I have a number of goals for 2026, both on this blog, online in general, and in the real world. I’m waking up more and more to what the world feels like it is and what I feel like it should be, and there is a large gap there that, bluntly, I feel the need to do something about.
As we approach the end of the year, I realize that if I’m going to finish my Oscar chores, I need to get on the last couple of movies I haven’t seen. I started to watch Nickel Boys a few months ago, and then dropped off. This has nothing to do with the quality of the film. It has everything to do with the fact that it feels like this country is regressing, and movies that deal with oppression, racism, and similar topics are more overwhelming than normal right now. And make no mistake—this is very much a movie about racism and civil rights.
What’s frustrating here is that in a fair and just world, it wouldn’t be that story. We’re going to spend most of our time with Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), who is a promising student who appears poised for academic success. He is accepted into a study program at an HBCU, and while hitchhiking to campus, is picked up by a man driving a stolen car. When they are pulled over, Elwood, who is a minor, is accused and convicted of being the man’s accomplice. As a minor, he can’t be sent to prison, so he is instead sent to a reform school called Nickel Academy.
Wes Anderson is one of those directors whose films are immediately recognizable. I was trying to figure out exactly what it is in terms of his composition and characters that makes his film so distinctive and I’ve finally figured it out—it’s the title of this write-up. Everyone in Wes Anderson films is autistic. In his early films, it was only some of the characters, but now, everyone in his films has got a touch of the ‘tism, and they’ve all got the same variety. It wasn’t until I finished The Phoenician Scheme that I finally understood this.
The Phoenician Scheme is mid-level Wes Anderson, and I don’t like having to say that. I tend to like Wes Anderson films pretty well, although I can only take a bit of him at a time. Now that I’ve seen this, I probably won’t watch another of his films for six or seven months. When Anderson is good, he’s really good. When he’s off, even a bit, everything feels like it falls apart. The Phoenician Scheme just never feels like it gels in the way his films normally do. It might be simply because the characters here, almost to a person, are unlikeable.
On another note, it appears that at some point, 15 movies were added to the List, which (according to IMDb) is up to 1260 total entries, so I suddenly have a touch of work to do on that—I’ve seen most of them already. So I’ll be getting through few that I’m missing soon. That being the case, I’m going to suggest my yearly addition of 10 movies. I won’t include anything from 2025, but I will likely touch on 2024. As always, these are not ranked, just in the order I thought of them.
EDIT: It's been brought to my attention that one of my original picks, BlacKkKlansman, has been on the 1001 List before, so I am replacing it.
I am someone who has a lot of hard and fast habits, but not a lot of hard and fast rules. There are a few solid rules that tend to work really well for me, though. One of the rules that does work for me is that if you find something that manopshere podcasters and gym bros hate, it’s almost certainly going to be something great. Case in point: Kristen Stewart. Because of the popularity of the Twilight series among teen girls for years, Stewart, much like Taylor Swift and boy bands, became the focus of intense hatred of guys who seem to do everything specifically to impress other men. So when a film like Love Lies Bleeding shows up, they’re going to hate it by rote without looking.
It's such a weird way to live, and it seems to be only Kristen Stewart who gets this treatment from those films. Robert Pattinson, Michael Sheen, Anna Kendrick, Edi Gathegi, Rami Malek, Graham Greene…all of them emerged unscathed eventually (okay, maybe not Taylor Lautner). But Kristen Stewart has been doing interesting work for the last decade, and Love Lies Bleeding, made by Rose Glass, who also directed Saint Maud, is a great case in point.
One of the issues with Best Animated Feature specifically at the Oscars is that the winner is pretty much always going to be a movie for children. There are movies that are nominated that are clearly for adults, and this is a trend I like, even if I don’t always like the movie in question. It’s how we got nominations of films like I Lost My Body, Anomalisa, and Persepolis (and it doesn’t explain why Waltz with Bashir was robbed). Memoir of a Snail was never going to win this award, but I love that it got nominated, and it certainly partially makes up for the fact that Adam Elliot was denied a nomination for Mary & Max.
Make no mistake—while the Claymation looks like it would appeal to kids, Memoir of a Snail is clearly made for an adult audience. This is not merely for a couple of minor moments of animated nudity, but because of the adult themes—religious abuse, sexual kinks, suicide, and more. This is not a movie to sit the kiddies in front of while you go about your day. The bland color palette might be the first indication of this, but then again, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie exist.
This might well be the shortest review I have written for this site other than those I do in the monthly wrap-ups. There’s an inherent problem in looking at a movie like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The problem is that there is an inherent audience for this film, and you are either a part of that audience or you aren’t. Furthermore, you already know if you are in the audience for this movie or not. Did you watch the 1990s Twin Peaks television series? If you did, congratulations—this movie is for you. Have you not watched that series? You won’t have any interest in this.
