Good Movies Archives - Vanyaland

Year in ReView: Vanyaland’s favorite film screen performances of 2025

Nick Johnston — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:54:57 +0000

If you’d like to know my thoughts on acting in movies, I’d point you to the scene from Moneyball in which Billy Beane tries to convince Scott Hatteberg to play first base. It is incredibly hard, though the compensation and fame and all of the other accoutrements go a long way to convince the average schlub that it’s easy as hell. Just imagine trying to do a monologue in which you have to run the gamut of emotions while not […]

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‘Marty Supreme’ Review: Josh Safdie serves up a masterpiece

Nick Johnston — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:13:18 +0000

If folks were disappointed that The Smashing Machine wasn’t just Uncut Gems 2: Howie Ratner Learns How to Lift, they’ll be absolutely delighted by Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. It’s a continuation of the storytelling throughline that Safdie established with his brother Bennie in their last few films — white-knuckle insanity on the streets of New York taken to absurdist extremes, grounded in a thoroughly-brilliant performance by a uniquely-talented lead — but placed in a more-distant time period, with more textures […]

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‘Eternity’ Review: A good take on the great beyond

Nick Johnston — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:01:12 +0000

David Freyne’s Eternity breaks one of the cardinal rules of first-date cinema — for the love of God, unless you’re absolutely certain the person is sufficiently cool with talking about death, do not bring that subject up in your multiplex selection and, in fact, you should at all times pretend that it doesn’t exist and that you both are immortals unless you’re hot enough to get away with it — but still winds up being what I’d think of (aside […]

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‘The Running Man’ Review: The Wright stuff

Nick Johnston — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:07:38 +0000

Thanks to Baby Driver breaking people’s brains (and that Anthony Bourdain tweet didn’t help matters), Edgar Wright is now caught in a miserable catch-22. If he were to continue making the types of films he always has — deliciously self-critical and deeply personal tributes to genre cinema — he runs the risk of the work being misunderstood at best and uncharitably savaged at worst (see Last Night in Soho and the baffling vitriol that was hurled its way). If he […]

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IFFBoston Fall Focus ’25 Review: Josh O’Connor is ‘The Mastermind’

Nick Johnston — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:12:03 +0000

When you think “Massachusetts art museum heist,” it’s understandable that you’d default to the one that took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum some 35 years ago. You know the one: The subject of a million “whodunit” documentaries and endless speculation (as well as one solid crime novel, Charlesgate Confidential, which transplanted the heist to the ’40s and heavily involved the mythos of the Charlesgate Hotel), where the paintings were cut from their frames and potentially lifted by a […]

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‘Good Boy’ Review: A doggone great horror picture

Nick Johnston — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 15:15:24 +0000

My greatest fear when walking into Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy was that it would ultimately turn out to be like Jason Eisener’s segment in V/H/S 2, which was a thoroughly nasty little bit of found-footage that ends in a (perhaps appropriately, given the subject matter) apocalyptic fashion that nevertheless had me wanting to put three rounds into the screen like I was Elvis trying to change the channel. That short — an outgrowth of the “let’s mount a camera to […]

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‘Anemone’ Review: Daniel Day-Lewis still has it

Nick Johnston — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 18:12:28 +0000

There’s no such thing as “ring rust” when you’re Daniel Day-Lewis, and it was foolish to even consider that for even one fucking second. Sure, Day-Lewis has been in some bad movies (Nine, anyone?), but the man is nothing if not committed. His retirement from acting was less a fuck-you to Hollywood this time — no cobbling here — and more an admission of just how much his line of work and, more importantly, his method takes out of him. […]

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‘One Battle After Another’ Review: Good enough

Nick Johnston — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:35:17 +0000

Here’s a conundrum that has mystified writers, editors, audience members, significant others, and possibly every single person to ever engage with art throughout human history: what does one do when they’re the odd man out and can’t exactly figure out why? Now, I’m not talking about simply holding a contrarian view – a person should think and say whatever the hell they want, as long as they have a strong opinion, well-supported and analyzed, or, at the very least, possess […]

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‘Highest 2 Lowest’ Review: Spike Lee’s still got it

Nick Johnston — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 18:19:45 +0000

You know you’re in for a good time when, at the start of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, you get a tongue-in-cheek yet still deathly-earnest montage of the sun rising over New York set to “Oh What a Beautiful Mornin’” from Oklahoma. It’s a tip of the hat to the film’s subject matter (provided that you’ve been forced to watch Oklahoma as often as I have been over the last three decades), mostly preserved by screenwriter Alan Fox in his […]

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‘Nobody 2’ Review: Have some sun-and-gun with Bob Odenkirk

Nick Johnston — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 18:09:43 +0000

Unless the studio spends extra on someone like Jim Cameron (either as screenwriter or director), most action franchises benefit from consistency. Timo Tjahjanto’s Nobody 2 sees that logic and then uses its face to play Whack-a-Mole, much like Bob Odenkirk does in one of the film’s fight scenes. When the delays stacked up and Ilya Naishuller, director of the first installment, moved on to make an off-brand Has Fallen movie for Prime Video (it’s weird that they’ve had two of […]

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