Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Despite my mostly positive reviews of prior entries in the series, I'd been putting this one off. I'm a practicing Catholic, and Hollywood rarely depicts the Church in a kind light. Even members of other religions have reported WUDM rubbing them the wrong way -- and indeed, director Rian Johnson says he likes to make polarizing pictures that annoy much of the audience. But this one is still popular overall, and my curiosity about a cultural phenomenon won out.

During a Good Friday service in a small New York town, controversial Msgr. Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) is found stabbed to death under seemingly impossible circumstances. The police chief (Mila Kunis) is inclined to arrest junior Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor), who has a history of violence and notably locked horns with Wicks. But famed PI Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) thinks Jud, while no angel, doesn't act like the guilty party. He enlists Jud's help in gathering clues. The case gets freakier still come Easter....

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

In the past year, for the first time, I checked out some Fantastic Four comic books. They seemed like the biggest gap in my superhero education. I didn't even know at first about their influence on the Incredibles, let alone later Marvel properties. Alas, they've had a hard time getting popular screen outings, so this reputedly middling one would have to suffice.

Four years after the four astronauts gained powers from radiation exposure, Reed "Mr. Fantastic" Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue "The Invisible Woman" Storm (Vanessa Kirby) are expecting their first child, Franklin. Johnny "The Human Torch" Storm (Joseph Quinn) looks forward to being an uncle, and even Ben "The Thing" Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) sees Franklin as family. Then the alien Silver Surfer (a woman for once, Julia Garner) announces that she has selected Earth for the next meal of giant Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and recommends making the most of the time people have left. The Fantastic Four travel to meet Galactus, who offers to spare Earth if he can have the secretly powerful Franklin absorb his curse of insatiable appetite. Since Galactus, like Dormammu, is too mighty to consider fighting head on, the four struggle to come up with a third option....

Chak De! India (2007)

Never before had I watched field hockey (called just "hockey" throughout the picture), but getting the gist looked easy enough. At any rate, I chose to watch this partly because I had plenty of time to kill and partly because I can count on a sports flick to end happily. Or at worst, it's not a very important defeat.

In a Men's FIH Hockey World Cup match, Indian team captain Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan) makes a shot so bad that, in conjunction with his Islamic faith, people widely assume he took a dive in Pakistan's favor. Under pressure, he resigns and even moves out of town. Seven years later, he sees the opportunity for redemption when invited to coach the women's team. Of course, he wouldn't get that chance if officials had a high opinion of the female players....

The Maze Runner (2014)

Yes, one more dystopia for the year. It stops streaming on Netflix January 8, and I didn't want to forget. Besides, there's some advantage to watching while my memory of a certain other is still pretty fresh.

Once a month, an initially unidentified organization sends a new amnesiac teen, along with a few supplies, to a walled-off Glade with other such teens. Part of the wall opens each dawn to reveal a mechanized labyrinth, and designated "Runners" will explore and map it, hoping to find an exit. They have to return before the wall closes at dusk, because no one has ever lasted a night in the maze without getting stung by a cyborg monster called a Griever. If it doesn't kill you outright, its venom makes you too aggressively insane to retain your welcome in the Glade.

Protagonist Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) is the latest arrival, about three years into the maze's existence, so the population is a couple dozen. Within a few days, his curiosity has him breaking the teen society's rules and succeeding where no one else has. Not everyone appreciates this, especially Gally (Will Poulter), one of the leaders, who fears how the maze will respond. Indeed, it does start doing things differently, upping the difficulty level....

Tenet (2020)

Christopher Nolan doesn't seem to have directed any unpopular features, and this was one of the more profitable of the (infamously off) year. But I haven't encountered people discussing it much, and its IMDb rating is relatively low for him, so I hesitated to watch. The 150-minute runtime didn't tempt me either. Only a Netflix notice that it would stop streaming at the end of the year prioritized it for me.

Like in Looper, the time machine hasn't been invented "yet," but its effects can already be seen. Unlike in Looper, it doesn't just send things back; it can send things backwards. Even inanimate objects behave differently that way, as by falling upward to be caught by a "dropper." The curiously unnamed protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA agent, comes across such effects on a mission and is then made privy to a still more secretive agency, Tenet (clearly named just for the palindrome), that tries to use time travel for the greater good. He and recruiter Neil (Robert Pattinson) are among a globe-hopping team out to neutralize the forces of the world's most dangerous time traveler, Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh).

