Fighting the battles of 2025

Too similar to my 2024 wrap-up post? Here, you can have a look if you don't remember. 

Alex Garland's Civil War and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another are, in many ways, speaking to the same divisions in the current American sociopolitical landscape. In fact, I referenced the former in my review of the latter. So is it a sign of progress that this one at least has a second identity as a comedy? 

Few of us were laughing this year as Donald Trump ran roughshod over the constitution and continued to flood the zone with so much scandal that it was not possible to meaningful prosecute him for any of it, and even in some cases, to remember it two weeks later. 

But One Battle After Another was the movie of the year -- not in my rankings but in the zeitgeist -- because it was the best of a lot of movies that are starting to try to deal with the very real form of fascism taking hold in the U.S. It's too soon to have gotten many/any films that were conceived of wholly after Trump won his second presidency, but art tends to reflect the times around it, mirroring what we're going through even when the timelines for its creation don't match up with current events. This was such a big year for cinematic attempts to topple fascism that by the end of the year, we were kind of rolling our eyes at them, since so many lazy versions were thrown at us in the hopes that we'd mistake them for vigorous ones. 

In everything from Wicked: For Good to Zootopia 2 to The Penguins Lessons to The Secret Agent to The Long Walk to The Running Man to The Assessment to The Electric State to Eddington to Tron: Ares to Bugonia, our dictatorial overlords were on the run, and so what if not all of those movies were good? Actually I do like most of those. The point is, if Trump can flood the zone with nonsense, filmmakers can flood the zone with reminders of the dangers of oppression and silence, and maybe eventually, it will sink through our first few layers and prompt action -- at least at the polls.

The real-world reminder of just what a fascist state looks like came most recently when an ICE agent, blissfully unencumbered by any fears of negative consequences to his person, shot an unarmed driver in the face, just because she happened to be actually protesting him or in proximity to those who were. That was actually one week into 2026. Which means we could get another post a lot like this one at the end of this year. 

Best and worst performers of the year

As usual I'm here to shine a light on people who happened to appear in multiple movies I liked, or multiple movies I disliked. "Appear" doesn't have to mean in front of the camera, though it usually does. Because getting a lot of work, and being good or bad in all of it, are the key criteria for inclusion, I'm of course not focusing on people who did one really awesome thing, or one really terrible thing. And I did have a pretty hard time coming up with both lists this year. It's a flawed exercise at best, and yet I can't quit it. 

Three who had a good year

Elle Fanning - There were few slam-dunk choices this year in the sense of actors or other movie collaborators who had multiple movies that were really high on my list. But I'm leading off with Elle Fanning because she's long been a favorite of mine, and 2025 showcased the range of her abilities, some of it quite unexpected. The unexpected part was how funny she was in Predator: Badlands (#5), which is not within the anticipated range of outcomes for a movie series involving a murderous alien that can cloak itself. Typically, there's nary a laugh in these movies, including the great one from a few years ago, Prey, another top ten movie for me. But Fanning, in the dual role of two different androids, made me laugh out loud several times as her legless character rides around on the back of the predator, kind of like a wisecracking C3PO to his Chewbacca. Her exact lines of dialogue are things I no longer remember, but in the moment they tickled me pink. Of course, this movie also requires her to play a more sinister android, the one you see above, and she's great at that as well. Fanning's second 2025 film was not one I was as high on as many people, some of whom just helped Sentimental Value (#49) nab a best picture nomination yesterday. I will say that her character was perhaps my favorite thing about it, and yes, I recognize it's strange to expend that sort of praise on the single American in a movie full of Norwegians. It's more what she does with this character that, again, surprised me. You expect her Rachel Kemp to be set up as a catty rival to the daughter (Renate Reinsve) of Stellan Skarsgard's film director, but Fanning has no interest in playing the role that way (which, it should be said, is also a credit to director Joachim Trier's take on the material). In fact, I found her final scene in the film to be incredibly touching, both as a further departure from the character a lesser movie would have given us, and as a look inside the insecure and broken parts of a successful Hollywood actress. Fanning is the best kind of successful Hollywood actress, continuing to show us her impressive craft without ever having to compromise on her choices. 

Mark Hamill - Speaking of long-time favorites, this is my longest time favorite, considering that Star Wars was the first film I ever saw in the theater. (I may have seen a Disney movie before then, but as far as I remember it, it was Star Wars.) So I had to honor Hamill for his interesting supporting work in two 2025 films that I liked quite a bit, both of which happen to be adaptations of Stephen King stories -- especially since I don't know how many more chances the 74-year-old is going to get at this sort of honor. The first is The Life of Chuck (#14), which isn't going to get a lot more year-end love from me as it fell outside my top ten and isn't something I've otherwise been writing about. Here Hamill plays the grandfather to Chuck as a boy, in scenes that play out of chronological order from several different time periods of the boy's life. It was the sort of role that made me appreciate what an interesting career Hamill has had, from being destined for the sort of career Harrison Ford did end up having, to becoming a man primarily known for voice work, to playing the kind of sturdy grandfather figure we see here, as though he'd been playing grandfathers his entire career. There's nothing particularly outstanding about the work other than how it completes the package of the ambitious whole of Mike Flanagan's film. Although I thought Hamill could have been used a bit more in The Long Walk (#58), it provided a great reminder of the range that, again, we never imagined Luke Skywalker might have. From a kind Peter Falk type in Chuck to a sadistic military leader in Walk, Hamill reminds us that he spent the middle of his career as a villain, voicing the Joker on the Batman animated series. And sure we hiss this figure who is the embodiment of a fascist government that puts on a competition to walk its competitors into the ground, but it's not because Hamill has left him with only the single dimension of villainy. We appreciate the way Hamill has given this malevolent man the nuance to make him human. After starting out more myth than man, Hamill has been playing complex humans like this for the length of a surprisingly durable career.

