May 2025 Roundup | Vroom, Boom and Escaping Doom
I'll always trust Ethan Hunt, but I might trust Cassian Andor more. Sorry, Tom.
With all apologies to The Mayor of Moviestm Tom Cruise, I must start this month’s post talking about television. Andor absolutely defined my May, and I’d be lying to myself and the dozen of you who read this newsletter if I didn’t admit it.
Over the course of four weeks, the show’s second season quite simply reshaped how I view Star Wars as a whole. Democratizing the Rebellion felt like one of Tony Gilroy’s main missions when crafting Andor. Rather than Luke Skywalker coming in as a mystical Chosen One honing his powers for good thanks to an old man’s wisdom and a legendary lineage to save the Rebels from the Death Star, he is instead another hero standing on the shoulders of a relay race of heroes who created the chance to make that legendary trench run. That isn’t to diminish Skywalker’s Hero’s Journey nor the Original Trilogy. Quite the opposite. Andor fleshed out and articulated all the million little sacrifices, insurrections and risks required to fight against an oppressive power, and watching A New Hope after right after Andor and Rogue One highlights exactly that.
Within the storytelling is high levels of craft and performance. From the central players like Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, Adria Arjona and Genevieve O'Reilly to the supporting cast, each person felt like they read the script and felt they needed to bring their A-game.
It was plainly special to watch and savor. If you’re a fan of Star Wars, I’d implore you to give Andor a run.
Anyway, May was a scatterbrained month of movie-watching. These are the highlights:
Rewatch: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
While I admired Rogue One upon first watch in 2016, I’ve only grown to appreciate what Gilroy and Gareth Edwards created. Now, partly thanks to Andor and also thanks to half-a-dozen rewatches, it is firmly planted in second place behind The Empire Strikes Back. I find Jyn Erso an even more compelling character post-Andor as well as she falls right in line with several of the women we spend time with in the series who play major parts in building the Rebellion. The sacrifices required to pull off the heist of the Death Star plans even make the destruction of the massive space station in A New Hope feel much more like the miracle the act actually is.
While watching Rogue One with all the context Andor provided elevates the film, it just remains a rock-solid war film set in the Star Wars universe on its own. The final act on Scariff is some of the most dynamic sci-fi action in the entire franchise. You feel the weight of each blaster beam. You feel the scale of the ships and AT-ATs. You feel the desperation in the battle of over every inch. You just feel, which isn’t always the case in franchise filmmaking.
What a miracle it is to fall so deeply in love with a gang of characters despite their limited time on-screen in one of the biggest franchises in movies and television.
I am also moved each time Mads Mikkelsen says, “Stardust.”
New Release: Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise a.k.a. Ethan Hunt (is there a difference anymore??) asked everyone to trust him one last time, but the thing is: I’ll always trust Cruise/Hunt when it comes to blockbuster movie-making. There are few franchises more worthy of that belief than Mission: Impossible. For the last 30 years and particularly for the last decade, M:I has defined action movies.
Final Reckoning, for the most part, delivers on all the expected and surprising thrills you’d hope for in a franchise’s eighth film. Yes, the movie bends—perhaps even splinters—under the self-imposed weight of tying storylines back to past films at an unnecessary level. And yes, artificial intelligence as a Big Bad is, while aspirational and something I support on a philosophical level, quite confounding in execution.
However, there was a lot of vroom, zoom and Ethan escaping doom, so I still enjoyed myself. Final Reckoning had some of the series’ highs (for all the clamoring about the bi-plane sequence, Tom Cruise setting his parachute on fire 19 times was actually the most impressive stunt to me) and also its lowest lows (there is a callback to the first movie that is so pointless that I actively rolled my eyes), but in the end, I’m glad we got eight of these.
My arbitrary rankings, which are always subject to shifting:
Fallout
Rogue Nation
Mission: Impossible
Dead Reckoning
Ghost Protocol
Mission: Impossible 3
Final Reckoning
Mission: Impossible 2
New Release: Thunderbolts*
A satisfying and complete story should be the standard, but when it comes to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, things get a little convoluted. Ever since Avengers: Endgame tied a perfect bow on 10 years of singularly excellent world-building, the MCU has gone through a sort of odyssey. Some of it hasn’t been their fault (i.e. the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman and the less tragic situation around Jonathan Majors), but some of it absolutely has highlighted the studio’s hubris. The quality dipped under the demand for Disney+ content, and the trust from its fanbase is now fragile at best.
That’s not to say it’s been all bad. WandaVision and Loki were genuinely excellent television shows. I have personal soft-spots for Shang-Chi, Ms. Marvel and The Marvels, but the whiffs have been big and loud.
With those stakes established: Thunderbolts* represented a step in the right direction as we approach The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Director Jake Schreier, along with writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, set out to make a thoughtful, mindful and ultimately heartfelt story about a ragtag bunch of wannabe-heroes and executed exactly that. Florence Pugh showed she could carry a big-budget studio movie with all the humor and emotional range she has shown in smaller, award-nominated movies. Bob Pullman and Wyatt Russell gave great performance as well, a reminder that nepotism isn’t always a bad thing.
Ultimately, Thunderbolts is not only one of the best MCU films post-Endgame, but probably ranks somewhere around the top-12 for me all-time. Thank goodness.
New Release: Warfare
Alex Garland’s Civil War was divisive when it was released in the spring of 2024. Some thought the lack of clear politics cowardly, and the world-building left many wanting. Those critiques are fair, but as far as the story and movie we got, I loved it and ranked it as one of my 10 favorite movies of the last year. The road/journalism movie aspects really clicked for me as did the relationship between the hard-bitten Kirsten Dunst and the doe-eyed Cailee Spaeny. It helped that the story focused on photographers, and the fact that Spaeny’s character shot on 35mm film felt specifically tailored toward me, but on top of that, the climactic final 30 minutes of the movie was the most thrilling sequence of 2024 that didn’t take place on Arrakis.
Ray Mendoza, who served as the film’s military supervisor, was largely responsible for a lot of what made that concluding section viscerally great. He and Garland then partnered for Warfare. Garland took more of a “guiding hand” role in the movie’s production as Mendoza went through the venture of directing a film for the first time.
The movie, essentially, is a recreation of Mendoza’s experience as a Navy SEAL during the Iraq War. Early in the film, a title card tells the audience the movie is based on the “memories” of those involved, which sets up a unique tone. We meet a SEAL platoon as they take over a house, and, for the sake of not spoiling too much, chaos ensues. The next 70-80 minutes are breathtaking but also a little more sparse than I was expecting. This isn’t a sprawling war epic. Instead, it’s a slice of the hellish life that is war.
The cast, comprised of next-in-line-stars including Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn and Kit Connor, are all locked in and committed. D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, who some may know from his work on Reservation Dogs, stands in for Mendoza himself, but he isn’t necessarily the main character because there isn’t a main character. The main perspective shifts as is needed, but the audience’s orientation is never unintentionally confused while the movie follows these soldiers pushed to the brink.
I’m not sure I’ll ever watch Warfare again. Its heart-pounding intensity in a theater will be hard to match at home, and I’m OK leaving that experience — one I did enjoy as much as one could enjoy a movie as violent as this — in my own memory.
First Watch: Killer of Sheep
Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is one of those white-whale movies for cinephiles. Mostly shot over weekends in 1972 and 1973 on a budget of less than $10,000, Burnett submitted the movie as his Master of Fine Arts thesis at UCLA. Although acclaimed at the time, seeing the movie was nearly impossible due to an inability to secure music rights, so the film lived in relatively obscurity until 2007 when it was restored and enlarged from 16mm to 35mm. At the time, the film landed at or near the top of several critics’ lists, but it wasn’t until 2025 that the movie would be digitally released thanks to a 4K restoration through The Criterion Collection.
I caught a screening at The Beverly Theater in Las Vegas and was thoroughly transfixed. The film was part slice-of-life dramedy and part coming-of-age story. Burnett captured Black life in Watts as it was, allowing the environment to speak for itself. Over the course of its 80-minute runtime, Killer of Sheep almost invites the viewers’ minds to wander and wonder, but one sequence stopped me in my tracks.
Our main character, Stan (portrayed by Henry G. Sanders) dances with his wife (portrayed by Kaycee Moore) for an unbroken 3-minute shot. The couple slowly spins in a trance that feels like it lasts and portrays a lifetime, their figures silhouettes against a window while Dinah Washington’s This Bitter Earth plays. Without a word, you feel the love, yearning and heartbreak between the couple. It is a quiet, minimalist and masterful moment I won’t soon forget.
This movie has more than a dozen moments that stick with you even when you don’t think they will, which is one of various reasons it is required viewing.
First Watch: The Sweet East
If you’re a fan of the Safdie brothers, you might be familiar with and a fan of Sean Price Williams’ work as the cinematographer on projects like Good Time and Heaven Knows What. He also served the same role on Alex Ross Perry’s hellacious 2018 movie Her Smell.
Williams wandered over to the director’s chair for his feature debut with 2023’s The Sweet East, a surrealist road movie journeying through America’s east coast. The movie centers on Lillian via a wonderfully layered performance from Talia Ryder, a high school senior who goes on an odyssey that takes her from a class trip in Washington D.C. to a movie set in New York City to a secluded barn in Vermont. Along the way, she meets a zany cast of characters played by the likes of Jacob Elordi, Ayo Edibiri and Simon Rex.
The Sweet East has all the acid-trip chaos familiar to those who’ve watched Good Time, and while the coloring outside of the lines goes a bit far, it was an entertaining spectacle nonetheless. Elordi is particularly hilarious, using all of his movie-star charm and good looks in a playful manner, and Ryder is a winning central performance as well.
First Watch: Lee
Although Lee, a biopic about the iconic war photographer Lee Miller, is pretty standard fare, it is executed in good-intentioned manner. Kate Winslet gives a committed and charming performance as Miller, but the standout to me was the surprising turn from Andy Samberg as David Scherman. He brought a steady heartbeat to the movie as the characters move through all that World War II entailed. Josh O’Connor did what he could in a sort of stunted role as a journalist interviewing Lee, but it’s always good to see him squint-smiling on screen.
I did, also, have to fight against the urge to buy a TLR camera after watching the movie, but I digress.
Blindspotters: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial / Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
We swapped Steven Speilberg movies on May’s episode of Blindspotters, which was naturally a joy. I watched E.T. the Extra Terrestrial for the first time while amanda watched The Last Crusade. It was a big moment for me, personally. Not just because I watched one of Speilberg’s most iconic movies in a career full of them, but also because of an E.T.-related childhood moment which I dive into on the podcast. Anyway, Spielberg makes bangers. Nothing new here.
--
Apologies for the slightly delayed nature of this post. I was in New Jersey for a week on a work trip, and instead of typing this up in my free time, I saw Mk.gee one night and Turnstile (with a surprise appearance from Hayley Williams) the next. Both shows were a form of cinema in their own right, honestly (aside from the fact that Turnstile’s new project Never Enough is a visual album). Anyway, thanks for the time as always. See you next month!