CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 11-7-25
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review six new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, November 7th, 2025.
So here we go again. Another Predator movie. The sixth live-action one, if you're keeping score, though, at this point it feels like the fourteenth because they've been trying to keep this thing alive for decades.
Dan Trachtenberg, who made the actually-pretty-good Prey, is back in the director's chair, but this time he's traded in grit and tension for what might be the corniest, most misguided, PG-13 cash grab in the franchise's history.
Predator: Badlands is a bad movie. Bad with a capital B. The kind of bad where you sit there in disbelief, wondering how something this expensive, this loud, and this desperate can feel so lifeless and so completely un-Predator-like.
The movie takes place in the future on some random planet where we meet Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Predator who's been kicked out of his clan for being too small and weak. He's basically the Predator version of a bullied high-school sophomore.
His domineering father, Njohrr (the "Apex Predator"), wants him dead because, you know, that's the kind of deep, meaningful father-son drama you expect in a movie about space hunters with crab faces.
Dek ends up on a planet called Genna (which, of course, is described as "the death planet") filled with dangerous creatures, killer plants, and weird monsters. He's trying to prove himself by killing a legendary beast so he can go home and be accepted again.
Along the way, he meets Thia, a damaged robot (or "Weyland-Yutani synth") played by Elle Fanning, who is separated from her own kind. She's missing her legs, so Dek carries her around on his back while they trek across this weirdly bright, overly CG-rendered wasteland in search of his big monster kill.
There's also a cuddly little alien creature they adopt along the way, who is basically Baby Yoda's unwanted cousin. It's supposed to be cute and funny. It's not.
Where to even start? Let's begin with tone, because Predator: Badlands has no idea what tone it wants to strike. It's part adventure movie, part YA melodrama, part sci-fi western, part bad Pixar knockoff.
There's this push to make the Predator sympathetic, like a misunderstood teenage outcast with daddy issues who just wants to belong. Really? We're turning one of the most terrifying movie monsters ever created into a misunderstood kid from an after-school special?
The film's PG-13 rating doesn't help. The violence is neutered. The kills are quick, bloodless, and generic. You can feel Disney's fingerprints all over this thing. They want to sell toys, not traumatize anyone. And because it's missing the primal brutality that defined the original Predator movies, the whole thing just feels sanitized and dull.
Then there's Elle Fanning. She's a wonderful actress (she's done great work in other films), but this is not her moment...at all. As Thia, the legless android, she gives one of the most grating, over-acted performances of the year.
She's constantly chirping, spouting pseudo-profound dialogue, explaining every single thing that's happening on screen, as if the audience can't figure out what's going on. It's exhausting. She's like the world's most annoying GPS system with hipster hair.
Her second role as Tessa, a "synth" villain, is no better, just stiff and robotic in every sense of the word. Two bad performances for the price of one.
If you're going to make a big, dumb sci-fi movie, at least make it your own big, dumb sci-fi movie. But Badlands spends its entire runtime ripping off other films.
The first fifteen minutes are a shameless, blatant copy of Dune: Part Two, from the sand-drenched visuals to the sound design to a score that sounds like someone doing a Hans Zimmer impression on a cheap synthesizer.
There's Avatar all over this movie too (do you really want something as awful as Avatar all over your film???), from the alien language, the bioluminescent plants, the pseudo-spiritual nonsense about "balance" and "connection to nature."
There's Star Wars, complete with cutesy comic relief creatures, sentimental droid dialogue, and a scene that literally echoes C-3PO being carried on Chewbacca's back in The Empire Strikes Back. It's so blatant that you almost expect John Williams' theme to start playing.
And the worst part? The movie thinks this mash-up of stolen ideas is fresh. It's not. It's corporate Frankenstein filmmaking, a product assembled from the leftover parts of other movies.
Okay, I'll give it this: the movie looks expensive. The visual effects are slick, the creature designs are polished, and the cinematography is professional. You can tell there's a ton of money on the screen. But none of it matters because there's nothing underneath it.
The action scenes are loud and chaotic, but they're never thrilling. You don't care about the stakes because you don't care about the characters.
Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, buried under all that makeup and motion capture, does what he can. He's physically fine, but emotionally, there's nothing there. The story tries to make you feel something for him, but you don't. Dek's emotional arc, "bullied kid proves himself to his dad," could have worked if the writing hadn't been so lazy.
And then there's the ending, which sets up yet another sequel that I can't imagine anyone wants. It's the kind of cliffhanger that feels less like a tease and more like a threat.
There are bad sequels, and then there are sequels that make you question why the franchise even exists. Predator: Badlands is the latter. It's the worst film in the series that doesn't involve aliens with acid blood. It might even give The Predator (2018) a run for its money in the "what were they thinking?" department.
What once started as a lean, mean, R-rated survival thriller about soldiers being hunted in the jungle has devolved into a bloated, PG-13 space opera with cute animals and wisecracking robots. The creature that used to skin people alive is now learning life lessons about friendship and family.
If you're a hardcore Predator fan, you might get a kick out of the Easter eggs and nods to the Alien universe. But if you came looking for tension, terror, or even a hint of the primal energy that made the original so much fun, you're out of luck.
This movie isn't a hunt... It's a cartoon.
Predator: Badlands? More like Predator: Bad Movie. - ⭐️1/2
Let's start with this: I've run very hot and cold on Guillermo del Toro for his entire career. He's one of those directors people seem to worship... like he's this mystical creature whisperer, a poet of monsters, a cinematic saint. But I've never bought into the cult.
I respect the guy. I know he loves monsters, fairy tales, and all the gothic trappings of horror cinema. He's a nerd for this stuff, I get it.
But the truth is, I think he's the weakest of the so-called "Three Amigos" of Mexican filmmaking. Cuarón and Iñárritu make films that actually have scope, emotional intelligence, and visual power. Del Toro? He's incredibly inconsistent.
For every The Devil's Backbone or Nightmare Alley, you get a pretentious, overstuffed mess like Pan's Labyrinth or The Shape of Water (which, yes, is basically The Creature from the Black Lagoon… with sex).
So now we've got Frankenstein. The big one. The project del Toro has been dreaming about for decades. It's his holy grail, his cinematic destiny.
And somehow, somehow, after waiting thirty years for this guy to finally make his passion project, he's managed to turn Mary Shelley's Frankenstein into a goddamn Marvel origin story.
Visually, sure, it's gorgeous. That's always the case with del Toro. The cinematography is lush, the production design is baroque, the costumes immaculate.
You can freeze almost any frame of this movie and hang it in a museum. But pretty pictures don't save a hollow movie, and this thing is hollow to its core.
Del Toro divides the film into sections: a Prelude, Victor's Tale, and The Creature's Tale. It opens in the Arctic, with a Danish sea captain (Lars Mikkelsen) discovering a half-dead Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, chewing the icy scenery like it owes him rent).
Victor warns of the monster, who is now a hulking, fur-wrapped phantom played by Jacob Elordi, who cannot die.
From there, we flash back to Victor's privileged childhood, the death of his mother (played by Mia Goth, who also doubles as Victor's sister-in-law, because why not?), his cruel father (Charles Dance doing his usual regal bastard routine), and his descent into godlike obsession as he tries to reanimate the dead.
Enter Christoph Waltz as a wealthy arms dealer who funds Victor's experiments, because, of course, there's an arms dealer. Mia Goth plays Elizabeth, Victor's brother's fiancée and the object of Victor's lusty, tortured affection.
And Elordi's creature, when he finally comes to life, looks like a marble statue crossed with a mannequin. It is more Vogue cover than cosmic tragedy.
Here's the big problem: del Toro's always been fascinated by the "beauty of monsters," but he can't get past the surface of that idea. He's a filmmaker who tells you the creature deserves sympathy, but rarely shows you why. The Shape of Water had the same issue: it romanticizes freaks without truly giving them interior lives.
In Shelley's novel, the monster's tragedy comes from his humanity; he learns language, philosophy, and morality, and becomes aware of his own loneliness. It's heartbreaking. Here? It's all visual noise.
