2025’s film landscape delivered mixed results: Black Bag (Soderbergh) and F1 (Kucinski, Brad Pitt) shone as standouts—one a sharp spy-drama with Kate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, the other fun conservative entertainment. Caught Stealing (Aronofsky) thrived on hyper-violence and NYC grit, while Eddington (Astor) exposed COVID-era political failures despite Joaquin Phoenix’s weak performance. Sinners (Koogler) and One Battle After Another (Anderson) faced backlash for glorifying extremism, despite strong casts like Michael Jordan and Sean Penn. Most films fell flat, leaving only two truly praiseworthy in a year of uneven storytelling. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, so as a Christmas present, they are letting me do a bonus video that is not the painful task of watching Idiot Leftists talk on TikTok.
We're going to talk about 2025 movies.
Now I have to tell you, I did not see that many movies this year because there just weren't that many movies I was interested in seeing.
So I will pick out, I didn't make this list.
I'm going to just go through the list and anyone that I saw, I will talk about.
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First is Running Man, directed by Edgar Wright.
And I did review this, I think, a little bit on the air.
I love action films.
The previews looked great.
I thought the first, let's say, 40 minutes, were a masterclass on how to make an action film.
And after that, it just became kind of a random cry of annoyance at everything.
Like, I hate reality TV.
I hate rich people.
I hate corporations.
I hate pollution.
I hate scarves.
I hate everything.
And it just became so empty.
Empty.
Seriously, I walked out to validate my parking ticket in the lobby and I paused for a minute and think, what did I just see?
I totally forgot because my mind had drifted.
All right, Black Bag.
I forgot all about that movie.
This is Steven Soderberg.
I thought that this was a really good spy film, a very surprising spy film, small but fashionable and fun.
And the thing that made it so much fun was that it looks like it's going to be about the in-and-out kind of John LeCorrette tangles of spycraft, but it's actually about a marriage.
And that's what made it work.
It's Kate Blanchette and Michael Fassbender as married agents.
And I thought it was really fun.
And it's over the top, totally over the top.
Kate Blanchette is so glamorous.
You know, it's like, you can't stand how glamorous she is.
But I recommended this.
I forgot, you know, we were talking on Friendly Fire about movies that we didn't like and did like.
And I forgot Black Bag.
That was a really good one.
And I thought when Steven Soderbergh makes movies that I don't like, but when he does make a good one, they're really good.
Eddington by Ari Astor.
This is with Joaquin Phoenix, one of my least favorite actors, because he just doesn't care about the audience at all.
But I have to be honest, when I started watching this, I hated it so much I was going to turn it off.
And I started texting my son, Spencer Claven, no relation.
And he said, no, keep watching it because it actually is pretty good.
And I did watch it.
And even though it was painful to watch, because it was about COVID and it got COVID really right, by the end of it, I really realized it was a movie that sticks with you and it was very insightful into the mechanics of what was going on.
And it's not a leftist movie and it's not really a right-wing movie.
It's just a movie of how badly COVID was handled and the nonsense of it and the inarticulate nature of the people on the right in trying to oppose it.
And it's a really interesting movie, but it's not fun to watch.
One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson with a great Sean Penn performance and a good Leo DiCaprio performance.
It's an evil movie.
It actually glamorizes left-wing violence.
This is an announcement of revolution.
The message is clear.
There's no question about it, but it's not a bad movie.
Unfortunately, those two things don't always go together.
It would be nice if every evil movie were bad, but it wasn't bad.
It was funny at times.
It was well acted.
It was interesting.
It wasn't a great movie.
It was empty.
Empty.
You know, it was okay.
It was okay.
It was not a great movie, and it was evil in its intent, but it wasn't the worst film I've ever seen either.
Weapons, directed by Zach Krager.
Well, this I thought was a really interesting film.
I thought it was overpraised, but, you know, that's not the worst thing in the world.
I thought it was overpraised, but I thought it did show Krager is a really good creative director who is going to ultimately deliver.
I think the thing is, so far, he's bad on the reveal.
The film starts out, it's creepy, it's cool.
It has a little too many dream sequences because dream sequences can't be that scary because they're just dreams.
You know, he made the film Barbarian, which was the same way.
It had a great setup.
And then once the reveal came, it just was another, you know, kind of slasher type picture.
Weapons, once the reveal came, I didn't think it fully made sense.
I didn't really care.
It was kind of, he made it comical.
It lost its eerie flavor, but it was interesting and it was worth watching if you like horror movies.
And I think Zach Krager is a real talent and I think he'll do better in the future.
F1, Brad Pitt with Joseph Kucinski, really enjoyed it.
