Now that I've finally wrapped up 2024, with a list of my favorite films and a collection of general thoughts about "the movies," I can move on to this year. I saw my first new movie of 2025: The Count of Monte Cristo. Review below.
Special Screenings
Thursday, January 9
Paprika (2006)
Emagine Willow Creek
Just like the Japanese Breakfast song. $12.50. 6 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
Paris Texas (1984)
Grandview 1&2
Nastassja Kinski's face during Harry Dean Stanton's monologue.... Also Sunday. $14.44. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Terminator (1984)
Parkway Theater
No spoilers, but he says he’ll be back and then oh man does he come back! $9/$12. Pre-show trivia at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Friday, January 10
To Die For (1995)
Trylon
Clinton era takedowns of “the media” feel so quaint now. $8. Friday 7 p.m. Saturday 9:15 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.
The Others (2001)
Trylon
Nicole Kidman in a solid ghost story. $8. Friday 9:15 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 5:15 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, January 11
Seven Samurai (1956)
Alamo Drafthouse
That’s just the right amount of samurai. $10. 11 a.m. More info here.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
Emagine Willow Creek
Hm, not quite the last one. Also Sunday & Wednesday. $10.60. 12 & 6 p.m. More info here.
Dahomey (2024)
Main Cinema
Well, if it isn’t my 20th favorite movie of 2024. $11; free for Film Society members. 11 p.m. More info here.
Labyrinth (1986)
Parkway Theater
Daddy, daddy, get me out of here. $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
Trylon
He was cycling before any of you. $8. 12 p.m. Sunday 1 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, January 12
Hot Rod (2007)
Alamo Drafthouse
Did not know till recently that Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone is married to Nightbitch director Marielle Heller. $15.18. 3 p.m. More info here.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
Alamo Drafthouse
A simpler time for Ezra Miller. $10. 12 p.m. More info here.
Good Night and Good Luck (2005)
Parkway Theater
Now this is some real Bush-era filmmaking. Music from the Larry McDonough Quartet at 7; movie at 8. $10/$15. More info here.
Lenny (1974)
Trylon
Dustin Hoffman is Lenny Bruce. $8. 7:30 p.m. 7 & 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Monday, January 13
Mind Game (2004)
Alamo Drafthouse
An anime classic. $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
Ghoulies (1984)
Emagine Willow Creek
Eww, he’s in the toilet. $6. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, January 14
Northern Lives (1978)
Main Cinema
A restored version of the Minnesota-made 1979 Cannes Camera d’Or winner. Preceded by the 1998 short film Shortwave. $5. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, January 15
Battle Royale (2000)
Alamo Drafthouse
Before Kill Bill, before The Hunger Games, there was Battle Royale. $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
Horrorvision (2001)
Trylon
Remember when movies tried to convince us that the internet was evil? We shoulda listened! Presented by Trash Film Debauchery. $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
RIP Dimebag.
Better Man
Look, England, Americans are just never going to accept or appreciate Robbie Williams for whatever he means to you, and that's that.
The Girl With the Needle
A Danish serial killer murders newborns. Yikes!
The Last Showgirl
Is this Pam Anderson's time to shine?
Game Changer
"An IAS officer with anger issues strives to combat corrupt politicians" in this new Indian flick.
