CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS 11-21-25
- 23 minutes ago
- 15 min read
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review four new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, November 21st, 2025.
Every now and then, a movie comes along that shouldn't really work, and yet somehow, against all odds, it does. Rental Family is one of those movies. The concept itself (a lonely American actor living in Japan who joins a "rental family" service to play pretend in other people's lives) could've easily tipped into either absurd comedy or cheap sentimentality. Instead, it walks a surprisingly steady line between both.
Brendan Fraser plays Phil Vandarploeg, a washed-up American actor who moved to Tokyo years ago for a toothpaste commercial and somehow never left. He's stuck doing odd gigs, existing on autopilot, until he stumbles into a job at a business that literally rents out people to fill emotional voids: fake spouses, fake kids, fake parents, even fake coworkers for karaoke night.
Phil's first assignment? A funeral. Not for a dead man, but for someone still alive who wants to see who would show up. Before long, he's hired to fill every imaginable role, from a fake wedding groom to a pretend father for a young girl named Mia (Shannon Gorman).
What starts as a strange acting job slowly becomes something meaningful, as Phil begins to experience actual connection, which is the very thing he's been faking all along.
Yes, Werner Herzog already tackled this topic in Family Romance, LLC, but where Herzog went dark, existential, and deeply unsettling, Hikari goes the other way: warm, bright, a little corny, but full of heart. This isn't a story about someone losing themselves in the illusion of love; it's about someone finding genuine love through an illusion.
Hikari, who's done solid work on Tokyo Vice and Beef, brings her television sensibilities to the structure. The film plays like a streaming series pilot, with episodic, cleanly resolved arcs, and Phil encountering new "clients" who each teach him something about life and connection.
You could absolutely see Rental Family becoming a series where every week Brendan Fraser pretends to be someone's father, husband, or best friend and learns a new emotional lesson. And honestly, that's not an insult. It's the reason this thing goes down as smoothly as it does.
The performances are what make Rental Family far more engaging than it has any right to be. Brendan Fraser carries the movie with the same gentle sincerity that's made his comeback so welcome.
Ever since The Whale, he's aged into this beautifully grounded performer; he's a real, human presence, no vanity, no pretense, just warmth and empathy. You can see everything he's feeling in his face: the loneliness, the guilt, the quiet joy of connecting with someone again.
He's surrounded by a terrific Japanese cast. Takehiro Hira is excellent as Shinji, the company's owner, who treats this bizarre business like a mix between therapy and theater.
Mari Yamamoto brings complexity and warmth as Aiko, Phil's coworker who sees the cracks in what they do but keeps doing it anyway.
Akira Emoto, as the retired actor who hires Phil to interview him so he can feel remembered, gives the film its most touching subplot.
And young Shannon Gorman as Mia (the girl who believes Phil is her real dad) avoids all the child-actor clichés. She's natural, funny, and heartbreakingly real. The scenes between her and Fraser are genuinely moving, even when you know the emotional manipulation is coming a mile away.
This movie is pure, uncut sentimentality. It's got the glossy Searchlight Pictures look, the Sigur Rós soundtrack swelling at every turn, and a script that's so cleanly structured it feels like you could watch it while folding laundry and still catch every beat.
There's no real darkness, no sharp edges. You keep waiting for it to dig deeper into the existential weirdness of its premise (the idea that human intimacy can literally be bought and sold), but it never quite goes there. The movie's too nice for that.
And yet… that niceness works. It's refreshing, even. Hikari's direction is calm and openhearted. She's not interested in cynicism or irony. She's interested in what happens when lonely people reach out, even in artificial ways, and find something real in the process.
What ultimately holds Rental Family together is Brendan Fraser. His presence gives the movie its emotional legitimacy. He's not just playing a character; he's reflecting the very thing the film is about, which is a man who's been through pain, isolation, and humiliation but still chooses kindness.
