Good Boy, Good Times at the Movies (CREDIT: Ben Leonberg/Independent Film Company and Shudder)

Okay, here we go. It’s time for me to release my thoughts about the new movies that I saw in the month known as October 2025 that I haven’t explicated until now. Trick-or-treat furever!

Good Boy

Starring: Indy the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, Shane Jensen, Arielle Friedman, Larry Fessenden, Stuart Rudin

Director: Ben Leonberg

Running Time: 73 Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: October 3, 2025 (Theaters)

CREDIT: Disney/Screenshot

Tron: Ares

Starring: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Hasan Minhaj, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson, Jeff Bridges

Director: Joachim Rønning

Running Time: 119 Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Release Date: October 10, 2025 (Theaters)

CREDIT: Eros Hoagland/Netflix

A House of Dynamite

Starring: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Jonah Hauer-King, Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, Malachi Beasley, Brian Tee, Brittany O’Grady, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Willa Fitzgerald, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Kyle Allen, Kaitlyn Dever, Francesca Carpanini, Abubakr Ali, and Angel Reese as Herself

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Running Time: 112 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: October 10, 2025 (Theaters)/October 24, 2025 (Netflix)

Orwell 2+2=5

Starring: The Life and Career of George Orwell, as Narrated by Damian Lewis

Director: Raoul Peck

Running Time: 119 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: October 3, 2025 (Theaters)

CREDIT: Eddy Chen/Lionsgate

Good Fortune

Starring: Aziz Ansari, Keanu Reeves, Seth Rogen, Keke Palmer, Sandra Oh

Director: Aziz Ansari

Running Time: 97 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: October 17, 2025 (Theaters)

CREDIT: Yannis Drakoulidis/Amazon MGM

After the Hunt

Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, Lío Mehiel

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Running Time: 139 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: October 10, 2025 (Theaters)

We’re going to go ahead and start with Good Boy, a horror movie starring Indy, a dog who didn’t even realize he was acting for the big screen. Or at least that’s what the filmmakers claimed! Can we ever really know for sure what is in the canine mind? Maybe Indy had it all figured out in his own sort of way. Anyway, this was well edited in the way that it aspired to be.

In general, I don’t think that lega-sequels should try to recreate the magic of the original. But when Tron: Ares started biking around that same ol’ LightCycle arena we fell in love with more than 40 years ago, it really came alive. Let’s put more modern AIs inside outdated technology! I also appreciated how the love of Depeche Mode remained unexplained.

Next we’ve got A House of Dynamite from director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim, who serve up the disturbingly timely possibility of a nuclear missile hurtling towards the United States, while various government officials react to the crisis. But I was most pleased by Angel Reese playing herself (it makes sense in context). More WNBA stars should show up in thrillers that ostensibly don’t have anything to do with basketball.

Moving on, let’s dive into Orwell 2+2=5, which I shall dub a “Juxtaposition Documentary.” That’s because it combines audio recordings of the works of novelist George Orwell with news and historical footage (mainly of strongmen leaders), as well as clips of Orwell’s life and adaptations of some of his most famous books. It’s essentially a warning against authoritarianism from director Raoul Peck. It’s a little blunt for my taste, but it did kind of make me want to watch every version of 1984 and Animal Farm that’s out there.

As we make our way through the thick of it, I must note that I had the good fortune of seeing Good Fortune. With Keanu Reeves playing a guardian angel who tries to do just a little bit more than is asked of him in service of Aziz Ansari’s character, I’m out here thinking, “What a lovely and clever premise!” Fun is had, lessons are learned, and then the credits are soundtracked by Real Life’s new wave hit “Send Me an Angel.” That’s a song that I heard plenty of times on the radio while studying abroad in Australia in 2009, but hardly ever in the years since.

I obviously considered making my last theatrical outing of October 2025 a full-on horror flick, but then I decided that it was possible that After the Hunt could scare me. Well, turns out it’s only scary if you’re frightened by cinematic vomit. Seriously, this movie is much more effective as a PSA for properly treating your ulcers than it is in saying anything about the fallout surrounding a sexual assault allegation.

See you next October (and every month in between), film freaks!

Grades:
Good Boy: 3.5 out of 5 Good Boys
Tron: Ares: 3 out of 5 Paranoidiacs
A House of Dynamite: 1 Basketball out of 1 Mirror Folding in on Itself
Orwell 2+2=5: 48 Orwells out of Infinity Despair
Good Fortune: Moderately Embiggening Wings
After the Hunt: 1 Perforation out of a Million Conversations