- The Social Network
In Hollywood, the rule of thumb is one page per minute of screentime. Aaron Sorkin’s shooting script is 163 pages, but the final cut of The Social Network is just under two hours; the way he heard the dialogue in his head was rapid. To fit 163 pages into two hours of screentime, the film’s director, David Fincher, had to hit all his marks: establish setting, build character, and convey dialogue coherently. What does that make a director do? Collaborate. Fincher had a precise vision for The Social Network, yet he pushed his screenwriter, cast, and department heads to their creative limits. To paraphrase Jesse Eisenberg, Fincher thought about everybody’s job more than they did. Everything in the film is deliberate. You can pause and sift through the layers to find a satisfying core. But make no mistake: the primary experience of watching the film is absolutely thrilling.The Social Network - Eddington
I left the theater in shock at the escalation of events, but something about it was very honest. Unfortunately, I can imagine a small town going this south this quickly. Eddington is Ari Aster’s attempt at holding up a mirror to America, with a silent plea: We need to start listening to each other again. Eddington is an artistic achievement, a film that is original,, dramatically entertaining, and thought-provoking. In a single experience, Aster aspires to capture American behavior and culture and point to its origin — our lack of self-awareness around how much our thoughts, words, and actions are influenced by powerful corporate and technological forces. Experiencing such a big, artistic swing that offers honest observations about American society, I can’t ask much more of a filmmaker. Making a well-constructed and technically astounding film is difficult enough. Attempting to make sense of our world at the same time is downright insane. I salute Ari Aster’s work — in my eyes, he has succeeded.Eddington - Jurassic World: Rebirth
Jurassic World: Rebirth is a film that demands a large tub of popcorn, an ICEE™, and a recliner. When its opening scene concluded, I knew I was in for a good time and a ton of fun. The momentum carried on — and I left the theater thinking, That’s how you make a popcorn movie! Audiences have endured a long road of sequels since 1993’s Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg’s masterful adaptation of Michael Crichton’s sci-fi book, which balanced a “popcorn movie” tone with real ethical discussions. It changed Hollywood forever: unleashing digital visual effects that were believable, paving the way for blockbusters ever since. Spielberg returned to make 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which he has publicly said was inferior to the original. Unfortunately, many directors tried the same experiment and failed. 2015’s Jurassic World introduced a new central cast of characters within the same universe and began a trilogy released across seven years. Unfortunately, each film became progressively worse — bloated, uninteresting, CGI-filled stories. Sometimes, the dinosaurs weren't the main attraction. I left this series with bad memories. And what a return to form! Edwards has studied the history of the franchise and is one of Steven Spielberg’s biggest fans. He opted to shoot Jurassic World: Rebirth on film, not digital. This is more expensive and time-consuming than an all digital workflow, but the final result connects to the visual language of the original. The largest intangible about Jurassic World: Rebirth is how familiar, yet fresh it feels. In terms of restoring audience goodwill, that is unquantifiable. References to the previous entries are embedded in the script and visuals. There is a Crichton Middle School, a direct allusion to Dr. Alan Grant, and blood dripping from above like what happens to the poor soldier in Jurassic World. Edwards uses John Williams’s original theme, going full-bore at the right time in a way that gave me goosebumps. A great sequel has to do more than simply fulfill the commandments. It must have great plotting, likable characters, and sound visual construction. Jurassic World: Rebirth does all of these things, which is why it felt like an authentic successor to Jurassic Park.Jurassic World: Rebirth - F1: The Movie
