In the last month of my most prolific movie-watching year ever, I attended a number of 70mm screenings, including a couple of Alfred Hitchcock classics that I hadn’t seen before, a rewatch of my favorite film of 2025, and one of my new favorite movies from the 1980s.
North By Northwest
United States of America | 1959 | 136m | English
After some consideration, I bumped up my score from a 3 to a 3.5. The more I think about it, I go, “Oh yeah, that one scene is good, and so is that other one, and that other part is funny…” and so on and then I have to conclude that yes, North By Northwest is overall a pretty good movie. It felt a bit long, though (yes, even the airplane scene—maybe especially the airplane scene) and 50s screenwriting and cinematography is still not really my cup of tea. (Notable exception: that top-down shot from the UN building.) I watched this on a clean 70mm print at the TIFF Lightbox with my family, who came to Toronto to visit—so of course I wanted to take them to my favorite place in the city!
The Children’s Hour
United States of America | 1961 | 108m | English
Oh my God. The Children’s Hour is completely tragic and devastating, but engrossing all the way through. Old movies adapted from plays usually leave me feeling like they fail to take full advantage of the cinematic medium but I can’t say that about The Children’s Hour. It conveys so much through the blocking, which may have been necessitated by the Code, but it elevates the depth and creativity of the film. And the tragedy! A certain close up shot at the end was gut wrenching. The script is incredibly impactful and moving. The characters are fleshed out flawlessly. (I can’t think of another movie that manages to make a child character so contemptible.) What a remarkable movie.
The Shining
United Kingdom, United States of America | 1980 | 144m | English
Long before my current film bro era, I was a high schooler who decided to watch a number a famous, R-rated horror movies that I had heard so much about. Among them were Alien, Predator, and… The Shining. At the time I thought it was kind of weird and slow. Now, many years later, watching this movie for the second time, I have a similar reaction. At least now I’m willing to give it more of a chance, as I’m more attuned to subtext in film—and not to mention, the name Stanley Kubrick actually means something to me now. I see The Shining as being about domestic violence and alcoholism (among other things). I think it’s notable that Jack says that he would sell his soul for a drink and then immediately envisions a bartender. I don’t think this movie is scary at all, but the big, open-room cinematography looks fantastic all these years later, at least on the Criterion Channel’s version available for streaming. I have to imagine the 4K UHD release looks even better. The music has some atonal moments that remind me of 2001 as well. The Shining isn’t really a classic to me personally but it was definitely time for a rewatch.
JUJUTSU KAISEN: Execution – Shibuya Incident x The Culling Game Begins
Japan | 2025 | 88m | Japanese
I’m a big fan of Jujutsu Kaisen, and my soul still aches when I think about all the potential it squandered with its hasty ending. Still, JJK is like Demon Slayer in that its anime elevates the material, so I feel an obligation to support its theater outings, even when they are recaps of the anime series as opposed to anything new.
Execution is majority a compilation of big moments from the Shibuya Incident arc. Then it gets into material from the start of the next season. I am glad I went into this with all the background knowledge of someone who has read through the manga multiple times, because the movie provides ZERO context (and JJK already doesn’t do a great job of explaining its own convoluted world and power system to begin with) and I’m sure I would have been lost if I had come into this blind. Season 3 looks like it will break its animators, judging from the Naoya fight. (Imagine being an anime-only who doesn’t even know how hype things are about to get once Maki shows up to the Zen’in clan compound.) I’m excited for the new season so I guess this compilation movie did its job, even if the editing is all over the place.
Megadoc
United States of America | 2025 | 107m | English
For a documentary about the making of something as bizarre and enigmatic as Megalopolis, I expected something more… salacious? Chaotic? Interesting?
It all felt very pedestrian to me, which is still sort of interesting in its own right because I love movies and don’t see a lot of behind the scenes footage of actors playing improv games with their director, or filmmaking budgets being itemized onscreen alongside their results, etc. But watching this documentary on its own, I wouldn’t have had the sense that the actual film that resulted from this production was anything close to the trippy, extravagant mess that we got with Megalopolis.
Maybe Mike Figgis was too friendly with Francis Ford Coppola and wouldn’t—or couldn’t—show us more of the juicy drama or sustained, stunned disbelief that I have to assume occurred among the oversized production crew. We get little bits and pieces of that, like when Dustin Hoffman admits that even after wrapping shooting, he doesn’t understand what his character is supposed to be, or when large parts of the art department get laid off partway through production, or a series of conflicts unfolds between Coppola and Shia Leboeuf. But it still feels like everyone held back in expressing what they really thought of this doomed experience.
Mike Figgis himself has a long scene in front of the camera where he talks about the conflict between wanting the best for the actors he befriended vs. wanting drama and disaster to spice up his own documentary—for wanting a story to tell, in other words. But I don’t think he succeeded in finding a compelling story to undergird Megadoc, which is disappointing because, I mean… have you seen Megalopolis? I just refuse to believe that a more interesting documentary couldn’t have been created out of the production of such a bizarre, financially disastrous, narratively chaotic, decades-in-the-making, ego-driven project as that.
Late Chrysanthemums
Japan | 1954 | 101m | Japanese
Yeah, this just didn’t do anything for me. Not much happening in the plot, all the characters are unlikable for one reason or another, not a lot of cinematic creativity on display. Felt pretty slow, miserable, and pointless overall. Lots of crabby people sitting around, smoking, getting drunk and telling—not showing—how their lives used to be better. Nothing I could connect to or care about.
Late Chrysanthemums seems not to be among director Mikio Naruse’s most well-known movies, so maybe his others are better, but this did not motivate me to check out any of the other movies in his TIFF Cinematheque retrospective.
