Materialists (2025)

 

Since reserving my tickets one month ago for the first showing of Materialists, I’ve been managing my expectations. Celine Song’s cinematic follow-up to her Best Picture-nominated Past Lives—my favorite film of all time—could never meet my impossible expectations. Even while walking into the theater today, I whispered It’s not Past Lives to myself under my breath.

As anticipated, Materialists fails to approach its predecessor, but I found myself increasingly shocked by the film’s inability to charm me. Although the work is undeniably Song’s, as evidenced by the exquisite framing, New York setting, and pregnant pauses, Materialists is everything Past Lives was not: a sterile, shallow story with stilted, repetitive dialogue and distancing performances unable to worm its way into my heart’s borough, let alone neighborhood.

The craziest part: I suspect this was all by design.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a successful matchmaker in New York. While attending the wedding between two clients, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a smooth and wealthy equities trader who’s immediately smitten with her, as well as John (Chris Evans), a part-time actor she once dated who’s catering for the wedding. The former courts her, showing her the luxuries her working-class wallet can only dream of, while the latter stokes memories of a relationship soured by empty savings accounts. As Harry pulls Lucy into his orbit, John keeps reappearing, throwing her love life and career into chaos. Meanwhile, after a dark incident at the service, Lucy begins to question the work she does and everything she believes about love.

Whereas Past Lives floated on Song’s romantic warmth toward all spectra of love, Materialists sinks like lead in the river. By virtue of her profession, Lucy approaches love as a commercial venture, treating it as a business defined by risk. Conversations in intimate settings become negotiations, moments of pleasure with the strapping and immaculately attired Harry confined to flitting glances and observed opulence. The script enforces this romantic remove, with line deliveries cold and intensely formal; the film lacks passion, oozing sterile corporate polish. As we glimpse a play explicitly written by Song within the story where the actors speak the same way, it’s clear this is an intentional choice, but that doesn’t diminish how off-putting it sounds.

Making matters worse is Johnson, whose every line delivery sounds as alien to me as it did in Madame Web. I know that’s ridiculous, but it’s a consistent struggle I have with her performances, and it’s exacerbated here by how deliberate it is: Lucy performs at all times in her life, posturing and pleasing wealthy clients to assure their cooperation and subscription, leaving her words as authentically human as an LLM’s. Honestly, it’s not just her—Evans struggles to render his dialogue naturally as well. He’s charming, of course, and his John is the only emotionally available vertex in our triangle, but awkwardness clings to his addresses. Only Pascal escapes unscathed; his character is in permanent woo mode while performing opposite Johnson, but there’s a warmth and curiosity Pascal exudes that Johnson never matches, and he’s simply more adept at reading those lines by Song.

 

Another struggle with Materialists comes via its plotting, which veers away from the Lucy-Harry-John triumvirate several times. Dancing around spoilers, I’ll say that I admire the gritty, realistic intrusions regarding her client Sophie (Zoe Winters), some of which cut through the shallow story like a knife, but that I call them “intrusions” points to the problem: they don’t flow organically into Lucy’s saga so much as inject a secondary concern to investigate and elicit character growth. They’re essential, but they feel wholly contrived.

No problem is larger than the film’s absence of subtlety. Past Lives won me over with its profundity despite economy: Song’s story and the expressive performances by Greta Lee, Teo Yoon, and John Magaro create a lived-in world with incredible depth, needing so few words that it stuns me. Rich thematic takeaways are abundant, with diverse and challenging messages woven together into a delicate but moving braid. Materialists, on the other hand, bleats its messaging at the audience in every conversation, inverting the deft rationing of tell and show from her previous work. I feel smart while watching Past Lives; I leave the film itching to discuss and explore. In this new entry, Song isn’t conventional, but she drops any pretense of trusting her audience. The deepest insights come from Winters’ character in the C plot, but even those are explicitly (and repeatedly) articulated.

I sound like a sourpuss, I know, but Materialists isn’t without redeeming qualities. The film looks stunning across a wide swath of locations, earning visual acclaim in high-end apartments, collaborative offices, and open barn wedding venues (that you know will feature soft outdoor string lights). The score proffers emotion that the film withholds, the costuming reinforces character and class in vital ways to this story, and Song projects perfectly framed artwork from start to finish. While this film clings to New York City more than its predecessor, we’re once again gifted fantastic park vistas and intimate shots of apartments and stoops I’d love to visit. I’ll also tip my hat to Song for taking risks, most notably the temporal shift that bookends the story proper. That move feels atonal and awkward to me, but I admire the idea behind it.

