Winter 2024/2025 Movie Roundup

It’s time to take a look at the movies and streaming shows I watched in Winter 2024/2025!

As always, my ratings are totally subjective and based on nothing more concrete than my own opinions.

RED ONE (2024)

A strange mashup of genres – a holiday movie, urban fantasy, a thriller, and just a bit of existential horror.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson plays Callum Drift, who is the head of Santa Claus’s security. Meanwhile, Chris Evans plays an unscrupulous hacker and thief named Jack O’Malley. Jack unwittingly helps unknown malefactors kidnap Santa Claus, and so Callum and Jack have to team up to rescue Santa from his kidnappers.

This sounds like a lighthearted holiday movie, but it really isn’t. The movie is rather dour, and takes itself very seriously. Callum acts like he’s in a Jason Bourne movie, and deals with various supernatural creatures like a special forces operator assessing targets. Additionally, there are some urban fantasy elements with a vast government agency dedicated to hiding the supernatural world from normal people. I don’t think the dissonance really worked at all – it had pieces of a light holiday movie and pieces of a thriller, and they really didn’t mesh. It’s not hard to see why this one didn’t do well in the theaters.

Overall grade: D, in the spirit of Christmas generosity

ARGYLLE (2024)

This was a dumb movie, but I enjoyed it. Kind of like MURDER MYSTERY with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston on Netflix. I mean, that wasn’t exactly Shakespeare or Milton, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy myself while watching it. Same thing applies to ARGYLLE.

The plot is that the protagonist Elly Conway is a bestselling spy novelist. Elly is a bit of an eccentric personality, and travels everywhere with her cat in a backpack that has a window in it so the cat can see what’s going on. However, it turns out that Elly’s novels are accurately predicting events in Real Life espionage, so several sinister spy agencies are hunting her down to learn her secret. A spy named Aidan saves Elly, claiming he is the only one she can trust.

Of course, this is the kind of movie that has a shocking betrayal and plot twist every eight minutes or so, and the revelation of the central twist made me facepalm a bit. There’s a fight scene at the end involving colored smoke that’s absolutely bonkers.

It was on Apple+ or Apple TV or whatever it is called, but that means all the characters did all their computing on shiny new Apple devices, which is always amusing.

Overall grade: D+, but barely

VENOM: THE LAST DANCE (2024)

This wasn’t as good as the first two since so many of the characters did not return, but it brought the Venom trilogy to a mostly satisfying conclusion.

Eddie Brock and Venom are on the run after the events of VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE. Unbeknownst to either of them, the US government has a secret facility holding captured symbiote aliens, and the agency that runs the facility is hunting for them. Unbeknownst to the US government, the creator of the symbiotes, an evil entity called Knull, is preparing to escape his prison, and to do that he needs Eddie/Venom delivered to him alive. So he dispatches his creatures to Earth to hunt down Eddie and Venom, with disastrous results.

The best part of the movie was the comedic duo of Eddie and Venom, since the movie takes the absurdity of their situation and plays into it.

Overall grade: B-

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM (2024)

I read an interview with Brandon Sanderson where he said that a big part of the problem with movie adaptations of books is that the filmmakers often want to tell their own story, not the book’s, so they basically use the book as a framework for telling their own story, which inevitably annoys the readers of the book.

I suspect that was what happened with THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM.

This movie was a mixture of strong points and weaknesses. Apparently it only exists because New Line needed to put out something or they’d lose film rights to Tolkien’s stuff, and so THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM was fast-tracked.

The strong points: the animation looked pretty, the battle scenes were fun to watch, the voice performances were good, and the music was also good.

The weak points: it felt too long and slow-paced. I think a good half-hour could have been cut of the characters looking pensive and thoughtful. Additionally, I don’t think the changes to the plot quite worked. It’s based out of the Appendices of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, specifically the history of Rohan.

In the book, the plot is touched off when the corrupt Lord Freca demands that King Helm’s daughter Hera marry Freca’s son Wulf. Helm takes exception to this and ends up killing Freca. His son Wulf swears vengeance, gathers an army from Rohan’s enemies, and sets out to seize the crown for himself. In the book, Helm’s sons are killed, and Helm himself dies in the defense of the Hornburg, but his nephew Frealof gathers an army, kills Wulf, and becomes the new king of Rohan.

