We are living in a cinematic landscape where nostalgia is currency and IP reigns like royalty, the summer of 2025 has delivered a surprisingly emotional cross-section of blockbusters, reboots, and original visions. It’s not just about which movie makes the most noise anymore—it’s about which ones resonate. From a soulful new Superman to a punk-rock resurrection of Final Destination, this season’s most popular films don’t just chase spectacle—they grapple with identity, grief, legacy, and the quiet terror of living in a hyper-connected world. What follows isn’t just a ranking—it’s a reckoning with what movies are saying about us right now, and which ones are worth your time, your tears, and your rewatch.
In The Shadow of Titans – Icons, Speed, and Rebirths
🦸♂️ Superman (2025)
Directed by James Gunn | RT: 83%
James Gunn’s Superman doesn’t just reboot the world’s most recognizable superhero—it reshapes him. In a cinematic landscape crowded by cynicism, the film dares to take Clark Kent seriously not just as a symbol, but as a soul. David Corenswet’s take on the Man of Steel is warm, principled, and paradoxically human in all the right ways—he carries the burden of power without posturing, and his moral clarity feels like a quietly radical choice.
Gunn’s direction wisely avoids a gritty rehash or a nostalgic homage. Instead, it’s earnest without being naive. Rachel Brosnahan’s Lois Lane has bite and vulnerability, and Nicholas Hoult brings a Lex Luthor whose menace is rooted in quiet control, not megalomaniacal camp. The film occasionally fumbles in pacing—its globe-spanning scope can feel cluttered—but its emotional axis remains steady. Gunn places heart before heroism, and in doing so, brings Superman soaring back down to Earth, where we need him most.
🦖 Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
Directed by Gareth Edwards | RT: 52%
“Back to basics” is the phrase that echoes through Jurassic World Rebirth, and while Gareth Edwards certainly revives the primal awe of the franchise’s earliest thrills, the film ultimately limps under the weight of fossilized clichés. Scarlett Johansson leads the cast with a measured, emotionally weathered performance, while Mahershala Ali elevates his character beyond exposition dumps with quiet gravity. The setup—a post-Dominion Earth where dinosaurs face extinction again—has potential, but feels undercooked.
The action set pieces are where Edwards thrives: tension builds from silence, framing is wide and patient, and the creatures are filmed like ancient gods—massive, unknowable, terrifying. But the human drama never quite matches the scale of its scaly stars. There’s an opportunity here to reflect on ecological collapse and the ethics of extinction, but the film plays it safe. What remains is a satisfying ride with teeth, but little bite.
🏁 F1: The Movie (2025)
Directed by Joseph Kosinski | RT: 83%
In F1, Joseph Kosinski harnesses the same kinetic intensity he brought to Top Gun: Maverick, but instead of jets, it’s Formula 1 cars—and instead of youthful bravado, there’s the magnetic burn of nostalgia. Brad Pitt, as fictional driver Sonny Hayes, is a weathered soul whose presence on the track evokes a past glory he can’t quite reclaim. It’s a performance steeped in restraint: cool, bruised, and captivating.
Kosinski’s filmmaking is ferociously precise. Cameras mount to the cars’ hoods, tires, and visors, translating speed into emotional velocity. You feel every turn, every loss of traction. What separates F1 from your average sports movie is its wistfulness. Beneath the torque and screech, it’s about the cost of legacy—of how we age out of greatness and race against obsolescence. It’s not flawless—some characters orbit Sonny too shallowly—but it roars with sincerity and style.
🎶 Sinners (2025)
Directed by Ryan Coogler | RT: 97%
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners isn’t just a movie—it’s a thunderclap of imagination. In a year of IP-driven behemoths, this original blockbuster pulses with soul. Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld play twin brothers (yes, it’s a story that bends gender in ways that ultimately work) whose return to their crumbling hometown sets off a chain of events part musical, part myth, part memory.
The film unfolds like a gospel-infused graphic novel, bursting with bold colors and rhythmic editing. Coogler’s direction has never felt more confident: he weaves between street-level grit and surreal interludes with a deft hand, balancing spectacle with specificity. Every musical cue feels earned, every dramatic beat thumps with generational weight. If Sinners has a flaw, it’s that it dares so much it can’t quite land it all. But its ambition is the point. It’s one of the rare blockbusters that wants to move you and move the medium forward.
