Dispatch #48: Patrick Brown at the Movies

we've got a guest post, ladies and gents!

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Today we have a very special guest post!

The following piece, about the films of 2025, is written by the inimitable Patrick Brown, AKA my husband of nearly 20 (!) years, AKA the father of my three (!) children. Some of you might have enjoyed his Tumblr, The Feeling, back in the day; some of you might have enjoyed his hot takes at a dinner party or two. Some of you have no idea what pleasures are in store for you. The man watches a lot of films.

A few weeks ago, when Patrick asked if he could write about them for my newsletter, I said, Yes please. In my eyes, he’s a movie expert, especially compared to me, a doofus. Look at these texts he sent me last week, for instance:

duh

Okay, here’s Patrick:

When I was in college, a film professor of mine told me that you need to watch a film at least 80 times before you’re ready to write about it seriously. Most of the films on this list I’ve seen once or twice (and for a few of them, that was one time too many). I lead with this to properly set expectations: none of this is too serious. What follows are my thoughts on the new films I saw this year. Most of these are 2025 releases, though a few 2024s might have snuck in there. Fourteen of these I saw in the theater, two of them I saw on airplanes, with the rest being beamed into my living room by one streaming service or another.

I break films into five tiers: the best of the year, good films that are not quite at that level, other films worth watching, films to skip, and, finally, films I never finished. All of the movies in each section are presented in no particular order because ranking something first and something last is a foolish waste of time (unlike sorting movies into arbitrary tiers).

Here we go—

The Best of the Year:

The Girl with the Needle

Don’t read anything about this movie – don’t even read this little blurb right here! – and instead just watch it. Mesmerizing, horrifying cinema.

The Testament of Ann Lee

It’s simplistic to compare films to one another, a lower form of criticism to be sure, but in the case of The Testament of Ann Lee, it’s a challenge not to compare it to The Brutalist, given that both films, out in back-to-back years, are cowritten by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold (Fastvold directs Ann Lee while Corbet directed The Brutalist). So let’s get this out of the way first: The Testament of Ann Lee is better than The Brutalist. I’m glad that’s settled.

We’ll get to the obvious stuff here, but let’s talk for a second about the matte painting in this movie! If you watch carefully, you can see that many of the exteriors feature matte painting – essentially a trompe-l’oeil painting of a landscape or backdrop of some sort. This reliance on old-school craftsmanship gives the film a handmade quality and is appropriate given the subject matter (the Shakers were craftspeople, responsible for great furniture and for much of America’s baking tradition). In an era where every Apple series can travel the globe to shoot in any location it wants and movies retreat to CGI for 75% of the frame, the matte work in The Testament of Ann Lee lends the film a distinctive visual style that stands out from its contemporaries.

wow

But let’s get real, this movie succeeds or fails with the performance of Amanda Seyfried. Possessed of the biggest and best eyes in film, there isn’t much she can’t do onscreen. If I could go back in time, I would give her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Mean Girls (“I’m a mouse. Duh.”). She has already shown she can carry a musical, and if you ever doubt her acting chops, I’d direct you to this little bit of wizardry. You know she’s acting in that scene, because here, in Ann Lee, she can dance. And sing! The Shakers, afterall, were thrown out of England because of noise complaints (or so I gather).

Weapons

The most fun I had in a theater in 2025, without question. Watching it with a full house at 9pm on Tuesday, it absolutely killed. It elicited huge laughs, and then, when one of the characters stumbles, zombielike, from a seemingly haunted house, scissors held aloft menacingly, one person in the crowd said, “Oh, fuck no.” I giggled hysterically at the climactic scene at the end of the film where [SPOILER AHEAD] the children chase Aunt Gladys through walls, fences, and windows, and then ultimately tear her apart, a moment of pure cinematic catharsis without peer in recent memory.

Unfortunately, for a movie that’s so successful on so many different levels, Weapons is held back by some muddled thinking around its themes. Emily St. James wrote what I think is the best piece on Weapons (paywalled, at the moment), arguing, essentially, that the film is about child sex abuse. I think I agree with that take, but then what is with the floating assault rifle? And there is something unsatisfying about the culprit once again being an old woman (no shade to Amy Madigan, who was wonderfully horrifying). The result is an entertaining, compelling film that falls short of mastery.

