Category: Movie Reviews

Sinners (2025) | REVIEW

Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton in Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS — PHOTO: Warner Bros. Pictures (Still image from trailers).

Directed by Ryan Coogler — Screenplay by Ryan Coogler.

Ryan Googler should be a household name. He burst onto the scene with his incredible feature debut Fruitvale Station, revitalized the modern American sports drama (and an iconic franchise) with Creed, broke box office records with the iconic superhero film Black Panther, and took on the daunting task of making a sequel to his superhero epic, even though it would be without its leading man with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, following Chadwick Boseman’s tragic passing. Coogler has proven himself to be a commercially viable filmmaker with something on his mind and the skill with which to pull off his ideas breathtakingly. But now he’s finally made something unique and original, despite the genre tropes his film willingly embraces, following years upon years of working with true stories, established characters, or within the Marvel machine. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is an original vampire period film of which he insisted on having full creative control and future ownership, with a deal that resembles what Quentin Tarantino, among others, have done before him. That was a deal worth fighting for, because Sinners is the kind of instant classic original genre film that will blow people away.

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Holland (2025) | REVIEW

NICOLE KIDMAN stars in HOLLAND — PHOTO: JACLYN MARTINEZ / PRIME.

Directed by Mimi Cave — Screenplay by Andrew Sodorski

In 2022, Mimi Cave’s debut feature FRESH, a thriller about dating with a wicked twist, was one of the, ahem, freshest surprises of the year. Naturally, this always makes you curious about the director’s next step. For her sophomore effort, Mimi Cave dropped her first film’s very modern narrative and feel in favor of an early 2000s narrative set in a quirky Michigan suburbia. Cave’s Holland is a psychological drama with thriller elements that is set in Holland, Michigan (hence the title), which is a town settled by Dutch-Americans and which prominently displays its Dutch cultural identity with tulip fields and windmills. The film follows Nancy Vandergroot (played by Nicole Kidman), a teacher who is starting to suspect that her husband, Fred (played by Matthew Macfadyen, is living a double life on his many work trips. To figure out what is going on, she teams up with a colleague, shop teacher Dave Delgado (played by Gael García Bernal), to spy on her husband and investigate his optometrist office. However, in that process, Nancy may have bitten off more than she can chew, as her husband’s secrets aren’t exactly what she expected, while, at the same time, she starts having an affair with Dave.

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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2023/2024) | REVIEW

Benedict Cumberbatch and Dev Patel in ‘Poison’ from THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR AND THREE MORE — PHOTO: NETFLIX (Still image from trailers).

Directed by Wes Anderson — Screenplay by Wes Anderson.

In 2023, Wes Anderson teamed up with Netflix to release four short films, all of which were based on the works of Roald Dahl, in September of that year. Eventually, one of these features — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar — was the effort that finally earned Wes Anderson his first Oscar, though in the short film category, which I don’t think many would’ve seen coming just a few years ago. Then, in 2024, following the Oscar win, Netflix released an anthology film consisting of Wes Anderson’s four short films. All four shorts feature heavy but quirky narration and the heavy stylization that we’ve come to know and love Wes Anderson for, though with slight tweaks from short to short. In this review, I’ll share my initial reaction to each of the four shorts, as well as give a final score out of ten for the repackaged anthology feature.

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Novocaine (2025) | REVIEW

Jack Quaid mid-action in NOVOCAINE — PHOTO: Paramount Pictures (Still image from trailers).

Directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen — Screenplay by Lars Jacobson.

Dan Berk and Robert Olsen’s Novocaine follows Nathan Caine (played by Jack Quaid), an introverted assistant bank manager, who has the condition known as ‘congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis’ meaning that he doesn’t feel pain and temperature. This diagnosis means that he lives a life defined by his own attempts at protecting himself, by, among other things, avoiding solid foods as he could conceivably bite off his own tongue due to his issues with the sense of feeling. However, one day he runs into someone who could change his life. That person is Sherry (played by Amber Midthunder), an extroverted co-worker, who he is immediately smitten by. They eventually establish a connection, but, right as he is finally starting to discover happiness in his life, she is kidnapped and taken as hostage during a bank robbery. Desperate to save her, he follows in pursuit and is willing to put his body through hell to get her back.

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Black Bag (2025) | REVIEW

Michael Fassbender in BLACK BAG — PHOTO: Focus Features / Universal Pictures (Still image from trailers).

Directed by Steven Soderbergh — Screenplay by David Koepp.

