Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 14 - Kiss of the Spider Woman

  

14. Kiss of the Spider Woman, dir. Bill Condon

I guess I'm alone on this one?

Some of these movies are going to appear on nearly every Best of 2025 list. Do not be surprised when I cover Sinners, one of the most popular movies of the year. Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent is going to make this list too. That one will likely win Best Foreign Language Picture and might be nominated for Best Picture, the juxtaposition of Brazilian fascist oppression and Hollywood blockbusters being an irresistible concoction for the Academy voters. But a very similar movie is not on a lot of Top 10 Lists. Kiss of the Spider Woman, a queer romance set in an Argentinian prison and a love letter to the golden age of musicals, will not win many awards. It got mixed reviews and nobody saw it. This movie made two million dollars against a budget of $30 million, because Lionsgate wrote it off as a failure. The only reason I knew Spider Woman existed at all was thanks to randomly checking the AMC App, which has become my only way to know about what's actually playing in theaters.

I didn't even know it was a remake of a 1985 movie, or an adaptation of a 1992 stage musical based on a 1974 novel by Manuel Puig. I saw that title and thought "huh, they made a sequel to Madame Web, I gotta see this!"

Bill Condon has the credentials to make a glamorous musical. His CV includes Dreamgirls and Chicago. He was also the director who did the best with the aching unsatisfiable romance at the center of the Twilight movies. Spider Woman is another collaboration with frequent cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, and it might be his best work. The structure of Spider Woman is about two prisoners, Valentin (Diego Luna) and Molina (Tonatiuh) stuck together in the bowls of one of the junta's worst black holes. Their cell is cramped and dark, so minimalist that it could be a stage set. Meanwhile, the two escape into the fantasy world of Molina's recounting of one of his favorite movies, the movie-within-a-movie Kiss of the Spider Woman. This is where the film explodes into dancing and movement and the bright dazzle of technicolor celluloid. At the center of their dreams is the actress Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), a Hollywood starlet who is both the heroine and villain in a dual role. Duality is all over the place here since Molina and Valentin end up playing singing roles in their imagination. Reality is dismal and small, but the big screen can be enormous and free.

I'm always a sucker for fiction playing with its multiple levels of reality. Molina, who is a trans in a time when such things are not recognized properly, casts themselves in the movie as Luna's gay sidekick, magically replacing the mediocre actor in the original text. From there you can be increasingly unsure how much of what we're seeing is the "true" Spider Woman and how much is Molina's invention to help along Valentin in his struggles. Diego Luna is playing another Cassian Andor, a butch Marxist hero, who resents Hollywood musicals as unimportant capitalist nonsense. But eventually he's drawn into the glamor of it all. Luna/Valentin is cast as J-Lo's handsome leading man lover. We therefore have a queer romance that develops within the veneer of a Hollywood romance. They use the play of a straight male-female Hollywood movie to slide past the cultural taboo that separates them. It's a great dynamic.

It is an enormous shame that this version of Kiss of the Spider Woman is certainly doomed to be forgotten. I can only hope that Tonatiuh does not end up forgotten with it, I want to see more movies with them in it. Lopez and Luna are not quite perfect for Old Hollywood glamor, they're never quite comfortable doing this, but Tonatiuh belongs in celluloid.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 15 - Predator: Badlands

15. Predator: Badlands, dir. Dan Trachtenberg

That shaved sides haircut is so hot now that even Predators go for it, huh?

The Predator franchise was a miserable embarrassment just five years ago. Until Dan Trachtenberg, this was a franchise consisted of one classic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, one direct sequel that I think I'm alone in enjoying, and a lot of sequels that are better off forgotten. It took over thirty years to figure out what to do with the Predator as a movie monster again. 2022's Prey was both the first time these movies had anything interesting to say since the Eighties, and also a tight exciting thriller about a young woman proving herself to be a better predator (lower case) than the Predator (proper noun).

Predator: Badlands is structurally the same movie as Prey, just starring an actual alien this time. It is amazing that there have been seven of these movies and nobody thought to have a Predator be like... an actual character for my entire lifetime. The new lead even has a respectful rivalry with a sibling as our previous Comanche heroine. Both characters wind up in the wilds of either the Great Plains or a comic book barbarian planet, and have to use nature's tools of tricks to face off against White human colonizers. I'm more than fine with repeating a plot structure if it works, and Prey worked. Let's just do it again but bigger, louder, and more Heavy Metal-ish. Sequels can be good! We got three Knives Out movies using who-done-it mysteries as cultural criticism and that franchise peaked in 2025.

