Family ily estrangement, artistic legacy, and the limits of self-mythology.
Sentimental Value (2025) review
Sentimental Value is another deceptively slight movie about coping with tragic loss, but one that feels far more likely to linger. Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, a Lars von Trier–like director who hasn’t made a film in over a decade and now feels pressure to deliver one final artistic statement before he dies. His daughters have long since stopped needing him, and the distance feels permanent. Gustav is the kind of man who only loves punishing, perverse cinema—to the extent that he thinks DVDs of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher would be appropriate gifts for a twelve-year-old’s birthday.
Movies about filmmakers rarely thrill me—they tend to be self-congratulatory, and therefore less honest—but this one is handled with restraint and surprising humility. The central question cuts deep: how do you convince anyone your story is worth hearing when you’ve spent a lifetime showing no interest in listening to others? Elle Fanning plays one of his collaborators, and even she seems uncertain whether this man’s vision deserves her faith. And honestly: why isn’t she already regarded as one of the finest actors of her generation?
Sentimental Value comes and goes for me a little. It says something real, and I don’t doubt that it matters, but it didn’t stay with me in quite the way The Worst Person in the World did, which felt like the movie I’d want all my friends to watch when I die. That film felt big—about terminal illness, infidelity, and the stories people tell themselves about their own lives. Sentimental Value feels smaller by comparison, more about famous people having problems that will probably never apply to me. My boyfriend loves it. I admired it. I’m just not sure how much I’ll think about it later.
A gentle love story about music, missed chances, and making the most of the time we have. Song Sun Blue (2025) review
Song Sung Blue feels like exactly the kind of movie that would play the Heartland Film Festival, doesn’t it? Let me check… okay, it didn’t. But they gave it some sort of award anyway. You can almost hear the thought process: “We’re not letting a movie this modest—and this transparently engineered to make audiences cry—go by without our name attached to it.”
And yet.
This is actually a very sweet love story about two people dealing with genuinely relatable problems—at least to me. Kate Hudson does her own singing, and she sounds great: exactly like an extremely talented performer who can’t quite turn that talent into a full career.
The real pang here is that Hugh Jackman never played Neil Diamond in a biopic. He looks and sounds uncannily like him. That said, I can’t imagine there’s a story we urgently need to see about a 60-year-old Neil Diamond—and, truth be told, this story didn’t strictly need to be told either.
But it was told, and it’s very sweet. The film gently reminds us of the importance of making the most of our lives while we still have time on Earth. I’m glad to have this one available for people grieving the loss of family members.
A somber meditation on solitude, memory, and the slow passing of a life.
Train Dreams
Train Dreams may be one of the most somber movies ever made. For comparison, I thought of films like Bringing Out the Dead, Palindromes, and Synecdoche, New York—all famously bleak works that offer little to no emotional reprieve. This film is quieter, sadder, and somehow lonelier still.
It captures the immensity of solitude: what it feels like to be briefly, modestly happy; to watch that happiness erode; and then to wake up one day and realize the world has kept moving without you—that you may be the only truly sad person left in it. The performances are restrained and affecting, communicating grief and endurance without overt dramatics.
Still, the film’s devotion to mood comes at a cost. It often feels less like a story unfolding than an emotional state being sustained, and at times it nearly forgets to become a story at all.
Sorry, Baby existing at all may be one of the best things to come out of the MeToo movement.
While the exposure of real monsters—like Bill Cosby and Danny Masterson—showed how power can be abused through drugs, fame, or violence, Sorry, Baby reminds us that none of that is required to permanently damage someone. More than one person I talked to (in real life) called the film “quietly devastating.”
Its premise is deceptively simple: “Something bad happened to Agnes.” The film never fully shows what that something is, and many viewers may wonder whether the ambiguity justifies a movie at all. What we learn is enough. Someone Agnes admired desired her for her mind but had no respect for her autonomy. She wasn’t allowed to decide. She was coerced into something she wasn’t ready for. That quiet violation—the kind some people still struggle to even name—is the film’s subject, and it is more than worthy of examination.
Men can be awful, particularly when entitlement overrides empathy. The film understands that harm doesn’t come from brute force alone, but from insistence—from wanting what you are explicitly denied. Eva Victor, pulling triple duty as writer, director, and lead actor, tells this story with restraint and discomfort rather than spectacle. Sorry, Baby is labeled a dark comedy mostly because it’s too minimal and too emotionally raw to fit anywhere else.
