I have seen the most visually stunning movie of the year. Every frame is a painting. Every effect is seamless. The 3D is used in ways that make you forget you’re wearing glasses.

I have also seen a movie where the story could be summarized on a napkin. Where the characters remain archetypes instead of people. Where the environmental message is delivered with the subtlety of a brick through a window.

Welcome to Avatar: Fire and Ash.

James Cameron takes us to a new biome this time — volcanic regions near Pandora’s equator. A tribe that lives with fire instead of water or forest. They’re grey-skinned and tougher and apparently in conflict with both the humans and the other Na’vi tribes. It’s worldbuilding. Lots of worldbuilding.

The villain is still Colonel Quaritch in his Avatar body. Stephen Lang doing gruff military antagonist for the third time. The character works because Lang commits completely but there’s only so much you can do with “guy who wants to exploit resources and doesn’t care who dies.”

Sam Worthington’s Jake Sully has become. What. A leader? A legend? I honestly don’t remember much of what he does in this movie other than look concerned and give speeches. Zoe Saldaña’s Neytiri gets more to work with including an action sequence that’s probably the highlight of the film.

The kids continue to be central. They’re older now. The deaf daughter has her own subplot that actually works emotionally. The son who was connected to Quaritch continues to be conflicted. It’s. Fine. It’s character development by checklist.

Here’s my problem with these movies and I don’t think it’s solvable. Cameron wants to make spectacle. He’s the greatest spectacle filmmaker who ever lived. But spectacle needs something to anchor it. Story. Character. Stakes we care about. The original Star Wars had Luke’s journey. Jurassic Park had the wonder of seeing dinosaurs for the first time. Titanic had Jack and Rose.

Avatar has blue people in pretty environments saying things about nature while humans do bad things. For three hours. Beautifully filmed. Technically unprecedented. And I felt. Nothing.

The movie made 1.5 billion dollars in its opening week. Cameron will make two more of these. The machine will continue. And I’ll keep going because the visuals ARE impressive enough to justify theatrical viewing.

But when I walked out all I remembered was the colors. Not the characters. Not the story. The colors.

My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Avatar: Fire and Ash on IMDb | Avatar: Fire and Ash on Rotten Tomatoes

The post Movie Review – Avatar: Fire and Ash appeared first on Archer Avenue.

Original Rating: ★★★★★
New Rating: ★★★★☆

We were all 19 once.

When I first saw Fight Club — on DVD, in my college dorm, surrounded by other guys who thought Tyler Durden was saying something important — it felt revolutionary. Anti-consumerism as religion. Masculinity as violence. The whole “reject society and find yourself through destruction” thing. We quoted it constantly. We thought we understood.

Twenty-five years later. Hmm.

The movie is still brilliantly made. Fincher’s craft is undeniable. The editing. The visual tricks. The way information is revealed. The twist — which everyone knows now but still works — is set up meticulously. On a technical level this is filmmaking at its peak.

Brad Pitt’s performance is iconic for a reason. Tyler Durden is charismatic and dangerous and exactly what a certain kind of lost young man wants to be. Norton plays the pathetic Narrator with perfect weariness. Helena Bonham Carter remains underrated as Marla — she’s doing something complex and the guys I watched with in college didn’t even notice her character.

But. Here’s the thing.

The movie is a satire. Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk (who wrote the novel) are MOCKING Tyler Durden. The fascist undertones of Project Mayhem are not accidental — they’re the point. Tyler’s philosophy is seductive and wrong. The Narrator has to reject him to be free.

Except. The movie makes Tyler SO cool. So appealing. It films him like a god. And generations of viewers — including 19-year-old me — missed the critique entirely. We wanted to BE Tyler. We recited his speeches about working jobs we hate to buy shit we don’t need without recognizing ourselves in the punchline.

Fight Club is a victim of its own success. The satire was too effective. The style overwhelmed the substance. And now we have entire political movements built on the philosophy the movie was supposedly critiquing.

That’s not entirely the movie’s fault. Art can’t control its interpretation. But rewatching now I see the seams. I see how hard Fincher is trying to have it both ways — criticize the ideology while making it irresistibly watchable.

