Winter-Spring 2025-2026 Movie Preview

I'm getting back to my periodical entry, with a monthly selection of what's announced for the next half of the year. The "award movies" season is starting, so in theory we should have enough choice, although among what's below I don't think there are many qualified for this.

December has plenty to offer, but despite the stellar reviews I'll keep my doubts for the recently released "Hamnet". I can believe that Jessie Buckley does an Oscar worthy role, but I don't have any trust in Chloé Zhao's direction after the "Nomadsland" experience, out of which there's not much to remember, so I'll skip the trailer for this one. Another production that already got some decent reviews is "Nuremberg", and the patient-psychiatrist relationship between Hermann Göring and Douglas Kelley is indeed a movie subject. Again, however, the script seems a bit too Hollywood-ish, with enough overacting that transpires into the trailer, and which doesn't really seem to capture the case complexity (Kelley was a movie subject after Nuremberg as well). I think this still keeps some documentary value, and overall as a movie = including production and the technical side, it seems to deliver something ok-ish.

If I should choose only one movie for December out of what has a released trailer, that would be "Dust Bunny". The direction + script by Bryan Fuller, as his first big screen movie, doesn't promise much (even worse, he's responsible for a part of "Star Trek: Discovery", the only undigestible series from the entire franchise). Still, the trailer gives a hint of "Leon" mixed with a surreal fantasy a la "Sucker Punch" (underrated), so maybe it has some chance to move out of the classic Hollywood action. It depends how much movie time it spends on CGI with flying bullets and stuff.

I decided to mark "The Housemaid" too for the December list. Paul Feig has made plenty of mediocre movies but also a gem among them, "A Simple Favor" (the first; the second, more recent, I didn't have time to see, is down below in terms of ratings, and I don't see much sense for it anyway). We'll see if the chemistry between Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried here will come out as good as it was between Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. In "A Simple Favor" the script helped a lot, with a solid touch of dark humor; here it seems we'll just have the dark part, without the humor, but we still have some basis in a bestseller novel, so, we'll see.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to see a festival screening for "These Final Hours", a indie production of an Australian director, Zak Hilditch, with the story set on the end of the world, awaited as a cataclismic phenomenon, somewhere on the coast of down under. It wasn't a masterpiece, but what was left from there was some warm feeling (no pun intended, given the cataclism) felt like that on the apocalyptic background setting. In January we have an expected release for "We Bury the Dead", yet another zombie horror, directed and written by the same Hilditch, not so indie this time, however. I'll keep my opinion that this subgenre is not like any other horror, as long as it keeps the early line settled by George Romero, with his "of the Dead". The touch there is set mostly on the psychological side of inter-human relationship in a dystopic environment, and much less on the horror. There are many examples of this, like "The Crazies", "World War Z", "I Am Legend" and "The Walking Dead" as a series, despite all its soapy bits. The same category would also cover another more high-profile production announced for January, the 4-th iteration from Danny Boyle's "28 ..." series - "... Years Later: The Bone Temple". Only that it's not directed by Danny Boyle this time, and it seems to me that there's already quite a lot overexploitation of the setting there compensated with blood and gore to cover it up. So, if I'd have to choose between the two, I'd go for the Australian backed one, as long as it won't get too corrupted by Hollywood during production. s

To bring something a bit different to the list, for the beginning of 2026, we also have a French crime mystery frantuzesc, "Vie privée", released with an early screening at this year's Cannes, starring a Jodie Foster in a French-speaking part of a psychiatrist set somewhere between Maigret and Poirot. We'll see to which one is closer when the official release comes out in January.

"All You Need Is Kill" is the original Japanese manga of the story in "Edge of Tomorrow", one of the best SciFis produced by Hollywood during the last decade. Well, I might be slightly subjective, given when I watched it and the impact it left with the whole idea of a repeated cycle of the temporal perception. Nevertheless, the movie is widely regarded as underrated. Getting back to the Japanses version, unfortunately this was left only on paper until recently, when it finally got some screen time in an anime announced for January. The teaser says almost nothing + I'm not very thrilled by the graphich style. However, given the subject, it's something to keep en eye on, and for who's willing to find out more details, the second clip below, from about seven years ago, provides an extended comparison between the US version and the Japanese manga.

"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" lands in cinemas in February, being a joint effort of Gore Verbinski (directing) and Matthew Robinson (script). The first is more known for the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series, but he also directed other better movies, although underrated, the last being "A Cure for Wellness", a thriller from 2016. A plus of Verbinski is his versatility on switching genres - for instance we also have "The Lone Ranger" - a western with some nice accents of dark comedy, "Rango" - an Oscar awarded animation, "The Ring" - a reference in the horror genre. Matthew Robinson got known to me for his supposed involvement with the sequel to "Edge of Tomorrow", mentioned before, another previous reference I know being just "Love and Monsters" which was ok, although a bit Hollywood-ish. Here the trailer builds up a similar impression, so I'll keep lower expectations on this, but who knows? Maybe we'll have a suprise.

