Catching Up: April
April showers, movies dour (well, sort of)
Like a lot of newsletter projects, even my month-by-month year-in-review bit sort of fell by the wayside with the end-of-year rush. But I had mostly completed the April version already so I’m zipping it out to you before I do something a little more current.
New Releases for April 2025
A Minecraft Movie, plus a survey of trends in video game movies.
King of Kings: Shout-out to my Daily Beast editor Emma, who really let me go to town with the number of silly jokes in this review. Anti-shout-out to whoever quelled our working relationship at the Daily Beast by spearheading a 2026 direction shift away from, uh, publishing reviews in the culture section.
Sneaks (30 Rock-ass movie)
Sinners: Of course this inspired some other ancillary work; I enjoyed writing up some post-release thoughts about the movie that wouldn’t really fit in a spoiler-averse review.
I think I wrote about just about every new release I saw in April, which I think of as the goal but when it actually happens actually seems kind of weird!
Retrospectives
Sadly, another movie star passing, and I wrote about Val Kilmer’s general career and one specific movie of his I really like. And also The Saint, which I like mostly because of Kilmer. Honestly, there’s something sort of comforting about being called upon to eulogize movie people at short notice. Some of it is just that my editors know I can probably turn something reasonably interesting on a tight schedule, but there’s also something therapeutic about mourning in public. I’m not saying that I was in mourning about the death of Val Kilmer, but a lot of these performers, even ones you don’t think of as your favorites, do affect you in weird ways through their work, and I like focusing up to try to put that into words and/or a recommendation for a movie you can watch to pay tribute. And sometimes, with someone like Nicky Katt, it’s a figure some may not remember but whose work I care deeply about.
Anyway, two more movies from the year 2000: Over at Paste, I covered Keeping the Faith and High Fidelity, two rom-coms I saw three times each (!) in the theaters. And for Decider, I wrote about American Psycho, which I… maybe also saw three times?! What was wrong with me in the year 2000? Something different from what was wrong with me in the year 2025? Who’s to say?