The 2025 Films I Didn't Watch

I write this post every year to acknowledge some of the movies that I've made a conscious decision to skip watching.  In some cases there's a reason, and in some cases there's just a lack of enthusiasm.  I've got very strong completionist tendencies, so I hope writing about some of these films this way will help me put any lingering doubts to rest.  So, here are eight films that didn't make the cut this year.   I reserve the right to revisit and reverse my viewing choices in the future. However, I still haven't watched anything from last year's list.

It's Never Over Jeff Buckley - I generally like music documentaries, but I've found that I have little interest in the ones about musical artists where I'm not familiar with their music.  Jeff Buckley is an obscure singer-songwriter who put out one album and gained a cult following.  I'm sure the documentary about him is very good, but I'm also sure that I'm not likely to get much out of it.  

Ballad of a Small Player - Edward Berger directs a gambling film starring Colin Farrell, in scruffy loser mode, set in Macau.  A few critics I like are adamant that this is a hidden gem, but I remain wary.  "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Conclave" were respectable, but I didn't particularly enjoy either.  What really sank this one for me, though, were the totally unimpressed reactions this got at Toronto and Telluride early in the season.  

The Assessment - I generally watch every weird, high-concept science-fiction and speculative fiction film I hear about.  "The Assessment" is supposed to be about a future world where couples have to pass an interview to have a child.  However, this is just an excuse for a movie where Alicia Vikander gets to screw with Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel for two hours.  Once I saw the trailer, which looked insufferable, I dropped it in spite of positive reviews.

Magazine Dreams - This one had Oscar buzz when it originally premiered at Sundance back in 2023, but the allegations against Jonathan Majors quashed them.  After changing distributors, the film finally got a very limited release this year, and reviews were very positive, but this was never the kind of film that I was going to enjoy, due to the punishing subject matter.  Once it was out of contention for the major awards, I took the excuse to ignore it.  

Good Boy - I like the concept.  I get the concept.  However, watching an entire movie of a poor dog in danger from supernatural forces struck me as an experience I had absolutely no interest in having.  This was also a tiny production made for $70,000, helmed by a relative newcomer, so I wasn't keen on having to deal with shoestring aesthetics on top of everything else.  I'm glad people enjoyed this, but I'm also very sure about my decision to keep my distance.

Eleanor the Great - This is Scarlett Johansson's directing debut, starring June Squibb as a newcomer to New York who is accidentally mistaken for a Holocaust survivor.  The situation snowballs into a learning experience for everyone involved, and the trailer didn't do anything to convince me that the movie was any better than its tiresome plot.  The critical response was fine, but everything about "Eleanor" comes across as too contrived for me to take.     

Christy - Sydney Sweeney plays a female boxer who deals with domestic abuse.  I promise that I steered clear of all the culture war uproar around the film, and I'm avoiding it simply because this is a female-led awards hopeful that doesn't have much going for it except a lead performance that hasn't really made any waves.  I skip a lot of similar films like the Daniel Day Lewis starrer "Anemone," and I don't feel too bad about skipping this one too.  

Keeper - I'm a fan of Tatiana Maslany, but I've given Osgood Perkins enough chances.  After "The Monkey," I need a break from his brand of horror for a while.  And there were more than enough excellent horror films this year to keep me occupied. 

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"The Plague" Gets Under Your Skin

First time filmmaker Charlie Polinger has made a nerve-wracking film about a group of twelve and thirteen year-old boys at a water polo camp.  Everett Blunck stars as Ben, who runs afoul of the established group dynamics of the other boys, where a kid named Jake (Kayo Martin) has started a cruel game to treat the oddball Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) like he has contracted a mysterious "plague."  Desperate to fit in, Ben initially goes along with the ostracism, but also finds he enjoys being around Eli, who doesn't seem bothered by the negative reaction.

There have been many films about bullying and the way that adolescent growing pains can turn kids into monsters.  However, I've rarely seen a film like "The Plague" that lays out the forces at play so clearly.  The kids' cruelty looks harmless, but is extremely hurtful, even in the earliest stages.  It's immediately obvious that all of the boys involved in the game are vulnerable in some way or another, and most are like Ben - going along because nobody wants to be in the target role.  The ringleader, Jake, is the kind of smirking little instigator that seems Machiavellian to Ben, but later scenes make it clear that this is a child who is processing a lot of negative emotions very badly, and his cruelty is learned.  He has no real idea of the consequences of his behavior, or that the game will end up spinning out of everyone's control.  

