PopCult Reviews

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Winter 2025 Digest

[Features]
Patron Pick/Matt – Carry On
Patron Pick/Matt – Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Book Update – Jan/Feb 2025
Farewell, David

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PopCult Reviews is place to take deep dive into media & culture from a Left perspective. This isn’t content coming from a lofty, complicated, academic point of view but accessible reviews and analysis. We’re here to celebrate the good stuff and put a critical lens to the media that has saturated culture. Patreon is the best way to show your support for the work we do here. More details are below.

Movie Review – Sentimental Value

Sentimental Value (2025)
Written by Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier
Directed by Joachim Trier

It is becoming increasingly harder to find humanity on the screen in the 21st century. It started when finance conquered Hollywood in a hostile takeover. For a long time, there were a considerable number of studio heads who balanced the commerce of film with artistry. That battle was completely lost by the end of the 2010s. With AI coming into proliferation, we’re now gazing out at a bleak landscape of soulless content that will make the commercialism of the 1980s look quaint by comparison. Yet this list of films I’ve been working on is full of filmmakers I believe are trying their best to maintain a sense of humanity in cinema. Their work does not make much money and is not seen by as many eyes as most of the films in your local multiplex, but they express ideas and themes that are essential to examine if we are to understand what it means to be human.

Movie Review – Marty Supreme

Marty Supreme (2025)
Written by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie
Directed by Josh Safdie

2025 was the year we saw the results of the great Safdie Brothers split. Benny gave us The Smashing Machine, which also served as an opportunity for Dwayne Johnson’s reinvention as a serious, Oscar-worthy actor. It wasn’t a terrible film, but it didn’t evoke the same emotions in me as the films on my favorites list this year. I’m not writing Benny off; his performance and involvement in the television series The Curse was phenomenal. When it came to directing feature films in 2025, it was Josh’s time to shine. Marty Supreme was hyped to an extreme degree, which is always risky, but it ultimately lived up to that hype, emerging as one of the best pictures of the year while building on the themes the Safdies established as a duo.

Movie Review – The Brutalist

The Brutalist (2024)
Written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold
Directed by Brady Corbet

The immigrant has been the subject of a great deal of discourse in the United States for years, with 2025 being a moment when tensions boiled over. There is a convenient amnesia among many Americans who imagine their ancestors arriving on the Mayflower, choosing to ignore the fact that these settlers were invaders of an already populated land. The reality is that most white Americans are descended from immigrants who arrived much later, yet they pretend that the Irish, Italians, and other once-maligned “swarthy” races were always considered white, rather than persecuted in ways not unlike how immigrants from the Global South are targeted today. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a story about an imperfect person, an immigrant, a refugee, who brings talent alongside profound inner turmoil. He is not welcomed with open arms, but with a desire to exploit him and use him up.

Movie Review – Queer

Queer (2024)
Written by Justin Kuritzkes
Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Luca Guadagnino has been on quite the streak lately. In the last three years alone he’s made Bones and All, Challengers, After the Hunt and this film. While he’s not been to everyone’s taste, I think everything he makes is worth a view and showcases his filmmaking prowess whether on a technical or artistic level or both. Guadagnino resists the temptation to dramatize desire into a standard plot and instead lets longing exist as visual aesthetics. The film treats obsession not as pathology or romance, but as a state of being. It is disorienting, humiliating, sometimes tender, often unbearable. This is a film you feel and if you feel it, the characters and their experiences will linger with you for a long time.

Movie Review – Nosferatu

Nosferatu (2024)
Written and directed by Robert Eggers

I don’t really care for vampires. I’ve never felt drawn to this particular monster compared to others. I understand all the tropes and metaphors that orbit the vampire, and they’ve simply never appealed to me. What I do enjoy are the full-throttle productions of Robert Eggers, where he fills the screen with a healthy mix of period accuracy and atmosphere that seems to drip off the edges. I’ve enjoyed his previous features, and it didn’t surprise me that Nosferatu was no exception. The vampire here is wonderfully grotesque and inhuman, but it is not the focal point of the film. In my opinion, that distinction belongs to Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen, who delivers one of the most surprising and satisfying performances of the year.

