You’ll remember it for the acting. Dwayne Johnson (San Andreas, Fighting With My Family) and Emily Blunt (Sicario, A Quiet Place) deliver a pair of Oscar-worthy performances in Benny Safdie’s (Good Time, Uncut Gems) raw and unapologetic The Smashing Machine. Based on the true story of Mark Kerr, a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter who entered the international Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) circuit in the late 1990s, The Smashing Machine chronicles Kerr’s first professional fight, his early success in Japan, his personal struggles with opioid addiction, and the ups and downs of a volcanic, often toxic relationship with his girlfriend, Dawn (Blunt).
Category Archives: Year of Release
Relay (2024)
How do you stay concealed in a world that makes it nearly impossible to do so? How can you safely hide your identity at all times when all it takes is a partial photo of your face for the wrong person to learn more about you than you could imagine that they could ever know? These are all-too-real questions tackled by Relay, director David Mackenzie’s (Hell or High Water, Outlaw King) taut thriller. In a day and age in Hollywood where you can be anything, a typical moviegoer’s wish is for a film just to be original. That is what Mackenzie brings with this subtle, yet intense, character-driven whistleblower thriller, while also delivering the best twist of the year, one that will invite us to reexamine the movie’s entire timeline long after our viewing is complete.
F1: The Movie (2025)
If, after watching the trailer for F1: The Movie, whether it be at the theater, on a streaming service, or while you’re watching YouTube, and you say to yourself, “That movie looks like it’s the Top Gun movie, but on a racetrack,” you wouldn’t be far off in your assessment. If you combine that feeling with other racecar or other inspirational sports movies, you’ll have the formula that makes F1: The Movie. Joseph Kosinski (Only the Brave, Oblivion) directed Top Gun: Maverick, so drawing similarities between the two films isn’t a stretch. Top Gun: Maverick was my favorite movie of 2022. It was a masterclass in storytelling, as well as what you could do with a production budget of $170+ million. That’s what makes it such a shame that F1: The Movie, with a budget exceeding $250 million, felt like nothing more than a retelling of better racing movies with smaller budgets, more originality, and stories and characters we genuinely cared about. F1: The Movie felt like a propaganda movie to entice viewers to follow Formula 1 racing.
For Love Of The Game (1999)
I first watched Sam Raimi’s (Spider-Man 2, A Simple Plan) For Love of the Game in the fall of 1999. It was the day after Virginia Tech defeated Clemson at Lane Stadium on ESPN’s Thursday Night Football. My dad had come down for the game. The day after, we went to see the Kevin Costner-led (A Perfect World, Field of Dreams) baseball drama. I’m a sucker for films that seamlessly incorporate flashbacks to advance the story better. For Love of the Game did just that, perhaps, at the time, in a way that I hadn’t seen before. 23-year-old me left my viewing thinking that it was one of the top 10-15 movies I’ve ever seen.
28 Years Later (2025)
When director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours) and screenwriter Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Civil War) teamed up for the 2002 film 28 Days Later, little did we know what a cultural phenomenon this under-the-radar, “Zombie if they were infected with Rabies” story filmed on an $8 million budget would become. Nor did we know just how well Boyle and Garland would complement each other, as director and screenwriter, respectively. Having become a timeless film that ignited a quarter century of zombie fiction movies, television shows, books, and video games, 28 Days Later modernized this horror sub-genre with its “what if the infected zombies moved at warped speed rather than at a snail’s pace” question.