Compulsive Viewing: August 2025
Welcome to the August edition of Compulsive Viewing. Each month, I’ll list all the films I’ve watched for the first time that month, offering some brief thoughts on them as I go. Each film has a link to its page on Letterboxd, in case you want to find out more about it and see how my opinion compares to the Letterboxd consensus.
Savages (2025, dir. Claude Barras)
Stop-motion animation has a charm that I often can’t resist, and Claude Barras’s Savages is no different—visually the film has a visual aesthetic that it’s easy to warm to. Barras’s ecological and anti-capitalist message is both admirable and urgent, but is ultimately lacking in nuance, leaving the film’s central narrative feeling a bit too slight and overly simplistic. In fairness, however, when it comes to issues such as these, the time for moderation and subtlety has arguably passed.
Bring Her Back (2025, dirs. Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou)
In many ways, Bring Her Back is a markedly different type of horror film to the Phillippou brothers’ 2022 directorial debut, Talk To Me. However, both film left me with a similar feeling of wanting more than what the filmmakers ultimately gave me. Bring Her Back is at times absorbing, most often when it allows Sally Hawkins the space to subtly craft central character Laura into a believeable yet enigmatic presence. Too often, however, the Phillippous can’t decide if they want their film to present a version of the real world in which the supernatural elements exist, or a heightened horror-trope-filled universe, falling short of satisfyingly presenting either. As a result, some of the gender stereotypes they fall back on—particularly in relation to Laura, as her backstory is steadily filled in—feel at best ill-conceived, at worst really quite lazy.
Weapons (2025, dir. Zach Cregger)
Weapons has the (dis)honour of being the film that fell by far the furthest in my estimation this year during the course of its running time. For the first half, Zach Cregger had me: the eerie mystery at the film’s centre, the slow reveal of potential clues, the nonlinear storytelling, the gradual establishment of different characters and how they fit into a community on edge with anxiety increasingly bubbling over. The director sets up a taut psychological horror for the audience to invest in throughout the opening hour or so—and then destroys it. As the film heads towards its climax, characters transform from complex individuals to one-dimensional hack jobs or, worse, punchlines. The whiplash-inducing tonal shift from the first two acts to the finale may be intentional on Cregger’s part, but that doesn’t mean it works. The conclusion essentially renders the previous ninety or so minutes utterly, insultingly pointless. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Cregger giving the audience a jigsaw puzzle to put together, waiting until they’ve got a few pieces left to slot in, then violently dashing the whole thing to the floor whilst pointing and laughing at them for ever bothering to try.
Materialists (2025, dir. Celine Song)
What Celine Song does well in Materialists, she does very well. There are shots crafted throughout that confirm Song’s artful eye for cinema that was established in 2023’s Past Lives, while also pleasingly paralleling the meticulous, value-driven view of the world of central character Lucy (Dakota Johnson). There are individual scenes here which are excellent: Lucy’s dinner date with Harry (Pedro Pascal) is a particular highlight. In the end, however, Materialists never quite takes off in the way I hoped it might. What initially seems to be a smart, subtle subversion of the rom-coms that filled cinemas twenty years ago ultimately ends up fitting too comfortably into the box Song started out critiquing.
The Naked Gun (2025, dir. Akiva Schaffer)
Last month, I described James Gunn’s Superman as “one of the most fun experiences I’ve had at the cinema this year,” and Akiva Schaffer’s reboot-cum-legacy-sequel to The Naked Gun trilogy of the 1980s and 1990s joins Gunn’s film in sharing that accolade. What Schaffer does so well here is to remember what made The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (dir. David Zucker, 1988) work as well as it does, which the second and third sequels to my mind increasingly lose sight of: Frank Drebin—whether Lesley Nielsen’s original or Liam Neeson’s next generation—is funniest when played entirely straight, with the humour coming from the ridiculousness of the words he’s saying or the situation around him. Neeson is excellent, as is Pamela Anderson, with the film at its strongest when the pair share the screen. The laugh-per-minute ratio achieved by Schaffer is impressive, with the majority of the recurring gags always feeling welcome when they return. The film suffers in its final act, which feels as though Schaffer felt beholden to a finale that sticks close to the Naked Gun films of the past whether it actually works or not. But the niggles here are minor: 2025’s The Naked Gun is a welcome mainstream return for spoof comedy cinema, and I hope Neeson’s Drebin doesn’t end up as a one-off tribute.
Barbarian (2022, dir. Zach Cregger)
Call me a glutton for punishment, but I thought I would give Cregger’s directorial debut a try to see if Weapons was just suffering from being a “difficult second film” with a bigger budget and bigger expectations. Despite the critical acclaim Barbarian has generally received, all it did was confirm that Cregger has a formula for horror filmmaking, and that I don’t get on with it. Many of my criticisms of Weapons above also apply here to varying degrees. On balance, Barbarian is more consistent than Weapons, but certainly not enough to be able to recommend it as being worthy of your time. If you want intriguing premises that are ultimately squandered for increasingly pointless, idiotic plot developments, then Cregger is the director for you.
Sorry, Baby (2025, dir. Eva Victor)
A slow burn, but all the better for it. For the first twenty minutes or so, I struggled to click with the tone and performances in Sorry, Baby, but by the time I’d reached the end of Eva Victor’s film they made perfect sense. In depicting the form of trauma at the film’s centre, Victor achieves a powerful balance between presenting it as utterly life-changing whilst also being heartbreakingly ordinary, without ever trivialising or hyperbolising the issues depicted. Funny and sad, infuriating and hopeful, Sorry, Baby is amongst my favourite films of the year so far.
The Life of Chuck (2025, dir. Mike Flanagan)
Another film that shot into my top films of 2025, Mike Flanagan brings Stephen King’s short story (which I have never read) to life on screen with an infectious sense of Spielbergian wonder. The first act achieves a hypnotic blend of grounded reality and endearing fantasy that hooked me in entirely. The final act is arguably a little too saccharine here and there, but that feels like an unfair criticism of a film which so boldly and brilliantly sets out its earnestly hopeful outlook on life from the outset. The middle act is the perfect bridge between The Life of Chuck’s opening and ending, as well as showcasing why Tom Hiddleston is one of the most charming and talented leading men working today.
That’s it for August’s Compulsive Viewing—keep an eye out for September’s round-up in the first half of October.