Blue Moon (2025) Review

Title: Blue Moon
Year: 2025
Director: Richard Linklater
Country: US
Language: English

Director Richard Linklater has an uncanny ability to make entire films (like Blue Moon & Before Sunrise) feel like a single, captivating, fluid conversation. Plot becomes secondary to presence, and narrative tension is generated not through dramatic turns, but through emotional discovery. His characters speak the way people actually do: circling ideas, interrupting themselves, revealing more than they intend.

Structurally, Blue Moon resists conventional plotting, favoring a loose, episodic rhythm that mirrors the emotional state of its characters. Scenes bleed into one another like memories recalled late at night, guided more by feeling than chronology. This approach may test viewers expecting narrative momentum, but it proves deeply rewarding for those willing to surrender to the film’s pace. The camera lingers, patient and observant, capturing small gestures and fleeting expressions that quietly reveal entire inner worlds.

Thematically, the film explores time, aging, and the ache of paths not taken without slipping into sentimentality. There’s a melancholy that permeates Blue Moon, but it’s never suffocating; instead, it feels honest, even comforting. The film understands that disappointment and hope often coexist, and that meaning can be found not only in grand resolutions but in moments of fleeting connection. Its reflective tone suggests a deep empathy for characters who are neither triumphant nor defeated, just human.

Blue Moon is a film that lingers long after it ends, less because of what happens than how it makes you feel. It’s a quietly assured work that rewards patience and emotional attentiveness, offering a gentle meditation on love, memory, and the passage of time.

Highest 2 Lowest (2025) Review

Title: Highest 2 Lowest
Year: 2025
Director: Spike Lee
Country: US
Language: English

Spike Lee has never been a filmmaker concerned with subtlety, and that’s precisely why Highest 2 Lowest feels so vital within his body of work. A reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, Lee doesn’t merely update the setting, he reframes the story through the lens of contemporary America, where wealth, race, and power intersect with brutal clarity.

When a titan music mogul (Denzel Washington) is targeted with a ransom plot, he is jammed up in a life-or-death moral dilemma.

Structurally, Highest 2 Lowest mirrors its source material’s two-part design, shifting from a claustrophobic moral chess match to a wider examination of the world beyond the penthouse walls. Lee uses this transition to devastating effect, contrasting insulated luxury with the raw urgency of the streets below. The film’s pacing is deliberate, allowing tension to simmer rather than explode, while Lee’s signature style.

Lee interrogates how capitalism rewards detachment, how moral decisions become negotiable when filtered through wealth, and how easily empathy erodes when suffering exists at a distance. Yet Lee avoids reducing his characters to symbols; even those who make reprehensible choices are afforded complexity,

Highest 2 Lowest stands as one of Spike Lee’s most disciplined and resonant works in recent years. It honors Kurosawa’s original while asserting Lee’s unmistakable voice, transforming a classic crime narrative into a sharp meditation on modern inequality and moral compromise.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Story (2025) Review

Title: Wake Up Dead Man
Year: 2025
Director: Rian Johnson
Country: US
Language: English

Rian Johnson may not know how to make a great Star Wars film (although I personally liked many ideas presented in The Last Jedi), but his Knives Out installments have been a cinematic goldmine since the first was released in 2019. He is the only film-maker daring to still make these intelligent, comedic, dramatic Agatha Christie style murder-mysteries. which are always highlighted by a fantastic ensemble cast & the enigmatic Daniel Craig, who is a Sherlock Holmes if Holmes had a confounding southern drawl. 

Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) teams up with an earnest young priest (Josh O'Connor) to investigate a perfectly impossible crime at a small-town church with a dark history.

Rooted firmly in the locked-room mystery, a subgenre in which a crime occurs within a confined, often windowless space. The film devotes much of its runtime to methodically establishing stakes, motivations, and character nuances. This deliberate pacing enhances the intrigue surrounding the central crime, allowing the audience to fully absorb each suspect’s psychology. The mystery remains consistently engaging, grounded in strong character work and compelling performances. Each narrative “twist” feels earned, landing with genuine surprise rather than contrivance.

