Catching Up: February
Some leftovers before Thanksgiving?
There are tons of movies out right now, as I write this, the day before Thanksgiving. A bunch are in theaters, a bunch are on streaming, and Netflix is even doing their annual deluge of putting good stuff in a few hundred theaters, telling no one, and then dropping it on their service a few weeks later (right now, Train Dreams and Frankenstein are streaming while Wake Up Dead Man and Jay Kelly are still in theaters, theoretically). Because I just published my last review of November, I thought for a moment that maybe I should recap this month rather than continuing on through my erratic but chronological accounting of 2025, but that seems too complicated. So I’ll just say, because I didn’t actually review it anywhere, do not see Eternity. I thought that one was very, very bad. Of all the A24 pictures to go out on a few thousand screens! Blech. Anyway, here’s a bunch of stuff I wrote nine months ago! A lot of it is streaming for free (well, “free”) on various services by now.
A bunch of the reviews are also from Paste, which was sort of my home-base outlet for the past few years, and as of this month is no longer that (or anything at least until I start pitching the odd music feature). I am lucky enough to have several part-time gigs going at any given time, so it’s not that Paste paid me the most (lolz) or even was the place where I produced the greatest sheer volume of work. But! It’s where I had a cool title (Associate Film Editor) and a lot of leeway to do what I generally like doing best: the humble new-release movie review. I love doing retrospectives and bigger pieces, too, but I think I’m pretty well-suited to the grind of Eberting out 800-word reviews in the moment, and my deal at Paste involved doing usually 4-6 of those each month, which went a long way toward making me feel like a “real” movie critic who could put a specific default outlet on any film festival applications or press invitations. (For all of the hype Rotten Tomatoes gets, they apparently don’t direct that much traffic toward the actual reviews they aggregate and, as such, a lot of outlets don’t actually care that much about publishing regular reviews!) Paste recently decided to streamline their pop-culture coverage to concentrate almost exclusively on music, which was their original focus in the print-magazine days, because they also now own the A.V. Club, which is much better-known for its movie and TV coverage than Paste is. And, moreover, money stuff; I know the Paste EIC genuinely liked having lots of different culture coverage on the site and would have been happy to keep running two different sites that publish movie reviews. (If the Hollywood Reporter and Variety can somehow be owned by one company…) I’ll still freelance for the A.V. Club, covering some of the bigger and smaller titles for them, and again, I’m very lucky; I have several great outlets that help pay the bills (which is to say my daughter’s collection of Warriors books) and plenty of opportunities to write about movies in an environment where that’s not at all a given. None of it’s a given! To make my living as a writer/editor, and have most of that income be from actual writing, is practically hallucinatory.
But it’s nonetheless a little bittersweet to collect a bunch of Paste bylines knowing that this was my last year before my part-time position was eliminated. I know Paste didn’t have the greatest layout/UX going on, but man, they really tried to cover a lot of movies. For example: most of the movies I reviewed in February were for Paste and all of them were for Paste Media! (The A.V. Club let me review every MCU entry that’s come out since 2024 and that continues here with the worst of the bunch!) Anyway, here are those plus other stuff.
February New Releases
Captain America: Brave New World (Speaking of leftovers! Yeesh.)
Stuff I saw but didn’t write about: Love Hurts, Ne Zha 2, Paddington in Peru, Last Breath, My Dead Friend Zoe. Nothing terribly remarkable among those. Actually, I did get to talk a bit about Love Hurts in a commissioned round-up of “anti-Valentine’s Day” movies.
February Retrospectives
My technically now-unfinished Year 2000 retro at Paste continued with a look back at The Beach, a movie I quite predictably think is Good, Actually.
I also did anniversary pieces at Decider for Wonder Boys and a triple feature of Billy Madison, The Quick and the Dead, and Shallow Grave. They all opened the same day in 1995! What a time to be alive! Even if I only saw the Sandler one in a movie theater!
I also used Decider’s recommendation column to stump for Down with Love and Coneheads.
TV?!
Zero Day; not really a review, more a consideration of how fucking stupid it is.
Saturday Night Live’s anniversary special.
That’s it! The March version of this will arrive much sooner than this did.