I knew The Drama existed.

I saw Zendaya. I saw Robert Pattinson. I saw the wedding photos. I saw A24 doing that thing A24 does where the marketing looks expensive, tasteful, and intentionally vague.

And somehow, I still let this shit pass me by, probably because of the vagueness of it all. 

Alright, you keep your secrets. 

I blame A24, but with this movie making 132.5 million, they didn't miss my 15(x2) dollars. 

I assumed it was going to be a stylish little relationship movie about two beautiful people discovering they might not be ready for marriage. Maybe somebody cheated. Maybe one of them secretly hated the other one’s family. Something uncomfortable enough to threaten the wedding but safe enough to be resolved after an emotional speech in formalwear.

I was not prepared for what this movie actually was.

The Drama starts like a romantic comedy. Not even a dark romantic comedy yet. Just a genuinely sweet movie about two people who seem to make sense together.

Emma, played by Zendaya, works at a bookstore. Charlie, played by Robert Pattinson, is a museum director. They meet cute. They dress like they share the same closet. They live in one of those movie apartments where every room suggests that the people inside have excellent credit and have never purchased furniture from Rooms To Go.

They are getting married in a week.

Everything appears fine.

Then one conversation takes the entire movie, places it on a table, and slowly begins pulling its legs off.

Terrible behavior, certainly.

But still within the range of stories people can tell years later and receive some mixture of laughter, judgment and disbelief.

Then Emma shares hers.

As a teenager, she planned a school shooting.

She didn’t actually carry it out, but that barely matters to Charlie. The woman he planned to marry has suddenly become somebody else—or, more accurately, she has become somebody he realizes he never fully knew.

That is where The Drama becomes a much more interesting movie than I expected.

The question is not simply whether Emma deserves forgiveness. The movie is asking whether Charlie can continue loving her now that he knows something about her he cannot make fit inside the version of her he created.

That is a very different question.

Everybody wants honesty in a relationship until honesty brings something ugly through the front door. We say we want to know everything about the person we love, but what we usually mean is that we want more information that confirms our existing opinion of them.

We want their embarrassing childhood stories. Their old heartbreaks. Their fears. Maybe a regrettable tattoo.

We do not want information that forces us to rebuild the entire person in our heads.

Charlie does not know what to do with Emma’s confession because there is no emotionally clean response available to him. If he immediately forgives her, does that make him dangerously naïve? If he leaves, is he judging the adult woman he loves entirely by the worst thoughts of a troubled teenager? If he stays but never looks at her the same way again, what kind of marriage would that become?

Robert Pattinson is incredible here because Charlie does not process any of this with dignity.

He spirals.

He becomes frightened, cruel, self-righteous and increasingly ridiculous. Pattinson has gotten extremely good at playing men whose emotions appear to be attacking them from inside their own bodies. Charlie looks like he is trying to maintain control while every private alarm in his head is going off at once.

Zendaya has the harder performance because Emma cannot be played as an obvious monster or a helpless victim. Either choice would make the movie easier, and The Drama has no interest in making this easy.

Emma understands the severity of what she planned. She also understands that she did not do it. She has spent years living beyond that moment, only to watch her entire identity collapse back into it the second Charlie learns the truth.

Zendaya plays that contradiction beautifully. Emma is ashamed, defensive, wounded and sometimes strangely calm. She wants Charlie to understand the person she was without allowing him to erase the person she became.

The movie also understands how quickly private pain becomes public entertainment.

Once the secret leaves the relationship, everybody gets to build an opinion around it. Friends take sides. People search for the correct moral position. Emma stops being a person and becomes a question everyone else gets to answer.

Would you marry her?

Could you forgive her?

Should something somebody planned—but never completed—as a teenager define the rest of their life?

The movie does not provide a comfortable answer because there probably isn’t one.

That refusal is part of why the film became controversial. The revelation involving a planned school shooting angered critics and gun-violence advocates, some of whom felt the subject was mishandled or hidden beneath misleading romantic-comedy marketing. That criticism is understandable. This is not abstract material. There are survivors and families for whom this can never function as a clever moral thought experiment.

But I also do not think the movie treats Emma’s past like a cheap twist and then forgets about it.

The confession changes the temperature of every scene that follows. It forces the audience into the same impossible position as Charlie: trying to reconcile the person standing in front of us with something that feels irreconcilable.

What I loved most is that The Drama never stops being funny while everything is falling apart.

Not joke funny.

Human funny.

The kind of funny that comes from watching people attempt to behave normally during a situation where normal behavior is no longer available. The wedding is still approaching. Guests are still coming. Arrangements have already been made. Love may be collapsing, but deposits are nonrefundable.

