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I have not yet seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day. I probably will; despite being a 31-year-old woman, I have a lifelong affinity for Spider-Man the character and have always found Tom Holland to be adorable. I will watch pretty much anything that takes place within the Spider-Man universe, even (maybe especially) if Spider-Man himself isn’t there. I even enjoy those fuckass Spider-Verse movies and would like to watch the cartoon Jake Johnson Spider-Man kiss the cartoon Oscar Isaac Spider-Man when the new one comes out in three to eight years — that’s just my radical truth. This special interest of mine obviously harkens back to Sam Raimi’s seminal Tobey Maguire trilogy and the memes it inspired that were very important on late 2000s and early 2010s internet. The flop Andrew Garfield movies solidified my allegiance, for obvious reasons. But something happened between the Raimi trilogy and the Garfield films that in many ways still feels like a fever dream. That something is, of course, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.

At the heart of every Spider-Man adaptation is the concept of an average boy being turned into a very special boy by accident. That is the immutable idea of the character. It’s what makes him relatable. It’s also what makes him very boy, as normal men are literally always dreaming about randomly being revealed as exceptional. What makes Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark such a unique case study is that one of the most important factors of its downfall is the fact that a big-dreaming woman decided to try her hand at telling Spider-Man’s story, and the world just wasn’t ready for that. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What makes a boy musical?

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For reasons I don’t care to discuss here, I have a moratorium on non-essential shopping for the foreseeable future, but those What [Insert Name of Celebrity] Can’t Live Without articles on the Strategist are some of my absolute favorite things to read. I love shopping with a passion that borders on Shopping Is My Cardio levels, and even when I ban myself from shopping I can’t stop myself from online window shopping. Those Strategist pieces allow me to do just that. It helps that I am extremely nosy and love hearing about what boring things people are buying these days.

While reading Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak’s1 Strategist piece earlier, I caught myself thinking, “I would fucking love to do one of these things.” And then a second later I was …

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It’s an old song, it’s an old tale from way back when

Christopher Nolan has made The Odyssey before. Memento is The Odyssey. Inception is The Odyssey. Interstellar is The Odyssey. Oppenheimer is The Odyssey. Tenet is probably The Odyssey — I wouldn’t know, I was astral projecting to avoid walking out of the theater. Now here we are in 2026 and we finally have Nolan’s proper adaptation of The Odyssey, a film that stars my best friend Matt Damon as Odysseus and follows him on his long hero’s journey home, twenty years after the Trojan War. I could easily sit here nitpicking the minute details I had issues with, like the sound mixing, or the predictable lack of humor from a filmmaker who historically takes himself too seriously, or Nolan’s continued issue with leaving his actors’ big gaping earring holes visible1. But, to tell you the truth, I don’t feel like it2. Listen to this: I actually really liked The Odyssey.

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In celebration of the latest Christopher Nolan film, Travis Scott’s The Odyssey, I asked a few beloved friends of the newsletter to write a few words about their favorite film from Nolan’s oeuvre. Asking someone about their favorite Nolan isn’t like asking someone about their favorite Scorsese; even to his biggest fans (the normal ones, not the ones who spend 25 hours a day online and threaten to dox anyone who says he can’t write women), Nolan can aggravate. Despite being quite distinct stylistically (for better or for worse), he’s generally not the first, second, or even tenth filmmaker one thinks of when the word “auteur” is thrown around. His films are usually stupid but trick people into believing they’re smart due to the sheer amount of big ideas he crams into them. This is not a drag: I actually think it’s a …

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Ring the self-promo alarm

I got involved in online discourse for the first time in my life after writing a piece about how I believe that people are watching The Vampire Lestat wrong. This angered the nerds who still spend all their time on X the Everything App very much. One user called this thoroughly edited piece of criticism a “coke rant,” which is one of the funniest things that has ever ever ever been said about me. In true “while you are in high school, I am in Brooklyn trying to survive in this economy” fashion, I followed that discourse up with an interview with Eric Bogosian and Assad Zaman about Lestat’s most recent episode. I love to be an entertainment journalist in 2026.

If you want to listen to me talk with two geniuses about a girl movie, I joined the Five Timers Club on Exiting Through the 2010s to talk about Can You Ever Forgive Me. Thank you to longtime friends of the newsletter Jack Draper and for having me back <3

Lastly, very kindly had me back for Never Cursed’s Disclosure Day Prixe Fix. Because I can’t take anything seriously, my submission is by far the dumbest one, but it’s a fabulous read if you ignore that.

Why do I have to be Steve-O?

My body seems to operate in a near-constant state of turmoil with brief stretches of reprieve in between, during which I always make the mistake of letting my guard down and finding myself unprepared for what horror awaits me — my own personal It Follows. These things tend to happen to me at massively inconvenient times, so naturally the drama manifested moments before my friends and I were about to make our way to one of the beautiful city of Chicago’s AMC Theaters to see Jackass: Best and Last, the alleged final installment of the Jackass film series. Apropos of nothing, my right eye became rapidly and unbearably irritated. In moments, it was itchy and red and puffy and hideous. These types of eye issues happen to me all the time; I rarely know the reason for them. It’s as if sometimes my eyes get bored and decide to remind me they can do whatever the hell they want. I popped some allergy medication and continued with the rest of my evening. What else was I supposed to do?

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Housekeeping

• To everyone who has asked for my comment on The Social Reckoning trailer: The Boy Movies oral history of The Social Network internet phenomenon is always available for your reading pleasure.

• They finally gave me a tiny mic and I used it to talk to The Vampire Lestat cast about music and embarrass myself in front of the resplendent Jacob Anderson. TW my psychotic laugh.

Boy Movies summer loading…

Each day since the calendar struck June, I have received hundreds of thousands of questions from readers wondering what they can do to have a Boy Movies summer. Well, you can all stop worrying, as I’ve put together a comprehensive guide of all the things you can do to channel my spirit, and the spirit of my newsletter, over the next few months. Enjoy.

See The Odyssey, but please don’t bother me about the formats

Let’s begin with a controversial one. I love seeing movies in 70mm. I love seeing movies in IMAX. I love seeing movies in Dolby most of all, due to the seating. But I loathe the Letterboxdification of movie-going, and not just because of the infants who get all pissy when my gorgeous friends and I write our silly little single-sentence posts. (I’ll get to them.) The latest crime the Letterboxd app has committed against me personally is this “digital punch card” shit, and unfortunately, I have located Christopher Nolan at the scene of yet another crime. Look, I have no delusions about commodifying movie-going. We all remember the assault that was Barbenheimer. Approaching it with this mindset turns The Odyssey into a weirdly passionate form of engaging with something that, at the end of the day, is simply an act of marketing. Like this, it becomes a bizarre status symbol. There’s just something about empowering a bunch of nerds to treat a movie like Pokémon that rubs me the wrong way. You absolutely do not have to catch them all. You absolutely do not have to virtually line up for The Odyssey like you’re trying to buy concert tickets. And you absolutely do not need to tell me about it. Silence.

Turn Jackass: Best and Last into a group outing

Now here’s the boy movie event of the summer. I have plans to see it in the great city of Chicago with two of my good Judys — how about you?

Trawl eBay for movie promo merch

This is one of my favorite late-night hobbies. I often have trouble falling asleep, and when I’m feeling especially wired I go on the greatest website known to man: eBay. eBay is a treasure trove of bullshit (shoutout ), but it’s the sheer amount of movie promo merch people are selling over there that routinely leaves me in awe. These things make great gifts for your loved ones or for yourself. I got Ariana an Elvis promo hat for Christmas a few years ago and I want to say I was more excited about it than she was? (jk girl love you.)