Emily Mortimer - I don't look back at 2025 and think "What an Emily Mortimer sort of year that was!" But the fact remains, she was in two movies that finished in my 21 to 30, and in one of them, she had a role that went beyond just being an actor. In the other, I didn't even realize it was her at first, which is how seamlessly she fit in. So when I was looking into Sally Hawkins, to see if she had this kind of good year based on her performance in Bring Her Back, I came to realize that Hawkins had actually bowed out of the Paddington series prior to Paddington in Peru (#29) -- and that she was replaced by, you guessed it, Emily Mortimer. Apparently this did not make some Paddington fans happy, but the fact that I didn't notice the change was a good sign of how well Mortimer fit into the Paddington world. And since this was actually my favorite of the three Paddington movies -- sorry to those of you who are gaga for Paddington 2 -- Mortimer now has a weird claim within the series that, at least for me personally, Hawkins does not have. Her role is very small in Jay Kelly (#30), such that I barely even remember it within the context of the film. But that's because she's doing something different on here, namely, she co-wrote the movie with Noah Baumbach. Now this is not in my top five Baumbach films of all time, but it's a lot better than some Baumbach movies that displeased me over the past decade or so, such as The Meyerowitz Stories and Mistress America. I have one friend who hates this movie, but darned if its cumulative impact didn't get me -- and in that way we can credit the writing. In her first feature writing credit, following only work on two TV series, Mortimer gave us a poignant contemplation of how we can mispend our lives without realizing it -- even if we are not famous Hollywood actors. "If done well," I wrote in my review, "these stories should make us think of our own lives, our own regrets, as you don't have to be an internationally known celebrity to have casually neglected your children until the point it's too late." In 2025, Mortimer took two things that had previously already been good -- the Paddington series and Noah Baumbach's career -- and added something to make them better. Not bad for an actress who, at age 54, should already be closing up shop, by the usual standards of Hollywood. 

Honorable mentions*: Benicio del Toro (One Battle After Another, The Phoenician Scheme), Julia Garner (Wolf Man, Weapons, minus Fantastic Four: First Steps), Keke Palmer (Good Fortune, One of Them Days, minus The Pickup)

* - One or more of these might have made my main list, except I can't expend 300 words on someone who had a bad movie mixed in with the good -- preferably not even as an honorable mention, though beggars can't be choosers. 

Three who had a bad year

Paul Rudd - Paul Rudd works for me in everything. He didn't work for me in anything in 2025. In fact, he so didn't work for me that he appeared in three different films that didn't work for me, two of which saw him as the prospective prey of large, vicious creatures, only one of which is traditionally considered large and vicious. That last is the worst of his 2025 films for me, Anaconda (#169), in which for the first time I found Rudd's character actually unlikable. The movie's only been out for a month so it may not be right to spoil it already, but sending his friends into a dangerous jungle to make a movie he doesn't have the rights to make was just a bridge too far in terms of my rooting interests in him not becoming snake food. This idea was there on the page, it just wasn't there on the screen. Then there was the idea that was never even on the page, it was only on the t-shirt -- you know, that t-shirt you've seen where a majestic unicorn is impaling someone through the chest with his horn. That t-shirt seemed to be the only inspiration behind Death of a Unicorn (#139), a film I wanted to love that just sat there and did nothing for me. I'm not sure in what way I expected this to be glorious, but the movie missed the mark on any attempt to reach that neighborhood. But I was probably most disappointed not to get on the wavelength of Friendship (#149), especially since I consider myself a certified lover of Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave and consider Ben Stiller's The Cable Guy a foundational text. I wanted to be the guy who shook my head in sympathetic yet mildly superior pity at the plebes who didn't get what was so funny about this movie, but instead, it was me who didn't get it, and Rudd's inconsistently portrayed character was a big part of that. Maybe Tim Robinson is best in the small doses of three-minute sketches, since the gaps of silence between laughs were deafening here. Even one of the most charming ageless wonders in Hollywood can have an off year, and Rudd certainly had it in 2025. 

Eva Longoria - Anyone who had been missing Eva Longoria got their fill of her in 2025. Truth is, she never went away -- but you had to see the right things in order to find her. Or in 2025, the wrong things. And I really don't like to include her here because I watched season 4 of Only Murders in the Building only a month ago -- which was not from 2025 in addition to not being a movie, so it can't count here in her favor -- and really enjoyed her playing herself in that season. But the truth is I saw three Eva Longoria movies that came out in 2025 and not a one of them finished higher in my rankings than #156. The first was the worst, and by that I mean, the worst of the year. In War of the Worlds (#184), she plays one of the characters impossibly captured on one of the screens in front of an inert Ice Cube -- inert both physically and emotionally -- who sees an alien invasion through an ever-changing live stream of video feeds, many of which have no logical cinematographer. I won't get sidetracked on a rant about all the terrible things in War of the Worlds, but obviously the failure of the movie is not the fault of one of its supporting characters. That theme continues with the Christmas movie Oh. What. Fun. (#172), where Longoria has the small role of a TV talk show host modeled after Oprah, who gives hope to the main character (Michelle Pfeiffer) that she might win a mother-of-the-year contest. Again, guilt by association with this truly garish Christmas movie that was, sadly, the only Christmas movie released in 2025 that I watched during the Christmas season. And I don't actually remember her role in the "best" of these films, The Pickup (#156), which was, I suppose, a mostly inoffensive buddy action movie on one of the streamers, of which there were so many in 2025, this one starring Eddie Murphy and Pete Davidson. I'm sure I enjoyed Longoria's presence in it well enough, as she really has maintained that effervescence that she always had back in her glory days. But the movie was mid as hell. Since Longoria does keep popping up in several projects a year, a pretty good feat now that she has turned 50, maybe I'll have better luck randomly avoiding them rather than randomly hitting them in 2026. 