I was lucky to view F1 on the biggest IMAX screen I could find. Each individual element of the film is so well-crafted that the film defies moment-to-moment analysis — it’s too much fun to watch. Sonic accuracy was paramount to the sound team. Lewis Hamilton consulted on how the cars should sound on all 9 Formula One racetracks in the film. Sonny Hayes drives the same car on each track, but a side-by-side comparison will reveal the sonic textures, which change with weather, tire health, and track composition. More impressively, on a first-time viewing, all the dialogue, music, and sound effects felt incredibly clear and immersive — which means the sound team delivered against difficult circumstances. To capture this sprawling film which spans ten countries, Kosinski reunited with his longtime cinematographer, Claudio Miranda, who excels in visual composition. F1 is a beautiful film to view — pick any still and just gaze. Miranda knows where how to direct the human eye to the essence of a frame, which is an essential for a film that moves fast. Editor Stephen Mirrione cuts F1 at a lightning pace, refusing to let any scene last longer than the story demands and making two-and-a-half hours disappear. In dialogue scenes, Mirrione tends to hold shots either because the camera is moving, characters are moving, or the frame deserves to be scanned with our eyes. During Formula One races, Mirrione maximizes our sense of velocity with very quick cuts. Given my engagement in the story, these races have a pulsating tempo that caused my heart rate to rise. The film effortlessly bounces between perspectives of driver and car, spectators, and team members by satisfying our sense of spatial awareness. Miranda’s composition makes it easy to know where every character is positioned. The editing pace is a harmonious balance of Gen-Z and traditional Hollywood sensibilities, enabled by a deep collaboration with cinematography. Writer Ehren Kruger wrote Top Gun: Maverick a few years ago. It’s no surprise that F1 uses the same dramatic structure — and why not? Change the lead actor, the environment, and the technical details but maintain the circumstances: a has-been given one more chance at glory, a rookie with a chip on his shoulder, a love interest with intellect and great comedic timing, and memorable supporting players. Yes, F1 copies a Hollywood film archetype like Top Gun: Maverick but who cares when it’s this much fun.F1: The Movie - Materialists
Based on the trailer, I went into the theater expecting a typical romantic comedy. My mistake. Who approved the trailer? It is sending audiences in with the wrong idea. Once I broke the rom-com mold, everything fell into place. Materialists is Celine Song’s version of an op-ed. Rather than presenting her argument in a newspaper, she taps her filmmaking skills to encase commentary about modern romance in a dramatic story. Writer-director Celine Song’s first film, 2023’s Past Lives, was a remarkable debut, showcasing a brave and steady hand behind the camera. With her sophomore outing, 2025’s Materialists, she doubles down on the primary topic which has interested her so far: Romance in the modern age. Celine Song is fascinated by our thought processes around love. Past Lives was about how your personal history echoes into the present. Paths not taken, especially with romantic partners, never really leave us. They resonate beyond the moments in time they occupy. Materialists is equally meditative, refusing to be a typical romantic comedy that marches forward only with one-liners and odd situations. Song returns to a love triangle. She has assembled a three-star package with Lucy (Dakota Johnson), John (Chris Evans), and Harry (Pedro Pascal). Lucy is a matchmaker who deals with clients like stocks. Investors value a company’s stock using attributes like dividend yield, price-to-earnings ratio, and earnings-per-share. In the same way, Lucy’s matchmaking service has commodified clients, searching for a soulmate with the perfect combination of height, body type, education level, political affiliation, income, and attractiveness. Stock pickers would be out of work if they were this picky. Every character in this story wrestles with this societal myth: Your soulmate will match your list of desires. Lucy is on the frontlines of this battle. She feeds into their fantasies of finding that special somebody with the perfect combination, making love seem as simple as checking boxes. Since she spends her day selling dreams, she starts to believe what she says. The villain is silent, neither mentioned nor seen: Society. By applying the language of finance to modern romance, characters look at their potential mates like stocks, which peak in their twenties and fall forever after. In Materialists, society has taught the characters to value tangible attributes above all else. This cold-blooded analysis turns cruel. Even the ones who talk about intangibles, like having someone that makes you grow, don’t realize they are contradicting themselves. Watch everyone’s choices, which tell a different story than their words. Everyone knows how the game must be played. That is the neat trick of Materialists. As these characters speak in circles about their desires in a partner, we go with it. We become complicit in society’s game: The myth that if you check the box on every tangible attribute for each other, you are a match. Or should I say, an asset. Even if we say we don’t believe, are we being truthful to ourselves? Based on that, who does Lucy pick: Harry (Pedro