Lesser Known 2025 Movies
The year is drawing to a close, but New Orleans sometimes does not get award contenders until January, so it's a little too early to make a year-end best of 2025 list. However, this is a good time to draw attention to a few worthwhile films that almost no one saw (often due to marketing campaigns that were either non-existent or missed the mark).
These movies may not quite be best-list material, but they are worth seeking out.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
The trailers for this one made it seem like a cutesy rom-com, and an early scene is so excruciatingly twee it seems like the film is headed for disaster. But once two wedding guests (Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell) embark on a road trip guided by a magical GPS, the film starts getting better. That last sentence makes it sound like an exercise in forced quirkiness, but it's a deeper film than that. It's about coming to terms with the mistakes and sins of one's past. In most romantic comedies, the main characters' previous boyfriends/girlfriends are just shrugged off as unimportant and incidental steps on the heroes' quest for true love. But in Journey's best scene, the leads have to revisit the partners they hurt the most and sit there and listen to their recriminations and acknowledge the pain they caused. That's weightier stuff than one normally sees in a rom-com and that's why I suspect Journey will eventually find fans down the road. In a world of algorithmic "content" and endless reheated IP material, Journey is different—flawed in its early going, but different.
The Luckiest Man in America
'80s kids might remember the story of Michael Larson, a contestant on the game show Press Your Luck, where contestants pressed buttons hoping to land on prizes and not the dreaded "whammy." Larson had a seemingly unbelievable no-whammy streak. It turned out he recognized the board had a limited number of patterns and he memorized them all. In The Luckiest Man in America, Paul Walter Houser (Richard Jewell, Cruella) plays Larson. He's a misfit but not the cute, quirky kind. He's a difficult, awkward man who has routinely let his family down in his pursuit of the next get-rich-quick scheme. The film dramatizes Larson's run. Here, producers begin to suspect what Larson is doing on the day of the taping, but in real life, no one realized what Larson had done until years after the fact. It's a tight, tense film with an excellent lead performance from Hauser and strong supporting turns from David Strathairn as the show's producer and Walton Goggins as the show's host.
Secret Mall Apartment
In
the early 2000s, a group of Providence art students discovered a hidden area
within a local mall. They decided to turn it into an apartment with secret
entrances. With enough work, they had it resembling an actual living space. It
went undiscovered for a long time, too. Thankfully, they documented their
efforts on video. The result, combined with present-day interviews of the
participants, is the documentary Secret Mall Apartment. It's a
fascinating watch, in part because of the gonzo audacity of the art students
and in part because malls are on the decline around the world and the film
serves as a time capsule to an era when it seemed like malls would remain
eternally dominant. That said, you don't have to be fond of malls to find the
documentary interesting. It's well worth a look.