I laughed at times, but rarely out of joy…more out of tension, desperation, and the human need to feel something break through the numbness. I wanted Agnes to laugh at life again, so I laughed loudly, hoping she might too. Whether or not this story draws from Victor’s own life, it announces a rare talent: someone capable of articulating pain with clarity, intelligence, and moral weight. I hope she finds more stories to tell that live up to this first promise if brilliance.
Frankenstein is not Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and it bears almost no resemblance to the golden-era films directed by James Whale. So what is it? A Marvel origin movie with literary set dressing. At one point, the creature approaches a ship frozen in the ocean and casually pushes it until it tilts at an angle. I ask, how does the movie expect to get away with this. Does this. Make. Sense?
In the novel, Dr. Frankenstein discusses electricity at a time when it was still a mysterious, barely understood force. That idea—later visualized by Whale with lightning bolts and switches—gave the creature a sense of stored, barely contained power. The original monster moved like an ogre, slow and heavy, as if animated by a single catastrophic surge of energy. That logic I understood. Here, the creature is absurdly strong, with no explanation beyond “because the movie needs him to be.” He isn’t just as powerful as the Incredible Hulk. The Hulk wouldn’t stand a chance. Why? What element gained the Hulk (creature) this power?
Worse, this super-strength comes bundled with what appear to be hypnosis powers, making the creature function less like Frankenstein’s monster and more like Dracula. Mia Goth’s character falls for him almost instantly after seeing him alone in a basement, walking toward him as if under a charm spell. The moment doesn’t read as romantic or tragic—it’s incoherent, stripping the creature of his horror and her of her agency. I enjoyed Pinocchio, but this belongs firmly in the category of fun-but-messy genre fare like Blade II or Hellboy. It’s entertaining, but thematically muddled. The caskets include openable windows, and why? If you said, “Because it looks super cool” then you are on the movie’s exact wavelength.
This Frankenstein favors spectacle over logic, power over consequence, and superhero mythmaking over Gothic dread. It mostly gets the look of Mary Shelley’s novel correct, but by way of Marvel.
If you only see one movie before the 2026 Oscars, why not make it this one?
Blue Moon (2025)
Why would an obviously gay man living in New York City in the 1940s get utterly plastered in straight bars when gay bars existed—places where he could have had a drink, relaxed, and maybe even enjoyed himself? “What, are you my therapist now, Eddie?”
Richard Linklater’s film is about Lorenz Hart, the legendary lyricist. But even more than that, it is about a man who cannot stop circling the idea of happiness while suspecting it was designed for other people. Hart had far more to say than the near-meaningless love songs that made him famous, and the script—drawn from his real letters—lets him say it, slightly. What he had to say was that love seems suspiciously easy for everyone else. “Oklahoma! exclamation point, no less.”
Hart’s great claim to fame was writing the lyrics to “Blue Moon,” a melody by Rodgers that other lyricists had failed to turn into a hit. Hart found the angle: a lonely soul who has given up on love suddenly, miraculously, finds it. That idea landed during the Depression because it promised that despair might reverse itself overnight.
The irony, of course, is brutal. Hart never seems to have found anything resembling that kind of love himself. He found brilliant conversation, wit, companionship, and drinking partners, but not the thing his lyrics sold to millions.
There is another irony too: today, most people remember “Blue Moon” as a melody more than as a lyric, and even in Blue Moon—a film about Lorenz Hart—the soundtrack leaves you feeling how little the world retained of what he actually contributed. The song became a standard through singers like Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bobby Vinton, Elvis, and especially the Marcels, whose doo-wop version transformed it so thoroughly that it barely even sounds like the same song anymore. It survives as cultural wallpaper. Hart did not.
Blue Moon makes a serious case for itself as one of the best movies ever made about what it was like to be gay in the 1940s. Not because it lectures, but because it observes. Hart seems to have lived in a permanent state of fantasy that the right woman might somehow arrive and quiet everything in him that made life difficult. That never happened, so he drank.
