Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in 2025 I made 34 trips to the theater to see films released or screened in festivals that same year. Meanwhile at home, I made a point of checking out 27 new releases that were conveniently available through our family’s streaming subscriptions — what sounded most watchable and/or what felt like potential future Oscar nominees that should be gotten over with in advance to ease my annual Oscar Quest time crunch. I did what I could within the limited free time allotted.

The sixth annual installment of this MCC tradition is a rundown of all those films I saw on comfy, convenient home video in their year of release, ranked from awfullest to awesomest. I’ve also listed each service that carried them at the time I saw them, though a few may have migrated to different apps since then. On with our countdown!

27. Star Trek: Section 31 (Paramount+). Once upon a time Academy Award Winner Michelle Yeoh stole three seasons’ worth of Star Trek: Discovery as the Mirror Universe’s genocidal Emperor Philippa Georgiou, who’s later forced to assimilate into their crew for extra contrived hi-jinks. Franchise overlords granted a spinoff to her snarky antihero who amassed a body count in the billions — but they were another universe’s innocents, so they don’t count, because reasons — before she’s recruited into Starfleet’s space-CIA division. Section 31 was introduced in Deep Space Nine but have degraded into an edgelord Suicide Squad knockoff that’s the wretched opposite of “too cerebral”, with lowlights including a dull chase-fight set inside a tunnel of anime speed-lines, a nano-leprechaun, a welcome but whiffed attempt to make Captain Rachel Garrett happen, and less, less, less.

26. Ballad of a Small Player (Netflix). Gambling addicts never stop after One Last Really Big Win, so Colin Farrell’s pursuit of redemption through materially obsessed risk rings hollow from the get-go. We meet him only after years of luck and savoir faire have dribbled down the drain — assuming he ever had any of either — and never see him actually charm anyone of sound mind at Macau’s sea of casino tables, begging the questions of why this loser wasn’t jailed or murdered in an alley years ago and why we shouldn’t root for his creditors. Director Edward Berger (Conclave, All Quiet on the Western Front) filters Farrell’s sweaty desperation amid all the neon nightlife through a Terry Gilliam Wacky-Cam, only to grind the circus to a halt for romantic dullness with Fala Chen (Shang-Chi‘s dead mom) that’s meant to be soul-searching but comes off mind-numbing. So unconvincing and self-deluded, not even Tilda Swinton’s latest sci-fi hairstyle can save it.

25. Mountainhead (Max). Succession creator Jesse Armstrong writes and directs his first full feature, in which three billionaires and a multimillionaire retreat to faraway luxurious safety and watch the world burn, only for their greedy camaraderie to devolve into close-quarters survival-of-the-fittest slapfights. Cory Michael Smith (Gotham‘s Riddler) is the easiest to watch as amorally repugnant social-media titan Schmelon Schmusk, but Steve Carell hasn’t shed all his Michael Scott tics and it’s cringe-com not nearly funny enough to overlook that it’s just too much extremist narcissism too soon, and not worthy enough to snag Logan Roy’s mantle.

24. Play Dirty (Prime Video). Donald Westlake’s Parker novels under his Richard Stark pseudonym are classics of the heist subgenre, but I refuse to believe Mark Wahlberg is the right guy for their latest adaptation, based on his average jock-hero line readings. This abrasive action-noir caper isn’t writer/director Shane Black’s worst film of this millennium, but nothing here suggests what made the books so influential that the eminently discerning creators of Leverage named a main character after him.

23. The Gorge (Apple+). Somewhere in the world is a chasm with a mysterious evil dwelling within that might doom all humanity should it escape. Our best defense is exactly two snipers (Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy) on 24/7 guard duty for endless months, each stationed on its west and east sides, who must never let anything crawl up those two sides, and we’ll just assume none of its denizens ever wanders toward the undefended north or south ends. The inevitable long-distance romance has a few adorable moments (e.g., a birthday blasting of “Blitzkrieg Bop” across the gap), but after the time-bendy super-sorcery of Dr. Strange and the psychic-teens-vs.-serial-killer creepfest of The Black Phone, director Scott Derrickson settles for CG-monster fights, pitting Mr. and Mrs. Smith against Groot-Ents living in Annihilation‘s Shimmer and tossing in bigger explosions. The more we learn What’s Really Going On, the more predictable it gets, and the more I got distracted by logistical concerns such as “That heavy cable sure was tied into an extremely tight knot” or “We haven’t seen the last of Gangs of London‘s Sope Dirisu, right? Right? Hello, movie?”