In fact, the problem is even more significant. If you’ve watched Twin Peaks, you’ve almost certainly already seen Fire Walk with Me. The only reasons you haven’t seen this if you’ve seen the show are that you just finished the first two seasons of the show (I finished them on Thursday), or you were forced to watch the show by someone else and you didn’t like it, so the movie didn’t interest you. In any event, you’ve seen this, plan to see it in the immediate future, or have absolutely no interest in seeing it.
We’re at the time of year where people are starting to put together their year-end movie lists, both in general and in terms of specific genres. For some people, it’s also the time of year to put together lists of movies they were disappointed in. For whatever reason, it’s become quite trendy to list Zach Creggar’s Weapons on the list of disappointments for a lot of horror movie bloggers and commentators. I have to think that while some of that is likely honest, some of it genuinely feels like rage farming. Weapons goes in an unusual direction, certainly, and it might not be what people expected, but the seeming outrage I’ve seen from a couple of streamers really feels unbalanced.
The basic story is that one day, in the town of Maybrook, PA, 17 of the 18 children in the third grade classroom of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) don’t show up for school. Only Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) shows up for class. The 17 children are missing; parents of some of the houses check on their cameras and all of them confirm that at 2:17 in the morning, their children got up, left the house, and ran out into the street, all running off in the same direction, arms wide, not unlike Naruto.
There are times when I watch something, and I realize I am not the target audience. I felt this significantly with a number of Blaxploitation films from the 1970s. I felt it culturally when I watched Celine and Julie Go Boating. In a lot of cases, these are movies that I liked, but I felt like there was something there that was preventing me from fully getting the sense that the filmmaker intends. That’s definitely the case with I Saw the TV Glow.
What is the deal here? This is very clearly and very obviously a movie about someone coming to term with (allegorically in the sense of the movies) with being transgender. The film is very much about living a lie and living your own personal truth regardless of the consequences and despite the risks. I certainly have felt this way in some respects, like the world that we live in is broken and that I was supposed to be something other than what I am, but at least I feel at home in my own body. Because of this, while I can appreciate and understand I Saw the TV Glow, I don’t know that I can fully understand it at its deepest level.
If you are me and you start watching The Brutalist, you take a step back when you hear the name of the main character, Lázsló Tóth (Adrien Brody). For most people, that name doesn’t mean a lot, but for me, there’s an immediate connection. Comedian Don Novello, best known for his character Father Guido Sarducci, wrote a couple of books where he played a character named Lazlo Toth. This version of Lazlo Toth wrote earnest (and ridiculous) letters to companies and famous people. Seeing someone with essentially the same name in a serious movie was a bit jarring.
It took me several days to get through The Brutalist. The version on HBO is truncated only in the sense that instead of a 15-minute intermission, there’s a 1-minute intermission. It’s still more than 200 minutes with the shorter intermission, and that’s a lot to ask from an audience for any film in one sitting. I do wonder about the necessity of the length. Film critic Mark Kermode tends to reference 2001 in a case like this—in that film, Kubrick takes use from the birth of humanity to the birth of a new species in about 2 ½ hours. In The Brutalist, we take nearly 3 ½ hours to look at the story of a fictional architect.
I genuinely enjoy the regularity of the Knives Out franchise. Based on the past decade, we’ll get a new film in the franchise around the end of 2028. The latest one, called Wake Up Dead Man hits all of the points that we got from the original Knives Out. The script is dynamite, the mystery is a good one and yet completely solvable (I guessed right), and the cast is a who’s who of modern Hollywood.
This time, and for the first time in three films, the person who is being falsely accused of a murder is a man, and a priest, no less. Former boxer and new Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) has been relegated to a backwater parish in upstate New York as his first official appointment as a priest. He is in the position of assisting Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Wicks is prickly and demanding, abusive and rude. He’s also heading a cult of personality of local parishioners, all of whom have their own foibles and dependence on Wicks.
I can’t say that Black Mirror has ruined science fiction, but it has certainly changed the perception of it a great deal. Modern science fiction that touches on themes of the dangers of technology and near-future cyberpunk feels like a Black Mirror episode. That’s definitely the case with Companion. This is a near-future story that is absolutely about AI and promised technology and exactly how it can go wrong.
This is also a case where some of the major plot points are clearly revealed in the trailer. Josh (Jack Quaid) and his girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) go for a weekend get-together with friends. Included are couple Eli (Harvey Guillén) and Patrick (Lukas Gage), Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri), and Kat’s boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend). It’s clear that Kat is not a fan of Iris, and also that Sergey is someone who doesn’t treat her very well. Sergey hints that he has connections to some dark and unsavory people; the amount of money he clearly has backs this up.
The trailer for Together from 2025 doesn’t really hide what is going to happen in this film, or at least it hints pretty heavily toward a particular main plot. Even the cover art on the disc combined with the name are going to lead your thoughts in specific directions. For someone like me, who frequently likes to analogize, I’m in a quandary. There are so many different allusions and connections I can make to books, music, and other movies that I was at least temporarily overwhelmed by the possibilities.
