CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 9-19-25
- Sep 20, 2025
- 18 min read
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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, September 19th, 2025.
The snarky cynic in me showed up ready to roll its eyes at A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. And for the first few minutes, I could feel the reflex kicking in because the premise sounds a little twee, the framing device is precious on paper, and those freestanding doors plopped in fields scream "whimsy" with a capital W.
But somewhere between a Saturn SL with a GPS that talks sarcastically, a warehouse rental counter run by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Colin Farrell belting "How to Succeed," the human in me cold-cocked the cynic. I wound up, unexpectedly and wholeheartedly, really liking this movie.
Briefly, here's the setup: David (Colin Farrell), a tenderhearted avoidant with a boot on his car and a backlog of parking tickets, stumbles into a mysterious rental "agency" that offers a 1994 Saturn and a guidance system with plans bigger than directions.
The GPS nudges him toward Sarah (Margot Robbie). They meet at a wedding, then later reconnect over Burger King, and soon the two are walking through literal doors into the big hurts they never handled.
A lighthouse from David's childhood. An art museum etched into Sarah's memory. A high-school auditorium where adult David performs his teen lead in How to Succeed, and to everyone there except Sarah, he's 15 again. Hospital waiting rooms, parental regrets, missed goodbyes. It's a time-travel therapy road movie about two people clearing their past so a future together is even possible.
Kogonada directs, and that matters. Columbus and After Yang are delicate, formally precise movies that trust silence and composition; he brings that sensitivity here but loosens the collar. There is more color, more play, more pop surrealism.
Seth Reiss (yes, of The Onion/AV Club and co-writer of The Menu) smartly writes the movie as if it knows exactly how corny it could be.
The film keeps winking just enough to say, "We know this is the Ultimate Meet-Cute," and then uses that meet-cute as the excuse for a full-on, big-hearted, reciprocal therapy session.
What if the first sparks of attraction came with a mandated reckoning? No hiding ghosts in the closet, no "I'll fix it later," no pretending you're not broken? That's the pitch, and it works because the script keeps admitting the trope while burrowing past it.
The not-so-great? The rules of the fantasy are mushy. Sometimes inside the memories, they're their present-day selves; sometimes the world sees them as children; sometimes the film flips the POV altogether. At one point, David literally becomes his father.
The car flips, then doesn't. Doors lead to lighthouses, cafeterias, Fellini shout-outs (a café called "La Strada" is not subtle), and the metaphysics… well, they're more patchwork than puzzle-box.
And our delightful guides: the Mechanic (Kevin Kline, sly and serene) and the Cashier (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, all deadpan and rogue vowels), are intentionally undefined. Guardian angels? Cosmic travel agents? Trickster gods with paperwork? The movie shrugs, smiles, and keeps walking.
Normally, that kind of looseness drives me nuts. Here, the heart is so in the right place, and the ideas so resonant, that I forgave the hand-wavy worldbuilding. Because underneath the whimsy, there's cut-to-the-bone honesty about fear, commitment, and the way old wounds booby-trap new love.
Sarah's absence at her mother's deathbed, the guilt that calcified her; David's onstage adolescent implosion and rejection that taught him to never risk again. These aren't just post-it notes of trauma; they ripple through how they flirt, how they retreat, how they "protect" themselves right out of feeling anything real. The doors aren't just time portals; they're consent forms to be vulnerable.
The movie's also just… fun. Farrell singing How to Succeed (and really going for it) is a blast. Robbie doing nimble physical comedy in one scene and then lowering her guard with a tiny look the next is exactly why she's a star.
Kline is a joy to simply see again; every second he's on screen adds a weird, generous warmth. Waller-Bridge sprinkles F-bombs like confetti and makes an accent choice I can't place but loved anyway.
And the filmmaking allows these moments to breathe, as Kogonada's compositions are clean and purposeful without ever stifling the playfulness.
There's also dialogue that quietly floored me. We've all heard "life's too short," but David and Sarah entertain (I mean, really entertain) the idea that life is too long when you're alone.