Sinners

Damn. This was pretty ripping, right up until “That Scene.” You know the one I’m talking about: suddenly, Bootsy Collins, African drummers, and a troupe of Chinese folk dancers show up in the Mississippi Delta. I felt like this scene was too overtly arguing the film’s thesis, and frankly, beneath the quality of the rest of the movie. When we saw it together, Edan referred to it as a Coke commercial, and I think that’s pretty right on. You can respect the big swing of really trying something, but it fell flat for me.

That aside, this was a special movie. The first half, before the vampires show up, was sensational, and I could have watched another hour of that and been happy. The vampire parts were fine, but somehow less exciting to me than the historical drama that had been unfolding. After watching Bumblebee about ten times with Mickey, it was a shock to hear Hailee Steinfeld uncork this masterpiece of a line reading: “I heard you loud and clear but then you stuck your tongue in my cooze and fucked me so hard I figured you changed your mind.” Oh my.

It is a real shame that it appears that Wunmi Mosaku, who plays Annie, isn’t getting more love this awards season. She was a revelation and riveting every moment she was onscreen. Maybe I can give her an award. Wunmi Mosaku wins the Most Riveting Performance award at this year’s Patty’s (still workshopping the name of the awards). Lastly, while I appreciate that the post-credit scene ties into the plot so nicely, I also think post-credit scenes are annoying and should be illegal. Some of us are seeing these movies in the afternoon and have to get our kids like right after. We can’t be sitting through the whole credits. C’mon.

One Battle After Another

“Have you been drinking today, sir?”
“I’ve had a few.”
“A few what?”
“A few small beers.”

About two weeks after I saw One Battle After Another, I spotted a guy at Pasadena’s No Kings rally with an “A few small beers” hat. So there was at least one king at that rally.

This is Paul Thomas Anderson’s least mysterious, most easily psychoanalyzed film, returning to one of his frequent themes (no, not boners): the redemptive power of the family, biological or otherwise. Perhaps because I desire a little mystery, it doesn’t rank among my favorites of his. I do, however, admire the performances in this: Benicio Del Toro doing his thing, Leonardo DiCaprio’s befuddled fury, Chase Infinity, the incredible Teyana Taylor, Sean Penn as a human hard-on (see, you knew there’d be boners). Good stuff. The concluding car chase is the most innovative car chase since, I don’t know, The French Connection.

Friendship

The Hotdog Suit sketch from I Think You Should Leave is the defining metaphor of the last ten years of American politics. Nothing else fits the current moment quite so well. Friendship isn’t at that level, but it’s still a precision-crafted character study about a particular type of modern American dude, the Awkward Bad Hang. As a modern American dude myself (though hopefully not an ABH), I’ve often thought “Damn, I need to get some more friends.” What I have never thought, though, is that said friends might spontaneously burst into harmony during a Friday night basement get together. Perhaps I’m dreaming too small. The two funniest lines of dialogue from 2025 (non-A Few Small Beers division) are from this film – “I’ve been thinking a lot about your busty teen daughter” and “Let me just leave you with this: we should absolutely still be in Afghanistan.”

Good films, But a Level Below the Best:

The Mastermind

It seemed like Kelly Reichardt had found something regarding pace. Her last two films, First Cow and Showing Up, while hardly Safdie-speed, moved with an alacrity that I felt was missing in her earlier work. The first half of The Mastermind seemed to confirm this. Her small-time art heist film featured a distinctly Reichardtian (Reichardt-esque?) take on a lot of the usual heist tropes (putting the crew together, laying out the plan, etc.). Unfortunately, once the heist is over, the movie falls into a shambolic shuffle, saved only by a brief interlude with John Magaro and Gaby Hoffman playing a pair of O’Connor’s art school buddies.