Elordi mopes around slowly while lightning flashes, his voiceover drones on and on, and wolves fly through the air (literally, the CGI wolves are laughably bad). It's all style, no soul.
And that's what drives me nuts about del Toro: he's a brilliant designer, but a mediocre storyteller. His dialogue is painfully literal, his characters speak in platitudes, and his pacing is glacial.
He's too in love with his own imagery to actually engage with the psychology of his story. So you end up with a Frankenstein that's all thunder, no heartbeat.
Oscar Isaac gives one of the most overcooked performances of his career. He's doing every possible actor move here: trembling hands, feverish eyes, crazy accent, lots of heavy breathing. It's pure ham, the kind of thing that belongs in a melodramatic stage production, not a gothic tragedy.
Jacob Elordi, meanwhile, continues his streak of being tall and hollow. He was fine as Elvis in Priscilla (because Sofia Coppola actually knows how to direct actors), but here he's just a walking special effect.
He's supposed to be tragic and innocent, but there's nothing behind his eyes; there is no depth, no sadness, no rage. He's a model, not a monster.
Mia Goth, who's become the reigning queen of horror (Pearl, Suspiria, Infinity Pool), is completely wasted. Her character drifts in and out of the story like a ghost without purpose.
Christoph Waltz does the usual Christoph Waltz thing: he smirks, monologues, and twirls an invisible mustache. Charles Dance glowers. Ralph Ineson shows up briefly to remind you what a real actor sounds like.
It's one of those casts where you can feel everyone doing their best to elevate material that's beneath them. But when the script is this flat, there's only so much they can do.
Del Toro claims this is the version of Frankenstein he's always wanted to make, the faithful, emotional one that captures "the tragedy of the monster." But it's not faithful, and it's not tragic. It's melodramatic and self-serious, with none of the horror, tension, or philosophical depth that makes the novel so timeless.
Yes, there are a few strong moments: the blind man sequence/subplot with David Bradley works nicely, and there's a flash of something slightly moving when the creature learns the word "friend." But those moments are fleeting.
The rest of the movie is del Toro doing del Toro: ornate production design, dripping candlelight, overwrought speeches about the nature of life and death, and endless, endless scenes of characters staring dramatically into the middle distance.
And the ending (I won't spoil it) is pure Hollywood setup nonsense. It feels like the start of a franchise, like we're supposed to get The Creature Returns or Bride of Frankenstein: Origins next. You can almost hear the Marvel theme playing under it.
That, to me, is the greatest sin of this movie. Guillermo del Toro has taken one of the most profound horror stories ever written (a meditation on creation, responsibility, and existential pain) and turned it into a big dumb origin movie with CGI wolves and lightning bolts.
Look, I'll always admire del Toro's passion. The man loves monsters, and that's genuine. But love isn't enough. Frankenstein is beautiful to look at and empty to feel; it is a film that mistakes production design for storytelling and self-importance for art.
This is one of the worst adaptations of Shelley's novel ever made, and that includes Kenneth Branagh's bombastic Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with Robert De Niro. It's choppy, tonally confused, emotionally hollow, and visually overindulgent.
There's a line Victor's brother asks him in the film: "Did you ever ask yourself, of all the parts that make up that man, which part holds the soul?" Del Toro should've asked himself the same question, because this movie doesn't have one.
A massive disappointment. My love/hate relationship with Guillermo del Toro continues. This one? Solidly in the hate category. - ⭐️1/2
I love a great boxing movie because the best ones aren't about belts and cuts and cornermen, they're about identity. Who am I when the bell rings, and who am I when the crowd goes home? Christy should be perfect for that.
Christy Martin's life has everything: trailblazing fame, brutal relationships, the Don King showmanship, and the unimaginable survival that turns her into a folk hero. Instead, we get a movie that shadowboxes clichés until the ref mercifully waves it off.
From minute one, you can feel the "TV movie of the week" bones creaking. The script ticks every box like it's reading off a laminated card: small-town repression, stern Catholic parents glaring through Sunday lunch, the closeted teen love, the older trainer who "sees something" and morphs into an abuser, the rise montage, the Don King carnival, the "if you leave me I'll kill you" line that might as well be in 72-point font.
