Let’s get it out of the way up front: this has been a terrible year for my movie-watching. The baby, alluded to in my 2024 review of films, proved more and more adept at keeping me from carving out cinema visits as she grew steadily larger (within the prediction of the standardised curves which govern such things). I had a very brief patch of catching up with some Oscar nominees back in February, and since then it has been the slimmest of pickings with seven full calendar months in the year passing by without a single movie in them.
To match this, in a stunning piece of visual metaphor the physical, real world cinema I visit caught fire this year. It was ultimately fine, with only mild water damage that has since been repaired, but talk about a bad omen. The only film I managed to see there over the course of the year was James Gunn’s Superman (of which more later) which I was obliged to see both as a terminal DC super-fan and as a connoisseur of Dog Movies. I’m hoping to make it over there for Avatar: Fire and Ash before the end of the year, which will mean having to edit this list. A similar story with Netflix’s new Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man. (update: I made time for both!)
I’m not going to make any kind of limitation on what gets in here: if I watched it for the first time this year, it’s going in the list.
Look I’ll be very honest: I don’t remember this. I had a three-month-old and this was a shit film streaming at Christmas. Die Hard 2 by way of Phone Booth? Or something? I remember the climax hinging on a contrivance about permissible cabin bag sizes, which is great commitment to the part if nothing else. Michael Bluth was in it?
I was amiable enough to this in the cinema, I slated it in review at the time, and now I hold it in contempt. Pablum and shlock, dream bigger. Dream bigger!
Starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater as the only two clean men in Christendom. An enjoyable convention of grotesques in an adaptation that I felt kinda missed the point the book was making by throwing an epic rationalist in among all these superstitious monks: that modernity is an evolution of society, not fire handed down to the apes.
The two things a Formula 1 team has never tried: cheating and hiring a superfluous American. Looks great though and brings a bit of that race-day magic to the screen, even if glossing over qualifying should be a capital crime.
Rian Johnson does atheist G.K. Chesterton pretty well. Daniel Craig is having the time of his silly life. Like the second one, it’s somehow less than the sum of its parts, but this time some of the parts are pretty great.
This was a fun watch, bags of charisma and lots of sympathy for its characters. With hindsight I’m not too sure what it was trying to say, beyond the enjoyable yarn about a woman who sees her chance, grabs it with both hands and holds on for dear life. I just don’t think I’ll remember it? Best picture? Not sure about that, although thank God Emilia Perez didn’t get it.
Maybe it’s just that I have infinite sympathy for scenes of baffled tourists standing on train platforms in Europe.
Sometimes a film is just a great excuse to hang out with two of your favourite on-screen guys, and Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin definitely fall into that category. Eisenberg’s wound way too tight, Culkin is chronically oversharing, they’ve gone on holiday to Poland together to remember their dear departed Gran.
I don’t think there have been many successful Hollywood movies split into two parts, and I haven’t seen Part Two yet so maybe Wicked will still fluff it, but I can say that this particular split was made for me, the guy who stood up after Defying Gravity at the Apollo theatre in London circa 2008 and started putting on his coat and hat.
People moan about the colour palette as a synecdoche for this era of digital colour but eh, it works here. Movie looks great. As I said in my review at the time, it’s fascinating seeing someone do what Disney keep trying and failing to do in recent years and hitting a home run with it.
It has only taken sixteen years but James Cameron has convinced me. I’m a Na’vi guy now. I’m true blue. I will watch these until the end of time if he keeps making them. I hope every single one ends with a fistfight between Jake Sully and Quaritch.
In a year where I was starved, parched, fully withdrawn from the glory of the movies, I am so glad I managed to pack Danger: Diabolik in. Anarchic glee from the first frame to the last, all centred round the happy, healthy relationship between a man who only leaves the house in full leathers and his beautiful partner who sees things on the news and wants to steal them. Featuring possibly the worst Bond villain trap of all time, a plane with a trap door built in.
I’ve accidentally been savouring the Scorcese big hitters so this is a genuine first timer for me, and in terms of craft it’s basically flawless. Funny, infuriating, scandelous, every vignette chosen for maximum effect. Three hours float past like a dream as the guy gets it all and… well, doesn’t lose it all. Loses some of it. And that’s just how it went.
Impressively, I don’t appear to have watched a single film from the docket list at the end of my 2024 review. Whoops!
