The Baby Yoda Movie

Star Wars is back in theaters! Disney wants me to call this new movie 'Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu', but I never will. People who use the word "Grogu" are cops, just like Disney Adult influencers who are required to call Star Wars Land its full legal name "Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge". I'm not doing that. We do crimes here. So this is a review of 'The Baby Yoda Movie', starring Baby Yoda. If there are any issues with these decisions, please contact my customer service line. Dial 0 for a live agent.

After a seven year hiatus from cinemas following Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, it is interesting to see how little hype there seems to be around this movie. Box office followers were certain a month ago that this newest movie would have one of the lowest launches in franchise history. Reports seem to confirm that trend. But box office discussion is as empty and bad faith as the dreaded Dead Game discourse, a meaningless way of discussing a work of art. More substantive are the review scores: 63% at time of writing is technically a pass on Rotten Tomatoes. However, I find critics have been curving the grade for years now to avoid audience backlash. A 63% is probably in reality less than 50%. The audience score at 89% means even the fandom army are not that excited to fight for this one. (Michael, for example, with its hardcore MJ stans, sits at 97%, and that movie has a much worse critic score.) It is hard to say any movie in 2026 will be able to build the kind of excitement that even mid-tier Marvel productions could pull just ten years ago, but The Baby Yoda Movie has gained this reputation online of being a movie nobody is that interested in. That's become the narrative. 

Even I was pretty sure I would hate this, and I was there on Friday night, with a Baby Yoda doll in hand, a dapper Baby Yoda doll wearing a bow tie (see picture). I had people on both sides of me with Baby Yoda dolls. So on second thought, this is one of the only movies this year that feels worthy of being an event. 2026 has been a great year for movies so far, but nobody was making Mother Mary into a big family outting. And The Baby Yoda Movie on that scale feels big, big enough I'm bothering to review it. Even if a lot of the space online feels annoyed and frustrated that they have to deal with Star Wars again.

Luckily, if expectations are low, the ambitions met them. LucasFilm is not out here promoting a Rise of Skywalker or anything, no triumphant return to glory. The Baby Yoda Movie feels like the studio slowly tip-toeing back into theaters with the kinds of movies they wanted to make: small, annual events with low stakes about little corners of the greater Galaxy. The fate of the universe is not threatened. In fact, neither is the major duo listed in the Government Name of this movie. The Baby Yoda Movie is a big episode of the TV Show, The Mandalorian. That's it. It is not the series finale, it's not even a season finale, it is not the most important part of either one of these character's lives. You don't need to have seen any of the Star Wars from before to watch this. And if there's a Baby Yoda 2, don't worry about Baby Yoda 1.

This movie has all the gravitas and drama of Ant-Man 2, possibly the least interesting movie in the entire MCU. It is a couple of adventures on a few planets with a darling little puppet at its center fighting goons with his badass dad. And if you can except a movie that is only that, well... that might not be so bad.

Always Be Hatin': Super Bowl 2026

Let me remind you of my motto when it comes to sports. And indeed, this is my motto when it comes to most everything else too. It is three letters: A.B.H.

A. - Always

B. - Be

H. - Hatin' 

Always Be Hatin'. I hate a lot of things. One of them includes the New England fucking Patriots. There's a lot of things wrong in the world, but the Patriots one of the few we can see corrected. I hope they lose tomorrow. I hope they lose by 200. We can all go to bed after the Daddy Yankee show because Seattle will already be up by 60 at the half.

I'm a born hater, I'm good at hating. Growing up, I hated school, I hated summer camp, I hated going to Synagogue, I hated visiting most relatives, and I hated going outside to play. Today I hate waking up early, I hate my commute to work, I hate every health insurance, I hate how helpless my damn patients are when it comes to this industry, I hate networks, I hate copays, I hate deductibles, I hate premiums, I hate prior authorizations, I hate EOBs, I hate form 10-10172, and I hate my commute home. I hate the government, I hate the cops, I hate the useless cowardly media that pretends all this is perfectly normal. The president and endless reductions in how much Medicare Part D covers and crooked-ass Cigna Health Plans who love to deny every claim just for the fun of it are not going anywhere. 

The Patriots are going somewhere. Win or lose, they're going away after tomorrow night and won't be back until September. Goodbye and good riddance. The Patriots have earned nothing and deserve even less than that. Always Be Hatin' Edition Super Bowl LX: Fuck the Patriots.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: Honorable Mentions, Dishonorable Mentions, Other Stuff

Every year way too many truly great movies come out to ever talk about in a Top 15 List, so here's a lot of other movies I have something to say about. 

