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It's the first pair of Film Critic pants for 2025, and yeah, they're a bit tight, thanks to all those holiday treats. But it's time to put them on for another week of film releases.
Three new movies are featured in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, January 3rd, 2025.
1) NICKEL BOYS
Based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, this film chronicles the strong friendship between two young African American men who navigate the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida.
The events in the movie are based on things that happened at a historic reform school in Florida called the Dozier School for Boys, which was notorious for the abusive treatment of students.
Despite strong performances by Ethan Herrise and Brandon Wilson in the lead roles, a passionate message, and one particularly powerful scene (the most subtle sequence in the film), I was surprisingly underwhelmed by "Nickel Boys."
I found the subjective point-of-view camera and storytelling style distracting, inconsistent, and pompous. It gets annoying when a trick is pulled on the audience about halfway through when director RaMell Ross, making his narrative feature debut here, switches the POV gimmick between characters.
The switch only draws further attention to the weird stylistic approach, which had already proven unnecessary and distracting. The quality of the fine cinematography and the terrific use of locations could not rescue the movie from its mistakes.
This gimmicky trope completely took away from my being emotionally invested in the characters and events of the film, which are clearly important and powerful. I was detached and didn't care, and it had everything to do with the confused way the film was made. - ⭐️⭐️
The latest stop-motion Wallace and Gromit adventure (their sixth feature film) is yet another delightful, incredibly captivating, and absolutely hilarious trip through the minds of creator Nick Park and his collaborators at Aardman Animations.
The wonderful world of Wallace, a goofy inventor with a penchant for cheese (especially Wensleydale), and his very smart chess-playing, tea-drinking beagle Gromit, has been around for over 35 glorious years. It's just as fresh as it was in 1989 when it began, as it is right now...even more so.
In the latest feature, Wallace invents a robotic garden gnome named Norbot and uses it to make money. Gromit feels left out and is concerned with Wallace's new interest in technology, which is ultimately what this very smart movie is about.
As is usually the case with these "Wallace and Gromit" adventures, the simple plot setup becomes a gateway to other more complicated and interesting themes that add so much to the simple fun and goofy sense of humor.
A myriad of hilarious characters appear, along with plot twists involving heists, mistaken identity, and power struggles. The film is also loaded with action sequences, crazy flights of fancy, and more, all while maintaining the trademark Aardman sense of humor.
I LOVE Wallace and Gromit and Vengeance Most Fowl is no exception. It is a perfectly wonderful piece of entertainment that is suitable for the entire family but is in no way simplistic or infantile.
In fact, this film is a very strong examination of technology gone awry and a plea for everyone to be careful with obsessiveness over electronic devices and that particularly seductive world. It has big laughs, smart satire, and a potent message.
Of course, as is the case in almost every Aardman film, the voice work is exemplary, the animation is top-notch, and the overall style is impeccably executed, resulting in one of the most entertaining and lovely family movies of the year. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
3) THE DAMNED
I'm always happy to start the new film year with a horror movie, and that's precisely what we are getting in 2025 with this 19th-century period piece from Iceland (in co-production with Ireland) directed by Thordur Palsson.
The story takes place during a very harsh winter in and around an isolated fishing outpost run by Eva (a terrific Odessa Young), a widow whose husband died in a shipwreck the previous winter.
One early morning, she, the male crew of the boats, and one other female inhabitant of the outpost witness a horrible shipwreck in the rocks nearby.
Eva makes the hard decision to not help the sailors on board the sinking ship because there aren't enough supplies and food for everyone to survive. As a result, several men from the shipwreck die, haunt the members of the fishery, and ultimately try to cause their demise.
The setup is simple and very familiar, but the execution is superb. Palsson's direction is sharp, focused, and stylish, and the movie has an encompassing dread that builds to a very effective climax and a nicely executed final reveal.
The atmosphere of coldness, death, and isolation is wonderfully realized, as is the recreation of the time period. In a refreshing twist, the real enemy here is guilt and how a selfish decision forever haunts the main characters in the film. More than the demonic visions, guilt is what truly takes its toll on the victims here.
Using the legend of the Icelandic/Nordic demon "The Draugr" as its centerpiece, the film also handles creepy mythology with assurance and aplomb. Why the film wasn't called "The Draugr" instead of the generic and tired title of "The Damned" is a complete mystery.
Overall, this might not be the most original ghost story ever made, but it's scary, exceedingly well-made, and filled with terrific performances, particularly by Young, who is simply outstanding.
This is a decent, creepy, and confidently made little chiller that will also bring to mind other great horror films from the past (particularly two John Carpenter films: "The Fog" and, most obviously, "The Thing."), And that's a cool way to kick off 2025. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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