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Ringing in my ears as I enter the cinema is Pulp’s old-new single off their latest album, Got To Have Love. I don’t know how seriously I’m supposed to take this self-directed admonishment from leading man Jarvis Cocker, who so often inhabits a grim, seedy persona as the protagonist of his songs. I’m here to see the Superman film that is also about how we’ve got to have love, or kindness, or something. In its worst, most tawdry moments the script tries to get away with calling this attitude ‘punk rock’. It’s not, and the comparison lands uncomfortably similarly to those awful right-wing op-eds that call Conservatism ‘the new punk rock’ every five years. But it’s Superman, back on screen, and if Cocker can breath life back into these hoary old aphorisms then there’s no reason that seeing a straight depiction of mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent back on the big screen shouldn’t be cause for celebration.
Before we go further, permit me to address my motivations directly to the camera – as so many characters in this film choose to do: I was dubious in my anticipation of this film. Superman (2025) is the latest effort by DC and Warner Bros to make seaworthy their idealised Whedonesque universe of heroes. It didn’t work in Justice League (2017) and it didn’t work in The Flash (2023) and that it works here is down to the careful efforts of new CEO(!) James Gunn in the twin caps of writer and director. Gunn draws liberally from the previous cinema outings for the ‘big blue boy scout’ in a manner that recalls Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and as with that film there is a note of the grim reaper’s chill hand in realising that there has now been 9 years since Batman v Superman, 12 since Man of Steel, 19 since Superman Returns and 46 since Superman (1978). It’s a haunting reminder of the passage of time, seeing these films (most of which I was around for the release of) plundered for many of their best ideas, repackaged for a new generation of cinema-goers.
Indeed the earlier films aren’t so much referenced as ransacked: The visual design pulls from the Donner and Lester films, particularly in the elements of Krypton present. There’s a plot point pulled directly from Sidney J. Furie’s The Quest for Peace which is so prominent that it feels strange to call it an Easter Egg. There’s even a particular attention to eyeballs which speaks to an influence from the disgraced Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns. And the plot, at least until the final act, is something of a greatest-hits-tour of imagery from the two Zack Snyder movies: Superman cooking breakfast for Lois, a naive Superman intervening in foreign affairs, Superman placed in handcuffs while surrendering himself to the state. Lex Luthor turning opinion against Superman, Lex Luthor pitching killing Superman to politicians, Lex Luthor creating a monster for Superman to fight. It’s all transliterated into a post-streaming world of characters who state their feelings and intentions out loud, and action which sits solidly within a centre vertical for TikTok, but it’s recognisably the same stuff. Where there are changes, it’s to externalise and literalise: In the aftermath of his conflicts, Snyder’s Superman had to sit with the existential anguish of free choice. Gunn’s Superman has to sit with robots holding him down in the big agony chair that shoots fire at you because it hurts to be a hero.
Sometimes a guy just has a second, secret home where he can hang out with the guys and the agony chair.
I’m being droll but that’s not necessarily a criticism; there’s nothing inherently wrong with simplifying and literalising, though it means that this Superman is ironically often a bit more alien than he might otherwise be, oscillating in his scenes with Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane between a kind of post-teenage petulance, demanding that the world be simpler so that he can act without consequence, and a detached aloofness. Fortunately Brosnahan brings her considerable talents to making the relationship seem plausible, with a nice subtle humour to the idea that – tormented by her own relationship demons – she is in a sense settling for Superman.
One of the more perplexing elements of Superman (2025) is that in the final analysis, Superman isn’t the one to deal the meaningful blow to the hotheaded Lex Luthor. Rather, Superman being occupied contending with his nondescript clone Ultraman, the intrepid reporters of the Daily Planet crowd into Mr Terrific’s Owlship and hover over the ruins of Metropolis as they publish a front-page takedown of Luthor’s crimes to the internet. Exposed at last, and savaged by the unruly Krypto in a strange bit of dark humour, Luthor is ushered into the back of a vehicle by some of the heavily militarised operatives he spent the film directing. Presumably this sequence of events is intended to split agency over the film’s climax between Superman himself and Lois Lane, reporter at large, and it’s broadly successful. The Planet gang are a distinct if glossy bunch, and Wendell Pierce plays a delightful but brief Perry White, editor, as a man who only seems to own one cigar.
Hoult’s Luthor is a delight, even when he’s given lines like “Super… man.”
