The year 2025 being what it was — and the less said about that, the better, although the New Year doesn’t seem much better, so far — it was easy to miss some things. No excuse, but the unraveling of the social fabric, geopolitical fuckery, one’s own laziness and the continuing inability of the movie industry to read the room all contributed to a drifting-away feeling, a lack of focus and (maybe only in my case) a tendency to retreat into old, familiar comforts. As such, there is a lot of catching up to do, movie-wise; this seems like as good a time and place as any to start.
CLOUD made the festival rounds in late 2024/early 2025, to no small acclaim. In the intervening period, it’s been widely touted among the cognoscenti, its reputation now further burnished by its appearance on a number of savvy critics’ and filmmakers’ best-of lists. Written and directed by Kyoshi Kurosawa, something of a giant of international cinema (my literacy of which is an ongoing source of embarrassment), it has been readily available on the Criterion Channel (let this be another unpaid, unsolicited endorsement) for some months now. Fearing that watching it might feel more like homework than entertainment, it has languished in my queue since its debut there.
Motivated by unknowable impulses, I finally committed and, per usual, found that the thing people with trustworthy opinions have been talking about is not at all what I had presumed.
In contemporary Tokyo, Ryôsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) has a good grift going. A daytime factory worker, he spends his nights and weekends scamming unwitting marks out of consumer goods and reselling them online. Business being brisk, he quits the day-job, much to the chagrin of his boss, and decamps to the outskirts of the city with his girlfriend Akiko (Kotone Furukawa) to take the hustle to the next level. Soon after the move, though, he attracts unwanted, frightening attention from parties initially unknown, a situation that rapidly devolves into surprising violence.
Cloud might be simply described as a psychological horror or, more headily, a treatise on late-stage capitalism. Safe to say it is both things, but Kurosawa’s singular writing and direction, simultaneously laboratory-precise and poetically elliptical, blooms in the darkness of ambiguity. Our protagonist cannot be called a Good Guy, at least by objective storytelling standards, but the enmity leveled at him by his “victims” also feels wildly disproportionate to his crimes. The piece as a whole becomes defined by the unravelling of the assumed order of things, the entropy of dissatisfaction, greed and revenge.
With its elemental links to mid-late period Cronenberg (minus the body-horror effects), Cloud is both consummately dreadful and ceaselessly compelling, its initial slow-burn giving way to a jarringly satisfying, but still almost inscrutable, climax. The lasting effect is indeed like that of a classic horror picture, but its planning and execution are decidedly unlike most everything American cinematic tradition has led us to expect. 124M. CRITEREON, STREAMING.
EEPHUS. Elegiac is not the first word I would imagine using to describe a low-key comedy about a bunch of middle-aged dudes playing the last recreational baseball game on their home field, but it is a testament to the work that it defies my vocabulary.
Directed by Carson Lund, who co-wrote with Nate Fisher and Michael Basta, Eephus (named for a slow pitch) was, like Cloud, a festival favorite of last year that, despite its limited theatrical release and has gained significant critical traction; I can see why.
The movie feels almost like an exercise in servicing cinematic conventions, even as it defies them: It’s got something like a conventional three-act structure, complete with inciting incident and central conflict. But those elements are all represented by a no-stakes ballgame played by past-their-prime suburban New England schlubs who really don’t have anything better to do. They’ve got their petty beefs, lives outside the ballpark and a disproportionate commitment to the game, but those stories are told on the periphery of an almost-unsanctioned contest with no trophy for the winner. In fact, many of the players (and officials) can’t even be bothered to stick around to the end of nine, let alone the headlight-illuminated extra innings that follow.
But, as we so often hope, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Photographed with a golden-hour saturation giving way to inky full-dark, Eephus moves with an art film’s unhurried self-regard. Punctuated by precious few outstanding plays (that, if we’re being honest, just barely rise above the decidedly middling normal of the teams’ rosters), it moves along languorously, peppered here and there with acerbic asides and lubricated by innumerable cans of beer. The movie feels like an ostensibly meaningless baseball game, by which I mean it is girded by the great significance its contestants, maybe unknowingly, ascribe to it. NR. 99M. STREAMING.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
NOW PLAYING
ANACONDA. Buddies (Paul Rudd, Jack Black) on a DIY movie remake mission are pursued by the title character. PG13. 100M. BROADWAY.
AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH. Na’vi-on-Na’vi violence in the latest installment of James Cameron’s sci-fi action franchise. PG13. 195M. BROADWAY (3D), MINOR.
FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’S 2. Sequel to the Chuck E. Cheese-esque animatronic horror. PG13. 104M. BROADWAY.
GREENLAND 2: MIGRATION. Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin in the sequel to the eco-apocalypse disaster movie. PG13. 98M. BROADWAY.
THE HOUSEMAID. Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney in a thriller about weird dynamics with the help. R. 131M. BROADWAY.
IS THIS THING ON? A couple (Will Arnet and Laura Dern) cope with divorce and the husband turns to stand-up. R. 124M. BROADWAY.
MARTY SUPREME. Timothée Chalamet plays a ping pong champ in the 1950s, when that kind of thing apparently got you laid. R. 150M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
PRIMATE. Vacation with friends turns to horror when the family chimp gets rabies and that’s why we don’t have pets with thumbs. R. 89M. BROADWAY.
SONG SUNG BLUE. Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson play singers who find love in a Neil Diamond cover band. PG13. 133M. BROADWAY.
THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SEARCH FOR SQUAREPANTS. Your favorite boxy hero takes on the Flying Dutchman’s ghost. PG. 96M. BROADWAY (3D).
WICKED: FOR GOOD. Elphaba and Glinda reunite from opposite sides of the yellow brick tracks to save Oz in the sequel. PG. 137M. BROADWAY.
ZOOTOPIA 2. Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman return to voice the rabbit and fox crimefighting duo in the animated comedy adventure. PG. 108M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in Free Food!.