Wrapping 2025
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The year-end listing, polling, and awarding has been simmering down as we head into the holidays, but there are other ways of revisiting the best of what 2025 has had to offer. The Slate Movie Club is still in session, and Notebook editors have called on dozens of contributors to dream up fantasy double features, “placing one new release and one older film back to back, coaxing out subtle resonances or following a thread—of theme, genre, performance—through the years.”
Friends of New York’s Metrograph are looking back on their best film experiences, and on The Last Thing I Saw, host Nicolas Rapold talks with Beatrice Loayza and Adam Nayman about their highs and lows in a year of moviegoing. Writing for the New Republic, Nayman notes that “2025 featured a series of sweaty, intimate thrillers about couples therapy exercises gone dangerously wrong.” Michael Shanks’s Together, for example, or Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. “The collection of isolation movies widens considerably when you factor in the strange proliferation of movies set in and around ominous, out-of-the-way compounds.”
Awards season roundtables are underway, with the Hollywood Reporter bringing together Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), Laura Dern (Is This Thing On? and Jay Kelly), Cynthia Erivo (Wicked: For Good), Jennifer Lawrence (Die My Love), Renate Reinsve (Sentimental Value), and Amanda Seyfried (The Testament of Ann Lee). The Los Angeles Times (video) has gathered directors Jon M. Chu (Wicked: For Good), Nia DaCosta (Hedda), Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein), Mona Fastvold (The Testament of Ann Lee), Rian Johnson (Wake Up Dead Man), and Benny Safdie (The Smashing Machine).
Talkhouse has been asking filmmakers about some of their favorites, and Kaouther Ben Hania (The Voice of Hind Rajab) recommends Hasan Hadi’s “beautiful, sensitive” The President’s Cake. Hailey Benton Gates (Atropia) is taken with Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project, which is “in the tradition of one of my favorite genres of documentary—‘director dilemmas’ films like Hearts of Darkness, Sherman’s March, American Movie, and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers—which explore the hubris and folly of trying to make something, and it not going as planned. I really admire that kind of pivot.”
Bi Gan (Resurrection) was “moved and touched” by Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, and for Bi, Park Chan-wook (No Other Choice) is “one of the great and most important filmmakers of the present moment.” Park himself caught up with two older films that impressed him, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Twilight (1957), “a film where emotions are laid bare,” and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds (2012), “an incredibly free-flowing narrative that defied expectations.”
There is, in the meantime, still some straight-up ranking and annotating going on. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another tops the lists from contributors to Little White Lies and the Playlist’s Rodrigo Perez and Gregory Ellwood. Oliver Laxe’s Sirât is the favorite of three of the seven critics at Screen, and it’s #1 on the list at Cineuropa.
A few highlights from a short week:
- We know AI is going to have an impact on the way movies are made and seen, but we don’t yet know how profound that impact might be. Opening a new symposium, Reverse Shot editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert have asked contributors “to pitch an idea for an essay centered around a film that somehow utilized or enabled a technology—relatively new or more widely available at the time of its making—that was indivisible from the experience, meaning, or aesthetics of the film itself.” In the first entries, Julia Gunnison writes that the early films L. Frank Baum “demonstrate the syncretic relationship between Oz and cinema, two realms where technology and magic bear little distinction.” And from Jawni Han: “To clumsily imitate how Godard himself might have put it: if Film socialisme [2010] reckons with the zero of digital filmmaking, Goodbye to Language [2013} searches for the one.”
- On a somewhat related but cheekier note, Jess Love has a piece in the American Scholar about the thrill of having her household switch from streaming to physical media—for a while, at least. Reflecting on the broken promises of social media and smartphones, Love writes: “‘When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,’ said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.”
- Starring Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon as friends “in different stages of nursing grief and developing new relationships,” Waiting to Exhale is “perhaps the quintessential ‘chick flick,’” writes Niela Orr in the New Yorker. When Forest Whitaker’s adaptation of Terry McMillan’s novel premiered thirty years ago this week, it “became as much a sociological phenomenon as an artistic one.” Orr notes that the New York Times ran a piece quoting a woman “who said, of the collective filmgoing experience, ‘This is our Million Man March.’” For many like her, “going to see Exhale was a proxy for political gathering. In 2025, it’s a reminder that lots of revolutions have to start somewhere internal first.”
- Round-number anniversaries make for a fine excuse to revisit classics of all stripes. As Michael Mann’s Heat turns thirty, Jesse Raub (Atlantic) finds the heart of the movie in the love between Chris (Val Kilmer) and Charlene (Ashley Judd), while Gayle Sequeira (Filmmaker) sees the coffee shop meeting between Robert De Niro’s thief and Al Pacino’s cop popping up in “a slew of TV shows this year.” In the Guardian, Sam Moore talks with Abel Ferrara, Catherine Breillat, and Bruce LaBruce about Pasolini’s Salò on the notorious film’s fiftieth anniversary, and Scott Tobias notes that while, sixty years on, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago “feels like a relic of an earlier era,” it’s also “as deeply romantic as storytelling gets. That’s the trick of love stories set against tumultuous backdrops: there’s a plane-going-down urgency and passion to them that ordinary times cannot possibly replicate. Kisses detonate like bombs.”
- We’ve recommended roundtables to watch and articles to read, and we’ll wrap with a few hours of holiday listening. Recent guests on the LARB Radio Hour include authors A. S. Hamrah (Algorithm of the Night) and Melissa Anderson (The Hunger), as well as Julia Loktev, discussing her vital documentary, My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow. Outskirts has launched a new podcast with an episode dedicated to Walerian Borowczyk. Rico Gagliano, host of the excellent MUBI Podcast, has been speaking with Kelly Reichardt (The Mastermind) and with Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay) and Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox), and Guide for the Film Fanatic hosts Jason Bailey and Mike Hall tear into Gone with the Wind with cultural critic Soraya Nadia McDonald.
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