Rachel Brosnahan - Let me start with a completely irrational bias against Rachel Brosnahan. I have never watched a minute of her show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but I got the impression there was something too clever by half about that show that made me skeptical about the value of its lead performer -- especially since I didn't know her from anything else, and I guess I'm prone to snap judgments about things that involve a lot of hype but that I'm not a part of. Unfortunately, in the first year I really grappled with her film career, she did nothing to disabuse me of that notion. I didn't love the opening argument between Lois and Clark in Superman (#181) the way some people did, but I was open to the particular spitfire energy she brought to the role. By the time the movie had totally devolved for me, which happened pretty quickly, she's flying around spaceships and blending into the movie's chaotic wallpaper, something worthier of spitting out than calling spitfire. (As I mentioned yesterday, I hate to side with Superman haters who are on the opposite side of the political aisle from me, but at least we dislike the movie for different reasons.) But the Lois Lane here is woman of the year compared to the retrograde, and very brief, role she plays in the truly odd spy movie The Amateur (#170). Retrograde in what way? Well, spoiler alert, she gets fridged! Did you know wives still got fridged to help fuel their husband's quest for vengeance in movies made in 2025? Apparently they do, at least in this one. Rami Malek's unconvincing performance as a "normal guy" -- Malek can never play a normal guy -- was more to blame for the failure of this movie certainly than Brosnahan, and yes, it's possible there are people in my honorable mentions who are more deserving of this third spot. But I felt I could better explain why Brosnhan didn't work for me in her movies than why they didn't work for me in theirs, or at least that's what I'm telling myself now that I've written this. (And besides, I didn't think it was fair to dump on either of Ice Cube's terrible movies, Anaconda and War of the Worlds, a second time after I let those movies have it with Rudd and Longoria.)

Dishonorable mentions: Ice Cube (Anaconda, War of the Worlds), Brandon Sklenar (The Housemaid, Drop), Ayo Edibiri (Opus, After the Hunt) 

The year I stopped liking animation

Do you know what's been a constant about my movie lists for about a million years in a row? And yes, I realize that is approximately 999,970 more years than I've been doing this.

I have an animated movie in my top 25, that's what. At worst my top 40. 

Do you know what my highest ranking animated movie in 2025 is? 

It's Predator: Killer of Killers, all the way down at #69. 

Now you might say this is just because I didn't watch as many animated movies as I have in some years. That's true. But I did watch four others and they are all lower than that: Elio (#96), KPop Demon Hunters (#107), Death Does Not Exist (#116) and Zootopia 2 (#117). 

So even with two of those five being adult-oriented animation, I still could not hit on anything I really loved. (Killer of Killers is quite good, but it just got steadily pushed down as the year went on.)

And the ones I did skip?

Dog Man - If I had kids a few years younger, we would have gone to this. 

Plankton: The Movie - I think there were at least two Spongebob movies this year. I don't do Spongebob.

Smurfs - I completely forgot there was a Smurfs movie this year.

The Bad Guys 2 - We did see the original (and I didn't care for it), but again, my kids have moved on. 

And then some other stuff for babies, as there always is.

So I guess the question is, did my tastes change, or did my kids' tastes change? Or are the animated movies just not good anymore?

Actually this sort of seems to be the year animation went international. I saw one of those in KPop Demon Hunters, but I did not see the year's highest grossing movie, Ne Zha 2, in part because of its length. But on that international front, you know they were digging deep when niche stuff like Demon Slayer: Kinetsu No Yaiba the Movie gets nominated for a Golden Globe. At least Chainsaw Man: The Movie - Reze Arc, which someone reviewed for my site, didn't make the cut.

So my 2025 in animation is probably a combination of all of the above factors. What remains to be seen is whether I can get my love back in 2026. I guess one of the first up will be Goat. We'll see how it goes. 

A year without tears

I don't cry in a lot of movies, but there are almost always one or two each year that get me. And more often than not, I end up making that movie my #1 of the year. (It's happened twice already in the 2020s, in any case.)

But 2025 was a dry year. 

Hamnet (#148), one of my final viewings of the year, had a chance to dampen things up a bit. That is, if I did not consider it overwrought and emotionally manipulative. Not only did I not get close to crying, I didn't even really feel sorrow. The title character's death scene is kind of like something out of a demonic possession movie, and since it comes only halfway through, it's timed poorly within the narrative to make the tears happen. By the time the movie actually ends, we've been living with Chloe Zhao's attempts to make us cry for almost an hour.

Did the exhausting year that it was just ring me out? Or is this just proof of how difficult it is to actually pull this off? 

I only cried once in 2024, in Wicked, and in 2023, when my #1 was also not a weepie, there were three movies in my top five that pushed me to the brink of tears -- and whether I squeezed out any salty ones or not, I count that as an emotionally rich year.

That emotional richness didn't find me in the movies of 2025. Much as I loved my top ten -- maybe a little less than I usually love my top ten -- none of them had me wavering between misty and dry eyes. I liked them for different reasons than that they penetrated through to my emotional core.

