Category Archives: Movies/Films/Flicks

Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Zootopia 2” End Credits

February 1, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Nick the fox and Judy the bunny sit in a therapy group, wearing nametags and looking askance at each other.

HE’s a wiseacre loner trying to walk the straight-and-narrow! SHE’s an irrepressible do-gooder crusading for justice! THEY FIGHT CRIME!

Previously on Zootopia: I was thrilled to see my favorite film of 2016 go on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I was less thrilled when Disney announced it was next in line to be stuffed into their sequel-sausage grinder. I don’t need every great film to keep filing for brand extensions. Zootopia 2‘s unhelpful first teaser trailer invoked one of my personal theorems: if a given film’s teaser is just a clip of dancing main characters who won’t dance in the actual film, said film is bound to suck. (Exhibit A: Chicken Little, Disney’s weak attempt at making their own Nickelodeon flick.)

Two months after release, the sequel is still riding high in theaters and now likewise Oscar-nominated. It’s therefore on my annual Oscars Quest scorecard, which obligated me to see it per my self-imposed rules. I doubted it would hit Disney+ before the March 15th telecast deadline, so I relented for the sake of the game.

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“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple”: Jimmies Eat World

January 29, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Six weirdos in blond wigs, droopy canvas masks and jumpsuits.

Mighty Morphin’ Jimmy Rangers!

Previously on 28 Years Later: Director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland reunited to imagine further adventures and new terrors in the world of their 2003 speed-freak zombie nightmare 28 Days Later, which redefined the subgenre’s rules for years to come. I wrote of 28YL, “Boyle shifts gears to a more measured pace as Garland reveals the film’s true heart — one of vain hopes in a hopeless environment, of love in an arena of rage, of reconnecting with inner humanity in the middle of the killing fields. Audiences gripped by fiercer bloodlust craving their EPIC KILLS NOW NOW NOW might then revolt. Given Garland’s recent track record for sometimes denying our base cravings, it’s worth wondering if maybe the best zombie movies are the ones that veer from the storytelling dead end by transforming into another kind of movie.” I didn’t expect Boyle to test me on this right then and there: the film’s last five minutes needle-scratched off the turntable into one last out-of-nowhere cliffhanger throwdown that felt like a Skittles ad starring Mr. T’s cartoon teen gymnastic squad.

That was never meant to be The End, though. Their planned trilogy continues with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, for which Boyle retires to a producer’s chair and invites guest director Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, the Candyman remake) to team up with Garland and lay fresh eyes on what happens next. Once again most of the undead are reduced to incidental critters in favor of Man’s Inhumanity to Man, but the foregrounded terrors are all the scarier for it. That goes double for the dance number.

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My Oscars Quest 2026 Quick-Start Scorecard

January 22, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Michael B Jordan in red hat and Sinners suit, grinning and surveying his hometown.

16 nominations for Sinners? Smoke and Stack about to throw another killer party.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: every winter is my annual Oscars Quest! The game is simple but time-consuming: after the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announces their latest nominations for the Academy Awards, I make plans to watch as many nominees as I can in every category — not just Best Picture, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. They have the Super Bowl; I have the Oscars.

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2025 at the Movies at My House

January 21, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Michelle Yeoh in a black dress, smirking in a space nightclub.

Like it or not, a universe of infinite possibilities means some Everything Everywhere All at Once timelines are gonna suck.

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!

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“No Other Choice”: There’s Been a Murder at Dunder Mifflin Korea

January 18, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A sweaty Lee Byung-hun in business suit being asked by his wife, "Did the interview go well?"