On my February list, I also marked "How to Make a Killing", a dark comedy written + directed by John Patton Ford, his second movie after "Emily the Criminal" from 2022. The previous one was lifted a lot by Aubrey Plaza, the reason I've watched it after all, so I might be subjective, but anyway her part there was quite different from other roles. This movie leaves an impression of having a more solid/complex script, so I'll give it a chance.

I'm not watching slasher horrors for quite some time, but I couldn't let February go without "Scream 7", especially considering that Neve Campbell returns one more time as Sydney Prescott, backed by Kevin Williamson which wrote the scripts of the series by its 4-th iteration if I'm not wrong. This time he took as well the directing prosition, so we'll see what results from this. However, after the passing of Wes Craven, Williamson is probably one the most qualified persons for the job. Despite the commercial feeling it manifests, I doubt there's any other slasher horror series to maintain a decent average level for so many years, to exert so much influence on the genre, and to keep a perfect balance between the horror, the dark comedy and the teenage drama, which brings me back every time to a nostalgic feeling on the times when I've watched the first "Scream". And again, Sydney is back ;)

The trailer for "Project Hail Mary" already says more than enough, but there aren't many SciFis out there, and neither trailers out for this spring. So I'll stop to this option for March. After all Drew Goddard (script) also has "The Martian", "Bad Times at the El Royale" and "The Cabin in the Woods" in his CV. So, it can't be very bad.

There's not much to choose for April either, and I don't trust sequels, but again, let's keep some hope for "Ready or Not 2", given that the movie kept the team from its first iteration. With all the red paint that was spilled, that was surprisingly good. The subject is quite straightforward and probably won't provide much surprise, so if this manages to get to at least 2/3 from the level of the first that should be acceptable I guess.

Instead of releases announced for May, where we would have some "Star Wars" spinoff or a sequel to "Mortal Kombat" (to be fair that seems to provide at least some self-irony), I preferred adding to more titles, already released in their home country I assume, but still not distributed throughout Europe. So, with an undefined release date for next spring, we have as well "No Other Choice", the last Korean production by Park Chan-Wook ("Oldboy" + the rest of the Vengeance trilogy, "Thirst" and others), featuring again Lee Byung-hun as main lead, with some extra wrinkles maybe, but still like in possession of an anti-aging formula, and also "Fabula", a Dutch production, which looks like a sort of Guy Ritchie movie in a more continental version.

That's about it. I've chosen a slightly more extended variant that in the previous rounds, from more than one year ago, to compensate a bit the long break. Hopefully it's useful for somebody + and I also hope that I didn't mess it up too often - with previews you never know.

18 - Paprika (2006)

Back. The annual aniversary occasion seemed like a good moment to try a comeback, although I don't estimate frequent entries for the upcoming months. During this one year break I've watched some movies, not so many as back in the early blog days, but there were some titles good enough for this occasion:

• "Conclave" - probably the best movie as "full package" seen over last year
• "Mickey 17" - very underrated
• "Straume" - just in case somebody thinks a movie can't work without having dialogue in it
• "Bugonia" - the Lanthimos/Stone tandem still works, new episode, sufficiently different from the previous to counter some criticism on increasing monotony in the collaboration
• "La sociedad de la nieve" - hard to watch, but it's worth it
• "The Brutalist" - a bit too long, but it's worth it
• "Anora" - good, but slips towards guilty pleasure
• "Companion" - was expecting a guilty pleasure, but good
• "Alien: Romulus" - surprisingly good, above Fincher and Jeunet's iterations, below Scott and Cameron, practically the best comeback of the series since '86
• "Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl" - "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" of 20 years ago is probably more funny (damn, I'm old), but this gets close to it
• "The Accountant 2" - not as good as the first one, but still sufficiently original to move out from the classic action pattern

and there are others too. However, I picked something older for today's entry, "Paprika", probably not as good as many of the above. However, it's the last I watched, and by a strange multi-layered coincidence it really got to me. Among its layers there's a metaphor of cinema as a "reality escape" equivalent to dreams = got synced well with a blog revival.

