This is part two of a wider review of some of the films I watched last year (though by no means all of which came out in 2025 itself). As you might have worked out by now, it’s essentially just an excuse to write up some mini-reviews of a variety of movies, be they those at the heart of the current discourse™, more niche recommendations, or those I just sort of want to slag off. You can read part one for free here.
CATEGORIES:
Biggest Letdown: Babygirl
Ugliest Film: From Hell
Most Ambitious Film: The Brutalist
Weightiest Metaphor: Sinners
The Saltburn Award for a Swing and a Miss: Materialists
Scroll down to read them.
If Marty Supreme got Gwyneth and Chalamet’s relationship spot on – genuinely perverse, fucked-up, funny and believable – then Babygirl staked everything it had on the idea that Harris Dickinson and Nicole Kidman would have chemistry together in the same way. Unfortunately, they didn’t.
This is partially the fault of whomever made Dickinson do an American accent. Scrapper already proved that it’s his gentle Essex-ness that makes him work, and you lose that all if you make him a Yank – it’s like making Hugh Grant a New Yorker, albeit approaching it from a slightly different class angle. That boyish, old-world charm disappears immediately, and Harris’ cheekbones can’t do all the heavy lifting by themselves.
The other problem with Babygirl was that it seemed almost afraid to look its own concept in the eye. The power dynamic between Dickinson’s intern and Kidman’s CEO (her babygirlboss? sorry) was supposed to be fraught and sexy, dangerous and subversive: she can have Dickinson fired or promote him, but he’s in charge of her when they have sex and could get her removed in disgrace if he goes public, as well as potentially breaking up her family. But, watching the film, you never really feel that anything is at stake every time they have a sexual encounter. Sure, the roleplaying stuff with the milk and the whole Dickinson-calming-the-dog analogy gave a frisson of kink to the actual relationship within the hotel rooms where the pair were meeting to conduct their affair, but once they were back in the office or at home then… what? I never got any sense of there being real peril for either of them, emotionally or professionally.
This was made all the worse by a garbled last 45 minutes. Again, I couldn’t tell if the film had anything to actually say about the relative power dynamics – sexual and professional – between Dickinson and Kidman’s characters, or even whether it was trying to take a point of view at all (it would also have been defensible not to have a view, and to simply present a sort of fucked-up affair and then let the viewer make up their own mind – but did Babygirl want to do that? I don’t know). As it was, the script felt almost like a lawyer presenting confused arguments for both sides of a case at the same time, to a viewer who doesn’t know whether or not they’re meant to be on the jury at all.
When the trailer for this one dropped, I think a lot of people were ready for it to be excellent. For me, it didn’t work. Just watch Eyes Wide Shut instead.
This has to be one of the worst films Johnny Depp has been in, and since 2015 he’s racked up some serious competition.1 Such is the dross that From Hell pukes up – the name is basically an open goal – that I found myself mashing out an incoherent plan for a couple of thousand words on why no Alan Moore adaptation has ever really worked properly. So look forward to that one in the future.
This film was shot badly on a cheap backlot with Vaseline smeared all over its lens. It’s Netflix lighting before the term, oddly flat, with one of those inexplicable nu metal soundtracks they liked to give films in the early 2000s and all-lower case trailer title cards which look as though they were inserted with some sort of ancient iteration of iMovie. In fact, there’s literally a typo in one of them: Only the legend will survivE [sic], apparently. Check it out, at 02:06 below:
Everybody in From Hell looks like pig shit. Joanna Page – that’s Stacey from Gavin and Stacey – is sweating bullets out of a patchily shaved head. Robbie Coltrane is thickly walking around in a three-piece suit and frowning, also thickly. Heather Graham, an unfortunate victim of smartphone face before the condition had been identified, does a very poor English accent while playing an Irish woman who grew up in 1870s Wales. Depp himself gives a run-out to the pseudo-Estuary that will later become a hallmark of Jack Sparrow, but with none of the attendant swagger of that role. Cursed.
Spoilers for The Brutalist follow below.
A.K.A. the film which lost me the most money last year. I saw The Brutalist at the British Film Institute, went home in stunned silence and immediately put £100 on it to win Best Picture at 2/1. I lost, obviously – curse you, Anora!!! – but I’d do it all over again. Maybe.
Adrien Brody has already starred in one of the great Holocaust films. Here, he found another. The Brutalist is a lesson in the art of hubris and the hubris of art, if that’s not too cute a way of putting it. A work of sordid grandeur. Not coincidentally, this is also the longest film I watched last year.2 Unlike Marty Supreme (see part one), the symbolic takes that people have been reading into The Brutalist are correct: this is a conscious and deliberate story about the building of America. It’s about immigration, displacement and rape, both literal and metaphorical (clue’s in the name). It’s about addiction and trauma. It’s also a meticulous character study. An epic. A parable. All the other words that critics like to throw around a portentous movie: The Brutalist fits them all. There’s barely a note wrong in it over 215 minutes. Let me list just a few of the things that made this the most ambitious film of the year, beat by beat.
