Project Hail Mary I was late to this, so I missed it in IMAX, but was able to catch it in 70mm. I guess I'm glad that non-franchise sci-fi blockbusters are still getting made and are doing well at the box office, bu...

#ProjectHailMary ('25) ★★ 2001 for twelve-year-olds. www.film5000.com/2026/project...

Fantasy Life Matthew Shear, known for playing supporting roles in Between the Temples and Mistress America, makes his debut as writer/director/star in this tale of a mildly depressive paralegal who, after being...

#fantasylife ('25) ★ Shear's debut feature about a schlubby neurotic who becomes a manny to a power-couple whose marriage is going through a midlife crisis is a nice throwback to the days when comedies were less extreme and more grounded in relatable situations. www.film5000.com/2026/fantasy...

The Bride!

#thebride ('25) ★ Gyllenhaal's fake-punk, pseudo-feminist, looky-what-I'm-doing! exercise is one of those maximalist, director-centered, sophomore efforts that auteurists seem to believe filmmakers "deserve." www.film5000.com/2026/the-bri...

Films of 2025 <p>A rough year for society, but a solid year for the movies</p>

I was late finishing my year-end list for 2025, though there were fewer major films to see than in past years. Still, while 2025 was a rough year for society, it was a grand year for movies. www.film5000.com/2025

Familiar Touch

#FamiliarTouch ('25) ★★★ Kathleen Chalfant gives a magnificently understated performance as an octogenarian in cognitive decline transitioning to a new life in an assisted living facility in Sarah Friedland's moving drama about the final stages of life. www.film5000.com/2025/familia...

An Unfinished Film

#anunfinishedfilm ('25) ★★ Ye Lou's docufictional approach heightens the artificial aspects of his picture, hindering its ability to authentically capture the feeling of being trapped at the centers of the COVID-19 outbreak. www.film5000.com/2025/an-unfi...

The Lost Bus The most shocking thing in this "inspired by real events" disaster movie from Apple Studios, Blumhouse Productions, and producer Jamie Lee Curtis is the director's credit at the end. I didn't know ...

#TheLostBus ('25) ★★ Real-life disaster movie lays everything on so thick it strains all credibility; features a surprisingly unpleasant turn from Matthew McConaughey and direction from Paul Greengrass that you'd swear was done by one of his imitators. www.film5000.com/2025/the-los...

The Mastermind Kelly Reichardt leaves the lush greys of the Pacific Northwest for the drab greys of Framingham, Massachusetts (though I think this film is shot in Ohio). Set during the transitional year of 1970, ...

#TheMastermind ('25) ★★★ Kelly Reichardt gives us a small-time criminal more down on his luck than Eddie Coyle, with even less helpful friends. Josh O'Connor is hilariously deadpan as an uncool, unsuccessful Thomas Crown wannabe. www.film5000.com/2025/the-mas...

It Was Just an Accident

#ItWasJustAnAccident ('25) ★★★+ Jafar Panahi's latest plays like a compellingly dark hybrid of Death and the Maiden and Little Miss Sunshine. www.film5000.com/2025/it-was-...

WTO/99 The best unreleased film of 2025 is Ian Bell and Alex Megaro's masterfully edited archival documentary about the 1999 World Trade Organization Conference protests. These were the massive anti-globa...

#wto99 ('25) ★★★★ The best unreleased film of 2025 is this masterfully edited archival documentary about the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, which uses only participant and newscam footage to tell the complex and nuanced story of this key event. www.film5000.com/2025/wto99/1...

The Perfect Neighbor Geeta Gandbhir's Oscar-nominated documentary takes the approach of the previous year's best Oscar-nominated short. Bill Morrison's The Incident uses nothing but publicly released police bodycam foo...

#ThePerfectNeighbor ('25) ★★★★ Building a compelling film from 2 years of police bodycam footage & 911 calls, Gandbhir's documentary provides astute, subtextual commentary as it chronicles events that led to a murder. www.film5000.com/2025/the-per...