That would have been perfectly good for the plot, but as we mentioned above, I think the screenwriters decided they wanted to write about a Strong Female Character, so they massively expanded Hera’s part and made her the protagonist. The problem with this is that Hera is only mentioned once in the book, so the script has to make up a lot of extra stuff to justify Hera’s presence, which always weakens an adaptation of a book. This version of Hera would have been in danger of becoming a stereotypical #girlboss character, but she acts more like a Japanese anime protagonist, which does work better in this sort of movie than an Americanized Strong Female Character.

So, in the end not a bad movie, but I think it would have worked better if they had stuck closer to the original plot in the book.

Overall grade: B-

GOLDENERA (2022)

A documentary about the making of the classic Nintendo 64 game GOLDENEYE, and the company behind it. Until I watched this, I never knew that Rare, the company that made GOLDENEYE, was based in the UK.

I admit I really didn’t play GOLDENEYE back in the 90s. I did a few times at various social events, but I never really got into it since I didn’t own a game console from 1998 to 2019. Nonetheless, GOLDENEYE was a very influential game that left its mark on all first-person shooter games since. The documentary interviews most of the people who were involved in the making of GOLDENEYE, and it was fascinating to see how they more or less accidentally created a genre-defining game.

If you enjoyed GOLDENEYE, or are interested in video game history at all, the documentary is worth watching.

After many years of official unavailability, GOLDENEYE is now available on Nintendo Switch and Xbox, so I may have to give it a try.

Overall grade: B

WONKA (2023)

I didn’t really intend to watch this, but it was on in the background while I was playing STARFIELD…and STARFIELD has a lot of loading screens. 🙂

This wasn’t made for me, not even remotely, but I thought it was a competently executed example of a movie musical.

Anyway, the plot revolves around a young Willy Wonka coming to a city that seems like a weird hybrid between Paris and New York. He sets out to start selling his innovative chocolates, but soon runs into stiff opposition from the corrupt local candy industry, the corrupt local police chief, and his equally corrupt landlady, who has somehow transitioned from hospitality to luring people into debt slavery. Wonka makes allies from his fellow indentured workers, and soon he is conducting local chocolate manufacturing like a heist.

Like I said, this really wasn’t made for me, and I’m sure people who actually like musicals would have many more detailed opinions. But this had some genuinely funny bits. Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa was hilarious, and so was Rowan Atkinson as a corrupt bishop. The best line: “Judgment has come…in a most unexpected form!”

Overall grade: B

MAN ON THE INSIDE (2024)

A Netflix comedy from Mike Schur, who created PARKS & RECREATION , THE GOOD PLACE, and BROOKYLN 99. To describe this show, think of a meditation about accepting aging and death through Schur’s comedic style, and you’ll be there.

Anyway, Ted Danson stars as a recently widowed retired professor of engineering named Charles. His daughter is worried that he’s not handling things well and becoming too isolated, so suggests that he find a hobby. Charles answers a classified ad for an “older man who can use technology”, and finds himself recruited by a private investigator named Julie. Julie’s company has been hired to find a thief within a retirement home, and Julie is about 35 years too young to convincingly infiltrate a retirement home. Hence, Charles pretends to be a new resident, and finds himself befriending the residents he is supposed to investigate. All the while he tries to deal with the remaining grief from his wife’s death.

THE GOOD PLACE and BROOKYLN 99 both kind of fell apart in their final seasons, but MAN ON THE INSIDE avoids that in its final episodes, providing good resolution to both the conflict and the emotional stakes.

Both bittersweet and quite funny, and I approve that there’s going to be a 2nd season.

Overall grade: B

MINTED (2023)

An interesting documentary about the rise and fall of the NFT, which in the early 2020s we were assured was going to the Next Big Thing, but which turned out to be just another scam.

The documentary follows an interesting course, first explaining what an NFT is, and then interviewing artists who made life-changing money from minting their early NFTS. But then the speculators arrived, and so did the scammers. As of 2025, of course, NFTs are quite worthless, like so many Web 3.0 style technologies.

I think the documentary’s biggest weakness was assuming that NFT technology was around to stay and would find a use. I agree that it’s around to stay, but I don’t think it adds value to anything.