Read fanfiction on the beach

One of my fondest memories from last summer was lying on a towel and periodically glancing up from the fanfiction epic I was enjoying to update my friends on the latest plot developments. I know we’re all reading this shit anyway, might as well read some while relaxing in the sand.

Watch a movie on cable, commercials non-negotiable

I recently watched Mrs. Doubtfire (which is, believe it or not, a boy movie) on E! with my mom, and it reminded me that one of the best ways to enjoy a movie is on cable with frequent ad breaks. For some reason this just feels like summer to me.

Sneak an iced coffee into the movies

I’ve been on my All Movie Theaters Should Allow Me To Purchase A Coffee At Any Hour Of The Day soap box for years, but if I’m being completely honest, I get a little rush from sneaking my little plastic cup in. Strategically draping a jacket over the hand holding my coffee, surreptitiously supporting the bottom of the bag I’ve shoved it in to keep it from spilling all over my belongings, sometimes simply holding it behind my back and angling my body so the ticket-scanning attendant can’t see — I’ve used every method in the book. Here’s the thing: There’s a strange joy in this, even though nobody really gives a shit anymore. I like to feel like I’m getting away with something, don’t you?

Pick a director, fill in the blanks

The Boy Movies-approved Museum of the Moving Image is doing a Brian de Palma series this summer. Film Forum is on its Guy Maddin beat. IFC Center is hosting a John Waters double feature. And those are just some ideas if you happen to lead a very similar life as me (read: you live in New York City). Obviously, this is also a project you can take on for free at home. Spielberg and Iñárritu and Araki all have films coming out this summer. As does, famously, Nolan. Why not use these hot, hot days to become an obnoxious completionist for someone’s filmography?

Ride Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift

This is a monumental event for Boy Movies culture. If you go, I require a full report.

Buy a DVD, just one

I <3 physical media. You can come watch it at my house if you want.

Blog

Increasingly, I want to read really normal things. Devouring Famesick is what brought me to this realization; for a few hundred pages, it felt like the 2010s again, which was a beautiful time for blogging for the hell of it. I don’t care what anyone’s working on, I don’t care what “takes” people have about whatever bullshit is going on. Just tell me what you had for breakfast, or what you impulse bought, or the movie you saw last week, or some random shit that’s pissing you off. I’m a big fan of ’s Current Enthusiasms for this reason. Let’s all be normalistas again

Read film criticism

If you’ve ever found yourself on Letterboxd getting angry about the joke “reviews” people write, I’m going to have to ask you to get a literal life. I’m not sure if you know this, but there are people whose jobs it is to watch movies and write about them. Increasingly few, but they exist.

Commit to the AMC A-List subscription, babe

This is directed at a few of my friends. You know who you are. Do you know how much easier it would be if you just joined my entourage? Why don’t you want to join my entourage?

Wish me a happy birthday :)

Courteney Cox. Neil Patrick Harris. Ice Cube. North West. Allison Boy Movies. June 15th is an historic day in culture. AND it doesn’t coincide with the dreaded Father’s Day this year. Let’s celebrate that.

Share Boy Movies

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My god! There’s… room for everybody, let’s just say that!

Except Ariana Grande-Butera. Pack it up, Katharine Hepburn! It’s over. Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead, and Dracula Erivo clearly couldn’t give a shit. The Oscar nominations came out yesterday, and it only highlighted how underwhelmed I was by last year’s offerings. I think Sinners should sweep across all categories, both because I enjoyed it and because I think it would be funny to watch Paul Thomas Anderson and the dreaded Yorgos Lanthimos lose to some vampires. Here are some reactions from a person who feels nothing:

• The Creature being the first Euphorier to be recognized by the Academy is genuinely hilarious. I can’t stop thinking about it. What the hell, sure.

• Rose Byrne winning Best Actress is the most I’ve cared about one of these little awards since Brendan …

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Well, well, well. We have once again reached that time of year where I line up the working he/hims of SAG-AFTRA and pit them against each other in a fight to the death to determine who enchanted me most over the past twelve months, casting the rejects into the sea. I’ve closed out the past two years this way and have decided to make it a three-peat. For feminism.

The Boy Movies Top 25 Boys of 2025

25. Kevin Durand, The Naked Gun

If a Lost alum appears in a movie I have seen I am legally required to add them to my best-of list. Yay Keamy!

24. Those two guys from Splitsville

I’m so sorry I just really don’t have time to look up their names because I have a lot going on right now, but thanks both for putting in the Boy work.

23. Dave Franco, Every child’s smedium tee he wore across various projects

You know when you have your DDD titties out at the school where you teach and then your wife dies? How about when you’re a magician and you have your DDD titties out at the heist? This year, Dave Franco took up residence in cinemas across the globe and dared to ask those questions. I’m not sure we got any conclusive answers, but he made this ranking nonetheless.

22. Jeremy Strong, The hole in the floor monologue they cut from Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

People don’t forget.

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Welcome to the third annual Boy Movies extravaganza celebration wrap-up (I still can’t decide how to brand this) issue, which is historically my favorite issue of the year. In my first year doing this newsletter, I ranked the top 20 boy movies of 2022 because I wasn’t yet confident enough to ask other people to attach their name to this thing. I actually think that one holds up better than a lot of older issues (please don’t read those) which is to say that I stand by most of what I said (RARE!), and Sarah’s graphics are such all-timers (go look at them), but it was still a solo venture, and that’s just never as fun.

For the 2025 festivities, I called upon the Boy Movies [Dom Toretto voice] familia, asking them to choose their favorite boy movie of the year and write a few words explaining what made it so very boy. There were no rules, because there never are and because it was another weird year for movies, meaning that the only real guideline I gave was that their pick did not have to be a 2025 release. Everyone ran the fuck away with the prompt and sent me some genius submissions, a few of which really defy the form in ways that delighted me. (The amount of times One Battle After Another is invoked… Paul Thomas Anderson should cut us all a check.) I had so much fun reading them and I hope you do too. I am grateful for those people and for you, dear reader, and most of all for Austin Butler <3

I have one more issue to send out before the end of the year, but until then, enjoy the extravaganza, happy holidays, I love you, kiss kiss.

Akosua T. Adasi, Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Amidst all the buzz around the (allegedly) last Mission Impossible movie, I made a commitment to watch all the Mission Impossible movies, from the beginning and in order, since I’d only seen MI: Ghost Protocol (in theaters and at the height of my Jeremy Renner crush). While my MI journey is not yet finished (that’s what the holidays are for), I cannot imagine how any of them will ever top Mission Impossible 3. What can top Philip Seymour Hoffman as a dry and debonair villain who seems almost bored by the antics of Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt? As always, PSH delivers a top-tier performance that makes you wonder how anyone could be that good? If you’re at all familiar with the MI universe, you know that it relishes in prosthetics, particularly face masks that allow for Scooby Doo reveals that make you do a baby’s clap of delight. They’re always fun (if a little silly) but there’s something so remarkable about Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Tom Cruise pretending to be Philip Seymour Hoffman. The range! MI3 also has my favorite joke in a movie this year, delivered dryly by Laurence Fishburne. Discussing Hoffman’s villain with Billy Crudup, Fishburne remarks, “He’s the invisible man.” Expecting a snarky comeback from Crudup, he quickly follows up: “Wells, not Ellison, if you wanna be cute again.” Half of the delight I get from it is that I know it’s 100% J.J. Abrams—a character in Felicity, Abrams’ 1998 teen drama, mixes up H.G. Wells’ sci-fi novel with Ralph Ellison’s coming-of age novel. There’s something incredibly nerdy about slipping in your literary joke into a flashy action blockbuster, just as a reminder to everyone that, at the end of the day, you’re a “serious” person. Very boy.