⚔️ Thunderbolts* (2025)
Directed by Jake Schreier | RT: 88%
Marvel’s latest team-up film is less an Avengers imitation and more a scrappy, black-ops character study—and that’s why it works. Thunderbolts* gives the MCU a much-needed edge without falling into grimdark territory. Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova is the film’s heart and comic engine, radiating charisma in every deadpan line and bruising action sequence.
What’s most refreshing here is tone: the film flirts with nihilism but ultimately leans into redemption. Jake Schreier allows scenes to breathe—conversations play out without a mandatory joke every ten seconds. It’s a surprisingly restrained film for Marvel, with characters like Bucky Barnes and Ghost given space to be complicated. The third act gets a bit too CGI-heavy, but the film earns its emotional payoff. It’s not just “Marvel’s Suicide Squad.” It’s Thunderbolts*—funny, bruised, and better than expected.
Make sure to check out our guide on watching all of the MCU’s films in order here.
Rage, Power Plays, and Hearts in Conflict
☣️ 28 Years Later (2025)
Directed by Danny Boyle | RT: 88%
There’s a haunted urgency in 28 Years Later that makes it feel like more than a sequel—it’s a reckoning. Danny Boyle returns to the post-apocalyptic franchise that changed horror, this time alongside screenwriter Alex Garland, and together they deliver a film as socially searing as it is viscerally terrifying. Rage Virus may still be the hook, but what’s more infectious is the way fear mutates into ideology.
Jodie Comer commands the screen with a fierce intelligence that transcends the typical “survivor” role. Her performance, alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson, feels rooted in a desperate empathy that Boyle captures with intimate close-ups and frenetic handheld shots. The cinematography feels less like observation and more like intrusion. This isn’t a movie that lets you breathe. It grabs you by the throat, forces you to look at collapse not as chaos but consequence. There’s despair, yes—but also a grim, unshakable sense of hope clawing its way through the blood.
🕴️ Heads of State (2025)
Directed by Ilya Naishuller | RT: 71%
On paper, Heads of State shouldn’t work—a buddy-action comedy about the UK Prime Minister and the U.S. President teaming up to save the world feels one executive decision away from total cringe. But in practice? Idris Elba and John Cena make it sing. Their chemistry is the entire engine: Elba’s simmering cool against Cena’s guileless brawn creates a dynamic that’s less “odd couple” and more “oddly perfect.”
Director Ilya Naishuller (Hardcore Henry) keeps the action brisk and inventive. There are sequences so absurd—one involving a zipline, a diplomatic summit, and an alpaca—that they border on cartoonish, but the film knows exactly what tone it’s chasing. What falters is the satire. The geopolitical commentary is skin-deep at best, and Priyanka Chopra’s role feels frustratingly underwritten. But when it leans into chaos and camaraderie, Heads of State is a fun, fizzy ride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
🐉 How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Directed by Dean DeBlois | RT: 77%
Bringing a beloved animated classic into live-action is no easy flight, but How to Train Your Dragon mostly soars. Dean DeBlois returns to helm the adaptation of his own work, and his reverence for the original trilogy shines through. The result is a film that honors its emotional roots, even as it loses a bit of the animated magic in translation.
Mason Thames plays Hiccup with a charming awkwardness, and the relationship between him and Toothless remains the glowing ember at the film’s heart. Visually, the film is spectacular—Viking villages feel lived-in, and the dragons are rendered with a blend of majesty and menace. But there’s an unavoidable stiffness in some of the interactions that animation once smoothed over. Nico Parker is a standout, grounding the narrative with a soft but assured presence. It doesn’t quite eclipse the original, but it earns its place beside it.
🧳 The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
Directed by Wes Anderson | RT: 78%
Wes Anderson doesn’t make movies. He crafts moving dioramas—each frame a painting, each cut a wink. The Phoenician Scheme is no exception, though it’s perhaps his most narratively twisty project in years. A familial caper wrapped in a deadpan spy thriller, the film features Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton as estranged siblings trying to unravel their inheritance while dodging assassins, tax agents, and emotional baggage.
Anderson’s style remains intact: center-framed shots, pastel palettes, impossibly symmetrical mise-en-scène. But here, there’s an added layer of espionage farce that pushes his tone toward the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading. It’s funny, yes, but also quietly melancholic—a story about legacy, image, and the business of being born into something you didn’t choose. Riz Ahmed and Michael Cera provide offbeat counterweights, making the film feel like an intricate clockwork where everyone’s a little off-beat, and that’s exactly how it ticks.