Last year, the fashion newsletter Blackbird Spyplane (correctly) referred to Josh O’Connor’s wardrobe in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera as consisting of “pan-seared suits” that O’Connor makes look swaggy as hell. One of the pleasures of The Mastermind is its rich, fuzzy New England in the 70s vibes. Earth tones, wool sweaters, knit skirts, and corduroy abound. Josh O’Connor, for his part, adds another beautifully wrecked suit and a set of long-gone work boots to his repertoire, but before that, you’re treated to Josh O’Connor in a pair of flat front chinos and Keds. Josh O’Connor in an Oxford shirt and a crewneck wool sweater. Josh O’Connor in a broken down corduroy jacket…Nobody looks better in clothes on screen these days.

drip king

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

…Josh O’Connor in a clerical collar. More Gothic than the first two in the series, this latest edition of the Knives Out franchise is elevated by the performance of O’Connor (again) in the role of a novice priest wrestling, or boxing, I guess, with his personal demons. The cast is deep (does Glenn Close ever miss?), the twists are many, and if it’s a bit too long, the overall ambiance and humor is compelling enough. Mila Kunis plays a buttoned up, by-the-book police chief, and she never once gets to let her hair down. That’s the real crime here.

Marty Supreme

Marty Supreme opens as a costume jewelry version of Uncut Gems, with a synth score accompanying a trip through the body of one of the protagonists. While Uncut Gems emerged appropriately from the asshole of its protagonist, Marty Supreme equally apropos, centers on its hero’s striving, hustling, indefatigable sperm.

The sports movie portions of Marty Supreme are formulaic but well done. But your enjoyment of this film will likely hinge on how compelling you find the rest of it, as well as your appetite for watching an asshole do his thing (his “thing,” in this case, being relentlessly using those around him to further his aims). Production designer Jack Fisk is a legend for a reason, and Marty Supreme shows that he still has his fastball. There’s something so tactile and pleasing about how this film looks. As always, Josh Safdie gets great mileage from stunt casting (Kevin O’Leary, George Gervin, Tyler the Creator, Pico freakin’ Iyer, and, the king of New York himself, Abel Ferrara) and a rogue’s gallery of general New York types. What I can’t figure out is what, beyond pure shock value, Safdie gets from the several insane Holocaust references in this movie.

Lurker

I first saw Théodore Pellerin in the fantastic Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and he’s popped up in a few things since. But in Lurker he has a vehicle to show off his particular blend of yearning, intelligence, and smarm. Alongside Archie Madekwe, he carries this fun, creepy two-hander. The beats of the plot are predictable, but the performances and the overall vibe make up for it. No film before has so accurately captured the unique retail scene on Fairfax between Melrose and Beverly. All those shrink-wrapped sneakers…

Zootopia 2

Is this film about the Palestinian experience? Who can say? But the fact that one could even consider making such a statement about the sequel to a Disney animated movie speaks to the strengths of the film. Less reliant on overt animal metaphors than the first film (Get it – everyone at the DMV is slow, like a sloth!), this one delivers an effective allegory on ethnic cleansing. My theory is that all of the political undertones of the movie are there to do one thing: distract the audience from the fact that the two leads – a fox and a bunny – clearly want to fuck. There’s a scene, common to all buddy cop movies involving a man and a woman, in which the two partners have to infiltrate a fancy party. So they put on their dress-up clothes, and then see one another, and are like “Damn, I didn’t know you had it like that.” But again, it’s a fox and a bunny, so it’s unsettling, like a sitcom where the actors playing the brother and sister have sexual chemistry.

Hubba hubba

Les Phantomes (Ghost Trail)

This is a slow burn gem about a network of people (some Syrian refugees, some NGO workers) who try to track down and bring to justice the torturers from Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison. In a clever bit of cinematic tradecraft, the network communicates with each other by playing an online game of Call of Duty. I’ll use this movie to recommend Mubi. I think Mubi might be the best value of any streaming service I have. It highlights the need for curation. Ten of the movies I discuss here are streaming on Mubi.

