movie gourmet

8 Most Overlooked Films of 2025

by
Photo caption: Ed Harris, Natalie Morales and Sonequa Martin-Green in MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE. Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment.

Everybody knows about One Battle After Another, Frankenstein and Sinners, but today I’m highlighting 2025 movies that have slipped below the popular radar. You may not have seen Hollywood commercials for these films, but they are novel, well-crafted and mesmerizing. And you can stream all of them at home.

Here are the 8 Most Overlooked Films of 2025:

  • A Little Prayer: This exquisitely-acted family drama, by the writer-director of Junebug, explores the dynamics between parents and their adult children, and the profound frustration of seeing problems that you can’t fix. David Straithern and Jane Levy lead the year’s best ensemble cast. Best Movies of 2025. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
  • My Dead Friend Zoe: This deeply affecting dramedy might be the best film on the transition from wartime military service to civilian society since The Best Years of Our Lives. The screenplay, by first-time director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, himself a decorated Army paratrooper who served in Iraq, is brilliant. Best Movies of 2025. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
  • Caught by the Tides: Sweeping over decades of modern Chinese history, the auteur Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides reveals profound changes in Chinese society by implanting a personal story within an epic sweep. Writer-director Jia has built Caught by the Tides from footage shot over the 21 years as he made other movies. In a tour de force, actress Tao Zhao delivers an exquisite portrait of resilience. Best Movies of 2025. Criterion (included) Amazon, AppleTV, Fandango.
  • No Sleep Till: In this engrossing art film, a hurricane is about to hit downscale Florida beach towns; the tourists are already gone, and workaday Floridians prepare to evacuate or hunker down. The storm is merely the setting for a compendium of short stories, as writer/director/editor/producer Alexandra Simpson, in her feature debut, reveals essential truths about her characters, one or two at a time – a lost crush, a solitary obsession, a resuscitated friendship. Each chapter is so authentic, I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t watching a cinema verité documentary. Best Movies of 2025. hoopla (free), Amazon,
  • To Kill a Wolf: In this character-driven indie drama, a reclusive woodsman in the Pacific Northwest finds a seventeen-year-old runaway collapsed in the forest. He nurses her back to health, but she’s not forthcoming about why she’s there, so he has a mystery to solve. Meanwhile, the audience is on to other mysteries – why is he living such an isolated life and why is his relationship with local community members so charged? As he takes the girl on a road trip to her most recent residence, the answers, one by one, are revealed. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube.
  • Made in Ethiopia: This scintillating documentary is a brilliant exploration of clashing cultures and economic imperialism. Chinese entrepreneurs build a mammoth new industrial park, essentially a gleaming sweatshop, in Ethiopia. What could possibly go wrong? PBS, PBS POV.
  • Twinless: In this refreshingly original dramedy a young man has been rocked by the sudden death of his twin brother and meets another participant in his grief support group who reminds him of his dead brother. That new friend is played by James Sweeney, Twinless’s writer director, who has written a character of remarkable ambiguity and vulnerability. Reflecting both the sweetness and edginess we find in life, Twinless is one of the smartest and most satisfying comedies of recent years. Best Movies of 2025. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango
  • Architecton: This documentary is the film most unlike the others on this list. It is cinema as high art and surprisingly entertaining. Almost narration-free and elevated by Evgueni Galperine’s original music, Architecton is director Viktor Kossakovsky’s immersion into rocks – rocks arranged and moved by Nature and by humans. The visual experience is hypnotic. HBO Max (included), Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango,
Jordan Coley and Xavier Brown-Sanders in NO SLEEP TILL. Courtesy of Factory 25.

A LITTLE PRAYER: comfortable, then bewildered

by
Photo caption: David Straithern and Jane Levy in A LITTLE PRAYER. Courtesy of Music Box Films.

In the exquisitely-acted family drama A Little Prayer, Bill (David Straithern) seems to be an unlikely candidate for a life crisis. He owns a successful Winston-Salem, North Carolina business, which he runs with his son David (Will Pullan). Bill is popular in the community, and his employees appreciate his fairness and generosity. He shares a spacious home and a longtime. comfortable marriage with his wife Venida (Celia Weston). David and his incredibly sweet wife Tammy (Jane Levy) live in a smaller house on their property, and both Bill and Venida adore Tammy.

But Bill is upset when he suspects that David may be having affair with one of their employees. Protective of Tammy, Bill dithers about what to do. As he tries to intervene, he finds that David’s extramarital fling might be the only tip of the iceberg.

Bill and Venida know what it’s like to disappointed by an adult child. Their daughter Patti (Anna Camp) is the hottest of hot messes, a nightmare of selfishness, entitlement, irresponsibility and self-created drama. In every respect, she is the worst possible role model for her daughter Hadley (Billie Roy), and Bill and Venida are sickened when they see Hadley acting out. I am not a violent person, but I wanted to reach through the screen to slap Patti.

It’s one thing to be disappointed by your child’s lack of achievement or romantic choice or even to suffer embarrassment from their legal trouble. But it’s entirely another level of horror to recognize profound character failings in your child. Could I have raised a sociopath, a victimizer? Why can’t I fix him?-

BIll has always known that Patti is a mess (and he has enabled her behavior). But, the deeper he probes into David’s life, the more shattered he becomes.

Bill is a Vietnam vet and enjoys the camaraderie of other old vets at the VFW hall. David is a veteran of the conflicts in the Middle East, and, although he is affable and fun-loving and seemingly functional, he may have unresolved issues from his service. Venida intuits that something is wrong in David and Tammy’s marriage, but Bill is gobsmacked to learn what it is.

David Straithern’s performance as Bill is one of his best. Bill is a decent, well-intentioned guy who is in control of his life, until he becomes absolutely bewildered by what is wrong and his own inability to fix it. I’ve loved Straithern’s work since his early John Sayles films, and he is now recognized as one of America’s most reliable screen actors.

Bill is the protagonist, but the story is centered on Tammy’s arc. Jane Levy (Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist) is exceptional as Tammy, a seemingly perfect woman who masks her vulnerabilities. Levy has two scenes – one at a clinic and one after a museum visit with Bill, that are among the most emotionally powerful of the year.

The character played by Dascha Polanco (Daya in Orange Is the New Black) also has two extraordinary scenes with Bill, one where he is in control and one where he is powerless I always enjoy Celia West in a movie, and she’s also very good as Venida. This cast is one of the strongest ensembles in recent movies.

This is only the fourth feature film that writer-director Angus MacLachlan has directed since 2005, but one of them was the wonderful family dramedy Junebug. Junebug became an indie hit, and Amy Adams’ Oscar nominated performance launched her career.. A Little Prayer deserved to be a hit, too, but its release seemed to be delayed and it somehow got overlooked.

Junebug was also set in North Carolina. A Little Prayer was produced by a stalwart of North Carolina indie cinema, Ramin Bahrani, director of Goodbye Solo, At Any Price, 99 Homes, Fahrenheit 451.

A Little Prayer is one of the Best Movies of 2025 and can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.

Movies to See Right Now

by
Photo caption: Lee Byung-hun (left) in NO OTHER CHOICE. Courtesy of NEON.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of the deliciously perverse Korean comedy No Other Choice, by Park Chan-wook, director of The Handmaiden and Decision to Leave and the delightfil concert film You Got Gold.

The annual Noir City festival begins tonight at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater. I’ll be covering it in person next weekend. Here’s my Noir City Preview.

ICYMI here’s my year-end coverage:

NOTE: One Battle After Another is now free for HBO Max subscribers.

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

On January 21, Turner Classic Movies presents 1977 neo-noir The American Friend, an adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game. Director Wim Wenders and cinematographer Robby Muller

Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz) is a craftsman who makes frames for paintings and dabbles in the shady world of art fraud, making antique-appearing frames for art forgeries.   Here, Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper, in his Wild Man phase)) entangles him in something far more consequential – a murder-for-hire. As befits a neo-noir, Zimmermann finds himself amid a pack of underworld figures, all set to double-cross each other with lethal finality.  In very sly casting by Wenders, all the criminals are played by movie directors: Sam Fuller, Nick Ray, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, Gérard Blain, Rudolf Schündler, Jean Eustache. As the murder scheme unfolds, there is a tense and thrilling set piece on a train, worthy of The Narrow Margin.  Other set pieces include a white-knuckle break-in and the ambush of an ambulance.

For sure, The American Friend has the only movie Tom Ridley in a cowboy hat, and I’ve heard Highsmith experts trash Hopper’s Tom Ripley. But I think the casting pays off in a brilliant scene in which Hopper lies on a pool table, snapping selfies with a Polaroid camera; it’s a brilliant imagining of a sociopath in solitary, with no one to manipulate.

Dennis Hopper in THE AMERICAN FRIEND

NO OTHER CHOICE: keeping up with the Parks

by
Photo caption: Lee Byung-hun in NO OTHER CHOICE. Courtesy of NEON.

In the brilliantly dark comedy No Other Choice, master filmmaker Park Chan-wook serves up social satire in delicious perversity. Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) and his family live a privileged life, financed by his job as a manager in a paper mill. But he loses his job, putting the big house, the tennis club, the cello lessons, and the all rest at risk. Man-su looks for another job – but there are other candidates. Man-su decides to eliminate the competition by murdering the other guys.

Remember that Man-su is a paper mill manager, not a skilled hit man, so his efforts to murder guys, dispose of their bodies and keep it all secret from the police and his family are very funny. His wife Miri (Son Yejin) is not exactly Lady Macbeth, but, when she catches a whiff of what is going on, she demonstrates some moral flexibility.

The recent great Korean satire Parasite was about the desperation of the disadvantaged in a society exploited by the rich. No Other Choice is about the desperation of the affluent to hang on to their material comforts and amenities. Man-su could, of course, choose to downsize his family’s lifestyle instead of becoming a serial killer.

No Other Choice works because, Park Chan-wook is fully committed to his pretty simple, but transgressive, premise and because he is a superb storyteller, just like in his stellar Decision to Leave and The Handmaiden. Of course, No Other Choice is also a pointed scritique of materialism and status-seeking, particularly in Korea, but also in the rest of the capitalist world.

No Other Choice is one of the Best Movies of 2025, and it opens widely this weekend.

NOIR CITY 23: a musician walks into an alley…

by
Elvis Presley and Carolyn Jones in KING CREOLE.

The Noir City film fest, always one of the best Bay Area cinema experiences, returns January 16 and runs through January 25 at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland. The 23rd edition of the festival showcases noir and neo-noir movies with and about musicians. After all, how many guys start off playing in a nightclub and end up face-down in the gutter?

Noir City is the annual festival of the Film Noir Foundation, spearheaded by its founder and president Eddie Muller. The Foundation preserves movies from the traditional noir period that would otherwise be lost. Noir City often plays newly restored films and hard-to-find movies. You know Eddie Muller from TCM’s Noir Alley, and he hosts Noir City in person..

Noir Ciry 23 features films with real-life musicians Elvis Presley, Doris Day, Louis Armstrong, Keely Smith, Dexter Gordon, Ella Fitzgerald, Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Davis, Jr., Peggy Lee, Oscar Levant, Dave Brubeck, Charlie Mingus, Mel Torme and many more. It turns out that Elvis, Louis Armstrong and Sammy Davis, Jr., among others, could really act when they chose to.

Of course, movie characters in the classic period of film noir inhabited a jazz-infused world, so films in the Noir City program feature plenty of movie stars playing musicians: Kirk Douglas (Young Man with a Horn), Rita Hayworth (Gilda), Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not),John Garfield (Humoresque), Mickey Rooney (The Strip), Frank Sinatra (playing a trumpet player in The Man with the Golden Arm).

Sammy Davis, Jr. in A MAN CALLED ADAM

Highlights include:

  • King Creole (1958): If you think that Elvis Presley never made a good movie, you haven’t seen this outstanding MIchael Curtiz crime drama. Elvis plays an impoverished wannabe singer who becomes entangled in the New Orleans underworld when he attracts the romantic interest of a sultry Bad Girl (Carolyn Jones), whose boyfriend is the local gangster kingpin (Walter Matthau). Jones, now best remembered for her campy Morticia in The Addams Family, had 44 previous screen credits, but only one as the female lead in a feature film. Besides future stars Matthau and Vic Morrow, the cast features past Oscar-winner Dean Jagger and the reliable noir stalwart Paul Stewart. The Good Girl is played by Dolores Hart, the only Elvis co-star to become a nun in real life. This was Elvis’ favorite of his movie performances, and his charisma, deployed in a grown-up story, makes us wonder what might have been had he returned to well-written screenplays.
  • Hangover Square: As with Elvis, we wonder what might have been, had not star Laird Cregar died at 31, when early weight loss surgery went wrong. Cregar’s rare combination of tortured magnetism and hulking menace dominates this noir set in Edwardian England.
  • A Man Called Adam (1966): In this hard-to-find gem, Sammy Davis Jr. plays Adam, a self-destructive jazz star. Adam draws people in with his talent and charisma, and, racked by guilt, pushes away those closest to him with selfish and cruel behavior. Claudia (Cicely Tyson, in her first screen credit) is drawn to Adam and tries to save him, anchoring herself in the roller coaster of his life. Remember that, after all the ups and downs, a roller coaster always ends at the bottom. Tyson absolutely commands the screen in two great speeches which reveal she is going to be a movie star. Louis Armstrong is very good here as an actor, and Sammy, a multi-instrumentalist who did perform with the trumpet looks credible as a musical prodigy. The best musical performance in A Man Called Adam is by Mel Torme, playing himself at an after-hours musicians party.
  • All NIght Long (1962): This is Shakespeare’s Othello, set in the jazz world of 1962 London – and with real jazz stars and real jazz music. When the musicians show up for the jam, they include none other than Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck – and a slew of top British jazz musicians, too. The juicy Iago role of drummer Johnny Cousins is played by Patrick McGoohan (Secret Agent, The Prisoner).
  • Pete Kelly’s Blues (1966): In real life, Jack Webb of Dragnet fame was a bona fide jazz enthusiast. Webb directs this story in which he stars as a speakeasy’s bandleader, amid mobbed-up nightclubs, alcoholism and murder. Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald perform, and the cast includes Janet Leigh, Edmond O’Brien, Lee Marvin and Andy Devine. Watch for Jayne Mansfield as the cigarette girl.
Patrick McGoohan in ALL NIGHT LONG

As always, Noir City features films that are not available to stream: so Noir City is your best chance to see them:

  • Hangover Square (1945)
  • The Strip (1951), with one of Mickey Rooney’s most naturalistic performances.
  • The Crimson Canary (1946), a very hard-to-find Brit noir.

Make your plans now. Review the program and buy tickets at Noir City. I’ll be there.

YOU GOT GOLD: why John Prine is admired and beloved

by
John Prine in YOU GOT GOLD: A CELEBRATION OF JOHN PRINE. Courtesy of Abramarama.

The experience of watching You Got Gold is better than the movie itself. After all, it’s just a paint-by-the-numbers concert film – documenting a Nashville tribute concert with musical artists performing John Prine songs and telling stories about him. But the film, aptly subtitled A Celebration of John Prine, is elevated by Prine himself, his relentless playfulness and his concise, searing lyrics, so venerated by his peers, beloved by fans and acquaintances.

Prine’s song lyrics were poetry of the highest order, as in the unsurpassed fundamental truths and ultra-real humanity of Sam Stone, Souvenirs and Hello in There, Lyle Lovett recalls being stunned by the Prine lyric “naked as the eyes of a clown”. I remember being frozen by “There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm where the money goes.”

A great song can be performed in many genres. The deeply soulful War and Treaty bring a new dimension to Prine’s Knockin’ on your Screen Door. Rocker Bob Weir shreds on Great Rain.

Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile and Dwight Yoakum all perform. Prine’s longtime friend and collaborator Bonnie Raitt tells of how she thought of them as Tom Sawyer and Becky-style playmates and performs the iconic Angel from Montgomery.

Lucinda Williams performs her own song about working with Prine, the hilarious but wistful Working On a Song (what could go wrong?).

John Prine was a great American humorist. Think Mark Twain and Will Rogers. One of his funniest songs, In Spite of Ourselves, is featured, and another, Illegal Smile, is referenced. (His funniest, Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian, isn’t in the movie.)

This is ultimate Feel Good movie. If you know John Prine, You Got Gold is a Must See. If you don’t, you won’t regret watching it, either. Here’s a link to the trailer.

Movies to See Right Now

by
Photo caption: Ed Harris, Natalie Morales and Sonequa Martin-Green in MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE. Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of an overlooked film from 2025, My Dead Friend Zoe, the dark comedy My Neighbor Adolf. and Cover Up, the Netflix biodoc of journalist Seymour Hersh. ICYMI here’s my year-end coverage:

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

Tom Wilkinson, Robert Carlyle and Paul Barber in THE FULL MONTY.

On January 13, Turner Classic Movies presents a charming little British comedy that became a huge art house hit in the US, The Full Monty. A steel mill in Sheffield has shut down, throwing its entire workforce into hopeless unemployment. One of the former steelworkers, Daz (Robert Carlyle) flits between dodgy under-the-table gigs so he can buy pints at the pub and pare down his child support arrearage. Daz enlists his mates in his latest scheme – to develop a Chippendale-style male strip act. He recruits their former foreman Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) as their choreographer; heartbreakingly, Gerald still hasn’t been able to tell his wife that he, too, is unemployed. Daz is a shameless rapscallion; his foibles are funny, as are the regular blue collar guys trying to learn sexy dance moves. As funny as it is, The Full Monty explores masculine identity and the human impact of Thatcherism. The Full Monty was nominated for three Oscars, winning for its music.

For most of the US audience, this was a first look at Tom Wilkinson, who went on to a significant career in US and British movies: Smilla’s Sense of Snow, The Patriot, Shakespeare in Love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, John Adams, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Selma. Wilkinson was Oscar-nominated for In the Bedroom and Michael Clayton.

MY NEIGHBOR ADOLF: more than a match of wits

by
Photo caption: Bill Hayman and Udo Kier in MY NEIGHBOR ADOLF. Courtesy of Cohen Media Group.

In the wry fable My Neighbor Adolf, the chess master Polsky (David Hayman) has lost all his family in the Holocaust. Consumed by grief and bitterness, he lives the life of a misanthropic recluse in a remote South American countryside. Polsky is rocked when the long-vacant house next door becomes occupied by a mysterious German (the piercing-eyed Ugo Kier). Polsky becomes convinced that the new neighbor is Adolf Hitler himself. To convince skeptical authorities of his theory, Polsky must get past his terror and loathing to personally engage with the neighbor. A battle of wits between two strong-willed men ensues.

The 75-year-old Scottish actor Bill Hayman is excellent as Polsky, capturing both his vulnerability from residual trauma and the determination summoned to overcome it.