👽 Elio (2025)
Directed by Domee Shi, Adrian Molina | RT: 82%
Pixar’s Elio is a cosmic balm for anyone who’s ever felt too weird, too shy, too unsure. Directed by Domee Shi (Turning Red) and Adrian Molina (Coco), this star-bound tale follows a young boy accidentally beamed into an intergalactic UN where he’s mistaken for Earth’s ambassador. It’s a classic Pixar setup: child, big idea, emotionally resonant misadventures.
Elio, voiced with wide-eyed sincerity by Yonas Kibreab, isn’t a chosen one—he’s just a kid navigating self-doubt in a universe that expects confidence. That’s the heart of the story: identity not as something bestowed, but built. The alien designs are playful and inventive (one species looks like sentient lava lamps), and Zoe Saldaña, as Elio’s mom, brings a grounded gravity. It may not hit the emotional peaks of Pixar’s best, but Elio glows with kindness and quietly radical empathy. It’s a film for anyone still figuring out who they are—which is to say, all of us.
Horror, Heartbreak, and Shadows of the State
🏛️ Sovereign (2025)
Directed by Christian Swegal | RT: 93%
Sovereign is one of the most unsettling political thrillers in years—not because of its violence (though it’s unflinching), but because of its plausibility. Inspired by real events, the film explores the radicalization of a father and son into domestic extremism with such slow-burning dread that you barely notice the temperature rising. When it finally explodes, the impact is seismic.
Nick Offerman turns in the performance of his career: feral, heartbreaking, and eerily familiar. His descent into ideological madness is not played with theatrical menace, but with the sad delusion of someone who truly believes he’s protecting his family. Jacob Tremblay matches him beat for beat, portraying innocence corroded into conviction. Christian Swegal directs with icy restraint, giving the material room to fester. If Sovereign lacks subtlety in its final act, it’s only because the truth it’s reflecting rarely does either.
🕵️♀️ Deep Cover (2025)
Directed by Tom Kingsley | RT: 90%
Who knew that a comedy about an improv teacher infiltrating a criminal underworld could carry such punch? Deep Coveris light on premise and heavy on charm, propelled by Bryce Dallas Howard’s giddy, nervous energy and a script that understands timing in every sense of the word. It’s part farce, part identity crisis, and entirely enjoyable.
What makes the film land is its balance—each set piece walks the line between absurdity and genuine stakes. Orlando Bloom, surprisingly delightful in a supporting role, plays an aging ex-thespian turned arms dealer with a flair for Shakespearean monologues. The improv angle could’ve been a gimmick, but it’s woven smartly into the story’s deeper concern: how easily we become the masks we wear. There’s real pathos beneath the pratfalls, and Kingsley’s direction knows when to go broad and when to let silence do the work.
👻 Bring Her Back (2025)
Directed by Danny & Michael Philippou | RT: 89%
After the breakout success of Talk to Me, the Philippou brothers double down on psychological horror in Bring Her Back, a film less about the supernatural and more about the ways trauma embeds itself into family. Sally Hawkins is flat-out terrifying—not because she screams, but because she rarely does. Her foster mother character exudes a calm so unnatural it leaves you squirming.
Set in a secluded countryside home, the film uses spatial tension and sound design brilliantly. Silence becomes a language of menace. The horror beats are precise and vicious, but it’s the emotional terrain that cuts deepest. This is a story about loss—twisted into control, disguised as love. The performances from the young cast (especially Sora Wong) are uniformly strong, grounding the nightmare in raw vulnerability. Like the best horror, it leaves you wondering whether the ghosts were ever real, or if we brought them with us.
👊 Ballerina (2025)
Directed by Len Wiseman | RT: 76%
A bloody pirouette through the John Wick universe, Ballerina makes a strong case for Ana de Armas as a full-fledged action icon. Her character, Eve Macarro, is given more pathos than John Wick ever had, and her grief is stylized into choreography. Literally. Wiseman leans into the baroque aesthetic of the franchise while adding a dreamlike layer of feminine fury.
