Some of the best acting moments in any given film can happen without dialogue. A facial expression or a piece of body language can mean as much as a multi-page monologue. Those performers who can nail that moment are onto something special in their roles. When possible, Fantasy Life, from writer-director-star Matthew Shear, seeks to make the most of those wordless character statements.
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What is more important: the creation or the creator? While we could open that very debate to a movie and its director—especially this one returning to the director’s chair for his first feature in a tumultuous eight years—this film focuses on the field of architecture. So, more specifically, does the created structure matter more than the artist who conceived the design?
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In Storm Rider: Legend of Hammerhead, you’ve got muscular, heavy-metal boats racing for survival through surf laced with dazzling electrical bolts dropping from the sky. That doesn’t have to be entirely serious. Swash that buckle up a bit and squeeze some more color and courage out of this spectacle.
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Sometimes, the low point of a screw-up is the necessary springboard and not the “I told you so” gotcha moment. When that clarity is found in For Worse, it’s treated more as confirmation than a delayed epiphany, which plays truer to life than orchestrated movie moments that plant those revelations in grandiose gestures and climaxes.
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That positive togetherness among solid friends is your stamped answer to Lesson #2. The small yet serious life-and-death situation does not need an extra roller coaster. This is a keen balance in a film that is rightly not trying to create pitfalls to rattle cinematic seismometers for the action junkies because the wisening emotions displayed are more than enough.
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Clever comeuppance is not the same as legitimate consequences, and that’s where the stiff reality of real-life outside the dramedy movie crashes the party. Because Signing Tony Raymond hops back and forth between the sordid and the sincere without full potency for one or the other, the cinematic takedown of college football recruitment practices is half-strength, at best.
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Tributes and the flutters of nostalgia exist for the weirdest things in the oddest places, even for a cheesy 1997 movie that made $65 million after being #1 for two whole weeks. It was a helluva time to be alive then, and it’s helluva time to be alive now to see Anaconda both lampooned with love and gilded with the guts of its many victims…err… fans.
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There’s an energy—an intoxicating and exhausting fix—to hitchhiking on this downward spiral. However, when it’s all said and done in this male-dominated affair, you’re back to scrounging for or justifying the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of Lesson #3 and the fact that this is, once again, a tizzy made for ping pong.
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Unlike Stanley Kramer’s much-lauded Judgment at Nuremberg from 1961, which took a more fictional/composite direction, this film uses as many real figures as possible. Even so, there’s plenty of pendulum space for a courtroom drama of this subject matter to veer somewhere between respectful and exasperating. James Vanderbilt had a choice, and he, as an experienced and successful screenwriter known best for his gaudy action flicks, perked up Nuremberg with a little pump and pomp.
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What strengthens this viewing experience is the unyielding performance from Rose Byrne. Her expressive interpretation of both physical and mental fatigue is beyond anything she’s ever done and is one of the best acting displays of 2025. Her fully-formed comedic timing as a seasoned actress of that genre stirs the dark and uncomfortable humor that bubbles within If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
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Through it all, Truth and Treason means to call on more dissenters in this world. Either in the actual moment or in hindsight later, when people learn of or reflect on time periods of war and tyranny, they raise the question of where the dissenters were. Too often, the evil majority dominates the headlines and narratives of the given political or social conflict. In those times, conscientious objectors, protesters, or flat-out opponents of resistance were needed more than ever.
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This supporting role in an independent movie from Good Deed Entertainment is smaller in scope than his previous three credits in massive Marvel Cinematic Universe entries and pales in complexity to the memorable, morally complex characters on his resume, where this final bow may not feel important enough in some eyes. Nevertheless, there’s something special about placing Michael Douglas’s mystique in such a soft, simple position.
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