This past year was an awkward time for movies. Perhaps it was most acutely captured by a Tron sequel/reboot nobody wanted, staring an actor most people can’t stand.
At the risk of sounding overly negative, it was a “meh” year for movies in general. Still, there were a few gems — I only wish there had been more of them.
Theater of Thought
For many years Warner Herzog has lent his unique philosophy and filmmaking skills to document some of the most peculiar and fascinating subjects, from the earliest human cave paintings to a man who wanted to be accepted by a group of grizzly bears. In this film he turns the subject inward, discovering how we think by interviewing leading neuroscientists and philosophers.
Unlike typical pop psychology, Herzog never bores us with easy answers or wildly optimistic projections about the future. He remains focused on understanding what we’ve learned about how our brains work using the technology available today, even when that leads the overall narrative of the documentary to unresolved questions.
Important note: The film includes brief footage of animal experiments and human brain surgery that some may find upsetting.
Best moment: For me this one’s easy — it’s when the “theater” metaphor extends to a movie theater, which happened to be the very theater where I was watching the film (the Roxie in San Francisco.)
Rating: 9/10
Companion
In the science fiction world there seem to be two types of humanoid robots: hyper-capable androids who save everyone (Star Trek’s Commander Data) and killer sex androids (Dolores in the Westworld TV series.) The problem is that unlike Data, the killer robots look and behave nearly indistinguishable from humans.
This dark comedy is about the latter type of humanoid android, an almost unrealistically good looking robot girlfriend who’s used as an assassin in an ill-conceived scheme.
While the movie gets its share of thrills, kills, and silly moments, it never quite gels into anything beyond the sum of its parts. A big part of the problem is that more effort seems to have gone into developing the robot characters than the human ones, raising the question of what it means to be sentient robot in a world of humans — a point for a more introspective movie, perhaps.
Best moment: “Are you robot-shaming me?”
Rating: 7/10
The Day the Earth Blew Up
Also known as “the Looney Tunes movie that almost didn’t get released in favor of a tax write-off,” this animated movie features Porky Pig and Daffy Duck getting wrapped up in an alien’s dastardly chewing gum plot. Think of the type of cheesy sci-fi B movie you’d see on MST3k but with cartoon characters and you’re on the right track.
An offshoot of Peter Browngardt’s Loony Tunes reboot, The Day the Earth Blew Up at times feels more like an homage to the original cartoon shorts. Which is okay! After all, the best known Warner Brothers cartoons were the postwar era — already a reboot of the originals — when the humor became a little darker and much more violent. Unbelievably, it wasn’t until now that the characters appeared in a full length feature film of their own.
Adding a sibling relationship between Daffy and Porky, as well as a love interest for Porky, are all interesting ideas — but they don’t amount to much. Which is too bad as the sci-fi plot feels quite thin even at a meager 90 minutes.
Frankly, I’m just glad to see Hollywood produce a hand animated movie again after all these years.
Best moment: I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that there’s a “sequel” (Coyote vs. Acme) but the way it’s revealed within the movie is pretty clever and in-line with its self-referential humor.
Rating: 7/10
Black Bag
What if we took a James Bond movie, and bogged it down with a bunch of scenes where people sit around and mumble stilted dialog? That’s basically the pitch for Black Bag: a British spy movie that mixes up the showing vs. telling part of storytelling.
If it weren’t for the gorgeous cinematography there would be nothing worth mentioning about this one. Certainly doesn’t live up to the trailer. It’s easy to see why it flopped in theaters.
Best moment: The moment I realized I was falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy and turned it off before the end.
Rating: 2/10
Secret Mall Apartment
When the forces of gentrification force a group of artists out of their space, what are they to do? For Rhode Island-based artist Michael Townsend and his group of collaborators, they discover a hidden “room” of sorts inside a recently built nearby mall and make it their own living space.
If this sounds familiar it’s because it was all over the news twenty or so years ago when Michael got caught and the space was walled off. But here for the first time it’s presented as a documentary, with interviews from the artists who’d lived there intercut with grainy footage filmed on a cheap camera at the time.
There’s not much to the story itself, it’s presented more as a framework to look at the people involved, occasionally punctuated with some pie-in-the-sky questions like the nature of art itself.