He drank and talked and flirted and performed intelligence for bartenders, strangers, and anyone else who would listen. He built a substitute version of romance out of conversation, alcohol, self-mythology, and pop culture. That is the premise of the film. Hart, doomed to drink himself to death in 1943, slips out during the second act of Oklahoma!—partly because he can’t stand its extroverted optimism, partly because he wants a head start on the evening. He sits down at a bar, orders a shot he claims he will only stare at longingly, and begins the familiar ritual of trying to outtalk, outwit, and outmaneuver the bartender into letting him have the one thing he has supposedly come there not to touch.
The movie does something remarkable here: it makes an entire era of romantic cliché newly legible. To someone like Hart, all those happy endings and moon-June platitudes were not stupid. They were sacred. They represented the life he wanted and could never quite enter.
Ethan Hawke is splendid. The physical transformation alone is great—he often appears tiny, shrunken, almost swallowed by the world around him—but the real achievement is that he plays Hart as a person rather than a type. This is not a stock tragic homosexual, not a camp caricature, not a clever drunk dispensing epigrams. Hawke gives him anxiety, vanity, ache, bitterness, hunger, and genuine romantic feeling. He seems believable, recognizable. Linklater, who I already admire to an almost unreasonable degree, has made something that belongs with Boyhood and the Before films among his best work.
Blue Moon is smart, sad, and piercingly observant about the way pop culture can sustain a person while also ruining them. Everyone should get to look this hip and this intelligent while being this intensely miserable—at least once.
Two more reviews from the tail end of movie season.
This turned out to be a surprisingly strong year for awards-caliber films. What made it especially encouraging is that many of the standouts came from filmmakers who seem genuinely interested in making movies that are both carefully constructed and emotionally risky. There aren’t many directors right now aiming for polished and interesting at the same time, which makes these final entries feel like a small but meaningful vote of confidence in the future of cinema.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
The way Rose Byrne is shot and edited in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You makes her feel like an uncredited fifth character in Requiem for a Dream. If she were in that movie, audiences would be asking where her drugs are—but here, she needs none. Her mental illness behaves like a drug anyway, distorting time and flattening reality. She sees a therapist, though she is one herself. It makes you wonder: is this what my therapist is like when they’re not talking to me?
Linda’s life collapses quite literally when a hole opens in her apartment ceiling—possibly from flooding, faulty plumbing, or maybe an alien in the walls. The film never clarifies, because Linda can’t. Her grip on cause and effect is slipping. At the same time, she is responsible for caring for her daughter, who can technically eat but refuses food because it feels “squishy,” and who is graded daily on how much she consumes. The entire household revolves around a single goal: getting her weight up to fifty pounds. Linda is never alone, yet utterly abandoned.
Byrne carries the entire film, delivering a performance built on quiet humiliation and sustained dread. Linda isn’t heroic or admirable; she’s exhausted, brittle, and increasingly convinced she is failing at everything she’s supposed to do well. Everyone else feels like a walk-on cameo. Conan O’Brien actually acts, briefly, and his presence reminded me of Dylan Baker in Requiem for a Dream: when someone is unraveling, the most others will do for them is ask a few questions and then discreetly step away.
For a first feature, director Mary Bronstein shows tasteful control. This could easily have been an amateurish mess—a pile of anxiety with no shape—but instead it becomes a low-budget, quietly devastating minor masterpiece. Byrne somehow landed a role most actresses would have killed for, had they known what Bronstein was after. Onscreen, it feels uncomfortably familiar.
This is what I felt like during COVID.
8/10
Marty Supreme
I went into Marty Supreme assuming I was about to watch a straightforward, inspirational true story about a legendary ping-pong player. Which immediately raised a question: why have I never heard of this person?
That confusion never really goes away—and that’s the point. Whose story is this, exactly? And when is it being told? The film feels like it’s been assembled inside Marty’s own head, cut together from half-remembered movies, cultural artifacts, and emotional highlights. It’s as if Marty walked out of a theater in 1989 after seeing Look Who’s Talking and thought about his own life, then edited the memories together with needle drops from Peter Gabriel, Alphaville, and Tears for Fears. The soundtrack is wall-to-wall ’80s pop for no obvious reason. That’s before you even get to the score by Oneohtrix Point Never, which is one of the most exhilarating film scores in years, so good that Pitchfork rightly highlighted it in its Best New Music section. . Marty Mauser has one supreme goal: to prove he’s the best at something. Unfortunately, he’s only exceptionally good at two things—selling shoes and ping pong. No one wins trophies or headlines for selling shoes, so ping pong it is. He robs his own family’s cash register to fund a trip to an international tournament, because that’s what belief looks like when it borders on delusion.
