September 2025 — Reviews Roundup

Most Septembers are a scramble for the next big hit, and there seem to be at least a few for each day of each fall festival, only because festivals are where hype is currency. Hype curates — no doubt — but it also endangers hope; Venice came, Toronto went, New York’s still chugging along, but if Late Fame was any indication, prestige only extends as far as the next upper-middle soirée. We still love NYFF (and the other FFs too!), that’s why we’re pushing our baby dispatches out despite having gone into labor several times this month. Things otherwise sandwiched between the Lido and Lake Ontario had room to breathe in September’s latter weeks; things we didn’t cover in Cannes, because one can never completely cover Cannes, surfaced with a few months’ worth of anticipation and critical distance alike. A.I. Dracula bites; heaven and hell are potentially the same amid a WWIII rave; the powder kegs of repression go off in 1970s Recife; and, of course, Josh O’Connor does double duty stealing art and getting his heart stolen, decades apart amid the warm yesteryears of the twentieth century.

Festival obsessions aside, some of the year’s biggest buzz tends to arrive around this time, and this time a government shutdown, a two-year-old (charitably speaking) genocide, and a grotesque display of warmongering vanity have really put into perspective the incipient paranoia and pessimism of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest. One Battle After Another, screened in VistaVision some cities and IMAX in others, needs little of such marketing tactics: it’s already too large for life, too real in its diagnosis and gentle depradation of America’s mercurial neuroses. Arguably, no one should read our review until seeing it, and possibly not read it even after seeing it, not until the dust has settled and we permit ourselves to look back. But looking back is the stance of the priggish liberal for whom reviews specifically, and art more broadly, serve only to comfort and confirm. Not for no reason do we have “Online” in our name: the web has taken off, we’ve come to terms with it, and our adaptability to the changing ever-present is one of our few constants. Clarity of mind is, for both our readers and writers, on the line. This month, we remake Kurosawa, revisit jailbait, Rock out, and ram macho men. It’s a long walk, but as always, it’s ours (and yours) to run.