Here are (most of) the movies I watched in 2025. There are fewer this year than last, partly because I watched fewer movies this year, partly because I was a little less diligent about writing reviews for the ones I did. Find last year’s reviews here.
Reviews are in order of viewing, new to old. Special favorites are rubricated.
THE THING (1982). A flying saucer crash lands in Antarctica. Thousands (millions?) of years later a team of scientists excavates it, and a shape-shifting virus-alien-lifeform gets loose. With a crew of scientists holed up in their base in the middle of a snowstorm, everyone is a suspect, no one is safe.
This is one of those movies that shows you the monster early, and keeps showing it—but it retains its shocking, stomach-turning effect as it takes a different form each time. Tightly plotted, excellently acted, with an ominous, understated score by Morricone.
Classic.
SCANNERS. A private security company has been finding and training “scanners”—people with telepathic/telekinetic/head-exploding mind powers. Then a rival company sabotages them by exploding one of their scanners’ heads.
Adequately coherent plot, terrific visual effects. Cronenberg gives us the goods.
It’s mind-blowing. 😉
EYES WITHOUT A FACE. A surgeon is trying to perfect the technique of the full face transplant. The recipient: his daughter, believed to have died in a car crash, but actually just disfigured. The donor: any beautiful, young, isolated woman that his wife can snatch off the streets of Paris.
Very nicely plotted, some eerie visuals, and a great ending. The daughter’s mask is more disturbing than the disfigurement, when it’s finally revealed. The movie is most horrifying when it’s matter of fact—when the father is just a cold, precise professional, carefully slicing into a woman’s face.
Its good.
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE. Mashup of Phantom of the Opera with Faust with an original soundtrack by Paul Williams. A genius composer is swindled out of his compositions by a music mogul (played by Williams) looking for a big number to open his new concert hall. The cheated composer tries to sabotage the production, but is instead convinced by the mogul to sign another, more sinister contract, and help from the shadows.
The music slaps and the actors are devouring the scenery.
Cult classic BANGER.
BRAZIL. A cog in the machine begins to rebel against the laws of the hyper-bureaucratic, turbo-fascistic world he lives in, driven by dreams of a woman—and then by the woman herself, when it turns out she’s real.
A typically shallow dystopia, authoritarianism = bad, individuality = good, but the comedy hits, and the vision is magnificent and utterly original. Anachronistic, monochromatic, claustrophobic interiors and agoraphobic exteriors.
It’s great.
ANORA. Stripper hustles her way into marrying a Russian scion after spending a week as his hired girlfriend. The scion’s minders, on order of his parents, must do everything possible to annul the marriage.
The leading couple are entertaining enough but the movie really comes alive in its second half, when the scion runs away and his minders and the stripper have to work together to track him down. Great performances, a rollicking plot, but didnt need to be 140 minutes for all that actually happens.
It’s cool.
TANGERINE. Sin-Dee has recently gotten out of jail, and is hellbent on confronting her boyfriend/pimp, who cheated on her while she was behind bars.
Did you know it was all shot on an iphone?? Yes. And so will anyone who watches the movie.
But it doesn’t detract from it too much. Fairly entertaining plot. The actors are all decent, with occasional stand-out moments, but no one’s really excelling here.
It’s fine.
THE HUSTLER. Traveling pool hustler Fast Eddy meets his match in Minnesota Fats. Eddy is up $18,000 on Fats, but just keeps playing, until he’s totally wiped out; spends the rest of the movie scrounging and scraping, and finally getting in debt to a shady manager to get together enough money to play with Fats again.
Wonderful performances by the whole cast, snappy writing, compelling drama. The pool playing and hustling is marvelously paced and shot, but the scenes of dialogue and argument and flirting are just as absorbing.
It’s a classic for a reason.
THE SUBSTANCE. Modern B-movie about an aging actress who injects herself with a mysterious fluid to become young again. For a week. Then she returns to her old body for a week, then back to the young body. You must never stay in your animal morph for more than two hours—I mean you must never stay in the younger body for more than seven days.
Guess what happens next.
Meathead feminist body horror bonanza. No subtlety, nothing truly unexpected, but the execution is top notch, and the grand finale is a triumph. 140-minute runtime is unwarranted, but the movie never really drags.
It’s great.
THE FLORIDA PROJECT. Cinema verite-style film following long-stay residents of a budget motel in Orlando, Florida—specifically 7-year-old Mooney, her friends, and their parents.
Chemistry galore! Pick any two of the principles, and they’ve got amazing chemistry.
Cinematography and location choice are phenomenal as well. It’s a more minor element than the interpersonal drama, but the roadside attraction architecture, the vivid sun-basked lawns and forests, the structure of the motel, all underscore the whole film, make it inextricable from its Central Florida setting.
It’s great.
THE WITNESS (1985). Amish boy witnesses a Crooked Cop murder a man in the bathroom of Philadelphia’s 30th St Station. Clean Cop Harrison Ford is on the case, but soon has to flee to Amish country with the boy and his mother, as the rest of his unit turns on him.
A simple but compelling plot elevated by the novelty of the setting. Nicely executed, nicely, quietly acted.
It’s cool.
I SAW THE TV GLOW. A loner kid becomes obsessed with The Pink Opaque, a late night TV show on the “young adult network.” He and another loner at school bond over the show.
