CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 12-5-25

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 5th, 2025.

1) FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S 2

I'm going to start this by saying something that will immediately get me yelled at by teenagers, Twitch streamers, TikTok lore theorists, and anyone who has ever spent more than ten minutes on a FNaF subreddit: I have never played a Five Nights at Freddy's video game.

I couldn't tell you the controls, the plot, the strategy, the backstory, any of that. I'm not a gamer, I can't pretend to be, and at this point in my life, I'm not about to learn how to manage cameras and ventilation systems while being hunted by demonic Chuck E. Cheese rejects.

But here's the thing: even if I had played the games, even if I knew every animatronic name, every Easter egg, every fan theory, every "Afton always comes back" meme… I would still hate this movie, because Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is a boring, inane, shockingly lifeless PG-13 nothingburger of a horror film.

And that's the real crime here. Not bad lore. Not changes from the games. Not "they didn't explain the Marionette correctly." No. The crime is that this thing is boring. It's stupid. It's lazy. And it does not have a single scare, a single clever kill, or a single memorable moment from minute one to minute 104. Yes, I counted.

The movie takes place a year after the events of the first film, which I barely remember other than thinking it was bad, in which Matthew Lillard at least seemed to be having some fun chewing scenery like it was pizza crust.

Now we're a year later, the whole event has become a kitschy town legend, and everyone is trying to protect Abby, the young heroine from the first movie, from the truth.

Abby, naturally, sneaks out to reconnect with her animatronic "friends," which sets off another chain of supernatural nonsense.

Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is back, Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is back, and William Afton (Matthew Lillard) "always comes back," though in this movie, he comes back just long enough for a dream sequence where he falls down a stairwell and screams his head off.

The new big addition? The Toy animatronics (Toy Freddy, Toy Chica, Toy Bonnie) and the Marionette, this skeletal, disturbing puppet thing that looks like the love child of Jigsaw and a ventriloquist dummy.

And of course, they introduce these new creatures the same way they do everything else in this film: with zero suspense, zero creativity, and zero horror.

This movie is put together like somebody dropped the reels on the floor, shuffled them around, and said, "Eh, close enough." It starts with a flashback in 1982, jumps 20 years to 2002, and then throws characters into situations that feel like they belong in different movies entirely.

We get a whole subplot with paranormal investigators (led by McKenna Grace, who is a terrific young actress and should not be wasted on idiotic nonsense like this) showing up to film some ghost-hunting show inside the original Freddy's. She's in the movie for about seven minutes total. Fourteen lines, maybe. Then she gets possessed by the Marionette for no discernible reason.

There's a new villain security guard, played by Freddy Carter, who announces he's evil by constantly grinning, having a bad haircut, and scowling like he's auditioning for a CW pilot.

We get Skeet Ulrich popping in for what looks like half a day's work, probably because Matthew Lillard is also in the film and someone thought, Hey, Scream reunion! Except Skeet looks exhausted, mutters a few lines, drinks coffee with Josh Hutcherson, and exits.

Wayne Knight (Newman from Seinfeld himself) shows up as a jerk science teacher just long enough for you to think, "Okay, how is Newman going to get killed this time?" And then the movie doesn't even give you THAT satisfaction.

Josh Hutcherson is a genuinely interesting actor. He has presence, he has charisma, he's proven himself. And in this movie, he has absolutely nothing to do. He wanders around rooms, reacts to loud noises, has a few emotional conversations that feel like they were pulled from an after-school special, and mostly gets pushed aside so the animatronic clowns can have more screen time.

Matthew Lillard (who was the one actual spark of life in the first movie) gets maybe two minutes here. And even his manic, over-the-top energy can't save this disaster.

Here's the thing: if you're going to make a horror movie about animatronic robots murdering people, let them murder people! Let them have fun! Let the audience have fun!

But no. This is PG-13, teen-targeted, offscreen-kill nonsense.

Every time an animatronic monster cornered somebody in this movie, they'd say something like, "I want to see what's inside your head!" and then instead of actually doing anything cool, the camera would cut away, we'd hear crunching sounds, maybe a scream... and that's it.

