This Happy New Year on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of the superficially entertaining Marty Supreme and the brilliant We Shall Not Be Moved, Mexico’s submission for the Best International Film Oscar.
I have posted my Best Movies of 2025, and you can watch ALL of them them now, either in theaters (Hamnet, Sentimental Value) or on home video! (Four of the top eight are even on Netflix!) One Battle After Another is free on HBO Max. Here’s the rest of my year-end coverage:
- Best Movies of 2025
- Best movie-going experiences of 2025
- 2025 Farewells: on the screen
- 2025 Farewells: behind the camera
- 2025: 14 new filmmakers to watch
REMEMBRANCE
Brigitte Bardot demonstrated her acting talent in …And Man Created Woman, Contempt, and many other films, but it was eclipsed by her unworldly beauty and unsurpassed sexiness.
CURRENT MOVIES
- Hamnet: a grieving couple finally aligned. In theaters.
- It Was Just an Accident: trauma, justice and complications. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- Train Dreams: quietly thinking and quietly feeling. Netflix.
- Left-Handed Girl: a family’s path to to catharsis. Netflix.
- Marty Supreme: a portrait of chutzpah. In theaters.
- Sentimental Value: generational healing. In theaters.
- The Mastermind: when selfishness exceeds talent. In theaters.
- Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words: “X-raying us all the time“. HBO Max, HBO Max YouTube channel.
- Orwell: 2+2=5: we didn’t get the message. In arthouse theaters, but hard to find.
- Nouvelle Vague: a subversive trickster bets that he is an artist, too. Netflix.
- Jay Kelly: finding that the ship has sailed. Netflix.
- Frankenstein: who is the real monster? In theaters and on Netflix.
- A House of Dynamite: a master filmmaker reminds us of the terrifyingly plausible. Netflix.
- One Battle After Another: sometimes hilarious, sometimes thrilling, always outrageous. HBO Max (included), Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- The Baltimorons: vulnerability, recovery, good-hearted laughs. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube Fandango.
ON TV
On January 6, Turner Classic Movies presents an oddity from 1950, Storm Warning, certainly the only film noir where Doris Day gets shot by the KKK. A NYC model (Ginger Rogers) arrives in a Southern town to visit her sister (Day) and immediately witnesses the Klan murder a journalist and then, not seeing that she is a witness, take off their hoods. She gets to the sister’s house and is shocked to recognize her sister’s husband (Steve Cochran) as one of the murderous Klansmen. Will she testify to the anti-Klan DA (Ronald Reagan)? This is supposed to be a an allegory about the red baiting HUAC. Weirdly, there is no mention of the KKK’s hated of blacks, Catholics and Jews, and there are hardly any black people in the movie. The film certainly doesn’t work in 2025, but the bizarre casting of Doris Day, Ginger Rogers and Ronatd Reagan in a noir is fun, and Rogers and Day give excellent performances.