CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 12-19-25
- 2 days ago
- 16 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, December 19th, 2025.
I cannot properly quantify how much I despise the Avatar movies. I truly can’t. My dislike for this franchise borders on the philosophical. These films represent, to me, almost everything that is wrong with modern blockbuster filmmaking, and Avatar: Fire and Ash only confirms, solidifies, and deepens that feeling.
This is the third installment in James Cameron’s long-gestating, endlessly delayed, monumentally expensive science fiction saga, and it is every bit as hollow, bloated, soulless, and exhausting as the previous two entries...maybe even worse, because it is longer, louder, and even more convinced of its own importance.
The film picks up about a year after the events of Avatar: The Way of Water. Jake Sully, Neytiri, and their family are still living among the Metkayina reef people, mourning the death of their son Neteyam and trying to hold themselves together emotionally while Pandora once again becomes a battlefield.
This time around, we’re introduced to a new Na’vi clan, the Mangkwan, also known as the Ash People, who live in volcanic regions of Pandora and are led by Varang, a hardened, ruthless leader played by Oona Chaplin.
They’ve allied themselves with the returning Colonel Quaritch (yes, again) and the ever-evil RDA, who are now attempting to exploit Pandora’s molten core in yet another colonialist extraction scheme.
As the war escalates, Jake is forced to try to unite multiple Na’vi clans, rebel humans, and fractured family members while the cycle of violence and revenge spins on endlessly.
That’s the plot, or at least the version of it that can be explained without diagrams, flow charts, and a migraine. Because once again, Cameron buries the audience under an avalanche of exposition, recycled themes, and endlessly repetitive conflict.
Humans bad. Nature good. Grief causes anger. Anger causes violence. Violence leads to more grief. We’ve seen this movie before. We’ve seen it dozens of times. We’ve seen it done better in animated films, westerns, science fiction, and even children’s movies.
Cameron doesn’t so much tell a story as he bludgeons you with it, repeatedly, for over three hours.
I’ve said this many times, and I’ll say it again: James Cameron has never made a better movie than The Terminator in 1984, and he never will. He’s made some solid, occasionally thrilling entertainment since then.
The Abyss has moments of real wonder. Terminator 2 is technically impressive and reasonably exciting. I even think Titanic, once it finally sinks the damn boat, is a pretty effective spectacle.
But once Cameron committed himself fully to the Avatar universe, he completely lost whatever storytelling instinct he once had. These movies are nothing more than recycled plots lifted from FernGully, Pocahontas, and every “outsider joins the noble natives” story ever told, filtered through a cold, joyless, tech-obsessed lens.
What makes Avatar: Fire and Ash especially aggravating is how empty it feels despite its staggering scale. Every frame is stuffed with performance capture, CGI creatures, digital fire, digital ash, digital lava, digital explosions, and digital faces, yet none of it feels alive. The characters are barely characters at all.
They are archetypes at best and placeholders at worst. Sam Worthington remains one of the stiffest, least compelling leading men imaginable, even under layers of motion capture. Zoe Saldaña is asked to play rage and grief at full volume for three straight hours.
Stephen Lang’s Quaritch continues his endless cycle of dying, resurrecting, and scowling, a villain who returns so often that his presence now carries absolutely no weight.
And then there’s the sheer visual incoherence. For all the money spent (and we’re talking about one of the most expensive movies ever made), the film is shockingly inconsistent.
Shots within the same scene don’t match stylistically. Action sequences are chaotic and unreadable. You never quite know where you are, who is hitting whom, or why you’re supposed to care. It plays less like a movie and more like watching someone else play a video game, badly, with the camera wildly flailing around trying to keep up.
The irony, of course, is that before the screening I attended, Cameron felt the need to precede the film with a five-minute video condemning the use of AI in filmmaking. This from a man whose movie consists almost entirely of computer-generated imagery, artificial environments, artificial performances, and digital manipulation in nearly every single frame.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. This is a three-hour theme park ride disguised as cinema, and a deeply cynical one at that.
If Avatar truly represents the future of cinema, then count me out. I want nothing to do with it. Cinema, to me, is about storytelling, character, emotion, imagination, and heart. This movie has none of those things.
It has the soul of a corporate attraction, the integrity of an arcade machine, and the emotional depth of a tech demo running on a loop at Best Buy.
