While this column focuses on physical media with an appetizer of Netflix options, it’s worth noting that one of the essential films of 2025 is exclusively available on PVOD through the rest of the year. Go spend money to see “One Battle After Another” if you haven’t done so yet, exclusively On Demand until January 2026.

Also, stay tuned for a special edition of this column in December with limited editions and box sets for the holiday season, including new versions of “Scarface,” “Pride & Prejudice,” and several John Woo masterpieces.

10 NEW TO NETFLIX

“Back to the Future“
“Baby Driver“
“Collateral“
“Doctor Sleep“
“Ghost“
“Star Trek“
“Tenet“
“This is the End“
“Whiplash“
“Zodiac“

11 NEW TO BLU-RAY

“Burden of Dreams” (Criterion)

One of the craziest productions in the history of moviemaking was Werner Herzog’s feverish shoot of his masterful “Fitzcarraldo” in Peru in the early ’80s. Just watching Herzog’s story of a maniacal robber baron (the unforgettable Klaus Kinski), one can sense the chaos that must have been unfolding behind the scenes, but it takes Les Blank’s stunning documentary to really comprehend the insanity. Basically, Herzog decided to make a movie about someone who tried to do something crazy, and so did something crazy himself, trying to move a 320-ton steamship over a Peruvian mountain. A lost star (Jason Robards), multiple on-set injuries, and arguments of exploitation followed, and all of it makes for riveting viewing in Les Blank’s essential documentary, now remastered by Criterion. It also includes a great short film called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe,” which is pretty self-explanatory.

Special Features

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by filmmaker Harrod Blank, director Les Blank’s son, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• Alternate uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• Audio commentary featuring Les Blank, editor and sound recordist Maureen Gosling, and Fitzcarraldo director Werner Herzog
• Interview with Herzog
• Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), a short film by Blank
• Deleted scenes
• Behind-the-scenes photos taken by Gosling
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Paul Arthur and a book of excerpts from Blank’s and Gosling’s production journals

“Caught Stealing“

Darren Aronofsky tries to do the Guy Ritchie thing to mostly positive results in this dark comedy that moves as well as it does largely due to the blinding star power of Austin Butler (Zoe Kravitz, Matt Smith, Bad Bunny, and Regina King don’t hurt). Butler plays an average guy who gets caught up in a violent plot involving a key hidden in a kitty litter box. Some of it feels like it should be a bit more chaotic than Aronofsky allows, but there’s an energy to the piece that keeps it moving from one twist to another. It’s an especially easy watch at home. Consider it the anti-holiday movie this season.

Special Features

• Aronofsky: The Real Deal – Director Darren Aronofsky and Screenwriter/Author Charlie Huston explore the genesis of the film, the process of adaptation, and how to keep audiences guessing.
• Casting Criminals, Chaos, and a Cat – Austin Butler leads an incredible ensemble of actors – hear from the cast & crew on their characters, filming on set, and more!
• New York Story – From nosy neighbors to Black & White cookies, Caught Stealing is a love letter to New York.
• I Don’t Drive – Whether he’s running through traffic or hanging from a sixth-story balcony, Austin Butler brought an intense physicality to his performance as washed-up baseball player Hank Thompson.

“El” (Criterion)

Every Luis Buñuel film that joins the Criterion Collection is an occasion for celebration. The latest is the 4K restoration of his 1953 surreal nightmare adaptation of Pensamientos by Mercedes Pinto. Arturo de Cordova, Delia Garces, and Luis Beristain star in a film about an overprotective husband that’s arguably minor for Buñuel, but one would never know that from this excellent release that includes not just a new video essay about the film but an appreciation from none other than Guillermo del Toro. Another cool piece of supplemental material is an interview with the director himself from 1981 but none other than Jean-Claude Carrière.

Special Features

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by photographer Gabriel Figueroa Flores, director of photography Gabriel Figueroa’s son, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New video essay on director Luis Buñuel by scholar Jordi Xifra
• Appreciation by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro
• Interview with Buñuel from 1981 by writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a longtime collaborator of the director’s
• Panel discussion from 2009, moderated by filmmaker José Luis Garci
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by critic Fernanda Solórzano and an interview with Buñuel by critics José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent

“Eyes Wide Shut” (Criterion)

The Criterion release of the year is the 4K restoration of Stanley Kubrick’s final masterpiece, now available in a color grading that looks better than ever before, one overseen by D.P. Larry Smith. It’s hard to convey how PERFECT “Eyes Wide Shut” looks on this release, one of my favorite transfers, maybe ever. It’s not overdone, allowing the shadowy underworld of this film to offset the bright colors that make it feel like a nightmare. The movie itself also feels like it would be a masterpiece if it came out today, over a quarter-century later. A study of masculine insecurity and the systems that control society, it’s an incredible drama, one of the best of its era. The Criterion release also includes tons of great special features, my favorite being “Lost Kubrick,” a short documentary about two abandoned Stanley projects: “Napoleon” and “The Aryan Papers.”

