This year, I've decided to try something different. On my Letterboxd, I have, alphabetically, the 23 movies I considered for this list. I have finally whittled that number down to this Top Ten, which I present here, not in alphabetical order, nor ranked, but in the order in which I saw them:
dir/scr: Ryan Coogler
pr: Ryan Coogler / Zinzi Coogler / Sev Ohanian
cin: Autumn Durald Arkapaw
The first movie of 2025 that sent me soaring. A stunning horror/music epic of mind-boggling scale - narratively, thematically, visually - it is both highly entertaining and a genuinely provocative piece of art. Coogler takes time to establish the community built within the margins of 1930s Southern society, one that will gather one fateful night for music and celebration, only to face an outside horror: an Irish vampire whose promise of eternal life comes with the sacrifice of individual expression. A fascinating way to discuss assimilation and cultural exchange vs. appropriation, but you can also just thrill to the action (plenty of it), the performances, and, especially, the MUSIC. I didn't even see it in IMAX and still, I felt the rest of the room fade away during the already iconic "I Lied to You" sequence, the screen overtaking all as Coogler et. al. paid tribute to music as emotional expression, artistic interpretation, and cross-generational communication, the blues of Mile Canton's Sammie summoning banjo pickers of the past, rockstars of the future, Chinese opera singers and West African dancers, hip hop girlies and, ultimately, the monsters just outside. You don't get many flicks like this, successful both as a blockbuster and as art. Few films released throughout the rest of the year matched the high I felt after this one. Until…
Highest 2 Lowest
dir: Spike Lee
pr: Jason Michael Berman / Todd Black
scr: Alan Fox
cin: Matthew Libatique
Caveat/confession: I’ve never seen Akira Kurosawa's High and Low, which this is a remake of (both are adapted from the 87th Precinct novel King's Ransom by Ed McBain). Well, whatever, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Like Sinners, it deftly employs the trappings of its genre while using music to shape the narrative and its characters: Norm Lewis singing Rodgers & Hammerstein over sweeping views of our millionaire music exec’s penthouse apartment and the city it looks down on, immediately sets up how expressions of authenticity and respectability run throughout the narrative: has Denzel Washington's David King still got the ear for raw talent that took him from the streets of Harlem to a $20M penthouse in the DUMBO district, or has success, wealth, and age rendered him out-of-touch? And how will his idea of himself affect the harrowing decisions he is faced with making during the narrative’s 24 hours? A$AP Rocky contributes two original hip-hop tracks that become vital to the plot, the movie ends with a beautiful orchestral ballad from Aiyana-Lee, and there’s a banger chase sequence midfilm partially scored live by the late Eddie Palmieri and his Salsa Orchestra. Come for the thrills, stay for the music!
Yes, for the third time in a row, a movie whose story is inextricable from its soundtrack. Ann Lee was a 17th-century religious leader who formed her own subset of the Shakers, itself a subset of the Quakers, albeit with an emphasis on intense convulsing, dancing, and singing. The narrative is scripted not unlike a church pageant: Thomasin Mackenzie's narrator sometimes tells you exactly what you're seeing, sometimes fills in blanks that could have been dramatized, sometimes ignores connective tissue that leave questions hanging, and miracles are related without question - for instance, the visions Ann experiences during a period of starvation following physical and emotional trauma are divine manifestations.The words are propaganda for awe and recruitment, but Mona Fastvold’s direction allows you to draw your own conclusions, allowing for both grace and skepticism, even as she makes sure we understand what makes this figure so exceptional. That’s all done through Amanda Seyfried’s performance, and God, she nails it: slight of frame but with undeniable purpose in her bearing, you understand how she was able to start a movement that has long outlasted her. And, yes, it is a musical, though an unconventional one. Music appears to be the theme of 2025 cinema, and The Testament of Ann Lee has two sequences that rival the one I mentioned from Sinners: the somber yet hypnotic “Beautiful Treasures” finale, and, most effective for me, within the first thirty minutes, the first Shaker “Worship” celebration we see in full a community glorifying Christ and all He created through a sprawling, spiraling dance number through a country manor, a scene that had me weeping the first time I saw it.
Hedda
dir/scr: Nia DaCosta
pr: Nia DaCosta / Dede Gardner / Jeremy Kleiner / Gabrielle Nadig / Tessa Thompson
cin: Sean Bobbitt
An adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler that takes the source material's characters and themes and adjusts time period, races, sexualities, genders, and vibes to create a delicious, scandalous, but by no means superficial or trivial, melodrama. It’s a thrilling showcase for Tessa Thompson, cementing her status as one of the most versatile, exciting actors (male or female) currently working, her Hedda a confounding mixture of sympathetic depressive and calculating manipulator; is she a woman with few options trying to seize what little control she can, or is she a spoiled brat determined to prove to everyone just how high above them all she is? Can she even help it? Thompson keeps us guessing, keeps us gasping, she’s a hurricane and the life of the party, and she’s complemented by the seductive stillness of Nina Hoss as Lovborg; that simple gender swap deepens the conflicts - between Hedda and Lovborg, between Lovborg and the academic establishment, between Hedda's husband and everyone else...it's a genius move whose new complication are actually explored, thoroughly, wonderfully. Might be the most fun I had watching a movie this year.