The action sequences are exquisitely staged—each one feels like a dance number from hell. De Armas moves with calculated grace, and the camera treats every broken limb and blood spatter like brushstrokes. While the plot isn’t exactly revolutionary (revenge, mentorship, secret cabals), it’s elevated by mood. The Wickverse cameos are used sparingly and effectively—Keanu Reeves appears more as an omen than a co-star. If this is the direction the franchise is heading, we’re in for something more poetic, more operatic, and intriguingly weird.
🧱 Brick (2025)
Directed by Philip Koch | RT: 35%
There’s an intriguing premise at the heart of Brick: one day, a mysterious brick wall encloses a Berlin apartment building, trapping the residents inside with no way out. Unfortunately, the film squanders this setup with a muddled tone and undercooked characters. What could have been a claustrophobic allegory becomes a frustrating exercise in spinning its wheels.
The central performances—from Matthias Schweighöfer and Ruby O. Fee—aren’t the issue; they commit. But the script doesn’t know what it wants to be. At times it flirts with Kafkaesque satire, at others it leans into horror, and occasionally it dabbles in relationship drama. Nothing coheres. Worse, the mystery of the wall never deepens—it just becomes background noise. There’s a clear attempt to say something about isolation, bureaucracy, and existential dread, but Brickends up as a metaphor without a message. A structure with no foundation.
Immortals, Legends, and Last Missions
🗡️ The Old Guard 2 (2025)
Directed by Victoria Mahoney | RT: 22%
The original Old Guard found a surprising pulse in the superhero genre: melancholic immortality, slick fight choreography, and Charlize Theron wielding an axe. The Old Guard 2, unfortunately, feels like an echo of that promise. Bloated with lore and thin on urgency, the sequel trudges through ancient grudges and convoluted plotting, losing the character-driven heart that made the first film pop.
Theron remains magnetic, but she’s given little to do besides brood and bark orders. Attempts to deepen the mythology—flashbacks, secret councils, even immortality politics—clutter rather than expand. There are a few flashes of the old spark, particularly a tense sequence in Marrakesh involving Matthias Schoenaerts, but the pacing is glacial, and the emotional arcs fall flat. A film about undying warriors shouldn’t feel this lifeless.
🐉 How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
Directed by Dean DeBlois | RT: 77%
Returning in live-action form, How to Train Your Dragon is both a tribute and a translation—faithful to its animated roots, yet determined to forge a new path. Dean DeBlois, co-director of the original trilogy, brings the same emotional clarity to this version, and it shows. Hiccup’s awkward charm, Berk’s rugged beauty, and the bond between boy and dragon remain the emotional spine.
Mason Thames, as Hiccup, carries the film with an endearing mix of fear and curiosity. Toothless, rendered via some of the most expressive creature design in recent memory, is once again the silent star. While some supporting characters feel underwritten compared to their animated counterparts, the world-building remains rich. DeBlois resists the temptation to go bigger; instead, he goes deeper. The film’s central themes—trust, empathy, and the courage to build peace—resonate as strongly as ever.
🧬 The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
Directed by Matt Shakman | RT: Not Yet Rated
While the Rotten Tomatoes score hasn’t landed yet, First Steps is already dividing fans. Matt Shakman’s 1960s-inspired, retro-futurist aesthetic gives the film a comic-book authenticity that’s more stylish than sincere. Pedro Pascal leads the team with understated gravitas as Reed Richards, and Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm gets more agency than past versions—but the film’s tonal tightrope wobbles frequently.
The introduction of Marvel’s “First Family” feels more like a stylistic experiment than a cohesive character study. There are smart ideas—a Cold War backdrop, vintage tech, and internal team tensions—but the pacing is choppy, and the emotional stakes feel oddly distant. That said, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm is a scene-stealer: gruff, tragic, and quietly tender. It’s too early to call First Steps a triumph or a misfire, but its ambition is undeniable.
🥋 Karate Kid: Legends (2025)
Directed by Jonathan Entwistle | RT: 58%
Legends banks heavily on nostalgia—and while it doesn’t always hit cleanly, it does land a few crowd-pleasing strikes. Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio return with gravitas and warmth, bridging generations of martial arts storytelling. Their chemistry, surprisingly underused, is the film’s most compelling element, though it’s often sidelined in favor of newer, younger characters.
Ben Wang takes center stage as the new protégé, delivering a committed performance that balances insecurity with grit. The training montages are slick, if a bit mechanical, and the film hits familiar beats with sincerity but little surprise. The villain is laughably one-note, and some of the dialogue feels airlifted from 1986. Still, there’s a humble honesty in its execution—it may not reinvent the dojo, but it bows respectfully to its past.
