This Is What a Fall Sounds Like: The Most Anticipated Movies of 2025

As I type this, the high was 94 degrees today. It’s supposed to be around 92 tomorrow, then mid- to high 90s for the foreseeable future. Welcome to fall in Los Angeles. While I cannot vouch for the weather, I wouldn’t mind things heating up at the cinema a little over the next few weeks and months. While the highs (Sinners; Sorry, Baby; Warfare) have been very high, 2025 has been a little soft through the first eight months of the year.

Luckily, as happens every fall, it’s festival season, which bleeds right into Oscars season, and that means it’s time for the studios to release their best and brightest into the world for all of us to see. It’s not an ideal ecosystem for healthy moviegoing, wherein we get five months of blockbusters and maybe some counterprogramming, then the blockbusters go away and we get 12 weeks to cram in as many prestige pictures as we can stomach. But, things are only moving more in that direction, so for now, we’ll celebrate the best of what’s to come and try to plan for how to see it all.

Before we get to the top 10, some honorable mentions broken up into a couple categories:

Big-budget fun

Anaconda – The original 1997 Anaconda is one of the great B-movie creature features of the ’90s. I couldn’t possibly guess the number of times I saw it as a child. This appears to be Jack Black and Paul Rudd teaming up for a knowingly comic, meta-remake. Thanks to A Minecraft Movie and the continued success of the Kung Fu Panda franchise, Black could not be hotter. Rudd is always gold. And as someone currently working my way through Ione Skye’s tell-all memoir Say Everything, it will be fun to see her back on the big screen.

Avatar: Fire and Ash – I wasn’t the biggest fan of Way of Water, which is of course visually stunning but has some character issues and is too damn long. That said, James Cameron is really doing the thing here, and as long as he wants to deliver this level of spectacle, I will absolutely line up to see it on the biggest screen imaginable.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery – Though it didn’t reach the heights of Knives Out, I liked Glass Onion more than a lot of people. I am fully in the bag for what should obviously be called the Benoit Blanc Mystery series, and Johnson clearly has a knack for moving around the pieces on his chess board in the most surprising, entertaining, and delightful ways every time.

Indie darlings

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You – I truly know nothing about this film except that it was highly lauded out of Sundance this year and Rose Byrne reportedly gives a tremendous performance. Also, what a title! I don’t need to know more than that.

Predators – All due respect to Dan Trachtenberg and his pair of franchise films in release this year, but this is the Predators movie I most want to see. A documentary about the world behind the scenes of the To Catch a Predator series, this seems tailormade to force us to ask the question: But who are the real predators? The answer is the child sex predators. But also the TV executives who profit from them, the internet vigilantes who often do more harm than good, and the audience that gets its vicarious thrill from all of this. Pourquoi pas tout?

Sacrifice – Another film I know very little about except that it is the English-language debut of French filmmaker Romain Gavras, son of legendary director Costa-Gavras and whose 2022 political thriller Athena went criminally underseen. If this film captures half of that feature’s magic, this will be one to watch.

Yorgos Lanthimos: or, I wish I knew how to quit you

From 2010 to 2018, Lanthimos might have been my favorite filmmaker on the planet. Certainly among them, anyway. The run of Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Favourite is about as strong as I can imagine (I haven’t seen Alps, the director’s Dogtooth followup, but it’s long been on my watchlist). I liked a lot of Poor Things, but something about it kept me from fully embracing it. Kinds of Kindness was interesting but uneven. 

Now, we get Bugonia, the director’s fourth collaboration with Emma Stone. In the wake of The Favourite, this would have been one of my most anticipated movies of the year, as Poor Things was the year it came out. But, I find myself wondering if the Stone era has been good for Lanthimos. Don’t get me wrong: She’s one of my favorite working performers, and he remains a fantastic director. I just wonder if something about their alchemy isn’t working for me. Anyway, I will absolutely be seeing Bugonia the minute it comes out. I hope it’s great, but my excitement is tempered.

Now, on with Last Cinema Standing’s 10 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2025:

10. The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

Release date: Nov. 26

I was introduced to Mendonça Filho by his 2016 screed Aquarius, a bold, beautiful, angry film about the toll it takes to stand up against the oppressive forces in society. His followup, Bacurau, was similarly bold and angry but took a much more metaphorical approach to the material, reminding me a little of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville or Manderlay without quite so much artifice. 