None of that is false to Christy's true story. What happened to her is real, horrific, and worth telling, but the movie refuses to ask why.
Why does she choose this man? Why does she reshape herself for public consumption? Why do the people who love her look away? It's all surface. No psychology, just plot points.
Sydney Sweeney, as Christy, never finds the person under the persona, mainly because she is a massively limited actress. In-ring, the movie wants the "pixie next door who will wallop your ass" vibe, but there's no lived-in rhythm to the boxing. There is no weight in the feet, no timing in the hands, no sense of a fighter's intelligence.
Outside the ring, Sweeney leans on pose and volume; it's a one-note, press-kit performance that confuses transformation with wigs, weight shifts, and a new walk.
Halfway through, when the movie lets the "disguise" drop and she snaps back to more familiar Sweeney glam, it feels like a brand reset, not a character beat. Christy Martin is a complex, contradictory, magnetic figure; this terrible performance makes her generic.
Ben Foster, buried under belly, jowls, and a pious comb-over as Jim Martin, should be terrifying. Foster's capable of real darkness; he's played the American nightmare before.
Here he's just a bored bundle of tics and threats, a cartoon of abusive entitlement with no inner logic. The movie never interrogates him; it points. He's a scowl that lifts weights.
When we reach the real-life attempted murder (stabbed, shot, left for dead), the film hasn't earned it. It just arrives, because the outline said it would.
Around them: Merritt Wever, usually one of the most precise actors working, is stuck in a single frown as Christy's mother; it's all temperature, no weather. Ethan Embry, surprisingly, supplies the most human notes as the father, with small, reactive beats that feel like an actual person, not a function.
Katy O'Brian pops for a couple of rounds as Lisa Holewyne. Jess Gabor brings flashes of tenderness as the high-school girlfriend Rosie. And Chad L. Coleman has fun as Don King (of course, he does), though the scenes are pure theme-park King: hair, laugh, menace, exit. Everyone's trapped inside an outline.
David Michôd can make urgent, muscular cinema (Animal Kingdom, The King), but this is flatly staged, cut within an inch of its life, and shot like prestige basic cable. The fights never bruise, there is no geography, no escalation, just coverage and sound effects.
The timeline hopscotches to the obvious beats (Sports Illustrated cover, King's contract, the big TV nights) without ever letting us sit in the muck of consequence.
It's as if the movie is afraid of the parts that would make it specific: the way Christy weaponized showmanship, how she negotiated her public image versus her private truth, how the business chewed her up and cheered anyway.
Worse, the film treats Christy's sexuality like a checkbox instead of a core tension. The shame machine is there (closeted small town, homophobic family), but the interior cost is not.
What did it feel like to build a marketable "coal miner's daughter" while hiding your heart? How did denying herself tangle with the adrenaline of winning? The movie says, "it happened," then hustles to the next headline, while Sweeney lazily coasts along.
And look, I'm not here to take victory laps on easy targets, but it's impossible to ignore how nakedly the film chases "transformative" awards narrative, with Sydney Sweeney obviously roughing it up for respectability, the Big Serious Role.
We just lived through the same thing with The Smashing Machine: two brand-name stars promising metamorphosis, and halfway through both films, the physical "transformation" dissolves back into the familiar persona. Transformation is interior. If we don't see the soul shift, the muscles are cosplay.
The great sports biopics (Raging Bull, The Fighter, Foxcatcher) understand shame, ego, class, and commerce; they understand the violence you do to yourself just to stand still. Christy understands the order of events, and that's it.
It knows where to put the triumph music, where to dim the lights, where to cut to Don King's grin. What it doesn't know is Christy Martin.
That's the real heartbreak here. Christy's story as the first woman on the Sports Illustrated cover, first to sign with King, the coal miner's daughter who made America watch women's boxing, then survived what should have killed her, is opera.
It deserves a movie with a point of view, not a recap with a pulse. Give me a director who wants to live inside the contradiction of a woman selling a palatable femininity while throwing hands like a storm. Give me a script that's curious instead of dutiful. Give me a performance that bleeds.