And if you want some conservative entertainment, it's deeply entertaining and incredibly enjoyable and fun.
And Brad Pitt is great.
You know, and he has conservative values.
He prays before a race.
He teaches people discipline.
He teaches the cocky black kid that he's got to really take things seriously.
You know, he teaches him discipline and all this stuff.
And it's just, it's a good movie.
It really, really was fun to watch.
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Caught Stealing by Darren Aronofsky.
Thoughts On A Good Film00:04:53
I thought this was a good film.
This is a good, strong, solid film.
It is based on a novel by Charlie, I believe his name is Houston, who I've met a couple of times just briefly at writers' conferences in the past.
He was not that popular a writer, but we always understood that he was a very good writer.
There are plenty of writers who are underappreciated, and I always felt he was underappreciated.
He wrote the script for this.
It has a cool New York feel to it.
It's got some hyper-violence in it, but it's really entertaining and funny.
My favorite guy in it is Leif Schriiver, who plays a Jewish Hasid villain, which is really good.
I like this film.
And Darren Aronofsky makes films.
A lot of times his philosophy just, I think, is goofy.
But this had a lot of good stuff in it.
Sinners, directed by Ryan Koogler, another film I thought was evil in the sense that it actually is in favor of hatred and violence and retribution.
And I don't mean that in the usual revenge style.
There's a scene in it at the very end, which really just kind of puts me off.
It had a lot of beautiful, beautiful stuff in it.
The cinematography is good.
The acting is fine.
It's not great.
It's Michael Jordan playing two parts.
It's also stolen from a film called From Dusk Till Dawn.
Is that the one I'm thinking of?
From Dusk to Dawn, right?
Yeah.
And it's a Tarantino film.
Everybody be cool.
You be cool.
But it's watchable.
It's got some great music in it.
Got some great acting in it.
It's lovely to look at.
I just thought it was kind of lost.
I think a lot of movies were kind of lost.
The Phoenician Scheme by Wes Anderson.
That was funny.
Now, you know, I liked that.
It's another one of these films that doesn't entirely work, but it's fine.
There were performances in it that were really, really good.
Frankenstein, I reviewed on the show by Guilliar Mo del Toro.
Unbelievably beautiful.
Unbelievably beautiful to look at and terrible every time it veers from Mary Shelley's original.
Mary Shelley's original is better in plot and ideas.
This is just this thing that Guillermo del Toro is absolutely stuck on, that the monsters are really the good guy.
No, they're not.
They are not.
It's Paul Mo.
Postmodern.
There may be reasons for them to be monsters, but they're not the good guys.
And he always wants the girl to love the monster.
And I just think that that is some kind of weird Freudian problem that he has.
Blue Moon by Richard Linkletter.
I talked about this on the show as well.
I really enjoyed it because I love the theater world.
It's a filmed play about Lorenz Hart, one of the greatest of American lyrics, as he's replaced by Oscar Hammerstein in the team of what used to be Rogers and Hart becomes Rogers and Hammerstein.
And it's basically, you know, his career coming to an end.
Ethan Hawk is so good in this movie that it's worth watching just for that.
But I just enjoyed the, you know, you'll see it has lots of flaws, but still, it's very enjoyable if you like the theater and if you love musicals.
And Ethan Hawk is just a revelation in it.
He's fantastic.
Warfare.
That's a basically real-time, hyper-realistic scene of United States forces being caught in Iraq.
And it's very realistic and it's good.
It's entertaining.
It's straightforward, but really, you know, gives you the feel of it.
And I liked it for that.
Let's see.
Mission Impossible, the Final Reckoning.
I'm the only person who liked this.
I was probably wrong, but I kind of liked it.
It was dumb beyond the borders of dumbness, but they did have a couple of great set pieces they do in Mission Impossible.
And I just like watching an old man run around as fast as Tom Cruise runs.
I just think, wow, if he can move like that at 60, you know, there's hope for us all.
All right.
I saw Superman.
I've totally forgotten it.
James Gunn, completely forgotten it.
Okay.
So it can't have been any good.
Fantastic for Matt Shackman.
I don't know why Christian Toto liked this film.
It was fine.
I thought it was a lie.
It was all a lie.
Because like, it was fine.
It was entertaining.
But it was a lie because it basically showed us what the future would have been like if there had been no 60s.
So it was men and women dressing like men and women and people dressing well and living in a kind of civilized way, but in the future.
And so it was kind of what the future would look like if they'd never been the 60s.
So I saw more films than I thought I did, but very few really good ones.
And I'm going to give the award to Black Bag.
I think that was the best film I saw all year.
Was there anything else that I really liked?
F1.
F1 and Black Bag, I think, were the best films I saw all year.
All right.
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