In January 2013, Vulture ran an article by Adam K. Raymond titled “Just How Bad of a Movie Month Is January?”, which primarily comprised Rotten Tomatoes scores that point to the ongoing label of the first month of the year as a dumping ground for Hollywood: a place where movies go to die. Raymond contextualizes the supposed dregs of the month with the usual surge of awards season hopefuls, stating that if anyone should find favor in the films on offer, it’s “lovers of shlock who have been dying of crap starvation through said Oscar season.” But if anything, that low-hanging studio fruit existing in stark contrast to awards favorites is exactly what should make January so exciting for cinephiles. Especially in 2025.

This year kicked off with Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, a follow-up to Christian Gudegast’s 2018 picture that received modest success initially, but surged on home video and even found an unexpected superfan in art-house German filmmaker Christian Petzold. Leigh Whannell is back in Universal monster mode this weekend with Wolf Man, a director-studio combo that saw major success with his 2020 take on The Invisible Man, notching strong reviews and a $140 million global box office off a $7 million budget just before the pandemic shut theaters down.

The jury is out on whether or not the American public will still continue to Mel Gibson’s directorial efforts, but it’s worth ing that his last time around garnered Hacksaw Ridge six Oscar nominations and two wins. His latest, Flight Risk, appears to be a cross between Turbulence and The Edge, and features Mark Wahlberg sporting a bald cap with an element of menace we haven’t seen from him since Fear. Fear is in store plenty for Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, a rare modern Soderbergh hitting theaters rather than going straight to streaming, which has all the makings of a future fan favorite as it’s earned walkouts over its intensity on the festival circuit. Capping off the month, the Barbarian team returns with Companion, whose cryptic marketing campaign could tease out a sleeper hit similar to last year’s Longlegs.

Though January 2025 seems to be a bump up in quality from the month’s usual offerings, it really isn’t, especially when looking at recent years. Suggesting that the films released in the first month don’t have a potential audience, or that the audience for them deserves their low quality, largely dismisses the cultural and economic success of genre cinema, which represents the majority of January releases. To further illuminate this, here are a handful of January selections from years past that have stood the test of time for one reason or another. For more bangers to add to your watchlist, from 1980 to present day, look at my list canonizing films from the month that don’t suck.

Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

Directed by Ernest R. Dickerson
Written by Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris and Mark Bishop
Released: January 13, 1995

Television programs being adapted into feature films were already on a roll in the ’90s before Tales from the Crypt got its moment in 1995. The first half of the decade saw critical and financial success for The Addams Family, Wayne’s World, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, The Fugitive and Star Trek: Generations, which would kick off the film franchise for Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew. Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, the first of only two theatrical feature films adapted from the hit HBO show, would be directed by Ernest R. Dickerson, veteran cinematographer for Spike Lee and the man behind two vastly underrated genre films in the first half of the ’90s: Juice and Surviving the Game.

Dickerson’s energy and aesthetic is a perfect match for the pulpy origins of Tales from the Crypt, with the film’s visuals owing more to the comic book origins of the property than the HBO program it was tethered to. One of the great horror pictures of the decade, Demon Knight is full of splatter practical effects and a charismatic, histrionic villain performance from Billy Zane. Initially dismissed in 1995, the film has become a cult classic on home video and may be, on a given day, Dickerson’s most celebrated work even if it didn’t lead to a robust career as a feature filmmaker. SilentDawn states, “Hollywood did Ernest Dickerson dirty, because anyone who directed a film like Demon Knight should be given blank checks for the rest of their life.” While Hollywood did in fact largely turn its back on Dickerson, he did manage to make the similarly underrated, Snoop Dogg-starring horror movie Bones (one of Letterboxd’s highest-risers) and the DMX-starring neo-noir Never Die Alone, which would be his final theatrical release. Both are well worth seeking out.

Like the novel, Hyams’ film is an inspired amalgam of police procedural and monster movie, putting a homicide detective (Tom Sizemore) and a biologist (Penelope Ann Miller) in the path of an ancient creature unleashed in a Chicago natural history museum. Robyn quips that “there’s no way you won’t catch me smiling once the monster gets loose and starts savaging cops and rich benefactors alike.” It’s the type of tech-savvy spectacle that is often reserved for the summer movie season yet was dropped in the early days of 1997 to little fanfare, garnering very little of the attention its source had received a couple of years prior.

Deep Rising

Written and directed by Stephen Sommers
Released: January 30, 1998

Another entry in the “goopy creature feature” canon of the ’90s is Stephen Sommers’ monster-movie riff on Die Hard, Deep Rising. Bestowed with a hefty, for the era, budget of $45 million dollars, it would be a box-office bomb in early 1998, earning barely a fourth of that back. One could chalk this up to mismarketing by Disney, who leaned into its action elements but shied away from its gory horror, with its rather generic title likely not doing it any favors. Audiences largely dismissed it, too; Emalie at least recognizes that, upon a rewatch, it’s quite good, stating, “this movie rules, hate to say I was wrong several years ago, but I was.”

