4 Favorites: June 2025
Ozploitation, David Lynch's Victorian England, Mike Flanagan's Memento Mori, and one of the most beautiful animes I've ever seen
Welcome back to the 4 Favorites series!
In addition to the movies mentioned today, June was also a great month for rewatches. I threw on my DVDs for “Step Brothers” and “Hot Rod” last week for some levity among all the breaking news. While I wasn’t surprised at how well those nostalgic hits hold up, I was shocked by how much of “Hot Rod” is a part of Taylor’s vocabulary (“Hwhy am I saying hwhat hwhat hway?”).
Taylor and I also just finished reading “Sunrise on the Reaping” together, and re-watching the first two “Hunger Games” movies after reading that prequel about Haymitch Abernathy is wild. If Suzanne Collins didn’t have all of her characters’ backstories planned out decades ago, you could have fooled me. (Also: the book’s great.)
In other business, I wrote streaming guides for May and June for Book & Film Globe if you’re looking to catch up on something to watch this summer, and I highlighted some Texas drive-in theaters in the Star-Telegram.
But most importantly: Production on Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” adaptation continues apace, and Marshall and I are starting a new season of “Friends at Dusk” to do a read-along of Homer’s epic poem and document all updates on the Nolan production. Take a listen to the trailer below to see what we’ve got planned.
But now, as Vin Diesel says … THE MOVIES:
“Dangerous Animals”
Get it? Because Man is the Most Dangerous Animal? The twist in this Australian horror thriller is that serial killer Bruce (as in the name of the animatronic shark in “Jaws”) doesn’t technically kill most of his victims — sharks do. Bruce (Jai Courtney) runs a tourist boat for his own “swimming with the sharks” business, which is the perfect alibi for pushing innocent customers overboard.
Bruce finally meets his match when he abducts itinerant surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), who turns the tables on him in more ways than one.
This is an Ozploitation film that knows what it’s about and how it’s about it. Every actor in this plays the ridiculous premise completely straight, even during a bonkers moment involving a bull shark in the third act that had me hootin’ and hollerin’. Harrison never lets Zephyr become a caricature of a character, and Courtney is a revelation of gleeful evil, showcasing what he can do when he’s not in franchise mode.
This also has a cathartic ending despite all the carnage. Was pleasantly surprised by this one.
Now playing in theaters and coming soon to streaming on Shudder.
“The Elephant Man”
As I watched David Lynch’s second film (and, arguably, most straightforward, even more of a traditional narrative than “The Straight Story”), I kept thinking about how it wouldn’t work without Lynch. It would be easy to turn the true story of “The Elephant Man” John Merrick (John Hurt) into a maudlin sob story destined to win awards and make the audience feel good about watching An Important Movie where they can imagine themselves like Dr. Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins), who brings Merrick in under his care after seeing him in a sideshow.
But what Lynch does is a much more understated thing. This is a profound film, and a sad one, but it never becomes saccharine or over-the-top.
Lynch’s empathy was his strongest asset as a director and a writer. Here, he makes us identify with both Merrick and Treves, while also not letting Treves off the hook for initially taking on Merrick’s incurable case as a path to fame in the medical world.
This tension is best explored in the film’s famous “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” scene.
You give this scene to any other director, and those lines are shot in close-up, with a swelling musical score that practically screams “This is the Oscars clip.”1 We would be right there with Merrick. But Lynch unfussily places the camera at the back of the crowd. We have to strain to hear like everybody else. No close-up. This way, the audience is a part of the crowd that harms Merrick, but we are also meant to feel kinship with Merrick. Not an easy feat to pull off, especially since the movie is partially about Merrick being objectified by one audience or another (whether that be carnivals or medical boards) for his whole life through no fault of his own.
All of Lynch’s sensibilities are here, from the dream-like opening and closing sequences to his penchant for outsiders. Today, directors make the leap from small indies to tentpole and Oscar fare all the time. Lynch perfected that model 45 years ago, and didn’t sacrifice his artistic or commercial sensibilities.
The Criterion Blu-Ray is curently unavailable (but not completely out of print), so the only way to own this movie on physical media is to buy a copy of the Criterion disc on eBay; buy a region-free 4K disc from StudioCanal; find it used on DVD at a secondhand store; or see if your library has a DVD copy available, which Is how I found it. For those without a 4K or Blu-Ray player, this copy on archive.org is decent, but the sound is quiet and delayed.
“The Life of Chuck”
I’ve already written a lot about this movie, with more to come soon, but I’ll let my previous piece on it speak for itself. This is a beautiful film.
Get busy livin' or get busy dyin': Thoughts on 'The Life of Chuck'
I cross my thumbs left over right whenever I clasp my hands together (never right over left). My face contracts into the same frown as my dad’s does when I see something I don’t like.
Now playing in theaters.
“Your Name.”
I knew nothing about Makoto Shinkai’s highly acclaimed 2016 body-swap anime before watching it, except that it came recommended by multiple anime fans in my life.
And that’s how I’m going to leave it here. “Your Name.” is best experienced with as little prior knowledge as possible. I will say that it’s refreshing for a body-swap movie to have two characters who almost immediately understand what’s going on. And I’ll also say that it’s much more than a body-swap movie, and goes to some interesting places in the final act.
It’s also full of gorgeous animation. There are some shots of food here that look real. Even the background objects like oscillating fans or sliding doors were beautiful.
Supposedly, there is an American live action remake coming soon with J.J. Abrams producing. I hope not.
Available to stream on Crunchyroll, and also available to own on physical media.
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This newsletter is written by me and edited by my favorite person, Taylor Tompkins. Views expressed here are my own and don’t reflect the opinions of my employer.
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“The Elephant Man” was eventually nominated for eight Oscars and won none.