Tag Archives: reviews

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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“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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