As much a visual album as a movie, the film relies more on its superb original soundtrack and vibey garish images than it does on the dialogue and plot. Performances by the two leads are outstanding, but their relationship is portrayed exclusively through turning points and escalations—no real texture, no meat.
It’s cool.
THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO. Ensemble cast of yuppies forming and wrecking relationships amongst themselves in the twilight years of disco. Characters are sometimes hateable, sometimes charming, always amusing.
Glitzy costuming and set dressing plus a vast entourage of revelers in all the club scenes provide visual flare to compliment the witty, wordy dialogue. A great movie to have on in the background of a party. Of Whit Stillman’s three 90s films, this was my favorite.
It’s great.
VIRTUOSITY. A killer cop is given the opportunity to clear his criminal record if he can bring in an android serial killer. The android is controlled by an escaped VR AI amalgamation formed from the psychic signatures of hundreds of serial killers—including the one who killed the cop’s family.
The cop and the android, played by Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe respectively, have a great Batman-Joker dynamic. Crowe is delightfully crazed. The one-liners are fresh and cutting. The dumbass plot is shockingly well-executed.
It’s cool.
DARK CITY. An amnesiac stumbles through a retro-noir city of eternal night pursued by pale, hairless freaks who periodically re-shape the city and the memories of its inhabitants.
Extremely well-executed vision—bleak, verdi-tone, insomniac. Even the late-90s CGI is worked in pretty nicely. The mystery plot is well-paced and satisfyingly coherent.
Banger.
TAKE OUT. A chinese takeout delivery worker is in debt to some loan sharks, and has one day to come up with his payment. After scrounging up most of the payment, he has to make up the rest in the day’s tips.
Real! Damn that’s real. The way the customers talk, the way they tip (or don’t), the way they complain, the way the cooks talk and bicker and joke, the way the “big sister” manager (played by Wang-Thye Lee, love her, she steals every scene she’s in) takes orders and talks on the phone, damn that’s real, the way the other delivery guy drinks water from a pint cup—real!
It’s fantastic.
RHYMES FOR YOUNG GHOULS. 1976, Miqmaq reservation. Aila is a young truant who bribes her way out of being sent to the residential school by selling weed. Father in prison, mother dead by suicide, brother dead by mother’s drunk driving. The movie starts when one of Aila’s crew has been robbed, and her father is newly out of prison, and Aila starts planning a heist to steal all the bribe money from the residential school.
A dark and desperate movie with little interest in redemption. A resolute portrayal of reservations and residential schools of the period. Solid performances by the young cast and by the father.
It’s great.
THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT. Divorceé fashion designer Petra Von Kant falls cataclysmically in love with a young model. It does not work out.
Pitch perfect melodrama, if you’re into that kind of thing. Bonus points for nicely composed long shots, extravagant costumes, and being gay.
It’s fine.
BILLY ELLIOT. Billy Elliot is a boy in a coal town in Northern England who wants to dance ballet. This is naturally upsetting to his father and his older brother, but Billy doesnt care, he just wants to dance. Margaret Thatcher’s union-busting does not help matters.
A movie straight from the heart, exquisitely performed by every actor, with Jamie Bell, as Billy, delivering the keystone performance. This movie makes you want to dance and kick and shout.
Banger.
DRUGSTORE COWBOY. Two young couples rob drugstores and get high. Bob, the leader of the crew, narrates.
Stylish, playful, paranoid, deluded. Nice performances from the cast. Pacing is a little stop-and-start, and the big turning point in the movie feels pretty abrupt.
It’s cool.
WATERSHIP DOWN. At the urging of a doomsaying runt, a group of rabbits leaves their home and travels far across the English countryside to found a new warren. They encounter fascists.
The animation is a little plain at times as far as rendering, but excellent as far as the movement of the rabbits, both expressive and realistic, emotive and animal. Nice watercolor backgrounds, and wonderful voice acting.
The story is a little sparse, the result of faithfully adapting a 400-page book into a 90-minute film. But what it shares with the book is these moments that utterly startle you at first contact, and haunt you when the movie is over.
It’s great.
EIGHTH GRADE. Coming of age film following Kayla in her final week of eighth grade.
Exquisitely authentic, immaculately awkward. A specific, attentive movie, capturing the particular discomforts, desires, and banalities of this age in this country in this year. Impressionistic cinematography, especially in the scenes which center on social media. Fantastic score. Stellar casting and acting—Elsie Fisher gives a Great performance as the lead, but everyone else is so damn accurate, too.
It’s flawless.
SORCERER. Four men drive two trucks of dynamite through the Unspecified South American Country jungle to blow up, and thereby extinguish, a burning oil well. If they hit a bump, the TNT will explode.
Not really though, they proceed to hit every bump in existence. The trucks bounce around like jello, and it’s soon clear that driving smoothly actually doesn’t matter. This would utterly deflate the tension of the movie’s premise, but then they arrive at a rope bridge. In the middle of a storm. And they decide to drive over it.
The movie wastes a lot of time setting up these men, their backstories before coming to the jungle, though they really aren’t that interesting and we’re here for the rodeo, not some Hemingway bullshit. Once the trucks get going it’s a good watch. Tangerine Dream murders the score, and the visuals live up to the haunting soundscape.
It’s cool.
Francis Bass 