It’s not unusual for blockbusters to get a little All the President’s Men when depicting journalism. The myth of the crusading journalist cuts across the 20th century, from John Reed to Hunter S. Thompson. But it’s a curiously narrow take here, not even going as far as the depiction in Batman v Superman of legacy media as an honest institution in ignoble decline. The Daily Planet gang are happy, healthy, gainfully employed, and all operate out of a lush downtown office space with dedicated cubicles – hell if you’re Neo trapped in the long 90s, but positively anachronistic for a world where WeWork has been and gone. It’s curious that the plot doesn’t go anywhere near touching on the idea of Lex buying the Daily Planet, something both Smallville and the Adventures of Lois and Clark took their swings at. Jeff Bezos put his fingers on the scales at the Washington Post to keep it from endorsing a candidate in the US Presidential election; it seems odd to portray fictional journalists free from editorial intervention when the real-life ones evidently aren’t.
You might contend that the film is really just a piece of fluff, an object of wish fulfilment and that earnest journalists who speak truth to power are of a set with the flying man with laser eyes – a cynical take, but reasonable. But the film is really very concerned with this question of the good journalist, and touches on it a few times. Lois and Clark come to sharp words in an early scene over Lois’s insistence on interviewing Superman as she would any other political figure: over her refusal to ‘print the legend’, which we are meant to assume Clark has been doing in his ethically questionable self-interviews. In a bizarre aside, Clark insists that he – Superman – doesn’t engage in social media, before naturally revealing an encyclopaedic knowledge of what people are saying about him on it. Implicitly, that’s why he needs to write these dishonest features about himself: to put right the braying masses who are speaking ill of him. Now this is not Superman’s finest hour, and so the film is quick to offer an excuse for him. During the interminable pocket universe sequence, there’s a quick visual gag in which Lex Luthor claims to have a host of barely-literate apes tasked with running Superman down online. A quirkly take on the notion of bot armies manipulating opinion for pay, this must be a comforting notion for Director Gunn, who infamously lost his job – but then quickly regained it – after a social media storm over the content of some of his old tweets. Among the feckless prisoners in Luthor’s space prison is, we are told, a blogger who wrote a negative profile of him. Presumably they’ve been preserved as the last of a dying breed. If the general quality of discourse is so poor, the suggestion seems to be, then it’s impossible to say if Superman or Lex Luthor or anyone else is good or bad – unless it’s printed by the authorities at the Daily Planet.
Ah yeah a stun stick, that’ll do it.
A final discordant note on social media comes with the depiction of Eve Teschmacher by a vaguely scene-stealing Sara Sampaio. Lex Luthor’s partner, she’s a constant presence alongside him taking an endless array of selfies with goofy expressions on her face, as he goes about his many crimes. Exactly why he indulges her in this is never touched on, and the degree to which she is intentionally cataloguing his sins is also frustratingly vague. For some unknown reason she’s head over heels for Skyler Gisondo’s unpleasant Jimmy Olson, who in a strange and mean-spirited bit has issues with her physical appearance. Via Olson, Teschmaker gets her crucial smoking gun of photographic evidence to Lois for publication at great personal risk, despite which Jimmy continues to shun her. In this way Eve really takes second credit for exposing Luthor and it would have been nice for her to have her moment in the Owlship also. The absence of such means that the film makes an odd distinction between the serious Lois Lane and the slightly infantile Teschmacher, as if placing them on an even keel might sully Lois with Eve’s girlish vices.
Give her the Pulitzer!
This aside, if there’s an Achilles’ heel to this Superman it comes in how the slightly disjointed plot doesn’t quite gel, and I’m no stranger to the prospect of stitching together multiple disconnected takes on a subject into a single whole which thus gains the appearance of deliberate creative intent. Early screenings of this film apparently made overt the formal structure of it, with title cards for each day of events proceeding linearly through a week of Superman’s life. But there’s an odd tension between the different ‘days’ of the film, some of which seem to be saying very different things to each other – the climax insists that the citizens of Metropolis can perfectly evacuate at a moment’s notice, when much of the rest of the film has hinted that they’re becoming dangerously carefree about superhero action. The absolute outlier is the aforementioned pocket universe sequence, which is visually uninspiring, reminiscent of the ugly Ant-Man 3, as well as trivial to the plot – Superman is locked in a room with only a deeply conscientious man to guard him. Whatever could happen next. Lois and Mr Terrific (a fantastic Edi Gathegi, who just sort of wills his character into having a bigger role than he does) stand in one spot for the majority of it, gazing at a distant green screen. And most oddly, Lex Luthor gets his big villain moment here: he’s picked out a man, Malik, who showed Superman basic human kindness earlier in the film, and he’s had him bound and gagged and brought before Superman, wherein Luthor shoots him in the head. It’s kind of sped past in the moment but it’s a real dark turn.
