I’m a sucker for Joel Edgerton movies. I’ll give any movie that he’s in a chance. I first learned of him when I saw the vastly underrated Warrior. This film follows a fairly predictable sports-drama formula. Still, for me, it was elevated to a Top 100 all-time movie by the performances of Edgerton, Tom Hardy, and Nick Nolte. Edgerton continued to impress with The Gift, a film that he both starred in and directed. Since then, he’s had memorable performances in movies that critics received well, but didn’t do well at the box office. Loving, Midnight Special, The Green Knight, It Comes At Night, and Boy Erased all earned Rotten Tomatoes critics’ scores of >80% fresh, yet each failed to reach $20 million at the box office. While I didn’t particularly care for any of those five movies, Edgerton continued to impress.
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.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)
Occasionally, poorly received biopics are victims of having all the necessary elements in place, except for a compelling story. One notable example is the 2009 film Invictus. Filmgoers had been clamoring for a biopic about Nelson Mandela. When Clint Eastwood signed on to direct a movie starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela, it seemed like a lock that the film would be, at the very least, a best picture candidate. Eastwood, with three Best Director Oscar nominations (Mystic River, Letters from Iwo Jima, Million Dollar Baby) over the previous half dozen years, was at the peak of his behind-the-camera career. Freeman, also at the height of his career, had been just about everybody’s favorite choice to play the South African anti-apartheid activist turned politician, whenever the right opportunity arose. And yet, we ended up with a movie that revolved around a rugby team attempting to qualify for the 1995 World Championship. Invictus wasn’t a bad movie. By many accounts, the film was a success. It earned positive scores with critics (75% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, 7.3 on IMDB, 7.4 on Metacritic). While it failed to break even domestically ($38 million in revenue on a $60 million budget), it earned an additional $85 million internationally. While Freeman did earn an Oscar nomination for his portrayal, many of us wonder what could have been had the film centered on a more compelling story.
The same could be said of Scott Cooper’s (Hostiles, Out of the Furnace) Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, the 2025 Bruce Springsteen biopic. The film could have touched on various aspects of Springsteen’s life. It chose to center on the time around his writing of his quiet, retrospective Nebraska album.
Continue reading Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)
The Long Walk (2025)
Sometimes it’s tough not to recommend a good movie. While there are exceptions to the rule, they are rare. Francis Lawrence’s (Red Sparrow, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1) adaptation of Stephen King’s 1966 novel The Long Walk is one of those. I imagine his book wasn’t overly controversial when it was published, particularly given that media, such as novels, didn’t have the same reach they do now. Likewise, Stephen King was still a relative unknown. In fact, he wrote this novel under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. That is all to say that a work of fiction that dealt with something as dire as this story’s plot likely wouldn’t have seen the light of day. Nonetheless, once King earned the “King of Horror” nickname, his bloodthirsty fans would undoubtedly search for and find his earlier works.
The Smashing Machine (2025)
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).