Nevertheless, an interesting look into the NFT fad.

Overall grade: B

GLADIATOR 2 (2024)

Basically the same movie as the original GLADIATOR, just reshuffled a bit and with twenty years of improved technology.

The main character Hanno is a soldier in an African city that rebels against Rome. After the rebellion is inevitably crushed, he is taken as a slave and ends up as a gladiator in Rome, determined to take his vengeance on the Roman general who ordered the death of his wife. However, the general was only carrying out the orders of the insane twin emperors Geta and Caracalla. For that matter, Hanno’s owner, the charming and affable Macrinus, has his own agenda. As Hanno seeks revenge, he finds himself drawn into the deadly game of imperial politics, and must confront the secrets of his own past.

The movie is only vaguely accurate in terms of history, but it does a good job of capturing the corruption and decadence of the Roman Empire at that time. The empire was in very bad shape, and in fact was only a few years from what historians call the Crisis of the Third Century, a fifty year period of continual civil war, assassination, usurpation, and economic meltdown that resulted in the empire breaking into three separate states for about fifteen years. Everyone knows that the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, but it very nearly didn’t make it even to 300 AD. So the ending of GLADIATOR 2 is a total fantasy, like one of those alt-history books where the Roman Empire ends up conquering the Americas or expanding into outer space.

That said, I enjoyed the movie. Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, and Connie Nielsen in particular gave very good performances, with Denzel Washington’s Macrinus as the standout.

Overall grade: B

HIGH SIERRA (1941)

1940s true crime grimdark. A common misconception is that black and white films are generally more sanitized and saccharine than modern fare. This definitely isn’t true – there wasn’t any gratuitous violence and nudity in 40s movies, but some of them were very cynical and dark. HIGH SIERRA definitely falls into that category. Humphrey Bogart plays Roy Earle, a bank robber currently in Indiana state prison. His former boss Big Mac arranges a pardon for him, and brings him out to California for one last big job. Unfortunately, the other people on Earle’s crew are idiots, and he has a growing sense of impending disaster. Additionally, Earle gets emotionally entangled with two women – Velma, a sick woman from back home, and Marie, a woman inured to the lifestyle of criminals. As Earle prepares for the job and attempts to deal with the two women, things get more and more complicated.

Definitely on the darker side, but well worth watching, both as a historical artifact and a crime story in its own right.

Overall grade: B+

STAR TREK: LOWER DECKS SEASON 5 (2024)

LOWER DECKS is an example of a parody of a thing that is so good that it sort of loops around the horseshoe and becomes a good example of the thing it is parodying.

Season 5 is the undeserved  end to the very funny LOWER DECKS series. Paramount really, really wants to get purchased by Skydance, and that’s probably going to happen in 2025, so there’s a lot of clearing the decks at Paramount, and I expect LOWER DECKS was one of the casualties.

Then again, our protagonists are no longer lower deckers but junior officers, so perhaps it was a natural place to end the show.

So LOWER DECKS went out pretty strong with a collection of funny & good episodes. All the characters experienced plot arcs and development. The lower deckers matured from the callow ensigns they were in Season 1, and the senior officers likewise experienced character growth and development. (I liked Commander Ransom’s triumphant battle cry of “high intensity interval training!”) I’d say the only weakness is that the show ended with multiverse stuff, and I don’t like multiverse stuff in general. Still, the show made a compelling argument for it, and the multiverse plot did give an excuse to bring back various TREK actors for speaking parts. And, to be fair, Star Trek has been doing multiverse stuff long, long before the Marvel movies ran the concept into the ground  – Captain Kirk was dealing with alternate universe stuff back in the 60s.

The last episode was a satisfactory conclusion to the series.

LOWER DECKS might be over, but once the Skydance acquisition settles down, maybe the characters will return in a new show called JUNIOR OFFICERS? One can hope! 🙂

Overall grade: B+

FRASIER REBOOT SEASON 2 (2024)

I liked this about as much as I liked season 1, which is to say I enjoyed it and found it funny. Frasier’s and his son Frederick’s relationship seems to have reached equilibrium, so the season spent more time on more 1940s style screwball comedy, which is not a bad thing. Some of the best comedy remains the conflicts between Frasier and Frederick, which is of course an echo of Frasier’s own conflicts with his father back in the original show in the 1990s.

