Best First Watches: June 2025
Happy July! I hate to be the one millionth person to complain about the heat, but…the heat! I was built for a breezy 55 degrees and nothing more. I love jackets too much to accept 90 degrees and 80% humidity. Regardless of the weather, though, I did spend a lot of time indoors watching movies. Here are my favorites from June.
(Also, if you’re already following me on my newly launched Instagram, thank you! I appreciate you!)
Past 2025 months: January, February, March, April, & May.
Blade Runner 2049
Warner Bros. Pictures
I was briefly in New York City this month for a conference and decided it was finally time to make the trek to Astoria to visit the Museum of the Moving Image. I highly recommend stopping in if you’re a Jim Henson fan because they have an insane amount of memorabilia from his career. Plus, the baby Muppets are on display and I would die for baby Kermit. Anyway, with admission, you can get a ticket to one of their daily screenings. They were showing Blade Runner 2049 at 12:30pm and I thought sure, why not? It’s free, and if I hate it I’ll just leave. Well, despite the truly frigid theater conditions, I did not leave! Have I seen the original Blade Runner? No! It doesn’t matter. 2049 is gorgeous neon noir and I was enraptured. Freezing, but enraptured.
28 Years Later
Sony Pictures Releasing
Another storied franchise I hadn’t seen until recently. I actually paid money…okay I found an old Fandango gift card that miraculously still had money on it, but I paid money to rent 28 Days Later! That’s called commitment. I came out of Days and Weeks kind of lukewarm, but Years knocked me on my ass in the best possible way. A zombie movie about our unspoken collective grief and how it’s seeping into our souls in a deeply sad way that no one wants to talk about.
Gwen and the Book of Sand
courtesy of Gaumont
Sometimes you get assigned to review a forgotten, animated, French science-fiction film from the 1980s and it turns out to be magnificent. To explain the plot of Gwen and the Book of Sand is to rob you of the trancelike spell the film puts you under almost immediately. It’s a story of love and adventure that looks like a Salvador Dalí painting come to life.
Predator: Killer of Killers
courtesy of Hulu
This installation of Best Of is turning out to primarily be a list where I admit that I haven’t seen many classic franchises. First Blade Runner, then 28…, and now Predator. I have seen Prey, which was criminally released on Hulu in 2022, but I do believe that’s my only touchpoint. Similarly, Predator: Killer of Killers was also criminally and unceremoniously dropped on Hulu. This is an animated movie that starts as a series of three unrelated encounters of humans fighting the Predator throughout time. It’s a gorgeous set of animated stories that culminate in a fantastic battle. Where this falls in the grand scheme of the Predator franchise, I couldn’t tell you, but it’s a nice lead-up to the (finally) theatrical release of Predator: Badlands. I say “finally” as though I’m some haggard member of the Predator fan base, but I do like seeing action movies on the big screen.
courtesy of Tribeca
I covered the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival for this site and Natchez is one of the movies I find myself constantly thinking about. It’s a languid, verité documentary about the town of Natchez, Mississippi, whose economy relies almost wholly on Antebellum tourism. How one experiences this city depends on the tour guide hired. Some tell the whole ugly history of Natchez while others sugarcoat it, insisting that some slave owners were really nice. Natchez is a stunning piece of documentation that provides a snapshot of the way many Americans look at our dark past. We don’t learn anything by ignoring the truth of our history, but many in Natchez, and the U.S. as a whole, would rather pretend it doesn’t exist.
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