The big difference is that Prey is a solo affair, the movie's lead had only a dog to hunt with her, but Badlands is a movie about a building an RPG party. Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is a scrawny little Predator (or "Yuatja" to use the franchise name for the species) who has to prove himself to his warrior race family, and chooses to go to the most awful planet full of the most dangerous creatures in order to earn his place. Very quickly Dek is overwhelmed by the local flora and fauna who are level 99 enemies, even his fancy Yuatja tool-kit is insufficient for this world. The only way to survive is by teaming up with a half-ruined Weyland-Yutani android, Thia (Elle Fanning) and an adorable little monkey guy, Bud (Rohinal Ravinesh Narayan). Yuatja are not terribly friendly as a species, as seen with their usual propensity to murder action stars in the jungle, so it takes awhile for Dek to open up and team up with this new crew. There's not a lot of depth to him, this is basically a movie starring a hulking slasher villain, but Elle Fanning and the CG Pokemon fill in the gaps well.

Sure, we have lost a lot of the cultural commentary by removing the Comanche historical element. I won't kid you by saying that Predator: Badlands is as interesting a movie as Prey - it isn't. Badlands is not necessarily a dumb movie, it is as clever a script as Prey, especially towards the end when Dek has to rebuild his Predator arsenal by using the various killer fauna of this death world as video game items. Call it Chekhov's space gizmos. There's a second Elle Fanning-bot who is one of the best villains of 2025. I have not seen Elle Fanning in anything for a minute, last year proved she is a fantastic actress, and she completely nails both of her robot roles. Getting to watch a Predator work as the scrappy underdog is quite the role reversal. Dek pulls off quite the Metal Gear Solid adventure with his friends in the third act. 

You could do a lot worse with a popcorn flick franchise sequel in 2025. And what Best Of list is complete without a crowd-pleaser?

Top 15 Movies of 2025: Introduction

  

Once again another year has passed and 20XX has become 20XY. So we're doing this again! The Top 15 Movies of twenty... something something! I saw about 70 newly-released movies last year, as I do most years. There's at least forty movies that could make this list any given year to talk about, and I still haven't seen a ton of stuff on people's Best Lists. Sorry, Sorry, Baby, I was just not interested. 

First an intro, then tomorrow we'll get into No. 15.

Argument: 

Last year sucked. Let us start there.

Some years earn special meme status for being awful. 2020 was so bad that we had several movies in 2025 to remember how terrible it was, most notably Ari Aster's Eddington. I do not know if 2025 will also gain such status as a numerical shorthand for bad memories. This was a year where it felt like at any moment we might tank our economy, go to war, or fully toss our constitutional rights for good. But to be positive, none of those things quite happened in 2025 - it was almost irritating. Sure, we might bomb the Hell out of innocent people and put up tariffs, yet still the year had this energy of "that sucked... so I guess we still gotta go to fucking work, huh?" The great final battle of Good vs Evil can play out in your fantasies every day and then, yup, tomorrow you're getting up and taking a shit and getting in the car to do it again.

This is horrible, but it could be worse. If you need an obvious blunt metaphor, only part of the White House was bulldozed, and I'm ambivalent about the rest of that structure at this point.

However, you could talk the same way about 2024, or to a certain extent about 2023, or 2019, or 2016, or 2015, or 2004. I have been dooming about more or less exactly this second act of the Trump Era since two elections ago, and there's paper trail on this very website to prove it. Really nothing about last year was special: not cosmically, not in terms of the general standards of humanity. And also, you might not have noticed this, but movies were really good last year. It was a great year in the theaters that it felt like there were three movies playing at all times I needed to see. I might never catch up on the things I missed. However, no matter how many times you saw One Battle After Another, it didn't fix anything. 2025 still was one battle after another, and like 2024, 2023, etc, nothing was settled.

No, 2025 was simply one of the worst years of my life, and that was not the president's fault, or Elon Musk's fault, or the shitheal kicker for the Kansas City Chief's fault. This post going to get really sad really fast, just a warning. Maybe the world edged itself all year for the worst to happen and it didn't. That's the world. The worst actually did happen to me. There's no relief to be found in the other shoe dropping.

