Ranking Every 2025 Movie: Flight Risk/Presence/Brave The Dark/Inheritance

In a weekend where the biggest question was whether a pilot was needed, another movie jumped up to become the best movie of the year.

Here are some mini-reviews in what was mostly a dumping ground of lousy January movies.

Flight Risk has a terrible script with some of the worst editing you'll see in any feature film. There are multiple occasions where someone's head is turned and in the next shot, they are staring straight ahead. It's shocking that Mel Gibson, who won an Oscar for Best Director, directed this mess of a movie.

Having said all of that, this movie is way more fun than it has any right to be. Mark Wahlberg is pretty great as a villain. I wish he'd play bad guys more often (remember how good he was in Fear). My biggest issue with the movie isn't the lazy editing or screenplay. It's that we don't get enough Wahlberg who spends half of the movie incapicated. 

Topher Grace and Michelle Dockery do exactly what you'd expect. It's a campy, silly movie and all of the actors buy into it. This is a great movie to watch with the guys and have a good laugh. It's a terrible movie to watch if you're looking for something that isn't lazy or stupid.

Presence is fantastic with a simple premise: a haunted house movie from the perspective of the ghost. Director Steven Soderbergh tries a lot of stuff but when it hits, it really hits. But you can only have a movie like this work if you care about the people involved. I found myself caring about this family quite a bit.

Compare this to Here, the horrible Robert Zemeckis movie that takes place in a single room. Nothing in that movie mattered because you didn't give a shit about the people involved. Soderbergh wisely uses very long takes to make the family feel more natural and because you are spending so much time with them, you do care more. The performances here are solid enough. I especially liked Chris Sullivan (the dad) and Callina Liang (the daughter). 

This is very short movie (85 minutes) with a tight screenplay by David Koepp (another guy like Soderbergh that is prolific but when he hits, he hits).

This is, BY FAR, the best movie to come out so far this year and I'd say it's a must watch for any fans of haunted house or ghost stories. I love when a great director takes on a genre that can be ignored by iconic filmmakers and flexes his muscles.

Inheritance was shot entirely with an iPhone. But unlike Presence, this gimmick doesn't work. The problem is you've seen a hundred spy movies just like this. The script and plot points couldn't be more boilerplate if they tried. This was directed by Neil Burger, who you might remember from the "other" magician film The Illusionist with Edward Norton which came out the same time as the much better The Prestige. 

Burger must think that the iPhone spin is enough to differentiate it, but it's not. If anything, it makes the movie worse. For some reason, every shot ends with a close up of Phoebe Dynevor's (Bridgerton) face. She's a very pretty actress but I don't need to see an extreme close up of her face for what felt like 43 minutes of a 101 minute run time. That rawness of being shot entirely with an iPhone also means that Inheritance's weaknesses have nowhere to hide. 

I did like that this was shot on location all over the world and having the iPhone being so up close worked well for a motorcycle chase through the streets of India. But, this movie ultimately falls short with Dynevor not being a good enough actress to carry an whole movie and the very basic script.

Brave The Dark is made by Angel Studios which typically tries to release more inspirational movies. I just found it very uncomfortable. This high school teacher takes in a student to live with him and everyone is fine with it? Scenes like giving the student far too many Christmas gifts and opening them while the teacher is wearing pajamas don't play as cute as the director intended.

I also find it to be amusing when a movie takes an issue with saying "shit" or having characters smoke while also showing horrific acts of domestic violence. Brave The Dark doesn't treat them equally but it's hard to take a movie seriously when you remove nuance from human behavior.

It's too bad because after the movie, they show pictures of the real Mr. Deen and he seemed much more normal than how he was portrayed. I don't understand Jared Harris' performance here. He was really good in Mad Men and Chernobyl. I know his brother (Damian Harris) directed this (it also stars his other brother Jamie Harris as a parole officer). The movie just feels odd and creepy.

I may just be too cynical for the intended audience. This had a message before the movie saying it was "approved by the Angel Guild". I guess the Angel Guild doesn't give a shit about editing because this movie was very sloppily done.

I have to believe an inspirational movie can be created on a thin budget and have characters that feel more like real people and less like something you'd see in a Highlights Magazine.

Presence: B+

Flight Risk: C+

Inheritance: C-

Brave The Dark: D

2025 Movies

1. Presence

2. The Damned

3. One Of Them Days

4. Flight Risk

5. Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera

6. Inheritance

7. Brave The Dark

8. Wolf Man