Watching him here, you remember what made him such a beloved actor in the first place: the openness, the lack of ego, the vulnerability. This is the same guy who made The Mummy fun and The Whale devastating, now channeling all of that into a small, sincere story about connection.
Rental Family isn't a great film, because it's too simple and too safe for that. But it's an undeniably good one, the kind that sneaks up on you with its heart. It's funny in small ways, moving in big ones, and anchored by a lead performance so human it smooths over all the clichés.
Yes, it feels like a TV pilot. Yes, it's predictable. But it's also gentle, well-acted, beautifully shot, and filled with warmth. And sometimes, that's exactly enough.
It's not the best movie of 2025 (not even close), but it's one of the nicest. And in a year full of bombast, noise, and self-importance, that sincerity feels almost radical.
Brendan Fraser once again proves he's one of the most empathetic actors working today. And Hikari, even with her safe storytelling instincts, knows how to make that sincerity shine.
So, flaws and all, Rental Family is a sweet, sincere, quietly touching little film; it's the kind of movie that leaves you smiling, maybe even a little misty-eyed, and thinking, "You know what? That actually worked." - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
There are bad sequels, and then there are sequels that feel like someone took an hour-long second act of an already-mediocre musical, injected it with helium, stretched it to two-and-a-half hours, and told the audience with a straight face: "Yes. This needed to be two movies."
And that, my friends, is Wicked: For Good.
Let me be very clear up front: this entire two-part Wicked experiment (five-plus hours total) is one of the dumbest, most transparently cynical decisions in modern Hollywood. Studios have milked franchises before, but slicing Wicked into two bloated epics? That's next-level "We want more money" energy.
And the wildest part is: they chose to split a musical whose second act has always been notoriously thin. Even fans of the stage show (which I am not one of) admit Act II is the weak link. So the idea of turning that limp material into a 150-minute cinematic "event"? Absolute madness.
We pick up after Part One, with Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) branded the Wicked Witch and Glinda (Ariana Grande) rising as the sparkling, smiling Glinda the Good. Meanwhile, the Wizard is still a fraud, Michelle Yeoh's Morrible is still doing evil bureaucratic PR, animals are still being oppressed, and the Yellow Brick Road is under construction like it's a never-ending Ozian infrastructure bill.
Dorothy shows up, but only barely, and without a face (a very strange creative choice), which makes this feel less like a mythic reimagining and more like a rights-issue workaround.
There are new songs (none memorable), new subplots (none needed), and a bigger, louder, more humorless tone that desperately wants to feel "epic." Instead, it feels like watered-down political allegory meets theme-park bombast.
This movie is ALL padding. Olympic-level padding. Padding so aggressive it should get its own choreography at the Tonys. Some scenes exist just to keep the runtime inflated. Characters wander. Plot threads repeat.
There are political themes shoved in with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The villains monologue. The heroes mope. And the screenplay treats every moment, no matter how small, like a Shakespearean monologue delivered at full decibel Broadway intensity.
It's filler on top of filler, with padding stuffed into the padding like a depressing cinematic turducken.
This is where I need to confess something. Longtime listeners know this: I don't like The Wizard of Oz.
Even when it was "event TV" in the '70s and '80s, I didn't care. The songs didn't grab me, the story never worked for me, and the whole "Follow the Yellow Brick Road" vibe just irritated me.
Wicked the musical, didn't help change my mind. Found the music totally interchangeable and the story aggressively underwhelming. On stage, Act I at least has some cool production design and a couple of catchy tunes. Act II? A slog.
The only Oz-related screen versions I've ever loved: Return to Oz (1985), which is bizarre, terrifying, and actually unforgettable, and Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), Sam Raimi's crazy, creepy, and fun prequel.
Everything else? Not for me.
So yeah... maybe I'm not the target audience. But even putting that aside, Wicked: For Good is just not a good movie. Period.