There are filmmakers (real filmmakers) who know how to make large-scale spectacle without sacrificing intelligence or humanity. Denis Villeneuve. Robert Zemeckis. Peter Jackson. George Miller.
Those are artists who understand how to balance technology with storytelling. James Cameron no longer does, if he ever truly did. Avatar: Fire and Ash is a depressing, bloated, obscenely expensive exercise in cinematic emptiness, and like the previous entries, it stands as one of the worst movies of 2025.
Three films in, and I still don’t care about the characters, the story, or the world. And with two more sequels on the way, that may be the most terrifying thing of all. - ⭐️
When I went to a press screening of The Housemaid, I walked in knowing basically three things: it was based on a best-selling book I hadn’t read, Sydney Sweeney was in it, and Amanda Seyfried was in it.
That’s it. No deep research, no spoiler-y prep, no “let me read the twisty plot breakdown first.” I wanted to let it play. I wanted to see what kind of movie it was going to be on its own terms.
And then the movie ended, the credits rolled, and I saw “Directed by Paul Feig.”
And I swear to God, I don’t know if I’ve had a more depressing, head-in-hands, “wait, what?” reaction to an end credit in a long, long time.
Because here’s what The Housemaid is, in the simplest, non-spoilery terms. Sydney Sweeney plays Millie, a young woman trying to outrun a messy past who takes a live-in housemaid job in this beautiful, wealthy home owned by Nina and Andrew Winchester, played by Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar.
It’s supposed to be the fresh start job. New roof, new routine, new life. But the second she walks into this place, the “perfect family” vibe starts to feel like a showroom with rotting floorboards underneath it, and Millie realizes that whatever she thought she signed up for is turning into something twisted, dangerous, and full of secrets.
Now, that description? That’s the kind of thing Paul Feig should be able to do in his sleep. This is the guy who gave us Bridesmaids, who knows how to juggle tone, who can make something glossy and dark and funny, who nailed that naughty, twisty energy in A Simple Favor and Another Simple Favor.
He also has that sharp, very clear perspective on women in genre spaces, and he’s often made that perspective fun, playful, biting, and confident.
This movie wants to be that kind of delicious little female-driven thriller. It wants to be the kind of movie where you’re leaning forward, having a blast, enjoying the performances, getting seduced by the nastiness, and then laughing at how gleefully it’s messing with you.
Instead, it is a slog. A long slog. And not the fun kind, not the “ooh, let me see what insane turn this takes next” kind. The “how is this still going?” kind. The “I am completely checked out, but the movie keeps insisting I should be shocked” kind.
And the biggest issue, for me, is that the whole thing is built around Sydney Sweeney. I know people love her. I know she’s a massive star. I know the camera loves her. But as an actress? She is stiff. She is one-note.
She’s got that one setting, and that setting is where she displays her cleavage, stares, breathes, and looks “intense."
If the role needs anything beyond that, like, I dunno... comedy, shading, real internal life, the kind of slippery moral complication a thriller like this absolutely needs, she cannot deliver it.
She’s not the right engine for this kind of twisty psychological material. She just isn’t.
Amanda Seyfried, meanwhile, actually understands what kind of movie this is supposed to be, and she’s game. She tries. She commits. She gives you texture. She’s easily the best thing in the movie, and that’s not even close.
The storytelling is another mess, because The Housemaid keeps doing that thing thrillers do when they don’t trust their own setup: it leans on clunky point-of-view maneuvering, it leans on heavy exposition, it leans on restructuring what you already watched so it can re-explain it to you in another way.
And look, I’m not against perspective shifts. I love perspective shifts when they’re sharp, when they’re surprising, when they change the emotional meaning of what you thought you saw. Here, it’s mostly an excuse to stop the movie dead and dump information on you, and it’s done with all the grace of a forklift.
And the twists? I’m not going to spoil the movie because people want to see these things fresh, and I respect that. But I will say this: I wasn’t surprised once. Not once.
I could see the “big stuff” coming so early that I spent huge chunks of the runtime just waiting for the movie to catch up to what it thought was a revelation.
When your thriller is running on fumes like that, all you have left is style and tension and pacing, and those are the exact things this movie fumbles.
