2025, all together in one place

New Year's resolution: It's time to stop judging myself for breaking viewing records.

A year ago, after ranking 177 movies that qualified for 2024, and besting my previous record by two movies, I told you it didn't bother me because I was sure to lose 25 movies from that total in 2025. My logic was that I was going to Europe for six weeks during the second half of the year, when there are a lot of current year movies available for rental and when I start to really goose my numbers, and if I kept up my usual pace during that stretch, I'd be doing Europe wrong and somebody should slap me.

As it turned out, I did go to Europe, I did only watch nine movies in the month of September (only five of which qualified for ranking this year), and yet at some point, I still noticed I was 19 movies ahead of last year's pace. And even as events in my real life intervened in December and January, and I made intentional efforts of throttling my viewing, I could tell at a certain point that I still had a lot of must-see movies. Even a reasonable viewing schedule over the remaining days was going to result in a new record. 

So that's what happened as I finished with 184 movies ranked in 2025, a new record by seven. At least I didn't beat it by 19. 

These things should be as organic as you can make them. You can't specifically fear a certain total of movies because you're worried about what it says about you and how you spend your time. I've long since gone all in on watching movies at the necessary expense of other ways I could spend my time -- the fact that I have no nighttime sports to watch in Australia helps with that -- and no mid-life reassessment will likely cause me to reconsider. I should just own it and damn the consequences, which are nothing more than your perception of me and perhaps my own perception of myself. (My family life has not been suffering from it, at least not that I know of.) 

I knew, as it was early January and the record was looming, that I wasn't going to arbitrarily sacrifice some of the movies I hadn't yet seen just to avoid some arbitrary ranking total. This process is about seeing a large sampling of movies from the year, in as many genres as possible, both significant and insignificant, to build up a dynamic list that contains both awful howlers at the bottom, and movies I never imagined I'd see rising to the top. It's not about aiming for a specific total or avoiding a specific total. Let the chips fall where they may in the course of living your life. 

Maybe if I really want to diet in 2026, I shouldn't fatten up on buddy comedies straight to the streamers in March and April, since those are not likely to be either great or out-and-out terrible, and are really just list filler. But then, if I had such a cynical view of the potential of unexpected movies to be great, I mightn't be doing this in the first place.

Regarding 2025 specifically, my top ten is not going to look like last year's top ten, when I had six movies that went on to be nominated for best picture. I predict only one or two this year. And consistent with the weird 2025 it was, I did not have a single dominant film that demanded to be my #1, though I became more comfortable with my eventual #1 after a second viewing confirmed and in fact deepened my appreciation of it. 

So without further ado, let's get into it. 

Even when I set records, there are still movies I regret not getting to, movies that sat on my Letterboxd watchlist a good chunk of the year and could never be freed from it. Here are the five omissions from the following rankings that I am sorriest about:

5. The Testament of Ann Lee - I hear great things about Amanda Seyfried's performance. Pretty much no one got to see this one in time.

4. Father Mother Sister Brother - I was looking forward to this Jim Jarmusch film all year, but it never really surfaced. I guess now it's available on MUBI, but it wouldn't be in Australia, even if I still subscribed. 

3. Eternity - This was available in theaters and for a $19.99 iTunes rental, but I just couldn't fit it in, though high-concept movies like this are just my bread and butter. 

2. Marty Supreme - It opened yesterday in Australian cinemas, but my date with David Byrne, as I wrote about earlier in the week, prevented me from seeing it. 

1. Sirat - I understand this is wild, but seeing it at an advanced screening in two weeks is not early enough for it to make this list. 

And five other prominent movies that I just couldn't or didn't fit in:

5. Ballerina - I've had enough of the John Wick Universe.
4. Lilo & Stitch - I am purposefully excluding one Disney movie per year these days. This was it for this year.

3. Song Sung Blue - End of year crunch, Neil Diamond not enough of a draw for me. 

2. Christy - I did see the three other Sydney Sweeney movies in 2025. 

1. Rental Family - End of year crunch, was sort of intrigued by this. 

As usual I will go into detail on my top ten and less detail on my bottom five, then leave the whole enchilada for you to consider. 