To any head-of-household having a hard time out there: keep in mind your spouse will not consider your flop-sweat a turn-on.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: It’s Lee Byung-hun’s time to shine! Zillions of Netflix subscribers tuned in for the South Korean actor’s machinations as Squid Game‘s nefarious Front Man, but that wasn’t his first villainous turn for American moviegoers. He was a T-1000 in the wisely forgotten Terminator Genisys, the worst in the series. As the murkily motivated ninja Storm Shadow, he was among the few highlights of the two G.I. Joe movies. And discerning youngsters out there caught him voicing the demon king in last year’s animated sensation KPop Demon Hunters. (I’ve yet to convince myself to check him out in the most recent Magnificent Seven alongside Denzel Washington. Maybe someday, but it wouldn’t fit this paragraph anyway, unless there’s a shocking twist in which he betrays them and shoots Chris Pratt in the face.)

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“The Secret Agent”: The Past Is a Shark’s Maw, Swallowing Our Histories Whole

January 17, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Closeup of Wagner Moura's face as he decides whether or not react to a specific customer among a crowd in an office.

Flashback to the ’70s when DMVs and recordkeeping offices were miserable places of endless waiting.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: The latest chapter in the South American Totalitarian History Cinematic Universe is here! In recent times native filmmakers beyond the Panama Canal have been yearning to tell stories of their homelands’ darker times now that decades have passed and some of the worst regimes have since been deposed or overruled. We’ve had Prime Video’s docudrama Argentina 1984, the 2020 Netflix documentary The Edge of Democracy about Brazil in the 2000s, and last year’s I’m Still Here, which traveled thirty years back in the same country under its perpetuated terrible circumstances. And those are just three recent Academy Award nominees I’ve seen (and a win, in the latter’s case), to say nothing of how many others have flown under my radar or haven’t reached North American audiences.

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My 2025 at the Movies, Worst to Best

January 11, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A surprised Galinda standing in a pink bubble for the first time while Michelle Yeoh judges her.

So what movies did you love or hate inside your magic hermetic bubble?

It’s listing time again! In today’s entertainment consumption sphere, all experiences must be pitted against each other and assigned numeric values that are ultimately arbitrary to anyone except the writer themselves. It’s just this fun thing some of us love doing even though the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

I saw 34 films in theaters in 2025 that were actually released in 2025, a 14.7% increase over 2024’s list, still climbing post-COVID. That number doesn’t include ten Academy Award nominees I caught in theaters in 2025 that were officially 2024 releases, but which I saw later outside the house as part of my annual Oscar Quest.

Of those 34 releases, 12 were sequels, prequels, or chapters in an ongoing universe or venerated popcorn-flick IP. 6 were reboots, remakes or do-overs. Only 4 were superhero films. 3 were Stephen King adaptations. 6 had scenes or noteworthy extras during or after the end credits. 7 were screenings at the 34th annual Heartland Film Festival, some of whose makers are still seeking an American distributor. 3 were primarily in languages other than English.

One shocking discovery when I tallied everything up: I saw zero animated feature films in a theater, which hasn’t happened since 1995. Even in 2020 when I only saw four total films on big screens, one of them was Pixar’s Onward. So that’s pretty disappointing. And I refuse to count the new Avatar just to make myself feel better.

Here’s the annual rundown of what I didn’t miss in theaters in 2025, for better or worse, starting as always at the bottom. This doesn’t include the 2025 films I watched on streaming services, which will receive their own listicle (and will include three animated films!). Links to past excessively wordy reviews and sometimes bizarrely construed thoughts are provided for historical reference. As a fun challenge, this year I tried something new: given how much I already overwrote about each of them throughout the year, this time I allowed myself just one sentence each. No parentheses, no em-dashes, no semicolons whatsoever, though obviously many are the same old run-on stream-of-consciousness so y’all know it’s still me typing and I’m not shelling out bottom-dollar for crappy AI to do my own amateur hobby-work for me.

On with the countdown!

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“Marty Supreme”: The King Kong of Ping-Pong Is a Ding-Dong

January 4, 2026 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Timothee Chalamet in period-piece mustache holding ping-pong paddle with American flag design, standing amid other players with paddles bearing their own homeland's flags.

Preening Putz Proud of Patriotic Paddle.