Let's be fair: Cynthia Erivo is a brilliant performer. Ariana Grande has real charm and presence. Jonathan Bailey is a pro. Michelle Yeoh is Michelle freaking Yeoh. Jeff Goldblum? Always fun.
And yet…. none of them can rise above this script. They are trapped in a story that gives them nothing to play except flattened melodrama and YA-level dialogue.
Erivo pours everything she has into Elphaba, but the character is still a one-note martyr. Grande fares slightly better here than she did in Part One, but Glinda is written like a Pinterest board of sparkly quirks.
Jeff Goldblum gets a few tiny flashes of life (because he's Jeff Goldblum, and he rules), but even he feels boxed in by the material.
It's astounding how many extraordinary actors are wasted on this thing.
Still, let's give credit where credit is due: The movie looks expensive in the best way. The production design is often stunning. The costumes are lush. The sets are a feast. The CGI is polished. The sound mix will probably shatter a few Dolby Atmos speakers.
This is Jon M. Chu's wheelhouse, as he knows how to mount BIG, shiny productions. This thing has glitz and sparkle and swirling emerald flourishes everywhere. If you love visuals, you'll get your money's worth.
But visuals don't fix the emptiness at the movie's core.
Even if you removed every personal bias I have about Oz, musicals, or the original Wicked… this film simply does not work on a story level. It's overlong, overstretched, and emotionally hollow.
You can feel the seams. You can see the desperation. You can sense the studio whispering behind every scene: "We spent too much money on this… keep it going… KEEP IT GOING."
The thing is built like a prestige event, but the screenplay feels like a middle-school adaptation wrapped in IMAX spectacle. And the worst sin? It's boring. Just long, plodding, padded boredom sprinkled with a few pretty songs and a whole lot of self-importance.
And here's something that might seem obvious: an intermission should not last a YEAR.
Audiences waited twelve months for the cinematic equivalent of an elongated second act with more filler than a 1990s CD where the single is track one and everything else is stuff the band wrote in math class.
This was a bad idea on paper, in practice, and in outcome.
Yes, it will make a billion dollars. Yes, fans will dress up. Yes, it'll get Oscar nominations for just about everything. But in terms of pure cinematic enjoyment? Zero. In terms of storytelling? A disaster. In terms of musicality? Totally flat.
A chore to sit through, and a prime example of how Hollywood bloat can turn even the most beloved material into a lifeless, glitter-covered endurance test. - ⭐️1/2
Sisu: Road to Revenge is the sequel to 2022's gloriously insane Finnish action film Sisu. This is not just a sequel, it's a bigger, bloodier, louder, and funnier reimagining of everything that worked the first time, turned up to 11.
Set in 1946, after the end of World War II, the story finds Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) returning to Soviet-occupied Karelia to rebuild the home that was destroyed when his family was brutally murdered.
His plan is simple: dismantle the remains of his house, load it onto a truck, and take it to safety. But, of course, simplicity dies quickly when the Soviets get involved. The sadistic Red Army officer Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang), the man responsible for killing Korpi's family, is sent to finish what he started.
What follows is 88 minutes of non-stop, blood-soaked chaos; it's a series of escalating, hyper-violent set pieces stitched together with grit, gallows humor, and the kind of reckless cinematic energy that only Jalmari Helander can conjure.
Helander is one of the most fascinating genre filmmakers working today. This is the guy who gave us Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale back in 2010 (still one of my favorite Christmas horror movies of all time), a film about a group of Finnish hunters battling a monstrous version of Santa Claus. That movie was weird, hilarious, violent, and utterly original. It's still his masterpiece.
With Sisu and now Sisu: Road to Revenge, Helander has carved out his own subgenre of gonzo Finnish mayhem. He's basically taken the war movie and filtered it through the sensibility of George Miller, Sam Raimi, and Looney Tunes. It's part Mad Max: Fury Road, part Army of Darkness, part Tom and Jerry with grenades.