Why’s this guy got to be the Omelas here. Whats up with that.
Especially for a film that’s about to proceed into a third act where we are repeatedly assured, in excruciating detail, that no-one is harmed or hurt. What makes this guy so unspecial that Superman – who volunteered himself to the position where he’s unable to act to save him – gives up? Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who episodes used to have a recurring refrain of “Just this once, everybody lives!” where an episode that had seemingly settled into the regular fictional logic of tragic but unavoidable loss would rebound, go one step weirder and have the outcome be no loss at all. It’s a neat trick, and of course it’s the ending to Superman (1978), where Superman reverses time to keep Lois from dying. Not every Superman film has to be Man of Steel; if you’re making something purportedly inspired by All-Star Superman then I want to see Dr Leo Quintum popping in at the end with a hundred clones of Malik ready to go.
The politics of the movie are the kind of cypherous mush that has been typical of the genre going all the way back to Iron Man: war is bad, but also the fault of a bad man who can be individually picked up and struck off if we only had the moral fortitude and a smart enough missile. Everyone else, from the top to the bottom, is only following orders. This goes for Luthor’s oddly diverse goon squad as well as fictional foreign actor ‘Boravia’, with the movie’s clash between a Boravian military detachment and an gathering of innocent civilians on a nondescript (although strangely small) sandy outcrop being the closest it ever gets to looking like The Flash (2023).
This was in the trailer, I’m not sure this shot was actually in the finished film. Look at those tanks!
Any real dive into the morality of the film is blunted not just on the ‘be kind’ platitudes but also the shifting message between the different chunks of film; early on Superman is criticised for his naïveté, at the end of the film he’s commended for his inspirational rigidity. Killing is always bad, except when it’s the cowardly and murderous Boravia president, or you’re doing the ending of Batman Begins and allowing public transport to bring your antagonist to an untimely end. Even ‘be kind’ folds in the face of ‘let your dog knock a guy about if it’s funny’.
On a grandular level, in maybe the strongest sign of a botched script edit job, Mr Terrific appears in both a scene in the middle of the film where he’s strangly unconcerned with random antagonists milling about him as he works to shut down a portal, and a scene at the end of the film where he chews a guy out for attempting to assist him in closing the rift. Neither sits particularly well, given that the stakes for closing the rift are meant to be “the world is destroyed” and the portal in question was the one for taking people to Luthor’s extrajudicial space prison. The culpability of ordinary people is just not something the film concerns itself with – agency belongs to prime actors, business CEOs and presidents, the proud and free press, and superheroes.
Wow, rude.
Well, it’s not punk rock. In fact (you may be surprised to hear) it’s often quite cringe-worthy, the cynical (multiple lines confirming that someone who just fell down from space is ‘still breathing’) clashing with the earnest (Superman being so committed to 100% rescues that he’s moving squirrels about while a giant monster thrashes about). The action is mostly a bit naff and the acting is carried by a few strong players making the most of scraping their bowls clean (Nathan Fillion here operating at the elastic limit of his talent). It’s a $200 million dollar movie that leans heavily on putting a funny dog in centre view, like an episode of Britain’s Got Talent or a sequel to Soccer Dog.
But it’s coherent, and it’s fun – something DC’s films have generally only managed one or the other of for several years now. Corenswet is a charming enough presence that you want Superman to win even though he’s an idiot, and he has genuine chemistry with Brosnahan that makes you overlook all the yelling he does. The robots are funny. Is it the bedrock of a whole new franchise of films, fifteen years of sequels as James Gunn has promised? I won’t hold my breath, and I won’t watch Creature Commandos, but stranger things have happened.
It’s been a funny year for movie watching — the arthouse cinema near me closed down in the middle of the year, which was disappointing. The Odeon over the road still thrives though, so plenty more blockbusters in my future. More than anything else though, my movie-watching has been dictated by the preparation for and arrival of my shiny new baby, which is delightful in most ways but did put a dent in the time I’d previously have used to sneak in the Rebel Moon director’s cuts, which I’ve shamefully still not caught up on.
