she can't even watch a movie without a big pour of wine -- and popcooorn!

Hall of Presidents-ass lookin’ monkey, but the synth score ruled

Well, that’s that. Kinda has way more 2025 stuff on here than I’d expected.

Marty Supreme: What if you took apart the inspirational sports movie and put the “believe in yourself” part in a particle accelerator until it collapsed into a black hole? Has all the immaculate hallmarks of the genre (great acting, exquisite production design) in service of self-made lunacy.

Superman: Zips through plot and emotional arcs without feeling like it's constantly setting things aside for later. Maybe in a few years, it will sink under the lumbering weight of another dozen movies. For now? It's an infectiously sweet, gentle, wholesome confection that aches with kindness.

Bring Her Back: 2025's great for horror, and the Philippou bros are the most interesting directors working the genre. Smaller, more spare and unrelentingly grim than 2022's Talk to Me, but has the same spark of humanism and empathy shining in the pitch-black void. I’m Day One for what they do next.

Hard Truths: unblinking slice-of-life for a nasty old crank so wholly embodied by Marianne Jean-Baptiste's tremendous performance that it slammed the trigger on my childhood PTSD. Yet, by the end, you find this bitter piece of shit as luminous, yearning, and worthy of love as any of us.

Excellent

Final Destination Bloodlines: Rattles an established formula and serves up zippy popcorn fun about a bunch of human water balloons. Elevated by series-best comic timing, nearly parodic engagement with lore, and a terrific goodbye to Tony Todd.

me pointing to Little Richard ice skating around with a pillow strapped to his butt and explaining to my nephew that this person had a seismic impact on a century of music and pop-culture.

(clears throat) GO BIRDS

Valley Green bouncers

28 Years Later is Danny Boyle’s Fury Road: elegiac, poetic, deeply felt, and sometimes really freakin' goofy. It’s a beautiful post-apocalyptic horror fantasia that aims for the mythic visual sweep of a David Lean movie and mostly nails it. I did not expect to be so deeply moved.

Persona: It felt like checking a big thing off the to-do list, where I finally saw the clear line between this and zillion movies that exist in its wake. Still, even better to have my brain switch off Homework Mode and just get pulled along by its intoxicating, mysterious undertow.

Mickey 17: Gotta love its Gremlins 2 energy, where Bong Joon-Ho builds a giant middle finger out of studio money and gleefully sets it on fire. Doesn’t maintain the sleekness of the savage anti-capitalist first half, but there’s a lotta fun to pan for in the kitchen-sink wreckage of the back half.

OBAA: Stands alongside Sinners and Weapons as indelibly crafted pop-art meeting the moment. Bleakly comic insight on our miserable age, expertly paced to seem shaggy and relentless at the same time. There’s a car chase in a straight line and it’s one of the most thrilling things I saw all year.

Sinners: This audacious scene in the middle takes a music performance and supercharges it to cosmic scale. That's the movie: genre mash-up on a Dusk Til Dawn skeleton piling contrasting pieces to make itself bigger without falling apart. Brain-melting it manages that while moving like an angel.

Weapons: A sad, onion-layered fairy tale about lots of things, but especially about that giant AR-15 floating in the sky (even if it doesn't seem like it). How surprising, then, that something so somber and grief-tinged becomes such a rollicking, exciting crowd pleaser in the back half.

This rules. Happy for you, Kaye!