The tone here is pure pulp; it is unapologetically cartoonish and self-aware. Each sequence is introduced with a title card ("Motor Mayhem," "Incoming," "Blood on the Snow") as Korpi dispatches wave after wave of enemies in increasingly absurd and inventive ways. You think you've seen the craziest kill in the movie… and then the next scene tops it.
Like a bullet train loaded with dynamite, this film is edited within an inch of its life, bursting with energy, and gleefully unconcerned with realism.
Korpi is less a man than a force of nature; he's a silent, blood-soaked Finnish Terminator. He gets stabbed, shot, blown up, set on fire, and keeps coming back for more. You stop asking "how" after about ten minutes.
There's an extended chase involving motorcycles, a truck, and what I can only describe as a mid-air woodpile explosion. There's also a sequence where a plane battles a truck... and yes, the movie does answer the age-old question: what happens when a plane and a truck face off? (Spoiler: the plane loses.)
Helander's direction has that same manic glee he showed in Rare Exports. The violence is over-the-top but never mean-spirited; it's played with the twisted sense of humor of someone who loves old pulp comics and Raimi-style splatter. It's Looney Tunes with entrails.
Jorma Tommila once again proves that saying nothing can sometimes say everything. He's perfect as Korpi; he is stoic, intense, and oddly sympathetic for a man who kills roughly a hundred people before lunch. He's a one-man wrecking crew, and you never doubt his resolve for a second.
Stephen Lang, who has made a career out of playing terrifying bastards (Don't Breathe, Tombstone), is having the time of his life here. He's the kind of villain who could kill a puppy, smirk, and light a cigarette with the same match. He's all hard angles and gravel-voiced menace, and the perfect counterpoint to Tommila's silent rage.
And then there's Richard Brake, who has become the go-to guy for creepy supporting roles. He doesn't have much screen time here, but every time he shows up, you know something insane is about to happen.
What makes Sisu: Road to Revenge so much fun is that it never takes itself too seriously. Helander understands exactly what kind of movie he's making; it's big, bloody, and ridiculous, and that's the point.
The humor is baked into the ultraviolence. Some moments play like live-action Wile E. Coyote sketches, where Korpi survives explosions and crashes that should leave him vaporized, but instead he brushes off the soot, reloads his gun, and keeps going.
It's the kind of movie that demands to be seen with a midnight crowd, you know, the kind where people cheer, groan, and laugh in equal measure. Watch this with a packed house and you'll have a blast.
Sisu: Road to Revenge is everything you want in a sequel; it's bigger, faster, bloodier, and somehow even more absurd than the first. It's a lean, 88-minute blast of adrenaline that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve: Fury Road, Rambo, The Road Warrior, Evil Dead II, and about a dozen Chuck Jones cartoons.
If you check your brain at the door, grab a beer, and surrender to the chaos, you'll have a hell of a time.
Helander might owe a creative debt to George Miller and Sam Raimi, but he's developed his own twisted Finnish flavor of action insanity; it's a cinematic brew of revenge, resilience, and cartoon physics.
Even though Rare Exports remains his masterpiece, Sisu: Road to Revenge is a wild, hilarious, blood-soaked reminder that sometimes all you really need in life (and in movies) is a man, his truck, and a righteous reason to kill everyone in his path. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
At just 32, Max Walker-Silverman has already carved out a spot as one of the most quietly impressive American indie filmmakers working today. His 2022 debut, A Love Song, was a beautiful little movie; it was tender, minimalist, and deeply human.
His follow-up, Rebuilding, takes that same Colorado landscape and emotional tone and expands on it in every way.
This is a filmmaker who gets what so many modern directors miss: that sincerity isn't weakness, that stillness can be powerful, and that people (just people, with all their flaws and small kindnesses) are often more interesting than any plot twist.
The title Rebuilding says it all, and not just because it's about burned-down homes and FEMA trailers. This is a movie about rebuilding everything: your life, your family, your faith in other human beings.