For fun cinema experiences not represented here, I saw Burden of Dreams at a small cinema in downtown Las Vegas while I was over there on my second trip of the year, using a giant spanner to adjust the big bolt that keeps the Sphere from floating off. I think that was about it — I saw Beekeeper, Madame Web, Love Lies Bleeding and Megalopolis on the big screen, all of which benefitted from it (Madame Web in particular was something of an impromptu private screening). Hopefully next year I can muscle in on the baby viewing game — there’s a cinema a short drive away where they’ll bring you a cake while you and the little one watch, which sounds pleasant.
Without further adieu, the list. It’s ‘new releases’ ranked, for a definition of that which includes everything since my 2023 review and a few more that I just felt like fitting in.
An absolute hangover from last year, a tombstone movie for a dead era of Disney-Marvel which fails at almost everything it attempts. A shame as it’s hung on a trio of decent lead performances but I’ve not thought fondly of this once since seeing it.
23. Watchmen: Chapter One
A tepid adaption of the graphic novel which hews even more close to the source than the famously meticulous Snyder film. The only real adjustments made are to bowdlerise it, so lines that are paced well on page become slugging, leaden scenes on screen.
This did not work for me at all, which is a shame because I know a lot of people have highly rated it (and it’s got awards buzz, whatever that means.) I’ve seen a bunch of variations on the black comedy/musical combination, some that work (Dear Evan Hansen stage musical) and some that immediately collapse under their own contradictions (Dear Evan Hansen movie) and this just ended up more the latter for me.
I promise you nothing interesting is happening here.
In his documentary Reel Bad Arabs, Jack Shaheen calls Friedkin’s Rules of Engagement the most racist film ever made against Arabs. Impossible to forget that watching the climax of this, a weepy-eyed polemic on behalf of America’s mid-2000s adventurism in the Middle East. Soured the whole film.
Who is the real Agent Argylle? Ironically something of a return to form for Matthew Vaughn after some wobbly Kingsman entries, this outstays its already limited welcome and then some. You spend the first half thinking “this isn’t so bad” and the second half thinking “please end”.
Her web truly does connect us all. If you want this year’s Suicide Squad, look no further: the seeds of greatness are here, in this film nobody asked for and nobody wanted. Dakota Johnson is magnetic as the titular weird little gremlin woman forced by fate to creepily abduct three teenagers. Every frame of this film is a testament to how something went down here, and hopefully one day we’ll find out what.
It’s a buddy comedy farce with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who have enough chemistry to keep it watchable. Will mostly remember it for the insane BTS video about how they faked all the water in the final sequence.
I promise you most of Madame Web looked better than this.
Caught this Indian answer to both Bond and the MCU on a plane — great fun, very silly, some impressive action set pieces (as well as a few that seemed to have not quite worked out) and super interesting to watch soft power cultural chauvinism play out in a totally different context.
I didn’t get to see this second half in the cinema, sadly, so it didn’t have a chance to wow me with the big screen visuals like the first. On top of that, it was chased up by the director’s cuts which are on all accounts superior, but I wasn’t able to pack them into my now baby-dominated schedule. I’m sure they’ll be on next year’s list. Fear not, I am still a died-in-the-wool Snyder Sicko.
It’s good, and a very enjoyable watch, and it rightly draws attention to the scummy phenomenon of civil forfeiture, and Aaron Pierre has buckets of screen presence, I just expect a bit more from Jeremy Saulnier, the guy who directed Blue Ruin and Green Room. Feels like he was aiming for a broader appeal and just sanded a bit too much of his style away.
Still unsure what to make of Yorgos Lanthimos’ end-2023 sprawl of gothic steampunk and proto-feminism. Many excellent elements somehow fail to come together to produce something truly excellent, despite a stout lead performance by Emma Stone and a scene-stealing impresario in Mark Ruffalo.
This is far too low for Villeneuve’s middle entry into what will be a trilogy of Dune films; having read Dune Messiah earlier this year I can see why he considered it a necessary third — it’s basically the climax of the entire first book. Suffers a little as a distinct film from not having much of it’s own setting to introduce; the underground sietches are fine, and Giedi Prime is spectacular, but it’s a small slice of the worldbuilding of part one.
