Exit 8

EXIT 8   **

Genki Kawamura

2025

IDEA:  When he discovers that he's trapped in a subway tunnel that inexplicably goes around in circles, a soon-to-be father needs to learn a game to find the exit.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Exit 8 reaches the peak of its intriguing eeriness in the first 15 minutes, when first-person filmmaking unnervingly puts us in the shoes of a man who finds he’s trapped in an infinitely looping subway tunnel. Replicating the logic of the video game, the zigzagging spatial layout creates suspense about what surprise might appear behind each monotonously white-tiled corner, while also posing a challenge to the player/viewer’s attention, memory, and perhaps even sanity. Does this maddeningly inescapable space represent the endless grind of workaday life under capitalism? Is it a purgatorial trial meant to test the moral fiber and flexibility of people who have made questionable life decisions? Yes and yes, as Exit 8 makes explicit in a script that has very little faith in its audience to understand subtext. The considerable tension and mystery built up by Kawamura quickly evaporate as more characters are introduced and the story fully flattens into the clichéd, moralizing parable of reluctant fatherhood it teased from the first of a hundred crying baby sounds. When the mute, cherubic “Boy” appears, it becomes groaningly obvious where this is headed, and what the protagonist will have to do to redeem himself and secure his escape. To their credit, Kazunari Ninomiya invests gravitas in his paper-thin protagonist-avatar, and Keisuke Imamura’s camerawork nimbly navigates shifting character perspectives and vectors in a confined space. It’s too bad they’re stuck serving a script that never really advances past Exit 1. 

Cure

CURE   ***1/2

Kiyoshi Kurosawa

1997

IDEA:  A Tokyo police detective investigates a mysterious case of a man who hypnotizes his victims into murder.

BLURB:  The concept of virality in so much horror fiction involves not only the fear of infection and transmission, but the instability of boundaries. Even when the ostensible contaminant seems to come from without, as in Cure, what is being transmitted is usually a contagion that was there all along, traveling within social and psychological structures it exposes as far more porous than we’d like to believe. Mamiya, for all his seeming alterity and strange malevolence, does not so much introduce a virus as draw out what is already insidiously contagious within late-20th-century Japanese society. Kurosawa teases out these sociocultural toxins with as much disquieting, methodical rigor as Mamiya lures his victims, piecing together a chilling portrait of a citizenry bound by emotional repression, obedience, historical amnesia, and self-negation. What is passed between the characters in and across the hushed frames — typically long-take wide shots that assume a perspective of clinical omniscience — is a condition of susceptibility. The self is contingent, not only on the social systems it operates within but on day-to-day encounters, influences, and suggestions that accumulate over time. It’s in these quotidian moments Cure locates its truly unsettling existential horror: the implication that just about anything, whether a vexingly gnomic drifter or a certain sensory stimulus, can alter consciousness. Kurosawa does his own subliminal magic on the viewer’s consciousness through constant doubling, mesmeric motifs (trickling water, flashing lights), elliptical edits, and a subtle ambient soundscape that make us question our perception of events. After all, what is film but a kind of hypnosis?

Project Hail Mary

PROJECT HAIL MARY   ***

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

2026

IDEA:  Awaking aboard a spacecraft with no idea how he got there, a molecular biologist and science teacher finds that he's responsible for saving the universe.

BLURB:  A sturdy four-quadrant blockbuster, Project Hail Mary insists on delivering the crowd-pleasing goods: spectacle, laughs, tears, and a humanist message of cooperation and scientific optimism. It’s a boisterous galactic adventure characterized by the same mixture of sincerity and jocosity screenwriter Drew Goddard brought to The Martian, and given added spark by the fleet-footed pop style of Lord and Miller. This is a jokey movie, to a fault — the filmmakers can’t seem to resist a well-placed quip, snarky cutaway, or even a corny T-shirt — but with a star as magnetic as Ryan Gosling at the center, it largely works. Playing the complete opposite of his taciturn Neil Armstrong in his greatest space movie, First Man, Gosling makes Dr. Ryland Grace into a garrulous, fun-loving goofball whose scientific acumen is belied by his fumbling dorkiness. The actor is equally agile with a bewildered reaction or sheepish retort as he is with the role’s ample physical comedy, which has him flopping face-down and spinning clumsily in zero G like Chaplin’s Tramp if he had been sent to space. Gosling’s Grace also shares with the Tramp a deep vein of sentimentality, particularly in his life-affirming friendship with his alien counterpart, Rocky. The good-natured simplicity of this friendship is the core of Project Hail Mary, and while the film perhaps makes the friendship too simple, ironing out the pair’s cultural differences in favor of buddy-comedy hijinks and trite universalisms, it’s a relationship that registers with primal directness: we need each other, and to do things for each other. Like The Martian, the film unashamedly espouses such earnest, even naive humanism, communicating it with enough heart, panache, and craft to feel both earned and rather moving.

The Bride!

THE BRIDE!   ***

Maggie Gyllenhaal

2026

IDEA:  In 1930s Chicago, a murdered gangster's moll is resurrected to serve as a companion to Frankenstein's monster.

