Conversations with friends reveal that their search for entertainment at home, like mine, yields mixed results. Confrontation by a dismaying number of choices on a particular streaming service does not necessarily lead to a satisfactory entertainment experience, particularly when one has little to guide one in making a choice. How does one decide what to view?
Having already seen and loathed the much praised and likely Oscar winner, One Battle After Another, I was reluctant to select from lists of Best Films of 2025 lists. Clearly, I needed to choose on some other basis.
For example, motivated by the memory of the original Knives Out movie, a film which I did enjoy, I opted to view Wake Up Dead Man, the most recent film of the franchise.
I should have known better. After all, I found the last effort, Glass Onion, annoyingly pretentious and too stylized for its own good. As it was, I found the new Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) movie thoroughly distasteful from the very beginning. It includes a young priest being sent to deal with the problems caused by a decidedly hateful pastor (Josh Brolin) holding evil sway over a small contingent of equally hateful, loyal parishioners.
It is no surprise when this leads to murder and Benoit enters the scene to solve the crime.
What is supposed to be a puzzling “Whodunnit?” devolves into an altogether unlikely and bewildering attempt to spot the perpetrator, a search that becomes more and more ridiculously complex.
Throughout, the film is an unrelenting exploration into nastiness which most Catholics, indeed most people, will find quite abhorrent. The only mystery that remained for me at the end of the film was why a group of fine actors would have chosen to participate in such an offensive venture.
Nothing daunted, on the recommendation of one of my favourite television hosts, Christiane Amanpour, I decided to watch The Smashing Machine.
Let me say at once that I had some misgivings about the film, as it is based on the experience of a real mixed martial arts fighter, Mark Kerr.
I have always found the so-called “sport” of MMA abhorrent in that it is based on what can only be described as a brutal determination to do as much physical harm to one’s opponent as possible.
Surprisingly, however, the film concentrates on the humanity of Kerr, his own regrets when he injures an opponent, his desperate attempts to remain victorious, his struggles with his own personal, emotional life, and the lengths he has to go to in order to achieve his ambitions.
In this, the film is given, perhaps even more surprisingly, a decided effective dramatic centre by Dwayne Johnson, who, in the lead role, displays a wide emotional range. He is well supported by Emily Blunt as Kerr’s partner, while the rest of the cast acquit themselves in fine fashion.
While some may find the whole subject of MMA to be altogether too problematic to watch the film, those who venture into this territory may well find The Smashing Machine to be a compelling investigation into a world of which they know little. With the aforementioned caveats in mind, I can certainly say that the film is worth viewing.
Finally, on the recommendation of some friends whose opinion I respect, I turned to Operation Mincemeat, a fine British film about an audacious spy plot in World War II.
The difficulty here is that the same material was covered many years ago in both book and film form under the title The Man That Never Was.
The film revolves around the British attempt in 1943 to make Hitler think the Allies were going to invade Europe through Greece rather than Sicily.
To say more would be to spoil the film for viewers not familiar with the amazing story. For those who are unfamiliar, the film is well worth watching simply as an account of an audacious espionage plot. For others, it is an entertaining, often humorous, story well worth revisiting. More relevantly, it is an engaging study of people caught up in the complexity of war, showing how it can have enormous emotional and personal cost even for those who triumph in their efforts to bring about victory.
This may be especially true for those of us who tend to think of espionage as a glamorous activity in the style of James Bond. As a sidebar to this, it is worth noting, as an indication of the film’s richness, that Ian Fleming appears as a minor character, learning on the job that espionage can make for entertaining reading, though, of course, serious espionage films are worth viewing.
One could do worse than watch Operation Mincemeat.
So there you have it, an account of some of my attempts to find entertainment at home during the holidays. And my conclusion? You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a princess.
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