I still think it’s a great movie. But it’s a complicated greatness. And I’ve lost the ability to watch it without thinking about the generation of guys who got the wrong message.

Four stars. One star deducted for everything it spawned.

My rating: ★★★★☆

Fight Club on IMDb | Fight Club on Rotten Tomatoes

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These are MY top 10 of 2025. Not the objectively best. Not the most important. The movies that meant something to me personally in a year that I will remember for. Various reasons.

10. Mickey 17
Bong Joon-ho doing Bong Joon-ho things. Weird sci-fi with class commentary. Pattinson playing two versions of himself. Not his best work but “not Bong’s best” is still better than most people’s career highlights.

9. Materialists
Celine Song’s follow-up to Past Lives is maybe too long but still funny and sad in the right proportions. Dakota Johnson proving she can actually act when given material.

8. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Tom Cruise is 62 and still doing his own stunts. The man is insane and I respect it. Pure blockbuster cinema done at the highest level.

7. Black Bag
Soderbergh doing spy movies. Talky and paranoid in the best ways. Blanchett and Fassbender playing chess with each other for two hours.

6. Nosferatu
Robert Eggers remakes the original vampire movie and makes it genuinely terrifying. Bill Skarsgård as Orlok is nightmare fuel. Horror filmmaking at its peak.

5. Andor Season 2
I know it’s television. I don’t care. This is the best Star Wars since the original trilogy and deserves recognition. Tony Gilroy understood the assignment.

4. 28 Years Later
Danny Boyle returns to the franchise he created and proves he still understands horror. Cillian Murphy haunted and broken. The best legacy sequel in years.

3. Severance Season 2
Again. Television. Again. I don’t care. This show is operating at a level nothing else is touching. Ben Stiller directing existential corporate horror.

2. Sinners
Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie about Jim Crow America and it’s a masterpiece. Michael B. Jordan playing twins. Genre filmmaking with actual ideas.

1. The Brutalist
Three and a half hours. Adrien Brody. An American epic about what America does to immigrants who believe in it. Brady Corbet shot this for under $10 million and it looks like a hundred. This is why cinema exists.

Honorable mentions: Paddington in Peru, Ghost of Yōtei, GTA VI, Death Stranding 2.

Biggest disappointments: The Fantastic Four, Superman, Avatar: Fire and Ash.

Anyway. That’s the list. Disagree in the comments. Or don’t. I’ll probably ignore them either way.

See you next year.

The post My 2025 Top 10 appeared first on Archer Avenue.

I didn’t expect to love Ghost of Tsushima as much as I did. Another open world game. Another map full of question marks. But then I played it and the wind guided me and the leaves scattered and the katana duels felt like actual duels and somewhere around the third act I realized I was deeply invested in Jin Sakai’s journey.

Ghost of Yōtei is set three hundred years later. Different era. Different protagonist. A woman named Atsu whose story I won’t spoil but whose journey is. Look. It’s as emotionally resonant as Jin’s. Maybe more so.

The setting is Mount Yōtei on Hokkaido. Snow-covered landscapes. Dense forests. Volcanic terrain. If Tsushima was autumn and golden leaves, Yōtei is winter and survival. The visual identity is distinct enough that it doesn’t feel like a retread despite using the same fundamental design language.

Atsu plays differently than Jin. She’s lighter. Faster. The stance system returns but now there’s an emphasis on mobility over power. Combat flows in a way that feels evolved. The duels — which were my favorite part of the first game — are even better here. More mind games. More tension.

The story deals with. Okay without spoilers. It deals with what happens to communities when they’re forgotten. When the systems meant to protect them fail. Atsu’s journey is political in ways the first game wasn’t. Not preachy. Just. Aware of context.

The side content is much improved. The question marks on the map lead to actual stories now instead of copy-paste encounters. There are characters who recur. Narratives that build. It feels less like checklist completion and more like exploring a world with history.

My complaints. The game runs long. 40+ hours for completionists. Some of that is padding. There’s a section in the middle where momentum stalls while the game sets up the back half. And the stealth — which was always the weaker part of Sucker Punch’s design — still isn’t as satisfying as the combat.