First, that dizzying, gyrating seven-minute opening oner, beginning deep in the smoky bowels of whatever ship architect Lázsló Tóth has managed to catch from Europe to America as Tóth searches for his papers as they approach Ellis Island. He makes his way up, up, up through the steel gantries and doorways of the boat until he reaches the cold air, doubly soundtracked by a V/O of a letter from his wife Erzébet updating him on the nasty situation back in Hungary and a pulsating composition by Daniel Blumberg which sounds both like someone drumming on metal and a ticking clock. And there he sees the Statue of Liberty. Upside down, shaky in a handheld shot, but there nonetheless. Not just a symbol but a real, colossal thing, something constructed, infinitely heavy and coated in verdigris.
Second: the quiet desperation in the way Tóth’s cousin Attila, played by Alessandro Nivola, changes his name, converts to Catholicism and integrates into picket-fence American life, earning himself a blonde shiksa wife, Audrey, herself the embodiment of WASPish, seductive arrogance.
Third, the way the film sets up our expectations Felicity Jones’s Erzébet will arrive in the States as little more than a harridan babushka, unwanted and half-forgotten by the philandering Tóth, before part two of the film shows us she’s far fiercer than he is, even wheelchair-bound by excruciating famine-induced osteoporosis. Perhaps the fact she quotes Goethe in her letters to Lázsló should have been a clue.
Fourth, the double act of the industrialist Lee Van Burens: Harry Snr, played by Guy Pearce, muscular in his own self-regard, only brought low by Erzébet’s almost biblical intervention and revelation as to his true nature (how weird that Pearce and Jones starred as lovers in a Drake Doremus film back in 2013. Very different vibe here!). And Harry Jr – Joe Alwyn, who was born to play cruel men – his father’s understudy, whose predatory character is only hinted at, as are its roots.
Fifth, every single shot in the movie.
This was the only film of the year I gave a full five stars to, if star ratings happen to be your jam. But you don’t take my word for how good I think it is: you can listen to the ever-articulate Bill Burr sing its praises instead.
The award for “weightiest metaphor” doesn’t here refer to the obvious one within the text of Sinners: the way that American culture and/or pop culture has, over the last century, relentlessly sucked the blood out of black culture for its own benefit and sustenance. I think making a vampire movie about how (nearly) all the white people involved consistently bite both the black characters and, by implication, their style, was an inspired idea from Ryan Coogler, and executed with typical panache.3
It was badass and avowedly horny, particularly in Annie and Smoke’s relationship, in a way blockbusters seem to have forgotten to be since the 1990s. Michael B. Jordan’s double act was good enough as to be invisible – as in, I forgot within about ten minutes that both Smoke and Stack were played by the same guy. And I liked many of the smaller details here: the Choctaw vampire hunters, for example, about whom I would watch a whole movie. (In fact, tell me in the comments because you guys will know better than me: are there any good vampire/Native American movies out there?) That 1990s ending was cheesy and funny and seemed deliberately designed to appeal to Van Lathan personally. I adored Preacherboy’s voice.
Beyond what was on screen, though, Sinners has become all things to all men. It’s been imbued with a certain importance; it’s a bellwether for all sorts of different tests. Will audiences turn out in strength to watch an all- or majority-black cast? Sinners’s release was positioned as a referendum, and it told us pretty clearly that yes, they will. Is there still an appetite for original, non-IP blockbusters? Again – Sinners says yes. Was Coogler right to push for the unusual finance structure that he did, under the terms of which he looks likely to make millions of dollars, if not tens of millions? Abso-fucking-lutely.
Let me quote an excellent post from The Vane on the film’s significance and what it means for Coogler, who directed Black Panther for Marvel/Disney when he was all of 31 years old:
“There are filmmakers who’ve gone into the Marvel machine and failed spectacularly, and others who’ve never quite made it out. Coogler now appears to be the first to parlay his wins into what we’d imagine, theoretically, is the ultimate goal of any indie voice who signs up to direct a franchise project: a license to make big ambitious movies of their own design, with the backing of a studio that can trust them not to lose money.”
Again and again, Sinners was seen as more than just a big, fun movie with a great premise and execution. It was seen by many commentators as the site of a battle over the very future of movies.
So – here goes. Head-above-the-parapet time. I didn’t quite like Sinners as much as everyone else seemed to. I still think it was very, very entertaining and, as I say above, had a lot resting on it for what it implied about Hollywood in 2025. I’m glad it was a triumph. But (and this is perhaps a question I would also pose of One Battle After Another), was it really the best film of the year? This film received the most Oscar nominations of all time on Thursday morning. Are we sure, if we’re being really critical and not just thinking about this in the context of 2025 but of the history of all movies, that it really deserves them?4 Sinners has a 4.11 rating on Letterboxd. That’s the same as A Clockwork Orange and Taxi Driver, and better than 25th Hour and Blade Runner.
