Spoiler Warning: This article contains major plot details and the ending of Sinners.

Sinners is a masterpiece. It is the best film I have seen in a very long time. After watching it three times, I still can’t get enough. And I’m not the only one who feels that way. Just this week, the Ryan Coogler-directed Southern Gothic horror film received a record-breaking sixteen Academy Award nominations.

Most films are either entertaining or thoughtful, but Sinners is both to an impressive degree. It has something for everyone, but the depth of its visual storytelling keeps me coming back.

As a social commentary, Sinners has a lot going on. Ryan Coogler’s presentation of black existence in America touches on everything from slavery and race to capitalism and music. Yet Christianity and the Blues are central to the story because the protagonist, Sammie (Preacherboy), must choose between them.

Since its release, online reviewers have debated whether Sinners is “anti-Christian propaganda,” as suggested by the American Christian rapper Lecrae. Sinners is unabashedly critical of Christianity — so much so that it is easy to understand why some viewers have dismissed it as “anti-Christian.” The film repeatedly frames Christianity as restrictive, oppressive, and spiritually inert when measured against the power of the Blues and Hoodoo spiritualism.

And yet, Sinners gestures toward something more complicated than outright condemnation. Coogler seems drawn to the unresolved tension between Christianity and the Blues, to the painful space occupied by those who, like Sammie, feel forced to choose between inherited faith and ancestral heritage. The film hints at reconciliation, but never fully commits to it.

To understand what Sinners is attempting and where it ultimately falls short, we first have to take its critique of Christianity seriously on its own terms.

Christianity Opposes Individual Freedom

Sinners’ most obvious critique of Christianity is that the religion opposes individual freedom and self-expression, especially as it pertains to art and music.

Sammie loves playing the Blues, but his father, a pastor, calls it a sin. It is music played “for drunkards and philanderers who shirk their responsibilities to their families so they can sweat all over each other.” As Sammie is leaving the church to perform at his cousins’ juke joint, he shows his resentment.

“I just wanna be free of all of this for a day,” he says, gesturing to the sanctuary.

During his opening performance at Club Juke, Sammie sings a song he wrote for his father called “I Lied to You.”

Somethin’ I been wanting to tell you for a long time

It might hurt you, hope you don’t lose your mind

Well, I was just a boy, ‘bout eight years old

You threw me a Bible on that Mississippi road

See, I love ya, papa, you did all you could do

They say the truth hurts, so I lie to you

Yes, I lied to you. I love the blues

The moral absolutism of the Christian faith causes Sammie to hide his musical gifts and lie about his love of the Blues. He cannot be his true self around his father and the church.

When Sammie returns to his father’s church after surviving the vampire onslaught at Club Juke, he is told to drop the remains of the broken guitar he clutches in his hand.

His father shouts, “Drop the guitar, Samuel. Put it down in the name of God! You tell them [pointing to the congregation]. My heart, my voice, my soul, belongeth to the Lord!”

Throughout the exchange, every shot features a cross in the background, just out of focus, to emphasize the tension among the Church, the Blues, and Sammie.

Production designer Hannah Beachler told Variety that the three crosses in the church represent the Holy Trinity and are exactly 33 inches apart, alluding to the age Jesus died. The scene portrays Christianity as demanding the subordination of the individual to God, resulting in a loss of self, which Sammie is unwilling to sacrifice.

Holding the broken guitar neck against his chest, Sammie leaves his father, family, and faith to pursue his love of the Blues. I cannot praise the film’s careful and intentional visual storytelling enough. Every shot has a purpose. The film encourages and rewards careful analysis, but it does not require it to be enjoyed, which is the hallmark of any great movie.

At the end of Sinners, the lack of freedom in Christianity is starkly contrasted with the freedom found in the juke joint and the Blues. Decades after the fateful events at Club Juke, Sammie and Stack reunite and agree that it was the best day of their lives. “Just for a few hours,” Stack says, “we was free.” Some argue that the explicit critique of Christianity is tempered by the fact that Sammie’s radical individualism is not without consequence.

“Son, you keep dancing with the devil,” Sammie’s father warns, “one day he’s going to follow you home.”

The preacher’s words seem prophetic as everyone at Club Juke, except Sammie, is doomed to die or cursed to live as a vampire for eternity. They pay for their “sins” and the unrestricted, hedonic freedom they so deeply desire. In the end, even if Sammie rejects the faith, don’t the warnings of his father and Christianity prove to be true?

On the surface, it is a very reasonable conclusion. But that interpretation becomes increasingly difficult to hold when we see Christianity and vampirism portrayed as two sides of the same coin throughout the film.

The Church & Vampirism as Systems of Oppression

Christianity and vampirism have been portrayed as antithetical in art and literature, especially in classic vampire stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Vampirism is a selfish inversion of Christian self-sacrifice. Count Dracula takes our blood so he might live, while Christ gives his blood so we might live.

Sinners turns this traditional understanding on its head by subtly suggesting there is no difference between Christianity and vampirism. The opening scene plants the seed.

When Sammie enters the church, bloody and scarred from the events of the night before, his father beckons him to come forward. As Sammie’s father extends his hand, there is an immediate cut to Remmick, the vampire leader, holding the same visual posture. Sammie’s gaze sweeps over the church’s congregation; a flashback replaces them with the congregating vampires we see at the end of the film.

From the outset of Sinners, there is an implicit comparison being made between Christianity and the oppressive, bloodsucking nature of vampirism. Delta Slim explicitly drives the point home when he says, “The blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion. Nah, son, we brought this from home.” Like a vampire, the Church carefully forces its “salvation” on unwilling victims through manipulation and, if necessary, violence.

Mary, a name that evokes the Virgin Mother of Christ, reveals the connection we are meant to see between the church and vampirism. Remmick tells Mary he can save her. “I’m sad, is all,” Mary replies, “I don’t need no saving.” Against her free will and choice, Remmick “saves” Mary by turning her into a vampire, a true believer. Like the Virgin Mother, Mary carries a vampiric salvation and eternal life within her, and she plans to share it with everyone at Club Juke.

However, she cannot walk into the juke joint without permission. She must be invited in, ideally without arousing suspicion of her motives. The need for an invitation plays upon an established vampire troupe while also evoking images of door-to-door evangelists asking to enter your home and tell you about the Good News.

After Mary convinces Cornbread to invite her into the juke joint, she seduces and violently “converts” Stack, forcing upon him an eternal life he never sought. When secrecy is no longer possible, Remmick openly tries to manipulate the remaining patrons of Club Juke into willingly becoming vampires because their fate is already sealed in death. Remmick reveals that the sawmill was intentionally sold to the Smokestack twins by the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan to lure blacks into a “killing floor.”

He does not offer protection from the evils of the world. Instead, he attempts to use the fear of suffering and death at the hands of bigoted whites to manipulate his victims into joining his vampiric cult.

Similarly, the Church cannot or will not save them from suffering and death. On the contrary, it calls them into suffering and death with the promise of eternal life in the world to come. Remmick suggests that religion is a baseless hope used to support a malevolent system of manipulation and oppression. Organized religion, particularly Christianity, might be a lie.

Remmick says, “Long ago, the men who stole my father’s land forced these words [the Lord’s prayer] upon us. I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort. Those men lied to themselves and lied to us. They told stories of a God above and a devil below. And lies of a dominion of man over beast and Earth.”

Even if Christianity is true, its disciples abuse its teachings, using the fear of suffering and death and the hope for eternal life to manipulate and oppress others for selfish ends.

Sammie’s father spends his time in the church while his family and community pick cotton as sharecroppers. Remmick desires to appropriate Sammie’s ability to commune with his ancestors through music. Both use their position as arbiters of eternal life for personal gain.

Remmick offers an alternative to religious salvation, but the vampiric hive mind similarly requires the individual to disappear and become one with the collective. He proclaims, “We are earth and beast and God. We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I, to everything.” Sammie may live forever as a born-again Christian or a bloodsucking vampire, but he will lose himself and his ancestral heritage either way.

On the other hand, Blues and Hoodoo spiritualism offer a pseudo-afterlife by establishing and preserving one’s connection to ancestral “spirits from the past and the future.”

They provide fellowship and “bring healing to their communities” without placing demands upon the individual. Most importantly, they actually work.

Christianity is Powerless, but Blues & Hoodoo are Powerful

If the Church is merely another system of oppression, it follows that it has no spiritual power in reality. Sinners makes clear that the traditional Christian arsenal is useless against evil, suffering, and death. The Lord’s Prayer, the ultimate spiritual weapon in countless horror films, has no effect on Remmick. He even joins Sammie in its recitation. Deliverance does not come from the Word of God; it comes from Sammie’s guitar.

Hoodoo works where Christianity fails. A mojo bag protects Smoke from being turned into a vampire by his brother, Stack. Annie, who carries ancestral knowledge, becomes the only one who can help the group fight the vampires.

Even the afterlife is reframed.

After Smoke kills Hogwood, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and the gang of white racists, he begins to die from a wound he received during the firefight.

While Remmick and the Church ignore and even participate in systems of oppression to further their selfish ends, Smoke directly confronts an actual threat to black existence, namely, white supremacy. He defeats the film’s real antagonists. Perhaps as a reward for his pure, genuine sacrifice, Smoke sees Annie, dressed in white, nursing their child in a kind of beatific vision.

Despite scoffing at the power of Hoodoo and his connection to the spirits of his people, Smoke is reunited with the souls of his deceased family. Meanwhile, Mary and Stack are cursed to linger as vampires, denied reunion with their ancestors.

Sammie’s fate is more ambiguous. He leaves behind everyone and everything, connecting to his roots only through the Blues, a tradition that, like any art form, risks losing its purity over time.

Clarifying the Unbalanced Critique of Christianity

For a film that derides moral absolutes, Sinners seems hellbent on presenting Christianity as an absolute moral evil. Christianity is presented as oppressive, manipulative, and powerless. However, two scenes help to clarify the critique. There is an explicit warning that Smoke gives Sammie about playing at juke joints for a living, and an implicit desire for reconciliation between the Church and the Blues in a post-credit scene.

After Sammie finishes his initial performance at Club Juke, Smoke tries to convince Sammie that playing at juke joints isn’t a good, happy life. “Well, you got the talent. That’s for certain,” he says, “but all this ain’t no life for nobody.”

Outside the Church, Smoke is the only character in the film to warn against the Blues and the culture around it. He does not say it is not a life fit for some; he says it is a life fit for no one. He continues, “You like makin’ music? Make church music. You wanna leave, go on down to Mound Bayou. Live with the proper Black folks. Leave all this here improper shit to us.”

When Sammie refuses to heed the warning, Smoke threatens to kill his cousin if he finds him playing at another juke joint. While Smoke is not directly advocating for the Church, he similarly judges and condemns Delta Blues and its culture, suggesting there is some truth and, at least, practical wisdom to its teachings.

Playing Blues at juke joints as a lifestyle lacks true community, the kind of community Smoke recommends Sammie find at Mound Bayou. Blues and its culture offer a semblance of human community and fellowship, not their realities. Smoke acts as a counterbalance to the instability of not only the Blues but also other unstable elements in the film, such as his twin brother.

In addition to their clear difference in personality and mannerisms, the twins are starkly contrasted in color, representing the proper tension between themselves and the world throughout the film. Smoke is dressed in blue, while Stack is dressed in red, a color he shares with the atmosphere of the juke joint.

It is essential to see the constant balancing act at every level of the film, because it is a pattern we expect to find between Christianity and the Blues, but it is never fully realized.

Sinners is not anti-Christian in the blunt, reactionary way some critics suggest. Its critique of Christianity, particularly its relationship to Delta Blues and Black cultural expression, is far too thoughtful to be dismissed as propaganda. Coogler understands the importance of the Church, just as he understands the power of the Blues. He and his team stage their conflict with extraordinary creativity.

In an interview with the Grio, Coogler described Sinners in these terms:

“It has to do with that relationship that Delta Blues has with its kinda like twin sibling, gospel music.”

Blues music was the first American music to be referenced as the devil’s music. That judgment of the practitioners of the music and folks who engage in the culture around it is at the heart of this movie. That conversation and acknowledgement that we all are [sinners] and if you point the finger at somebody calling them a sinner, you also have to point the finger back to yourself.

Even the most religious person would admit that they’re a sinner; everybody is. It’s a term of judgment, but it’s also a term that’s welcoming as well. [In a] Christian context, that’s who Jesus spent the most time with.” But understanding tension is not the same as sustaining it.

If Sinners is truly about the balance between gospel and blues, restraint and release, Smoke and Stack, holy water and blood, then that balance ultimately collapses under the film’s own moral gravity. Christianity is given weight as an institution and as a historical force, but it is never granted real spiritual efficacy or moral defense.

Gospel music never heals, never saves, never meaningfully competes with the power of the Blues. The Church is acknowledged, but lacks vitality in the film. It exists primarily as an undefined structure of control, fear, and negation. That imbalance matters because it lessens the tragedy of Sammie’s choice. His struggle should feel agonizing, an authentic tearing between two living, breathing worlds.

Instead, the scales are tipped so decisively that his departure from the Church feels less like a loss and more like an inevitability. The film tells us he is choosing between faith and freedom, but it shows us freedom on one side and suffocation on the other. What should be a genuine spiritual dilemma becomes, in the final analysis, a predictable exodus.

And yet, Sinners is bold enough to hesitate. In the post-credit scene, it gestures toward something unresolved, something still aching. Sammie’s blues-inflected performance of This Little Light of Mine in his father’s church does not redeem Christianity, but it refuses to erase it.

It acknowledges that for Black Americans, the sacred and the profane have never been cleanly separated. The Church has wounded, but it has also healed. The Blues has liberated, but it has also unmoored. To borrow Sammie’s words, “I’m full of the blues, Holy water too.”

Sinners ultimately insists that salvation cannot be inherited, enforced, or imposed by fangs or by crosses. It must be chosen. However, by denying Christianity any real counterweight to the spiritual power of Blues, the film makes that choice feel less significant than it should. Gospel and Delta Blues are more like estranged relatives, and less like the twin siblings Coogler envisions.

The question is not whether Sinners condemns Christianity, but whether it allows it enough life to truly matter. That unresolved tension between what the film understands and what it ultimately affirms is not a failure of intent but a limitation. One that keeps Sinners from fully embodying the very balance it so brilliantly imagines.

Sinners is now available for purchase on physical media and for streaming on HBO Max. Rated R for strong bloody violence, sexual content and language.

From time to time, Cinemantic’s contributors will jump on a call to chat about anything and everything movies. As we enter the Year of our Lord 2026, we look back at the year that was. One with large dry spells, worrying trends, looming mergers, euphoric highs, and a sense that maybe, just maybe, movies will make it out alright.

Here are our picks for the best movies of 2025. Each contributor had ten picks.

Graham’s List:

10. The Naked Gun/Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

The two best times I had at the theater this year. The Naked Gun successfully channeled the side-splitting comedy of the original trilogy; the last hour of the Final Reckoning was some of the best adrenaline-pumping cinema of the year. These are two great tributes to passionate franchise filmmaking. Reviews here and here.

9. The Phoenician Scheme

Director Wes Anderson — one of our great auteurs — spins a convoluted but poignant tale about Benicio del Toro’s patriarch learning how to become a father through a modern-day biblical story about the relationship between a father and a daughter. As always, Anderson’s ability to direct an ensemble cast is a joy to watch.

8. Black Bag/Presence

Another two-fer from the team of Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp. Presence is a perfectly structured screenplay that tells the story of a huanted house, but from the ghost’s perspective. In a lesser writer’s hands, the movie could be dismissed as a gimmick, but Presence plays its premise patiently, waiting until the very end to reveal an emotionally devastating twist that becomes obvious in hindsight. Black Bag is a similarly taut spy thriller that doesn’t waste a second and is a tribute to Soderbergh’s ability to make a simple dinner conversation cinematic.

7. Bugonia

Bugonia doesn’t quite stick the landing in the third act, but it’s still a compelling, heartbreaking, and revolting story about male loneliness and extremism. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons shine, but Aidan Delbis turns in one of the best performances of the year as the simpleton brother. This and an entry further down on this list make a great companion piece about our present moment.

6. Weapons

Director Zach Creggers’s follow-up to 2022’s Barbarian hit all the right notes for a summer horror break-out hit, and also defied a simplistic, didactic interpretation. It’s equal parts intriguing, scary, and funny, and its cathartic finale was one of the great moments of 2025.