Special Features

• New 4K digital restoration of the international version of the film, supervised and approved by director of photography Larry Smith, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
• New interviews with Smith, set decorator and second-unit director Lisa Leone, and archivist Georgina Orgill
• Archival interview with Christiane Kubrick, director Stanley Kubrick’s wife
• Never Just a Dream (2019), featuring interviews with producer Jan Harlan; Katharina Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick’s daughter; and Anthony Frewin, Kubrick’s personal assistant
• Lost Kubrick: The Unfinished Films of Stanley Kubrick (2007)
• Kubrick Remembered (2014), featuring interviews with actors Todd Field and Leelee Sobieski and filmmaker Steven Spielberg
• Kubrick’s 1998 acceptance speech for the Directors Guild of America’s D. W. Griffith Award
• Press conference from 1999, featuring Harlan and actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman
• Teaser, trailer, and promos
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by author Megan Abbott and a 1999 interview with filmmaker and actor Sydney Pollack

“Familiar Touch“

Everyone should see this one before making any proclamations on the films of 2025. It’s haunted me since I first saw it around the time of its Venice premiere in September 2024, and we were proud to program it for the 2025 Chicago Critics Film Festival. Now, Sarah Friedland’s delicate drama about the subtlety of dementia is available to rent on VOD and on physical media from Music Box Films. Kathleen Chalfant gives one of the best performances of the year as a woman forced to move from being on her own into assisted living. It’s a great study in how tactile memories can often linger longer than traditional ones. It’s smart, empathetic, and beautiful.

Special Features

• Roundtable Cast Conversation presented by Caring Across Generations
• Familiar Touch: The Creative Process – A Conversation with Sarah Friedland
• Q&A with Kathleen Chalfant from Jacob Burns Film Center
• Behind the Scenes at Villa Gardens
• Image Gallery
• Theatrical Trailer

“Hell’s Angels” (Criterion)

It’s funny to think that an entire generation of movie lovers probably know this flick better from how its production was essential to the story of Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator.” Remember all the crazy flight scenes in that movie? They were capturing the production of Howard Hughes shooting “Hell’s Angels,” now restored in 4K by the Criterion Collection. A film that changed aerial filmmaking and launched the career of Jean Harlow, it’s an essential part of movie history, and an unexpected choice for Criterion. The release includes an interview with one of my favorite film historians, the brilliant Farran Smith Nehme, and outtakes from the film with commentary by a Harlow biographer. There’s even a direct connection to “The Aviator” as Criterion interviews the VFX supervisor for Scorsese’s film about the production of this one. It all comes full circle.

Special Features

• New 4K digital restoration of the Magnascope road-show version of the film, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• New interview with Robert Legato, the visual-effects supervisor for the Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator, on the groundbreaking aerial visuals of Hell’s Angels
• New interview with critic Farran Smith Nehme about actor Jean Harlow
• Outtakes from the film, with commentary by Harlow biographer David Stenn
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by author and journalist Fred Kaplan

“In the Mouth of Madness” (Arrow)

While fans bow at the altar of ’70s and ’80s John Carpenter, they’re often quick to dismiss his later work. Listen, I’m not here to defend “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” or “Village of the Damned,” but I will go to bat for the one in between, this 1994 surreal nightmare that’s arguably the filmmaker’s last true vision. Closing out what he called his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” it stars Sam Neill as a man investigating the disappearance of a famous horror novelist when he discovers a Lovecraftian nightmare. The incredible Arrow edition is oe of their best of the year, including two archival commentaries with Carpenter himself and tons of new material. The exclusive stuff includes a new interview Jurgen Prochnow, a new featurette, a new appreciation, fantastic cover art, and a great collector’s book. It may not be Halloween, but it’s never too late to snag this one.

Special Features

• Archive audio commentary with director John Carpenter and producer Sandy King Carpenter
• Archive audio commentary with director John Carpenter and director of photography Gary B. Kibbe
• Brand new audio commentary by filmmakers Rebekah McKendry & Elric Kane, co-hosts of Colors of the Dark podcast
• Making Madness, a newly filmed interview with producer Sandy King Carpenter
• Do You Read Sutter Cane?, a newly filmed interview with actor Jürgen Prochnow
• The Whisperer of the Dark, an archive interview with actress Julie Carmen
• Greg Nicotero’s Things in the Basement, an archive interview with special effects artist Greg Nicotero
• We Are What He Writes, a new featurette in praise of John Carpenter and In the Mouth of Madness
• Reality Is Not What It Used To Be, a new appreciation by film scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
• Horror’s Hallowed Grounds, an archive featurette looking at the locations used in the film
• Home Movies From Hobb’s End, behind-the-scenes footage
• The Making of In the Mouth of Madness, a vintage featurette
• Theatrical trailer and TV spots
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Francesco Francavilla
• Double-sided fold-out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Francesco Francavilla
• Perfect bound collector’s book featuring new writing on the film by Guy Adams, Josh Hurtado, Richard Kadrey, George Daniel Lea, Willow Catelyn Maclay, and Alexandra West

“The Long Walk“

It really has been quite a year for Stephen King fans with “The Running Man,” “IT: Welcome to Derry,” “The Institute,” and this theatrical hit, arguably the best of the bunch. To this viewer, Francis Lawrence never quite figured out how to update what was a story written by a young man in the wake of the Vietnam War, but he did something essential to this long-awaited adaptation’s success: he cast two future stars. Years from now, it’s going to be fun to look back on this one in the wake of how critically and commercially successful I expect Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson to be. They’re both just fantastic here, even if the movie around them sometimes struggles to keep pace.

Special Features

• Alternate Ending – 4K Blu-ray SteelBook Exclusive
• Stephen King: An Appreciation – 4K Blu-ray SteelBook Exclusive
• Cooper & David Scene Read – 4K Blu-ray SteelBook Exclusive
• “Ever Onward: Making The Long Walk” Multi-Part Documentary
• Theatrical Trailers

“Sea Fog”

Am I including this in this month’s guide just because I wrote the essay for it? So what if I am?!? In all seriousness, “Sea Fog,” co-written by Bong Joon-ho, is a propulsive piece of filmmaking, a tense true story starring the fantastic Kim Yoon-seok (“The Chaser”) and Han Ye-ri (“Minari”). It’s the tale of a fishing vessel that agrees to smuggle a few dozen illegal immigrants into Korea on a stormy, dangerous night. The sequence in which the “cargo” is transferred to their shop is haunting and brilliant. And, yes, if you want to read more about the film’s production and craft by yours truly, that’s included in your purchase.