But when the sword comes out. When the wind picks up. When Atsu faces down an enemy and you have to read their tells and time your strikes perfectly or die.

That’s when it sings.

Sucker Punch did it again. Open world samurai done right.

My rating: ★★★★★

Ghost of Yōtei on IMDb

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The Netflix Daredevil was the best thing to come out of the Marvel TV experiment. Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock. Vincent D’Onofrio as Kingpin. That hallway fight in episode two of the first season. It was genuinely adult. Dark. Violent. The kind of superhero content that took itself seriously without being pompous.

Disney brought it back. Disney Plus. New showrunners. Same cast. And.

Look. It’s fine. It’s FINE.

Cox and D’Onofrio slip back into their roles like no time has passed. The chemistry — that push and pull between Murdock’s idealism and Fisk’s ruthlessness — remains compelling. When they share scenes together the show comes alive.

Jon Bernthal returns as The Punisher and he’s. I mean. He’s Jon Bernthal as The Punisher. That’s all you need. His presence immediately raises the stakes of any scene he’s in.

The problem is everything around them.

Disney has sanitized it. The violence is still there but it’s less impactful. The hallway fights exist but they feel choreographed rather than desperate. The moral ambiguity that made the original series interesting — Matt Murdock as a man of faith struggling with his own capacity for violence — has been sanded down into something safer.

The pacing is weird. There are nine episodes and it feels like they have material for six. Subplots meander. Supporting characters get arcs that don’t connect to anything. The Wilson Fisk mayoral storyline from the end of Hawkeye gets resolved in a way that’s. Unsatisfying.

The legal stuff — Matt Murdock as lawyer, the courtroom drama element that differentiated Daredevil from other superheroes — is almost completely absent. He’s just Daredevil now. A vigilante who punches people. Any lawyer could be under that mask.

I wanted to love this. I was excited when they announced it. The Netflix series meant something to me. But Born Again is a pale imitation of what came before. The ingredients are there. The execution is corporate content.

Charlie Cox deserves better. Vincent D’Onofrio deserves better. The characters deserve better.

Disney looked at something special and made it ordinary.

My rating: ★★★☆☆

Daredevil: Born Again on IMDb | Daredevil: Born Again on Rotten Tomatoes

The post Series Review – Daredevil: Born Again appeared first on Archer Avenue.

Past Lives was one of my favorite movies of 2023. Celine Song directing her own script about love and timing and the lives we don’t live. Quiet. Devastating. The kind of movie that sits with you.

Materialists is. Different. Less quiet. More obviously a comedy. But that same intelligence is there. That same attention to how people actually talk to each other. That same willingness to let scenes breathe.

Dakota Johnson plays a matchmaker. A high-end one. She finds partners for wealthy New Yorkers who are too busy or too damaged to find partners themselves. It’s a job that requires her to understand love while keeping herself at a professional distance from it. You can already see where this is going.

Chris Evans plays a client. A finance guy who’s superficially charming and slowly revealed to be more complicated than that. Pedro Pascal plays. Someone from her past. I’m being vague because the structure of the movie depends on you not knowing exactly how these pieces fit.

What I can say is that Song is interested in transactional relationships. What happens when love gets professionalized. When matching algorithms replace chance meetings. When people approach partnership with the same optimization mindset they bring to career advancement. It’s funny and also kind of terrifying.

Johnson is excellent. I know. I was surprised too. After the Madame Web thing I had low expectations but she’s genuinely good here. Funny. Guarded. Letting the cracks show at exactly the right moments. Song knows how to direct actors toward naturalism and Johnson responds to that.

Evans is doing something against type. Captain America he is not. This guy is slick and a little sad and covering both with constant motion. There’s a scene late in the film where he stops performing and the stillness is almost shocking.

Pascal doesn’t get as much screen time as the marketing suggests but what he has is crucial. He grounds the film in something real.

The movie is about thirty minutes too long. Some scenes meander. A subplot involving one of Johnson’s other clients doesn’t land. And the ending is maybe too tidy for what comes before.

But Celine Song remains a filmmaker to watch. Past Lives wasn’t a fluke. She has something to say about how modern people try and fail to connect. I’ll see whatever she makes next.

