65/2497. Black Eye (1974)
This is very much a mid-70s "neo" noir. It's even easy to imagine Gene Hackman or James Garner in the title role if it hadn't been dipped in the trappings of the blaxploitation genre. It's not perfect, but it's not bad, either.

66/2498. The Cleaner (2025)
It's not Daisy Ridley's fault that this is a mediocre Die Hard knock off. She may be the best thing in it. It's just a very shallow action thriller with some very confused James Bondian antagonists. Yawn.

67/2499. Love Me (2024)
Maybe think of this as a dumber Wall-E where all of humanity is dead. I'd probably like it more if I could get over the typical Hollywood bullshit about technology being functionally immortal. But it's also a typically Hollywood bullshit romcom dressed in sci-fi trappings, raising questions it has no interest in actually answering. So that's two strikes. I do, however, enjoy Kristen Stewart, who (largely) succeeds at making her character sympathetic while working with a script that doesn't seem to understand (or care) what "self-awareness" is.

68/2500. Surviving Ohio State (2025)
This documentary is largely just the testimony of several former OSU wrestlers about events that they experienced in the 1980s and 1990s backed up with documentary evidence, and damn, it's a gut punch. I've never cared for the arrogance of "The" Ohio State University sports teams, but how could anyone support an athletic department, an institution, that would do this to its own kids? (If you watch this, know that just this week, a federal judge ordered mediation between the university, which has offered a total payout of $60 million, and the subjects of this film to be conducted by the same man who negotiated Michigan State should pay $500 million for similar circumstances. So expect more news to come in February 2026.)

69/2501. A Minecraft Movie (2025)
The similarities between this and Napoleon Dynamite were obvious even before I looked up the credits and saw that it was made by the same writer/director. I admit that a whole bunch of the specific jokes were lost on me. I've only played a couple of hours of Minecraft, and this is aimed squarely at the game's hardest-core community. Therefore, I found it just an okay movie experience, but I can understand why it was a such a big hit with the target audience.

More to come.

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