Reviewing All 8 Entries of MMFF 2025

Amid the discourse on whether the 51st Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF) should have made its tickets more affordable, the latest lineup of the annual festival makes for a solid slate, though some entries are more worth watching on the big screen than others.

- By JANUAR JUNIOR AGUJA

Savannah (Bianca De Vera) tries to get back at her athlete boyfriend, LA (Dustin Yu), who ghosted her, by putting up a “fake” relationship with student council president Vic (Will Ashley).

Both men develop feelings for Savannah, placing her in a love triangle that forces her to reevaluate her priorities.

Capitalizing on the hype surrounding the leads' real-life triangle from “Pinoy Big Brother” through a movie is inevitable. It offers a handful of fan service moments that would satisfy the ever-passionate fans of WilCa and DustBia.

However, its presentation is filled with head-scratching elements, such as cringey dialogue and unlikable characters. It feels like a whiplash from director Mae Cruz Alivar’s quite-on-the-nose yet profound “Rewind” to “Love You So Bad,” which explicates everything bad about a loveteam movie in Philippine cinema.

Whether you’re Team WilCa or Team DustBia, the leads deserved a better film pairing than this. Two stars out of five.

Three stories set in different timelines are connected by an ancient box that houses a malevolent spirit named Malum, which tries to take over the world.

“1775” features nuns fighting against the yet-unnamed Malum haunting their church; “2025” follows a group of young partygoers trying to survive the night after a cult of followers invades a Halloween party; and “2050” is set in a post-apocalyptic Philippines, where survivors battle zombie-like aswangs ruled by Malum.

The slasher-themed “2025” is the best episode of the three, with its creative kills set to budots music and fun performances from its leads, notably Francine Diaz, Sassa Gurl, Fyang Smith, and Karina Bautista.

But the other two stories make it questionable whether the two-and-a-half-hour runtime is worth sitting through. The character-driven “1775” episode drags with its slow development and little payoff, while the action-driven “2050” is frankly unmemorable and lacking in intensity.