These creatures aren't scary. They aren't funny. They aren't clever. They're not even interesting to look at because the movie doesn't do anything interesting with them.

This screenplay tries (desperately) to give emotional depth and meaning to a movie that absolutely cannot support emotional depth and meaning. This is a movie about haunted Chuck E. Cheese murder robots. You cannot turn that into Manchester by the Sea. Stop trying.

Instead, we get endless exposition scenes, endless conversations about trauma and memory and destiny, endless attempts to tie together lore from a video game universe that I'm convinced nobody on the planet actually understands.

I am a horror fanatic. I know the genre inside and out. And this is one of the least scary "horror movies" I have ever seen. There is not one moment (NOT ONE) where tension builds, where suspense is present, where anything remotely resembling fear happens.

There are no scares. No laughs. No tension. No memorable kills. No creativity. Nothing. It is PG-13 horror at its absolute worst: toothless, gutless, bloodless, joyless.

I will never get the 104 minutes I wasted on this movie back. And I'm angry about it.

Easily one of the worst horror films of 2025. - ⭐️

2) MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

I am very surprised this thing is being released as a theatrical film. Very surprised. Because Merrily We Roll Along, in the form we're getting it, is not really a movie. It's not cinematic. It's not even pretending to be cinematic.

What we have here is basically a filmed play; it's a beautifully done filmed play of a fantastic musical, sure, but a filmed play nonetheless.

And the fact that this is getting a full, wide theatrical release and not just as a Fathom Event is one of the strangest release strategies I've seen in a while. And I say that as someone who LOVES Stephen Sondheim and LOVES this show.

Merrily We Roll Along is one of the most infamous flops in Broadway history. A legendary disaster when it premiered in 1981, directed by Hal Prince, featuring a cast of teenagers and young adults with a wildly ambitious structure, to an audience that simply did not want to deal with a musical told in reverse about artists selling out and ruining their friendships.

Sixteen performances. Critics hated it. People walked out. Sondheim himself was crushed by the failure. And yet (because Sondheim's music is genius and because theater people know a masterpiece even when it's messy) the show has lived on, been rewritten, revived, tinkered with, and ultimately resurrected.

The 2022 Off-Broadway production directed by Maria Friedman was the one that finally cracked it wide open. And that version transferred to Broadway, starring Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez, and Daniel Radcliffe, and won a mountain of Tonys. It was a phenomenon. A landmark production.

And this "movie" is literally that production... filmed. Cameras set up at the Hudson Theatre capturing a performance. No cinematic staging. No reimagining. No adaptation. No version built for the screen. Just the Broadway show… filmed.

Which brings me back to the surprise: why is this being released in thousands of theaters across the country like it's a big studio film? Why isn't this a two-night Fathom Events screening, like the filmed Les Misérables anniversary concerts or Kinky Boots or whatever?

The answer, clearly, is the success of the Hamilton filmed version. Disney dropped that on the world, and suddenly studios went: "Oh, wait, we can package filmed theater as a movie, and people will show up."

And sure, they might. But that doesn't magically make this a piece of cinema. It plays exactly like a Fathom Event; it is a lovely, energetic, live-capture document of a great production, but it's not a movie with cinematic language, film grammar, or anything resembling film direction.

And yet… the material. The material is so good.

Sondheim is maybe my favorite Broadway composer of all time. He was a genius. His lyrics, his music, his sense of structure, his prickly humanism, I adore all of it. And this show, Merrily We Roll Along, is deeply personal Sondheim.

It's about friendship, about selling out, about jealousy, about ambition poisoning relationships, about drinking too much, about holding onto dreams, about losing everything that mattered in the pursuit of things that don't.

The backward structure is brutal and beautiful. You start with a broken man at the bottom of his soul. You roll back the years until we land on that miraculous night when three young dreamers stand on a rooftop, look up at Sputnik, and believe they can do anything. It's devastating in the best way.

