More 2025 Movie Reviews: Train Dreams, It Was Just an Accident, Hunting Season
As the year nears an end, let’s take some time to review three more 2025 films. Are any of these titles worth checking out before we head into 2026?
Train Dreams (2025)
Netflix, 102 minutes
Train Dreams is a period drama based off of an award-winning novella that feels, somehow, exactly like a movie based off of a quality novella. It’s a visually beautiful film, and though the plot is far from complex, the story is still a worthwhile one.
The film tells the life of Robert Grainier, a man who works primarily as a logger. Grainier falls in love and starts a family. Events, many of them small, but some impactful and massive in the telling of his tale, happen over the course of his life/the movie. Train Dreams is an emotional film and almost poetic in its telling.
Joel Edgerton stars as Robert Grainier and delivers a heartfelt performance. Grainier’s personality is such that he’s a somewhat reserved individual, and that requires a nuance in the performance that Edgerton is able to communicate.
Overall, Train Dreams is a slice-of-life type film that, in fact, tells the whole life of a man who lived during a time of great change in America. It might be more methodical in its pacing, but the message of the film about life and aging is profound, and this is certainly a quality film.
Grade: 8/10
It Was Just an Accident (2025)
Memento Distribution, 104 minutes
It Was Just an Accident is the latest movie from Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. If you’re not familiar with Panahi, he’s continued to make films despite having been banned to do so by the Iranian government and has even spent time in prison as a result of the films he’s made. Needless to say, when he writes, directs, and produces a film, as he did with this one, he’s doing so with great personal risk.
It Was Just an Accident is a thought-provoking drama that also has thriller aspects to it. The movie centers on a man who, by a chance encounter, thinks he finds the sadistic torturer who held him captive on behalf of the government. When he’s not 100% positive that he’s got the right man, he decides to gather up several other former captives to confirm the man’s identity.
This is a serious movie with profoundly serious subject matter that at times takes a lighter tone. Though the situation amps up in terms of being somewhat more out there and farfetched with everything that happens, Panahi ups the stakes gradually in a way that feels natural.
Overall, It Was Just an Accident is a film that I’d definitely recommend. Panahi definitely has a message he’s trying to convey and he’s successful.
Grade: 8/10
Hunting Season (2025)
Samuel Goldwyn Films, 93 minutes
Hunting Season is a generic crime drama that would be not watchable if it didn’t star Mel Gibson. As it is, it’s still pretty brainless.
Gibson plays a survivalist who lives with his daughter in a large cabin in the woods. The movie plays out as a sort of American conservative’s fantasy. Gibson’s character owns loads of guns (which he, of course, cares for responsibly), hunts, prays, doesn’t quite trust the police, and is very self-sufficient. When Gibson’s daughter finds a woman who’s been shot in the wood, Gibson is (of course again) able to patch her up.
The woman is the victim of a ruthless (yet generic) band of criminals who are definitely going to continue coming after her once they find out she survived. Fortunately for the woman, Mel Gibson and his well-trained daughter are the exact sort of people who can help her deal with these thugs. (I know I keep referring to the character as just Mel Gibson and that’s because I forget the character’s name already and it basically is a fictionalized, survivalist version of Mel Gibson.)
Like I said, this is pretty much a fantasy movie for lots of conservative Americans. Gibson still has solid acting chops though, and despite being somewhat of a slow burn, the movie is still watchable. Hunting Season is the definition of it is what it is – and it is fine but forgettable.
Grade: 5/10