That tension makes the final stretch feel like a nightmare wearing formal clothes.

Kristoffer Borgli directs the movie like he knows discomfort lasts longer when nobody is allowed to escape it. Scenes continue past the moment when another filmmaker might cut away. Characters say the wrong thing, realize they have said the wrong thing and then somehow make it worse.

By the time the wedding arrives, the title finally feels like a threat.

The ending works because it does not pretend love has solved the problem. Emma and Charlie do not arrive at some magical place where the past no longer matters. They are left with something messier: the possibility that knowing a person completely might be impossible, and loving them may require accepting that impossibility.

That does not mean ignoring what they have done.

It means deciding whether their worst moment is the only true thing about them.

I finished The Drama thinking about how much of a relationship is built on the stories we tell each other—and how much depends on the stories we quietly leave out. Everybody enters love with an edited biography. Some edits are harmless. Some could destroy the entire production if restored.

This movie finds the worst possible deleted scene and presses play a week before the wedding.

I cannot believe I was sleeping on it.

Then again, maybe that was the best way to watch it. I missed the arguments, avoided the think pieces and went in expecting a beautiful little A24 relationship movie.

What I got was a moral crisis with a seating chart.

That shit was great.

A sequel to The Devil Wears Prada had every reason to be terrible.

Let’s be honest. Some movies should be left alone like a good outfit in an old photo. You don’t need to recreate it. You don’t need to “update” it. You definitely don’t need to run it through the nostalgia machine and act like putting the old cast back in expensive coats is the same thing as having something to say.

But The Devil Wears Prada 2 understands something most sequels forget: nostalgia is not the meal. It is the seasoning.

The reason this movie works is because it does not just ask, “Remember Miranda Priestly?” Of course we remember Miranda. That woman walked so every quiet corporate villain with a bob could run. The real question is: what happens when the world Miranda ruled has changed, but her belief in power, taste, and excellence has not?

That is where the movie finds its bite.

Fashion is different now. Media is different now. Influence is different now. The old gatekeepers are still standing, but the gates are bent, broken, screenshot, reposted, and turned into content before lunch. The magazine world that once felt untouchable now has to compete with TikTok stylists, celebrity creative directors, algorithm taste, and people calling anything with a logo “quiet luxury.” The movie knows this, and instead of pretending print media is still the center of the universe, it lets the tension live there.

Anne Hathaway’s Andy is more interesting this time because she is no longer the wide-eyed girl learning that fashion is a language. She already knows the language. Now she has to decide how much of it she wants to speak. That is a better conflict. The first movie was about getting close to power and realizing the cost. This one is about already knowing the cost and still feeling the pull. That is adulthood right there. You can know better and still circle the same fire.

Emily Blunt, as always, is a weapon. The original movie knew Emily was funny, but the sequel seems to understand she was never just comic relief. She was ambition with cheekbones. She was sacrifice in a sample size. She was what happens when someone gives everything to a machine and still gets treated like a replaceable part. Seeing her older, sharper, and more aware of the game gives the movie some of its best energy.

And Stanley Tucci? Come on. Nigel remains the soul of this world. He is the reminder that style is not just clothing. It is memory. It is labor. It is obsession. It is all the invisible hands that make glamour look effortless. Every time he is on screen, the movie feels warmer, smarter, and more lived-in.

That has always been the secret of this franchise. It is not really about fashion. It is about work. It is about how much of yourself you are willing to trade to be close to something beautiful. It is about the lie that if you are talented enough, loyal enough, and tired enough, the machine will finally love you back.

It will not.

It may promote you. It may dress you. It may put your name on the masthead. But love? No. The machine does not love. It consumes. And this sequel is at its best when it remembers that.

Is the movie perfect? No. Some moments lean a little too hard into “look who’s back” energy. A few lines feel written for the trailer instead of the scene. And yes, the movie occasionally winks at the audience so hard you almost want to hand it an eye drop. But when it locks in, it locks in.

The best sequels do not simply return us to a place we loved. They make us ask why we loved it, what changed, and whether the thing still has teeth.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 still has teeth.

It is glossy, funny, cold, warm, petty, elegant, and smarter than it had to be. It knows we came for the coats, the shade, the office warfare, and Miranda saying very little while making everybody question their life choices. But it also knows the world has moved. The runway is no longer just in Paris or New York. It is in your phone. It is in the group chat. It is in the comments. It is in the outfit breakdown posted before the person even gets out the car.

And still, Miranda walks through it like she owns the air.