Brandon Sklenar, who can be a perfectly solid screen presence, is stuck playing a collection of thriller clichés. Michele Morrone pops in as the groundskeeper Enzo and has a couple of moments where he’s genuinely watchable.
And Elizabeth Perkins (always great to see her) has a steadiness and a knowingness that suggests she’s acting in a better movie than the one we’re watching. For me, she’s the only person who consistently seems to understand the tone the movie needs, even when the movie itself doesn’t.
The comedy and attempted satire on display here are also misguided and painfully unsuccessful. A running gag about Richard Dawson and Family Feud is obvious and dull, and some smug, uneducated, satirical swipes at Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece Barry Lyndon not only fail miserably but only reinforce just how empty-headed and shallow Feig's movie really is.
But the real heartbreak is this: the movie feels like an imitation of the kind of thing Paul Feig can do well, instead of an example of him actually doing it well. It’s like The Housemaid is reaching for that slick, smart, twisty, female-driven thriller vibe, but it can’t balance its tones, it can’t land its reveals, it can’t generate real suspense, and it can't survive its own lead performance.
So yeah. This is a big one for me: The Housemaid is not just disappointing, it’s kind of baffling. And seeing Paul Feig’s name at the end didn’t make me go, “Oh, that explains it.” It made me go, “How did this happen?”
The movie is a disaster, but if you loved the novel, you may still want to go just to see how it’s adapted.
Listen, if you’re looking for a twisty, sexy, smart thriller that actually works, I’d tell you to rewatch A Simple Favor before I’d tell you to sit through this.
Because this one, for me, is a flat-out misfire, and one of the most frustrating wastes of talent I’ve sat through this year. - ⭐️
At this point, SpongeBob SquarePants is basically comfort food. It’s like late-night drive-thru: you know exactly what you’re getting, you know it’s going to be weird, and you know you’re probably going to laugh more than you’d like to admit.
We’re now on the fourth theatrical movie in the SpongeBob universe, and while The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants is, to me, the weakest of the four, it’s still a wildly entertaining, very funny ride that fans are going to enjoy.
Is it perfect? No. Is it fun? Absolutely.
We start in Bikini Bottom on what passes for a normal day (which of course means it’s not normal at all). SpongeBob finally hits the minimum height requirement to ride the massive “Shipwreck” roller coaster at the local amusement park.
Ecstatic, he declares, “Now I’m a big guy!” and you immediately know this is going to turn into some kind of emotional crisis, because this is SpongeBob, and his entire existence is one long, adorable identity crisis.
When he actually sees the coaster, he chickens out. To save face, he tells Patrick that he’s waiting to ride it with Mr. Krabs. Krabs, being Krabs, leans into this lie and tells SpongeBob he’s not a “big guy” yet anyway, because he hasn’t proven his bravery. He whips out his old “swashbuckler certificate” from his sailor days and brags that he earned it by confronting the Flying Dutchman.
So now SpongeBob, desperate to prove himself, decides he needs his own swashbuckler certificate. Poking around in Krabs’ seafaring junk pile, SpongeBob and Patrick accidentally summon the Flying Dutchman himself.
The Dutchman offers to help SpongeBob complete a swashbuckling checklist (bravery, moxie, “intestinal fortitude,” all that good stuff) and drags SpongeBob and Patrick down into his undersea ghost domain aboard his creepy pirate schooner.
Of course, being a sentient glowing green con man, the Dutchman has his own agenda. He wants to use SpongeBob’s gullibility to break the curse that keeps him in ghost form and become human again. So he runs SpongeBob through a series of videogame-style “challenges” that get increasingly dangerous and bizarre, all under the guise of making him a true swashbuckler.
Meanwhile, Mr. Krabs realizes SpongeBob is off trying to impress him in the most dangerous way possible, and sets out on a rescue mission with Squidward and Gary (whose deadpan snail energy continues to be one of the funniest things in this entire franchise).
The adventure eventually goes topside, we get a live-action section with Mark Hamill as a physical, non-ghost version of the Flying Dutchman, and it all leads to the expected big, noisy, heartfelt climax about bravery, identity, and being a “big guy” without needing to risk death on a roller coaster.
Let’s get the major disappointment out of the way: a lot of beloved supporting characters kind of get sidelined here.