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Allison Picurro (me), Sinners (2025)

If you ask me, which no one ever does but has never stopped me before, vampires are for gay people. That is not the philosophy of Sinners, but I’m nonetheless impressed by how Ryan Coogler went above and beyond the call of boy when he made this one, which is a movie about music so good it can summon the devil but also, when you boil it down to its simplest terms, is a movie about a man fearlessly daring to be a nerd in public. Coogler was playing around in a sandbox of boyish ideas, blending hundreds of thousands of themes and concepts together just because he could. He experimented with time and space and aspect ratio. He let his boyfriend Michael B. Jordan play twins. He named those twins Smoke and Stack. He let the demonic little Irish vampire step dance. He gave that demonic little Irish vampire glowing red eyes because he was so inspired by the Puss in Boots movie. He could not shake his proclivity for fake-out endings — but love and light, of course. The sum of its parts equal boy.

Sinners is what happens when a boy gets to go wild: He makes the most “one for me” movie of 2025, an uninhibited product of a mind that has spent years toiling away at the Marvel factory. I don’t necessarily think Sinners is the boyest movie I saw all year (that honor is reserved for No Country for Old Men, which I watched for the first time in August), but the scale and audacity of it made it impossible for me to ignore as I reflected on Our Year of Boy Cinema. It’s big and messy and full of gorgeous women, and obviously “Rocky Road to Dublin” showed up in my Spotify Wrapped.

Ariana Bacle, John Q (2002)

I cannot be limited to a single blurb for my beloved John Q (2002, Denzel Washington, holds hospital hostage to get a heart transplant for his dying son because he can’t afford it otherwise, Anne Heche sucks here but RIP legend, 26% on Rotten Tomatoes), so instead I will simply submit this sentence I ended my original 5-paragraph essay defending the movie with: I won’t apologize for having a heart, but America should apologize for making it impossible to get a new one. (Feel free to use that in future healthcare manifestos <3)

Cassidy Olsen, About Adam (2000)

While I think my actual Favorite Boy Movies of 2025 thus far are OBAA and 28 Years Later, I’m going to take this opportunity to sing the praises of About Adam (2000), which I saw at a rep screening in April and might be my first Boy Rom-Com ever. It’s an Irish indie that no one saw where the titular Adam has such astounding sexual charisma he seduces two sisters at the same time, and then some. One of the sisters is a lounge singer played by Kate Hudson, at the peak of her rom-com powers, and despite her remarkably rough accent work she is endlessly charming. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in a theater all year. It’s an absurdist masterpiece. Check it out if you can? I have no idea where!

Follow Cassidy on Twitter.

Claire Cao, Eraserhead (1977)

David Lynch passed away in January of this year, which by this point feels like eons ago. Even with all that time, it’s hard for me to accept we won’t get another film from him. Lynch is probably one of the top directors boys love to be smug about online — but it strikes me that Lynch himself feels totally unpretentious, someone tapped into a subconscious well of feeling that we can all access, and who never tries to explain any of it in boring literal terms because no hay banda! There’s only the magic of the movies!

After his death, I went to a late-night screening of Eraserhead, which I think is one of the greatest boy movie feature debuts of all time. It opens with wide-eyed loser Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), his head floating in space, his mouth gaping open to reveal a wriggling sperm creature (this film pre-dates Alien’s chest-bursters, but this thing evokes the same level of helpless animal disgust). The scene telegraphs what this whole film will be about: the cosmic horror of Sperm and Fatherhood. The film is littered with dreamlike curiosities. Henry lives in a desolate industrial wasteland, there are those iconic interludes with the tiny singing woman who lives in his radiator, and his decapitated head ends up being taken to a pencil factory to be turned into erasers. But the essence is pretty simple: Henry is a young guy, living in a shitty apartment, whose girlfriend he doesn’t really care about suddenly falls pregnant. When the baby emerges, we see that it’s a grotesque alien creature, swaddled in gauze and plaster, whose constant wailing pierces through the otherwise droning and quiet soundscape. I went on a journey with this monster baby. Lynch famously kept the practical effects for it a secret, but theories posit he could have used a skinned rabbit, to give you an idea of alive it feels. It struggles to breathe, it develops painful sores, its cries mostly go ignored by both his confused and miserable parents. By the time the film hits its climax — one of the most awful and unforgettable scenes I’ve ever seen — I felt so much for that child, which felt totally real and unloved.

Though Henry’s perspective is so specific, and the experience of motherhood is completely different, I think Lynch strikes such a powerful emotion right out of the gate: the horror of creating life so carelessly, when you’re still a careless person who hasn’t figured anything out. It’s a theme I’ve been thinking about a lot recently because I watched If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein back to back, but there’s something so singular about the suffocating atmosphere of Eraserhead, with its bizarre sense of humour and images that worm their way into your brain…just like the cosmic sperm…

Find Claire on her website.

Like Tom Fucking Cruise, by Erik Baker

The first film I watched in 2025 was Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise. At the time I am writing this, the last narrative feature I saw was Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise. Between these bookends, Letterboxd informs me, I watched an additional thirteen movies starring Tom Cruise — The Firm, The War of the Worlds, Edge of Tomorrow, Top Gun, Collateral, and the entire Mission: Impossible franchise, which I had never seen before — for a total of fifteen films, besting the total of my next-most-watched actor (Denzel Washington, naturally) by six. None of this was planned, nor had it even really occurred to me what I was doing until I saw One Battle After Another and heard Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei explain that freedom is no fear, like Tom Fucking Cruise. Apparently Paul Thomas Anderson shares my sense that there is something irresistibly compelling about Tom Cruise in our moment. But I don’t think Sensei gets it quite right. I think that what made me unable to stop watching Tom Cruise this year was the way that he is so obviously afraid of a great many things — most of which my lawyers have advised me not to name explicitly — but has nonetheless fled what terrifies him in a series of performances whose increasingly unnecessary recklessness has converged, over time, on something indistinguishable from authentic fearlessness. And if Tom Cruise can find a way to allow his demons to chase him into his own form of bravery, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. As Vincent Collateral explains: “We’re in this together. Fates intertwined. Cosmic Coincidence.”

Follow Erik on Twitter and buy his book, Make Your Own Job.

Geoffrey Lapid, Hard Boiled (1992)

I finally caught Hard Boiled in a theater this year, and it sort of felt like uncovering the Rosetta Stone for cinematic gun violence. Chow Yun Fat plays a loose canon cop named Tequila (hell yeah) and Tony Leung Chiu-wai plays an undercover cop named Alan who may be in too deep (been there, brother). The two cross paths, first as enemies, then as frenemies, then as brothers. A classic trajectory for male friendship. Hard Boiled is filled with action, gunfire, stunts, explosions, and all the John Woo stuff that modern action movies have riffed on endlessly. I caught myself several times throughout with my jaw fully dropped at how audacious, how operatic these action scenes get (the shootout that ends with the bad guy’s main henchman lighting his cigarette on an engine block that caught fire from being shot full of bullets is a particular fave). Woo’s action sequences are violent and macho and powerful, but they also have such style, which elevates things from tense gunfight to “OMG THIS IS THE COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN SHOULD I GET A GUN??”

Bully Geoff into bringing back MOVIE DIARY.

Haley Patil, The part of Highest 2 Lowest that’s a music video for Trunks by Yung Felon (aka A$AP Rocky)

Don’t get it twisted: this movie is bad. But the music video actually made me smile and the song goes crazy. I think it’s cool for A$AP to be the best part of a movie that hates his character — kind of a girl thing to do in a decidedly boy movie. Loving that for him. Stream Trunks!!!

