AFI Fest 2025: Day One

I only bought a 10-film pass this year, having already seen many of 2025’s notable movies at TIFF. So it'll just be two or three drive-bys per day, rather than four or five. But if I tried to write an individual review for each one, I'd speedily fall behind, since I'm getting home around midnight.

Father Mother Sister Brother (Jim Jarmusch): 58

Can almost guarantee that this was the Venice jury's compromise choice, a Competition film that nobody disliked and everyone could live with as their winner. It's a bit more Night on Earthy than I'd have preferred—for whatever reason, I'm not especially charmed by Jarmusch's penchant for geographically diverse omnibus tales linked only by random recurring elements. (Here, each one features slo-mo skateboarders, a Rolex that may or may not be genuine, and the phrase "Bob's your uncle." Okay. Sure.) It's easy to walk away with a warm feeling, because the third and final section, "Sister Brother," couldn't be more quietly lovely, even if some of its thunder got pre-emptively stolen by Assayas' Summer Hours. I also mostly enjoyed "Father" while it was in front of me, thanks to three fine performances (not having seen Mayim Bialik in anything since 1988's Beaches and Pumpkinhead, I was unprepared for how hilariously judgmental she is, opposite an atypically recessive Adam Driver)...but in hindsight, it kinda feels like a five-minute sketch-comedy idea that got turned into an arty half-hour short for some reason. Has a punchline and everything! And then "Mother" was just kinda there, hampered by one of Blanchett's goofy "I'll let my hair and costume do most of the work" turns and too much overt sweatiness from Krieps. "All I ask is that it be better than The Dead Don't Die," I told a friend as the lights went down, and mission accomplished. But it's extremely minor—much more Coffee and Cigarettes than Paterson—and taking home the Golden Lion arguably did it no favors.

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos): 71

Rating's misleading, because I loved pretty much the entire movie but also strongly suspected that I knew where it was headed and just kept fervently hoping that I was wrong. Alas, I was not. (Same ending as Save the Green Planet!, looks like. Haven't seen that.) Thing is, not only do I consider what happens in the last five minutes or so dopey in and of itself, but it flatly contradicts the potent metaphor I'd thought the film was (perhaps unconsciously; that'd be fine and arguably preferable) fashioning. Emma Stone's once again on absolute fuckin' fire, this time as a blithely amoral CEO (seemingly part Bezos, part Elizabeth Holmes)—nothing funnier all year than Fuller's explanation of the company's new policy encouraging employees to head home at 5:30pm, which consists of 90% discouragement—and we're by no means expected to "like" her, much less perceive her as an innocent victim. Yet Bugonia's fundamental question is: How do you deal with a crazy person who's making impossible demands and can inflict irreparable damage if you don't comply? There's not one iota of explicit contemporary relevance in the film, yet I couldn't stop thinking, as Fuller keeps frantically, craftily trying to negotiate with Teddy by humoring his madness, about how many world leaders are in more or less that exact nightmarish position right now. (Admittedly it's as much venality and wanton cruelty as it is insanity out in the real world.) If you know how Green Planet ends, you can see how that kinda scuttles my preferred reading; I'm so irked that I may well become a TÁR-style truther, insisting despite the lack of any concrete evidence that the film's last few minutes are a concussion-inspired fantasy, a case of becoming what one beheld. Even tossing said interpretation aside, though, so much of Bugonia is so damn funny, in its disturbing way, that there was no chance I wouldn't groove on it.