Starring Wagner Moura, who I thought was tremendous in last year’s Civil War, The Secret Agent covers a part of Brazil’s history that is well covered in the cinema, but I can’t wait to see what Mendonça Filho does with it. The film won numerous prizes at Cannes, including best actor for Moura and best director for Mendonça Filho.

9. Sound of Falling, directed by Mascha Schilinksi

Release date: TBA

Another hit at Cannes, where this film won the jury prize in competition (think third place, for whatever that’s worth), Sound of Falling is Schilinski’s second feature film after 2017’s little-seen Dark Blue Girl. The same fate will not befall this much-lauded tale of four generations of women and girls all connected by the same farm. In the little I have read about this film, it sounds haunting, ethereal, and generally right up my alley.

8. Orwell: 2+2=5, directed by Raoul Peck

Release date: Oct. 3

A feature-length documentary on George Orwell would be interesting in and of itself. A feature-length documentary that puts Orwell’s writing and philosophy in context then brings that context to bear on our current predicament, as I understand this film does, sounds fascinating. That all of that may be true and comes to us from Peck, director of the superlative James Baldwin investigation I Am Not Your Negro, makes this an asbolute must watch.

7. It Was Just An Accident, directed by Jafar Panahi

Release date: Oct. 15

Five of the past six years in which I have compiled this list, the Palme d’Or winner has made the cut. How could it not? Panahi’s film, however, feels particularly worth anticipating, given what it represents just by existing, let alone its many plaudits and near-certain quality. Panahi is perhaps the most important filmmaker to come out of the Iranian New Wave, a rebellion against the oppressiveness of that nation’s regime. You will recall last year’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by exiled filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, as part of the same movement.

Panahi is banned from making films in Iran, but during the ban, he has produced some of the finest experimental films of our time, from the meta-documentary This Is Not a Film to the slice-of-life docudrama Taxi. Panahi continues to battle against the forces that would silence him and come out victorious, this latest film succeeding on the world’s grandest stage for cinema.

6. Ballad of a Small Player, directed by Edward Berger

Release date: Oct. 15

Bless Berger for continuing to take on new genres and new styles of filmmaking, stretching his muscles and giving us something we’ve never seen before – or rather, something we have seen before done better. From the domestic dramas of Jack and All My Loving to the epic war film All Quiet on the Western Front (the further removed from which I get, the more I think it is a masterpiece) to the paperback thrills of Conclave, Berger is a chameleon.

Now, here comes the Colin Farrell-starring Ballad of a Small Player, a drama about life, death, and redemption in the seedy world of Macau casinos. The Farrell renaissance appears to be chugging along quite nicely still, and I can’t wait to see what Berger’s eye will make of the surface-level glitz and glam of Macau.

5. Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier

Release date: Nov. 7

Trier’s Louder Than Bombs hit the indie scene in New York like, well, a bomb in 2015. That’s when I was living there and trying my best to see just about everything that played at the Lincoln Center. That said, I missed both Bombs and Trier’s followup, Thelma. I didn’t miss The Worst Person in the World, which remains one of the most tender and insightful films of this half-decade.

For his Cannes hit this year (Grand Prix, second place basically), Trier has brought along some familiar favorites like Worst Person stars Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, while adding in heavy hitters Stellan Skarsgard and Elle Fanning, among others. I hear Skarsgard gives the performance of his career, which is saying something when you consider the career we’re talking about here.

4. Kontinental ’25, directed by Radu Jude

Release date: TBA

It is unclear to me whether this movie will actually come out in the U.S. this year – it currently has only European distribution in place – but rest assured, whenever it comes out, I’ll be there. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and it will play at AFI Fest this year, where I caught Jude’s excellent Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World in 2023. The director has an AI-skewering Dracula epic making the rounds now, too, but this seems the more likely of the two to be coming out sooner rather than later.

Jude has entered that rare air for me where any film he makes is appointment viewing. There is no one out there right now pushing the bounds of what cinema can be and what it can express quite like Jude. From what I know of both Kontinental ’25 and Dracula, it seems that instinct toward boundary pushing has only grown sharper and more astute.

3. Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao

Release date: Nov. 27

Speaking of Dracula, not so long ago, Zhao was attached to a radical reimagining of Bram Stoker’s classic novel. It was to be her next film after Eternals. Instead, we are getting Hamnet, a lush romantic drama that in lesser hands would seem like Shakespeare in Love but for Hamlet instead of Romeo and Juliet. However, I trust Zhao to bring her keen sense of human frailty and the little dramas of life to this epic tale.

I never want to tell a filmmaker what to do – because who the hell am I – but this is the film, or at least the type of film, I wish we’d gotten after the Oscar-winning Nomadland. I’m among the few folks who was not entirely negative on Eternals, Zhao’s entry into the MCU, but that was not what I wanted for her. Happily, we seem to be moving away from independent-minded directors being swallowed up by the Marvel machine, and hopefully, that means more films like this.

2. Frankenstein, directed by Guillermo del Toro

Release date: Oct. 17

If asked to design in a lab – perhaps the lab of a mad scientist? – the perfect pairing of art and artist, filmmaker and subject, I feel one could do no better than Guillermo del Toro and Frankenstein. No one embodies the love of classic cinema and its classic monsters more than the Mexican auteur who won his first Academy Award for the Creature from the Black Lagoon homage The Shape of Water. In so many ways, del Toro has been moving toward this film his whole career.

Of course, it does not hurt that in a recent interview, del Toro decried the overreliance on green screens and CGI to tell stories, stating emphatically that he films on real sets with practical effects (a little rich from the guy who made Pacific Rim, but the spirit is in the right place). Throw in Oscar Isaac as Dr. Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi as The Creature, and Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz in supporting roles, and you’ve got the potential for something truly special. I only wish it weren’t produced by Netflix and that more folks would have the opportunity to see it on the big screen.

1. One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Release date: Sept. 26

As Stanley said to Blanche, “We’ve had this date with each other since the beginning.” Anderson was supposed to work with Leonardo DiCaprio on Boogie Nights, just as each was beginning his ascent. Instead, DiCaprio went off to do Titanic and Mark Wahlberg subbed in on Boogie Nights. It happened the way it had to happen. 

Ever since, DiCaprio has gone around collecting our greatest (male) auteurs like pogs, working with mononymic giants like Cameron, Spielberg, Nolan, Eastwood, Tarantino, and of course Scorsese. Meanwhile, PTA has attached himself to many of the greatest actors in the world like Daniel Day-Lewis, Joaquin Phoenix, and his early muse Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hell, Anderson even worked with Leo’s dad on Licorice Pizza. But, they have never found each other until now.

That alone would make this enough to be the event of the decade for me, as a devotee of Anderson and with DiCaprio being my favorite actor. And yet, lucky us, we also get Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, and a seemingly committed Sean Penn. The trailers, cut as always by Anderson, look fantastic. PTA has always specialized in making grand stories feel human and making the human feel grand. This appears to be his grandest story yet, and I have no doubt that it may also end up being his most human.

Monday Miniatures: The Runner, Czech New Wave, and ’70s Classics

Amir Naderi's The Runner

I want to try something. I watch a heckuva lot more movies than I ever get the chance to write about in depth here, but that doesn’t mean they’re not worth writing about and sharing. Inspired partially by the capsule reviews that concluded last year’s 31 Days of Horror and partially by a desire to cover a wider variety of films in this space, I want to share some quick thoughts on the movies I’ve been watching lately. 

In that spirit, I give you: Monday Miniatures. Some movies will inspire more writing, others less, but this should be a fun snapshot of how I’m thinking about movies as I watch them. Hopefully, this will be a weekly feature on the site and something I can look forward to doing each Monday morning.

The week of August 18-24, 2025:

The Runner, directed by Amir Naderi

How I watched it: Criterion Channel

An absolute revelation to me, a reminder that though I have seen many films and a high percentage of the so-called “canon,” there is still much left to discover. Made in post-revolution Iran but set pre-revolution to avoid censorship issues, The Runner is quite simply one of the finest films about childhood ever made.

Naderi’s semi-autobiographical film follows an orphan named Amiro (Majid Niroumand) who lives in the rusted hull of a wrecked boat and survives on the money he scrapes together from a variety of odd jobs: sifting through trash, collecting glass bottles from the ocean, shining shoes, etc. He is obsessed with travel, with planes and trains headed to faraway places he can only imagine. He cannot read, so he scans the pictures in foreign magazines, no doubt filling in the gaps with stories of adventure and discovery.

