The nominations for the 98th Academy Awards have been announced! There were surprises, headscratchers, shocks, and snubs, as is always the case. Below, I’ve assembled bullet points and explanations of the biggest headliners, in my opinion, from this year’s nomination group. Let’s get to them.
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AMPAS is announcing its list of nominees for the upcoming 98th Academy Awards on the 22nd. So, yes, now is the time to fill in your final Oscars nominations predictions. This is exactly what I’ve done here. Below you’ll see what I’m predicting. The choices are ranked from one to five or one to ten, based on how confident I am that something is getting nominated, with 1 being the most confident. One thing of note: I am predicting that Sinners will break the record for most Oscar nominations (by getting 15).
Continue reading “Who Will Be Nominated? – Final Predictions | 98th Oscars”
Directed by Joe Carnahan — Screenplay by Joe Carnahan.
We’re only a few weeks into the new year, and we already have a freshly made and relatively high-profile action thriller to feast on. That high-profile feature is Netflix’s The Rip, which brings together famous friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in a film built around drug money, dirty cops, and snitches. The Rip, from The Grey-filmmaker Joe Carnahan (who, in recent years, has been making plenty of B-movie action films), is the first 2026 film that I am reviewing, and it also happens to be the first 2026 film that I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s not high art, but it is exactly the kind of straight-to-streaming action thriller star-vehicle that you would want to chew on in January.
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Here are my picks for the most anticipated upcoming movies of 2026, ranked by my own personal anticipation rather than any other metric like box office or hype. Normally, I’d go with 25 selections, but because it’s 2026, I decided to go with just one additional selection. But, frankly, this could’ve easily been a top 40 list. If you’re at all interested in a longer list, then check the honorable mentions at the bottom of the list, or click here for my Letterboxd list that contains quite a few more films. But, yeah, let’s get to it!
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Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things; Kinds of Kindness) — Screenplay by Will Tracy (The Menu).
Bugonia marks the 4th collaboration between multiple Oscar-winning actress Emma Stone and the most famous filmmaker of the so-called ‘Greek Weird Wave’ (and in a row, no less). Their latest film together is an English-language remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s black comedy titled Save the Green Planet!, a South Korean film released in 2003. Though initially conceived as an opportunity for Jang, the original filmmaker, to direct the English-language remake of his own film for an international audience (not unlike what Ole Bornedal did with his English-language Nightwatch remake in the 1990s), it is now, instead, a fascinating instance in which a European auteur is adapting an Asian original story though in a North American setting. In a way, that almost intercontinental approach is fitting for a film about people who may or may not come from different worlds in more ways than one. It’s also, frankly, a really effective film.
Continue reading “Bugonia (2025) | REVIEW”
Regardless of what you think about the show or this season, I think you have to admire the gusto of the release strategy for the final season of Stranger Things, of which the first volume (episodes one to four) was released early in December, the second volume on Christmas, and the series finale on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day (depending on your region). Stranger Things really took over a huge chunk of the online entertainment focus in December, despite the fact that massive trailers for huge films were released alongside a new Avatar film in theaters around the world. They really made the three-part release of the show into events. But did the series finale of the most popular US-based Netflix original series, or the season as a whole, live up to the hype it created for itself? Well, let’s talk about it, because it’s not a straightforward answer.
Continue reading “Stranger Things – Season Five (2025) | TV REVIEW”
Would you look at that? We’re now in 2026. Granted, it’s only the first day of the new year, but, hey, we have to accept that 2025 is now in our collective rearview mirror. Like has become tradition on this website, I start every year by listing the ten articles or reviews written in 2025 that were the most popular based on views. At the very end of the article, I’ll also reveal what non-2025 written output (i.e., an article or review that wasn’t written in 2025) was the most popular in the year to which we have now all said goodbye. Well, let’s get to it!
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We’re back at the end of another year, but we’re also on the precipice of the beginning of a new one. As is always the case, I like to say farewell to the year that we have lived through on the final day of the year, and today is no different. Tonight, we say farewell to 2025. At the end of 2024, I expressed concern about the US Presidential Election result, the return of a Commander-in-Chief in America who is synonymous with the post-factual era, and all the scary elements attributed to it. I was also nervous about the armed conflicts that continued to dominate the world. But I desperately tried to hold onto a hope that it wouldn’t be as bad as it looked like it could be, that the US election result and the rhetoric that immediately followed it weren’t as destructive as they had seemed, and that we could still find a way. I tried to remind my readers just how important it was to speak truth to power, to hold your leaders accountable, and to fight for justice. So, how were those fears and that hope reflected in the year that we actually got in 2025?
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Having a whole HBO show centered around Stephen King’s IT and its iconic character, Pennywise the Dancing Clown, always felt like it would be an obvious success. It’s honestly a little bit strange that it didn’t come sooner, given that the two-part film adaptations, IT: Chapter One and IT: Chapter Two, are two of the highest-grossing horror films ever made (with Chapter One holding the top position). The wait is over as the first season of the films’ spin-off show IT: Welcome to Derry recently ended. Though it received some online fan criticism for taking its time, I found it to be absolutely thrilling. Frankly, I think it’s a lot better than Chapter Two was.
Continue reading “IT: Welcome to Derry – Season One (2025) | TV REVIEW”
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos — Screenplay by Yorgos Lanthimos & Efthimis Filippou.
I consistently find Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek filmmaker behind works such as The Lobster and Poor Things, to be one of the most fascinating rising auteurs of European cinema. I often think about the Lars Von Trier quote: “a film should be like a stone in your shoe,” and, when it comes to European artists breaking through to the Hollywood gravitational center, Lanthimos is perhaps the one auteur that best manages to adhere to that specific Trier-esque modus operandi or end goal, as his films constantly test boundaries, provoke, or work against conventionality. Despite the odd and boundary pushing premise of Poor Things, it can feel as if, as Lanthimos has been embraced more and more by American audiences, he may have gotten further away from his auteurist roots, but Kinds of Kindness, his 2024 anthology triptych film, does, at times, feel like the American output of his that shares the most DNA with his most famous Greek film, Dogtooth. The closest English-language comparison of his is probably The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Kinds of Kindness is a fascinating work that many will find challenging, as it sometimes explores depravity, features tonal shifts, and is quite lengthy at two hours and forty-four minutes.
Continue reading “Kinds of Kindness (2024) | REVIEW”
I'm Jeffrey Rex 