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Good Boy 2025

Good Boy

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The role of the dog in a horror movie is a thankless one.  They appear early on, growl at something unseen and vanish into the night chasing after it.  The dog is found dead soon afterwards, a bad omen that the human characters never take seriously.  Good Boy turns that cliche on its head by telling the entire story from the dog’s point of view, an inspired choice that makes a run-of-the-mill ghost story harrowing and unpredictable.  In addition to its solid horror movie trappings, the movie is also a sobering meditation on what it means to be “man’s best friend”.

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One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another

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For writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, no subject is too unwieldy for a movie.  In his latest film, One Battle After Another, Anderson explores revolution, something most of us have only either read about or experienced from a safe distance.  He wants us to understand what it’s like to be a revolutionary and embeds us within a violent political movement so that we experience the emotional roller-coaster of their daily existence.  In his view, revolutionaries aren’t a faceless group of angry radicals wielding guns, but ordinary people who live and breathe a cause.

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The Roses

The Roses

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Married couples going at each other has been a reliable source of laughs for as long as I can remember.  The Roepers on Three’s Company.  The Bundys on Married with Children.  The Barones on Everyone Loves Raymond.  When you put two actors who can deliver zingers with deadly precision together, it’s comedic gold.  Which is probably what interested Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in The Roses, who play the eponymous warring couple in addition to being executive producers.  They knew how much fun they would have with this material, and that we’d enjoy watching them tear each other to shreds.  They were right.

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The Naked Gun (2025)

The Naked Gun (2025)

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When Liam Neeson agreed to star in The Naked Gun, he knew he had big shoes to fill.  If you’ve seen the previous movies in this franchise, you probably heard those words in the voice of leading man Leslie Nielson, a dramatic actor who quickly mastered the art of the deadpan delivery.  You may also have envisioned the 6’ 4” Neeson stumbling around in a pair of noisy clown shoes.  That’s the challenge with following up one of the greatest comedies ever made, filling those iconic shoes.  While Neeson is up to the challenge and the movie is funny, it’s not in the same league of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker films from the Eighties and early Nineties.

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Materialists

Materialists

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At first blush, Materialists looks like a typical romantic comedy, where an attractive single woman is forced to choose between two suitors.  Option A is the handsome, rich, older man she’s just met and could give her everything she wants.  Option B is a man closer to her age who’s scrapping by, but who she connects with because they were once in love.  Since both options are good–for different reasons–the fun is in waiting for the heroine to make her choice.  Although Materialists follows the same formula, Celine Song’s follow-up to her wonderful Past Lives aims higher.  It invites you to reflect upon your dating experiences and asks, how did you end up with the love of your life?

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Dangerous Animals

Dangerous Animals

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Horror movies have always given sound advice of where not to go on your vacation.  For example, you really shouldn’t stay at that ominous-looking hotel up on the hill (Psycho), or your friend’s cabin in the middle of the woods (Evil Dead), or that hostel in Slovakia (Hostel).  Dangerous Animals suggests that despite the obvious reasons for visiting Brisbane’s Gold Coast in Australia, you probably don’t want to go there either.  Because even an exciting tourist activity like swimming with the sharks may very well end up being unexpectedly life-altering.  But if you really can’t resist, definitely let your loved ones know what your plans are before you climb aboard that boat.  That way, they’ll know where to start searching for your body parts when you go missing.

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The Amateur

The Amateur

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The Nerd Identity.  The Geek Ultimatum.  Although it may sound like I’m being snide, both of those fake titles describe The Amateur perfectly.  The movie isn’t about an extremely capable one man wrecking crew out for revenge, like the characters played by Matt Damon, Jason Statham, Denzel Washington, for example.  Instead we have Rami Malek, who nobody would ever describe as being physically threatening.  He has the body of a man who’s probably never set foot in a gym, and if he ever did it was to reboot the WI-FI router.

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