10. Train Dreams - One of my fiercest competitions this year was between my #10 and my #11, and in deciding which one ultimately won out, I just asked myself which one's merits I felt better able to declaim in a short capsule form like this one. And so I ultimately went with Train Dreams, and you can look below to see who lost out in order not to further cut into the real estate earned by Clint Bentley's film. (Also, this does allow Netflix to get one movie in my top ten, after just missing out on two others.) Train Dreams is like what I want every Terrence Malick film to be, but what they so rarely are. Using a memorable voiceover from Will Patton, the film follows a number of years in the life of a logger, railway worker and other completer of small jobs (Joel Edgerton) that require him to be away from his wife (Felicity Jones) and child for extended periods of time, in the Pacific Northwest between approximately the 1920s and 1960s. Like Malick's Days of Heaven specifically, it appears to be shot entirely at magic hour, and it's wonderful to be transported both to this part of the world in these moments of history, and to an older school style of filmmaking that we don't see much anymore. The deep melancholy of this film connected with me in the way that frequently occurs with films that explore what I have called the "uncontrollable slippage of time," as Bentley beautifully uses an elliptical style to remind us that we sometimes aren't present for our life until it's too late, and sometimes not even through any fault of our own. I suspect I will revisit Train Dreams again just to bathe in its vibe, even if part of that vibe is to acquaint us with the loss and regret we all feel.

9. Companion - The sixth movie I saw in 2025 stuck with me, and I knew it was not going to get a lot more clever this year than Drew Hancock's film. Prompting me to ask at the time: Drew Hancock, where have you been all my life? Everybody knows by now that Companion is a movie about a world where people have sex with and relationships with artificial intelligence robots, but the joy the movie takes in teasing this out in its first few minutes, through suggestive dialogue and other environmental queues, is just a preview of Hancock's masterful command of the perfect time and way to reveal information. And there are plenty more surprising reveals in the movie, which genuinely surprise in the moment, even though after the fact you feel like you should have been a step ahead and guessed it. Excellent writing prevents a viewer from getting ahead of the story, and I was putty in Hancock's hands. The story constantly sets up information and pays it off in funny ways, but this is more than just a "friends in the woods when shit goes down movie," though it's also a very enjoyable version of that. Companion also has profound contemplations on the selfhood of artificial intelligence, and whether it's possible to be exploiting such a being while also actually being in love with it. This is one of those good times that just keeps escalating and making smarter decisions as it goes, and I'm looking forward to my third viewing. Bonus points to Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid for their really charismatic performances. 

8. Vulcanizadora - One of the bleakest films of 2025 actually held my #1 spot for a while, before I realized it was not something I was coming back to regularly in my thoughts. A sequel of sorts to Joel Potrykus' 2014 film Buzzard, in that it features the same characters (one of them played by Potrykus himself, who was just a minor character in Buzzard), this is the grim story of two depressed friends who head deep into the woods to carry out a solemn pact, which I won't spoil for you, but which is probably pretty close to what you might be imagining. The exact details of that pact, though, are specific and horrifying. It's hard to talk about this film without going into more details about the story, but let's just say it spends a significant amount of time without revealing what the pact is, as these men engage in mumblecore-style conversations about ordinary topics and hypothetical scenarios. (The other is played by Joshua Burge as the wonderfully named Marty Jackitansky.) These men also show how stunted they might be, as they spend time on what seem like childish activities, messing around with fireworks and banging trees with sticks. When the depths of what's cast a cloud over them finally become clear, it swoops in with devastating emotional impact, and without saying what happens when they reach their destination, the remainder of the film deals with the aftermath. Buzzard never hit harder for me than as a weird curiosity that I admired, but Potrykus takes it to the next level here, while never sacrificing any of the weirdness and never letting us off the hook with pat conclusions. It's this year's version of The Coffee Table for me in that it's not for the faint of heart, but it should be for everybody else. 

7. 1001 Frames - My #6 is also a movie I saw at this year's MIFF, but my #7 takes my annual slot for "MIFF movie no one has ever heard of, at least not yet." It's one of two Iranian films in my top ten, and it heavily features what has historically been a trademark of the country's feature films: their blending of reality with fiction. The premise is that a famous director, mostly off screen, is interviewing actresses to play Scheherazade for his new film version of her story. Over the course of 87 minutes, we see as many as 20 of them on screen, sitting in (or sometimes pacing around) a single chair in an empty warehouse. Some are timid, some are brassy. Some the director knows from previous experiences, some are brand new to him. All become increasingly upset as he makes insinuations about what might be needed to win the role, and as he invades their personal space. And it soon becomes clear that getting out of the room won't be as simple as just walking to the door. This would not have been one of my more tense and intense viewing experiences of 2025 if it were just an ordinary #metoo cautionary tale about a director with too much power and too few checks on his behavior -- an especially frightening prospect in a patriarchal society like Iran. So it's obviously more than that, but I care enough about keeping its secrets not to tell you how it's more than that. I will tell you, though, that the director character, Mohammad Aghebati, is playing himself, and though I don't believe they are ever named, the actresses are playing themselves as well. The actual writer-director of the film is Mehrnoush Alia, and I can't wait to see more from him -- including possibly his 2015 short, Scheherazade, of which this is a feature-length version. 