Movie Review – I’m Still Here

I’m Still Here (2025)
Written by Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega
Directed by Walter Salles

In 1964, Brazil experienced a military coup, supported by U.S. forces, against then-president João Goulart and his proposed social reforms. These reforms, including land redistribution, expanded labor rights, and the nationalization of key industries, alarmed conservative politicians, business leaders, the Catholic hierarchy, and much of the officer corps, who framed his government as a step toward communism. The U.S.-backed dictatorship dismantled democratic institutions and installed an authoritarian regime that would last twenty-one years. The dictatorship ruled through censorship, political repression, torture, and forced disappearances, while promoting a narrative of “order” and economic modernization. Though the regime oversaw periods of rapid industrial growth, these gains were unevenly distributed and came at the cost of civil liberties, deepening inequality and leaving lasting scars on Brazilian society that continue to shape its politics and collective memory today.

Movie Review – It Was Just An Accident

It Was Just An Accident (2025)
Written and directed by Jafar Panahi

In 2022, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was arrested while inquiring about the status of two fellow filmmakers who had been detained by authorities. He became the third director taken into custody in less than three weeks. After initiating a hunger strike, Panahi was released 48 hours later. He was barred from leaving Iran while under investigation and was subsequently tried. It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but the filmmaker was not permitted to leave the country to attend. In December 2025, Iran’s government sentenced Panahi in absentia to one year in prison and imposed a two-year travel ban over alleged “propaganda activities.” During this period, he was also prohibited from joining any political or social organizations. This ruling came a decade after many previously banned Iranian film organizations had been allowed to reopen.

Movie Review – Weapons

Weapons (2025)
Written and directed by Zach Cregger

The voiceover of a little girl telling us the story of something she may not have experienced herself, a communal trauma, opens the film. This blooms into a nighttime montage of children running with their arms slightly extended at their sides, set to George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness.” The song appeared on Harrison’s first post-Beatles album, All Things Must Pass. The tracks were mainly derived from songs the rest of the band had passed on, which in turn became side projects Harrison would play around with until the band inevitably fell apart. “Beware of Darkness” tells us at the outset to stay clear of people who appear fashionable for the moment and to be wary of destructive thoughts that seek to entangle our minds. The final verses of the song become far more specific when they say, “Take care, beware of greedy leaders / They take you where you should not go / While Weeping Atlas Cedars / They just want to grow – grow, grow…” There doesn’t seem to be an explanation anywhere as to what Harrison meant by this, but he does seem to be referencing something specific. He’s dead now, so we’re left to wonder what he was saying there, knowing there will likely never be an answer.

Movie Review – Hard Truths

Hard Truths (2025)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

In 2024, I did a deep dive into the work of British filmmaker Mike Leigh and fell in love. He has a profound love of humanity, and it comes across in his choice to tell grounded, slice-of-life stories. At age 82, he has given us his latest film, Hard Truths. This re-teams him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whom he previously worked with in the wonderful Secrets & Lies. As with all of Leigh’s work, he shows a trust in his actors through the use of improvisational techniques and respects the intelligence of his audience by never passing judgment on his characters. This is a film about difficult people and a refusal to stop seeing them as human beings deserving of dignity; something that feels particularly challenging in our current moment, but also something people have grappled with throughout history.

Movie Review – Universal Language

Universal Language (2025)
Written by Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, and Matthew Rankin
Directed by Matthew Rankin

Universal Language is a hard film to pin down. It has the framing and subtle sense of humor of Wes Anderson, yet it is also informed by filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s love of Iranian cinema, which he discovered as a young man in Winnipeg. That’s the other key element: Rankin’s own feelings about his hometown, a landscape of brutalist architecture and perpetual snowbanks. The languages spoken by the cast are Farsi and French, and almost every cast member is Iranian. If this sounds like an odd mix, you would be right. The humor is offbeat and the world is very strange, while still grounded in authentic emotions, culminating in an ending that will linger with you.