Plus all the other stuff, then 2025 is finally over:

Honorable Mentions:

Kohuko, dir. Lee Sang-il

Fun fact: this is the most successful live action Japanese film of all time. It only released for a brief window in the US, I made a point to see it at the Angelika ASAP when it came out. The plot involves two boys who are raised into a storied kabuki actor family, one of the noble bloodline, the other an adoptee. The conflict arises when the newcomer, Kikuo (Sōya Kurokawa as a child, Ryo Yoshizawa as an adult) proves to be much more talented than his brother, Ryusei (Keitatsu Koshiyama as a child, Ryusei Yokohama as an adult). In this art form, you are not just a son, you actually inherit a mighty name, and these two fight like Biblical brothers for their father's blessing. 

Then there is the gender complication. Kabuki theater still does not allow female actors. Female parts are played by men. Kikuo and Ryusei are both masters of the feminine side of the production, finding themselves as brothers, rivals, and even tragic lovers on stage. I'm reminded a lot of the novel and film, Farewell My Concubine, set in the similarly mono-gendered Peking Opera. Kohuko is a very pretty movie, a great big family epic of people chasing the mastery of art at the expense of all else.

I'm going to shoot out a stray bullet for a movie I disliked to catch: Kohuko is a better movie about the loneliness of the superstar than Jay Kelly.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 1 - Sinners

1. Sinners, dir. Ryan Coogler

I saw Sinners three times in 2025. That does not happen for me. Usually I see these movies once, if they're lucky twice, and there's a good chance I never watch them again regardless of my opinion. At the time of writing, I want to go home and watch Sinners for a fourth time. Now, I don't really put much stock into how often you can watch a movie for rankings. Personally, I don't want to watch the same movies over and over, I want to see new things and new great things, or old great things that I haven't seen. If rewatchability were all that mattered, I would just make Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight the best movie of every year, because Demon Knight is near-perfect and extremely watchable. Looking back to my Best of 2025 List,  I haven't thought at any point, "yeah, I gotta watch I Saw the TV Glow right now". It is something of a heavy meal. 

With Sinners though, I need to rewatch this... right now.

Remember when Ryan Coogler's last movie was Black Panther 2 and it was terrible? And it looked terrible and muddy? In retrospect, that issue seems to be on Disney, not Coogler, not on his DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Sinners looks incredible. If you had the privilege to see it in IMAX, it was the most gorgeously-shot movie of the entire year. Day scenes are huge and sweeping like the rural Mississippi Delta of the 1930s was infinitely huge, the sky never-ending. At night Sinners is warm and sensual and also full of deep black depths from all corners of the Juke Joint. It is a night where anything is possible, for good and bad. Come back of the year, clearly.

Okay, so what if you took From Dusk Till Dawn and turned it into a period-piece blues musical? You had me at the Blues, you didn't even need to add vampires that sing Celtic folk music. Sinners is already a masterpiece by the conclusion of the first act when we have a full IMAX montage of all our heroes preparing for the opening of the Juke Joint, and then a Satanic figure literally crashes in the movie. Note he crashes from above, not below, we'll get back to that. 

The great heroes of this movie are two brothers, Smoke (Michael B. Jordan wearing blue) and Stack (Michael B. Jordan wearing red) coming back to their home town after adventures in war and gangland crime, ready to live their dream of opening the ultimate night club for the sharecroppers. They're living on borrowed time already, having ripped off Chicago, buying their land from a racist good ol' boy, and having based on a business model on making a profit from the poorest of the poor in the United States. They have to know this is a good time, not a long time.

Just they could not imagine how good of a time it would be. Or how short.

Ryan Coogler's previous smash hit was Black Panther, one of the greatest Marvel movies thanks to consciously being a work of mythmaking. Superheroes are often about nothing but punching. Or they could be symbols where ones are desperately. There was no Wakanda, there was no magical space in the heart of Africa where native culture held out against colonization and could be a beacon for repression everywhere. (And the near-Wakandas that people have relied behind, Dahomey or Ethiopia were all deeply flawed places with uncomfortable histories of slavery themselves.) Smoke and Stack are not real, there was no twin pair of broad-shouldered cool guy action heroes who could march into town and scare the Klan during the height of Jim Crow. But Sinners is a myth, not reality. Why not conjure another dream of a time when you could fight back? When you could have something when the world demanded you be happy with nothing, even for a moment?

There's much more on Sinners' mind than merely sharecropper vs White Supremacists. This movie recognizes the full breath of the racial caste system in the United States. We have a Chinese couple (Li Jun Li and Yoa) who operate two separate grocery stores in the town, one on the Black side of the street, one on the White side, and we travel between these places in one long take. They get to be the "racial neutrality", fulfilling a key economic role that the color lines choke off. Then there's the question of "what are you?" when it comes to Stack's one-time-lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld). She can pass for fully White and could live in that world, in safety. But she's not, she's multi-ethnic, and merely existing makes her a bomb ready to go off. You can't have a beautiful woman who looks White talking to a very dark-skinned Michael B. Jordan in public. Everybody knows what happens next. Meanwhile, in the darker spaces of our myth, there is a creature that passes for human. 

Wait, a minute. I'm this deep into Sinners and I have not mentioned the main character yet! That would Smoke and Stack's precocious teenage cousin, Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (Miles Canton), a talented young guitarist and soulful singer who is the secret weapon of the Juke Joint. We open Sinners in media res, with a bloodied, terrified Sammie walking into his father's church, his mind flashing back to the night of horrors that he has just barely survived. His father (Saul Williams) demands that his son put down his guitar, or what's left of it, rejecting the life of sin and music it represents, and returning to the faith. Then Preacher Boy has flashes of the Devilman, Remmick (Jack O'Connell), his mouth full of teeth and eyes aglow with evil. Uniquely amongst vampire movies, Christianity fails to banish the undead in Sinners. The Devil fell from heaven after all. Also, Christianity is the magic of the Europeans, imposed on their slaves, so how could it work here? There needs to be some other power.

That power ends up being music, and the conflict of Sinners is who gets to own it. What Preacher Boy does when he sings for the crowd is unleash mysticism more powerful than any other force in this film's mythology. He can transcend time and space, instrumentalizing the entire history of African and African American music traditions into one single moment of religious ecstasy. And not for nothing is the song he's singing, 'I Lied to You', about rejecting his father's church and embracing a new path of "sin". Historically, there has been no stream of culture more heavily fought over than the ownership of Black music. As generations pass, it all gets absorbed into neutral, colorless "American music". In genres like rock or country, you'd never from where it started. You can trace the path of Delta Blues across a century from obscure Black artists like Robert Wilkins or Bo Carter to eventually James Dolan, the White talentless owner of the New York Knicks. We can't quite murder James Dolan in a movie (yet) so for now, Remmick will represent the consuming force of integration gone wrong, integration as erasure.

Remmick can quote the Lord's Prayer right back at you. However, he cannot sing like Preacher Boy. The man can sing very damn well: he comes with his own Irish ballads and can make his ghouls dance along. "The Rocky Road to Dublin" has never been so terrifying. Sharecroppers and even the White people Remmick converts are singing songs they would not know, in accents they do not have. One wonders if perhaps Remmick is not even Irish, if there was a Sinners prequel where he devoured that folk tradition first. If Sinners goes one way, you'll have a vampire with a White face singing with a Black voice. And maybe that doesn't sound so horrible, I like Rick Astley, Elvis is Elvis, I don't even hate Snow. There is the promise of the Melting Pot, or some colorless future where we can all be one people, as one vampire says. But also, we won't be one people, it won't ever be equal. It will merely be a great tradition, a great people, digested and destroyed.

Sinners has a chance of being my favorite movie of this entire decade. It is great fun, the songs be them Blues or Irish hit every dang time, you got vampires riverdancing. The script is fantastic. The screen drips with eroticism, be it Preacher Boy's bold first experience with a married woman or Hailee Steinfeld drooling into Michael B. Jordan's mouth. "I want to taste you." It's sweaty, it's raw, it's glorifying liberation. There's great gore. One vampire spends much of the movie with his face torn off and he's still dancing along. There is not a weak link in the cast. I have not had time to mention Wunmi Mosaku or Delroy Lindo or Jayme Lawson or Omar Benson Miller, and they're all perfect in Sinners. The ideas Sinners has on its mind are really interesting and complicated. It would be good enough to just be a big dumb movie about sexy people killing vampires. May nobody say that From Dusk Till Dawn does not rule! Then Sinners just does it better, with deeper ideas, and music that will be eternal.

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So 2025 is not quite over. Stand up this week for the Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff. Don't think I won't find a space to talk about Frankenstein.

EDIT (1/29): Post-script: I spoke with my uncle and Grandma did get to see this movie before she passed away. I was worried she might have missed it. Vampires and long spooky nights were definitely her thing.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 2 - The Monkey

2. The Monkey, dir. Osgood Perkins

The Monkey is a movie I never expected out of Oz Perkins. Imagine of Celine Song's next movie were to be a boner comedy, that's how much of a radical shift left of the dial that this is. Perkins' career so far has been a series of sullen, enigmatic horror films. He's had moderate hits here or there, usually too dense for a wide audience. Which is what made 2024's wild success of Longlegs so inexplicable to me. Heck of a marketing campaign for that one, I guess. Perkins has done pastiches or direct adaptations of many horror writers like Shirley Jackson, Thomas Harris, the Brothers Grimm, so it seems inevitably he would cover Stephen King eventually. I just didn't expect him to go so silly with it. This director has been a lot of things: irrelevant shock comedy is definitely a new one. 