And then the movie earns the tiniest, sweetest turn of that idea: once they meet, time feels faster. That's not just a cute line; it's a thesis... love doesn't fix you, but it reorients the clock.
If you're allergic to sentiment, this won't convert you. I understand why some colleagues found the twinkle and called it slight. But to me, this felt like an unabashed defense of romantic sincerity that's also self-aware enough to interrogate it.
It's the meet-cute reimagined as couples therapy: clear the baggage first, start clean, don't pretend the wreckage isn't there.
Is it perfect? No. The fantasy rules wobble, and the film occasionally trips over its own cleverness. But Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell are magnetic, the script is cannier than it looks, and the ending pays off with genuine emotion.
It made me laugh, it made me think about my own history, and it nudged the cynic to shut up for two hours and let a tender movie be tender. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Him is absolutely one of the very worst movies of 2025. Unspeakably bad, confused, confusing, pretentious, moronic, as stupid and simplistic as movies get, and as ineffective and uninteresting as horror gets.
This is the kind of movie that gives horror films a bad name. The type of movie that, when someone says "horror is dumb," you point to as Exhibit A. It's empty, idiotic, and loaded with flashy distractions: x-rays, bones snapping, blood spurting, grotesque slow-mo hits, quick-cuts, dilating pupils, convulsing veins.
All surface, no substance. A hollow shell of "ideas" that it never commits to.
This comes from Justin Tipping, who co-wrote and directed and has primarily worked in TV. It's his second feature, and man, it plays like a director trying to be bold and "out there" but really just recycling music video tricks from the late '90s while thinking he's making some deep psychological horror statement about sports, masculinity, fandom, and fame.
He isn't. He's just making noise.
And then you've got Jordan Peele's name slapped on it: Monkeypaw Productions. Let me say this as someone who adores Peele's sketch comedy work and has loved him since Key & Peele: Jordan Peele is now producing the exact movies that "Key & Peele" would have savagely made fun of 15 years ago.
He's fallen so far. Get Out was smart, sharp, and somewhat scary. Then we got Us, which was shaky. Nope, which was terrible. And now, as producer, Peele's attached to a streak of garbage (Monkey Man, the Twilight Zone reboot, Scare Tactics revival).
His brand now screams: beware. When I see "Produced by Jordan Peele" today, my stomach sinks. And Him is the nadir. The worst movie he's ever touched.
The setup: Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is a young football star in waiting, recovering from an attack by an obsessed fan. His idol, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), legendary quarterback of the San Antonio Saviors, invites him to train at his remote compound.
Over the course of six "chapters" (one per day), Cam is pushed physically, psychologically, and spiritually to prove he can be the heir to the throne. Sounds like a fertile playground for horror, right? Nope. What we get instead are endless, dull, over-the-top gore gags and clumsy fake commentary.
Training drills where failure means someone else takes a ball to the face until it explodes in blood. Speed drills cut to x-rays of brains rattling like pinballs.
Fans dressed in monstrous mascot costumes breaking into the compound like they wandered off the set of a rejected Purge sequel.
A third act that spirals into surreal nonsense: bloody decapitations on a football field altar, marching bands and cheerleaders turned into sacrificial cult members, a fever dream of incoherence that wants to be The Twilight Zone meets Any Given Sunday but instead feels like a rejected Nine Inch Nails video from 1997.
Marlon Wayans is embarrassing here. He thinks he's playing "intense" but comes off like he's stuck in a straight-faced parody of Scary Movie 7. His speeches about "being HIM" and "what it takes to be the GOAT" are laughable, not in a good way.
Julia Fox, playing his influencer wife, is given nothing but an ugly caricature. Tim Heidecker and Jim Jefferies (two very funny, smart comedians/satirists) are wasted in roles that demand they play straight-faced nonsense.
And while the very charismatic Tyriq Withers tries, he's stuck in the middle of absolute chaos.
And look, I love mascots. They're goofy, lovable, sometimes creepy, sometimes scary, but part of the joy of sports. Even they get dragged through the mud here, turned into grotesque horror imagery for no reason other than "Wouldn't it be freaky if?"