Maria Friedman's production brought all of that to life with clarity and compassion. She refocused the show around Frank (the composer who becomes a Hollywood sellout), and suddenly the whole thing clicked. Jonathan Groff is terrific. Lindsay Mendez is heartbreaking and hilarious.

And Daniel Radcliffe, and I cannot emphasize this enough, is extraordinary. He won a Tony for this, and he deserved it. The guy is one of the hardest-working, most versatile performers of his generation. Comedy, drama, singing, dancing, strange indie stuff, Broadway... he can do it all.

And watching him in this is another reminder that he is not Harry Potter anymore. He's a full-blown actor with range and guts and commitment.

And the production itself is terrific. The staging is smart. George Furth's book (in its revised form) is sharp. The added songs work. The ensemble is excellent. The crowd goes wild. It's a great piece of theater. I wish I had seen it in person. Truly.

But as a film? No. It's not a film. It's a recording.

There is nothing inherently wrong with filming plays, and God knows I want more filmed theater out there for people who can't afford Broadway or don't live near a major city. But calling this a movie and sticking it into a couple thousand multiplexes while actual new films struggle to secure screens is frustrating. It takes up space that should be going to filmmakers, not Broadway archival footage.

And it's pretty transparently being rushed out because Richard Linklater is currently (and famously) making his own version of Merrily We Roll Along, filming it over twenty years just like Boyhood.

That is an ambitious, cinematic undertaking. That will be a movie. A real movie. And you can feel the producers of this filmed stage version hustling to get theirs out first, grab some awards attention, and ride that wave of publicity.

But the truth remains: this isn't cinema. It's a lovely document of a great show. I enjoyed watching it. I loved hearing those songs again. I loved seeing Groff, Mendez, and Radcliffe nail every number.

And I love Sondheim deeply enough that I'm thrilled this show (this once-disastrous, misunderstood musical) is finally getting the reverence and respect it deserves.

But should this be marketed as a theatrical feature? No. It shouldn't. It belongs in limited screenings, with fans, theater kids, Sondheim lovers, and Radcliffe devotees cheering it on. It doesn't belong in wide release, taking up screens from indie films that need help.

It's not a great movie because it's not a movie. But it is a terrific musical, a terrific production, a terrific set of performances, and a terrific preservation of a show that should be preserved. I liked it, a lot, because I love the musical. But as a film? No. As theater? Fantastic.

And Sondheim (wherever he is) would probably be thrilled that the show that flopped so hard in 1981 is finally rolling along merrily in 2025. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️

3) FACKHAM HALL

You would never, in a million years, guess from the way Bleecker Street has quietly dumped this thing into a handful of theaters, with zero press screenings and almost no promotion, that they are sitting on the funniest movie of the year. They hid it. They buried it. They acted like it was an embarrassment.

Instead, they've buried a gem: a flat-out hysterical, old-school, anything-for-a-joke spoof that understands the Zucker–Abrahams–Zucker playbook better than anything I've seen in ages.

This is the Airplane! / Naked Gun / Top Secret! style of comedy done right... which, as history has shown, is way harder than it looks.

The movie is set in 1931 at the grand English estate of Fackham Hall - say that out loud a couple of times, and you'll get the glorious, filthy, schoolyard pun they're going for.

Lord and Lady Davenport live there with their daughters, Poppy and Rose. Because of inheritance laws that favor male heirs, the family is in danger of losing the estate. Their solution? Marry one of the daughters off to their awful, preening cousin Archibald, so a male can technically "marry in" and keep Fackham Hall in the family.

Poppy is supposed to take the hit for the team. Still, she's not thrilled about marrying a creep out of duty. Eventually, she runs off with a guy of much lower social standing: a manure man, which is already a joke all by itself. That leaves the more bookish, sensible Rose as the next victim in line.

Into this mess walks Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe), a lovable, low-rent pickpocket who worms his way into a servant job at the estate and then quickly rises through the ranks.

