It’s a slow week for new films, so I’m going to put 2025 to bed by publishing this annual feature of mini-reviews of 13 notable things I saw last year. Many of these only played in North Texas theaters for one week before disappearing, something that’s happening more often these days.
Bogotá: City of the Lost
Korean films just keep coming in new stripes. This Netflix entry is about a South Korean student (Song Joong-ki) who is stranded in Colombia during the late 1990s and takes up a life of crime thanks to his uncle (Kwon Hae-hyo), who smuggles Korean-made dresses, bags, and shoes into the country and sells them in the capital’s commercial district for knockdown prices that ordinary Colombians can afford. Our young antihero learns enough Spanish to curse at the customs inspectors who hold up his shipments. This follows the template of crime epics where things are great for a while until criminals start getting greedy, but the culture clash here is enough to make it worth a look.
Bring Them Down
Christopher Andrews’ film rated an honorable mention in my directing debuts feature. It saw the inside of the AMC Grapevine Mills for a few days in February 2025 and then disappeared before I had a chance to write about it. Too bad, because it’s one of those old-fashioned Irish thrillers about two rural families that have been feuding and killing each other for generations over sheep grazing territory. A fair amount of it is in the Irish language, so you can hear Barry Keoghan and American lead actor (and Aubrey Plaza’s current squeeze) Christopher Abbott speaking the lingo. It makes for an Irish stew laced with the proper amount of violence.
Hedda
For good reason, everybody talks about the partnership between Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan. What about the one between Nia DaCosta and Tessa Thompson? The actress hasn’t appeared in all of DaCosta’s movies the way Jordan has been a mainstay of Coogler’s, but the working relationship has been just as fruitful. Henrik Ibsen made Hedda Gabler into an 1890s antihero constrained by her gender, and DaCosta triples down by making her Black and gay in the 1950s, too, though she marries a weak-willed man (Tom Bateman) to give herself cover. Thompson is unforgettable as a ruthless materialist who’s willing to destroy her ex-girlfriend (Nina Hoss) to secure her own future, and the production values are worth luxuriating in.
Influencers
The Canadian actress Cassandra Naud has a large birthmark on her face. That becomes a plot point in this sequel and its predecessor, Influencer, where she portrays a con artist who manages to move ghost-like through the world despite having such a memorable face. Her character is like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley for the digital age, as she manipulates social-media influencers into paying her large sums of money. (Also like Ripley, she has sex with both men and women as it suits her purposes.) See this for her and for the cleverness that writer-director Kurtis David Harder brings to the premise.
Julie Keeps Quiet
The executive producers of this Belgian tennis movie include Grand Slam winner Naomi Osaka and Golden Palm winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Good of them to attach their fame to this deserving drama, which stars Tessa van den Broeck as an up-and-coming prospect whose tennis club is thrown into disarray when the star phenom commits suicide and the man who coached both of them is put on suspension. First-time director Leonardo van Dijl has a real feel for the rhythms of tennis players’ training regimens, and van den Broeck looks convincingly like someone who might win a Slam someday, but this is one of the best movies about sexual relationships between coaches and athletes.
Left-Handed Girl
Everybody made noise about this movie being edited by none other than Oscar-winner Sean Baker, who is a personal friend of director Shih-Ching Tsou. However, what makes this special is Tsou’s story about a 5-year-old girl (Nina Ye) whose biggest concern is being left-handed when her superstitious grandfather (Akio Chen) tells her that using her left hand for anything is evil. Eventually, a much bigger domestic issue will come floating to the surface. This Netflix movie belongs in the grand tradition of closely observed Taiwanese domestic dramas by the likes of Edward Yang and Ang Lee. Marvel at the way Tsou adopts the child’s perspective here.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
The first film I’ve ever seen from Zambia begins arrestingly with a woman dressed for a party driving down a remote country backroad, only to find a man’s dead body lying in the middle of the street. She recognizes him. She leaves him there. Rungano Nyoni’s movie is a colorful look at local costumes and food, but it’s also a disquieting portrait of a family who realizes that one of their own is a pedophile and tells his victims that going public will only bring shame upon the clan. A bit extreme, to be sure, but not that different from the way people in other places protect pedophiles.
Parthenope
The title character of this Italian drama is supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and with Celeste dalla Porta playing her, you can make a case. That’s the best reason to see this lightweight exercise, in which she’s approached to go into acting but finds herself better suited to being an anthropologist. There’s one scene in English when she encounters her favorite short-story author, John Cheever (Gary Oldman). Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino once again shows us how big a fan he is of SSC Napoli. There’s better things for such a talented filmmaker to do.
Queens of Drama
France produced this darker gloss on KPop Demon Hunters set in 2045, as a drag queen and YouTube influencer named Steevy Shady (Bilal Hassani) narrates the story of secretly gay pop star Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), who fell in love with female punk singer Billie Kohler (played by trans man Gio Ventura) in 2005 until Billie became famous on her own and publicly outed Mimi, which caused Steevy to make his version of the “leave Britney alone!” video and spend the next 30 years posting videos telling Billie to kill herself. Non-binary filmmaker Alexis Langlois captures how toxic pop-star fandoms can be, and Mimi’s hit song “Pas touche!” is as catchy as anything in Netflix’s animated Oscar-winner.
Resurrection
This Chinese film popped up on a bunch of critics’ top 10 lists. It did not make mine, but it was my first exposure to director Bi Gan, and I came away impressed. The plot revolves around a future where human beings have stopped dreaming in exchange for immortality. Jackson Yee portrays a monster who has refused to go along with the consensus and hides inside movies to keep dreaming. Don’t bother trying to follow a plot, just revel in Bi’s hallucinatory journey through tropes of Chinese cinema, as the monster morphs into a Buddhist monk, a fugitive musician, and a modern-day pickpocket.
Tornado
This is only John Maclean’s second film, coming 10 years after his debut Slow West. The Scottish director’s sharp visual sense comes in handy in this Japanese samurai film set in 18th-century Scotland. Koki portrays a traveling puppeteer who has to use her swordfighting skills to avenge the murder of her father (Takehiro Hira, who had a busy 2025 with the Captain America film and Rental Family as well as this). Maclean seems born to make Westerns, with his command of deliberately paced set pieces amid the wind whistling on the Scottish heath.
The Ugly Stepsister
This is nothing like Sentimental Value, even though they’re both Norwegian movies. Emilie Blichfeldt’s take on the Cinderella story tells it from the point of view of a stepsister (Lea Myren) whose mother marries an older widower and who bullies his beautiful daughter (Thea Sofie Loch Næss). Klaudia Klimka’s production design and Manon Rasmussen’s costumes frame a hideous story where our unsympathetic protagonist gets a nose job with a chisel and ingests a tapeworm egg to stay thin, all at the urging of her aristocratic mother. The trailer was made to look like The Substance, and if you’re a fan of that, this fairy tale is for you.
Watch the Skies
This Swedish film caused a kerfuffle this past summer because of its new method of rendering foreign-language dialogue into English. The actors re-recorded their dialogue in English, and then some AI tech altered their onscreen selves so that their mouths would match the words they were saying. This practice is called “vubbing,” and I have doubts about whether it’s a viable long-term solution for foreign films. Still, it’s a movie about UFO cults that has both psychological insight into its characters and big-scale special effects, and lead actress Inez Dahl Torhaug is someone to watch.