Top Gun
United States of America | 1986 | 110m | English
Okay, this movie rules. Top Gun rides the line between silly and serious but it does it so well that I had a smile on my face the entire time. It’s easy to see how it directly led to greater recruitment rates in the U.S. Air Force—living in this pilot academy just seems so damn fun. Top Gun is a hyper masculine film—so masculine, in fact, that at many points it crosses into straight-up homoeroticism (and that’s before we get to the volleyball scene, set to Kenny Loggins’ “Playing with the Boys”). But the heterosexual romantic relationship underlying the film is a joy to watch develop, too, with each and every cue of “Take My Breath Away” (I think I counted four) escalating the entertainment value of the scenes between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis in a campy sort of way. The friendship between Cruise’s character Maverick and Goose, played by Anthony Edwards, is developed well enough that when the story takes a turn for the tragic, I felt it.
This movie has everything: great characters, action, romance, camp, a kickass soundtrack, plus red-blooded American patriotism. You could call Top Gun shameless propaganda for the U.S. military—and you’d be right—but as a movie it’s exhilarating. I watched this on a 70mm print at the TIFF Lightbox and they played it with the volume gloriously loud, subwoofers rattling my chest. I didn’t mind that the print itself was missing a few frames and showing noticeable wear. After this screening, I can probably say that Top Gun is immediately one of my favorite 80s movies.
Starship Troopers
United States of America | 1997 | 129m | English
After watching Top Gun the previous night, I think I was in the mood for something that reminded me of that, so this bootcamp-to-warzone military story centered on a group of young recruits seemed like the right fit. Then Michael Ironside showed up again and I knew for sure I was in the right place.
I watched Starship Troopers years ago and remember really liking it. Few movies do a better job at satirizing militarism. (The enemies are literally inhuman bugs.) By the end of the story, we’re back where we started, another generation of naive young people swallowed up by the war machine.
What’s Up, Doc?
United States of America | 1972 | 94m | English
What’s Up, Doc? is a throwback to screwball comedies of decades prior—and since this movie came out in 1972, that means this is a throwback to some old movies. The kind of quick-fire, highly scripted dialogue characteristic of this time and genre is hit-and-miss with me, but in the case of What’s Up, Doc? it worked. I thought this movie was totally charming and actually pretty clever and funny. I think the direction for Barbara Streisand was literally just “be Bugs Bunny.” The movie even ends with a Looney Tunes cartoon, in case there’s any doubt where the title and overall goofy energy of the film is derived from. Also, this might have one of the best car chase sequences in all of cinema(!?) At the very least, it’s easy to follow and actually leads to some real laughs.
Do You See What I See?
United States of America | 2020 | 12m | English
I unironically love many of David Dees’ unhinged art pieces. The one where Obama resusitates Karl Marx after digging him out of his grave? I’ve definitely shared it on Discord. So any kind of information on Dees and where he came from was more than enough of a hook to get me to watch this short documentary, freely available on Vimeo. The production values are great and it does manage to paint a picture of what Dees’ day-to-day existence looked like (RIP), but I wish it went deeper into his life and probed his beliefs a bit harder. I was not expecting to learn that this same artist did graphic design for Sesame Street back in the day, and I didn’t fully understand how he went from that to drawing pictures about how Sandy Hook wasn’t real. There’s a quick mention of him being “poisoned” but to assume that that must be the cause of his change in artistic direction would be as conspiratorial as one of his pieces. I wish this was longer!
Vertigo
United States of America | 1958 | 128m | English
How can Sight & Sound call this the greatest film of all time (in 2012) when it isn’t even the greatest Hitchcock film? (I like Psycho a lot more than this.) Vertigo is alright. The technicolor cinematography and tense score are its strongest points. The convoluted, implausible plot never had me believing in the romance of these characters. Poor Midge! She did nothing wrong.
Save the Green Planet!
South Korea | 2003 | 117m | Korean
Save the Green Planet! swings wildly from scenes of goofy martial-arts comedy to gruesome torture sequences that may as well have come from Saw. I’m not sure such dramatic fluctuations in tone always worked for me, but with its strong premise and crazy energy, the movie always held my attention from start to finish.
Looking past the sci-fi elements of the story, the message of the film really does seem to paint domestic terrorism in a defensible light. The protagonist is given an over-the-top tragic backstory that tries to make the viewer sympathize with his kidnapping and torture of the CEO, but I never saw him as anything other than a sadistic psychopath. That is until the ending, where, well, you basically have to take the position that he did the right thing.
The ending, as predictable as it was, does seem necessary to hammer home the overbearing misanthropy and pessimism of this movie: the chemical company CEO is so evil as to be literally inhuman, and any person who recognizes this and decides to take drastic, terroristic action against an evil figurehead of capitalism will of course be seen as an insane, contemptible conspiracy theorist by the complacent masses and taken out accordingly. The inhuman, anti-human forces win and the planet is destroyed—the end. And this same fate will befall our real-life planet… unless…?
I imagine this movie is a favorite among those who repost thirst trap edits of Luigi Mangione on TikTok, but I find the politics of those people odious. Thus, I can’t totally get behind what this movie is trying to say. Still, I found Save the Green Planet! to be a memorable, unique, and wild splatterfest of a film that lived up to its association with TIFF’s “Midnight Madness” brand.
Other Movies I Saw This Month
- Possession (1981) [3.5/5]
- The Lost Chapter: Yuki’s Revenge (2025) [3.5/5]
- One Battle After Another (2025) [5/5]
- No Other Choice (2025) [4/5]
Best Movies I Saw This Month
- The Children’s Hour
- Top Gun
- What’s Up, Doc?
Worst Movies I Saw This Month
- Late Chrysanthemums
- Megadoc
Josh Anderson 