2025 Awards Season Round-Up Part 2

 by Rob DiCristino

Watch these movies or don’t. I’m not your dad.

Eternity (Dir. David Freyne)

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a high-concept rom-com with as much potential as David Freyne’s Eternity, a Nora Ephron-y, James L. Brooks-y afterlife love triangle that forces Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) to choose between eternity with her lost soulmate (Callum Turner, whose Luke died in Korea shortly after their wedding) and the man she built a life with (Miles Teller as the sturdy-if-uninspiring second husband, Larry). Trapped in an airport-style purgatory with a pair of “afterlife coordinators” (Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early) awaiting her decision, Joan weighs her untapped passion for Luke against the decades of mortgage payments and dirty laundry she shared with Larry. It’s a great premise, but even at a bloated 114 minutes, Eternity spends too much time on convoluted worldbuilding for its talented cast to develop enough character — or, you know, comedy — in the margins for us to care. Instead, Eternity punts its chance to say something insightful about everlasting love, splitting the thematic difference in the dullest, most predictable possible way.

Eternity is in U.S. theaters now.

Sirāt (Dir. Óliver Laxe)

I joked on Letterboxd that Óliver Laxe’s Sirāt is the Mad Max: Fury Road of despair, a sweaty odyssey into a heart of darkness that begins when Louis (Sergei López) and his young son, Esteban (Brúno Nuñez) arrive at an illegal Saharan rave — no, that’s not a cocktail or a sex position; I mean an actual illegal rave in the Sahara Desert — in search of Louis’ missing daughter. From there, they join a group of ravers in RVs heading to the next party, inadvertently forming a makeshift family of refugees from a WWIII-sized conflict that escalates somewhere beyond the edges of the desert. Set to a thumping house score and sporting some of the most spectacular landscape cinematography you’ll see this year, Sirāt tests its characters and its audience in the bleakest imaginable ways — prepare for a lot of online litigation about its Big Spoiler — on the road to a larger, if, by the end, more than a little muddled, message about the power of compassion, the value of trust, and the unexpected catharsis that comes when we surrender ourselves to an indifferent universe.

Sirāt is in limited U.S. release now.

Rental Family (Dir. Hikari)

Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser — man, that’s really true, isn’t it? — returns with Rental Family, a sickly-sweet family dramedy about a lonely American actor (Fraser as Phillip) who takes a job with Rental Family, Inc., a Japanese service providing all-purpose human surrogates to those in need. Want to stage a wedding to get your parents off your back about getting married? Phillip’s your rental husband. Need a “mistress” to apologize to your wife for your bad behavior? His colleague Aiko (Mari Yamamoto) will play her. It’s an innocuous enough arrangement in service of adults, but when Phillip is recruited to play the father of a young girl (Shannon Gorman as Mia) so that she can get into a prestigious private school, he finds himself unable to keep up the ruse without getting attached. Rental Family isn’t too interested in its logistics — Fraser’s wincing smile betrays uncomfortable cultural undercurrents that the film never explores — but director/co-writer Hikari maintains just enough emotional integrity for a light, harmless diversion.

Rental Family is in U.S. theaters now.

Is This Thing On? (Dir. Bradley Cooper)

If you’ve been divorced for more than a few years, watching Bradley Cooper’s new film Is This Thing On? is a bit like reading The Catcher in the Rye in your thirties: It’s impossible to engage with the story of an upper-middle class marriage on the edge of implosion — that of Alex (Will Arnett, welcome in a dramatic role but styled too similarly to Cooper) and Tess (a bored and wasted Laura Dern) — without rolling your eyes at its presumption and complacency, at its crippling lack of wisdom and self-awareness. Yes, Cooper’s story of mid-life self-reinvention — co-written with Arnett and English comedian John Bishop, who based it on his life — nails all the minutiae of domestic upheaval, the way it feels to suddenly remember all the things you’ve forgotten about yourself. And yes, it’s gratifying to watch Alex and Tess arrive at the self-evident conclusion that they were unhappy “in” their marriage, not “with” their marriage. But as with Holden Caulfield and his phonies, I spent most of Cooper’s dry, unfunny film wishing they’d grow the fuck up and get over themselves.

Is This Thing On? hits U.S. theaters on December 19th.

A House of Dynamite (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

As a machine engineered to generate tension, the first act of Kathryn Bigelow’s new Netflix thriller A House of Dynamite functions far more effectively than any of the military tech deployed to deter the nuclear attack at its dramatic center. Chronicling the twenty-odd minutes before the end of the world from the perspectives of a missile command major (Anthony Ramos) and a White House duty officer (Rebecca Ferguson), Bigelow captures the horrifying implications of institutional collapse and the existential hopelessness that comes with the realization that one can do everything right — follow every protocol, execute every command — and still fail. But when A House of Dynamite repeats those twenty minutes a second and third time through other eyes — Tracy Letts, Jared Harris, Gabriel Basso, Idris Elba, and others — the limp incuriosity of Noah Oppenheim’s jargony screenplay becomes just as catastrophically clear. The unintentional result is a film just as feeble and inert as the characters it dooms into defeated oblivion.

A House of Dynamite is on Netflix now.