Patrick, Squidward, Mr. Krabs, Sandy, Gary, and Plankton (all these wonderful characters we’ve loved for years) spend big chunks of this movie on the bench. They’re around, they’re funny when they show up, but the story is so laser-focused on the Flying Dutchman plot and the pirate-ship adventure that the ensemble, which is one of the main reasons SpongeBob works so well, ends up feeling pushed to the background.
For a fourth movie, where you’d think they’d lean hard into the whole Bikini Bottom gang, it’s a little bit of a bummer that so many of them get such limited screen time.
Having said that, when this movie is cooking, it’s a blast.
Derek Drymon, a veteran from the early Stephen Hillenburg days, clearly still understands what makes SpongeBob tick: relentless optimism, aggressively stupid wordplay, visual lunacy, and a weird sweetness underneath all the nonsense. The jokes come fast, and there are plenty of big, honest laughs.
The animation is lively and inventive, especially in the Dutchman’s underworld realm. There are riffs on The Matrix, Apocalypse Now, and other adult-leaning cinematic touchstones sprinkled in there, which is one of the things these movies do so well.
The kids are laughing at SpongeBob trying to act brave and failing spectacularly; the adults are laughing because some throwaway gag just referenced a Vietnam War movie.
And you can feel Pam Brady’s fingerprints all over the script. She’s one of the geniuses behind South Park, and co-wrote one of the most criminally underrated comedies ever made, Hamlet 2, which is a movie that everyone should go back and watch immediately.
Her brand of edgy, weird, smart, occasionally unhinged humor is absolutely present here: the social commentary, the meta jokes, the wild swings into absurdity that somehow still make emotional sense.
Tom Kenny, as always, is perfect. SpongeBob and Gary are still two of the most lovable, weird little vocal performances in animation. Clancy Brown continues to be a delight as Mr. Krabs, Rodger Bumpass gives Squidward that eternal “I’m so done with this” energy, and the core cast is as strong as ever.
We also get Regina Hall, Sherry Cola, Arturo Castro, George Lopez, and Ice Spice... all fun additions, though honestly, most of them are barely around long enough to really register. That’s another small disappointment: you’ve packed this thing with great guest voices, and they end up as glorified cameos.
And then there’s Mark Hamill as the Flying Dutchman.
Now, I have not exactly been kind to Mark Hamill’s live-action performances this year. He has been, frankly, terrible in several 2025 movies. But here’s the thing: the guy is a legitimately great voice actor. Always has been. His Joker is legendary for a reason.
As the voice of the Flying Dutchman, he’s terrific: manic, gleeful, villainous, hilarious. He fits right into this universe. The ghost-pirate version of the character works really well.
But once we move into the live-action portion and Hamill actually shows up physically, it’s… less great. The performance gets broader, more forced, and not in a fun way. After all the wild animated Dutchman stuff, seeing the human version is almost a letdown. The voice stuff: great. The live-action antics: not so much.
So, where does that leave The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants?
Of the four SpongeBob theatrical movies, this is the weakest, but it’s still very entertaining, very funny, and absolutely worth seeing if you love this world.
Yes, it sidelines too many of the supporting characters. Yes, some of the live-action stuff with Hamill doesn’t land. Yes, you might walk out wishing there had been more Bikini Bottom and fewer ghost-pirate side quests.
But the charm is still there. The energy is still there. The creativity, the gags, the movie references, the absurdity, the sweetness... It’s all still there. SpongeBob remains one of the most endearing, joyful, ridiculous characters in modern pop culture, and spending another movie with him, even an imperfect one, is still a good time.
If you’re a fan of the show, if you’ve enjoyed the previous films, you’ll laugh, you’ll have fun, and you’ll get exactly what you came for: another loud, colorful, over-the-top adventure with the world’s most enthusiastic fry cook. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Secret Agent feels like it was somehow shot in another decade, smuggled through time, and dropped into a film festival in 2025. This sweaty, politically charged, Brazilian historical thriller from Kleber Mendonça Filho doesn’t just take place in 1977; it feels made in 1977.
Not in a cutesy, nostalgic, “oh look, we put film grain on the footage” way. No. This thing lives in that era. Breathes in that era. Smells like cigarette smoke, dried sweat, and analog tape.
And right at the center of it, surviving the heat and the paranoia and the political rot, is Wagner Moura, giving one of those breakout performances that everybody at Cannes was right to lose their minds over.