If there was one thing that I could have seen happening, it was spectacle tears for Sinners (#2), during "the scene" -- because I was just so thrilled by what Ryan Coogler had decided to do, and what he was currently in the processing of pulling off. But I can't lie -- I didn't actually cry.

Given the paucity of examples -- even when my #1 of 2021 and 2022 made me cry, they were among the only ones those years -- I do suspect it's just because that's the hardest thing in movies to do. I said as much in the opening paragraph of my review of Hamnet ... and I only mentioned it in the review because of how hard Zhao was trying, not how close she came to succeeding. 

Ranking the directors with two 2025 movies

In my "three who had a good year" and "three who had a bad year," I'm usually looking particularly hard for directors who made more than one movie in the just-completed year. That relieves the segment from just being a way to talk about actors who happened to be in movies I liked or didn't like. This year, I had so many options on that front that I actually specifically excluded those directors from consideration in the above segment, just so I could talk about them here.

That's right, there were five directors who directed two movies I saw in 2025, and if I'd done my due diligence and watched the other two movies beyond Sex that were released by Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud -- there were called Love and Dreams, and might have been hard to come by unless I'd also seen them at MIFF -- then I would have also had one who directed three. 

So without any further ado, here is how those five ranked, from highest average of their two films to lowest. 

1. Richard Linklater 
Movies: Blue Moon (#27), Nouvelle Vague (#31)
Average: 29
Comment: Yes I paid $14.99 to rent Blue Moon as my final viewing this week ... and it was worth it. A director making two movies in the same year is even more impressive when they are as different as these two are, and still both well within the top 20% of my rankings.

2. Dan Trachtenberg
Movies: Predator: Badlands (#5), Predator: Killer of Killers (#69)
Average: 37
Comment: On the surface this is the opposite of Linklater in terms of range ... until you consider how different these two Predator movies are from each other, and from the previous films in the franchise. I mean, the predator isn't even consistently definable as either a villain or a hero across the two movies.

3. Osgood Perkins
Movies: The Monkey (#17), Keeper (#165)
Average: 91
Comment: Perkins wins the "range of outcomes" award here. When I loved The Monkey like I did, I was all ready to declare Perkins "back" after Longlegs was my worst movie of 2024. Then last week I saw Keeper and it was ... not good. 

4. Steven Soderbergh
Movies: Presence (#100), Black Bag (#143)
Average: 121.5 
Comment: I'm not sure why people were falling all over themselves talking about how clever Black Bag was ... unless this is just my dislike for spy movies rearing its head again, which wouldn't surprise me. I loved the concept of Presence, I just wanted more from it in the final analysis. 

5. Paul Feig
Movies: The Housemaid (#121), Another Simple Favor (#160)
Average: 140.5
Comment: When did the director of Bridesmaids become Hollywood's preeminent purveyor of overheated domestic thrillers involving catty women? That is a major step backward. His average would have been even lower except that The Housemaid did some things in its second half to win me back a bit ... before ultimately leaving me cold by the end. 

Ten best non-2025 movies

Once again this year, listing alphabetically the ten best movies I saw in the previous year that were not released in the previous year.

Carrie (2013, Kimberly Peirce) - During my October of horror remakes, I never would have guessed that one of them would elbow out many other worthy candidates to make this list, but the ingredients of Carrie came together for me in just the right way to make that so. 

Fail-Safe (1964, Sidney Lumet) - One of my three five-star non-2025 movies made it in just under the wire among my final viewings of the year, as the kid who grew up with WarGames as one of his favorite films was terrified by this one, mostly for its sheer plausibility -- and that unforgettable final montage of images. 

I'm Still Here (2024, Walter Salles) - The only 2024 best picture nominee I didn't rank last year ended up being worth the wait, with an unforgettable look at the casual malevolence of an oppressive Brazilian government kidnapping its citizens. 

Lake Mungo (2008, Joel Anderson) - A found footage horror movie, still resonating with me in 2025? I can't even remember all the reasons I was so taken with this one, but it reminded me of when this genre was once a goldmine of potential chills. 

The Lion in Winter (1968, Anthony Harvey) - When I wrote about this I called it "Shakespeare for dummies," but I meant that in the best possible sense, as I was struck dumb by the performances and the Shakespearean-lite language used to bring this part of British history to vibrant life. 

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, Werner Herzog) - Make that two horror remakes among my best ten movies not released in 2025. Herzog's visionary retelling of this familiar tale is a triumph of cinematography and score. 

Poetry (2010, Lee Chang-dong) - This was on my radar due to a recommendation by Filmspotting guest host Michael Phillips way back at the time it was released, and finally seeing this intimate portrait of a Korean woman fighting the onset of Alzheimer's and a truly shockingly behaved grandson, I found it well worth the wait. 

The Right Stuff (1983, Philip Kaufman) - The best previously unseen film in my Understanding Editing series, this filled in a long-time blind spot for me as a Gen-Xer, as apparently many of my compatriots were regularly watching it on cable. I can see why they adored it, and it surprised me by also being very funny. 

Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann) - Yes I watched this 566-minute Holocaust documentary all in one day on June 21st as my 7,000th movie of all time, and it packed every bit of the wallop I expected it to pack. 

Yi Yi (2000, Edward Yang) - It took me some time to embrace Yang's nearly three-hour movie about a contemporary Chinese family, which had eluded my attempts to watch it for a quarter century, but by the end, this too was well worth the wait. 

Statistics 

Here's how many movies I saw, and what sort, by the numbers. 