Perkins decided to out Final Destination-Final Destination. However, making a black comedy gross-out work in The Monkey does not preclude this movie from being very personal to him. Longlegs was a response to his father, horror legend Anthony Perkins' own closeted sexuality and death from AIDS-related complications. The Monkey is a response to an even more shocking loss, his mother, Berry Bereson's death in the 9/11 attacks. It sounds like a bad 2007 internet humor joke: "your dad died of AIDS, your mom died on 9/11, haha". To borrow the line of a character in The Monkey: "shit, man, that sucks". (The Monkey is the kind of movie to have a character whose only role in the script is to say that one line about twelve times.)

What else can you do with a life history that was, to use the correct term, absolutely fucked except find a way to laugh at it?

The Monkey is about two twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convey as children, Theo James as adults) who have just reached their nastiest phase of middle school puberty. They discover an inheritance from their long absent, probably dead father (Adam Scott in one scene), a magical evil wind-up toy monkey that kills people once you turn its crank. And yeah, the verbal metaphor for masturbation is not lost on this movie - "he's playing with his monkey!" teases Bill to the entire class to humiliate his brother Hal. One of the first victims is Hal and Bills' babysitter, Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer). This happens as she takes the boys out for a nice meal, and is visibly aroused by a hibachi chef. The two boys are not yet able to fully process this show of adult sexuality. Then they never get a chance to, because the Monkey slams his cymbals together and much of Annie's head splits in half. The get more Freudian, the Shelburn twins are jealous for their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany)'s affection, and well, crank the Monkey with terrible results.

And yeah, I did say Annie Wilkes - she's that Annie Wilkes, Kathy Bates from Misery. I'm not really sure what to do with that, does not seem anything. There was a ton of Stephen King adaptations in 2025: some really bad (that IT series), some really good (The Long Walk), some simply not interesting (The Running Man remake). The Monkey feels like the most King-like(?)/Kingly of them all. It is unfaithful to the source material, though actually by deviating, Perkins made it more idiosyncratically Stephen King. He put more King than King had in there.

The original short story The Monkey is based on is not one of King's best or his most memorable. It does not go to the level of cartoon horror that Perkins takes it to. (For instance, he casts himself as the boys' uncle, and we're told after his wild and elaborate death death, his body looked like smashed cherry pie, cut to the coroner opening up a body bag full of smashed cherry pie. Delightful.) That story is just about a father and son getting rid of an Evil Object, trying to overcome the family curse. You'd never guess that most of what is iconic King details were not there, that was Perkins adding them. The ribbing between Hal and Bill feels like the way King writes kids, all spectacular vulgarity and lewdness. Gallows humor is aplenty in King. The Monkey has a mother screaming while running in a circle in a circle as she pushes a pram that is completely on fire, and King's lone directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive has things like this.

Now if neither of those things sound funny to you, I don't think The Monkey is going to work for you.

The Monkey is the kind of movie where we get a classic Final Destination Rube Goldberg kill set-up: a pretty woman is about to jump into the motel pool, and a broken air conditioner means the water is dosed full of killer volts of electricity. You know what's coming: she drives in and screams and screams, maybe a gore effect. Except, you don't know what's coming. She doesn't electrocute herself, she explodes! The second her body touches that pool, she's goes out like a fire cracker. How does that make sense? I don't know. Why was a woman swimming at 2 AM anyway all alone at night? This movie sets up a wedding skydiving service, and you better believe that card is going to get played. If you think The Monkey has hit the limit of how gonzo it will get, you're wrong, it has just one more gag up its sleeve.

Hal and Bill never learn to work out death. (Though who does, really?) Hal grows up to work in a supermarket with a very distant teenage son, Petey (Colin O'Brien) who is about to be legally adopted by another man. Bill makes... I won't spoil it, but he makes different life choices. They're both living gruesomely incomplete, terribly lonely lives since their mother passed and they hid the Monkey down a well. Only the Monkey the back, of course. At the beginning of the movie, Lois tells the boys "everybody dies, and that's life". It's the second time hear something like this. The Monkey comes in a box with an engraving saying it is "Like Life". Not 'lifelike' but "Like Life", choosing the wording carefully. Life is temporary, fleeting, confusing, incredibly painful, and then it's over and really nobody knows what to say, especially the extremely young pastor at the funeral who seems like he just got hired at this job ten minutes ago. Or is high as hell. Or both.

What else can we do but turn out traumas into Troma exploitation? The boys grew up and forgot their mother's most important lesson, "The hell with it, let's go dancing." They never danced, and they did not adjust well. There's a lot of movies that wallowed in a lot of feelings in this Top 15, but I knew, The Monkey had to be the highest ranked when it comes to my favorite subject lately: death. You gotta learn to take it in stride, have a laugh, and make room to dance in the face of oblivion. Because oblivion is coming anyway, so why be miserable?

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But of course, The Monkey is not the best movie of 2025. We have one more to go. The competition was not close. The last one laps the field. I don't think you'll be surprised by my choice.