6. The Ballad of Wallis Island - The guy who nearly made John Carney's Once his #1 of 2007, until There Will be Blood came along, is still in there somewhere. There are plenty of more "important" films that will finish lower in my rankings, but The Ballad of Wallis Island reminds us that sometimes we go to the movies to be transported into gentle comedies with a heavy dose of wistfulness, that take place entirely on an island off Britain too small to even have a proper dock for arriving boats. The Once comparison comes from the fact that Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan were once McGwyer Mortimer, a folk duo who made sweet harmonies that are reminiscent, perhaps only in a superficial way, of those made by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. If there's a reason these two can't be together romantically, it's because they've already tried that and it didn't work. Now, about a decade after breaking up, they've both been called out to the titular island by an eccentric man with a bushy beard who lives there (Tim Key, who co-wrote with Basden), for a reunion gig -- the circumstances of which neither of them signed on for. Especially led by Key's performance, James Griffiths' film embodies the sort of low-key British humor we've loved since the run of films started by The Full Monty, adding one more local eccentric (Sian Clifford) to balance the two musicians and give us whimsy in small enough doses to charm our pants off. There's also loss and regret baked into this film that sensitively considers our capacity to love and make art. I can only really describe it in the way I started out my MIFF review of it, that Wallis Island is a "dopey grin" movie -- which is not an underhanded compliment in the slightest. 

5. Predator: Badlands - I'd say I can't recall the last time two consecutive movies in a series made my top ten, but a) it just happened with Dune and b) it's not actually happening with the most recent two Predator movies, because 2025 also featured the animated movie Predator: Killer of Killers to split them up. But there is now zero doubt after Prey (#7 of 2022) and Predator: Badlands that director Dan Trachtenberg has totally taken control of this previously moribund franchise, and steered it into the realm of the consistently creative and the frequently jaw-dropping. He dropped our jaws then by putting a Yautja (I didn't know they were called that either) up against Comanche of the early 18th century, and he does it now by making a Yautja the lead character -- and not featuring any humans in the cast at all. (Elle Fanning plays a Weyland-Yutani android -- two of them, actually.) The thing that amazed me most about Predator: Badlands is that it amazed me. Although I think the Yautja effects are mostly practical, the movie relies on digital for some of the other things it's doing -- like showing us only half of Fanning as an android without legs -- and it's been some time since digital effects delivered such sheer wonder to me. The movie also captures the prestige and alienation of the aforementioned Dune movies, but you know what it does that the Dune movies don't? It makes us laugh, with Fanning producing some of the year's funniest line deliveries, and even Kiwi actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi getting off some good one-liners -- in a made-up language, no less. Oh yeah, that's another amazing thing this movie does: It only translates his dialogue through subtitles. We should demand that our popular entertainment demands more from us in terms of our traditional comfort levels, because the rewards are rich indeed. This was my only five-star movie of the year, though that counterintuitively landed it at only fifth for the year. 

4. Echo Valley - How did a "well-made Lifetime movie of the week," as I have heard Echo Valley described, make my top four of the year, and at one point hold the #1 spot for more than a month? Easy: A terrific lead performance from Julianne Moore, and a nightmarish dilemma for parents of wayward children, seen out to its logical ends. Moore plays a recently widowed lesbian who is now trying to oversee their horse farm by herself, who was once at least passing for heterosexual and had a daughter (Sydney Sweeney), who in her early 20s is now a certified disaster and drug addict, mixed up with sketchy people. The daughter relies on her mother for support, financial and otherwise, making nice until she gets what she needs from her, and then goes off the rails again. Instead of reminding me of a Lifetime movie of the week -- the acting and directing (by Michael Pearce) are too good for that -- it reminds me of one of these intimate domestic crime thrillers of yesteryear, something like Ulee's Gold, which is high praise from me. Proving a mother will go to incredible lengths to protect even a child she should have written off years ago, the sequence of events that plays out in this one is a doozy -- but sadly, may only be one example from a toxic relationship dynamic where the mother just can't quit her daughter. Sweeney, in a smaller role, is also great, and there's terrific support from Fiona Shaw as a fellow lesbian who tries to help out, and a particularly icky Domhnall Gleeson playing a much more three-dimensional villain that he played in Star Wars. It all adds up to something that sticks with you -- or at least, as a parent, it stuck with me. 