Zootopia 2 (2025)

I had been looking forward to this sequel at least as much as I had to Inside Out 2. When I learned that it would feature a good-aligned snake, I grew even eagerer. So I talked my parents into joining me at a theater. (If you go to a family movie in December, expect an obscene number of ads. I finished my candy before the first preview.)

Within a week after the last scene of Zootopia, lapine Officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and her new ZPD partner, reformed vulpine hustler Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), are losing their heroic public image and the support of Chief Bogo (Idris Elba), thanks to Judy's highly irregular, reckless approach to crime fighting and Nick's complementary unserious attitude. It gets worse when they start aiding and abetting Gary De'Snake (Ke Huy Quan), a pit viper who steals a city treasure that he believes holds a secret that will vastly improve life for the marginalized reptiles in Zootopia. Crime boss Milton Lynxley (David Strathairn) wants to keep that secret at any price, and he pressures new mayor Brian Winddancer (Patrick Warburton) into authorizing a deadly hunt for the rogue cops.

The Hunger Games (2012)

After all the post-apocalyptic horrors I watched in October, I thought it'd be a while before I tried another dystopia. But when YouTube suggested this one to me, I thought it was a pretty big hole in my cultural education. Besides, at least the dystopia is legalistic and orderly for a change.

In the future nation of Panem, an annual televised competition has two 12- to 18-year-olds from each of 12 districts live in a rigged woodland until only one survives, with an expectation that some deaths will be at each other's hands. They're usually drafted by lottery, having greater odds of being picked the more they accept government rations, but Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), 16, volunteers to replace her younger sister (Willow Shields). The other "tribute" from her district is her friend Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who has wanted to be more than a friend to her, but the rules have erased his hope. Katniss, however, does not adopt a loner attitude....

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

I hadn't seen any big-screen TMNT outing since the abortive Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III more than 30 years ago. The latest entry got my attention mainly when the first trailer met with very mixed reactions, presumably because it emphasized the teenage aspect at the expense of coolness. Nonetheless, reviews of the actual movie have been positive overall, and I was willing to take a chance on an alternate version for a new generation.

After rogue scientist Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito) accidentally spills mutagenic ooze into a New York sewer, four anthro-reptilian brothers spend their first 15 years enjoying human culture in secret, albeit not as stealthily as adoptive anthro-rat Splinter (Jackie Chan) would like. When they unwittingly cause aspiring high school journalist April O'Neil (Ayo Edebiri) to lose her moped to a thief, they finally use their ninja training for good and gain a human ally. She and they both want to gain popularity by foiling serial robber Superfly (Ice Cube), but that gets complicated when they discover that he and his closest minions are fellow mutants out to create more mutants. Can the turtles hope to take them on? Do they even want to fight their likeliest comrades to protect humans, some of whom, under a shady project leader (Maya Rudolph), have nasty plans for the turtles?

Daughters (2024)

I don't remember reading about this documentary before. Most likely, I added it to my list because it's set in my long-time hometown. And unlike most DC pics, it has nothing to do with the federal government. It's all residential Washington, albeit nowhere I recognize.

The Date With Dad program assembles girls whose fathers are all in the same jail and buses them there. Then they have something of a fancy ball for a few hours. This doc focuses on four dads and four daughters, the latter ranging from age five to the teens. We also get epilogues one and three years later.

I'm Still Here (2024)

Not to be confused with the 2010 Joaquin Phoenix flick of the same title. I've been dragging my heels about watching the latest Academy Best Picture nominees, because few of them look like my type. I finally decided to go ahead with another when it came up on Netflix, not knowing much about it.

In 1970, military-run Brazil faces a lot of unrest. The Paiva family in Rio de Janeiro gets a taste of it when officers thoroughly search motorists for suspects. More importantly, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) has been supporting expats, which his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), and their five kids don't seem to know -- until plainclothesmen arrest him. Asking about him yields incomplete answers at best and follow-up punishment at worst.