The year is 1952, and the film mostly couldn’t care less about anything else happening in the world. Marty is Jewish, carrying the psychic weight of WWII while refusing to be seen as a victim. He disarms people by insulting Jews in public, then reassuring friends in private: “It’s fine—I’m Jewish.” It’s ugly, funny, defensive, and very human.
Marty Supreme is buoyant and exciting. Marty is an archetype—the Rocky Balboa fantasy most of us secretly entertain. We may never be Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth, but maybe, if we really applied ourselves, we could become the world’s greatest pickleball champion. The movie understands that hunger perfectly.
This is one of the most exhilarating collections of well-written scenes I’ve seen in years. Timothée Chalamet produced the film, the first from the Safdie brothers since Uncut Gems—to the eternal disappointment of Adam Sandler’s Netflix fans. Try comparing this to something broadly beloved like Forrest Gump, and you can feel how unsure audiences might be. Is it a tragedy? A comic romp? A true story? It’s all of those things, but never long enough to be comfortable.
Like Marty himself, the film wants to prove it’s extraordinary, hilarious, and capable of shocking you at any moment. It brushes up against crime-movie territory—poverty, desperation, proximity to ruin—without ever collapsing into cliché. It’s a genuine delight.
I want to be like Marty one day.
9.5/10
My Top 10 Movies of 2025 (So Far)
1 One Battle After Another 2 Marty Supreme 3 Blue Moon 4 Ocean with David Attenborough 5 Sorry, Baby 6 28 Years Later 7 The Alabama Solution 8 On Becoming a Guinea Fowl 9 Sentimental Value 10 Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Next up, I’ll be posting a standalone review of Blue Moon, followed by individual posts for each film on this list—partly to give them the space they deserve, and partly to let future readers find them more easily through search. Some of these movies will age well. Others might not. Either way, they’re worth arguing with.
After that comes my 27-Day A–Z “I Might Actually Enjoy This Movie” Film-a-Thon. The idea is simple: one letter per day, one movie per letter—but only films that most people don’t seem to like very much. These are the movies that get shrugged off, dismissed, or quietly forgotten, but that I suspect might contain something interesting if given another chance. I’m hoping to uncover a few underrated gems, maybe even a hidden masterpiece or two. Think of it as detective work. I’ll be your movie sleuth—a Daryl Zero of cinema.
Enjoy movies. Catch up on the great ones, no matter how old they feel now.
Talking Animals, Shakespeare, and Amazonian Aliens.
At some point these stopped being short reviews and started turning into whatever this is. I’m fine with that. Here are the next three movies, in the order I watched them.
Here you go:
Zootopia 2
Zootopia 2 benefits enormously from revisiting Zootopia, which has aged surprisingly well—far better than Moana, which now feels small and oddly muted, like a wannabe epic propped up by great songs. The problem with Moana as a franchise is structural: it barely has characters. There’s Moana, her stern father, her dead grandmother, Maui, a chicken, and the ocean. That’s not a world; it’s a fable. Moana 2 clearly didn’t know where to take those pieces next, and the result felt pointless. (Also: why did no one ever eat the chicken?) Disney’s recent sequel strategy has been so uninspired that it briefly makes you wonder whether they should just stay out of theatrical sequels altogether.
Or maybe not. Zootopia 2 is fun, clever, and densely packed with jokes. The original film had a deceptively simple premise that left room to grow, and this sequel smartly picks up only a week after the first movie ends. It initially feels odd, but it works—the film plays like episode two of a throwaway detective TV show that accidentally became excellent. Unlike Moana 2, which lists four credited screenwriters, Zootopia 2 is written by a single voice: Jared Bush, who also co-directs. That cohesion matters. Even when the movie leans into procedural rhythms, it feels confident—like an artist cracking jokes, experimenting and laughing at his own instincts. It’s lighter than the original, but boldly understands its own strengths.
8/10.