When it comes to filmmaking, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who is a more prolific filmmaker than Steven Soderbergh. Since the 2020s began, he has had six feature films released — some in theaters, some on streaming services. Incredibly, it’s not like his films suffer from the speed with which he gets them out for the public to see. In the case of No Sudden Move (2021) and Kimi (2022), those were some of the best surprises of their respective years. Soderbergh is also quite experimental, as he has tried his hand at using iPhones to shoot major motion pictures, like Unsane and High Flying Bird. His latest film, Black Bag, never feels like an experiment, rather it feels like Steven Soderbergh at his very best. It’s a sleek relationship spy drama with a terrific ensemble cast led by Michael Fassbender in top form.

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Control Freak (2025) | REVIEW

Kelly Marie Tran in CONTROL FREAK — PHOTO: DISNEY PLUS (Still image from trailers)

Directed by Shal Ngo — Screenplay by Shal Ngo.

Shal Ngo’s generically titled body horror flick Control Freak follows Valerie (played by Kelly Marie Tran), a motivational speaker, who, in her first scene, talks to her audience about rejecting and resisting the voice inside of your head that keeps you down. Valerie, who is struggling with a constant itch in her scalp, is quite popular, it seems, as she is getting ready to go on a tour of Asia. This world tour requires her to go find her birth certificate, which forces her to face her troubled family history. When she meets with her father, who fought in the Vietnam War and is now a Buddhist monk, she is told that the itch, as well as the frequent visions of both ants and a dark figure, is a direct result of a demonic parasite that will attach itself to a host and will continue to gnaw away at them until they’re all gone. Valerie initially refuses to believe her father, but when things start to escalate, she realizes she has to do something drastic. 

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Mickey 17 (2025) | REVIEW

Robert Pattinson and Robert Pattinson in Bong Joon-ho’s MICKEY 17 — PHOTO: Watner Bros. Pictures (Still image from trailers).

Directed by Bong Joon-ho — Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho.

It boggles the mind that it’s been more than half a decade since the release of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, the first non-English language feature to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Director Bong’s Oscar-winning magnum opus is a widely recognized 21st Century masterpiece, and, thusly, the director’s follow-up to such an achievement would always be hotly anticipated, especially given the fact that his next release was a blockbuster-budgeted American studio release. In fascinating fashion, Bong Joon-ho has spent his Hollywood blank cheque, or carte blanche, on a scathing but funny political satire sci-fi flick about the way capitalist governments, whose leaders may use religion to gain and exercise power, view and treat the common person, women, and foreign territories, as well as its inhabitants. Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17, an adaptation of Edward Ashton’s novel Mickey7, is ambitious, messy, strangely predictive about the time we’re in, and very much a Bong Joon-ho film, even though it is very different from Parasite.

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The Monkey (2025) | REVIEW

The titular toy monkey in Osgood Perkins’ THE MONKEY — PHOTO: NEON / Black Bear.

Directed by Osgood Perkins — Screenplay by Osgood Perkins.

Filmmaker Osgood Perkins is fast becoming one of the most interesting horror filmmakers on the rise. Following three relatively unknown features, including the quite good The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Perkins finally had his breakthrough as a filmmaker in 2024 with the excellent horror-thriller flick Longlegs. Now in 2025, he’s hoping to fully etch his name into stone, as a prominent horror filmmaker with Keeper, releasing later this year, and The Monkey, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story, which was released in theaters at the end of February. Here Perkins is trying to prove himself in another horror subgenre, namely that of the horror-comedy, but, while there is a lot to like here, it isn’t quite as effective as his 2024 hit.

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Nickel Boys (2024) | REVIEW

Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson in NICKEL BOYS — PHOTO: Amazon MGM (Still image from trailers).

Directed by RaMell Ross — Screenplay by RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes.

Based on Colson Whitehead’s 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys follows a smart and politically engaged young African-American man named Elwood Curtis (played primarily by Ethan Herisse) who, in 1960s America, is wrongfully convicted of grand theft auto while hitchhiking on his way to college. Elwood, due to being underage, is then sent to Nickel Academy, a so-called ‘reform school,’ where he befriends a boy named Turner (played by Brandon Wilson) and experiences racial segregation and abuse.

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The Order (2024) | REVIEW

Jude Law in THE ORDER — PHOTO: Amazon MGM Studios / Vertical (Still image from trailers).

Directed by Justin Kurzel — Screenplay by Zach Baylin.

Based on Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt’s The Silent Brotherhood, Justin Kurzel’s The Order follows a veteran FBI agent, Terry Husk (played by Jude Law), who, alongside a local Idaho Deputy named Jamie Bowen (played by Tye Sheridan), takes on a case to investigate a series of disappearances and instances of domestic terrorism carried out by a white supremacist militant group led by a man named Bob Mathews (played by Nicholas Hoult).

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