One Battle After Another (2025) ****

 

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson is firmly established as a director who makes long movies. They tend to be good, but they are invariably well over two hours long, which serves as a barrier to watching them. It took me a while to get motivated to watch his latest, despite an Oscar nomination, but I'm glad I finally did.

Loosely based on the novel Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Pat Calhoun, a washed-up, former revolutionary. Back in the day, Pat and his lover Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) did explosives work for an anti-fa-type group. When Perfidia gets caught, she sells out her comrades and abandons Pat with their baby girl. Years later, Pat is raising their now-teenager, smoking weed, and being paranoid that the government is coming for them. Turns out, he is right.

Paul Thomas Anderson is a master at 2 things: recruiting great talent and blending the dark with the humorous. Both skills are fully on display here. DiCaprio is in top form, and he has great chemistry with Teyana Taylor. Benicio del Toro is excellent in a small but critical role. Sean Penn, however, steals the movie as rogue ICE commander Steven J. Lockjaw. His obsessive border cop is a mix of Captain Ahab and General Jack D. Ripper, from “Dr. Strangelove.”

Anderson manages to maintain a perfect mix of drama and comedy through this 2 hour 41 minute film. “One Battle After Another” deals with domestic terrorism, murderous government agents, brutal immigration crackdowns, and racist secret societies. He leavens the film with just enough absurdity to lighten the mood while keeping us in the narrative. Of course, the film contains some completely fantastical elements. ICE agents would never just execute people in the streets, and the U.S. government would never turn American cities into war zones just to arrest a few illegal aliens. Would they?

4 stars out of 5

Frankenstein (2025) ****

 

Guillermo del Toro ("The Shape of Water" "Pan's Labyrinth") is known for telling stories about monsters, so it made sense he would tackle the Frankenstein myth. In fact, del Toro has said that making a Frankenstein film was long a dream of his. It took him quite a while to realize the dream, as he started this project as far back as 2008. Almost 20 years later, he has given us what I think is the best film adaptation yet.

Oscar Isaac plays the titular Victor Frankenstein. Raised by a domineering father (Charles Dance), who is a renowned surgeon, Victor loses his mother as a child. He follows his father into medicine, determined to outdo him and overcome death. Victor's experiments in reanimation lead him to create a man-like creature (Jacob Elordi) from assembled body parts. Ultimately horrified and disappointed by his creation, Victor tries to destroy the Creature, but it escapes to wreak havoc on Victor's life and wander a world where it doesn't belong.

I tried reading the source material, Mary Shelley's novel, quite a few years ago, and honestly I found it boring. Maybe the 19th-Century Gothic writing style just isn't my thing. Maybe I would like it better now. Really, I think this story may just make a better movie than a book. The animation scene, for example, is barely touched on in the novel. Shelley wasn't really that interested in how the Creature was made, more on how he felt in an unwelcoming world. On film, though, the scene provides spectacular visuals, whether Victor is harnessing lightning to animate his creation, or, as in the 1994 Kenneth Branagh version, electric eels. The Creature, too, with his enormity and his patchwork of scars, is meant to be seen, not just described.

Still, del Toro's “Frankenstein” is reasonably faithful to Shelley's book, and certainly to her vision. He maintains her narrative structure, in which Victor and the Creature each get to tell their own side of the story. The classic 1931 version of "Frankenstein", starring Boris Karloff as the Creature, focused heavily on the mad scientist angle. As the film states, it was a story of “a man of science, who sought to create a man after his own image, without reckoning upon God.” Del Toro's film has plenty of mad science, but he fleshes out the characters' motivations, giving Victor much more of a backstory than he has in the book. He also fleshes out the character of Elizabeth (Mia Goth), the brother's fiance, for whom Victor develops feelings. She is barely an extra in the book, but del Toro turns her into a major character. He also gives us a more sympathetic Creature than we have seen in other versions. In every version of this story, you would have to be a monster yourself not to feel compassion for the Creature, but he is still murderous and fearsome. Del Toro's Creature does kill, but he is much less of a beast.

For my money, Guillermo del Toro and an excellent cast have brought Shelley's novel to life better than anyone so far.

4 stars out of 5

Train Dreams (2025) ****

 

Every year, Oscar nominations come out, and there are 2 or 3 films that everyone recognizes and is talking about. Then there will be 1 or 2 on the list that you never heard of. I think “Train Dreams” is one of those small, unseen films this year. It's streaming on Netflix, and you might want to check it out.

Based on a novella by Denis Johnson, “Train Dreams” is one of those pieces of fiction that feels more real than life itself. It relates the life of a character named Robert Grainier, starting with his boyhood as an orphan growing up around what would become Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. Robert does the things that most young men do: he has a family, experiences joy and sorrow, and makes a living – mostly as a logger.

For such a deceptively simple story, “Train Dreams” is quite moving and beautiful. Director Clint Bentley gets some memorable supporting performances from his cast, especially William H. Macy and Kerry Condon, and the cinematography is outstanding, depicting the Inland Northwest in all its seasons. Primarily, though, the film lives and dies on the strength of its star, Joel Edgerton, who appears in every scene. His version of Grainier is laconic. Watching “Train Dreams” is almost like watching a foreign film with subtitles – you have to pay attention to the screen to read what is happening on Edgerton's weathered face, because he rarely speaks aloud what he is thinking.

The majesty of this film is its commonality. It's sort of the antithesis of “Forrest Gump.” The plot of Grainier's life is filled not with a series of wildly imaginative adventures, but with the kinds of drama we all experience – things that occur daily to somebody, somewhere, but which seem to completely fill our world when they happen to us. Grainier weathers the storms of his life one day at a time, waiting for a big revelation that will explain to him who he is and what IT is all about. But that revelation never comes. Instead, Grainier finds that while he was waiting for that big moment when his life would really begin, his life WAS happening, one day at a time.

4 stars out of 5