10. Conclave
As with 2019’s The Two Popes, scurrilous little priests bickering and scheming is an easy way to win my affection. Ralph Fiennes stars as the will-he won’t-he Cardinal trying to determine who should be the next Pope, with a pleasing cast of character actors to face off against. Unfortunately there’s a few slightly outlandish elements that are maybe meant to feel destabilising but can only summon bathos. Looks beautiful though.
I really loved this bouncy, extravagent yet bleak tale of two bodybuilding lesbians and one gross dad. This sort of thing is so often scared to be goofy where appropriate, but the Las Vegas scene here will be sticking with me for a while, as will the [Steven Universe voice] giant woman.
The year’s biggest contradiction in terms, the political thriller with no politics. Francis Ford Coppola spent his own money putting the biggest swing for the fences since Attack of the Clones in cinemas and it’s a truely unique bit of nonsense. It’s genius, it’s beautiful, it’s obviously had to ration the VFX shots and despite being absolutely mad it’s still exactly the film you’d expect Coppola to spend all his money making. Could have been at the bottom of the list, could have been at the top. In the event, it’s here.
My affection for the work of David Ayer is sealed in blood, sweat and tears of course, but it was still enervating to start the year out seeing him return to mainstream success. The Beekeeper, written by Kurt Wimmer of Equilibrium fame, is a script so silly but self-serious that it hits like alchemy combined with Ayer’s game direction. The rapid-fire shifts between nonsense and hard action seen in films like — for example — Suicide Squad just flies, and Jason Statham (who often seems on a permanent quest for his breakthrough action persona) is exactly the right man to swirl at the centre of it. He’s a Beekeeper, they need to get hit, he’s the man to hit them. All the way to the top.
Do not say Megaflopolis.
6. Hundreds of Beavers
Surely not the first film inspired by the mechanics of a video game, or the comedic flow of a Let’s Play, but definitely the most successful. The Minecraft film is unlikely to capture the agonies of progression half as well as this did. An inspirational piece of low-budget filmmaking and genuinely funny to boot.
If only Signor Ferrari would attend to business matters and not be so fixed on racing! This was a very pleasant surprise, an exacting character study shared between Penelope Cruz and Adam Driver as Laura and Enzo Ferrari. Death — and the spectre of the war — is so omnipresent that no-one blinks an eye as another test driver careens off the track to his doom. Ferrari has races to win.
The face of a man who has dealt death to Hundred of Beavers.
Dragged across from 2023 is this instant Christmas classic, where frustrated schoolmaster Paul Giamatti must face down the holiday period responsible for Dominic Sessa’s troubled young man, with only Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s school cook to mediate. Deeply funny and affecting; the scene where Sessa visits his father is heartbreaking.
Another holdover from 2023, you know Anatomy of a Fall is going to be genius from the moment that steel drum hits. Sandra Hüller is magnetic as the frosty professional writer accused of killing her talentless partner, summoning great oceans of displeasure in just sitting still with a neutral face. Alongside everything else, a fascinating insight into the French legal system.
Highly anticipated, I thought this was an astonishingly confident follow up to Fury Road, and a contribution that would enhance that film on a viewing of the pair together. Miller’s action sandy action set pieces are unlike anything else still being attempted, but for me the highlight of the film was the climax: an intense, intimate meditation on the utility of revenge and how any one person can be responsible for a whole world of shit.
Speaking of poor viewing conditions, surely the best movie I have ever watched on a plane. Making it all the more impressive that this is sitting at number one! It’s such a slight thing as well, with a consciously truncated third act that leaves you screaming at the screen for more. A worse movie would feel unfinished or unsatisfying, but I Saw the TV Glow is filled with just enough absolute despair — and just enough brilliant hope — that all you want to do is experience it again.
Still on the docket —
Trap: I haven’t seen anything from the M. Night Shyamalan renaissance, hoping to give this a go.
Kinds of Kindness: Didn’t manage to find time for this Lanthimos follow-up.
The Substance: I’m not generally a horror person but this had great buzz at the end of the year.
Rebel Moon Director’s Cuts: Netflix’s decision to break this film into four indisputably a swing and a miss. I liked the theatrical cuts more than most but the red meat is meant to be in these extended versions.
Joker: Folie à Deux: No film that makes people this upset can have nothing going for it.
The People’s Joker: Vera Drew absolutely living the dream, giving two fingers to the notion that you can own pop culture and taking it all for herself. Sadly not out in the UK yet.