As one of the biggest fans of Song and Past Lives out there, my being down on the Materialists is inevitable. Past Lives touched me in personal ways while also telling complex, heartfelt tales about love, time, and origins simultaneously; this one carries lofty aspirations and has a lot to say about love, capitalism, and expectations, but it evokes Will Smith’s Hitch without any of the humor. It pains me to call this a step back, but Materialists is that: a romantic drama that strips away the romance and includes only low-energy sequences in hopes of warmly landing a far better—but still imperfect—conclusion. It isn’t Past Lives, and even worse, I’m not sure it’s even a good movie worthy of this many words. Like the film, that observation brings me almost no pleasure.

Save for one: there’s nowhere to go but up from here.

I look forward to watching her next film.

Past Lives (2023)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 23, 2025

For a more thorough response to Past Lives, read "See You Then" from Intensely Specific)

Have you ever wondered what your first crush is up to these days? Have you ever typed their name into Facebook or scrolled through their Instagram photos? Have you ever imagined what a life with them might have been like? It’s probably a fleeting thought, and a silly one for sure, but it’s a natural one. What if, you wonder. What if your little kid heart had been prescient? Perhaps you chuckle. Perhaps you sigh.

Part immigrant story and part pragmatic love triangle, Past Lives fictionalizes nostalgia’s gentle nudge in a film about partings and pairings. Written and directed by playwright Celine Song, the film grapples with those connections that should have long ago faded but nevertheless grip us well past their assumed expiration dates.

A quiet drama told in three parts, Past Lives follows childhood sweethearts Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) during three short intervals in their lives. In the first, Nora’s family leaves their home in Seoul to immigrate to Canada, leaving twelve-year-old Hae Sung behind. In the second, Nora and Hae Sung reconnect via Skype during college, chatting for hours about their shared youth and separate futures. In the third, a 36-year-old Hae Sung visits the happily married Nora in New York City, bubbling decades-long questions to the surface.

Because I saw Past Lives in theaters five times, have watched it at home seven more, written a 5,000+ word analysis of it, and encouraged basically every friend and family member to watch it, I struggle to frame my affection for this 2024 Best Picture nominee. It’s my favorite movie of all time, which is to say, I barely remember the experience of watching it without counting couples in Brooklyn Bridge park or ruminating on the symbolism of a stalled Skype session. With favorite movies, I try to space out my rewatches to maintain freshness, but Past Lives invites me to contemplate huge philosophical questions about life, love, and what we owe our childhood selves. I never used Skype, yet I can tell Song understands the digital world that welcomed me during high school and college; that is to say, I feel understood watching Past Lives. It’s why I’ve watched it so often across merely two years.

Since my gushing, glowing praise risks “overhyping” the movie, let me concede a few points. Song’s film is muted and tender to a fault; there’s drama and tension, but everybody’s an adult, so pivotal scenes play out without histrionics. That tempo and understatedness won’t agree with everyone. As always, your mileage may vary.

Aware though I am of those limitations, I still love it. More than anything, Past Lives is a movie about the mechanics and mysteries of what-ifs, and meditating on might-have-beens mesmerizes me. Some people move on from old feelings easily, burying their former selves far below current concerns, but others find those feelings’ fingers digging dirt away on the regular.

Past Lives resonates with the latter.

If you think it might with you, it’s available on Netflix right now. If you don’t have Netflix but want to watch, I’ll happily Venmo the $5 rental fee to the first five staff members who message me. It’s a small price to pay to share something beautiful.

*****

Speaking of our former selves’ desires, I’ve enjoyed writing about movies and sharing those reviews with you here. This was my first time writing on deadline for another person’s publication, and I had fun cosplaying as a movie critic. These all took time, but they offered me a nice release valve from everything else.

Thanks to Adam and everyone for indulging me. Have a great summer. Hopefully, I’ll have a longer form of writing to share with everyone this upcoming fall.

Tangled (2010)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 16, 2025

It’s for extra-textual reasons that the poster for Disney’s Tangled hangs in the back of HL-5. For follicle-challenged me, a movie about magical flowing locks should stoke envy, not warmth, but the story behind the rectangle I face while I teach overwhelms jealousy. I have the same poster hanging at home, too.

Because my affection is so divorced from the film, I’ve tended to overlook how excellent Tangled is. With catchy songs, a winning story, and two clever character arcs, Tangled showcases Disney at its fairytale repackaging best.