Special Features

• Cast and Crew Interviews
• Making of Featurette
• Trailers
• 16-page booklet with essay by Brian Tallerico, managing editor of RogerEbert.com

“Shin Godzilla“

The deserved love for “Godzilla Minus One” has brought people back to the timeless franchise overall, allowing for a bit of renewed interest in this 2016 gem, one of my favorite Godzilla flicks. It’s technically the 31st Godzilla film, but the first in the Reiwa era. And it rules. One of many things I love about it is how directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi lean into the idea that red tape is the real monster that’s going to destroy us all. A story of how bureaucratic incompetence only makes international disasters worse was almost prescient in 2016. And now you can own it in a beautiful steelbook 4K edition.

Special Features

• Promotional Video Collection
• Making Of SHIN GODZILLA
• Deleted Scenes
• Outtakes
• News Reels
• Previs Reel Collection
• Previs and Special Effects Outtakes
• Visual Effects Breakdown
• Trailer 1
• Trailer 2
• Teaser 1
• Teaser 2

“Splitsville“

One of the funnier films of 2025 is this adult comedy starring Michael Angelo Covino, Kyle Marvin, Dakota Johnson, and Adria Arjona. Marvin, who co-wrote with director and co-star Covino, plays an ordinary guy whose partner (Arjona) up and leaves him one day, pushing them into the arms of his BFF’s wife, who happens to be in an open marriage. A comedy of sexually active, bed-hopping adults doesn’t come along that often in the 2020s. So while this one isn’t perfect, it’s willingness to comedically examine the insecurities of man-children who don’t know how to keep anyone but themselves happy is more than welcome. It also has the best fight scene of the year. Yeah, I said it.

Special Features

• The Making of Splitsville – Featurette
• Original Theatrical Trailer
• TV Spots

Documentary is a filmmaking approach inherently designed for remembrance. In fact, it’s the approach that most closely can be aligned with photography and the desire to capture a moment, a person, or a thing before the forces of time overcome and erase its existence. So, you know, usually with these films, you’re going to get a topic of some import. The three films in this Chicago International Film Festival dispatch take the form’s ability to heart in a bid to preserve the memories of a Kosovo village, the legacy of a disgraced Ghanaian president, and an area of Italy previously wiped out by a volcano. These films, to varying degrees of success, stand as a testament to the importance of remembrance, even when the memories hurt.   

For the last year or so, cinema has been inundated with films about unmoored individuals and shaken communities grappling with the loss of their homelands. Swiss-Albanian director Dea Gjinovci’s elegiac documentary “The Beauty of the Donkey” is a fine addition to that trend. It concerns the filmmaker’s father, who, with his daughter, returns to their small village in Kosovo for the first time in nearly 60 years. While there, her father, Asllan, shares memories that Gjinovci decides to stage as abstract theatrical productions, bringing the past back to modernity with potency.

This is also a film that mixes politics with loss. In 1968, a 19-year-old Asllan was a political activist when he was exiled. Upon leaving the country, he lost contact with his family, particularly his mother, whose death has always lived in family lore. Asllan shares the oppression his family suffered under Serbian authorities and the risks taken to combat their rule with stunning clarity; he also investigates his mother’s death with equal fervor. These family stories, of course, impact Gjinovci as well. Because she grew up in Switzerland, she’s never seen her father’s homeland. In the opening sequence, when Asllan emerges from the woods, walking toward the field where his stone home once stood, in the assuredness of her lens you can feel the haunting reverence Gjinovci has for this moment.

Despite the film’s fanciful title, however, there aren’t many donkeys in this picture. Two scenes featuring donkeys bookend the work, and while you can certainly sense how the animal traces back to a moment of innocence in Asllan’s life and serves as a reminder of his own endurance, the moments don’t cohere enough to be the film’s throughline. Instead the film is strongest when it doesn’t give way to twee metaphorical scenes, but focuses on the cathartic reclamation of one’s history.   

I really wish director Ben Proudfoot’s messy historical documentary “The Eyes of Ghana,” a partial product of executive producers Michelle and Barack Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, was better. It’s one of those films whose desire to tell a little-known story grants it some slack, but whose unsteady execution quickly evaporates much of the goodwill you came into it with. The film concerns legendary Ghanaian cinematographer and director Chris Hesse’s desire to reclaim over a thousand cans of footage from London that he shot of the country’s first president Kwame Nkrumah before the leader’s downfall from a military coup in 1966. While that story alone would make for an incredible documentary, Proudfoot overpacks “The Eyes of Ghana” with far too many other threads for it all to hold together. 

Proudfoot is a two-time winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film (“The Last Repair,” “The Queen of Basketball”), a background you can unfortunately feel when “The Eyes of Ghana” begins with the three cold opens. The first opener introduces Hesse; the second produces his protege, director Anita Afonu; the third brings in the steadfast projectionist of Ghana’s Rex Cinema, Addo, who often dreams of hosting film at the disused movie house again. With that set-up you can pretty much guess where this film will end up. Nevertheless, Proudfoot doesn’t neatly interweave these threads. He continues shifting subjects, giving us the early history of Ghanaian moviemaking, Nkrumah’s troubled story, and how America disrupted the Pan-Africa movement via destabilizing newly independent governments. Rather than making a coherent feature out of these varied topics, unfortunately, Proudfoot has produced several shorts whose total composition lacks focus as a feature. 