Movies by star rating on Letterboxd: 5 stars (1), 4.5 stars (17), 4 stars (38), 3.5 stars (35), 3 stars (33), 2.5 stars (23), 2 stars (17), 1.5 stars (10), 1 star (7), 0.5 stars (3)

The big difference from last year is the jump in 4-star movies, from 27 to 38, allowing this to be the first year that something other than 3.5 stars was my most number of rankings. I think this is consistent with me starting to think of 3.5 stars as not a strong enough rating for a movie I enjoyed quite a bit, when it really should be. I'll have to work on that. 

Movies by source: Theater (50) (6 by advanced screening), Netflix (31), Amazon Prime (21), iTunes rental (18), Airplane (17), Amazon rental (14), Screener (11), MIFF (7), Disney+ (7), AppleTV+ (6), Stan (1), Kanopy (1)  

The big difference was a dropoff from 44 to 31 in movies watched on Netflix, so obviously I made up for that in other areas, since I saw seven more movies overall. In fact, rentals through Amazon made up the entire difference as this was a new means of acquiring VOD for me this year, where I'd previously relied almost exclusively on iTunes. I guess that means 14 more movies I sought out intentionally rather than having Netflix serve them up to me passively?

Total new movies watched in the year: 288
Total rewatches: 47
2025 movies seen more than once: 7 (Together, Sinners, Echo Valley, Companion, The Monkey, One Battle After Another, Resurrection)

Another name for ...

The Gorge is ... Echo Valley
Jay Kelly is ... The Actor
Avatar: Fire and Ash is ... One Battle After Another
The Roses is ... Splitsville
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is ... Die My Love
Oh, Hi! is ... Sorry, Babe
Oh, Hi! is ... Honey Don't! 
The Old Guard 2 is ... Death Does Not Exist

Discoveries

A$AP Rocky (If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Highest 2 Lowest)
Chase Infiniti (One Battle After Another)
Eva Victor (Sorry, Baby)
Alfie Williams (28 Years Later)
Kathleen Chalfant (Familiar Touch)

Welcome back 

Pamela Anderson (The Naked Gun)
Orlando Bloom (Deep Cover)
Aziz Ansari (Good Fortune)
Amy Madigan (Weapons)
Cameron Diaz (Back in Action)

Farewell

Udo Kier (The Secret Agent)
Julian McMahon (The Surfer)
James Ransone (Black Phone 2)
Tony Todd (Final Destination: Bloodlines) 

and of course

Rob Reiner (Spinal Tap II: The End Continues) 

(We lost plenty of others in 2025, some of whom were memorialized already on this blog, but these were the ones who actually appeared in 2025 movies.)

Lighting round

Highest ranked best picture nominee: Sinners (#2)
Lowest ranked best picture nominee: Hamnet (#148)
Best picture nominee I haven't seen: Marty Supreme 
Film that should never have been a best picture nominee: F1
Sequels I'm glad were not rubber-stamped as best picture nominees: Wicked: For Good and Avatar: Fire and Ash
Appearing in the most best picture nominees: Kerry Condon (F1, Train Dreams)
Most deserving Oscar nomination for acting (female): Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
Least deserving Oscar nomination for acting (female): Jessie Buckley, Hamnet 
Most deserving Oscar nomination for acting (male): Michael B. Jordan, Sinners
Least deserving Oscar nomination for acting (male): Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein (though I thought he was good)
Sophomore directing effort that lost me: Celine Song, Materialists (#178)
Sophomore directing effort that won me over: Danny and Michael Philippou, Bring Her Back (#20)
Most surprising director: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Freaky Tales (#42)
Least surprising director: David Ayer, A Working Man (#176)
Low ranking I'll get the most guff about: Superman (#181)
Low ranking I'll get the least guff about: War of the Worlds (#184)
High ranking I'll get the most guff about: Together (#1)
High ranking I'll get the least guff about: Sinners (#2)
Best reboot: The Naked Gun (#19)
Worst reboot: Superman (#181)
Best umpteenth movie in a series: Predator: Badlands (#5)
Worst umpteenth movie in a series: The Conjuring: Last Rites (#168)
Biggest surprise: Wolf Man (#15)
Biggest disappointment: Mickey 17 (#175)
Worst title for a good movie: A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (#24)
Best title for a bad movie: Clown in a Cornfield (#173)
Best head of state: Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister
Worst head of state: Donald Trump (no film listed)
Most heads of state: Idris Elba (A House of Dynamite, Heads of State)
Best movie featuring a revolving restaurant: Final Destination: Bloodlines (#28)
Worst movie featuring a revolving restaurant: Drop (#162)
Best movie named after a Bloom County character: Steve (#93)
Worst movie named after a Bloom County character: Opus (#138)
Best Stephen King adaptation: The Life of Chuck (#14)
Best Stephen King adaptation about walking or running: The Long Walk (#58)
Worst Stephen King adaptation about walking or running: The Running Man (#166)
Best outcome for a dog in a horror movie: Good Boy
Worst outcome for a dog in a horror movie: Together
Most syllables: Vulcanizadora 
Fewest syllables: Him
Best movie with a season in the title: When Fall is Coming (#99)
Worst movie with a season in the title: I Know What You Did Last Summer (#163)
Title that best describes my ranking process: Highest 2 Lowest
Title that second best describes my ranking process: A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Title that describes how I feel at the end of my ranking process: Last Breath

One more formal wrap-up post tomorrow with my annual portmanteaus post, then a deep-dive into my #1 movie, set to drop on Monday my time. 

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 her -- including possibly her 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? 

I'm not taking a half day off work to see Marty Supreme

Here we are, down to my last post before I reveal my 2025 rankings tomorrow.