After being kidnapped as an infant, Princess Rapunzel (Mandy Moore) grows up unaware of her royal bloodlines but in possession of a rare gift: her hair has revitalizing powers. Her kidnapper, the vain Mother Gothel (Donna Summer), uses that hair to remain perpetually young while securing her access by gaslighting her “daughter” into believing she can never leave their tower home. When the strapping Flynn Rider (Zachary Levi) serendipitously ends up in her living room while evading police, the two set out to answer Rapunzel’s many questions about the dangerous world beyond her cramped home.

Disney released Tangled fifteen years ago, and that age shows. Everything looks fine from a distance, but the character models look rudimentary on a larger modern TV screen. That’s a minor issue in an otherwise gorgeous film that frames lively characters with painting-esque backdrops that evoke a fairytale world. Paired with expressive voice actors, the film overcomes its aged tech, filling the screen with vivid color and a dynamic story beat via a careening screenplay by Dan Fogelman of This Is Us fame.

Watching Tangled last week for the first time in a decade, I found myself newly enlivened by the experience. The songs really do rock, and I don’t just mean forever-favorite duet “I See the Light”; “When Will My Life Begin” and “Mother Knows Best” establish the story’s stars and stakes, while “I’ve Got a Dream” subverts stereotypes in a manner far more profound than I’d ever given it credit for.

Perhaps due to our proximity to year’s end, I realized this week that Tangled is an excellent film for graduates. Rapunzel begins her story trapped inside a small place, yearning to connect and bursting with curiosity about the larger world; by the end, she’s found a new home and family by overcoming her fear and trudging forward into the unknown. There’s a scene in the film where she struggles with her newfound freedom, oscillating between giddy glee and anxious apprehension, and I thought of my classes, many of whom bounce between blow-this-pop-stand dashing out the door and nervous gnawing over the friends and familiarity they’ll flee. Through that lens, I love Tangled for the Class of 2025: Rapunzel wants change yet also fears it. But when she takes the leap, she discovers her place in the wider world waiting beyond her walls.

It’s been a long time since I looked to the future and didn’t see a familiar loop, but I don’t envy Rapunzel any more than I do our soon-to-be graduates. I appreciate the stability that comes with staring at a poster for fourteen years and centering one’s work around the mindset it once inspired.

I hope each Wildcat walking at Golden One next week finds their place and people as Rapunzel does in Tangled, and as many of us have here at Franklin High School.

 

Your Name (2016)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 9, 2025

I first watched Your Name on a bootleg anime website. “Don’t click on any banners,” the recommender instructed me. “Play it safe.”

That first viewing felt surreal. Tipped off to the gorgeous music and production design, I was unprepared for the emotionality of a story, particularly one about star-crossed lovers that blends body-swap farce, disaster flick, and coming-of-age dramedy.

Teenagers Taki and Mitsuha each have bizarre dreams about living alternate lives. When they discover those alternate lives to be one another’s—and not random dreams—their lives entwine, but fate refuses to let them connect. When danger looms for one, each endeavors to prevent devastation and maintain the possibility of one day meeting the other.

Much like Haruki Murakami’s novels, Your Name leans into a magic realism that occasionally disorients me. Some scenes have cultural components outside my perspective, leaving me sure I’m missing something significant. But Your Name wields an urgent intensity that overwhelms my questions. When there’s no real threat, the film grips me, squeezing my heart in a vice as these teens learn about each other and themselves, but things ratchet up to eleven in the second act. There’s tense drama when two not-that-distant worlds collide and the clock ticks ever closer to tragedy.

Still, the defining feature of Your Name is its beauty and artistic craft. I’m no anime connoisseur, but I’ve watched enough to confidently declare that few look and sound like this. Night skies swell with mesmerizing color, while lake water beckons cool and nourishing; the lens flare here’s so vivid you’ll wonder whether it’s actually filmed. Every shot, whether pastoral or urban, is a masterpiece, the music keeps pace with the images, and the score by RADWIMPS incites emotion with every piano keystroke. I use several instrumental pieces from Your Name in my “If You Really Knew Me” playlist for Diamond Day—they’re that soothing, that powerful.

That all of this beautiful art would support a Quantum Leap romance between teenage protagonists would seem to be a misappropriation of resources. How many times have we watched young lovers pining? It’s a trope as old as time! But Your Name is greater than the sum of its parts because it treats the Taki-Mitsuha relationship with cosmic sincerity; yes, there’s a silly body-swap premise, but the filmmakers portray it as a grand, metaphysical tether across time and space, in a way that should be laughably ridiculous but instead pulls me onto its wavelength. Your Name presents its relationships as they feel to the young people within them: epic, all-encompassing, and life-affirming. It’s refreshing.