Se7en
Re-released in IMAX.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Anora
From Kitana Kiki Rodriguez’s enraged trans sex worker in Tangerine to Simon Rex’s washed-up porn star in Red Rocket, Sean Baker knows how to let a character loose upon a movie, and Mikey Madison’s Ani may be the most fully realized of Baker’s high-powered, self-deluded survivors. A stripper and occasional escort whose charm and sheer self-determination haven’t failed her yet, she’s eking out a life in Brooklyn’s least glamorous southern reaches. (Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach, and Coney Island are captured in all their drab, offseason outer-borough-ness.) Her life changes after a dance for a Russian oligarch’s son parlays into a paid fuck, which in turn goes so well he hires her for an extended stint. Baker captures their whirlwind spree through all forms of excess, ending with a Vegas wedding, as an audiovisual sugar rush that makes Pretty Woman’s shopping montage look like amateur hour. But when Ivan’s parents find out, they sic his handlers on him; he runs off like the spoiled little fuckboy we always knew he was and Ani is left to unleash her rage on the hired muscle as they hunt for him. Madison can be as subtle here as she was on Pamela Adlon’s Better Things and even more furious than she was in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood before Tarantino thought it’d be a hoot to immolate her with a flamethrower. This decade, we’ve seen plenty of commoners enter the worlds of the wealthy, often ending with fantasies of vengeance. Anora’s trip through the looking glass ends on a far more ambiguous note. A
Babygirl
I know many misguided youth feel deprived that Adrian Lyne’s alleged prime ended before they hit puberty, but take it from grandpa, erotic thrillers were rarely this self-assured in ye olde 20th century. Nicole Kidman is a tautly wound robotics exec who still packs her daughters’ lunches, Harris Dickinson is the intern who sniffs out the need to surrender beneath her hypercompetent sheen. And let’s not forget Antonio Banderas, who ably fills the traditional Anne Archer Hot Spouse role. What writer/director Halina Reijn gets about America’s official contemporary sexual ideology is that while no kink may be shamed—certainly not the fairly tame obedience training Kidman undergoes here—sex with an intern is a taboo we daren’t treat lightly. And what Kidman captures in her performance, especially in the petulance that precedes her submission, is that every kink feels like an unimaginable transgression to the person overcoming her shame. She’s a genuine auteur of self-degradation—truly, no one this side of Isabelle Huppert can match her freak. Yes, it’s “sometimes a bit much,” to quote the quibbles of one AP critic, which is like noting that “there are a lot of songs” in Wicked, but give in to your uncomfortable snickers, even if they emerge as full LOLs. The fun here is never knowing when to be turned on, amused, anxious, or outraged. As for Dickinson, he smolders credibly as Samuel, a kid whose instinct for dominance outpaces his competence or authority, and I promise never again to confuse him with George McKay. A
A Complete Unknown
Timothée Chalamet’s relative success here—he gets that Bob Dylan himself has always been a guy performing as Bob Dylan—is just one reason that James Mangold’s new biopic is so relatively un-embarrassing. The source material also helps: Elijah Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric! is a thoroughly researched and reported account of Newport ’65 that’s preceded by an even-handed evaluation of what was at stake. Wald represents the ethos of the folk scene with a respect that rockist triumphalists could never see past their ingrained generational narratives to allow, and the film’s climax, Dylan’s amplified defiance of the Newport folkies, doesn’t feel as triumphant as we might expect. Dylan comes off less as a genius coming into his own than a cornered, confused guy lashing out at whoever comes closest; when his pal Bobby Neuwirth asks him point blank who he wants to be, it’s hard not hear a hollowness in the defiance of Dylan's reply: “Whoever they don’t want me to be.” When he returns to visit Woody Guthrie one last time after Newport, reflecting on what he’s done and lost, Bobby Zimmerman is now as completely Bob Dylan as Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith. How does it feel? Not great, Bob. Read our full review here. B
The Count of Monte Cristo
France’s highest grossing film of 2024 distills 1,200 pages of Dumas père down to a brisk three-hour romp through 19th century France with impressive economy and clarity. At no point during Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière’s adaptation do you wonder “That must have made more sense in the book” or “Why did they leave that in?” or really anything besides “What next?” The first half feels a bit rushed—the movie's gotta get framed innocent Edmond Dantès in and out of prison ASAP so he can seek his revenge as the mysterious count. And that's where the film settles down and the fun kicks it. Still, the characterizations could be bolder—Pierre Niney’s Edmond just kinda feels like some guy who does stuff rather than a wronged hero who's corrupted by his life-changing decision. And the filmmakers could showcase pivotal moments more dramatically, so that the pacing isn’t just a continual onward rush. And all this could've been done without sacrificing narrative efficiency. Those are the kind of decision that could make a film great rather than impressive. B