Hamnet
Hamnet is intermittently compelling while you’re watching it, but I don’t think the world will ultimately care very much. The first half works surprisingly well, unfolding with a meditative patience that recalls the style of Chloé Zhao—a comparison that will excite the half of the audience that tolerated Nomadland and bore everyone else senseless. There’s a quiet confidence early on, an observational calm that suggests grief as a lived condition rather than a dramatic event. For a while, Hamnet feels like it knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be.
That confidence collapses by the end. Some have positioned Hamnet as the “real” Shakespeare in Love, but that comparison only highlights how much that film got right. Hamnet can’t decide how its characters should exist: they often speak like modern people who binge Outlander, then suddenly shift into scenes written in full Shakespearean verse. The tonal whiplash is baffling. Are we meant to believe the audience can’t handle period language—except when it’s convenient? The final act fails outright. Leaning on Adagio for Strings—arguably the most famously depressing piece of music ever written—to sell Shakespearean tragedy feels desperate, not profound. The camera lingers on Jessie Buckley’s face for so long that people around me literally fell asleep, and the staging of the finale makes entering the center of the Globe Theatre feel about as casual as finding a spot near the stage at a rock concert. I liked too much of Hamnet to recommend against seeing it—but I give a thumbs down to the very elements most people seem to praise. 6/10.
Bugonia
Is Bugonia a place? A character’s name? Apparently, it has something to do with Greek mythology and bees. I’ve always thought that if the human race died, it would have something to do with colony collapse disorder. I just never imagined it could really happen—or look quite like this.
Emma Stone plays Michelle, an executive at a vast, vaguely defined conglomerate—something like Amazon filtered through the pharmaceutical industry. She delivers corporate edicts that sound humane while being quietly coercive, the kind of language designed to make people work harder for less while thanking management for the privilege. Stress is treated as a given. Burnout is reframed as responsibility. Somewhere in the background, the bees are dying.
There’s enough good in Bugonia to almost compensate for Yorgos Lanthimos’s increasingly questionable sense of humor. The film has the shape and texture of something very familiar—procedural, paranoid, vicious. With only minor adjustments, it could easily pass for a season of Fargo. The score and cinematography are immaculate, the performances relatably absurd. Everything feels carefully built. It might even feel like a masterpiece—right up until it decides not to be one. But what’s the fun in that?
The Oscar buzz around Stone feels less about nuance than about her continued commitment to being Lanthimos’s most pliable collaborator (yes, she really shaved her head for this). The film flirts with weighty ideas—mental illness, institutional power, corporate systems managing human behavior—in ways that feel unnerving and recognizable. But it keeps shifting, nudging, testing how much disbelief the audience is willing to suspend.
The whole thing plays like a meticulously structured Upright Citizens Brigade sketch that refuses to announce where the joke is—or when it’s over. I understood what it was doing. I admired the confidence. This could have been No Country for Old Men or The Silence of the Lambs. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was laughing at a version of the movie I would have liked better.
Bugonia is handsome and deeply committed to its own logic. In real life, we probably already know these characters. Whether we recognize them as such is another matter.
7.5/10
This will all continue in a third and final-ish part.
I am not retired from blog writing—I am just busy. I’ve been sick off and on, or at least sick enough that a good chunk of my “time off” disappeared into fevers and whatever mysterious bug was going around. Mostly, though, I’ve been cooking. I dusted off my apron, my knife skills, and my immersion blender and made all kinds of interesting things, as my mom would say. Chicken spinach quesadillas, for one. Next up: chicken pot pie (with the crust on the bottom). Carla Hall’s Cooking With Love has quietly become my culinary Bible.
But I have also been watching things. New movies, mostly—and all five seasons of Stranger Things since December, which I’d give a solid B overall. I realized I was too far behind to pretend this would be a single post, so consider this the first part of a recent movie round-up. I wanted to get it out before the Oscars. Ideally before the nominations. Life had other ideas.
First up.
Frankenstein
Frankenstein is not Frankenstein’s Frankenstein, and it bears almost no resemblance to the golden-era films directed by James Whale. So what is it? A Marvel origin movie with literary set dressing. At one point, the creature approaches a ship frozen in the ocean and casually pushes it until it tilts at an angle. My question is simple: why does this movie think that makes sense?