The movie is the last anime of the 4 produced by Satoshi Kon during his short time span in this world. I've heard about these, but not being very into the genre I kept ignoring them. Until three days ago, since when I've seen the current one in split pieces. Initially, it didn't catch me enough to see it to the end, but still, finally reaching its end after a second break, I understood why I didn't give up. Let's get a bit into the subject: in a not so far future, DC Mini, a new device invented in a research institute permits connecting to a person's dreams. The action revolves among several characters, mostly the employees of the respective institute, among whom a psychiatrist takes advantage of the device to interact with her patients, via an alter ego: Paprika, and in particular with one patient, a policeman plagued with isomnia and haunted by recurrent dreams. The story gets complicated when the DC Mini prototype gets stolen, and as consequence an increasing number of victims starts popping up, manifesting a strange behavior, where the dream dominates the reality. Further, the action revolves against investigating the theft, but more details would result in spoilers, so let's stop here with the story.

"Paprika" has a literary basis, and it's often referenced as an inspiration source for "Inception". I wouldn't say that is more present there than P.K. Dick's "Ubiq". Indeed, there is a common theme of "dream access", which is central in "Paprika", but we have a different story, with a completely different meaning. A story for which its development convinced me that chaotically nuanced surrealism it's not something specific for Hayao Miyazaki + Studio Ghibli in Japanese animes, because we have plenty of it here too. And that's the minus, which at some point makes the movie slightly entangled and hard to follow, not being clear anymore what happens in reality and what in the dream world. Still, finally we get that meaning I was referring to above.

On the plus side, the movie excels technically, at least for an anime. We have scenes that include volumetric nuances to enhance the perspective, a game of lights, and others, very nicely worked out. The editing helps enhancing the impact. We have a soundtrack which cannot get unnoticed, even just for a track that maintains the impression of a chaotic dream with a bunch of harmonic overlaps, where if we extract just the melodic line on a single track, what results is constrastingly calm (see the keys variant below, even though it's with an active reverb/sustain + a high pitch).

That's what the end of the movie gives you. An impression of getting through a rollercoaster, but leaving enough to you to extract whatever metaphor you want from the dream :) = sufficiently complex to interpret by desire. From a balance between live your life vs. regrets to... but I said, no spoilers ;)

Rating: 4 out of 5 ( for the anniversary occasion, otherwise I would've got stuck to 3.5, too much metaphor can be tiring :) )

PS: And still, spoilers :P press play by choice - although that's probably the most obvious metaphor (pretty much what I wrote above):

17 + Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) + blog break

"The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too." This is how "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", ended in 1991, 33 years ago. Now, after these 33 it looks to me that the world is more worried about hypothetical scenarios, either like being wiped out by the AI like in the movie, or getting back to the dark ages when the demographics of a place didn't matter in face of any invaders, or other apocalyptic outcomes. The essence of the last phrase above is sort of lost, given that in the objective reality some die stupidly in overfinanced armed conflicts while others die stupidly in underfinanced hospitals. But when I started this blog, 17 years ago, I didn't do it for politics...

When I started this blog 17 years ago I did it with a personal top 5, and "T2" was just out of it at that time, after watching "The Jacket". I don't have a top 5 anymore, and I'd like to rewatch "The Jacket" because I don't remember it very well. But, by chance, I recently got to see a TV screening of "T2" that somehow came at a moment when I needed it. So, I thought it's the proper time to fix the issue of including this on my blog. I doubt, however, that it does make much sense to discuss the subject of very well known movie, so I'll just stick to a couple of ideas.

I had the privilege to watch "Terminator 2" for the first time in a movie theater, I think in 1992, when in Romania the distribution of made in Hollywood movies just started expanding, with some delay after the official release dates. I was either 9 or 10 years old, and my father decided to take the family out to see a movie, despite the fact that he never was too much into SciFi. The motivation were the visuals, which it was said they're over anything that was released to cinema until then. Re-watching the movie many times, and many years after, I can only say that from this perspective, it sticks to a very select category, maybe together with the first two in the "Alien" series and a few others, where the effects don't show much of their age. The visuals are complemented by one of the two scores (the other being "The Serpent and the Rainbow") that impress through their expressivity considering the specific minimalism of Brad Fiedel, a synth oriented composer, who wasn't used much in the Hollywood mainstream, given that the specific sound lost its trend afer the '80s.

I was saying above that my father was never much into SciFi, but "T2" somehow got to him. And probably it did because the script of "T2" is not one of a deep SciFi, like the "Matrix", which builds up on the same ground idea, but a script that's anchored in a real life context, and besides the credibility factor this creates as well an empathic factor. It's also using the concept of time travel in probably the most direct way, by making an effective journey to the past in order to change the future. But "T2" is not out of nuances, some of which I only see now. For instance, for somebody who watched the first movie in the series in chronological order before "T2" (not my case), at a first watch of this one, excluding spoilers, for a good part of the movie, you couldn't know that Arnold isn't still the evil character and not the positive hero. And there are others too.