As is, Christy is the Tuesday Night Movie of the Week version: overly earnest, messy, instantly forgettable. A powerful true life reduced to montage and makeup, with a terrible central performance by Sweeney. I wanted a fight. I got a highlight reel. It is a bad film. - ⭐️1/2
Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay is one of the most fascinating directors working today. She is a visual poet obsessed with grief, guilt, and madness. From Ratcatcher to Morvern Callar to We Need to Talk About Kevin, she's carved out this haunting cinematic lane where trauma and beauty collide.
Her only real stumble was You Were Never Really Here, which was a pretentious, joyless mess that tried way too hard to be a modern Taxi Driver and wound up being an exhausting Joaquin Phoenix showreel.
But now, eight years later, Ramsay has returned with Die My Love, and it's her comeback masterpiece.
This is Ramsay at her most unhinged, her most hypnotic, her most fearless. It's also her darkest and most emotionally overwhelming film. And thanks to Jennifer Lawrence, it's not just one of the best movies of 2025; it contains the single most outstanding performance anyone has given all year.
Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) move from New York City to his family's rural Montana home to start a new life and a new family. The house is big, creaky, and isolated. His parents (played by Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek) live nearby, both hovering between affection and quiet insanity.
At first, Grace and Jackson's marriage looks passionate, wild, even feral; they are the kind of couple who can't keep their hands off each other. But after the birth of their baby, everything begins to rot from the inside.
Grace starts to unravel. The postpartum depression creeps in quietly, then takes over like a virus. She stops sleeping. She stops caring. She starts prowling around the yard at night, masturbating in the grass, hearing noises, seeing things that may or may not be real.
There's a mysterious biker (LaKeith Stanfield) who may exist only in her mind, and a constant sense that something terrible is about to happen, or already has.
The movie doesn't care about plot in any traditional sense. Ramsay jumps around in time, fractures scenes, repeats moments, and blurs dreams into reality. It's part horror film, part psychological drama, part dark comedy, part fever dream. The tone shifts constantly (one second hilarious, the next unbearable), and you never, ever feel safe watching it.
This might be Jennifer Lawrence's best work yet. What she does here is fearless. There's nothing polished, no vanity, no effort to make the character likable. Grace is raw, unpredictable, sexual, dangerous, and utterly human.
It's the kind of performance that makes you squirm because you're not sure whether to pity her, fear her, or both. Lawrence throws herself into this character so completely that you can feel her pulse on screen.
She's manic, tender, cruel, loving, self-destructive... often in the same scene. The physicality alone is astonishing: crawling through mud, smashing mirrors, slamming her head into glass, whispering to herself like she's in a trance.
It's also one of the bravest depictions of postpartum psychosis ever put on film. There's no Hallmark movie sentimentality here. Ramsay and Lawrence don't simplify or sanitize the horror of what it feels like to lose control of your own mind after giving birth. It's messy, painful, sometimes grotesque, and absolutely unforgettable.
And yet, despite how intense this movie is, there are moments of genuine love and humor. The car scene where Grace and Jackson sing along to John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves is one of the most beautiful, bittersweet things Ramsay's ever filmed.
Their version of David Bowie's Kooks plays like a sad echo of what they used to be; it's a fleeting reminder that, beneath all the chaos, these two people really did love each other once.
Robert Pattinson matches Lawrence note for note. He's heartbreaking here as a man watching the person he loves slowly disappear in front of him. There's exhaustion in every movement, a quiet desperation that makes his performance one of his best.
Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte are terrific as his parents. They are fragile, haunted ghosts of an older generation who've seen madness before and recognize it immediately. Spacek's scenes are eerie and sad; Nolte's are oddly tender, even funny. He shares one incredible moment in the woods with Lawrence that feels like two wounded souls connecting through shared insanity.
LaKeith Stanfield pops up as the biker (sexy, mysterious, possibly imaginary), and even though he doesn't get much screen time, his presence lingers. He's like a hallucination made of gasoline and temptation.
Ramsay's visual style has always been singular; it is poetic and brutal at the same time. Here, she shoots in a 1.33:1 Academy ratio, and it's perfect. The tight, boxy frame turns the wide-open Montana wilderness into a prison.