While you can surely find it online, the streaming service Crunchyroll has Your Name available right now. I technically own the Blu-ray, but considering I loaned it out in 2018 and haven’t seen it since, you’re on your own finding this one.

Rest assured, Your Name is worth some searching.

 

Almost Famous (2000)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 2, 2025

The girl I had a crush on for most of high school was into music.

Everything she said left me spellbound, but her affection for music awed me. The bands, songs, albums, and venues changed every day, but she spoke about it as an astrophysicist does the universe. Music was everywhere. Music was everything.

And I never understood it. We were staring at the same Red Delicious, but I saw an apple and she saw divinity. For that reason—as well as her more than passing resemblance to Kate Hudson—I’ve always watched Almost Famous with a detective’s eye. I watch it every year and remember both her and that chasm between our respective hearts while listening to music (music).

William (Patrick Fugit) is the brilliant but sheltered son of a college professor (Frances McDormand). His hobby of writing about music gets him an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine: write 4000 words about Stillwater, an emerging rock band led by the golden Russell (Billy Crudup) and the jealous Jeff (Jason Lee). This task sends naive William on the road, where he documents the band while discovering himself and falling in love with Stillwater’s persistent fan Penny Lane (Kate Hudson).

All these years later, Almost Famous remains my Rosetta Stone for music. In the beginning, that perspective endeared Cameron Crowe’s film to me. The open road, the wild parties, the endless charisma of a young Crudup—these were my hints, my ciphers, my decoder rings to this other state of being. If you watch Almost Famous as a story about music, there’s reward; it makes me believe that art, emotion, and rhythm form the fabric of existence. Watching now in 2025, I’ve been to concerts big and small; I’ve felt favorite songs vibrating through my ribcage from the front row and joined 70,000+ in performing the chorus for my favorite singer. If ever I could extract some of what she felt in music, now would be the time.

But I’m also older now, and watching again, I marvel at how young Hudson, Fugit, and Crudup look. Instead of feeling this time-displaced wonder, I watch three characters grapple with growing up. I once watched Russell as the “golden god” he declares himself to be, but now I see a man at a crossroads with gray threatening his temples; he’s ready to rise, but also terrified. William and Penny also straddle a critical line: they are children in a mature world, play-acting as theoretical adults extrapolated from still-developing selves. There are no deities here, only flawed, flailing people hoping the wave of music carries them to shore. That sex-drug-rock n’ roll lifestyle they encounter doesn’t appeal to me now anymore than it did while I stared doe-eyed at my crush, but that moment when anything and everything seemed possible? That still does.

Almost Famous is a frolicking coming-of-age film about music. It follows an exciting journey, it features a fantastic cast, and it fictionalizes a world I’ll never know with such vivid realism that it feels almost like I do. It’s a blast. But it’s something greater, too: we all bring something to Almost Famous separate from the film itself, tapping into the last dwindling traces of our dust-coated almosts and long-retired dreams.

That’s almost certainly not what my high school crush meant when her eyes lit up talking about music like it was everything. Or maybe, in some way, it was? Perhaps she already understood that it’s a blessing to think a noun in italics like she did music.

Or to watch a film that convinces you that you do, too.

 

Sinners (2025)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 25, 2025

I can’t tell you what genre Sinners belongs to.

Often, that’s a problem for a movie; it’s a sign the film lacks cohesive vision, that it doesn’t know what it wants to be, do, or say. But Sinners, while ambitious and chock-full of ideas, has no such struggles. Ryan Coogler’s latest work is a supernatural musical historical horror-drama, which sounds like too much but is instead much too startling, moving, and entertaining to falter. There’s something in Sinners for everybody, but without ever feeling rounded off or broad. It’s tight, it’s intense, it’s an original sensory feast.

It’s the best movie so far in 2025. I’m not sure anything else is close.

After absconding from Mississippi to work for gangsters in Chicago, twins Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan) return with money, liquor, and a vision: to open a juke club at the old saw mill. After purchasing the property, recruiting the transcendent musicians Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) and Slim (Delroy Lindo), and rallying support and interest around town, the community joins forces and has the place hopping on opening night. But when Preacher Boy’s performance draws in malevolent forces, a war breaks out between the townsfolk and folk-singing vampires hell-bent on destroying what Smoke and Stack aim to build.