Best moment: Their confession to a like-minded individual working at the mall’s Pottery Barn.
Rating: 8.5/10
The Naked Gun (2025)
Not a remake exactly, this movie is sort of a reboot of the 1988 classic Leslie Nielson police comedy. Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr., the son of Nielson’s character.
While it could have been a rehash of the first movie, it has a new story about an evil tech company and relies far more on action slapstick for comedy.
What works are the casting choices, particularly Neeson and Pamela Anderson in the (relatively) straight-laced main characters. What doesn’t work as well are the action scenes, which seem geared more to Neeson’s strengths than what works for the movie. There’s so much slapstick in modern action movies anyway that it feels redundant in the context of a comedy movie.
What does work incredibly well here are the wordplay jokes. I just wish they had more of them.
Best moment: “UCLA?” “I see it every day, I live here.”
Rating: 6/10
CatVideoFest 2025
Once again, this year’s collection of cat videos are in theaters to raise money for cat rescue charities. Like every year it’s a mix of various “genres” of cat videos — drama, action, music, etc. — along with a handful of animated shorts.
This year felt a little different with lots of quick TikTok style videos. Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your taste, or perhaps more importantly your attention span. Either way the movie never gets bogged down with long videos, though I can’t help but to think the videos from TikTok would have been better with the music intact; presumably another victim of copyright issues.
Best moment: A budding film director trying to be the next James Cameron but can only get a blurry video of his cat in a bathtub.
Rating: 10/10
Nobody 2
Everyman asskicker Hutch is having a rut in his marriage, so he takes the family on a vacation to a dilapidated waterpark where he gets in a fight protecting his kids from bullies at an arcade.
There’s something about these movies that seems like it’s a parody of a parody, like it’s making fun of the John Wick movies as a response to Taken. At some point it all starts to blur together a little and you’re left with a violent “good” guy in an elaborate fight with a violent “bad” guy. Or gal, in this case. It’s a well established trope that the villain is the real star of such action movies (The Dark Knight, anyone?) but after so many sequels they all start to blend together.
That said, with its brisk 90 minute runtime, Nobody 2 never overstays its welcome; the humor and boomingly loud music are enough to make it a fun watch.
Best moment: The “Duck Boat” tour guide remaining oblivious to the chaotic fight happening behind him.
Rating: 8/10
Slice of Life: The American Dream. In Former Pizza Huts
What happens when a franchise restaurant chain abandons its once-signature building style? This documentary looks at various businesses and organizations around the US that are in former red-roofed Pizza Hut locations, from a BBQ joint to a church.
The documentary banks heavily on nostalgia for the era when people would go to a Pizza Hut for a table service meal instead of takeout or delivery. Even if you never went to one yourself you’re probably familiar with it through cultural osmosis: the hot pizza from the oven, the salad bar, the soda in red plastic transparent cups, the hanging glass lamps…
Unfortunately the documentary refuses to take off its rose-tinted glasses even for a moment to consider the downsides to the cookie cutter combination of the American landscape, one where you can travel hundreds of miles and somehow feel like you’ve gone nowhere at all.
Which is also the crux of what I don’t like about this film: it doesn’t go anywhere or have anything unique to say.
Best moment: Seeing how a Pizza Hut was repurposed into a church.
Rating: 2/10
Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile
This short film from The Onion — embedded in its entirety above — parodies a typical true crime show. In this case, we learn what Epstein was up to in between molesting children and allegedly killing himself… like his career in the NBA.
Filled with ridiculous photoshopped images and dense wordplay with the thinnest veneer of authority, Bad Pedophile captures The Onion’s signature style perfectly. While not every joke lands — some of them go by so fast a second viewing is practically mandatory — my only real issue is that it doesn’t punch up enough. Perhaps it’s difficult to find humor in a situation where a sitting US president is withholding information about his criminal best friend, but at this point that’s the most relevant aspect of this news story.
If I’m not mistaken this is The Onion’s second short film, their first was “The Onion’s Future News” which came out twelve years ago. Perhaps now that they’re an independent company again we’ll see more of this sort of thing. One can hope.
Best moment: A “photo” of Bill Gates with a desktop PC that’s somehow wearing lingerie.