In the novel, Dr. Frankenstein discusses electricity at a time when it was still a mysterious, barely understood force. That idea—later visualized by Whale with lightning bolts and switches—gave the creature a sense of stored, barely contained power. The original monster moved like an ogre, slow and heavy, as if animated by a single catastrophic surge of energy. That logic made sense. Here, the creature is absurdly strong, with no explanation beyond “because the movie needs him to be.” He isn’t just as powerful as the Hulk—he’s as powerful as ten Hulks put together, and the film never bothers to justify it.
Worse, this super-strength comes bundled with what appear to be hypnosis powers, making the creature function less like Frankenstein’s monster and more like Dracula. Mia Goth’s character falls for him almost instantly after seeing him alone in a basement, walking toward him as if under a charm spell. The moment isn’t romantic or tragic—it’s incoherent, stripping the creature of his horror and her of her agency. I enjoyed Pinocchio, but this belongs firmly in the category of fun-but-messy genre fare like Blade II or Hellboy. It’s entertaining, but thematically muddled and largely uninterested in Shelley’s ideas. Even basic period details feel careless—why are bodies buried with uncovered faces, as if people in the 18th century simply tossed dirt directly onto the dead?
This Frankenstein favors spectacle over logic, power over consequence, and superhero mythmaking over Gothic dread.
6/10
Sorry, Baby
Sorry, Baby existing at all may be one of the best things to come out of the MeToo movement. While the exposure of real monsters—like Bill Cosby and Danny Masterson—showed how power can be abused through drugs, fame, or violence, Sorry, Baby reminds us that none of that is required to permanently damage someone.
Its premise is deceptively simple: “Something bad happened to Agnes.” The film never fully shows what that something is, and many viewers may wonder whether the ambiguity justifies a movie at all. It does. What we learn is enough. Someone Agnes admired desired her for her mind but had no respect for her autonomy. She wasn’t allowed to decide. She was coerced into something she wasn’t ready for. That quiet violation—the kind some people still struggle to even name—is the film’s subject, and it is more than worthy of examination.
Men can be awful, particularly when entitlement overrides empathy. The film understands that harm doesn’t come from brute force alone, but from insistence—from wanting what you are explicitly denied. Eva Victor, pulling triple duty as writer, director, and lead actor, tells this story with restraint and discomfort rather than spectacle. Sorry, Baby is labeled a dark comedy mostly because it’s too minimal and too emotionally raw to fit anywhere else.
I laughed at times, but rarely out of joy—more out of tension, desperation, and the human need to feel something break through the numbness. I wanted Agnes to laugh at life again, so I laughed loudly, hoping she might too. Whether or not this story draws from Victor’s own life, it announces a rare talent: someone capable of articulating pain with clarity, intelligence, and moral weight.
9/10
Train Dreams
Train Dreams may be one of the most somber movies ever made. As a point of reference, I thought of films like Bringing Out the Dead, Palindromes, and Synecdoche, New York—all famously bleak works that offer little to no emotional reprieve. This film is quiet, sad, and ever lonelier.
It captures the immensity of solitude: what it feels like to be briefly, modestly happy; to watch that happiness erode; and then to wake up one day and realize the world has kept moving without you—that you may be the only truly sad person left in it. The performances are beautifully restrained, communicating grief and endurance without overt dramatics.
Still, the film’s devotion to mood comes at a cost. It often feels less like a story unfolding than an emotional state being prolonged, and at times it nearly forgets to provide a plot at all.
8/10
Song Sung Blue
Song Sung Blue has to be a movie that played the Heartland Film Festival, right? Let me check… okay, it didn’t. But they gave it some sort of award anyway. You can almost hear the thought process: “We’re not letting a movie this paltry—and this transparently engineered to make audiences cry—not have our name attached to it.”
And yet.
This is actually a very sweet love story about two people dealing with genuinely relatable problems—at least to me. Kate Hudson does her own singing, and she sounds great. Exactly like an extremely talented singer who can’t quite turn that talent into a full career should sound.
The saddest thing of all is that Hugh Jackman never played Neil Diamond in a biopic. He looks and sings exactly like him. That said, I can’t imagine there’s a story we urgently need to see about a 60-year-old Neil Diamond—and, truth be told, this story didn’t strictly need to be told either.