3. It Was Just an Accident - I spent the first portion of It Was Just an Accident thinking that Jafar Panahi would just never be able to measure up to perennial top-tenner and fellow countryman Asgar Farhadi in my heart, and then the movie came thundering home for me in its final 30 minutes. Turns out all I needed was for Panahi to stop experimenting with non-films (many of which were made as such to get around government censorship) and make something of a Farhadi-style social drama. This is a great "strange bedfellows" movie, as a steadily accumulating number of former Irani political prisoners begin riding around in a van carrying a bound and gagged man, the man they believe tortured them when they were held captive. But they can't be sure it's him because they never properly saw him, only going on his voice and on the fact that he's got an artificial leg. Here Panahi explores the limits of the revenge impulse, especially when the desire for righteous fulfillment of that impulse is complicated by the fact that it could be targeting an innocent man. On what becomes a sort of circular road trip movie, there are a number of developments and reversals and moments when the characters' basic humanity comes into the light, when they do things to help this man and his family, even if he is who they think he is. The film really stakes its claim to greatness in the endgame, as there's a powerful confrontation followed by a final image that is both ominous and, in my mind, unspeakably optimistic, depending on whether you take it literally or metaphorically. How can one movie end on a note that is both ominous and optimistic? That's the little miracle -- the little accident, you might say -- of It Was Just an Accident. 

2. Sinners - Instead of emphasizing why Ryan Coogler's Sinners made it all the way up to my #2, I'll start by telling you why it isn't my #1. There is a not-insignificant portion of the second half of this film -- like, maybe as long as a half-hour -- that has major pacing problems and sequencing problems, placing lower stakes developments later in the narrative than higher stakes developments. That such a large portion of the running time could have these problems, and yet the film could still finish as my runner up for the year, tells you just how good the rest of the movie is, and just how close Coogler came to becoming the first Black director to earn a #1 from me -- instead settling for his second second-place finish after Creed in 2015. Everything before the sun sets in Sinners -- in other words, before anything really happens -- is an absolute master class in drawing a time, a place, and a series of characters, who we feel we know intimately despite the economy of time we've spent with them. The supporting cast is all first rate, but it's the two Michael B. Jordans -- with two distinct personalities as Smoke and Stack -- to whom this film really belongs, as Coogler continues to get the absolute best from his muse. And then, not long after the sun does set, we get maybe the cinematic set piece of the entire year, a musical sequence I could probably spoil -- who hasn't seen Sinners? -- but won't, just for the one or two of you out there who may not have. It's kind of what Damien Chazelle tried to do at the end of Babylon, only it works -- in fact, it works like such gangbusters, I still get chills any time I think of it. It's this true movie magic, and not the vampire stuff, that makes Sinners such an indelible experience -- though the vampire stuff is fun as hell, too. The race allegories are not perfectly delineated, but they also give us something to chew on, which feels especially urgent this year. 

1. Together - We know movies must make a good first impression. Professionals vetting a script will give up on it if they aren't grabbed within five pages. But it's the final impression that determines how you feel about a film, and I had a unique experience with this year's #1: the very last image of the film entirely changed my impression of what the movie I'd just been watching had actually been doing. In a year in which I gave out only one five-star rating and it was for a sci-fi action movie, that was reason enough to honor Michael Shanks' Together as my #1 movie of the year. I've been steadfast in keeping the secret of that final image, because I want people to have the experience I had with the movie. But let's just say that even before you realize the untold thematic depths of this movie -- which only became richer for me on my second viewing -- you've already got a very sturdy and very icky body horror that is using the potential merging of the bodies of two people (real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie) as a metaphor for commitment jitters. Together does the work of convincing us it might exist purely on this simpler genre level, as it's replete with gross moments -- but also scary images that are among the best that recent prestige horror has to offer, that don't specifically rely on fusing flesh. Franco and Brie fully commit, as it were, with a sprinkle of supporting help from Aussie Damon Herriman. (Together also has my favorite needle drop of the year, in a moment that reveals its sense of humor.) But as I said, there's something deeper going on here than this film's skin suggests, and if you come back three days from now, I might be writing a spoiler post that reveals what that is. The best proof that this was my favorite of 2025 was that tingle of anticipation I got when I sat down, three weeks ago, to watch it again and confirm its spot. It's the same tingle I got anticipating my second viewing of last year's #1, The Substance, to which this bears some similarities that I may also explore in the coming days. When something reaches the pinnacle of your affection, you feel it in your bones -- again with the biological metaphors -- and that's the feeling I have toward this year's #1. 