5. Wake Up Dead Man

Wake Up Dead Man has all of the clockwork-like, clever precision that Rian Johnson’s mystery scripts are known for. But it also one of the single best sequences of the year — Josh O’Connor’s priest talking to a woman on the phone. It’s a surprisingly moving film about faith, and it smartly eschews much of the self-satisfied smugness of the previous entry in the series.

4. Marty Supreme

An absolutely electric two-and-a-half hours at the cinema, I am very grateful I saw Marty Supreme in time to include it on this list. It’s both a story about Jewish assimilation into American life after the Holocaust, and a story about post-war America needing to mature and take responsibility for the things it creates. Timothée Chalamet should be the frontrunner for Best Actor.

3. Eddington

Eddington feels of a piece with Bugonia in that it’s a movie about our current moment, or at least about the insanity of the past five years. The first half of the film is incisive, funny, and will bring back some painful memories of the COVID pandemic. The second half gets increasingly unhinged, and truly defies explanation like no other film this year.

2. Sinners

The breakout hit of the year, Sinners produced the single best sequence of the year: the long-take through the history of African American dance and music. It’s a film that takes literally the idea of as appropriation and forced assimilation. It’s scary, smart, and refreshingly sexy, and Ryan Coogler’s directorial chops are on display at every moment.

1. 28 Years Later

A nail-bitingly tense first half gave way to a beautiful, thoughtful, and quiet second half about death, mercy, and end-of-life care. 28 Years Later is the best film of this year because it’s a gorgeous work that is highly entertaining on a moment-to-moment basis that engages with contemporary concerns about disease and isolation, and also has something timeless to say about human mortality.

Tyler’s List:

10. Black Bag

More than once this year, I watched a movie where I thought, “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.” Steven Soderbergh’s talky, dining room espionage thriller Black Bag is the pinnacle of that: an intimate, witty, genre flick with clockwork precision and terrific turns from Cate Blanchett and Tom Burke.

9. One Battle After Another

The heir apparent to the coveted Best Picture trophy, Paul Thomas Anderson’s ambitious leap to big-budget fare paid off. Sprawling in scope and intimate in character, it’s The Searchers if told from the perspective of the Comanche. While I have criticisms, the bravado of the craftsmanship and performances cannot be dismissed.

8. The Naked Gun

Like my counterpart, watching Akiva Schaffer’s Naked Gun was the best theater going experience I had this year. It’s so funny. The audience chuckled constantly, stretching into the ending credits. And what a thrill it was to join them in that. Its the best studio comedy in a long time—and proof that there is still a market for silly, irreverent films. If only studios were brave enough to make them.

7. Wake Up Dead Man

It’s not the most entertaining Benoit Blanc mystery, but this third caper is by far the best. Ditching the silly smarminess of COVID-era hypocrisy for a moving gothic-style meditation on the mystery of faith, writer-director Rian Johnson reminds us of what he’s capable of. Daniel Craig is ever delightful, but it’s Josh O’Connor who gives this film a heart and soul you won’t soon forget.

6. F1

This is a capital-M movie. Escapism at the highest level, a high-concept original film that’s short on story but so fucking cool to experience. The ending is inevitable but the verisimilitude of the film makes you grip the seat in anticipation nonetheless. Platitudes like this shouldn’t be surprising, considering it was directed and produced by the folks who gave us Top Gun: Maverick just a few years ago.

5. Eddington

Boy, this movie goes there. Fearless in its criticisms and its shockingly violent third act, writer-director Ari Aster has made the best American western since the Coen Brother’s True Grit. A bold statement on the American psyche during 2020, this slow burn is an provocative descent into a shared madness that we can’t look away from.

4. Hamnet

Good Will Shakespeare. Returning to her naturalistic roots that made her a known quantity, Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao explores the devastating origins of the Bard’s most famous play (I’ll give you three guesses which one it is). Anchoring the whole film is a towering performance from Jesse Buckley, whose grief is all-too-real and sits with you long after the lights come up.

3. Marty Supreme

Timothee Chalamet is the defining movie star of his generation. After commanding blockbusters and indie darlings for the last decade, the triumph of his role as Marty Mauser, a charismatic, shockingly vain, and blindly confident ping pong hustler in 1950s New York is so singular, so self-evident, that it cements his place as the next DiCaprio. Thrillingly episodic, writer-director-editor Josh Safdie keeps you on the edge of seat for the entire runtime — even if the conclusion is evident from the, “Wait, is that what I think it is?” opening credit sequence.

2. 28 Years Later

Trailers historically give the whole movie away. How refreshing it was to realize that the year’s best trailer only hinted at the first act of the year’s best horror film. Wildly inventive, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland return to the franchise that made them famous with flare to spare— imbuing the series with a sense of grace that was previously absent. Elegiac and mythical.

1. Sinners

Ryan Coogler’s gothic horror film is cinematic jolt of blockbuster adrenaline: fiery and sensual and funny and creepy and deeply entertaining. And while other films this year explore the damaged American mind, including Marty Supreme and One Battle After Another, none do so with as much originality and flare. It’s a bold declaration that film still matters, that it can still shape culture, and that it can still take our breath away. Original, phantasmagorically beautiful, and utterly singular.

Daniel’s List:

10. One of Them Days

Keke Palmer is one of our great entertainers, and I hope she gets a real breakout opportunity for even bigger successes. This was a fun buddy comedy with plenty of chemistry between Keke and SZA. Wish I’d seen it in a loud, rowdy theatre.

9. Train Dreams

A beautiful tale about the times changing and a man’s reflection on his life. Joel Edgerton gives a career-best performance as a man grappling with the loss of his wife/daughter and figuring out his place in the world. Love seeing William H. Macy even in a brief role.

8. Black Bag

I’m immediately going to be in on a taut, under-2-hour Steven Soderbergh thriller, especially one starring Cate Blanchett & Michael Fassbender. And it’s a wife-guy movie? Every time. I’d watch 10 of these a year.

7. Wake Up Dead Man

I hope Rian Johnson makes 20 Benoit Blanc movies. I love a big ensemble cast, and even though it wasn’t the strongest cast of the three installments, we did get a standout performance from Josh O’Connor. He’s poised to be a name we hear much more from – already celebrated roles in Challengers and The Crown, and he’s starring in Steven Spielberg’s summer sci-fi movie Disclosure Day next.

6. Mr. Scorsese

A five-part documentary on Martin Scorsese, that’s pretty much all you need to know. I loved getting an up close and personal look at one of the all-time great directors. Thank goodness he has continued to make movies well into his 80s. Every movie he makes is another gift to film lovers.

5. F1

Top Gun Maverick but with fast cars. Sign me up. The racing sequences were electric and you feel the adrenaline rush at each turn. While it could have been a little shorter, I’ll still revisit this one plenty of times. The “aging-guy-who-mentors-a-young-hotshot” genre is always going to deliver. A perfect summer blockbuster.

4. 28 Years Later

Had a much better time watching this movie than I was expecting to – horror generally is not my go-to genre at all. Ralph Fiennes appears in the final section and elevated an already elite movie even higher. The best of the franchise.

3. Marty Supreme

I saw this on January 1, but I’m including it on the year-end list anyway. It’s that good. A propulsive, frenetic tale of chasing greatness. Timothee Chalamet gives the performance of the year, and I hope he wins Best Actor in a couple of months. Chalamet’s drive channeled into the character of Marty Mauser to perfection. I can’t stop thinking about it, and the next time I watch it cannot come soon enough.

2. One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson is well overdue for an Oscar, and this likely will be the year of his coronation. The Oscar frontrunner in several categories, it’s PTA’s largest scale film to date, and I expect it to be well rewarded this season. There’s a lot of dialogue and takes surrounding the plot and Anderson’s handling of Teyana Taylor’s character Perfidia – I’d encourage you to watch the movie and come to your own conclusions.

1. Sinners

Wholly original, one of the best films of the year, if not decade. Will be thinking about the juke-joint history of music scene for a long time. I love the Ryan Coogler-Michael B. Jordan collaborations and am eager to see how they work together and continue their partnership. I hope we get another 20-30 years of their movies. I will also say, I don’t normally enjoy a mid-credits scene, but the one in Sinners was top tier.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has long been the black sheep of the Bond series. Bond fans mostly agree that the casting of George Lazenby is the weak link in an otherwise strong entry in the series, one that has received appropriate reappraisals over the year.

Lazenby famously took over for Sean Connery after Connery had (visibly) tired of the role in You Only Live Twice. Despite the opportunity to reprise the role, Lazenby walked away from doing future movies, mistakenly believing that Bond would become an antiquated character in the 1970s.

OHMSS’s grounded action, sublime stunts, and emotional story arc have all aged the film extremely well. Director Peter Hunt does a masterful job of cutting around Lazenby’s stiff, awkward, stilted performance. Lazenby sells the action scenes well, but he looks exactly like someone who has never had to sit and deliver lines on screen before.

But would the movie have really been better with Sean Connery still in the role? I’m not so sure. OHMSS doesn’t just stick out because Lazenby is taking over the role from the original (and some might say definitive) Bond. It sticks out because it’s telling a story about a significantly different Bond.

From the jump, OHMSS doesn’t try to hide the fact that there’s a new actor in the role of Bond. Lazenby breaks the fourth wall with his famous quip, “This never happened to the other fellow,” just before the credits roll.

The film still goes out of its way to tell the audience that this is still the James Bond they know and love — like the blatant homages as Bond goes through his desk, pulling out prominent props from the preceding films. But Lazenby’s Bond feels different from Connery’s in tangible ways, beyond just the actor.

For a start, Lazenby plays Bond as significantly less confident in his own abilities and prowess. Connery’s Bond was the kind of man who was never out of ideas. Sure, he could be a little panicked, like when Goldfinger has him restrained with a laser pointed at his crotch, or when Red Grant has him on his knees at gunpoint on the Orient Express. But even when we come close to seeing his Bond lose his cool, Connery is still in control on some level, never doubting his ability to wriggle out of some new crisis.

Lazenby plays Bond as much more emotional and self-doubting. There’s that fourth wall moment where he expresses some winking frustration at the audience after he’s initially spurned by Tracy. Beyond that, he seems to even doubt his own sexual prowess, conveying doubt in his ability to bed two women in the same night, quipping the second woman would “have to be” an inspiration for him.

But more significantly, Lazenby’s best moment in an otherwise flat performance comes after his escape from Piz Gloria. Desperately trying to evade capture, Bond gets lost in a crowd of skiers and Christmas party revelers. His Bond is downright scared as he’s visibly startled by a bear mascot in his face. When he goes to sit on a bench in the middle of a crowd, trying to blend in, he looks frightened, exhausted — even defeated. He’s only saved by the arrival of Tracy.

Finally, at the end of the film, his Bond looks appropriately devastated cradling Tracy’s dead body. Connery played his Bond like a man never capable of falling in love, a man who treated women as nothing more than disposable. But Lazenby’s Bond was actually capable of emotional investment in another person.

It’s a rare moment of humanity for an otherwise unflappable character. That sort of emotion would be built upon in the performances of later Bonds, especially Daniel Craig.

Casting Connery in OHMSS likely would have improved the biggest weakness in the film in that a lot of the film has to compensate for Lazenby’s stiffness. At the same time, though, it is a little difficult to envision his Bond acting with the same vulnerability. OHMSS might only really work because of the novelty of Lazenby’s performance. At certain moments, it feels like a radically different Bond.

Connery was an undeniably great actor with underrated range, and he does some really great work with Bond, especially in his earlier films. But for OHMSS and that specific Bond, maybe, just maybe, Lazenby was a better fit for the tuxedo.

The latest take on literature and cinema’s most legendary monster has divided your friendly neighborhood movie nerds here at Cinemantics. Graham and Tyler duke it out across Europe — from the Arctic Circle to a seaside castle to the Swiss Alps — as they break down their thoughts on the hotly debated movie.

Tyler’s Review

Frankenstein’s creature has stalked the shadows of nearly every film by Guillermo del Toro. By his own admission, Mary Shelly’s Gothic novel is the Oscar-winner’s great creation myth; the very fable that has shaped his life and art. Most of his films grapple with the themes the novel explores: fathers — earthly and eternal — and sons; faith and reason; sin and redemption; and finding your place in a cold and cruel world.

All of these appear, too, in his latest film. And if you’re looking for Guillermo del Toro’s definitive take on the scientist and his innocent creation, then watch Pinocchio.

Putting aside the question of whether or not this story merited yet another adaptation, Del Toro’s Frankenstein is dead in the laboratory. It is an overstuffed, $120 million, two-and-a-half-hour made-for-television gothic melodrama that belongs at the backend of a streaming platform’s catalogue rather than on the big screen.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Del Toro’s struggles with dialogue are on full display here, with some of the most ham-fisted, eye-rolling monologues I’ve heard in recent years. Mia Goth really struggles to make this dialogue believable. Oscar Issac delivers a British accent straight from the Dick Van Dyke School for Acting. Structurally, the movie tacks on unnecessary new characters and subplots for Christoph Waltz because … boo capitalism …, thereby creating a glacially dull, often uneven pace. Not a good sign for a two-and-a-half-hour movie!

On top of all of that, while Del Toro is still a master of light and attention to detail in production design, the Netflix curse has taken hold of him. This film is visually dull, flat, and often ugly. Even with its emphasis on real sets and miniatures, the movie’s Netflix-quality CGI (not a compliment) makes everything feel cheap and unworthy of the big screen. I might as well have watched this on an Apple Watch.

The one thing that is worth praising in this film is the Creature itself. Jacob Elordi’s physical and emotional performance is angelic, innocent, and wrathful all in equal measure. It’s a performance that demands attention and, hopefully, will receive it from awards bodies in the coming months. It’s a damn shame the rest of the movie fails to live up to his beautiful creation.

Verdict: Dead

Graham’s Review

Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro seem like a match made in heaven between a director and subject material. And for large portions of the film, that match shines through. When del Toro is on his game, his Frankenstein is an incredible film. Now that he actually has his hands on the material that has shaped his career, his adaptation has moments that leap off the screen. But other portions of the film feel like a slog.

Del Toro tells Frankenstein like a story set in a world perpetually on the verge of overwhelming the characters that seek to dominate their surroundings. Seeing the film on Netflix doesn’t do it justice. You should see it on a big screen – so much of the film feels like del Toro creating worlds that feel huge, dwarfing the characters in ornately decorated, sprawling interiors and cold, vast expanses of wasteland.

But too much of the film has the typical Netflix production problems. The first half of the film that tells the creation of the Monster is soggy, with an extraneous subplot involving Christoph Walz not adding much to the story beyond a strained political subtext. And for as good a visual storyteller as del Toro is, there are some truly terrible visual effects moments that frustrate an otherwise gorgeous-looking film.

When del Toro is able to flex his visual muscles, the film really sings. One particular cringe-inducing montage showing Victor assembling the body of the creature is a delight to audience members with strong stomachs, demonstrating del Toro’s obsession with misshapen, disassembled, and reassembled bodies. As Tyler aptly noted above, Jacob Elordi also steals portions of the entire film as the Monster.

Del Toro’s decision to do away with much of the moral ambiguity of the Monster in the original book reduces his Frankenstein to a story about a misunderstood, tragic figure brought to life by a monomaniacal madman. It works on its own terms, and it follows del Toro’s previous works telling broad stories about good and evil. But it leaves the viewer feeling like something is missing, like the film is less than the sum of its parts. But perhaps that’s fitting for a story that has been repeatedly disassembled and reassembled like the titular monster himself.

Verdict: A reanimated Monster that’s missing something.

‘Frankenstein’ is now playing in select theaters and streaming exclusively on Netflix. Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images.

It’s the Hollywood story no one expected. After the disaster of 2024’s Joker: Folie à Deux and underperformance in the first quarter of the year, punctuated by two high-profile disappointments in the DeNiro gangster drama The Alto Knights and Bong Joon Ho’s sci-fi satire Mickey 17, Warner Bros. Pictures was on the hot seat.

So were those in charge. It was Hollywood’s worst-kept secret that the company’s film czars, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, were going to be axed. The studio’s unorthodox slate of films for the year—dominated by either new IP, horror, or auteur-driven original fare—was the subject of much scrutiny and fear.

It wasn’t an unfounded concern. The IP was unproven, original fare had had little success at the box office in the last decade, and the superhero industrial complex was falling apart in dramatic fashion.

Then the narrative changed.

