The Secret Agent (2025)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Actor, Best International Feature, and Best Casting     Not gonna lie, this was a little hard to follow without a lot of culture-specific context, but it was probably one of the more entertaining entries this year.  Content warning:  violence, blood, dead animal (shark)

Armand (Wagner Moura) is in hiding from the CEO (Luciano Chirolli) of a tech company with ties to the Brazilian government.  He's living under an assumed name in a safehouse but putting everything on the line to keep seeing his son (Enzo Nunes) until he can get forged passports so they can get out of the country.  Meanwhile, a pair of assassins are looking for him.

The title is a bit of a misnomer.  The protagonist isn't involved in anything clandestine or undercover or related to spying.  He's a professor at a university working on energy products.  At the time, the CEO was working for Electrobras, the government-run electricity company, and pressuring the professor to can certain projects, or give up patents, in order to make himself wealthy in the private sector.  There's probably more to it but I don't know enough specifics about Brazil's military dictatorship.  Anyway, I think the title is a reference to the TV show Armand and his kid are watching, but I'm just guessing.  

I thought this was really entertaining, despite how little I understood.  There were so many weird little characters living fully fleshed-out lives.  It's great.  Best casting, if you're counting everybody.  Everything else is kind of a miss.  But super worth watching.  I rented it on Amazon because I had credits.  Otherwise, it would have been $20, which is ridiculous.  Just wait a couple of weeks and it'll drop on Hulu or HBO Max.

Bugonia (2025)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score    Happy Valentine's Day!  Here's a completely unrelated movie.  Content warning:  blood, violence against women, allusion to sexual abuse, suicide (gun)

Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) has figured it out.  There are aliens amongst us and they have been fucking over the planet.  He knows this because he did his own research on YouTube and Reddit.  And he has a plan.  He is going to kidnap a high-ranking alien who just so happens to look exactly like the CEO of the company he works for, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), whose experimental drug almost killed his mom (Alica Silverstone), and use said alien to negotiate the peaceful surrender and retreat from Earth of all aliens.

The premise makes the movie sound light-hearted and funny but it's really not.  It's probably the tamest Lanthimos film yet, which is also not great.  It ends up just being fine, instead of interesting or cool or provocative or even just weird.  

Stone is great but isn't doing anything really new.  Plemmons nails the tone of desperate dipshit that's just a little too unhinged to be sympathetic but didn't score a nomination.  Could easily have replaced one of the two Supporting Actor noms OBAA got, but whatever.  Nobody asked me.  Silverstone is damn near unrecognizable.  

I will say, this is the first Lanthimos film I've seen that didn't have a completely unnecessary scene of animal abuse (unless you count actors as animals).  Progress?  I haven't seen the original Korean film this is adapted from, so no idea on that.  Score is good, though.  

Train Dreams (2025)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song   Content warning:  racist violence, animal death (elk)

Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) searches his life for meaning in the face of tragedies while working as a logger in the late 19th century Pacific Northwest.

On paper, this is not a film I thought I would enjoy.  It's paced very deliberately, the characters are bare sketches, and the cinematography centers on nature.  I hated Tree of Life for less.  But Train Dreams resonated in a way none of Terence Malick's films ever have.  Maybe Clint Bradley is just a better director for me.  

It is slow and incredibly sad, interspersed with sudden violence.  Bit like life, really.  Edgerton doesn't have a lot of lines but he does a lot of emoting.  It is heavily Vibes-based and will not be for everyone.  I recently had a death in the family so that may have been a factor in how well I responded to it.  It's probably my second choice for Best Picture but I seriously doubt it's actually going to win.  I don't think it will get anything, honestly.  It's too quiet and unassuming.  I will say that I absolutely hated the Nick Cave song at the end.  It felt so jarring tonally and did not work for me at all.  

It is streaming on Netflix.

The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

Nominated for:  Best Hair and Makeup    Ah, our first Women's Horror entry of the year.  This was a total surprise to see on the Oscar list.  Content warning:  medical horror, body horror, worms/maggots, some gore, blood, vomit

All Elvira (Lea Myren) wants to do is marry Prince Julien (Isac Calmroth), but she is plain of looks and poor in class.  There's a chance that her mother, Rebeka's (Ane Dahl Torp) new husband (Ralph Carlsson) can raise their social profile but he already has a beautiful daughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess).  And then he dies and it turns out he had a title but no money.  With the ball to determine Prince Julien's bride coming up, Rebeka ruthlessly makes over Elvira to compete with her stepsister --who has literal magic.  

This movie is very funny in the way it highlights how fucked up it is to pit women against each other.  It is a deeply feminist retelling of Cinderella that surprisingly keeps a number of supernatural elements from the original fairy tale.  It does change the ending slightly, which is nice, but amps up the gross-out factors with a trip to a plastic surgeon and a, shall we say, all-natural approach to a miracle weight loss drug.  If you are at all squeamish, this is not for you.  Pretty hurts, y'all.  

The Swedes are much less prudish than American audiences so there is some full-frontal nudity in case the words "violence" and "torture" weren't enough to convince you not to let your children watch this.  It's not Disney's Cinderella.  (One sex scene in the barn is made even more awkward by constant cuts to reaction shots by the horses.  They are not involved but the editing suggests that they are enthusiastic voyeurs.)

Myren carries this movie admirably.  You can visibly see her desperation to stand out and her crushing despair when none of her efforts are deemed worthy.  Special shoutout to Flo Fagerli, who plays Elvira's younger sister, Alma.  She doesn't get a lot of lines, but her facial expressions convey everything you need to know about her.  

The Ugly Stepsister is streaming on Shudder and Hulu.  Hulu also has an English dub, if you're a coward.