Or Something

Or Something is a dark horse, co-written and starring the Subway Takes guy (Kareem Rahma) and filmmaker/comedian Mary Neely. It’s kind of an indie hipster version of Before Sunrise, a talky two-hander about two people getting more and more intimate with each other on an impromptu odyssey around New York City. I like a nice, tight 82-minute runtime, as well. Knock this out some Wednesday night instead of episodes of Property Brothers. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Eddington

We live in an era that gives power and voice to the ignorant in staggering ways. People who don’t believe in germ theory, people who think vaccines (or maybe Tylenol, who knows?) cause autism, people who think the moon landing was faked…these people run the government and occupy important positions in the culture. In this way, Eddington is rightfully the movie of 2025, despite being set in 2020. It is a movie for people who are doing their own research.

Eddington is a Western (though it’s also a comedy and horrifying, as well) about tribalism, ignorance, and the toxicity or failure of the family unit to act as a successful bulwark against the outside world. If One Battle After Another suggests that family is what will save us, Eddington takes a profoundly dimmer view.

When I saw Eddington, it felt at least forty minutes too long, and it seemed to have threads that don’t connect in entirely satisfying ways. Having said that, a few moments stand out: Joaquin Phoenix’s character heading out to confront a mob with a flak jacket and a tripod/selfie stick (complete with fill light). Austin Butler’s low-key insane story about being hunted in the woods by his father’s friends. The TikTok video a teenager makes of her dancing in bedroom with the subtitle “When you just finished reading Giovanni’s Room.” It wouldn’t surprise me if this film has more staying power than it might have seemed on its release. Of all the 2025 movies I’ve seen, this is one I’m most excited to revisit again.

Pavements

What to call this movie? A documentary? A pastiche? Who knows? I can’t even say whether the filmmaker and actors in this movie are in on the joke or if there is even a joke here somewhere. This is a mix of archival footage of Pavement from the 90s, present day scenes with the real band preparing for a reunion show, behind the scenes footage from the making of a biopic about Pavement called Range Life, and behind the scenes footage of the making of a musical that uses Pavement’s music. At times hilarious, at times bewildering, at times the sort of movie that makes you want to hit Stephen Malkmus on the head with a tack hammer (Oh, I’m too cool to be on Saturday Night Live, sorry!)…points for originality, though. This is infinitely more ambitious and interesting than the typical talking head rock documentary.

Jay Kelly

I wonder how I’d feel about this movie if it had been released in theaters by A24 or Neon. This is an admission that, for whatever reason, Netflix movies feel kind of cheap to me. Not that this movie is in any way cheap (you can’t spring for Laura Dern for two scenes and be considered cheap), but there’s something plastic or not entirely real about Netflix’s attempts at capital C Cinema.

Moving past that, there’s some good stuff here in Noah Baumbach’s version of 8 ½ or All That Jazz. Clooney is Clooneying all over the place, looking perfect and seeming kind of broken. One of the best scenes of the year is Billy Crudup’s method acting in the bar (watch it on Youtube if you don’t feel like seeing the whole movie). Is using all the Clooney clips at the end manipulative? Sure, but that’s cinema, baby.

Other Movies Worth Watching:

Die My Love

It’s hard for me to hate a movie that goes for it like this one does. It’s a noble attempt at poetic cinema, a film that relies on imagery and metaphor, and one that is comfortable allowing metaphor and reality to blur together, narrative impact be damned. Unfortunately, that creates a somewhat opaque character study of a woman going through postpartum depression (and maybe some other shit.) I generally like Jennifer Lawrence on screen, and I think she does admirably here with material that simply isn’t able to convey whatever it is that’s going on inside her head. The dreamy/nightmarish qualities of the narrative create confusion (was the wedding a flashback? Oh, apparently not) that pushes the viewer out rather than pulling them in. And why was so much of it shot day for night?

Companion

Whenever a new technology comes along, we first react with fear, and then progress to horniness. Is ChatGPT going to take our jobs? Probably. Can we fuck it, though? Probably! Companion is another in a long line of sex robot movies, films as varied in quality as the excellent Her and Ex Machina to the execrable Subservience. Companion is campier and less ambitious than Ex Machina, but I really liked it nonetheless! Judge me if you must, but this was fun, and the fact that it leaned into the fact that these are just fuckbots (as opposed to caregivers you fuck or robot coworkers you fuck, etc.) was refreshingly frank. The two leads work well together. Jack Quaid has all of his dad’s punchable charm, and Sophie Thatcher has one of those faces that’s so interesting it’s almost deformed.