22. A House of Dynamite (Netflix). Academy Award Winner Kathryn Bigelow returns with a three-act end-of-the-world thriller about what some folks might do with their free time if they only had eighteen minutes till the first nuclear missile might hit America and start World War III. I don’t mind its unorthodox ending in theory, which angered more than a few viewers who waited in vain for Chekhov’s Nuke to detonate, but this anti-blockbuster art-film conceit puts the weight of the entire film and the world on the shoulders of President Idris Elba. His presence should’ve been an easy home run, but it isn’t, whether he was too exhausted from overwork, or Bigelow let him down, or screenwriter Noah Oppenheim (Jackie, The Maze Runner) didn’t ask enough of him, or whatever went wrong…all I know is our man didn’t nail it and the attempted realization of Gen-X’s starkest childhood fear ends not with a bang, but with a sigh.

21. Havoc (Netflix). I brake for anything by Gareth Evans, director of The Raid and master of Gangs of London‘s season-1 carnage. (I’ve rewatched the farmhouse episode more times than any film made in the last fifteen years.) Sure enough, the action scenes here are impeccably Gatling-meat-grinder anxiety-inducing, but sometimes they pause and dullness stomps in. Tom Hardy is irritating as a blowhard corrupt cop tasked with rescuing the criminal son of corrupt mayoral candidate Forest Whitaker from the misdirected vengeance of Asian drug gangs whose grievances should actually be toward even corrupter cop Timothy Olyphant. Extra demerits for wasting Gangs‘ Narges Rashidi in a meager holding place as Hardy’s Concerned Ex-Wife. If someone’s posted a “Havoc fight-scene supercut” on YouTube, check that out instead.

20. Predators (Paramount+). Not Nimrod Antal’s popcorn flick about fictional space monsters, but rather a documentary about real-world human monsters.
This deep-dive into the heyday of Dateline NBC‘s now-classic “To Catch a Predator” recurring feature is initially revelatory as it revisits the show’s successes and failures, including the one time their camera crew’s looming presence seemingly drove a suspect to commit suicide. The final act goes introspectively meta as the doc’s director begins interrogating his own backstory and biases, and wondering aloud why he felt driven to make this. Stuck in the middle, though, is a dawdling ride-along with one of the show’s far-too-many YouTube imitators who stage their own amateurish anti-pedo Candid Camera GOTCHA! videos for Likes and clicks, convincing themselves they’re doing a public service but leaving the audience power-cringing at their bumbling till our nerves go numb.

19. Drop (Peacock). Happy Death Day director Christoper Landon serves up another slick thriller, this time sans sci-fi with Meghann Fahy (The White Lotus) as a woman who’s being ordered by mysterious texts to murder her blind date Or Else. There’s much fun to be had as Fahy troubleshoots her dilemmas and tries to pin the source of all these memes that are coming from inside the restaurant. The Law of Economy of Characters drains away the suspense once you realize the only viable suspects are the over-the-top peppy gay waiter, the too-suspiciously glowering tech-bro glued to his phone, or Reed Diamond from Homicide: Life on the Street sheepishly smiling at her from a far corner. It isn’t exactly Agatha Christie.

18. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (Max). Completed in 2022 but tossed in a subbasement by the Max regime, this wacky Warner Bros cartoon’s suppression never earned quite the public outcry that Coyote vs. Acme‘s did, even though they bear the same gift-shop merch label. It’s amusing enough for what it is, casting Porky Pig and Daffy Duck as adopted brothers raised by the same farmer who grow up and have to save us all from an alien invasion that lacks Marvin the Martian’s charm. Bonus points for rebooting long-lost counterpart Petunia Pig with a newly STEM-forward personality, but a few bawdy gags that somehow made it in kept knocking me right out of it.

