CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 10-17-25
- Oct 18
- 17 min read
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, October 17th, 2025.
After the Hunt is Luca Guadagnino doing Woody Allen. Or, more accurately, Luca Guadagnino dismantling Woody Allen.
Because what this movie really is, at its core, is a thought experiment: What if you tried to make one of those pompous, pseudo-intellectual Woody Allen films from the '80s and early '90s… but dropped it into the world of 2025?
A world of MeToo, cancel culture, generational warfare, identity politics, and everybody walking around with an agenda.
And it's fascinating. And it's a mess. A fascinating mess, but still a mess.
Julia Roberts stars as Alma, a Yale philosophy professor on the cusp of tenure. She's admired, respected, has the perfect husband (Michael Stuhlbarg, playing her psychiatrist spouse), and a close friend/colleague named Hank (Andrew Garfield), who may or may not also be more than a friend.
Alma's star student is Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), whip-smart, bold, and definitely carrying a crush on Alma.
Things detonate after a faculty party, when Maggie shows up at Alma's door claiming Hank assaulted her. Suddenly, Alma is caught in the middle, with her loyalty to her friend versus responsibility to her student, her own tenure prospects versus her buried past, the optics versus the truth.
Guadagnino shoots it like a ticking time bomb, complete with a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score that buzzes and pulses under every scene. But underneath the thriller trappings, this thing is staged like a Woody Allen intellectual dinner-party comedy of manners, with annoying characters pontificating, drinking wine, throwing around philosophy and morality like it's foreplay.
Guadagnino leans all the way in. Same black background and font Woody used in his credits for decades. Alphabetical cast listings. Opening scenes of academics babbling pompously about big ideas. For the first half-hour, it's practically a parody of Husbands and Wives or Crimes and Misdemeanors.
But then the accusations hit, and the film flips. Suddenly, every pompous intellectual with a glass of wine in their hand is exposed for what they are: flawed, secretive, biased, manipulative, and absolutely dripping with agenda.
It's Guadagnino tearing Woody Allen apart, saying that these kinds of pseudo-intellectual gabfests can't exist anymore without consequences. In a world of MeToo and cancel culture, you can't just pontificate about morality while hiding your own skeletons.
Someone's going to pull the curtain back.
And in that way, this movie is fascinating.
The screenplay, by first-timer Nora Garrett, is wildly uneven. It's ambitious, but also clearly derivative and sometimes flat-out clumsy. You can feel the inspiration dripping off every page, but it doesn't quite cohere. Characters are introduced as if they're chess pieces on a board, then left dangling when the story wants to pivot to its next big thesis.
The performances are all over the place, too. Andrew Garfield is terrific; he is loose, messy, unpredictable, the kind of character who makes you lean forward in your seat. Chloë Sevigny is sharp and funny in a more minor role, walking the line between satire and sincerity.
Michael Stuhlbarg, an actor I usually love, gives one of his strangest performances ever. It is full of bizarre hand gestures and vocal tics, like he's doing a Michael Caine-as-a-professor parody that belongs in another movie entirely.
And Julia Roberts? Completely miscast. She's just not equipped to navigate this kind of material, with the layers of satire, self-deception, and implosion. Alma should be a complex, imploding center of gravity, but Roberts feels like she's flailing, in over her head. You can't build the movie around her, and Guadagnino tries anyway.
Every so often, it does click. The sound design (ticking clocks, pulsing bass lines, blasts of score) builds real tension. Some of the monologues hit, particularly when Garfield cuts loose.
Some scenes absolutely nail the generational clash: Alma telling Maggie that life isn't meant to be comfortable like a warm bath, Maggie pushing back with her own fire. Those moments sting because they feel so rooted in right now.
As a cultural experiment (as Guadagnino dismantles the idea of the Woody Allen pseudo-intellectual comedy of manners in a world of consequence), it's fascinating. Watching insufferable, pompous characters get shredded by their own hypocrisies is satisfying in its own way.