Every shot feels claustrophobic, even when it's outside. The 35mm cinematography by the great Seamus McGarvey is breathtaking; it is rich, textured, and feverish.
The sound design is insane in the best way. The constant crying baby. The barking dog. The hum of insects. The creak of the floorboards. It all builds a psychological rhythm that mirrors Grace's unraveling. The editing cuts like a razor; it's abrupt, jarring, elliptical. Ramsay puts you inside Grace's head, and it's not a comfortable place to be.
And then there's the music, and the way Ramsay uses pop songs as emotional weapons. Tony Basil's Mickey becomes this manic loop during a scene where Grace spirals into madness, and it's both funny and horrifying.
Cream's Crossroads scores a chaotic car crash involving a horse, which is one of the most insane sequences of the year. The John Prine duet. The Bowie singalong. And over the end credits, Ramsay herself sings Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart. It's the perfect coda... raw, haunting, and devastatingly fitting.
Die My Love is not an easy movie to watch. It's unsettling, uncomfortable, and emotionally draining. Some scenes will make you flinch. There are moments of absurd dark humor that make you laugh, then immediately feel guilty for laughing. There's blood, sex, madness, and heartbreak... often all at once.
But it's also riveting. You can't look away. It's the kind of movie that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until you're completely spent. When it ends, you feel hollowed out, like you've been through something real.
Ramsay doesn't make films you enjoy. She makes films you experience. And this one, in all its chaos and pain and beauty, is the purest distillation of what she does best.
Die My Love might be a hard movie to love, but it's impossible to forget. It's raw, fearless, funny, disturbing, and profoundly sad. Ramsay has made a film about motherhood, madness, and identity that feels both deeply personal and universally terrifying.
Jennifer Lawrence delivers a career-defining performance; it is brave, complex, and utterly fearless. Robert Pattinson is quietly heartbreaking. And Lynne Ramsay reaffirms that she's one of the boldest filmmakers alive.
This isn't Oscar bait. This isn't a "message movie." This is art, it's messy, dark, and full of life.
Die My Love is one of the best films of 2025. It is a gut punch of emotion and filmmaking craft that leaves you shaken, haunted, and oddly grateful for the experience. It's not for everyone. But for those willing to go there, it's unforgettable. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Writer-director James Vanderbilt has had one of the strangest careers in modern Hollywood. He's written everything from Darkness Falls to Basic, from The Amazing Spider-Man to the great Zodiac.
He's also written Scream 5 and Scream 6, produced Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria, and directed one other movie, Truth, the stiff and self-important Dan Rather drama from 2015 that no one remembers.
Now, a decade later, he's back in the director's chair with Nuremberg, another "important" movie based on a true story.
And I hate to say it, but this thing is just as stiff, lifeless, and Oscar-bait-y as they come.
Based on the 2013 nonfiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, the film follows Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to evaluate captured Nazi leaders awaiting trial after World War II.
Among those prisoners is Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Hitler's second-in-command, a delusional narcissist and war criminal who thinks he's untouchable.
The setup is actually pretty compelling: Kelley has to determine whether Göring is mentally fit to stand trial, but what he really wants to understand is the psychology of evil.
The movie positions this as a kind of cerebral "battle of wits" between two men: the American doctor trying to define evil and the smug Nazi monster who embodies it.
In theory, that's fascinating. In execution, it's basically Silence of the Lambs all over again.
Russell Crowe plays Göring as this enormous, sweaty, slick-haired, larger-than-life caricature of arrogance, and to be fair, Göring was that guy. But Crowe plays him like he's auditioning for a stage production of Amadeus directed by Oliver Stone.
Every line is shouted or sneered, his accent wanders all over Europe, and by the end, he's basically growling his dialogue through a mouthful of scenery. It's a performance that should've been terrifying, but it's just hammy.
Rami Malek, meanwhile, does what Rami Malek always does: stares intensely, underlines every syllable, and somehow manages to overact while doing almost nothing. His Dr. Kelley is supposed to be this haunted, cerebral presence, but Malek just feels robotic.