His film is further hobbled when he begins including the digitized and restored pieces that Hesse shot (in a sense “The Eyes of Ghana” is a well-meaning advertising for further funds to restore the rest of Hesse’s stored footage). Not because the images aren’t exceptional, because Hesse’s films are so much better than the movie we’re watching, which relies on a garish Disney-esque score by Kris Bowers and an on-the-nose desire to capture Hesse at such an angle that we’re always staring deeply into his eyes. Though Proudfoot clearly has an appreciation for the material—“Rwanda and Juliet,” his only other feature, considered the post-genocide lives of that African country—this film is too slick and too broad for such a sensitive story.    

The history of Vesuvius, whose eruption led to the decimation of Pompeii, has served as a shot that continues to be heard round the world. So when Gianfranco Rosi’s gorgeous, black and white shot documentary “Below the Clouds” fixes its lens on the mountain, you immediately expect his film will hyper focus on that looming threat. But Rosi, whose previous films include overtly political works like “Fire at Sea” and “Notturno,” rarely takes notice of the life inside the volcano. He instead weaves through the ordinary life bustling around Naples and the recording of lives long past gone by the archeologists excavating local historical sites. 

“Below the Clouds” isn’t a talky documentary, per se. It’s totally observational. Even so, Rosi’s meditative lens takes notice of the chatter emanating from its many locations. There’s the emergency call center where people phone for assistance following every tremor. While you’d think these would be intense communications, their inherent franticness is cut down by the humor and sweetness of the officials taking these calls. Greater chatter is found via Syrian boatmen looking for entry into the port for their Ukrainian grain. And even more talk occurs whenever we jump into the work performed by archaeologists, who are navigating, at times, vast tunnels and excavated caverns holding the frozen, calcified victims of Pompeii.   

When combined, all of these scenes entail a documentary fascinated by the fragility and suspension of life. The rhythmic editing, for instance, creates a circular pattern, returning to and remixing images whose continual convergence imbues these mundane images with great meaning. Rosi also ventures into a movie house, where he plays films like “Last Days of Pompeii” (1913) and “Voyage to Italy” (1954), which speak to the long-held cultural fascination with an event that continues to fascinate outsiders and remains ever prevalent in the minds of those living near the famed volcano. In a sense, by locking his contemporary documentary in this rich black and white photography, Rosi has also put his film along those. Thereby, preserving the artifacts of memory that make this place home.  

“It was in Odessa that I found those Friday night lights, and they burned with more intensity than I ever imagined… As someone later described it, those lights become an addiction if you live in a place like Odessa…As I stood in that beautiful stadium on the plains week after week, it became obvious that these kids held the town on their shoulders.” — H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream (1990)

If the conversation is about the most significant and enduring book ever published about high school football, the universally acknowledged GOAT is H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights.

When we’re debating the best movies about high school football, my vote goes to Peter Berg’s adaptation of “FNL” (2004), just ahead of “All the Right Moves” (1983) and “Remember the Titans” (2000) and light-years ahead of the admittedly entertaining but borderline cartoonish “Varsity Blues” (1999).

As for TV series in this category, let’s broaden the discussion to include series covering all sports, at any level. I have a fond place in my memory bank for “The White Shadow” (1978-1981), and I loved “Ted Lasso” so much that I’m cautiously optimistic about the somewhat surprising news of a Season 4, even though I thought Season 3 wrapped things up in note-perfect fashion. Still, it’s the television adaptation of “Friday Night Lights” (2006-2011) that has remained atop my rankings of the best TV sports shows ever made.

High school football season is here. Hawaii and Alaska have already begun their 2025 seasons, with the vast majority of states kicking off their campaigns in the third or fourth weeks of August. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the legacy of “Friday Night Lights”—the book, the movie, and the TV show.

The Book

By the fall of 1988, the brilliant, then 34-year-old H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger was already a star journalist. Bissinger had won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting while writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he made another big splash with a Vanity Fair article titled “Shattered Glass,” an exposé of the fabulist catalog of work by Stephen Glass. (Writer/director Billy Ray’s adaptation of that piece was one of the best films of 2003.)

Bissinger spent a year in Odessa, TX, and immersed himself in the football-crazed community—and the result was the sensational bestseller Friday Night Lights, told in the “New Journalism” style pioneered by the likes of Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Gay Talese. The book was about so much more than high school sports; Bissinger took us inside a West Texas community where solid, small-town values were stressed—but racism was prevalent, and football was given priority over academics, with the locals placing an inordinate amount of importance on the Friday night gridiron performances of a bunch of 17-year-olds.

The most tragic figure is the star running back Boobie Miles, who seems bound for Division I and perhaps even NFL greatness, until he suffers a brutal injury in a preseason scrimmage. At a time when Boobie most needed the support of the community, the easy grades teachers were handing him disappeared (at a time when education required to be stressed), and some members of the coaching staff reportedly made cruel and racist jokes about Boobie being useless. Even in the most tragic of passages, there is a poetry to Bissinger’s narrative, and this is a work of complexity and subtlety. He includes positive portrayals of head coach Gary Gaines and several players, including Brian Chavez, Ivory Christian, and Brian Winchell, but he never shies away from showing us the darkest side of those Friday night lights.

(Sidebar: Over the years, Bissinger provided financial and emotional support for the struggling Miles and published a 34-page afterword titled “After Friday Night Lights” in 2012 that detailed their relationship–but to no avail. Miles has made a mess of his own life and has seriously harmed others; he has been convicted of multiple crimes and is currently serving a 13-year prison sentence.)