Pascal), the unicorn in private equity, or John (Chris Evans), the one with two roommates? You might think you know Lucy’s decision. Her journey offers much to ponder about modern romance. Hopefully, a rethink is coming soon.Materialists - Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (lovingly known as McQ) have done it again. In The Final Reckoning, surprises await! Most set pieces are saved for the film, as they were not revealed in the marketing. Cruise and McQ always create phenomenal set pieces, which are unlikely to be repeated by any other actor-director partnership that we know of today. New characters are memorable, serving their small purpose to the story and ceding screen time to the main cast. The Entity, the machine-turned-villain, makes a tangible threat to humanity, and is no longer just an abstract artificial-intelligence-gone-rogue that governments want to control. Unlike most Hollywood productions, Mission movies are staged around set pieces: Tom climbing the world’s tallest building, Tom running on London rooftops, Tom hanging off a plane during takeoff. Safety crews can only do so much. The world’s biggest movie star-stunt man-combo places himself in significant danger to entertain us. If you watch enough interviews, you’ll catch his signature catchphrase: See you at the movies! Cruise’s stunts are the primary building blocks of each film. Other elements, like character and plot, are crafted in response. This process is most similar to video game production, where story is fleshed out last. Story becomes the connective tissue from each set piece to the next. For the most part, the construction of Mission films never feels so obvious while watching. During the theatrical experience, the seams are hidden. This process works because Cruise and McQ are relentless in reexamining their decisions: Does this scene work? No? Then, let’s reshoot it. They are comfortable filming without a typical script because they have a very collaborative and speedy team. They are filming new material, editing scenes, or mixing new music into the movie as late as two days before the picture is locked for distribution. It is astounding that they are able to do this at the pinnacle of big-budget filmmaking. Each Mission movie is an experiment in delivering action, with the goal of improving every time. It will be missed, but Cruise and McQ know better than anyone: Film lives forever. With the contributions of thirty years of crews, theater workers, and moviegoers, Mission: Impossible is eternal.Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning - Moneyball
Billy Beane is in an abusive relationship. He has dedicated his life to the American game of baseball, but at forty years old, he is oppressed by it. Within the sport, he has a poor history, with none of the accolades he’d like to own. As the general manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy has a reputation as a hard-ass. With his disdain for small talk, he prefers to get straight to business. When making deals with other teams, he has a keen sense of when he’s being cheated. His colleagues would say that he’s an unemotional guy. Knowing this, it is surprising that the first thing we learn about Billy’s character is how much he cares. In the very beginning of the film, the A’s are eliminated from the 2001 playoffs. Billy is alone in an empty ballpark, sitting in silence. After all that work, you can see the disappointment on his face. Director Bennett Miller uses the next shot to set up the character for us: an extreme close-up of Brad Pitt’s eyes closing. Billy is defeated, fighting back tears. It’s not his first time. Moneyball is a classic docu-drama. While it departs from the historical record for the sake of entertainment, it belongs to the pantheon of great films based on true stories. It captures Brad Pitt’s greatest performance (so far). It is internally consistent, fully formed in its depiction of character, and a prime example of technical excellence — where the camera and sound serve only the story. Now, I see why Bennett Miller hasn’t made another feature film in eleven years. Because making a film like Moneyball is pretty damn hard.Moneyball - Warfare
In a way, Warfare has extended the opening act of Saving Private Ryan to an entire film. That is its level of intensity. But it has stripped away the glory from the fight. The hero in that film, played by an American icon in actor Tom Hanks, is nowhere to be found. Warfare cast new faces, in part, to convey how the cost of battle is borne by ordinary Americans. Their faces prove that, when these men are in combat, they are not fighting to save democracy, eliminate insurgents, or epitomize the American way. These higher purposes are out of mind. Rather, they are fighting for their own survival and to keep their brotherhood alive by any means necessary. That is the truth of Warfare. It is also why Elliott Miller, a survivor of the events in the film, describes it as a love story.Warfare - Munich
