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 (Past Lives) Materialists won’t earn any Oscar nominations. It had lukewarm aggregate scores (77% critics, 65% audience on Rotten Tomatoes, 6.2/10 on IMDB, 70 on Metacritic). These two things, combined with a plot that didn’t pique my interest, made me think this movie wouldn’t see the light of day. However, it felt like every movie influencer I follow kept singing its praise, with many in their end-of-year Top 20. It was enough to give it its fair chance.
Category Archives: Romance
Little Fish (2020)
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.
Hamnet (2025)
Hamnet was the one film of the year that you expected to feel the most heartbreaking emotions from. It had all the elements, including glowing reviews from film festivals held months before its release. Though still relatively new to the director’s chair, Chloé Zhao has a penchant for directing a couple of super affecting movies in The Rider and Nomadland, for which she won her first Oscar. Add, perhaps, Hollywood’s next leading man in the already accomplished Paul Mescal (Aftersun, All of Us Strangers, Gladiator II) as William Shakespeare, and equally young and accomplished Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter, Beast, Chernobyl) as his wife, Agnes along with the tragic play Hamlet, and this had the formula for a film that would leave an entire audience sobbing by the ending credits. Unfortunately, Zhao never took us there in her tender, though underwhelming Hamnet, the true story of William and Agnes’s son, who inspired Hamlet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most recognized and revered play behind Romeo and Juliet.
Babygirl (2024)
One of the most divisive films of 2024 was Halina Reijn’s (Instinct) Babygirl. Much of this may be due to the film being Reijn’s follow-up to the highly successful Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, while some of this may be due to the film’s taboo topic of a workplace affair between a superior and subordinate, revolving around domineering and submissive sex. Some filmgoers likely lined up on opening night to see this much-talked-about movie since its 2024 Venice International Film Festival screening. For many others, this would be a film they could never watch. While I am willing to give most films a fair chance (at least 10-15 minutes), Babygirl is not one I would have felt comfortable watching with someone else. It’s a film that takes a far-too-taboo subject for most social settings and groups to discuss and gives it a home. However, while the film felt genuine and honest, Babygirl did not venture into the lanes we may have wished for. Presumably, what we thought would occur did exactly that. While it did those things well, many may be disappointed that it didn’t aim for something more profound. I lay somewhere in between.
Far and Away (1992)
There have only been a handful of movies I’ve been able to call my favorite of all time. From 2015 to the present (February 2024), it has been The Revenant. The Town had a few years’ run before that. Before that, the honor belonged to The Shawshank Redemption, holding it for many years after wrestling it away from Braveheart, which had an equally long run. It dates back to the 1980s, The Goonies, and a surfing movie called North Shore, until Young Guns took the title in 1987. The ’90s were when my favorite film changed hands the most, full of some of the first Rated R movies I saw in the theater, including Flatliners, True Romance, Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, and Ron Howard’s (In The Heart of the Sea, Rush) sweeping romantic adventure, Far and Away.