Sinners was creative, yes, and important, maybe even the “most culturally important” if that’s the sort of thing you think can be quantified. But I also think that it was a victim of its own success – the film was so big and aimed at such a wide audience that, in many ways, its storytelling remained creatively actually quite safe and conservative. Definitionally, a film that big can only work within certain aesthetic parameters.
Someone on here said something unintentionally funny when I revealed that I had a similar criticism of Everything Everywhere All At Once. She said, in a disapproving comment under my article: “You’re clearly not an Asian American.” Which was of course a very astute observation for her to make. Well spotted.
My point here is – nor am I a black American. I’m a white British guy who sort of vaguely likes blues music, if someone happens to put it on. I haven’t got an emotional attachment to this film. I admire it, but I can’t pretend it’s flawless just because of the win we all agree it represents within the industry. For example: I don’t think Sinners looks that good; there’s a slightly Netflixy oily sheen to many of the shots. It’s a little too long, the action a little too rote. And I might quietly suggest that casting the Ku Klux Klan as the villains in your Hollywood picture in 2025 is not actually as subversive as might be claimed. And, just to cover my back, I would like to suggest that another Coogler-Jordan collaboration, Fruitvale Station, is a far more affecting and harrowing commentary on racial politics in America. That one didn’t need vampires to qualify as a horror movie.
Anyway: let me reiterate that I really liked this film a lot. And that someone desperately needs to adapt it for Broadway. But it’s not better than Blade Runner, sorry.
Spoilers for Materialists follow below.
They say the most important thing is to have an opinion, even the wrong one. The only real sin is to hedge. Well – is it hedging to say Materialists was quite good, but ultimately a failure? That I admired its flawed attempt at putting modern dating on film despite its eventual regression to a standard-issue love-triangle romcom?
As I say, there was a lot to like about Celine Song’s follow-up to Past Lives, not least the way it let us peek into a sleek world of New York professional matchmakers which I assume exists in real life. I went to seven weddings myself in 2025 and still enjoyed the sprawling, elegant affairs in the movie; the movie looked very good. I also liked the comic relief of Chris Evans’s shithead flatmates and all the men with insane dating requests that Dakota Johnson’s matchmaker Lucy had to deal with. I thought the plot with Sophie, the woman who is assaulted by one of the men Lucy sets her up with, was clever and thought-provoking. I enjoyed how Lucy’s office was basically the “Gen-Z boss and a mini” video incarnate.
But beyond that, this was probably the movie of 2025 which promised the most to a certain type of A24 filmgoer – people went crazy online when the trailer dropped, fans of Past Lives not least among them – and it ultimately failed to deliver on that promise. The criticism here is similar to that for Babygirl above, I suppose. Materialists5 was hugely buzzy, not least here in the UK where it was released months later than the States. At the same time, that meant whispers reached us across the Atlantic that, actually, all was not perfect with the film. It was hard to avoid spoilers about the resolution of the love triangle, but as someone who has never had TikTok nor Instagram, even I couldn’t avoid understanding that people were broadly pissed off with the ending of this movie.
I wonder if the problem was that Materialists was billed as an ultra-modern film about dating and relationships in 2025, whilst actually quite oddly old-fashioned in its plot, following as it does a cynical woman who doesn’t believe in love who eventually changes her mind and falls for a penniless but handsome and charming guy. Lord forgive me for saying this, but I think TikTok may have been right: Dakota Johnson probably should have ended up with Pedro Pascal. In the long run I think she would have been happier. Anyway. There was also 100 per cent too much Dasha Nekrasova. A brave swing and an unfortunate miss.
Cf. Mortdecai, London Fields, that thing he was in with Maïwenn.
I am strongly pro-intermission.
I also appreciated the inclusion of that weird little scene with Jack O’Connell and the Irish vampires dancing to “The Rocky Road to Dublin” because it acknowledged that there are any non-black folk traditions in the USA and the wider world. That’s not a given! I once watched a video by the otherwise excellent Youtuber F.D. Signifier who claimed with a straight face that “white people have no culture of their own” which… what on earth do you mean? I’ve seen this claim made elsewhere, and always by Americans. The validity of this claim within the framework of America aside, I think this is a symptom of black Americans – indeed all Americans – sometimes forgetting that there are white people outside the States. Fellow Youtuber Robert Tolppi pointed out the obvious rejoinder to this: everywhere else in the world, culture is less tied to race than to nationality. Anyway. Good to rep the Irish.
I guess I’d like to say here that the nominations record meant little even before Sinners broke it. Titanic was the previous holder, and very few people would seriously argue that that meant it was the best film ever.
For some reason, almost everyone I meet insists on calling this film “The Materialists”, which is not its name.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.