Follow Haley on Letterboxd.

Katie’s Year in Boy Movies 2025, by Katie Zhu

Anyone who knows me knows that I identify as a Nolanhead, and at any given moment, can be found quoting either *Michael Caine voice* The Prestige, or *Matthew McConaughey voice* “Love, TARS, love!!!” with great gusto. For my contribution to the inimitable Boy Movies Extravaganza, I will be incepting a list within a list of my favorite BM each month, so I hereby present: Katie’s Year in Boy Movies 2025.

January: The Fast and The Furious—Not much to add about this. Everyone is hot, and that’s on la familia!

February: National Treasure—My friend Jess introduced me to this masterpiece for her birthday. “Boy” on the surface, but actually, this is American history fanfic and these colors don’t run.

March: The Big Lebowski—John Turturro in head-to-toe purple as The Jesus, what could be more boy than that? Dios mio, man.

April: The Big Short—One of my all time favorites with all my favorite boys!! Adam McKay really convened Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Jeremy Strong1, Brad Pitt, Anthony Bourdain (rip), and more in one movie! Thank you for your service.

May: Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning—May really was a true M:I month, where I rewatched M:Is 1 and 3 in preparation for Tom Cruise once again saving movies and rescuing humanity from The Entity and AI. If only Ethan Hunt was real…

June: Spider-Man—How fitting that my top boy movie in the birthday month of Boy Movies editor-in-chief is the one we rewatched together in Paris :’) Sam Raimi understood the assignment, because “superhero” is the platonic ideal of “boy” and yet, Raimi knows how to elicit peak girl behavior in drama and freak villainery, as evidenced by Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin.

July: Men in Black—Still slaps. This movie has it all: men, suits, aliens, aliens drinking coffee, aliens shape shifting human skin, terrorist aliens, cute aliens.

August: Days of Thunder—The most “boys will be boys” movie ever, and I mean that as a compliment. This was my first viewing of this entry of the Tom Cruise canon, and I didn’t know it’s where he and Nicole Kidman met! Her calling “Tom’s character” an infantile egomaniac…… much to consider.

September: The Matrix—“Boy” movie but with girl heart! Love saves, once again (see also: Interstellar)

October: Boyz in the Hood—This had been on my to watch list for years, and I finally locked in this fall. What a real portrait of a world! Raw, emotional, real. After learning John Singleton made this masterpiece at a mere 23 years of age, I decided to never pursue anything creative again (compliment!)

November: Coach Carter—Rich WHAT? Rich MOND!! Peak boy is being emotionally manipulated by sports (love) and also how sports can solve systemic issues like racism and education (love x2!).

December: I mean. Greatness. It’s already Marty Supreme and I haven’t seen it yet.

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Leah Williams, I Like Me (2025)

My favorite boy movie of the year is probably One Battle After Another, but in the interest of not too many OBAA entries, my fave was I Like Me. I Like Me is the Prime Documentary about the most lovable man who ever lived, John Candy. If you, like me, can’t even talk about his Plane, Trains, and Automobiles monologue without tearing up, this movie is for you. I already knew I loved John Candy’s work, but I got a lot out of hearing from his loved ones. I was really struck by how much his friends and family still miss him, even 30 years after his death.

Find Leah on her website.

Nicholas Russell, Northernlion attempts the ‘Name 100 Women’ Challenge

For the last couple years, Haley and I have become obsessed with a Canadian Twitch streamer named Northernlion. Perhaps you saw this viral video on Twitter at some point. There’s too much nonsensical lore about this guy (including the fact that his voice and entire affect is basically unrecognizable from how he was ten years ago), but he is hilarious and so is the video where he’s challenged to name 100 women as fast as he can.

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The Naked Gun: Bring back stupid (boy) movies, by Nicole Zhu

One of my favorite boy movies and overall moviegoing experiences of 2025 was The Naked Gun. There’s nothing like laughing with a bunch of strangers in the dark. It’s ninety minutes of nonstop gags with Liam Neeson as inept Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr. as he solves a murder with Pamela Anderson—sorry, Miss Spaghetti. Frank has a “deceased cop wife,” can’t resist a chili dog (or five), and doesn’t know what the Miranda Rights are. “Miranda writes? No, Carrie’s the writer.”2

This movie, along with The Pink Panther (2006), Kindergarten Cop, Dodgeball, and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (all of which I watched/rewatched for some reason this year) has made me realize something. We need to bring back stupid movies. They’re not always great, and likely hover anywhere between 20% to 60% on Rotten Tomatoes. But they always incorporate farts, physical comedy, and at least one stupid joke that you end up remembering for the rest of your life.

The Naked Gun is resurrecting this forgotten but crucial subset of boy movies. It isn’t afraid to show a police department immediately turned into a Spirit Halloween. In the first ten minutes of the movies, the villains steal a P.L.O.T. (”Primordial Law Of Toughness”) Device from a bank. And most importantly, it has Liam Neeson in his deep gravelly voice declaring, “I would never forget Fergie.”

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Books are smart and movies are stupid, by Sarah Turbin

I watched some movies based on books this year. Here is where they land on the stupid meter, because if a boy/girl movie binary exists, then surely a stupid/smart binary also must hold. Full disclosure: I have not read all of the below books. Nor do I intend to <3 If this angers you, I apologize and implore you to skip this section. My theory? Books are smart and movies are stupid…UNLESS?!

Hamnet: Good movie, pretty great book. (This is the one book on this list that I read btw.) This movie upholds the movies=stupid hypothesis. I learned from a Chloé Zhao interview that test audiences were confused about who Paul Mescal was supposed to be playing (spoiler alert: William Shakespeare. HEARD OF HIM!?), hence the added scene where Mr. Mescal stands along the edge of the Thames and recites the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy. Ok…sure! I think this actually takes away from the themes of the novel, which treats Agnes as the main character instead of Willy. But I guess that’s just my opinion.3

No Other Choice: This Korean movie is based on a 1997 book called The Ax that takes place in America. I went to a Q&A with Park Chan-wook (brag) where he explained that originally, he intended for the movie to take place in America. I honestly don’t care where he sets his movies, as long as he keeps making them. Making No Other Choice contemporary was the right choice. This movie deals with the existential dread that comes with AI and goes beyond the book’s original inciting incident of “corporate downsizing”. A prime example of a movie adapting the source material to work for our shitty times. This movie=smart.

Regretting You: A Colleen Hoover vehicle…I have read one Hoover work, and have decided that was enough for me. I can only imagine how this book holds up next to this movie. I will say that I did feel my brain working at maximum capacity here. Synapses were firing. I had some questions that I don’t think would arise while reading a book, like “Why are they showing me flashbacks of Allison Williams as a teen when that is clearly a weird smoothing filter they have put onto her face?” My verdict…it’s a draw!

One Battle After Another: This movie is based on Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. I’ve never read a Thomas Pynchon but I enjoyed this movie. All love!

Find Sarah on her website.

Tessa Strain, Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Cary Grant, god love him, is not a guy I typically associate with boy movies—he tends to thrive playing glib and charming divorcés in movies with a “Gowns By” credit. But in Only Angels Have Wings, he is in rare Boy Mode form as the cheerlessly glib and emotionally unavailable owner and operator of an airmail service in the Andes, where he and his employees fly planes in unimaginably dangerous conditions (thrillingly filmed with a combo of stunts and miniatures), come back to their favorite bar to pound shots, and have an ongoing comedy bit/coping mechanism where they pretend to have never heard of their compatriots who die on the job (a, uhhh, nontrivial number of guys). Dudes rock! When Jean Arthur, a traveling chorus girl, comes ashore from an ocean liner for what is supposed to be one wild night taking in the local color before she continues on her way, it’s no surprise that Grant’s total indifference and hostility activate her “I can fix him” instinct and induce her to scrap her plans and extend her stay to try and win him over. Can she hang? Sort of! Can she melt his cold heart and tame his reckless spirit? Not really <3 Boys are powerful like that.