17. Highest 2 Lowest (Apple+). Spike and Denzel together again! Their latest team-up is a remake of Kurosawa’s adaptation of one of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels (I’ve read several, strongly recommended), about a high-end shoe magnate who’s threatened by kidnappers that come after his son, only to realize they actually snatched his chauffeur’s son, which presents (to him) a very different list of response options. The first hour is oddly stultifying,. ransom-movie boilerplate that could’ve been directed by anyone (a tense single-take scene with Cloak & Dagger‘s Aubrey Joseph gets undercut by a bedroom poster that’s aged poorly since its early-2024 filming), but the second half winds up to a breakneck pitch as it all leads to an extended confrontation between Denzel and A$AP Rocky’s killer performance as our bitter villain. At the film’s pivot-point, distracting but hilarious even if you aren’t in on the joke, is Lee’s obligatory fourth-wall break — a chant-and-dance PSA led by old pal Nick Turturro that has nothing to do with any of this, but the proud New Yorker just really, really wanted to make sure we all know “BOSTON SUCKS!”

16. The Lost Bus (Apple+). The first major film about wildfires since last year’s California catastrophe sidesteps that particular too-soon setting in favor of a similar true story out of Texas. Local man Matthew McConaughey is a school bus driver aiming to transport a busload of kids and their occasionally unhelpful teacher America Ferrara to safety at Point B through the vast CGI conflagrations surrounding them on all sides. Bourne maestro Paul Greengrass is aces at turning heroic Everyman tales into nail-biting popcorn flicks (see also: United 93) and the ubiquitous firestorms more than validate the film’s mention on the Academy Awards’ shortlist for Best Visual Effects, but the innovations end at the fire breaks, especially whenever my wife Anne kept predicting its easy plot-turns while half-eavesdropping from another room.

15. Train Dreams (Netflix). The makers of last year’s great prison-stage drama Sing Sing follow up with a Pacific Northwest tone poem about the hard-knock vicissitudes of Joel Edgerton’s barely verbal lumberjack. The erstwhile Young Uncle Owen has come a long way and delivered numerous sterling performances since then, but the attempt at deciduous komorebi isn’t scintillating enough to reach a Terrence Malick nature-trance state and the film burns through a stellar supporting cast too quickly for us to appreciate most of them — William H. Macy, Kerry Condon, Clifton Collins Jr., and most criminally Academy Award Nominee Felicity Jones, onetime star-warrior Jyn Erso herself, reduced to a Concerned Wife. On the other hand, honk if you recognize Paul Schneider, making the most of a couple minutes’ screen time to exhibit far catchier quirkiness than he was ever afforded in two seasons of Parks and Rec.

14. Jay Kelly (Netflix). George Clooney is getting old and has regrets! And so does his titular character, a Hollywood legend onscreen and a spoiled narcissist everywhere else. Noah Baumbach’s latest human-interest drama is more intriguing whenever he focuses on old pal Adam Sandler as Kelly’s manager who’s tired of being used as a servant without regard for his own personal life. Most astounding is a brief visit from Billy Crudup as an old friend with thoughts about being forgotten in the wake of Kelly’s rise to stardom. But in case we’re still in denial that any of this is not necessarily a roman à clef for Clooney, Baumbach tacks on a precious meta-ending to catch up the six slower viewers out there who don’t notice that Kelly and Clooney sure do have an awful lot in common, and he means like an AWFUL LOT, WINK WINK WINKETY WINK.

13. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (Netflix). Benoit Blanc is back and more insufferable than ever! Rian Johnson’s one-man revival of the mystery-movie genre (unless Branagh’s Poirot might care to rejoin us) keeps escalating in star power and convolution, this time with a locked-room puzzler in a dying church with a tiny congregation made entirely of suspects. If you can get past Monsignor Josh Brolin’s red-state blind-rage persona and Daniel Craig playing more of a nosy sitcom neighbor than a sleuth this time, enjoy the most stand-up participant here: Assistant Pastor Josh O’Connor (The Crown, Challengers), who strongly illustrates the never-ending tensions between sin, regrets, redemption, perseverance, compassion, and the occasional urge to punch. But the “who” in the whodunit is kind of a letdown if you simply keep tabs on which suspect Johnson is keeping farthest away from his all-seeing cameras for as long as possible. Points are again awarded to Anne the next-room armchair detective, who learned a lot bingeing all twelve seasons of Murder, She Wrote.