My rating: ★★★★☆

Materialists on IMDb | Materialists on Rotten Tomatoes

The post Movie Review – Materialists appeared first on Archer Avenue.

That’s it. That’s the tweet. That’s the whole trailer reaction.

I’m kidding. Kind of. But also that accent remains genuinely delightful. Craig was stuck playing stoic British spy for so long that watching him cut loose as Benoit Blanc — theatrical, flamboyant, enjoying himself — feels like a gift.

Wake Up Dead Man is the third Knives Out movie and the trailer suggests Rian Johnson is doing religion this time. The setting appears to be a Catholic retreat or compound of some kind. There’s talk of faith and doubt. Someone is dead and everyone is a suspect. You know the drill.

The cast is typically stacked. Jeremy Renner is back in action movie shape. Cailee Spaeny from Priscilla. Mila Kunis doing something against type. Josh O’Connor being probably sinister because he has that face. Andrew Scott who should be in everything.

Johnson’s formula works. Take Agatha Christie structures. Add class commentary. Populate with character actors having the time of their lives. Let Daniel Craig do whatever Daniel Craig wants to do. The first Knives Out was great. Glass Onion was slightly less great but still enjoyable.

The religious setting interests me. Johnson has been dancing around American institutions — old money family, tech billionaire class — and the Church is. I mean. Ripe for critique. Whether he does something interesting with it or just uses the aesthetic for vibes remains to be seen.

Netflix is releasing this in December. No theatrical exclusivity which is a shame because these movies play great with an audience. The collective gasp when the twist lands. The communal laughter at the jokes. That’s lost on the couch.

But still. Benoit Blanc is back. The accent is back. The game is afoot.

I’m in.

The post Trailer Reaction – Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery appeared first on Archer Avenue.

Robert Eggers is a madman and I mean that as the highest compliment.

The Witch. The Lighthouse. The Northman. Each one more obsessively detailed than the last. Each one absolutely committed to its period and its vision. The man researches 17th century goat husbandry for authenticity. He builds actual Viking longhouses. He’s insane.

Nosferatu is Eggers tackling the vampire myth. The original story. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film. The shadow on the wall. The fingers. The rat-faced horror that defined what movie monsters could be.

And it’s. God. It’s so good.

Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok is genuinely terrifying. This is not sexy vampire territory. This is not suave immortal seducer. This is plague in human form. Death wearing skin. The makeup and performance work together to create something that shouldn’t exist, that your brain rejects as wrong. When he appears on screen the temperature drops. You feel cold in the theater.

Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen is the center of the film in a way that previous adaptations haven’t explored. Her connection to Orlok — that psychic bond that draws him across Europe — is not just plot mechanics here. Eggers makes it erotic and horrifying and shameful. Ellen is pulled toward something she knows will destroy her and she cannot stop. It’s addiction metaphor if you want it to be. It’s sexual awakening horror if you want that instead. It’s both.

The production design is beyond praise. Every frame looks like a painting from the 1800s come to life. The practical effects — the rats, the shadows, the decaying bodies — make CGI look like a cheap trick. Eggers shot on 35mm film and you can feel the texture of it.

Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas Hutter, Ellen’s husband, and he’s essentially the audience surrogate. A rational man confronted with the irrational. His journey to Orlok’s castle is. I mean. Horror filmmaking at its finest. The dread builds and builds until you want to scream at him to turn around.

Willem Dafoe returns to vampire hunting after Shadow of the Vampire and he’s obviously having a blast. Van Helsing reimagined as this eccentric occult scholar, playing against his usual intensity with something more theatrical.

My complaint. One complaint. The middle section in the town drags slightly. After the castle sequence the movie has to downshift and set up the finale and some of that setup feels slower than the rest. Minor issue.

Nosferatu is the best horror movie of the year. Maybe the best horror movie in years. Eggers took a story that’s been told a dozen times and found new terror in it. New beauty in its ugliness.

Go see this in theaters. Go see it with someone who’s scared easily. Watch them clutch their armrest. That’s the experience.