So where do I land on this? After the Hunt is ambitious, fascinating, sometimes fun to watch, but ultimately a failure. It's Guadagnino swinging big, aiming to satirize, critique, and destroy an entire cinematic style. While he scores a few solid hits, the film never comes together as a whole.
It's miscast, unevenly written, and sometimes insufferable. But it's also bold, weird, and occasionally thrilling. A fascinating failure.
Not something I can recommend outright, but I was glued to it anyway, if only to watch Guadagnino rip Woody Allen to shreds while drowning in the mess of his own overreaching screenplay.
In other words: Luca does Woody, Luca tears Woody down, and we're left with a cultural autopsy that's as messy as the people it's dissecting. - ⭐️⭐️1/2
Let me start with this: I barely remember The Black Phone. I remember thinking it wasn't great, that Ethan Hawke was good despite the material, that the first half had some promise. Then it all fell apart in the second. That's about it.
So when The Black Phone 2 came along (same director, same cast, same mask), I went in with low expectations. Turns out even those were too high.
This movie takes place four years after the original, in 1982. Finney (Mason Thames) is now a high schooler still dealing with the trauma of being kidnapped by "The Grabber," the creepy, masked child killer played by Ethan Hawke, whom he killed at the end of the first film.
His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) still has psychic visions, though they're less "useful power" and more "ongoing torment." Their dad (Jeremy Davies) is sober now and trying to be a decent human being. But all is not well, because Gwen starts having these nightmares, the kind of supernaturally grotesque visions that scream "sequel hook."
These visions lead her, Finney, and their friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) to a snowbound Christian camp called Alpine Lake, where dead kids, her late mother, and the ghostly echo of The Grabber are all somehow connected.
Once they get there, it's Nightmare on Elm Street meets Friday the 13th meets "faith-based horror movie that forgot to be scary."
The Grabber, now basically a demonic force, starts haunting dreams, killing kids from beyond the grave, and (I swear I'm not making this up) ice-skating around in the nightmare world like Freddy Krueger on a frozen pond.
Yeah. That's the movie.
It's supposed to be 1982, but no one involved has ever met someone from 1982. The dialogue is fake, the slang is wrong, and every music cue feels like it was pulled from a "Totally '80s Halloween" Spotify playlist made by an intern.
There's a Duran Duran reference, a Pink Floyd cue, and a kid in a Peter Gabriel T-shirt, but none of it feels remotely authentic. I was in high school in the early '80s, and nobody talked like this. It's nostalgia by algorithm.
And the kids (Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, and Miguel Mora) do their best, but the dialogue they've been given is laughably bad. Every insult, every attempt at teenage profanity feels forced and artificial, like an AI was told to "write Gen X slang."
McGraw, to her credit, still gives it her all. She's got real emotion behind her eyes, and when the movie briefly remembers to be about grief and trauma instead of frozen corpses and telepathic phones, she totally sells it. She deserves better.
What Scott Derrickson has done here is turn The Black Phone into a full-on Nightmare on Elm Street ripoff. Instead of Freddy Krueger haunting dreams with knives, we've got The Grabber haunting dreams with his stupid mask and a rotary phone.
The nightmare sequences even borrow the visual gimmicks of old 8mm home movies (grainy, flickery film stock, a faint projector sound in the background), which might have been eerie for two minutes but becomes insufferable when it eats up half the film.
It's a pretentious stylistic trick that doesn't work, and it screams, "Look, it's ART!" while you're rolling your eyes. Derrickson even applies the desperate gimmick to the opening Universal logo...and it doesn't work.
And the scares? Nonexistent. I didn't jump once. Not one chill, not one shock. This is just loud music, fake blood, and endless dream-within-a-dream nonsense that tries to be psychological but ends up being exhausting.
