Song Sung Blue – 8

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Music can make you happy, and this film did, over and over. Good songs, sung with joy to enthusiastic audiences, were played to the end but smartly intercut with snippets of the characters’ daily lives, so they never outstayed their welcome. The characters were all people you rooted for (cf. Marty Supreme) and enjoyed being with, even the teenage girls. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson were wonderful, as was the supporting cast, featuring good old Michael Imperioli. The plot may have been based on a true story, but it doled out excessive tragedies in a Hollywood-hokey way that erased any thought of authenticity. But that music!

Cover-Up – 6

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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 with the byline, but not much insight or follow-through on the title.

Sentimental Value – 7.7

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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 Person in the World, just some great acting.

Marty Supreme – 3

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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 character of the year, but who wants to watch that? I can’t think of a single moment I enjoyed, aside from Pico Iyer’s astonishing performance.

Nouvelle Vague – 7.8

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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 its rigor, a fitting companion to Richard Linklater’s simultaneously released Blue Moon.

Train Dreams – 6

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Sort of a Nomadland for loggers, this story of man’s life is simple, maybe too simple, and he’s simple too, but a nice guy who never hurt anyone. The movie goes off the rails, so to speak, toward the end, which makes you realize it’s based on a novella, not a screenplay. Meant to be moving, it moved me not.

Sirat – 7.8

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Spain’s submission to the Oscars is a trip, in many senses. Like many trips it doesn’t come with a meaning, but it’s an unforgettable experience. The booming sound of a rave in the desert, a wild drive to where across emptiness, the shock of death–this is the setting for getting to know a small group of what some would call “freaks,” who come to embody a community of friendship that seems better than the world they are escaping.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – 7.8

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A spectacular Rose Byrne falls deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of personal calamity until there’s no way out and director Mary Bronstein turns the ending over to deus ex machina so we won’t go home totally depressed. As an intensely focused one-person drama, although Conan O’Brien and ASAP Rocky are good in supporting roles, this is a worthy companion film to Blue Moon.

Jay Kelly – 7.9

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A smart and entertaining romp with something fun every two minutes, smartly employing a cast of 80. Writer-director Noah Baumbach is a star. George Clooney is the meta lead, playing a handsome movie star (Jay Kelly even sounds like George Clooney), which meant I always saw him as George Clooney, acting, which made me less concerned by his personal troubles. (Interestingly, the clips of his Jay Kelly movies made him appear to be a terrible actor, emphasizing his role as “movie star,” not a person.) Adam Sandler was another figure recognizable only to Hollywood. Billy Crudup, by contrast, grabbed me as a person, not an actor. Key plot points fell apart upon examination, but I loved the ride.

Hamnet – 6.5

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Two hours of Jessie Buckley is a treat–what an actress!–but the movie is a bit of an unmodulated slog, careening from dramatic incident to dramatic incident. None of it would matter, of course, if it wasn’t William Shakespeare we were watching (and if you hadn’t read the book you might not realize who “Will” is until 90 minutes in). The point of it all shows up in the final ten minutes, at which time the film dispenses with its realism for a bit of “manipulation” (to quote director Chloe Zhao) that feels overdue and welcome.