Rating: 9/10
The Surfer
An aging, divorced American surfer (Nic Cage) wants to impress his teenage son with surfing lessons and his own childhood beachfront house in Australia. The only problem is, well… everything.
The story centers around feelings of not being accepted. Between the bright blown-out color palette, ethereal soundtrack, and raw action sequences, the film has a peculiar 20th century fever dream aesthetic, which only serves to make it feel more alien.
My issue with this one is that it becomes rather obvious where the story’s heading from about the halfway point. Still, showing your cards too early in such a short movie isn’t a dealbreaker. But the screenplay would have benefited from another draft.
Best moment: When the (unnamed) main character randomly entrusts everything he has of value to a random coffee shop employee.
Rating: 6/10
Outerlands
Cass, a non-binary restaurant staffer and babysitter, lusts after a woman they work with. Their whirlwind romance takes a sudden turn when she leaves her daughter Ari with Cass and disappears. Often intoxicated and short on cash, Cass struggles to be a role model. As the pair bond over video games, Cass quietly confronts their own neglectful childhood and irresponsible present.
The real star of the movie is the young actress who plays Ari, the emotional center of the story who’s far too young to be so jaded by a world in which she’s failed by all the parental figures in her life.
Filmed here in San Francisco, the cinematography largely avoids the glamorous side of the city in favor of the mundane, including the foggy outerlands of the Sunset District from which the movie takes its name. Likewise the interior shots are all in weathered, mostly dimly lit places, suggesting these characters are hanging on by a thread in a city doing the same.
Despite getting off to a strong start, the movie ultimately fizzles out in the end, much like the previous generation of indie films around twenty years ago that kind of went nowhere.
Best moment: Ari being the only one to directly call out Cass on their excessive drinking.
Rating: 6/10
Wake Up Dead Man
There’s been a murder in a small town church and Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) shows up to solve the mystery. The church’s priest (Josh Brolin) dies in a side chamber during a break in the middle of a sermon from his mast-shaped bully pulpit. The parishioners seem all too quick to blame the new guy in town, who also happens to be the junior priest.
Like the other movies in the Knives Out franchise your first guess as to who’s behind the murder is probably right. The question is more of how they did it and for what reason, which Blanc has to figure out while stumbling from one dramatic comedy moment to the next.
But where the film itself stumbles a bit is in simply not giving Blanc enough screen time in this one. Sure, we get a few more breadcrumbs about the character’s life and backstory, but he doesn’t appear until a third or so into the movie. We also don’t know exactly why he appeared — in stark contrast to that being a major plot point in the previous film, Glass Onion.
Still, it’s quite funny, particularly how Blanc seems to be on the verge of discovering that he’s ripped straight from the pages of a classic mystery novel.
Best moment: The realization that the “locked door mystery” applies in more ways than one.
Rating: 7.5/10
Zootopia 2
There’s generally three types of sequels: a carbon copy of the first movie (Home Alone 2), a getting-the-gang-back-together for a new adventure (Ghostbusters 2), or a movie that expands on the first one (The Dark Knight.) Zootopia 2 splits the difference; while keeping the same story and characters, it treats the first movie like an origin story while telling a second origin story. Along with a new theme song by Shakira.
Unfortunately this also means the movie kind of falls apart once the action gets underway in the third act, just like the first movie. Be honest: how much of the “exciting” part of that one do you remember? Because you’re in for more of that here, although the reveal of the villain is less of a surprise this time around.
Without saying too much, it also seems to be setting up the possibility of a third movie.
Best moment: A self-aware jab at Disney for making too many sequels.
Rating: 6/10
In Your Dreams
A young family is growing apart. Younger sister Stevie is prone to getting a bit lost in her vivid dreams. After they discover a mysterious book, she and her obnoxious younger brother discover they can not only share a dream — but a lucid dream. Stevie attempts to use this unusual power to bring her family together.
The first third or so of the movie do an excellent job of introducing the characters and the concept. It’s a great concept! Unfortunately like so many other films, it struggles with where to go from there, getting bogged down by repetitive action scenes.
Credit where credit is due: I did think the ending was surprisingly sincere.
This is the first movie from Kuku Studios, a company started by Pixar alumni, and it shows. For better or worse.
Best moment: All the times Stevie notices something’s off and questions her reality.
Rating: 7/10