That is the movie.

The world changed.

The heels still click.

I Love Boosters, Riley’s new crime comedy, follows a crew of shoplifters who steal high-end fashion and resell it cheaper, until a ruthless fashion mogul steals their designs and gives them a bigger reason to strike back. The film stars Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Don Cheadle, and Demi Moore, with Neon releasing it theatrically in the U.S. on May 22, 2026.

The movie sounds like a joke until you realize Riley is dead serious. That has always been his trick. Sorry to Bother You took corporate America, race, labor, and desperation and turned them into a carnival ride with the brakes cut. I Love Boosters appears to be playing in that same register: absurd, loud, messy, funny, political, and allergic to being normal.

Just how Boots like it. I mean, just how Boots loves it. 

The idea of “boosting” has always lived in that gray area America loves to pretend it does not understand. When rich people steal ideas, labor, land, culture, designs, slang, and style, they call it business. When poor people steal the finished product back, suddenly everybody finds a moral compass. That is where this movie seems to plant its flag. Not in the question of whether stealing is “right,” but in the bigger question: what do you call a system that robs people so cleanly it gets to write the law afterward?

The fashion angle is what makes the movie hit a little harder. Clothes are never just clothes. They are class, access, taste, aspiration, costume, armor, and sometimes a receipt of who got left outside. A luxury brand can take from the street, mark it up, put it behind glass, and call it “inspired.” But when the same people who created the sauce find a way to get paid off it, now it is theft. That hypocrisy is the movie’s real villain.

From early reviews, I Love Boosters seems to be divisive in the way a Boots Riley project should be. Some critics praise the film’s originality, visual ambition, and anti-capitalist bite, while others call it overstuffed or chaotic. That does not scare me. Some movies are clean because they do not have much to say. Riley’s work is messy because he is trying to stuff the whole broken machine into the frame.

That does not mean the movie is above criticism. A story this packed can lose emotional weight if every character becomes a symbol. Satire can also get so busy proving its point that it forgets to let a scene breathe. But even when Riley misses, he misses swinging at something real. I will always respect that more than a polished movie with nothing on its mind.

I Love Boosters looks like a movie about shoplifting, but it is really about ownership. Who owns style? Who owns labor? Who owns rebellion once rebellion becomes marketable? And who gets punished for taking back a little piece of what the world already took from them?

That is the fun of it. That is also the sting.

Because under all the jokes, fits, scams, surrealism, and chaos, I Love Boosters seems to be asking one very simple question:

If the whole system is built on stealing, why is the booster the only one being chased?

I didn’t spend much time this year looking for comfort at the movies. I was drawn to stories that felt uneasy, patient, and unresolved — films more interested in consequence than catharsis. The kind that don’t rush to reassure you, and don’t pretend complexity can be wrapped up cleanly before the credits roll.

What I responded to most were movies willing to sit in the darker corners: inheritance, guilt, ambition, silence, and the quiet systems that shape people long before anyone makes a “bad” decision. These weren’t films about shock for shock’s sake. They were about what happens when pressure builds slowly, when accountability gets deferred, and when people convince themselves they’re only bystanders.

This year, movies followed the same path while taking different roads to arrive. Here are my top five movies of the year 2025. 

Sinners

Summary:
Sinners follows a group of people pulled into a confrontation with an ancient, malevolent force rooted in legacy, bloodlines, and buried history. What begins as survival horror slowly reveals itself as something more psychological — a story about what communities inherit, suppress, and refuse to name, even as it consumes them.

Rather than racing toward answers, the film lingers in uncertainty, allowing dread, guilt, and inevitability to shape every decision its characters make.

The Moment:
Not a jump scare. Not the violence.
It’s the stillness before people realize what they’re dealing with — that pause where survival instincts kick in but morality hasn’t caught up yet.

The Feeling:
Dread layered with familiarity.
Like the past showing up uninvited, confident it still knows you.

Why It Stayed:
Sinners isn’t really about monsters — it’s about inheritance.
What gets passed down. What gets buried. What keeps feeding even when nobody wants to name it.

In a year where culture kept pretending history was optional, this movie refused to let anyone move on without reckoning.

Cultural Footnote:
A lot of people talked about what the movie was.
Fewer talked about why it felt inevitable.

Summary:
One Battle After Another follows a man navigating the long aftermath of conflict — not the fight itself, but the years that come after when the war is supposedly over. As personal relationships fray and old wounds resurface, the film interrogates what it actually means to “move on” when the past keeps demanding new versions of the same fight.