The performances from the young leads are very good, and the writing is perceptive enough to nail the behaviors and dynamics of kids this age, even if the specific vernacular might not be right.  Ben is guileless enough to say exactly what he's thinking most of the time, and when he tries to feign amenability or aloofness, he's bad at it.  Eli seems to have no self-awareness, which seems odd for a kid his age, but not unlikely.  I found myself getting frustrated with Ben and Jake, and had to keep reminding myself that these were seventh graders who may have never been away from home for an extended period before, and whose social skills were rudimentary at best.  The kids being so young certainly increased the emotional intensity of the film throughout, and I found myself hyperaware in even the most innocuous dialogue scenes.    

You have to suspend disbelief about some aspects of "The Plague."  For instance, the only adult presence at the camp seems to be the coach Daddy Wags (Joel Edgerton), who is aware of the bullying and does his best to intervene when things get out of hand.  However, the lack of supervision was something that I couldn't help fixating on.  This is a horror/thriller, largely told from the subjective point of viewpoint of a prepubescent kid, so was this an artistic choice?  Was Daddy Wags the only adult around because that's what it felt like to Ben, and the other adults simply didn't register for him?  Was this to suggest that the camp, despite catering to the kind of rich kids who would have the money to play water polo, was financially cutting corners?  Or was this simply because the "Plague" is a low budget film and couldn't swing the cost of more adult actors?

My instinct is to go with the first option.  "The Plague" does a lot with a little, whipping up some potent horror imagery out of swimming pools, darkened bathrooms, and institutional corridors.  I especially like the opening underwater shot, where the boys appear to be headless as they tread water.  The sound design is a marvel, using human voices as part of the soundscape in places where you might not expect them.  Water is a recurring motif, naturally, standing in for the subconscious.  

Horror fans may come away disappointed because there's only one real moment of gore, most of the chills are strictly psychological, and the story stays mostly grounded in reality throughout.  However, I came away extremely impressed with everyone involved.

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"The Night Manager" and "Fallout" Return

I'm grouping the reviews for the second seasons of "The Night Manager" and "Fallout" together, because they're both short ones, albeit for different reasons.  In the case of "The Night Manager," it's a good season with plenty to talk about, but the spoilers are unwieldy, and I feel that saying less is more.  As for "Fallout," the new season is worth some acknowledgement, but I don't feel that I have that much to add that wasn't already covered in my review of the first season.  So, here we go.  

First, the second series of "The Night Manager" comes ten years after the first, and really should be treated as a self-contained sequel.  Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) and Angela Burr (Olivia Coleman) parted ways after the death of arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper (Hugh Laurie), and Pine has been quietly working in intelligence under Rex Mayhew (Douglas Hodge) at the Foreign Office.  Contact with a woman named Roxana (Camila Morone) brings Pine to Colombia, where a major arms deal appears to be in the works.  The key figure is the mysterious Teddy Dos Santos (Diego Calva), who turns out to be a protege of Roper's.  We also get a new villain played by Indira Varma, and a new ally played by Hayley Squires.

We've swapped out directors, so Georgi Banks-Davies replaces Susanne Bier, but David Farr is back to script the whole series.  I'm happy to report that the quality hasn't fallen off at all, and the second season of "The Night Manager" is every bit as good as the first.  Thorny personal relationships and a very intense menage-a-trois are again at the center of the story, but the dynamics are different.  Hiddleston and all the returning cast are great, as expected, but the actor who really grabbed my attention this time around was Diego Calva, who I last saw in "Babylon," channeling a young Javier Bardem here to very good effect.  The new tropical setting is also very helpful in distinguishing this season as a different animal, with lots of excuses for everyone to get sweaty and disheveled.  As I mentioned previously, I do want to steer clear of spoilers, but I want to give the last episode special kudos for being one of the very best season cappers I've seen in a while, with a lot of good surprises, and the best set-up for a possible third series that may never happen.  And if it doesn't I won't even be mad. 