Everybody loves narcissists! They’re everywhere today! They’re an evergreen industry and a dominant species and we can’t stop throwing money and attention at them! They rule our reality shows, win our sports, determine our politics, influence our social media, hoard our headlines and flood our feeds! We’re posting about them nonstop and letting them live rent-free in our heads, comping them on head-utilities and buying them head-groceries! We just can’t stop talking, thinking, mocking, or mentioning and mentioning and mentioning and mentioning one of the most self-aggrandized narcissists of them all! We never seem to shut up about him in particular! And by “we” and “our”, I mean you ‘n’ yours — constantly feeding the troll, day-in day-out, exactly what Usenet newsgroups taught us never to do way back in the 20th century. I sure can’t wait for this century’s students to catch up.

Now’s the perfect era for a story like Marty Supreme — a slick all-American anti-fairy tale about an entitled motormouth who almost always gets his way thanks to his unspoken magical self-help affirmation, “Because I said so!” and tries to steamroll over every “NO” like the nice-guy twin to Ben Kingsley’s Sexy Beast human monster. It doesn’t hurt that he’s played by Academy Award Nominee Timothee Chalamet, that beloved Manic Pixie Dream Boy idol of millions who just turned 30 last month. Who wants to be mad at that face, as long as we viewers aren’t the ones suffering in his character’s self-absorbed path of destruction?

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“Avatar: Fire and Ash”: Spider! He Is Our Hero!

December 28, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Avatar 3 IMAX poster with Oona Chaplin's evil fire-motif warrior astride her pet alien dragon.

Beware the Dragonriders of BURN!

Previously on Avatar: three years ago James Cameron did his part to help save beleaguered theaters worldwide after the pandemic with the billion-dollar spectacle Avatar: The Way of Water, the long-awaited sequel to the 2009 blockbuster. At the time I boiled down my impressions:

The predictably huge box-office smash is the visually stunning James Cameron comeback we expected, an underwater world of wonder that left our IMAX 3-D audience stunned all throughout its three-hour runtime. The beautifully panoramic Pandora ocean-tribe expansion pack and the extended no-holds-barred final-battle extravaganza exceed the baselines even by Cameron standards in all their gloriously maximized CGI razzle-dazzle nonpareil…[but] after exiting the theater and regaining your senses it’s much easier to think again, and disappointing to realize you’ve just watched the most expensive witness-protection story in world history, one in which Our Hero sought to stop endangering his community by moving his family to a strange new neighborhood and endangering them instead. And much of the family’s stresses feel like Cameron reusing salvaged parts from his previous films and from any number of fish-out-of-water family dramas. The technological bells-‘n’-whistles have been upgraded in accelerated leaps and bounds, but the chassis could use some new solder and an oil can.

But oil and water don’t mix, and some guys love laying amazing paint jobs over refurbished parts, so here we go again. Cameron and the same four co-writers continue the saga with Avatar: Fire and Ash, which is here to re-rescue the box office through the healing power of space magic and environmentally friendly EXPLOSIONS!

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“Hamnet”: Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow

December 25, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Jessie Buckley in the front row of a standing Shakespearean audience, reaching out to the actor on stage.

The Globe Theatre used to be pretty cool about letting audiences interact with actors on stage, long before trying to tear famous people’s clothes off became a thing.

Oscars season is coming! On January 22nd the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce the next round of Academy Awards nominations. Fans have a month to go before we learn which multi-million-dollar blockbusters will be validated in the secondary categories and which Best Picture nominees were only released in a single Times Square theater that would’ve made more money if they’d just shown porn instead. The more potential Oscar winners we watch now, the less we’ll have to cram into our annual Oscar Quest before the March 15th ceremony. Or, y’know, I could just take the old-fashioned approach: go see films I want to see for my own reasons and hope they get recognized later.