Gladiator II
Gladiator worked as well as it did (which might not be quite as well as you remember) because Ridley Scott stocked his swords ‘n’ sandals rehash with hams who knew how to spout nonsense about "the dream of Marcus Aurelius" and "the glory of Rome" as though it were meaningful, nay crucial. And this sequel is almost worth seeing solely for Denzel Washington, who accepts his role as a challenge, supercharging the eccentric cadences that made his Macbeth a darkly comic curiosity a couple years back—his “I own … your house. I want … your loyalty” may be the line reading of the year. As the wily former slave Macrinus, Washington traipses, flounces, pounces, smirks, exclaims, and keenly outwits his dim foes. Close your eyes and he could be playing an evil Disney tiger. But poor Paul Mescal looks as out of place as a puppy at a Senate budget hearing. He’s surely swole enough as the son of Crowe’s Maximus (and a rightful heir to the imperial throne) to credibly wallop challengers in the arena, whether corporeal or poorly animated. But we all know Paulie’s a weeper not a fighter. Every generation needs its moody dreamboat, and Aftersun and Normal People made Mescal that nontoxic totem. As for the combat scenes, if the first Gladiator challenged Scott to revamp a genre for modern audiences, all his sequel can offer is more. Read our full review here. C+
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
Nosferatu
Who needs a vampire to drain the life from a town when you’ve got Robert Eggers directing? Wisborg, the German community that Count Orloc (Bill Skarsgård) will eventually infest with plague, is so gloomy at the start of Eggers's take on the Dracula story that the fiend has hardly got any work to do. And the wan woman Orloc is drawn to (Lily Rose-Depp) already endures joyless orgasmic gasps and speaks in trite Emily Dickinson first drafts. Like any well-prepared corpse, Nosferatu can be striking, even beautiful, in its airless, stylized way. For the German scenes, Eggers favors a blue filter familiar to admirers of The Piano or the first Twilight movie, and some of his fussily framed shots do rise to a Barry Lyndon quality—no mean feat. Orloc’s castle is a black-on-black-on-black realm of shadows within shadows, a daring and somewhat frustrating design for those of us who like to occasionally see what we’re looking at. Willem Dafoe’s mad, chaotic Prof. Albin Eberhart Von—ah fuck it, I’m just gonna call him Van Helsing—brings a mad touch of chaos to the proceedings, but much of Nosferatu advances with the grim inevitability of a fairy tale. Skarsgård’s Orloc, a hulking, shadowy beast with the bristly mustache of an ancient warlord and a booming, electronically modulated voice, is a beastly embodiment of menace, a dark force awakened. But without pathos or malice, he’s just acting on instinct. Turns out pure evil can be almost as boring as pure good. B-
Queer
An older gay man sets his sights on a pretty younger fellow in a picturesque sunny clime, and if you think Luca Guadagnino has been here before, well, yes and no. We’re in Mexico City (actually a staged facsimile thereof) and the elder is Bill Lee (Daniel Craig), the alter ego of William S. Burroughs and the central figure of that author’s most personal work. Sure, it figures that Luca’d be the director to show us James Bond sucking dick, but Craig’s at his best here, bringing pathetic depth to a sensualist. There’s nothing smooth about Bill—he loves hot guys and shooting junk, and thinks he can manage both addictions. He’s so entranced by one Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) he does an awkward little dance for him in the middle of a bar and ignores how their relationship blurs the transactional and the intimate for as long as he can. Guadagnino sharply evokes a postwar gay expat milieu, fleshed out by Jason Schwartzman, pudgier and more hirsute than ever, as Bill’s cruising pal. But when Queer gets trippy in the home stretch, as Bill and Gene journey into the jungles of Ecuador in search of a rare psychotropic and the wonderful Leslie Manville lurches into frame, the only real revelation is that Guadagnino is a big fan of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. The result is a movingly disappointing sort of film—heartfelt, but often dull. B
Wicked
Thinkpieces are surely in the works about how Wicked, the story of a good woman who is cast as an enemy of the people by authoritarians using fiendishly disseminated lies, is a perfect Trump era fable (just as it was a perfect Bush era fable two decades ago). But maybe the best topical lesson that Wicked offers is that villains are often more entertaining than heroes. If anything, Cynthia Erivo has too much screen presence for her already underwritten part, and her almost-adult dignity undermines her character arc. Her Elphaba (a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West) is no ingénue misled by foolish dreams, and seems incapable of humiliation. Meanwhile, Glinda is a dream of a role that Ariana Grande floats through with perfect timing, flaunting her shallow vanity, scene-stealing blonde hair tosses, and comically sudden upshoots into her showy soprano. And while I’ll take songwriter Stephen Schwartz’s generically inspirational pop over the wan schlock of the dreaded Pasek and Paul, I have seen better movie musicals set in Oz. Read our full review here. B