First came A Minecraft Movie, an irreverent, silly comedy based on a popular video game, which was followed two weeks later by Sinners, an original gothic horror film from Oscar-nominee Ryan Coogler. The movie still holds the title of my favorite flick of the year. In one month, the studio’s fortunes reversed. Everyone forgot about the disaster of 2024. Here was a studio that found success in tapping into both new IP that resonated with what young people are actually engaging with and an original film that blended sociopolitical commentary into what is unquestionably the most satisfying blockbuster in a long time.

By the time that Paul Thomas Anderson’s three-hour, original epic One Battle After Another crossed $185 million internationally this week, Warner Bros. set a Hollywood record—seven consecutive films from the studio opened to over $40 million domestically. They’re the first studio this year to cross $4 billion in international revenue. Even when the hot streak broke in late September, One Battle still managed to open number one domestically and recoup its production budget.

The story of Warner Bros.’ historic successes with an unorthodox slate reveals that things are changing —and, hopefully, for the better.

What lessons can we take away?

1. Original films must be event films, too

Of Warner Bros.’ eight successful films released between April and September, half of them — Sinners, F1, Weapons, and One Battle After Another were original concepts. Genre-wise, they span comedic adventure, horror, and sports drama, but what made them work in the marketplace was they were all marketed as event films. Here were experiences you simply had to see on the big screen. Leaning into the IMAX, 70MM, and VistaVision formats only heightened the online chatter around these flicks.

The culture vacuum left by waning interest in superhero films has created a moment in movie culture where original films can recapture some of their glory.

A tertiary observation on this: All four films are directed by respected auteurs. They each have passionate fans on Film Twitter ready to jump into the fold to defend the filmmaker from any critique. Part of the marketing campaigns for each film was to emphasize the filmmaker and their credits. “Come to F1, it’s made by the same guy who made Top Gun: Maverick!” “Did you like Black Panther? We got a vampire flick from the same director.” “The dude who made ‘Boogie Nights’ just made a comedy epic with Leo DiCaprio.”

I’ve been critical in the past of filmmakers who risk their personal fortunes on original ego-driven vanity projects that fail to take off. These four consecutive original successes does prove my argument correct: Even the best directors need an opposing force within the studio to push back and reign in.

2. Horror is the new genre king

Half of the eight success stories this year were original. Half were also horror films — Sinners, Final Destination: Bloodlines, Weapons, and The Conjuring: Last Rites. A fifth, Companion, was released this January but garnered more positive attention after it was released to HBO Max. After the Prestige Horror craze swept the world with films like Get Out and Hereditary, one thing is clear after 2025: The Age of Horror has arrived.

It makes sense why. It is perhaps our most malleable genre, capable of being both popcorn entertainment of the highest order and the most penetrating commentary. Sure, we go to horror flicks for the scares. But we think about them long after the credits role because of what they’re trying to say. The 2025 Warner Bros. slate gave us a little bit of both, proving the versatility of the genre.

Expect to see Warner’s genre subsidiary New Line Cinema lean even more into horror in the years come, as other studios begin to play catch up.

3. Audiences reward variety

Originally feared to be a disaster in the wings, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy’s decision to invest so much time, talent, and treasure into a diverse slate of films this year paid off ten-fold. The proof: Warner Bros.’ films amount to over a quarter (27%) of the marketshare this year. They have sold 163 million tickets and $2 billon in domestic gross — outpacing Disney by twenty million tickets sold and several hundreds of millions of revenue.

The House of Mouse helps prove the point. Increasingly relying on legacy IP, Disney has struggled since making the business decision to continuously resurrect old franchises from the 80s and 90s. They’re trying to drag young people to what they think is cool. But the kids aren’t budging. And with little original fare or attempts to meet young people where they are (apart from this year’s Lilo and Stich), they’ve struggled to bring in the revenue that they’ve grown accustomed to in the last twenty years of movie dominance. Tron: Ares is just the latest example of this trend.

Warner Bros’ creative risk bet on the premise that audiences craved more than what’s been creatively regurgitated for the last forty years. That original and new can be, when made responsibly and well, even more rewarding for the consumer and the bottom line. After 2023 ended with three non-sequels in the top three spots on the highest-grossing films list, Warner Bros. success story shows that we might finally be seeing the light at the end of the legacy IP tunnel.

The poster for John Carpenter’s iconic slasher Halloween has to feature prominently in conversations about the greatest movie taglines in history: “The Night He Came Home!”

Much like other great taglines — “In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream,” “You’ll Believe A Man Can Fly,” “An Adventure 65 Million Years in the Making,” — Halloween’s conveys the fundamental appeal of the 1978 classic. The embodiment of evil has come home.

The numerous sequels to Halloween (read more here!) significantly diluted the terror of Carpenter’s original film. Viewed in isolation (without the familial connections or cultic curses), Halloween is a story about a faceless, inexplicable, relentless attack on what was supposed to be a safe haven. It was a story about an attack on the safety and security of suburban America.

Zach Cregger’s Weapons, one of the hits of the 2025 summer season, lent itself to numerous interpretations about what Cregger was trying to say about the state of contemporary America. It was an allegory about school shootings. It was about the impacts of COVID on children. It was about the failures of elder care.

But what Cregger does with Weapons is an update to the themes established by Halloween decades prior. At its core, Weapons is a story about the failure of parents in a bucolic American suburb to keep their children safe. The film plays on decades-old horror tropes about how the suburbs — places where families go for safety, peace, and security — contain their own danger.

Weapons’s grand reveal of its antagonist presents a monster that comes literally from inside the family. Aunt Gladys is introduced as a elderly relative in need of end-of-life care from a central character’s parents (although it’s fair to question whether she’s actually related to the family, or if this was just part of a spell or trick). She quickly takes over the household and bends the parents to her will, proceeding to launch her scheme to draw the children to her.

Cregger cleverly mixes the relatable issue of dealing with aging family members with his emerging brand of villainous elderly matriarchs. But underneath it is the sinister implication that the expectations placed on the parents — to open their suburban home to an elderly relative — completely upends their lives in unpredictable ways.

With how muddled and convoluted the Halloween franchise became, it’s easy to forget just how simple Carpenter’s first film was. Michael Myers isn’t presented as anything otherworldly or supernatural. He is simply the boy who lives down the street and snapped one day with no explanation. He stalks the main characters for no discernible reason, appearing to choose them by chance.

A scene at the beginning of the film drives this point home. When Dr. Loomis goes to a local graveyard, the graveyard keeper briefly recounts to him a story about a father who went insane and murdered his family in a nearby town, remarking to Loomis, “Every town has something like this happen.”

Indeed, Carpenter even positions the town of Haddonfield (named for a town in New Jersey) right outside of Chicago, a city with an extensive history of flights to the suburbs. His Haddonfield is also a mostly empty town, with few extras and empty streets surrounding the characters.

Both Carpenter and Cregger play on long-running themes about paranoia in the suburbs and threats to the nuclear family. For Carpenter, the threat comes from a member of that family. For Cregger, the threat comes from a malevolent force looking to take advantage of expectations of the family.

To be sure, there are a number of other quality suburban horror films that are worth visiting, including many in the haunted house and home invasion genres. But with Halloween serving as the formative slasher movie and Weapons providing the latest entry in the “prestige horror” genre, the pair make for a great double feature. To play on the tagline from Halloween: Weapons is the night everyone leaves home.

Recapturing the magic of the original Naked Gun trilogy would be nearly impossible in 2025. But somehow, the creative team behind The Naked Gun comes extremely close.

Replacing the great Leslie Nielsen was the biggest challenge to continuing the series. Nielsen’s pitch-perfect deadpan delivery played the films completely straight without a tongue-in-cheek moment or a self-aware wink at the camera. Nielsen’s dry-as-a-bone style (“saying unfunny things in an unfunny way,” as he once put it) is the glue that holds the original trilogy together. If Nielsen ever broke character to let the audience in on the joke, the whole conceit of the film’s sense of humor would break down.

The original trilogy (The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, The Naked Gun 2 and 1/2: The Smell of Fear, and The Naked Gun 33 and 1/3: The Final Insult) maintained a consistent quality thanks to Nielsen’s performance. ABC famously cancelled the television show that would becoming the movies, Police Squad!, after just six episodes because its humor was too intricate and clever for an easily distracted television audience. (One network executive infamously remarked that the show was being cancelled because “the viewer had to watch it in order to appreciate it.”)

It helped that Nielsen started his career as a serious actor who starred in science fiction classics like 1950’s Forbidden Planet, only making his transition to comedies decades into his career. So it’s only fitting that 2025’s The Naked Gun casts one of the great serious actors of our age — Liam Neeson — in the role of Frank Drebin, Jr.

The Naked Gun’s humor doesn’t quite operate on the same intricate level. There are lots of broad and juvenile jokes that will appeal to audiences of all ages. But the film’s unapologetic, unironic embrace of silliness is what makes it work, and what sets it apart from so many other major blockbusters.

Indeed, the sheer quantity of jokes is what makes The Naked Gun work so well. Director Akiva Schaffer packs an astonishing number of gags and jokes into the 85 minute running time. If a joke doesn’t land for you, don’t worry about it! There’ll be another one in about 15 seconds.

You may roll your eyes at the film’s repeated use of scatological jokes, but if you do, you’ll miss a more subtle background gag about taking the term “cold cases” literally. From voice-over jokes that pay tribute to the original’s dry wit1 to an absurdist homage midway through the film to Jack Frost, the relentless pace of jokes does wear a bit tired by the end of the film. But the 85-minute runtime reflects the fact that Schaffer edited the film to within a moment of its life, leaving absolutely no room for fluff.

The jokes range from chuckle-worthy to sidesplittingly hilarious. The sequences set in the police station are an absolute delight: the movie is moving a mile a minute as characters deliver exposition while presenting a panoply of visual jokes in the background.

It also helps that the entire cast is acting at the height of their dramatic powers. Neeson —who has had a career renaissance as a deadly serious old man action star — is an ideal spiritual successor to Nielsen, as he is completely committed to playing all of his lines as seriously as possible. Danny Huston is pitch-perfect as the antagonist, despite the fact that the film riffs a little too heavily on major plot elements of Kingsman: The Golden Circle. And Pamela Anderson is a surprising revelation as the all-important female lead, continuing another promising late career renaissance.2 She matches Neeson’s performance perfectly.

There was also an unbridled joy to seeing the movie with a guffawing crowd. The death of the theatrical comedy has been one of the worst developments of the streaming era. The Naked Gun follows in the footsteps of 2023’s criminally underrated No Hard Feelings, which failed to make much of an impact at the box office. And the dearth of theatrical comedies in the interim suggests that the exodus of comedic stars to streaming services has had the effect of sapping audience interest in big screen comedies.

That’s why it’s important to see The Naked Gun in a theater with the biggest crowd possible. Sharing multiple laughs with an audience heightens the enjoyment of the film, and goes to show that theaters don’t need Avengers: Endgame-level events to get reactions out of audiences. A solid opening weekend suggests that there’s still some audience appetite for the big-screen comedy. Let’s hope that more comedies follow The Naked Gun’s lead by putting stars front and center, creating a clear tone, and embracing the magic of movie theaters.

For Marvel Studios, this weekend’s news is anything but fantastic.

After a respectable $117M domestic opening, The Fantastic Four: First Steps cratered in its second weekend. No, seriously, it plummeted to earth like a Kryptonian spaceship (different franchise, I know). Week-over-week, the Matt Shankman-directed film dropped by a larger-than-expected 66%. That’s on par with Marvel’s prolonged string of creative and commercial failures, including February’s Captain America: Brave New World (down 68%), 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (down 70%), and 2022’s artistically bankrupt Thor: Love and Thunder (down 67%).

But that’s not the worst of it. On its second Friday of release, August 1st, the film grossed only $ 11 million. That is an 80% drop from its opening day just six days prior.

That’s right: eighty percent. For every five seats occupied in a theater last Friday, only one of those was peopled this weekend.

Not only that, but the Man of Steel is not soaring as high as many—myself included—expected. Even after a six-month, surround sound marketing blitz that criss-crossed the globe, James Gunn’s Superman is just closing in at $540M worldwide. While a domestic success ($305M as of Sunday), international audiences have largely rejected this most all-American of cultural exports.

It’ll be a miracle if it hits $600M when the last of the theatrical screenings wrap up.

The middling success of Superman and the commercial underperformance of Fantastic Four — the summer’s most anticipated movies — led me to an inescapable conclusion, one that I have quietly held since the aftermath of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.

The golden age of superhero movies is over.

Don’t believe me? Well, consider this:

Over six weeks in 2019, three superhero movies — Endgame, Captain Marvel, and Shazam! — were released. They collectively grossed $4.3 billion worldwide. Over the last eight months, four superhero movies — Captain America, Thunderbolts*, Superman, and The Fantastic Four have grossed a total of $1.6 billion.

Not only that, but, for the first time since 2011 (not counting 2020 due to the pandemic), the year’s highest-grossing superhero film will not break $600M worldwide.

Much like Thanos, the end of the era is inevitable.

The prognosis was written on the wall when Tony Stark snapped his fingers. “Okay, so where do we go from here?” Narratively and artistically, Kevin Feige and company have stumbled blindly through the Multiverse Saga. Coupled with an oversaturation of the marketplace, with two to three theatrical productions and several streaming programs being released annually, superheroes at the multiplex had no clear path forward — just a downward spiral.

Pure glutton of superhero movies since 2008 evokes similar moments of genre dominance in Hollywood history. Most famously, the musical and the western. The advent of sound in the late 1920s ushered in an unmatched reign of the Hollywood musical that reached its zenith with 1965’s The Sound of Music and floundered out of fashion with 1969’s Hello, Dolly! in the early days of the rougher, grittier New Hollywood. The western, a staple of silent films, peaked commercially in the mid-50s. While much more versatile than the musical, audiences grew to find the tales of Cowboys and Indians to feel more like fantasy as the world moved further and further away from the closing of the American West.

We find ourselves in a similar moment now. As my colleague Graham Piro has often remarked, most superhero movies are a reflection of our anxieties in a post-9/11 world. Now, nearly a quarter of a century after that tragedy, the world has started to forget what happened that day—and the narrative stakes that superhero movies have provided have lost their effectiveness. Audiences are tired of the same stories, the same “dramatic” stakes, the same weightless CGI action, and the same silly sky beams.

In December 2023, movie fans looked at the final box office in awe. For the first time in twenty-two years, the three highest-grossing films were not sequels. Adjusted for inflation, all three — Barbie, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Oppenheimer — grossed over a billion dollars. There was a hope that maybe the tyranny of spandex was lifting. It took another sixteen months or so, but it appears that time has come. The success of non-superhero blockbusters like A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, F1, and Lilo and Stitch, as well as smaller films like The Naked Gun, 28 Years Later, and Materialists, shows that neither Marvel nor DC rules the cineplex like they once did.

That’s good for the marketplace.

With Marvel and DC slowing down production, more movies can gain a foothold in the theaters, find their audiences, and (hopefully) achieve success.

The more successful movies we have, the more movies get made.

The more variety in those successful movies, the more variety we have in our theaters.

Now, I’m not going to prophetically declare that we’re about to enter some new Golden Age of Moviemaking. Nor will I celebrate the end of this era. For all the creative problems I have with most superhero movies, they have kept Hollywood financially alive for the last half-decade.

Plus, like musicals and westerns before it, superheroes aren’t going away completely. The next two-part Avengers film will undoubtedly roll in the money. As will Spider-Man: Brand New Day. But it’ll be harder to bring new audiences—younger audiences—into seeing these films when Marvel is competing with younger IPs like Minecraft.

That’s why Kevin Fiege and James Gunn would do well to pause, reset, and scale down. Put these heroes into smaller, more grounded genre pieces. 2026’s body horror-influenced Clay Face could go a long way in proving this hypothesis, much like Logan (western), Wonder Woman (romantic comedy), and The Dark Knight (crime thriller) before it.

Superheroes work best when they make us believe a man can fly. In 2025, we’ve become too accustomed to it. The enterprise has lost its joy, its wonder. What we need now is a cultural reset, some time off, so that we can rediscover that wonder again one day.

In the meantime, there are plenty of good movies that merit your attention.

It is no secret that the Fantastic Four, often called Marvel’s “first family,” have had a rough go when it comes to the big screen. Prior to First Steps, the best adaptations were director Tim Story’s Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) — and that’s not saying much. This duology is far from the worst of Marvel’s disjointed early 2000s films, but some casting choices, flat humor, and a misguided take on Doctor Doom left us with a couple of unremarkable films that reek of the decade in which they were made. And the less said about 2015’s practically unwatchable Fant4stic, the better. With such a disastrous run, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the introduction of Marvel’s First Family into the Cinematic Universe for quite some time.