That said, if I can find a way to both reference my earliest prog rock musical roots and a more obscure Greek myth, I’m a happy dude. The issue here for me was the fact that I knew where the film was going before I put the disc in the spinner. The trailer gives it away, as does the cover of the DVD. That being the case, this becomes more about how the story is told rather than where the story is going.
I’ve long had a sort of love-hate relationship with Dario Argento and the giallo style in general for years. Argento’s films are all about the style and often light on substance. My knock against him has been, for years, that it feels like a lot of his films come from his visualization of a couple of outstanding scenes, and the rest of the movie is made to connect them. For as good a visual masterpiece as Suspiria is, it does seem like it started from the stabbing/hanging death and the barbed wire room and went from there. This is much less the case for Tenebrae (Tenebre in Italian, evidently), where there is an actual plot. That’s a low bar, but for gialli it’s a necessary one.
True to the style, Tenebrae is a horror movie in the guise of a mystery. Horror author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa) has come to Rome on his latest book tour, promoting a book called Tenebrae. Coming with him on the trip are his assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi) and his agent Bullmer (John Saxon). He will eventually discover that his ex-fiancée Jane (Veronica Lario) has followed him to Rome as well. What Neal doesn’t know is that just before he arrived, a young shoplifter named Elsa (Ania Pieroni) has been brutally murdered.
I spent far more time catching up on TV shows, although I only finished a couple. I did a rewatch of the NetFlix/Disney Daredevil since I realized I had never seen the third season. I also watched Helstrom, which is the one Marvel-based show you can easily skip if you decide to watch all of the Marvel content. My wife decided she wants to watch the new Dexter, so we temporarily have a Paramount account; I’m using this as an opportunity to finally watch Twin Peaks.
Movies like Him present a problem for me. I generally only do a full review of a movie from the last few years if I think it’s worth the time and effort, and Him isn’t. But I also know that the They Shoot Zombies list is still being updated pretty much every year, and there’s a non-zero chance that this will show up on it in the future. It shouldn’t, but it is better than some of the movies that have made that list. And, honestly, it’s not a movie I necessarily want to watch a second time. I don’t say this to dissuade anyone from watching on their own. Him has a lot of promise; it just doesn’t fulfill that promise.
This is very much a sports movie, and it’s one that revels in the idea of football as a sort of religion. That’s a fair position to take. It is close to a religion for a lot of people, and as someone who still lives in the shadow of Chicago where the Bears are resurgent, it feels like a lot of people are seeing the light. But it’s not just “football as religion” that makes the film go. This is football as cult, and it gets into some pretty culty places.
One of the issues with modern action movies is that they have expanded in length over time. The genre used to be pretty straight forward. You could sit down with The Terminator or Predator and be out in under 2 hours, or go with Die Hard for a bit longer than two hours. The John Wick series is a solid example of what I’m talking about. The first film runs 101 minutes, the second is 122, the third is 131, and the fourth is a whopping 169. And why? Nobody 2 is a return to normalcy. It’s a tight 89 minutes including credits, and actually a touch shorter than the original film.
It helps to know the basics of the original film. Seeming average guy Hutch (Bob Odenkirk) has what seems like an average life but is distant from his family. In reality, he’s a former assassin, who gets dragged back into the life when he beats the snot out of someone who turns out to be connected. Mayhem ensues, and it is a glorious 90 minutes or so of absolute ass kicking. So here’s the sequel.
Takashi Miike is a legendary horror director, but not every good or great director gets a hit every time they step up to the plate. I knew going in to One Missed Call (or Chakushin ari) the basics of the story. Essentially, people get a cell phone call from themselves that they invariably miss. The call they get is from the future, and essentially that call predicts their death. When the time arrives from when the call came, they die horribly, and someone from their list of contacts is called, and the cycle begins again.
I also knew about the American remake from a few years after Miike’s film. The American version of One Missed Call is legendarily bad. It’s remake of Pulse/The Wicker Man/The Uninvited levels of bad, scoring a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Honestly, the best thing I can say about Miike’s original is that it’s not the remake, but few movies are.
I’m desperately behind on finishing up the Oscar movies from 2024, having five to knock out in the next 31 days if I’m going to get them all done by the end of the year. It’s more than I’d like, and I will admit that a part of this is that I’m dreading the length of The Brutalist and I’m not that interested in Anora. But of the films I need to finish, it’s The Apprentice that I have dreaded the most. The last thing I want to spend time with is watching some sort of attempt to reform the character of Donald Trump. I have no interest in offering him any sympathy.
This is a movie where the title is doing double duty. The Apprentice, of course, is the name of Trump’s old television show, and arguably the one that truly made him accessible to the masses, and more than anything paved the way to his misbegotten presidencies. The real meaning of the title, though, is that this is essentially the origin story of Trump (Sebastian Stan, who was Oscar nominated for this, and the reason I’m watching it), who was essentially taught to be the man he is by Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Essentially, Trump learned at the feet of Cohn, who is almost certainly in the top-5 of the most genuinely evil people from the 20th Century.