The Boy and the Heron: I’ll be straining credulity including this in the 2025 list.
Challengers: I will watch the sexy tennis love triangle movie.
Deadpool and Wolverine: I just think I’m better than this.
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Contains detailed discussions of things that happen in Megalopolis. Go see it first.
Filmed on an LED volume; put that in your pipe and smoke it.
It’s easy to take a film like this at its own myth, and much of the marketing in the run up to the release has encouraged you to do so. The now-infamous trailer consisting of machine-apocryphal negative quotes about Coppola’s earlier films, the much-vaunted selling of Coppola’s vineyard to fund the budget, the tactically-leaked tales of late improvisational nights smoking weed in the production trailer with the cast. It all contributes to an image of this film as something special, something which has taken an above-and-beyond effort to see realised — something which has loftier goals than the average flick. It’s always going to be hard to sit in the cinema and see that collapsed into an actual film.
Does Megalopolis crumble under the weight of expectation? Not quite. True, it’s not that weird and the giddy fervour with which critics have spent the last month damning it to hell as an incoherent mess (46% on Rotten Tomatoes, for anyone whose soul is withered enough to care) seems really a bit of a put-on; no-one is risking their cushy access to Oscar screeners or whatever by dunking on this ‘independent’ film. It’s a well-made film with some judacious if budget-bound visual effects. It has a mercurial cast of talented and famous actors who are well-suited to their roles. It’s not particularly radical in structure — there’s a nod to formalism with the occasional act-breaking title card but mostly it follows a classic Hollywood plot structure with a few break-outs into something weirder (Protagonist Cesar’s drug-fuelled breakdown; the final Megalopolis montage) and a few things that are ostentatiously typical — the scene where Cesar sees old flame Wow Platinum at the park and offers her his coat is sublimely executed, but could have come from Love, Actually.
We’re never given any real explanation for why Cesar is playing with this prism. Perhaps he just thinks it’s neat.
What’s actually weird in Megalopolis? There’s two main aspects, and both bear comparison to some other controversial directors. The acting in Megalopolis is not at all naturalistic — it has an element of the Shakespearean. In fact many scenes feel like they have come from an adaptation of some unknown discovered Shakespeare: the way in which we follow around the members of one or two families as they explain the popular politics to us through their encounters recalls Romeo and Juliet; the plot itself of course is filled with references to antiquity and to Julius Caesar. The good nephew who hides his virtue in controversy and the bad son who wages war on his own King is a twist on personal favourite Henry IV Part 1. And so the acting is grandiose, prone to monologue, and allows the actors reign to interpret the dialogue as they will. Adam Driver’s delivery of “You think one year of medical school entitles you to plow through the riches of my Emersonian mind?” is not something you will see emulated in any other movie this year. George Lucas, of course, filled his Star Wars prequels with similarly stylised performances and dialogue and was pilloried for it — Coppola perhaps had some of the Tom Stoppard-inflected monologues from Revenge of the Sith in mind when scripting Megalopolis, with its odes to a dying republic and portraits of the people who let it become so.
The other aspect is the earnestness, with Megalopolis being a distinctly funny film — again aping Shakespeare, every indulgent moment of drama is defused with a little following slapstick — that is nonetheless bereft of the cynical humour that has become the mode for big Hollywood presentations. What does this mean? Well there’s several dick jokes and no “well that happened” moments. Alongside this cheeky humour, the actual meat of the film is similarly direct: Driver’s Cesar wants to build his dream project, the titular Megalopolis. The film wants you to want him to build it. There’s no interrogation of the merits of doing so — indeed other reviews have noted the lack of any class perspective whatsoever. It’s about the pure power of creating, the inherent worth in having the will to see something done. Naturally this recalls the cod-Nietzschean energy of Ayn Rand’s infamous The Fountainhead, another epic about a man who wants to build a thing. But Megalopolis is not Randian except in the most broad of strokes. Cesar’s high goals set him above the other characters but not in terms of rational self-interest, or in a way that is permissive of him to be cruel. Rather, the other characters are simply fallen, craven, too beholden to this existing world to open their eyes and see the next one approaching fast.
