Joey Magidson
Welcome back to my Home Movies! This week, I’m about to head home from the Toronto International Film Festival, though the column presses on. Today, we have a bunch of 2025 releases hitting shelves, led by Materialists. The slate also features Elio and Jurassic World Rebirth, plus a very interesting entry into the Criterion Collection. Read on for more…
Joey’s Top Pick
Materialists
Filmmaker Celine Song managed to to take the idea of a romantic comedy and spin it into a romantic drama with Materialists, for the better, too. Chris Evans, Dakota Johnson, and Pedro Pascal are excellent, while the skewering of modern dating really does land. My highly positive review here on the site began like so:
Modern dating is…not great. Between technology, the anxieties of the day, and all of the added pressures put on everyone, it’s actually kind of a miracle any date goes well, let alone can blossom into a relationship. So, why do we do it? I know I’ve had many a tale that I could tell of dates that went awry. Well, it’s the hope for love, right? At the same time, how does that absolute positive brush up against all that negative? That’s just one element being considered in Materialists, a romantic drama that’s only masquerading in promotional materials as a romantic comedy. There’s a lot going on in this film, to be sure. It’s a lot of things. A rom-com? Not even in the slightest, so just know that going in.
Materialists is a romantic movie that still manages to have a heaping does of cynicism and realism mixed in. It has the capacity to really upset you, given the razor sharp precision with which the subject matter is being depicted. Rom-coms are fantasy, of course, so they can play by their own rules. This flick sticks almost entirely to the real world, give or take a cinematic moment that does still manage to be effective. This is at the very least a deconstruction of the romantic comedy, if not just a romantic drama of the first order.
Also Available This Week
Ballerina
Bride Hard
Dark Winds: Season 3 (TV)
Ice Road: Vengeance
Jurassic World: 7-Movie Collection (4K)
The Ritual
Criterion Corner
High and Low
From The Criterion Collection: “Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in High and Low, the highly influential domestic drama and police procedural from director Akira Kurosawa. Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a diabolical treatise on class and contemporary Japanese society.”
Stay tuned for more next week…
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