Ethan Hawke's name is all over the marketing, but don't be fooled, he's barely in it. You hear his voice more than you see him. When you do see The Grabber, it's almost certainly a stunt guy in the mask.
Hawke probably shot all his material in two days. And you feel it, his presence used to give the original movie a weird, unhinged energy. Here, he's just another ghost in the machine.
Meanwhile, the supporting cast: Demián Bichir as the camp supervisor, Arianna Rivas as his niece, Graham Abbey and Maev Beaty as other camp officials, they are fine but wasted. The movie never gives them anything to do beyond looking worried or possessed.
One of the big themes here is trauma: how Finney is haunted by what he did, and how Gwen is haunted by what she saw. But The Black Phone 2 doesn't explore that trauma in any meaningful way.
It's all surface-level, translated into literal ghosts and frozen corpses instead of real emotion. You can feel the movie trying to say something about healing and guilt, but it gets buried under all the noise.
Instead, we get bloody deaths, surreal dream logic, and a climax so ridiculous that I half expected someone to yell, "Welcome to prime time, bitch!" This movie wants to be "elevated horror" but lands squarely in the awful Bring Her Back territory, which is over-directed, over-loud, over-violent, and under-thought.
There's not an original bone in this movie's body. It's derivative, dull, and dumb. It is a cash grab sequel that mistakes louder for scarier and grainier for deeper. Derrickson, who's capable of great stuff (The Exorcism of Emily Rose still holds up), feels completely out of gas here.
Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw are talented young actors, and they give this everything they've got, but they're stranded in a movie that doesn't know what it's about.
Childhood trauma? Ghosts? Religion? Dreams? Ice? Who knows. By the end, you'll just be begging for the phone to stop ringing.
Ethan Hawke, bless him, probably filmed his scenes between better projects and went home early. And Blumhouse should probably stop making sequels to movies that barely justified one in the first place.
The Black Phone 2 is a soulless, messy, and utterly pointless horror sequel. It is a limp echo of a movie I barely remembered in the first place. - ⭐️1/2
Every once in a while, you walk out of a movie with a big, dumb grin on your face, feeling lighter than when you walked in. That's what Good Fortune did for me.
Aziz Ansari (actor, stand-up, Master of None creator) makes his feature writing and directing debut here, and he absolutely nails it. Is it original? Hell no.
This thing owes a lot to Wings of Desire, City of Angels, Heaven Can Wait, Trading Places, and even that weird John Travolta-as-an-angel movie, Michael. But here's the thing: none of that matters, because Ansari injects it with heart, wit, sincerity, and joy. It's one of the most entertaining movies of the year.
Ansari plays Arj, a struggling gig worker in L.A. He's scraping by doing odd jobs for rich people, sleeping in his car, and striking out with Elena (Keke Palmer), his co-worker at a hardware store who's fighting for better working conditions.
His boss is Jeff (Seth Rogen), a wealthy, obnoxious tech bro living in a mansion with a disco in the living room.
Enter Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a bumbling "budget guardian angel" whose job is to stop people from texting and driving. Gabriel decides to teach Arj a lesson about how money doesn't buy happiness by swapping his life with Jeff's.
Except the plan backfires because, well, Arj's life does get better with Jeff's money. Gabriel loses his wings, Jeff gets displaced, and chaos ensues. Sandra Oh plays Gabriel's angelic boss, swooping in to keep everything in check.
The body-swap rules are fuzzy (they change depending on what the script needs), but it doesn't matter, because this thing is powered by charm. Ansari's script is sharp, funny, and loaded with great one-liners (including a Kevin James in Hitch joke that had me laughing out loud).
But more importantly, it's sincere. There's no cynicism here. This is a movie that genuinely believes in people, in friendship, in love, and in enjoying the small things in life.
And then there's Keanu Reeves. Holy hell, Keanu. He's phenomenal.
