Some of the 2025 movies honored by the American Film Institute (AFI): Top Left, Frankenstein ; Top Right, Hamnet ; Bottom Left, Marty Supreme ; Bottome Right. Note : MJ's reviews of all the movies mentioned here can be found at MJtheMovies homepage. It's that time of year that, for some of us, is as exciting as the holidays themselves: reviewing the year in film, identifying the best movies of 2025, and looking ahead to the awards season, which has already begun via many regi

Will Arnett in Bradley Cooper's Is This Thing On? I hate it when movie titles end with punctuation. It makes writing a review all that more challenging, especially when the title is a question. I'll stop whining now. Bradley Cooper's intimate portrait about the trauma of divorce raises more questions than the simplistic one in its title, a reference to the kind of query an amateur thrust onto a stage might make when being handed a mic: "Is this thing on?" You get the idea. B

Timothée Chalamet as ping-pong virtuoso Marty Mauser in Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme. Timothée Chalamet aspires to greatness. Just ask him. At last year's SAG Awards when he accepted the "Actor" for Best Male Lead in a Movie (for playing a "version" of folk rock icon Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown ), Chalamet gushed to his fellow actors that he wanted to be one of the greats: “ I'm really in pursuit of greatness … I want to be one of the greats; I'm inspired by the greats ,”

Director Rob Reiner during the filming of 1995's The American President. "It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black." -Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), This is Spinal Tap (1984)  It is only fitting that an off-hand remark on a totally unrelated topic from his first directorial effort be used to describe Rob Reiner's (and wife Michele's) untimely death this past week. News of the couple's murder allegedly at the hand of thei