But it was told, and it’s very sweet. The film gently reminds us of the importance of making the most of our lives while we still have time on Earth. I’m glad to have this one in my back pocket for people who are grieving the loss of family members.
7/10
Sentimental Value
Sentimental Value is another deceptively slight movie about coping with tragic loss, but one that feels far more likely to linger. Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, a Lars von Trier–like director who hasn’t made a film in over a decade and now feels the pressure to deliver one final artistic statement before he dies. His daughters have long since abandoned their need for him, and the distance feels permanent. Gustav is the kind of man who only loves punishing, perverse cinema—to the extent that he thinks DVDs of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher would be appropriate gifts for a twelve-year-old’s birthday.
Movies about filmmakers rarely thrill me—they tend to be self-congratulatory and therefore less honest—but this one is handled with restraint and surprising humility. The central question cuts deep: how do you convince anyone your story is worth hearing when you’ve spent a lifetime uninterested in listening to others? Elle Fanning plays one of the finest actors of her generation, and even she seems uncertain whether this man’s vision deserves her faith. (And honestly—why isn’t she already regarded that way?)
Sentimental Value kind of comes and goes for me. It says something real, and I don’t doubt that it matters, but it didn’t stay with me in the same way The Worst Person in the World did, which felt like the movie I’d want all my friends to watch when I die. That movie felt big—about terminal illness, infidelity, and how people explain their lives to themselves. Sentimental Value feels smaller by comparison, more about famous people having problems that will probably never apply to me. My boyfriend loves it. I admired it. I’m just not sure how much of it I’ll think about later.
8.5/10
Part two will come next week or sooner, I promise.
A personal archeology of fear: what I unearthed in fifteen first-time horrors.
I’m ending the project at 15 movies. My goal was 16, but the season is long over, and I’m itching to watch other movies.
What have we learned?
There was a French horror movie that was basically as important as Psycho.
Eyes Without a Face proposes that a face transplant is as simple as cutting around the outside of someone’s face with a scalpel and lifting the skin off like a Halloween mask. I don’t think the procedure is quite that simple, but the movie shows it in its entirety, and the only thing keeping you from fainting is pure disbelief (or hope) that it wouldn’t work that easily.
In 1960, this was shocking enough to make some audience members pass out—and probably caused a few to wish they could.
It was one of the first films to make the respected father the villain, even a killer. If that doesn’t equate to brilliance, it comes close.
The Best and Worst Zombie Movies Since 1980
By sheer luck, I watched both the best zombie movie made since 1980 and the worst.
28 Years Later was the first in the series that felt like a true “franchise picture” in the best meaning of the phrase. It’s not really about the rage virus—it’s about losing a parent to cancer. The score by Young Fathers (virtually unknown in the U.S., semi-popular in the U.K., and respected everywhere else) is phenomenal. The “tower of skulls,” a modern mausoleum for treasured loved ones, is instantly iconic. The characters actually do know how to handle fast zombies, but the threat becomes the backdrop for a story about people who only have their families left.
World War Z, on the other hand, is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Expensive-looking, hollow at every level, and completely neutered by its PG-13 rating. The zombie virus seems to spread through aura or osmosis. No one ever actually gets bitten on screen, yet everyone instantly looks like they’ve been rotting for a month. How does that even work?
Every scene is a problem except for the car chase.
Eraserhead and The Lighthouse: Two Triumphs
Eraserhead was another highlight. It’s the movie that inspired half the 1980s cult creature-features. Poor Henry’s life is staring at a brick wall outside his bedroom window while his mutant baby screams in the next room. His partner is gone; she couldn’t take it anymore.
It’s brilliant—part Cronenberg, part Twin Peaks, part stop-motion nightmare—and possibly the biggest spiritual influence on Beetlejuice. Next time I see this playing at midnight somewhere, I’m going.
Almost as good was Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse. Hallelujah: I finally liked one of his movies as much as people say I should. The “lighthouse drives men mad” trope deserved a full exploration, and this one dives straight into mythology, sea legends, and Cthulhu-adjacent imagery. The lighthouse setting itself is spectacular. You’ll see more of these in the future—there have already been two: this and The Vanishing from a year earlier.
