The Long Walk, the newest screen adaptation of a Stephen King novel, is enjoyable enough for its depiction of the harrowing conditions in which it places its characters, and for the excellent cast embodying them. But director Francis Lawrence’s latest effort feels like an imitator of the director’s own wildly popular Hunger Games franchise – itself based on the bestselling series written by Suzanne Collins – which is ironic, considering the source material for The Long Walk was published decades before Collins ever put pen to paper.
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Paul Thomas Anderson spent years dreaming of adapting Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, a novel published in 1990. He then filmed his adaptation of that novel nearly two years ago. Yet somehow, One Battle After Another, Anderson’s latest masterpiece, feels like it was made expressly with the headlines of the last few months in mind. It also feels eerily prescient, showing us a twisted, fun-house mirror version of the depravity to which the United States will likely sink in the coming years under the hideous Trump regime.
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If there were any doubts left that Bong Joon Ho is the world’s foremost fantastical chronicler of how class continues to hold the human species back from the best version of itself, Mickey 17 should put them to rest. Like Parasite and Snowpiercer before it, Bong’s wackiest sci-fi adventure to date focuses on people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
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Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that Eddington is about our nation’s fractured, contentious response to the outbreak of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. It’s true that Ari Aster’s latest effort to unnerve us is set in May of 2020, during the heart of lockdown, mask mandates, and social distancing. Much of the picture’s action centers around a small New Mexico town’s mayoral race in which one candidate extols the virtues of coronavirus safety protocols, while the other lambasts those same protocols as an attack on personal freedom.
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To paraphrase the troubled Jimmy Gator: I’m back, ready for round two!
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If you’re sleeping on the Oak Cliff Flim Festival (OCFF), I’m here to let you know that you’re missing out on one of the country’s most authentic, scrappy, and original celebrations of the moving image. Each of the handful of times I’ve attended the fest – including once as a volunteer over a decade ago, and twice now covering it for this site – I’ve been delighted by its punk-rock aesthetic and complete and total immersion in film culture. The programmers and staff at OCFF schedule quirky, thought-provoking titles that rarely disappoint.
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OCFF 2025’s theme, Real Movies for Real Movie People, stresses the idea of human emotion and connection through movies. The fest’s website landing page features a graphic that includes the phrases “Human Cinema, Filling Heads, Connecting Souls, Sparking Feelings.”
Based on my personal belief that the absolute best antidote to small people with small minds – a constituency that only seems to grow by the day here in the good ole US of A – is as much exposure to different cultures, perspectives, ideas, and art as possible.
So, if anything can get me out of my funk, it’s a film festival.
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A depressed writer, a group of angry librarians, nuclear waste, and a pioneering comedian all played a part in my cinematic adventures at DIFF 2025, along with a few detours to connect with friends and loved ones, as well as to join in solidarity, for a few hours at least, to others like me who are desperate to stem the tide of the spreading fascism in our country.
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On my way to Cinépolis for my first screening of DIFF 2025, I heard a ping from my phone. As I drove, my car’s robot voice delivered the incoming message from a North Texas Film Critics Association colleague. He was letting the NTFCA Discord channel know that he saw one of the DIFF opening films, called Omaha, at Sundance, and that it was his favorite film of that fest. I was, in fact, on my way to see that very movie.
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My film festival coverage for 2025 is in full swing with the upcoming Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF). This is an exciting year for DIFF for one particular reason. For the first time in its nineteen-year history, DIFF is now an Oscar-qualifying festival following an announcement last October from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The Dallas International Film Festival is now one of 181 festivals worldwide – 59 in the US – that has been approved by the AMPAS as a qualifying festival. According to the DIFF 2025 website, “[F]ilms that win qualified awards between October 1, 2024, and September 30, 2025, may be qualified to enter the 98th Academy Awards®, provided that the films meet all the requirements set forth in the official rules for that season.”
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“TEN YEARS, MAN! TEN YEA... TEN YEARS! Ten years. TEN! TEN YEEEEAARS! TEN YEARS!” – Paul Spericki (Jeremy Piven) upon seeing his high school classmate, Martin Blank (John Cusack), for the first time in, well, ten years in Grosse Pointe Blank.
