Ticketworthy! - 2025 Stars and Duds

Stars

1. Sinners: Ryan Coogler’s slick and stylish addition to the vampire genre is just about everything that you could want from a modern horror film. It’s gorgeous, has memorable characters, features an incredible soundtrack, and is jam-packed with standout performances. In particular, Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton just dominate the screen. Maybe it doesn’t have quite as many great kills as I’d like, but when a movie is this downright awesome, it’s tough to nitpick it.

2. The Long Walk: If you want a movie that’s going to grip you from beginning to end and never let go, you can’t do much better than The Long Walk. This Stephen King adaptation is a grueling, intense masterpiece that refuses to ever let up. Director Francis Lawrence gives you the exact perfect mix of misery and hope, then lets his phenomenal cast work their magic. It’s an absolute ride that I cannot recommend highly enough.

3. Thunderbolts*: If you’d have told me at the beginning of 2025 that a Marvel movie was going to be in my top three movies of the year, I’d have laughed at you. Yet, I can’t deny how shockingly great Thunderbolts* is. While the requisite CGI fights and quirky humor that have defined the MCU are definitely still present, it’s the film’s focus on real, meaningful themes that elevates it. Florence Pugh is asked to do a lot of emotional heavy-lifting, and she delivers one of the most impressive performances of the year. Given the kind of movie this is, she probably won’t get much award love for her work, but if I had one to give, she’d be the clear favorite.

4. Predator: Badlands: Continuing the theme of films absolutely shocking me in 2025, Predator: Badlands is probably the most fun I had at a movie all year. It’s a complete departure from the rest of the franchise in every possible way. Its characters, its style, even the overall tone of the movie is just unlike anything else we’ve seen from Predator before, and it is a breath of fresh air. I can see Predator purists having some issues with the new direction but honestly, it’d just be a real shame to not let yourself have a blast with this movie. Also, is this finally the film that makes everyone realize just how good Elle Fanning is? I hope so.

5. Black Bag: Great spy thrillers have been in short supply in recent years. Action tends to outweigh espionage in modern blockbusters. So, I’m thrilled to say that Black Bag gets the “spy” part of “spy thriller” about as right as one could hope for. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender’s chemistry is through the roof, which is good because the movie depends on you believing that they want each other literally every second they share the screen. Without question, this is the most engaging, smartest, and most interesting spy movie that came out in 2025. It may be the best one in a long time.

Duds

1. Hurry Up Tomorrow: I can appreciate an artist making a vanity project. That happens pretty often. I can’t justify The Weeknd making one this unbelievably awful, though. It’s nonsensical, poorly acted, and a complete failure of direction. It looks terrible and is extremely hard to watch. In all honesty, Hurry Up Tomorrow is barely even a movie. It’s more like an overlong music video. Unfortunately, the sound mixing is also somehow bad, so it isn’t even fun to listen to. I’m not sure what this movie was supposed to be. What it is, however, is easily my least favorite film of the year.

2. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2: It’s so rare that a movie gets nothing at all right, but Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 pulls it off. Outside of some pretty decent monster designs, there isn’t a single thing to enjoy here. Fans of the games won’t appreciate how far from the source material the film strays. Non-fans will still find themselves sitting through a boring, PG-13 slog of a horror movie. I’m not sure if the script, the director, the writer, or the actors are more to blame. Maybe it’s all of them. Either way, it’s a disaster that is honestly impressive in how bad it actually is.

3. I Know What You Did Last Summer: If there was an award for the least necessary sequel of the year, I Know What You Did Last Summer would be the frontrunner. It doesn’t update the franchise in any interesting way, nor does it really even work as a new entry in the series. An over-reliance on jump-scares makes the whole experience more annoying than scary, and the cardboard-cutout characters are so dull that it’s hard to muster any emotion when one of them gets offed. In the future, it might be worth considering that if the last movie in your franchise came out almost 20 years ago, there’s a good reason for that. Just leave it alone.

4. Snow White: Despite the absolute best efforts of its star, this Disney live-action remake may well be the worst one yet. The changes to the story don’t do anything to improve upon the original film, and the parts that stay faithful somehow only make the whole thing even worse. Gal Gadot gives one of the worst performances I have ever seen, while the costuming and CGI are so embarrassingly awful that it’s impossible to ever get invested in the movie. To top it all off, the film gives up on its own premise at the very end and closes on a whimper. I have no idea what the thought process was in creating this mess. I’m not entirely sure there was one.

5. Shadow Force: To be perfectly honest, until I sat down to write this list, I had forgotten that this movie even happened. Shadow Force is filled with choppy, badly edited action, characters so uninteresting that most of them don’t even get names, and a plot that’s little more than an excuse to move to the next bad action sequence. It isn’t well written or acted, and worst of all, it isn’t even fun. This is the kind of low-effort, uninspired action film that I expect to find after browsing Netflix for an hour, buried underneath much better movies. That’s usually when I just turn off the TV and go to bed, which I recommend much more highly than watching Shadow Force.