By conventional wisdom, Munich is a film that never should have been made. Its subject matter is hotly contested and fiercely political. It is a three-hour, morally complex film of considerable scale, made on a very crunched schedule, and distributed by two major Hollywood studios. How many lives must be taken to avenge the ones you lost? In our responses to violence, should we accept any compromises on the values of our nation? If so, where do we draw the line? And how do we hold it? When the film was released, all sides found fault with the depictions of various groups and its factual basis. While he maintains that he has told this story truthfully, Steven Spielberg is not making a documentary, embedded in the exact methods of spy-craft; other films serve that purpose. Spielberg’s highest goal is to immerse the audience in the story’s emotional truth. The most famous Jewish director in the world has made a challenging film that ends by pointing the camera back at us. For all the moral qualms we have experienced in Munich, he asks us to delve into our own souls to find the answers that we can live with.Munich - Black Bag
Black Bag is a fully participatory experience at the movies. Throughout the film, the audience asks a steady cadence of questions, which subsides only at the end. Remarkably, the film’s answers are always discovered at just the right time, before we eject ourselves from the experience. This is a risky maneuver! Waiting too long to reveal information, not properly answering a question, or building up too many questions at once can undo the spell. It is a testament to Koepp and Soderbergh’s skill that the dominos topple exactly when they desire.Black Bag - Mickey 17
Rather than being a satirical gut-punch that makes us feel the ills of our society, Mickey 17 simply amounts to a good time. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I thought there would be more depth. While I was leaving the theater, all the focus on powerful men, colonization, and ethical grey-zones felt somewhat hollow. In his previous films, Boon Jong Ho has surprised us with how he creates stories around these ideas, blending genre and exploiting structure to achieve any end. But in Mickey 17, his unique style is used in service of a comedy about a wacky mishmash of humans on a far-away planet trying to figure things out.Mickey 17 - Companion
The most valuable skill in drama may be how a writer withholds information, letting the audience fill the void with their own assumptions. The information is always present, but we don’t have the right lens to see it - and we are shocked when we learn the full story. This is a concept that Companion has mastered. I am awed by how often this film reframed what I assumed to be true. The story moves so quickly that there is no time to think ahead. We’re too busy reacting to the current events. Companion is a film best viewed without much knowledge about it. The premise is cliché: a group of friends arrive at a weekend getaway. Luckily, I knew nothing else about the film other than its reputation. Whatever my expectations for the story were, Companion goes somewhere far more interesting. It is a prescient, original film with equal measures of comedy and human drama. I left the theater with my head spinning, while feeling thoroughly entertained.Companion - Captain America: Brave New World
In Captain America: Brave New World, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) dons the uniform and the mantle of the departed and beloved Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). This movie could have changed the ongoing narrative of exhaustion, but it only takes a few minutes of the film to understand: This one ain’t doing it. The film opens with a bland political speech given by President-Elect Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford). As is customary, this is followed by a been-there, done-that extraction of a metal cylinder, better known as a “goober.” Sam Wilson is tasked with obtaining the goober and taking out some bad guys. Who are the bad guys? What’s the goober? That’s classified. No exposition is provided. We are expected to watch people fighting completely out of context. Given there are five screenwriters credited on Captain America: Brave New World, it is somewhat surprising how badly the film suffers from a severe lack of emotional stakes. Couldn’t anyone discover a reason to care? The best solution the film can find is digging into the MCU’s lore, bringing back a trio of characters from 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, whose version of Bruce Banner, played by Edward Norton, was recasted by producer Kevin Feige. Therein lies the MCU’s new bane: The hard-core fans will love the lore-dropping, but the rest of us… are awfully confused.Captain America: Brave New World