Mr. Nobody Against Putin Danish documentarian David Borenstein (Dream Empire) shapes the footage of a determined teacher and A/V guy, Pavel Talankin, working at a primary school in one of Russia's poorest, most polluted mi...

#mrnobodyagainstputin ('25) ★★ More an oral history, illustrated with footage than a documentary, but Pavel Talankin, the protagonist of Borenstein's film, bravely exposes Putin's militarization and indoctrination practices in Russian primary schools. www.film5000.com/2025/mr-nobo...

Palestine 36 Annemarie Jacir's exciting portrayal of Palestinians at this titular place and time is only the third film ever submitted by Palestine for Academy Award consideration. Set in a key year in Middle E...

#palestine36 ('25) ★★★+ A small historical epic that feels impossibly grand, Annemarie Jacir's multi-character story of Palestinian villages striking against British colonial rule at a pivotal place and time is an incredible film to be released in 2025. www.film5000.com/2025/palesti...

Happyend

#happyend ('25) ★★★+ Neo Sora's clever coming-of-age story is set in a Japanese private school in a not-so-distant future where authorities are slowly implementing draconian rules and heavy surveillance in the name of freedom and safety. www.film5000.com/2025/happyen...

The Voice of Hind Rajab Tunisian writer/director Kaouther Ben Hania follows up her Oscar-nominated Four Daughters with another excellent blending of reality and dramatization. The Voice of Hind Rajab reenacts the events o...

#thevoiceofhindrajab ('25) ★★★+ Kaouther Ben Hania's tense docudrama about a 5-year-old girl trapped under fire in Gaza begging desperate Red Crescent call-center volunteers for rescue, explores damned-if-you-do and if-you-don't procedures in wartime. www.film5000.com/2025/the-voi...

Father Mother Sister Brother The best Jim Jarmusch pictures are the ones where the least happens. This has been the case ever since his minimalist masterpiece Stranger Than Paradise came out in 1984. Some of his livelier movie...

#FatherMotherSisterBrother ('25) ★★★+ The now septuagenarian Jim Jarmusch delivers one of his most layered works of minimalism, an anthology about the unspoken, often unknowable dynamics of familial relationships. www.film5000.com/2025/father-...

The Chronology of Water Kristen Stewart has been a sharp, instinctive actor whose choices in material and projects have always been savvy ever since the Twilight series made her a mega-star. From Greg Mottola's Adventurel...

#TheChronologyOfWater ('25) ★★★ Imogen Poots gives a compelling lead performance in Kristen Stewart's aggressively fragmented, fiercely internal character study. www.film5000.com/2025/the-chr...

The Testament of Ann Lee Merry F-ing X-mas! What a movie to release on Christmas morning for the whole family to go out and see! Those two zany kids, actors-turned-writer-directors Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet (whose dep...

#TheTestamentofAnnLee ('25) ★★★ Amanda Seyfried gives a (literally) dizzying tour-de-force performance as the titular Shaker founder in this unpleasant yet kinda fascinating historical drama from the team behind The Brutalist. www.film5000.com/2025/the-tes...

Fréwaka

#frewaka ('25) ★★★ Irish language and setting make this unique, though it’s not too different from many recent horror movies with its themes of grief, mental illness, undealt-with parental conflict, and the blurring of lines between reality and fantasy. www.film5000.com/2025/frewaka...

The Monkey I'll say one thing for Osgood Perkins: he is inconsistent. That can be a good thing when you crank movies out with the speed of this writer/director, who released two features this year. While Perk...

#TheMonkey ('25) ★★+ Osgood Perkins adapts Steven King's short story about a cursed wind-up toy monkey into a Sam-Raimi-esque slapstick-gore-comedy-horror that sustains its playfully nihilistic belly laughs until it runs out of gas in the last third. www.film5000.com/2025/the-mon...

Dreams Meaningless, interchangeable single-word titles have become my biggest pet peeve of contemporary cinema, but of all the terribly named features to be instantly forgotten six weeks after their relea...

#dreams ('25) ★★★ Michel Franco's latest explores class and gender power dynamics in some unexpected ways, with strong performances by Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández as a wealthy American socialite and her Mexican ballet dancer lover. www.film5000.com/2025/dreams/...