Follow Tessa on Twitter, Letterboxd, and Instagram.

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Ranking season

All three of TV Guide’s best of 2025 lists are out and, guess what, they’re great. We ranked the best shows, best episodes, and best performances of the year, and although my favorite TV show continues to be any episode of 30 Rock that I randomly hit play on using the Peacock app, there was some good stuff this year. Ethan Hawke, feel free to call me whenever.

Bad week

Rob Reiner dying is quite literally the worst possible note to end the year on. The coverage around it makes me feel insane in a very “Will God forgive us?” way, similarly to how I felt watching the coverage of Liam Payne’s death unfold. I’m not interested in bringing those vibes into this issue, so instead I will say this: In the days since the news broke, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Casablanca phone call scene in When Harry Met Sally, which was famously inspired by Reiner and Billy Crystal’s actual phone calls, and how it’s the kind of warm, lived-in detail I associate with Reiner as an artist. It’s why I like his work so much, and why his work has been so central to shaping my own taste. That sense of warmth is all over The Princess Bride, my dad’s alleged favorite movie that I wrote about in the early days of this newsletter. It’s even present in a film like The American President, which Sarah and I watched for the first time the other night. We were both surprised by how Reiner managed to imbue that, a truly strange, implausible story about an alternate alien world that sort of resembles our own — written by Aaron Sorkin, no less, who is not a writer I would ever attribute warmth to — with those signature moments of sincere tenderness. Reiner always pulled it off without being cloying about it. He never had to manipulate the audience to make us feel something. It feels so obvious that it can be taken for granted, but he always did it so well. It was everywhere. And that’s what I want to think about when I think about Rob Reiner.

I should have been an accent coach

Here’s a hard pivot: You will all certainly remember my annual ins and outs list from 2024, in which I declared accents one of the year’s ins. This ended up being truer than I could have ever anticipated; 2024 was, after all, the year of whatever sounds Daisy Edgar-Jones was producing from her mouth in Twisters. I cannot for the life of me recall even a single frame from that film, but I remain haunted by how that British woman screamed “HOLY COW!!!” None of it seemed right to me.

Accents are very much still in, especially with the influx of youngish UK and Irish actors who seem to multiply by the day. Accents have never gone out, I fear. It was a really lame year for movies, but I must say that it was a thrilling year for ACCENTS. Just off the top of my head, 2025’s most egregious examples are David Jonsson in The Long Walk, Paul Mescal in The History of Sound, Oscar Isaac in Frankenstein, Emily Blunt in The Smashing Machine, and Manny Jacinto in Freakier Friday. I would categorize what Robert Pattinson did in Mickey 17 as more of a Voice than an Accent, but I can’t get into him again. And there’s the ongoing problem of Margot Robbie, whose Big Bold Beautiful Journey I made the big bold beautiful decision not to see after weeks of being terrorized by the trailer. Her post-Wolf of Wall Street attempts at an American accent have consistently made her sound like a baby learning to talk. What are we doing?

Daniel Craig has had the world on accent watch since he debuted certified lunatic Detective Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, the most late 2010s film to ever be committed to screen. I think this is fine: Blanc, too, requires more of a Voice, but Craig is committed to it, and the I say I say I say of it all is so psychotic that you don’t really mind or notice when he slips up. He’s created a very comfortable cushion for himself. Three movies deep into this franchise, elated nerds are going to burst into breathless applause when he makes his first appearance no matter what he says or does. (This happened in my theater — brag, I live on a coast!) Would I rather listen to Craig’s blustery approximation of a Southern drawl than the vague America-lite accents of his Wake Up Dead Man co-stars Josh O’Connor1, Andrew Scott, and Daryl McCormack? Depends on the day, I guess. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but, boys, please: We need to work on our short A sounds.

Scooby Dooby Doo

If Knives Out’s direct sequel, Glass Onion, was a money-laundering scheme, Wake Up Dead Man is at the very least a movie. Or something closer to a movie than Glass Onion, which was such a Twitter-brained mess that it was rendered fully unwatchable even before its release. Another whodunnit that has the same baseline plot as Johnson’s other whodunnits, Wake Up Dead Man is about the death of a domineering priest at a quiet church in Middle of Nowhere, Upstate New York. The streamer character (which Johnson has shoehorned a slightly different flavored version of into all three of these movies) and the Substack reference exhausted me. The wink-wink Netflix reference made me feel violent — the man can’t fucking help himself. He is so addicted to libbing out in such an empty, stupid way that we must begin to ask if he is capable of doing anything else. In that sense, he’s very Mike White. These are two guys whose work was more interesting before they logged permanently on.

I’m not sure that Wake Up Dead Man says anything about religion that hasn’t already been said better by movies like First Reformed or Doubt or Conclave, or the second season of Fleabag, or what Lost did with Jack and Locke (yeah, I said it, complain to the wall), but I wasn’t surprised to learn that Johnson comes from an Evangelical background, and not just because some of the film’s Catholic-specific details were inconsistent with reality. Man of faith vs. man of science — what a classic. I’m not opposed to it, and I like that this one operates on more of a downbeat than the other two, but I can’t help thinking that it has more to do with the very grounded O’Connor’s talent as an actor than with Johnson’s writing or direction, or even his ability to cast around O’Connor. (The more I think about Mila Kunis’ performance, the weirder it gets — girl, who put you there?)

It blows my mind that people are so impressed by this franchise. Even Knives Out, which I still enjoy rewatching due to the fact that I was born in the year 1995, isn’t, like, great. It’s a case of “fun, but you’re all doing too much.” These movies are able to coast on the reputation of being good rather than actually putting any effort into being good, and Wake Up Dead Man made me feel Johnson’s exhaustion with the murder mystery framework he’s created. To me, the cracks in his general interest became evident, most of all when it came time for The Big Reveal, which had the exact structure of the other two Big Reveals: Now is the time where we will rely exclusively on obscure details to stage the ending, and also the murder has been committed by the most boring culprit of all possible suspects. Perhaps it’s time we all take a step back. And maybe stop letting Netflix interfere.

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The Boy Movies November movie review 🎥

I didn’t realize this until I started writing this issue, but I only watched one singular boy movie last month. I wasn’t watching a ton of movies at home, and all the boyish November releases made me want to die: The Running Man? Predator: Badlands? Nuremberg??? What do I look like. Be serious for even a single second. Still, I wonder what’s gotten into me. Are there any recent boy releases that have somehow evaded me that I need to see immediately?

Here’s what I did see in November:

Regretting You, dir. Josh Boone
The most fun I’ve had at the movies all year. It’s so exciting when you realize that every single person in the theater has come to the unanimous agreement that what we are all watching is completely insane and we can all begin hooting together. This has only happened to me a couple of other times and I believe it to be the purest form of community. Regretting You is a disorienting experience. It exists in an alternate reality where Hillary Clinton has been the president for the past ten years and Allison Williams, wearing what I can only describe as a Spirit Halloween wig, can believably play a 17-year-old. Every time Dave Franco emerged in one of his child’s smedium tees Daniela and I looked at each other and wordlessly made the big titty gesture. The teenage boy in this film has a Sunset Boulevard poster in his bedroom and Mckenna Grace wears a bolo tie to her dad’s funeral. I pledge allegiance to Colleen Hoover, I guess, if it means 500 more movies exactly like this.