In one scene, he and some other children race after a train, and even after he has lost the race, he keeps running. When asked why, he says he wanted to see how far he could. In the film’s emotionally overwhelming climax, there is another race, wherein we learn just how far he can run. It is a confluence of storytelling, allegory, and filmmaking on par with the best of world cinema. I was floored by it.

Niroumand, an untrained actor who would make just one other film, also with Naderi, gives one of the great coming-of-age performances ever committed to screen. He stands shoulder to shoulder with Jean-Pierre Léaud in The 400 Blows, Subir Banerjee in Pather Panchali, and David Bradley in Kes among the defining child performances in cinema.

Based solely on my own observations, this movie does not get talked about enough. It belongs in any conversation of great films and certainly among the great films of the Middle East. One can draw a straight line from the social realist filmmaking coming out of Iran (and its many exiled filmmakers) today to Naderi’s beautiful, brilliant film.

The Monkey, directed by Osgood Perkins

How I watched it: Disney+

Perkins’ critical and commercial smash Longlegs didn’t do it for me last year the way it did for so many others, but I went into this with some excitement. The trailer looked fun. A Stephen King adaptation is usually a good reason to be excited. And, while I found the story lacking in Longlegs, the filmmaking is undeniably strong. 

So, what of The Monkey? It’s a fun, silly time with one core thematic idea that I think was done better in a different King adaptation from this year. The premise is that the titular toy monkey (don’t call it a toy; it doesn’t like that) will, when activated, kill a random person gruesomely. “Gruesome” is the word Perkins keys on, and I can admit that many of the over-the-top deaths are pretty fun, if occasionally poorly rendered by the CGI. But, I think the important word is “random.”

King’s point – which is not missed by Perkins so much as it is underexplored – is that death is random, unpredictable, and painful. It is just as likely to happen to someone who doesn’t deserve it as someone who does; more so actually since more people don’t deserve it than do. It’s a strong theme, but Perkins is too interested in jokes and gore to make it land.

As alluded to, King’s The Life of Chuck, adapted for the screen by Mike Flanagan this year, carries much the same theme, right down to having the same solution: If we’re all dying anyway, we might as well dance. Flanagan’s film, which I saw twice in theaters, is the more powerful, effective exploration of this idea, and I expect to be writing more about it during my year-in-review series.

One last thought: Theo James is pretty good playing both twin brothers at the center of the story, and more than that, he has an excellent Stephen King Narrator voice. Make of that what you will.

Intimate Lighting, directed by Ivan Passer

Capricious Summer, directed by Jiří Menzel

How I watched them: Criterion Channel

Both films are part of the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s, which gave us a wide variety of classics like The Firemen’s Ball, The Shop on Main Street, The Cremator, Daisies, and Menzel’s own Closely Watched Trains. Not that it’s necessary to pit them against each other, but I would put the Czechoslovak New Wave up against the French New Wave any day in terms of quality and import. Perhaps not in impact, simply because the French films were easier to access in America and, thus, more influential on that up and coming generation of filmmakers.

But, I digress. I love these films and try to set aside time to watch at least a few new (new to me) films each year. Unbeknownst to me, Intimate Lighting and Capricious Summer actually make a fine little double feature, particularly for a lazy Sunday morning. Each film deals with the boredom and aimlessness of quiet rural days, the rye comedy of life, and the desire to exert control over one’s surroundings in a place and time when control was often reserved for the government.

Passer’s film is the more accessible of the two, dealing with a family and friends who gather to play music and drink and tell tales at a farm house on the eve of a big orchestra performance. It is equal parts sweet, funny, and sad, with touches of Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika or Wild Strawberries from the decade before. Beautifully captures the melancholy of old friends passing like ships in the night, wishing time would slow down just so we could hold onto the precious moments a little longer but so rarely recognizing those moments when we are in them.

Capricious Summer, which was Menzel’s direct followup to the acclaimed Closely Watched Trains, is meaner, bawdier, and generally a less pleasant hang, despite being a fine film. If the setup sounds like a joke, that’s because it is: An athlete, a soldier, and a priest walk into a bar – okay, not quite, but those are the characters and they spend their days lounging around a river during a particularly rainy summer. When a traveling magician and his beautiful young assistant arrive in town, lovers are taken, loyalties are tested, and relatively speaking for this small rural enclave, all hell breaks loose.