As Gabriel, he's goofy, sweet, naive, and endlessly lovable. Watching him discover life as a human is a joy. He begins chain-smoking, wolfing down tacos, calling chicken nuggets "chicken nuggies," marveling at the miracle of a strawberry shake, and it is an absolute delight.
He might be one of the best movie angels ever. He plays dumb, he plays sincere, and he sells every moment.
Rogen is hilarious as the smug rich guy, Palmer brings fire and heart, and Sandra Oh is pitch-perfect as the no-nonsense angel boss. But the movie belongs to Keanu. He's the MVP here, and he looks like he's having the time of his life.
This movie is just pure joy. It's funny, but it's not just jokes; it's about how life can suck, how hard it is to make money, how working-class people get treated like crap while the rich skate by. But it's also about treasuring what you do have: love, friends, good food, the weird little joys that make life worth living.
It's also surprisingly pro-union, which I loved, with Keke Palmer's subplot giving the story some extra bite. But mostly, this is a life-affirming, crowd-pleasing comedy with a giant beating heart.
Look, you can nitpick this thing to death. It's derivative. It borrows from a dozen other movies. The rules of the fantasy don't make sense half the time. But when a movie makes you feel this good, who cares?
For an hour and 45 minutes, I sat in that theater, laughed my ass off, smiled from ear to ear, and walked out feeling lighter than air. Good Fortune is exactly what its title promises: good Fortune for anyone who buys a ticket.
See it with a crowd, with friends, with people you love. It's communal, it's hilarious, it's heartwarming. One of the best times I've had at the movies in 2025.
Sometimes, a movie doesn't need to be groundbreaking... it just needs to make you really, really happy. Good Fortune did that for me, and I loved it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
In Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You, Rose Byrne plays Linda, a Montauk psychologist whose life is collapsing from every possible direction. Her young daughter is terminally ill, her husband (Christian Slater, seen primarily through phone calls and smug excuses) is off captaining a cruise ship, and her work life is a nonstop carousel of needy, unstable patients, including one (Danielle Macdonald) who abandons her newborn and disappears.
Then the ceiling of her house literally caves in, oozing black goo like some suburban version of a Lynchian nightmare.
Forced out of her home and into a rundown motel, Linda tries to keep it together for her daughter while juggling guilt, rage, therapy sessions, and a growing dependency on wine, weed, and eventually, cocaine. The coke is helpfully supplied by the motel's charming superintendent, played with surprising depth by A$AP Rocky.
Meanwhile, her own therapist (yes, her therapist, Conan O'Brien, in one of the most hilarious yet dark turns of the year) has run out of patience with her spiral.
The movie plays like Uncut Gems if it were filtered through the mind of a sleep-deprived, overmedicated mother trapped in her own domestic purgatory. It's loud, funny, horrific, sad, and utterly relentless.
Mary Bronstein, who made the cult indie Yeast back in 2008, is married to Ronald Bronstein, longtime collaborator, editor, and co-writer with the Safdie Brothers (Good Time, Uncut Gems). So yeah, the DNA is all there: the jittery handheld camera, the suffocating close-ups, the pulsating anxiety that never lets up.
But this time, the lens is flipped. Instead of male desperation, we get female desperation... motherhood as both body horror and black comedy.
If the Safdies' movies are about men destroying themselves while chasing validation, Bronstein's film is about women barely surviving the impossible demands placed on them.
If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You is Uncut Gems through the eyes of a mother who's expected to hold it all together while the ceiling literally rots above her.
It's also one of the most purely A24 films ever made. The anxiety, the surreal imagery, the queasy humor, the queasy camera, the way every single thing feels just slightly off. Like Hereditary, Eighth Grade, and Good Time smashed together and run through a maternal nightmare blender.
Rose Byrne has always been a versatile, reliable actress who is capable of being hilarious (Bridesmaids, Physical) and heartbreaking (Damages). But this? This is next-level stuff. Her performance is raw, feral, and electric.