The latter applied for me in regard to Hamnet, the latest from Academy Award Winner Chloe Zhao. Her contemplative road-trip drama Nomadland took Best Picture during the pandemic, and I was among the six viewers who enjoyed Marvel’s disavowed Eternals, in which super-team punch-’em-up veneer cloaked a thoughtful exploration of religious disillusionment, immoral sacrifice in the name of The Greater Good, the soul’s search for purpose and sometimes repurpose, and what the treasured canard of With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility means on a cosmic scale. With Hamnet four years later, she’s retracted her reach from planetary destruction to merely the foundation of classic Western Literature, with a story set in the sixteenth century rather than traveling all the way back to the Dawn of Time. Yet another survivor of the Marvel Machine finds deeper artistic fulfillment on a smaller stage.

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GalaxyCon Columbus 2025 Photos, Part 3 of 4: Comics!

December 12, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Six graphic novels, an omnibus, a Godzilla T-shirt, a button and a flimsy cardstock con badge.

My reading haul this year, plus a little extra merch.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Anne and I enjoy attending entertainment and comic conventions together, whether in our hometown of Indianapolis or in adjacent states (or sometimes beyond). She’s been doing them since the early ’90s, and invited me to tag along as our relationship evolved from classmates to coworkers to neighbors to BFFs to married geeks twenty years and counting. We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

This weekend we attended the fourth annual Galaxycon Columbus in Ohio’s very own Greater Columbus Convention Center. The show returned with another lengthy guest list for fans of all media across the pop culture spectrum…

…which included comics at the comic con! As the easternmost show that we attend every year, GCC recruits quite a formidable lineup of creators for their Artist Alley, a boon for us longtime readers that includes some folks who haven’t traveled very west yet.

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“Wicked: For Good”: Revenge of the Shiz

November 30, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
Glinda lays her head on Elphaba's shoulder as they sit smiling in a peaceful meadow.

Down the witches’ road, one last time…until Universal decides this should be a prequel trilogy.

The best thing I can say about Wicked: For Good is how heartening it was to confirm that communal experiences can still happen if we want them. Our showing was the most crowded Tuesday night I’ve witnessed in months, and certainly the most responsive, at two points in particular. One was the film’s funniest scene — a wacky slapfight that garnered loads of laughter and audience backtalk, maybe because it was the only scene with that kind of spark — and the other was, as a Wicked fan would expect, the tender BFF-breakup duet “For Good”. I can’t remember the last time I heard that many people crying and sniffling at the same time.

Its box office grosses certainly reflect a tsunamic response from the public at large. I’m glad so many people have enjoyed quality time out of the house and away from their phones, maybe even the lady with super-sized elbows who sat next to me and only dug her phone out of her purse twice to check the time. I like to think that’s far fewer times than she’d normally check her phone if she were bored. Good on her for showing self-restraint! Anyway, here came headlines trumpeting, “CINEMA IS BACK, BABY!”

If you were among the millions of Americans who super-loved it, gave it an 11/10, and won’t shut up about it for the next month or two, enjoy your convos with other fans in your usual social spaces, you’re free to go and we’ll see you the next time Google brings you to my virtual hobby-shack’s tiny doorstep. Cheers! Have a nice day! Yay Elphaba!

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“The Running Man”: A Fistful of New Dollars

November 23, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Glen powell disguised with glasses, mustache, and boring hair, very tense in a science fiction hallway filled with red WANTED posters for his character Ben Richards.

Hit Man is back! And this time, it’s personal!