12. Nobody 2 (Peacock). Saul Goodman: Super Spy, is back! Bob Odenkirk’s Wick-ification in the first one was such a guilty pleasure, they brought back his whole family — including Christopher Lloyd as the War Grandpa! — for another round of Looney Tunes martial-arts antics and shoot-’em-up chaos. The Mansells’ earnest attempt at a much-needed getaway takes them to a proverbial Small Town With a Dark Secret where big-bad Sharon Stone emerges from seclusion to savor the taste of chewed scenery and evil sheriff Colin Hanks has stolen his dad’s Forrest Gump haircut. National Lampoon’s Vacation meets Ballerina and yes, there’s a family slideshow at the end.

11. Sweet Lorraine in Auschwitz (Heartland Film Festival, via Eventive). American society has yet to stop needing heartfelt Holocaust documentaries. The survivor interviewed here, Frank Grunwald — a Czech Jew, jazz accordionist, and longtime Indianapolis resident till his passing in 2023 — lived through a lot and then some, from die Anschluss to horrific imprisonment in multiple concentration camps to his freedom at war’s end. His story is worth knowing on principle, but in terms of runtime he’s nearly reduced to a subplot in his own film, overwhelmed by all the Holocaust Documentary 101 historical background material…which, to be fair, can be especially illuminating for anyone who hasn’t already watched a few of these. Every Holocaust documentary is someone’s first.

10. Nonnas (Netflix). Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) directs a big warm hug of a movie, based on the feel-good true story of a big Staten Island lug (Vince Vaughn, aging affably) who staffs his new Italian restaurant with a team of, shall we say, women of a certain age. (Susan Sarandon! Talia Shire! Brenda Vaccaro! Lorraine Bracco!) I’d be unimpressed if this were about a new Olive Garden, but it’s about a mom-and-pop joint, so this doesn’t count as a corporate-biopic puff-piece like Flamin’ Hot or Air…though they’ve since redesigned their website to capitalize on the film, so it takes a few extra clicks to drill down toward their current menu.

9. KPop Demon Hunters (Netflix). Sony’s versatile Spider-Verse artists crafted one of the year’s biggest phenomena – so big that they put it in theaters after initially dumping it onto Netflix, where it exploded and overtook the world. K-pop isn’t my thing, but I got enough of the digs at the prefab music industry, the animation’s dazzling, and it’s fun pretending in my head that what I’m actually watching is a reboot where Buffy, Willow and Faith form their own riot-grrl band, Angel fronts N*SYNC, and everyone keeps calling Xander “Derpy”.

8. Heads of State (Prime Video). John Cena IS the President of the United States of America! Idris Elba IS Prime Minister of England! The stars of The Suicide Squad and distant participants in the unfinished Fast/Furious saga reunite as duly elected Goofus and Gallant (guess which is which!) without their security details and on the run from an international goon squad that wants them dead. In the first Nobody, director Ilya Naishuller gussied up Bob Odenkirk into an action hero and here continues workshopping his hypothesis that he can do much the same for anyone (Priyanka Chopra Jonas! Paddy Considine! Jack Quaid, playing a confident gunman for once!) in a big-budget action extravaganza that manages nonstop cheesy quips slightly funnier than expected (even when they double down on awful puns as a running gag), leans hard into the ludicrousness of its own freewheeling set pieces, and — in its nimble gunfight prologue — provides a public service by introducing Americans to La Tomatina, a real-world tomato-fight festival held every year in Spain. If only every cash-grab buddy-flick were this educational and such madly grinning fun.

7. Nouvelle Vague (Netflix). A few minutes after Blue Moon came Richard Linklater’s second-best film of 2025, an appropriately black-and-white behind-the-scenes reenactment of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classic Breathless. Sometimes these extremely specific period pieces leave my ignorant self behind, but as it happens I saw Breathless shortly after Godard’s death in 2022. I understood many of the references, Googled what I didn’t know (I love love LOVE that he labels every single person), and I’m always up for one of Linklater’s trademark laid-back productions, where everyone’s rehearsed so many time before filming that the ensemble’s joy is an immersive delight, even when their characters are a hairbreadth away from strangling each other.