With this entry in the Knives Out series, Johnson explores faith, devotion, and the institutional power of the church with notable care and restraint. Rather than mocking belief itself, the film respectfully interrogates how faith can be weaponized by manipulative leaders to exploit those who trust unquestioningly. The pageantry and grandeur of the church are shown as tools, often used to cultivate a cult of personality around men like Father Wicks (Josh Brolin), whose authority rests as much on perception as it does on conviction.

Ultimately, Wake Up Dead Man may be Johnson’s most thematically ambitious Knives Out film to date. Beneath the clever plotting and razor-sharp dialogue lies a meditation on moral certainty, guilt, and the stories people tell themselves to justify their actions.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2025) Review

Kill Bill The Whole Bloody Affair
Year: 2025 (2004)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Country: US
Language: English

When I first saw Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol 1 & II on DVD (I wasn't old enough to see it in the theatre) I was very impressed with the first installment, but very disappointed by the second. I felt like the second part of Kill Bill was poorly paced, compared to the first, and as a whole didn't flow very cohesively. I saw the film(s) once, and told myself that if it ever became one long movie I'd watch it again. Surprisingly, Tarantino decided to re-edit & re-release Kill Bill as one full movie.

The Bride (Uma Thurman) must kill her ex-boss and lover Bill (David Carradine) who betrayed her at her wedding rehearsal, shot her in the head and took away her unborn daughter. But first, she must make the other four members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad suffer.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is Tarantino's intended version of the story, before studio's interfered and split the story into two halves to make it more commercially feasible. This experience isn't just the two films awkwardly stitched together. There are a few noticeable changes, such as the cliffhanger ending being removed from Vol 1, as well as minor edits that improve the pacing of the overall story. I went into the theatre being concerned about the 4hr 35 min run-time, but left feeling like very little time had passed. 

I love that Kill Bill is an ode to cinema; the Bride's journey of revenge is also a journey through film genres. We get a venture into Blaxploitation, Western (traditional & spaghetti), Kung-Fu, Samurai, and nearly everything in-between. The memorable Crazy-88 scene is made more jaw-dropping as it is presented in color, looking more impressive than ever before. The cinematography, soundtrack, and acting all add to Tarantino's homage to cinema. 

As two separate films, I thought Kill Bill was fairly forgettable apart from a couple of fight sets, but presented as one long epic it's clearly a masterpiece in story-telling. This is a must-see in the theatre, especially since it will very likely never make it to streaming. 

Hamnet (2025) Review

Title: Hamnet
Year: 2025
Director: Chloe Zhao
Country: US
Language: English

I knew Chloe Zhao was a one-of-a-kind film-maker after I saw Nomadland at TIFF. I said to myself "this film will win Best Picture at the Oscars", I was probably the only person who declared so early on, and it turns out I was right. Eternals (2021) was a bit of a miss for most audiences, but I understood it as a means to get future funding for a passion project. Hamnet (2025) is clearly the passion project. It's a return to her auteur style of film-making. 

After losing their son Hamnet to plague, Agnes and William Shakespeare grapple with grief in 16th-century England. 

Clearly inspired by Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven), Hamnet is a very deliberately paced film that is as visually stunning as it is emotionally devastating. When Zhao's camera is not fixated on close-ups in search of intimate moments, it is panning around nature, shooting through forests and trees, sometimes looking up towards the heavens. The understated score, by Max Richter, quietly intensifies the drama unfolding around us. His instrumental On the Nature of Daylight is used with heartwrenching effect in the finale.

The acting by Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley is remarkable. They have undeniable chemistry & their range is essential to pulling off such a demanding performance. Buckley's role as a grieving mother is especially challenging, but she had me in the palm of her hand the entire film. If this film is guaranteed any awards, Buckley is going to win Best Actress. 

For me, Hamnet is not the clear "Best Picture" winner that Nomadland was; primarily because we have a few heavy hitters like One Battle After Another and Sinners to contend with. It also has to contend with viewers comparing it to Shakespeare in Love, which has aged badly, and many people view a mistake considering Saving Private Ryan was also in contention that year. Hamnet is a great film that I certainly intend to watch again.