On to the second season of "Fallout," which follows Lucy, Cooper, Maximus, and Norm on their various adventures.  There's less of a piecemeal approach to exploring the "Fallout" world this year, and more of a commitment to sticking with the various storylines that are playing out.  Hank (Kyle McLachlan) and Steph (Annabel O'Hagen) become more prominent characters who also get their own narratives, and there are some fun new recurring characters, including those played by Kumail Nanjiani and Macaulay Culkin as prominent members of the Legion.  As promised in the last episode of the prior season, there's a lot of time spent with Lucy and Cooper in and around New Vegas, who learn that there was a Vault specifically for management located there, and Hank may be restarting certain experiments.  

Frankly, I wasn't too interested in the plottier parts of the season.  It's clear from pretty early on that the showrunners aren't going to provide any major payoffs, and they spend a lot of time setting up bigger conflicts down the road.  We have several factions preparing for war again, scuffles for leadership in both the Vaults and the Legion, and more revelations via flashback as to what Hank and his cohorts were up to in the past.  Cooper and Lucy are briefly on the outs with each other when their priorities clash.  Everybody makes some incremental progress - most notably Lucy, who becomes more comfortable with violence on her quest to bring her father to justice - but mostly it feels like we're playing the side quests.  

Eight episodes is enough to build up some stakes, so that the big, violent, season finale feels kind of meaningful, and one of the major characters gets a pretty good exit.  And that's not too bad for a show like this, which is still very dependent on the spectacle and the action.  The shock value of the gore and black humor have worn off a bit though, so this season isn't as fun.  However, it's still fun enough that I plan to keep watching.  

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"The Boys," Year Five

Parts of "The Boys" fandom seem to have vocally turned against the show in its last season, which is getting weirdly common with genre media these days.  I find this a little mystifying, because "The Boys" has been pretty consistent in quality throughout its whole run, and has even been released on a reasonable schedule - five seasons across seven years.  My pet theory is that it's the same old story.  Some of the fans expected the show to be something that it never was, and handled the disappointment badly.  "The Boys" did decrease in quality the longer it went on, ran short on ideas, started repeating itself, and had to juggle the same issues that all long-running shows do.  Still, I thought it ended just fine - better than "Supernatural," or "Preacher," other genre shows from the same creators.

The fifth season has its ups and downs.  Like "Daredevil: Born Again," events in "The Boys" mirror current events in 2026 to a startling degree.  However, "The Boys" has been purposefully reflecting the rise of MAGA and the alt right since the beginning, with Homelander standing in for Donald Trump.  Still, it's wild how some of the extreme escalations in Homelander's tyrannical behavior look an awful lot like what the Trump administration is actually doing, starting with our heroes incarcerated in a "freedom camp" in the season premiere.  The season's biggest storyline involves The Boys hunting for the means to create a plague that will only affect people with superpowers, and to prevent Homelander from obtaining Compound V, a substance that will potentially give him immortality.  After establishing total control over the US government, Homelander finds he's still miserable, so he turns to religion.  With the help of the superpowered televangelist, Oh Father (Daveed Diggs), he decides to create a new American belief system with Homelander himself as the supreme being.  

Beyond this point, there will be spoilers.

I suspect that one of the reasons certain fans of "The Boys" were so unhappy is that this season, is that it stays pretty small scale throughout.  There's no epic spectacle, no mass casualty events, and a fairly modest amount of property damage.  We do get our big showdown in the last episode, but it's not any more impressive than the showdowns we've seen in previous seasons.  The pacing is also fairly slow and meandering, not really building up to a major climax.  Instead, the season could be called a collection of false-starts, abrupt endings, and lots of indulgent nonsense that the creators wanted to try while they still had the chance.  There's an episode that's essentially a bunch of one-shot character shorts that at one point involves a lot of random celebrity cameos and a few "Supernatural" alums.  It's also very apparent that the creators are setting up storylines for other shows in "The Boys" universe - we're at three spinoffs so far.  This means some characters like Solider Boy really wear out their welcome, and nobody bothers to explain who any of these kids from the "Gen V" show are.  

