REVIEWSetc.

From the very first frame, Scarlet  (2025)  announces itself with confidence. The animation is flat-out gorgeous—bold in its color design, fluid in its motion, and constantly finding new ways to make a familiar kind of story feel freshly haunted. And yes, I’m always going to show up for a good revenge tale. Give me a wronged hero(ine), a righteous target, and a world that keeps twisting the knife. I’m in. What makes Scarlet  work as well as it does—when it’s working at full p

Today's movie offering comes via Amazon Prime, and it stars two of Hollywood's current hottest gets, Dave Bautista and Jason Momoa. I am looking at The Wrecking Crew . The Wrecking Crew is a new direct-to-streaming action-comedy that follows in the buddy cop vein of flicks where two heroic characters are paired together to take down shady ne'er-do-wells. It walks the well-tread path of movies such as Hot Fuzz (my favorite film of all time!), 48 Hour s, Lethal Weapon , and ot

It is sometimes very hard to choose a movie to watch. I have so many streaming services and so varied a taste and so many classic films I still haven't seen. I often think something along the lines of "Okay, it's time to watch a movie", but it will be forty minutes later before I choose anything. I open Prime, for example, and I scroll through their Most Recent Additions, and I scroll through their Most Popular, and I scroll through their various categories. I pick one or two

Within the Miami-Dade County police department is a specialized unit known as the TNT (Tactical Narcotics Team). Before we even get introduced to the members of the TNT, we see the unit lead, Captain Jackie Velez (Line Esco) get murdered in cold blood. It just so happens that there are rumors the TNT is housing dirty cops who, when busting a drug house, will wind up robbing the house and reporting far less cash than what was actually on-site. So it is only natural that Intern

As of this writing, it's January 12th, and I've already watched my second foreign language film of the year! I wonder how long it took me to watch a non-English movie in 2025? (Actually, the answer to that depends on whether Flow counts or not. It's a foreign made picture, sure, but it has no language to speak of) Anyway, today's movie comes to you due to the fact that I have seen a lot of Letterboxd friends log this movie recently--with pretty high scores for it!--and I deci

Bust out your fanciest formalwear because today's movie review is a Dutch offering that was in consideration for Best International Feature for the 2026 Academy Awards! Unfortunately, Reedland was not chosen as a finalist for that category at the 98th edition of the Oscars, but just to be in the picture and chosen as your country's offering is great recognition. So let's talk about a movie that came close to taking home Oscar gold (and had received multiple nominations at th

The Letterboxd video store is live and with it came a handful of festival darlings which, without distribution deals, were destined to fall between the cracks. The only English language film of the bunch, Alexander Ullom’s It Ends  serves as an excellent example of just what this selection of movies stand for. That being the type of movie you watch debut with a hushed audience in South by Southwest’s Paramount Theater or Telluride Colorado’s ice rink: thrilled to dissect with

Roofman was a movie that came out recently, and it was one that I had wanted very much to see in theaters. But I never got around to finding the time to do so; it came and left the cinema pretty quickly without leaving too much sign of its existence. Luckily, it was a short-lived break between its theatrical window and its streaming one, as Roofman debuted on Paramount Plus recently. Magic Mike himself, Channing Tatum, plays the lead here: the titular "Roofman", Jeffrey Ma

Every so often, I am reminded of how little I care for director Todd Phillips. I've written on this before , but it's something I come back to every now and again. If I were to look it up , I would see that Phillips' exact quote was "Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture... There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the fucking funny guys are like, ‘Fuck this shit, because I don’t want to offend you.’” The pro

(This review originally appeared in its entirety on scenethatreviews.com ) Hey there! Welcome to another review from 29th PÖFF | Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. This time I turn to the "Critics Picks' Competition" category for a film that just had its world premiere at the festival... China Sea (2025). Osvald (Marius Repšys) was a championship fighter who was nearly unstoppable in the ring. Though the television highlights we see of him winning a tournament in Japan is a

(This review originally appeared in its entirety on scenethatreviews.com ) Welcome back to another review from 29th PÖFF | Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival! This time, from the “Official Selection Competition”, we have a political scandal that threatens to upend an election. It doesn’t matter what the story is though. All that matters is time and patience in… No Comment (2025). Prime Minister Alma Solvik (Laila Goody) is locked-in and focused on the upcoming elections. The

( This review originally appeared in its entirety on scenethatreviews.com ) Who's ready for some reviews from the 29th PÖFF | Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival! First up, from the “First Feature Competition”, comes… Interior (2025). As we first meet Kasimir (Daniil Kremkin), he’s climbing out of a couch with a camcorder, while wearing nothing but underwear and socks. As he emerges from the department within the couch, he makes his way upstairs where he takes the camcorder a

(This review originally appeared in its entirety on scenethatreviews.com ) Welcome back to another review from 29th PÖFF | Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival! This time we are looking at a film from the “Baltic Film Competition” that follows a young child trying to process the complexities of a troubled home in… Fränk (2025). After yet another domestic incident at home involving his father, Paul (Derek Leheste) is forced from his home in the city to a small town to stay with

Mike ( Frank Dillane) is a street urchin in London, struggling to just get by. When we first meet him, he's chasing down a friend that's stolen his wallet. A scuffle ensues between the two men, one that is largely ignored by nearly everyone just casually walking by. Eventually, a decent man, Simon (Okezie Morro) steps in and breaks things up, even offering to take Mike for a bite to eat. As the two men begin to walk to a nearby bagel shop, Mike attacks Simon and steals his wa

When your favorite movie is from a particular sub-genre, it can mean one of two things. You either grade that sub-genre really kindly because you know you love it, or you grade it harshly because any competition has an uphill battle to measure up. With me, my favorite movie is somehow NOT from the horror genre, which shocks even me. No, my favorite film of all time is 2007's Hot Fuzz . That means the sub-genre we are judging today is the action-comedy. There is no shortage of

Some films tell a family story. Sentimental Value  feels like it wandered into your own, quietly rearranged a few memories, and then left you to sit with the mess. Joachim Trier’s latest is a father–daughter drama on the surface, but under that it’s a film about time, about the way we turn life into narrative, and about how cinema becomes a substitute language when we don’t know how to speak honestly to the people closest to us. It’s also easily sitting in my top ten of the

I know Netflix kind of hangs its hat on shows these days, but I have always been a movie guy, and I'm glad to see they still release so many new original films. I like television programs, sure, but they're an awful big commitment. Several seasons of several episodes, all lasting between thirty and sixty minutes each. Sometimes much more if you enjoy something like Stranger Things! That's a time commitment of, like, twenty-ish hours or so on a low average. The wife and I rece

A critical deep dive into Wicked for Good—its emotional resonance, standout performances, visual upgrades, and awards potential across major Oscar categories.

I need to watch more of the classic Universal Horror features from the 1930's through 1950's. I've seen a handful of them, sure, but there are several more out there. For instance, I have skipped The Mummy and The Phantom Of The Opera because I had heard they didn't quite measure up to the rest. But maybe I'll dig them anyway when I try them out. My favorites at the point to what I've seen are The Creature From The Black Lagoon , The Invisible Man , and The Bride Of Franken

I just recently, as of this writing, passed one hundred movies released in 2025 watched. In that hundred films, I've obviously seen a lot of movies in theaters and that were big, major releases ( Predator: Badlands was officially #100, for instance), but you don't get to that figure without finding a lot of independent flicks on streaming services. When you watch a lot of indie films--especially in the horror genre--you end up seeing a lot of films of a somewhat dubious qual