Romance blooms between Eric and Rose, Archibald becomes his rival, the class structure starts to wobble, and just when you think this is going to be a straightforward "upstairs/downstairs rom-com spoof"… a murder happens, Eric gets framed, and in walks an inspector straight out of an Agatha Christie fever dream.

All of that is basically just scaffolding so the movie can hang jokes on it. It's a Downton Abbey parody, a Gosford Park riff, an Agatha Christie spoof, and a send-up of every British period cliché you've ever seen, all crammed into 90-something minutes of nonstop idiocy.

This is very clearly built in the tradition of ZAZ: the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams, the guys behind Airplane!, Police Squad!, and The Naked Gun. It's also in the lineage of the first Scary Movie to Scream, or Top Secret! to spy movies.

It's that full-tilt, wall-to-wall gag style where if one joke doesn't land, you're already three jokes past it.

Jimmy Carr co-wrote the script (with his brother Patrick Carr and the Dawson Brothers). If you know his stand-up (sharp, filthy, rapid-fire), you can feel that sensibility all over this thing.

It's his first screenplay, and it's an incredibly confident one. This is not "let's dip our toe into spoof" tentative; this is "we're going all in, joke every five seconds, hope you can keep up."

You have to pay attention to this movie. There are verbal gags, puns, slapstick, background signs, throwaway visual jokes, running gags, bodily function jokes; it's the whole buffet.

There are jokes in the dialogue, jokes on the walls, jokes in the cutaways, jokes in the credits. If you don't laugh at one, don't worry, there will be seven more in the next minute.

The percentage of jokes that land is shockingly high. I'd say 90% of them work, and that's insane for this kind of comedy. I laughed hard and often, from the opening narration all the way through the final credit gag.

One of the biggest problems with a lot of later spoofs (the bad Scary Movie sequels, that awful new Naked Gun with Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson) is that the actors mug. They wink at the camera. They act like they know they're in a comedy, and everything becomes this self-aware, "look how silly we are" thing.

Fackham Hall does the most important thing you can do in this genre: everybody plays it absolutely straight.

Damian Lewis, who's known for heavy, serious dramatic work, plays Lord Davenport like he's in a real period drama. Thomasin McKenzie, who's done terrific work in films like Last Night in Soho, gives Rose a genuine emotional center.

Katherine Waterston, Tom Felton, Ben Radcliffe... they all commit like this is actual "prestige British cinema," not a giant absurdist prank.

And then the jokes just collide with that seriousness. That's why it works.

Tom Goodman-Hill as Inspector Watt (and yes, there are plenty of "Watt?" / "What?" exchanges straight out of Abbott and Costello land) is like some bizarre hybrid of Hercule Poirot and a malfunctioning robot.

He literally hangs his mustache on a coat hook when he enters a room. But the performance is played at full Christie-adaptation sincerity, which makes it ten times funnier.

Anna Maxwell Martin might give my favorite performance in the movie as the ferociously efficient head of the maids, walking the new servant (Radcliffe's Eric) through the house rules with hilariously grim precision.

There's a scene where she's explaining what he has to do, where he has to be, and when he's allowed to exist, and the way she delivers it (and the way he just nods and accepts it) is absolutely killer.

This movie is not afraid of going low. There are fart jokes. There are sex jokes. There are incest jokes. There are jokes about how perfectly acceptable it was to marry your first cousin in 1930s England, and that becomes a running gag that works every time.

There's a pub sequence (this dingy, wonderful, hyper-British public house filled with Cockney characters) where everyone starts singing a rousing anthem about London. The chorus is basically "London is a shithole," and it might be one of the funniest pub scenes I've ever seen.

Even the name of the pub is a joke, but they don't shove it in your face; you have to read the sign. That's true of half the movie. Also, look at the tailor shop sign, look at the shop names, and look at the background. The movie rewards you for paying attention.

There are modern-tech jokes (Siri/Alexa-type bits) folded into a 1930s world, and they shouldn't work, but they do. There's a full-on "Who's on First?" style routine blatantly lifted from Abbott and Costello and re-skinned for this setting. It's actually laugh-out-loud funny instead of feeling like a lazy reference.