It's like he's doing his Bohemian Rhapsody "Freddie Mercury in thought" face for two and a half hours.
Everyone else is fine but forgettable. John Slattery has a few scenes and delivers every line like it belongs on an Oscar-hopeful trailer. Colin Hanks pops in for a paycheck and vanishes.
Michael Shannon, one of the most reliably intense actors on the planet, is strangely subdued; it's like someone told him to turn the volume down to "sleepwalking."
And Richard E. Grant, who shows up late in the film as David Maxwell Fyfe, ends up being the best thing in the movie, injecting a little actual spark into the dullness.
The whole thing is shot and edited like an early-'80s prestige drama, like the kind of film that would've been released in 1984, marketed as "powerful," and forgotten by the following spring.
Everything about it feels trapped in amber: the stiff pacing, the "important" lighting, the overly serious dialogue. It's the kind of movie that seems to have been built by a committee with one goal in mind (to win Oscars), but nobody ever stopped to make sure it was actually interesting.
Vanderbilt clearly wants Nuremberg to be this grand moral inquiry into evil, the human psyche, and historical guilt, but the movie never earns its weight. It's long, heavy, and relentlessly self-serious. There's not an ounce of spontaneity or life in it. The characters don't feel like people; they feel like exhibits in a museum.
At one point, the film even resorts to using real archival footage from the concentration camps (horrifying, graphic, and absolutely real), and it's effective, but also manipulative. It's the kind of moment that feels less like a storytelling choice and more like a desperate plea for credibility.
It's like Vanderbilt wanted to make sure the audience knows this movie is important. And yet, despite all that, Nuremberg feels hollow.
The main issue here is that Vanderbilt doesn't have the chops as a director to handle this kind of material. His approach is weirdly flat, everything's shot in the same dour tone, every conversation sounds rehearsed, and the pacing drags like you're watching a History Channel special stretched into a two-and-a-half-hour endurance test.
And that "battle of wits" between Kelley and Göring? It's about as thrilling as watching two people argue over chess rules. The scenes between Malek and Crowe should crackle with intensity, but they just sit there, heavy and dull. Crowe rants; Malek listens. Repeat. For 150 minutes.
You can practically feel the movie checking boxes: the dramatic speeches, the moral questions, the historical montages, the swelling score. It's all there, but it never comes alive.
Judgment at Nuremberg from 1961, Stanley Kramer's old-school courtroom epic, wasn't exactly the most subtle movie ever made, but at least it had energy and purpose. This new Nuremberg doesn't. It's just prestige packaging; it is a stiff, humorless, self-satisfied slog that mistakes importance for impact.
Crowe hams it up, Malek stares through the camera, and Vanderbilt directs it like he's making an awards-season demo reel for himself. It's all very serious, very noble, and very boring.
It's also two and a half hours long, and by the end, you'll feel every minute of it.
Nuremberg is the definition of middlebrow Oscar bait: a film that wants to be profound but is too lifeless to move you, too self-conscious to surprise you, and too derivative to matter. It's respectable, yes, but it is never compelling.
You'll leave the theater not angry, not moved, not enlightened... just tired. And that's the worst sin a movie like this can commit. - ⭐️⭐️
Some movies are inspired by great filmmakers, and some are straight-up copies of them. Clint Bentley's Train Dreams is very much the latter; it is a derivative, pretentious, self-serious slog that desperately wants to be profound, but instead just plays like a film school imitation of Terrence Malick crossed with Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
And that's not an exaggeration, I mean almost every frame, every music cue, every slow dolly shot through fields and forests with a whispering voiceover feels like someone doing karaoke of better cinema.
Based on Denis Johnson's 2011 novella, the film stars Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier, a logger working in the early 1900s American Northwest.
He's an orphan who spends his days building railroads and chopping down trees. His nights are haunted by guilt, ghosts, and the fact that progress (literal and metaphorical) is leaving him behind. He falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones), they have a daughter, and, predictably, tragedy follows.
The movie tries to turn his life into a sweeping American elegy about time, loss, industrialization, and mortality. It wants to be a statement about what gets erased when progress marches forward.
