Honorable Mention for the Best of 2025 List

K-Pop Demon Hunters

• I’ve already talked about how much I liked this movie on the “A Good Story Well Told” Podcast, so you can check that out there.
• One question I continue to have about this movie: “Golden” is the first song in the movie, but doesn’t it give the whole plot and character arc away? “Put these patterns all in the past now / And finally live like the girl they all see / No more hidin’, I'll be shinin’ / Like I'm born to be.” Surely that was supposed to be the song at the end of the movie, but it was such a bop that they put it at the beginning and trusted us not to pay attention to the lyrics. But now it’s played on the radio for almost a year and every time it bugs me that she shouldn’t be singing that until the end.

The Phoenician Scheme

• The only director that automatically gets me to buy a ticket these days is Wes Anderson, and he keeps failing to disappoint me. As I mentioned before, Del Toro is great here as a wealthy wheeler-dealer trying to pull off a caper with the help of his nun daughter.

Train Dreams

• I really liked how this movie attempted to counterbalance many other movies set in similar times and places, which often claim that “It was a time when life was cheap and everybody would kill you as soon as look at you.”  But I think this one goes too far in the other direction. Can you imagine how annoying life would be if everybody was this philosophical all the time?
• Two pet peeves in this movie:
• When he visits the woman living on her own in the fire tower, who wasn’t expecting visitors, her hair is far too pretty. (As seen above)
• When our hero visits the city we have one of the hoariest cliches of all time: He watches a broadcast on a TV in a store window. Can that trope please die?

Frankenstein

• I basically felt the same about this movie as I felt about The Substance: It was great, but you just can’t make a 2 ½ hour movie with this much gore. Super-gory movies should be capped at 2 hours long. As with that movie, one is left with the impression that you could simply cut out half an hour of gore and get the movie into fighting trim.

Tomorrow: The real list finally starts!