Since the release of Avengers: Endgame in 2019, Marvel’s luster has dimmed. The end of its historic Infinity Saga marked the beginning of the (near) disastrous Multiverse Saga, in which box office returns plummeted and critical reception cooled. Although commercially successful, not even the introduction of Fox-owned characters like Deadpool could turn the tide of the scattershot saga. I have my criticisms of the franchise and of some of the creative choices made in recent years, but, to be honest, I have never wavered in my excitement to see the Fantastic Four brought to life in a film worthy of those iconic characters. Kevin Feige and company can drop the ball as many times as they want, but if they get those characters right, I’ll be happy.

Friends, they cracked the code.

First Steps is a film that functions primarily to introduce a definitive version of Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Ben Grimm, and Johnny Storm to the MCU, and reintroduce them to an audience who mostly knows their deal. Many superhero movies, especially reboots, are opting to skip the origin story, or at least pare it down in favor of diving into the plot, but First Steps opens with an in-universe recap of the team’s fateful space expedition that leaves them forever changed, via an ABC Television special. It’s brief, but effective in reminding us what these characters can do and where they stand in their world —a visually rich Earth-828, set in a retro-futuristic 1964 New York City. We meet the team four years into their tenure, and are shown how they have become beloved heroes across the globe. Director Matt Shakman (WandaVision), confidently helms this film, allowing it to dance between interpersonal drama, sci-fi action, and tender family moments. I greatly appreciated Shakman’s willingness to let the movie lean on scenes where the Four talk, eat, argue, or put their heads together to solve a problem, rather than relying on a string of massive fights to move the plot along.

Visually, this is the prettiest film in Marvel Studios’ catalogue. The production design is outstanding and so fitting of the spirit of Jack Kirby’s(no relation to Vanessa, who plays Sue Storm) art and the 1960s origins of the Fantastic Four. The team’s costumes are solid, and I really enjoyed how each one has a distinct style rather than a uniform look. In keeping with most films in the Multiverse Saga, I felt that the CGI was generally below par, especially in scenes that featured Franklin Richards, Reed and Sue’s son, and some of the scenes where Reed stretches looked noticeably fake to me. That said, the depiction of Galactus is a major win here. Ralph Ineson’s (The Witch, The Green Knight) booming voice is perfectly suited to the cosmic giant, and his comic-accurate look was magnificent to behold on a big screen. I was initially skeptical when it was announced that Galactus would be the primary antagonist, but there is no denying that Shakman and co. have done justice to the space god. Now, let’s talk about the most important aspect of any superhero film: casting.

I’ve been a Marvel fan since I was about 3 or 4 years old, and have loved the Fantastic Four in particular for most of my life. Naturally, I was always going to be impossible to please, and while I respect some of the actors in previous iterations’ casts, I was never sold on those casts. The announcement of Pedro Pascal as Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Ben Grimm/The Thing, and Joseph Quinn as Johnny Storm/Human Torch was a welcome one indeed. This is a troupe of generally well-regarded actors, and Pascal’s star power in particular was surely needed to convince detractors that these characters were worth giving another chance.

While none of them would have been my personal choices, the four actors in question all do a fantastic (I promise I won’t do that again) job in this movie. Credit is also due to the writing, which not only adequately depicts the obvious traits of each member, but gives us a strong understanding of their humanity: Reed’s insecurity about his obsessive quest to solve every problem, Sue’s grit and tremendous power, Ben’s passion for life in spite of his physical setback, and Johnny’s often-overlooked intelligence. Not only does each actor understand how to play each character, but they also play off each other in a way that makes them a believable family unit with the dynamics of a spouse, sibling, or close friend. I was particularly struck by Reed and Sue adjusting to parenthood, as I myself welcomed a son last year, and I identify with Reed the most. There is one scene in particular, where Reed and Sue argue about something I won't spoil pertaining to Franklin, that hit home for me in a big way. I think Pascal and Kirby give a stellar portrayal of this couple as equals, and I’d argue that even though this is an ensemble film, Sue is its heart. In that spirit, Kirby really shines here, though she will need to refine her American accent slightly next time.

In addition to Ineson, the supporting cast features Julia Garner as Shalla-Bal/Silver Surfer, Galactus’s cold, calculating herald, and Paul Walter Hauser as Mole Man, a former adversary of the Four who has since reformed. Both actors do a fine job. Aside from Kirby, my favorite performance was easily from Herbie the Robot, who played Herbie, the Fantastic Four’s helper robot, and I want one of my own immediately. In all seriousness, Herbie is great in the comics and was a welcome addition to the movie, which added an extra smile to each scene he featured in.

The overall tone of the film ranges from silly to somber in a way that feels appropriate. The Fantastic Four feature in some dark comic book storylines and events, but their own adventures are typically lighthearted in tone but epic in scale. I think Shakman’s film perfectly captures the essence of this wonderful family, and while I think this cast has their work cut out for them going forward, they have earned the esteemed honor of being the definitive live-action Fantastic Four.

We have officially entered the final phase of the Multiverse Saga. Sighs of relief all around, am I right? Just kidding. You know there’s at least another 10 years of this nonsense to come, and with the X-Men taking center stage after 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars, I’m as excited as ever for yet another helping of superhero movies. I look forward to enriching your lives with my very correct opinions on next year’s MCU movies, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday, where the Fantastic Four will next be seen.

Until then, thank you for reading, and now go read a comic book!

From time to time, Cinemantic’s four main contributors — Tyler MacQueen, Graham Piro, Caleb Boyer, and Daniel Mitchell — will jump on a call to chat about anything and everything movies. After the New York Times released its list of the 100 Best Films of the Century, we decided to discuss what our list would include. Each contributor had four picks. Vote below on which person you think drafted the best!

GRAHAM: With the first pick in the Cinemantics “Best Films of the 21st Century” draft, I’m going back to the beginning of the century: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s arguably the most influential movie of the last 25 years. It shaped the Hollywood blockbuster for decades and captured a mythic spirit in a post-9/11 world, a sweeping story of good and evil, brilliantly told. I know it’s not the “film bro” pick, but it’s big, populist, and I think it’s one of the best films of the century.

CALEB: I love that pick.

DANIEL: It’s a great pick.

TYLER: Graham and I have had this argument a hundred times — and we’ll have it a hundred more — but I still think the elegiac tone of Return of the King hits harder.

DANIEL: I’m going smaller scale with Get Out. It’s one of the few horror films to fully break through into the Oscar conversation - four nominations, one win for Original Screenplay. Jordan Peele is one of our most promising directors, and I think the film reveals something new every time I watch it. Also, Daniel Kaluuya is just phenomenal.

CALEB: My first pick is No Country for Old Men. I think it is the most iconic neo-Western of the 21st century, maybe Hell or High Water is a close second. As an adaptation, it’s incredibly faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel. People often label McCarthy as nihilistic, and that’s not wrong, but I think there’s a thin vein of hope running beneath the despair. That comes through in Tommy Lee Jones’s final monologue, the dream about his father carrying a torch and going out into the deep, dark, cold to light a fire for him somewhere out there. It mirrors The Road in that way. You’ve got the father and the son, and what holds them together is the concept of them carrying the fire of humanity. I think the Coens translated it to the screen with such mastery. I just love that movie.

TYLER: That hopeful undercurrent is true of a lot of the Coens’ work, even in Miller’s Crossing, True Grit, and Hail Caesar. There’s always something beneath the cynicism.

DANIEL: Alright Tyler, you’ve got two picks back to back.

TYLER: First up: La La Land. To quote the opening number, it’s “a technicolor world made of music and machine.” Damien Chazelle modernized the classic Hollywood musical while paying loving homage to its roots. Gosling and Stone could easily become an all-time great pairing like Astaire and Rogers, and the songs are immaculate. But it’s the emotional core — the human cost of chasing dreams, of what you lose in the pursuit — that really lands. That ending sequence still hits me like a freight train, no matter how many times I see it. It’s just a beautifully constructed film.

DANIEL: I knew that was coming. And it’s a worthy pick.

TYLER: And now, for chaos: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Hear me out… it might be the best comedy of the twenty-first century. Yes, other comedies could merit the title (Mean Girls, Anchorman, Tropic Thunder come to mind), but what makes this one stand out is its ability to skewer a well-established genre while also redefining how audiences interact with it. The metric of success? It’s now impossible to take any film in the music biopic genre seriously without thinking of this movie. Every beat in Rocketman, Elvis, and Bohemian Rhapsody — Walk Hard skewered them all first and, frankly, better. John C. Reilly gives a performance that is equally sincere and stupid, sings all the songs, and the jokes hold up nearly twenty years later. A total gem that deserves more love.

GRAHAM: A great parody needs to understand and respect what it’s skewering, and Walk Hard does exactly that. It really was the last gasp of the studio comedy era. Now everything’s either niche or buried on streaming. And it’s wild that Walk Hard flopped when it came out, but has grown such a loyal cult following since.

CALEB: I’d never seen it until Tyler showed it to me, and I became obsessed. Still quote it regularly: “Ma, I can’t smell anything.” “You gone smell-blind, son!”

DANIEL: Tyler might be its biggest evangelist.

CALEB: Yeah, it's so good. I love that movie. Okay, my next pick: Hereditary. I genuinely think it’s the best horror film of the century so far. It hit the way The Exorcist did in its time. Ask anyone what the scariest movie they’ve seen is, and most will say Hereditary. And I know that's the case for me, undoubtedly hands down the scariest movie I've ever watched. It is wild that it was Ari Aster’s debut. It’s not just terrifying; it has depth. The dollhouse imagery, the themes of fate and family, and the meticulous direction. It’s about people who lack agency, who are being manipulated by outside forces. It’s brilliant and deeply disturbing.

DANIEL: I’m going to be honest. It’s probably a no for me, dog. I haven't seen it, and I'm not sure I ever will.

GRAHAM: It pairs well with Get Out as part of that Prestige Horror wave. It also helped usher in the Blumhouse model, which features low-budget, high-return films that build buzz through social media and word-of-mouth, as seen with Long Legs last year. Hereditary became a phenomenon because it shocked people. And Aster really knows how to weaponize the frame. Those slow, creeping reveals are masterful.

DANIEL: Alright, time to shift gears from horror. My next pick is Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. The neon lights flickering on to “Out of Time.” It's just pure dopamine. Tarantino recreates late-‘60s Hollywood with such affection. And not to mention, the breadth of Hollywood from the cast. Stacked top to bottom with past stars (Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Al Pacino), current stars (Leo, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie) and the current slate of the next stars. Even those tiny roles — the Manson followers (shout out Dakota Fanning), the bit players — it just makes for a much richer Hollywood time capsule.

TYLER: Yeah, Mikey Madison, Austin Butler, Sydney Sweeney. It’s a time capsule of talent.

DANIEL: I think Inglourious Basterds might be more fun, but Once Upon a Time is his most mature film. It’s warm and nostalgic, but still delivers that classic Tarantino-violence right when it needs to. That ending is brutal, yes, but also deeply emotional. You realize this is a fairytale. Sharon Tate lives. Evil is punished. It’s wish-fulfillment through cinema, and it’s beautiful.

GRAHAM: It’s also part of this late-career Tarantino trilogy with Basterds and Django that rewrites history. These are movies that take real trauma and let us imagine another ending. Once Upon a Time is a hangout movie, a Hollywood elegy, and a revenge fantasy all in one.

TYLER: And that original music cue at the end when Sharon invites Rick in for a nightcap, it’s subtle but powerful. One of the rare times Tarantino doesn’t use a needle drop, and it works. Just a gentle reminder that this is fiction. In reality, she didn’t survive. But for a moment, the movies let her.

GRAHAM: Alright, I’m sticking to the post-9/11 theme with The Dark Knight. Alongside Fellowship, it’s one of the most influential blockbusters of the century. It changed superhero films, it redefined what audiences expected from “comic book” movies. And Heath Ledger’s Joker is arguably the most iconic performance of the last 25 years. The movie is just wall-to-wall memorable scenes.

TYLER: What The Dark Knight does brilliantly is what Donner’s Superman and Mangold’s Logan also understood: ground your superhero in a real-world genre. Donner gave us an American biblical epic, Mangold gave us a Western, and Nolan gave us a crime thriller, basically Heat with a cape. That’s why it works.

GRAHAM: It also tapped into deep cultural anxieties: surveillance, security, moral compromise. It’s a gripping action film and a reflection of the post-9/11 mindset. That’s why it holds up.

GRAHAM: For my next pick, I’m going with Zero Dark Thirty. Kathryn Bigelow crafts an incredibly tense, morally complex depiction of the hunt for Bin Laden. The final shot with Jessica Chastain alone on a plane, unsure of what comes next says so much. It’s a movie about obsession, about what we sacrifice in pursuit of vengeance. And despite what some critics say, I don’t think it endorses torture. I think it shows it, unflinchingly, and leaves you to wrestle with it. Easily the best War on Terror film we’ve had.

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CALEB: I’ve had it on my watchlist forever. I know I need to sit down and watch it finally. But yeah, that runtime, man. Two and a half hours is no joke when you’ve got kids.

DANIEL: I’ll stay in the 2000s with a Fincher pick, not The Social Network, though that’s in the conversation. I’m going with Zodiac. It’s slow-burn, procedural perfection. Creepy, obsessive, chilling. You’ve got Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo. It’s a serial killer movie, yes, but it’s also a movie about the need to solve the mystery, even when the answer never comes.

CALEB: Oh, great pick! Did Zodiac kick off some of our modern obsession with true crime in film and television? It was before the whole podcast boom. But that blend of real-world horror and narrative craftsmanship has aged really well.

TYLER: I can’t believe we’re this far in and haven’t picked an action movie.

CALEB: I’m glad you said that because my next pick is Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s pure cinematic adrenaline. It is a masterclass in action filmmaking with the practical effects, minimal dialogue, and the subtle but powerful use of CGI. George Miller basically reinvented his own franchise and reminded everyone what blockbuster filmmaking could be. It is an absolute acid trip! The sandstorm scene alone? Unreal. It’s one of those rare movies that genuinely feels like something you’ve never seen before, and that was my experience when I first saw it in the theater, besides maybe Blade Runner 2049.

GRAHAM: I think Fury Road set the standard. Everything else, even John Wick, is living in its shadow. Great pick.

DANIEL: When I am old and rich and own a movie theatre, it will be standard programming to have a showing of the 6-time Academy Award-winning Fury Road once a week.

TYLER: For my next one, I need a Spielberg. There are a lot of possible contenders — West Side Story, Minority Report, or more than likely Lincoln — but I’m going with The Fabelmans. Yes, it’s a $40 million therapy session. But it’s also the most insightful film we’ve had this century about the art form of cinema itself and how movies become a way to process the world. Spielberg, in his capacity as director and co-writer, shows us how a rickety 16mm camera helped him understand his family, his heritage, his pain, and his place in the world, in both good and bad ways. That shot with the camera reflected in the mirror during the divorce scene? Devastating. It’s not nostalgia, it’s reckoning.

DANIEL: That opening line — “Movies are dreams that you never forget” — that’s a line that has stuck with me. Tyler, we saw that one together, too, one of many!

TYLER: And that final sequence with David Lynch as John Ford? Pitch perfect. It’s a fairytale about the birth of a director and the first fifty years of Hollywood history, starting with Sammy watching Cecil B. DeMille and ending with that symbolic meeting between Ford and the next generation of filmmakers. Funny, strange, mythic.

TYLER: Alright, my last pick: Brokeback Mountain. I think it’s one of the most important romances of the century. It redefined the genre. Ang Lee takes the imagery of the American Western and uses it to tell a tragic love story, one that couldn’t exist openly. His restraint as a director mirrors the characters’ emotional repression. Lee is capable of incredible spectacle. Life of Pi proved that, but here he holds back, and it makes the heartbreak land even harder. Ledger, Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway they’re all exceptional. It’s heartbreaking, beautifully directed, and culturally significant. A real turning point.

GRAHAM: It really is. It’s one of those rare films that you can say mattered in the culture. And it’s aged incredibly well.

CALEB: For my final pick, there has to be at least one animated film on our list. Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki. It came out in 2001, and it still stands as one of the most imaginative and emotionally rich animated films ever made. Miyazaki uses animation to explore adult themes through a child’s eyes — identity, loss, consumerism, environmental decay — all while crafting a dreamlike fantasy world. It’s bizarre, beautiful, and a delight. You can see his influence everywhere in Western animation and live-action films as well.

GRAHAM: Fantastic choice. And we definitely needed at least one animated film in the mix.

