These are the movies that I got to see for the first time in May 2025 that I haven't already written about.
Watched on May 5th, 2025
This movie premiered in theaters in the United States on March 14th of this year, but you'd never know it if you were living in Northeast PA. I never saw a trailer for it. My local Regal Cinema didn't screen it. I had no idea that this movie even existed. I'm not sure how that's even possible in 2025 with businesses advertising on everything from streaming platforms, to social media, to the little screen on the gas pump when I'm fueling up.
Director Steven Soderbergh has gone public with his frustrations that his "mid-level budget, star-driven movie can't seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theatres", but I think his wrath would be better directed at the marketing team that was hired to promote this film. Pal, I'm 44 years old and between Regal Unlimited and the Mahoning, I go out to theaters to see over 200 films a year. If your marketing team couldn't reach me, I guarantee you that the average potential moviegoer has absolutely no clue that your movie exists at all.
It really is a shame too because this was a damn good spy thriller. My wife found it while browsing through Peacock to find something to watch and we both enjoyed it quite a bit. But... yeah, Steven... you're selling me a product here, not the other way around. It's your job to find me and sell it to me. Plenty of other filmmakers have worked with people who found ways to connect with an audience. If the studio or the marketing team aren't up to the challenge, cut them loose. Adapt or get left behind.
Watched on May 5th, 2025
This is another movie that we found on Peacock and it absolutely blew me away. The story begins in the English countryside in the years leading up to World War II. Sisters Thom and Mars Hanbury were orphaned at a young age, but are now young adults who live together and take care of each other. Thom is a genius who invents a device called Lola which allows the sisters to receive over-the-air broadcasts from the future. This allows experience music from the future, like David Bowie and The Kinks, but it as Great Britain enters World War II, it also allows them to see news broadcasts of the aftermath of German air strikes before they happen.
I don't want to say any more than I already have, but this is a film that is absolute worth your time. It does an excellent job of exploring the concepts of time travel and parallel dimensions, and it really pulls you into the world of the story that is being told.
Most of the plot descriptions that I've come across for Lola refer to it as a found footage movie, but don't let that dissuade you if you're not into that sort of thing. I'm not a big fan of found footage either, but it's used in a manner that is very creative and goes hand-in-hand with the plot. This one gets my highest recommendation.
Watched on May 12th, 2025
There was a period of time in the mid 2000's when movies about magicians seemed like they were Hollywood's flavor of the week, but I never managed to catch any of them. To this day, I've still not seen The Prestige, The Illusionist, or The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and I was only vaguely aware that Now You See Me existed.
This is a fun popcorn movie, but it's not the kind of thing that I would recommend to everyone. If you're the type to pick a film apart for inconsistencies and plot twists that defy logic at times, this movie will probably drive you crazy. However, if you're able to switch off your critical brain and just enjoy a movie for what it is, this is an enjoyable experience. I'm going to have to see if I can find the sequel.
Watched on May 14th, 2025
My friend Mike recommended this movie to me. He recommends a lot of movies to me, but I don't remember him ever being as enthusiastic as he was when he praised this 1957 film and told me that I had to check it out. He was absolutely right. It's so incredible that I can't believe that it's not more well known than it is.
A Face In The Crowd stars Andy Griffith in a role that could not be more different than the roles on The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock that made him famous. He plays a drunken drifter named Larry Rhodes who is discovered by a radio show host named Marcia. He is unexpectedly very charismatic and Marcia is inspired to fight for him to have his own radio show for the man who she has given the moniker "Lonesome Rhodes" to play guitar, tell stories, and share his views on the world. This leads Rhodes down a path in which he becomes highly popular, influential, and dangerously powerful, and he becomes more unhinged with each passing day.
This movie is fascinating and I highly recommend it to anyone who has any interest in motion pictures at all. It feels like a voice from the past warning us about the ways that a narcissistic con artists can rally the angry and ignorant masses with bluster and bullshit in their rise to power. Sounds oddly familiar to what we're living through today.
