2025

dir: Ira Sachs

2025

This could be, I imagine, one of the most boring films that 2025 conjured, for certain people.

Let’s be honest, for most people. I don’t think most people, most humans, though not most people who love film, would have the time or the inclination to watch a flick like this. They would have far more entertaining things to do with their lives and their time, which could include anything from whacking cane toads, to counting trains to even jogging.

But for weird people (like me), who make decisions on what to watch based on what films esteemed film critics like Richard Brody of The New Yorker nominate in their best of end of year lists, you would come along to a film like this primed, ready to be fascinated and entertained.

And of course it helps that the film stars two people, both accomplished actors, both dream boats in their own ways. If you love Ben Whishaw, then this flick would be like crack to you: It’s 70 or so minutes of him talking talking talking endlessly and smoking. It further helps if you think Rebecca Hall is the bee’s knees too, which I do. She’s a great actor and an accomplished director as well.

The other criteria for possibly enjoying something like this is that it helps if you’re a bit of an art wanker, or whether you’re art wanker adjacent. I’m not going to pretend I knew who either Linda Rosenkrantz or Peter Hujar were back in the day or before watching this flick, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve learned that much about them, but they namedrop Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Warhol and Allen Ginsburg, and I know all of them, so I get some of the milieu they were swimming around in, back in December of 1974.

1974! That long ago? That’s like… 52 years ago! Wow, imagine if someone was, like, born in 1974? They’d be ancient! I feel like disintegrating into dust and flying away in the wind right now, but anyway…

People back then were very different, mostly because of a profound lack of technology. They didn’t fill their days with endless doomscrolling, or with posting movie reviews on websites, or shopping for furry costumes online.

They called people. On telephones. And talked to them. They smoked cigarettes, and talked face to face with people. They left their domiciles and travelled to other buildings in order to photograph people, or record them talking about themselves on tape recorders.

Sounds like the Middle Ages or something.

Artist Linda Rosenkrantz gets the idea to interview artist friends she knows in order to capture every detail of a given day of their artistic lives. She interviews her friend Peter (Whishaw), as he relates to her every single thing he did, every thought he had, every lie he said or thought of, every element of every task he performed on that particular day, being the previous day.

dir: Kelly Reichardt

2025

Hmm.

I think the title is meant to be ironic.

The Mastermind is so low stakes, despite what the jazzy 70s soundtrack would have you believe, that it’s almost a comedy. Almost. But comedy implies funny, whereas this is too wry to be openly comedic.

The central guy JB, or mastermind, if you will, is a blank chap (played by Josh O’Connor) who lives a mundane suburban life with his wife (Alana Haim, in a thankless role) and two sons. She works, and he spends most days in his boxers, dreaming of something. He is an art school dropout, and a competent carpenter, but otherwise doesn’t work. Family visits to his parents, a conservative judge (Bill Camp) and doting mother (Hope Davis) infuriate him, even though he’s way too old to be a rebellious teen.

It’s meant to be important that this is set in the 1970s, specifically 1970. The mood is intense. The war in Vietnam is escalating, and an empowered Nixon makes it feel like the spirit of activism and rebellion deserves to be crushed under the jackboots and batons of the cops and the National Guard. Previously hopeful hippies and dissidents have fled, gone underground. The tide has turned, the mood has shifted.

I don’t really see how what JB does, which is, organise the theft of four paintings from a Framingham gallery somewhere in Massachusetts, has to do with any of that, but the theft all happens early in the movie, so there’s no build up, no carefully concocted plan with meticulous precision or any of that bullshit. It just happens, but then everything runs off the rails almost immediately.

The director isn’t interested in the heist – there is far more time spent watching JB trying to hide the paintings in carefully tailored cloth bindings and a well-constructed wooden box, that he stashes in the roof above a pig sty. And when I say that’s what she’s interested in, I mean she makes us watch as JB drives to the site, removes the box from the trunk of the car, remove the paintings from the box, climb a ladder clutching two of the paintings at a time, then carry the box up the ladder, then put the paintings back in the box, then hide the box under some straw.

Does that sound fascinating to you? Does that sound like an attack on American imperialism and the domestic malaise that middle America was suffering through way back when?

dir: Rian Johnson

2025

It’s hard to talk about a film that’s really about faith without sounding like I’m succumbing to the religious bullshit we snorkel through in every day life (as atheists, obviously believers and godbotherers don’t have this problem). This film isn’t about religion, or against religion per se, but it’s not coming from the usual place you’d expect when it comes to which side it’s on.