You can see the exhaustion etched in every frame of her face. It's physical, it's emotional, it's total surrender. This is one of those performances that should absolutely be in the awards conversation, but it won't be, because the Academy never touches films this weird or this brave. (See also: Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, Toni Collette in Hereditary.)
Byrne's breakdown feels real, not stylized. Every time she screams at the absurdity of her life (at her absent husband, at her sick child's IV machine, at the endless noise), it's both terrifying and darkly funny. She's like a walking panic attack, equal parts rage and empathy, trying to mother everyone around her until she has nothing left.
The supporting cast is equally excellent:
Conan O'Brien, shockingly good and deeply funny as Linda's burnt-out therapist.
Danielle Macdonald, heartbreaking as the patient who leaves her baby behind.
A$AP Rocky, mellow and unexpectedly warm as the motel manager, until he, too, gets pushed away.
Christian Slater, doing perfect work as the absentee husband who weaponizes his "hard job" against his wife's chaos.
Even the minor roles: Ivy Wolk's punk motel clerk, Josh Pais's endlessly annoying clinic worker, and Mary Bronstein herself as Dr. Spring, add texture and realism to this cracked world.
Let me be clear: If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You is exhausting. This thing grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go for two solid hours. It's a full-body experience with handheld cameras swirling, IV machines droning, water dripping, people talking over each other, Rose Byrne breathing too fast, lights flickering, music buzzing. It's pure, uncut anxiety.
And yet, it's beautiful. Beneath the panic, there's truth about motherhood, guilt, love, and the impossible expectations society dumps on women. It's funny, yes, but in that horrible, "I can't believe this is happening" way that feels way too close to real life.
You could call it a black comedy. You could call it a horror movie. You could call it a psychological meltdown. All are true. It walks that razor-thin line between hilarious and horrifying, sometimes within the same shot.
One minute you're laughing at the absurdity of a hamster running free in a house that's falling apart; the next minute, you're recoiling at a hallucination that might actually be happening.
By the time it's over, you'll be sweating. Maybe even shaking. But it's worth every minute of the chaos.
Mary Bronstein has made something astonishing here: a film that's both a nightmare and a catharsis. It's bold, angry, deeply female, and unapologetically weird. She hasn't made a feature in 15 years, but with this one, she's planted her flag as one of the most exciting and fearless voices in American indie film.
And Rose Byrne? She gives one of the best performances of the year. I'd give her every award possible. But like I said, the Oscars will never touch this kind of brilliance. It's too raw, too surreal, too real.
In the end, If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You is what happens when a filmmaker takes all the chaos and heartbreak of motherhood, filters it through the jittery energy of Uncut Gems, and lights it on fire with humor and horror. It's a panic attack in movie form, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
Oh, and it is everything that last year's dreadful Amy Adams vehicle Nightbitch wasn't.
It'll drain you. It'll shake you. It might even terrify you. But damn, it's one hell of a film. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Truth & Treason tells the true story of Helmuth Hübener, a real-life teenage resistance fighter in Nazi Germany, a kid who had the guts, intelligence, and moral clarity to recognize that Hitler's Germany was collapsing into madness while the rest of the country shouted "Heil!" and looked the other way.
When we first meet Helmuth (Ewan Horrocks), he's the quiet one in a group of four teenage friends. He's not the bold one, not the rebel... at least not yet.
He's more of a timid observer while his buddies dive off bridges, spout party slogans, and go through the motions of Hitler Youth life in Hamburg. But over time, he begins to see the truth: the Nazi machine is built on lies, fear, and blind obedience.
After watching his own church hang up a "No Jews Allowed" sign and fall in line with Nazi policy, Helmuth snaps. With his Jewish friend Salomon (Nye Occomore) beaten and "disappeared," he starts typing and distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, using an old Remington typewriter to spread the truth about Hitler's atrocities.
