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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!
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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.
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Allison note: I loathe this movie but Jeremy Strong is soooooooooooooo fucking hot in it……………
Allison note: AND SAMANTHA’S THE WHORE
Allison note: I’m happy to announce that Hamnet is my Movie I Am Skipping of 2025, due to the fact that every single person in my life who has seen it has been like, “You would hate it.” Heard!
We need to normalize calling a frequent director+actor combo "boyfriends" (non-gendered)
Justice for ‘John q’, which I watched for the first time this year. It still holds up! Healthcare is still expensive and maddening!!