Clown In A Cornfield
Watched on May 14th, 2025
I'm kind of played out on the idea of clowns being used as monsters in horror films. It's a trope that has been done to death in horror films like the Terrifier series, the Killjoy series, the Camp Blood series, the book, mini-series, and feature films for Stephen King's It, House Of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, 3 From Hell, and one-off films like Killer Klowns From Outer Space and Carnival Of Souls, and many others. Letterboxd has a Clown Movie Master List that has over 600 films that feature clowns, and the overwhelming majority of them are horror films. I honestly wonder if kids in elementary school in 2025 have any concept of clowns as entertainers, or anything other than a monster in a scary story.
I went to see this solely because my friend Tom told me that he enjoyed the book that the film is based on. He and I have pretty similar tastes, but I was still kind of skeptical walking into the theater to see this. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Clown In A Cornfield is a pretty damn good slasher flick. It's mostly set in the present day, but it feels very much like the kind of horror flick that I would have brough home from a rental shop in the late 80's or early 90's.
Watched on May 19th, 2025
The Final Destination films are my favorite horror franchise of the 21st century. Some movies in the series are better than others, but all of them are enjoyable, and the rules of how fate hunts down the people who have cheated death are consistent. Bloodlines is no exception. In fact, I think it's one of the best movies in the series.
This movie takes the lore of the Final Destination series in an interesting new direction. It explores the possibility of a large group of people who cheat death. Fate goes after the survivors in order of how they would have died if they hadn't cheated death, so if the group of people is large enough, the rest of the survivors would have time to grow older, have children and grandchildren, and generate an extensive branch of their family tree of people who wouldn't have existed if they had died at the moment that fate intended. Would these people be safe, or would fate come for them to correct the mistake when their parent or grandparent cheated death.
I don't want to spoil the plot, but I will say that it has one of the coolest disaster scenes in the beginning of the film, and a very awesome story about how all of those people cheated death and how their lives played out afterward. It also features the last on-screen appearance of the great Tony Todd before his passing on November 6th of last year.
Cooties
Watched on May 20th, 2025
This is one of those movies that is so dumb that it can't help but to be fun. It's the story of a zombie outbreak in an elementary school that is caused by one girl eating an infected chicken nugget. Everybody in this movie, including its star Elijah Wood, are way over-the-top for most of its runtime. It's available to watch for free on Tubi, and it's the perfect movie to laugh at with a group of friends over pizza and beer.
Watched on May 20th, 2025
Most of the reviews that I've come across for the 2016 movie Passengers have ripped it apart. Frankly, I think they all have a screw loose because I found this to be one of the most interesting and well made science fiction films in recent memory. A lot of the bad press that I've read about this movie seems to be fans and critics passing a morality judgment on Chris Pratt's character and, for some reason, lashing out against the film as a whole because of it, which I find to be asinine. You're not supposed to think he did the right thing. You're supposed to examine the grey area, and maybe have an honest moment of self-reflection and ask if you would have done the same thing.
This is the story of a man who is awakened too early from suspended animation to find that he is alone in a spaceship on which he will die of old age before it gets to its destination. The explanation of who these people are, where they're going, and how this ship is being financed are fascinating and left me wanting to know more about the world and human society outside of this ship.
Passengers is available to stream on Amazon Prime. Do yourself a favor and skip the bullshit opinions from people who forgot that good storytelling is not all about taking every opportunity to virtue signal to the world what wonderful people we all think we are. Watch this movie and judge for yourself.
Drive In
Watched on May 21st, 2025
Finally, we have the 2000 indie slasher Drive In. My friend Bill has been telling me about this movie for months. He found an old copy of this on VHS at Goodwill for 25 cents, marked down from 47¢, and he went out and bought a VCR just so he could see it. The premise is that the mentally challenged son of the drive-in manager has seen so many horror movies on the big screen that he goes on a killing spree. It's very low-budget, but it's not one of those movies that's deliberately bad in the hopes of being labeled "so bad it's good". It's a sincere attempt at a horror movie, with acting performances that could best be described as amateurs doing their best, and it's not terrible for what it is. Just don't go into it expecting to see a Hollywood blockbuster.
