Brendan Hodges

well I guess if Nolan didn't leave Warner Brothers in 2021 he would have left them in 2025 lol

’Tis the Season: twenty underseen winter holiday favorites • Journal • A Letterboxd Magazine To honor the winter break on the horizon, Letterboxd crew and contributors share twenty underseen holiday favorites: where Christmas and Hanukkah deep cuts and surprisingly festive noir and stop-motio...

I wrote about THE LION IN WINTER for @letterboxd.social's list of underseen holiday gems, where Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn joust over which son should take over their kingdom. It goes down like a mulled wine laced with hemlock and yew:

letterboxd.com/journal/unde...

I'll add FIRE AND ASH is so dense with characters, plot arcs and thematic ideas –– many only gestured at in shorthand –– you get the sense Cameron knew this might be his last AVATAR so he threw in everything he could. I'm not the first to say it, but it's his RETURN OF THE JEDI.

AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH is the darkest and dreamiest of the three, with epic action foiling a nearly Biblical rumination on tested faith and loss. If it spends too much time messily restaging series highs, it's only to come full circle. Frustrating, exhilarating and transcendent.

I just think there's a lot more substance and strong work done here than is being given credit for –– Joyce is criticized for being kooky comic relief, but she gets a couple of the season's most important dramatic beats with Will, full circle moments of their arc the entire show

it's true dialogue this year is deplorable, overly expository and forces characters to say things they normally wouldn't (the Netflix phones thing), with some trapped in the past like Steve, Jonathan, or Hopper early on. That sucks, and if it's enough to take you out, I get it.

I really liked Mike becoming a good big brother to Holly, which like the Harry Potter movies or BOYHOOD, emphasized the way these kids are aging with a new generation coming up after them. Fearlessly leading through a battlefield felt like a natural destination of his arc.

despite criticism I actually felt STRANGER THINGS 5 had strong character work: Will's agency, Nancy's accountability, Robin's self-confidence, Dustin's grieving edginess, Hopper trusting Eleven. These are smart choices! They're not perfect in execution but they worked for me

The 15 Best Sci-Fi Movies & TV Of The Year, Ranked From shows about aliens among us to revolutions in a galaxy far, far away, here are Inverse's top sci-fi movies and TV shows of 2025.

for @inverse.com I ranked the top 15 sci-fi movies and tv shows of 2025, from anti-fascist Star Wars to a miserable woman who has to save the planet and even an underdog Predator, here's the best science fiction of 2025:

www.inverse.com/entertainmen...

reading Derrida in between rewatching episodes of STRANGER THINGS, I contain multitudes

MARTY SUPREME aka THE TORTURED PING PONG SOCIETY is incredible, a screwball sports thriller about the horrible exuberance of youth and the cascading consequences of betting it all on greatness. Chalamet’s best performance. Even at two and a half hours, exhilarating.

Their Show Cracked Open the World: Siskel & Ebert Memories | Roger Ebert | Roger Ebert Our contributors weigh in on the impact of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on the 50th anniversary of their hit TV show, "At the Movies."

I wrote about the wonderful Siskel & Ebert for its 50th anniversary at @ebertvoices.bsky.social, along with a deep bench of incredible writers. Reading through these made me emotional:

www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/...

It's a film of tremendous courage and rascally wit. I frequently couldn't believe what I was seeing. for all of Panahi's frank ethical debate and direct account of Iran's past, ACCIDENT is often playful and funny, all while maintaining its gut-punching tension. it's a masterpiece

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT was one of the most intense movies I've ever seen; knowing how it was made, the more the characters put themselves in danger by rushing through the streets and openly critiquing Iranian authority, the more Panahi risked his life and career for his art.

I'm still reeling from IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT, Panahi's queasy thriller about how authoritarianism dehumanizes not only through horrible living conditions, but by pushing the persecuted to be the worst versions of themselves in pursuit of something like justice.

turning WUTHERING HEIGHTS, a wonderful novel about cycles of abuse and selfish and horrible people, into an erotically charged "greatest love story of all time" style pop-adaptation seems like it was designed just to irk me personally

Some might throw this in the good dumb fun category, and certainly the cast is having a great tine, but it’s so blandly directed the “real stunts” fleetingly fly by. Little that happens is motivated. And worse, most of the best bits are spoiled in the trailer.

THE RUNNING MAN is a sloppy bore. Action is cut to pieces, the plot is all lazy contrivance and if you Pepsi Challenged the movie nobody would know it was directed by Edgar Wright. It slips by with a low hum of entertainment value. I didn't expect much, but it was worse than that

a lot of great acting here, but especially by Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen, who all give nuanced turns of humor and sadness. I usually feel what I might call the "Shannon vibe" coming through his performances (complimentary), but he really disappears into this one.

DEATH BY LIGHTNING is particularly great for the LINCOLN-heads, which also contrasts the spoils of high office with the underhand sausage-making that feeds our government. Only, with the added dimension of a man whose limited grasp of the American Dream spurs him to violence.

really loved DEATH BY LIGHTNING. it's a thrilling study of our American Project, where a Wambsgansian Raskolnikov pathologizes his failings into a mission to murder a president, whose ascendance captures the folly and power of politics. but most crucially: it has all of the boys.

PLURIBUS is also clearly a show made by Vince Gilligan. Not just the cold opens, but he also interweaves BREAKING BAD style set-pieces –– with characters problem solving bizarre situations on the fly –– into his philosophical questions. It's incredibly smart, savvy storytelling.

Gilligan has episode 1 ends where most shows would've ended the season, and episode 2 repeats the trick. Instead, each development prompts an existential problem: individualism and agency, the solipsism of wish fulfillment, the ethics of civil responsibility. It's a thrillingly dense show.

PLURIBUS is amazing. It feels like the classic speculative sci-fi of the 1960s, with Gilligan using his genre setup to provocatively explore nothing less than the nature of consciousness and what makes us human. Every scene is a discovery. And yes, Rhea Seehorn is extraordinary.

Like PREY, BADLANDS has rad sci-fi ideas (sword fights with tree tentacles, fields of razor grass, etc), but those novelties are undercut by bland filmmaking and flat, low-contrast images. Trachtenberg comes up with cool stuff, but he's not a strong enough visualist to execute.

PREDATOR: BADLANDS is a good time, playing as an episode of STAR TREK where a Klingon is stranded with a chirpy android, full of images right out of the gamerbrained sci-fi desktop wallpapers circa 2008. Many will love this, but I'm just so tired of movies looking so fucking gray

Yeah, and being clever about which arcs to adapt into movies.

it's wild how Disney via Marvel and possibly Star Wars (we'll see, I guess) have been struggling to interconnect TV and theatrical releases, you've got DEMON SLAYER, JUJUTSU KAISEN now CHAINSAW MAN proving the effectiveness of the model when done right.

the CHAINSAW MAN movie is terrific, a heart-fluttering, shark-riding, tragicute romance-action movie that subverts anime/manga romance tropes while delivering exhilarating multi-art-styled action. poor Denji. basically the platonic ideal of what I want one of these to be.

BUGONIA is much more a comedy about the nature of language and syntax as a way to unravel our warped perspectives, especially from a top-down point of view, than it is a kidnapping thriller. It doesn't quite do everything it wants but a more interesting movie than I expected.