Still, I was satisfied with the way things shook out, even if the season felt like it was running short of material.  This time there is no more pulling of punches or ducking out on the consequences.  The bill comes due and there are a lot of major character deaths.  Some of them should have probably happened earlier, but none of them feel cheap.  Endings are difficult, and I thought that the showrunners did the right thing choosing to focus on the characters instead of the carnage.  My favorite storylines this year had to do with the Vought toadies like Ashley and Firecracker dealing with their complicity in Homelander's reign of terror.  Ashley becoming Vice President and literally growing a second face on the back of her head (Who has her own personality!  And is telepathic!) is so much fun. 

Sure, there are missteps.  Everything involving Soldier Boy and Sage is pretty underwhelming.  Kimiko being able to talk felt kind of pointless, though clearly it needed to happen.  I wish some of the big character moments, like Hughie finally standing up to Butcher, were given some better buildup.  Honestly, I haven't been very invested enough in the show since the first season, so its slipping quality simply didn't bother me much.  The ending was telegraphed long in advance, and the fact that they stuck it was all I really wanted.          

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My Top Ten Episodes of 2006-2007

Below, find my top ten episodes for the 2006-2007 television season below, in no particular order.  And a few spoilers ahead, including that one episode of "The Wire."  I'm also cheating and counting a certain two-parter as a single episode.

30 Rock, "Black Tie" - Let's start off with the episode of "30 Rock" where we meet Jack's ex-wife, played by Isabell Rossellini, and Paul Reubens shows up as a degenerate Habsburg prince.  This was the first episode of the show that really clicked for me - the absurdity, the character dynamics, and of course the amazing use of the guest stars.  This is also the episode that got closest to putting Jack and Liz together, which thankfully never went anywhere.

Heroes, "Company Man" - The first season of "Heroes" was a phenomenon, and the best episode of that season was the spotlight episode for Jack Coleman's shady Noah Bennet character.  Written by Bryan Fuller, it's a villain/antihero origin story that shows how Bennet operates as a morally ambivalent agent of "The Company," who is nonetheless a good father who will make big sacrifices as needed.  Alas, the show was never this strong again.  

Battlestar Galactica, "The Occupation" - I really liked the New Caprica arc.  This season premiere clues us in on what's been going on with all the characters, and the new status quo and conflicts that have developed.  Gaius is a collaborator, Tigh is leading the resistance, and Starbuck is in prison under the thumb of a Callum Keith Rennie Cylon who is in love with her.  Lots of real world parallels and gutsy ideas are in play here that I really enjoyed. 

Dexter, "Born Free" - This episode was spoiled for me, as I didn't see it until the network broadcast in 2008, but I adored it.  The first season of "Dexter" is still probably the best one, and the truth about the Ice Truck Killer was one of the show's best reveals.  The performances are key to the episode's intensity, with Michael C. Hall and Christian Camargo taking no prisoners as a season's worth of tensions finally all pay off in the bloodiest way possible.    

Doctor Who, "Human Nature" and "The Family of Blood" - And here's that two-parter.  What would happen if the Doctor became human?  And in the face of an implacable threat, what would it mean to sacrifice that human existence?  This would be my pick for the best David Tennant era "Doctor Who" story, where the Doctor barely appears, but the consequences of his actions are far-reaching and deeply impactful for everyone involved.

How I Met Your Mother, "Slap Bet" - Let me clarify that this is the first "Slap Bet" episode, the one that sets up all the ones that followed and where Lily is appointed Slap Bet Commissioner. However, the highlight of the episode is the Robin Sparkles reveal, which is such a wonderful, nostalgic bit of nonsense that is somehow both celebratory of and deeply insulting to Canada.   This is likely the best episode of the show, just based on all the callbacks to it. 

Venture Bros. "Guess Who's Coming to State Dinner?"- It came down to this or "Escape to the House of Mummies Part II," but I'm going with the State Dinner based on the quality of the dialogue and the character interactions.  I may have never laughed harder than at Mrs. Manstrong's come-ons to Brock, or Dean being possessed by the Ghost of Abraham Lincoln.  What's certain is that  I can never watch "The Manchurian Candidate" with a straight face again.  