🎩 Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie | RT: 80%
Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt finally reaches his endgame in The Final Reckoning, a maximalist sendoff that juggles emotional closure with globe-hopping chaos. Christopher McQuarrie delivers action sequences so elaborate they teeter on surreal—one standout involves a vertiginous, underwater train heist scored like an opera of inevitability.
What sets Final Reckoning apart is its emotional resonance. Hunt’s mortality is no longer a narrative tease—it’s a looming presence. The ensemble cast, especially Hayley Atwell and Simon Pegg, feel more central than ever. There are stumbles: a bloated runtime, a villain whose motivations dissolve under scrutiny, and a finale that’s more sentimental than surgical. But Cruise commits with the zeal of a man rewriting his own cinematic epitaph. He doesn’t just run—he runs toward legacy.
Dolls, Doom, and Descent into Chaos
🤖 M3GAN 2.0 (2025)
Directed by Gerard Johnstone | RT: 57%
M3GAN returns with sharper nails and more sass, but her upgrade feels like a patch rather than a true evolution. M3GAN 2.0 leans more into action than horror, shifting the tone from eerie satire to quirky survival thriller. The result is fun, but less unsettling—and that’s a tradeoff not all fans will appreciate.
Allison Williams and Violet McGraw reprise their roles with familiar rhythms, while the titular AI doll gets more screen time and a snappier personality. Jenna Davis’ voice work continues to balance menace with hilarity, but the stakes never quite feel real. The choreography of M3GAN’s movements—once uncanny and graceful—now feels cartoonish, played more for laughs than dread. It’s still a ride, but the tension that made the first film work so well is lost in the noise. Call it Child’s Play meets Spy Kids—not a failure, just a pivot to popcorn.
☠️ Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
Directed by Adam B. Stein & Zach Lipovsky | RT: 93%
With Bloodlines, the Final Destination franchise finds new life by embracing the inevitability of death not just as a hook—but as a haunting legacy. Set before the events of the original film, this prequel isn’t just a backstory; it’s a bone-chilling reset that adds emotional weight to its grisly premise. Director duo Stein and Lipovsky stage death not as spectacle but as fate—ironic, poetic, cruel.
Kaitlyn Santa Juana anchors the film with a haunted sincerity that transcends the genre. Each kill sequence is a grotesque ballet of tension, distraction, and inevitability. But what truly elevates the film is its atmosphere: less zany than previous installments, more mournful. The mythology deepens without becoming self-parody. There’s a reverence here for what Final Destination has always flirted with: the idea that death isn’t random, but intimate. It’s the franchise’s best entry since the original—and perhaps its most mature.
🛡️ The Old Guard (2020)
Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood | RT: 80%
Revisiting The Old Guard in the wake of its less successful sequel is a reminder of what worked so well the first time. Prince-Bythewood brought a grounded sensibility to the superhero formula—less capes and cities, more scars and consequences. Charlize Theron leads with controlled sorrow as Andy, an immortal warrior who’s grown weary of endless battle and empty victories.
The film’s real strength lies in its humanity. KiKi Layne plays Nile, a marine thrust into this world of eternal conflict, and her dynamic with Andy forms the story’s emotional backbone. The fight scenes are crisp, brutal, and efficient—less about flash and more about fatigue. It’s a film that asks: what do we lose when we outlive purpose? Though it occasionally stumbles under exposition, it never forgets the power of character over concept. In a genre of gods and monsters, The Old Guard is about warriors—and the weight they carry.
🦇 The Batman (2022)
Directed by Matt Reeves | RT: 85%
Matt Reeves’ The Batman isn’t here to entertain—it’s here to brood, bleed, and whisper. With a noir aesthetic soaked in grime and shadow, this iteration of the Caped Crusader is perhaps the most psychologically insular to date. Robert Pattinson’s Batman doesn’t perform heroism; he endures it. He’s not a symbol yet—just a man clinging to the idea of one.
Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle brings a vital, feline grace to the film, while Paul Dano’s Riddler is less puzzle-master and more homegrown terrorist. The tone is oppressive, the visuals drained of light, and yet the film feels singularly alive. Greig Fraser’s cinematography turns Gotham into a character: rain-soaked, rust-colored, always rotting. At nearly three hours, it dares you to slow down, to linger in the discomfort. It may not be universally loved, but for those attuned to its frequency, The Batman is a masterclass in mood.