What it ends up being is a two-hour yawn, complete with endless "poetic" narration by Will Patton that could be replaced by a screensaver and have the same emotional effect.
This is Bentley's second directorial effort after Jockey, which had similar issues: sanctimonious tone, pacing like a snail on Xanax, and a reliance on one great performance (Clifton Collins Jr.) to carry everything else.
Here, Bentley reunites with his creative partner Greg Kwedar, whose own film Sing Sing was another insufferable example of pseudo-profound, faux-inspirational filmmaking.
Both of these guys make movies that scream AWARDS BAIT so loudly you can practically see the For Your Consideration ad appear in the corner of the frame.
And guess what? They're going to get nominations for this one, too. The critics' groups will fall all over themselves to praise the "haunting beauty" and "poetic humanity," even though it's really just The Tree of Life if The Tree of Life were made by someone who didn't understand The Tree of Life.
Joel Edgerton tries his damnedest to make Robert Grainier feel like a human being. He's one of the few actors who can do silent anguish well, with that stoic pain that reads without dialogue.
He's pretty solid here, but he's trapped in a movie that doesn't care about people, only symbols. His character isn't a man; he's an Idea. Everyone in this movie is an Idea.
Felicity Jones is saddled with a completely indistinct accent and maybe five minutes of screen time before she's turned into a symbol herself.
Clifton Collins Jr. (one of the most consistently great character actors around) shows up for a handful of lines and is promptly wasted. William H. Macy plays an old explosives guy, chewing on the same kind of one-dimensional "wise old timer" dialogue we've all heard a thousand times before.
Then there's Kerry Condon, who shows up late in the movie and finally injects a little actual humanity into the film. She's luminous, grounded, and the only character who feels remotely real.
Unfortunately, she's only in it for a few minutes, because God forbid the movie focus on something compelling instead of endless shots of trains chugging and trees swaying.
It's impossible to talk about Train Dreams without pointing out how blatantly it steals from better films. The cinematography looks like outtakes from Days of Heaven. The voiceover and score are identical in tone and rhythm to The Assassination of Jesse James.
And the whole structure (the spiritual meditations, the disconnected vignettes, the obsession with nature) feels like a hollow attempt at Malick's transcendence, without a single drop of his insight or Grace.
There are even shots of trains at night that are practically frame-for-frame recreations of Dominik's movie. The score? A total knockoff of the Nick Cave and Warren Ellis masterpiece from Jesse James.
And then, just to drive the point home, just to make sure you know how derivative it is, who shows up during the end credits? Nick Cave himself, with a song that basically says, "Yeah, we know. We stole all of this."
The film wants to be about America's changing landscape, about how progress erases memory, how people fade into history as the world modernizes. That's fine. That's good material.
But Bentley handles it with such heavy-handed symbolism and overbearing narration that nothing breathes. Every idea is spelled out, every emotion is told to you instead of shown.
There's tragedy after tragedy, complete with death, ghosts, and isolation, but none of it hits. It's all theoretical sadness. I didn't feel anything for these people. I didn't even believe they were people. It's a collection of pretty images pretending to be profound.
Train Dreams is 100 minutes that feel like 600. It's slow, not in the contemplative way, but in the "please, God, make it stop" way. It's the kind of movie that critics will call "languid" and "hypnotic," when really it's just dull.
The voiceover never shuts up, the symbolism is on-the-nose, and the sincerity is so forced it becomes parody.
It's a film that mistakes imitation for inspiration, and reverence for depth. And despite Joel Edgerton's best efforts (and a brief, wonderful interlude from Kerry Condon), it never becomes more than a pale echo of greater works.
So yes, expect it to be nominated for every award imaginable. Expect think pieces about its "meditation on the American spirit." But don't expect to actually feel anything while watching it. Because underneath the golden light and the slow dissolves and the constant narration, there's nothing there.
In short, Train Dreams isn't just disappointing. It's the cinematic equivalent of watching someone plagiarize a Terrence Malick movie in real time. It's hollow, humorless, self-satisfied, and completely derivative. A train to nowhere.
Train Dreams is, fittingly, a train wreck. - ⭐️1/2
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