Early Monday (3.10) HE posted a roster of 43 stand-out films due for release between now and 12.31.25. In the late afternoon Sasha Stone and I discussed the apparent ins and outs of the 43. Here’s the 2025 Movie Preview Page.

Hottest of the hotties: Joseph Kosinski‘s F1, Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another, Scott Cooper‘s Deliver Me from Nowhere, Darren Aronofsky‘s Caught Stealing, Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt, Josh Safdie‘s Marty Supreme, Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest, Ari Aster‘s Eddington, Paul Greengrass‘s The Lost Bus, John M. Chu‘s Wicked: For Good, Julian Schnabel‘s In The Hand of Dante, Jonah Hill‘s Outcome, Michel Franco‘s Dreams, Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride!, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare…what is that, 17?

After several weeks of horrid, miserable, bone-chilling cold, it’s wonderful to suddenly feel the coming of spring. Temps were in the mid 60s today. Daylight savings (i.e, more daylight) has done wonders for my general outlook. Could it be that a benevolent God, perhaps even a kindly and gracious one, is watching over me?

I think not. Timothy Ratliff’s life is totally miserable and collapsing…the FBI is after him, his assets are being seized, he’s swallowing pills and slurping booze…the indications that he’s on the verge of commiting suicide are so numerous and relentless that I’m convinced he won’t go down the hole.

The White Lotus character who’s in actual serious trouble is Natasha Rothwell‘s Belinda Lindsey, the chubby spa manager who’s threatened Jon Gries‘ “Gary” character by telling him she’s fairly certain they’ve met before.

I’ve finally gotten Walton Goggins. I’m finally in the proverbial boat with the guy. Before absorbing his White Lotus performance as Rick Hatchett, the sweaty, greasy-haired, anxiety-ridden dude who’s looking to confront a man who killed his father…before watching Goggins dig into Hatchett, I had never been stirred by his acting. I had never felt what he had…never let him in. But now I’m a convert.

Hatchett is some kind of lost soul or blank slate or whatever. Nothing about him is settled, much less serene. Who decides to free a bunch of venomous snakes and let them just slither away? That’s a fairly moronic thing to do. People could get bitten. And yet Hatchett is oddly relatable.

I haven’t seen Goggins work all that much, but my impression is that before The White Lotus he’s mainly played secondary or scumbag roles in crap-level features and whatnot. Hatchett may be his first really well-written role. Is it?

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The wokester campaign to urge the freeing of Lyle and Erik Menendez has pretty much collapsed. L.A. District Attorney Nathan Hochman isn’t buying into the “boo-hoo, I blew my parents away because my dad repeatedly fucked me in the ass.” To which I say, “Eat shit, shotgun murderers!”

A movie about a sexual chow–down affair during the late World War I era between a pair of British dudes, to be played by Josh “stinky feet” O’Connor and Paul “God help us all” Mescal?

It’s almost as if director-writer Oliver Hermanus (whose Beauty won the Queer Palm award in 2011) is deliberately hoping to trigger Hollywood Elsewhere…or, you know, trying to get guys like me to go “eewww!…

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O’Connor is on his way up (the talk is that he might even be cast as the new 007) but post-Gladiator II Mescal is unmistakably on his way down. Is there anyone in the civilized world who wants to see this hawk-nosed Irish actor, the quintessence of dead-fall charisma, play ‘60s-era Paul McCartney?

The Forty Elephants may have been an all-female London crime syndicate in 1880s London, but they weren’t so much an underworld criminal gang as a fleet-fingered shoplifting operation, which sounds a lot less malicious than, say, a female Dead Rabbits.

I haven’t yet sunk into Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows (Hulu) but being a scruffy 19th Century thing it’s obviously not related to the cinematic visions of the late Francois Truffaut and his 66-year-old debut film, The 400 Blows, which excited the imaginations of the young Harvey and Bob Weinstein. (I doubt they were the only young lads with thoughts of an oral-sex marathon.) Not that this has anything to do with the Forty Elephants…wait, I’ve lost the thread.