My rating: ★★★★★

Nosferatu on IMDb | Nosferatu on Rotten Tomatoes

The post Movie Review – Nosferatu appeared first on Archer Avenue.

I first read this book in 2011. Thought it was interesting but maybe a bit alarmist. The internet was fine. Social media was fun. What was this guy so worried about?

Reading it again in 2025 I want to go back in time and slap myself.

Jaron Lanier — who helped invent virtual reality, who was there at the beginning of Silicon Valley, who knows these people and these systems from the inside — saw everything coming. Not the specifics but the trajectory. He understood that the decisions we were making about digital architecture would lock in and become permanent. That treating humans as data points would eventually make us act like data points.

The book is fifteen years old and it reads like it was written yesterday.

His critique of “the hive mind” — the way platforms aggregate human expression into statistical averages, flatten individual voices into “content,” reward conformity and punish originality — describes the internet we live in now. Twitter reducing all thought to 280 characters. TikTok’s algorithm deciding what creativity looks like. AI art trained on human labor, erasing the humans in the process.

Lanier was warning about AI before most people knew what AI was. Not killer robots. Something worse: systems that would make human contribution invisible. That would blur the line between human creativity and statistical recombination until we forgot the difference.

The writing is sometimes meandering. He’s a polymath with too many ideas and not all of them land. There are sections about music and economics and virtual reality that feel dated in their specifics. And his proposed solutions are vague — he knows what’s wrong but not exactly how to fix it.

But the diagnosis is prophetic. The chapter on “lock-in” — how early technological decisions become permanent because so much gets built on top of them — explains why we’re stuck with platforms that don’t serve us. The chapter on “digital Maoism” — his term for the cult of collective intelligence that erases individual achievement — describes the ideology driving the worst tech companies.

I don’t agree with everything. Lanier is more hopeful about capitalism than I am. He thinks better design can fix systemic problems. I’m less sure. But his humanist core — his insistence that people are not users, not data, not content — feels essential now.

Read this. Then look at your phone. Then feel bad. Then maybe do something different.

My rating: ★★★★☆

You Are Not a Gadget on Goodreads

The post Book Review – You Are Not a Gadget (Re-read) appeared first on Archer Avenue.

Original Rating: ★★★★★
New Rating: ★★★★☆

I cried the first time I saw this movie. The “don’t let me leave Murph” scene broke me. McConaughey watching twenty-three years of messages from his kids while tears stream down his face broke me again. I walked out of the theater convinced I’d seen one of the great films.

Ten years later. Hmm.

The first two hours of Interstellar are still incredible. The setup on the dying Earth. The launch. Miller’s planet with the massive waves. The time dilation reveal where Cooper realizes decades have passed for his family. All of that still works. Nolan at his best is unmatched at creating awe, at making you feel the scale of things.

But the third act. Oh the third act.

Cooper falls into a black hole and ends up in a tesseract built by future humans where he can communicate with his daughter across time through gravity and morse code and a bookshelf.

I. Look. I bought it in the theater. The emotional momentum carried me through. But watching it now — sober, at home, able to think about what I’m seeing — it doesn’t hold up. It’s goofy. The logic is hand-wavy in a movie that spent two hours establishing scientific credibility. “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space” is a beautiful sentiment and a terrible basis for the third act of a hard science fiction film.

And the ending. Cooper wakes up on a space station named after his daughter. She’s an old woman. They have a brief reunion and then he flies off to find Brand. It’s weirdly rushed for such a long movie. The emotional payoff we’ve been building toward — Cooper and Murph reuniting — happens and then immediately ends. He doesn’t stay. He doesn’t see his grandkids grow up. He just. Leaves again.

The performances remain excellent. McConaughey is giving everything to this role. Jessica Chastain in the middle section is great. The score — Hans Zimmer doing organ swells — is one of the best of Nolan’s career.

I still love the ambition. I love that Nolan swung for the fences. I love the practical models and the real cornfields and the commitment to showing space as it might actually be. I love that this exists.

But I can’t give it five stars anymore. The third act breaks too many rules the movie established. Four stars. Still great. Still flawed.

My rating: ★★★★☆

Interstellar on IMDb | Interstellar on Rotten Tomatoes

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