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Some muddled thoughts on a bunch of movies that came out fairly recently but not that recently, sorry, I meant to publish this issue weeks ago and now it has morphed into something else entirely. What have you all been up to?

I don’t know if it’s just 2025’s dearth of exciting movie releases or the fact that the two sprained ankles I sustained over the summer (we all remember where we were) kept me from going about my usual business for a time and really drilled into my head that almost nothing matters, but this has been my year of not rushing to the movie theater. I’m at the point of waiting days, even weeks, after movies are released to see them, if I see them at all1. I realize I sound like Jenna Maroney when she thinks she’s invented a new kink called “normaling,” and that many people see like, one movie a year and decide to weigh in on who deserves to win Oscars anyway, but understand that I have a Letterboxd account and all my friends are nerds.

Among the few 2025 releases I have gone out of my way to see on opening weekend are The Accountant 22, Regretting You3, and Now You 3 Me4. To put that in perspective, it took me seven failed attempts to bring myself to see Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. It was a real “now or never” moment, which is to say that I opened my AMC app last week and realized that convenient showtimes at conveniently located theaters were rapidly dwindling and my options were soon going to consist of exclusively 10pm showings at AMC Empire 25, a place I have only gone to kicking and also screaming. I was already kicking and screaming over going to see this movie — why make it harder on myself? Needless to say… I absolutely loved it! Just kidding, it is garbage.

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ICYMI

This is issue #101, and due to how sequential consistency works we all can of course infer that the previous issue was #100. If you haven’t yet read my sensational AMA, in which I finally air my thoughts on Beau Is Afraid and make a suggestion for Aaron Sorkin’s next career move, among other things, you can check it out below.

Let’s get this out of the way

Saying this makes me feel like that Rita Ora tweet, but since, I swear, a lot of people HAVE been asking: No, I have not yet seen Springsteen: Deliver Us From Evil. On three separate occasions, I used my favorite app — the AMC app — to book tickets, all of which I canceled about an hour before showtime. I love to call myself the Boy Movies CEO, but the fact of the matter is that Dua Lipa’s Service95 has yet to buy me out which means I cannot expense my ticket, nor can I get back the two hours that film will steal from the one singular life I have to live. What I’m saying is that there has been very little motivating me to get to the theater, as both a person from New Jersey (read: a Bruce Springsteen fan) and a great lover of actors (read: Jeremy Strong is the most important man in my life).

Anyway, I’ll see it soon and will weigh in using my massive platform once I do.

The Boy Movies October movie review 🎥

My ongoing brave era has officially gotten me to a place where I now am capable of looking forward to watching scary movies in the month leading up to Halloween. Unfortunately, October has come and gone, which means that it is once again illegal to watch horror movies until October 1, 2026, but I can still look back on all the fun I had last month. Here are all my first watches from this year’s season of the witch:

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Real quick

Hate to do this up top, but it’s always self-promo o’clock, so here are two recent reviews from me that will give you a sense of the full breadth of what HBO has to offer at the tail end of 2025:

• The Chair Company: really good!

• IT: Welcome to Derry: really dogshit

On with the show

As threatened, today I am here to answer your questions, which I received more of than I could have possibly anticipated. Wow! I love writing Boy Movies so much and I love every single person who reads this newsletter and I love being earnest about these things. Thanks for being here, nerds!

Submitted by Ezgi:

What’s a #boymovie you were put off by initially but came around to liking? If any

I’m ashamed to say it, but in the spirit of radical honesty, I never thought I’d like the Lord of the Rings movies due to my general di…

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The floor remains open for questions

We are merely one issue away from the biggest cultural event of the year — Boy Movies’ 100th issue (#BoyMovies100) — which also means we’re merely one issue away from Allison’s Big AMA. In case you haven’t heard, this issue will be for all subscribers, so please do submit your questions by replying to this email, taking to the comments, DMing me, sending a carrier pigeon to my home, etc. If there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to hear my thoughts and opinions on, your time is now.

Happy third birthday, Boy Movies

The other day I was in a Fleetwood Mac-themed yoga class (fuck with me, I dare you) and during “Silver Springs,” the instructor asked, “Does anyone know Lindsey Buckingham’s astrological sign?” The answer came immediately, from somewhere at the back of the room: “LIBRA!” I bring this up not only as a reminder that I live in Brooklyn, but also because, as it turns out, Lindsey Buckingham’s birthday is today. Happy birthday, Lindsey Buckingham — did you know you share a birthday week with my Substack newsletter, Boy Movies? It’s true: Tomorrow, October 4th, my child turns three years old. Oh, how the time does fly when you’re having fun.

I like reflecting on that unseasonably cold and rainy day in October 2022 because I remember every part of it very clearly. My apartment’s heat and hot water was out, I had tickets to see Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster on Broadway in The Music Man that evening, and in the middle of all that excitement, I published the very first issue of this newsletter1. Much has happened in the years since: Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster cheated on their spouses with each other2, Boy Movies was mentioned in the failing New York Times, I sprained both ankles. I’ve cycled through apartments, interests, friends, therapists, jeans, Dunkin iced coffees, and tubes of Glossier Balm Dot Com3, but through it all, two constants have endured: my AMC A-List subscription and Boy Movies.

What I remember most of all about October 4, 2022 is feeling embarrassed and prematurely defensive of “boy movies” as a concept. I was afraid no one would get it, that no one would read it, or worse, that those who did read it would accuse me of being one of those adult women who says things like “I’m just a girl” or whatever. In the years since, I’ve grown less concerned with sticking so rigidly to that original concept. With that loosening up has come with a general sense of freedom when I think about Boy Movies. The fact that I haven’t given up (not sure if you know this but I love giving up) is significant, and I did say basically the same thing in last year’s birthday issue, but it bears repeating because it’s just as true as it was in October 2024. It’ll still be true if/when I make it to Boy Movies’ fourth birthday. And if/when Boy Movies celebrates that aforementioned fourth birthday, it will be entirely because of my dazzlingly gorgeous readers.

Today’s post marks 99 issues of this thing, and it’s very serendipitous that the next one will bring me to a whole ass 100 issues. (#BoyMovies100!!!!!!!) As a platform, Substack is often intolerable, but I’ve made extraordinarily lovely friends because of it, and that in itself is special. Maybe this will be the year Boy Movies finally gets bought out by Dua Lipa’s Service95 (longtime readers will remember that this has been my dream since the beginning), but even if it doesn’t (heaven forbid…) I’m sure we’ll find ways to keep the party going around here. Whether you’ve been a subscriber since October 4, 2022 or this is your first issue, I’m grateful to every reader, even the ones who don’t pay, but I am of course slightly more grateful to the ones who do — you get it. In summation: Thanks for being here. Because when you’re here? Baby, you’re family.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. Onward to the September culture review!

The Boy Movies September movie review 🎥

Splitsville, dir. Michael Angelo Covino
Wondering if I will ever laugh as hard at anything ever again as I did at the goldfish rollercoaster scene in this movie. I implore you to watch Splitsville if only for that moment, and also because it offers a fascinating look at what heterosexual couples are up to these days.

Twinless, dir. James Sweeney
I was Dob agnostic pre-Twinless, but I have to give it up to him not only for fucking on screen in the year 2025 but, perhaps most importantly, for playing such a specific type of gay guy with such deft understanding that it had me wondering what he knows and how he could possibly know it. Once Hollywood’s rampant Gay4Pay community (I’ll get to two of that community’s preeminent members in just a moment…) hears about what Dob is capable of, I fear it’s over for them all.