I think the best episode was the return of Frasier’s scheming, Machiavellian agent Bebe and her daughter Phoebe, who did not exactly fall far from the maternal apple tree. The 10-episode format for the season does seem rather cramped compared to the 20-ish episodes per season of the original show, but that was a different era.

Frasier remains, as one of the characters said in the previous season, the same well-meaning buffoon who goes “that extra, ill-advised mile.”

Overall grade: A-

Finally, the three best things I saw in winter 2024/2025.

SATURDAY NIGHT (2024)

A biopic about the chaotic first night of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE back in the 70s. Quite hilarious in a vicious sort of way, and (from what I understand) it accurately captures the sheer chaos of live TV. Of course, the chaos surrounding SNL is probably a bit higher than usual for standard live television.

After I watched it, I looked it up, and it seems the movie compresses about three months’ worth of events into the hour and a half before the launch of the very first episode. What’s amusing is that the more outlandish an event was, the more likely it was to have actually happened in the leadup to the show’s launch. It was the mundane stuff that was made up.

JK Simmons was hilarious as Milton Berle.

Nowadays, SNL is an Institution, so it was amusing to see it back when everyone thought it was a bad idea that would fail catastrophically. The movie convincingly captured the “look” of the 1970s – all the characters looked like they were made of nicotine, cholesterol, and cocaine, and in some instances, a lot of cocaine. That stuff is bad for you, as several SNL stars later found out to their sorrow.

It really shows the randomness of history – watching the creation of SNL, you wouldn’t expect it to have lasting cultural impact, but it did.

Overall grade: A

THE THIN MAN (1934)

This is based on a novel by Dashiel Hammett, and was made pre-Hays Code, so the female lead tends to wear outfits that show off a bit more skin than you would otherwise expect in a 1930s movie. Interestingly, THE THIN MAN is a fusion of a noir detective movie and a screwball comedy, not two genres that are usually connected, and somehow it all works.

Anyway, the movie centers around detective Nick and his wife Nora, who have returned to New York after a four-year sojourn to California. Nick used to be a private detective, but then he married the wealthy Nora, and wanted to retire to a life of ease and parties with a lot of alcohol. Except everyone in New York assumes that Nick isn’t retired and is back on the case, and so he gets dragged into the disappearance of an eccentric factory owner and a string of murders that pop up around it. Of course, Nick isn’t as reluctant to come out of retirement as he pretends.

As is often the case in the 1930s, many of the rich characters are shown as malicious buffoons, especially the factory owner’s ex-wife. Nick and Nora, as the protagonists, are exempt from this.

This is considered a classic, and deservedly so – the characters are sharply drawn, the dialogue is good, the performances are excellent, the movie manages to portray a fairly complex plot in 90 minutes. You’ll want to watch it with the captions on, of course, because while human nature may not have changed in the ninety years since this movie came out, audio technology has sure improved.

Fun fact: Nick and Nora’s dog is named Asta, which is apparently a frequent answer in crossword puzzles due to the double vowels.

Overall grade: A

STAR WARS: SKELETON CREW (2024)

STAR WARS meets THE GOONIES meets PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN, and despite that odd combination of influences, the show was really good.

The show opens on the idyllic planet of At Attin, which looks like an idealized version of 1980s suburbia filtered through STAR WARS. Everyone on the planet has the same job – contributing to the Great Work. Since our four protagonists are kids, they don’t pay much attention to that or the concerns of the adults. When one of the children discovers a derelict spaceship in the woods, they accidentally activate it and fly off-planet. This is a problem because At Attin is protected by a Barrier that doesn’t allow travel, and the galaxy is a dangerous place with a lot of pirate gangs roaming around looking for prey.

However, the children fall in with Jod, who claims to be a Jedi who will help the kids get back to their home. Everyone they meet warns them that Jod is a con artist and not to be trusted, but he demonstrates Force powers again and again. And the kids’ home of At Attin has a mysterious secret, one that Jod desperately wants to claim.

Very entertaining. STAR WARS really works best as a kids’ adventure show, though I’m still looking forward to the second season of Andor, which is STAR WARS crossed with a John le Carre spy thriller.

Overall grade: A

-JM