There's a recurring J.R.R. Tolkien bit where this guy is wandering around the estate taking notes, clearly meant to be Tolkien absorbing inspiration for The Lord of the Rings. Except what he writes down is hilariously not what actually ended up in the books.

Later, there's a Bilbo Baggins–related gag involving donkeys that I'm not going to spoil here, but it's very, very wrong, and very, very funny.

Jimmy Carr himself shows up as the vicar, and his entire schtick is that he misreads his text and pauses in all the wrong places while officiating funerals and weddings. So what should be solemn, holy scripture instead becomes accidentally filthy or deeply inappropriate. Every time he appears (and he's only in a couple of scenes), it's laugh-out-loud funny.

And then you've got Hayley Mills as the narrator. Hayley Mills! A legend. The movie gives her an "Introducing Hayley Mills" credit at the end, as if we've never seen her before in our lives.

That alone is funny, and then the closing credits go even further, giving us stills of each character with little "where are they now" blurbs that are all punchlines. The epilogue for Carr's priest character, in particular, is priceless.

One of the great things about Airplane! and Top Secret! is that jokes are happening everywhere: what people are saying is funny, but so is the guy behind them falling over, or the sign on the wall, or the extra in the corner doing something insane. Fackham Hall absolutely gets this.

There are moments where serious "plot" stuff is happening in the foreground while a car is burning in the background because someone flicked a cigarette into it. Servants are doing completely insane things out of focus while the Davenport family argues about inheritance. There are sight gags layered in so densely that you need a second viewing just to catch half of them.

Jim O'Hanlon's direction is sharp and clean. He knows exactly when to move the camera, when to hold, when to let a gag play out in a wide shot so you can scan the frame and find multiple jokes at once. It's not flashy, but it's precise, which is precisely what you need for this kind of comedy.

Look, not every joke lands. Some characters get fewer laughs than others. A couple of bits feel like they're reaching. That's the nature of this style. But the hit rate here is ridiculously high, and I genuinely have not laughed harder at any movie this year.

Jimmy Carr and company have pulled off something that a lot of people have failed miserably at over the past couple of decades: they've made a real, honest-to-God ZAZ-style spoof that actually works.

Bleecker Street blew it by dumping this movie with no promotion, no critic screenings, nothing. They should be shouting from the rooftops that they've got a killer ensemble, a script this funny, and the best parody film in ages.

Go see Fackham Hall while it's still in theaters, both because it's one of the year's best comedies, and because the title alone is a staggeringly good dirty joke. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

4) 100 NIGHTS OF HERO

Julia Jackman's feminist fable 100 Nights of Hero is one of those movies where you sit there thinking, okay, this is a swing. A real swing.

Like, "I'm going to take a huge cut at this very old folktale and see if I can crack it into the upper deck" kind of swing. And I always admire that... even when the ball doesn't quite leave the infield.

This is Jackman's second feature after Bonus Track, and it is undeniably a big, bold, visually wild attempt to bring Isabel Greenberg's graphic novel to life. And on that front (the "bring it to life" part), it absolutely succeeds. But on the "make me care deeply about any of this" part… not so much.

The plot is a queer, feminist remix of One Thousand and One Nights, taking place in a world where the patriarchy sits on the throne, women aren't supposed to read or write, and men hold these completely idiotic wagers over women's bodies.

In this particular setup, Cherry (Maika Monroe) is married to Jerome (Amir El-Masry), who is both awful and uninterested in her, and the village elders blame her for not being pregnant.

They give Jerome 101 nights to impregnate her, or it's guards-with-swords time. Meanwhile, Jerome, who couldn't care less about the whole process, decides to make a bet with his friend Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), this puffed-up hetero peacock who shows up ready to seduce anything that moves.

If Manfred can seduce Cherry by the time Jerome returns, he gets the wife and the castle. If he fails, Jerome gets Manfred's castle. Either way… Cherry loses. Again. Great guys.