The Long Walk, dir. Francis Lawrence
I love that thing in a boy movie where the only featured woman is Mother. It’s kind of like that thing in a boy movie where the only woman is Wife. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll get Mother and Wife. Not in The Long Walk, which only has Mother, but sometimes. If you want to read more in-depth thoughts on the incredible display of male friendship in Splitsville, Twinless, and The Long Walk, you’re always welcome behind the Boy Movies paywall.

The History of Sound, dir. Oliver Hermanus
Now here’s a movie that has both Mother and Wife. And would you believe it? Mother’s not well and Wife is scorned. Here’s something else: I had a real “don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining” moment at this film trying to convince me that Hoboken, New Jersey is actually New England. Give me a break. Additionally, I’m here to announce that I’ve about reached my limit with Paul Mescal4. When he opened his mouth and that busted approximation of a Kentucky accent came out I simply had to laugh. I think he’s talented, but History of Sound is unfortunately another Challengers situation in which he’s completely out of his depth next to Josh O’Connor, who is, as ever, so good that it had me saying unfathomable things like, “Sure, why not, that guy with that face is American.” I’ve heard the My Policeman comparisons but — and no one’s going to enjoy hearing me say this — Harry Styles actually dared to fuck on screen in My Policeman. Point Harry.

San Andreas, dir. Brad Peyton
Pregamed Rocktober with a modern classic. What if Dwayne Johnson had to fight not only a huge earthquake but also a tsunami? Boy movie! Boy movie! Boy movie! I’m going to list the names of a few people who appear in this film and just leave it at that: Paul Giamatti, Colton Haynes, Kylie Minogue, Chris Cuomo.

A special mention must go out to Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Day at a Time One Battle After Another, which unfortunately just missed the cutoff for inclusion in the September culture review. I am planning on doing a full issue on it for paid subscribers (how have I not already done a PTA issue… and I call myself Miss Boy Movies…) after the excitement of #BoyMovies100 dies down. I got some shit to say.

The Boy Movies September music review 🎶

In my house, it was JADEtember. I assume how I feel about JADE’s That’s Showbiz Baby! is how other people felt about the Addison Rae album. “Self Saboteur” and “Before You Break My Heart” are the ones for me, “Lip Service” is a pastiche of Carly Rae (compliment), and I would like to hear Lestat cover “IT girl” on the new season of Interview with the Vampire. I learned that JADE wrote “Unconditional” for her mom while her mom was in hospital, which is just stunning: Imagine shaking your ass while wailing about your eternal love for your sick mother. The requisite mental health song that every pop diva is now held at gunpoint and forced to release is TSB’s only major skip, but “Silent Disco” convinces me that she has all the correct influences. I wish her vicious critiques of the music business were spread out more, since, despite the album title, that theme drops off in the second half, but I come from the perspective of someone who was a rabid teenager during the One Direction/Little Mix years: Let them all speak. Overall, it’s big and weird and kooky and exaggerated all while being grounded in honest emotion. And that’s showbiz, baby!!!!!!!!!

Grizzly Bear’s return had me reliving my youth in other ways. Shields was a huge deal for teenage Allison and it turns out I’m still kind of addicted to “Yet Again.” The artists you listened to in high school will have a hold on you forever, etcetera.

I spent much of this past month anxious and angry, and in those moments I usually turn to Fiona Apple and/or Hole. A lot of my alone time in September was spent screaming along to Live Through This in the shower, which didn’t fix any of my problems but is just a cathartic thing to do sometimes. Relatedly, I think about Courtney Love’s episode of WTF from a few years ago, like, all the time. I love being fifty-five years old!

Finally, I’m trying something new this month by linking you all to the fall playlist I’ve been steadily assembling. Recs welcome.

The Boy Movies September Jeremy Strong review 🧍‍♂️

This man is testing me. It was armageddon in my iMessages when news of “The Social Network 2” dropped. If you haven’t heard about Aaron Sorkin’s latest act of terrorism, he is for some reason writing and directing a sequel to The Social Network, which will be called, lol, The Social Reckoning. Jeremy Strong has been cast as Mark Zuckerberg, and joining him will be two movie stars: Better Things on FX’s Mikey Madison and Shameless on Showtime’s Jeremy Allen White.

What does anyone stand to gain from this? Is everyone not exhausted? Sorkin and David Fincher made the perfect movie in 2010 and it should’ve ended there. Why tarnish your own legacy because you’re self-important enough to believe you specifically have more to say about one of the great losers of our time? I blame all of you who have spent the past fifteen years whining that The Social Network wasn’t hard enough on Zuck. It seems that Aaron Sorkin heard all the complaining and thought, “I can do something about that.” I feel tortured by this, and yet I also feel nothing. There is so little to say about something that simply shouldn’t exist.

My feelings on the rapidly approaching (threat) Springsteen movie, Deliver Me From Nowhere, are similar. Yes Chef stars as Bruce, Jeremy Strong plays Jon Landau, and one of Meryl Streep’s daughters is there too but there’s no telling which one. You know when you knock over a glass and it’s too late to do anything about it so all you can do is watch in slow motion as it falls and spills and breaks all over the floor, and hope against hope that your dumbass pet won’t come investigate the disturbance? My relationship to Jeremy Strong feels like that right now.

And lastly, looking forward to October…

The Smashing Machine, dir. Benny Safdie
Dwayne, they could never make me hate you. Excited to see Emily Blunt’s latest head transplant on the big screen.

Roofman, dir. Derek Cianfrance
I need this to come out because if I see the trailer for it one more time I’m going start hitting.

After the Hunt, dir. Luca Guadagnino
Is anyone ready to have an honest conversation about what we’re allowing the cast of The Bear to get away with?

Kiss of the Spider Woman, dir. Bill Condon
Produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, dir. Mary Bronstein
Does Rose Byrne not have an Oscar yet because she’s so beautiful and talented that it has successfully intimidated the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? Discuss.

Frankenstein, dir. Guillermo del Toro
In January, the Boy Movies newsletter predicted 2025 would be huge for monster fuckers, and judging by the early reactions I’m seeing to GDT’s Frankenstein, I was absolutely right. Not for me, but have fun.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, dir. Scott Cooper
Right.

Regretting You, dir. Josh Boone
As someone who has seen It Ends With Us [redacted] times, I already know I’ll be seated for whatever this shit is. I can’t stop thinking about the line in the trailer that’s like, “We’re sorry, your husband and sister were in a car accident, we did everything we could.” Literally that feeling when we’re sorry, your husband and sister were in a car accident and we did all we could. It’s like music. It’s like if they wrote “Moppa’s dead of natural causes and says to start dinner without her” into a movie.

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I forgot to link this in the last issue, oops

I am so bad at self-promotion. I reviewed Ethan Hawke’s latest television venture, The Lowdown, which is out now and one of the best new shows of the year. You do have to fire up Hulu (one of the most dreadful streaming platforms, second only to the foul Paramount+) to enjoy it, but I promise it’s worth it.

AMA, if you dare

If you missed Monday’s big announcement, I’m doing an AMA for the upcoming 100th issue of Boy Movies!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m still “TAKING QUESTIONS” for #BoyMovies100, so reply to this email, take to the comments, or DM me on this horrible website if there’s anything you want to hear my brain dead thoughts on. #BoyMovies100 will be free for all subscribers so do not let the threat of a paywall stop you from A-ing me some Qs <3

Men shouldn’t have friends… or should they?