DANIEL: I still haven’t seen Spirited Away, but it’s been on my list forever. Is it too scary for kids?

CALEB: It's not intentionally scary, but it's just so weird and bizarre at times that kids might get scared. Some of his other films are more approachable, like Kiki’s Delivery Service. If you ever want to have your faith in humanity restored, that’s a wonderful film. Spirited Away is amazing too.

DANIEL: Okay, last pick. I’m going with Ocean’s Eleven. It might not be the most important movie of the century, but it’s definitely one of the most fun. The cast is pure charisma: Clooney, Pitt, Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle. The needle drops, the heist structure, the poker scene with early-2000s celebs — it’s a time capsule and a perfect vibe. Soderbergh followed up two Best Director nominations (and the win! in 2000) with this absolute banger.

GRAHAM: Great pick. It’s so satisfying to watch. Everyone in that movie is cool, charming, and impossibly good-looking. Just pure pleasure.

TYLER: When I went to Vegas last year, all I could think about was that soundtrack. That’s how ingrained Ocean’s Eleven is in my brain.

GRAHAM: Okay, last pick for me: The Florida Project. Directed by Sean Baker. It’s one of the most human, heartbreaking, and quietly powerful films I’ve ever seen. It tells the story of families living on the edge of society, just outside the gates of Disney World, and it does so with so much compassion and dignity. The performances — especially from the nonprofessional child actors — are incredible. Willem Dafoe is heartbreaking. That final sequence? Devastating and transcendent. It’s a small film that leaves a huge mark.

TYLER: That’s a curveball I did not see coming, but it’s a great pick. A perfect closer.

CALEB: I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard it’s incredible. Adding it to the list now.

The Snyderverse is dead. Long live the DC Universe. The road to get to these words is a long and bizarre one. To kick things off, I’d like to provide a primer that summarizes the events that have led us to this point for those who might be out of the loop or confused about why there’s a new guy wearing the red cape.

In 2010, Warner Bros. hired filmmaker Zack Snyder, of 300 and Watchmen fame, to helm their upcoming Superman reboot following the conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy. This Superman origin film would be the first in a series that would culminate in an Avengers-style “Justice League” team-up movie, and continue henceforth, ideally mirroring the success of the juggernaut that was the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Despite its divisive reception, 2013’s Man of Steel, starring Henry Cavill, ultimately paved the way for a shared universe of DC films, colloquially known as the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). Still, a lack of a cohesive structure, drastic reshoots, and underwhelming box office and critical performance ultimately doomed WB’s answer to the MCU.

With this knowledge, welcome to the new age of DC Comics on film. Enter: James Gunn’s Superman. As a comic book/superhero nerd who appreciated some of what the DCEU did, but was mixed on the pulpy action and humor of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, I was hesitant to join the movie’s hype. With the film’s announcement, I was skeptical of the idea of a lighter tone for DC adaptations that would potentially pander to the MCU audience, despite that franchise starting to decline. Needless to say, I was exhausted by years of constant DCEU controversy and WB’s poor management and longed for a reboot. Once it was announced that Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Amateur) had been cast as Lois Lane and Nicholas Hoult (Juror No. 2, Nosferatu) had signed on to play Lex Luthor, however, the light began to appear to me.

Those casting choices, along with the then-unfamiliar David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman, convinced me that this new outing had potential. Brosnahan is an adaptable actor with great comedic ability, which suits Lois Lane perfectly, since her wit is just as important as her grit. Lex Luthor, being a slimy, cruel, rich bully, was a departure for Hoult, but he has a career going back to his adolescence (see 2002’s About a Boy) that showcases his range. These crucial decisions make all the difference, especially in a film based on characters with storied histories and strong visual identities.

Superman opens with a brief text summary of the world state, giving the audience the rundown on why we’re about to see our hero crash into the snow and call his unruly dog, Krypto, for help. This immediate choice to tell rather than show makes a strong impact when people are so familiar with the concept, and from there, a consistently entertaining and heartfelt film follows.

Taking heavy thematic inspiration from the beloved Christopher Reeve Superman films of the 1970s, and light narrative inspiration from Snyder’s work, Gunn creates an all-encompassing, familiar but fresh Superman that feels like the formula has been perfected. Corenswet is undeniably charming in this role, not only being a physical match for the character, but embodying the sweetness and resolve that defines Clark Kent/Superman. Pair that with his exceptional chemistry with Brosnahan and you have a Clark and Lois for the ages based on acting alone.

We learn that Lois and Clark have only been dating for three months, and in one of the film’s best scenes, Clark allows Lois to interview him as Superman. It’s the kind of scene that actors live for, and Corenswet and Brosnahan are at their absolute best under the emotional strain of this tense clash of business and personal. I greatly appreciated Gunn’s interest in allowing Superman to be frustrated with both the world and himself, which calls back to Henry Cavill’s take on the character in the Snyder films, but Gunn also makes him wholesome, which harkens back to Christopher Reeve tremendously. This balancing act is reminiscent of the Superman from DC’s early 2000s animated series’ Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and as someone who has always held a deep reverence for those works, I was absolutely thrilled to see it play out in live action.

The plot is less remarkable, but still completely serviceable. Gunn wrote the script in addition to directing, and I think his experience thus far lends to the quality of the pacing and the movie’s ability to juggle many elements. You will be pelted with CGI action sequences and copious destruction along the way, and if you haven’t already reconciled that that aspect of superhero films is here to stay, you might be a masochist. That isn’t to say the action isn’t exciting, as there are some solid anime-esque fights. On the other end, you have a compelling story about Clark’s struggle to come to terms with who he is vs who he needs to be, And while Man of Steel explores this quite well, and honestly, catches more flak than it deserves, I think it is more powerful in Superman, because we see it through the eyes of Clark Kent, the human instead of Kal El, the Kryptonian.

Musically, the soundtrack is typical James Gunn fare. Gunn is a self-proclaimed punk rock music nerd, and you will hear many, many songs in this movie, many of them likely unfamiliar to you. It’s one of those directors’ signatures that can work really well sometimes, and fall a bit flat other times. Take that as you will. John Murphy’s score calls back proudly to John Williams’ iconic theme from the Donner films, but I wasn’t amazed in all honesty. While the title track in particular is excellent, I think the score is eclipsed by Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL’s brilliant work for the DCEU, and I hope to see bolder choices made for future films.

In writing this review, it was difficult to avoid spoiling this movie’s “twist,” and I will keep my word and let you experience that for yourself. However, I want to note that the twist plays into the dominant theme of the movie, which is ultimately the importance of empathy. Clark’s mission in life, while centered around heroic feats and saving lives, is really about being kind to others, be they human, alien, superdog, or giant monster. This is a movie about the power of helping someone, simply because you can. It’s the character's greatest strength, but also the movie’s.

As I watched this movie, I sat in awe of one of my favorite characters brought to life yet again, not just because of the epic battles or the easter eggs, or the massive IMAX screen, but because I saw something real life rarely offers us. I saw a powerful person empathize with his enemies. I saw Superman save the world with kindness, in addition to his great strength. I saw Clark Kent fight evil, all in the name of doing the right thing. I think that now, possibly more than ever before in our lifetimes, this message of empathy is needed. I think that is why this movie has resonated so deeply with so many people. I did not expect to get misty-eyed during this movie, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I did once or twice.

It’s a silly and bombastic comic book romp, packed to the gills with characters and references. It’s messy sometimes, and triumphant most of the time. What this movie truly excels at, though, is showing us the impact of empathy. We get to see the kind actions of a nice person from a small town who isn’t always sure of himself, but is sure that he wants to do his part to make his world a place where people are free from fear and persecution and pain.

That’s who Superman is, after all. What more could I ask for as a lifelong DC fan who just loves to see his heroes fly?

Superman is rated PG-13 for violence, action and language. Now playing in theaters.

Search the term “Great American Novel” online, and a Google-assisted artificial intelligence will spit out worthy titles: The Great Gatsby, Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, Moby Dick, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Google the Great American Songbook, and you’ll recognize musical staples like “Over the Rainbow” and “The Christmas Song.”

But if you search “great American movie,” an odd assortment of classics, movies with the word “America” in the title, and even one picture that is now almost unavailable on any streaming service is presented.

For some reason, no canonical discussion of the Great American Movie exists.

Yes, the American Film Institute has ranked the 100 best American movies, but that is a separate conversation. To distinguish a picture as the “best” is to deem it the most excellent, effective, or desirable type or quality. Seeking out the “best” American movie is to find the most impressive and effective combination of the cinematic arts—story, performance, craftsmanship, etc. So, it’s unsurprising that Citizen Kane is often at the top of the list.

But the Great American Movie is different.

Like Huckleberry Finn, Invisible Man, or even Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the quest for the Great American Movie is defined not by technical or storytelling excellence. Rather, it's the search for the most effective exploration of America’s soul. Stick with me; this is not just an abstract philosophy here. This doesn’t mean the Great American Movie can’t be a masterwork in the cinematic arts and sciences (because it should be). But its primary motivation should be using those tools to analyze our history and purpose dramatically. If there is such a picture, it would reveal in every frame both the beautiful and the aspirational, the flawed and the uncomfortable.

There are three criteria for what makes the Great American Movie.

• Must take place in America;

• Must be produced by a predominately American production company;

• Must embody the American experience.

And as young as the art of filmmaking is, there already seems to be a clear contender for the title of the Great American Movie: The Searchers (1956, dir. Ford).

Don’t know this one? Well, you should.

Based on a 1954 novel of the same name by Alan Le May— itself inspired by the 1836 kidnapping of Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanche warriors— The Searchers tells the story of a middle-aged Civil War veteran and his nephew who spends years looking for his niece, abducted in a home raid by Comanche tribesman. It’s a film by a master craftsman at the height of his power. John Ford, at this point in his career, was already the most honored director in Academy history: The Informer, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Quiet Man.

Starring John Wayne in an uncharacteristically dark performance, the film was a critical and commercial success upon release. It grossed $3.7 million domestically in its first year; Look magazine praised it as a “Homeric odyssey.” Admired on its release, it is now beloved. Spielberg, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, and Lean all have cited it as influencing their work. The American Film Institute named it the 12th greatest American movie and the greatest American Western. Entertainment Weekly agreed. Across the pond, the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine ranked it the seventh-best film of all time in a 2012 international survey of film critics. Their 2022 poll ranked it fifteenth. In 1989, it became one of the first 25 films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Like hundreds of movies released yearly, The Searchers easily checks two of the three requirements to be the Great American Movie. It takes place in America—Texas and the American southwest, to be exact—and is produced by an American production company (Warner Bros. and Ford’s Argosy Pictures). Easy peasy. But the third criterion, which weeds out almost all other pictures, save for The Searchers, is that they must embody the American experience.

Tons of ink have been spilled examining what exactly that experience is. So it’s fruitless to try to do so here. Suffice it to say that, generally speaking, the “American experience” is the search for political and social community and the societal struggle with racism.

We see the search for community play out across American history. The first European settlers saw the coastline of the North Atlantic as a safe haven from persecution in their homelands. To them, America was a religious community. By the time of the Revolution, thirteen separate colonies bonded together to become a larger political community. With the opening of the West in the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants and pioneers made the dangerous trek toward the Pacific in search of creating new communities where wealth and security belong to the strongest. The dominating sentiment behind all these movements? That the individual meant more than the state; that community was built on common interests and values, not the class status you were born to. This opened up the promise of America to everyone, but it has also been used as a bludgeon.

On the other side of the equation are the existing political and religious systems of the Native people. For three centuries, the Native peoples and tribes saw their communities threatened, eliminated, and, eventually, forcefully integrated into the ones brought over from across the sea. Tragically, those who came to America to escape persecution became the persecutors.

The Searchers offers a nuanced exploration of these themes and ideas, which are so subtle at times that they might as well be subliminal. It is not surprising that the Great American Movie would be a Western. As Richard Brody recently wrote for the The New Yorker:

Westerns are an inherently political genre, for the obvious reason that they depict (or distort or interrogate) American history. But they are also political in that they show the birth of the polis itself—the institutions of modern urban society, with their laborers, clerks, merchants, teachers, sheriffs, entertainers. Where philosophers from Plato to Rousseau sought to imagine the development of civil society from first principles, the makers of Westerns—John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh—showed it being created from the ground up, by hands-on labor.

Ford’s films, regardless of the genre, have an abiding interest in upholding the virtues of the everyman, their communities, and what holds people together. It’s seen in a microcosm in Stagecoach and transplanted to locations such as Wales and Ireland in How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man. To Ford, there is strength in a people’s union—and the West is the most natural canvas to explore it. In The Searchers, Ford and company spend valuable film stock exploring the customs and virtues of the frontier community, itself the greatest force for creating the American mythos.

For instance, the courtship between Martin Pawley and Laurie Jorgensen, while disjointed from the shocking urgency of the main storyline, gives us a glimpse into what it means to find community in desolate places. Here are strong-willed individuals, stepping out from the protection of society to build new communities in the way they see fit. It’s not hard to see where the myth of the West came from, or why it was perpetuated for so long. Yes, it’s a white Christian community, but that is a historical fact, not a comment on Ford’s own social or political views.

This community is shaken to its core with the arrival of John Wayne’s Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards—who lusts for his brother’s wife and abhors his nephew, Martin, for his one-eighth Comanche blood—and the raiding of the Edwards homestead. Murdered are Ethan’s brother and sister-in-law. Murdered are all the children, save for his niece, Debbie. Ethan, too, seeks community after many years away. The murder of his brother and the woman he pined for from afar destroyed that ideal he had hoped to return to. This says nothing, mind you, about the racism that animates most of his actions throughout the movie.

Figures like Ward Bond’s Rev. Capt. Clayton embody the tension felt in the community. While disgusted by the heinous acts Edwards commits, they feel powerless to stop him. Clayton and others abandon Edwards in his efforts, but that alone does not stop the search. When they do try to stop him, necessity and time demand they turn their attention to the Comanche.

And it’s here where the commentary around The Searchers becomes even more intriguing. In the twenty-first century, the depiction of the Comanche tribe and Native peoples has increasingly come under fire. Among them is the criticism that the portrayal of Comanche chief Scar by Henry Brandon, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed actor, is problematic. This is valid. The condemnation of the sequence in which Martin Pawley accidentally “buys” a Native wife is also entirely fair. I myself squirm at the scene, which belittles this poor woman for the sake of what, frankly, feels like an extended joke about the intelligence of her people. But disregarding the movie or its deeper meaning because the mores of the twenty-first century are widely different than those of the previous generations is a disservice to the art.

Those who would ignore The Searchers’ scathing exploration of racism because of these elements are the same who would discredit Huckleberry Finn’s condemnation of antebellum slavery because of its uncomfortable use of the n-word. For a piece of art to be listed among the “Great Americans,” it has to confront the harshest realities of our past. Chief among them is racism. It has to be ugly and unsettling. After all, many parts of our shared history are. Holding up the bad equally against the good, we see in the greatest American art the promise and pitfalls of being a democratic people, one centered around the “proposition” (to quote Mr. Lincoln) that all people are created equal.

The Searchers warns what the absence of that proposition does to the heart of man. Imperfectly told by today’s standards of Native representation, the potency of Ethan Edward’s arc cannot be denied. His five-year odyssey of unequivocal hate is populated with horrific acts too numerous and gruesome to mention, the least of which is his grotesque treatment of Martin Pawley. Here’s one instance:

For most of the picture, it does not seem interested in punishing the character for his vile acts. Ambivalent might be the right adjective. Yes, characters like Pawley and Ward Bond’s Rev. Capt. Clayton attempt to stop him from carrying through his most horrific acts of madness, but no sentence is handed down. But that in no way means Ethan’s madness goes unpunished. Take a moment to watch the final scene of the movie.

Having saved his niece, Ethan receives no absolution. His madness drove everyone away. And, although he accomplished his mission, he finds no forgiveness for what he did along the way. The community he returned to at the beginning of the film—the one Ford spent so much time and film stock giving us a glimpse into—eventually leaves him behind.

Ford’s ending of The Searchers does not vindicate the actions of its racist protagonist. It gives him a punishment worse than death. In the first clip from the movie, Ethan maliciously shoots out the eyes of a Comanche corpse killed during a gun battle. Comanche tradition believes that without eyes, they cannot enter the spirit land and must wander forever between the winds. Ethan’s hatred and bigotry towards the Comanche, his rejection of human equality, blinded him. The film’s ending condemns Ethan to the same fate as the one he gave that Comanche corpse—to be exiled from his community and wander the West aimlessly and alone.