The Movie

Rewatching director Peter Berg’s 2004 adaptation of Bissinger’s book (Berg co-wrote the screenplay with David Aaron Cohen), I was struck by the gritty authenticity of the football sequences, whether it was preseason practices, weight room sessions, or the climactic championship game at the Astrodome. (Berg wisely kept the story planted in the past, capturing the atmosphere of the Odessa of the late 1980s.) In subsequent films like “Battleship” and “Lone Survivor,” Berg and the talented cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler would sometimes overdo it with the whip-around, herky-jerky camera moves. Still, on their first collaboration with “FNL,” the style is just slick yet raw enough to create a docudrama effect without being too showy.

Although Berg had to jettison background historical passages, streamline storylines and nudge facts around to winnow a 357-page tome down to a 118-minute movie, the fictionalized portrayals of Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) and Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), among others, feel true to the spirit of the book. Derek Luke is electric as Boobie, who talks about himself in the third person and is more concerned with personal glory than team success, until he suffers that horrific injury. When Boobie insists to his coach that he’s ready to return for an October game against Midland, he immediately goes down again, this time for good. (Gaines takes one look at the hurting Boobie on the sidelines, walks away, and bluntly states, “He’s done.”)

Another compelling storyline involves the fumble-prone running back Donny Billingsley (Garret Hedlund, terrific) and his alcoholic and abusive father, Charlie (a menacingly good Tim McGraw), who wears and displays his state championship ring as if it represents the most important accomplishment in his life—which, sadly, is true. 

At halftime of the climactic game against the heavily favored, physically dominant Dallas Carter team, Thornton’s Coach, Gaines, sums up a reality about high-stakes high school football that rings true to this day: “You got two more quarters, and that’s it… Most of you have been playing this game for 10 years. You’ve got two more quarters, and after that, most of you will never play this game again for as long as you live.” (I remember hearing my coach at Thornridge High School giving a version of that same speech before the final game of my senior season.) Little wonder that even though these kids are playing a game they truly love, they often seem to forget to inhale the joy of it all.

The TV Show

As we all know, Ben Affleck starred in the NBC drama series that was inspired by Bissinger’s book. Wait, what? 

“Against the Grain” (1993), featuring John Terry as high school coach Ed Clemons, and Affleck as his son, the hunky young football player Joe Willie Clemons, was loosely based on Friday Night Lights. It lasted just eight weeks before it was permanently sacked, and quickly forgotten.

Onto the main event. When Peter Berg and showrunner Jason Katims brought “Friday Night Lights” to NBC in 2006, it marked the relatively rare occurrence of a book becoming a movie and then a TV show, with “M*A*S*H” arguably the most famous example. (Other notable titles: “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan stories, “The Dead Zone,” and “Snowpiercer.”)

With W.G. Snuffy Walden creating the iconic, slow-build,  chills-inducing opening anthem—it’s a Top 10 TV theme for me—that sets the tone for the blending of sports and family drama, “Friday Night Lights” was almost entirely fictionalized, and it softened some of the harsher themes explored in the book and the film. We spent at least as much time following the domestic arcs of the various nuclear families as we did on the football scenes–but that’s why it appealed to some non-sports fans as well as us football nerds. Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton created one of the most believable and empathetic couples television has ever seen in Eric and Tami Taylor, with an underappreciated Aimee Teagarden doing emotionally charged work as their teenage daughter Julie. (Britton had little to do as Coach Gaines’ wife Sharon in “Friday Night Lights” the movie, but she was a formidable co-lead on the TV show.)

The football scenes were well-choreographed, even if there were far too many games decided on the final play, and we were emotionally invested from the get-go, due to the stellar performances by Scott Porter as the star quarterback Jason Street, who suffers a paralyzing injury in the pilot episode; Zach Gilford as the aw-shucks backup QB Matt Saracen, Gaius Charles as Brian “Smash” Williams; Taylor Kitsch as the troubled anti-hero Tim Riggins, and, later on,  Michael B. Jordan as Vince Howard. (The insanely talented cast also included Jesse Plemons and Adrienne Palicki, and would expand to include blazing talents such as Aldis Hodge and Jurnee Smollett. Even though most of the actors playing high schoolers were too old for the part, at least the storylines would have some students graduating while others rotated in.)

The TV version of “FNL” would sometimes venture into lurid territory (e.g. Plemons’ Landry killing the stalker of Palicki’s Tyra, and the two of them conspiring to cover up the crime). But on balance, the series did a stellar job of tackling issues of race, economic class, crime, domestic strife, healthcare, school board politics, and, yes, the overemphasis on high school football in small-town America. Over five seasons, first on NBC and then on DirecTV’s 101 Network, “Friday Night Lights” struggled to find a large audience, but it was critically acclaimed—and dearly embraced by those of us who loved it. In the film version of “FNL,” Coach Gaines says to his team, “Can you live in [the] moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? With joy in your heart… Boys, my heart is full. My heart’s full.”

On TV, Coach Taylor’s mantra was, “Clear Eyes, Full Heart, Can’t Lose.” Sentimental as it might sound, the story of “Friday Night Lights,” warts and all, has cleared many an eye and filled many a heart. It is a football story, an American story, a story that holds up a mirror to society, and it rings as true and insightful in 2025 as it did in 1998 and again in the 2000s.