I enjoyed each film in both style and substance and can’t wait to dive even deeper into this wonderful movement.

The Hospital, directed by Arthur Hiller

How I watched it: MGM+ (through Amazon Prime)

It is tempting to say screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky could see the future, given just how well his two Academy Award-winning original screenplays seem to describe our current cultural malaise. Sadly, brilliant as he was, Chayefsky was no prophet. It simply is that in 50 years, our societal afflictions remain largely unchanged, worse and more acute perhaps but with the same roots.

As a journalist, I am, of course, familiar with the 1976 masterpiece Network, a skewering of media so pointed its prick remains painful to this day. I had never before yesterday, however, seen The Hospital, and I can only imagine it would strike my cousins – one an ER nurse, the other a firefighter – the way Network strikes me. That is to say: quite hard.

I found it brilliantly constructed and am a little at a loss for those who feel it goes off the rails in the final act. To me, that final act is what brings it all together. The pitch-black humor hasn’t aged a day (give or take some unfortunate sexual politics); the social commentary about an understaffed, underfunded, overflowing hospital remains distressingly astute; and George C. Scott delivers an all-timer of a performance just a year after he won and famously refused the Best Actor Oscar for Patton. To describe the plot is to spoil too much, so suffice it to say, this gets my highest recommendation.

Rocky II, directed by Sylvester Stallone

How I watched it: Amazon Prime

It is a near certainty I will write more about the Rocky franchise in the future – possibly next year for the 50th anniversary of the first film – so I will not go too deep here. I love Rocky. The franchise, the character, the symbol. It’s all fabulous stuff. I was obsessed as a kid, and I’ve seen the original five films in the series at least 15-20 times a piece, some of them many more. But I have not revisited the sequels since a full franchise rewatch ahead of Ryan Coogler’s Creed, so it’s been a while.

Happily, this remains the same film I remember and adore. As a child, I preferred Rocky II to the original because he wins. It was as simple as that. He’s the hero. I wanted him to win. I know better now, but this is still an excellent time at the movies. Stallone’s second directorial effort after the little-seen Paradise Alley, he mostly sticks to the template established by John G. Avildsen in the Oscar-winning predecessor. It would not be until Rocky III that the films would veer into “only the good parts” self-parody, which is enjoyable in a different way.

The ending still hits in a truly special way, and it remains fascinating that the franchise’s most iconic line caps this sequel, not the original film. Of course, he must win the championship to be so moved as to declare, “Yo, Adrian! I did it!” It is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise, where in the oft-misquoted, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question. ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” does appear in the first film, but the somehow more iconic, “Go ahead, make my day,” doesn’t appear until Sudden Impact, the fourth film in the series. Fun stuff.

I watched Rocky III a few weeks ago, and I’m certain I’ll be watching Rocky IV at some point in the near future. Out of order or not, these movies are like Pringles. Once you pop …

John Williams: Maestro of the Movies at the Hollywood Bowl, performed by the L.A. Philharmonic

Lastly, this was not a movie but a movie-related experience. Courtesy of my new job, I was able to wrangle a ticket to the annual celebration of composer John Williams at the Hollywood Bowl, where the L.A. Philharmonic performs a selection of his best and most iconic film scores. The first half of the show was not accompanied by film clips, which allowed those of us in the audience to focus fully on the intricacy and complexity of Williams’ compositions and orchestrations.

The second half of the show, which contained a lot of Indiana Jones and Star Wars, was loaded with clips. While fun, they did distract a tad from the music, but hey, a good time is a good time. If you’re interested in more of my thoughts on Williams, you can check out a review I wrote last year of a recent documentary on his life, as well as my ranking of my five favorite Williams scores.

New movie review: Eddington

You remember 2020. I remember 2020. Eddington writer-director Ari Aster clearly remembers 2020, and his new film does a comprehensive job of capturing the madness of the moment and suggesting the madness yet to come. All the hallmarks are there: mask mandates, social distancing, the George Floyd demonstrations, online conspiracies, etc. Enough to make one say, Yes, I recognize this world and it is ours. But, let’s rephrase the premise.

