This thing was rough. Setting aside the implausibility, Brian Duffield’s (Underwater, No One Will Save You) Whalefall still doesn’t offer anything we haven’t seen before. The imperfect father-son relationship. The conversations we had, and the ones we didn’t. The anger. The wishing we had one more day together. The regret. The guilt. Duffield uses an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale that swallows his lead character whole as the vessel for his story of life, loss, and redemption.
One year after his father, Mitt (Josh Brolin – The Dog Stars, Sicario), a deep sea diving legend turned cancer-ridden sufferer, commits suicide by sinking himself with weights attached to his body in an ocean bay, Jay (Austin Abrams – Resident Evil, The Starling Girl) makes the decision to gear up with his scuba suit and search the floor of where his father sank, hoping to find his father’s bone or some other remnant that can give closure for him, his mother Zara (Elizabeth Shue – Leaving Las Vegas, Hollow Man), and his two sisters who haven’t successfully reconciled with the fact that the tomb they visit at the graveyard is empty. Great premise…
Each year, I see only a handful of movies I’d ever consider unless circumstances warranted it. These are mostly films nominated for several Academy Awards (especially Best Picture) and those consistently recommended by social media influencers I follow. Sometimes I’ll check aggregate scores before deciding. Celine Song’s (
Little Fish, the limited release and widely underseen 2020 film from Chad Hartigan (The Threesome, Morris From America), was a movie that captivated me so much that I turned it off 30 minutes in while falling asleep late at night, knowing I could not give the film the full justice it needed, and started it from the beginning the next morning. Released straight to streaming during the COVID-19 pandemic, most who have watched this film likely did so through word of mouth or because they are fans of one or both of the two lead characters, each an A-list actor with a large following.
Continuing the trend of biopics with A-list actors that perhaps aren’t interesting or important enough to warrant such a big-budget production, the Timothée Chalamet-led Marty Supreme (Dune, 
The 2025 film that felt the most real to me was one of the year’s final releases. Bradley Cooper’s (