At that point, I wanted to yell at Justin Tipping: "Stay away from mascots. They deserve better than this."
By the time the movie limps to its bloody, surreal climax, I was just shaking my head.
Ninety-five minutes that felt longer than Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, a 2-hour and 45-minute movie I saw the night before that flew by. That tells you everything.
Him isn't scary. It isn't satirical. It isn't clever. It's shallow, empty, flashy nonsense.
It doesn't work as horror, it doesn't work as sports commentary, and it doesn't work as anything else. And the fact that Jordan Peele's name is on it is maybe the saddest thing of all.
Him is not just one of the worst horror movies of the year. It's one of the worst movies of any year. Avoid it. - Zero Stars
First things first: no, this has nothing to do with The Clash. Don't even go there. The Clash's London Calling is one of the greatest albums of all time, groundbreaking, important, and legendary. This London Calling is a bad action comedy knockoff. Let's not confuse the two. One is essential. The other should be flushed down the cinematic toilet.
This one stars Josh Duhamel as a hitman named Tommy Ward, and what we get is basically a third-rate Guy Ritchie imitation. And if you know me, you know how much I despise Guy Ritchie's movies. Lock Stock, Snatch, RocknRolla, etc. All of them loud, smug, macho, and derivative of Tarantino, but without an ounce of originality.
Ritchie is one of the biggest hacks in modern cinema. So imagine how bad it has to be when you're watching something that feels like a bad imitation of Guy Ritchie. That's London Calling.
The movie kicks off with an opening scene ripped straight from Eyes Wide Shut, complete with masks, costumes, weird orgy vibes... only instead of Kubrick's hypnotic creepiness, we get Duhamel screwing up a hit because he refuses to get his eyes checked.
He shoots the wrong guy, and because this movie is convinced that's comedy gold, it becomes a running gag: "Get your eyes checked, Tommy!" Hilarious.
Then Duhamel takes off the mask and looks exactly like Timothy Olyphant in Hitman. Not just similar: identical. Which means this director is ripping off Hitman, a terrible movie in its own right. So you're watching a copy of a copy of something that wasn't even worth copying in the first place.
Then we get to the real heart of the story: Tommy has to babysit his boss's socially awkward son, Julian (Jeremy Ray Taylor). Julian is into Renaissance cosplay. That's his thing. He reads Lord of the Flies for school, he's got a crush on a cosplay girl, and he spends his weekends LARPing and pretending to be a knight at a Ren fair.
And here's where it gets jaw-droppingly bad. This entire subplot is stolen directly from the Paul Rudd/Seann William Scott comedy Role Models, down to specific scenes, including the finale where the kid has to fight in the LARPing arena and the "mentor" character shows up to save the day. It's not homage. It's theft.
So yeah, this is a movie that rips off Guy Ritchie, Hitman, Eyes Wide Shut, and Role Models. That's a hell of a cinematic stew. Spoiler: it tastes awful.
Here's the shame of it: some of the cast isn't bad. Josh Duhamel, for one, actually has charisma. He's funny, he's likable, and he does the best he can with the garbage script. He deserves much better material.
Rick Hoffman is here too, playing yet another jerk, because that's what he does best. If you've seen him in Suits, or Eli Roth's Hostel, or even Thanksgiving, you know this guy has "obnoxious creep" down to a science. He's very good at being awful, and here he's reliably awful again.
Jeremy Ray Taylor as Julian isn't bad either, doing what he can with the nerdy kid role.
But none of them can escape how bad the writing is. The dialogue is wannabe clever, stuffed with f-bombs and phony monologues that think they're witty. The violence is flat. The suspense is nonexistent. Every beat is predictable. And every "twist" is stolen from a better movie.
This is directed by Allan Ungar, who has apparently made it his mission in life to make knockoffs. His Bandit was another pseudo-Ritchie crime flick, Gridlocked was the same thing, and now this. Five movies into his career, and he still hasn't had a single original thought.
Watching London Calling is like watching a Guy Ritchie superfan who doesn't understand what little charm Ritchie's movies even have, and just imitates the surface junk. It's cosplay filmmaking.