And as much as I would have liked to have written a post called "Final movies of the ranking year with Timothee Chalamet," it's not to be. 

You see, my last movie of 2024 was A Complete Unknown, which was a strangely timed Friday night advanced screening that capped off that ranking year. Similarly, this year, Chalamet appears in Marty Supreme, which opens in Australian cinemas today.

In another year, I would have gotten in Marty with ease, because I'd have had plenty of time after work to see the movie and to adjust my in-progress rankings accordingly for this final entry. It wouldn't be until 12:30 a.m. that night, which is of course really the next day, that I'd need to finalize those rankings. 

This year, though, I am going to see David Byrne in concert tonight. It was supposed to be with my wife, but she's had to be out of town, so it will be with my younger son, who basically doesn't know any Talking Heads or David Byrne. That should be interesting. 

When I first heard about this conflict, and didn't yet know my wife was going to be out of town, I imagined going into the office today, and then meeting her at the concert site in time for David to start plucking the strings. In between the end of my workday and the start of the concert, there would be a Marty Supreme-sized window of time -- or at least, the window of time necessary for a movie of moderate length, unlike the presumably bloated 149 minutes of Marty Supreme.

But now that I have to accompany my 12-year-old into the city, there just isn't the time, and I'm not willing to take a half day off just to fit in this movie.

Yeah, that was another option. And I have actually taken days off to fit in juicy new releases on the final day, which was necessary in 2014 for Inside Llewyn Davis and Her, and in 2016 for The Hateful Eight, Carol and The Big Short. (Those are the years in which the Januarys fell, not the release years of those movies.) 

But the cost-benefit analysis seems to favor at least two movies for this to be worth it, and considering that it's something I haven't done in ten years now, it's also something I haven't considered worth it in any respect in quite some time.

And certainly not for a movie that a critic I trust said gets very repetitious and ultimately exhausting, which I might have known from the movie to which it is drawing the most direct comparisons, Uncut Gems, also directed by Josh Safdie. Will-to-power narratives where the main character has an excessive amount of arrogance are not really my bag, especially not for the price of a half day's salary. 

You can't get in every movie, but this year, I got in a higher total than any other, and that will have to be enough.

A cinematic connection between New York City and Oklahoma!

I didn't expect to be writing about Richard Linklater's Blue Moon again so soon, but I guess that's the risk you run when you write about a movie in anticipation of an upcoming viewing. You never know what the actual viewing will inspire.

This is a superficial observation only, and maybe I could have fit it into one of my year-end wrap-up posts later this week, but let's just do it now and get it out of the way. I have nothing else planned for this particular Wednesday. 

Blue Moon makes you think a lot about New York City, where it is set, and the show Oklahoma!, which is the catalyst for change among its characters. As I was ruminating on these topics, I was reminded that it is not the only 2025 film that features both of these elements.

Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest memorably opens with drone shots (or maybe they're helicopter shots) of New York City, specifically the part of Brooklyn on the opposite side of the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. And what music, counterintuitively, is playing over it?

Why that would be "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" from, you guessed it, Rodgers and Hammerstein's first and most popular collaboration, the one at the center of Blue Moon, Oklahoma!

But wait that's not all.

Of course in late 2025/early 2026, we're all thinking a lot about Rob Reiner. I've already written about the guy a good five times since he passed. And he's got a role in this as well. 

In Reiner's 1989 classic When Harry Met Sally, in one of their moments of bonding that is interrupted by Harry spotting his ex, Harry and Sally are walking through a store singing "Surrey With the Fringe On Top." The store is, of course, in Manhattan, and the song is, of course, from Oklahoma!

If there are more movies that would fit here, I'm not going to try to figure them out today. 

Accidental Christmas movies

I have a rule about not watching Christmas movies after Christmas. My rule is so extreme that I don't even really like to watch a Christmas movie on Christmas day. Christmas Eve is pretty much my cutoff. So January 19th is certainly out of the question.

But when it happens accidentally, well, there's not a lot I can do about that.

This was the case with The Baltimorons, my penultimate viewing of 2025 before I post my rankings early Friday morning my time. I was already committed to my $5.99 rental by the time I was ushered in to the movie by the familiar sounds of what sounded like the Vince Guaraldi version of "O Tannenbaum" from A Charlie Brown Christmas. (Looking it up online, I can see that this was just composer Jordan Seigel's loving homage/ripoff of Guaraldi.)

There were two reasons I had to doubt/never consider that The Baltimorons might be a Christmas movie:

1) The title. It wasn't A Baltimorons Christmas or Jingle Balts or something that would have given it away.

2) The release date. When I looked it up on IMDB to confirm its eligibility for 2025 -- this being a movie I only recently realized I should watch, it being directed by a Duplass brother -- I saw that it had hit U.S. theaters on September 5th. The second half of the year, at least, but not otherwise within the logical range of releasing it in conjunction with the holiday.

Of course, if I'd actually read its synopsis, I would have been set straight: "A newly sober man's Christmas Eve dental emergency leads to an unexpected romance with his older dentist as they explore Baltimore together."

I guess in the end I'm kind of glad I didn't, because I would have skipped it and then might have continued skipping it in perpetuity. When December rolls around each year, we tend to watch new Christmas movies and classic Christmas movies, rarely seeking out the middle ground between the two. 

But it wasn't only liking the movie enough to be glad I'd seen it. It was that I happened to also be taking down our Christmas tree last night, so it seemed appropriate.