After wildfires destroy his ranch, cowboy Dusty (Josh O'Connor) ends up in a FEMA camp, trying to figure out what's left of his life. His ex-wife Ruby (Meghann Fahy) and their nine-year-old daughter Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre) are nearby, and that uneasy proximity sparks a halting, heartfelt reconnection between a father and daughter who haven't really known each other in years.
The world Walker-Silverman builds feels lived in. You can smell the ash in the air, feel the quiet despair of people sitting in aluminum trailers surrounded by what used to be their world. There's a hauntingly beautiful simplicity to it, the kind that sneaks up on you and gets under your skin.
Like A Love Song, Rebuilding takes place in Walker-Silverman's home state of Colorado, and again he teams up with cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, who does stunning work here. The movie looks absolutely gorgeous.
The burned forests, the desolate plains, the rust-colored sunsets, it's all captured with such authenticity and emotion that you could watch this film with the sound off and still get its message.
It's not flashy, but it's powerful. There's a quiet rhythm to it: the hum of a truck, the clink of a coffee cup, a single acoustic guitar strumming on a porch. The editing by Jane Rizzo and Ramzi Bashour gives everything room to breathe. Even the silences carry weight.
Josh O'Connor is on fire right now. The guy's had an insane run the past couple of years (Challengers, The History of Sound, The Mastermind, Wake Up Dead Man) and now Rebuilding, which might be his most grounded, human performance yet.
The British actor who once played Prince Charles in The Crown has gone full American cowboy here, and he nails it. His accent, his physicality, his weary quiet... everything feels lived in. You believe this guy's been through hell and is just trying to hold it together with duct tape and hope.
Dusty isn't a talker. He's not the kind of guy who makes big speeches about loss or redemption. But you see it all (the guilt, the love, the self-loathing) in O'Connor's eyes. It's a subtle, heartbreaking performance, and it's the kind of work that solidifies him as one of the best actors of his generation.
Lily LaTorre, who plays Dusty's daughter Callie-Rose, is a revelation. She's sharp, funny, and wonderfully natural; she's one of those child actors who feels like a real kid, not a precocious script robot. Her chemistry with O'Connor is the heart of the film.
There's a beautiful scene where he teaches her to saddle a horse that is so simple, so gentle, that it feels like something out of an old movie. It's a brief, perfect moment where you realize life might still be okay.
Meghann Fahy, as the ex-wife, brings warmth and grounded realism to the role. Amy Madigan (who, let's be honest, is having one of the strangest late-career runs imaginable) is excellent here too.
After her wild, ridiculous, cartoonish performance in Weapons (which, I still can't believe, is getting awards buzz), it's a relief to see her doing something real.
She's fantastic... understated, emotionally present, and quietly commanding. This is the kind of role that reminds you why she was so great in the first place.
For about two-thirds of Rebuilding, I was totally with it. The writing, the performances, the pacing, it all clicks. There's real emotional truth here. You feel the pain of loss and the awkward, halting process of reconnecting with people after everything's fallen apart.
It's a film about people learning to live again, and about finding grace in tragedy and community in chaos.
But, yeah, that third act. It wobbles. The film hits some predictable beats, a couple of too-convenient turns that feel like they belong in a more conventional drama. A death, some tidy resolutions, a little bit of "well, I guess everything's okay now."
You can see the seams of the script a bit too clearly near the end. It doesn't ruin the movie by any means, but it does make the finale feel less organic than what came before.
Still, the film's message: that rebuilding isn't just about bricks and wood, it's about relationships and forgiveness, lands. And it lands hard.
There's something wonderfully old-fashioned about Rebuilding. It's not cynical. It's not ironic. It's not trying to be clever or meta or shocking. It's just a human story about loss and renewal. In an era when so many films are loud, overdesigned, and emotionally hollow, this one is quiet, handmade, and full of heart.
This is a film that doesn't just show you rebuilding, it is rebuilding: piece by piece, person by person, moment by moment. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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