Extras, "David Bowie" - It's one thing for David Bowie to put in a guest appearance on your sitcom.  It is quite another to have him show up to compose your own personal diss track and lead a sing-along insulting you to your face.  Of course, Ricky Gervais wrote the lyrics himself.  I wasn't a regular viewer of "Extras," but this episode and the clip of Bowie's appearance achieved near-universal acclaim almost instantly, and still brings a smile to my face.

Lost, "Through the Looking Glass"  - "We have to go back!"

The Wire, "Final Grades" - The fourth season of "The Wire" is one of the best seasons of television ever made, bar none.  I was completely gutted the first time I saw the finale, and the fates of the four boys we'd been following all year were revealed.  Never was it more apparent that the kids never had a chance, only reaching good outcomes through extraordinary intervention.  And in the case of Carver and Randy, even that wasn't enough.  

Honorable Mention

The Lost Room

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"Invincible," Year Four

Spoilers for the first three seasons ahead.

I'm having some trouble with "Invincible."  I've become convinced that the show probably peaked with the first season.  There's plenty of interesting stuff that happens this year, as Mark and Nolan reconnect to wage war against the Viltrumites.  There are more allies to be gathered and new villains to be revealed.  However, an awful lot of time is also spent on Nolan's apology tour, as he starts to make amends with Debbie, Mark, and Oliver.  And while I appreciate that "Invincible" is still committed to portraying all of Mark's personal relationships with something approaching realism, it still bothers me that the show has spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to walk back Nolan's betrayal, arguably the defining moment of the entire show.  And the show is worse for it.

It's not that three seasons isn't long enough to pull off this kind of development, but "Invincible" is much better at being a superhero action show than it is at being a melodrama.  During the big emotional showdowns the vocal performances are very good, but visually the characters are noticeably static and there's hardly any change at all in lighting or composition or shot choice to help sell the intensity.  "Invincible" has been cutting corners with its animation from the beginning in order to keep the production timeline reasonable, but I felt it more this season.  There are several flying scenes where the limited animation is especially egregious.  It's hard not to notice that the character designs of new characters like The Grand Regent Thragg (Lee Pace), rebel leader Thaedus (Peter Cullen) and new recruit Tech Jacket (Zoey Deutch) are very derivative of other characters.  

Many of the writing choices this year struck me as off.  While I liked some of the individual episodes, there's a real head-scratcher in "Hurm," which is spent exploring the Under Realm, the show's version of Hell that is populated by supernatural creatures.  It might be setting up something further down the line, but feels like a strange digression the way it's placed in the season.  The Guardians show up for two early episodes, set up a big cliffhanger, and disappear until presumably next year.  The most interesting subplot is actually about Eve having trouble with her powers, and big chunks of that take place completely offscreen.  I'm glad that Debbie gets more of the spotlight, but her wonderfully cathartic scenes with Nolan wind up being seriously undercut by where the story goes in the last episode.  I haven't read all of the source material, but I have the same terrible feeling that I had with a lot of cartoons growing up when they were about to do something that drove me crazy - moving back to the original status quo, and resetting the board even where it doesn't make sense to.  Maybe it won't happen.  I really, really hope it doesn't. 

I know some viewers are only here for the outrageous level of violence that "Invincible" regularly delivers.  I don't think this gets remotely as gory as the third season, but the action fiends should be satisfied.  There are many more Viltrumite-on-Viltrumite battles, and the premiere episode had a pretty gnarly take on an alien invasion that I enjoyed.  Those who have been waiting for a full scale Viltrumite war might come away a little disappointed, however.   Despite spending so much of the prior seasons setting up the Viltrumites as an implacable threat, when push comes to shove they almost feel like underdogs in the fight.  It was akin to preparing for the Galactic Empire, and finding out the enemy is a single terrorist cell - it's still bad, but much more manageable.  