It’s a story less concerned with victory than with endurance, tracing how unresolved battles quietly reshape identity, intimacy, and belief.

The Moment:
When it becomes clear the fight isn’t external anymore — it’s internal, and it’s been there the whole time.

The Feeling:
Exhaustion without defeat.
Like realizing you’re tired not because you lost, but because you never stopped bracing yourself.

Why It Stayed:
Because One Battle After Another understands something a lot of films avoid:
Survival isn’t closure. It’s continuation.

In 2025, a year where everyone talked about “healing” like it was a destination, this movie treated it like a process — uneven, circular, and unfinished.

Cultural Footnote:
Some people wanted this to be about the conflict.
It was really about the residue.

Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man

Summary:
Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man drops Benoit Blanc into another carefully arranged mess — a death wrapped in wealth, performance, and misdirection. As always, the mystery isn’t just who did it, but who benefits from the confusion. The film uses its whodunit framework to examine power, ego, and the lies people tell themselves when money insulates them from consequence.

The plot moves briskly, but the real work happens in the margins — in what characters reveal when they think they’re smarter than everyone else.

The Moment:
When the mystery stops being clever and starts being obvious — and you realize the film has been daring you to underestimate it the entire time.

The Feeling:
Amused, then quietly indicted.

Why It Stayed:
Because Wake Up Dead Man understands that satire works best when it lets people laugh before they recognize themselves.

In a year full of performative outrage and selective morality, this movie trusted the audience to connect the dots — and didn’t rush to absolve anyone.

Cultural Footnote:
Some dismissed it as “another Knives Out.”
That was the point. Repetition is the theme.

Opus

Summary:
Opus follows a young writer drawn into the orbit of a legendary, reclusive artist whose influence still looms large despite years of silence. What begins as an opportunity — access, proximity, validation — slowly becomes something more destabilizing as admiration curdles into control. The film examines the power imbalance between creators and gatekeepers, and the cost of proximity to genius when the rules are never stated out loud.

It’s a psychological thriller disguised as a character study, more interested in tension than revelation.

The Moment:
When you realize the silence isn’t emptiness — it’s strategy.

The Feeling:
Claustrophobic respect.
Like knowing you’re in the presence of something important, but not knowing what it’s taking from you in exchange.

Why It Stayed:
Because Opus understands a specific modern fear:
That success might require shrinking yourself to fit inside someone else’s mythology.

In 2025 — a year obsessed with platforms, proximity, and co-signs — this movie asked a dangerous question:
Who benefits from your belief?

Cultural Footnote:
A lot of the conversation centered on the performances.
Not enough lingered on the warning.

Weapons

Summary:
Weapons unfolds around a disturbing mystery involving missing children and a community desperate for explanations. What initially presents itself as a puzzle slowly fractures into something more unsettling — a portrait of collective denial, misplaced blame, and the quiet violence embedded in systems meant to protect. The film refuses to offer a single villain, instead exposing how harm compounds when fear, authority, and silence overlap.

Rather than solving the mystery outright, Weapons forces the audience to sit with what happens when everyone is partially responsible — and no one wants to be accountable.

The Moment:
When the film stops asking what happened and starts asking why nobody stopped it.

The Feeling:
Unease without release.
Like realizing the danger wasn’t the act itself — it was the environment that allowed it.

Why It Stayed:
Because Weapons understands that violence isn’t always loud.
Sometimes it’s procedural. Sometimes it’s inherited. Sometimes it looks like routine.

As a closer, it works because it doesn’t resolve the year — it reveals it. After legacy, endurance, exposure, and ambition, this film lands on the hardest truth of all:
Participation doesn’t require intent. Only silence.

Cultural Footnote:
Some viewers wanted answers.
The movie wanted accountability.

Looking at these five movies together, it’s clear I wasn’t drawn to spectacle or escape this year. I gravitated toward stories that sat in the darker corners — not because they were bleak, but because they were honest.

Each film wrestled with a different version of consequence. Sinners explored inheritance and the things we pretend we’ve outrun. One Battle After Another examined the exhaustion of carrying unfinished fights. Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man used humor to expose how easily power hides in plain sight. Opus questioned the price of proximity and ambition. And Weapons forced a reckoning with collective silence.

What connects them isn’t darkness for its own sake — it’s accountability. These weren’t movies about evil people; they were movies about systems, environments, and choices that compound quietly over time. They asked uncomfortable questions and refused to tidy up the answers.

If this list says anything about my year, it’s that I wasn’t looking to be distracted. I was looking to understand. To sit with complexity. To recognize where responsibility lives — even when it’s inconvenient.