⚔️ Warfare (2025)
Directed by Ray Mendoza & Alex Garland | RT: 92%
Warfare isn’t a war movie. It’s a panic attack filmed in real time, stitched together from memories that blur into nightmares. Co-directed by Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland (Civil War), the film offers an unflinching look at modern combat with a documentary’s rawness and a poet’s sensibility. It doesn’t glorify—doesn’t even moralize. It just watches.
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai leads a tight ensemble with quiet intensity, portraying a young soldier swallowed by an environment where survival is more instinct than strategy. The editing is disorienting, intentionally claustrophobic. You never know where the next bullet or betrayal is coming from. And yet, Warfare finds room for introspection—moments where silence is louder than gunfire. If you’re looking for thrills, this isn’t your film. But if you want to understand what war feels like, this may be one of the most vital offerings of the year.
Grief, Intrigue, and Quiet Cracks in the System
📱 Drop (2025)
Directed by Christopher Landon | RT: 84%
In an era where digital privacy is both sacred and routinely violated, Drop finds a potent thriller in our collective anxiety. Meghann Fahy plays Violet, a widowed mother caught in a vortex of surveillance and suspicion after her phone inexplicably begins feeding her information she shouldn’t know—texts from the dead, photos that never existed. What follows is part Hitchcock, part Black Mirror, and entirely unnerving.
Christopher Landon directs with stylish restraint, letting tension build through suggestion rather than spectacle. Fahy delivers a nuanced performance, navigating grief and paranoia with aching vulnerability. The film cleverly uses familiar tech tropes (lost phone, data leaks, GPS tracking) to strip away the illusion of control we have over our digital selves. While the third act dips into melodrama, Drop earns its thrills through atmosphere and concept rather than shock. It’s a thriller that lingers—not with a bang, but with a chill.
💔 Evelyn (2018)
Directed by Orlando von Einsiedel | RT: 100%
Not new, but newly rewatched by many amid 2025’s emotionally heavier offerings, Evelyn is a profoundly personal documentary that quietly devastates. Directed by Orlando von Einsiedel, the film follows him and his family as they walk across the UK to commemorate his brother Evelyn, who died by suicide over a decade prior. But the journey isn’t really about walking—it’s about finally talking.
There are no stylistic fireworks here. The power is in the silences—the hesitant starts of conversation, the memories stumbled into, the moments when words fail. The camera is unintrusive, a silent companion to grief. What emerges isn’t just a tribute to a lost sibling, but a raw meditation on masculinity, mental health, and the generational patterns we inherit. In a culture obsessed with spectacle, Evelyn is a quiet act of defiance—a reminder that healing can be as simple, and as impossible, as a walk together.
🎯 The Amateur (2025)
Directed by James Hawes | RT: 60%
The Amateur wants to be Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but lands somewhere closer to a subdued Bourne. Rami Malek plays Charlie Heller, a CIA decoder who finds himself drawn into fieldwork when his wife is killed in a terrorist attack. The hook—an analyst pushed beyond his limits—is compelling. But the execution is a slow burn that forgets to spark.
Malek brings his usual introspective edge, portraying Charlie not as an unlikely hero but as a reluctant one, unraveling in real time. His chemistry with Rachel Brosnahan is warm and authentic, though the script gives her little to do beyond supportive glances and moral center. The film’s biggest issue is its tone: it wants to be grounded, but also thrilling, and the pacing suffers as a result. Still, there’s value in its quieter ambitions. The Amateur isn’t flashy, but it hums with quiet dread and bureaucratic paranoia, capturing the loneliness at the heart of espionage.
🎬 Final Verdict
Across six batches and thirty films, we’ve seen cinematic ambition in every form—from intimate grief rituals (Evelyn, Sovereign) to bombastic spectacle (Superman, Final Reckoning), to surprising hybrids like Sinners and F1. Some stumbled under legacy pressure (Old Guard 2, Brick), others found life in reinvention (Bloodlines, How to Train Your Dragon, Thunderbolts*). But what unites the best of them is this: they care not just about what happens, but how it feels—to lose, to grow, to break, to try again.
Let me know if you want a printable version, a ranked recap, or an awards-style superlative list (Best Direction, Best Performance, Most Surprising, etc.). I’d love to wrap it all up in the way that suits you best.