“The wreckage of my past is haunting me, it just won’t leave me alone,” sang Ozzy on “Road to Nowhere,” the reflective closer on his bestselling 1991 album No More Tears. It’s a standout in a solo career that endeared him to Gen Xers as much as his Black Sabbath albums did for boomers and The Osbournes for millennials, by which point Ozzy’s status as a top-tier rock legend was irrefutable. The establishment didn’t take him seriously—his first Rolling Stone cover story wasn’t until 2002 (he graced the cover twice that year), and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame didn’t induct Sabbath nor Ozzy solo until many years after their earliest eligibility. That may have endeared Ozzy all the more to fans who packed amphitheaters for Ozzfest and bought millions of his records that FM radio was hesitant to play. Like David Lynch or Pee-wee Herman, he was a very public weirdo who offended puritans and made other weirdos feel safe. People wanted to dismiss this pastor-terrorizing, bat-chomping, Alamo-desecrating hellion as a shock-rocker, but those of us who listened knew part of what made the Ozzman such a striking artist was how hard he worked to convince us of the opposite.

In Penelope Spheeris’ unforgettable “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years,” rockers are eager to be filmed showing off their excesses—beset by young groupies, or chugging vodka in a private swimming pool, perhaps. Ozzy gave the most memorable interview by showing himself making breakfast in his kitchen. (We now know that the orange juice spill is staged, which further speaks to Ozzy’s humor.) He constantly downplayed his music’s heaviness (“I’ve never felt comfortable about that title that they put on me — ‘metal,’…it was always just rock music”), Satanism (“We couldn’t conjure up a fart”), and annoyed his more serious bandmates by jumping around on stage too much. He duetted with Miss Piggy on the 1994 Muppets album Kermit Unpigged. He was far more likely to sing the praises of the Beatles or Peter Gabriel than his Ozzfest brethren, though he certainly elevated numerous young and underappreciated artists on tour. He insisted Black Sabbath were “the last hippie band” (“We were into peace”) and sang about leaning to love and forgetting to hate in his biggest solo hit. Most famously, he played the befuddled father on an MTV show that may have been the worst possible publicity for someone widely marketed as the Prince of Darkness, or the Godfather of Metal. In a Rolling Stone profile riding on the success of the hit show “The Osbournes,” Ozzy recounted being recently invited to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, where he bashfully tried to cover up his tattooed fingers (O-Z-Z-Y) for the monarch. Ozzy wasn’t trying to get people to ignore the man behind the curtain, he wanted to reassure us the man on stage wasn’t so bad.

But like the wolfman Ozzy sang about in “Bark at the Moon,” or the Robert Louis Stevenson character he referenced on an Ozzmosis deep cut, something horrifying kept breaking out of John Michael Osbourne. No matter how much he downplayed his dark side, there was something unpredictable and unnerving in his persona. No other rock musician can seem so convincingly possessed. Part of it was the debauchery—if Ozzy’s peers and his fabulous autobiography I Am Ozzy are to be believed, he lived through and forgot about more depravity than most rock stars have enjoyed (anyone who can gross out the members of Mötley Crüe is on another level). But the most stunning thing about Ozzy Osbourne will always be his music. “I don’t want to change the world, I don’t want the world to change me” chanted Ozzy in another No More Tears banger, which eventually (speaking of shocking) won him a Grammy. No matter what he intended, the world changed for Ozzy Osbourne, a troubled, impoverished boy from an abusive household, a high school dropout with undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia, who struggled to fight off bullies or hold down a steady job, and grew up to be one of the most celebrated artists of his lifetime.

Black Sabbath sounded like nothing before it when their first album dropped in February 1970, and every metal act in their wake owes something to them. It’s still startling how contemporary Sabbath still sounds with today’s cutting-edge metal bands. Purists like to point out that guitarist Tony Iommi was the riff architect and bassist Geezer Butler wrote most of the band’s lyrics, while Sabbath’s reunion minus original drummer Bill Ward emphasized his critical percussion. But Ozzy’s ability to own and define songs he didn’t write underscores his place as heavy metal’s Elvis, its first global superstar arriving as a jaw-dropping, irreplaceable talent. Nobody sings like Ozzy—most metal vocalists are operatic (Rob Halford, Bruce Dickinson) or growlers (Lemmy, James Hetfield), none of whom can achieve Ozzy’s banshee wail. He could pull off wild harmonies with himself through multitracked vocals, or go from singsong to maniacal within seconds. He articulated insecurity, uncertainty, and even love as well as the most rowdy or foreboding characters he’s known for. It was not the kind of voice people develop with singing lessons. Ozzy may have the distinction of being both metal’s most influential and inimitable vocalist. Analyzing some of metal’s biggest vocalists in a feature for metal blog Invisible Oranges, renowned voice teacher Claudia Friedlander noted that the “War Pigs” singer’s technique was all wrong, asking, “How long did his career last?” Ozzy’s howl didn’t sound like it was meant to last, which is part of what kept us hooked to every note, even as he seemed to withstand every ingested narcotic, vehicle collision, deadly illness, or other catastrophe thrown his way. 

When Ozzy was unceremoniously fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, one could be forgiven for thinking he’d be metal’s Art Garfunkel, adrift without his corresponding songwriters. But with a help of a new team (Ozzy was always quick to attribute his solo success to wife/manager Sharon Osboune and prodigy guitarist Randy Rhoads), Ozzy forged a new path on his knockout solo albums Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, pioneering a speed metal sound with enough pop hooks to make songs like “Crazy Train” and “Over the Mountain” eventual anthems, armed with the most innovative young rock guitarist this side of Eddie Van Halen. Like a metal Iggy Pop with David Bowie, Ozzy and Rhoads will always be linked as collaborators for their two genre-changing albums together, establishing the frontman as his own astonishing voice rising from his previous band’s implosion. After Rhoads was tragically killed in a plane crash, Ozzy soldiered on with new guitarist Jake E. Lee for some less consistent albums that still have some gems and a deserved following. Ozzy seemed to be having more fun than ever when the Satanic Panic preachers and PMRC parents started blaming him for society’s ills, and he was happy to mock Jimmy Swaggert in the “Miracle Man” video or play a televangelist in 1986 horror movie Trick or Treat. Looking back at the goofball on the cover of Diary of a Madman or in the “Shot in the Dark” music video, it’s hard to believe so many people were afraid of him.