The rejection of equality is the rejection of community. The worst of America destroys the promise of her best. And for her to be the best, she must confront and cast out the worst. As filmmaker Domino Rene Perez wrote for the British Film Institute:

The iconic image of Ethan Edwards framed in the doorway, the expanse of the West stretching behind him, is as lyrical as it is telling. A relic of the past, he cannot cross over the threshold into the civilised world. He has helped to preserve a world he cannot be a part of any longer. Racist and unyielding, Ethan is not likeable and his redemption seems impossible. But Ford holds audiences in his visual and narrative thrall to the very end so that when the door shuts on Ethan, it's hard not to think about those who get left behind when the world moves on.

The Searchers is a deeply ambivalent movie until the last shot. Framing John Wayne in that doorway turns the movie into what Scorsese has called “a ghost picture,” and turns an ambivalent story into a counterculture exploration of the evil lurking in the heart of America. With The Searchers, Ford poetically exposes the noblest and ugliest parts of this curious political project, making a movie that is deeply political, deeply human, and uniquely American.

Its problems in the twenty-first century notwithstanding, Ford and company hold up a mirror to our nation and its history. In The Searchers, we see America for what it is: a beautiful contradiction. Majestic and awe-inspiring, dark and corrupted, ambivalent and moral.

That is why it is the Great American Movie.

Reader, what do you think is the Great American Movie? Let us know in the comments below!

Warning: The following review discusses plot elements of all three entries in the franchise.

The first two entries in the 28 [Unit of Time] Later… series are remarkably prescient films about 21st-century paranoia.

There are surface-level concerns with disease and how people turn on each other in the face of an all-consuming pandemic and the breakdown of civil society.

And then there is the deeper concern with what happens when those charged with protecting us are the ones who harm us.

Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, released in 2002 and written by series collaborator Alex Garland, tells the story of the immediate aftermath of the outbreak in London. The film’s third act plays directly with the most prominent zombie story trope: “Fight the Dead. Fear the Living” by pitting the central adoptive family unit against a group of soldiers who present clear threats of sexual violence.

28 Weeks Later, produced by Boyle and Garland, is a direct reflection of post-Iraq invasion fears about nation-building. It depicts an arrogant American military undone by its overconfidence in its knowledge and abilities. Some of its most disturbing moments come when, during an outbreak, the military members begin shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of fleeing people, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to discern between infected and uninfected.

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But beyond the two films’ depictions of the rage-infected people, there’s a very clear through-line about abusive parental figures. This is most explicit in 28 Weeks Later, where Robert Carlyle’s Don opens the film by abandoning his family to their death to save himself. He later seeds the outbreak in the quarantine zone because he wants to salve his conscience. The film repeatedly brings the infected Don back to threaten his children.

28 Years Later, the third entry in the franchise and the second directed by Boyle, builds on these themes during its fairly conventional first half before a significant tonal swing turns the second half on its head. The first half plays out like a straightforward post-apocalypse story. We are introduced to the island enclave where a New Britain has been created, complete with a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth.

Boyle splices in film reels of cinematic depictions of battles in British history, cementing how the story of the Rage virus outbreak takes its place alongside other retellings of British history. It situates this story as the latest in a line of stories about the conflicts that create British history and culture.

Jaime (a characteristically gruff Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes his 12-year-old son Spike (a breakout performance by Alfie Williams) on a coming-of-age journey to the mainland to get his first kills. The pair encounter requisite Infected trouble and after a number of tense encounters, they return. An undercurrent of rough hostility in Jaime comes to the forefront, causing a fallout between father and son.

Lurking in the background of the story is Spike’s sick mother (a transformative Jodie Comer). Spike, determined to diagnose and save his mother and disillusioned with his father, strikes out from the safety of the island with her to locate a mad doctor (the always dependable Ralph Fiennes, who does incredible work in limited screentime). Spike hopes against hope that the doctor, without access to modern medicine and whom Spike has been warned away from pursuing, can cure his ailing mother.

The second half maintains its intense pace, but it becomes a much quieter film about the other sides of sickness and death. Spike’s faith in preserving human life is contrasted with a cold, amoral world where might makes right and the only relevant disease is the one that transforms you into a monster. Spike’s desire to save his mother and care for a new life in their midst give the film its emotional core.

The tonal shift away from a standard action movie elevates 28 Years Later to the status of a near-masterpiece. The quieter, subdued third act allows the viewer to breathe and contemplate the film’s central theme of preserving life in a world where survival is the objective, not the means, of living. Comer’s portrayal of a struggle with a non-Rage disease is gut-wrenching.

The film is a surprisingly hopeful and emotional story that feels thematically connected to its predecessors in its depiction of a dishonest and failing patriarch, but that explores new ground. There’s enough in 28 Years Later to satisfy zombie genre fans while still leaving more than enough meat on the bone to tell a bigger story about human mortality. For a franchise preoccupied with 21st-century concerns, it’s a refreshingly timeless story.

‘28 Years Later’ is now playing in theaters nationwide. Rated R for strong bloody violence, grisly images, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality.

Summer movie seasons are often dominated these days by rampaging dinosaurs, people in spandex, and children’s entertainment. That’s true for this year, too. Since Memorial Day weekend, the biggest hits have been Tom Cruise defying death (again) for our amusement and Disney’s live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch. And while we’re approaching a dynamite streak of F1: The Movie, Jurassic World: Rebirth, Superman, and Fantastic Four all within five weeks of each other, there have been three pictures that have stood out from the pack thus far.

The movies in question — The Phoenician Scheme (dir. Wes Anderson), Materialists (dir. Celine Strong), and The Life of Chuck (dir. Mike Flanagan) — have nothing in common. They do not look, sound, or feel alike. Their genres do not criss-cross, nor are they geared towards the same audiences. As movies, they are as far apart as one can be from another. Yet some tiny but non-insignificant thread tangentially connects them.

All three movies seem interested in examining and subverting what we value in the modern world. This results in either rejecting twenty-first-century idols or recognizing that they have a place alongside the simpler things of life.

Case in point: Anderson’s espionage dark comedy The Phonecian Scheme, wealthy businessman and arms smuggler Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) appoints his only daughter, a nun (Mia Threapleton), as sole heir to his estate and bets his entire fortune on a risky scheme to overhaul the infrastructure of the Mediterranean with slave labor. If successful, his wealth will be secured and multiplied for the next century. To him, life is wealth.

In Song’s romance Materialists, Dakota Johnson’s Lucy works as a professional matchmaker in New York City. She and her colleagues view finding love like it’s a Hinge algorithm, forced to mine through her clients’ desires from the perfect partner: good-looking, well-educated, and what’s the other one? Oh, rich. Filthy rich. To her, dating is a game, the people are the chess pieces, and she never expected to be a sap enough to play it herself.

In the science fiction drama The Life of Chuck (which won the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award), a younger version of the titular character (Benjamin Pajak) wishes to learn how to dance for the Fall Fling. And he’s good at it. Really good. But his grandfather and guardian (Mark Hamill), a man of logic and mathematics, dismisses the young man’s passions for dance and extols the virtues of numbers and their place in every facet of life. Chuck dances at the fling, sure, but he spends his life as an accountant yearning for a chance to express himself truly. To his curmudgeon grandpa, life is numbers.

These cold worldviews are confronted and changed; each in a unique way, but all of them life-affirming. Del Toro’s Zsa-zsa realizes that the love he has for his religious daughter is worth more than a century’s worth of wealth. Not only that, but her faith is worthy of admiration and aspiration.

Johnson’s Lucy is confronted with a choice between a Hinge equivalent of a perfect man (Pedro Pascal) and an old flame (Chris Evans). The character of Chuck (eventually played by Tom Hiddleston) is given a moment in the last few months of his life to do the very thing that his grandfather dismissed. In doing so, he showed that he contained multitudes.

Each character learns that their lives, for better or for worse, are more than the cold, impartial, unfeeling social mandates we are handed today. In fact, they all seem to be rejections of how we live life in some capacity. But let’s be clear, the similarities stop there.

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The quality of the movies themselves is mixed, to be kind, ranging from good to fine to outright failure. It is strange to try to juggle reviewing three movies at once, so please read on with indulgence as I hopscotch through the rest of the piece.

Phoenician is the strongest of the trio after what I believe was a backward slide for the Oscar-winner Wes Anderson with his lesser flicks, Asteroid City and The French Dispatch. It has a better sense of space and motion than his immediate predecessors, particularly Asteroid City, which often visually felt like a parody of a Wes Anderson film, and has a much bigger heart, too. And while I will be the first to admit that Anderson’s ultra-staged style of filmmaking is not my cup o’ tea, there is no denying that his restraint here serves the dark comedy and its touching father-daughter story.

It also has the best cast assembled this year, which I will not write out but encourage you to Google if you’re interested. My word. Don’t expect this to be in conversation for Anderson’s best films, but do anticipate consensus that this is a solid entry in his filmography and a charming anecdote to the blockbuster fare.

Celine Song offers another recommended summer tonic. Hot off her acclaimed, Oscar-nominated romance Past Lives, she keeps to the same genre with Materialists but with a much different approach. While the former keeps the yearning simmering under the surface, the latter joyfully wears its influences on its sleeve. While it is unquestionably an entertaining take on modern love, it feels more like the traditional movie romances that audiences gravitate to. With that in mind, I prefer Materialists to Past Lives. That’s not the last controversial take you’ll hear in this piece.

That said, the movie is not entirely successful. But what it does well, I liked. Song’s script is commendable if a little too monologue-heavy at times, and Chris Evans has returned to form after a dismal post-Avengers streak. He best succeeds as an actor when he’s in the extremes — ultra noble or ultra sleezy — or when he’s a loveable loser. Song utilizes Evans’s skills there to craft a character impossible not to root for.

The same, sadly, cannot be said for the other two performers. Pedro Pascal, a perfectly fine actor, gets much less to do in the film than I expected. And Dakota Johnson? Well, the less said, the better. To be brief, Johnson doesn’t have the skills as an actor to anchor a movie like this. We’re supposed to be following her journey. But how can we root for her if it's impossible to empathize with her? Johnson’s cold, detached style of acting does her no favors here.

And now, by process of elimination, you can probably assume where Life of Chuck lands: with a thud. A clanking thud. Don’t think I’m telling the truth? Well, folks will remember that I walked out of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis last fall. I thought about doing so again more than once here. In fact, at one point, I was so bored with the tension-less, aimless, story-less series of moving images that I went to use the restroom just to do anything else. After the movie, my friend and beloved Cinemantics writer Graham commented, “If you just left and texted me when you got home, I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

Based on a Stephen King short story of the same name, Life of Chuck is utterly lifeless. It is visually flat. At best, it has the visual language of a bad hour of Netflix television. It is emotionally vacant. Writer-director Mike Flanagan recently said in an interview that he didn’t want to lean too heavily into one emotion or feeling because “that’s life.” Well, that may be life, but that’s not a movie.

It is also poorly acted. Karen Gillan and Mark Hamill especially gave two bad performances for different reasons. Gillan, who I like as an actor, is as flat as cardboard and colorful as a newly painted white fence. Hamill, on the other hand, hams it up with a bizarre hairpiece, an even more bizarre delivery style, and an accent that is best described as Foghorn Leghorn by way of Brooklyn. That’s not to mention a near constant narration by *checks notes* Nick Offerman who does not shut the fuck up. Seriously. In the movie’s quietest moments, where the emotion is all there and you just want to be with them in the silence, fucking Ron Swanson starts talking and I feel like I’m in a Parks and Rec episode.

The great sadness of this movie is that there are glimmers of a good movie — nay, a great, euphoric movie — in here, but not enough to recommend this to even my worst enemy. It’s ironic. For a movie that’s supposed to be life-affirming, it makes you wish it were all over.

From time to time, Cinemantic’s four main contributors — Tyler MacQueen, Graham Piro, Caleb Boyer, and Daniel Mitchell — will jump on a call to chat about anything and everything movies. As we officially enter the Summer Movie Season, we hopped on a call to talk about our most anticipated flicks of the next three months.

TYLER: “You’ll believe a man can fly.” That is now the iconic tagline for the Richard Donner-directed 1978 classic Superman: The Movie. In the half century between audiences first staring at the silver screen, mouth agape, at the sight of Christopher Reeve’s graceful aerial acrobatics, movie audiences have grown even more cynical than at the peak of the seventies. Not only that, but superhero fare — the genre that Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman willed into existence with the help of John Williams’ orchestral flair — has become the industry's crown jewel.

That is what writer-director James Gunn is up against with my most anticipated film of the summer, Superman. Kryptonite isn’t the Man of Steel’s greatest weakness this summer; it’s spandex fatigue at the multiplex. And while the quality of the movie will be the final arbiter as to whether or not this Supes soars, most signs point to Gunn and company breaking through the public’s weariness. The key? Gunn’s understanding of what makes the nearly indestructible character so universally beloved: His humanity, deeply felt and wholly optimistic. In a world mired by turmoil and confusion, Superman has always been best as the ray of hope — the embodiment of truth and justice — whose greatest drama comes from that optimism cracking under the weight of the world. The tone of the promotional materials seems to hint that, at least partially, the filmmakers understand that. The militaristic trumpets synonymous with Williams’ original score accompany the trailer, signaling that this Superman will build on the best of the Donner-directed picture. It looks big, fun, and could be the tonic we need. Hopefully, we’ll be able to believe a man can fly again.

CALEB: When Jordan Peele fires his management team because they lost a bidding war for a horror script, you pay attention. That’s exactly what happened when his production company Monkeypaw missed out on Weapons, the new horror film from Barbarian (2022) director Zach Cregger. Peele wanted this one badly—and honestly, after watching the trailer, I get it. Wednesday began like any other day for the town of Maybrook, but it was also different. Every other class at the local high school had all their kids, but Mrs. Gandy's room was totally empty. Why? The night before, at 2:17 in the morning, every kid woke up, got out of bed, walked downstairs, and into the dark. They never came back.

The best horror films take something usual and make it unusual. I never knew that children running could be so unsettling. Watch the teaser, and go check out the trailer! Great teasers and trailers do not make great films, but it is hard not to be hopeful after feeling the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

In a year stacked with sequels, franchises, and safe bets, Weapons feels like it could be something unique and terrifying. If anyone wonders where I am on August 7th when I take off running down our street in the middle of the night, you’ll find me at the theater.

DANIEL: Since we are posting this after the release of Mission Impossible - The Final Reckoning (my most anticipated movie of 2025), I’ll choose some other movies. To claim 2026, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is the most anticipated movie of my lifetime, and that’s not hyperbole. You’ll be seeing plenty of content from us on The Odyssey, don’t you worry!

Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest intrigues me. Denzel Washington/Spike Lee make magic together. This remake of a Kurosawa adaptation is updated to take place in the music industry. I cannot wait to see what Denzel brings to this role . I just wish it’d have a longer time in theaters before it’s at home on Apple TV+.

For Summer 2025, my other two lower tier picks are brought to you by the letter F: F1 and Freakier Friday. Yes, you read that right. This is purely a nostalgia pick, and to be clear — I don’t have high expectations for Freakier Friday. I’m just rooting for Lindsay Lohan’s comeback. As for F1 - I love a grizzled veteran mentors/competes with an up and coming talent flick (see: The Color of Money. Zoom zoom.)

GRAHAM: Tyler and Caleb already hit on my three most anticipated summer movies, and my most anticipated movie already came out (read my Final Reckoning review here!). I’ll take two August releases: The Naked Gun and Americana. I adore the original Naked Gun trilogy. The films’ deadpan, dry-as-a-bone sense of humor was only made possible by the comedic chops of Leslie Nielsen. It feels like a series that could never be replicated with another actor. So I was highly skeptical of a modern day remake.

And then the teaser trailer’s final gag made me involuntarily guffaw.

It may not be able to capture the spirit of the original, but the talent behind and in front of the camera, plus the fact that Liam Neeson does feel like the best spiritual successor to Leslie Nielsen, makes me very excited for this one.

In contrast, I know next to nothing about Americana, outside of its very intriguing premise and trailer. A Neo-Western with a sneakily good cast, what few reviews we do have of it rave about its direction by Tony Tost, who makes his feature film debut. Much like Caleb’s pick Weapons, an original crime thriller set in the American West has a ton of promise, and will likely get at least some public attention thanks to Sydney Sweeney playing its lead role. It doesn’t come out until the end of August, so we’ll know what movies are dominating the summer by then, but I’m optimistic that Americana can be the indie critical darling that picks up some steam around Labor Day.

