Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, we have one of the best films of the year in Sinners hitting shelves. Today also features 2025 movies like The Amateur, Hell of a Summer, The Legend of Ochi, and Until Dawn, in addition to one of last year’s best fright flicks with In a Violent Nature. Plus, we have a tremendous Criterion Collection release in Barry Lyndon to consider here. Read on for more…
Joey’s Top Pick
Sinners
Simply put, Sinners rocks. Bloody, horny, musical, and a stunning achievement from Ryan Coogler, the film offers up nearly everything you want in a cinematic experience. Horror fans obviously have fallen for it, but the movie is far more than a genre exercise. It’s among the best works of 2025 so far. My four star rave review here on the site began like so:
Okay, listen up folks. For anyone who ever complains that Hollywood never does anything original, Sinners is for you. This is the type of film that spits in the face of those who say cinema has nothing new to offer. By taking one of the oldest movie monsters there is, spinning them on their ear, and filtering it through a setting/time period that’s never utilized them before, and you have something completely singular. There has never been anything quite like Sinners. Not only is this 2025’s first truly great blockbuster, it’s also the best film of the year so far.
Sinners absolutely rocks. Bloody, horny, musical, and full of genre-bending on the part of filmmaker Ryan Coogler, it’s all the right kinds of audacious. What begins as a light period drama, with plenty of reverence for the power of music, it slowly but surely transforms into horror, with the third act becoming an actual bloodbath. Through it all, there’s impeccable technical aspects, first rate acting, and a true feeling that you’re watching the full possibilities of film. Coogler makes movies for the big screen, with Sinners being just the latest example of an event picture, meant to be seen with the best sound and on the biggest screen possible.
Also Available This Week
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Abigail (4K)
The Amateur
Clueless (4K)
Fallout: Season One (TV)
Grave of the Fireflies (Blu-ray)
Hell of a Summer
In a Violent Nature (4K)
The Little Things (4K)
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman: The Complete Series (TV)
Man on Wire (Blu-ray)
See: The Complete Series (TV)
Until Dawn
Criterion Corner
Barry Lyndon
From The Criterion Collection: “Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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