So what do we get? A "tough guy" hitman movie that's loud, stupid, unfunny, and hopelessly derivative. A script that steals from bad movies and somehow makes them worse. A subplot ripped wholesale from the terrific Role Models. A director who has no voice of his own.
Josh Duhamel deserves better. The cast deserves better. Audiences definitely deserve better. This is one to skip, hard.
London Calling is a bad movie with a great title, and unfortunately, The Clash can't sue. - ⭐️
In Whose Name? is a new documentary directed by Nico Ballesteros, who somehow, at just 18 years old when he started, gained unprecedented access to Kanye West's world.
Over six years and 3,000 hours of footage (much of it shot on iPhones), Ballesteros followed Ye through some of the most chaotic, controversial, and flat-out disturbing chapters of his life: the collapse of his marriage to Kim Kardashian, his MAGA-hat-wearing meltdown on Saturday Night Live in 2018, his White House visit with Donald Trump, the absurd Donda stadium listening party, his failed 2020 presidential campaign, his "White Lives Matter" stunt, his antisemitic rants, his friendships with Elon Musk and Candace Owens, and his business empire collapsing under the weight of his own words.
The doc also shows the bipolar episodes, the paranoia, the screaming matches with family, the architectural delusions ("I am Picasso"), the moments of happiness with his kids, and the sheer spectacle of being Kanye West, a man both enabled and destroyed by his fame.
It runs 106 minutes, but it feels like watching six years of slow-motion car crashes edited together.
Let's get this out of the way up front: your tolerance for In Whose Name? is directly tied to your tolerance for Kanye West. I am not a fan. I've never understood the critical acclaim, never enjoyed his music, and I certainly haven't enjoyed the endless circus of his behavior.
The antics, the drama, the narcissism, none of it has ever appealed to me.
So watching this movie, for me, was like watching a slow-motion train wreck. Fascinating? Yes. Hard to look away from? Absolutely. But also depressing as hell.
Here's the thing: the access Ballesteros had is jaw-dropping. It's unprecedented. You rarely see a camera this close during genuine meltdowns: family fights, paranoid rants, backstage chaos.
The filmmaker is just there, fading into the background, catching everything. How and why did Kanye allow this? Who knows. With Ye, logic doesn't apply.
That level of access is what makes the doc compelling. If you've ever wanted an all-access pass to someone's unraveling, this is it. It's not a flattering portrait, but it's certainly an honest one.
Much of the film feels like watching someone drive headfirst into walls, over and over again. The delusions, the contradictions, the self-sabotage, it's relentless.
The SNL section is the most fascinating because I'm an SNL historian and host a podcast about the show.
To see the backstage meltdown in 2018, with the MAGA hat, Chris Rock laughing nervously, Swizz Beatz trying to rein him in, Michael Che visibly furious... that's gold. It's also one of the clearest examples of Kanye at his most destructive: confusing shock value with genius.
But then it just keeps going: the Wyoming city fantasy, the White House stunt, Elon Musk as a sounding board for marital problems, "White Lives Matter" as a "joke," the antisemitic posts. And you realize, yes, all of this happened, and all of it looked just as ridiculous and dangerous as it did in the headlines.
The one thing the doc captures with clarity is the role mental illness plays here. Bipolar disorder is not a punchline, and In Whose Name? does show that wealth, fame, and power don't insulate you from it. Kanye's refusal to medicate, his paranoia, his violent mood swings, it's disturbing and sad.
If there's a "positive" takeaway, it's that mental illness can affect anyone, from the richest to the poorest, and it should be treated seriously. But that doesn't make watching 106 minutes of this any easier.
Here's the bottom line:
If you're a Kanye fan, you'll find it fascinating. It is a rare inside look at your idol, warts and all.
If you're not a fan (like me)? It's 90+ minutes of confirmation that Kanye West is exactly what you thought: a dangerous, delusional jerk with too much money, too much power, and not enough medication.
It's compelling in the way a car wreck is compelling. You can't look away, but when it's over, you feel drained, maybe even a little dirty. I didn't learn anything new; all my preconceptions about him were confirmed, loud and clear. - ⭐️1/2
There is absolutely nothing fresh or new about The Senior. Not one thing. Directed by Rod Lurie (who has made some interesting films before, like The Contender) and written by Robert Eisele, this one trudges through every single sports movie cliché you can possibly imagine.
Every trope, every beat, every "old guy gets one more shot" storyline, it's all here. And not in a clever way, not in a satirical way, not in a subversive way. Just in the most predictable, by-the-numbers fashion you can think of.
The premise is true enough: Mike Flynt, at 59 years old, went back to Sul Ross State University to play football. Sounds like a neat story, right?
The problem is the movie can't resist hammering it into the same tired mold that's been used for The Rookie, Cinderella Man, Rocky Balboa, The Champ, The Natural, Invincible… hell, even the titles sound the same. The Senior fits right in with that cookie-cutter "The ___" naming convention. You could shuffle the titles around and not miss a beat.
You know the beats before you even sit down:
The flashback of his angry, violent youth and the bad father who instilled it in him.
The reunion where the old teammates make the "joking suggestion" that he should try again.
The skeptical coach (played here by Rob Corddry, who, to his credit, underplays nicely).
The eye-rolls and good-natured mockery from teammates half his age.
The training montages.
The injury that could "end it all."
The inspirational speech, which, of course, the coach conveniently hands over to the player instead of giving it himself.
And yes, it ends with the Big Game™. Because of course it does.
None of this is surprising. None of this is exciting. It's the exact same story we've all seen a million times before, dusted off and trotted out again.
The only things that make this even remotely watchable are a few very good performances. Michael Chiklis, who plays Flynt, is a criminally underrated actor. He's been good even in junk (Fantastic Four, Wired). And on television, in The Shield, he gave one of the greatest performances in TV history.
Here, he once again shows up, does the work, and somehow manages to make a lot of the ridiculous material land. That big speech? It's utterly unbelievable in context, but Chiklis sells the hell out of it.
Mary Stuart Masterson, God, it's just lovely to see her again. In the '80s and '90s, she was one of my favorite actresses, and she hasn't lost an ounce of her presence.
She plays Eileen, Mike's wife, the standard "supportive spouse" role that's been written a hundred times before, and she still makes it compelling. Every scene she's in lifts the whole movie. She's luminous, she's grounded, she's the real deal.
Rob Corddry is also a pleasant surprise here as the coach. He doesn't mug, he doesn't oversell it, he plays it straight, and it works.
But even with those strong performances, they can't hide how tired the material is.
This comes from Angel Studios, the faith-based company behind stuff like Sound of Freedom. And as expected, the religious themes are jammed in here, too. They're heavy-handed, unnecessary, and feel tacked on just to check a box.
It's not the worst offender in that genre, but you can feel the seams. The story was already clichéd; now it's also preachy.
At this point, I can't help but laugh at how identical these movies are. Older athlete, against all odds, gets one more shot. Cue the training montages, the "you're too old" doubters, the inspirational speech, the Big Game.
It's all here. Again. And again. And again. You could splice together reels from The Rookie, Rocky Balboa, Invincible, Cinderella Man, and this movie, and I bet most people wouldn't know which film they were watching.
That's the problem. There's no originality here. No spark. No attempt to do anything different with a true story that actually could have been something special. Instead, they sand it down into the safest, most predictable Hallmark Channel version of a sports drama.
So yeah, I can't recommend The Senior. It's not offensively bad, but it is aggressively, painfully generic. The performances (especially Chiklis and Masterson) are good enough to make it watchable in stretches, but they deserve so much better.
At the end of the day, this is just another clichéd underdog sports movie, weighed down by forced faith-based themes and indistinguishable from a dozen others that came before it.
You've seen it all before, and you'll forget it the second the credits roll. - ⭐️⭐️
Waltzing with Brando is one of the strangest movies I've seen in a while, and that's saying something when it comes from Bill Fishman, a director who's only made six films since 1988 and every one of them has been odd in its own way.
