May 2025 — Reviews Roundup

As the onset of  summer movie season increasingly inches its way toward late winter, it becomes more and more difficult to establish any kind of firm delineation between the before/during/after. But that illegibility is also freeing in its implicit admonishment of categorization. Likewise obliterative to any kind of tidy organizing of release date implications is the advent of our present streaming era, in which anything can be dropped anytime, giving studios some structural leeway with regard to their theatrical release calendars. Sprinkled amidst the more insidious inferences to draw from this reality is the more relative freedom afforded counterprogramming. Sure, this May we had the potential send-off to the Mission: Impossible franchise (though who really believes this is the end? Vegas odds that Tom Cruise is still operating as human scaffolding into his 70s…), the latest Disney live action remake (a mere two months after the last), Marvel’s latest attempt at convincing us it isn’t artistically bankrupt, and a little juice to goose the briefly dormant Final Destination franchise. But also hitting theaters were the latest films from Jia Zhangke and Warwick Thornton, a number of genre entries from last summer’s Fantasia Fest, Alex Ross Perry’s Pavement-reverent fiction-blurring work, and, of all things, a new David Mamet moving… starring Shia LaBeouf. Which is to say, the post-Covid, streaming-dominant release calendar remains the wild west, with wigs who are big still trying to figure out the proper nu-calculus, gifting viewers a more reliable 12 months of hunting diamonds in the rough. Swon, Minervini, and co. have you covered in May 2025.