Imagine you’re in a harsh alt-reality episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the next question — for, I dunno, a cash prize of six bucks — is “How does this entry about Edgar Wright’s The Running Man begin?” The possible answers are:

  • A. “In the wake of The Long Walk and The Life of Chuck, the best-ever year for Stephen King film adaptations maintains its batting record with yet another home run…”
  • B. “As with his last feature film, the glam-noir psycho-thriller Last Night in Soho, Edgar Wright once again spins nostalgic flax into a new generation’s gold…”
  • C. “After his charismatic turns in Top Gun: Maverick, Devotion, Hit Man, Twisters, and more, Glen Powell keeps flying high toward A-list cloud-nine…”
  • D. “I read the book in high school and watched the Schwarzenegger adaptation on late-night cable around the same time, so I wrote 2000 words on all the differences I noticed…”

If you picked an answer, you’re wrong! They’re all lies. And in this harsh alt-reality the producers could drop your loser self into a boiling vat of Crystal Pepsi, film your embarrassing demise, have an A.I. Regis Philbin hologram deliver a mocking eulogy, and sell action figures of you covered in third-degree burns and sticky soda. But if you’re an average sci-fi citizen, of course the part that’d make you maddest in your final seconds of life on Earth is how you’re out the six bucks.

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“Predator: Badlands”: Yautja, Yutani! Yutani, Yautja!

November 16, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Elle Fanning and guy in Predator costume standing back to back, sternly.

She’s a happy-go-lucky corporate android! He’s a space hunter with a grudge! THEY FIGHT CRIME!

The Predalienator Cinematic Universe is in full effect, or whatever we’re calling it! Fans of the formerly standalone IPs never expected 20th Century Studios would use the two Alien vs. Predator crossover films — one a mediocre slog with a decent Final Boss Battle; the other, amateurish drek — as the foundation of a unified transmedia empire a la Marvel and DC. After both lay fallow for years except in licensed comics, they’ve been called back to active duty and merged into a single science fiction canon through the magical power of Easter eggs.

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“Bugonia”: What If Rod Serling Made a Lifetime Movie

November 12, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
In a basement, Jesse Plemons and Aiden Delbis in rumpled suits standing over a seated and angry Emma Stone, whose head is shaven.

Reservoir Dogs x V for Vendetta.

Two-Time Academy Award Winner Emma Stone has earned the clout to do only whatever she feels like after La La Land and Poor Things cemented her in the Hollywood history books, not to mention her nominations for Birdman and The Favourite. She could easily coast for the rest of her career playing unstoppable world-changing women with the best fashions, hairstyles, and male costars equal or lesser to her in power rankings. She’s more than earned the right to just sit back, relax, and coast along as the headliner in a network or streaming legal drama for the next ten years.

Instead with her latest she’s doubled down on her current outré mood. Anyone who hasn’t seen her previous black comedies she made with the idiosyncratic director Yorgos Lanthimos — not just The Favourite and Poor Things, but also Kinds of Kindness, which I have yet to endure — may be unprepared for their latest collaboration Bugonia. Technically it could be reduced to a too-basic streaming-menu logline: “Resourceful businesswoman must escape the madmen who kidnapped her.” Sounds like it could be slotted snugly in between 20-year-old basic-cable remainders and Netflix’s increasingly middlebrow offerings, right? Like a prime candidate for an inaugural Investigation Discovery TV-Movie of the Week? You could maybe even con subscribers into thinking it’s a vanguard in that burgeoning new pop culture market, “Based on a True Crime Podcast”. Eventually — and it does take a while — the viewer realizes with growing horror that it’s none of those things as Lanthimos gets down with his outlandish Lanthimosian self.

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Del Toro’s “Frankenstein”: 9 Reasons Why You’ll Need a Bigger Screen

November 7, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Frankenstein Movie Poster 2025 displayed outside a theater at night. The monster is a gangly tatterdemalion behind the logo and the logline "Only Monsters Play God".

Now showing at a theater near few!

Midlife Crisis Crossover Calls Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein One of the Year’s Best Filmsâ„¢!

Once again the Academy Award Winner has collaborated with Netflix after the previous successes of his animated version of Pinocchio, his Cabinet of Curiosities anthology miniseries, and the Trollhunters stuff I never looked into. Frankenstein was clearly one of the highest ranking dream projects on his wish list, fulfilled at last with a noticeably enormous budget, a stellar cast, his most lavish production design ever, and a too-brief theatrical exhibition before the November 7th relegation to its forever-home in the app’s small-screen back-catalog cellar.