Luckily, Cherry has Hero (Emma Corrin), her loyal maid, best friend, future lover, and the real heart of the story. When Manfred starts prowling around like he's auditioning for a medieval version of The Bachelor, Hero steps in with the ultimate defense tactic: storytelling.

She basically Scheherazades him to death, spinning tales every night to distract him from his gross mission to seduce Cherry. Story after story, night after night, Manfred gets hypnotized, gets tired, gets bored, gets confused, gets everything except lucky.

Meanwhile, the women grow closer, their bond strengthening as they build a fortress of narrative around themselves, forming this beautifully queer love story right under the patriarchy's nose.

And honestly, that's the best part of the film: the women supporting each other, resisting, fighting back in small acts of creativity and solidarity. The idea is lovely. The execution? Well… that depends.

Emma Corrin is terrific; she is brave, vulnerable, eccentric, and beautifully weird. Maika Monroe is strong, giving Cherry dignity even when the script doesn't.

Felicity Jones does all the narration as Moon, and her voice adds a mystical, ethereal quality to the film… though it does sound like she recorded it at double-speed to squeeze the entire story into a 90-minute movie.

And then there's Richard E. Grant as Birdman, who, let's be honest, is great in everything and is once again fantastic here. Nicholas Galitzine hams it up as Manfred in all his sweaty, shirtless absurdity.

And Charli XCX shows up looking phenomenal in one jaw-dropping gown after another, barely says anything, but still somehow leaves an impression simply because the costumes are that outrageous.

And that brings me to the real star of the movie: the costumes. The costumes deserve their own Oscar category. They deserve their own separate end credits crawl. They deserve their own spin-off.

I'm not kidding, if you walk away from this movie thinking about the characters or the relationships, great, but if you're like me, you will NEVER forget these outfits.

Jewel-toned gowns, ornate capes, armor made for magazine covers, wild color palettes, these costumes are so over the top, they practically steal entire scenes away from the actors.

And I don't say this lightly: this is the most costume-driven film of 2025 so far. It looks like the wardrobe department won the lottery and decided to spend every penny on fabric, embroidery, and glitter.

The production design is the next big highlight. The world looks gorgeous. The lighting is wild. Some moments legitimately look like a Dario Argento movie (deep reds, saturated blues, weird shadows). Then you get these Poor Things-style compositions that feel lifted right out of a Yorgos Lanthimos fever dream.

It is a visually imaginative movie. A graphic novel come to life. And I mean that literally: this might be the single best adaptation of a graphic novel that actually looks like a graphic novel.

But… the script. The story. The characters.

That's where things get shaky. The movie is short (a little over 90 minutes), and it feels rushed. Things happen quickly. Too quickly. The narration races along. Emotional beats don't land because they barely have time to exist.

The characters aren't three-dimensional. They're symbols, ciphers, representations, not people. And that's fine if the movie is going for parable, which it is, but it makes it hard to care on any deep emotional level. You never fall into the story. You float over it, enjoying the aesthetics but not getting hooked by the heart.

Thematically, the movie has important ideas (feminism, agency, patriarchal cruelty, queer liberation), but they're handled with a heavy hand. Nothing is subtle or layered. It's all presented plainly, bluntly, sometimes a little clumsily. You can see where it's going from the first 10 minutes. And it doesn't carry the emotional or political punch it's throwing.

Still… it's entertaining. It goes by quickly. It's visually awesome. It's imaginative. It's weird in a good way. And for the audience it's aimed at (the queer community, fans of Charli XCX, fans of Emma Corrin, fans of the graphic novel), it will absolutely hit the spot. They will love the vibe, the romance, the aesthetic, the girl-power energy. And hey, I'm glad it exists.

Movies that take big swings like this, even if they don't fully connect, are always better than safe, watered-down, recycled nonsense.

So 100 Nights of Hero? It's fine. It's imaginative. It's absolutely stunning to look at. It has moments. It has ambition. It's got some terrific acting. It's just not the emotional or narrative home run it could've been. But I'm glad someone swung for it... because at the very least, it looks fantastic. - ⭐️⭐️1/2

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