I’m serious when I say there’s something in this for everybody. Sinners is a period piece, and the costumes and hairstyling both are marvels. The Ludwig Göransson score, like his from the Black Panther movies and Oppenheimer, evokes time and place despite modern sensibilities, and the musical performance by Caton really does play like it might disentangle the fabric of reality. Jordan’s performances are sharp and separate, while Coogler and his team vividly render the world of Clarksdale, presenting its thriving and collaborative community while always keeping the Jim Crow tension and bigotry visible in the frame.

With that incredible foundation established, Sinners is free to be so many seemingly disparate things. In one scene, Jordan somberly visits a grave and attempts a reconciliation; in the next, he drives burning stakes into a snarling vampire. Both work. Coogler engineers incredible horror sequences, timing cuts for maximal dread, but he renders loving glances and heart-wrenching anguish with the same precision. When Sinners momentarily melts into a time-bending music video, there’s spellbinding technical achievement afoot; when it becomes a shoot ‘em up war film, the combat is clear, the rage palpable, and the action gripping. I’ve mentioned the impressive cast already, but Sinners features superb performances up and down the card. Saul Williams, Wunmi Mosaku, Hailee Steinfeld, and Jayme Lawson all play secondary roles wonderfully and memorably, and I especially loved Jack O’Connell as Merrick, the folksy vampire who preys on the community with promises of a better “life” and a small guitar.

At just over two hours, Sinners does incredible things within its reasonable runtime. That Coogler’s film drew a diverse spectrum of emotion out of me, everything from over-the-shoulder fear and fist-pumping thrills to three occasions of earned tears, says it all. Whatever you could want from a film, Sinners has it—and probably has it in spades.

At the end of the day, what Sinners is might be elusive, but who cares? What matters is this: it’s awesome.

 

Mamma Mia Here We Go Again (2018)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 18, 2025

Mamma Mia Here We Go Again begins in bold fashion: by killing off its main character.

In the opening scene, we learn Donna (Meryl Streep) has died, leaving daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and her three fathers to grieve. Although the movie made nearly $400M at the box office, many audiences found this jarring. They expected a Meryl Streep movie. Some never forgave the film. 

Their loss: this frothy, ridiculous jukebox musical of ABBA songs is a glorious slice of cinema. Armed with hilariously on-the-nose pop songs sung and danced with earnest maximalism, Here We Go Again is sugary-sweet eye- and ear-candy padding two low-stakes stories…until it pops in a mouthguard, punches you in the heart, and slurps up your tears with a crazy straw. 

Daughter Sophie (Seyfried) wants to fulfill her mother’s dream by opening a cozy island hotel, but she and her partner Sky (Dominic Cooper) are struggling. While working to launch the resort, Sophie imagines her mother’s fateful summer when a trio of steamy flings led to her conception. 

This premise is…slight. The first Mamma Mia exists, so we know the trajectory of all those earlier romances, and a hotel opening in gorgeous Croatia-pretending-to-be-Greece offers sumptuous scenery but humble drama. There’s never a moment when you doubt all will work out for everyone involved; even when ABBA’s music dips into legato, it explodes into a peppy number four measures later. It’s a jukebox musical! There’s a ceiling on the intensity when stitched-together Swedish pop blankets the film.

But Here We Go Again has two aces hiding up its sleeve that make it magical. The first is Lily James, playing the young Donna while she canoodles through Europe. James glows in every scene, physically and musically; she’s doing an impression of Streep’s character (who wasn’t exactly deep herself), but she plays the role with radiant cheer and unblinking conviction. You end the movie in love with James and wholly convinced she’s destined for stardom. 

The second thing the movie has is intense, huge-hearted emotion. Underneath all the costumes and choreography, Mamma Mia 2 is about motherhood, and it lands its reverence for moms with devastating precision. In the second half, when Sophie’s life changes dramatically, her and her late mom’s stories pull up in parallel. It’s then that Streep appears, ushering in the waterworks. I saw this in theaters with my mom, and though each of us had seen it already, that viewing together meant so much more. This is a movie I think about on Mother’s Day. 

Even if the emotion doesn’t get you or you’re some mom-hating curmudgeon who finds Bambi hilarious, everyone’s having so much fun on screen I dare you not to tap your foot. I’m not a huge fan of ABBA’s music, but I know this soundtrack by heart and may have even dabbled in a dance number inspired by it. The movie offers less nuance than birthday cake, but I love birthday cake.

And I love this movie.