Daniel Craig, again playing detective Benoit Blanc for the third time, might seem to be a stand in for the director, or the main character in this ambiguously named flick, but it’s not really about him, and I feel like Josh O’Connor plays the real main character. For most of the flick, or at least the entirety of the first half, he’s relating the events he experienced leading up to the murder of a beloved monsignor, in the hopes of enlisting someone’s aid in proving his innocence. It’s O’Connor who somehow walks away with the film, somehow managing to credibly and believably portray something I had no idea was still possible, being an earnest Catholic priest who actually believes in his faith and who actually wants to love and help people.

That in itself is something of a miracle. He even does okay with the American accent, which couldn’t have been easy against the Foghorn Leghorn bullshit of Benoit Blanc (admittedly with the volume turned way down this time around).

Even with these solid performers in the mix, there’s also towering performances from Josh Brolin and Glenn Close to compete with, since this flick is somewhat more dramatically serious and less openly comedic than the earlier two movies (Glass Onion especially, which was way more farce than class). All the while I don’t want to make the flick sound like a slog; murder mysteries after all aren’t meant to be stolidly ‘serious’ cinema, unless you’re talking about the true crime variety. It’s meant to almost be fun and breezy, despite the number of bodies piling up.

These films are never about grief over who died, they’re whodunits and howdunits, and even then, I hesitate to mention, the good versions of these mean that the actual solution doesn’t really matter that much, it’s just punctuation at the end. This film, being a self-aware entity, even knows this, mentions all the predictable plot requirements and sources (locked room mysteries, or impossible crimes) and only subverts them in the mildest of manners.

dir: Edgar Wright

2025

This was never a good idea. It wasn’t a success the first time. I’m not saying you can’t remake a movie, because, that’s like 90 per cent of movies these days, but if you couldn’t make a movie work with Arnie in the lead role, what makes you think remaking it with a blancmange, a sculpted lump of tofu like Glen Powell is going to crack the box office?

The original Running Man from 1987 had Arnold in his prime, and it still died at the box office, because audiences weren’t ready to see him star in weird sci-fi adjacent corporate tv satires yet. I mean, there are probably a stack of other reasons why it didn’t delight audiences and make lots of money, but that has to be the main one. Plus audiences, mostly made up of morons, didn’t like watching a movie that mocked them for loving game shows, and telling them they’re morons who consume the dumbest media because they’re sadistic braying donkeys who love watching people die in horrible ways.

What has changed since then? Not much, really.

The most disappointing aspect of this whole endeavour is having Edgar Wright direct such an uninspiring ‘property’. He’s so great and brilliant everywhere else! He’s even delivered multiple parodies of these kinds of movies before, and yet now, as penance, they forced him, perhaps at gunpoint to make an uninspired straight version of the kind of Hollywood movie we thought he probably despised.

This is, for me, the most memorable part of the original Running Man - it’s not Arnie one-liners like “Well that hit the spot” or “he had to split” or “that boy’s one mean motherfucker” uttered by a sweet old lady, or any of the action, strange clothing choices or any other nonsense that happens: it’s the scene where two women are at a vending machine, and, to show how expensive things are in the “future”, being 2017, a can of Coke costs $6, and one of the ladies grunts over how many coins she has to feed into the machine to get her precious drink.

Six bucks? At least they got one thing right about the horrible future they envisaged way back in the 1980s. They got absolutely everything else wrong, though.

Sure, neo-liberalism and corporatism dominated society to a ridiculous extent, but we haven’t had food riots yet (in the States at least). There is the war in Venezuela to look forward to, though.

From the vantage point of the 1980s, they really did imagine that the dystopias of the future would look and feel like the 70s, just with odder clothing, resource shortages, pastel colours and perms as far as the eye could see.

Is Arnie good in the original flick? Of course not, but what does that matter, when has that ever mattered with Arnie? He’s fucking Arnie! That’s his superpower, his calling card and his motivation for everything.

The original also tries to tackle the idea of a group of revolutionaries trying to take on their corporate masters in order to cast off the shackles of oppression, but it’s a whole underground militia. What links there are between the masters of television and the political powers / military junta is not clear, just that it all blurs together In THE FUTURE!

Here, it’s far more explicit that the regime in charge that produces a program as dumb as this one is in cahoots with a privatised corporate police force called the NCG that brutalises whoever the Running Man show wants brutalised, and anyone else as well for good measure.

If the premise of the first flick was somewhat far-fetched; that the most important and viewed program of all time was one in which criminals are hunted and executed by ‘heroic’ hunters, this flick pushes things in an even less believable direction given people’s relationship with linear television these days: people religiously watching one program where three victims are selected, demonised by the program makers, and then graphically executed on camera.

Would people watch that? Of course they would. But what is this thing called ‘television’ they keep referring to? No-one watches that now, so why would they be watching it in the future?