I still like "Invincible" enough that I'm going to stick it out until the end, but I've had to adjust expectations.  That relentless sense of narrative momentum from the first season is probably not coming back.  We're never going to get a better villain than Nolan on this show because it was the family connection and the deception that really made the twist hurt.  And now Nolan is more akin to a redeemed antihero, and watching him is no longer very fun or frightening.  I still want to see where Mark and Eve's stories go, but Nolan's wearing out his welcome.  I hope to see less of him from here on out, as it's already been established that "Invincible" works perfectly well without him.

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"The Housemaid" and "Pillion"

Sometimes to get through awards season, you need to indulge in some trash.  And boy, is "The Housemaid" premium trash.  It's a domestic thriller starring Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney that covers all the bases - rich people problems, infidelity, psycho bosses, class warfare, a creepy kid, an evil mother-in-law, a sex scene or two, a bit of the old ultraviolence, and finally some sweet revenge.  

Directed by Paul Feig and written by Rebecca Sonnenshine, based on the Freida McFadden book, "The Housemaid" follows Millie (Sydney Sweeney), a parolee who is living out of her car, but manages to land a job as a live-in maid for Nina (Amanda Seyfried), who seems to have the perfect life and family.  Nina is married to the hunky Andrew (Brandon Sklenar), and mother to a young daughter (Indiana Elle), with another kid on the way.  Initially the job seems too good to be true, but then Nina starts showing signs of instability.  She's picky and paranoid, lies constantly, often flies into rages, and gives Millie contradictory instructions.  As Millie learns more about Nina, the dream job turns into a nightmare.

At first glance, "The Housemaid" is a terrible movie.  The characters are paper thin and the twisty plot is ridiculous.  Sydney Sweeney continues to display considerable screen presence but not much ability to emote, but Amanda Seyfried more than makes up for it.  She's so much fun to watch as the unhinged Nina, playing everything over-the-top.  And fortunately, just about everybody else involved seems to be in on the joke.  The film never quite tips over into self-aware parody, playing most of the dramatic bits pretty straight, but it's hard to keep a straight face during the cheesy seduction scenes, or the played up cattiness of the neighborhood mom group, or the physical impossibility of fight sequences.  Paul Feig and friends know we're here to see the drama and the mess, and are perfectly happy to give it to us.  The film's third act abandons all pretense and just runs full tilt into a pile of genre tropes with gleeful abandon.  I enjoyed the hell out of "The Housemaid," even though I groaned through the awful dialogue and nutty denouement.  I want a sequel immediately.

 

Now, on to "Pillion," which is the BDSM rom-com written and directed by Harry Lighton, and based on a novel by Adam Mars-Jones.  Harry Melling plays Colin, a shy, inexperienced gay man who starts a relationship with a mysterious biker named Ray (Alexander Skarsgaard).  Ray introduces Colin to a hardcore BDSM dynamic that essentially involves him taking over Colin's life, but while Colin enjoys this, he also wants more traditional things from the relationship that Ray is averse to.  Will the two of them be able to come to a compromise?  Will love triumph over their seemingly irreconcilable differences?

Despite being pretty open to what the film was selling, I didn't find "Pillion" very titillating or shocking, and I didn't find it very appealing as a romance.  I chalk this up to not being on the same wavelength as the filmmakers in regards to the aesthetics, which is perfectly fine.  Bikers and fetish gear don't do anything for me, or the focus on muscles, muscles, and more muscles.  Lighton has a good sense of humor about his subject matter, though, and a willingness to let the weird bits just be weird, which I appreciate.  However, I was concerned about the depiction of the BDSM activities - the movie goes to extremes very quickly, consent is not clear at all, and neither of the participants seem sure where their boundaries and limits are.  This seemed to be another in a long line of problematic film portrayals of BDSM - at least, at first.

Fortunately, this turns out to be the whole point of the story - that Colin and Ray need to sort out what they are and aren't willing to do for each other in order to function as a proper couple.  And this aspect of the movie turned out to be much more interesting and satisfying to see play out than any of the kinky business, and ensured that we weren't just getting a gay "Fifty Shades of Gray."  Melling and Skarsgaard both play their characters with emotional acuity and sensitivity, and by the end I was genuinely rooting for these two to figure things out.  I came away from "Pillion" feeling like I'd really gained something valuable from the experience that I never would have expected going in - a thorough dismantling of several unrealistic and harmful romance tropes.

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