This next world admittedly seems to involve a lot of petal-like buildings that flap around a bit. In the film’s driving metaphor, Cesar is able — by some virtue of his artistry or his engineering or his connection to the wonder-material Megalon — to stop time. But we never see him use it for any deliberate purpose. It’s only used for the artistic ends it’s already a metaphor for. Similarly, the shorthand for the Megalopolis project and it’s world of boons ends up being a sort of space-travelator; it’s a city that’s literally going to help you get to where you want to go. America like Rome is a dying Empire, so in this America Madison Square Gardens is literally a circus. Cesar at one point misses his dead wife while suffering from a hole in the head. It’s an exceptionally literal film in many ways.
What could it mean?
Where Megalopolis disappoints is in its handling of gender, the classical trappings being something of a lure to encourage you away from noticing that Cesar lives in a world where there are only three women: grasping climbers, frigid mothers and beautiful perennial muses. The climbers appear in the twin figures of Wow Platinum, the TV gossip host whose role is elevated significantly by Aubrey Plaza’s performance, and Taylor Swift-alike Vesta, the virginial singer who makes a brief but significant appearance at the halfway point of the film. Platinum is a perfect foil for Jon Voight’s slightly hateful, slightly loveable wealthy banker Crassus. Unlike the feckless Clodio (who has the classic Disney villain cross-dressing trait) and his two sisters, Platinum has the drive and the ability to outmaneuver old Crassus, who she marries after dumping a disinterested Cesar — so it’s a shame that of all the characters in the story, a violent death is reserved for her.
Similarly, there’s an odd edge to the reveal that Vesta — the subject of a ludicrous and deeply satirical auction for her virtue — is in fact not a virgin, or a teenager, or American. Do those things count against her? Should we be good Kantians and hold the subject of this horrid circus to account for lying, even in these circumstances?
Cesar’s mother is perfectly unloveable and a non-entity beyond that, perhaps to drive home his need for unconditional love from Natalie Emmannuel’s Julia. Much of the film is spent in discussion of Cesar’s previous muse Sunny Hope, who was driven to despair by his mercurial nature — and his cheating. Modern replacement Emmannuel’s Julia has the most difficult job in the cast, keeping any kind of edge on a character written as permanently doe-eyed and bowled over by the great creative virtues of the man she is muse to. Her big moment is getting to say “stop time… for me!” Furiosa this is not. It’s a huge missed opportunity for this ostensible vision of the future to be so hide-bound in its women characters.
Much like the film’s politics, it looks neat but it’s unclear what it’s actually meant to do.
As mentioned above, the film plays with being political, with having something specific about politics to say. Where it settles is not exactly deep however, and it’s more than a little reactionary. Rich dilettantes playing with the emotions of the mob are dangerous. Indulging fascism will bring some truly stupid people to power. Rioting is bad. It’s not much to sink your teeth into and even the ostensibly political framing of the corrupt old-world mayor who serves corporate interests is quickly rinsed out and replaced with an interpersonal conflict about Cesar marrying his daughter. The climax of the film has Cesar address the audience directly (okay, it’s somehow the second-most-direct address to the audience in this film) to beg them to dream big and shoot for the stars and so on. I couldn’t decide whether the slightly bathetic nature of this was intentional or not; I think it wasn’t. It’s a Mishima speech, one given by a character too detached from the world of regular people to have any purchase or impact. He’s hollering from that balcony but the noise from the planes is just too loud to hear what’s being said. It’s enough to wrap up the plot, but I didn’t feel inspired much at all.
Which I think is the ultimate problem for Megalopolis — Coppola wants to inspire us to debate, to think, to create society anew — but he doesn’t actually have any idea how. Taking a single rich family as a microcosm of society as a whole is useful for telling a story, but it’s a difficult way to offer something tangible. How To Blow Up a Pipeline could at least suggest blowing up a pipeline. Becoming Barron Trump is simply inaccessible for most people. There are plenty in the world who remember that the world was made by people, made by their choices. Rediscovering that is important, but it’s not even a first step. For me, Megalopolis can’t even claim to be reigniting that flame — the Graeber and Wengrow book The Dawn of Everything made a much more compelling case for the inadequency of our politics to our ever-changing nature.
Is it perhaps unfair to expect a film to reinvent politics. But it’s only even a notion because this is Francis Ford Coppola’s Film That Reinvents Politics (and Art, and Love, and Everything) which is maybe a silly thing to aspire for a film to be. I wouldn’t change it though.And as a mere film, it has unique moments, spectacular visuals and a beating heart. That’s enough, I think.
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