Probably what makes "T2" detach from other movies directed by James Cameron, generally lacking depth, is the the contrast it brings at the end on this. A terminator cannot self-terminate, but it can pragmatically decide when it would be the proper time to end its existence, even though it understands the tears of the child who attached to it. In some sense... you could interpret this as not being our right to decide when it's the time to leave, but we could though pragmatically evaluate when it would be most "appropriate" to have an exit from this world, and if that's really the the case, we might get it from -somewhere- ... The problem is that I don't really know who has the right to evalueate this, and maybe sometime it must be considered that a sequel is needed ( "T3" wasn't that bad :) ). Well... it's a way too look at it, a movie is a movie, life is life, and I'm not very objective these days...

It's the first time in the history of this blog when I'm going to close the entries for this year at a number of one digit only, so I'm going to make a wish of "Happy Hollidays!" in advance. I've had blog breaks before, but now I think it's the moment to say stop for longer time. Still, as pragmatic I could see an exit at an anniversary moment, a sequel might be needed someday. So, depending on how -somewhere- it will be decided or on how I will decide, "I'll be back"

Rating: 5 out of 5 ( I said I must fix leaving this out in 2007 ;) )

The woods...

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

(“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, Robert Frost, 1921)

(“Telefon”, 1977, written by: Peter Hyams, Stirling Silliphant, Walter Wager)

Dune: Part Two (2024)

Better late than never.. I know that it's probably not of much use an entry about "Dune: Part Two", now, at almost five months after its release, but this year I didn't have much time for movies, and even less to get to see one in cinema. So, finally reaching a couple of less busy days since a while ago, I'm trying to catch up on what I messed. And I'm trying to be selective.

I think there's not much to be said about the subject. Probably for who doesn't know already what's this about, the best recommendation would be to watch "Dune: Part One", or to go for a cliche line like: before "Game of Thrones"/"Star Wars"/"any other epic SciFi involving an empire and a twisted fight for power between rival factions" there was "Dune". At least since 1965, when the first volume written by Frank Herbert was released. Its latest adaptation is completed in the 2nd part, directed and partly written by Denis Villeneuve. The movie resumes the action from the exile of Paul Atreides joined by his mother in the desert along the indigenous fremens population, hunted by the raids of house Harkonnen, the established ruler of planet Arrakis.

I don't remember what I wrote exactly about the first part, but I think what impressed me most were the visuals and less the rest. The impact of the visuals holds here too. I have a major regret that I didn't manate to see this on big screen. As a complete mix of cinematography + art direction + video editing, it's probably the best SciFi I've seen since "Sunshine" (with a mention for "Inception" in this interval). And I didn't forget about "Avatar" or others, but for any visual appreciation there's a dose of subjectivity. In any case, here the camera work goes more deeply as meaning, as in the references before - it's enough to have a look at the contrast between the visual tone warmth of the desert scenes compared to the monochrome coldness of the fight in the arena under the sight of barron Harkonnen.

I stick to my opinion that both Paul Atreides as well as Chani didn't get benefit of the best character casting, and the previous "Dune" versions nailed this better. The rest of the cast compensates this, and I believe it delivers for all the new introduced characters this time. The part that surprised me most in a positive way though, is that the whole tone of the adaptation deviates less from the line I knew from the original "Dune". There are still elements that seem to be changed for no particular purpose, like the execution of baron Harkonnen, which made me to Google search to confirm which is the written version. But it's not something that changes that much a general feeling, like it was somehow expected after the first part. Maybe Denis Villeneuve heard some criticism about it and changed the course towards a more conservative approach concerning the original material. But besides that there's also a perfect way to handle the "mise en scene" of the written stuff. I think it's extremely difficult to find an optimal way to handle the complexity of "Dune" that doesn't seem too stretched or too brief. Here, in thi "Part Two", I think we can see the optimal way.

Maybe I'm either too old or nostalgic, but for me the most impactful overall adaptation of the "Dune" universe remains the "Children of Dune" mini-series, with all its liberties taken from the written part. From what I remember, there they tried compacting more than what's in the volumes corresponding to the title. The series is, however, the sequel for what we have in this movie, and the story has its role in the impact. So, it remains to be seen how "Dune: Messiah" will turn out, which seems to follow. For now, leaving aside the technical part that cannot be compared, what I can say is that among the adaptations of the original novel, Villeneuve managed with "Dune: Part Two" to provide the best, overcoming clearly the previous two versions. And what we have here it's probably going to stick as a reference SciFi for many years to come.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5