The Amateur

I watched this on a plane, and in that context, it really delivered. As far as revenge-o-matics go, it wasn’t top tier, but was still worth its runtime. [SPOILER!] I was with this movie until the reveal that the bad guy is ultimately Michael Stuhlbarg. I just can’t get there. I find his face too kind or friendly to be truly menacing. In that regard, he suffers from John Ortiz Syndrome.

She Rides Shotgun

Another one I knocked out on a flight (shoutout United in-flight entertainment!). I loved this book about a dad on the run from a prison gang and trying to protect his tween daughter, so I was excited to see the adaptation. Some of the simplifications they made make sense, but unfortunately, removing all the prison culture stuff from this really defanged it, and frankly made it kind of nonsensical. That said, Ana Sophia Heger was very strong, and so was Taron Egerton, if you can get past the fact that he has a name like a Game of Thrones character. The last shot of this movie wrecked me and is one of the most moving scenes/shots of the year. I nearly burst into tears on my flight, but I held it together so the middle-aged man wearing head-to-toe terrycloth sitting next to me wouldn’t feel uncomfortable.

Eephus

One of my favorite novels of the last ten years is Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special, about a group of guys who get together every year to reenact the Monday Night Football play where Lawrence Taylor broke Joe Theismann’s leg. There’s a little bit of that DNA here in Eephus, which follows a group of guys during the last rec league game before their beloved baseball field gets bulldozed. This film is almost avant-garde in the way it eschews character backstory or context and instead just kind of lets it roll. The film follows the game from beginning to end and takes place in its entirety at the field. I found it meditative and pleasant, though the Wayne Diamond cameo pulled me out of it.



Movies to Skip:

Unfortunately, a lot of these are kids’ movies. I try to grade on a curve for those (last year, I saw Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and you know what? It wasn’t terrible), but even by my generous standards this was not a banner year for kids’ cinema.

A Minecraft Movie

Was this the worst movie I saw in 2025 or am I just getting old? I saw this with my kids not long after it opened, and somehow every kid in the audience already knew when to shout callbacks at the screen, as though this were the two thousandth midnight screening of Rocky Horror. There were like seven screenwriters associated with this, which is always a good sign (you can never have too many cooks in the kitchen, as the saying goes, please bring more cooks!), and the cast is a thrown together hodgepodge. I also did not realize that the director of this movie directed Napoleon Dynamite, so you can imagine my surprise when a car pulled up with an alpaca in the backseat. Talk about having only one move. That said, Mickey has watched this at least ten times, and he has never played Minecraft, so again, perhaps this is merely another example of the world passing me by. Unfortunately, the indefinite article in the title of this movie implies that we will be treated to subsequent Minecraft movies. There’s nowhere to go but up.

Anaconda

If watching Jack Black do his scatting-along-with-the-score-of-the movie thing is your brand of whiskey, then you’re very much in luck. Also Thandiwe Newton is in this movie! I know, I was surprised, too. Unfortunately, my review has to be incomplete here because Ginger decided this movie was too scary for her around the beginning of Act 2 and didn’t let us go back into the theater until almost the very end. This movie has caused Mickey to watch the original Anaconda (1997) approximately sixteen times. Additionally, today he announced that he and some fellow elementary students are making a remake of Anaconda (2025), and I’m in it. Mickey informed me that I’m “the first to die,” so…thanks for that, Paul Rudd.

The Phoenecian Scheme

I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much about this except a shot of Benicio del Toro sitting in a bathtub while a bottle of white wine chills in an ice-filled bidet. I think I liked it fine when I saw it, but it has faded away like so much early morning fog. The usual crew of people stand in front of the usual symmetrical backdrops. At this point, if you go to a Wes Anderson movie and you’re upset that it was like a Wes Anderson movie, that shit is on you. I don’t think this one is his best, but it’s also better than The Life Aquatic with Steve Zisou.

