect movie. Star Theo James is much more believable as the cool, dickhead brother. 

 

Based on a Stephen King story. I read this three or four years ago before watching Monkey Shines, which I thought was based on King’s work. It wasn’t, but is still awesome. 

 

This is the only of Osgood Perkins’s three movies I’ve really cared for so far, the other two being Longlegs and Keeper. Here he delves deep into his personal trauma. His father, Anthony Perkins, you know, Norman Bates, died when the director was young of complications of AIDS, which he contracted as a closeted gay man. His mother, Berry Berenson, also an actress, was on American Airlines Flight 11 that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks. Perkins has said as much, saying specifically it’s about the melancholy of living. How casual tragedy becomes, like with the priest treating the funerals as a joke. Most of the deaths are funny as hell. But it’s inevitable, tragedy, death, and it comes in ways you don’t see coming, but is always just around the corner. Embrace the absurdity of living, this film says, or you are gonna have a hard time. That’s my brand.