And before we get to the whole list, we are duty bound to shine the interrogation room lamp on the five worst as well:

180. Shelby Oaks - Kogonada is a good YouTube film essayist-turned-movie director. Chris Stuckmann is not. When I thought this was just a found footage horror movie, I thought it was a perplexing anachronism in 2025 but I was still cautiously optimistic. When I then discovered, after something like 20 minutes, that it was actually a bad regular horror sloppily affixed to the trappings of the found footage horror, I thought it was a total, and at times laughable, failure. 

181. Superman - Never have I wanted to separate myself more from the right-wing trolls who were deriding the film because James Gunn called it an immigrant story. Never have I been less able to make a case for that separation based on the contents or quality of the film. Nothing about the politics of the film has anything to do with the fact that it is an incoherent, bloated mess that features things like a pocket dimension, Lois Lane flying a spaceship, and an annoying super dog. I was out from the first minutes. 

 

182. Fear Street: Prom Queen - In 2021, Leigh Janiak made a really interesting three-movie Netflix series set in three different time periods and using three different styles of horror movie. In 2025, Matt Palmer followed that up with a single steaming pile of shit that was totally lacking in any of the inspiration of its forbears. 

183. Holland - Unless you've seen Holland it is impossible to describe what a bizarre little disaster this movie is, which is a shame because I really liked Mimi Cave's previous film, Fresh. Yes, Nicole Kidman's face looks weird in it, but the worse problem is that her frozen face is a metaphor for exactly how uncanny and poorly conceived this domestic thriller, about the titular Michigan town, really is. I was sure this would end up as my worst film of the year, but ... 

184. War of the Worlds - Oh my. If we're talking outdated gimmicks in the reference to Shelby Oaks a moment ago, the "it all takes place on a screen" movie is similarly bereft of value, but especially so when it features an inert Ice Cube fused to his desk chair, robotically sending out communications to his children and others out there in the world as aliens attack. Rich Lee's film feels like a COVID movie in the worst way, and this is as stilted of a performance and a script as they get, never mind the impossibility of keeping track of everything through screen swipes and footage that comes in fully edited from camera angles that could never exist. It's been a long time since I've seen a 2.5 rating on IMDB for a movie that wasn't being specifically targeted by trolls. 

And all 184, start to finish! 

