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...