Yes in my house we keep our Christmas tree up for most of January. Traditionally we don't take it down until Australia Day, which is next Monday, but I'm starting early this year. I'm giving up the ghost on Christmas. My wife is out of town and has been so all month, tending to a family matter. She won't be back by Australia Day, so unless she reads this, she won't even know I took it down early -- nor will she care. But it's been dead for several weeks now and in the Australian summer, that becomes a fire hazard.

I was slow-walking the undecorating. I'd started it the day before, but then got distracted by another household chore, since I'm doing all of them myself at this point. (I'm not bothering to make my kids help me with them. Let them have their summer.) But I resumed last night while watching the Australian Open, and soon I'd gotten all the ornaments I could see removed from the tree. In order to help see them better, I turned on the Christmas lights for the first time in probably two weeks.

That looks nice, I thought.

So I didn't unstring the nights, deciding I'd let them illuminate my second-to-last viewing of 2025, whatever it might be.

And of course it ended up being a Christmas movie. I felt the coziness of the holiday there in my living room, even on January 19th.

And it's kind of nice that the Michelle Pfeiffer film Oh. What. Fun. is not the only new Christmas movie I watched in 2025. That one was forgettable, or rather, bad enough to be memorable, which is probably worse. It didn't give me that warm fuzzy feeling.

This one did, and I'll take it, even on January 19th. 

A premature end to a long ranking year

The way I feel right now, totally exhausted, I'm not sure how anything could be "premature" about the end of ranking 2025 movies, which will come later this week after a record total ranked this year. I'll save any further discussions of that record for later in the week. 

It's premature only because it's not coming as much later in the week this week as it usually does.

The Oscar nominations are revealed at 12:30 a.m. Friday morning, my time, which is early Thursday morning in Los Angeles. I usually work it out so I have a movie finishing no later than 10:30 on Thursday night, giving me two hours to finalize things -- and to hope that the last movie I chose to watch doesn't totally throw a wrench in the parts of my rankings post I will have necessarily prewritten.

This year, that last viewing is early enough that any and all wrenches can be easily dealt with. 

At the moment my plan is to watch that final movie tomorrow night, Tuesday night rather than Thursday night, which means only two more total to watch, including whatever I watch tonight.

No, I haven't suddenly turned into the sort of person who finishes something well in advance of the deadline. I never finished a paper in college more than 12 hours before it was due, and it makes sense that I always work up to the deadline in this case, considering that the deadline itself is the thing that tells me it's time to stop watching movies. 

No, it's that this year, I have conflicts on not one, but both of the final two nights before my ranking deadline. 

And they both came in the form of Christmas presents. 

When I got tickets to the Australian Open, which will be my first time going since 2021, I noted the date of Wednesday the 21st and thought "Hmm, that's right before my ranking deadline." When it was later revealed that I got tickets to see David Byrne at the Sidney Myer Bowl, the very next night, I thought "Hmm, that's right on my ranking deadline."

Of course I did not make these thoughts known to the givers of the gifts. I just thanked them for their generosity, with plenty of real gratitude. Indeed, I am excited to do both things. 

But there was a part of me that acknowledged that this year's home stretch will feel a bit different, as I won't be running right up to the wire as I usually do, and am already now down to my last two movies of the year. Better choose carefully. 

I'm including the Blue Moon poster with this post because I expect this to be my last viewing. I've waited as long as I could for the rental price to come down on this one (it isn't out in Australian theaters yet) and it did, at some point, come down from $19.99 USD to $14.99. That's still a lot more than I've paid for any other rental this year, but at least I did save a couple bucks by waiting. If I wait until tomorrow night instead of watching it tonight, there's a small chance it will be down to $9.99 by then. 

I might have just let this one go by, but there's something I'm planning to do that requires me to have seen this movie, the details of which will be revealed later in the week.

I tell you, though, I won't mind having the extra time to smooth over my rankings, rather than feeling under the pump to get it just right with only two hours to spare. 

Twenty twenty-five was certainly a "different sort of year," to put it mildly, so I suppose it makes sense that I'd be finishing it in a slightly different manner. If we were going only on last year's ranking deadline, I'd already be on my second day of recap posts by today, so no wonder I feel so exhausted. 

Double Tap

No, I did not just revisit the sequel to Zombieland.

Yes, I did just confront my first Rob Reiner film since the director was killed last month. 

Two of them, actually.

As I mentioned in this post, in 2026 I am going to rewatch six of my favorite Reiner films and watch six previously unseen Reiner films for the first time, all part of intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner.

I also mentioned that I had a seventh of each type of movie that wouldn't directly fit into the series, so I'd watch them first as a double feature, before formally starting the first bi-monthly series later this month.

Those are, of course, This is Spinal Tap and its sequel, the 2025 new release Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. 

It's not every day you get a sequel to one of your top ten movies of all time, and that's what This is Spinal Tap is, currently my #9 on Flickchart. So why, you ask, didn't I rush out to see this when it was in theaters? Long before Reiner's sad demise? 

Well its September 12th release was smack dab in the middle of my trip to Europe. And though I did see two movies in the theater when I was in Europe, it wasn't playing at the Barcelona cinema within walking distance of my Air BnB when I saw The Conjuring: Last Rites on that exact day. As it turns out I didn't see another movie on the trip, but if I had, I was trying to catch One Battle After Another in Greece. 

I might have watched it earlier on video, but then came the sudden shocking news of Reiner's passing. I needed a few weeks to get over that. In fact, I might have taken longer, but now my ranking deadline is the end of next week, and I wanted to include The End Continues with my 2025 rankings.