1. Together

2. Sinners

3. It Was Just an Accident

4. Echo Valley

5. Predator: Badlands

6. The Ballad of Wallis Island

7. 1001 Frames

8. Vulcanizadora

9. Companion

10. Train Dreams

11. Twinless

12. A House of Dynamite
13. The Perfect Neighbor
14. The Life of Chuck

15. Wolf Man
16. Good Fortune

17. The Monkey

18. One Battle After Another

19. The Naked Gun

20. Bring Her Back

21. Zodiac Killer Project

22. Sex

23. Splitsville

24. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

25. The Penguin Lessons

26. Prime Minister

27. Blue Moon

28. Final Destination: Bloodlines

29. Paddington in Peru

30. Jay Kelly

31. Nouvelle Vague

32. Familiar Touch

33. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

34. Grand Tour

35. Caught Stealing

36. Die My Love

37. The Roses

38. One of Them Days

39. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

40. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues

41. Spit

42. Freaky Tales

43. Sketch

44. Lurker

45. Ash

46. Dangerous Animals

47. Eephus

48. The Salt Path

49. Sentimental Value

50. Deep Cover

51. The Secret Agent

52. Weapons

53. The Assessment

54. The Electric State

55. Titan: The Oceangate Submersible Disaster

56. Resurrection

57. Pavements

58. The Long Walk

59. Sorry, Baby

60. Deaf President Now!

61. The Phoenician Scheme

62. Thunderbolts*

63. No Other Choice

64. Oh, Hi!

65. One More Shot

66. The Mastermind

67. Banger

68. The Rule of Jenny Pen

69. Predator: Killer of Killers

70. 28 Years Later

71. Back in Action

72. The Actor

73. Jurassic World: Rebirth

74. Tron: Ares

75. The Friend

76. Bugonia

77. Eden

78. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

79. Mistress Dispeller

80. Happy Gilmore 2

81. Eddington

82. The Baltimorons

83. Frankenstein

84. A Minecraft Movie

85. Avatar: Fire and Ash

86. The Woman in the Yard

87. Wicked: For Good

88. Nonnas

89. Hedda

90. Captain America: Brave New World

91. Inside

92. Parthenope

93. Steve

94. Highest 2 Lowest

95. F1

96. Elio

97. Brick

98. The Toxic Avenger

99. When Fall is Coming

100. Presence

101. William Tell

102. Bob Trevino Likes It

103. The Surfer

104. The Alto Knights

105. F Marry Kill

106. The Woman in Cabin 10

107. KPop Demon Hunters

108. Heads of State

109. The Wrong Paris

110. Novocaine

111. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl

112. Honey Don't!

113. Rust

114. By Design

115. Becoming Led Zeppelin

116. Death Does Not Exist

117. Zootopia 2

118. Inheritance

119. Freakier Friday

120. Love Hurts

121. The Housemaid

122. The Shrouds

123. Warfare

124. Last Breath

125. The Thursday Murder Club

126. Karate Kid: Legends

127. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle

128. La Dolce Villa

129. The Smashing Machine

130. Until Dawn

131. Havoc

132. The Gorge

133. Swiped

134. The Sand Castle

135. How to Train Your Dragon

136. Con Mum

137. In the Lost Lands

138. Opus

139. Death of a Unicorn

140. Shell

141. G20

142. The Life List

143. Black Bag

144. Him

145. Ballad of a Small Player

146. She Loved Blossoms More

147. Roofman

148. Hamnet

149. Friendship

150. The Old Guard 2

151. The Fantastic Four: First Steps

152. Redux Redux

153. Good Boy

154. Hurry Up Tomorrow

155. After the Hunt

156. The Pickup

157. Heart Eyes

158. Fountain of Youth

159. Five Nights at Freddy's 2

160. Another Simple Favor

161. Black Phone 2

162. Drop

163. I Know What You Did Last Sumer

164. Kinda Pregnant

165. Keeper

166. The Running Man

167. Night Always Comes

168. The Conjuring: Last Rites

169. Anaconda

170. The Amateur

171. M3GAN 2.0

172. Oh. What. Fun.

173. Clown in a Cornfield

174. Snow White

175. Mickey 17

176. A Working Man

177. You're Cordially Invited

178. Materialists

179. Playdate

180. Shelby Oaks

181. Superman

182. Fear Street: Prom Queen

183. Holland

184. War of the Worlds

And finally, ten movies from this list that I thought required a line further of explanation:

12. A House of Dynamite - I was taken aback for about ten seconds, but then I actually liked that ending! 

24. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey - This was supposed to be Kogonada's big whiff, but the family role-playing stuff in the final third really got me. 

49. Sentimental Value - I have one Australian friend who agrees this is overrated, who calls it "bang-on fine," which is a phrasing I would like to steal.

52. Weapons - Zach Cregger's cinematic energy is something I really cherish, but this film also left me nit-picking, just like Barbarian did. 

87. Wicked: For Good - A far cry from the first one, which was my #2 of last year.

111. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl - I was too mad that they showered so much posthumous praise on Uncle Fred, such that it affected my ability to properly assess the movie itself. 

117. Zootopia 2 - A far cry from the first one, which was my #3 of 2016. 

148. Hamnet - Stop it, Chloe Zhao. I have zero interest in crying, and the more you try to make me, the less interest I have.

175. Mickey 17 - Bong Joon-ho has had better days and will have them again. 

178. Materialists - Celine Song has had better days but may not have them again. 

That's a wrap on another year. No wait, it isn't. Two more wrap-up posts on the next two days and then a deep dive into my #1 the day after that. Won't you join us?