His actions get the attention of an obsessive Gestapo officer (Rupert Evans), who sets out to find and crush this "traitor." The story leads, inevitably, to Helmuth's capture, trial, and execution at just 17 years old.
That's an incredible true story. The problem is: the movie isn't.
Truth & Treason is not a very memorable film. It's a story that absolutely should be riveting, emotional, and morally powerful. But this version, directed and co-written by Matt Whitaker, never quite finds its pulse. It's competent, sure. It's respectful. It's even sincere. But it's also flat, generic, and painfully by-the-numbers.
The movie's biggest issue is that it feels like it's been made a dozen times before, and better. The story of brave German citizens (in this case, kids) standing up to Hitler's regime is fertile dramatic ground, but this film doesn't add anything new.
It's got the pacing and visual polish of a mid-budget cable drama. The cinematography is fine, the costumes are fine, and the score is fine. Everything's just… fine. And that's the problem.
What's more interesting than what's actually in the movie is the story of how it got made. Whitaker first told this story years ago in a documentary called Truth & Conviction, which was solid and straightforward.
Then he tried to turn it into a limited series, but budget problems forced the production to be reworked into a two-hour feature. And it shows. You can feel the compression, the missing connective tissue, the half-baked arcs that were clearly meant to breathe in a longer format. Scenes that should hit with emotional power rush by.
And then there's the Angel Studios element. If you've seen their movies before (Sound of Freedom, Homestead, Brave the Dark, The Senior), you know the formula: low-to-mid-budget historical or faith-based stories told with earnest intent, but often bogged down by preachiness and a kind of Hallmark-level production quality.
Now, I don't particularly have an issue with faith-based filmmaking. If it's done with depth and artistry (if it respects its audience), it can be powerful. But too often, these movies hammer their message so bluntly that the nuance and humanity get lost. Truth & Treason is one of those movies.
It's not aggressively preachy, but the Christian undertones are thick enough that you can feel the agenda more than the artistry. There's nothing wrong with highlighting Hübener's faith (it was a key part of his moral compass), but the film leans into the sanctimonious rather than the complex. It wants to inspire more than it wants to explore.
And stylistically, it feels cheap. The sets, the lighting, the direction, they all have that "straight-to-cable" look. It's the kind of movie that would air on The History Channel at 9 p.m. on a Sunday or pop up on a streaming service with no fanfare.
Ewan Horrocks, as Helmuth, does a decent job with what he's given. He has an earnestness that works for the role, but he's limited by the flatness of the script. His friends (Ferdinand McKay and Daf Thomas) are interchangeable, not because of their talent necessarily, but because the writing gives them nothing distinctive to play.
Rupert Evans at least adds some bite as the Nazi investigator, bringing a little menace to the otherwise sleepy proceedings.
The young cast clearly cares about the story they're telling, and that's admirable. You can feel the sincerity from everyone involved. But sincerity alone doesn't make a compelling movie.
It's hard to knock Truth & Treason for its heart. Matt Whitaker has spent years trying to get this story told, starting from a documentary, then trying to expand it into a series, and finally getting it made as a feature. That persistence is commendable. But what's on screen feels more like a school project than a cinematic experience.
There's no tension. No urgency. No distinct visual identity. It's the kind of movie that wants to mean something, but it's too conventional and too careful to leave a mark. When it's over, you'll nod, say "That was nice," and then forget about it five minutes later.
If you want to see a film about resistance during WWII that actually burns with passion and originality, there are plenty of options: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, Europa Europa, The White Rose, and even Jojo Rabbit. These are films that find new ways to confront the madness of blind nationalism.
Truth & Treason replays the same notes, without much melody.
So, while the story of Helmuth Hübener absolutely deserves to be told (and Matt Whitaker's determination to tell it is admirable), the movie itself feels hollow, formulaic, and instantly forgettable.
Yet another entry in the Angel Studios catalog that means well, but ultimately preaches to the choir and settles for mediocrity. - ⭐️⭐️
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