Reflection in a Dead Diamond Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzan's mind-bending, spy-vs-spy, Euro sci-fi action thriller is a movie that clearly loves movies, or at least the surface pleasures of movies. Reflection in a Dead Diamon...

#reflectioninadeaddiamond ('25) ★★ If you love this, I've got a wicked-cool Diet Coke commercial from the ‘80s to show ya!
www.film5000.com/2025/reflect...

Resurrection Chinese writer/director Bi Gan follows up his hypnotic but gimmicky dream film Long Day's Journey into Night (2018) with this marvelous dreams-within-a-dream film set in a future where people no lo...

#resurrection ('25) ★★★★ Bi Gan follows up his 2018 3D dream film Long Day's Journey into Night with this epic dream anthology of the 20th Century, the human senses, the logic of dreams, and the power of cinema. Fantastic! www.film5000.com/2025/resurre...

Song Sung Blue I love being reminded of why I try to avoid all trailers, press, and reviews of movies, even ones I'm not especially excited about, before I see them. I went into the latest from Craig Brewer (Hust...

#SongSungBlue ('25) ★★★+ Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson light up the screen in Craig Brewer's upbeat/downbeat musical docudrama about a down-on-their-luck couple of singers who find meaning and healing through Neil Diamond's music.
www.film5000.com/2025/song-su...

Left Handed Girl The solo directorial debut of Shih-Ching Tsou, Sean Baker's longtime partner, producer, costume designer, and donut shop proprietor, is a vibrant story of a family living on the margins. Though it ...

#thelefthandedgirl ('25) ★★★+ A struggling mother who moves to Taipei to eak out a living at a night market noodle stand in Shih-Ching Tsou's solo directorial debut, a captivating child-eye view of complex family relationships. www.film5000.com/2025/left-ha...

2000 Meters to Andriivka AP photojournalist Mstyslav Chernov's follow-up to 20 Days in Mariupol, the powerful 2023 documentary that provided a first-hand, on-the-ground account of the first several weeks of the Russian inv...

#2000meterstoandriivka ('25) ★★★+ Mstyslav Chernov's follow-up to 20 Days in Mariupol follows Ukrainian soldiers advancing towards a small village in an attempt to retake it from the Russians. www.film5000.com/2025/2000-me...

The Plague

#theplauge ('25) ★★★ This study in childhood cruelty and the struggle for acceptance follows a 12-year-old at an all-boys water polo camp who becomes part of a cruel hazing tradition. It'll take ya back and make you glad you don't have to be a kid anymore. www.film5000.com/2025/the-pla...

Marty Supreme Merry Dang Christmas! After a year with a lot of coal in the stocking, how great to get this uncut gem on Christmas morning! The Safdie Brothers (Heaven Knows What, Good Time, Uncut Gems) are the l...

#MartySupreme ('25) ★★★★ Benny Safdie’s thrilling, funny, exquisitely made tale of an aspiring 1950s-era ping pong champ is as relentless and doggedly persistent as its protagonist, played by Timothée Chalamet in yet another terrific turn. Merry X-mas! www.film5000.com/2025/marty-s...

The Secret Agent Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho follows up his wild and weird 2019 western Bacurau, a collaboration with Juliano Dornelles, with this more straightforward historical political thril...

#TheSecretAgent ('25) ★★★+ Wagner Moura is awesome as a former school teacher fleeing a mysterious past who returns to the Brazilian city of Recife, where he tries to lay low in Kleber Mendonça Filho's compellingly leisurely '70s-era political thriller. www.film5000.com/2025/the-sec...

Ella McCay It may seem like a weird thing to say this month, but sometimes Quentin Tarantino has a point. While I can't say I agree completely with his long-time assertion that the last couple of films by gre...

#EllaMcCay ('25) ★ One of the greatest comedy writers ever makes the rookie mistake nearly every kid trying to write their first terrible fantasy movie makes—all world-building, not storytelling. And the world Brooks builds... Jupiter Ascending was more credible. www.film5000.com/2025/ella-mc...