The body of work he created is versatile enough to be loved by glam rockers, grunge musicians, punks, thrashers, and the alternative nation, making him a rare artist to thrive across multiple generations. Rappers liked him enough for sampling (Trick Daddy’s hit “Let’s Go” riffs on “Crazy Train”) and collaboration (from “For Heaven’s Sake 2000” with the Wu-Tang Clan through “Take What You Want” with Post Malone and Travis Scott, giving the septuagenarian his greatest Billboard success in three decades).

But while Ozzy updated his sound with new levels of heaviness (special thanks to first mate guitarist Zakk Wylde, who’s performed on Ozzy’s best work since the ‘90s), and expanded his range with power ballads (the lovely “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” a song few of Ozzy’s peers could have pulled off, is as enduring as anything he recorded), he didn’t chase trends. He maintained his older fanbase but never stopped drawing in young fans. Nobody questioned Ozzy’s ability to headline over the mightiest thrash, doom, death, and black metal bands of his day, not to mention the nu-metal and rap-rock trends he outlasted. Anyone with a passing interest in metal can impersonate Ozzy’s garbled, f-bomb-heavy stage banter, offset by jumping and clapping, or the hunched, stalking, variation he adopted when his body started slowing down, like a heavy metal Crypt-Keeper inviting listeners in for a story. Ozzy wasn’t always a sober or coherent performer, but he was always magnetic, and the last time I saw him (2016 at Madison Square Garden, one of two sold-out nights) he was transcendent. 

The world has been catching up to Ozzy. After years of only making rare appearances on rock radio, he’s almost ubiquitous on classic rock and metal playlists, not to mention athletic events and movie soundtracks. A few seconds of Ozzy could be the best scene of a bad movie (his “Jerky Boys” and “Little Nicky” cameos are worth a YouTube search), or the best line of a good movie (his priceless delivery in “Private Parts”).

His Rock Hall induction, with an impassioned speech by Jack Black and performers ranging from Billy Idol to Maynard James Keenan to Jelly Roll, didn’t occur until last October. On July 5, 2025, seventeen days before his passing, Ozzy and Black Sabbath headlined the highest-grossing charity concert to date, packed with the greatest all-star metal lineup ever assembled, including Metallica, Gus N’ Roses, Slayer, Pantera, Tool, Gojira, Lamb of God, and Mastodon. At the end of the sold-out stadium show, Ozzy looks awestruck, as if he still can’t believe all this is happening to him. For someone who supposedly had seen and done it all, it’s not hard to see the young Birmingham slaughterhouse worker (“The stink was unbelievable”), car horn tuner (“Can you imagine being in a room with that fucking racket?”), and jailbird (“The best thing my father ever did for me was he refused to pay fine”) up on stage, still processing ten hours of tributes from some of the world’s biggest metal bands, while he’s handed a cake and watches fireworks go off in his honor.

I met Ozzy once. I was interning at a radio show where he was being interviewed, and I begged for a chance to give Ozzy his waiver to sign. Ozzy’s handler was firm with me: I was not to talk to, acknowledge, look at, or breathe near Ozzy, unless Sharon was in the room. I understood.

Sharon and Ozzy arrived together, and Ozzy sat peacefully in a chair while Sharon schmoozed. Sharon was delightful (when we didn’t have the drink she asked for she happily took a substitute) and signed her waiver, no problem. But when I turned to Ozzy with his waiver, Sharon walked out of the room.

I never found out if Sharon left because she didn’t care about the handler, or because she knew it’d make me euphoric to have a moment alone with Ozzy Osbourne. I can’t remember what I gushed to him about for 30 seconds (what does one even say to the Prince of Darkness? Shouldn’t we be kneeling?). But I’ll always feel blessed that he took a moment to peer out from behind his purple-tinted sunglasses and gently offer me a handshake. “Thank you,” said Ozzy.

A minute later, I watched Ozzy cackle and raise his arms when the DJ introduced him. There he was. The greatest metal frontman who ever lived.

Ben Apatoff is the author of Body Count (33⅓) and Metallica: The $24.95 Book, two books about bands that frequently cite Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s influence.

Who says that Halloween has to be the only holiday we associate with horror movies? Sure, it may be the spookiest month, but there’s enough pent up bloodthirst all year round, and baby, we gotta get it out from New Years to Christmas. The flexibility of horror is why it’s such a fun genre to tackle, and we’ve seen in the past that if there’s a holiday, someone can get brutally murdered during it. St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, hell, even Independence Day, truly there is no holiday where you are safe from some sicko trying to ruin the fun.

Valentine’s Day is no different, and it honestly kinda makes sense. It’s a holiday often filled with unrequited feelings that can boil to a breaking point that just makes you want to cut someone’s head off. Not talking from personal experience, if my wife happens to be watching this. From the obvious like My Bloody Valentine and simply Valentine, to the somewhat adjacent Bride of Chucky and The Loved Ones, it’s clear that romance and murder is a match made in heaven.