He’s been great for years (Elite Squad, Narcos, Civil War, Elysium, Praia do Futuro), but this is the one that kicks the door down. This is the “oh, he’s going to get nominated” performance. It’s his movie. His show. His star-making turn.
We’re in Recife, 1977, during Carnival, when the streets are drenched in color, but the politics are pitch black. Brazil’s military dictatorship is sputtering toward its violent, paranoid later years, and former professor Armando (Moura) arrives in town under an alias, trying to hide from the regime and find some kind of refuge.
He winds up in this house (practically a bunker) run by Dona Sebastiana, who’s sheltering political exiles, civil war refugees from Angola, activists, and anybody the corrupt state wants to disappear.
Meanwhile, Armando’s son is being raised across the city by his projectionist grandfather, because Armando’s wife has died and the dictatorship has turned him into a ghost.
From there, the plot becomes this swirling, sweaty, paranoid nightmare: corrupt police, an investigation triggered by a human leg that pops out of a shark (yes, really), hitmen hired by a vengeful official, and a resistance network trying to get Armando out of the country before the walls close in.
And then, decades later, in a haunting epilogue, a young student researching the resistance interviews Armando’s grown son (now a doctor), who can’t remember a single thing about his father.
A perfect metaphor for political trauma erasing itself through silence and fear.
It’s a thriller, a political howl, and a memory play all at once.
Kleber Mendonça Filho is one of the most interesting filmmakers working right now (Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius, Bacurau), and here he leans even more heavily into Hitchcock, De Palma, Carpenter, and a little bit of Peckinpah, soaked in tropical humidity.
I’m not kidding, this movie sweats. You can feel the heat coming off the screen. The colors, the grime, the Carnival chaos, the neon bleeding into darkness, the film grain, it’s fully immersive. Recife becomes a character. The world becomes a fever.
The director wears his influences on his sleeve, sometimes maybe a little too openly, with the split screens, the voyeuristic camera moves, the pop-music needle drops that scream early Scorsese, the Carpenter-esque widescreen compositions.
None of it is subtle. But it works because the movie is so fully committed to the vibe, the tone, the place, the paranoia.
It’s style-forward, but the style has teeth.
Wagner Moura gives a full-on movie-star performance; it is intense, internal, paranoid, bruised, desperate, and human. He carries the film’s political anger, its suspense, its quieter moments, its emotional scars.
And there are entire sequences where Mendonça Filho just lets the camera hang on him (sweating, thinking, running, panicking, plotting) and Moura gives you everything without pushing. He absolutely earned that Cannes Best Actor win. He will absolutely be in the Oscar conversation.
And then you’ve got Udo Kier. The great, weird, magnificent Udo Kier. In his final film role. Seeing him here (older, fragile, still magnetic) is one of those bittersweet cinephile treats. And his scenes add this melancholy, ghostly quality that fits perfectly with the film’s themes of memory and erasure.
So, I really did like this movie. I didn’t love it the way the Cannes jury loved it, but I liked it a lot. It’s immersive. It’s effective. It’s stylish as hell. And it has moments of real suspense, real heat, real power.
That said…It’s too long. By a lot.
This thing runs over two and a half hours, and you absolutely feel it. There are stretches (especially in the middle) where the plot spins its wheels, repeating beats, repeating moods, repeating stylistic flourishes. You could cut 20 minutes out of this thing and lose absolutely nothing.
And the story itself isn’t the most original political thriller framework in the world (persecuted hero on the run, corrupt state forces closing in, resistance network trying to extract him), but it’s how the film is made that elevates it.
Despite its flaws, The Secret Agent gives you something that is rare now: A modern film that genuinely feels like it was made in the 1970s.
Not pastiche. Not imitation. Not nostalgia. Just a movie soaked in its time and place, shot with intensity, and anchored by a knockout central performance.
It’s hot. It’s sweaty. It’s paranoid. It’s political. It’s a thriller that makes you feel the walls closing in. And when it hits, it hits hard.
A tough, immersive, sweaty, ’70s-style political thriller that’s absolutely worth seeing, especially for Moura’s star-making performance and Udo Kier’s final appearance on screen.
Solid cinema. Not perfect. But damn effective. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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