The Naked Gun

Pamela Anderson is perfect for the Naked Gun franchise. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a compliment or not.

The Materialists

“It’s getting kind of hard to believe this isn’t about the legs.”

Twinless

Aggressively Portland. Edan likes to talk a lot about how characters need to be specific and legible; I’m told she’s citing Philip Lopate. The characters in this film about grief and connection were specific alright, but not legible at all. For example, one character says he’s from Moscow, Idaho. “Not the one in Russia,” someone says, joking. To which he replies “Which one in Russia?” Ok, bro. This brand of quirkiness is a problem endemic to American independent cinema.

Caught Stealing

Against all odds, I finished Darren Aronofsky’s “gritty” crime thriller. For a genre film made by a director once considered an auteur, this was not particularly stylish. Matt Smith is unconvincing as a 1970s-style London punk rocker transported to 2002 New York. And I really don’t know what to make of Austin Butler. Is he kind of like the male Sydney Sweeney or am I just totally off base?

The Code

I can’t decouple my feelings about this film from my feelings about Dasha Nekrosova, and I suspect that will be the case for a lot of viewers. There are some funny bits here (the entire pump-and-dump NFT scam the boyfriend is doing and his concerns about being cancelled are good bits), but on the whole, this was a mess. I do really like Ivy Wolk, though. She’s got something.

Jurassic World Rebirth

Every Jurassic Park movie features kids in peril. You would think at some point they would try something else. Maybe a cute dog or something. Anyway, in this film, it isn’t even really dinosaurs who are the monsters, it’s dinosaurs who have been modified to become the rancor from Return of the Jedi.

Wicked: For Good

I never saw the first part of Wicked, which put me at quite a disadvantage for Wicked: For Good. But Ginger loved the first Wicked, and Edan sat through that one, so I drew the straw to accompany her and the other kids to the sequel. I was very confused. Wicked asks the question “Did you ever wonder how the Tin Man got that way?” and if your answer to that question is “No,” well, then this movie doesn’t have much to offer you. The only song I know from the musical was apparently in part 1, and all of the songs in part 2 were dirge-like exercises in characters singing dialogue back and forth at each other.

I’m not a huge fan of origin stories, which places me in opposition to, apparently, all other Americans. The magic of The Wizard of Oz lies partly in the wide-eyed wonder with which Dorothy (and by extension, the audience) gazes upon Oz – a land beyond explanation or imagination – like a New Yorker seeing the 10 freeway for the first time. Why would you want to ruin that with four and a half hours of explanation?

A House of Dynamite

The threat of nuclear annihilation felt very real in this film. What felt decidedly less real was Tracy Letts’ character’s excitement about the Major League Baseball All Star Game. Nobody, not even baseball fans, cares about the MLB All Star Game.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

This is the first Marvel movie I’ve seen since, I believe, Iron Man 2, so I can’t speak to whether this new phase or era of Marvel is better or worse than the ones that came before. It seemed fine to me. Lots of shots of Julia Garner’s gleaming silver ass. Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays a sort of Philip Roth character except he’s made of space rock.

Movies I started but didn’t finish

The History of Sound

Too short-fiction-y for my taste (despite Josh O’Connor’s boots). Also, I’m onto Paul Mescal, and I’m not buying his whole “Oh, I’m takin’ me mum to the Oscars” bit anymore.

After the Hunt

At one point, early in this film, Julia Roberts starts talking about teleology at one of those faculty cocktail parties that I assume only happen in movies. Somehow I made it through that, but I bailed when Andrew Garfield ordered Indian food (“Gimme that garlic naan.”) For all I know, Michael Stuhlbarg was the villain in this one, too. This movie had an omnipresent bus-stop ad campaign here in LA that featured Ayo Edebiri in a white button-down shirt and chinos, and I for real thought it was a Gap ad for like a month.

Thank you, Patrick! Everyone, tell us what movies you loved and loathed in 2025!