Well, it was tremendous to watch this as a double feature, and each movie is so short that I think I watched them both in the time it took for the last battle to play out in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Not only are these movies short, but they have such delicious comedic pacing that they feel even shorter than they actually are. 

Now clearly, that is more of an attribute of the 1984 original, which benefits from the actors being young and spry, and from shooting in a number of different locations around the U.S. (Or at least setting scenes in a number of locations, whether they were actually shot there or not.) There was never any question as to which of these movies was going to be better in that regard. To even suggests that there could have been a question is silly. 

However, I did really appreciate how well these actors remembered how to play their roles. The best in that regard is Christopher Guest, even though we'd ordinarily give more credit for their ongoing abilities to Michael McKean (recently in Better Call Saul) and Harry Shearer (in The Simpsons for nearly 40 years now). Perhaps without the distractions of other significant work, Guest was better able to home in on what made Nigel Tufnel Nigel Tufnel. Though they all provide credible incarnations of their earlier selves as those characters. 

If there was one I was disappointed with, it may have been Shearer, possibly because he just doesn't have enough to do. Derek Smalls is a low-key MVP of the original film, the "lukewarm water," as he describes himself, that allows him to function as glue for the group -- which has a fairly literal interpretation now, as we see Derek as the proprietor of a glue museum. I just didn't feel like the character got so many opportunities to shine in this low-key way -- never stealing the scenes, but sometimes being the funniest aspect of them anyway -- in the new movie.

Still, I liked The End Continues even a bit more than I expected to, which is why I'm giving it four stars on Letterboxd. Yeah, some of that may be nostalgia and my out-sized love for the original. If you were to try to argue with me that this is really more of a 3.5-star movie, I'd cede the point to you pretty quickly. 

But the minor miracle this movie pulls off is how similar it feels to the original. And part of that is Reiner's central role, both as a director and as a character. He's playing the same Marty DiBergi here as well, the same earnest filmmaker who allowed Spinal Tap to be who they were on camera, never for a moment doing anything less than being perfectly generous to them. 

That was something I appreciated about Reiner's performance this time when watching the original. He certainly questions the things the musicians say -- the most famous example, of course, being when he wonders why they couldn't just make 10 the highest volume setting on the amplifier when the volume units are arbitrary units of measure anyway. But he never questions them with the intention of embarrassing them, and it's this kind of kindness that make us love both him and them. They are able to show their foibles, their imperfect understandings of the way things work, and he just continues to encourage them, though not, you sense, because he thinks it's dynamite footage that is going to make his movie better. 

In fact I think the only thing that didn't totally work for me about Spinal Tap II was its very last image, which I think I can spoil, but if you don't want to know what it is, you can skip the next paragraph after this SPOILER ALERT. 

Interviews play over the closing credits here just as they do in the original, another strong choice to remind us of that original. The final interview is with the band's current drummer, an enthusiastic young woman who happens to be gay, though that's not important right now. She's played by Valerie Franco, a real musician. The subject of this interview is of course her ability to survive her experience with the band without dying in a gardening accident, choking on vomit (hers or anyone else's) or spontaneously combusting. I could see the joke coming from a mile away, that she was then going to start choking on the piece of fruit she was eating, at which point DiBergi jumps in and starts to give her the Heimlich Maneuver. The movie ends on a mid-Heimlich freeze frame. I think it would have been stronger to end with one of the band members, preferably Nigel as in the original, and not on a freeze frame, which is a cinematic device that's beneath someone like Reiner. 

I could probably go on and on about both films, but I've seen This is Spinal Tap so many times that I'm not sure if I'm actually getting new things from it each time I see it. I did, however, want to delve into one thing that has always puzzled me but that I've never actually looked up before, so I just fed Google this prompt to see what AI would say:

"Why is Bruno Kirby listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap?"

You would reasonably say that Kirby has no bigger role in that movie than any other actor who has a cameo of a minute or less. Yet he gets the "And Bruno Kirby" credit at the end of the movie. Why?

Here's what AI says:

"Bruno Kirby is listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap (1984) because, despite having a relatively short on-screen role, his performance as Tommy Pischedda, the limo driver obsessed with Frank Sinatra, was a significant improvised contribution to the film's success."

Well that's dumb because they had to create the credits before they knew whether the movie would be a success. Wrong again, AI. 

I guess that one will remain a mystery. Maybe he was better known at the time than the others who made cameos. AI goes on to speculate that it has to do with his close relationship with Reiner, appearing in several of Reiner's movies, but that's another retroactive analysis, considering that this was Reiner's first film. 

As for the sequel, I did enjoy the bits that I thought some others may have had issue with, like the cameos by Paul McCartney and Elton John. But in terms of "Can they still do it," I was indeed impressed by the vocal and musical fortitude of these three actors in their late 70s and early 80s (Shearer is 82). Any staging they did of any song we knew was a pretty darn good version of that song, as far as I was concerned, especially the little studio bit they did of, I believe, "Give Me Some Money," which ends with them fading out into just quieter and quieter repititions of the chorus. Some great harmonica, which I assume was real, by McKean there, too. I also love their reaction to realizing they've just been in total harmony and knocked out of the park.

The great thing about both movies is that this kind of earnestness is embedded within a world defined by partying and showboating. They allow us to see the humans beneath the rock stars. And that's Reiner all over, earnest to a fault, earnest to the end. 

I don't know what the form will be of Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale. For what it's worth, Reiner is not listed on IMDB as an actor in this movie, so it could just be a concert film, without a lot of jokes or great moments from characters we know and love. Maybe it was conceived just as a way to show us how much these men could really do as musicians.

I'll take any last little bit I can get, because it will, indeed, be the last.