2025 was the year my Grandma died. She was more than just a Grandma to me, she was my third parent, and that made 2025 a uniquely horrible year no matter what was in theaters or what the state of the world might be. I had a bad winter since she was in the hospital a lot. I had a bad spring because she passed away. I had a bad summer because I was in mourning. I had really awful holidays because Grandma was the holidays growing up: she did the decorating and the cooking and she was Santa Claus. she hid the toys and sang the songs and made us leave an apple for Rudolph to eat. 

This all matters for this list because I love movies because of my Grandma.

I have not written anything on this blog in awhile because I knew I would have to write what is effectively a second obituary here. I already wrote a good one for my friends and family back in June. This is a different kind of thing: odds are you didn't know her, and you were worse off for it. She was the kind of sweet old lady that took on the nickname "Duck". She loved children, never suffered fools (certainly not presidential fools), and wanted to care for everybody. She was there for us during the Last Worst Year of My Life(™), 2010, when my baby cousin passed away. That's the worst thing that could ever happen to a Grandma Duck, and she survived it because we needed her. You never heard her still talking to her Grandson when she dropped a pan, sure that his ghost was playing tricks on her. You never had her French Toast on a Saturday morning while watching Seventies Godzilla movies in the living room. You never heard her snore in the middle of Longlegs, wake up, and groggily insist she wasn't actually asleep. You never had the uncomfortable experience of listening to her comment how a certain actress in a shitty SciFi Channel Creature Feature about Giant Snakes has "an amazing body" when you've seen that very same actress naked in a Skinamax movie the night before. I do not know how many weekends I've spent just watching movies with Grandma, how many thousands of things she took me and my sister and my cousins to, how many movies on this blog that I've reviewed that I saw with her.

Take a random post from over ten years ago... Uhh... the World War Z review. Not my best work as a writer, obviously. I took Grandma to the theaters to see that one, because she liked Brad Pitt and liked dumb monster movies. She enjoyed that movie. I didn't. Doesn't really matter now, even watching a bad movie with her was a good time because at least we had something to complain about. The zombies looked dumb and it is fun to dislike stuff sometimes with people you love.

Just how many VHS's did we rent from the video store around the corner? How many DVDs were in boxes around our the house? We bought her a Gerard Butler pillow so she could cuddle with him all beefcaked out flexing his muscles because she loved Dracula 2000 and Olympus Has Fallen and similar kinds of junk. She was never a snob like me, never felt the need to write about anything, she just wanted to watch stuff with everybody. She had the purest kind of film-going experience.

This is the culture really I come from as a critic: the Manger set under the Christmas tree this year had a giant killer shark watching over Baby Jesus in lieu of the angel. My family made a point to all go see Jaws on its fiftieth anniversary. I wish Grandma had been there. I am not making a statement about films as an act of politics, our relationship with capitalism, or what the Netflix purchase of Warner Bros means for the state of the artform. I just wish I heard Grandma doze off in the middle of Jaws and snore. There's a terrible-looking movie coming out this week about a killer monkey attacking teenagers that I would love to tell Grandma about. I laugh at that trailer every single time I see it, she would love that pile of bullshit.

Death is going to be a recurring feature on this list.A lot of the movies in the Top 15 are about mourning, or about dying, or about letting go.  That was not necessarily by design. Mortality is universal, so it is going to come up a lot regardless of the year. But death seemed to be extremely on certain filmmakers' minds, and it was definitely on mine in 2025.

We're going to start with something fun and dumb and something I'm sure Grandma would have loved. It has a little monkey guy in it. Sad stuff will be back though.

Top 15:

15. Predator: Badlands

14. Kiss of the Spider Woman

13. Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc

12. 28 Years Later

11. No Other Choice

10. Friendship

9. Bring Her Back

8. Bugonia

7. The Secret Agent

6. Weapons

5. The Shrouds

4. Marty Supreme

3. Superman

2. The Monkey

1. Sinners

'Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning' Has More Ego Than Stunts

If there was ever a franchise that never demanded much out of its audience, it was the Mission Impossible movies. These films came out roughly once every five years, enough time to miss them but also enough to forget they existed. They barely had continuity, their protagonist Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is not really a character. There's all kinds of inconsistencies in tone and style between entries, which is fine. My question is this: are there people out there who have made Mission Impossible their whole personality? Anybody who would be offended if they retconned the end to Mission Impossible: Fallout or something? I like all these movies well enough but I don't remember which one was Rogue Nation and which one was Ghost Protocol. I don't remember why Tom Cruise climbed the Burj Khalifa in the fourth or fifth movie. Jonathan Rhys Meyers was in one of these? Where?