And now we have Heart Eyes throwing its creepy custom gas mask into the ring of holiday horror movies. The film centers around a masked killer the emerges every Valentine’s Day to kill unsuspecting couples just trying to feel the love in the air. This year Ally, a struggling pitch designer, is unintentionally thrown into a meet cute with fellow designer Jay, and one kiss is all it takes for the Heart Eyes Killer to set his bright red sights on these two love birds in denial.

Sounds pretty basic and predictable? Yeah, that’s because it is. For slashers to work for me in this modern era post Scream and Cabin in the Woods, the film needs to be bolstered by a few things; mainly it’s setup, its writing and its kills. Unfortunately, Heart Eyes only succeeds on occasion, hardly ever throwing me for a loop or gushing with enough personality to truly stand out in my eyes. It does have some fun deaths and occasionally the writing got a laugh out of me, but come on. We’ve seen this song and dance before, and it wasn’t exactly executed well enough to make me want to see it again.

Take our two MCs, Ally and Jay, played respectively by Oliva Holt and Mason Gooding. Both are no strangers to the slasher genre, with Holt appearing in 2023’s Totally Killer and Gooding appearing in both of the latest Scream films. I think each of them do an okay enough job, but for a film that kinda needs to revolve around the romantic chemistry of its leads, I honestly wasn’t feeling the connection. Their dynamic is pulled right out of a million Hallmark movies; a busybody girl who has given up on the idea of love, and the hot prince of a man that’s going to turn it all around for her. Truth be told, I don’t have a problem with this kind of setup if it’s going to play against expectations. And the film kinda does this at first, as the two constantly have to shout at the Heart Eyes Killer that they aren’t in love as if that’s going to stop him from hunting and killing them. Their budding romance is very predictable, and I honestly think it would have been funnier if it didn’t happen at all. Like, the whole reason the killer is following them is because they kissed in order to make her ex jealous, and I think it could have been funny to actually make them hate each other. The film could have started out with the possibility of them being together, but then it all gets dashed as soon as the knives come out. Then you could have had a few wacky setups of them trying to show how much they aren’t in love, like trying to screw each other over when the killer is after them, only realizing later they need to band together to stay alive. It could have been a bit of an anti-Valentines film with this as well, but I get them wanting to make this a holiday classic that couples could throw on every year. 

As we know from horror films, if there’s love, or lust in the air, stabbing and maiming is sure to follow shortly. The brutality in the film wasn’t as consistent as I would have liked, but when it hits, it hits pretty satisfyingly. The film opens with a newly engaged couple getting murdered, with the bride-to-be getting squished in a vat until she’s reduced into a crimson barrel of blood wine. It’s disgusting and funny and it really revs you up for more kills like that…and then the movie kinda just stops doing them. Yeah, the film segues really quickly into romantic comedy territory, which goes on for so long that you might actually forget you’re watching a horror movie. I get it’s there to develop the lead’s relationship, but I still feel like more could have been sprinkled in to let us know a killer is still out there. We hear about Heart Eyes’ next few kills on the news, but I think we could have afforded to see these murders played out, even if only for brief moments. But luckily the back half of the film is mostly a chase that happens all in one night, which means we get to see a lot more gory kills. Heads roll and skin holes get made, and these scenes are definitely the highlight of the film.

As for the comedy, I found it to be pretty hit or miss. There’s some great lines and deliveries here, but not everything lands. The film isn’t bogged down by copious amounts of irony like you might expect from a genre that’s really run its course, but even still, I kinda wish it was a bit more clever in how it presented the main relationship. Again, I just think it would’ve been more funny if they hated each other. The funniest moments in the film are usually involving the two of them arguing, so can you blame me for wanting to see more of that? Maybe it could have gone more out there, crafting a world that felt like an artificially peppy Hallmark movie that the two leads could have contrasted against, almost revolting against a world that is trying to drive them together, and now they’re gonna get killed for it. 

Despite me thinking this film is just fine, I still see the potential in this to entertain audiences. It delivers on more holiday themed horror that many seem to enjoy, with a twisted cupid ripping the hearts out of as many lovers as he can. The leads are charming, even if their chemistry didn’t always work for me, and the kills are a bloody good time that I just wish we got to see more of. It’s not going to rejuvenate the slasher genre or make you view the holiday through a different lens, but I wouldn’t call it a slog if you’re looking to have a decent, short watch with your boo and/or bae. Alright, what’s the next holiday to get a horror movie? I’m thinking Arbor Day; trees come to life and start killing us as revenge for deforestation? Wait, I think M. Night already did that one.

RATING

BLEEDING HEART

Valentine’s Day: great for some, terrible for others. Alcohol is a bit similar, but whether you’re enjoying the holiday with your significant other or rolling solo, you deserve a great drink. This drink is a bit of a cross between a blackberry whiskey sour and a Last Word, stabbing you in the mouth upfront with bright, tart fruit flavors, followed by a nice lingering of botanical notes. Whether the pain you’re experiencing this Valentine’s Day is from love or a masked killer, you certainly can’t go wrong with this drink.

INGREDIENTS

• 2oz gin
• 1/2oz Chambord (or other blackberry liqueur)
• 1/4oz Maraschino liqueur
• 3/4oz lemon juice
• Dash of grenadine
• 1 egg white
• Dusting: Strawberry powder
• Tool: Heart stencil

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Add all ingredients to a shaker and shake without ice for about 20 seconds.
2. Add ice and shake to chill.
3. Strain into a chilled coup glass.
4. Using a heart stencil, dust the strawberry powder on top of the cocktail to make a heart shaped design.