Deep Rising is one of the more inventive genre oddities of its decade: a loud, very bloody, Lovecraftian horror show set aboard a hijacked cruise ship. Stephen Sommers shows a technical finesse that would carry over well to next year’s box-office juggernaut The Mummy, and the special effects by Rob Bottin (The Thing) are reliably gross. It has taken a while for Sommers’ film to get the reception it deserves but it finally has, arguably due to a nice physical media release from Kino Lorber in 2018. It’s the type of movie that feels like the last bastion of studio-financed, big swing genre mash-ups that were all the rage in the ’90s and have since been replaced by wayward IP projects. It’s not the smartest movie but it doesn’t need to be when it’s this much fun.

Cloverfield

Directed by Matt Reeves
Written by Drew Goddard
Released: January 15, 2008

Arguably the first bona-fide event movie released in January, Cloverfield propelled its viral marketing campaign to a massive worldwide box-office cume of nearly seven times its production budget. Initially marketed ahead of Michael Bay’s Transformers in 2007, Paramount rolled with a largely cryptic campaign intent on keeping Cloverfield’s towering monster and found-footage conceit as mysterious as possible, with many millions of people buying into the hype it generated. It terrified many viewers in 2008, as Aundria states, “this movie is nightmare after nightmare. Love it.”

Nearly two decades on and Cloverfield isn’t just a box-office smash but a legitimate contemporary classic of modestly budgeted genre moviemaking. It has found its way to Rolling Stone’s list of the 150 Greatest Science-Fiction Films Of All Time, where it s classics of the genre like Alien and The Matrix. It is also featured on ur_mom_lol’s list of Letterboxd’s 1,000 Most Watched Films, racking up 559k watches as of this writing. However you cut it, Cloverfield was a pop culture touchstone in 2008 and remains one to this day, exemplifying the cultural cachet that films released in January can, and do, have.

Haywire

Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Lem Dobbs
Released: January 20, 2012

This year’s Presence isn’t Soderbergh’s first time in the fray of January, which finds itself in good company with 2012’s action-heavy spy thriller Haywire. With a marketing campaign that made ample use of its attractive ensemble cast—Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas and breakthrough martial artist Gina Carano as the lead—Haywire was modestly successful, earning more than its budget back and garnering plenty of praise from critics in the process.

Despite the initial acclaim and warm reception from audiences, Haywire remains an often overlooked entry in Soderbergh’s, ittedly illustrious, career. It remains his only proper action film, outside of the energetic heist sequences in Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, while still maintaining his peerless ability to engage with actors. It’s a real showstopper for the filmmaker, who also served as cinematographer and editor, and is ripe for reappraisal in the context of his new foray into genre filmmaking with Presence this month. Both are big formal and narrative swings from a director who remains one of the best working today. Editor of Little White Lies, and Letterboxd member, David Jenkins, even compares it to a Johnie To movie, which is, in my opinion, the highest of praise.

In the decade since its theatrical dismissal, Blackhat has found a resurgence via repertory screenings and a 4K UHD release from Arrow Video. Mann, per usual, has supervised a director’s cut which reworks numerous scenes in the film, making it overall a more cohesive experience. What was once a confounding entry in the career of one of America’s great filmmakers is now regarded, by many of his most ardent ers, as one of his very best.

At the same time, it still has plenty of detractors, landing it on Letterboxd’s list of Most Divisive Films of All Time. Those who love it really love it, though, with Zoey regarding it as “one of few films that genuinely feel ahead of our current time” while Neil posits that it may be “the most adventurous film made in Hollywood since Heaven’s Gate.” In any case, Blackhat is imminently more interesting than audiences in 2015 gave it credit for and on the eve of its tenth anniversary, it’s nigh time for a rewatch or an initial view if you’ve yet to have the pleasure.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

Directed by Michael Bay
Written by Chuck Hogan, from a book by Mitchell Zuckoff
Released: January 15th, 2016

In between his last two films in the Transformers series—Age of Extinction and The Last Knight—Michael Bay sought a palate cleanser. But this wouldn’t be the type of jovial detour that Pain & Gain provided just a few years prior when Bay was, again, between Transformers films. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi would end up being his most distilled blast of action, a nearly two and a half hour assault sequence that never lets up and finds the filmmaker at his most chaotically brazen.

13 Hours would, inevitably, like nearly every film Bay has directed to date, be critically panned. But what is more surprising is how audiences reacted: by not going. It’s not that 13 Hours lost money (it didn’t), but Bay had a tried-and-true record with audiences—even the aforementioned Pain & Gain, his only proper comedy film, returned well on its studio’s investment. Perhaps the market had fatigue from similar real-world war stories in recent years, like Lone Survivor and American Sniper, both of which performed much better, and broader. It’s also entirely possible that many Americans were unfamiliar with the events of Benghazi, prominently featured in its long-winded title.

Whatever the case may be, it was embraced by some steadfast Bay ers in 2016 like Josh who, in a four-star review, labeled it “Bay’s Black Hawk Down” and has garnered even more attention lately  from folks like Kaijuman, who in 2024 wrote that Bay “crafts a sweat-drenched nightmare brimming in paranoia and devastation.” Let’s hope he has another one of these in him.

Olivia expounds on its rampant masculinity by writing that “in the world this film occupies, testosterone might as well be an antigen that obliterates any hope for those that succumb to their worst impulses and thrive there.” With the sequel, Den of Thieves 2: Pantera, releasing this month, it is clear that the first film earned its audience and then some. Not only was it massively successful in its theatrical run, but it found an even more fervent audience on home video, recently topping the streaming chart on Max, six years after release.