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Writer and civic advocate Pete Davis, alongside his director and producer sister, Rebecca, have made in their documentary an extraordinarily convincing case for why it feels like American society is in the throes of complete disintegration. This is Pete Davis’s first film. It’s also Rebecca Davis’s feature directing and writing debut, after spending a decade as a producer for NBC News and as the supervising producer for the second season of the Netflix/Vox collaboration Explained.
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If ever there were a movie that exemplifies the recent viral social media phenomenon known as “Man or Bear,” in which women are asked if they would prefer to be alone in the woods with a man or a bear, it’s Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour. If you’re unfamiliar, an overwhelming majority of women, when given the opportunity, would take their chances hanging out with a grizzly rather than risk possible violence at the hands of an unknown man. Stranger danger, indeed.
Kendrick, with the help of Ian McDonald’s focused screenplay, imagines the world in a way that I would assume looks very familiar to many, if not most, women. It’s a world in which women are subject to men’s relentless quest to get sex out of them. Female utility begins and ends with their bodies, and if a woman insists on using her own agency to upset the status quo, she risks incurring the anger, or worse, of a man.
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David Cronenberg ain’t got nothin’ on Coralie Fargeat. Cronenberg, the body-horror director who has been called the “King of Venereal Horror” and the “Baron of Blood,” has been namechecked by French director Fargeat – along with David Lynch, John Carpenter, and Michael Haneke – as influencing her work. With her latest picture, the giddily gory The Substance, Fargeat makes a convincing case that she’s ready to join, as a peer, the ranks of those she admires. Her film is as nasty as any Cronenberg, as bonkers as any Lynch, and is so horrifically hilarious that I often found myself laughing as I was wincing and looking away from the screen. The Substance is also a razor-sharp feminist satire about youth and beauty and how both are weaponized against women in our society.
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Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola spent forty years trying to get Megalopolis, his sprawling, sci-fi epic fable about the Roman and American empires, made. Now 85, it might turn out to be the director’s last film. He waited about a decade too long for his examination of how and why empires crumble to be relevant. Maybe if he had made and released Megalopolis before Donald Trump’s infamous ride down that golden escalator, I would have praised his maximalist primal scream about our current cultural and political moment as visionary and prescient. Instead, what Megalopolis has on offer feels like a thin imitation of our nightmarish reality.
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Unlike Luca Guadagnino’s last effort, the unforgettable cannibal romance road trip movie Bones and All, his new film, Challengers, has very little in the way of graphic violence. The closest it comes is a wrenching scene depicting a torn ACL during a tennis match. Still, the emotional and psychological stakes underpinning this tale of elite athletes, insatiable ambition, and a fraught love triangle proves again how deft Guadagnino is at foregrounding human connection – and the messy emotions that come with it – no matter the broader subject matter of the movie.
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The Bikeriders is, on the whole, enchanted by its subjects’ nihilism. Nichols’s deep curiosity about human behavior and his non-judgmental, empathetic artistic style makes his film about small-scale fascism an engrossing portrait of our endless capacity for love and hate.
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Alien: Romulus is a nepo movie. Like nepo baby – the original term I’m borrowing and adapting for this new cinematic designation – I’m using nepo movie to describe offspring that coasts into success (of the kind which those without the famous pedigree could only dream) on the sterling reputation of famous progenitors. We’ve had movies like this before, as we had children of the rich and famous using their connections to jump start a career before the invention of the term nepo baby.
What made this oh-so-clever turn of phrase spring into my mind was Romulus mimicking the best, most memorable elements from both mom and dad in its pursuit to build its own legacy. Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez wrote the screenplay for this seventh installment in the iconic sci-fi/horror franchise with his longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues. His movie plays like a best-hits mashup of both Ridley Scott’s genre defining Alien and James Cameron’s sci-fi/horror-by-way-of-war-movie follow up Aliens, with a splash of Prometheus added in for good measure.
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There’s a very distinct difference between a movie shrouding itself in tantalizing mystery, so that the audience can fill in the blanks using their own imagination, and a movie being so opaque about its plot machinations that it’s indistinguishable from shoddy storytelling. German writer/director Tilman Singer’s second feature, Cuckoo, strives for the former, but, because of its confusing and nonsensical plot, lands squarely in the domain of the latter.
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And now, the thrilling conclusion of my OCFF 2024 adventures!
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