Reader, what’s your most anticipated movie thus summer? Let us know in the comments below!

It’s fitting that the Mission Impossible franchise is bookended by films that deal with emerging technology.

1996’s first entry constructs what feels like an entire set-piece around Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt using newfangled technology to send an “email” to another character. 2025’s Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, the conclusion to the eight-film series, sees Hunt face off against “The Entity,” an all-powerful AI in a bid to prevent the destruction of the world.

It’s exactly this escalation and attempt to reckon (pun intended) with changing technology that makes Mission: Impossible so great. And it’s what makes The Final Reckoning a huge, messy, but ultimately satisfying swing for the fences.

Final Reckoning picks up shortly after where 2023’s Dead Reckoning left off: The world is in turmoil, thrust into crisis by The Entity’s ability to twist the truth and the encroaching threat of the AI infiltrating major world powers’ nuclear arsenals. An early montage informs the viewer that The Entity’s ability to manipulate the truth includes changing footage of school buses into tanks and guns into cameras. It’s an effective—and highly relevant—visual that sets the stakes.

Where Dead Reckoning hurtled like a freight train through its rousing, and often quite funny, set-pieces, Final Reckoning spends significantly more time on exposition and set-up in its first act. The film takes some time to rumble to life as it puts all its different characters and subplots into place, giving the following two acts a weighted and epic feeling at the expense of a brisk pace. But it’s never boring. Writer-Director Chistopher McQuarrie (director of the previous three Mission films and frequent Cruise collaborator) knows how to frame emotional beats to keep the stakes feeling as high as possible.

It does feel disjointed at times because, in a curious creative decision, the film sidelines major franchise characters in favor of introducing a bevy of new faces that often lead to the audience wanting more. A thread involving Nick Offerman’s general and other government leaders managing the nuclear crisis is inserted while fan-favorites like Vanessa Kirby’s White Widow are dropped entirely. And after an intriguing setup in the previous installment, the film also doesn’t seem to know what to do with Haley Atwell’s Grace. The result means Final Reckoning lacks a strong second lead like Rebecca Ferguson or Henry Cavill to bolster the proceedings. But, on the plus side, Tramell Tillman’s submarine captain is a delight!

These decisions, intentional or not, put the film entirely on Cruise’s shoulders. And he delivers. He and McQuarrie spend an inordinate amount of time flashing back to previous films, pulling in plot threads and characters from previous films with varying levels of success. The montages don’t just tie the series together: They make clear that this is, and always has been, Cruise’s franchise.

And while we can quibble about the success of every narrative thread, there is one universal element that can be celebrated by anyone who watches Final Recknoning: Every dollar of the reported $400 million budget is on-screen. Every. Single. One. A sequence featuring Hunt swimming to and surviving the wreck of a submarine is among the franchise’s best. The nearly dialogue-free sequence is brutally tense, gorgeously shot, and a refreshing change of pace from the film’s and franchise’s other louder, more boisterous set pieces. And the much-hyped biplane finale is jaw-dropping to watch. Together, these two set-pieces make for the best second-half of any Mission Impossible movie.

Final Reckoning’s disjointed and slightly bloated nature feels more reminiscent of a series finale like The Dark Knight Rises, another overstuffed conclusion with an epic scale that delivers big emotional payoffs. Even if certain threads and ideas don’t pay off as well as they could, the film’s preoccupation with the threat AI poses to knowledge and phenomenology feels all too relevant.

Film critic Sonny Bunch described the series as the “first major franchise of the digital age.” I couldn’t agree more. May more action franchises be this interested in ideas about the threats of new technology while placing such an emphasis on practical, tactile action sequences. If this is indeed the end, what a luxury we have as moviegoers to see a series of films this committed to giving us the biggest and best experiences possible.

Here at Cinemantics, Amazon’s purchase of creative control of the James Bond franchise inspired us to take a trip through the highs and lows of the 25 film series. It just so happens that May marks the 62nd anniversary of the release of Dr. No, so what better way to commemorate the event than with a retrospective on the Sean Connery years?

Watching the initial run of Sean Connery’s Bond movies is one of the more fun trips through cinematic history. The first film, Dr. No (1962) is Connery doing a toned version of Ian Fleming’s sixth novel in the series — almost like Connery doing Bond as a John le Carre novel. The fifth, You Only Live Twice (1967), cements the official shift of Bond from a toned down spy into the larger than life symbol of the British Empire we know and love today.

So much of Dr. No focuses on Bond’s actions. There’s the great dialogue-less sequence of Bond sweeping his room for bugs upon his arrival in Jamaica. Or the famous poisonous tarantula sequence where we get to see Connery really sweat under pressure. Or Bond lying in wait playing cards while he waits for his target to walk into his trap. The low budget comes through at moments, but Dr. No is a great toned-down film that shows the audience Bond’s competence in spy craft. The iconic moments still sing, but it’s the film’s required restraint that gives it real staying power.

If Dr. No is Bond doing le Carre, From Russia With Love (1963) is Bond doing Hitchcock. The franchise’s second entry is arguably its best. From Russia With Love holds up stunningly well thanks to tight, focused directing from Terence Young and a sharp screenplay from franchise mainstay Richard Maibaum. Take the moment when Red Grant and Bond face off in the train car. In a masterful bit of visual storytelling, Bond manipulates Grant into opening the booby-trapped briefcase as his way out of a seemingly hopeless situation. It’s a brilliant bit of maneuvering by Young and shows Bond outthinking his opponent, which isn’t always the route the franchise takes. And Connery’s desperation is palpable as he engages in a gambit that’s his only chance of survival. It’s the finest bit of acting Connery does as Bond: he does everything with his eyes as he searches for options, tries to hide his genuine fear, and works to stall Grant. It’s the finest single scene in the franchise and set a high bar for all that follows it.

Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), and You Only Live Twice all progressively move the franchise away from the spy craft and towards the bombast the middle portion of the series became known for. Goldfinger expands the scope of the series with a huge third act set-piece that marks the climax for a movie that feels, and looks, bigger in every way. It’s pound-for-pound the most entertaining of the Connery Bond films, a movie that’s more about the images on screen than about any story beats. This focus causes the third act to flat narratively after a strong first two-thirds (outside of the Bond/Oddjob fight). The whole climax hinges on Pussy Galore’s change of heart after sleeping with Bond, which feels, at the very least, weak on a narrative level. But the set pieces still amaze and the film never lags, giving us some of the most recognizable iconography in the whole series.

While Goldfinger is arguably the most iconic film in the franchise, Thunderball is the archetypal Bond movie. (The book was famously the object of a decades-long intellectual property battle between Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory.) The plot, featuring a ransomed nuclear weapon, would later be parodied in the Austin Powers series, and the film clocks in at a (then) whopping 130 minutes. It’s big and it’s bloated — the film’s tagline, “Here comes the biggest Bond of them all!” feels quite appropriate. The underwater action does hold up well, and credit to the film for trying to make good the prior film’s treatment of Pussy Galore by featuring the two most interesting female leads of the Connery era between Domino and Fiona Volpe.

You Only Live Twice marked the end of this initial Connery run, and Connery fittingly begins the trend of Bond actors going out with a whimper. The third act set-piece in the volcano is a fantastic bit of large-scale action filmmaking. But the first two acts are languid and lack any real forward momentum, and Connery seems to just be going through the motions. And the less said about the subplot featuring Bond “becoming” Asian, the better.

The Connery era contains the most variety across its five initial films. Consecutive Bond films wouldn’t feel this different until 20 films later, when Daniel Craig takes over. Of the five, I don’t think there’s any doubt that From Russia With Love holds up the best. I could quibble with putting either Dr. No or Goldfinger second, but I’ll give the edge to Goldfinger because of how instantly recognizable so many moments from that movie are. Coming up a close fourth is the bloated Thunderball, which does a lot of things well, but lacks the momentum of Goldfinger and the tight focuses of Dr. No and From Russia With Love. And a distant fifth goes to You Only Live Twice. But we’d meet Connery’s Bond again…

Initial ranking:

1. From Russia With Love

2. Goldfinger

3. Dr. No

4. Thunderball

5. You Only Live Twice

SPOILER DISCLAIMER: This article contains major spoilers for ‘The Last of Us’ Season 2 and the video game The Last of Us Part II. If you haven’t watched the show or played the game and wish to experience the story unspoiled, consider revisiting this piece after doing so. Proceed at your own risk.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We are, first and foremost, a movie Substack. Do not expect television commentary to become commonplace. Caleb and his wife recently welcomed a baby girl to the world, so television is all they have time for. Thanks for understanding!

WRITER’S NOTE TO THE EDITOR: You leave my wife and children out of this! Every path has a price, and The Last of Us had it coming.

EDITOR’S NOTE TO THE WRITER’S NOTE TO THE EDITOR: Bite me.

On Wednesday night, after we put our kids to bed, my wife turned to me and said, “Let’s finally watch The Last of Us Season 2!” I took a deep breath and nodded. I wasn’t excited. How could I be? As someone who played the games, I knew what was in store for us.

I won’t pretend I loved The Last of Us Part II like its predecessor. I have profound memories of playing through The Last of Us into the late-night hours, sustained by pizza rolls and the incredible story that unfolded before me.

As the credits rolled, I sat in complete silence, tears welling up in my bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes. I never knew a video game, of all things, could move me so deeply. I can’t say the same about The Last of Us Part II.

Yes, it is ambitious. Its themes are thought-provoking. Its production quality is unquestioned. It is acted exceptionally well. But, its story is flawed and executed poorly—pun intended! Unfortunately, the same can be said about the show so far.

I could gripe about the story: the overreliance on deus ex machinas, the uncharacteristic character decisions, the pacing that will bore you to death one moment and put you in a neck brace the next, and the contrived, unnatural connections we are told to have with characters throughout the story.

Since 2020, the story has divided fans of the games, and I imagine it will similarly divide fans of the show. Whether or not The Last of Us Part II is a story worth telling is irrelevant because it has already been told.

My complaint is the overcommitment to a non-linear storytelling structure and how the story is presented to us as the audience.

The decision to jump through time and introduce key narrative elements out of order undermines the emotional weight and thematic depth of the story, especially in a TV series format.

Before I launch into my grievances, let me be clear about two things.

I am not opposed to non-linear storytelling. Many movies and TV shows, including Memento, Arrival, Pulp Fiction, and HBO’s season one of Westworld, use non-linear story structures well. There are certainly others.

I also admire writers who take risks. At least The Last of Us writers pushed the boundaries in an era of story “retelling” that either remakes the next classic Disney film left in a dwindling pile of source material or resurrects some beloved movie from the '80s so it can be peddled to the next generation of moviegoers.

That said, being bold doesn’t make a good story. When non-linear storytelling misses the mark, it can be confusing, annoying, and disastrous.

We are linear, storytelling creatures, living our lives step by step, with one event following another. The linear story of our lives, the story we tell ourselves, is how we process reality, make sense of our experiences, and understand those around us.

Like our ability to recognize humanlike VFX that fail to cross the “uncanny valley,” we have an intuitive sense for storytelling. By design, non-linear storytelling disrupts the natural, linear flow we deeply understand and experience.

When done well, non-linear narratives can create mystery, build tension, further develop characters, and give us insight into multiple perspectives of the same story.

Unnecessary or poorly executed non-linear narratives can confuse the audience and dilute the emotional impact of themes and characters.

The creative decision to force The Last of Us Part II into a non-linear structure ultimately does a disservice to the themes and characters, especially when adapted for television.

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As the opening credits for Season 2 began, I suspected the show would follow the game's non-linear structure, but I was curious how it would be adapted to the new format.

Would it stick to the structure of the source material? Abandon it entirely? Or find an alternative narrative order to better fit a TV series? The initial scenes of the new season confirmed my suspicion, but left me confused.

Season 2 opens by reminding us of Joel and Ellie’s conversation at the end of Season 1. Joel lies by swearing that the Fireflies couldn’t produce a vaccine from Ellie’s immunity to the cordyceps. Ellie reluctantly accepts Joel's word, and they go to Jackson together.

In the next scene, we are introduced to Abby. Not only are we introduced to her from the outset, but we are also given the driving force of her character, which is killing Joel.

Wait, seriously? Sure, we don’t know precisely why Abby wants to see Joel suffer and die, but it's obvious she is a Firefly seeking revenge for Joel’s murderous rampage at the end of Season 1.

The decision to establish Abby’s character and motivations immediately undermines one of the significant benefits of adopting non-linear storytelling: mystery.

In the video game, we are introduced to Abby’s character as she and the group reach the outskirts of Jackson. We have no context for her or the group's reasons for coming to Jackson, and we are left to wonder about their motivations even after Unhappy Gilmore does a number on Joel’s head, leaving him dead and mangled in a pool of his blood. Oh, yeah, Joel dies, by the way.

While the game’s non-linear approach still undermines the potential weight of Joel’s death, in my opinion, it was certainly shocking.

The show, however, undercuts the emotional force and shock value of its non-linear structure by revealing Abby’s motivations upfront.

When Abby and Joel miraculously run into each other in the show, we know conflict and, at the least, an attempt on Joel’s life is around the corner.

Why commit to a non-linear structure only to abandon its usefulness at a crucial moment like Joel’s death?

The scene introducing Abby also signals to the audience that we are meant to feel sympathy for her, which feels contrived and unnatural.

We have no connection to Abby yet and won’t for who knows how many episodes, but we are implicitly told that we are meant to connect with her, now or in the future.

Given the non-linear structure, it is no surprise that the show will attempt to form these connections through various time jumps to fill in the gaps.

Why is Joel and Ellie’s relationship strained? Flashbacks! Who did Joel kill that set Abby on her path of revenge? Time jumps! What have Joel and Ellie been doing for four or five years since returning to Jackson? Queue the “A Few Years Earlier” title cards!

Don’t get me wrong. I look forward to these moments, especially those between Joel and Ellie. They were the best parts of the game, and I am sure they will be the best parts of the show. The issue is the lack of linear context and overall story cohesion.

Season 1 of The Last of Us proved that a non-linear structure can be very effective. In Episode 3, Long, Long Time, we follow Bill and Frank's relationship from the beginning of the outbreak to Joel and Ellie’s arrival at their homestead, where our main narrative occurs.

The non-linear structure benefits from its brevity and focus on Bill and Frank. It’s a heartbreaking episode and a masterclass in storytelling.

Now, imagine that the episode starts with Bill and Frank at the end of their lives. They’re old and sick. Rather than leave one or the other to survive the terrible world alone, they choose to leave this mortal coil together of their own accord.

They are about to drink their poisoned wine when… flashback! Only then do we see their relationship and the events that precede their ultimate demise together.

Can you imagine how different that episode would be? The culminating moment of Bill’s and Frank’s relationship would lose its power and meaning.

The presence, not the absence, of all the context and events that precede Bill’s and Frank’s deaths allows us to understand and react to their experiences, making the pivotal moments of their story all the more meaningful.

By comparison, Joel’s death is deprived of essential context and preceding events, severely limiting its potential power and meaning.

The non-linear structure of The Last of Us Part II and Season 2 aims to offer multiple perspectives on the story, shifting between Ellie and Abby to show how their lives and choices aren’t so different. I get it.

Aren’t protagonists and antagonists different sides of the same coin? Don’t we love because we hate, and hate because we love? Aren’t we all just parallel lines endlessly drifting through the void, only to be caught in the eternal return of the same?

Who's to say! I’m still waiting for my flashback to find out, damn it.

Am I saying I could have done it better? I guess so.

Television, by its nature, is very different from video games and films. With limited time per episode and seasons broken up over several weeks and months, The Last of Us Season 2's non-linear structure feels jarring, underwhelming, and a bit exhausting.

The viewer must attempt to piece together a story of disconnected beats, narratives, and perspectives to walk away with something whole that they can feel emotionally and consider intellectually.

At least, I hope so. If the goal of the story is emotional apathy, moral ambiguity, and general confusion, it succeeds.

To make matters worse, we must wait for Season 3 before anything from Part II is remotely resolved. Season 1 of The Last of Us established a tight, emotional narrative that was linear and complete. If Part II or Season 2 never existed, you would never be the wiser.

By contrast, Season 2's non-linear structure demands that viewers hold onto these unresolved and disparate threads of a story for months, if not years, until the new season arrives.

We are four episodes into Season 2, and Abby has hardly been mentioned or on screen since she sent Joel’s head tumbling down the big, green fairway in the sky.

How are we as the audience supposed to engage with her character if there is nothing to engage with almost halfway through Season 2? Is she a psychopathic villain we are meant to hate? A misunderstood victim we grow to understand?