Many movies these days are asking this. If you’re making a film in 2025 and you dare not ask this question, good luck to you and your flop. Seriously, everyone’s talking about male friendship lately: I recently saw a video of American treasure Regina Hall on the Amy Poehler podcast (no comment) discussing the phenomenon of married men claiming their wife is their best friend while married women are more likely to say, “My best friend is Lisa,” or whatever. This intrigues me, and it seems to be intriguing many filmmakers this year as well. Male friendship, or even just the abstract idea of it, is trending.

The aptly titled Friendship, released earlier this year, follows the formation and dissolution of a, yeah, guess what, friendship between two guys who live in the same neighborhood. After Friendship came Splitsville, and then came Twinless, and then came The Long Walk. Very different films, all with the same baseline idea: To be a man with male friends is to know deep suffering. If movie romances took a particularly dark turn this year (Oh, Hi; Together), movie friendships did too.

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It’s time for Ask Boy Movies

In case you haven’t noticed, today’s issue marks 97 of these bad boys. I’m bad at math and I have a concerning amount of trouble visualizing numbers in my head, but even I know what that means: Boy Movies #100 is just around the corner. #BoyMovies100

Can you believe it!!!!!!!!!!!! I can’t. In honor of this “milestone,” I’m going to do another AMA! It’s been a longggggg time since I’ve done one of these. So long, in fact, that a great many of you weren’t even here for the first one. That just will not do! Consider the floor yours, dear reader. This is the Boy Movies version of when a podcast randomly does a call-in episode, or, more appropriately — although these are some of my least favorite types of events in the entire world — a post-film Q&A. If you’ve ever had anything to ask me about Boy Movies (newsletter), boy movies (genre/concept), movies (general), or, I don’t know, my opinion on whatever other shit, now is the time to ask. Whatever you’re wondering about, I will answer to the best of my ability in the upcoming centennial issue.

@thewendyarchiveNew York, New York — Liza Minnelli #wendywilliams #wendywilliamsshow #wendy #fyp #williams #askwendy

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#BoyMovies100 will be available to all subscribers, which means that anyone can (and should) submit questions. You can do so by responding directly to this email, taking to the comments section below, or DMing me on Substack dot com. To those who have my number: If you text me questions I will break into your home and dump water over your head while you’re asleep. Please keep in mind that if nobody writes in I’ll be forced to come up with questions to ask myself. It won’t be a problem for me, as I love talking to myself, but I can’t promise it will be a rewarding experience for the audience.

Kachow

A core value of the Boy Movies newsletter is that we here believe kids’ movies to be genderless. I have stood by this claim since the early days, but I recently watched a film that caused a disruption in my otherwise flawless logic. As of September 2025, I am forced to make an amendment to this core value: Kids’ movies are genderless, except for Pixar’s Cars.

When was the last time you watched Pixar’s Cars? This film had evaded me until mere weeks ago, and thankfully I watched it under the supervision of three friends/Cars enthusiasts. I don’t know what I could’ve possibly been doing to have missed out on this cultural juggernaut when it stormed the world stage in 2006, though I can only imagine that the release of Cars became the first recorded case of me recognizing a boy movie for what it was. I was like eleven, so I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to describe it as such, but something about those talking cars with eyeballs clearly made me put my foot down. No thanks.

Boys of all ages love cars. This is a known fact. At the very least, boys are conditioned to love cars from like, birth. The world yearns for boys to have a love for cars. Pixar’s Cars is simply a G-rated version of other Movies About Cars, like Ford v Ferrari, The Fast and the Furious, Drive, that one scene in John Wick where the titular character erroneously pumps his own gas in New Jersey and then becomes a target of the Russian mob. From my view, I would venture to guess that Cars was created as a sort of gateway drug: If a boy enjoys the work of Lightning McQueen as a child, he’s more likely to spin that interest into a passion for cars as he enters adulthood. I see the glimmer of masculine hopefulness. I understand it.

What helps is that Cars pretty much has everything: John Mayer on the soundtrack, Paul Newman in his literal last film role, a really strange Entourage reference1. It follows an ego-driven man is forced to discover the power of teamwork and is changed as a result, which is what most movies are about. In this case, the man in question is a car named Lightning McQueen, but spiritually it’s no different. On its surface, Cars isn’t a complicated idea, but trouble arises when you start asking questions about the world. There are so many questions and so few answers. Since I wasn’t able to ask these questions in 2006, I’m going to use my massive platform to ask them now.

All the questions I had while watching Cars for the first time in 2025

• Why aren’t the headlights their eyes?

  • I understand this could have caused issues with Lightning McQueen’s design and arc, as he explains early on that racecars don’t need headlights, but here’s my thought process about that: Who fucking cares?

• What is their currency?

  • Radiator Springs is a town with a thriving local business economy. What do they use as money and how do they pay for things?

• Should the doors not function as arms?

  • Do the doors open?

    • What goes on inside the cars?

      • Are there seats?

        • If so, who sits in them? Smaller cars?

  • If the tires are their arms and they’re always driving on the ground, are they not in constant pain?

    • Do they feel pain?

• What is the status of humanity in Cars world?

  • I know I’m not the first to ask this, but I wish someone would answer it.

• Why are there tire tracks in the sky if planes are also sentient beings in Cars world?

• Why do some vehicles — the nonverbal “cows,” for example — lack sentience?

• Why did they never actually show Lightning McQueen successfully paving the road? Why did he complete such a big task under the cover of night?

• Do the cars fuck?

  • How?

Don’t ask me about Cars 2. I know there’s a pope car and I can’t possibly hold space for that at this juncture.

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Is this issue late? It sure is. But if you’re paying to be here, I assume that is because you’ve been with me long enough to know that I will always be late, but when I arrive I promise to bring the party. In this case, the party is another monthly culture review. I got [businesswoman voice] good feedback when I did this in July, so I’m going to continue the fun with an August round-up.

Austin Butler is at it again

@letterboxdFour Favorites with Austin Butler 🎥 Caught Stealing is in US theaters now via @sonypictures. Watch more Four Favorites from the cast and crew, including Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber on our YouTube. #austinbutler #movies #filmtok #letterboxd #caughtstealing #darrenaronofsky #fourfavorites

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And I’ve been asked to comment.

Observing Austin Butler this past month… all I can say is that she’s really been startin’ lately. I was scared for my life to hit play on this, but in the name of journalism, I did, quite bravely.

Let’s break down Austin Butler’s run-in with Letterboxd, frame by agonizing frame.

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First of all

Everybody say happy birthday to my mom. Love you, Mother Boy Movies!

Recent recents

• I made my fourth guest appearance on the iconic Exiting Through the 2010s podcast, hosted by my friends Clay Williams and past Boy Movies guest Jack Draper. We talked about certified perfect movie, God’s Own Country. It was a delight, as always.

• I reviewed Alien: Earth. Everyone’s really enjoying this show so I hate to be a contrarian (jk I love to be a contrarian), but I had some notes.

• I wrote about the end of And Just Like That…, the only TV show that has ever existed.

• I wrote about something that pissed me the hell off in Peacemaker. Do you guys ever think about the fact that every few years I’m forced to come out as a person who enjoys the TV show Peacemaker? I can’t believe no one wants to marry me either.

Austin Butler claims to have never been invited to a bachelor party

And I believe him. He revealed this on the wretched Subway Takes “show,” a scourge on society that I typically make every effort to avoid like the plague, but longtime readers will understand that my hands were tied. I’m not linking because Subway Takes doesn’t need free publicity from me, nor do I think Austin fully understood the concept of Subway Takes, but here’s my favorite part of the whole train (ha!) wreck:

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