BLURB:  That exclamation point is no mere stylization; The Bride! is an emphatic, immodest, unbridled shout of a film, a rowdy cinephilic pastiche that isn’t afraid to get goofy. This means a delectably unhinged Jessie Buckley swerving from brassy Chicago flapper girl to her best, burlesque Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich; Jake Gyllenhaal as a prim Fred Astaire-type Hollywood star; randomly, Penélope Cruz as a chain-smoking incipient detective named Myrna Malloy; and, but of course, a gaudy ball reprise of Young Frankenstein’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” Maggie Gyllenhaal is as evidently drunk on movies as she is on a cathartic (if simplistic) brand of girlboss feminism, and her film’s unabashed embrace of camp is invigorating in a contemporary Hollywood so allergic to madcap fun. The Bride! also has a clear and mostly satisfying ideological point, which is to restore agency and bite to women whose representations have largely been dictated, and flattened, by men. By making Mary Shelley an actual character in her story, and one who speaks through her creation, the Bride, Gyllenhaal pays tribute to a fellow female auteur and shows how women creators through time can communicate with and build on each other’s legacies. Does everything work here? No; the feminist revolution sparked by the Bride feels like a dropped thread, and the mob/detective stuff is pretty sketchy, despite a scene-stealing performance from a ruthless Zlatko Burić. But The Bride! has style and verve to spare, as well as dozens of literal tongues figuratively planted firmly in cheek. 

Top 10 - 2025

 

2025 was an exceptionally stellar year for cinema, its greatness profoundly, inversely proportionate to 2025 as a year for basically anything else. The cinematic richness and the sociopolitical direness (especially in the United States) were often hard to separate. Films such as Eddington, One Battle After Another, and Bugonia furiously and creatively captured the head-spinning derangements of the country's current dystopia, reviving a spirit of acerbic political critique that perhaps hasn't been truly seen on the big screen since the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Such invigorated social consciousness resonated in national cinemas around the world, taking shape in stories about political prisoners, military dictatorships, washed-up poets, imperialist conquests, and possessed household appliances. It was exciting to see, and proof that art remains among our most vital and versatile tools for processing the mess of the world.

My top ten films of 2025 are after the jump...

Pillion

PILLION   ***

Harry Lighton

2025

IDEA:  A shy man from the suburbs of London enters into a dom/sub relationship with a confident biker, testing both of their limits.

BLURB:  At its essence, Pillion is an archetypal story of two opposites — one meek and impressionable and the other brash and obdurate — who change by awakening something in the other. This version of the story just happens to be told with more leather and assless pants than usual. That the film takes place within a gay BDSM subculture is a novelty that writer-director Harry Lighton also makes disarmingly mundane; he’s not interested in taboo-breaking eroticism but in the power imbalances that can affect any relationship, especially one based on dominance and submission. Risking generalization (or worse, misinterpretation), Lighton uses the BDSM milieu to study how partners might negotiate control, desire, and boundaries within an ostensibly consensual relationship. “Ostensibly” because the ways in which Ray treats Colin often tread the line of abuse. The grace and empathy of Pillion are such that neither character is judged for their respective behavior in this ethically slippery scenario, nor are they psychoanalyzed in some facile effort to rationalize their choices. Lighton puts enormous, gratifying trust in Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgård to carry the ambiguities of a relationship in which hurt and pleasure, control and surrender, are separated by a hair (trigger). As the tone oscillates, so does the image and sound, moving between orgiastic countryside idylls, dreamy slow-motion bike rides, and arguments fought through mirrors to the stuttering tune of Satie. Through its kinks, the film finally emerges as a classic Bildungsroman, in which Colin’s sexual, emotional, and moral education reveals how difficult — but also rewarding — it can be to discover yourself. 

Magellan

MAGELLAN   ***1/2

Lav Diaz

2025

IDEA:  Ferdinand Magellan and his crews wreak havoc on indigenous populations as they seek to bring Christianity to the global East.

BLURB:  It takes quite some time before the nominal hero of Magellan is given his close-up. Aside from a brief, wryly askance angle of him sleeping, he is seen in the first portions of Lav Diaz’s film wandering far afield in the deep-focus frames, marginalized by a foreground of merciless jungle and the lifeless bodies of the indigenous Malacca people his expedition has massacred. Even when Gael García Bernal’s Portuguese general assumes a more prominent visual and narrative role, Diaz continues to subvert his authority in a strategy of inversion that is anti-colonial at its core. Rebelling against “Great Man” historiography and Age of Discovery romanticism, the filmmaker depicts a grinding, sickly, recursive imperialist project carried out by petty, insecure Europeans ready to kill each other before even reaching the other side of the ocean. In the mesmerizing scenes at sea, Diaz films in low-angle shots that might seem reverential if not for the savage behavior of the men within them. He lingers on bodies battered by both the elements and intramural violence, on exhaustion and boredom and quarrels scored to nothing but a creaking ship. The extended duration, static camera, and elision of dramatic spectacle serve to undermine any sense of progress or accomplishment; this is a story, ultimately, of Western ideological and geopolitical failure. That failure becomes the (temporary) triumph of the indigenes in a last chapter that portrays their righteous uprising and the creation of a new national myth. Magellan also creates its own, cinematic myth, one that fascinatingly runs counter to both Western and Filipino grand narratives. Underlying the stunningly immersive sensory experience is the fundamental problematic of how history is written, imagined, and promulgated, and Diaz is bold enough to make his film not an answer, but another question.