I assume we will find out, but in the meantime, we’ve been introduced to a host of other new characters, factions, and narratives. It is difficult to know where our minds and hearts are supposed to focus.

Extending the story across multiple seasons will only make it harder for viewers to stay connected to the characters and their motivations, diluting the impact of the show’s most pivotal moments.

I am happy to be proven wrong as the show unfolds, but the true meaning of Joel’s death will have to be explained in a non-linear structure or left entirely unexplained. Both present problems for our ability to truly consider and feel the weight of the themes and characters.

We will have to wade through Ellie’s and Abby’s various perspectives and past experiences throughout countless episodes and, at least, another season before we can comprehend Joel’s death. By then, I worry that any sense of Ellie, Abby, or Joel as characters in that pivotal moment will be lost upon us.

A linear structure would have allowed the show to continue building the relationship between Joel and Ellie, exploring the four or five years between the events of Season 1 and Joel’s death.

This narrative path could have deepened the audience’s emotional investment in their bond, showing how it was tested and strained over time but never broken, ultimately making Joel’s death even more devastating.

Don’t get me started on the decision to replace Tommy with Dina as the second witness to Joel’s horrifying death! That was another story element the video game got right over the show.

I understand the show needed Tommy, a familiar character, at Jackson for the zombie invasion set piece, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Still, it is another example of sacrificing story for spectacle.

Anyway… we could witness Joel and Ellie’s relationship grow and change in a linear structure. Season 2 could end with Abby’s appearance and her murder of Joel.

It would preserve the emotional weight of that moment, allowing the audience to feel the shock and horror of his death as if we were Ellie. That is what we are meant to feel, the depth of Ellie’s remorse and sorrow.

Instead, the non-linear structure makes us Ellie with amnesia. We are still expected to feel her pain and anger in that terrible moment, but without any of the important memories that make Joel’s death so meaningful.

That’s why Joel has to undergo a brutal and grotesque death. It’s the only way we, as the audience, can feel much of anything without the preceding events that make it whole for the characters it defines, namely Ellie.

His body has to be destroyed because there is no soul, no deeper connection, no matured relationship immediately present for us to mourn then and there beyond what Season 1 established.

I felt the devastation of Joel’s death in Episode 2, but only because I knew the whole story. I have all the pieces to make that moment really matter.

Much like my wife’s reaction to Joel’s death, anyone unfamiliar with Part II’s story is likely more confused and annoyed than sad and angry.

In Season 3, the story could shift focus to Ellie’s quest for revenge, juxtaposed with Abby’s motivations and the larger cycle of violence and revenge they both experience and perpetuate.

Offering a serious, convincing attempt at restructuring The Last of Us isn’t why I am writing. Any linear structure would better serve the themes and characters, whatever that specific structure might look like.

I am just disappointed to see the story and characters unnecessarily subordinated to style and novelty, which aren’t the reasons we fell in love with The Last of Us in the first place.

Of course, who am I to offer criticism, let alone story revisions? After watching Episode 2, my wife responded, “Well, I may not be worthy to cast the first stone, but I will certainly get in line.”

I am also getting in line, along with many other fans, I imagine. But, I’ll trade in my stone for a pitching wedge.

Using today’s vernacular to describe something from the past: Movies just hit different when I was a kid.

I came of film-watching age in the mid-1970s in the heyday of the Walt Disney live-action films when we cut our cinematic teeth on high-quality gems like Escape to Witch Mountain or The Apple Dumpling Gang. Trips to the movies were reserved for events like a weekend at Grandma’s or a sleepover with your cousin, and if adult parties are being honest, they were used for babysitting. Drop the kids off at the mall theater, leave them with some popcorn money, and engage in retail therapy while the kiddies settle back for the adventures of Pete and his dragon.

I really didn’t see that many movies as a kid. Like I said, it was different. Parents didn’t take their families to the movies to watch a film together. (Not the ones in my house, anyway.) I’d venture to say we didn’t see more than one a year. At that time, we had five TV stations, and VCRs and cable movie channels weren’t even in our dreams yet. You had one shot to see a movie, and that was it. Maybe it would show up on TV on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon years later, but aside from watching The Wizard of Oz every Thanksgiving, movies were a one-and-done affair. And due to the quality of the kids’ movies at that time, they were largely forgettable anyway.

Back then, there were kids’ movies and adult movies, and ne’er the twain shall meet. My dad did not see The Cat from Outer Space, and I did not see The Sting. (The rare exception to this was when we had a family outing to a drive-in to see Jaws the same summer we went to the beach for the first time, which was the worst parenting idea of all time.) In my small suburban town, there was an old movie theater in what used to be considered the downtown and it was reincarnated as a “dollar show” where they showed second-run movies. On one glorious night, my dad dragged me along with him to see American Graffiti. I won’t pretend that I understood the film or its plot, but it was an honest-to-God grownup movie that seemed very similar to Happy Days, a TV show that was consuming American life at that point . . . and seeing a Happy Days-esque film on a big screen with a giant tub of popcorn with my dad was a moment not soon forgotten.

June of 1977 rolled around and it set itself up to be my greatest summer yet. For starters, I hit double digits. While this afforded me exactly zero privilege in the world, being ten felt a lot older than being nine. I was ready for big things and big things were indeed coming. That summer began a year of what I still think of as My Own Personal Golden Age of Cinema and thus began my lifetime love affair with the movies.

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That summer, my uncle took my cousin, my sister, and me to see the big new movie that everyone was talking about: Star Wars. And there was no messing around with the mall theater. We were going to the Showcase by-God Cinemas on Springdale Pike. There’s no way to adequately convey the excitement about this because it seems trivial now in an era of surround sound and stadium-tiered recliner seats. The Showcase Cinemas had four screens. FOUR! And it was a stand-alone building in a part of town I had never been to. This was living large. We loaded up in the green GTO and headed to the theater and were met with complete devastation: it was sold out. This was also prior to online ticket sales. You see, in 1977, one just had to show up at the box office and hope for the best. It was no can do for Star Wars that night. We were crushed. But Uncle Eddie had taken charge of three children that night – two of whom had ADHD – and he was not about to entertain us himself. So he made us a promise to see Star Wars the next weekend and we bought tickets to another show. (Incidentally, that’s what we called them then. Not movies. Not films. Shows.)

The consolation prize? Smokey and the Bandit. It was a fair trade. That movie came out amid the CB radio and trucker craze in the mid-70s and there was nobody hotter than Burt Reynolds at that time. We hooted and hollered and clapped when the 1977 Trans Am jumped the bridge, and we laughed when Buford T. Justice emerged from the truck stop bathroom with toilet paper stuck to his sunglasses. It was a big time and I still have a nostalgic fondness for that film. If I’m channel-surfing and it’s on, I’ve gotta watch.

But I digress.

Uncle Eddie was a man of his word and we piled back in the GTO the following weekend for round two of our quest to see Star Wars and this time we were successful. There we sat in the uncomfortable seats with the popcorn and the Jujyfruits and the big pop and when the lights went down, we could hardly contain ourselves. What happened for the next two hours completely blew our minds and changed our lives. The second that opening scroll started rolling on the screen seemingly from over our heads, we literally turned around to see where it was coming from. We had NEVER seen anything like that. And that was just the beginning. Everything we saw and heard was new. The special effects. The John Williams score. The droids. The land cruiser. The light sabers. WHAT IS HAPPENING??? The ADHD children didn’t blink for the entirety. The closing credits rolled and the audience erupted into applause. It was a new day.

There are many film moments that take my breath away every time, but none more so than the moment Darth Vader walks through the mist on that ship. My God -- my heart still races when I watch that scene. There was a viral clip a couple years ago of a little girl dressed as Rey watching a parade of Star Wars characters at Disney World. As they passed, they came right to her and she waved at them all. Darth Vader walked right up and stood inches from her and she didn’t even flinch. I nearly passed out. We went to hear the Columbus Symphony play the live score along with a screening of The Empire Strikes Back a couple years ago and someone dressed as Darth Vader came walking through the crowd in the lobby and I broke out in a cold sweat.

I’m sorry for the Star Wars fans in the generations behind me.

There are just some things about those films you can never understand. You’ve grown up with special effects. You really can’t grasp that NOTHING had ever looked or sounded like that before. The anticipation of waiting for The Empire Strikes Back was agonizing. I can’t recall another sequel I’ve longed for in quite that way. And, boy – it did not disappoint. I’ve watched a million more films since then and there has never been a bigger plot twist than learning Darth Vader is Luke’s father. I can’t even put it into words. This was way before the internet and spoiler alerts. A couple hundred of us walked into that theater not knowing our minds were about to be blown and we collectively gasped. (If you’re a sci-fi nerd, watch the early 2000’s run of Battlestar Galactica and report back to me when you get to the second biggest plot twist of all time. Only this time, you can hit pause and sit with your disbelief. With Empire, we just had to gasp and then move on with life.)

There was no going back after that. I was Darth Vader for Halloween. My cousin had Star Wars sheets and curtains. When Return of the Jedi was released on Wednesday, May 25 the year of our Lord 1983 and the last day of my sophomore year of high school, my friends and I got shut out of the late-night show and waited in line for over two hours to see the one at midnight. We ordered pizza and sat outside the Showcase Cinema – this time in Louisville, Kentucky – and ate on the sidewalk next to the velvet ropes.

Star Wars was – and is – serious business for me.

My cousin, uncle, sister, and I still talk about the initial viewing like it’s a historic event. “Remember when we went to see Star Wars and it was sold out and we had to see Smokey and the Bandit instead and we had to wait a week?” Good times. It was the first time a movie felt like an event. It was the first time a movie transported me. It’s the first movie that permeated American pop culture. I like to brag that I’ve seen every single Star Wars movie first-run in the cinema like it’s a badge of honor and not something that ages me. I have literally grown up in that world.

My love for that film runs deep because it ignited my love for ALL film.

Whats your first memory of discovering ‘Star Wars?’ Was it the original 1977 film, or perhaps an installment in the prequel or sequel trilogies? Let us know in the comments below — and May the Fourth Be With You!

History has a funny way of repeating itself. Around this time last year, the gang published a Group Chat apologizing for the lack of content in the first quarter of 2024. Things just got too busy to keep up with the output we wanted! Well, folks, here we are again. Sorry ‘bout that. As it has been for many, the first three months or so of the year have been hectic, confusing, and just downright busy.

So, Daniel, Graham, Caleb, and Tyler hopped online for a call to update everyone on life, movies, and how we keep up with everything Hollywood-related.

FAVORITE FLICKS THIS YEAR (SO FAR)

Box office reporting alone shows that 2025, much like last year, is off to a dismal start. So, are there any hidden gems that the gang saw?

DANIEL: While it’s been a little challenging to get to a movie theatre lately, I haven’t seen much of any of the 2025 slate, but I’ll shout out Carry-On. A fun thriller set at LAX, starring Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman (who makes a stronger villain than you might think). Pulpy and perfect for a movie night in.

GRAHAM: Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag is the best time I've had at the movies in a while. Soderbergh has done some very underrated work in recent years (last year's Presence is the kind of movie that's way better than it had any business being). Black Bag is a perfectly crafted thriller aimed at adult audiences -- the kind of movie we just don't get enough of anymore. It's a twisty film that never feels too convoluted or obsessed with its own cleverness. It's also an ensemble cast where no one dominates the screen and each character plays their part perfectly. Soderbergh also gives it a stylish sense of lighting that helps the pivotal dining room scenes land. At a tight 90 minutes, I can't recommend this one highly enough.

CALEB: I have yet to watch a film from 2025. Does that mean there haven’t been any good movies this year? Maybe. Is cinema officially dead? Possibly. Is watching a movie for more than five minutes with two under two difficult, if not impossible? Most definitely, but more on that later. Despite only having the time and mental bandwidth for MasterChef, I plan to watch some 2025 films soon. I am looking forward to Sinners (check out Tyler’s review), and I can’t wait for 28 Years Later, which gave us not one but two of the best movie trailers I can recall in recent memory. Hope remains for 2025.

TYLER: Beauty is skin deep, or so argues Aaron Schimberg’s psychological dark comedy A Different Man. Another gemstone in A24's ever-impressive crown as the king of mid-budget movies, the movie tells the story of Edward, an actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an experimental procedure to change his face and, hopefully, win the heart of playwright Ingrid. However, even with his new face, his past insecurities are never far away.

It’s a strange little movie, I’ll grant you that in advance. But what demands this twisty, unhinged character study be seen is an incredible turn from Sebastian Stan (who won a Golden Globe for this performance and earned an Oscar nomination for his other 2024 role, The Apprentice). Shedding that stupid metallic arm and the increasingly lifeless CGI of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Stan reveals himself to be one of the most interesting actors in Hollywood. Not far behind him is a beautifully emphatic Adam Pearson, who — in only his fifth feature film role — channels his neurofibromatosis into a beautiful, even joyous performance. Regardless of how strange it is, it’s by far the best thing I’ve seen this year.

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CHECK THE GATE

Folks, our content production has been, well, admittedly low recently—but there are lots of good reasons for that!

DANIEL: It’s been a busy start to 2025 for the Mitchell family - they welcomed their third child in January. Paternity leave was full of movies at all hours, time shared together, and settling in as a family of five. While the von Trapps will surely outpace us, “Edelweiss” is the bedtime song of choice for our youngest two. As the resident list completionist, Daniel’s almost done with the Best Picture winners - he has single digits left to view. Stay tuned for a decade ranking later this spring!

GRAHAM: I just finished moving apartments, which means that I had a lot of time to listen to podcasts (see below) but not enough to watch a ton of new movies. I have been making a point to get out of the apartment on weeknights to take advantage of the Alamo Drafthouse’s themed roster of older movies, and I recently loved getting to see Mulholland Drive on the big screen. Tyler and I have unofficially deemed next month the month of James Bond here on Cinemantics, so I won’t be quiet for long!

CALEB: Caleb and his wife, Emily, bought their first house late last year, and they were blessed with their second child in March. They had another beautiful baby girl and named her Cecilia. (Editors note: Andrew Tyler MacBoyer would have been the name if it was a boy out of respect for her beloved uncle). They quickly introduced her to the world of cinema soon after taking her home. Her favorite movies are My Neighbor Totoro and The Raid.

TYLER: Tyler was promoted to Director of Multimedia at his 9-5! Over the last six weeks, he has been developing a treatment for a feature film exploring the Free Speech Movement and its clash with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI in 1964. He is also starting training for the DC Half Marathon in September and the Columbus Half in October.

WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?

Where do we get all the news and updates on everything movies? We have a few recommendations for the best podcasts for reviews, news, and enjoyable (but not obnoxious) banter.

DANIEL: I’m a Ringer-diehard. If I had one movie podcast to listen to, it’d be “The Big Picture” by a mile. Current movie news, upcoming Oscar slates, interviews with current filmmakers, and banter and fun drafts from previous years - it’s got everything I want in a podcast. I also am partial to “The Rewatchables” that focuses on a classic-ish slate of action movies, rom-coms, and movies that you can’t turn off, whenever they’re on.

GRAHAM: My go-to movie podcast for contemporary reviews is The Bulwark's Across the Movie Aisle. The three hosts bring very different perspectives but never take themselves too seriously and seem to genuinely love discussing movies with each other. The episodes never overstay their welcome, and I always leave feeling like I've hit on every major perspective a critic can have of a movie. For reviews of past films, I came across The 250 because they reviewed all 13 movies in the Halloween franchise, and I've been loving their work ever since. The hosts, one Irish film critic and one Irish everyman, balance each other very well, with one (Darren Mooney) giving insightful and oftentimes esoteric explanations of the films they discuss, and the other providing a normie's view of the movie. They also actively push back against the "Cinema Sins-ification" of movie criticism. The backlog contains hundreds of episodes, which cover the IMDB's top 250 films and bottom 100, leading to their reviewing some truly horrendous films. With a diverse panel of rotating guests, the 250 kept me company during some recent time-consuming life events.

CALEB: CRITERION’s “Closet Picks” series on YouTube never fails to introduce me to new films. Send your favorite directors, actors, and composers into a room stocked with over one thousand films from around the world, and you are guaranteed to discover something new or old that you would probably never find otherwise. I have watched many movies, but “Closet Picks” made me realize that my knowledge and experience of film is a drop in the ocean of cinema. It is my go-to resource for movie recommendations and the bane of my ever-growing watchlist on Letterboxd.

TYLER: See Daniel and Graham’s takes above. Both offer something slightly different that, when paired together, are the only go-to podcasts I need.