6. Predator: Killer of Killers (Hulu). Dan Trachtenberg’s Predalienator Cinematic Universe renaissance continues! Shortly before the theatrical release of the live-action Predator: Badlands came an animated triptych that expands upon their lore (among other new trivia, their race’s name “Yautja” is finally canon) in the form of three shorts about the space-hunters’ multiple intrusions throughout Earth’s history, picking up the baton that Prey first brought into play. And there’s a bonus fourth act — a timeline-crossover team-up tying it all together and setting the stage for future developments. It’s nice to see at least one space-fight franchise moving forward.

5. The Phoenician Scheme (Peacock). The most I’ve enjoyed a Wes Anderson pristine artisan-dollhouse play in years. Starring nearly every actor who ever lived, evincing true emotions for once rather than burying us in rat-a-tat paragraphs that mention them offhand, and convincing me to pay close attention to its complex yet true-to-its-own-logic sequence of events instead of just shrugging and rolling with it. Help yourself to a hand grenade!

4. The Ballad of Wallis Island (Peacock). I saw the trailer for this low-key British dramedy so many times in theaters during last winter’s Oscar Quest that I quickly recognized Tim Key when he showed up in the main cast of Peacock’s The Paper. His suck-up middle-manager Ken (a more bumbling, less malignant David Brent) only faintly resembles his character here, a motormouth millionaire widower named Charles who uses some of his lottery winnings to trick his favorite folkie duo into reuniting for one more gig (frequent Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden, who wrote all the songs and co-wrote this). Charles’ dogpiled Dad-jokes and Brent-like inability to shut up for just five lousy seconds drive much of the first half’s humorous clashes and can drive the other characters and the viewer up the wall, but as they’re forced to coexist in tiny-town isolation, before long they open up and this blooms into a wistful, surprisingly tender walk through painful memories of partnerships torn asunder and how those can obscure the paths forward right in front of us.

3. Steve (Netflix). Academy Award Winner Cillian Murphy reunites with director Tim Mielants (Small Things Like These, Peaky Blinders season three) for a short, sharp shock of a film. Our man and a few hardy others (including Tracey Ullman and Murphy’s Small Things sparring partner Emily Watson) work at an experimental group home/school for nigh-incorrigible teen boys (who include The Long Walk‘s rambunctious Tut Nyuot), who’re devastated to learn funding’s been cut and the school is being closed. A rough-and-tumble heartbreaker of good intentions unraveled, steps forward and backward, and every hard-fought clique’s dueling forces of camaraderie versus collapse.

2. Paddington in Peru (Netflix). I was slow to hop on the bandwagon but finally did so last year, so now I get it. Removing him from merry olde England and his usual fish-out-of-water mirth seemed a rather ordinary move on the part of incoming director Dougal Wilson, but Ben Whishaw’s innate Paddingtonness remains unaffected. Our Bear makes the most of his international adventure with stops for the delightful Olivia Colman as a singing nun, a spot of un-British happy-teariness at the end (yes, again), and one clever Steamboat Bill Jr. homage the kids won’t get but will belly-laugh at anyway.

1. Companion (Max). I’m sorry I missed this near-future SF-horror dark gem in theaters, but it was released right in the middle of Oscar Quest. Jack Quaid drew me in, but it’s unfair to center him in this capsule when the real star is Yellowjackets‘ Sophie Thatcher (and, uh, one of Book of Boba Fett‘s biker rascals) as Iris, the adoring girlfriend of Quaid’s latest dweeb. (This cocky tech-bro is closer to his Scream V Redditor than to Boimler, Novocaine, or Hughie — collect them all! Their fancy cabin-in-the-woods getaway with friends (Harvey Guillen, Lukas Gage from The White Lotus, Bard from The Hobbit) belies a secret plot, Iris learns secrets about herself, and I may never tire of explorations of the metaphor of control-freak troglodytes and the puppets they casually use and throw away, only to regret their callousness painfully later. Echoes of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina are plainly audible, but first-time writer/director Drew Hancock’s cinematic descendant is funnier, harsher, nimbler, and more surprising. Another win from the producers of Barbarian and Weapons, who’ve cleverly curated their own special puzzlebox-horror space that’s giving Blumhouse a run for their money.

…

…thus endeth the list. For anyone curious, once again I also kept track of all other films I watched — not just new ones — regardless of release date, platform, or worth. This year’s roster spans between 1938 and 2024: