This Holiday week on The Movie Gourmet – I 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.
Here are capsules on two highly advertised (but nor very serious) movies:
- Wake Up Dead Man: It’s all in good fun when Ryan Johnson sends up the conventions of murder mysteries with his Knives Out series. This one is a heavily plotted locked room mystery with a moving finger on various suspects. Unfortunately, it’s at least 30 minutes too long and just not compelling. The brightest light is an engaging lead performance by Josh O’Connor. Netflix.
- Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale. The once-beloved series cashes in one last time on tropes from its first season: a Lady Mary scandal, a dire threat to the family’s wealth and the inevitable ill-adaptation of a lifestyle based on a medieval economic model. So predictable;le that The Wife and I turned it off midway through. Amazon, etc.
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.
- 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. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango.
- The Baltimorons: vulnerability, recovery, good-hearted laughs. Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube Fandango.
ON TV
Once again, Turner Classic Movies is giving us a wonderful New Year’s Eve present – an all-day Thin Man marathon. William Powell and Myrna Loy are cinema’s favorite movie couple for a reason – just settle in and watch Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man and its sequels do what they do best – banter, canoodle, solve crimes and, of course, tipple.
Stars abound in supporting roles in the series. James Stewart had only made one feature film before 1936, the year, he appeared in After the Thin Man. Dean Stockwell played Nick and Nora’s son Nick Charles Jr in Song of the Thin Man. Film noir goddesses Gloria Grahame and Marie Windsor also both appear in Song of the Thin Man.
The pre-notoriety Tom Neal has a key role in in Another Thin Man. Classic film aficionados will also recognize Maureen O’Sullivan, Keenan Wynn, Leon Ames, Sheldon Leonard, C. Awbrey Smith, Joseph Calleia and Sam Levene.
These six movies from 1934-47 (The Thin Man, After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, The Shadow of the Thin Man, The Thin Man Goes Home and Song of the Thin Man) are still first-rate escapist entertainment. Love ’em.