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The Heartland International Film Festival 2025 Season Finale

October 20, 2025 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
balcony view of a movie screen down below. Onscreen is a pic of Emily Deschanel and two producers, encouraging viewers to become a Heartland member. Walls around screen are glowing green and have large icons of film reels.

Our Sunday night view from the balcony of the Tobias Theater at Newfields. The slideshow still is from last year’s world premiere of ReEntry.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Once again I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for eight consecutive days about the six films I saw at three theaters in nine days, one virtual screening we’ll get to in a moment, plus a few other entries that included still another movie, albeit more of an anti-Heartland studio product that opened the same weekend. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet!

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Nuremberg”

October 20, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Russell Crowe faces off against Rami Malek while Leo Woodall stands in the background.

Zeus vs. Freddie Mercury! TWO GODS ENTER! ONE GOD LEAVES!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Our final theatrical screening of the festival, and their official Closing Night selection, was also the very first entrant I bought tickets for, based on a single selling point: Academy Award Winner Russell Crowe IS Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring IN Nuremberg! And that must be announced or imagined in the deepest possible Epic Voice Guy voice or else why bother.

Same as with the Academy Awards, World War II and the Holocaust are common subjects in Heartland selections, for reasons tragically obvious to anyone who’s seen enough of them and nevertheless supports the important, evergreen “Never Forget” message behind them. Nuremberg wasn’t the only such film on the docket, but it was certainly the highest-profile one. Its writer/director James Vanderbilt has worked on numerous big-budget crowd-pleasers (the last three Screams and both Amazing Spider-Mans, among others) and recruited a strong ensemble to tell this particular story, of which the indisputable highlight is — for those just joining us — Maximus himself as Göring, the bombastic narcissist and highest-ranking Nazi still alive after the war, the sort of boo-able real-life Kingpin in more ways than one, whose every move and every haughty gaze was like a steamroller through every room he entered.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Blue Moon”

October 19, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Andrew Scott in a tuxedo, one foot taller than Ethan Hawke in a 1940s suit. Both stand in a bar, staring through us at an offscreen woman.

Super-Villain Team-Up presents Moriarty and The Grabber!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Next up is Blue Moon, the twelfth film I’ve seen by prolific director Richard Linklater. His last joint, the true-story dramedy Hit Man, was among my favorites last year. Though his subjects vary wildly from one to the next, his films and their ensembles always have their laid-back charms, so invitingly that you don’t feel time passing because you’re enjoying the conversations so much…even when the loudest guy in the room is blissfully unaware that everyone else is aware of his problems.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “It Was Just an Accident”

October 17, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment
An Iranian auto mechanic sits in his van in the middle of the desert, smoking and thinking. Not far away are a body-sized hole he's dug and a discarded shovel.

CAUTION: Rated NC-45 for scenes of smoking.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Our next film is Heartland’s sold-out “International Centerpiece Screening” of It Was Just an Accident, which has been building buzz online among pro critics in the days leading up to its limited release in the largest U.S. markets this week. It’s rare for a small foreign film to open in Indy the same weekend as it does in NYC and L.A., so it’s nice that Heartland provides such occasions for us to feel like we count as a Major City by Hollywood distribution definitions.

The latest from writer/director/producer Jafar Panahi isn’t the first time he’s shot a film in his native Iran entirely without the government’s permission. The same held true for previous films such as This Is Not a Film and No Bears, not to mention some of his earlier ones that were made “legally” only to be banned later. A suspended prison already hangs over his head, but he still has plenty more to say through his art.

Full disclosure: after seeing Accident but before sitting down to collect my own thoughts, I read Vulture.com’s new interview with him, which contained a wealth of fascinating information. Anything in this entry that resembles Fun Trivia comes from their article.

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