You know what you think and feel about everything that happened in 2020. I know what I think and feel about everything that happened in 2020. However, based on Eddington, what Aster thinks and feels about everything that happened in 2020 – and everything he chooses to depict in his film – remains a mystery. And, that’s a shame.

The film is not so much a story as an experience, but what little plot there is revolves around Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and his decision to run for mayor against incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Already, the name Sheriff Joe should put one in mind of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Arizona “lawman” and politician who perfectly presaged the Trump era. As multiple characters in the film would tell you, this is not a coincidence.

Sheriff Joe has a wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who each get sucked into their respective conspiracy wormholes. Mayor Ted has a teenage son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), who won’t abide by the lockdown rules. Eric has a friend, Brian (Cameron Mann), the Bernie Bro type who slides so far to the left that he ends up on the right. Austin Butler’s in there, too, as a grifter guru on the periphery of the story. And, there are another half-dozen odd characters who populate the world but mostly feel more like devices than people.

Phoenix is excellent because he is always excellent, here playing a man who can’t seem to understand the direction the world is going but nevertheless is, himself, helping to push it that direction. Sheriff Joe is despicable, he is unquestionably part of the problem, but you almost feel bad for him when he pleads that “one-third of the police department is black” with the handful of Black Lives Matter protestors who gather to mildly inconvenience traffic on a single street in town. It’s not a world he recognizes anymore.

A key question in analyzing Eddington is how much sympathy we are meant to extend to Sheriff Joe or, really, any of the characters, who all act in deplorable ways all their own. By centering the Phoenix character and telling 90 percent of the story through his point of view, Aster does seem to be asking the audience, if not to be on his side, then at least to understand why his side might feel the way it does. It’s as if Aster is saying, ‘Hey, didn’t we all lose our minds there a little bit, and isn’t the new normal pretty strange?’

It’s a gamble, and one I don’t think pays off. It forces the film into a wishy-washy, centrist view of one of the most polarizing times in modern U.S. history. It lacks either spirit or spine, and in being everything to everyone, it ends up meaning nothing to anyone. 

I saw the film with, what I have to assume was, a largely liberal audience that smugly laughed at the dumb sheriff who wouldn’t wear a mask and printed up campaign materials with silly typos. It then seemed shocked and appalled by the brutality of the violence in the film’s final act. No minds changed there. But, I can also imagine the conservative audience siding with Sheriff Joe and believing that when the world is falling apart, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Good guy with a gun and all that.

If Aster is attempting to lampoon us all as a way of bringing us together in the middle, he fails. The movie isn’t deft enough to make anyone seriously reconsider a position or discover some new insight into The Way Things Are. As I said at the top, we were there. We remember. We know what we think and feel. It’s Aster who still seems to be figuring out where he stands, which is fair enough, but asking us all to sit through a 2 ½-hour movie about it might be a bridge too far.

Aster fascinates me as a filmmaker. I quite like Hereditary and find it a winning entry in the now overpopulated subgenre of horror films about capital-T Trauma. His sophomore feature, Midsommar, is absolutely brilliant, one of my favorite films of the past 10 years. Which is why his followup, Beau Is Afraid, left me feeling so betrayed.

Now, it is self-evidently absurd to feel “betrayed” by an artist who owes me nothing, except possibly my three hours back. But, a funny thing happens when you love a filmmaker’s work: You tend to give them a lot of latitude. It’s why being a fan of a filmmaker or band or whatever else can feel so culty. There are those kinds of fans for whom the object of their affection can do no wrong. These are the “Well, actually” folks who would try to tell us the bad thing is good for … reasons.

It is best not to be that way, but when a filmmaker earns my trust, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt. And, so I did for 150 minutes of Beau Is Afraid’s interminable 179-minute runtime. I truly believed Aster was taking me on a journey and would land the plane. Then, it crashed in the most miserable of ways.

I share all of this because it meant I went into Eddington with skepticism that Aster could take on a subject as grand as the COVID-19 pandemic and wrangle it into a richly textured narrative with thematic depth and emotional resonance. Now, having seen the film, that skepticism feels warranted. There are so many threads that lead nowhere, characters hung out to dry, and provocations in place of ideas. I wanted better. Aster is capable of better. He’s proven that before. On the next one, he might have to prove it again.