And that’s fine. If anything, that’s admirable. I think it is a series strength to be easy and breezy like a shampoo. Mission Impossible lost that strength when it became 2025 and Tom Cruise was staring down the barrel of a Medicare ID card. Now Mission Impossible is exhausting and pompous. There is one man that did make Mission Impossible his entire personality, and it just so happens to be the guy starring in them. The newest and worst movie in this series, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, is a film starring Tom Cruise in a Tom Cruise production, with only one audience in mind: Tom.

The final entry of the Mission Impossible franchise is so big it had to be split into two movies - the seventh, eighth, and also presumably last films in Ethan Hunt's career. Dead Reckoning, the one with a "Part 1" subtitle, was action-packed and impressive, but still too long and too complicated just to be a movie where Tom Cruise rode a motorcycle off a mountain. Its sequel, The Final Reckoning, curiously lacking a "Part 2" despite being the second half of a mammoth movie, doubles-down hard on the worst instincts of its processor. There's even less thrills, more talking, more plot. But really what strangles this duology is ego. What filled roughly six hours of runtime? A lot of self-worship, a lot of reverence for something that never really mattered. Everybody from low-level spies to the very president of the United States herself must stop and sing how special and important Ethan Hunt is. But there is no Ethan Hunt, even in his own film series he barely exists. He is just whatever Tom Cruise needs to be at the time of filming. It appears that what Cruise needs in 2025 is ungodly levels of self-importance.

I Want to Burn Down the House in 'Blue Prince'

Obviously there are what you would consider puzzle SPOILERS in here. I do not think I give away full answers, but know that you only read this at the PERIL of you own FEAR AND TERROR.

When I get really into a game, I can feel the obsession. The obsession manifests as a kind of light pressure just under my forehead. Nothing else in my life other than video games has generated this reaction in me: not any job, not writing, not movies, not any relationship, and certainly not jogging. My stomach will tell you I don't jog nearly enough, but it does have the shape of a man who has played at least 10,000 hours of video games. This pressure headache is actually not altogether unpleasant. The obsession is a purpose, a task to complete. Most of life is just the space between the things that matter, so a core drive, a direction that I can feel at all times, it isn't bad. This must be why religious people can get so freaky. Only instead of rebuilding the Temple my task is to solve the mysteries of Blue Prince, apparently. Only Blue Prince will not let me solve the puzzles I can literally see the solutions to already and that... that is infuriating. I have a divine will in my skull driving me forward and the game will not play along.

I like these puzzle exploration games to a certain limit. Last year I loved Animal Well a great deal, which was a Metroidvania with very little action, instead using the platforming as a kind of expanding series of locked room puzzles which you can solve outwardly. I devoured that game in a week, making it my whole existence. There is no joy in gaming greater than discovering you can use the Frisbee as a spinning platform and your little guy can ride on it back and forth to gain access to new spaces and things. There's tons of games like this: Fez, The Witness, Zero Escape and Danganronpa to an extent. I really like these opaque mystery realms of shadows and puzzles, all in the long lineage of Myst. And ultimately don't really care what the puzzle means (the answer is irrelevant to me and in the case of The Witness, painful and obnoxious), I just like solving things.

Blue Prince is a uniquely agonizing example of these... I've heard the term 'Metroid-brainia' on a podcast and it made me want to unsubscribe to that feed after hearing the term. Let us never speak of that word again. The twist Blue Prince puts on this subgenre versus say, any Zero Escape game, is that the game is also a RogueLite. I was just talking about my feelings on RogueLites a few weeks ago in when writing about Balatro, but in case you forgot, usually my feeling is "this game is great, shame it's also a RogueLite".  In Blue Prince, the Rogue-ish elements are especially painful, especially ruinous. You're trying to solve the puzzle while also fighting against the cruelty of random chance. Rooms are never in the same places, your runs can be scuttled early if you get bad rolls. You can get all the way to the very top of the map, and then get fucked since you roll up two dead ends and a room turning the wrong way. Game Over, start over. I hate this. I have come to truly hate Blue Prince. I came here looking to serve a buzzing in my head and do happy puzzles. Instead I want to burn this house down.