The Creature, The Camp, and The Witches
After those, I recommend Creature from the Black Lagoon. Not respected enough then or now, but the monster’s theme music is one of the best ever written (alongside Bride of Frankenstein). The editing, music, and cinematography could have made this a masterpiece, if the script hadn’t seemed like it was written in a weekend.
Friday the 13th was almost brilliant—for half an hour. It feels like it was written by a playwright trying to compete with Halloween, but lost a tug-of-war with producers who just wanted something fast and sellable. It’s preposterous, but believable enough that the silliness becomes irritating. The score is as good as Creature’s for the first 30 minutes, then even the editor gets bored of it.
And The Witches—the makeup work by Jim Henson’s team on Anjelica Huston is indelible. Huston never became the next Meryl Streep, but this is a role no one else would’ve played that way. I didn’t show the full getup in my review because seeing it for the first time is the reason you pay for admission. The mouse work feels like an afterthought, but everything else? The mouse work feels like an afterthought, but everything else? Burned into the psyche of every kid whose parents mistakenly took them.
And Then There Was Midsommar
The other lowlight was Midsommar. In some ways brilliant, in most ways incoherent. It did, however, introduce me to the Swedish folklore of elderly people jumping off a cliff once they became a burden. (Folklore only, but compelling enough for a filmmaker to say: “Okay… make this a movie.”)
It’s the Tokyo Story or Make Way for Tomorrow of human-sacrifice rituals, but the execution is a B- for the assignment. A C overall.
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Horror Movies Seen for the First Time in 2025 (ranked)
1 Eyes Without a Face (1960) – 9.5
2 Possession (1981) – 9
3 Eraserhead (1977) – 9
4 28 Years Later (2025) – 9
5 Strange Darling (2023) – 8.5
6 The Lighthouse (2019) – 8.5
7 Onibaba (1964) – 8
8 House (1977) – 8
9 Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954) – 8
10 The Stepford Wives (1975) – 8
11 Weapons (2025) – 7.5
12 Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) – 7.5
13 Sinners (2025) – 7.5
14 Train to Busan (2016) – 7.5
15 Revenge (2017) – 7
16 The Witches (1990) – 7
17 Night of the Creeps (1986) – 7
18 I Saw the TV Glow (2024) – 7
19 Ringu (1988) – 7
20 The Invitation (2017) – 7
21 X (2022) – 7
22 Possessor (2020) – 7
23 Paranormal Activity (2007) – 6.5
24 Nosferatu (2024) – 6.5
25 Heretic (2024) – 6.5
26 Mandy (2018) – 6.5
27 Blade II (2002) – 6
28 Dead Calm (1989) – 6
29 Frankenstein (2025) – 6
30 Arcadia (2024) – 6
31 Cube (1997) – 5.5
32 28 Weeks Later (2007) – 5
33 Midsommar (2019) – 5
34 Scream (2022) – 5
35 Friday the 13th (1980) – 5
36 Death of a Unicorn (2025) – 5
37 The Conjuring (2013) – 4.5
38 Longlegs (2024) – 4
39 The Endless (2017) – 4
40 The Coffee Table (2022) – 4
41 House on Haunted Hill (1959) – 3
42 Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – 2.5
43 World War Z (2013) – 1
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Twenty horror movies on my docket for October 2026 (if not before then):
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)
Cat People (1942)
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Pirhana (1978)
The Changeling (1980)
The Howling (1981)
Tenabrae (1984)
Critters (1986)
Monkey Shines (1988)
Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
Saw (2004)
The Orphanage (2007)
It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)
A Monster Calls (2016)
Under the Shadow (2016)
The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Halloween (2018)
The Wolf House (2018)
Oddity (2024)
Dangerous Animals (2025)
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Final Thoughts
Of those upcoming films, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Cat People are the ones I wish I’d squeezed in this year. I always hope to find new personal classics, but it’s rare that any actually qualify.
I also recommend Sinners and Weapons, two mainstream horror films that might even be nominated for Best Picture next year. I’d give them both a 7.5—which for me qualifies as a personal classic, just barely.
Every October feels like a tunnel you walk into, hoping something in the dark will change you. The best horror isn’t about fear at all; it’s about seeing the ordinary world more clearly afterward. Give me truth, memorably distorted and I’m a happy Crystal Lake camper.
Avidavr: Media Reviews 