Blue Moon
dir: Richard Linklater
pr: Mike Blizzard / Richard Linklater / John Sloss
scr: Robert Kaplow
cin: Shane F. Kelly
This one’s also a lot of fun, by the way, but how could it not with a plot like this: Lorenz Hart, lyricist and former writing partner of composer Richard Rodgers, getting increasingly soused the night Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! premieres on Broadway. That’s it! You just get to spend two hours hanging out with Hart, who, like most artists, swings wildly from sentimentality (his narrative about a mouse he catches but releases rather than kills) to plain meanness (his takedown of Hammerstein's lyrics is a hoot) - but always in a way that forces your attention. As portrayed by Ethan Hawke, Hart is magnetic, charming, and fascinating...until he starts to become depressing, dull, and desperate…which ultimately makes him heartbreaking. In order to be a gregarious charmer, you’ve got to have people to charm, and Hawke is surrounded by a game ensemble: Bobby Cannavale, Patrick Kennedy, Jonah Lee, Andrew Scott, Simon Delaney, and Margaret Qualley, among others. It genuinely feels like you’re part of a wonderful, witty evening of gossip and banter, an intimate, accidental party.
I don’t watch or understand baseball, but that doesn't matter. Eephus - named for some kind of curveball that appears to stay in the air forever - is about community ballplayers "enjoying" one last game on a field that is about to be razed. And yeah, look at these guys: most of them are older, out of shape, beholden to other responsibilities…hell, most of them spend their time bitching about the game. Yet they keep going: though they lose players, though the sun sets, though there is no longer electricity running to the field lights, they keep playing, they keep the space alive, delaying the inevitable, suspending time. There is no plot, per se, and it feels like you’re just hanging out with the guys, but at some point the profundity of the experience finally clicked, and I understood how this is just like someone fighting to stay alive. The light’s fading, everyone they knew is disappearing from their lives, and even the games they like to play are becoming increasingly unfollowable, yet they - well, we, people in general, I mean - are determined to stay alive, to keep what little time we have going for as long as possible. To stay in the air forever.
Yes, the very Ella McCay that bombed with critics and audiences, neither of whom could apparently appreciate a warm-hearted screwball comedy with just the right balance of idealism and wariness. I loved Emma Mackey as Ella, believable as the kind of well-meaning but steamrolling do-gooder who is admirable, deeply frustrating, and ultimately just the very best of us, flaws and all. I loved Jamie Lee Curtis as the straight-shooting Aunt Helen who serves as Ella's best friend and conscience - she reminded me of my own aunts, especially when she said things like, "You promised you wouldn't be yourself!" and "Please excuse the way I talk or act." I loved that it found new ways to explore its overall concern, that understanding each other as a couple, a family, a community, a country, starts not just with honesty and communication, but with generosity of spirit. And I loved that it said that sometimes those that betray our trust don’t deserve our forgiveness or our time! This is a delight!
A sweeping historical thriller about a man who becomes targeted by Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, riotously funny and heart-in-throat suspenseful, all while retaining this sense of mourning for the lives and stories that, whether through political violence, scant records, or just the ravages of time, will never be known in full. Through Wagner Moura's Armando, alias Marcelo, we come to appreciate both the tragedy of totalitarianism (his wife killed, his son in hiding, the liquidation of his former university department) and the absurdity of it (an unclaimed body lying dormant at a gas station for weeks, police hiring hitmen who hire hitmen who target the police, a disembodied leg wreaking havoc amongst gay cruisers at a public park). There are surprising turns I have not even hinted at. The attention to period detail - in costume, sets, hair and makeup, attitude - is uncanny. And the ensemble! You could almost say every performance is the best one in the film!
Dementia is a cruel disease, and while this movie doesn’t flinch from it, nor does it make it a long march to mental vacancy. Writer-director Sarah Friedland and star Kathleen Chalfant never forget that Ruth is, currently, right now, a person, one with a full life: a great cook but never a chef, a carnal woman, a woman who wrote cookbooks and participated in the civil rights movement, whose past and present are increasingly folding together as her dementia progresses. There are the heartbreaking, desperate scenes, yes, scenes where Ruth attempts to demonstrate that she is well in control of her faculties, even as we see the slipups, even as we see her determination change to panic. Yet she is also allowed the little graces: flirtations with handsome doctors, a chance to show her competency in the kitchen, meditative respite in the pool. There's the obligatory breakout scene, of course, though this one felt so real in how the initial desperation gave way to a casual stroll to the grocer: the unseen reasoning and recalibration beneath the fog. It's a warm, funny, humane movie, capped by a scene set to Dionne Warwick's "Don't Make Me Over" packed with decades' worth of love, regret, things unsaid, things that will never be understood, before a final, inevitable surrender… I think it’d make an interesting double feature with Eephus.
Song Sung Blue
dir/scr: Craig Brewer
pr: Craig Brewer / John Davis / John Fox
cin: Amy Vincent
We began with musical ecstasy, and that's where we're ending things. An unconventional music biopic - not about Neil Diamond, but about a couple in Wisconsin who find fulfillment by performing "a Neil Diamond experience", something more than a tribute band. And like any music biopic, you get the expected beats - early struggles, rise to stardom, personal turmoil that brings them to their lowest point, the second chance, the Big Climax - but with surprising twists to each element...and it's all true! This is a film for the modest dreamers, the people who aren't trying to become millionaire superstars, but who just want to find fulfillment doing something they love and sharing it with the world. It's about how we need music to express our sorrows, our joys, our strengths, our love, when we just don't have the words for it. It's about the incomparable joy of finding someone who understands you, of meeting that mate who fits you so well it feels, not even miraculous, but inevitable, fated. Hugh Jackman is phenomenal, the part he was born to play; Kate Hudson matches him beat for beat, a real "didn't know she had this in her" performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment