Top Films of 2025
The Teacher Americana. Weapons Sinners Sirat One Battle After Another Blue Moon/Nouvelle Vague F1 If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Sentimental Value
Author Archive for: Bob Marshall
Entries by Bob Marshall
Cover-Up – 6
A somewhat aimless documentary about our era’s most famous investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh. It wanders among clips of stories he covered, a current non-revealing interview and historic shots of him walking, like the directors had trouble coming up with visuals to fill the frame. The film gave me a face and a personality to go […]
Housemaid – 7.8
A feminist fun-house frolic and frightfest, glued together by the acting chops of Sydney Sweeney. The story makes an inexplicable 180-degree pivot midstream, but I was enjoying myself so much I didn’t mind. It was a good time at the movies, not something to analyze.
La Grazia – 7.5
So Italian, as with every film by Paolo Sorrentino. The story compresses the last six months of a presidency into three actions, but it is the loneliness of old age that is the subject with the existential question, “who owns our days?” Beautifully acted and shot in a wide-screen format that surrounds every figure with […]
Frankenstein – 7
A gorgeous Gothic bromance, better viewed on a larger screen than our home TV. We know the story but have to admire its presentation, along with the appearance of Charles Dance, Christoph Waltz and the rest of the finely costumed cast. Telling the story twice dilutes the drama in favor of sheer spectacle.
Ghostlight – 5
A family’s repressed feelings, anger issues and bad legal choices following the death of their son are resolved by therapy and play-acting. The plot, as presented, is manipulative and schmaltzy, more community theater than Sentimental Value.
Sentimental Value – 7.7
A Scandinavian psychodrama that brings back memories of Ingmar Bergman. Renate Reinsve joins Jessie Buckley, Rose Byrne and Zoey Deutch in the Actress-I-Enjoy-Watching category for 2025, while Stellan Skarsgard and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas are worthy Golden Globe supporting actor nominees. There’s disappointingly less to the story and landscape than in Joachim Trier’s earlier The Worst […]
4 Days in Santa Barbara
Four days, four events, shows how rich the cultural life can be in our small city. Friday we attended a preview of Marty Supreme, sponsored by the Film Society at the Riviera Theater, with co-star Gwyneth Paltrow interviewed afterward. (The movie was awful.) Saturday the Museum of Art hosted an interview with the premier Monet scholar […]
Marty Supreme – 3
Unwatchable. From the opening frantic sex scene to the discordantly beatific ending, the movie charges ahead with a frenzy and high volume that is unrelieved and wearing. The plot toggles between absurd and ridiculous. The repetitive table tennis scenes are fakey and the music is unusually bad. Timothee Chalamet succeeds in creating the most unpleasant […]
Nouvelle Vague – 7.8
A brilliantly conceived and faithfully executed homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s directorial debut, Breathless, in which he broke all the rules and pioneered independent cinema. Viewing Breathless beforehand, as we did, only made the recreation more telling, and amusing; the star here is Godard himself, although the radiant Zoey Deutch, as Jean Seberg, fills the screen wonderfully. In […]
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