My Neighbor Adolf is the career finale for 81-year-old German actor Ugo Kier, who died in November. Kier proved that one can have a prolific career (275 IMDb credits) as a character actor in both art films and cult movies. He worked with directors like Werner Rainier Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Lars Von Trier, and in Hollywood films like Johnny Mneumonic, My Own Private Idaho, Armageddon, Halloween and Ace Venture: Pet Detective. His visage, scarier as he aged, worked well in horror movies. and he did many, beginning with Jim Morrisey’s Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula.

My Neighbor Adolf, the work of Russian-born Israeli filmmaker Leon Prudovsky, was my favorite film at the 2023 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It opens theatrically in the US this weekend.

MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE: getting to resilience

by
Photo caption: Natalie Morales and Sonequa Martin-Green in MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE. Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment.

In the deeply affecting dramedy My Dead Friend Zoe, Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) is a US Army veteran back from her deployment in Afghanistan. Merit is talented, disciplined and highly focused, but there’s something unresolved from her military service that is obstructing her transition to civilian life. We know that Merit has issues because she is often accompanied by her sassy BFF from the Army, Zoe (Natalie Morales), or rather by Zoe’s ghost, because Zoe is dead.

Zoe is high-spirited, playful and sarcastic, and usually a lot of fun. But Zoe detests sitting-in-a-circle support groups, so she isn’t encouraging Merit to complete a a mandatory program led by a psychologist specializing in combat PTSD (Morgan Freeman). Meanwhile, Merit’s military role model, her crusty Vietnam vet grandfather (Ed Harris), is becoming unable to live by himself at the family’s legacy lake house; Merit’s mom has tasked her to move him, against his will, into a safer setting.

We get the back story of Merit and Zoe’s deployment in flashback. We’re well into the movie before we learn how Zoe died, which I’m not going to spoil, because it’s central to the meaning of the film. I can say that the movie touches on PTSD, the veteran experience and the path to resilience.

Ed Harris, Natalie Morales and Sonequa Martin-Green in MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE. Courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment.

My Dead Friend Zoe is an impressive first feature for writer-director Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, himself a decorated Army paratrooper who served in Iraq. The screenplay is brilliant, especially because the ingenious device of the very funny Zoe lightens what could have otherwise unwatchably bleak. Hausmann-Stokes wants us to appreciate a grim fact – what has killed more more members of the US military in the era of Middle Eastern wars than combat. He has succeeded in achieving a remarkably engaging movie with a satisfying ending.

Martin-Green carries the film with a very strong performance as Meit, and Morales is brightly charismatic as Zoe.

This might be the best film on the transition from wartime military service to civilian society since The Best Years of Our Lives., and it’s one of the Best Movies of 2025. My Dead Friend Zoe can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

COVER-UP: muckraking back in the day

by
Photo caption: Seymour Hersh in COVER-UP. Courtesy of Netflix.

Cover-Up is a biodoc of the hard-charging investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib abuses, and reported on the Nixon-Kissinger secret war in Cambodia and Watergate. These were important stories, and Hersh demonstrated remarkable resourcefulness and determination in his work.

He was a hyper-competitive practitioner of gotcha journalism, who himself was once gotten when duped by a salacious forgery

In Cover-Up, we hear about Hersh’s life and career, chiefly from Hersh himself, so we get a flavor of the man. I thought I was familiar with the My Lai massacre, but we hear about details that emerged after the initial sensation – details that I wish that I still didn’t know.

Today, we have a 24-hour news cycle, publication of gossip and fabrications, facts denied as fake news, media empires that are essentially propaganda, infotainment and so-called news obsession with celebrity. Seymour Hersh is an important figure in an era of journalism – the Woodward and Bernstein Era – that we have have moved past., IMO for the worst So, his story, while a notable episode in US political history during the Vietnam War, just isn’t that relevant today.

Cover-Up, which may interest some Baby Boomers, is streaming on Netflix.