Subscriber Weekly

Toisto Subscriber Weekly - Week 4

Everything reviewed January 20th - 26th, 2025

Joonatan

Jan 24, 2025 — 5 min read

Hi everyone!

It's been quite the hectic January, and I realize I'm a bit overdue on a weekly newsletter. So, here's a quick recap of stuff going on at Toisto, a few things I missed sending out to everyone, and all the reviews from this week, just to catch up on everything.

Recent Happenings

I was accepted into the International Film Society of Critics and the International Film & Television Critics Association! Alongside Rotten Tomatoes, these are big steps in making Toisto a more recognized international outlet. Hopefully, it also means that 2025 will see more opportunities and access than before.

Toisto now averages around 15,000 readers monthly. Thank you to everyone who reads my reviews. If you can, please spread the word and ask people to subscribe to the newsletter, as they're both things that really help out. Distributors really like it when I can show them hard data.

As always, my Ko-Fi reader contributor site is still up, and every bit helps to keep Toisto ad-free. I work on the site alongside a day job, but if every one of the 15k readers supported with a Euro per month, that would be already more than enough to make Toisto my career. One can dream, right?

Reviews from the end of 2024 and the start of 2025

It was a surprisingly busy turn of the year, and some last-minute surprises were worth covering.

We had the fantastic Nosferatu from Robert Eggers, a chilling and thoroughly immersive folk-horror that chilled me to the core.

There was also the equally immersive, but dour and flat A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold, which charts the creation of Bob Dylan's electric stage persona. Great performances and stellar set design couldn't save it from being a limp dud in my books.

I also charted the best films and streaming series that I had seen in 2024. With over 350 movies and around 70 shows cataloged during the past 12 months, it wasn't an easy task to choose from.

Film reviews

This week, we start with Julia Garner's latest Blumhouse chiller, Wolf Man, which has great ideas but an unsatisfying second half that loses all the steam it builds up in the excellent first 30 minutes.

Angelina Jolie returns to the screen as Maria Callas in the biopic Maria, which covers the final weeks in the life of the famed opera singer. Beautifully made and often superbly acted, I found the framing device of a film within a film tedious. Still worth seeing just for Jolie alone.

Paddington in Peru is the third outing of Britain's favorite bear, and it's just as charming and lovely as you'd expect. I thought it was great fun for the whole family.

Robbie Williams returns to public consciousness with this drab, cynical, and off-puttingly calculated biopic that he produced, contributed to, and stars in. It feels like a vanity project he made for himself, and we just have to suffer as a result.

Speaking of suffering, the last big premiere of the week is Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, a sequel to an easily-forgotten C-picture from 2018 that believes itself to be in the class of Heat or Ronin. Instead, it's a dull hangout movie with people you really don't want to hang out with.

Streaming reviews

This week, we got a new Disney+ Original from Sweden, and it's a corker! Based on the true story of a Soviet submarine running aground in the Swedish archipelago, this satiric thriller plays like a cross between The Hunt for the Red October and Dr. Strangelove. I really enjoyed it, and at just six episodes in length, it's the perfect weekend show to enjoy between bigger seasons.

Thank you all for tuning in and happy 2025 to everyone.

Next week, we have the premiere of a new season of Mythic Quest, theatrical premieres of The Summer Book, Companion, and the heartbreakingly wonderful How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies. I've also got recommendations for which films to see at DocPoint 2025 coming up, so stay tuned.

As always, if you have questions, comments, or recommendations, don't hesitate to reach out at joonatan@toisto.net.