The Smashing Machine (2025)

Nominated for Best Hair and MakeupContent warning:  drug use, violence, suicide attempt

Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) was a championship wrestler who became a forerunner in Mixed Martial Arts/Ultimate Fighting spaces in the late 90s and early 00s.  His first professional loss coincided with the mounting toll fighting put on his body and his toxic relationship with his girlfriend (Emily Blunt) to kick off a drug addiction and subsequent overdose, which is helpfully faced and overcome in the first 30 minutes of the movie.  

So I'm going to address some aspects as tactfully as I can without disrespecting Mark Kerr, a real person, or UFC fighters, who work and train really hard, or even UFC fans.  

This movie didn't need to be made.

It especially didn't need to be a boilerplate biopic complete with training montages.  For a guy who lost ONCE.  Again, no shade.  The first time you fail at something is really hard, and the longer it takes for you to fail, the harder it is.  That's why it's better to learn that lesson as early as possible so you develop the coping skills you need to deal with future failures.  But it does not feel like particularly high stakes in the film, so the resulting come-apart feels like an overreaction.

This was directed by one half of the Safdie Brothers (Benny).  Later, we'll watch Marty Supreme which is directed by the other one (Josh) and see which brother has been carrying the other.

The movie really wants Dawn the girlfriend to be the villain, if there is one, without ever once acknowledging Mark's own toxic behavior.  There's some commentary to be made there but I frankly don't have the energy to spend any more time on it while the gushing fanboy glaze is catching so much light.  I'm not going to discount the effort fighters put in, the time and energy --mental and physical-- analyzing their own and opponents' tactics and strategies.  That's real and valid.  But you are getting beat up by a stranger for money.  You're not curing cancer.  There is zero reason for you to have a full "Know His Name" end title card like you're Rosa Parks.  It comes off as silly and indulgent.

Still, if you are interested in one of the foundational members of UFC, The Smashing Machine is streaming on HBO Max.

The Big Heat (1953)

 I had a couple of days off unexpectedly because of the snowstorm so I watched this with my friends.  It's one of my absolute favorite noirs.  Content warning:  violence against women

Philly cop Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is investigating the suicide of another policeman, Tom Duncan, which seems pretty cut-and-dry until Duncan's mistress (Dorothy Green) comes forward to contradict the grieving widow's (Jeanette Nolan) assertion that Duncan was in poor health.  Then the mistress ends up dead and Bannion is warned not to keep pursuing the matter.  Obviously, now he can't let it go and decides to go straight to the top and confront mob boss Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby).  

This is a very straightforward noir that doesn't spend a lot of time on how Bannion solves the case.  He mostly just yells at people until someone tries to kill him.  This is apparently good police work.  But who cares?  The important people in this movie are the women.  Ice-cold Bertha Duncan.  World-weary Lucy Chapman.  Katie Bannion, the paragon of housewife-ly virtue.  And top of them all, bored, callous, gun moll with a heart of gold Debby Marsh, played by the criminally underrated Gloria Grahame.  

What's great about this movie is how it subverts the tropes that were already well-established by giving Debby the emotional impetus, instead of Bannion.  **SPOILERS FOLLOW** Bannion gets a little when he confronts Katie's killer, but Debby's reaction to her disfigurement and subsequent path of revenge, leading ultimately to her blowing the lid off the whole criminal conspiracy maker her a much bigger catalyst to the plot.  **END SPOILERS**  Even though she does ultimately fall prey to the Hays Code-imposed morality, she has much more agency than other femmes fatales of the era.

The Big Heat is one of the most highly regarded noirs by critics, so you don't have to just take my word for it.  It is well worth your time.  It's unfortunately not available for streaming but I already owned it so I just watched my copy.

As a side note, apparently the studio originally wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part of Debby Marsh, which would have been fascinating.  

One Battle After Another (2025)

Nominated for:  Best Picture, Best Director, Best Lead Actor, Best Supporting Actor x2, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Sound, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Casting    So this was the big frontrunner before Sinners came in and dominated the nominations and I'll be real with you, this doesn't live up to the hype at all.  Not only is it not one of "the best films of the year," it's not even a particularly good comedy.  

Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) used to be a revolutionary with the group French75.  His girlfriend (Teyana Taylor) ditches him with their baby, then gets rolled up by the cops, forcing Bob to go into hiding.  Sixteen years later, the cop that was leading the charge against them, Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), is up for membership in a prestigious secret society but needs to tie up some loose ends.  Bob spends his days in a paranoid haze of alcohol and weed while his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), is blissfully unaware of the past that is bearing down upon them both.

Look, if goofy stoner action comedies are your thing, great.  You will probably like this movie.  I found it interminable.  It's basically a weirdly horny Taken meets The Pineapple Express.  I have no idea why it's been nominated for 13 Oscars.  It for sure only needed one Supporting Actor nod, if that.  Benecio Del Toro is fine but he did not need a nomination for this.  Teyana Taylor is also fine but did not need to be nominated, especially just for being hot and DTF.  It reminded me of when everyone went nuts for Katherine Waterston's performance in Inherent Vice, when all she did was be naked and die off-screen.  Actually, this was written by the same director as Inherent Vice, so that tracks.  

I've also seen this touted as somehow politically divisive and uhhhhhh... not really?  It's not actually taking any kind of stand beyond "do what you believe in."  If that is the bar for political activism, we are fucked, folks.  You could have set this in the 70s with the Weather Underground and it would have been the exact same story.  All the jokes are tired retreads about liberal purity in-fighting and right-wing shadowy cabals of the lamest sort.  

It's streaming on HBO Max but save yourself some time and skip this one.