MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING
2025 | Dir. Christopher McQuarrie | 170 Minutes
4 out of 5
Long, surprisingly slow and dour, the concluding half of what is ostensibly the Mission: Impossible film franchise's grand finale does the espionage action series justice, but it's an exhausting affair when all is said and done. Going out of its way to revive specific plot points from previous installments, even goofily making use of flashbacks to the immediately preceding Dead Reckoning, it's a bit of a disservice to this feature that it relies more heavily on pre-established continuity than other M:I movies so much so that it never feels like its own picture. The stunts are as thrilling as ever courtesy of Tom Cruise's entertaining endless pursuit of delivering spectacle laced with ever-escalating peril, but the stakes of the plot are set so ludicrously high, the mind numbs at points in a bad way. Not the series' finest hour, far from its worst, satisfying enough as a conclusion if Cruise and co. have the wisdom to end it here.
FRIENDSHIP
2025 | Dir. Andrew DeYoung | 100 Minutes
4 out of 5
As unbearably uncomfortable as it is astoundingly funny. Tim Robinson's signature chaotic brand of anxiety-driven comedy is perfectly-suited for this tragic tale of a lonely man who makes every single wrong decision imaginable in the pursuit of forging and maintaining meaningful relationships. The narrative meanders unpredictably, but Robinson's ever-puzzled demeanor and baffling persona are consistently amusing.
THE SURFER
2025 | Dir. Lorcan Finnegan | 100 Minutes
3 out of 5
Captivating performance from Nic Cage aside, this one's a bit of a thematically meandering mess. Cage's trademark intensity keeps the picture's disorienting-by-design narrative engaging, though the experience is ultimately more hallucinatory aggravating than enlightening. The film's takedown of toxic masculinity just doesn't push things nearly far enough.
SINNERS
2025 | Dir. Ryan Coogler | 138 Minutes
5 out of 5
Ryan Coogler is a genius. This film functions beautifully on so many levels: as a breathtaking celebration of the transportational power of music (naturally with a genre-traversing soundtrack courtesy of constant collaborator Ludwig Göransson), as a stirring Prohibition-era drama centered on a set of Black world-weary gangster twins returning to the perilous cotton field hellscape of Jim Crow Mississippi, as a mercilessly gruesome vampire movie that sticks to all the rules according to folklore. Michael B. Jordan is perfect as both the lethally no-nonsense Smoke and the wild hot-headed Stack, and the supporting cast features superb performances from Li Jun Li, Delroy Lindo, Jayme Lawson, Hailee Steinfeld, Omar Benson Miller, Wunmi Mosaku, and Jack O’Connell. Above all, the picture's Miles Caton breakout star is absolutely compelling as the impressionable son of a preacher with guitar skills that are literally supernatural.
WARFARE
2025 | Dir. Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland | 96 Minutes
4 out of 5
Intense and harrowing, it's a no-frills head-first dive into the terror of the modern battlefield. The narrative is slight to say the least, the lead players operate more as ciphers than as fully-realized characters, but it captures an awful bloodbath of a single day in a senseless war in gut-wrenching visceral detail. The ensemble cast is all-around excellent, with D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, and Joseph Quinn standing out in particular.