His career started with Tapeheads (a terrific, weird satire with John Cusack and Tim Robbins that still holds up). He cratered with the atrocious Car 54, Where Are You?, and he's popped up only sporadically ever since.
But even for Fishman, this one is bizarre.
It's based on Bernard Judge's memoir about working with Marlon Brando in the late '60s and early '70s, trying to design a paradise hideaway in Tahiti. And while yes, the story really happened, the way it's told here plays like a surreal fever dream.
The tone is all over the map: part wacky comedy, part Brando career retrospective, part message movie about environmentalism, and part indulgent showcase for Billy Zane to show off his Brando impression. None of it coheres.
Billy Zane is actually pretty great here. He looks eerily like Brando thanks to some killer makeup and hair work, and he nails the voice and mannerisms. There are moments where you legitimately have to double-take because it feels like Brando himself is onscreen.
It's not just an impression; Zane clearly did his homework, and he brings depth and detail even when the script doesn't. Honestly, you can tell he poured himself into it. No surprise, since he produced the film himself and clearly sees this as his passion project.
The problem is the material. Instead of trusting Zane's performance to carry the film, Fishman loads the script with unnecessary detours.
Entire sections are recreations of Brando's famous movie scenes, from The Godfather to Last Tango in Paris. They're fun in the sense of "look how accurate Zane's impression is," but they add absolutely nothing to the story. They're there because Fishman and Zane wanted to show off, period.
And then there's Jon Heder. My God. He plays Bernard Judge, the architect who teams up with Brando. This character should be fascinating: a straight-laced guy pulled into Brando's bizarre orbit, the "normal" weirdo up against the Hollywood weirdo.
Instead, we get Heder. And I'll be blunt: Jon Heder is a terrible actor. I didn't like him in Napoleon Dynamite (yes, I know that's sacrilege to the cult around that movie), and I haven't liked him in anything since.
Here, he's flat, lifeless, and utterly incapable of keeping up with Zane. Every scene with them together is a mismatch. Zane is going full Brando, disappearing into the role, and Heder is standing there like he wandered in from a bad indie comedy. It's a huge problem.
The tone shifts are relentless. One minute, it's goofy comedy, with Brando suggesting they power the island with electric eels or build a water system out of his own urine. The next minute, it's a sincere lecture about civil rights, complete with a Martin Luther King sidebar that feels like it wandered in from a different movie.
Then it's a string of Brando clips. Then it's a fish-out-of-water farce about Judge being shocked by the nudity and hedonism on the island. Then it's a heartfelt drama about Brando's environmental concerns. None of it gels.
Richard Dreyfuss shows up as a financier and chews scenery like it's Thanksgiving dinner. Alaina Huffman is solid as Judge's wife, Tia Carrere pops in, there are some familiar faces, but everything is swallowed up by the tonal chaos.
The irony is that Brando was already one of the strangest, most enigmatic people in Hollywood history. He didn't need the goofy exaggeration. He was already fascinating, already unpredictable, already brilliant and bizarre in equal measure.
The film touches on his sincere passion for civil rights and the environment, his contradictions, and his eccentricity, but it's buried under too much tonal noise.
Bill Fishman has actually made this kind of movie before. He directed My Dinner with Jimi, which, among other things, was about an average guy hanging out with Jimi Hendrix.
Same idea: an everyday person brushes up against a genius/celebrity. And like that film, Waltzing with Brando is mixed at best. Fishman can't balance the reverence, the comedy, and the humanity.
What you're left with is a very uneven film that's absolutely worth a look for one reason only: Billy Zane. His Brando is mesmerizing, sometimes even astonishing. He deserved a better script, a better director, and definitely a better co-star than Jon Heder.
Instead, he's stuck in a weird, tonally confused mess that tries to do too many things and doesn't succeed at any of them.
Waltzing with Brando is simply a curiosity piece. If you want to see Billy Zane disappear into Marlon Brando, check it out. Beyond that? It's a tonal train wreck. - ⭐️⭐️
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